Authors: Paul Grossman
The kid pointed to a display case of small, tan evening bags with what looked like ivory clasps. Expensive, Willi saw. Seventy-five marks. Even Vicki’s mother’d probably never paid that. Each little bag, not big enough to carry three or four items, was clearly custom-made, though, its own unique insignia dyed into the leather. One had a black knight. Another a leaping lion. A third— His breath stuck when he saw it.
Exactly as Kai described … a small red Indian head, like the one in the front window that first caught the kids’ attention. The boys yanked up their sleeves and showed Willi their shoulders. They all had the same.
To be a Red Apache you had to get one.
Each gang had its own. The Black Knights. The Leaping Lions.
“It’s d-d-definitely Manfred’s tattoo,” a boy with a broken tooth stuttered. “I k-k-know ’cause I inked him.” He hiccuped and choked back tears. “S-s-slipped on the last feather and made a t-t-tiny extra line. L-l-look, Detektiv.”
Bending nearer, Willi focused on the last feather. Sure enough …
“Manfred disappeared last year.” Kai’s pink lips quivered. “That’s him, Detektiv.”
“Preposterous.” The woman, who proved to be Madam Schröder herself, was redder than the Indian.
“Madam,” Willi finally stammered, “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to close your shop doors.”
* * *
Within the hour Dr. Hoffnung arrived with the mobile crime lab. The boys of the Red Apaches had to wait outside. After summoning Gunther to get here at once, Willi interrogated Madam Schröder in the back office.
“From one of your own, Detektiv.” Her anxiety sought refuge in a scapegoat. “Of course I know who. I have the receipt right here. What kind of business do you think I run?”
She flung open a file cabinet and began hunting.
“‘A rare opportunity. Only bunch of its kind,’ he told me. ‘All handmade. The highest quality.’ That, I could see for myself. I happen to have an extremely discerning eye. Since he offered it exclusively, I grabbed the whole lot—two dozen and one. Sold four in the past two months, which isn’t bad, considering. People find them alluring. One has to compete on a street like this, with so many fine shops and all the big Jewish depar— Here it is. ‘Grenedier Strasse 139. Schmuel Markoweitsch. Dealer in Fine Leather.’”
A soft rap interrupted them. It was Hoffnung at the door. He had a sickly look.
All he had to do was nod and Willi understood.
The bags were human skin, all right.
And the clasps weren’t ivory, but bone.
* * *
Just a stone’s throw north of Alexanderplatz, a small, crowded district called the Scheunen Viertel was home to Berlin’s
Ost Juden,
eastern Jews who’d fled fighting and pogroms in places such as Russia and Ukraine and taken refuge in Germany, many illegally. At the heart the untidy, colorful, bustling little slum ran Grenedier Strasse. The minute you stepped on it you felt as if you’d entered Bialystok or Minsk, the sidewalks crowded with bearded men in long black coats, store signs in Hebrew lettering, sweet oniony scents wafting from tea shops. Sticking like glue to Willi’s side, tall, blond Gunther looked as if he’d landed on another planet.
It was twilight, businesses already closed. Barefoot kids were playing in the street, adults hunched on stoops and windowsills, clustered on the sidewalks. No one answered at number 139, Markoweitsch Fine Leather. A woman finally stuck her head out an upstairs window:
“Vus?”
Willi knew bits of the language of the
Ost Juden,
Yiddish, because his father’s parents had spoken it. But he hadn’t even a chance to respond when the kerchiefed head seemed to intuit he was not someone Markoweitsch wanted to see.
“Gevalt!”
She slammed the window shut.
“You wait here, Gunther. Don’t let anyone in or out. I’m going around back.”
“Yes, sir! But, sir?”
“What?”
“What if someone tries to sell me something?”
Despite the seriousness of the situation, seeing the childish fear in Gunther’s face, Willi couldn’t help it. He burst out laughing. “Unless you’re one hundred percent sure it isn’t cheaper around the corner”—he shook a finger at the kid—“don’t buy.”
Almost every building in Berlin was built around a courtyard. Some had courtyards within courtyards. Some even had courtyards within courtyards within courtyards; 139 Grenedier was one of the latter. As Willi penetrated deeper into the maze of brick alleys that opened onto brick yards, he was following his gut until his ears took over. From the upstairs apartments a symphony of clattering dishes and fighting family members was soon superseded by what he was certain was singing. Not just singing, but prayer. A service. He even recognized the song. “Adon Olam.” Master of the Universe. It was coming from the deepest courtyard in the building, inside a doorway over which was painted a small sign in Hebrew letters. Like most Jewish boys, Willi’d done his Bar Mitzvah at age thirteen, and he wracked his memory now to try to translate the sign.
M-A-R
—
All of a sudden, with a loud
“Ah-main,”
the song ended and the door was flung open, a pale, bearded face just inches away staring at Willi from under a white shawl. More pale faces under white shawls filled the room inside. Clearly they knew he was coming.
“Which one’s Markoweitsch?” He strained the extent of his Yiddish, breaking out his badge.
He might as well have been a specter from the other world judging by the way their jaws dropped. A cop who spoke Yiddish? A bearish fellow in his forties pulled off his shawl and stepped forward, half astonished, half terrified.
“Papers I’ve got, sir.”
“Not my concern,” Willi switched to German. “My interest is strictly your merchandise.”
Markoweitsch was now really astonished. “You’re here to shop?”
* * *
Half an hour later they were in his apartment upstairs, Gunther accepting second helpings of honey cake from the kerchiefed wife.
“Never,” Markoweitsch insisted over a glass of hot tea. “And believe me I would have noticed. Right here on Grenedier he stops me next to his truck. Such bags he shows. Stolen, I was sure. But, no. On the holy book he swears his sister made them, right in Berlin. Two years’ hard labor, that’s how he put it. How could I resist? These were grade-A goods. I went to the shop, got cash, and paid him on the spot, two hundred reichsmarks for twenty-five. Minute he was gone I shlepped them direct to Schröder. I know my customers. She went after them like a
chazzer
to stuffed mackerel—you understand me? Because they’re unique. Bags like these you don’t see around, Sergeant. Paid me five hundred. And she’ll make a nice profit, if business picks up.”
“You never asked him what they were made of?”
“Made? What, they’re not calfskin?”
“I don’t suppose you got a receipt?”
“Receipt?”
“No card, any way to reach him?”
“A corner transaction, Sergeant. Hardly uncommon in this neighborhood, you should know.”
“A bald man, you say? Extremely big?”
“Like a golem. A giant. Tell me—he did something wrong?”
Not unless you think kidnapping kids, gassing them, selling their flesh, and using their skin and bones to make handbags is wrong, Willi thought, without saying anything. At least he was zeroing in. Truck without license plates. Big as a giant.
Arms so strong they could stun a man with a single blow and, in seconds, lift him upside down, hang him on meat hooks, and split him in two.
* * *
The moment he’d seen the red Indian tattoo he’d known he’d seen it before—or something almost just like it. At Helga’s. From Markoweitsch’s, he and Gunther hurried directly there. The mansion on Bleibtreu Strasse was dark, but they could hear odd noises inside. It took minutes of pounding before the red turban answered the door. When Willi flashed his badge, Zoltan smiled as if they were dear cousins.
“But Sergeant-Detektiv, she’s meditating. You wouldn’t want to disturb her communion with—”
“I sure would.” Willi brushed past, Gunther covering his back.
There was noise, all right. Coming from downstairs. Like, screaming.
“Oh, no, Herr Sergeant, you—”
Yanking an appropriate-looking door, Willi found himself atop a long, dark staircase, the screaming immediately amplified. There was more than one voice, he could tell. Oddly muffled. A small sign overhead proclaimed
STRAFZIMMER.
Punishment Room. He took the steps two at a time, Gunther tagging along. Flickering light from what proved to be flaming torches revealed the outlines of chains. Cages. Whipping posts.
Gunther’d seen a lot today. Boys in makeup. Jews in caftans. He’d taken it all in admirably. But this time he let out an audible
“Mein Gott.”
Three women in schoolgirl uniforms were tied next to each other on a bed, bare buttocks in the air, some kind of plug stuffed into each mouth covering the shrieks as one by one they received blows from a leather paddle that left their rumps swollen and red. Doing the paddling, Willi saw, a “headmistress” in thick, black glasses and tweed suit, was Brigitta.
“You!” she cried when she spotted him. “What the fuck do you think you’re—”
“Shut up.” Helga rose from a pile of pillows, where she’d obviously been enjoying the show, snacking on cherries. Wiping her fingers, she walked toward them in silver heels and a tight gown with no back. When she reached Brigitta, she cracked her across the face. “How many times must I tell you—authority is to be respected. Always. Now out of here. All of you.”
Grumbling with disappointment, the women untied themselves, pulled out their mouth plugs, and trudged upstairs. Brigitta threw her schoolmarm glasses on the bed and shot an enraged glare at Willi before storming off with them. In the flickering torchlight Willi could see Helga was amused.
“We were just warming up, Sergeant. You ought to have come an hour from now.” She lit a cigarette, raising an eyebrow at him. “You’re welcome to join sometime. Yes, why not? Bring the little woman.” She blew smoke at Gunther. “Who’s your boy? Lanky—”
“Never mind,” Willi interrupted, seeing Gunther’s face go redder than those slapped behinds. “Upstairs with you now too.”
In the chrome-filled room where they’d first met, Helga sat at her dressing table, rolling her eyes but making the best of things by grabbing her silver comb and touching up her coif in the three-sided mirror.
Gunther, sweating, broke out a pad and pencil.
“Describe Ilse for me, physically,” Willi instructed.
“Scrawny. Ugly.” Helga sighed, smoothing out the platinum waves, then seeming to recant. “No, not really.” She squinted, thinking back. “The features were decent. She had a certain charm, actually. But that skin.” She dropped the comb and spun around to Willi. “I always thought it must have been terrible acne when she was a kid, but you never got a true word out of Ilse. I finally taught her how to use a good base to cover it. Guerlain, nothing else. With the right lipstick, a little mascara … for heaven’s sake, what are you staring at, Sergeant?”
“That desk lamp.”
Willi saw the color fade from Helga’s cheeks. “Why?” She crushed out a cigarette and lit another. “Is it so fascinating?”
From touring the tanneries he knew how many different types of leather it was possible to produce. A single cowhide could be rendered strong and inflexible for something such as shoe soles, or soft and pliant for jackets and gloves, turned any color, or cut so thin as to be nearly translucent. The difference all lay in the chemical treatments and dyes.
“That little red Indian head. How unusual. What’s the shade made of?”
“How the hell should I know?” Smoke shot through her nostrils as she deigned to glance at it. “Casts a nice diffuse light, that’s all I care. Gives me a healthy—”
“It’s human skin, Helga.”
The cigarette dropped from her mouth to the floor. “What?”
“Where did you get it?”
“From her!” Helga reached, blindly searching with her hand. “Four or five years ago. A Christmas present.”
As Willi watched her grovel, the carpet starting to smolder, he realized pieces were falling into place.
The Ox and the Shepherdess were in this together.
Twenty
Vienna may have given birth to it, but Berlin quickly adopted Freudian analysis as its own, and in the decade following the Great War the Berliner Psychoanalytisches Institut had grown into the movement’s undisputed international home. Staffed by such luminaries as Karen Horney, Theodor Reik, Wilhelm Reich, and Melanie Klein, the Institut not only furthered exploration of the unconscious but was the first to begin training new generations of analysts. It even provided cost-free clinical treatment to those who couldn’t afford it. Willi could think of more than one anguished soul he wished to God would partake.
Arriving at their building on Wichmann Strasse, he hurtled up the stairs two at a time. His cousin Kurt, bony-faced and ebullient, was one of the rising stars here. In his sun-filled office as Willi brought him up-to-date on the latest horrific twists in the case, his cousin leaned back in a leather armchair, slowly removing his eyeglasses.
“It seems to me, Willi”—Kurt sighed, pulling out a handkerchief—“that by taking these children apart and sewing them back together”—he wiped his lenses diligently—“the
Kinderfresser
’s probably seeking to bind up his own fractured psyche. You see, a real schizoid has no unified core personality. They chronically teeter on the edge of fragmentation. Even the minutest rejection can completely tear them to pieces.”
God forbid you made her feel unwanted.
Willi heard the High Priestess again, describing Ilse.
She practically ran amok.
“To ward off such a devastating attack, for example, as an accusation of worthlessness”—Kurt returned the frames to his bony face—“a schizoid might strive to construct a personality of unsurpassed utility. In this case, going so far as to compulsively convert his victims’ body parts into something of value—food, clothing. In all likelihood, it’s a ritualizing reenactment of the tortures he himself once endured. I suspect that as a child, our murderer must have felt as if he were being virtually dismembered. Eaten alive. Although”—he rubbed his chin, concerned—“the fact that more than one person’s involved might undermine my thesis.”