I seized her wrist as she pulled back for another slap. My dick was getting hard: this was more like the girl I knew.
Vogel stepped between us, a warning for me in his eyes.
I held up my hands in a gesture of surrender. 'All right, all right, I've had enough beatings for one night. Detective.' I nodded at him, then at Gisela. 'Frau Ritter. Thanks for the chat.'
Vogel took a step towards me. I left, the sting of Gisela's slap still warm on my cheek and my stomach muscles aching worse than ever as I headed home.
4
My own snores shook me awake, air dry-whistling through my nose. Then my bed rocked, and I started thinking maybe something else had awoken me, like someone trying to open my door without realising I'd wedged the bed up against it.
A dark pot-bellied man loomed against the far wall, picked out by the sunlight coming through the open curtains. I blinked a couple of times and the man resolved himself into the shadow of my corner stove. I'd got home close on three am to find the lock broken and my room ransacked by Ritter's mob. Funny though how the mess hadn't dragged me down as much as the realisation that my room was little bigger than the holding cell at Mühlenstrasse.
Plus the fact that somehow, in some way I couldn't understand, I'd felt more at home in that cell than I did in my actual home.
The door crashed against the bed. I sat up, rubbing sleep from my eyes.
'Hold on, for Christ's sake,' I said.
'Klein, wake up.' I recognised Vogel's honeyed tones.
'I'm awake, damn it!'
The door across the landing creaked open. I checked my watch. Just gone eight am. Good Christ, was I never going to get enough sleep?
'What's all this?' That was the voice of my neighbour – and landlady – Effi Schneider. She didn't sound happy.
Vogel stopped pushing at my door and said, 'I'm sorry madam, but we need to take Detective Klein to headquarters.'
'On a Sunday?' Effie said.
I sat as still as I could and held my breath. What did Vogel and Ritter want with me now? I wanted to tell the inspector to go to hell, to submit his request in writing to my precinct house and have to wait days for the response. On the other hand, maybe he wanted me to help find the Albermann kid after all. Or, worse, maybe they'd found her. No, scratch that last one: if they'd found her they wouldn't need me. Not unless Ritter was looking for a scapegoat.
'And I suppose you're the cretins who smashed the place up yesterday?' Effi went on. 'Honestly, you think this is a good use of tax payers' money while there's four million unemployed and people queuing round the block for the soup kitchens?'
'Madam, I really couldn't say. I've been sent down here from Berlin, and I didn't have much say in the matter, I can tell you.'
'Berlin, eh?' Effi made a sound somewhere at the back of her throat. 'Explains a lot.'
I wrapped a cotton sheet around my midriff and I got up. I scraped the bed back and opened the door. 'You found her?'
Vogel put a finger to his lips. There was something different about him today, but I couldn't work out what it was. There was another plainclothesman beside him, a squat man with thin hair draped across a dry scalp. This guy had the nerve to leer at me, revealing missing teeth. Beyond these two, Effi stood at the threshold of her rooms. Hot curlers steamed in glossy dark hair which came down over her ears. A black velvet jacket strained to contain her ample stomach and she was wearing a thin silver chain around her neck. Three dark-haired young girls peered out from behind her skirts.
'So what, it turns out I can help after all?'
'I thought they'd caught the Ripper?' Effi said.
'Well, we have...' Vogel said.
'Heard on the wireless yesterday evening. There's talk they interrupted the opera and the cinema to announce it and everything.'
'Well, yes...'
God bless her for making him squirm like that.
'We need to take him down to headquarters for a word with the chief,' he said. He made a point of looking around and down the stairwell, then he leaned in and stage-whispered: 'DCI Gennat, you know...'
My heart was pounding all the way to the hole in my cheek. Ernst Gennat, der volle Ernst: Germany's most famous detective, head of the country's only dedicated murder squad. He'd been brought in to head up the Ripper investigation from Berlin at the insistence of the Prussian interior ministry. Had Ritter dropped me in it with the top brass, or was Gennat looking to grill me for his own reasons? Either way, I was in for a long day and I didn't much fancy it, though I didn't have any choice now. Refusing to see Gennat would be career suicide beyond any of the bad decisions I'd made in the past. I'd have to find out what he wanted and then do my best to appease him.
Effi nodded at me. 'Well, he's not going anywhere in his birthday suit. Coffee?'
Vogel checked his watch. 'I'd like that, madam, but we must be going.'
'Nonsense!' Effi crossed the landing in a couple of steps and wrapped her arm around Vogel's shoulders. 'Give the man time to get some clothes on, eh?' She winked and managed to slap my arsch. She steered the two detectives into her kitchen just as my sheet fell around my ankles.
I retreated into my room and wedged the door shut with a chair. My clothes were still strewn across the floor and on top of my battered leather trunk, clean and dirty mingled together where Ritter's men had thrown them the day before. I picked out the cleanest looking underclothes I could find. A film of sweat covered my body at the thought of meeting Gennat.
I dug around in the mess for some suit trousers, found a pair that went with my double-breasted jacket. I'd bought them when my waist had been a size larger, before this damned depression had left us all hungrier and leaner. I fastened my belt on the last notch.
I tried to ignore the roughness of the woollen trousers against my legs while I retrieved the jacket and waistcoat that went with them. I checked myself out in the cracked mirror on the back of the door. Even after buttoning the jacket I looked like a tramp who'd stolen his clothes off a corpse.
I crossed the landing and pushed open Effi's door. Effi and the two policemen broke off from forced laughter at my entrance. The three of them were sitting at her circular dining table in the centre of the room, drinking coffee from her best blue-and-white glazed china cups arranged around a pot of the same manufacture. The good china she didn't like me using.
The girls were standing at the threshold of the second room dropping fruit cake crumbs on the floor. The smallest came over and thrust her nibbled wedge of cake at me, her cheeks pouched like those of a rodent. I waved her away. On her way back, she knocked the family's tin bath from its resting place against the peeling wallpaper and gave a squeal, running into the next room before her mother could shout at her. I didn't want these two cops sharing coffee or jokes with my landlady, much less scaring her daughters.
'Look Effi, I'm sorry about this disturbance. And the mess from yesterday.'
She talked over me: 'Never you mind, Herr Thomas. I'll just add the damages and the cost of the new lock onto your rent at the end of the week.'
Vogel rose from his seat and scratched the side of his nose. A wart nestled in the fleshy fold between cheek and nostril. It suited him. Now I realised what was different. He was wearing a jacket and his shirt sleeves went all the way down to his wrists. He had even oiled his hair, though on him the effect was unfortunate, as though he'd dunked his head in a grease puddle.
'You ready to go?' he asked me, buttoning his jacket.
'Does he look ready?' Effi said. I rubbed the stubble on my chin. I should have shaved, but I didn't relish the thought of negotiating a razor around all those cuts and bruises. Effi passed me a cup of coffee and a bottle of aspirins. On the cup, blue tulips bloomed. I uncapped the bottle and shook three aspirins into my mouth, washing them down with blistering-hot coffee.
'All right, let's go,' I told Vogel. With a little luck Gennat would be done with me before my shift was due to start. Then I could either help find the girl, or I could tr
y and put the Ripper case behind me and move on.
The squat guy with the bad scalp drove us back to Mühlenstrasse in a drab closed-top sedan from the Schupo auto pool. Vogel had taken the passenger seat and removed his jacket before getting in, draping the garment across his legs. We didn't talk. I played with my homburg in my lap and watched the city pass by through the window. Vogel even whistled part of the way. Watch on the Rhine, I think it was, though I didn't ask.
I sat back, the sting of Gisela's slap still with me from the night before. It had been a shock to see her. The good Frau Ritter. I chuckled. Vogel stopped his whistling to turn and look at me. Well, let him look. The image of Gisela as the dutiful wife, it irritated like a chicken bone stuck in the gullet.
I pictured a meadow in summer, Gisela and me eating a roasted chicken. The bread had gone dry and the Riesling had warmed in the sun, but none of it mattered. We'd eaten until our lips shone with chicken fat and Gisela joked about Ritter having to make do with the leftovers. Then we'd made love in the sun until my back burned bright red and her blonde hair went a shade lighter still.
Funny how people changed: funny/tragic, that is. That Gisela – my Gisela – was gone forever, replaced by a mousy matron clutching at her rosary as though that could save her from her sins.
But then, how much of that change was my fault?
Vogel's redundant, 'We're here,' announced our arrival at headquarters.
We pulled up to the entrance. The front of the building stretched along most of the block, three stories of large, evenly-spaced windows set in pale stone. This neoclassical façade had been one of Schinkel's efforts, or so people liked to think. I wasn't so sure. Why come all the way to Düsseldorf from Berlin in the days when that would take a week in a jittery horse-driven mail coach? My money was on one of the great man's less favoured disciples.
The squat guy drove away and left Vogel and me to enter the place without him. We passed through the high double doors into the first courtyard. Again without a word, Vogel led me diagonally across the cobbles through a smaller door and up the stairs beyond. When we got to the second floor he turned left and we entered the familiar world of two-tone grey brick and overheated hallways. The stuffiness made me shiver after the cool air outside. We passed rooms that clicked and rang with typing. Each face I saw belonged to a man I didn't know even though I'd worked on this floor for over six years. Maybe they were all Berlin Homicide.
Raised voices echoed down the hallway from the end corner office. One of the voices was Ritter's. I grinned at the thought of his being angry and then I thought of him turning that same anger on me and my fists clenched.
Ritter, yelling: 'He's not trustworthy enough. You've seen the file!'
We reached the corner office and stopped. Through the open door I got my first glimpse of Gennat's pudgy red face. He wore a small pair of reading spectacles and his moustache bristled as he sucked on a cigar. No doubt this was where Ritter had got the inspiration for his ill-conceived experiment in facial hair.
Gennat spoke through a smoke cloud: 'We don't have any choice in the matter.' His thick accent shone through: a real icke Berliner. I hoped I'd be able to understand him okay.
I tried to dredge up what I knew about the man, but that was nothing, pretty much. He had an unrivalled case clearance rate and was popular with the non-Marxist press. So what did that mean? He wasn't above forcing a few confessions, he liked publicity and he enjoyed the sound of his own voice.
He'd had a hand in solving that messy Fritz Haarmann business in Hanover back in '25 mind, so he knew his stuff when it came to mass-murderers.
Vogel knocked.
'Enter!' Gennat called. He waved us in and beamed at me. Ritter stood with a coffee cup in his hands, his face just as red as the chief inspector's, I was glad to note. Ritter clocked me looking at his moustache, raised his cup to his lips and looked out of the window.
Beneath the window was a small pine table bearing a scorched metal coffee pot and a sugar bowl alongside a typewriter and a stack of files.
'This the fellow?' Gennat asked Vogel. Vogel nodded and Gennat came over and shook my hand. His palm was damp and warm. A glimmer of shock lit his face, presumably at the sight of my wounds.
'Now then,' he said, 'Kl...er, Thomas, is it?' He didn't wait for me to answer. 'I'm not one for politics when public safety is at stake. I hope we can agree on that?' He was using the word 'politics' the way political people do, as a slur on the politics of others. I hoped he was trying to fool me and not himself.
Gennat's glasses had slipped to the end of his nose. The lenses magnified his soft brown eyes. I pumped his hand again and murmured a yes.
'You, er, want someone to fix up your face?' Gennat asked, removing the spectacles. The temples had left indentations above his ears. 'Bandages and so forth.'
All of this dancing around the maypole was chafing at my patience. 'May I ask what all this is about?'
'He wants to know what it's all about,' Gennat repeated, as though mid-way through a press conference. I glanced around to check for hidden press men, but the audience comprised just me, Vogel and Ritter. 'Fine quality in a detective, sir. Fine quality.'
He replaced his spectacles and gestured to an empty chair. The room was crammed with rows of chairs facing a map of greater Düsseldorf tacked to a cork board on the far wall. A dozen or more red pins adorned the map, half of them clustered in the south-eastern suburbs. A series of pencil-drawn circles rippled outwards at half-kilometre intervals from an epicentre in Mettmannerstrasse: Peter Kürten's apartment building.
I picked up the chair Gennat had indicated. I turned it round to face him and I sat.
'Well,' I said, 'it's just that the city does pay me to clock in at eight pm. I fear you may be forcing me to deprive it of my services if you keep me around too long.'
Gennat leaned on the edge of a paper-strewn desk. There was a black telephone and an open personnel file in his way. The ear piece hanging in the cradle made the phone look top heavy. Sure enough, when Gennat moved it aside to better accommodate his ample buttocks, the phone toppled. He slammed the ear piece back in the cradle, lifted the phone with both hands and deposited it on the other side of the desk.
I got a glimpse of the file. That was my photograph in there. They'd been discussing me, then. I didn't like that. But if that was true then why was the idea of it making my heart pump faster?
Gennat hitched his charcoal grey trousers at the knees, took a puff of his cigar and blew smoke rings through small lips. The smoke stank of wet autumn leaves. I hoped he wasn't going to offer me one of those cigars, because I'd have had to say no and that would have got our burgeoning professional relationship off to a terrible start.
When Gennat spoke, it was clear he'd decided to ignore my concerns regarding my night shift duties. 'What it's about, Thomas, is we've been sweating your Herr Kürten for the last,' he checked the wall clock and mumbled under his breath for a second, 'seventeen hours, give or take. Or at least, we've been trying to, haven't we Ritter?'
Ritter turned from the window. He declined to answer. He stood stiff-backed, making a point of not sitting while I was in the room. Christ, how I wanted to laugh in his stupid fluffy face.
'That is to say, Ritter has tried.' Gennat's voice was a rumble from the sternum that soothed as much as it unsettled. 'Vogel has tried. Hell, even I've tried.'
Gennat got to his feet and threw his arms wide, another theatrical gesture for the gallery. He'd be declaiming Goethe at this rate, God help us. 'He won't talk, it's that simple. Won't talk to me, won't talk to Vogel, won't talk to your precious Inspector Ritter.'
He pointed at Ritter who still said nothing. Instead, Ritter ran his tongue over his teeth in a way that made his top lip bulge and emphasised his overbite. The circles under his eyes went deeper than the day before. Could it be that he'd got less sleep than me? Had Gisela even managed to drag him home last night after I'd left her? Was he feeling jealous at our getting reacquainted? I di
d hope so.
Gennat slapped a hand on my shoulder and brought me back to the matter at hand.
'Kürten won't talk to anyone, Thomas, you understand me?' he said.
It was a message I'd have had a hard time missing. I opened my mouth to say so and he added:
'Anyone except you.'
5
Thirty minutes later, Ritter escorted me down the hall. Half an hour with Kürten's file wasn't long enough. After Gennat had got a girl in to bandage up my cheek I'd had maybe twenty minutes to read the thing, and if there was a more convincing argument for sterilising the criminal classes I'd yet to see it.
1897 saw Kürten's first conviction for theft at age fourteen. He'd stolen from the foundry where he'd worked as an apprentice sand moulder with his father. He'd then spent eighteen of the following thirty years behind bars, and his rap sheet heaved with arson and rape.
'Just get him talking,' Gennat said when he gave me the file, 'and Ritter can take care of the rest.'
Damned if I was going to leave it at that. We could spend all day talking and only just scratch the surface. And spending all day talking to Kürten was not a pleasant prospect. Those scant fifteen minutes we'd spent together in the Church of St Rochus would have done me. Albermann had to be the priority. As far as I knew she was still out there somewhere and we still didn't know where.
Ritter halted beside a door and said, 'Look familiar?' He opened up and ushered me inside.
It was the same interview room where Ritter had interrogated me. Nice touch, that. But then, there were only two in the whole building. There was a difference today, though. Today four chairs encircled the table. Kürten sat in the one facing the door, picking at his fingernails. His suit jacket was buttoned tight and his shirt collar had rubbed his neck red raw. In the chair to his left sat a stenographer with a pad. The stenographer wore a grey suit and the dark circles round his eyes supplied his face with its only colour.
The Killing Of Emma Gross Page 4
