The Good Cop

by Peter Steiner

  Willi descended the stairs to the basement. Sergeant Marschach was dozing at a battered steel desk behind a metal fence. As Willi closed the gate with a clang, the sergeant’s red-rimmed eyes slowly opened. He took a deep breath through his nose, sucked on what remained of his teeth, and tried not quite successfully to sit up straighter. ‘The new man?’ he growled.

  The basement had low ceilings with dim caged lights casting their gloom over rows of shelves from one end of the vast space to the other. The shelves were stacked floor to ceiling with cartons of files and who knew what else. ‘You’ll be back in Evidence,’ said the sergeant, pointing vaguely down the narrow aisle into the darkness behind him. ‘Back there. The desk with all the boxes on it.’

  ‘And?’ said Willi.

  ‘File them,’ said the sergeant.

  Willi’s job was to bring order to the Evidence Room, which was a section of the Records Department and not actually a separate room. Everything that was categorized as evidence – logs, testimony, exhibits – was supposed to be stored by case number, and was now his responsibility. As evidence moved in and out of the Evidence Room, things naturally got out of order and ended up stacked here and there waiting to be shelved in the proper place.

  Willi sat down at the desk and, as the first thing, filled out the transfer request he had brought with him. He signed it, folded it, put it in an envelope, which he slid into his coat pocket. The desk and an adjoining table were loaded with items to be put away. There was more under the table and against the wall. It had been weeks since anything had been filed.

  Whoever had dreamed up this assignment had meant to bury Willi, to exile him far from all police business. But it didn’t take Willi very long to realize that he had been cast into a gold mine. Every single crime that had ever been committed in Munich was in some form or other documented here. And, to Willi’s surprise, not only was the filing system simple and efficient, everything had been cross-referenced with related crimes and entered by a neat and legible hand into a master index. Willi’s recently retired predecessor in this job had spent his entire career in Evidence. Evidence had been his calling and he had never wanted to be anywhere else. Order was his passion and he had made organizing the Evidence Room his life’s work. If you knew what you were looking for, you could find it. In fact, you could pretty well find anything you needed to know about any crime.

  A week or so after Willi had arrived and the backlog had been put in its place, he began researching Otto Bruck’s extensive record. The pertinent files made a sizable stack, and he began to read. The list of Bruck’s arrests had been known to Willi. But the notes by the investigating officers were new to him and very revealing. There were critiques of investigations written by senior police officials, which was not unheard of. But he also found records of official tampering, efforts to undermine an investigation so that things fell out in Otto Bruck’s favor. Some officials, presumably assuming the files would never be revisited, had documented these unlawful efforts, noting conversations with this person or that or even with Bruck himself.

  Everywhere he looked he found examples of official malfeasance, documented in many instances by the perpetrator himself. Konrad Milch’s files, for instance, when he found them, contained letters and written testimony by SA and police officials alike meant to protect Milch from prosecution, all signed and dated. There was a letter from a judge declining to prosecute Milch because of his ‘useful political engagement’.

  Willi had at his disposal a massive record of government and police corruption and crime. Here was the legendary German propensity for order and thoroughness in full bloom. He held his arms out in front of him as though he were measuring the weight of this extraordinary new … what was it? A weapon? It felt as though he were holding a machine gun again.

  ‘Leave it alone, Willi,’ said Benno von Horvath. The two men sat in Benno’s living room. Willi hadn’t known who else he could talk to, who else he could trust.

  ‘How can I leave it alone?’ said Willi. ‘This is criminal activity and I’m a policeman.’

  ‘You have to leave it alone,’ said Benno. ‘You really have no choice.’

  Benno had no sway in the department any longer. But he knew the culture, knew how it used to be, and understood how it was now. ‘There was a time when you could have taken it to a judge, but not now. It’s too late for that. What you’ve found is too big. And you’re too small.’

  ‘Well, what about Bruck?’ said Willi. ‘Instead of blowing the whistle on the whole stinking mess, what if I just go for Bruck?’

  ‘You know the answer to that yourself, Willi. If you go after Bruck, everyone will see where it comes from, and worse, they’ll know what it means for them: that they’re next. If you expose a little corruption, you expose it all. Pulling any thread starts the whole thing unraveling. A lot of people will come after you. I’m not just talking about your career here, Willi. I’m talking about your life.’

  OBSESSED

  ‘What have you been up to back there, Geismeier?’ said Sergeant Marschach. Willi had just come in to work. The two men shook hands.

  ‘Filing, Sergeant,’ said Willi. ‘What else?’

  ‘OK. If you say so.’ Every policeman Marschach had ever known was trying to get away with something. Geismeier had obviously been sent to the Evidence Room as punishment for something, although Marschach didn’t know what it was and didn’t care, as long as Willi did the job and left Marschach alone. Whatever else he was, Geismeier certainly wasn’t the record-keeping type. ‘Just so you know, Geismeier: there was a captain back there last night, poking around.’

  ‘What was he looking for?’

  Marschach shrugged. ‘He didn’t say. He knew you, though. Mentioned you by name.’

  ‘Who was it?’ said Willi.

  Marschach held up the sign-in sheet for Willi to read. Reineke.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Willi.

  ‘No problem.’ Marschach took a drink and lowered the bottle back into the drawer. ‘Said he was a friend of yours.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Willi again.

  One morning on his way to work Willi got off the streetcar and came face to face with a poster. It had a red border with black swastikas in the corners, the slogan DEUTSCHLAND FÜR DIE DEUTSCHEN along the top in thick, black letters, and the stern face of Otto Bruck staring out at him. Bruck was running for a seat in the Reichstag as the NSDAP candidate, the Hitler candidate. The election was ten weeks away.

  In the following days Willi saw more and more of Bruck’s posters. They were everywhere. And there were young men on street corners wearing short pants, brown shirts, and red and black neckerchiefs, passing out his leaflets. ‘A vote for Otto Bruck is a vote for Germany,’ said a tall boy, maybe fifteen years old, with short, dark hair. He handed Willi a leaflet.

  Bruck held rallies and drew large crowds. ‘Many of us have given our flesh and blood for the Fatherland,’ he said. ‘And what do we have to show for it?’ He held up his black hand. ‘Nothing. What have we gotten from Berlin? Corruption and betrayal. And now, a great depression. If you’re out of work, you’re hungry, you’re homeless, you have Berlin to thank.’ The crowd mumbled and muttered. ‘You’re goddamn right,’ someone shouted. ‘Kill the bastards,’ someone else shouted.

  ‘Unemployment, hunger,’ said Bruck, ‘when we should be the greatest nation on earth. Where are the jobs they promised? When he’s in power, Adolf Hitler will create millions of jobs. He’ll bring prosperity back to Germany. If you send me to the Reichstag, together we’ll help the Führer take over. We’ll get rid of the crooked politicians. We’ll make Germany great again.’ After the rally had dispersed, a man in a ragged coat went around picking up the cigarette butts.

  Every day Willi labeled new files and put away whatever had come in the previous day. He was usually finished filing before noon. He devoted the rest of the day to his research. Otto Bruck was his north star. Willi found Bruck’s aliases by chasing paper trails. He found Bruck’s confedera
tes – criminal and police – in the same way and followed leads out from them as well. Willi was assembling the grandest scenario of all, an intricate map – no, a veritable atlas of the Munich police department’s corruption and criminality.

  Inevitably Willi came across an interesting cold case. A few years back, an office belonging to a minor right-wing party, a rival to the NSDAP, had been bombed. Someone had rolled a hand grenade through the office door and three political workers had been killed. A dozen others were injured. A suspect, a visiting ‘businessman’, who identified himself as Hans Dieter Gensler, had been spotted coming out of the building. Gensler was interrogated, and then promptly disappeared. Three men, though they could not say where he was now, swore they had been on a fishing trip with him the day of the bombing. A small hotel in the Black Forest confirmed their story. No one had been arrested for this bombing, and no charges had ever been filed. The name of one of the three alibi witnesses sounded familiar to Willi: Werner Schneidermann. Then it came to him: Werner Schneidermann was the student who had tormented Fedor Blaskowitz.

  Detective Hans Bergemann was tired. Today had been rough. He needed to unwind. The walk home would do him good. Sergeant Gruber was all over him lately, ever since he had finally been invited to join the SS. Divorcing his wife Mitzi had done the trick. ‘You have to divorce her, Gruber, if you want to get ahead,’ Captain Reineke had told him. And he was right.

  Today Gruber had been on his back about four people posing as a family and robbing people in the Munich Central Station and on the Marienplatz out front. They’d surround a mark – man or woman, ask for directions, and then pull a gun. ‘It shouldn’t be that hard, Bergemann. A man, a woman, a boy, and a girl robbing travelers in the middle of a crowd in broad daylight?’

  ‘The crowd’s the problem, Sergeant,’ said Bergemann. ‘They hide in the crowd. The whole thing’s over in seconds. They go different directions and disappear in the crowd. Even if the mark shouts for help, the thieves are gone before anyone pays any attention. The noise is impossible, Sergeant. Did you ever try to meet anybody down there? It’s hard to find people, even when you know what they look like.’

  ‘Damn it, Bergemann, you’ve got descriptions. You’re a detective, for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘Yeah, we’ve got descriptions, Sergeant. The man is tall with dark hair; no, he’s bald. She’s short and fat; no, she’s skinny and pretty. He’s sixty; no, he’s forty. The kid is fourteen; no, he’s twenty. The same with the girl. You know how witnesses are, Sergeant.’

  ‘We’ve got six uniforms in the station, goddam it. Get back down there and arrest somebody.’

  Bergemann turned into his street. The block was empty. He heard steps behind him. ‘This is for you,’ said a man, and pushed an envelope under his arm as he hurried past. Bergemann looked at the envelope. It had his name on it in large block letters. When he looked up, the man was gone. He looked at the envelope again. It was obviously from Geismeier. ‘This is all I need,’ he said with a groan.

  The envelope contained a number of pages which were, according to the heading on the first page, a copy of the Gensler file including witness statements and a summary of Gensler’s own statement. There was also a letter in which Willi had written that Hans Dieter Gensler and Otto Bruck were the same person, and that Werner Schneidermann had been one of Bruck’s students.

  ‘God, that man is obsessed,’ said Bergemann.

  ‘Did you say something, Liebchen?’ said his wife from the kitchen. Smells of Sauerbraten were filling the room.

  ‘No, dear,’ said Bergemann. ‘It’s nothing.’

  SEPTEMBER 14, 1930

  A gong signaled the hour. ‘It is eight p.m. This is Bavarian Radio. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Here is the news.

  ‘The votes have been counted in yesterday’s Reichstag election, and in a political upset of epic proportions, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, the NSDAP, appear to have exceeded all expectations. They have received more than 6,371,000 votes. That is 18.5 percent of the total votes cast. This outcome catapults Adolf Hitler’s NSDAP from being the smallest party in the Reichstag with twelve seats to being the second largest party with 107 seats. The Social Democrats remain the largest party with 143 seats, despite having lost ten seats. The KPD, the Communists, also gained seats, now having 54. Make no mistake, though, this is a resounding defeat for the SPD. And the big story is the shift to Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. This is a victory that must have taken even them by surprise. Once again, they have received more than 6,371,000 votes and have won 107 seats in the Reichstag.’

  The news report was followed by a discussion among a panel of journalists and political scientists about the causes and effects of this political earthquake. They debated what effect last year’s Wall Street crash might have had, how it had brought American investment in Germany to an end.

  Had the collapse of the German economy been inevitable or could it have been prevented? What could have been done to stem the massive unemployment that had ensued? Anger at the Social Democratic mismanagement of things in Berlin had pushed voters toward the political extremes. The rise of these extremes and the demise of the political center had led to renewed unrest, food shortages, people fighting in the streets. It was like 1919 all over again.

  ‘The economy explains it,’ said the moderator, ‘but only in part. This is a massive change in the political landscape, isn’t it? Was it coming in any case? Just how did the NSDAP manage to pull it off? Was it fear-mongering that did it?’

  ‘No, no,’ said one panelist. ‘Not at all. We have to face it: Adolf Hitler is a political genius. He took the correct measure of German society, then organized a brilliant campaign. He and his Party spoke to all the issues that concern ordinary German citizens today: jobs, security, a stable economy. And he spoke to them in a language they could understand. The Social Democrats and the Centrists missed the boat completely.’

  ‘Well, he’s a genius, if you call lying and intimidation genius. I mean, he made up “facts” that had no bearing on reality, his supporters beat up and intimidated their opponents …’

  ‘Oh, come on. Whatever you think of his politics, this campaign was perfectly organized. He turned out his voters all across Germany, people who have been left behind, who are unemployed, and they don’t see jobs coming back.’

  ‘Well, that may all be true,’ said someone else. ‘But when it comes down to it, what can Adolf Hitler or anyone else do about that?’

  ‘There’s plenty he, or anyone else, can do. Our industry is in ruins. Our infrastructure is crumbling from neglect. Look at the state of our roads and bridges. The armed forces have been downsized into insignificance. Our weapons systems are obsolete, insufficient to defend ourselves. Turning around any one of these things will create massive numbers of new jobs, and that will turn the economy around.’

  ‘Maybe you forget: the army is already larger than it is allowed to be according to the treaty we signed. We are forbidden, again by treaty, from rearming—’

  ‘Signing Versailles was a criminal act. That treaty had one purpose, and one purpose only, and that was to crush Germany. That’s what it was meant to do, and in that it has succeeded. That any German signed Versailles … it was an outrageous act of treachery. Treason, that’s what it was.’

  Otto Bruck was elected to the Reichstag from Munich’s Northern District by a substantial margin. He and his supporters celebrated at Party headquarters. People were cheering, pumping their fists, drinking, laughing, and slapping one another on the back. Bruck had won even though a series of articles in the Munich Post had accused him of several crimes, ‘not unsolved so much as unprosecuted, thanks largely to corruption in the police department and the judiciary’.

  Otto Bruck thanked his supporters for all their hard work, for turning out voters. ‘That was the key, you know, my friends. You came out, and you voted. Despite the lies and slanders of the Jewish Pest and their fake news �
�’

  ‘Don’t let them get away with it!’ somebody shouted. ‘Lock them up!’ shouted someone else, and others chimed in. ‘Lock them up. Lock them up.’

  Otto lifted his hands to calm down the crowd. ‘Don’t worry, my friends. They won’t get away with it. We’re taking power from the Jews, in Berlin, in the press and everywhere else, and we’re returning it to you, the German people. The authentic German people. Thanks to the Führer, we will soon rule Germany. Deutschland für die Deutschen! Heil Hitler!’ They raised their arms in the Hitler salute and cheered.

  The following week Adolf Hitler held a meeting with the new Reichstag members from Bavaria. He knew the Munich members, Otto Bruck among them, personally. He offered them his congratulations, thanked them for their devotion to the Fatherland, and promised them that the day was near when true Germans would again rule Germany. The Communists and the Jews, all the enemies of Germany would be dealt with.

  ‘And the press, Mein Führer?’ said Otto Bruck. He was still smarting from the articles in the Munich Post.

  For the last dozen years Hitler too had been locked in a state of war with the press, and most particularly with the Munich Post. His attorneys had been filing and mostly losing lawsuits against the paper. Hitler had even sent his storm troopers to attack their offices, all to no avail. The Post had relentlessly attacked Hitler and the NSDAP as a criminal enterprise, reporting on their physical violence, intimidation, and eventually on their intention to get rid of the Jews. The Post had gone after all of Munich’s Reichstag candidates, but none so forcefully as Otto Bruck.

  ‘It has not gone unnoticed that you were crucified by the Jew press,’ said Hitler, looking at Bruck. ‘I promise you that this poison kitchen’ – die Giftküche was his name for the Post – ‘won’t survive our ascent to power. They will be wiped from the face of the earth.’ Which was what eventually happened.