The Deceiver (8 page)

“Let’s have lunch,” said McCready.

During the meal, from room service, Morenz drank wine greedily and his hands shook.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” asked McCready.

“Sure. This damned summer cold, you know? And a bit nervous. That’s natural.”

McCready nodded. Nerves were normal—with actors before going onstage. With soldiers before combat. With agents before an illegal run into the Sovbloc. Still, he did not like the shape Morenz was in. He had seldom seen a case of nerves like this. But with Pankratin unreachable and twenty-four hours to the first contact, he had no choice.

“Let’s go down to the car,” he said.

Not much happens in Germany today that the press does not hear about, and it was the same in 1985, when Germany was West Germany. The veteran and ace crime reporter of Cologne was and remains Guenther Braun of the
Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger
. He was lunching with a police contact who mentioned that there was a flap going on in Hahnwald. Braun arrived outside the house with his photographer, Walter Schiestel, just before three. He tried to get to Commissar Schiller, but he was upstairs, sent word he was busy, and referred Braun to the
Präsidium
press office. Fat chance. Braun would get the sanitized police communiqué later. He began to ask around. Then he made some phone calls. By early evening, well in time for the first editions, he had got his story. It was a good one, too. Of course, radio and TV would be ahead of him with the broad outlines, but he knew he had an inside track.

Upstairs, the forensic team had finished with the bodies. The photographer, Schiestel, had snapped the corpses from every conceivable angle, plus the decor of the room, the bed, the huge mirror behind the headboard, and the equipment in the closets and chests. Lines were drawn around the bodies, then the cadavers were bagged and removed to the city morgue, where the forensic pathologist went to work. The detectives needed the time of death and those bullets—urgently.

The entire apartment had yielded nineteen sets or partial sets of fingerprints. Three were eliminated; they belonged to the two deceased and to Frau Popovic, now down at the
Präsidium
with her prints carefully on file. That left sixteen.

“Probably clients,” muttered Schiller.

“But one set the killer’s?” suggested Wiechert.

“I doubt it. It looks pretty pro to me. He probably wore gloves.”

The major problem, mused Schiller, was not lack of motive but too many. Was the call girl the intended victim? Was the murderer an outraged client, a former husband, a vengeful wife, a business rival, an enraged former pimp? Or was she incidental, and her pimp the real target? He had been confirmed as Bernhard Hoppe, ex-con, bank robber, gangster, very nasty, and a real low-life. A settling of accounts, a drug deal that went sour, rival protection-racketeers? Schiller suspected it was going to be a tough one.

The tenants’ statements and those of the neighbors indicated no one knew of Renate Heimendorf’s secret profession. There had been gentlemen callers, but always respectable. No late-night parties, blaring music.

As the forensic team finished with each area of the flat, Schiller could move around more and disturb things. He went to the bathroom. There was something odd about the bathroom, but he could not figure out what it was. Just after seven, the forensic team finished and called to him that they were off. He spent an hour puttering about the gutted flat while Wiechert complained that he wanted his dinner. At ten past eight, Schiller shrugged and called it a day. He would resume the case tomorrow up at headquarters. He sealed the flat, left one uniformed man in the hallway in case someone returned to the scene of the crime—it had happened—and went home. There was still something that bothered him about that flat. He was a very intelligent and perceptive young detective.

McCready spent the afternoon finalizing the briefing of Bruno Morenz.

“You are Hans Grauber, aged fifty-one, married, three children. Like all proud family men you carry pictures of your family. Here they are, on holiday: Heidi, your wife, along with Hans Junior, Lotte, and Ursula, known as Uschi. You work for BKI Optical Glassware in Würzburg—they exist, and the car is theirs. Fortunately, you once did work in optical glassware, so you can use the jargon if you have to.

“You have an appointment with the director of foreign sales at the Zeiss works in Jena. Here is his letter. The paper is real; so is the man. The signature looks like his, but it is ours. The appointment is for three
P.M.
tomorrow. If all goes well, you can agree to place an order for Zeiss precision lenses and return to the West the same evening. If you need further discussions, you may have to overnight. That’s just if the border guards ask you for such a mass of detail.

“It’s extremely unlikely the border guards would check with Zeiss. The SSD would, but there are enough Western businessmen dealing with Zeiss for one more not to be a cause for suspicion. So here are your passport, letters from your wife, a used ticket from the Würzburg Opera House, credit cards, driving license, a bunch of keys including the ignition key of the BMW. The baggy raincoat—the lot.

“You’ll only need the attaché case and the overnight bag. Study the attaché case and its contents. The security lock opens to the numbers of your fictional birthday, fifth April ’34, or 5434. The papers all concern your desire to purchase Zeiss products for your firm. Your signature is Hans Grauber in your own handwriting. The clothes and washkit are all genuine Würzburg purchases, laundered and used, with Würzburg laundry tags. Now, old friend, let’s have some dinner.”

Dieter Aust, Director of Cologne’s BND out-station, missed the evening TV news. He was out to dinner. He would regret it later.

*   *   *

At midnight, McCready was collected in a Range Rover by Kit Johnson, a communications man from the SIS Bonn Station. They drove off together to be at the Saale River in northern Bavaria before Morenz.

Bruno Morenz stayed in McCready’s room, ordered whiskey from room service, and drank too much. He slept badly for two hours and rose when the bedside alarm went off at three. At four that Tuesday morning, he left the Holiday Inn, started the BMW, and headed through the darkness toward the Autobahn south.

At the same hour Peter Schiller awakened in Cologne beside his sleeping wife and realized what it was about the Hahnwald apartment that had puzzled him. He telephoned and awoke an outraged Wiechert and told him to meet him at the Hahnwald house at seven. German police officers have to be accompanied on an investigation.

Bruno Morenz was slightly ahead of time. Just south of the border, he killed twenty-five minutes at the Frankenwald service area restaurant. He did not drink liquor; he drank coffee. But he filled his hip flask.

At five to eleven that Tuesday morning Sam McCready, with Kit Johnson beside him, was concealed amid pine trees on a hill south of the Saale River. The Range Rover was parked out of sight in the forest. From the treeline they could see the West German border post below and half a mile in front of them. Beyond it was a gap in the hills, and through the gap, the roofs of the East German border post, half a mile farther on.

Because the East Germans had built their controls well inside their own territory, a driver would be inside East Germany as soon as he left the West German post. Then came a two-lane highway between high chain-link fencing. Behind the fencing were the watchtowers. From the trees, using powerful binoculars, McCready could see the border guards behind the windows with their own field glasses, watching the West. He could also see the machine guns. The reason for the half-mile corridor inside East Germany was so that anyone bursting through the eastern border post could be cut to pieces between the chain-link fencing before reaching the West.

At two minutes to eleven, McCready picked out the black BMW moving sedately through the cursory West German controls. Then it purred forward into the corridor, heading for the land controlled by the East’s most professional and dreaded secret police, the
Stasi
.

“IT’S THE BATHROOM, IT HAS TO BE THE BATHROOM,”
said Commissar Schiller just after seven
A.M.
as he led a sleepy and reluctant Wiechert back into the flat.

“It looks all right to me,” grumbled Wiechert. “Anyway, the forensic boys cleaned it out.”

“They were looking for prints, not measurements,” said Schiller. “Look at this closet in the passage. It’s two yards wide, right?”

“About that.”

“The far end is flush with the door to the call girl’s bedroom. The door is flush with the wall and the mirror above the headboard. Now, as the bathroom door is beyond the built-in wall closet, what do you deduce?”

“That I’m hungry,” said Wiechert.

“Shut up. Look, when you enter the bathroom and turn to your right, there should be two yards to the bathroom wall. The width of the cupboard outside, right? Try it.”

Wiechert entered the bathroom and looked to his right. “One yard,” he said.

“Exactly. That’s what puzzled me. Between the mirror behind the washbasin and the mirror behind the headboard, there’s a yard of space missing.”

Poking around in the hall closet, it took Schiller thirty minutes to find the door catch, a cunningly concealed knothole in the pine planking. When the rear of the closet swung open, Schiller could dimly discern a light switch inside. He used a pencil to flick the switch, and the inner light came on, a single bulb hanging from the ceiling.

“I’ll be damned,” said Wiechert, looking over his shoulder. The secret compartment was ten feet long, the same length as the bathroom, but it was only three feet wide. But wide enough. To their right was the rear side of the mirror above the headboard next door, a one-way mirror that exposed the whole bedroom. On a tripod at the center of the mirror, facing into the bedroom, was a video camera, a state-of-the-art high-tech piece of equipment that would certainly provide clear-definition film despite shooting through the glass and into subdued lighting. The sound-recording equipment was also of the best. The entire far end of the narrow passageway was ceiling-to-floor shelving, and each shelf held a row of video-cassette cases. On the spine of each was a label, and each label had a number. Schiller backed out.

The phone was usable, since the forensic men had cleaned it of prints the previous day. He called the
Präsidium
and got straight through to Rainer Hartwig, Director of First K.

“Oh shit,” said Hartwig when he had the details. “Well done. Stay there. I’ll get two fingerprint men down to you.”

It was eight-fifteen. Dieter Aust was shaving. In the bedroom the morning show was on television. The news roundup. He could hear it from the bathroom. He thought little of the item about a double murder in Hahnwald until the newscaster said, “One of the victims, high-class call girl Renate Heimendorf.

That was when the Director of the Cologne BND cut himself quite badly on his pink cheek. In ten minutes he was in his car and driving fast to his office, where he arrived almost an hour early. This much disconcerted Fräulein Keppel, who was always in an hour ahead of him.

“That number,” said Aust, “the vacation contact number Morenz gave us. Let me have it, would you?”

When he tried it, he got the “disconnected” tone. He checked with the operator down in the Black Forest, a popular vacation area, but she told him it appeared to be out of order. He did not know that one of McCready’s men had rented a vacation chalet, then locked it after taking the phone off the hook. As a long shot Aust tried Morenz’s home number in Porz, and to his amazement he found himself speaking to Frau Morenz. They must have come home early.

“Could I speak to your husband please? This is Director Aust speaking, from the office.”

“But he’s with you, Herr Direktor,” she explained patiently. “Out of town. On a trip. Back late tomorrow night.”

“Ah, yes, I see. Thank you, Frau Morenz.”

He put the phone down, worried. Morenz had lied. What was he up to? A weekend with a girlfriend in the Black Forest? Possible, but he did not like it. He put through a secure-line call to Pullach and spoke to the Deputy Director of the Operations Directorate, the division they both worked for. Dr. Lothar Herrmann was frosty. But he listened intently.

“The murdered call girl, and her pimp. How were they killed?” Herrmann asked.

Aust consulted the
Stadt-Anzeiger
lying on his desk.

“They were shot.”

“Does Morenz have a personal sidearm?” asked the voice from Pullach.

“I, er—believe so.”

“Where was it issued, by whom, and when?” asked Dr. Herrmann. Then he added, “No matter, it must have been here. Stay there, I will call you back.”

He was back on the phone in ten minutes.

“He has a Walther PPK, Service issue. From here. It was tested on the range and in the lab before we gave it to him. Ten years ago. Where is it now?”

“It should be in his personal safe,” said Aust.

“Is it?” asked Herrmann coldly.

“I will find out and call you back,” said the badly flustered Aust. He had the master key for all the safes in the department. Five minutes later, he was talking to Herrmann again.

“It’s gone,” he said. “He might have taken it home, of course.”

“That is strictly forbidden. So is lying to a superior officer, whatever the cause. I think I had better come to Cologne. Please meet me off the next plane from Munich. Whichever it is, I will be on it.”

Before leaving Pullach, Dr. Herrmann made three phone calls. As a result, Black Forest policemen would visit the designated vacation home, let themselves in with the landlord’s key, and establish that the phone was off the hook but the bed had not been slept in. At all. That was what they would report. Dr. Herrmann landed at Cologne at five to twelve.

Bruno Morenz cruised the BMW into the complex of concrete buildings that made up the East German border control and was waved into an inspection bay. A green-uniformed guard appeared at the driver’s side window.

“
Aussteigen, bitte. Ihre Papiere
.”