by Pierre Frei
'You're lucky to find me home. I'm off work sick. I work for the Yanks.'
'We'd like to ask you a few questions, Herr Muhlberger.'
'Sure. I mean, I found her.'
'Can you tell us when that was?'
Around ten-fifteen. That's when I take Lehmann here walkies. Only a step or so outside the house because of the bloody curfew. Lehmann likes to do his business on that sandy strip where they're going to build the second carriageway some time. As I was standing there, I could see something pale dangling level with the third floor.'
Franke was sceptical. 'In spite of the dark?'
'I have a strong torch and a few batteries. I was works security guard for Leuna during the war. Only been back a few weeks.'
And you heard a motorcycle start up nearby, I expect,' said Dietrich casually.
'That's right. It moved away pretty quick. An NSU 300. I'd know that chugging exhaust in my sleep. Had a bike like that myself once. Hey, how'd you know, inspector?'
A guess. Go on, Herr Muhlberger.'
'Well, so I shone the beam of the torch up and saw her hanging there. Very sad, sure, but no great loss. Cheap little tart, she was.'
A woman in a headscarf and apron was coming up the stairs. 'That's what he says because she wouldn't have anything to do with him. Brauer, first floor,' she introduced herself. 'She was a good girl, she was, just wanted to be left alone. Who knows what she'd been through.'
'Did she have many men visitors?' asked Franke.
Frau Brauer shook her head. 'Hardly at all.'
'Except the bloke that did her in,' Muhlberger said. 'Fellow with a dimple in his chin.'
Inspector Dietrich pricked up his ears. 'You saw him?'
You bet your life. Just before ten, it was. Come on in, gents. Not you, Frau Brauer.' Frau Brauer moved away with an injured air. The police officers followed Muhlberger into his apartment, as Lehmann growled with hostility. 'Where was I? Yes, right, so just before ten I hear someone coming down from the third floor. I open my door. After all, you want to know who's hanging around the place in these difficult times. Had a candle in his hand. Probably helped himself to it up there so's not to fall down the stairs. I saw the dimple in his chin quite clearly.'
The sergeant was not satisfied. 'Can you describe him in more detail?'
'Had a dyed uniform jacket on.'
A German one?'
'Nope, it wasn't German.'
Franke took a framed photograph off the sideboard. It showed a younger Mi hlberger astride a motorcycle, his booted feet braced in the sand to left and right of it. He was wearing gauntlets, and had pushed his protective goggles high up on his leather helmet, just like his companion. Both their faces were stained with dust.
'My mate Kalkfurth and me,' said Miihlberger proudly. After a crosscountry in the Grunewald before the war. We were in the NSKK, the National Socialist Motorcycle Corps. We did some pretty good cross-country runs in those days. It wasn't all bad back then.'
The sergeant put the photo back in its place. 'What happened to your mate?'
'Kurt? Killed during the march into Poland, right at the start of the war.'
'This man in the dyed uniform jacket with the dimple in his chin - would you recognize him?' Dietrich returned to the subject.
'Should think so.'
'Thank you, Herr Muhlberger. We'll ask you to come to the police station and make a formal statement.'
'That's OK, inspector. I guess you'll get him soon.'
'I guess so,' replied Franke, giving him a sharp look.
'Chief Superintendent Schluter knows of six more murders before the war which match ours to a T,' Dietrich said when they were back in the car.
'You mean this Marlene Kaschke is the tenth?' asked the detective sergeant, incredulous.
'Looks like it, Franke. According to Schluter, the murders stopped when the war began.'
And now the war's over they're happening again. That suggests a man back from the army, sir.'
'It does, doesn't it? Someone who lived here before the war, and knows his way around the Onkel Toms Hutte quarter very well.'
'Muhlberger. He was away all through the war, he's only been back a couple of weeks. He could have hidden his motorbike somewhere. And he has a job with the Americans, too.'
Dietrich shook his head. 'That doesn't necessarily make him the murderer. But he's our only witness. I know from Captain Ashburner that there's a card index of all the Germans employed by the Yanks, with their photos. We'll look through it with Muhlberger. Who knows, this man with the dimple in his chin may be there.'
A heap of something was smouldering in the garden behind the terraced house. Ben looked at it with dire foreboding.
'Looks as if someone didn't know what to do with all his old Nazi junk and dumped it in our shed,' said his grandfather, confirming his fears. A complete Party uniform with all the bits and bobs. Take the poker, boy, and keep pushing the stuff into the flames.' Dr Hellbich went back to the house.
Ben poked about among the remnants, downcast. There was no hope of saving anything but the dagger of honour. He smuggled that upstairs under his shirt, and freshened up the steel blade and leather sheath with Sidol and shoe polish. Then he polished the swastika on the hilt with an old sock.
The gullible Clarence P Brubaker was in transports of delight. A truly historic artefact!'
'The Fuhrer himself gave it to him.'
'I just must meet him,' the hopeful aspirant to the Pulitzer Prize urged.
'The Fuhrer?'
'The man with the dagger. Hitler's right-hand man, didn't you say? When can I meet him?'
'He wants five cartons of Chesterfields for his dagger.'
Brubaker agreed at once. 'Five cartons of Chesterfields, OK. You take them to him and tell him he'll get another ten from me in person. He can pick the time and the place. That's a fair offer, right?'
'I'll tell him. But I can't promise anything. He's very cautious.'
Mr Brubaker found an army bag made of olive-green sacking, which comfortably held the five cartons of cigarettes along with a pack of a hundred pieces of chewing gum as a reward for Ben. This payment for such a sensational underground story seemed well worth it to Hackensack's star reporter. 'You can keep the bag,' he said.
You don't have an empty potato sack, do you?'
'I don't think so, but look around in the cellar if you like.' Brubaker had long since given up wondering about the peculiar things that Germans wanted.
There was no potato sack in the cellar, just a mountain of dirty washing going mouldy. A horde of Red Army soldiers had dragged the building's washerwoman away from her boiler and into the garden, where thirty men raped her before the thirty-first killed her. That had been four months earlier. Ben pulled a large pillowcase out of the heap and took it upstairs with him. Only a fool would carry an olive-green bag, easily identifiable as the property of the US Army.
'Don't forget to mention the ten cartons of Chesterfields,' Brubaker told him.
Ben boldly followed this up. 'Fifteen would be better.'
'Fifteen it is.'
Satisfied, Ben fetched himself a bottle of Coke from the fridge, put the pillowcase with the bag inside it over his shoulder, and marched straight off to Rodel the master tailor, who noted down credit for five cartons of Chesterfields on the suiting with his tailor's chalk. He added credit of a few hundred marks for the bag, chewing gum and pillowcase too.
On the way to the GYA Club, Ben did his sums. If he could get twenty cartons of cigarettes out of Brubaker instead of fifteen, he would be certain of his suit and his shoes. But the great reporter wouldn't pay up until he could shake the hand of Hitler's right-hand man, and this was going to be a difficult feat to bring off, even for the ingenious Ben. 'I'll think of something,' the German Reich's latter-day beneficiary told himself.
The drama group was rehearsing. 'We lead a life of liberty,' bawled Schiller's robbers down in the cellar, 'we lead a life of joy . . .' Meanwhile, behind the im
provised stage, Herr Appel was taking a mouse out of a trap and tipping it into the garbage. Ben watched with interest as Appel removed the chewing gum from his mouth and stuck it on the little board as bait, then set the trap again .
Heidi Rodel sat down beside him. 'What did you think of the song?'
'Not much different from what we sang in the Jungvolk.' Only a few months earlier, he and the other members of his troop had sung 'Flames arise!' Or as his grandfather Hellbich called it under his breath, 'Song of the Young Brown Fire-Raisers'. That had been the full extent of Hellbich's public opposition to the regime.
Heidi moved close enough for their knees to touch. 'We're going skinnydipping when it gets dark. Want to come?'
On weekend expeditions with the Jungvolk they had held swimming races naked, comparing penis size with their neighbours as they lay in the sun and thinking nothing much of it. But plunging into the water at night with a naked Heidi was something else. Ben suddenly had a feeling like climbing the bars in gymnastics. Confused, he went upstairs, dropped into an armchair and reached for the latest issue of the American soldiers' paper, Stars and Stripes.
Herr Appel made his laborious way up the stairs. He unwrapped a new piece of chewing gum from its silver paper, stuck out his tongue and applied the gum to it. With his bulging eyes, he reminded Ben of a chameleon he'd seen in the reptile house at the zoo. Except that Herr Appel drew in his tongue with its prey rather more slowly.
'We lead a life of liberty, we lead a life of joy .'sang the chorus down in the cellar for the umpteenth time.
Not bad, that Goethe,' said Appel appreciatively, chewing.
Ben didn't bother to put him right. He picked up the newspaper and read the headline: 'WEREWOLVES GETTING ACTIVE'. An over-eager correspondent had written about an alleged conspiracy of former members of the Hitler Youth, which he claimed had organized itself into a secret league called The Werewolves, whose aim was to oppose the occupying power. In his mind's eye, Ben saw the solution to his problem begin to emerge, if only in vague outline for the time being.
Inspector Dietrich was waiting in the outer office of the German-American Employment Office. The German secretary was painting her fingernails. 'Would you like a coffee, inspector? And a sandwich to go with it? I'll have one brought over from the canteen. We have plenty of everything here.'
'That's very kind of you, but I don't want to go in to see your boss with my mouth full.'
'Tell you what, I'll pack one up for you to take away,' she whispered in conspiratorial tones. 'My name's Gertrud Olsen.'
'Extremely nice of you, Frau Olsen.'
'I'm looking for a man, see? Well, a girl will try anything. Even sandwiches. Are you married, inspector?'
'Yes, these last fifteen years. We have two sons.'
'We'd been married just a year, Horst and I. He was a military airman, went on reconnaissance flights for the artillery. They shot him down at Smolensk. I lost our baby when the news came. I mean, it's not that I'll ever forget Horst. Only when you're on your own you feel kind of claustrophobic. Come and see me some time. Irmgardstrasse 12a.'
'That's very close to me. We live with my parents-in-law in Riemeister Strasse. As I said, I'm married.'
'The nice men always are.' She took a mirror out of her handbag and retouched her lips. Dietrich thought the colour of the lipstick was rather too bright. 'Present from the boss. It's what he prefers,' she said apologetically.
'What's your boss like?'
'Mr Chalford? I don't think he likes Germans much. Otherwise he's OK. A bit impatient sometimes, maybe. But then again, he often brings me a little something from the PX.'
Chalford arrived about five o'clock. He had been in a meeting with the city commandant. 'Come into my office. inspector. Captain Ashburner said you were coming. Let's see what we can do for you.' Dietrich looked at the American with curiosity. Chalford was round and well nourished, a messenger from a world where everything was all right. 'Terrible, all these murders.' The smooth, pink face with the pale-blue eyes was distressed. 'OK, inspector, let's come straight to the point.'
'What do you know about the dead woman?'
'We don't as a rule give information to Germans. But Captain Ashburner has asked me to help you, so I'll make an exception.'
'How good of you.'
Curtis S. Chalford stroked back his thin fair hair, looking a little uncertain. Was this German making fun of him? 'What would you like to know, inspector?' he asked.
'Who was she?'
Chalford picked an entry out of a card index. 'Marlene Kaschke, aged thirty-three. No sexual diseases. I gave her a job as an usherette in the Uncle Tom cinema three weeks ago. She lived at 198 Argentinische Allee.'
'The house where she was murdered,' the inspector told him. 'Is anything known about her past?'
'She said she'd been working as a farmhand.'
'Can you give us any more detailed information?'
'That's all I know. Are you on anyone's trail yet?'
'The murderer is presumably a German employee of the US Army and knows his way around Onkel Toms Hiitte. You probably gave him a job yourself.'
'The Uncle Tom Killer,' said Chalford in his broad American accent. 'Why the hell does he kill in Uncle Tom?'
'We're assuming that he has a hideout somewhere there.' Dietrich came out with his request. 'Captain Ashburner says you have a card index containing photographs of employees. We have a witness who claims to have seen the murderer. I'd be very grateful if you would let him take a look at the pictures of all the Germans employed by the army.' Chalford's face twisted. He obviously didn't like this at all. Perhaps it upset his routine. 'It really would be a great help to us, sir,' the inspector said with great courtesy. Chalford was playing impatiently with a pencil. 'We'll fit in with your engagements, of course.'
Chalford put the pencil down. All right, inspector. Come tomorrow, and Gertrud will show you the card index. Time to go home, Gertrud!'
'Yes, Mr Chalford,' said the secretary from the next room.
Franke was waiting downstairs in the Opel. 'How did it go, sir?'
'Chalford is a pompous ass. Probably a low-grade office worker at home, but he puts on airs here. It doesn't matter to us, just so long as we can see his card index. Let Miihlberger know.'
Curtis S. Chalford took the army bus from his office in Lichterfelde to the OMGUS headquarters in Clayallee, as he did every evening. From there he had only a couple of minutes to walk home. He was living in a requisitioned villa in Gelfertstrasse, assigned to him because of his position.
He was looking forward to his evening. The reason was a plump woman with dark curly hair, a pretty, full face, and the beginnings of a double chin. Renate Schlegel was twenty-eight, and the maternal type.
She had come to the German-American Employment Office to look for work. She spoke passable English. Chalford invited her to lunch. Over chicken and rice he made her an offer: she could live with him as his housekeeper and look after him. He offered her three cartons of cigarettes over and above her official wages, and of course good food, as well as those little items from the PX that a woman likes to have.
Renate Schlegel was on her own. Her husband had fallen at Narvik, at the very beginning of the war. After that she had two affairs, one with a bank manager who was too old to fight in the war and died of a heart attack in the shelter during an air raid, the other with a Swiss businessman who hurried home before the Russians arrived. The American seemed to be a quiet, undemanding man. Renate agreed.
Chalford rang the bell. He had keys, but he liked it her to open the door to him, neat in a flowered overall, a wooden spoon in her hand, the mixing bowl close to her big, soft bosom. 'There are pancakes for dessert,' she told him, beaming, and went back to the kitchen.
The dining room, the big sitting room and the master of the house's study were on the ground floor of the villa. Chalford worked in the study for half an hour every evening. He would sit at the desk in front of the cupboard where he kept hi
s papers, bending over exercise books from which he took notes. A correspondence course in bookkeeping,' he told her. 'My job here in Germany is only for the short term. I have to think of the future.' She admired his ambition and industry,
Today, as usual, he spent half an hour in the study before closing the cupboard and going upstairs to the bathroom. Ten minutes later he reappeared in a comfortable casual jacket. 'What's for supper?' he inquired good-naturedly.
'Pork chops in breadcrumbs, with young carrots and roast potatoes.' She brought him a beer.
He looked at her with pleasure, and that was where his interest in her ended. He wanted only her comfortable presence. She wondered if he had a family. A photograph of a young brunette and two little girls suggested that he did, but he never mentioned them. She hoped he would stay a good long time. She liked their arrangement.
'Do they know any more about that new murder?' she asked. 'It's the fourth victim, isn't it?'
He drank from the bottle. 'They're calling him the Uncle Tom killer. I heard that from a German inspector who visited the office today. They don't have any good leads yet.'
'Well, I hope they catch the brute soon.' She went to put the pork chops in the pan. Soon a promising aroma wafted out of the kitchen.
He waited in the shelter of the decorative shrubs outside Club 48 in the morning. He had to see her, had to imagine over and over again how he would possess her as soon as he had the opportunity. He had buttoned the officer's trench coat with the big tear over the left-hand pocket up to his chin, turning his collar up against the rain. From a distance he could just as well have been an American as a German, except that a Yank would have thrown the trench coat away or given it to a German long ago because it was torn.
She was punctual, as she was every morning. She got off her bicycle, pushing up her raincoat and dress in the process so that her knee and part of her thigh were visible. She untied her headscarf and shook out her long blonde hair. He swallowed in excitement.
