Despite having spent the previous day in the WASt and despite having attended a third crime scene that morning, Reinhardt did not see either Tanneberger or Ganz for the rest of that day, for which he was glad. He felt he had come to a stop and was not sure which way to go, but he knew he would have fought any direction suggested or imposed on him by them.
He waited, the time turning into an hour, then more, and still neither of them came. What was he to do then? What was he to do in a city where the police served four masters, but one of them above the other three? What was he to do when all the signs he had pointed to there being one murderer on the loose? A murderer who knew the city, who could blend into a tenement or into the foyer of an upmarket hotel, who could come into the house where Reinhardt lived. What was he to do when he knew Carlsen had himself been investigating Noell, or at least whatever it was Noell did during that time when his service record had been redacted? What connection was there between a Luftwaffe pilot and a half-German British agent? And what linked them to a Soviet officer who had also gone looking in the same place for the same information?
He did not know how long he might have sat there if he had not received a call from Endres, asking him to come to the morgue. That was enough to trigger him into motion. Shrugging into his coat and flipping his hat on, he left the squad room through the usual gamut of inquisitive eyes, one or two derogatory calls, and the now habitual cawing of a crow.
Outside in the streets, the sun had begun its fall toward late afternoon. Despite the burnished timbre of the sun’s light that gave brightness and depth, it was cold, as if the sun could not warm through or beyond the surfaces of the city, be they concrete or flesh. The station at Bayerischeplatz was shut for maintenance, so he decided to walk up Potsdamerstrasse to Bulowstrasse station, making himself walk quickly through the burden of his knee, as if he could somehow outpace his difficulties. There were people everywhere—men, women, the elderly, children who flitted and flashed as they chased each other over the ruins, a worker in a flat cap who pushed a handcart loaded with bricks down the street behind him—but he felt very alone.
He passed a block of flats that had once formed a square, but the side that had overlooked the street was gone, blown out and away. At the ends of the two wings that would once have joined the missing one there was only a ground-to-rooftop crosshatch of the remains of apartments, their cavities spilling pipes and wallpaper that flapped in the wind and radiators that clung to the walls like limpets. As he passed, though, he saw into the square within the wings. Against a backdrop of fire-scarred masonry, of windows boarded up with cardboard and wood, of electrical wires that crazed the gap between the buildings, was a small playground. A group of toddlers tumbled in a sandpit, and two boys, all bone-white flesh and scraped knees, were putting the finishing touches to a fort made from bricks and rubble. Mothers rocked prams, a pair of elderly gentlemen played chess, a man with a cigarette in his mouth and a faraway expression on his face pushed a little girl in a swing.
As he approached Bulowstrasse, he began to come up on the outskirts of the market around Potsdamerplatz. Spivs and touts, and dozens of children—some of them in rags for shoes—wound through the crowds with practiced ease. Allied soldiers bartered among the jumbled collections of wares for oil paintings, porcelain tea sets, silver cutlery, carpets, military medals and decorations, cameras, gramophones, and the piles of books their owners had not yet burned for warmth. While the soldiers sought souvenirs, Germans sought the more prosaic things in life: cigarettes and tobacco, butter and fat, meat and milk, medicines and drugs, and fuel. Fuel above all, coal or wood to heat freezing homes and cook the meager rations most families lived on. Women sauntered through the crowds or stood by the entrances to buildings and watched the men, especially the soldiers, and sometimes him, with hungry eyes. Although it had calmed down in the last months from its peak as one of the fulcrums of the black market in Berlin, Potsdamerplatz—along with Alexanderplatz further to the northeast in the Soviet sector—was still thriving.
An organ grinder with one leg and one arm leaned heavily against his machine, cranking a well-known Berlin tune. It was an old tune, but the words most Berliners knew were those which dated from the time of King Friedrich Wilhelm III and the wars against the French, and Reinhardt hummed them to himself as he walked past the cripple, laying a couple of cigarettes atop the casing.
When my legs were shaved off me
In the war that has just passed
Then my king, as though for payment,
Slapped a medal on my breast.
And he uttered, “Dearest Fritz,
So that you may live in ease,
We now further here reward you:
Let you crank songs in the streets.”
The cripple nodded his thanks to him, something in his eyes, veteran to veteran, but Reinhardt walked on, not wanting any contact. There was something wrong with him, he thought, as he turned aside for the station. Something wrong with him that he could not look at his city, at his people, without seeing them through a patina of suspicion, or worse, that he could not seem to see past a veneer of distrust. That he was surprised when he broke down the human tapestry around him into discrete parts—a face, a smile, the sound of laughter, the play of light on a woman’s hair—and found humanity there. Even at the worst of times during the war, even during the very worst of times in the first war, in the trenches, he had found humanity, or he had found the strength in himself to look for it.
Now he could not find it. He did not have the energy to look for it. It was as if he could not let himself go again and just become one of them. A person. A Berliner. A German. He wanted to believe what he had done during the war lifted him up and above. He wanted to believe he did not bear what he saw as their stain, when he knew he looked and walked and sounded no different from them. Just a tall, shabbily dressed man with a face drawn through tiredness and hunger, and his hair streaked with gray. When he knew the surest path to a place of loneliness and ostracism was to think that he was better than those around him, these people who swayed from side to side with the U-bahn’s motion, shoved together on the carriage’s benches or hanging from its leather straps.
Markworth looked at Germans and saw no hope. More and more, Reinhardt believed that. What, he asked himself, not for the first time, was he doing back here . . . ?
“You always did have a soft spot, Gregor.” Brauer had appeared beside him, all rumpled clothes and stubbled cheeks. “That organ grinder, wasn’t he there before the war?”
“Who gave you that shiner?” Reinhardt asked, pointing at a bruise that purpled Brauer’s temple.
“Eastern Front veterans with chips on their shoulders. Forget it. I’ve got news about Friedrich.”
“That was quick.” Reinhardt nodded Brauer to go on, his guts notching themselves tight.
“Bad news isn’t hard to find, Gregor. Friedrich’s not a popular man. It was asking about him that got me into trouble. No one who’s come back wants to remember the east, and none of them want anything to do with the Ivans. Friedrich’s not living in that halfway house, he works there. Word is, Friedrich’s a snitch for the Ivans. That he keeps an eye on what veterans are up to, and an ear to what they’re saying.”
“Go on.”
“No one knows for sure, right, but they say he was turned during the war. That he couldn’t handle the POW camps. There’s a whole bloody value system and pecking order among the survivors from the Eastern Front, particularly among the officers and the SS, and Friedrich and those like him are at the bottom.”
“Is my son in danger?”
“More because of what he’s doing rather than what he might have done.”
“Like what?” Reinhardt asked, regretting the snap in his voice but it seemed to roll off Brauer, or else his old friend understood the stress he was under.
“He strikes up conversations, they say. Like he was testing the waters. He passes out Socialist Unity Party literature. Encourages veterans to attend Party meetings. He’s close to a couple of Party councilors, both of whom were prisoners, and both of whom came back with the Soviets and who were put into power right after the fall of the city.”
“Enough,” Reinhardt said, raising a hand. “Enough,” he repeated, weakly.
“Look, Gregor . . . Friedrich’s not doing anything wrong. It’s not like he’s breaking any laws, or hurting anyone. It’s just . . . I mean . . .”
“It’s not very aught-eight-fifteen, you might say.”
“I might say that, indeed. Look, keep your ears stiff, all right?” Reinhardt nodded. “I’ll keep an eye on him a bit longer. But nothing will come up, I’m sure. He’ll be round the house again, soon enough, and you can talk this out with him.”
—
Reinhardt made himself stop outside the morgue and smoke another cigarette, calming himself and trying to lighten his mood. Endres, for all his professionalism, was no bundle of laughs, and Reinhardt needed time to try and sort out what Brauer had told him about Friedrich’s situation. He waited in the professor’s office while Endres finished an autopsy of a woman. He joined Reinhardt a short time later, bringing with him a touch of the morgue, of solvents and chemicals, of human rot.
Snap out of it, Reinhardt swore to himself. He blinked, as if to clear his mind and sight of the sludge of his thoughts. For a moment it seemed as if Endres had caught a glimpse of something, perhaps something that fled into the corner of Reinhardt’s eyes, perhaps some straightening of the rigor that tautened his face. The professor’s eyes considered, but he said nothing.
“Thank you for coming, Reinhardt,” Endres said. Reinhardt blinked. This was not how conversations with the professor usually started. “You will recall our conversation about that photograph you showed me? Yes? Well, that person is willing to meet with you. Now, if you agree.”
“Right now?” asked a surprised Reinhardt. Endres nodded. “Very well, yes, then. I was expecting something else.”
“News of the autopsy of that body that was brought in earlier? Stresemann? I have something for you, yes. Shall we go?”
Reinhardt blinked back further surprise, but followed Endres’s tall, angular frame out of the morgue, and then had to keep up a smart pace to stay abreast of the professor, who seemed to devour the corridors of the hospital with his long strides.
“Stresemann first,” said Endres, tipping his hat to the guard at the hospital gate, who ducked behind his post and reemerged with a pair of bicycles. “We’ll take these. We’ve not that far to go, but it’ll be faster this way. It’s all rather bizarre,” continued Endres, as he began pedaling. “I checked the bruising on the body and, I’m afraid to say, the strike marks are characteristic of an extendable baton, the type,” he said, glancing over at Reinhardt, “I am told you carried. An old SiPo model, correct? Indeed, the bruising shows the evidence of the individual segments of the baton as they struck the flesh. So instead of one long strike mark, the mark is broken in two or, in some cases, three. There is also another characteristic, which is that the baton was also flexible, and would ‘wrap’ around the body,” Endres said, demonstrating with one hand in the air before him before snatching it back to his handlebars when his front wheel wobbled precariously, ignoring the startled look a pair of pedestrians gave him. Reinhardt smiled, then grimaced as his knee began to hurt from the pedaling. “The baton also had a weighted tip at the end, and there are distinctive signs of that injury as well.”
They cycled past the Charité hospital complex and crossed the Spree at Kronprinzen Bridge. Over the bridge, Endres angled right across Königsplatz, with the blackened hulk of the Reichstag off to their left and just beyond it, absurdly pristine amid the drear expanse of the remains of the Tiergarten, the Soviet war memorial glittered white and gold.
“Reinhardt, are you listening?”
“My apologies, Professor. Please continue.”
“You were not listening. Otherwise you would have heard me say that none of the wounds he sustained from the beating killed this Stresemann.” Reinhardt’s pedaling slowed, and Endres’s balance teetered in front of him. “Keep up,” he chivvied Reinhardt. “I am quite surprised at you for not seeing it yourself. A detective of your experience, you should have seen the clue in the photographs. Especially the one of the back of the skull, the apparently fatal wound.”
“It had not bled,” Reinhardt blurted out. Of course, he should have seen it.
“It had not bled,” Endres repeated. “All of the strike wounds were received postmortem. Whoever did it struck at areas primarily showing high degrees of lividity. He obviously thought striking there, where the blood had pooled after death, would leave more traces and cause more damage. In both assumptions, he was right.”
Endres led him down paths and roads that paralleled the flow of the Spree to their right. “So what killed him, Professor?”
“A knife wound. Very precisely delivered to the back of the neck. Up under the skull. A very sharp, thin knife. Death would have been instantaneous, and there would have been minimal bleeding. Furthermore, the exact entry point of the wound would have been obscured by the later blows that split the skull. In essence, I believe the killer was quite literally covering his tracks.”
“The time of death?”
“Sometime between Monday and Tuesday, I would say. Lastly, there were ligature marks on wrists, ankles, and knees. Stresemann was tied up and also gagged. And now, please, I should save my breath.”
They pedaled on, a fairly easy pace, but still Reinhardt’s knee began to throb at the unaccustomed strain. They passed through the Tiergarten, stripped almost bare of its trees and foliage, and much of its area given over to vegetable allotments. Once hidden by hedges and decorative shrubbery, statues and memorials poked up incongruously across the churned expanse of the park. And yet, in the middle of it, the Victory Column still stood, blackened and scarred but upright, which was more than could be said for most of the rest of Berlin, and Golden Lizzy—the name Berliners had given to the angel at the summit—still watched over the city. Off to the west, another flak tower hulked out of the wrecked remnants of the Zoo. Endres led them up Altonaer Strasse, finally bringing the bicycles to a breathless halt in front of a big block of a building on Lessingerstrasse. “Here we are,” he said, panting over his short breath.
“And here is?” wheezed Reinhardt, rubbing his knee and then fumbling for a cigarette.
“The Luftwaffe-Lazarett.” Endres breathed deeply, frowning disapprovingly at Reinhardt’s cigarette. “The air force hospital.”