The Good Cop

by Peter Steiner

  ‘Actually,’ Willi said, ‘I’m here to talk to you, Herr Wolf. Or rather to look at your drawings, if you’ll let me see them.’

  ‘My drawings?’

  ‘Since the bombing.’

  ‘They’re personal,’ said Maximilian. ‘I’d rather not show them.’

  ‘I understand,’ said Willi. ‘But they might help us catch the people who did this.’

  Max gave him the notebook and Willi leafed through the pages, pausing when he came to a quick sketch of his own face. He stopped again at the portraits of Sophie.

  ‘You know Walther Hinzig,’ said Willi.

  ‘The pressman?’

  ‘How well do you know him?’

  ‘Just from the Bild offices. A nice man.’

  ‘Herr Hinzig was facing the door when the bombers came through. He saw them throw the bomb. When we first talked to him, he didn’t remember anything about them. He was in shock.

  ‘Now, I look at these drawings of yours, Herr Wolf, especially the faces: Fräulein Auerbach. And me. Particularly the picture of me. You drew that after we met for the first and only time. We spent maybe a minute together. And you drew from memory. And yet anyone could see that’s me.’ Willi shook his head in wonder. ‘So, I’m thinking, if I could sit you and Walther Hinzig down together, you could show Walther a sketch and he could say, “No, the nose is more pointed,” or “the eyes are further apart,” and you could …’

  ‘Don’t you have police artists for that? Why not use one of them?’

  Willi fidgeted uneasily on his chair. ‘For certain reasons I … don’t want to go into, can’t go into, I want to do this … outside the department. And just between us – you and me and Herr Hinzig.’ He watched Maximilian. He could see the wheels turning.

  ‘So you think …’

  ‘I’m not saying any more about it,’ said Willi.

  ‘OK,’ Maximilian said. ‘I’ll do it if you think it will help.’

  The next afternoon there was a knock on Walther Hinzig’s door. His daughter opened it and Willi introduced himself and Maximilian. She led them to her father, who sat wrapped in a warm coat and muffler on the balcony looking across the street to a small park. Walther seemed baffled by Willi’s presence. ‘I already talked to the police,’ he said. But when Willi presented Maximilian, Walther’s eyes showed a glimmer of light.

  ‘How are you doing, Walther?’ said Maximilian.

  ‘Not bad,’ said Walther, and lowered his eyes as they filled with tears. Then he remembered Sophie and said, ‘Have you seen Fräulein Auerbach? How is she doing?’

  ‘She’s getting better, Walther. She can see. Her wounds are healing. She just needs lots of rest. And then she’ll have to go through physical rehabilitation.’

  ‘Thank God,’ said Walther.

  ‘Herr Hinzig,’ said Willi, ‘I know you weren’t able to identify the people who bombed the office.’

  Walther dropped his eyes again.

  ‘But I’m thinking an artist, like Maximilian here, might be able to help you dig out details that you don’t even know you remember about these men. So, he could do a drawing based on whatever you do remember. Then you’d tell him what’s right and what’s wrong with it, and he’d correct it. Are you willing to try that?’

  ‘I really don’t remember anything,’ said Walther.

  ‘I know,’ said Willi. ‘But why don’t we give it a try?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Walther.

  ‘It would be a big help, Herr Hinzig,’ said Willi.

  ‘Give it a try, Vati,’ said his daughter.

  ‘So what do you remember, Herr Hinzig?’ said Willi. ‘Start with either man.’

  Walther pressed his eyes shut and thought.

  ‘He was … average looking,’ he said. He shook his head in frustration, but Maximilian started to draw. In a few seconds he held up a sketch of a generic man’s face, the sort of face you might see in an advertisement for toothpaste or cigarettes.

  ‘No, that’s not him,’ said Walther.

  ‘How’s the hair?’ said Maximilian.

  ‘There’s too much hair,’ said Walther. ‘It wasn’t wavy. And it didn’t come to his ears.’

  Maximilian rubbed out the hair and redrew it. ‘Like this?’

  ‘Yes, maybe. But his forehead wasn’t that tall, or his eyebrows were, I don’t know, higher up maybe?’

  Maximilian drew.

  ‘No, not that high.’

  ‘Like this?’

  ‘Closer together.’

  Maximilian erased and redrew, and each change he made seemed to trigger a new memory. The ears were larger, the eyes were small and closer together, deep set. There were bags under them. The nose was snub so you could see the nostrils. There were deep wrinkles from beside the nose to the corners of the mouth. Thin mouth, open, downturned, strong cleft chin, large Adam’s apple. Maximilian drew and redrew, and when the page became too smudged, he quickly redrew the last version on a clean sheet.

  ‘That’s him!’ said Walther suddenly, astonished by what his suppressed memory had now brought to light. ‘That’s him.’ The second man came to life even faster, and Walther was amazed all over again.

  ‘Thank you, Herr Hinzig,’ said Willi. ‘That was outstanding work.’

  ‘Wait!’ said Walther, suddenly remembering something else. ‘His hand!’

  ‘His hand? What about his hand?’ said Willi.

  ‘The second guy’s hand, his right hand. It was in a black glove. Like it was damaged or artificial. It just hung at his side.’ Now Walther couldn’t stop remembering.

  ‘Do you know who they are?’ said Walther.

  ‘I don’t,’ said Willi. ‘But I may know someone who does.’

  THE GRAND SCENARIO

  Putzi Hanfstaengl had learned how to throw a party during his student years at Harvard University. Now he oversaw the family publishing business in Munich, though, in truth, the business more or less ran itself. Putzi’s main talent was still having parties, and he used that talent now to bring together his new friend Adolf Hitler and people who might be willing to give him money.

  The evening was chilly and there was a crackling fire in the fireplace. Putzi sat sipping champagne, chatting with various guests, and noodling on the piano. Baron Detlev von Plottwietz had met Captain Walther Reineke, a district chief of detectives, at one of Putzi’s garden parties the previous spring. The baron was a bore, but a rich bore. The baron approached Reineke with a determined look in his eye. Reineke tried to maneuver away from him, but the baron was tenacious and ran him to ground in the library.

  ‘Ah, Herr Baron, it’s you. How are you this evening? Have you met Frau Doktor Bechstein?’

  The baron had not met Frau Doktor Bechstein. Nor was he at all interested in meeting her. He clicked his heels and offered her a perfunctory Handkuß. Frau Bechstein gave him one up and down look, smiled sourly, and took the arm of someone who steered her away. Von Plottwietz had only one thing on his mind, and that was Willi Geismeier.

  The next morning Reineke stormed into the precinct detectives’ offices. ‘Where the hell is Geismeier?’ he shouted. Someone pointed toward Willi’s desk. Willi had stooped down and was gathering together papers that had finally slid from the precarious stack to the floor.

  ‘Geismeier, a word!’ said the captain.

  ‘Herr Captain?’ said Willi, standing at attention.

  ‘I’m taking you off the newspaper bombing.’

  ‘Any particular reason, Herr Captain?’

  ‘I want you to focus on open cases you’ve already got. For heaven’s sake, look at your desk. Clear some cases, will you?’

  ‘Did someone complain, Herr Captain?’ said Willi.

  ‘Why do you say that, Geismeier? What have you been up to?’

  ‘Nothing, Herr Captain.’

  ‘You’re off the case – that’s all there is to it. Gruber will take over. It’s right up his alley. Right, Gruber?’ He turned toward Gruber with a smile.


  ‘Yes, sir!’ said Gruber enthusiastically. ‘It looks open and shut, Herr Captain.’

  ‘Open and shut. There, what did I tell you, Geismeier? While you’re out muddying the waters, Gruber is solving the case.’

  ‘Yes, sir, Herr Captain,’ said Willi.

  ‘Come with me, Gruber. Bring me up to date on what you’ve got.’

  When Reineke and Gruber had left the office, Willi dug into the pile of papers on his desk and found the folder with his notes from the bombing case. He leafed through the pages until he came to a peculiar schematic he had drawn.

  Captain Reineke hated Willi Geismeier. Willi seemed to regard police protocols as bothersome inconveniences that were best ignored. Moreover, his personal appearance was disgraceful and his manners were appalling. The only problem was that damned clearance record of his. Since coming back from the war, Willi had closed more cases than any other detective in the district. Every month he was at the top of the list Reineke turned in to the chief of detectives. That was the only thing that kept Reineke from firing him.

  Willi had not been born to be a police detective. His father, a prosperous factory owner, had expected his only son would go to university and then take over running Geismeier Ceramics. But on being granted his diploma in literature with high honors at Tübingen University – he had written a thesis on criminality in Shakespeare’s plays, focusing particularly on Richard the Third – instead of joining Geismeier Ceramics, he had joined the police force.

  To his father’s credit, he recognized right away that Willi’s particular brand of intelligence suited literary exegesis and, coincidentally, police work better than it did the manufacture of seamless ceramic pipe. And it didn’t hurt Willi’s cause that Benno von Horvath, one of his father’s dearest friends, had spent his career as a police officer and then as a senior police official. ‘I’ll watch over the boy,’ he said. But it wasn’t necessary. Willi proved quickly that he was a gifted investigator.

  Willi had learned from the English bard that lawful human behavior followed well-mapped social patterns. But every crime was a unique moment in human history, where human psychology and behavior ran off the rails in a very particular way. When you looked into crime thoroughly and deeply, as Willi had, it revealed dark, as yet uncharted corners of the human soul. Criminal activity oozed through civilization’s unmapped dark alleys in ways that were surprising, illuminating, and, for Willi, irresistible.

  Willi had developed his peculiar theory of crime and civilization over time. But his theory became reality in a flash in the savage trenches at Ypres. One gray winter morning – the sky had turned a metallic gray – his platoon was overrun by French soldiers pushing bayonets into every German they saw. Willi seized the machine gun and repelled the French attack with a ferocity no one would have thought possible of anyone, let alone Communications Sergeant Willi Geismeier.

  His superiors wanted to recommend him for the Iron Cross. But Willi did not see himself as a hero and resisted mightily. In the end the Iron Cross went to someone else. Willi never spoke of the experience again. Instead of a story to tell or a medal to wear, Willi took from the experience a profound sense of the chaos that surrounds us. And in that same moment an intense desire to understand how that chaos found its way into civilized society. If he could understand that, he would understand crime.

  Back in the police department, Willi set about developing methods, which he mainly kept to himself. Every crime had what he called a ‘grand scenario’, by which he meant not just the physical scene of the crime or the principal actors. He was interested in the relationships among all the players in the crime’s universe: suspects, witnesses, and victims, of course, but also the individual police, detectives, judges, politicians, and bystanders who drifted on and off the stage and how they interacted with their surroundings. Even the society at large came into play. All these elements formed a fluid, shifting constellation whose dynamics could reveal things the ordinary search for clues and witnesses might leave undiscovered.

  The Munich police department had always been nationalistic, with a strong connection to the army. And, like the army, they had always been insular and suspicious of civilian ways. Benno von Horvath, his mentor, was himself from a Bavarian military family. But now, in the expanding instability, not to say chaos, of postwar Germany the police had allied themselves more and more with dangerous and extra-legal elements: renegade political parties, anarchic movements and worse. Police higher-ups became involved in political schemes as they never had been before, and those who didn’t were sidelined. With the police department changing as it was, Willi’s grand scenario idea made even more sense to him than it had before.

  Willi was certain that Captain Reineke was somehow involved in the armory robbery, and Gruber was just as certainly the captain’s acolyte. Policemen like these now saw their mission as something other than law enforcement. Their job was not so much to prevent and to solve crime as to use crime to advance their political and personal agendas.

  Willi drew a diagram for every case he was involved in – much as he had done as an undergraduate with Shakespeare’s plays – which he kept in a private folder. In fact, he kept two sets of case files, a conventional one for his superiors in a department file drawer and another more thorough one for himself, safely hidden – either at home, or, if it was active, buried in the stack of papers on his desk.

  Alone in the office, he unfolded the schematic for the newspaper bombing. The names of the players were arrayed around the page with a dizzying web of lines connecting them to the other players he had identified so far. Willi himself (W.G.) was on the chart, as were Gruber and Reineke. He had drawn a dotted line between the two of them. And now, thanks to his talk with von Plottwietz and Reineke’s removal of Willi from the case, he could draw a line between the baron and Captain Reineke.

  He drew lines from all three to A.H. further on the periphery of his schematic. A.H. stood for Adolf Hitler, about whom both Reineke and Gruber had spoken in admiring terms. He drew lines to the Bavarian General von Lossow in charge of the police as well. He felt certain Reineke was not freelancing.

  Willi drew lines connecting Walther Hinzig, Erwin Czieslow, Maximilian Wolf, Sophie Auerbach with one another and with P-1 and P-2 – Perpetrators 1 and 2, the men whose portraits Maximilian had drawn. After a moment’s hesitation he drew lines between P-1 and P-2 and Baron von Plottwietz. He was speculating here, but he would have been surprised to be proven wrong. He slipped the schematic back into his file, along with Maximilian’s portraits, also labeled P-1 and P-2, at least until he had names he could attach to them.

  THE PRIVY COUNSELOR

  Willi was not fond of parties. But once in a while he showed up at the Horvaths’ occasional Sunday evenings, to their delight and the profound puzzlement of the other guests, who were mostly doctors and lawyers and professionals of a higher sort. Willi was the only policeman, unless you counted Benno von Horvath. There were usually eighteen or twenty guests, although the numbers had recently dwindled some. The streets were more dangerous now, and people were reluctant to come out after dark.

  On this particular evening, things began, as they always did, with a simple buffet dinner of cold sliced ham, sausages, and various cold salads. The wine was plentiful, and there was of course beer. Guests got their food and then sat here and there around the large drawing room, their plates balanced on their knees, their glasses somewhere within easy reach.

  As it almost always was these days, the talk was about the faltering Republic, the various efforts to overthrow it, the rising power of the army, and of course the hated Treaty of Versailles. Adolf Hitler was still mostly unknown in the rest of Germany, but in Munich people had at least heard the name by now. His rallies were notorious and his pronouncements were alternately ridiculous and alarming. So there was curiosity and some sighs of puzzlement or exasperation.

  ‘It’s all too depressing,’ said Margarete. ‘Why do we even have to think about such awful people?’
/>
  A minuscule man with a goatee who wrote essays about politics spoke up. ‘Don’t dismiss him, my dear lady. He is a brilliant speaker, and, while he has unconventional tendencies when it comes to politics, he has a canny ability to arouse a crowd and turn them to his purposes.’

  ‘So what?’ someone else said. ‘He’s a thug and a liar, isn’t he? Who’s going to listen?’

  ‘Well,’ said the essayist, ‘maybe. But you know how we Germans love a good speech. And, to tell the truth, despite some of the nonsense he spouts, he’s got an interesting and not entirely wrongheaded point of view. For instance, at the moment he’s not advocating Bavarian secession, as everyone else seems to be. He’s calling for a strong central government. Of course, he hates the current government, as we all do,’ said the essayist, checking the room, to make certain there were no dissenters. ‘The “November traitors,” he calls them, sold us out, and I tend to agree. He wants to defy Versailles and restore Germany’s greatness. I think he has to be taken seriously.’

  ‘Really? Taken seriously?’ This was a prominent surgeon speaking. He wore tinted glasses and a tiny red, white, and black rosette on the lapel of his suit, which signified some military order or other. ‘This Hitler’s proposal, at least as you summarize it – I confess, I haven’t followed him or any others of his ilk, but it sounds very radical, and, I must say, very unlikely. I mean, you’re talking about a dictatorship, aren’t you? OK, yes, the Berlin government is weak and unsure of itself. But, damn it, it has the army behind it. General Seeckt recently said as much. It was in the paper. The constitution is strong. It’s a good constitution. And under the constitution, if things get precarious, the president can always declare an emergency and govern by decree. And, damn it, the army stands behind him.’

  ‘Well, they do, yes, of course they do,’ said the essayist. ‘Now they do. But for how long? Where will the army stand if the president caves in on the French occupation of the Ruhr, for instance, and continues to let the French cripple our mills and mines and factories and ruin our economy? Or what if the government decides to start paying reparations again? Where will the army stand then? Or what if the army itself is ever forced to disband properly as Versailles says it must?’