Authors: Paul Grossman
“The sack, as you can see, is manufactured by a firm called Schnitzler and Son. The burlap fibers still contain bits of animal feed. Probably for cattle, maybe goats, swine; I don’t know. I’m no farmer. This is what it looks like.” Hoffnung used a tweezer to pick up some grain for Willi’s inspection. But Willi was no farmer either.
“What about that material binding these bones?”
“Muscle, all right.” Hoffnung pulled a leather pouch from his lab coat. “But … not animal. That, I’m guessing”—he sighed, dipping his pipe in, carefully filling the bowl with tobacco—“is the same muscle once attached to those bones. Dried out. Hand spun. Woven almost like a thread. Whoever did this is quite a craftsman.”
Willi felt a shiver of dread. Human muscle, rolled into thread?
“There’s more.” Hoffnung anxiously rifled his pockets. “These bones, for lack of a better word”—he looked relieved to find his matches—“have been … cooked.”
Willi’s throat closed. Like during the war, when the gas shells came.
“I couldn’t find so much as a microscopic shred of tissue on them.” The orange flame trembled as the doctor lit his pipe. “And there’s only one way bones get that clean, Herr Sergeant-Detektiv.” Hoffnung’s eyes blackened as he puffed. “You would have to boil them.” His face disappeared behind a cloud of smoke. “For many hours.”
* * *
The pile driver below knocked beams into the soggy Berlin subsoil as if into Willi’s skull. From his desk, he could see to the open cut across the street where the underground station was beginning to take shape. Eventually, all the layers of traffic in Alexanderplatz would be so intricately organized that not one line would cross another on the same level. How much less complex could the mind of a person be who’d boil the flesh off children’s bones?
He tilted all the way back in his chair, a dangerous habit since childhood.
Not just boil flesh, but dry the muscles, then hand-roll it into “thread.” Use this thread to weave the bones together into arrangements. Place the arrangements into a burlap sack … with a Bible. What would drive such behavior? What kind of person would conceive it? Could it even be called a person?
Sitting back up, he fingered the black receiver. He’d just gotten off the phone with Schnitzler and Son … no lead there. Feed for any type of animal could be put in their sacks, they said. They had customers all over north Germany.
The buzzer startled him. “Don’t forget lunch, Herr Sergeant.” It was Frau Garber … Ruta … on the intercom. “Noon downstairs.”
“Thanks, Ruta.”
He broke apart a paper clip.
Kriminal-Kommissar Horthstaler was fond of capping off the week with a unit meeting in the basement cafeteria, one flight above the labyrinth of holding cells known as the Dungeons. Willi wished they’d meet like all the other units, in a regular room, and to hell with lunch. Not for any religious reasons or even, as Vicki suggested, the pull of the “collective unconscious”—but really because he couldn’t stand the taste—he avoided eating pork, which in Germany rendered him completely outlandish. And it never failed to come up at these damned lunches.
“What, Kraus, no pig’s knuckles today?” Mueller’d throw an arm around him. “I hear they’re especially tender.”
“Perhaps for dinner,” Willi’d reply.
He’d long ago trained himself not to get hooked by these baits. In the army they’d come thick and fast. Not only about his diet, but about his nose. His hair. His “Turkish” complexion. His strangely naked prick. After the first year it pretty much wore off, once the real steel started coming down. But here, at police headquarters, the Jew stuff didn’t want to quit.
The cafeteria was full. Horthstaler had reserved their
Stammtisch,
their regular table, far in the back. Everyone was in attendance. Mueller. Meyer. Hiller. Stoss. And, of course, Freksa. Dear Freksa.
Willi nodded to them all, got chicken cutlets, and paid no attention to what anyone else was eating. After a while Horthstaler belched, wiped his pudgy lips, and looked ready to begin. With Horthstaler, it was always food first. Not that he was fat. He managed to distribute it.
“So.” He pulled out a folder, licking his fingers before searching inside it. “Let me start by congratulating you. Our unit once again has ranked number one in the least number of missed days. I have always maintained this is the hardest-working, most conscientious team in Homicide. And you, Detectives, continue to prove me right.”
For half an hour Willi did his best to make it look as if he were paying attention to Horthstaler. But he couldn’t tear his mind from the burlap bag. First thing, he figured, was try to determine what that passage from Ephesians might mean …
children of wrath
. Hopefully the query he’d put into the library yesterday would turn up something. If in fact it was a “burial,” as Dr. Hoffnung suggested, whoever had committed it might be trying to communicate something.
The second thing would be to trace that sewer line.
“Now to the assignments,” Willi vaguely heard, his mind deep underground. The overflow line that had carried that bag might well lead back to its origins. Or not, if someone had dumped it in trying to cover his tracks.
“Kraus”—he jumped. Horthstaler was looking directly at everyone but him—“did the intake the other day on that most unusual burlap bag in Lichtenberg. But the investigation will now pass into the capable hands of Hans Freksa.”
Willi blinked, then looked across the table. Freksa’s grin told him Willi hadn’t misunderstood. They were taking away his case.
News of the burlap bag and its bizarre bone arrangements had been all over the Police Presidium before Willi’d even gotten back from Lichtenberg. Berlin had no shortage of headline-grabbing crime, but this was clearly a showstopper. And Hans Freksa, besides being a damned good detective, could never get enough of his name in the papers.
Why were police on the track so fast? One name is worth remembering—Hans Freksa.… Using advanced police methods, Freksa has scored success after success.… Hans Freksa may be Berlin’s most accomplished detective.…
Berlin police were Germany’s best. Eighty-five percent of the city’s homicides were solved last year, as opposed to 75 percent in the rest of the nation. Freksa beat the city average, solving 90 percent of his cases; it was true. So was the fact that Willi tied him. And that several others in Homicide beat them both. But because Freksa was so personable, and Freksa looked so great in photographs, and Freksa was single, and Freksa dished himself out so shamelessly, journalists ate him up. He’d become a real celebrity. People in the street asked for Freksa’s autograph. But Willi wasn’t giving in to the star so easily. This was his case.
“Herr Kommissar. Naturally I accept any duty and gladly take on any new assignment you have in mind. But I’d like to request that, in addition, I be allowed to stay on the Lichtenberg find.”
A moment’s silence. Then Freksa’s clownish mask of horror: “
Ach, nein,
Kommissar. You mustn’t overwork Isidore’s protégé.” Freksa pretended to beg for Willi’s life. “You know how frail these people are … from all their years of money counting.”
A quick burst of violent laughter, joined in by Horthstaler himself.
Willi’d survived minefields. Machine-gun fire. Did these morons really think they could wound him? Dragging Weiss into it, though, in such an obscene manner, made him want to take his chair and clobber Freksa over the head. Good thing he had a highly developed, perhaps overfunctioning, superego, as Dr. Freud had named it.
Bernhard Weiss was not only their superior, but one of the few people in life Willi actually looked up to. Deputy president of the Berlin police, he was the first Jew since Jews had come to Germany eighteen hundred years ago to reach top-ranking law enforcement. Weiss had created the nation’s first modern crime lab. Spearheaded the transformation of the Berlin police after the 1919 revolution. Fostered the spirit of democratic policing. Extremists of all stripes hated him because he was vigorously evenhanded in his defense of the republic. Omnipresent in Berlin, he was always poking about crime scenes, overseeing demonstrations, safeguarding visiting dignitaries. With his large dark eyes behind wire glasses exuding openness and confidence, he’d become the face of the modern “people’s” police. And a lightning rod for all who hated what he stood for. Lately one of the city’s most vicious far-right rabble-rousers had cast him as a symbol of how “Jewified” Germany had become under the republic, repeatedly demeaning Weiss with the contemptuous Yiddish name Isidore.
“Well”—Freksa shrugged—“it’s no secret you people look out for each other.”
Clearly Freksa read the hate-filled rants of this Dr. Joseph Goebbels.
Weiss was responsible for Willi’s career, all right. But not the way Freksa imagined. Willi’d already been twenty-four, finishing his second year at Berlin University, when he met the doctor in 1920 at a dinner honoring Jewish war veterans. Willi’d met his wife at a similar event a year before. Weiss never said a word about joining the police. Never had to. Ever since Willi was a kid, since his weak-hearted father was robbed at knifepoint and taunted with anti-Semitic slurs, he’d burned to hunt evildoers. To bring them to justice. He’d just never heard of anyone Jewish actually doing it. Until Weiss, who by then was already deputy head of Kripo. But Weiss knew nothing of Willi’s application to the police academy, nor did he have anything to do with Willi’s acceptance into it. An Iron Cross, First Class, accomplished that. And Weiss certainly did not help Willi earn top graduate in his year.
Not until Foreign Minister Rathenau was murdered in June 1922 did Willi even met Dr. Weiss a second time. This notorious political assassination occurred in Grunewald Forest, which was in the Wilmersdorf precinct, where Willi was a first-year assistant detective. He was assigned to work on the team with Weiss, who’d come in from the Alex to head the investigation. The skill and tenacity and the energy with which this top sleuth led the pursuit was awe-inspiring. By the time the killers were cornered, Willi was a true admirer, and he and the doctor had made a connection.
Perhaps Weiss had taken a natural interest in encouraging Willi, an interest he might not have taken in say, Hans Freksa, who had whole ranks of role models. But it wasn’t Weiss who’d apprehended the husband who murdered a butcher, baker, and letter carrier he thought were having affairs with his wife. Nor was it Weiss who’d solved the case of the missing pharmacist that had baffled the Wilmersdorf precinct for years. Perhaps Freksa couldn’t reconcile himself to how Willi took five years to make full sergeant, while it had taken Freksa twice that. Plenty of guys here believed higher-ups were “managing” Willi’s career. But no higher-up had breached the Prenzlauerberg white-slave ring. Or cracked the Neukoln tenement murders.
“Kraus.” The Kommissar was insistent. “You haven’t even heard yet what your new assignment is. It’s a major task. A most heavy burden. Of far more consequence to millions of Berliners than whatever’s in that burlap bag, I assure you.”
Willi sucked in his gut. He could feel the bag and all its horrors slipping from his fingers.
“You’re no doubt aware of the tainted sausages spreading terror across this city.”
Willi hoped this was a joke. That it was all leading up to some hilarious punch line at his expense. But Horthstaler’s expression didn’t suggest wit.
“Yes, of course. It was in all the morning papers.” Willi clearly recalled Vicki’s reaction. “I didn’t think any fatalities were involved.”
“Think again, Kraus. As of noon today … three.”
“
Oy vey,
Kommissar.” It was Mueller, caricaturing the crudest Yiddish accent, cradling his cheeks, rocking his head. “Dos meat ain’t kosher. Dos is pig sausages!”
The laughter this time was uncontrollable.
* * *
Fury raged through Willi’s limbs as he strode the echoing hallways. At the elevators, even though it was after one and the building nearly empty for the weekend, he checked over his shoulder to make sure no one was watching. Upstairs, in the administration offices, a thousand pounds seemed to lift from his chest as soon as he saw Dr. Weiss’s door still open. And when the dark eyes looked up from behind wire glasses, he practically had to keep from throwing himself on the desk and bawling, “They took away my case!”
In the two years since he’d been here at headquarters, he’d come to the doctor’s office more than once, he had to confess … but only for moral support. It wasn’t easy constantly being undermined by colleagues and superiors alike. Never once, though, had he asked the deputy president for any sort of intervention. Until now.
“Freksa wanted it because it’ll be big news and he’s a publicity hound. Horthstaler yanked it from me because it’s his instinct to shove me aside. But I was the one called to the scene, and I filed the paperwork. So by all rights that bag of bones should be mine.” Willi rested his case before his superior. “Couldn’t something be done?”
Dr. Weiss’s eyes narrowed as put down his pen.
“Willi. We’ve known each other what, eight, nine years now?” Leaning his slim, forceful torso forward, he folded his fingers on the desktop. “I know the last thing you’d do would be to use your acquaintance with me to further your career. But others might not be so certain. Think of what could happen to your reputation if—”
“My reputation?” Willi hated interrupting, but there was no point even discussing that word. “My reputation couldn’t get much worse, Dr. Weiss. No matter who I am or what I do, the men in my unit only see me as one thing: a big-nosed Jew. You’ve never intervened on my behalf, and still you couldn’t convince anyone down there, including Kommissar Horthstaler, that my whole career wasn’t managed by you.”
The deputy president tightened his lips, letting out a long, low sigh. “Even if I thought it appropriate, I couldn’t interfere right now, Willi. I’m in a bit of a tight spot myself.”
Willi stared at him, his whole throat clenching. As if whacked across the face suddenly, he understood. Under attack by virulent anti-Semites, Weiss, one of the most prominent Jews in the whole civil service, could ill afford even the smallest scandal involving Jewish patronage. Willi felt a white-hot shame rush through his face for having been so selfish. To hell with the gentile world, he raged inwardly. For putting Weiss and him in such positions.