A Death in East Berlin (Peter Ritter thriller series Book 1)

by Richard Wake

  “Bauer, sir.”

  “Really good work, Sergeant Bauer. Both of you.”

  They trotted off and left me to paw through the contents of the wallet — a big wallet, the kind that was big enough to keep your identity card inside. There were 22 marks in the billfold, proving either that the uniforms were honest or that there were 42 marks inside when they picked it up. Whatever. The real gold was the documents — specifically the familiar blue-covered identity card and the driver’s license. The wallet had belonged to one Kurt Braun, of Heidelberger Straße. He was 22 years old.

  He was from the East, which was good news — the best news, in some ways. If the guy had been from West Berlin, the paperwork would have been hellacious, and the pressure to find the killer would have been multiplied by a factor of about 10. Of course, if the body had been from West Berlin, the Stasi almost certainly would have grabbed the case from me before the breakfast dishes had been cleared. And for some reason, I found this one to be interesting. I wanted this case, even if the odds of me clearing it seemed a bit on the long side.

  I paged through the identity card. The picture was of a young man, well-groomed. The card said blond hair and blue eyes, with no identifying marks. It had never been renewed and, leafing back, there had been no interactions at all with the Vopo. This really wasn’t that unusual, in my experience. Back when I walked a beat, I would sometimes request a minor troublemaker’s identity card but rarely bothered to make a notation inside. The truth was, you had to write in your badge number and sign the note, but all that ended up doing was putting you in a position to answer a bunch of questions and fill out a bigger bunch of paperwork if the troublemaker ever ended up causing some real trouble sometime down the road.

  The body was being bagged as I climbed the steps to the base of the monument. As I approached, Freddy Mann was staring intently at those steps, maybe halfway up.

  “Here, here, here, here,” he said, pointing to red splotches. “Clearly blood. Pretty obvious to me that he was killed somewhere else and carried up the steps.”

  “Sure it’s not blood that the killer tracked on his shoes on the way down?”

  “I don’t see any footprints,” he said. “I see splotches. Imagine a man hoisting the body on his back, and the compression on the body with each step.”

  “And a little squirt?”

  “Something like that — although most of the blood would have been long gone. More like a little drip, but enough.”

  “Can you see where it starts?” I said.

  “That’s the thing — just on the steps, nothing before. So maybe he was carried in something. I already checked all around the base, and there’s nothing.”

  “So carried in something. Like a wheelbarrow?”

  “As good a guess as any,” Freddy said.

  He started talking about some other test he might run on the blood, and I zoned out. I mean, even I had my limits when it came to that stuff. When he took a breath, I showed him the identification card.

  “That’s our fella, don’t you think?”

  “Looks like him,” Freddy said. “Well, looks like him after all of the blood has been drained out of his body—”

  “And his hands and feet cut off—”

  “And don’t forget Johnny and his buddies,” he said. “Yeah, that’s probably him.”

  I asked when the post-mortem would be. Freddy said the doc was planning on noon.

  “Hell, that’s quite a rush job, huh?”

  “Remember,” Freddy said, pointing up at the immense statue looking out over the entire scene. “Whatever you do, wherever you think the evidence is leading, remember.”

  “You trying to tell me my job?” I said, with all of the indignity that I could muster — which, admittedly, wasn’t very much.

  “Somebody has to, Little Shit,” he said.

  7

  Heidelberger Straße was in a neighborhood that I had once known well, but there had been a lot of reconstruction after the war, so maybe I didn't really know anything. I wandered for a few minutes in my car, trying to remember. But Flora's on Kiefholzstrasse, while still a bakery, was now Klemm's. And The Trail — once a bar where the Russian soldiers lined up outside starting at 4 p.m. pretty much every day, making it a prime location in the search for cigarette butts to sell on the black market — was now a coffee house called Lucky's. When I turned onto Heidelberger Straße, and then pulled up in front of No. 22, I saw a building faced by a nondescript brownstone that seemingly had not been sandblasted since the Kaiser. This was not new construction, but I recognized none of it.

  The first-floor front, almost always the apartment that housed the person who kept the house book, did not answer when I banged on the door. My corpse, Kurt Braun, had lived in 3B, in the back. I didn't know if there was a wife or a roommate, so I began with a polite knock. There was no answer. I pressed my ear to the door, hoping to hear, well, I didn't know what. But it was silent. I tried the knob, and it was locked. Which left me with a choice: wait for the person who kept the book, who likely also was the building superintendent and therefore in possession of the key, or just knock it down.

  Although I had not done it in a while, I had earned a reputation when I was a beat copper as being quite adept at knocking down apartment doors. The key, as I liked to tell my coworkers, was clean contact with the full sole of your boot — which meant standing just a hair farther away from the door than your first instinct. Too close and the contact would be too high on the door. It also would make for most of the stress on the front of the foot, potentially spraining a toe or two. And forget the shoulder. That was the first rule. As I once regaled my fellow beats in our bar across from the precinct, “Shoulders? Shoulders are for amateurs.”

  This door seemed a bit sturdier than many I had seen, likely because it was from a pre-war building. Still, I was confident in my approach, calculating the proper distance. My strike at the door was clean and firm, with the full sole of my right foot. But what I failed to remember until it was too late, was that I wasn't wearing a beat cop's boots, but street shoes instead. So while the door popped open nicely, the wood splintering around the lock, the thin sole did not offer half of the protection that my old boots did. I fell into the apartment, yelling curses. The sprain felt as if it was more in the arch of the foot than the toes.

  After the initial shock of pain wore off, I was able to hobble without any paralyzing discomfort. It was then that the super arrived. I showed him my Kripo identification. He looked at the shattered door frame and said, “Why didn't you wait for me?”

  “I knocked.”

  “I was in the shower. I yelled.”

  “I didn't hear. Just get the damn book.”

  In my experience, the supers tended to be a nosy lot, and that could be helpful. As for the house book, it contained personal information of the tenants, but I already had that from the identification card. The book also was supposed to have an entry for any guests who spent more than three nights in any apartment, but the record-keeping tended to be pretty haphazard in my experience. I mean, in none of the apartments where I had lived had any super ever taken the name of anybody. I once had a girl stay for five nights, but her name never made the book — and I don't think it was just because I was in the Vopo. Old Mrs. Meisner, who kept the house book in my building in Prenzlauer Berg, never saw a thing that happened after 8 p.m. — and not much the rest of the time, either.

  But even if the superintendent on Heidelberger Straße was a former Gestapo clerk, what were the odds that some name in his book would turn out to be the murderer? Not very high. Maybe if it was a boyfriend-girlfriend kind of that, but this? It just didn't seem likely. Because, yes, the cock-and-balls business did suggest a sexual element, but the hands and the feet and the moving the body to the Soviet memorial and hauling it all the way up those stairs to the top? Nah. This wasn't some deranged girlfriend.

  The super arrived back and handed over the book.

  “What's your name, b
y the way?”

  “Schultz.”

  “How long have you kept the house book for this building?”

  “It's impeccable.”

  “I'm sure it is, but that's not what I asked. How long?”

  “Six years.”

  I paged through and found our man in 3B. There was nothing written other than his identification details.

  “No visitors?”

  “I told you, the book is impeccable. If there are no visitors listed, he had no visitors for three nights.”

  “How about one night?”

  “I wouldn't know,” Schultz said.

  “You all know.”

  “Well, I don't,” he said.

  I let the man and his impeccable book go. On the way out, he examined the broken door. “And why are you looking for Mr. Braun?” he said.

  “We're not looking for him. We found him. Dead.”

  “Here?”

  “No.”

  “Where?”

  “That's more than you need to know. Thank you, Mr. Schultz.”

  Turning my attention to the apartment, I saw the place was, for want of a better term, bachelor-ish. It was one room with a tiny kitchen area in one corner and an open toilet and sink in another. There was a bed, a table that appeared to have been made by a failing student in his first carpentry class, and two chairs that were its mates. There was a pile of dirty clothes in the space between the bed and the wall, and there was a bureau with a busted leg that, upon inspection, contained two pairs of underpants and six socks, two of them mismatched orphans.

  In the kitchen, there were two sets of plates, bowls, cups, and silverware. In the cupboard, there was a tin of tomato soup and another of sardines. In the icebox, the ice long-since melted, there were three bottles of lager and a half-loaf of bread. I picked up the loaf and examined it next to the window, where the light was better. There was no obvious mold, but it was well past stale.

  In the other corner of the apartment, the toilet was disgusting — not just from the stray splatters on the porcelain rim and the surrounding tile floor. The last person who used it had peed but not flushed, and a skin had formed on top of the water.

  So it had been days since the last evidence of life in Apartment 3B, Maybe it had been a week but not likely much more than that, mostly because the bread had not yet begun the transformation into a colorful, moldy science project. So that was something I wrote down in my notebook, too.

  I sat on the edge of the bed and just mindlessly scanned the room for a minute or two. Then I went into the kitchen, leaned back on the sink, and did the same thing. Kleinschmidt had taught me that one, the view from multiple angles.

  “You never know what you're going to notice when you change your perspective,” he said, going on to tell the story of one of his old cases, a dead guy lying flat on a bed. Kleinschmidt said he saw nothing special about the site until the crouched near the foot of the bed and looked back at the body. There, because of the light streaming through the window behind the head, he saw it — a pubic hair caught between two of the stiff's upper front teeth.

  “Told me there was a woman in his life,” Kleinschmidt said. “Told me also that the dead man was something of an adventurer.”

  Leading to an arrest?

  “Nah,” he said. “But it added some splendid texture to the story I told in the bar that night. And, kid, short of a conviction, there is nothing better than a good story. Because they don't pay us great, and the hours can be shit, and the work can be dangerous — but they can never take away our stories.”

  So I tried from two, three, four different angles. But all I noticed, other than the throbbing in my foot, was a single man's dump of an apartment. I saw nothing special, and I don't think it was because of a lack of imagination. The room was like dozens of others I had seen in my life, including at least two that I had lived in myself. The truth was, other than the toilet, the apartment was not all that different from the place where I lived before my marriage.

  I closed the door as best as I could, given the shattered frame, and limped upstairs to the top floor and worked my way down. There was a deaf old woman on the fifth floor with whom I could not manage even the most rudimentary communication. A film of the hand gestures the two of us were making at each other would have been high comedy — especially with me screaming at her, as if a few additional decibels were going to make a difference.

  Moving down, there was a new tenant on the fourth floor, the wife of a husband-and-wife entry, newlyweds who had moved in just the day before. She said she had heard nothing unusual and knew nobody other than the super, the wonderful Mr. Schultz, who seemed so broken up about the passing of his tenant in 3B that he was likely trying to line up a new tenant already.

  Other than that, none of my knocks were answered. The tenants were probably all at work already. I made a note to call the precinct and add the building to the checks being done by the local cops. Dinnertime would likely be best. There was little point in going out before then.

  8

  Being in the old neighborhood and all, my conscience demanded a visit to see Red Rolf — my conscience, plus the idea of going back to the office and facing the boss without even the hint of a theory of the case was entirely unappealing to me at the moment.

  Back in 1945, Rolf Krueger was the resident old Commie in our apartment building. His party membership was from long before, about 1919 or so. When the Nazis took over, he was arrested and did a few months in Sachsenhausen — that was back when the concentration camps were mostly for the “re-education” of political enemies, not the mass murder of the Jews. As he said, “Hard work, shit food, but if you kept your mouth shut and agreed to keep it shut, they let you go after a few months.” When I was a kid, I always called him Mr. Krueger, but to my dad, the old man was always Red Rolf, even to his face. The truth was he kind of liked the nickname.

  When the bomb hit our building, Rolf was living on the second floor. The bomb wiped out the top two floors, but the rest was oddly intact, just a little dusty. Rolf took me in.

  I didn't ask. He just said, “You sleep here now,” pointing toward a small sofa. He had no family that I ever knew. He was 60 then. The last time I saw him, maybe six months before, he was still fit as hell at 76. “Wiry old bastard” is the other thing my dad had always called him. Yes, also to his face.

  After the Soviets came, Rolf was treated very well by the newcomers. He told them who he was and about his party membership. They verified it — somebody obviously kept a magic ledger somewhere, hidden from the Gestapo — and Rolf suddenly was out of the bombed-out building and in a much nicer place on Grabowstrasse, about six or seven blocks from my dead stiff's apartment. Rolf moved to the new place, and I moved with him. He fed me and clothed me and made sure I went to school — and when the time came, it was Rolf's Communist connections that got me into the Vopo. As the old man told me, “You don't need to be a genius, but you need to be loyal. I told them you were, and my word is good enough.”

  “But—”

  “No buts,” he said. “Now, you're loyal.”

  And that was that. In truth, the Vopo's reputation among the people was that any idiot could get on the force. And if it wasn't true, it wasn't entirely false, either. Between the ex-Nazis they fired and the men who crossed the border to work in the West, there were usually plenty of openings on the force. If you had even an ounce of ambition, it wasn't hard to see a path toward promotion — and I had a good ounce-and-a-half of ambition, easily. So even when I was on traffic patrol, I was taking courses and thinking about advancement.

  I banged on the door, and Rolf answered it in about three seconds. He still looked great, ever the wiry bastard.

  “Ah, the great detective drops in,” he said.

  “It hasn't been that long.”

  “I'll get out my diary if you want the exact date.”

  “No need,” I said.

  “I figured,” he said.

  He pulled out a bottle an
d poured us an inappropriate amount for ten in the morning. He asked me what I was working on. I told him, offering the few details that I had managed to accumulate.

  “Cock and balls, too?” He was musing.

  “What about the location?”S

  “The memorial? Oh, it means something,” he said. “How old is your cockless, ball-less friend?”

  “Twenty-four on his ID.”

  “So, it's not that.”

  “Not what?”

  “He's too young to have been one of Stalin's fine rapists — so it's not revenge for that.”

  “I never heard you call them that.”

  “People of my persuasion are supposed to tell you that it was a complicated time,” Rolf said. “You know — that the Nazis had killed millions of their countrymen, and that the fighting to get to Berlin had been brutal, and that an army of men in that situation was bound to take some liberties. What did they call it — blowing off some steam?”

  “But—”

  “But I draw the line there,” he said. “I was loyal, and I am loyal. But that doesn't mean I have to be blind, deaf, or dumb. I sometimes wonder if I'd had a wife or a sister when they came in '45, if I would have been able to protect them with my party membership.”

  “Well?”

  “Well, nothing. I wouldn't have been able — it took weeks to verify my credentials. Those animals couldn't be delayed for an hour, no less for a couple of weeks.”

  “And yet—”

  “They weren't animals because they were Communists,” Rolf said. And then he just barely muttered the rest: “They were just damn animals.”

  He poured himself another two fingers’ worth. I tried to take my glass back, but he said, “Oh, just be sociable,” and so I was in for another two fingers myself.

  He asked me about work, and I told him about the latest office gossip — that the boss might be headed for a promotion to who-knows-where.

  “You have no idea where?” Rolf said.

  “None.”