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

by Richard Wake

  We were on the second floor, but all of the office doors had numbers that began with a 1. We walked a few steps to the left and into the start of a hallway lined with a dozen such doors. The floor was a kind of deep red linoleum.

  “Just offices,” Grundmann said. “Mine is down there. We'll see it later.”

  He turned us in the other direction. After a few seconds, the first change I noticed was the flooring material. Red linoleum gave way to wood parquet, a golden color, probably oak.

  First, we came to what looked like a little apartment. We leaned our heads into the doorway. There was a sitting area with a couple of chairs and a television. For the record, my Grundig was nicer.

  “Bathroom and shower through there,” Grundmann said, pointing to a door on the right.

  A few more steps down the hall, he opened another door. Inside was kind of an office and a sitting room combined, with a desk and chair and another, more comfortable reclining chair. Leather.

  “When the minister does not wish to be disturbed,” Grundmann said.

  Farther down the hallway, another door. It was a meeting room with a long conference table.

  “Self-explanatory,” Grundmann said.

  Next was what my guide described as “the real nerve center.” We walked into the room, which seemed like an outer office of sorts, with a desk and some filing cabinets. Grundmann explained that this was Ursula's office, that Ursula was Mielke's secretary, and that she was married to Herbert, who was Mielke's chauffeur and bodyguard.

  “They're both on the trip,” Grundmann said, and here his voice was a little lower for whatever reason.

  “Where?”

  He pointed. East, I thought. The fact that Grundmann wouldn't say the word, and the fact that he pointed east, seemed to pretty clearly indicate that it wasn't Dresden or Warsaw. It was the biggest east: Moscow.

  Okay, then.

  “Look at this — Ursula showed me,” Grundmann said. He lifted the blotter on her desk and pulled out a large yellow index card. It looked like a child's drawing of a dinner service. At least, that's what I told him, and he laughed.

  “You're half-right,” he said. “It's Ursula's drawing of how to arrange the minister's breakfast every morning.”

  And so it was. Typed on top of the card, it said, “Breakfast: 2 eggs, cooked 4 1/2 minutes, picked beforehand.” Then came the drawings.

  On the left was a tray with the coffee service — coffee pitcher on the left, milk on the right. As for the meal service itself, the napkin went on the left — folded in a triangle. The plate with one egg was in the middle, spoon on the right, salt shaker just above it. Then, in a row farther away, the second egg in a cup on the left, a plate with bread in the center, and then another plate. I couldn't see what was supposed to be on that one because Grundmann pulled the card away too quickly to read it. He slid it back beneath the blotter.

  “Organized,” I said, after quickly rejecting “anal” and “bizarre” from my potential list of comments.

  “Organized, yes,” Grundmann said. His smile suggested he was at least in the “bizarre” camp, if not “anal,” but I would never know for sure.

  Through the far door, he said, was Mielke's main office, but we were skipping that. He said, “A desk, a few telephones, but we'll leave that be. Fun is fun, but that's enough.”

  We walked back down the hall, back onto the red linoleum, and into his office.

  “With that, Under Lieutenant Peter Ritter, the tour is complete,” he said. “Now, tell me why you're here. A body at the memorial in Treptower Park, is that correct?”

  22

  “Short version or long version, Captain?” I asked as a preamble.

  “Long,” Grundmann said.

  “Have you seen any of the paperwork?”

  “I’m sure it’s exquisite in its detail and accuracy, but no.”

  So I told the story from beginning to end, from being awakened in Prenzlauer Berg in the middle of the night to the visit from Beck in the office about 48 hours before I arrived at Normennenstrasse. I had told it often enough that I had developed some proficiency in the telling. And whenever I told it — including that day — the amputated cock and balls always drew a visceral reaction from my audience. Grundmann’s was a fairly standard wince, but it was accompanied by a noticeable squirm in his seat. But here was the thing: I always mentioned “cock and balls” twice in my retelling, but I only got the reaction once. By the second time, it was just another fact in the list. Hair, color of eyes, identity, address, cock and balls. Next.

  When I got done, Grundmann was silent. I wondered what his function was in my little moment of drama. He worked in Stasi headquarters, so he likely pushed paper rather than doing any real investigating of… anything.

  So what exactly was he pondering? Either he was going to grant the request or not, based upon the bureaucratic trading of favors. The facts of the case seemed irrelevant in the game he was playing — at least that’s what I thought. But, as the silence grew longer and more uncomfortable, I reminded myself that I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

  Finally, Grundmann cleared his throat.

  “So why exactly do you need to see Mr. Braun, currently resident in Hohenschonhausen?” he said.

  “Need to isn’t exactly it, sir,” I said. “But the coincidence between the appearance of my corpse and the appearance of Mr. Braun — how closely they resemble each other — is hard to ignore.”

  “I could walk over to the guard barracks outside and find you three pretty close matches without any trouble at all.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, partly because ass-kissing was my default in these situations but mostly because I knew he was right. But how to explain to a non-detective that even distant coincidences in a murder investigation needed to be checked out, regardless of the involvement of the Stasi and whatever political business that might entail?

  As it turned out, I didn’t need to explain. Grundmann took a deep breath and just barreled ahead.

  “So you have a mutilated body that you can’t identify,” he said. He waited for a reaction, and I nodded.

  “No hands, no feet, no cock, no balls, no name,” he said. Again, he paused. Again, I nodded. This was a bit of a performance on his part, I realized, and I was to play the part of the addled sidekick. That was fine. There were plenty of people who would tell you that I was more than suited for the role.

  “You have a wallet found in the woods nearby, and the best thing that’s got going for it is that it wasn’t rained on.”

  Pause. Nod.

  “And now you have knowledge, provided not by your own initiative but by the benevolence of Beck, from the Stasi’s Berlin station on Keibelstraße, that the identification in the wallet does not belong to your mutilated body but to a man currently incarcerated in Hohenschonhausen.”

  I wanted to object at that point, just on principle. But I nodded. It was my role, after all, and if I was to get what I wanted out of the meeting, I needed to play it.

  “So, in the vernacular, you don’t have shit,” Grundmann said.

  Nod. Maybe he knew Bernie?

  “And, also in the vernacular, what you do have is this identification card in one hand and your—”

  “Yes, Captain,” I said.

  “And your investigative training tells you that every lead needs to be followed, and the ID card is the only lead you have left.”

  “There’s a little more to my thinking, sir, but yes. Essentially, yes.”

  “Tell me about the little more.”

  “Well, it’s like this,” I said, about to speak aloud a thought that was no more than half-baked, and that essentially was just a restatement of what Grundmann had already said. “The coincidence of their looks needs to be checked out, however likely or unlikely it is. But the fact that the wallet was dry, after a week of heavy rains, well, it does suggest a timeframe that matches with my killing. And that just multiplies the coincidence by some factor.”

  “What
factor?”

  “Some factor,” I said. “Not zero. More than 1.”

  Again, Grundmann lapsed into silence. He was right. I had the identification card in one hand, my dick in the other hand, and nothing but a prayer of the interview with the guy in Hohenschonhausen being able to help me. So I sat there and waited.

  “Wait for me outside, and close the door,” he said, after a few more seconds. I got up and sat on one of the benches in an outer office.

  One minute became two, and two became five. I could hear that he was talking to someone on the phone, but wasn’t able to decipher any of the conversation through the heavy wooden door. Then I heard nothing. Then the door opened.

  “Under Lieutenant,” Grundmann said. “Your appointment is at 10 a.m. on Friday.”

  Two days from then.

  “You will have 15 minutes to speak to your Mr. Kurt Braun. Fifteen minutes and no more.”

  “Thank you, Captain.”

  His reply was in three parts. First, he smiled. Then he shook his head. And then Captain Grundmann closed the door in my face without another word.

  23

  I returned to the office and filled in the boss on my meeting at Normannenstrasse. The way he reacted almost made me wish I hadn’t. It wasn’t that he was harsh when I told him, just… uncomfortable. It was pretty clear to me that Greiner did not like playing the favors game, and that my little verbal report was a reminder he did not particularly need or want.

  So I cut it as short as I could, ending with, “Do you want an update after the interview at Hohenschonhausen?”

  Greiner paused for a second. Then he said, “If you believe it is warranted.”

  All of which seemed to mean that he was really, really hoping that it wasn’t warranted. Which suggested I was being permitted a measure of independence in the investigation, which was both comforting and unnerving at the same time. I mean, why didn’t he want to know what our Mr. Braun had to say? I wondered if the Stasi had already identified the favor that Greiner now owed to them.

  Whatever. As I walked out of his glass fishbowl, Gretchen handed me a phone message. It read, “The Willow in Pankow. 4:30.”

  “What’s her name?” Gretchen said.

  “I wish,” I said.

  “Why, Peter Ritter, I think you’re blushing.”

  “I’m really not,” I said, and I wasn’t — because this wasn’t about a woman, but her father. Maybe my face was red from whatever discomfort I had felt in Greiner’s office.

  I asked Gretchen for a telephone directory to find the address of The Willow — Florastrasse 9. As it turned out, it was right down the street from the train station that I had taken to Elke’s apartment.

  When I got there, and walked up and down, I counted exactly one flower shop on Florastrasse, but it was the motif of many of the businesses nonetheless. The Willow was one of them, a small restaurant. Why he picked it was beyond me — at least until he arrived, when it became obvious. I was early, so I sat at the bar with a Pilsator. When he swept into the room, he said, “Bring your beer,” and then he led me to a private booth in the back with doors that swung open and shut, sheltering the inhabitants from prying eyes. It didn’t take 30 seconds for a waiter carrying two beers on a tray to appear.

  “Is this near your office?” I said.

  He shook his head. “How many times have you been to Pankow? Dozens to my old house alone, I’m sure.”

  More than that, if you counted the times since the divorce, but I didn’t tell him that part.

  “The schloss is right down there, not a half mile,” he said, pointing out toward the front window of the restaurant. The schloss, Schonhausen Palace, is where the Central Committee did at least some of whatever they did. Grimm had once told me that he had three different offices and that one of them was in the schloss. I had never seen it before, but everybody knew what it was. The president had lived there before he died in 1960.

  “I took the train to Wollankstraße to get to your house,” I said. “That walk from the station to No. 52 is all I know about Pankow.”

  He shook his head again.

  “So, did you walk over from work?” I said.

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “I just figured, if it’s only a half mile—”

  “Nobody walks.”

  “Nobody?”

  “Nobody,” Grimm said. “They wouldn’t know what to do if you walked. I can just imagine the alarm bells it would raise if I walked.”

  “So, you’re saying that they follow you?”

  “You are so naive.”

  With that fact firmly established, we got down to my report. It was simple enough, but I read from my notebook anyway. When the bald guy left his apartment, the area where he went, the bar — or whatever it was — on the corner, the walk back to his car with a male companion, the companion leaving the car, and the bald Mr. Strassmann driving home. And, for dramatic effect, I saved the bit about the two men embracing and kissing in the vestibule until the end.

  Grimm took it all in, without any discernible reaction other than one of someone concentrating and cataloging the facts. There was no smile at my final revelation, no homosexual joke, no nothing — just a nod, and just barely, and the look of someone processing information. We sat in silence. I sipped my beer.

  Then, finally, “I need you to follow our bald fellow again, this Saturday night. And if he goes to the same place, which I expect, I want you to take note. But instead of following him home, I want you to follow the other fellow home.”

  “But that could take all night.”

  “Yeah, well.”

  “And it’s not like he’s likely to have a car — I mean, how many people do?” I said. “Especially in that neighborhood? A loud fart would knock down some of those buildings. And if he’s on foot, I’ll have to be on foot.”

  My former father-in-law looked on impassively.

  “Are you at least going to give me a hint?” I said.

  “Meaning?” And there, his eyes narrowed.

  “I’m following this poof around because, why? I mean, who is he? And what’s the purpose?”

  I knew I was crossing a line, but I didn’t care. I was performing a service for Grimm, and even if I didn’t have much choice in the matter, he really didn’t, either. He needed the service, and so he would just have to put up with at least a small serving of my impudent bullshit.

  “You know everything you need to know,” Grimm said.

  “But need-to-know and want-to-know are two different things.”

  “Your wants are not my concern.”

  “If you say so,” I said, with the picture of his daughter, naked in bed, leaning on one elbow, her hair just brushing against her right breast.

  My words hung there. He processed them for whatever I might be implying. Within about two seconds, though, he gave up, undoubtedly concluding that I was just being an asshole because it was understood — unspoken but understood — that I was permitted to be an asshole, within reason.

  “Just follow him and get his name,” is what Grimm ended up saying.

  “Nothing else? No date of birth? No next of kin? No listing of sexual proclivities.”

  I was wearing his patience. Mission accomplished. In most lives, the small victories were the only victories, and this was one of mine.

  “Just his name,” he said.

  “Really, is that all?”

  He did not answer. He just slugged down the end of his beer and walked out. I left the booth and watched Grimm go out the front door of the restaurant and saw him get into his waiting black Chaika, driven by a man in a dark suit who opened the back door for him. They roared off. Fifteen seconds later, a second black Chaika roared by. It was traveling in the same direction.

  24

  In exchange for a particularly athletic evening in my apartment in Prenzlauer Berg, I agreed to take Elke to the Konsum in Pankow. “When she said, ‘I mean, I think it’s the least you can do. I did everything but ride on
a trapeze.’”

  “Now there’s an idea. I wonder if the ceiling—”

  “Enough,” she said.

  We had to swing by her mother’s apartment for the list. I barely took a step inside the door and waved at Elke’s mother from there. She didn’t ask me in — either she was afraid, as she had been the last time, that I was going to stay long enough to eat something, or she just didn’t like me. I wasn’t sure.

  As we were leaving, she shouted at Elke, “Don’t forget the coupons,” as if anyone who shopped at Konsum ever did. It was pretty much our national sport, collecting those coupons. At the end of the year, you got a rebate check for them — 1.8 percent of your total purchases for the year, as every housewife knew. It usually added up to a free week of shopping and it was, as every woman in the country said, “The week when the food always tastes the best.”

  Or, as Elke said — after we took turns imitating her mother saying, “Don’t forget the coupons” — “The great socialist reward! More pork! More bread! More brown food! More white food!”

  When I mentioned that her mother never invited me in, I asked Elke if she didn’t like me.

  “Oh, no,” she said. “The opposite. She likes you just fine.”

  “Then why?”

  “It didn’t dawn on you because you live alone,” Elke said. “But didn’t you notice? My brother, the kids — they were all out. She was alone in the apartment. It’s like Nirvana for her when she gets an hour or two by herself. She just sits there and basks in the silence.”

  There wasn’t much of a crowd in the store. Elke’s list wasn’t too long. I was given three items to find on my own. A tin of herring was easy, 1.15 marks. Florena creme — “It’s for women’s faces, to help take off the makeup,” I was told — was a little harder, but I managed. But for some reason, I struck out on the banana pudding, at 0.55 marks. Elke gave me a sad mother’s shake of the head and found it herself in about 30 seconds.