Goldstein, page 8
They hadn’t mentioned there would be two of them. The caller had explicitly said it would be a private meeting.
The garbage truck had now passed, and was rolling slowly onwards. The doors of the black sedan opened and two well-dressed men got out. Rudi moved towards them. He’d give them a piece of his mind! He didn’t like it when people broke arrangements.
Then he heard the air brakes of the garbage truck hiss, and turned around. It had halted a few metres behind him, and the driver had climbed out of his cabin. Rudi turned back to face the dark sedan and the two men, feeling calmer now, more secure. They would hardly gun him down in front of a witness.
Something rustled behind him. He turned again and realised his mistake. He had been concentrating too hard on the men in the sedan and ignored the truck driver. Now he understood what had so confused him about the man. He was wearing neither an elegant suit like the other two, nor the BEMAG uniform. Strangely, what most confused him was that the pistol in the man’s hand was a make he had never seen before – and Rudi Höller knew his pistols. Without much time to think, he suspected the model into the barrel of which he was staring would be his last. Possibly American, he thought, then the muzzle flashed. He didn’t hear the bang.
14
Andreas Lange had slept badly. He was still shaken by yesterday’s events, even though things had turned out better than expected. Interrogating your colleagues was a thankless task, no matter the subject. No doubt that was why Gennat had lumped it on him, the new man from Hannover, whom no one at Alex took seriously anyway. True, he had been on duty at the weekend and was among the first CID officers at the corpse, but that also applied to Reinhold Gräf and he had been given some special assignment for Rath. Requested, it was said, from on high. Meanwhile Assistant Detective Lange had worked his first case as lead investigator.
It was little more than a show for Gennat, a case in which the worst you could do was make yourself unpopular at Alex. Buddha didn’t have to alienate any of his favourites, but could observe how the assistant detective from Hannover had developed this past year.
The interrogations hadn’t been nearly as bad as Lange feared. Even uniform knew what details were essential for the purposes of a statement. You didn’t have to squeeze it out of them. Everyone had cooperated. No stalling, wisecracks or protests, so that Lange already had more or less everything he needed. It just had to be written out neatly and filed away. In a few days, he’d hand over the file to the public prosecutor, who would draw things to a predictable close.
It looked like there was no blame attached to the operation command. The KaDeWe intruder had recklessly tried to escape down the store front and fallen in the process. These things happened.
‘One less for us to worry about,’ a few colleagues had said in the canteen. Lange saw things differently.
A human life was a human life, and the deceased from KaDeWe looked like he was still a child. They still hadn’t identified him. The operation commander, a young police lieutenant, regretted the fatal incident more than anything and had been so full of remorse that Lange almost had to comfort him. No wonder: it was a lot of responsibility for someone so young. Lieutenant Tornow wasn’t even two years older than Lange, and the assistant detective had no idea how he would have coped in the circumstances.
Then, yesterday evening – Lange had already packed his things and was about to leave the office – Dr Schwartz had telephoned. It was this call that would haunt his dreams. ‘I need to show you something,’ the pathologist said. ‘Could you come to Hannoversche Strasse early tomorrow morning? Best before the start of your shift.’
So here he was standing on the steps of the yellow-brick building with a queasy feeling in his stomach and an increasing sense of regret that he had eaten breakfast. At the top of the stairs, just outside the entrance to the morgue, he hesitated. Until now he had always visited the building with a companion, usually an investigating officer, which gave him the opportunity to stand to one side and not look too closely. Now, however, he had to go in and face whatever awaited him behind these walls, aside from a cynical doctor and dissected corpses.
The porter nodded as he showed his identification and entered the tiled surrounds of the morgue.
Lange had been racking his brains over why Schwartz had asked for him in person, rather than simply delivering the forensic report through internal mail. By now he could have been at his desk in the Castle, reading it over quietly with a cup of coffee before pinning it to the files. The boy had fallen from the fourth floor and died. Did it make any difference what bones he had broken, which internal organs he had damaged? Wasn’t it enough for the information to be in the files? Why did the investigating officer need to look himself? Perhaps Schwartz just wanted to show him his own little tunnel of horror, to shock the green assistant detective. A number of colleagues had said the pathologist enjoyed playing such tricks on young officers.
Lange pushed the swing doors of the autopsy room, eyes fixed on the floor and mentally preparing himself to see some freshly severed limbs or heads, a dissected abdomen or, at the very least, an open thorax. The worst thing he had ever seen in the morgue was a head whose skull-pan had been neatly detached, making the deceased seem like one of those clay beer steins displaying Bismarck’s countenance, the lid made up of a spiked helmet you could lift when you drank. Lange had managed to look away, but this time he was the investigating officer.
At last he dared to look up and was surprised. No chamber of horrors. There was a corpse on the autopsy table, but it was covered by a sheet. The pathologist hadn’t even fetched any disgusting samples from his selection – his canning jars, colleagues called them – to put on display. Dr Schwartz sat at his desk making notes. When he saw Lange, he stood up and stretched out a hand.
‘Ah, there you are. Also an early riser?’
‘Out of necessity.’
‘My assistant has just made coffee. Would you like some?’
‘Thank you.’
‘Thank you no, or thank you yes.’
‘Thank you no.’
‘Shame. You’re missing out on the best coffee in Berlin. Strong enough to wake the dead, they say. Pity they can’t drink it.’
Lange met the pathologist’s tired quip with a shy smile. Schwartz, who hadn’t batted an eyelid, pushed him towards the corpse. ‘I wanted to show you . . . how can I put it? . . . something a little odd. I can’t mention it in the report without having spoken to you first.’
‘It wasn’t the fall that caused his death?’
Schwartz shook his head. ‘No, there’s no doubt about that. He sustained such serious injuries upon impact that the internal bleeding filled the thorax. The poor boy choked on his own blood. Or more precisely: drowned.’
Lange swallowed.
‘How old was he then?’
‘Very young. Somewhere between fourteen and seventeen at a guess. But that isn’t why I summoned you.’ Schwartz grabbed a corner of the sheet, and Lange feared the worst, but the pathologist exposed only the deceased’s right hand. ‘That,’ he said, pointing towards it, ‘is the big surprise.’
Lange glanced down. No one finger seemed normal; instead each was unnaturally contorted, swollen and displaying all the colours of the rainbow.
‘Breaks to the index, middle and ring fingers,’ Schwartz said. ‘The whole hand covered in haematomas and contusions.’
‘So? He fell onto the pavement from the fourth floor.’
‘He didn’t sustain these injuries in the fall. The left hand is similar, but not nearly as bad.’
‘If it wasn’t the fall, then what?’
‘That is precisely the question, and I’m afraid it isn’t so easy to answer. Or, put another way: if you accept the most obvious answer, you could be in serious trouble.’
‘I’m afraid I don’t follow, Doctor.’
‘In my opinion, and I have been doing this job a long time, the nature of these injuries leads me to conclude that they were sustained shortly before the boy fell. Since discovering them yesterday afternoon, I’ve been trying to imagine what could have happened, and . . .’
‘Fortunately, it isn’t your job to draw conclusions,’ Lange said, realising straightaway that he had made an error. The pathologist seemed mildly peeved as he continued.
‘Take my words as a discreet attempt to spare you the use of medical terminology that would mean nothing to you,’ he said, looking at Lange like a professor eyeing his most unworthy student. ‘Anyway, assuming the boy’s fingers weren’t beaten by a hammer shortly before his death, which, I must say, seems unlikely . . .’
‘ . . . then someone else must have broken his fingers,’ Lange finished the sentence. All of a sudden he was wide awake, the fear of macabre jokes or unpleasant sights a distant memory.
‘As you said. It isn’t my job to draw conclusions,’ Schwartz replied, ‘but it looks like someone stamped on his fingers pretty hard. Perhaps even struck them with a blunt instrument. The poor boy lost his grip. With breaks like that, no one could have held on, it’s just not physically possible.’ Lange began to understand why the pathologist hadn’t wanted to put it in writing.
‘You’re saying that in all likelihood we’re not dealing with an accidental death . . .’
‘ . . . but with a murder. Correct.’ Schwartz cleared his throat. ‘That’s what I’d call it when someone is sent flying from the fourth floor.’
‘And it looks like the perpetrator is a policeman . . .’
‘That’s your conclusion, not mine.’
15
‘Anyone else without a ticket?’
Charly showed the walrus-moustached conductor her monthly pass as the house fronts of Warschauer Strasse flitted by outside. The tram was squeezed tight with people on their way to work.
As usual, she had packed a book for the journey. Heymann’s Principles of Criminal Law lay open on her lap, but she had too much on her mind to read. She preferred to look out of the window and think. Gereon’s mood at breakfast!
She had only half listened to his story. His car had been wrecked by vandals in Wedding, and then he had had to get it towed to a garage in the middle of the night. She hadn’t understood a great deal, only that it was his excuse for coming home so late without calling, and for being unable to drive her to work. She’d had to leave early as a result. Though the S-Bahn took barely twenty minutes to reach Warschauer Bridge, she had to take the tram the rest of the way, the 90, which stopped at every letterbox.
The secret still burned inside of her, even now when she was alone again. She had thought he would notice something in her expression at breakfast, that something in her eyes would give her away, but he was consumed by anger over the car. She hadn’t even said anything about the riots at the university, so wary had she been of straying anywhere near the subject. Her plan had been to talk things through over a glass of wine, but he had kept her waiting so long she’d ended up going to bed. Now she was almost glad. What could she say to him when she wasn’t even sure what she wanted herself?
Yesterday, Heymann had asked to speak to her in person, had even sent a car, and she had travelled to the university full of nervous anticipation. What could be so important that her former professor would send a chauffeur to pick her up?
The atmosphere was hostile when she stepped out of the car onto Dorotheenstrasse. People were demonstrating again, loudly and in the form of songs: Die Fahne hoch, the Nazi party anthem. A few Communists tried to combat it with The Internationale and the result was a dreadful cacophony. She managed to make it to the building’s north entrance unscathed, but the demonstrators had spread here too. Students in brown shirts tore messages and signs from the noticeboard and the few who tried to intervene, by no means all Communists, had been clubbed to the ground. The Nazis had brought batons.
By the time she reached her favourite professor’s office, fighting had broken out below too. Heymann had stood at the window, shaking his head in disbelief. Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität as the scene of such political vulgarity was simply too much for the old Prussian. Things were getting worse, especially in the legal faculty. You could almost assume that any first semester student would be a Hitler acolyte, and the younger they were, the more fervent. The brownshirted students didn’t shy away from violence, they thrived on it. Student unrest was how the papers described it.
She had been so unsettled by the commotion that she didn’t understand the professor’s request at first. Half a year, and he wanted her? She had asked for a few days’ thinking time, and still had Heymann’s reaction echoing in her ears. ‘Don’t take too long, Fräulein Ritter, opportunities like this don’t come around often.’
She couldn’t keep Heymann waiting long, she knew that, but nor could she agree without speaking to Gereon, and thinking it over some more herself. The truth was, she had other plans. Her goal had always been a senior role in the Prussian Criminal Police. That was the reason she had taken up her legal studies, and why she had knuckled down and crammed like anything after flunking the state examination. Failed was the terse judgement of the exclusively male board of examiners, no further explanation given. Half a year later she had overcome that hurdle, albeit without distinction. Satisfactory. The main thing was that she had passed.
The electric train crawled out of the shadows of the Ringbahn Bridge onto Möllendorfstrasse and overtook a swarm of cyclists pedalling uphill; the army of workers on its way to the Lichtenberg factories. Seeing them she remembered how much she enjoyed holding down a regular job. She had felt the same way at Alex, where she had worked as a stenographer in Homicide and earned money to pursue her studies. Against that was the year she had spent almost exclusively at university, hunched over her books . . . Suddenly she wasn’t sure whether Heymann’s offer was quite as attractive as it sounded. On the other hand, it would provide her with opportunities she could never dream of otherwise, certainly not as a woman, if she were to continue stubbornly with her legal preparatory service.
Make your mind up time, Fräulein Ritter.
Meanwhile, the tram had reached Normannenstrasse. She snapped Heymann’s book shut. Why was she so scared of discussing all this with Gereon? Because she knew it was about more than just these six months? It was about what would happen to them. That was it. Not that it made her feel any better.
16
Her eyes blinked and searched for him, as they had almost every morning since they met. His face was the first thing she saw, sitting fag in mouth, gazing into the new day. It felt all the more painful knowing he was gone, that he would never again smile and ask ‘Breakfast?’ and hand her a cigarette.
Suddenly, daylight filtered through the clouded windowpanes and made them seem dirty and grey. The day before her felt as bitter as the taste of night lingering on her tongue.
Alex sat and pulled her jacket tighter around her shoulders. In Flat A there was no blanket or sleeping bag to wrap herself in, and there was a strong draught besides. They had only used it in emergencies, or when they couldn’t find anywhere better, but she didn’t like sleeping here. There was far too much rubbish, shards of glass crackled underfoot, to say nothing of the rats, who were becoming more brazen. Barely a windowpane was intact and, on some nights, depending on which way the wind was blowing, you could hear the cries of the animals from the stockyard, their one final act of rebellion before death.
Flat A was a decommissioned axle factory, abandoned over a year before, and still standing only because the owner couldn’t afford to have it torn down. Unfortunately, it was no longer much of a secret, and people came from all around in search of a free place to stay. She didn’t like being here, certainly not without Benny, but after last night she had needed a refuge from the nightmare her life had become.
She wouldn’t forget the sight of Kalli’s corpse in a hurry. She’d never been able to stand the man, but now she felt something akin to guilt for intending to rob his till. Who on earth had made such a mess of him, and why? Wasn’t the money in the cash register enough, or had he tried to hoodwink Berolina and found himself on the receiving end of Red Hugo’s revenge? She had considered these questions on her long, night-time journey to Roederstrasse. At some point she had grown too tired to think and all she wanted to do was sleep.
She hadn’t encountered a soul on her way to the flat, not even Kralle, the rat. The dirtbag had his eye on her and, on one occasion, she had only managed to fend him off with the help of her knife.
Only a few rooms were taken. It must have been well after midnight when she arrived, and everyone was asleep. She had sought out one of her usual places, as far away as possible from the stairs, covered herself with her jacket and pulled her cap over her head. Despite everything going on in her mind, she had briefly fallen asleep. And danced with Benny.
Stretching her arms towards the ceiling she yawned, still exhausted. She couldn’t have been asleep for long, the floor wasn’t exactly soft. She had to go back to Flat B one final time to pick up her sleeping bag and a few other things before finding a new place to stay. How, she wasn’t sure. Benny had always known where, but she had no idea where he picked up his information. Somehow, he had just always known. If it came down to it, there was always the factory. Despite having so many things to take care of, she couldn’t get up. Her body felt so stiff and heavy it was as if it were made of lead.
What a shitty day! What a shitty month! What a shitty time to be alive!
Something scraped over the floor and the door creaked on its hinges, pushing forward a mountain of junk. Suddenly wide awake, she fumbled for the switchblade in her pocket, feeling immediately more secure when she had it in her grasp. If it was Kralle, that stupid, puffed-up bastard, then he’d be in for a nasty surprise.
