Goldstein, page 7
10
The red-black Horch parked next to the silo seemed out of place. The corner of Stralauer Allee was chock full of lorries and small delivery trucks. Hugo Lenz got out of the car and stretched his considerable frame into the night, feeling the blood course through his body. He liked the air here by the harbour, the smell of the river, mingled with the smell of petrol from the nearby tank. He didn’t lock up. This was his kingdom; no one would think of stealing Red Hugo’s car, not here. He had worked at the Osthafen many years ago prior to the war, before he started earning money by more dangerous, though far more profitable, means. The two and a half years in prison seemed a fair price, all things considered.
Things weren’t running so smoothly at the moment, however. The Nordpiraten had been making serious trouble ever since Rudi the Rat had returned from the clink. Only this morning some hooligan had smashed up Fritze Hansen’s kiosk, one of the most reliable earners Berolina had on their lists. It was a brazen insult. Well, what do you know, it said, Berolina can no longer protect their own. What are you still paying them for?
If Marlow didn’t react soon, things would get out of control. Until now he had preferred to sit back, reluctant to do anything that might bring the cops into play and disrupt business.
Dr M. was perhaps not entirely wrong, but doing nothing wasn’t the answer. The Pirates were becoming bolder by the day, and it was only a matter of time before somebody snuffed it. They had thrown Kettler out of the window, leaving him in a wheelchair, but it could have been worse. Lenz had wanted to strike there and then, but Marlow kept him in check. They had been allowed to torch a Pirate betting office on Greifswalder Strasse, but that was his only concession to his men’s desire for revenge.
The good doctor had no idea that feelings were running so high. If he allowed this to continue, people would start jumping ship. Something had to give. The Pirates had to be taken out of circulation in a way that was sanctioned by the cops, and Hugo Lenz knew how to make it happen. His new allies would help him; they’d even pay for it.
He could already tell they were serious. The department store brats had been neutralised at the weekend. One of the little bastards had even been killed, not that Hugo had wanted that. All he wanted was to give those urchins, who had been making the cops nervous for weeks and ruining Berolina’s business, a little warning. He hadn’t wanted anyone to die, although a dead body was a damn good warning. The other brats would keep away from the city’s department stores for a while, and Kalli knew that Berolina were better business partners than a couple of snotty-nosed street urchins. If there should be further deaths Hugo wouldn’t complain. After all, Berolina wouldn’t have anything to do with it.
He crossed the railway tracks that ran parallel to Stralauer Allee and connected the Osthafen with the wider world. He had suggested the meeting point himself. One of the warehouses next to the big cold-storage depot belonged to Berolina. Not officially, of course, no one rented a warehouse to a Ringverein. Officially, it was the firm Marlow Imports who used the almost two thousand square metre space, as the sign above the loading bay indicated. Lenz had seen to it that none of his men were present. Who the boss was meeting was none of their concern.
He moved along the quay, past the cranes that shifted goods by the ton, and the ships moored on the Spree, waiting to be loaded. There wasn’t much happening. The crews were asleep, and the few workers he met had tired faces.
There were two men waiting at the loading bay. They were a little too well dressed for the neighbourhood, even if their suits were off the peg. Typical cop suits, Hugo Lenz thought. So, they were serious. Satisfied, he breathed in a gust of Spree air and grinned. He didn’t need Johann Marlow to keep those Nordpiraten rats at bay. Things would be different now, and Johann Marlow, the arrogant prick, could go hang once and for all.
11
The house lay in darkness as Rath opened the main door. Everyone was asleep and no wonder: it was almost midnight. He felt as if he should have been in bed hours ago. Yet the rage in his stomach would make sleep hard to come by. He switched on the light in the stairwell and climbed the stairs, past Brettschneider’s door. She looked at him in a funny way whenever their paths crossed, couldn’t get it into her bourgeois little head that a man came and went in a flat shared by two young women. The landlord accepted that while Fräulein Overbeck was in Uppsala for two semesters, Rath sometimes spent whole nights and even had his own key. Frau Brettschneider, a single, retired teacher, did not. It simply didn’t fit into her worldview.
He was tempted to ring her doorbell before disappearing into Charly’s flat but, in the interests of domestic peace, resisted. It was Charly who’d bear the brunt, not him.
As quietly as possible, he opened the door and groped his way into the kitchen without switching on the light, only doing so once he had closed the door behind him. There was a note on the table. He removed his hat and read as he shrugged off his coat.
Dear Gereon,
I did wait up for a while, because I was hoping to see you, but now I’m too tired, almost too tired to write these lines. And tomorrow I have to leave early again. Annoying about your car. Tell me what happened in the morning.
C.
P.S. There’s an open bottle of red wine in the cupboard. I wanted to share it with you, but we’ll do it some other time. If you like.
He opened the cupboard door. The bottle was more than half full. Charly must have drunk two glasses on her own. He imagined her sitting there, some legal book or other open on the table, wine glass at hand, growing more and more weary as she waited for him. He would have liked nothing more than to take her in his arms, but she wasn’t there, she was in bed sleeping and he couldn’t wake her.
Next to the wine stood the bottle of cognac he had brought from Luisenufer. He only had to think for a moment, before leaving the wine untouched. It was a long time since he had drunk cognac before going to bed, and not just because Charly complained about the smell. He no longer needed it; sleeping by her side was enough to banish those nightmares that, for a time, had haunted his dreams. The smell of her body was enough to keep the demons at bay.
There was a pitter-patter across the hallway floor, and a scratching at the door. Rath opened it and a black dog looked up at him. ‘Did I wake you, Kirie?’ he asked, letting her in.
By the time he fetched the glass from the cupboard, she had curled up under the table as if she knew exactly where her master was going to sit.
Kirie was the living reminder of a murder investigation. She had belonged to a victim, and no one wanted to take her, not even the parents of the deceased. Rath had adopted the sweet little neglected pup who had been trapped in the flat of her dead mistress and, since then, had turned into a rowdy chit of a hound.
‘We’ll need to think of something for you,’ he said. ‘Your mistress can’t keep you anymore, so you’ll have to be a police dog again.’ Kirie pricked her ears up, and tilted her black, canine head to one side.
Rath opened the bottle of cognac and sniffed its neck before pouring. The familiar smell recalled the times he had sat alone in his Kreuzberg flat wrestling with the day’s problems before taking himself off to bed. Charly could grumble all she liked, today had been hard, damn it, and cognac alone offered the solution.
He felt his anger rise, rapid as a thermometer in boiling water. He cursed Abraham Goldstein, and he cursed Bernhard Weiss for foisting the assignment on him in the first place.
Czerwinski and Henning had been waiting an hour and a half when he and Goldstein finally reappeared in the Excelsior. However, Rath didn’t know the extent to which Goldstein had ruined his evening until later, after he had left the Yank with Plisch and Plum and gone back out to Wedding to retrieve his car. He had travelled by taxi, determined to drive his expenses higher still, so furious he couldn’t even look out of the window. The Buick was parked where he had left it: Kösliner Strasse, a notorious Communist area, and a neighbourhood in which sports cars were seldom left on street corners. Someone seemed to have guessed that the car belonged to a cop, or had taken it for a capitalist’s plaything. Either way, they had serviced it good and proper.
Despite the flat tyres and smashed headlights, Rath was most annoyed about the scratches in the paintwork. Sheer vandalism and envy, nothing more. That jobless rabble! Rath had gone to the Rote Laterne on the corner, the same bar he had visited or, rather, passed through, hours before. It was already closed, even though it wasn’t yet ten o’clock. He felt sure that Goldstein had recruited the people who had wrecked his car here. How, he wasn’t sure, but money seemed the likely answer.
Then came the problem with the tow truck. He had had to run to the S-Bahn, to Senefelder Platz, to find a public telephone, which of course was out of use. After hailing a taxi on Reinickendorfer Strasse he found a late-night garage which could tow the defective Buick. By that point, however, the hands of his wristwatch already showed half past ten, and the garage was somewhere out in Reinickendorf.
He poured himself another cognac, then a third. He would charge the repairs to the Free State of Prussia, that much he had already decided in the taxi to Charly’s place.
Meantime, Kirie had fallen asleep. Listening to her snore quietly, he rinsed his glass and placed it in the sink. In the bathroom he brushed his teeth extra carefully and downed two large glasses of water. The last thing he needed was trouble at breakfast. Charly mumbled something as he lay beside her, turning to place an arm around his shoulder, and he nestled close to her warm body, carefully, so as not to wake her. As the scent of her skin reached his nostrils, that scent which belonged to Charly alone, he closed his eyes and fell asleep.
12
The shop lay quiet and dark, the gas lamps on Rigaer Strasse were switched off, and moonlight shone dimly through the clouds. There wasn’t a single light on in the building. Alex had been watching the street for almost an hour, but since the last S-Bahn spat out its half a dozen or so passengers she hadn’t seen a soul.
It was late by the time she reached Rigaer Strasse, much later than anticipated. She ought to have been exhausted, but her rage kept her awake: rage at Kalli, rage at the cops, rage at that stupid caretaker who had forced her to climb over all those roofs until she finally located a skylight in the front building.
After today’s incident, Flat B was too dicey. Alex would return for a final time, but only to pick up her stuff. She hadn’t wanted to run the risk earlier. First, she had to take care of business in Kalli’s shop.
Although certain that the street was deserted and no one was watching from the window, she took a final, precautionary, glance in all directions before emerging from the dark entrance, crossing the street and heading towards the shop. The carefully drawn letters on the sign told her it was closed. As she set about the door with her skeleton key she realised it wasn’t locked. She pushed it open as slowly as possible, to avoid triggering the bell which announced new customers. A shy pling, then everything was still. She listened into the darkness. The open door made her suspicious. Better safe than sorry!
Alex couldn’t help thinking of Benny, and the memory pained her. She saw his laughing face, then the grimace of the cop who killed him, his boots stamping on Benny’s fingers as if he were treading out a cigarette, and her rage rose once more.
She was surprised that Kalli had forgotten to lock up. True, he was prone to getting drunk, and sometimes slept on the sofa in the back, which was why she had brought the knife. She wasn’t scared of him, having dealt with far worse in the past. If need be she would extract the money by force.
The thought of a snoring Kalli in the backroom made her proceed as quietly as possible. Not daring to switch on the light, she groped her way forwards until she found the counter, following its contours with her fingertips to the cash register. She didn’t know how much he left in the till overnight, but her plan was to take whatever money she could lay her hands on. There had been quite a sum in the drawer when she visited at lunchtime.
Thinking of how to unlock it without making too much noise, she hesitated. It was already wide open, the big cash drawer pulled out as far as it would go. And it was empty.
A strange feeling took root in her stomach. Even if he had been drinking, which seemed more than likely, a schlockmeister like Eberhard Kallweit would hardly forget to close the cash drawer. Or had he already taken the money out and locked it in the cash box, which he took with him every morning to the bank? She knew where he hid the box: on the bookshelf in the backroom. She had seen him once heading out back to fetch his cash, not realising that the display cases in his shop, dirty as they were, made for perfect mirrors.
Alex opened the door slowly and carefully, straining as she listened. No sound, not a snore, not a breath, just the ticking of the wall clock. Inside, she closed the door behind her. It was darker here than in the shop, pitch black in fact, without a window in sight. She searched for the light switch but, after a while, gave up, getting down on her knees and groping her way forward on all fours.
Here was the edge of the carpet, so that must be the table, and behind it the sofa. The bookshelf hung above the sofa. Alex continued crawling across the carpet, which hadn’t been beaten in a long time and had crumbs and dirt everywhere, until she felt something sticky, instinctively pulling her hand away. What a pigsty! At first she thought Kalli, the messy bastard, had knocked over a bottle of spirits and failed to clean up, but then she recognised the faintly metallic smell.
She had waded into a pool of blood!
God damnit! She needed light to see what had happened.
She crawled back and edged open the door. In the meantime her eyes had grown so used to the darkness that the little light entering from the shop was enough to get her bearings. There was something big on the floor under the table: a body, a human body. Stay calm, she told herself. Finally she located the light switch on the other side of the door. Suddenly she felt curiosity and fear in equal measure. Her right hand gripped the handle of the knife, as her bandaged left hand stood poised over the switch, but there was no one else there.
Eberhard Kallweit lay in his own blood, which by now was seeping into the carpet. His body was in a horrific state, worse than Alex had ever seen, the face a crusty, bloody mess. She had to look twice to recognise him at all, but the grey overalls left her in no doubt. Her knees grew weak as she threw up the little she had eaten that evening against the wall.
13
Rudolf Höller trudged through the Brandenburg March sand. He was in good spirits, even if early morning wasn’t his best time. He could have remained in the car, but wanted to see what had become of the dump. He stepped on a branch by the entrance and a flight of crows fluttered into the early morning mist. Apart from the beating of their wings, their cawing, and the rustle of the wind in the pines, there wasn’t a sound. At this hour the garbage trucks were still out and about; they wouldn’t roll up with their load for a while yet, but, when they did, there would be a continuous stream of rubbish flowing into the former clay quarry until late evening.
The wood on the other side of the hollow was part of Greater Berlin, but the dump lay beyond the four-million-strong city. Berliners didn’t like to bury their rubbish within the city walls, and Schöneiche was an excellent place to dispose of things that had outlived their purpose. No one knew that better than Rudi Höller.
The fact that they had designated the dump, of all places, as the meeting point, seemed like a sign. He knew his way around here. It was, so to speak, his home patch. A few years ago, Rudi had worked as a garbage man and discharged his load here every day. Increasingly, however, he had used his rounds to nose out properties for a break-in, and ultimately to deliver packages of drugs. At some point he had ended up with the Nordpiraten, eventually elbowing his way to the top of the organisation, and not just in a figurative sense. Now he had reasserted his leadership claim after spending two years in the can at Tegel with Hermann.
The Pirates were crying out for strong leadership. Since the catastrophe at Reichskanzlerplatz, where half the Ringverein had fallen into the hands of the police, the organisation was fighting for survival. In the meantime, those bastards at Berolina had grown stronger.
It was time to put a stop to it. Soon the Pirates would no longer be limiting themselves to regaining lost ground. Today’s meeting could change everything. He had managed to get to someone who, though still loyal to Red Hugo, had long been a thorn in Johann Marlow’s side. And, make no mistake, Berolina were headed by Marlow, not Hugo Lenz. Without Dr M., Berolina would crumble like a dry leaf.
Yes, this was his chance to finally get even with Dr M., to show that arrogant upstart who was in charge of this city. Rudi Höller knew who he had to thank for his prison years. They had been shopped. The pigs had been waiting for them in the vault when he and Lapke and a few others broke into the bank on Reichskanzlerplatz. When Berolina worked in conjunction with the police, you could be sure Johann Marlow had a hand in it. He had half of police headquarters in his pocket, although they wouldn’t be much use when he was in the ground.
Rudi the Rat had no qualms when it came to bumping people off. That was how he had earned his nickname, but with a nod to his former profession. There were thousands of rats at the dump, many more than there were crows. Only, you couldn’t see the rats. They didn’t caw like the birds, but kept themselves hidden, striking mercilessly, quick as a flash – when the situation demanded.
Surveying the dump’s expansion as if it were his own work, Rudi turned around. When he returned to his car, he saw a black sedan parked on the edge of the wood. Behind the windscreen were two men. He ran his hands over the old war pistol in his waistband as the first garbage truck rumbled slowly towards the entrance. The truck was early, he thought. On the one hand it was disrupting their meeting, but on the other it made him feel safer. He turned his face towards the wood in case the driver recognised him.
