Authors: Paul Grossman
“Is Heinz here?” she asked through white, pinched lips.
“Heinz? You know very well you forbade him.”
“The boy can be stubborn. I can’t find him. He’s not in his room and he’s not downstairs. I was wondering if you allowed him in.”
“I hardly think so. Vicki’s asleep. I just got home.”
“Where are your boys? May I speak to them?”
Willi expected her to come in but she just stood there, outside the door.
“Could you get them for me, please?”
Only Stefan was in the kids’ room, playing with the Red Baron’s plane.
“Hey there, Stef, how’s life? Where’s Erich?”
Stefan blinked his large brown eyes. “I don’t know.”
Willi felt a little twinge, but figured Vicki knew. Maybe he’d gone to a friend’s for dinner; he did that now and then. When Vicki was awakened, though, she turned paler than the sheet. “He should be here.” She raced to the boys’ room.
“Is there something wrong?” Irmgard shouted from the hall. “Where’s my Heinz?”
“Stefan.” Vicki clasped his little shoulders. “This isn’t a joke. Where’s your brother?”
Stefan started crying.
“Vicki, really,” Willi said.
“What have you done with my son, you bastards?” Irmgard was yelling.
Willi took his son’s hand. “Stefan, even if Erich made you swear on the holy Bible not to tell, you must, do you understand me?”
Stefan hid his face in Willi’s arms. “Heinz came over after Mommy fell asleep,” he bawled. “And then … and then … they ran away together.”
“Oh, God,” Vicki moaned.
Willi looked at his watch. “What time did you fall asleep, Vic?”
“Don’t you dare blame me.” She winced as if he’d punched her. “It’s you who put us at—”
“Never mind now; they could be just downstairs for all we know. I’m only trying to figure out how far they might have gotten.”
“What’s going on in there?” Irmgard kept shouting. “Why won’t you tell me?”
Vicki held her head, trying to think. “It must have been after I spoke to you.”
Three o’clock. Nearly an hour and a half.
Willi turned and ran out the door.
“Where’s my Heinz, you bastard?” Irmgard tried to grab his sleeve as he flew past. “I’m calling the po—”
Willi was already halfway out the door, downstairs.
Twilight darkened Beckmann Strasse, the little park across the street already lost in shadows. A man on a motorcycle sputtered by. A woman walked a dachshund on a leash. “Have you seen two boys?” he tried to keep as calm as possible. “One skinny, one not?”
She shook her head sadly. “I’m sorry, no.”
“I seen ’em,” a voice called from a second-story window. An old man stuck his head out, pointing stiffly. “Skinny and fatty. Right on that park bench.”
It was empty now. Willi’s heart raced. “Which way did they go?”
“Wasn’t which way but how. One of those little white trucks selling ice cream. Man and lady practically yanked them off the street. I’d say an hour ago.”
My God. Willi felt the earth sway beneath his feet. She’d been trailing him all this time. Waiting for her chance—
Thirty
Fog hung shroudlike over the Landwehr Canal. The warehouse at 146 Maybach Ufer stood half-concealed in vapor. The rest of the block, apartments mostly, was a Monet-style blur of grays and blue-whites. The whole scene—empty streets, wet cobblestones, a briny, green canal—reminded Willi of the last tense moments before the March 1918 offensive. A cat tiptoeing down the sidewalk. Mourning doves under a cornice. He could almost hear the piercing whistle signaling the attack.
Only this time the stakes were far more personal.
Checking his wrist for the hundredth time, he saw he had just a few minutes left to launch his own offensive without endangering countless innocents. At
pünktlich
eight, this whole block would spring to life, all the windows open almost simultaneously, the maids and housewives begin setting out the bedding. All the metal security shutters cranking up at the shops of the butchers, bakers, and barbers. Streetcars would clatter down the tracks as sidewalks filled with men in suits, women out shopping, gangs of children in knee-high socks on their way to school. Even in troubled times such as these,
Ordnung
—punctuality, reliability—ruled in Germany. So where the hell was his last squadron?
The second hand ticked away.
Crouched behind a wall of wooden crates on a flat barge that had floated in before dawn, Willi took a deep breath and tried to slow his heart. Despite the morning chill, sweat was dripping from his forehead and neck, under his arms, all the way down his back. He’d ordered six rifled Schupo squadrons in place by seven, but the last had not arrived. He didn’t want to go in shorthanded, but he couldn’t hold off much longer. Next to him, Gunther smiled with saintly patience, as if waiting for nothing more than breakfast. He’d never been in combat before.
Never had his son kidnapped.
Willi swallowed painfully.
The men entering 146 Maybach Ufer last night had been armed, the kid reported, with Thompson submachine guns. Which may have been common in Chicago—but not here. Something huge was going on in that warehouse. Regardless of the obvious dangers in a residential neighborhood, assault by force was the only way to find out what. And get Eric and Heinz out. If that’s where they even were.
The uncertainty made pain scorch at his eyes again, threatening to break out and devour him in a conflagration of grief. He’d lived through some long nights in his life, but nothing like last night. From the moment he’d heard the ice cream truck got them, an unbearable agony raged in his chest, searing him with every breath. Plus he had had to contend with Vicki’s and the Winkelmanns’ emotions—a conflagration of anguish and recrimination.
He looked again at his watch.
Fifteen hours and thirty minutes. What must Erich be thinking? Did he feel forsaken by his father? Had little Heinz soiled his pants, as he’d nearly done that day at Luna Park? What terror they must—
If
they were even—
He couldn’t bear to think it, or he would burn with insanity.
The second hand refused to slow. The big wooden barge bobbed gently up and down. On the far side of the canal a truck was already delivering morning editions to the news kiosk. Nearer, across from the warehouse, a baker in a long white apron was hurrying across the road with trays of
Brötchen
. Willi could almost smell the fresh dough. A girl with short, bobbed hair and a sailor jacket, flimsy white skirt blowing in the breeze, skipped from one of the buildings. It was three minutes to eight. His stomach clenched. There was just no more—
Gunther nudged him, pointing to the roof across the street. Three rapid flashes off a mirror indicated all the troops at last in place.
Not a minute too soon.
“Return signal,” Willi whispered furiously.
With a gulp, Gunther flashed his mirror back.
Mirrors flashed up and down the block—and from a dozen directions crouching figures began inching forward, rifles ready. Willi broke out his binoculars and focused on 146. Okay, he chanted silently. Let’s make this swift and clean.
Suddenly, a second-floor window flew open; a woman in a headscarf tossed a small, red carpet out and began beating it with a cane. For God’s sake, hurry, Willi urged the troops mentally. A kid around Erich’s age, in a blue serge suit with knickers, had joined the little girl in her sailor jacket, both with big leather briefcases on their backs. Her shiny shoes clacked against the pavement as she kicked up her heels.
Just as the first assault wave almost hit the warehouse, though, a loud
pop,
like the opening of a champagne bottle, ricocheted down the block, followed by half a dozen more. Across the street, windows began exploding one after the next. It was the worst that could have happened, Willi realized. The enemy had opened fire.
Turning his binoculars, he saw the girl in the sailor suit spin with her arms in the air as if doing a ballet exercise, then keel over and drop, the sidewalk reddening, her companion too stunned to move, the carpet woman screaming.
He dropped his binoculars and pulled out his Luger.
A hailstorm of bullets was pouring from the first two floors of the warehouse. Up and down the block, police were dropping, dogs howling, iron shutters hurtling back down. The barge captain, a beer-bellied man with a big mustache who’d been paid handsomely precisely because this might turn dangerous, stood up to see what was happening. A loud
sluck
sent a glutinous spray shooting from between his eyes.
Willi fell back to the trenches of the Western Front, operating mechanically on adrenaline, joining the terrific battle. He aimed his Luger, a semiautomatic handgun, getting off half a dozen rounds in as many seconds before he had to reload. The Schupo men had Mauser rifles with far superior range and penetration. But neither could outfire a Thompson submachine gun.
Bullets ricocheted off the walls and cobblestones, exploding the streetlights and clattering from metal pipes like hellfire brimstone. Each one felt as if it had penetrated Willi’s heart. He kept picturing Erich and Heinz in there, cringing.
Damn it, he called to them. Live. Live! Reloading cartridge after cartridge, he pulled the trigger in a fit of resolve. If he could, he’d have dodged the whole rain of death to get to those boys.
But no firing was coming from his right, he realized, and turning, he discovered Gunther there, covered in blood. Not his own … the barge captain’s. It had the kid paralyzed, his mouth hanging open, Adam’s apple frozen midthroat, pants soaking wet. The proverbial slap across the face sometimes did the trick, Willi knew. But in this instance, he saw, it wouldn’t make a difference. A line of splashes jumping down the canal was heading directly at them. He threw himself over Gunther and covered their heads, then the wooden deck shivered and sharded all around them. After a hard jerk to the left came the sound of gushing water. The barge was going down.
Gunther grabbed Willi by the collar. “I can’t swim!”
“Never mind. We’re right offshore. Just hold my—” Willi couldn’t finish before they were dunked in ice-cold water.
Amid a clatter of tearing planks and floating debris, Gunther’s grip grew implacable, his arms and legs, his whole torso, clenching like a gorilla on Willi’s back. Blazing terror seized Willi when he realized he couldn’t free his arms. The harder he tried, the harder Gunther clung to him. They were both going under.
Gunther, don’t, Willi could only scream beneath the surface. We’re so close to shore. But no matter how loudly he tried to convey this, his head remained pushed down. He couldn’t breathe. His lungs were beginning to ache. He fought and raged, but Gunther was too terrified, and far too strong.
He thought about the boys waiting to be rescued.
And Vicki. What would she go through to lose both husband and son? He couldn’t do that to her.
One more time. One more—an arm flailed underwater, free.
He started punching, hard, like a jackhammer, but it didn’t stop the downward pressure. The exertion was depleting him. His lungs grew hotter, desperate to be filled. In another second, he knew, he’d have to gasp, suck in water, and die. One last frenzied effort, though, produced a sudden doubling over and the desired release of pressure. He’d located Gunther’s testicles. In a moment he was bursting through the surface, inhaling in a frenzy of rebirth.
Gunther, though, was thrashing frantically only inches away. Unless he simply left him there to drown, Willi saw no choice but to knock him out with a hard blow to the nose. After dragging his big body cross-chest to the edge, and then by the arms up the embankment, he sat next to him in the weeds, dripping wet, shivering. Unable to fully catch his breath, as if in a dream, he dimly observed two red police boats race in from the west and spin themselves into position. Aiming at the warehouse with fixed machine guns, they opened fire. Simultaneously, a Reichswehr armored truck came rumbling down the street, mounted with artillery. When Willi saw the giant black vehicle halt and turn its cannon, his whole being shook from its torpor. They couldn’t do that. He had to stop them! Before he so much as lifted a leg, though, there was a terrific burst and the very earth trembled. The first floor of 146 Maybach Ufer began crumbling to dust.
Along with Willi’s last shred of hope.
He collapsed facedown, letting out a wail of agony.
When the firefighters had the flames out, he was the first to enter the building with them. Room by room, they found no survivors. Just six charred bodies on the first floor and two more on the second. No children among them. When he realized Erich and Heinz must still be alive, Willi nearly passed out.
An hour later, in the back of a Red Cross van with a blanket over his shoulders, he was alone, drinking coffee, Gunther already off to the hospital for observation. From all the equipment inside the warehouse, including a massive chemical-distillation apparatus, it had grown clear that they’d uncovered one of the largest illegal narcotics-manufacturing operations in Europe. Nothing to do with the
Kinderfresser
case, though. Wherever those two boys were, it hadn’t been here.
“Inspektor.” It was Ruta, sticking her head in the truck, panting, she was so out of breath. “I hurried as fast as I could. The queerest boy came up to the office, wearing lipstick and mascara! He insisted he had to see you. Said I should get you to meet him on the double at the foot of Berolina. To tell you that they’d seen her again—the Shepherdess.”
Thirty-one
Willi’s clothes were barely dry as he leaped between streetcars and in front of trucks, practically over a baby carriage, face unshaven, hair uncombed. Not that he gave a damn what he looked like. Only one thought pounded in his brain, raged in his bloodstream. Impelling his legs. Those boys. Needing him.
Far to the right, the clock on the Police Presidium sounded eleven fifteen, each chime, fingers on his throat. Straight ahead, towering over the rubble of the old Grand Hotel, big copper Berolina thrust her sword, readying for protective custody now in a halo of scaffolding. Since her arrival on the Alexanderplatz, she’d witnessed years of peace and war. Defeat. Revolution. Prosperity and depression. What pages of history might turn while she sat in a warehouse awaiting the New Alex? Willi could scarcely care.