SATURDAY
It rained overnight. The rain had the benefit of keeping the dust down, but it made the atmosphere heavy and muggy, the air cut and lined with the stench of sewage and waste. The sky was a luminous, milky gray, a flat sheet with nothing to hang one’s eyes on, and the streets were blotted gunmetal gray with water that puddled in darkened pools or seeped foully out from under the ruins.
Reinhardt arrived later than he would have wanted at the station the next morning, a Saturday. He had slept badly, curled around his pain, arriving to find Bochmann already at the police station and ensconced with Mrs. Dommes. If there was a silver lining to anything, it was finding that the two of them had already gone through Bochmann’s lists and the list of names she was to call. Dommes had obviously found something of a kindred spirit in Bochmann, who looked decidedly worried as he clutched a cardboard folder to his chest with spidery fingers.
“Mr. Bochmann has made my life a great deal easier, Inspector,” Mrs. Dommes said, bright as a button, and bestowed a positively warm glance upon Bochmann. “I understand Prellberg is dead. Thurner was never found. Remember his prewar address was in Stettin, and that’s now in Poland. That only leaves Hauck and Osterkamp, and according to Mr. Bochmann they seem to have passed away. So there’s not much left to do it seems, Inspector.” Dommes finished, frowning at him. “Are you well, Gregor?”
Reinhardt blinked at her use of his first name. He had not even realized that she knew it. “Quite well, Mrs. Dommes, thank you. Mr. Bochmann. Perhaps you will come with me?”
He took Bochmann out of the station and through the little park, the ground wet and heavy from the rain and from the blocked drains that flooded half of it, over to a small café behind the Magistrates’ Court. Reinhardt sat Bochmann down, ordered two coffees, then pinned him with his eyes, and if his voice was a little harsher than usual, he felt the situation merited it. “Out with it, Bochmann.”
“I went over the registry again last night. After we finished.” Bochmann’s eyes were muddy with apparent distress. “Both Hauck and Osterkamp . . . I believe they may . . . they may have been murdered.” Reinhardt said nothing, only waited for him to go on, not dropping his eyes, not even when the waiter brought their two mugs. “For Hauck, I see my records show he died in April 1946.” He fiddled with papers. “See. Here. There’s a letter from a neighbor. Hauck was killed when his house collapsed. The house had been damaged during the war. And there had been any number of Americans or whoever billeted in it. It was a mess.” Reinhardt looked at him, saying nothing, waiting. “Osterkamp. He died in July. See. Another letter. From his wife. He died . . . he died . . . See. There.” Bochmann seemed manic as he stabbed at the paper with his finger.
“He died in a suspected fall down an embankment.”
“His wife writes that he was carrying home a heavy sack of potatoes. They said it was a heart attack. Too much effort. They found him on a stretch of road. They thought he must have fallen down into the ditch.”
Reinhardt looked at Bochmann, looked through him. He thought of the man who had come to his house with a sack of potatoes. Who had ingratiated himself into Mrs. Meissner’s house with offers of food. He thought of a man who might have lured someone out with promises of sustenance. Who might have lured him out at night, who might have finished him off on some road. Rolled the body into a ditch. He thought of Hauck and Stucker, just two more bodies found on ruins. Who paid any attention to men killed on bomb sites, killed by falling rubble?
“Prellberg,” said Reinhardt, his mouth a grim line.
“Yes. Prellberg. He was murdered. That we know because his son wrote to us. He was murdered at Bad Oeynhausen in February 1946. There was something of a scandal apparently. I have his letter. Here,” Bochmann said, thrusting a paper at Reinhardt, which fluttered in the air between them from his trembling hand.
Reinhardt read it slowly, the son’s prose terse and factual. Prellberg had been captured by the British at the end of the war, and interned, but before year’s end, he was out of the camp and helping them track down certain military and Nazi Party personnel, but for what, the son could not say. Prellberg was accommodated in Bad Oeynhausen when he was not at home, and that was where he was found dead along with another man, a Dr. Lütjens. Prellberg’s son did not say much about his father, only that he was one of those men from the war whom the Allies had taken an interest in. The son did not know why, but Reinhardt could guess. What was it he had said to Collingridge? “A race for what glitters in the rubble.” Both Prellberg and Lütjens had been beaten to death, the son saying the British had not classed the affair as murder, rather as some kind of settling of accounts. The son also described a British administration that, in his opinion, was more interested in covering up the deaths than actually investigating them.
“Did they find the person who did it? Any leads, or suspicions?” Bochmann shook his head, then dipped his face into his coffee cup. Reinhardt’s gaze went back and forth between the lists, his and Bochmann’s. “Right, we’re going to do this methodically. I’ve got fourteen names, all men who were serving in IV./JG56’s second squadron in North Africa at the same time. We’re going to check them off your lists, starting with those killed in action during the war. Albrecht, Kastel, and Meurer.” Bochmann nodded. “Then we have Jürgen, Noell, and Zuleger, murdered in the last few days. We have yourself. Group executive officer. Very much alive. Thurner. Vanished. No contact with him ever. And we have Hauck, Osterkamp, Prellberg, and Stucker, all killed in 1946. That leaves Gareis, who you say is living in the Soviet Zone, and . . . Fenski?”
“Yes. Umm. He was supposed to have come to the gathering, but he did not. We’ve not heard from him, and we didn’t get any RSVP from him, either.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Bochmann.” Reinhardt shook his head, lit a cigarette, and took a long pull of his coffee. “Did it occur to none of you what might have been going on?”
“Safety in numbers, Inspector,” Bochmann snapped back. He waved his lists at Reinhardt. “There’s over a hundred names here. Men who served with IV./JG56 during nearly six years of war. So no, the deaths of a few of them did not register with us.”
“You’re right. I’m sorry. I’m being unfair.”
Bochmann’s eyes clouded over suddenly. “That means . . . that means it’s just me and Gareis left. From North Africa.”
“No. I may as well come clean, as well. Noell’s alive. I’ve spoken with him.” He nodded at Bochmann’s surprise. “The body we found was his brother. Theodor Noell.”
“I think Noell talked of him, but I never met him.”
“There’s something else. All the men you have listed as dead—Hauck, Osterkamp, Prellberg, and Stucker—died or were killed in the places they lived in before the war. My information from the WASt has the same addresses.”
“So?”
“So the killer was able to find them through their prewar addresses. It means he had access to them.” It almost certainly meant he had access to them through the WASt. Reinhardt could think of no other source that might have contained that information. “All of them were killed between February and July 1946. Prellberg was the first, along with this Lütjens. Then Hauck. Then Stucker and Osterkamp. Then there’s a gap. Then someone called Haber, in January, in Hamburg. Not one of your pilots, probably linked to whatever group Lütjens is from, which means the killer is after two sets of people with some kind of common link. Then there’s Fenski who was, according to your lists, living in Kempfen, although he was from a town near Augsburg. He was alive until recently?”
“We had a letter from him in January.”
“Zuleger, Noell, and Jürgen. How was he able to find them?” Bochmann shook his head, his chin bunching. Reinhardt looked over the association’s list, then his own, and it leaped out at him. Or rather, it revealed itself from where it had been hiding in plain sight. “What do they have in common, those four? No? No guesses? None of them were living in their prewar addresses. Therefore, the killer couldn’t find them. Your list,” he said, pointing at it, “your association . . . was all the killer needed to find his last victims, with the last three all murdered here. In Berlin. And all in the space of a couple of days.”
“You cannot suspect us?”
“No. I want to talk to your British backers.” Reinhardt threw the words into the conversation, darting them at Bochmann. “Don’t try to lie. I know there is a connection. There must be. You would not try to form a veterans’ association without some form of backing, and the only backing that counts nowadays is Allied. Von Vollmer has gone to the British to complain about me. And I know nothing would bring men so far afield as Kempfen for Fenski, and . . .” he fumed, feeling anger suddenly rising in him, “and Cologne for Jürgen, to Berlin, to occupied Berlin, for a simple veterans’ reunion. And I know Carlsen was at your event on the weekend. Noell saw him there. So don’t treat me as if I’m as dumb as a loaf of bread, and start talking.”
—
But Bochmann did not talk. He stubbornly refused to do so, his face firming even as his eyes silted up, becoming watery and unfocused leaving Reinhardt, a short while later, back in Mrs. Dommes’s office with an update for her lists and a clogged sense of frustration in his throat.
“Fenski, address in Kempfen. He’s missing. Can you contact the local police and see what they might have? Then the same for Hauck and Osterkamp. Police reports, doctors’ reports, anything they might have on those deaths. Keep looking for Thurner. Anything you can think of. Then a call to the police in Bad Oeynhausen with a request for information, and if there was an investigating officer or anyone with knowledge, could they call me? Then can you ask your ladies to kindly go back through the papers for me? I’m looking for news of a death—it may have been reported as a murder—in Bad Oeynhausen in February 1946. There may or may not have been Allied involvement.” Dommes arched her eyebrows at him, but nodded, pen poised over her writing pad. “Lastly, can you have a call placed to this number, please,” he finished, handing over a business card.
Reinhardt returned to his desk where he seethed, quietly, smoking cigarette after cigarette until he sat in a sluggish swirl of smoke. He stared straight ahead, and for once he was left alone. Perhaps it was the image he gave off, of distant but furious concentration, or the way his chin bunched as he stroked the gap in his teeth with his tongue. When the telephone rang on his desk, he looked at it as he ground out his cigarette before lifting the receiver.
“’alloo? Inspecteur Reinhardt?”
“Lieutenant De Massigny. Thank you for taking my call.”
“Not at all, Inspecteur. I have some news for you.” Reinhardt heard the rustle of papers. “Alors. For this Kausch person, I have nothing. No record. He was in the Wehrmacht, this person? He was armed forces?”
“No. SS. I recently found out.”
“Ah, alors, he is not here. You might look for him in the Document Center. They have all the Nazi files. But for Leyser, I have something, and nothing. I think you should come to the WASt.”