Goldstein, page 3
Dear Lord, if you should be out there somewhere listening, please get me out of here, I don’t care how, just get me out, and I’ll pay any price, even if it means going to church.
She closed her eyes and listened to the drumming of the rain. Something about the sound made her hesitate and open the window. It was making an unspeakable noise, as if someone were striking a hammer against an anvil again and again. Alex poked her head outside and thought she must be dreaming. At that moment, she believed she had her prayer to thank for it. A fire escape! Iron steps led down floor by floor to the yard.
She packed her torch, shouldered her bag, stepped onto the grating and looked down. A fleet of lorries and delivery trucks was parked in perfect formation, otherwise the courtyard was empty – not a blue uniform in sight. The cops had overlooked the fire escape.
Alex gripped the damp, cold handrail and descended the wobbly steel staircase step by step, keeping the windows and yard in view. The wind blew rain in her face and the steel structure swayed and squealed under her feet, but she inched ever closer to the ground. She was dripping wet, with her bandage soaked through and her bag growing heavier by the minute until, at last, she reached the bottom.
If only she could tell Benny about the fire exit, but hopefully his luck would be in too. Using the delivery trucks as cover, she made her way to the entrance onto Passauer Strasse. The great iron gate was locked, but she’d been expecting that. She took out her picklock and, though she was shivering slightly and needed a little longer than usual, soon had it cracked.
The gate squeaked as she opened it just enough to slip through. And then she was outside. Free at last!
Never had she enjoyed listening to traffic quite so much. She sucked in the air greedily, as if only now could she breathe again after surfacing from a long dive. The rain had stopped. There wasn’t much happening on Passauer Strasse, just a few hurried pedestrians snapping shut their umbrellas, and two or three cars splashing through puddles. No one paid her any attention. She tilted her head back and looked at the department store front, the crowning feature of which was the giant neon sign here on Passauer Strasse. Lit up at night like this, the store had a festive, almost Christmassy feel. She thought of Benny and, in the same moment, saw him clambering on the balcony’s steel railings. What on earth was he doing there? He didn’t seem to have moved very far from his previous hiding place, where she had caught sight of him moments before.
He stood on the balcony ledge, outside the railings. Alex caught her breath. The ledge could only be a foot wide. Surely he wasn’t thinking of climbing down, not with the heavy bag on his shoulders. But that’s what it looked like. Quick as a flash Benny crouched, facing inwards as he gripped the ledge with both hands, gradually lowering his body until he hung, legs dangling, a dark shadow against the narrow, illuminated windows. His feet were too far from the next ledge; he’d never make it down. A gasp of horror made her turn. Behind her stood a thin man with metal-rimmed spectacles and bowler hat, craning his neck.
A police officer appeared in silhouette above the railings, the star on his shako flashing briefly in the light. Benny was hanging from the balcony to hide, not to escape. The building’s front was his final resort, but the cop must have seen him. He was leaning over the railings as if he knew someone was there.
Alex ought to have fled, but couldn’t, and stood on Passauer Strasse as if rooted to the spot.
‘The cops are there already,’ Alex heard the man in metal-rimmed spectacles say. ‘Why on earth would you jump from KaDeWe?’
Alex couldn’t see exactly what was happening, only that the officer was now next to Benny, having also climbed over the railing. Did he mean to help him up? It seemed not. He tilted his head forwards as if speaking. Benny seemed to be saying something too, though Alex couldn’t make out what.
Benny gave a cry, making her start. Was his strength deserting him? Surely not! Give yourself up, she thought. Climb back up and turn yourself in.
The cop’s head was still tilted forwards and, for a brief moment, Alex made out his face in the glow of the sign. He was grimacing furiously. What on earth was going on? Had Benny shot his mouth off again? For a second time she heard him cry, more drawn out now, and desperate. He sounded like the boy he was, rather than the man he wanted to be.
She was holding her head at such an angle that her neck hurt, but, still, she couldn’t look away. Why had he let go with his right hand? How was he supposed to hold on, with just one hand plus the heavy bag on his shoulders? She stared and stared and couldn’t believe what she saw. Until at last she understood.
No scream, no cry. He fell silently through the night.
There was a thud like a sack of potatoes falling from a truck and, at the same time, a mighty crack. Then everything was quiet.
She snapped out of her trance to see Benny not ten metres away, painfully contorted and motionless on the ground. She rushed to his side. Hardly any blood, strangely. Benny’s eyes were closed. There was someone wheezing behind her. The man with the metal-rimmed spectacles was staring goggle-eyed.
‘Call an ambulance!’ she hissed, but the man shrugged his shoulders helplessly and made himself scarce.
Alex leaned towards Benny and heard him rasping. He was still alive!
She kneeled on the pavement, laid his head on her knees and stroked his hair. He opened his eyes; his breathing became quicker and quicker.
‘Alex,’ he said.
‘Try not to talk. There’s an ambulance on its way.’
‘I’m sorry, Alex, I messed up.’
‘No!’
‘I couldn’t . . . I couldn’t hold on any longer. He was standing on my fingers.’ There was a wheezing sound as Benny tried to catch his breath. He was finding it hard to speak.
‘Don’t talk so much, Benny, don’t talk so much.’
‘Get out of here . . . or they’ll catch you. These are bad people . . .’
She looked skywards to where the cop was staring down. He said something to his colleague and gestured towards her, towards Alex and Benny on Passauer Strasse below. The other cop began speaking animatedly, seeming to curse his partner. That wouldn’t do any good now.
Benny took another breath and, again, there was a wheezing in his lungs. Dark blood suddenly streamed from his mouth.
‘Benny!’ she cried. ‘Hold on. Hold on!’
He tried to smile. ‘Promise you’ll go dancing with me sometime.’
‘I promise.’
The interval between his breaths became shorter and shorter. Alex wiped at the blood with her sleeve. Benny gazed at her wistfully the whole time, as if preparing to say goodbye. He closed his eyes.
‘Don’t give up, do you hear me, don’t give up! The ambulance will be here soon.’ Benny’s wheezing became more and more frenetic until suddenly it stopped, as if someone had switched off a machine. ‘No,’ Alex screamed. ‘No! You can’t just die! I won’t let you!’
She let his head sink slowly onto the pavement and looked around. A few rubberneckers had made their way over from Tauentzienstrasse. The man with the metal-rimmed spectacles hadn’t reappeared, nor was there any sign of an ambulance, but a group of uniformed officers emerged from a discreet side door of KaDeWe.
She swallowed her tears and ran.
‘Stop that boy! He’s one of them!’
Alex didn’t turn around. She knew she was being chased. She had to steer clear of pedestrians, screaming at an elegant lady to move aside and forcing her into the window grilles, before running towards the throng of people surging down Tauentzienstrasse. Find cover there and disappear. A whistle sounded behind her, and someone shouted.
‘Stop! Police!’
She kept running, straight across the pavement onto Tauentzienstrasse past tooting cars. A taxi screeched to a halt, but Alex paid no heed. After what had happened to Benny, she feared for her life. She threw herself sideways in front of a tram, whose driver sounded the warning bell, crossed the central reservation, and followed the electric train as it juddered eastwards. Her gaze fell on the warning sign, which strictly forbade passengers from jumping aboard while the train was in motion. She leapt onto the moving platform and squeezed herself into the car. The windows on the other side were more or less obscured by her fellow passengers, but not quite completely. There they were, her two pursuers, waiting for the tram to go past as it took the bend on the Wittenbergplatz approach.
Alex jostled her way inside and looked at the sign: the number six, going towards Schöneberg. Not ideal, but if she got out again at Wittenbergplatz there was a good chance they’d spot her. The tram stopped, with more people getting off than on, and her cover grew thinner. She kept glancing out of the window, but could no longer see any blue uniforms. The last passenger to board was a fat man, whom she moved towards straightaway, taking cover behind him, keeping the doors in view.
A bell sounded and the train moved off. As it picked up speed, metre by metre, Alex felt her tension dissolve. She had shaken them off!
Suddenly she felt the cut on her hand throbbing again. The blood had already seeped through the temporary bandage Benny had tied an hour or so ago, and grief came over her like a wild animal. Tears streamed down her face and soon she was crying uncontrollably for the first time in years.
Only when she wiped the tears on her sleeve did she realise that everyone in the car was staring at her. ‘What are you looking at?’ she shouted, and the people, who had been gazing at her in sympathy, returned to whatever it was they were doing before.
2
That’s what you got for being punctual: a wait. Rath’s gaze flitted between his fingernails and the pictures on the wall. He spotted a grease stain on his jacket. He had been wearing the grey suit for too long. If he had known he was being summoned he’d have chosen the brown one, since it had been freshly laundered. At least his fingernails were clean.
Renate Greulich hammered at her typewriter as if she were the only person in the room.
‘Dr Weiss is still in a meeting. Please take a seat,’ was all she had said. So Rath had taken a seat, feeling as if he were in a doctor’s waiting room about to receive bad news. He didn’t know what exactly, only that it was sure to be bad.
When the bosses sent for him, it was usually trouble, although Rath couldn’t remember a single occasion in the last few weeks when he had flouted the rules. He had only been back on duty for a week, after a fortnight’s summer holiday. A few days in Cologne, then a week on the Baltic Sea with Charly. He – they – could have saved themselves the bother.
The telephone rang and Renate Greulich picked up. ‘Yes, Herr Doktor,’ she said, reaching for the file on her desk. She disappeared with it behind the padded door.
Rath gazed after the secretary and picked up a newspaper from the makeshift table. He leafed indifferently through the day’s political issues, reparations disputes, austerity measures, until alighting on a headline in the regional section.
Late-night police chase in KaDeWe. Young intruder plunges to his death.
This was the case Gennat had mentioned at briefing: two jewel thieves caught red-handed in KaDeWe at the weekend, one of whom had launched an unsuccessful bid for freedom via the façade. The young lad, no more than sixteen or seventeen, was still to be identified. His accomplice had escaped with a portion of the spoils.
The way the article read, you’d think the police had hounded the boy to his death. That the pair had shut themselves in a department store to empty the jewellery displays didn’t seem to concern the paper.
The door opened once more, only it wasn’t Greulich who emerged, but a police officer, picture perfect in his freshly ironed and spotlessly clean blue uniform, shako wedged under his arm. The man knew how to appear before a deputy commissioner. Rath laid the newspaper over the grease stain on his suit as the officer nodded his head in greeting.
‘What’s the atmosphere like in there?’ Rath asked.
‘OK.’ The officer gestured towards the paper. ‘Have you seen the news?’
‘Just looking now.’
‘Then you can picture Dr Weiss’s mood.’ The officer appeared at a loss. ‘I was in charge of the KaDeWe operation the night before last.’
‘Nasty,’ Rath said.
‘A nightmare.’
‘Don’t take it to heart. Things like that happen every day.’
‘Thanks, but I still need to go to Homicide.’ The officer put on his shako. ‘Why have you been summoned?’
‘If only I knew.’
The officer tipped the peak of his shako by way of goodbye and disappeared into the corridor. Moments later, Renate Greulich reappeared and bade Rath enter. The deputy commissioner sat behind his desk, noting something down. His expression gave nothing away.
‘Please take a seat,’ he said, without looking up.
Rath sat and looked out of the window while Weiss calmly finished his notes. The crane in front of Alexanderhaus gleamed in the sunlight, leaving a cluster of reinforcing bars hanging weightless in the sky. Weiss snapped his notebook shut and gazed at Rath through thick lenses, like a senior teacher surveying an exam candidate.
‘Inspector, am I right in thinking you have a brother in the United States?’
Rath had reckoned with all sorts of possibilities, but not this. ‘Pardon me, Sir?’
‘If my information is correct, your brother Severin Rath lives in America . . .’
‘That’s true, but . . .’
‘ . . . and you visited him there once . . .’
How had Weiss come by this information? No one knew about that trip, not even Rath’s father, Engelbert, the police director, and he wasn’t a man you kept secrets from. In the spring of 1923 Gereon had spent three months in the USA looking for his brother; his parents had thought he was on an exchange semester in Prague, thanks to the letters his friend Paul had posted from there. ‘You’re well informed,’ Rath said.
‘It’s what I’m paid to be,’ Weiss replied, without a trace of irony. ‘You’ve heard of the Bureau of Investigation?’
‘The American Federal Police . . .’
Weiss nodded almost imperceptibly and opened a thin file. ‘I have a job for you, Inspector. A special assignment in which knowledge of American customs could be a distinct advantage. How’s your English?’
Rath shrugged. ‘OK, I think. The Yanks understood me anyway, and I understood them.’ What the hell was Weiss driving at?
The deputy commissioner pushed the file across the table. ‘This came through the ticker a few days ago,’ he said.
Rath skimmed the first page. Abraham Goldstein, place of birth: Brooklyn, NY. A profile. Weiss continued: ‘Our American colleagues have warned us about this man. The Bureau believes he is a member of a New York gangster syndicate.’
‘OK, but how does this concern us?’
Weiss raised his eyebrows before responding. ‘Abraham Goldstein, nickname Handsome Abe, is on his way to Berlin. He went through customs at Bremerhaven yesterday evening.’
‘If he’s so dangerous, why did the Yanks let him leave in the first place?’
‘Because they don’t have a case against him. Goldstein was put on file a few times in his youth: larceny, criminal damage, grievous bodily harm, but since then nothing, not even a parking ticket. He’s thought to be responsible for a number of underworld killings. Our American colleagues believe that he kills on behalf of Italian and Jewish gangster syndicates. The one thing no one disputes is that he has links to underworld heavyweights. Only, that isn’t a crime.’
‘Goldstein’s Jewish?’
‘Yes.’ Weiss didn’t bat an eyelid. As if it were unimportant – though of course it was anything but. A Jewish gangster in Berlin, that fact alone would be grist to the mill of the anti-Semites. Newspaper reports about the Sklarek Brothers’ fraud had been full of anti-Semitic undertones. Suddenly Rath understood why Weiss himself had intervened.
‘What’s Goldstein doing in Berlin?’ he asked. ‘Any ideas?’
‘None. The one thing we know for sure is that he is coming, on a tourist visa. Perhaps it’s only to visit the Wintergarten or the Sportpalast, or he means to throw himself into the local nightlife, like the other tourists who come here because it’s so cheap. Anything’s possible.’
‘Could he be taking care of a contract in Berlin? Eliminating someone who’s making problems for the New Yorkers?’
Weiss adopted a sceptical expression. ‘Links between local criminal circles and American gangster syndicates are not particularly well developed. Mostly drug-smuggling or alcohol. I can’t believe that an American underworld feud would reach Europe.’
‘Things aren’t exactly peaceful here at the moment,’ Rath said. ‘If you think back to the last few weeks. Maybe one of our lot sent for him, to carry out a job . . .’
‘There is tension in the city,’ Weiss agreed. ‘The Ringvereine know about Goldstein. Even before the Bureau got in contact, our underworld informants heard rumours that an American was expected in Berlin.’
‘What are we supposed to do if the Yanks don’t have anything on him?’
‘Round the clock surveillance, and we want him to know it too. Make it clear he is being watched, that he can’t so much as move without our knowledge. If he really has come to Berlin to kill someone, we have to show him that the best thing he can do is return straight home. Empty-handed.’
‘With all due respect, Sir, isn’t this a job for Warrants?’
‘I’m certainly not about to discuss whose jurisdiction it falls under with you.’ Weiss’s voice took on a shrill, piercing tone like something from the parade ground. The man had served as an officer in the war and would brook no arguments.
‘As you yourself have just observed,’ he continued, ‘we are talking about preventing a potential homicide. That alone ought to underline the importance of this assignment.’ Rath nodded like a schoolboy. ‘You’re in charge of this operation. Round up a few men and get on your way. Goldstein has reserved a suite in the Excelsior. I understand you’re familiar with it.’
