The Butchers of Berlin (21 page)

‘Gherkin, maybe. Mustard. Onion. Too much flour. Not bad all the same. They look after their own.’

They were in a large dining hall, full of clerical and secretarial staff and workers in overalls from the slaughterhouse. Food was dished up by kitchen helpers from a stainless-steel counter.
Schlegel supposed some enterprising manager worked hard keeping the place supplied with meat sidelined from the wholesale market.

They had been bounced around different offices in search of Metzler’s job record, starting with the downstairs reception where the old girls were now as disobliging as they had been
previously jolly.

‘We’re disinclined to help if it involves Jews, after what they did to that body. Try upstairs. You might have better luck there.’ It was the woman who had given Schlegel the
map. ‘We’re not a filing cabinet down here.’

Upstairs they visited dull rooms staffed with disagreeable clerks. Metzler’s name could not be traced. Schlegel presumed his work record had been removed after his death. The young, sourly
pretty female clerk dealing with them looked washed out and disgruntled.

Schlegel stared, mesmerised by the dandruff in her parting.

He saw her again in the canteen, chatting animatedly.

Both men ate fast and used their fingers to lick their plates clean, after which Morgen lit up and flicked his ash into the tin lid provided.

Outside was sunny for a change, with a rising wind. They walked past empty halls that attested to a lack of business.

‘Odd that none of them upstairs had heard of Metzler,’ said Morgen.

They were on their way to try the rail depot where Metzler was supposed to have worked before his transfer to the shed.

Morgen said, ‘Agatha Christie at least gives you clues and suspects.’

Schlegel’s mother was an avid reader of Christie.
The Body in the Library
had come out the year before. Morgen had read earlier Christie translations in Russia, where her domestic
murders worked well as a counterpoint to battlefield massacre.

‘Almost delicate, you could say.’

Once peace came Morgen would dedicate himself to expanding his waistline. He stuck his hands in his pockets and recited, ‘ “Let me have men about me that are fat, sleek-headed men
and such as sleep a-nights. Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look, he thinks too much; such men are dangerous.”
Julius Caesar
, act one, scene two.’

Turning to Schlegel, he asked, ‘Any relation?’

Not as far as he knew; his namesake was Shakespeare’s first translator.

Morgen said, ‘I bring culture to the slaughterhouse. “Upon what meat does this our Caesar feed that he is grown so great?” ’ He strolled on, saying over his shoulder,
‘And upon what meat do we feed? And such talk of sedition.’

Schlegel again mentioned the idea of Metzler as possible agent for Gersten, thinking how people didn’t repeat themselves in Christie. For all the red herrings, things proceeded along
well-oiled lines.

The rail depot stood at the opposite end of the pig district, beyond the S-Bahn with its enormously long elevated walkway that spanned the whole of the estate, down to Eldenaer
Strasse.

Metzler was at least remembered at the depot, by the single clerk in a moss-green suit who sat in a hut in the big storage shed. He made a point of having to be prompted before grudgingly
conceding that Metzler had not been a bad worker.

‘For a Yid.’

All the same, it must have been a relief when he left, said Morgen.

‘He minded his own business,’ conceded the clerk.

‘What was his job?’ asked Schlegel.

‘Checking deliveries. Dry goods mainly into one warehouse. Imported machinery into the other. For collection.’

‘What’s the strangest item you might get sent here?’ asked Morgen.

‘I have no idea what you could mean,’ said the clerk with suspicion.

‘Do you know why Metzler was transferred to the slaughterhouse?’

‘Where?’

As the man seemed not to know, Schlegel explained.

‘As far as we were concerned, he just left. It didn’t bother us to know where.’

‘Nevertheless, now you know, would you like to speculate why?’

‘He must have crossed someone.’

‘Not you?’

‘I don’t have the power.’

‘Where’s your boss?’

‘On leave.’

‘So there’s only you?’

‘Just me. They bring in labour as and when it’s needed.’

Morgen turned away then back again. ‘Was Metzler in fact your superior?’

‘He was here before me, but once I came he couldn’t be my boss because of what he was.’

‘But he had to teach you the job.’

‘Ticking things on and off lists, you don’t have to be taught that.’

‘These minor functionaries with brains the size of hamsters,’ said Morgen as they walked off, loud enough for the man to hear.

‘Isn’t that being unfair to hamsters?’

‘Why isn’t he in the army? He looks fit enough to be cannon fodder. Why aren’t you, come to that? Not that you look fit.’

‘I have a doctor’s chit to say I am a liability.’

‘In that case they should make you a general. Now, show me this murder room.’

They passed the pig shed. The stench was as bad as before but the eerie silence told Schlegel the animals were gone. Morgen insisted on looking. The enormous space appeared more disturbing for
being empty.

‘It looks like the piggies went to market,’ said Morgen.

Upstairs, all Schlegel could think was nothing was as before. The room had been stripped. The sink was smashed. The draining board was gone, as was the improvised shower and paraphernalia. There
was no bucket. The knives had been taken. The crude drawing on the wall had been smashed away with a chisel; the plaster remnants lay on the floor. In the middle of the room stood a small pile of
ashes – what was left of the book, Schlegel presumed – on top of which lay deposited a huge turd. Shit had been smeared over another wall in huge, angry swipes.

Baumgarten, the slaughterhouse foreman, was casual about the destruction of the murder room, saying some of the boys had gone a bit wild, being so disgusted by what the Jews
had done. They thought the place evil. He added, what could you expect from Jews and their revolting practices.

Baumgarten recognised Schlegel and called him Whitey.

He had his own hut, on wheels, with steps up, near the porter’s lodge on Thaerstrasse, which marked the start of the pig district. A long cobblestoned street ran in a straight line to the
Landsberger Allee gates at the other end.

Baumgarten grudgingly allowed them in, helped himself to tea and offered none.

‘What about Metzler?’ Morgen asked. ‘Did he have anything to do with the Jewish butchers?’

Metzler he hardly knew, Baumgarten said. It was a repeat of his earlier performance. Schlegel, not caring about Baumgarten, told Morgen they were dealing with a classic stonewaller.

Baumgarten glared, hands twitching.

‘Did all the Jewish butchers work in the pig shed?’ asked Morgen.

Baumgarten scoffed. ‘Refused absolutely. Jews and pigs. Probably didn’t like killing in kind. They did sheep and cattle.’ He pointed behind him. ‘Over the road. Cattle
and horses at the far end. Sheep in the middle. At this end mutton and pigs.’

‘Yet the old man worked with the pigs,’ said Morgen.

‘It seems so.’

‘What did he do exactly?’

‘No idea. You can go and ask.’

Like Stoffel, Morgen was incredulous that Jews were allowed to work with offensive weapons.

‘What was to stop them running amok?’

‘They were guarded. Strict rules. They didn’t mix with our butchers.’

‘Guarded by?’

‘Hitler Youth.’

‘Fourteen-year-olds?’

‘No. Strapping lads, tough as they come.’

The telephone in the hut rang. After hanging up Baumgarten addressed them with the air of issuing a dare.

‘Two sows. Come and see how it’s done.’

Baumgarten was more forthcoming once he was giving the guided tour. The Zentralviehhof remained one of the world’s most advanced slaughterhouses, with every stage
calculated for speed, efficiency and lack of waste.

Schlegel asked about the state of the pigs they had seen. Baumgarten wasn’t responsible for the pens. His duty began once the animals started their final journey. He pointed to a ramp that
led down to several doors, which accessed the tunnels known as runs, taking the animals to the last stage.

‘They die with their own. Let’s go this way,’ he said, gesturing towards the run. He grinned, showing his missing tooth.

Was it a joke in bad taste? Schlegel asked.

‘We use it all the time. Saves having to go round.’

Impatient with the man’s nonsense, Schlegel went down, followed by Morgen.

They entered a long, badly lit, narrow tunnel that disappeared into the distance. If it was anything like the length of the street above, Schlegel calculated it would take them at least five
minutes; a long last journey for any pig.

A smell of death permeated the walls. The passage rose slowly. Schlegel grew attuned to all the terror experienced in that corridor.

Baumgarten lectured them in a loud voice. ‘As the process unfolds it becomes less bloody. It is a miracle of modern efficiency that a live animal can be reduced in minutes to a carcass and
butchered into the parts we are familiar with eating, and all under one roof. When my father worked here public visits were so popular special guide books were printed.’

He carried on spouting facts and figures for the length of the passage. Broken lights sometimes made it almost too dark to see. Pervitin now seemed like a bad idea, its quickening effect
indistinguishable from panic. It made Schlegel want to run back and check there still was such a thing as sky and daylight.

He remembered a devilish trick in one Agatha Christie involving the pig-like squeal of a murdered man, and someone quoting Lady Macbeth saying who would have thought the old man had so much
blood. Schlegel’s breathing grew ragged. He feared an asthma attack.

At last Baumgarten, still droning on, said, ‘Here’s the blue door.’

It took them through to a large hall whose walls were full of complex and infernal-looking piping.

‘This side of the door the animals continue in single file. Here’s the bar I told you about. Step over it carefully, please. At this point the floor usually falls away, but of course
not now, ha-ha! The bar becomes the mechanical process that moves the now-helpless animal forward until it reaches Haager, who is standing there waiting to render you brain-dead with his
hammer.’

Haager was waiting on the platform above.

Baumgarten called out, ‘Or are you using the stun gun today?’

‘Always the hammer.’ Haager brandished it and made a pantomime of hitting them on the head. The opaqueness of Haager’s eyes made Schlegel very much not want to pass under his
waiting hammer. They were being sized up the same as any other animal awaiting extinction.

He was spared by a service gate which Baumgarten led them through.

‘So, gentlemen, the killing floor.’

Morgen looked like he wanted to hit the man. Schlegel was certain that the whole exercise had been done as a way of telling them to get lost. Or perhaps Baumgarten had grown so coarse he
considered such conduct normal.

‘And what does Haager think of as he swings his mallet, time after time?’ muttered Morgen.

Probably of nothing but his mother and his tea, thought Schlegel.

Haager brandished the stun gun. ‘Perhaps one of our friends would like to do the honours.’ In his other hand was a bottle of brandy. ‘The butcher’s swig. Well, gentlemen.
Aim between the eyes. Compression does the rest.’

‘Do your job,’ Morgen called out. ‘Or I will come and fire it in your knee.’

Haager laughed uncertainly.

The first sow emerged through the blue door, blinking and uncertain, refusing to play her role, visibly petrified, rooted and shitting herself. Baumgarten had to prod her until she stepped
across the bar and the floor fell away, causing her to scream uncontrollably as the mechanism jerked her forward into the death stall where the hammer swung and Haager grunted and the cracking of
the skull sounded like a rifle shot, and the sow fell stunned and thrashing, and her squeal transferred to the next pig, waiting unseen, whose wails of terror told them she knew exactly what lay in
store.

Schlegel saw Morgen had forgotten to smoke.

Baumgarten said in civilised countries they believed the animal should be insensate at the moment of slaughter, unlike the Muslim and Jew whose religion demanded the throat be cut.

‘A cow bled to death standing can take six minutes to die, from the cut to when the eyes roll back and it starts to collapse. We have seen film of kosher butchers ripping the tracheas and
oesophagi from the throats of fully conscious cattle, and animals writhing in pools of their own blood, while struggling to stand for minutes afterwards.’

Everything happened much quicker than the time it took to tell. They had been laboriously informed how chains were attached to the animal’s hind legs so it could be
lifted and worked along a pulley system. Once hanging, she was bled and then would be completely dead.

A second man stepped forward with a long knife which he stuck in the sow’s aorta, a practised thrust, a lateral tear to the throat. The knife made a sucking noise as it was extracted. The
man stepped aside as the pig gave a great sigh and steaming blood shot from the incision, splashing into a bath underneath, in huge dark, sticky bursts until the jet’s pump faded.

The sweet smell of blood filled the air. Schlegel thought how they were all just sacks waiting to be pierced.

The attendant pig’s screams built in a crescendo. Schlegel was almost forced to clap his hands to his ears as he had with the bombs. Morgen looked pale.

Despite the speed of the process, it seemed to go on forever. Squelches and farts emerged from the expiring animal. Haager leaned casually against the stall, a cigarette dangling from his
fingers. When the beast was quite still, the man with the knife, watched by Haager, slit the belly from ribcage to anus. The body defied the cut for a moment, then gravity did its work and steaming
entrails spilled out in a hot mist.