Authors: Paul Grossman
What choice was there, though?
He sent Gunther first, able to watch only through one eye as the kid began to rise. The two Schupo men broke into a real sweat turning the pulleys, but going slowly managed to keep the noise to a minimum. Reaching the top finally, Gunther whispered down that there was a decent-size platform, able to accommodate maybe five or six men. Which was good, Willi thought, because when they pried open those doors, he wanted to enter in force.
Willi went next. As he climbed on and jerked skyward, he had to suppress a rush of doubts. Perhaps Magda’d already heard the squeaking pulley and was fleeing through some exit they had no idea about. Perhaps she was already at the door, hatchet raised, about to swipe. He peeked down. One severed rope and his spine would snap as fast as a pretzel. But he forced his eyes upward and realized, after all this time, how near he’d gotten to his goal. Whether its origin was Bruno’s father or his father’s father all the way back to Adam no longer made a difference. All that mattered now was that he put an end to it, once and for all—the Köhlers’ tortured legacy. Rising over the memorial of names, all the rust seeping from the iron tracks made it look as if the walls themselves were weeping blood.
The three Schupo men followed, hoisted by Rollmann and Eberhard, then Woerner came, camera ready. All the while the clock ticked. In less than two minutes Team B would break through. When everyone finally crowded on the ledge, a Schupo man began wedging a crowbar between the doors. Willi’s heart pounded. From the day he first saw the bizarre contents of that burlap sack, he’d known he was up against something truly terrible. Now he didn’t really want to have to see.
As the doors rolled apart, he smelled it first. A long, low chamber opened before them—no hatchet but a stench as sharp as one slicing at their noses. Willi knew at once what it was: rotting flesh. It brought him back to those hospitals at the front. Only here, an unearthly silence reigned—because staring at them, mute with shock, were eight or nine young boys.
They looked more like creatures from the depths of the ocean, heads shaven. Eyes bulging. Ears sticking out. So emaciated their collarbones seemed ready to break from their skin. But they were boys, all right, seated at low tables with lamps, each with different work in front. Their feet, Willi saw, bare and raw, were chained to the floor. Like—
Slaves.
A taller one, not as emaciated, the overseer evidently, patrolled with a small cane whip. He too stared in mute amazement at the invaders, as if those bones in the basement had reincarnated and arisen.
No one batted an eyelash, so stunning to each side was the apparition of the other.
Only the reporter held his mouth, to keep from retching.
Two large vats fired by orange flames added to the hellish atmosphere. One, Willi saw, contained bones. A batch of fibulae and tibiae on an adjacent cart were clean and white. The second, he guessed from buckets of thick, gray fat nearby, was probably boiling gelatin or soap—one of the reasons, though not all, for the violent stench. The opposite wall held long wooden racks filled with strands of bloody muscle hanging like spaghetti. Two little boys were rolling them into the leather thread that was Magda’s trademark. Next to them, two more skeletal figures were boring holes with hand drills into knuckle bones, passing finished products on to a third, who shined them up with sandpaper. Another was at a sewing machine, pushing pedals with his feet, the way Willi’s grandmother used to.
Only she never stiched human skins.
On the far side of the hellish workshop a wooden handcart was draped with naked corpses. One had already been dismembered, judging by the remains on a nearby butcher’s table. Two still in the cart, Willi realized, looked familiar. He’d seen their photographs not long ago: the sons of industrialists who’d vanished off horses in the Tiergarten. His throat clenched when he realized each of their right arms was missing. And their skulls appeared to have been sliced open at the top.
Suddenly, atop a short staircase overlooking this chamber of horrors, a loud, twisting scream came from a set of hinges, and a door opened. Lit from behind, Magda’s massive body cast a shadow over the silent children, a white apron covering her front completely drenched in red, her whole face smeared with it, her hair, her hands. For a second, she just stood there looking at Willi as if she wasn’t sure who he was. Then like a little girl happy to see her daddy, she gave a great big smile and proudly held aloft the child’s arm she’d been gnawing to the bone.
Book Four
TOWER OF SILENCE
Twenty-six
BERLIN
SEPTEMBER 1930
The giant radio mast over Wilmersdorf scanned the night sky with a powerful searchlight, its antenna beaming high-frequency waves across the heart of Europe—plays by Brecht, concerts by Schönberg. A towering symbol of Berlin as transmitter of modernity.
A third of the way up its truss-work spine, accessible by high-speed elevator, the four-sided Terrace Restaurant beckoned with a 360-degree panorama, enhanced by the rhythms of the finest dance orchestras. From here the whole city—the good side, anyway—seemed to throw itself at one’s feet. To the north, the old Charlottenburg Palace with its sprawling baroque gardens. To the west, the flat, green expanse of Grunewald, woods and lakes and luxury villas sailing toward the horizon. Southward, handsome Wilmersdorf, with its pretty plazas and respectable apartment blocks, the festive lights of Luna Park. And east, the elegant shops, cafés, and movie palaces along the tree-lined Ku’ damm, racing into the heart of the city. It was a fitting vantage point to celebrate Willi’s thirty-fifth birthday.
And his triumph over
Der Kinderfresser.
Imperfect though it might have been.
Several of Woerner’s hair-raising photos, along with his heart-palpitating, if slightly inaccurate, firsthand report proclaiming the case of the Child-Eater closed, had catapulted Willi into a national hero: Catcher of the Beast. By the end of the week his face had appeared in newspapers across Germany. The chancellor had called to thank him. Sigmund Freud phoned to discuss certain details of the case. Even Kommissar Horthstaler, who wouldn’t think of missing this celebration tonight, got into as many photographs with Willi as possible, insisting to whoever would listen that he’d always known he’d had a master sleuth on his team.
A hundred people must have turned out for this party, which his father-in-law had said he’d be “honored” to pay for. The orchestra was playing “It Will Never Be Like This Again,” and as Willi and Vicki swayed in a gentle fox-trot, people kept coming over to have their picture taken with him, asking for an autograph.
“Go on, for goodness’ sakes,” Vicki kept urging.
“Thank you for giving us back our city,” they all said.
The whole of Berlin was breathing easier. Schools, playgrounds, orphan homes, even the gangs of Wild Boys, could relax now that
Der Kinderfesser
was behind bars.
Which there was no doubt she was, thanks to Willi.
He gave himself credit where it was due.
But even if no one else wanted to admit it, he for one knew the final nail in this coffin had not quite been driven in.
* * *
Once they’d grabbed her, Magda’d gone easily enough, lingering in a state of severe regression while they got her into cuffs, mumbling “Ring Around the Rosie” the whole way to the Alex, even as they locked her in the Dungeons:
Ringel, Ringel, Reihe
Sind wir Kinder dreie
She certainly hadn’t relinquished her secrets as easily.
While medical teams from Charité Hospital worked to save the boys she’d tortured, Willi and Gunther faced her in the cell. By then she’d been made presentable, dressed in a prison gown and clean, white headscarf, all washed up. An awful stench, though, discharged from her mouth; half her teeth, Willi saw, were rotting and black. Even with a woman’s scarf on, nothing about this woman was womanly. It spooked Willi how closely she resembled her brother.
Only a day ago that maniac had nearly taken off Willi’s head.
At first, she seemed cooperative. Nearly rational. Offering grim excuses in her own defense.
“You think I wanted to?” Her voice was less enraged than Axel’s but more deeply bitter. “He locked me down there. You think I had a choice? I was given quotas of how much I had to produce, like during the war.”
Willi was relieved at least she was cognizant of reality, however much she may or may not have meshed with it.
“Who locked you up, Magda?” He could tell she knew exactly who he was and that they’d met before. “Who forced you to do all those terrible things?”
“You know who.” She shot him a glance, twisting her lips in a grin. “My better half.”
You could almost feel sorry for her. The woman had endured such a childhood of torture that her eyes were still shellacked with many coats of pain. But recalling how she played him that first time they’d met, he knew well that pity was what she was aiming for. And that it was only meant to distract him.
“You mean, your brother?”
She shivered, seeming to expel something from her bloodstream. Then, peeking at Willi, she snickered and broke into a storm of such hilarity she had to hold her middle with both hands. “You sure took care of him, didn’t you!”
Startled, Willi couldn’t help wondering—if she’d known about her brother’s death, why hadn’t she tried to flee? Perhaps she’d felt too secure down there in her slave-filled dungeon. Perhaps she was just ready to give up.
“When I spoke to you in the
Viehof,
I don’t recall any chains around your feet, Magda, like you put on those little boys. You looked quite free to leave.”
“How the fuck do you know?”
Clearly he’d taken the wrong approach.
Her massive weight shifted as if she was about to tackle him. He opened his hands to warn her off, and she fell back with a pitiful whimper, holding her arms over her head, trembling as if she were about to get clubbed.
“Oh, please don’t hit. God, please. No. Please.”
“No one’s hitting, Magda.”
It was too late.
Curled in a ball, she’d taken leave of her senses behind some invisible wall and wouldn’t come out, appearing at first not to understand, then as if she didn’t even hear Willi. In the blink of an eye she fell sound asleep and started snoring like a drunken sailor. Gunther and Willi looked at each other, unsure how to proceed. In just a few seconds, though, she was wide awake, stretching as if from a long night’s sleep. “Jesus.” She looked around. “Where are my kids?”
“They’re all being taken care of,” Willi assured her.
He tried to coax her into revealing what he needed to find out most: her sister’s whereabouts. But the minute he mentioned Ilse, Magda went wild.
“You leave her out of this!” she screamed, and balled her fists, then tenderly pretended to cradle a baby in her arms. “My sweet little angel. Cares for everybody—but herself.”
Willi had to give her his handkerchief, she started sobbing so profusely.
“Always worried about the future of the world.” She mopped her rubbery cheeks. “Out there doing good. On her own, unrewarded.” Every time Magda blew her nose, her face appeared to expand. “Cleaning up neighborhoods. Getting rid of rodents.” Finally her whole head looked like it were about to explode. “That’s all they are, you know: vermin needing extermination.” Her eyes detonated with delight. “And, boy, did they come running when Ilse yelled, ‘ice cream.’” A blast of laughter tore from her heart. “‘Ice cream, ice cream!’ A real Pied Piper.”
Magda threw up her meaty hands, then let them fall in a gesture of deflation.
“So can you tell me, Sergeant, why does she keep falling in love? It breaks my heart. First the doctor. Then the priestess. Now that mustached little schemer. She gives them everything, and what does she get?” Magda leaned back, swaying. “I like it alone. Just me and my boys.” Her voice descended to a whisper. “Such sweet things, ain’t they? Theirs is a Christlike suffering.”
She winced, stabbed it seemed, deep in her side.
“Little shits!” she screamed again, murderously looking around. “I’ll make something useful out of them.”
She sighed, leaning back, taking a deep breath. “The living I’ll make work, and the dead I’ll make into—”
Sensing perhaps she ought not say what she was about to, she froze and, in a desperate ploy, ripped open her prison gown, unleashed one of her enormous tits, stuck it in her mouth, and started suckling.
“Mmmm, Mother, I’m so hungry.”
Willi had to concede about this time she was more than he could handle.
* * *
The Terrace orchestra broke into a lively Charleston, a dance that had practically defined the last decade, but now sadly seemed too jubilant. Gunther and Vicki’s sister, Ava, however, were out there making the best of it: arms, knees, heels flying in a dozen directions. Willi spotted Fritz at a table chatting with Willi’s cousin Kurt.
After that insanity with Magda in the jail cell, Willi’d turned to Kurt for help. With two out of three siblings plus the underground lair down, he was confident the Köhler death ring had been knocked out. But he couldn’t feel as if this thing was over until he’d gotten Ilse too. Little angel.
Hoping Kurt could wrest something out of Magda, he’d gone to see him. It was a fine day, the first hint of autumn in the air. Turn-of-the-century mansions in the Tiergarten district glistened in the sunshine. Approaching the handsome Insitut building, he’d spotted his bony-faced cousin out front talking to a man in a trench coat and gotten a real start when he realized the guy was wearing a silver eye patch.
Kurt knew von Hessler?
Nearing, Willi could hardly help but overhear the scientist’s strident polemic.
“You speak as if there really is such a clear separation between sanity and madness. What if this ‘psychosis’ you place such stock in is simply an extreme expression of thoughts or behavior present in the entire population?”
“Willi.” Kurt spotted him and looked immediately relieved. “Doktor, I’m afraid I’m going to have to bid adieu. This is my cousin Sergeant-Detektiv Kraus, of the Kriminal Polizei.”