by Richard Wake
A Death in East Berlin
Richard Wake
Manor and State, LLC
Copyright © 2020 by Manor and State, LLC
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical figures, are products of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Contents
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Part II
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Part III
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Part IV
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
REVIEW
Afterword
Untitled
Untitled
Untitled
Afterword
Part I
1
We entered my apartment, and I flipped on the lights. My date for the evening opened her mouth as she looked around, and it formed the sweetest little circle. I didn’t hear the inhale, but the exhale was both soft and long. This was going well.
She walked across the living room, the red sheath of a dress clinging to all the right places. She leaned over, and the cling became a revealing stretch. At that moment, I was more than ready for her to begin fooling with the buttons — on the front of her dress, on the front of my shirt, or my pants, it did not matter much. It was with some disappointment, then, when I saw that the buttons she fondled instead were on the front of the television set.
“Turn it on. Which one? Show me.”
I leaned over and grabbed a kiss, which she permitted. But then it was to the knob that turned on the television, as she would allow no further delays. As the console hummed and warmed up, I cooled just a bit.
“There’s nothing on, you know,” I said.
“Telefunken?” she asked. She did not care that nothing was on.
“No, it’s a Grundig.”
Again, she did the thing with her mouth, the round thing. It was as if she knew the difference between the manufacturers. I didn’t. All I knew was that Grundig had classier billboards in the West.
The Grundigs just looked more expensive, but I had no idea if that was true. The cost of the number that was warming up in front of us, in its cherry wood cabinet, was a mystery to me.
After a few seconds, the picture came to life. There was, indeed, nothing on. It was nearly midnight, and the programming for the day was over. We watched a test pattern.
“Ours or theirs?” she said. Her right arm was hugging her torso, her left hand was cupping her chin, and she studied the unmoving image as if it were a Van Gogh.
“Theirs.” I leaned over and turned the channel to the GDR station. It was another test pattern, but different. It featured a picture of the national flag.
“Our test pattern is better,” she said.
“The rest, not so much — unless you enjoy stiffs sitting behind desks reading the Party news in between documentaries on animal husbandry.”
I put my hands on her shoulders and nibbled a bit on her left earlobe. It was permitted.
“Animals, huh?” she said. Then she pried my hands away and took herself on the tour.
Her name was Elke. We had been fixed up by a friend of mine, Cobie — or rather, by Cobie’s latest, whose name didn’t seem to matter much. Cobie was an old friend but not a close friend, and we just happened to run into each other. Cobie’s real name was Harald, but his nickname from when we were 13 was Cobra because of, well, what he was packing in his gym shorts. We saw him in the shower and decided that Python should be the nickname, except he asked for Cobra instead. It went against the generally accepted rules — people don’t get to pick their own nicknames — but my friends and I allowed it. I mean, who could deny him the right? Certainly, no one who had ever seen Harald’s accomplishment.
Anyway, Harald became Cobra, and Cobra became Cobie, and by the time we were about 18 — a decade ago, and the last time we ever really ran together — Cobie began to notice that, after his first intimate encounter, a lot of other girls were lined up for their opportunity. It was a damn long line, too. I had not seen him in years when we bumped into each other in the bar on Ku’damm, but I assumed it was still a damn long line when I saw the quality of the one he was with, the one whose name didn’t matter.
Back when, he would shrug and smile. “What can I say? Reputational sex is the best sex. I mean, they don’t even care that I’m getting fat.”
And now, all of these years later, I was beginning to understand what he meant. Because as it turned out, Elke was a friend of a certain Karin, who had briefly been under my spell a few months before. And Karin had told Elke about my apartment, and Elke was here to see it. I think it would have been okay if I was getting fat, too.
The apartment was in Prenzlauer Berg, the Berlin neighborhood that was mostly spared — by accident, probably — from the Allied bombing at the end of the war. It was actually two apartments that had been knocked into one, on the second floor of a brownstone.
We walked from room to room, and neither of us said anything. The kitchen wasn’t the typical galley, but a room with enough space for a table for four. It also had a gleaming white refrigerator —- which at the moment contained two bottles of beer and a jar of pickles. The living room was twice the size of a typical East Berlin living room, seeing as how it was what usually took up the space of a standard East Berlin living room and two small bedrooms.
Down the hall, there were two bedrooms and a decent-sized library, although it was mostly empty shelves. My wife took the books when she moved out. The library did have a desk and chair, and another overstuffed chair with another lamp and a table. Just no books.
Also, there were two bathrooms. When Elke saw the second one, off the master bedroom, well, that singl
e sight and the luxury it represented did more to get her to pull the red sheath over her head than anything I had said or done. In the calculus of the moment, I was sure that the master bathroom was even more critical than the vodka.
There was reputational sex, and then there was reputational sex again, and then there was sleep — tired, peaceful, natural, wonderful sleep that lasted maybe three hours. Because the phone rang at just after 4 a.m., blasting the bliss out of my body. I picked up the receiver and mumbled something. It was the duty sergeant.
“Under Lieutenant Ritter, is that you?”
I mumbled again.
“Detective Ritter?”
Nothing intelligible from me.
“Come on, Peter. Is that you.”
“Yes, sergeant. What is it?”
As it turned out, there was a body in Treptower Park.
2
The only good thing about driving at 4 a.m. in East Berlin in the summer of 1961 was that nobody else was driving — and I mean nobody. Even at the busy times, it wasn’t busy. It wasn’t as if we had traffic jams at any time of day, not like in the West. It could get pretty clogged up around Alexanderplatz in the morning and late afternoon, but that was really about it. And at 4 a.m., there wasn’t a soul. I could run the lights without a care.
It was maybe six miles from my place to Treptower Park. I spent the first five of them mourning the exit from my warm bed, and the warm, naked body I left behind. I managed to get dressed in the dark, and Elke never woke up. I scribbled her a note — “Duty calls. Sorry.” — and left it on the hall table by the apartment door. I would have set out a little breakfast snack for her, but beer and pickles seemed a bit much for the morning.
This was the second time in July that I had been dragged out of bed in the middle of the night, and the month wasn’t even half over. Three times in March, three in April, five in May — damn May — one in June, and now two more in July. Most of them were dead prostitutes in dark alleys, likely killed by customers who preferred not to pay for service rendered. Some were dead men in dark alleys, likely killed by prostitutes in pursuit of some cash on top of what had been agreed. Three were floaters in the canal, jumpers — at least they were self-evident. The rest were entirely unsolvable, either because the loved ones of the dead men didn’t want them solved, or because the loved ones of the dead prostitutes were non-existent. In either case, all it meant was paperwork — and another lost night’s sleep.
I had argued about all of this with the boss. There were eight of us, after all, but only one of us received the phone calls in the middle of the night. He said, “You’re the youngest, by far. You’re the only one who isn’t married, the only one who doesn’t have children.”
“But I have a life, too.” That’s what I managed to blurt out in my defense. I could almost hear the whine in my voice. The boss responded by making a wanking motion. He was a serious man, and this was not typical.
“Some life,” he said. At which point he returned to whatever paperwork had been occupying his attention when I walked into his office. Meeting over.
This call was a little farther out than most of the late-nighters. As I drove through the dark streets and got closer to the park, I skirted the neighborhood where I was born. The apartment house on Bootsbauerstrasse was gone, and it was nowhere near being rebuilt the last time I had driven past. The building was gone. Everybody was gone.
I arrived at the small parking lot nearest to the monument and checked my watch. It was 4:35 a.m. The lot was empty. There was no sign of another police car or of anyone. I doused the lights and just sat for a minute.
The only clear memory of my father — really clear, like I could still see his face — came from our times in Treptower Park. I looked out through the windscreen and did a mental calculation. If the memorial was over to my right and a little behind me, then, yes, it was probably in that field straight ahead. I could see a couple of football goals in the distance, lit by the moon. We probably went there a dozen times.
My mother was home, pregnant with my little brother, so it was just me and him and a football and a paper sack containing two liverwurst sandwiches, two bottles of lager, and an orange soda, a special treat.
We played and laughed, and then we sat and ate. After a while, I would climb into his lap, and he would let me have a sip from the beer bottle. On the way home, he would always have to carry me the last bit at the end — I would insist, and he would pretend to resist, and then he would scoop me up with a great flourish. It was 1940. I was seven.
Five years after that, we lived in the same apartment, but my father was long gone, dead at Stalingrad. My mother kept the telegram and reread it almost daily, it seemed, the edges frayed, the creases starting to wear through, the paper stained. But she stopped crying after only a couple of weeks.
By 1945, the war was over except for the final punishment. Hitler was in a bunker somewhere near the Wilhelmstrasse, and we were in our apartment a few miles away. If he was terrified or defiant or somewhere in between, we did not know. The only thing we shared for certain was the rain of Russian bombs.
By then — actually, long before then — we had no proper heat in the apartment except for what was left after dinner from the cooling stove in the kitchen — and that was on the nights when we had food and a rock of coal. My mother and my brother, who was then five years old, slept together in the bedroom, for warmth and also to calm him. I was 12, the man of the house, scrounging for food during the day and sleeping in a little nest I would make by the stove at night. If I was lucky, it would still be just a bit warm when I fell asleep. I remember that it was warm that night. I remember reaching out from beneath my quilt and feeling the stove — and it was warm. It wasn’t much, but it was something.
The bomb, as it turned out, landed on the roof of the apartment building. I don’t remember hearing it fall — sometimes there was a whistling kind of sound, but if this one whistled, it did not wake me. I don’t remember hearing it, or hearing the explosion, or feeling anything. All I knew is what they told me later. We were on the fifth floor, the top floor, and the bomb crashed right through the roof and into the bedroom.
3
I grabbed the torch from the glove box and switched it on. The light was bright and steady. Good batteries. My lucky day.
The memorial was separated from the car park by a stand of trees. A narrow path marked the way. The torch managed to illuminate a few exposed tree roots, saving me from a face-plant that would have been especially embarrassing, seeing as how I was still half-drunk, and maybe visibly so. The last thing I needed was to have people talking about me at headquarters after showing up at a crime scene with a bloody, busted nose. Which reminded me: I reached into my pocket and fished out a breath mint. It turned out to be more linty than minty.
When I was through the trees, the scene opened up, even in the darkness. The Soviets built the memorial in the late '40s to honor their war dead, and the damn thing was massive. Why they built the other one in the Tiergarten, I think in the American sector, made no sense to me. Then again, I was a teenager during the construction and wasn't consulted.
After getting through the trees in one piece and on two feet, I arrived at the beginning of the memorial and shined my torch on the big red marble wings that formed the entrance to the site. Two carvings of Soviet soldiers, each on bended knee, formed the inside of each wing and invited you inside. Each of the wings featured a hammer and sickle carved into the stone, as well as a quote — German on one side, Russian on the other:
“Eternal glory to the fighters of the Soviet army, who gave their lives in the struggle to free humanity from fascist bondage.”
The monument itself was probably 200 yards away and on top of a mound that took 50-odd steps to climb. It was a gigantic statue, maybe 40 feet tall, of another Soviet soldier, this one cradling a German child in its arms while stomping on a swastika.
There was very little moonlight, but the silhouette of the statue was still so fa
miliar, and almost as impressive as when it was bathed by the sun. I had been there dozens of times over the years, watching the construction as a kid and then, in the years after, for the big commemorations that meant nothing to me, other than the fun of being part of a big crowd.
In the darkness, and in the distance, I could see one, two, three men with torches at the base of the statue. Their lights were bigger than pinpricks from where I stood but not a lot bigger. That must have been where the body was.
Between the entrance and the statue was the vast open space, sunken below, where thousands of Soviet soldiers were said to be buried, the ones who died saving the city from Hitler and prepared the ground for their raping brethren who followed. From teenage to old age, no German woman was safe after the Soviets took the city. Every one of my friends whose mother was alive could tell of her having been raped by a Soviet soldier, along with all of the sisters and grandmothers who they couldn't hide. There were times back then when I was glad that my mother was dead. And it was why some people I knew insisted on calling the place “The Tomb of the Unknown Rapist,” even all of these years later.
