by Philip Kerr
Of course, the old-fashioned sort of Berlin murders – the ones that used to sell newspapers – were still committed. Husbands continued to murder their wives, just like before. And on occasion wives murdered their husbands. From where I sat most of the husbands who got murdered – bullies too free with their fists and their criticism – had it coming. I’ve never hit a woman unless we’d talked about it first. Prostitutes got their throats cut or were battered to death, as before. And not just prostitutes. In the summer preceding my return from the Ukraine a lust-killer named Paul Ogorzow pleaded guilty to the rapes and murders of eight women and the attempted murders of at least eight more. The popular Press dubbed him the S-Bahn Murderer because most of his attacks were carried out on trains or near S-Bahn stations.
That is why Paul Ogorzow came into my mind when, late one night in the second week of September 1941, I was called to take a look at a body that had been found close to the line between the S-Bahn stations at Jannowitz Bridge and Schlesischer. In the blackout nobody was quite sure if the body was a man’s or a woman’s, which was more understandable when you took into account that it had been hit by a train and was missing its head. Sudden death is rarely ever tidy. If it was, they wouldn’t need detectives. But this one was as untidy as anything I’d seen since the Great War, when a mine or a howitzer shell could reduce a man to a mangled heap of bloody clothes and jagged bone in the blink of an eye. Perhaps that was why I was able to look at it with such detachment. I hope so. The alternative – that my recent experience in the murder ghettoes of Minsk had left me indifferent to the sight of human suffering – was too awful to contemplate.
The other investigating detectives were Wilhelm Wurth, a sergeant who was a big noise in the police sports movement, and Gottfried Lehnhoff, an inspector who had returned to the Alex after having retired.
Wurth was in the fencing team, and the previous winter he had taken part in Heydrich’s skiing competition for the German Police and won a medal. Wurth would have been in the Army but for the fact that he was a year or two too old. But he was a useful man to have along on a murder investigation in the event that the victim had skied onto the point of a sword. He was a thin, quiet man with ears like bell-pulls and an upper lip that was as full as a walrus moustache. It was a good face for a detective in the modern Berlin police force, but he wasn’t quite as stupid as he looked. He wore a plain grey double-breasted suit, carried a thick walking stick, and chewed on the stem of a cherrywood pipe that was almost always empty but somehow he managed to smell of tobacco.
Lehnhoff had a neck and head like a pear, but he wasn’t green. Like a lot of other cops he’d been drawing his pension, but with so many younger officers now serving in police battalions on the eastern front he had come back into the force to make a nice cosy corner for himself at the Alex. The little Party pin he wore in the lapel of his cheap suit would only have made it easier for him to do as little real policing as possible.
We walked south down Dircksen Strasse to Jannowitz Bridge and then along the S-Bahn line with the river under our feet. There was a moon and most of the time we didn’t need the flashlights we’d brought, but we felt safer with them when the line veered back over the gasworks on Holtmarkt Strasse and the old Julius Pintsch lighting factory; there wasn’t much of a fence and it would have been easy to have stepped off the line and fallen badly.
Over the gasworks, we came across a group of uniformed policemen and railway workers. Further down the track I could just make out the shape of a train in Schlesischer Station.
‘I’m Commissar Gunther, from the Alex,’ I said. There seemed no point in showing him my beer-token. ‘This is Inspector Lehnhoff and Sergeant Wurth. Who called it in?’
‘Me, sir.’ One of the cops moved toward me and saluted. ‘Sergeant Stumm.’
‘No relation, I hope,’ said Lehnhoff.
There had been a Johannes Stumm who had been forced to leave the political police by Fat Hermann because he wasn’t a Nazi.
‘No, sir.’ Sergeant Stumm smiled patiently.
‘Tell me, Sergeant,’ I said. ‘Why did you think that this might be a murder and not a suicide or an accident?’
‘Well, it’s true, stepping in front of a train is a most popular way to kill yourself these days,’ said Sergeant Stumm. ‘Especially if you’re a woman. Me, I’d use a firearm if I wanted to kill myself. But women aren’t as comfortable with guns as men are. Now with this victim, all of the pockets have been turned inside out, sir. It’s not something you’d do if you were planning to kill yourself. And it’s not something that a train would normally take the trouble to do, either. So that lets out it being an accident, see?’
‘Maybe someone else found him before you did,’ I suggested. ‘And just robbed him.’
‘A copper maybe,’ offered Wurth.
Wisely Sergeant Stumm ignored the suggestion.
‘Unlikely, sir. I’m pretty sure I was the first on the scene. The train driver saw someone on the track as he started to gain speed out of Jannowitz. He hit the brakes but by the time the train stopped it was too late.’
‘All right. Let’s have a look at him.’
‘Not a pretty sight, sir. Even in the dark.’
‘Believe me, I’ve seen worse.’
‘I’ll take your word for that, sir.’
The uniformed sergeant led the way along the track and paused for a moment to switch on his flashlight and illuminate a severed hand that lay on the ground. I looked at it for a minute or so before we walked on to where another police officer was waiting patiently beside a collection of ragged clothes and mangled human remains that had once been a human being. For a moment I might have been looking at myself.
‘Hold the flash on him while we take a look.’
The body looked as if it had been chewed up and spat out by a prehistoric monster. The corrugated legs were barely attached to an impossibly flat pelvis. The man was wearing a workman’s blue overalls with mitten-sized pockets that were indeed inside out as the sergeant had described; so were the pockets in the oily rag that was his twisted flannel jacket. Where the head had been there was now a glistening, jagged harpoon of bloody bone and sinew. There was a strong smell of shit from bowels that had been crushed and emptied under the enormous pressure of a locomotive’s wheels.
‘I can’t imagine what you’ve seen that could look worse than this poor Fritz,’ said Sergeant Stumm.
‘Me neither,’ observed Wurth, and turned away in disgust.
‘I dare say we’ll all see some interesting sights before this war is over,’ I said. ‘Has anyone looked for the head?’
‘I’ve got a couple of lads searching the area for it now,’ said the sergeant. ‘One on the track and the other down below in case it fell into the gasworks or the factory yard.’
‘I think you’re probably correct,’ I said. ‘It looks like a murder all right. Quite apart from the pockets, which have been turned out, there’s that hand we saw.’
‘The hand?’ This was Lehnhoff talking. ‘What about it?’
I led them back along the track to take another look at the severed hand, which I picked up and turned in my hands like it was an historic artefact, or perhaps a souvenir once owned by the prophet Daniel.
‘These cuts on the fingers look defensive to me,’ I said. ‘As if he might have caught the knife of someone trying to stab him.’
‘I don’t know how you can tell that after a train just ran over him,’ said Lehnhoff.
‘Because these cuts are much too thin to have been inflicted by the train. And just look where they are. Along the flesh of the inside of the fingers and on the hand between the thumb and the forefinger. That’s a textbook defensive injury if I ever saw one, Gottfried.’
‘All right,’ Lehnhoff said, almost grudgingly. ‘I suppose you are the expert. On murder.’
‘Perhaps. Only of late I’ve had a lot of competition. There are plenty of cops out east, young cops, who know a lot more about murder than I do.’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Lehnhoff.
‘Take my word for it. There’s a whole new generation of police experts out there.’ I let this remark settle for a moment before adding, very carefully, for appearance’s sake, ‘I find that very reassuring, sometimes. That there are so many good men to take my place. Eh, Sergeant Stumm?’
‘Yes sir.’ But I could hear the doubt in the uniformed sergeant’s voice.
‘Walk with us,’ I said, warming to him. In a country where ill-temper and petulance were the order of the day – Hitler and Goebbels were forever ranting angrily about something – the sergeant’s imperturbability was heartening. ‘Come back to the bridge. Another pair of eyes might be useful.’
‘Yes sir.’
‘What are we looking for now?’ There was a weary sigh in Lehnhoff’s voice, as if he could hardly see the point of investigating this case any further.
‘An elephant.’
‘What?’
‘Something. Evidence. You’ll certainly know it when you see it,’ I said.
Back up the track we found some blood spots on a railway sleeper and then some more on the edge of the platform outside the echoing glasshouse that was the station at Jannowitz Bridge.
Below, someone aboard a river barge that was quietly chugging through one of the many red-brick arches in the bridge shouted at us to extinguish our lights. This was Lehnhoff’s cue to start throwing his weight around. It was almost as if he’d been waiting to get tough with someone, and it didn’t matter who.
‘We’re the police,’ he yelled down at the barge. Lehnhoff was yet another angry German. ‘And we’re investigating a murder up here. So mind your own business or I’ll come aboard and search you just because I can.’
‘It’s everyone’s business if the Tommy bombers see your lights,’ said the voice, not unreasonably.
Wurth’s nose wrinkled with disbelief. ‘I shouldn’t think that’s very likely at all. Do you, sir? It’s been a while since the RAF came this far east.’
‘They probably can’t get the petrol either,’ I said.
I pointed my flashlight on the ground and followed a trail of blood along the platform to a place where it seemed to start.
‘From the amount of blood on the ground he was probably stabbed here. Then he staggered along the platform a ways before falling onto the track. Picked himself up. Walked a bit more and then got hit by the train to Friedrichshagen.’
‘It was the last one,’ said Sergeant Stumm. ‘The one o’clock.’
‘Lucky he didn’t miss it,’ said Lehnhoff.
Ignoring him, I glanced at my watch. It was three a.m. ‘Well, that gives us an approximate time of death.’
I started to walk along the track in front of the platform and after a while I found a greyish green passport-sized book lying on the ground. It was an Employment Identification Document, much like my own except that this one was for foreigners. Inside was all of the information about the dead man I needed: his name, nationality, address, photograph and employer.
‘Foreign worker’s book is it?’ said Lehnhoff, glancing over my shoulder as I studied the victim’s details under my flashlight.
I nodded. The dead man was Geert Vranken, aged thirty-nine, born at Dordrecht in the Netherlands, a volunteer railway worker; living at a hostel in Wuhlheide. The face in the photograph was wary-looking, with a cleft chin that was slightly unshaven. The eyebrows were short and the hair thinning to one side. He appeared to be wearing the same thick flannel jacket as the one on the body, and a collarless shirt buttoned up to the neck. Even as we were reading the bare details of Geert Vranken’s shortish life, another policeman was coming up the stairs of Jannowitz Station with what, in the darkness, looked like a small round bag.
‘I found the head, sir,’ reported the policeman. ‘It was on the roof of the Pintsch factory.’ He was holding the head by the ear, which, in the absence of much hair, looked as good a way to carry around a severed head as any you could have thought of. ‘I didn’t like to leave it up there, sir.’
‘No, you were right to bring it along, lad,’ said Sergeant Stumm and, taking hold of the other ear, he laid the dead man’s head carefully on the railway platform so that it was staring up at us.
‘Not a sight you see everyday,’ said Wurth and looked away.
‘You want to get yourself up to Plotzensee,’ I remarked. ‘I hear the falling axe is very busy these days.’
‘That’s him all right,’ said Lehnhoff. ‘The man in the worker’s book. Wouldn’t you say?’
‘I agree,’ I said. ‘And I suppose someone might have tried to rob him. Or else why go through his pockets?’
‘You’re sticking to the theory that this is a murder and not an accident then?’ enquired Lehnhoff.
‘Yes. I am. For that reason.’
Sergeant Stumm tutted loudly and then rubbed his stubbly jaw, which sounded almost as loud. ‘Bad luck for him. But bad luck for the murderer, too.’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
‘Well, if he was a foreign worker, I can’t imagine there was much more than fluff in his pockets. It’s a hell of a disappointing thing to kill a man with the intent of robbing him and then find that he had nothing worth stealing. I mean, these poor fellows aren’t exactly well paid, are they?’
‘It’s a job,’ objected Lehnhoff. ‘Better a job in Germany than no job back in Holland.’
‘And whose fault is that?’ said Sergeant Stumm.
‘I don’t think I like your insinuation, Sergeant,’ said Lehnhoff.
‘Leave it, Lehnhoff,’ I said. ‘This isn’t the time or the place for a political argument. A man is dead, after all.’
Lehnhoff grunted and tapped the head with the toe of his shoe, which was enough to make me want to kick him off the platform.
‘Well, if someone did kill him, like you say, Herr Commissar, it’ll be another of them foreign workers that probably did it. You see if I’m wrong. It’s dog eat dog in these foreign-worker hostels.’
‘Don’t knock it,’ I said. ‘Dogs know the importance of getting a square meal now and again. And speaking for myself, if it’s a choice between fifty grammes of dog and a hundred grammes of nothing then I’ll eat the dog anytime.’
‘Not me,’ said Lehnhoff. ‘I draw the line at guinea pigs. So there’s no way I’d ever eat a dog.’
‘It’s one thing saying that, sir,’ said Sergeant Stumm. ‘But it’s another thing altogether trying to tell the difference. Maybe you haven’t heard, but the cops over at Zoo Station are having to put on night patrols in the zoo. On account of how poachers have been breaking in and stealing the animals. Apparently they just had their tapir taken.’
‘What’s a tapir?’ asked Wurth.
‘It looks a bit like pork,’ I said. ‘So I expect that’s what some unscrupulous butcher is calling it now.’
‘Good luck to him,’ said Sergeant Stumm.
‘You don’t mean that,’ said Lehnhoff.
‘A man needs more than a stirring speech by the Mahatma Propagandi to fill his stomach,’ I said.
‘Amen,’ said Sergeant Stumm.
‘So you’d look the other way if you knew what it was?’
‘I don’t know about that,’ I said, getting careful again. I might have been suicidal but I wasn’t stupid: Lehnhoff was just the type to report a fellow to the Gestapo for wearing English shoes; and I hardly wanted to spend a week in the cells removed from the comfort of my warm, night-time pistol. ‘But this is Berlin, Gottfried. Looking the other way is what we’re good at.’
I pointed at the severed head that lay at our feet.
‘You just see if I’m wrong.’
CHAPTER 2
About a lot of things I’m not always right. But about the Nazis I wasn’t often wrong.
Geert Vranken was a voluntary worker and had come to Berlin in search of a better job than the one that was available to him in Holland. Berlin’s railway, which was experiencing a self-inflicted cr
isis in recruiting maintenance staff, had been glad to have an experienced track engineer; Berlin’s police was less keen to investigate his murder. In fact, it didn’t want to investigate the case at all. But there was no doubting that the Dutchman had been murdered. When eventually his body was given its grudging, cursory examination by the ancient doctor brought back from retirement to handle forensic pathology for the Berlin police, six stab wounds were found on what remained of his torso.
Commissioner Friedrich-Wilhelm Lüdtke, who was now in charge of the Berlin Criminal Police, wasn’t a bad detective. It was Lüdtke who had successfully headed the S-Bahn murder investigation that led to the arrest and execution of Paul Ogorzow. But as he himself explained to me in his newly carpeted office on the top floor of the Alex, there was an important new law coming down the pipe from the Wilhelmstrasse, and Lüdtke’s boss, Wilhelm Frick, Minister of the Interior, had ordered him to prioritize its enforcement at the expense of all other investigative matters. Lüdtke, a doctor of law, was almost embarrassed to tell me what this important new law amounted to.
