Authors: Paul Grossman
* * *
“Certainly something to tell our grandchildren.” Vicki slid herself under Willi’s arm as they joined the glittering throng pouring from the courtyard. “The night we saw Josephine Baker at the Admirals-Palast.”
On busy Friedrich Strasse, wind whipped off the river. The line for cabs stretched almost to the Weidendammer Bridge. How insane not to have taken something more substantive than a thin silk wrap, as he’d suggested before they’d left. But despite the forecast, Vicki’d refused to believe the temperature would really drop so fast. “Might I wear your dinner jacket, darling?” she had to plead.
“Forgive me.” Willi practically tore it off his back. “My mind’s just been so—”
… inside that bag, pondering the substance used to bind those bones. To him it had looked like some kind of animal gut. Hoffnung assured him the lab would determine its exact composition. But these things could take time.
Wrapped in Willi’s jacket, Vicki rose in her blue silk pumps, shaking back her bangs, the beads on her dress jingling as she put her lips to his ear: “That show got me all jazzed up.” A dark sparkle beckoned in her eyes. Almost ten years now, and Willi’d never stopped thanking his lucky stars for this woman.
Unfortunately, not just the Admirals-Palast, but the Wintergarten across the street, the Metropole down the block, everything was letting out, and not a free cab was in sight. After a while, she was shivering again, and he was starting to feel inadequate. He really ought to have taken the Opel.
All of a sudden an open black sports car raced up as if from out of the future.
“Alles in Ordnung?”
Dr. von Hessler’s silver eye patch glistened behind the oversize wheel. “Not stuck, are you?” It was a new SSK, the most-talked-about car in Germany. According to the Sunday supplement, this 1930 model was a “Rembrandt of iron and rubber.” Only forty had rolled off the line, the last in a series for Mercedes-Benz by the brilliant Ferdinand Porsche, who’d since left to form his own company. It had a revolutionary profile some were calling
streamlined
, curved, low, sleek as a bullet, looking able to fly that fast. Along with the
Graf Zeppelin,
the Dornier flying boat, and the giant new
Bremen,
the world’s swiftest ocean liner, the SSK was one of the reasons Germans were holding their heads a bit higher these days.
“Which direction?” the doctor demanded to know.
Willi waved him off as if it were Mars. “Wilmersdorf.”
“Just my way.” Von Hessler revved the supercharged 6.8-liter engine. “I’m in Grunewald.” But sensing their hesitation, he grew impatient. “Don’t tell me I’m going to have to pull rank.” In his own way he seemed to be trying to let them know they weren’t too inferior to travel with him. Which was thoughtful, Willi supposed, making the mistake of glancing at Vicki. Beneath those dark bangs, clutching his big white dinner jacket, she looked like one of the boys dying to try a roller coaster. Dear Lord. What the hell. Let it be one for the history books. Josephine Baker
and
an SSK in one night.
Pulling open the car door, however, a glimpse of his own reflection in von Hessler’s eye patch was enough to give Willi the creeps.
It was a two-seater. Vicki had to squeeze between them. When the doctor smacked the big black gear stick, there was a tremendous rumble, and off they went, spinning into a mad U-turn, yanking back as if they were about to be sucked straight up to the overhead S-Bahn tracks. It was Friday night. Traffic jammed the Friedrich Strasse. This maniac, though, was accelerating as if he were at a grand prix final. Beyond the train station, lights from nightclubs began blending into one:
Haller-Revue … Salamander … Café Imprimator
. Advertisements spun overhead:
Aschinger am Bahnhooooo
— They flew by a yellow streetcar so fast Willi couldn’t even make out the route number.
“Not afraid, are you?” The smirk on the doctor’s lips seemed congenital.
Willi could see how a person might grow to dislike that expression.
Holding on to Vicki with one hand and the leather armrest with the other, he was remembering how, once, as a teenager, he’d gotten good and sick on a speedboat. Which is why he’d wound up in the infantry, sidling on his rear end under barbed wire.
“Afraid?” Vicki’s symmetrical face fractured with amusement.
“Au contraire
!
”
A sharp turn onto Dorothean Strasse plunged them into darkness.
“I ask only because I am a researcher of human nature,” the doctor projected over the roaring 225 horsepower. “Fear is one of the subjects my studies focus most on.”
“How fascinating.” Vicki flung her head back, letting her bobbed hair fly. “No, we’re not afraid. Are we, darling?”
The doctor could at least observe the traffic signals, Willi felt like saying.
“As a scientist of course I work under controlled observation,” von Hessler shouted as they tore around the Reichstag, its glass dome all lit up, the red, black, and gold flag of the republic flapping proudly above. “But some of my most profound insights have been drawn from random surveillance.” When they reached the leafy haven of the Tiergarten, Berlin’s largest park, his volume diminished. You could almost see stars overhead. Which might have been romantic, Willi thought, if the doctor would just shut up.
“My experiments focus on what I call unconditioning, the breaking down of learned behavior patterns.”
Von Hessler, however, apparently relished a captive audience and imagined himself now before a university lecture hall, even though Vicki had stopped pretending to listen and Willi had never even started. Concealed beneath his jacket she’d begun tickling his pant leg, sending tingles up his spine, every so often shooting him a smoldering glance.
In the busiest part of Berlin-West, around the towering Kaiser Wilhelm Church, night seemed to turn into day, everything in motion. Women in helmetlike hats walked with skirts flipping side to side. Men in double-breasted suits waved fedoras, trying to grab cabs. Advertising zipped across billboards:
Crème Mouson, for the Lady of Today; Audi, Type M: for the Gentleman in You.
In every direction, chic modernity. Stainless-steel doorways. Long, curved windows. The best boutiques. The place-to-be restaurants. The nation’s premier cinemas lined up like chorus girls: the Gloria-Palast, the Capital, UFA am Zoo. Everything swank. Glittering. Frenetic.
On Kurfürstendamm, Berlin’s Great White Way, the show windows reflected traffic like an avant-garde movie, full of incongruent angles and rushing rivers of light.
“So you see, this respectability the baroness was raving about is all romantic nonsense.” Von Hessler honked insanely, nearly hitting a couple clutching each other for dear life as they tried to ford the mayhem. “The more we learn, the more we realize what people call
order
in this universe is actually just conditioning. What street did you say you lived on again?”
Far from crowds and flashing lights, the quiet avenues around Prussian Park ran past ornamented five-story apartment blocks with attics peaking from high-pitched roofs, plaster gargoyles and Valkyries still reigning over all. On Beckmann Strasse, in front of their solidly respectable building, Willi and Vicki practically flung themselves from von Hessler’s race car, thanking him profusely. “We really ought to do this again,” the doctor shouted after them, his silver eye patch fading.
“Absolutely.”
Vicki waved.
Inside the lobby, with its carpeting and glass chandeliers, she threw her arms around Willi and kissed him hard, penetrating her warm, soft tongue into his mouth.
“Wow,” he whispered.
Up the staircase, she slipped from her blue shoes and made him unfasten her dress hooks, all the little beads jingling wildly. What if one of the neighbors should see? he wondered. They’d never live it down. They’d have to move. He’d have to resign from the police force. But so late on a work night … the kids at a slumber party …
It really was one for the history books.
Next morning she was humming, kissing him sweetly on the lips when he came in for breakfast. While sausages sizzled, she held up bananas and started swaying her hips in a little hula dance, running her fingers through his waves of dark hair. What a holiday, not having the kids around. If only Heinz Winkelmann had more birthdays. Except for that damned party at four … and today half a workday … no escape.
Vicki dropped the bananas. “What’s this?” She grabbed the newspaper out of his hands.
TAINTED SAUSAGES! HUNDREDS SICKENED!
Off went the flame under the
Wurst
. “Even during the war I never heard of such a thing.” She squinted intensely under her dark fringe of hair. “Infected meat—here in Berlin? With all the controls we have?”
“Anything can happen in this world, sweetheart.” Willi calmly took the paper back. “Even with the best controls.” Another story had caught his eye, a smaller one at the bottom of the page. Apparently, the stock exchange in New York had had a bad day.
Two
They were tearing up the Alex—big-time. After two centuries of hodgepodge growth, order was being imposed on the jumble of streets that comprised the old commercial hub just east of the city center. Alexanderplatz, with all its hotels and grand department stores, famous restaurants and nightmarish traffic, was going to become an “architecturally coherent” square, with multilayers of unimpeded traffic and bright modern buildings. In the meantime, all was chaos. Jackhammers. Steam shovels. Pile drivers slamming relentlessly. Willi had to hold his ears. Pedestrians were being forced down narrow gangplanks onto convoluted courses that had them all but colliding with the convoluted courses forced on cyclists, cars, trucks. The path to paradise evidently ran through purgatory. Even on Saturday morning.
When he reached the end of Königs Strasse, the air itself shook from pounding wrecking balls. The Grand Hotel, where his grandfather had his eightieth birthday party in 1911, was on its last legs. Already felled was Haus zum Hirschen, with its dining hall boasting ninety-nine deer heads. His cousin Kurt had his wedding dinner there. A storied yesterday was being hammered to dust for a drawing-board tomorrow. Pity the Police Presidium hadn’t been consigned to the hit list, Willi thought, making his way toward it through the swarms of early shoppers. Its menacing façade and sullen cupolas loomed over the whole southeast side of the Alex like a dead whale. Six floors, 605 rooms, third-largest building in Berlin after the royal palace and Reichstag, its real bloodred color barely discernible under decades of soot. As he reached the massive iron doors at Entrance Six, though, how grateful he felt to have made it here. Not many officers ever did. Even the best. Even after years of service.
Riding the brass-caged elevator up, crushed with a dozen others trying to make the eight o’clock shift, Willi acknowledged he wasn’t the most likely candidate for the Berlin police. His parents, may they rest in peace, certainly never imagined it. A Jewish detective? Who ever heard of such a thing? For centuries Jews had stood on the wrong end of a billy club. But those days were gone, Willi was certain. And he truly loved his work. Believed in justice and the law. Which was very Jewish, as he understood it. Not that it made a huge difference.
He certainly wasn’t ashamed of his ethnicity, but he hardly considered it the keystone of his identity. He enjoyed celebrating traditional holidays with the children: lighting candles at Hanukkah. The Passover seder, liberal as theirs were. He loved reading about the towering achievements of his people and its long trails of tears. But in everyday life in modern Berlin, being Jewish held little more significance to him than his wavy, dark hair, dark eyes, or his circumcised prick.
The Homicide Commission was on the top floor. Willi’s desk was right up against a window. From his chair you could see half of the Alexanderplatz. When you stood, you could see the whole thing, the whole master plan being overlaid on it. The new subway station that would connect to the elevated station, under the new traffic island, which would distribute the flow from five major streets.
“
Guten Morgen,
Herr Sergeant-Detektiv.”
Frau Garber, the unit secretary, had come around with her wooden cart. A slender, sexy grandma in her forties, she was one of the few people on the floor who didn’t give him a cold shoulder. More than two years after Willi’s promotion from Local 157 in Wilmersdorf, he remained the department pariah. In numerous ways, his colleagues had made it clear that was exactly how it was going to remain.
Because of the dark hair and dark eyes and the circumcised prick.
“Oh, Dr. Hoffnung called.” She poured from a steaming pot, smiling. “Says he’s ready whenever you are.” A cup came toward him the way he liked it, black with a touch of sugar. “New beans, from Brazil.”
“Your coffee’s always best, Frau Garber.”
“By now it’s quite permissible to call me Ruta, Herr Sergeant.”
Hoffnung, the pathologist, was among the most competent specialists Willi’d come across at headquarters. Smart. Straightforward. Cool as a cucumber, normally. But this morning, Willi could see, the doctor was perturbed.
“One of the more peculiar and, I’d even go so far as to say, heinous cases I’ve come across in twenty years.” Hoffnung stuck a black pipe in his mouth. Grunting, he yanked aside a bedsheet. Willi’s throat constricted. Laid out in a row on a stainless-steel counter were the burlap sack and multiple bone arrangements.
“It’s no joy to report my initial assessment was correct.” The doctor’s pipe hung from his jaw, his eyes fixed darkly on the clean white remains. “These are boys’ bones, all right. Five boys in all. Ages approximately nine to fourteen. Impossible to determine an exact time of death. But”—he slipped on a pair of cotton gloves—“one telling detail.” Gently opening the ruined Bible, he used his pipe stem to point out a still-legible publication date.
Berlin. 1929
. “This ‘burial,’ therefore”—he shrugged theoretically—“if that’s what the contents of the sack may be termed, took place within the last nine months.