Goldstein, page 47
‘If this is another dead animal!’ Rath said.
Kirie took no notice, but dragged him down the steps to the platform. Rath had to watch he didn’t take a tumble.
She was lying huddled on a bench. Charly in her flowery, summer dress.
The other passengers barely took any notice, and those who did were more disdainful than compassionate. It was her, though. Kirie must have sniffed her from upstairs.
She had made it to the U-Bahn, only to fall asleep while waiting for the next train and the citizens of Berlin, accustomed to going their own way and never interfering, had let her sleep. Not even the noise of the nearby construction site had wakened her, in contrast with Kirie’s tongue.
Charly opened her eyes, just a little at first, then wide with fear as she gazed into the face of the smiling, black dog. She sat up and recognised first Kirie, then Rath, who was standing alongside. She smiled blissfully and wrapped her arms around his legs, on the point of sleep again. ‘I have a ticket,’ she mumbled.
‘We’re taking the car.’ He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. ‘You just have to walk a few metres.’
That proved trickier than anticipated. Rath provided support, and Charly made every effort, but her circulation was so restricted that she had to pause repeatedly, above all when climbing the stairs.
‘Come on,’ Rath said. ‘The car’s just up here, you’re almost there. You made it from the wood to the station!’
‘That was before I fell asleep. Sleeping makes you tired.’
Rath debated whether he should get her a Turkish coffee from the cafe opposite, but decided against. Get her in the car, quick-sharp. He bundled her onto the seat and she was asleep again before he started the engine.
At Spenerstrasse he carried her over the threshold, otherwise he’d have had to leave her sleeping in the car. She lay soft and light in his arms as he bore her up the stairs. The hardest thing was turning the key in the lock, but he managed that too. He kicked the front door shut and carried her into the bedroom, laid her on the bed and undressed her as best he could. As he put the covers over her the doorbell rang. It was just before eleven.
He left Kirie with Charly and went into the hallway, took the Walther from its holster on the hall stand and reloaded. He crept towards the door, keeping close to the wall in case the person outside decided to blast their way in. He placed his hand on the handle and with a jolt, threw the door open, taking aim at the intruder.
A small man looked like he was about to collapse out of fear. Rath lowered his weapon. It took a while for the little man to calm down. ‘Maltritz,’ he said at last. It sounded like an apology. ‘I’m the buildings manager here.’
‘Please excuse me, Herr Maltritz,’ Rath said. ‘But I thought . . .’
‘What did you think?’
‘There was a break-in here a few days a go, which is why I’m on my guard. I’m a friend of Fräulein Ritter,’ he said, ‘and a police officer.’
He showed his identification, but the little man seemed unimpressed.
‘Where is Fräulein Ritter?’
‘Not at home, which I can understand, after everything that’s happened. The break-in, I mean.’
‘She really isn’t here? I heard footsteps on the stairs just now.’
‘Footsteps? Well, that must have been me.’
‘You alone?’
‘Me and my dog,’ Rath said. ‘What business is that of yours, if I might ask?’
‘Fräulein Ritter is behind on her rent. She said she would have the money by yesterday evening. Only, yesterday evening she wasn’t home.’
Rath remembered how Charly had asked him for a loan. No wonder he had forgotten, after everything that had happened. How they could use Alex’s hundred and fifty marks now.
‘You’ll get your money, Herr Maltritz. Fräulein Ritter has . . . ah . . . asked me to settle up.’
‘Good,’ Maltritz said, looking expectantly.
‘What is it?’
‘I’m waiting for the money.’
‘I don’t have it for you now.’
‘Listen: go tell your cock and bull story to some kids. Maybe they’ll believe it, but I will not be taken for a fool. Wherever Fräulein Ritter is hiding, whether it’s in this flat or somewhere else, please let her know that Hans Maltritz is not to be messed with.’ He placed his hands on his hips. ‘I don’t care who pays, whether it’s you, Fräulein Ritter, or your monkey’s uncle, but if I don’t have twelve marks fifty by tonight you’ll see a different side to me. You wouldn’t believe how quickly I can get hold of an eviction order.’
Twelve fifty! What a ridiculous sum to make such a fuss about! ‘Don’t do anything rash,’ Rath said. ‘You’ll have your money. I’ll go to the bank later today.’
‘Are you being funny with me?’
‘Nothing could be further from my mind.’
‘Then you obviously haven’t seen the papers. You won’t be getting any money at the bank. I hope you’ve got another source of capital.’ He looked Rath up and down. ‘I don’t care how you get it. Just make sure you do!’
Once the man had gone downstairs, Rath looked out his copy of the Vossische Zeitung, bought to rub the Goldstein article in Tornow’s face.
It was a different story that had made the front page: a German banking crisis. He skimmed the article and continued flicking through the paper. The stupid buildings manager was right, getting money from the bank today would be impossible.
The Danatbank had hit the skids over the weekend and could no longer pay out to its customers. The Darmstädter and Nationalbank! But that was a perfectly reputable enterprise. Rath had his money elsewhere, in a postal giro account, though things didn’t look too rosy for the other banks either. Fearing for their deposits, an onslaught of customers had attempted to withdraw cash, causing most banks to close their counters – only increasing the sense of panic. Rath felt himself worrying about the few thousand marks he had set aside for a rainy day. As if he didn’t have enough on his plate already.
The Danatbank had been so badly hit that the government had been forced to guarantee all deposits. ‘Aunt Voss’, as the Vossische was known, wrote that following discussions with the government, all other major German banks have declared that they view any government guarantees as superfluous, that they are fully solvent and capable of meeting all demands.
Even so, all bank counters would remain closed for the next few days. Arrogant bastards, Rath thought. He didn’t have much time for the financial industry, which he had never understood anyway. He knew even less about the financial crisis, which now seemed to have pulled the banks into its maelstrom. Only two years ago, any number of shares on the New York Stock Exchange had fallen through the floor, and speculators had jumped out of the windows of the city’s skyscrapers. Why enterprises that had nothing to do with New York should be affected, honest German companies for example, even German public servants such as himself who had seen their salaries cut, was a mystery to him.
To the economics editor of the Vossische too, it seemed. What we lack, was the title of his lead. What has happened? The factories, on which Germany’s economic strength has been built, are still standing, as they were four weeks ago. The German soil has yielded the same harvest as last year, if not better than in many previous years. Our reserves of coal and iron remain intact beneath the ground. In all these ways Germany is no poorer, so why the alarm? Because, although the German economy is as strong as ever in itself, we lack the fuel to drive it forward. We lack money.
How true, Rath thought, we lack money. Isn’t that what so many people have always lacked?
This catastrophe is upon us, the journalist continued, and it would be cowardly to turn a blind eye to the gravity of this unique situation. The collapse of a major German bank is without precedent in the country’s economic history.
What we are now experiencing is not inflation, but its exact counterpart.
Rath didn’t quite know if that was good news or bad. At first glance it sounded good: no inflation. That was something, surely. Nevertheless, it didn’t change the fact that money was in short supply. What a lousy world, he thought, remembering what Alex had said in the stairwell.
When he returned to the bedroom, Kirie was waiting eagerly. Charly was still fast asleep. ‘You dogs have it good,’ he said, stroking Kirie’s fur, ‘and not just when it comes to affairs of the heart.’
He sat beside Charly. She briefly opened her eyes and snuggled up to him, reaching for his hand. ‘I didn’t tell them anything, Gereon,’ she mumbled, more asleep than awake. ‘Not a thing!’ She closed her eyes as Rath pulled the covers over her shoulders and kissed her on the cheek.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he said, though he wasn’t sure she could hear him. At least it made it easier to admit his error. ‘If I had believed you none of this would have happened.’
He sat on the chair next to her bed and placed the Walther on his lap. He gazed at her, fast asleep in broad daylight. No one would ever take her away from him again.
118
Dusk was falling as the police vehicles pulled up. The enormous silhouette of the gasometer stood against the westerly glow of the night sky. It had rained in the early afternoon, and the pavement was glistening dark and wet. A great number of people and addresses stood on their arrest lists, stretched across all four corners of the city. Even so, Rath had opted for Schöneberg, just like Gennat. Böhm had gone to the West End, which made the decision easier still.
Right now, police units were stationed at seventeen different locations throughout the city. At eight on the dot they would swoop, so that those under arrest would be unable to warn each other. At seventeen different addresses in Berlin, the illusion that police officers were above the law was about to shatter.
Rarely had Rath found the passage of time so torturous as in these last few days.
Even after Charly’s release, little had changed. As far as possible he had kept his distance from Sebastian Tornow, though they had crossed paths on a number of occasions at work. Everyone was working with great zeal to make the chain of evidence in the case against Abraham Goldstein as tight as possible.
Everyone except Gennat, Böhm and Grabowski.
Rath was the only one who knew. Everyone else assumed they were looking into the Goldstein affair. No one suspected that they were actually conducting interrogations in an undisclosed location. Even less, that Helmut Grabowski was the man being interrogated by Homicide’s two oldest hands. They had needed three days to crack him, but then Grabowski started talking. Seventeen names, and enough background information to justify today’s arrests.
Now, they stood at the base of the stairs: Gennat, Rath and the squad leader with his men. They had taken a dozen uniform officers along with them. Every so often the wooden stairs emitted a tired protest, as if unused to carrying so much weight.
Rath and Böhm had discovered that Assistant Detective Grabowski must be the Castle’s leak at more or less the same time. Böhm, still angry that confidential information pertaining to the Goldstein investigation had been passed straight to the press, narrowed the list of suspects one by one. Only seven people had known what Abraham Goldstein looked like: Gereon Rath and his three men, Deputy Police Commissioner Bernhard Weiss, CID Chief Scholz and the female employee who had received the telex from America and passed it on.
At first Böhm focused on Rath and his men, whom he obviously thought capable of such indiscretion. He even briefly considered Weiss and Scholz for different, no doubt politically motivated, reasons. The one person he hadn’t reckoned with was the girl from the teleprinter’s office, an innocent in her mid-twenties. Eventually, however, she had been the only possibility remaining, and, after a marathon interrogation, had confessed to having mentioned Goldstein’s imminent arrival to a fellow officer in the canteen.
That fellow officer had been Assistant Detective Helmut Grabowski. The same assistant detective whom the porter at the Scherl building recognised as the man who had delivered the mysterious envelopes to Stefan Fink.
At first Grabowski stubbornly maintained that he had acted under his own steam, but when Gennat confronted him, bit by bit, with the statements Lanke junior had already made, he cracked. Gregor Lanke, whom Rath had softened up the week before, appeared to be a relatively small cog in the machine.
Then there were the names Charly had been able to throw in. Over the past few days she had gazed at hundreds of police portraits. Gennat hadn’t summoned her to Alexanderplatz but to a safe house. His co-conspirator was his trusted secretary Trudchen Steiner, with whom Charly continued to live for security reasons, and with whom she would stay until Scheer and Tornow were safely behind bars.
The picture they put together was shocking. Die Weisse Hand. The White Hand. A secret band of frustrated police officers, who were tired of the judicial system releasing people onto the streets after they had bust a gut to put them behind bars. Police officers who had resolved to go over and above the call of duty, and play judge, jury and executioner. Their aim: to eliminate the most notorious criminals in Berlin’s underworld.
Police officers who were moments away from being arrested.
They arrived upstairs. Everything in the attic flat was dark. They hadn’t switched on the light in the stairwell. Only a little twilight filtered through from outside. It took a lot of effort but Rath could just about read the nameplate on the door. S TORNOW. Only a week ago, he had been here thinking he had made a new friend. How quickly things changed.
Gennat had paused on the stairs. Rath gave the squad leader the nod. He waved at his men and they stepped into action like a perfectly rehearsed ballet troupe. The first man kicked in the door and the second peeled inside, firearm at the ready, followed by three colleagues. Rath remained outside, his Walther primed, even if he didn’t think Tornow would come out shooting.
The squad leader emerged from the flat shaking his head. ‘No one home,’ he said.
Rath cast a brief a glance over the flat. It didn’t look as if Tornow had fled. His gaze fell instead on the gasometer at the end of Leuthener Strasse. He exited the flat and the officers descended once more, frustrated as ever after a futile operation. Gennat was waiting for them at the foot of the stairs.
Rath shrugged. ‘No one home, but I’d be willing to bet I know where he is.’
Perhaps Tornow had an inkling after all, Rath thought, as they approached the gasworks, although it wasn’t public knowledge that Helmut Grabowski and Gregor Lanke had been arrested, let alone interrogated.
Rath had waylaid Gregor Lanke outside the canteen, using the pretext of a confidential discussion to lure him out to Schöneberg. The detective had been astonished to find Superintendent Gennat and Chief Inspector Böhm waiting for him in the priest’s office at Saint Norbert’s. Once he had recovered from the shock, Lanke had seemed genuinely relieved by the presence of Buddha, and unburdened his soul.
Grabowski, meanwhile, was part of Böhm’s team. All the Bulldog had to do was summon him. The assistant detective from Homicide was, by far, the harder nut to crack, but Gennat’s doggedness, allied with Lanke’s statements and the names Charly had provided, finally broke him.
Rudi Scheer seemed to act as a kind of patron, placing the necessary means at the group’s disposal for specific operations. Grabowski claimed that Scheer was still involved in weapons trafficking, though it would be difficult to prove. The only lead they had was an illegal arms dealer in Grenadierstrasse. Goldstein confirmed that was where he had purchased the Remington. He got the address from Marion, who at that time had been working on behalf of Gregor Lanke and Die Weisse Hand. Somehow, in the maze, Goldstein had become an important witness.
But that was another story entirely.
Even if Scheer had provided the money, the group’s driving force was Sebastian Tornow, young as he was. The two hoods he had told Rath about, who had apparently lost their lives as part of a gangland war, the two who had ruined his sister’s life, had been his first victims. In Rudi Scheer, whom he must have met in the early stages of his training, Tornow recognised a kindred spirit. From that point, the pair had surrounded themselves with men who shared their worldview. Gräf, too, had been sounded out by Tornow, when asked whether a good police officer ought to be able to kill.
In Tornow’s eyes, the answer was yes. Jochen Kuschke, meanwhile, who had taken this principle too much to heart, had to die, because he had acted impetuously and become a danger to the organisation. His fate, so Grabowski said, had been sealed at a secret night-time meeting of group members. In the end Tornow took the job upon himself because Kuschke, his erstwhile superior officer and mentor, had trusted him the most.
They reached the site of the gasworks without any trouble. As Tornow had said, only signs forbade people from climbing the gasometer. They described such behaviour as strengstens verboten, the sound of which alone was enough to make would-be offenders recoil.
Rath was used to breaking rules.
‘Wait here with your men,’ he said to Gennat. ‘I’ll see if anyone’s up there.’
Before Gennat could say anything, he was on his way.
Scaling dizzying heights was hardly the stuff of his innermost dreams, but this was personal. Tornow had taken Charly from him and made her suffer for two days. If he was crouched up there, admiring Berlin’s night sky, then he, Gereon Rath, wanted to be the one to tell him he was under arrest.
The gasometer was a massive, barrel-shaped guide frame, a steel, half-timbered construction, around eighty metres high, in which the gas bell patiently went about its business. A kind of fire escape led upwards, a steel staircase the like of which could sometimes be seen in tenement houses. After four steps, Rath reached the first maintenance gangway, a steel ring of catwalk grating that extended around the whole gasometer. There was one every ten or so metres, but Tornow’s spot was up on top of the gas holder, not on one of the maintenance gangways. Rath continued.
