The Divided City

by Luke McCallin

  “Noell lived here alone? You’re sure?” Ochs nodded, a yawn pulling his mouth down. “Very well, Mr. Ochs. Thank you for your help. You may go, but please give the name of the man who has the lease on this apartment to the sergeant downstairs.”

  Alone in the rooms, the only sounds a faint whisper of voices from the lower floors, Reinhardt leaned against a wall. His knee ached, terribly. It was getting worse, he knew. All the walking he was doing around Berlin, the cold and damp, the lack of food, was making the knee feel as bad as it did twenty years ago.

  When he had caught his breath, he closed the door. It shut quietly, the door fitting quite well to its frame. He pulled it, pushed on it, shaking the door, but it stayed shut. He opened it again, bending to the lock, running his fingers up the door frame, inside and out. There was a key in the lock, and a bolt drawn back and open. There was no sign of damage, no sign of a forced entry.

  From downstairs, Reinhardt heard the distinctive bull bellow of Berthold’s voice berating someone for something, and let a grin flash across his face. There was no sign of a struggle in the apartment either. Noell’s body bore no defensive wounds that he could see, and neither had the man downstairs, although he would have to check with Berthold for that. Nothing in this room looked disturbed or out of place. Nothing broken, or overturned. It was not that big a room. If two men had been assaulted in here, there ought to have been some sign of it, unless the assault had been of devastating speed and surprise, Reinhardt thought, as he went into the kitchen.

  The cupboards were bare, or might as well have been. A collection of mismatched plates, cups, glasses, and cutlery, a battered frying pan and an even more battered army cook pot, all of it probably salvaged from some wrecked building, or given out at municipal shelters. There was a half-empty sack of coffee, a bottle of oil that glistened greasily, and an empty cardboard CARE package. A couple of bottles of schnapps that had a homemade feel to them—these few things were all the kitchen contained.

  It was clean, though, Reinhardt noticed. A couple of plates were stacked upside down by the sink, together with a glass; a cloth hung from the single tap. The surfaces were clean and dry, although the sink was pearled with water. There was a dustbin under the counter. Reinhardt hooked it out, peering inside at the inevitable slew of potato peelings that made up the staple diet of any German lucky enough to afford vegetables these days. Beneath the peelings was Friday’s newspaper. He flicked out his baton, lifting the paper out to have a look through, in case Noell had made any notations, perhaps in the help-wanted section. That said, he thought to himself, poking the baton farther down into the rubbish, most of the content of the papers these days was either want ads or obituaries, unless you read one of the Allied publications, which were full of upbeat stories about the benefits of Occupation policies or pieces about Nazis and the harm they had done.

  His stirring of the rubbish pulled up several thin sheets of paper covered in typing with handwritten notes jotted into the margin. The papers were stained by being in the dustbin, but there was enough of the writing intact that Reinhardt could read most of it. He straightened, his knee a tight knot of pain as he did so.

  3

  “Reinhardt? You in here?”

  “Through here,” Reinhardt called back, hearing Berthold’s heavy footsteps and the bass gravel of his muttering.

  “Reinhardt, goddamn it, was it you let those damn Amis foul up my crime scene? That stripling of an officer downstairs says you’ve been letting Americans tramp around up here. Say it’s not true.”

  “I’ve been doing my best to save it for you, Berthold. Nice to see you, at last.”

  “Well, thank Christ for you, Reinhardt.” Berthold was all curves, a dense, rotund man with thin hair plastered by sweat to his cannonball of a skull. “If only all our brethren, in what passes for a police force these days, were as discerning as your good self.”

  “Flattery, Berthold, will get you nowhere other than out of bed at three in the morning. Seen the one downstairs?”

  “Broken neck for sure, but he was pretty badly beaten up before that. Blows to the mouth and nose, one to the throat, one almighty blow to the sternum. We’ll hand him over to the professor for full autopsy, but the fall down the stairs was the least of his problems I’d say, the poor bugger. That blood on the wall his?”

  “Probably, but you tell me.”

  Berthold swung his bulk back the way he had come. For all his bluster, Berthold was one of the more competent forensic technicians on the force, a remnant from the pre-Nazi days brought back out of premature retirement to provide some much-needed technical skills to Berlin’s police. Twelve years of Nazism and six of war had seen Berlin’s police, once one of the world’s most advanced forces, regress to levels Reinhardt had seen in the Balkans. Men like Berthold knew what needed doing but struggled to do it with the means left them.

  Reinhardt watched the balloon-like curve of Berthold’s back as he hunched over the blood on the wall, taking a sample for analysis. He unfolded himself upright, his cannonball head searching for Reinhardt, in his hand a big camera, a veritable prewar antique. Reinhardt backed out of the way as Berthold took a rapid series of photographs of the living room, then squirmed away as Berthold did the same for the kitchen, and then the bedroom.

  “What have you got up here, then?” he asked when he was done, packing the camera away.

  “Firstly, no forced entry as far as I can tell,” said Reinhardt. “In here, no sign of a struggle. Bottle and glass, there, maybe some prints. Try the door handle as well, please. Kitchen is clean. I found some papers in the rubbish. I didn’t touch them,” he said holding up his baton as Berthold made to open the cavern of his mouth in protest.

  “I’ll start in the bedroom then,” said Berthold, lugging his case through.

  Reinhardt backed into the kitchen, drawn back to the papers. The sheets were of poor quality, with ink that had run and stained, and they were hard to read. One page seemed to be a statement of grievances of a group that Reinhardt could not make out, of their untenable situation, reference to the loss of all worth, pride, and benefits, with benefits underlined twice. The second was something of a manifesto, or a call for action. There was a heading on the paper in block capitals—RITTERFELD ASSOCIATION. It was the more damaged of the two, creased, spotted and, he realized, bending low over it, someone had spilled alcohol on it. He poked his baton back into the dustbin, searching for more of the same, but came up with nothing.

  “Berthold, I’m going to start looking through the living room. I’ve got gloves,” he said, cutting off Berthold’s inevitable protest. He heard the forensics technician subside into a series of tectonic rumbles, muttering under his breath, and Reinhardt grinned again. He began fingering through the piles of books and papers in the apartment. Most of the newspapers were old, stacked next to a cast iron stove as fuel or kindling, most likely. The books were old, too, and the collection was eclectic. Prewar novels, a few histories, a couple of treatises on philosophy, travel guides, children’s stories, and a photo album.

  Reinhardt’s eyes narrowed as he opened it, finding pictures in some of which Noell was recognizable. The wartime Noell had been a bigger, healthier-looking specimen than the one lying in the bedroom. There were photographs of him in what appeared to be bars in Paris, several taken in front of various aircraft, Noell standing grinning with a hand or elbow placed proprietarily on the wing or rim of a cockpit, Noell standing arm in arm with other pilots. Reinhardt put the album to one side, and continued searching the room. He looked under the chairs, ran his fingers down the back of the sofa, and found, wadded against the wall as if kicked or thrown there, a crumpled piece of paper. Fishing it out and unfolding it, another photograph. Another one of Noell, glancing up at whoever had taken the picture, this time in a dress uniform, with another man, both of them stooped over—something. Reinhardt could not make out what. Something in some kind of water-filled ta
nk, wrapped in fabric of some sort, wires and tubes attached to it.

  He added it to the photo album, although Reinhardt was fairly sure it did not belong there, and continued his search, looking now for what was clearly missing. There was no identification of any kind, and that was a mystery. He went through the clothes, finding nothing. He went into the bedroom and searched through the clothing hanging up, finding nothing again. Noell had been a veteran, so there had to be some kind of identification, at the least a Wehrpass, the document all soldiers received upon demobilization, and he had clearly been eating, so he had to have been getting rations from somewhere, and if he had been getting them, he had to have had identification.

  There was nothing in the apartment, though, at least nothing he could find. At the end, he stood in the doorway, taking a last look, brushing his hat against his leg. The unforced door, the undisturbed living room, the ascetic lines of the bedroom . . . What had happened to the man who had lived here, and what link to that other man downstairs?

  “Berthold, I’m finished here,” said Reinhardt. The ambulance men were waiting impatiently on the landing. Berthold grunted back at him from where he was brushing down surfaces. “Can we have the professor look at the bodies?”

  “Yes. That’s what I said earlier.”

  “Let the ambulance men take the body away when you’re ready then. When will your report be finished?”

  “Later today if you leave me alone.”

  “Consider it done. There’s a photo album and some sheets of paper in the kitchen, please take care of those.”

  “Right,” Berthold grunted, again, eyes comical behind the bottle as he dusted it down for prints.

  “And let me know if you find any ID. I haven’t found anything.”

  “Right.”

  “And I think Gestapo Muller’s hiding under the sofa.”

  “Very funny, Reinhardt.”

  “Just checking you were listening,” said Reinhardt cheerily. He paused on the landing, looking up. The fifth floor was uninhabitable, Ochs had said, but he had a quick look, anyway. It was as Ochs had said, though. The top floor was a ruin, the roof sagging in places, patched and braced, and the two apartments were empty husks flecked with animal tracks and droppings, and an ammoniac reek of urine smothering the smells of damp and dust.

  Downstairs, Frunze was waiting with the canvassing report. All the building’s tenants were listed and accounted for. Apart from the widow, no one had ever seen the man found dead on the stairs. All of them confirmed Ochs’s description of Noell as a quiet and courteous man, but two of them reported that he could at times be surprisingly gruff and distant, passing them on the stairs in the hallway without a word. No one, it seemed, had ever been up to Noell’s apartment, and he had never been a guest in any of theirs. The family on the second floor had also mentioned that he had cheered up somewhat in the last few weeks, but did not know why.

  “Not much is it, Sergeant?” mused Reinhardt. He took a packet of Lucky Strikes from his pocket and offered one to Frunze, who accepted with a smile. Reinhardt struck a match and lit both of them up, pinching out the match and putting it back in the box. “Mr. Noell. Quiet and courteous, although sometimes rude. Ex–air force. Quite well read. Altogether, something of a mystery man. And he pales in comparison to Mr. X, who ended up at the bottom of the stairs.”

  “Indeed, sir,” murmured Frunze, as he took a long pull on his Lucky, then stubbed it out, saving the rest for later. “There is this as well,” he said, handing over a slip of paper with a name—Mr. Kessel. “The man from whom Noell was subletting, Mr. Ochs said to give it to you.”

  “Thank you, Sergeant. This Mr. Uthmann, the one who lives below Noell. Ochs reported he had had something of a confrontation with Noell on more than one occasion. He might be worth talking to.”

  “Leave a message, with Ochs, sir?”

  “Yes.

  “There’s children living across the street in that ruin.” Frunze nodded. “I’m going to see if I can talk to them. They may have seen something.”

  “Diechle tried already, sir.”

  “Yes, I saw that. Where is he?”

  Diechle was outside on the building’s steps. He straightened as Reinhardt came out. “What happened, then?” asked Reinhardt, pointing his cigarette at Diechle’s face.

  “The little fuckers threw rocks at me.”

  “For talking to them?”

  “I thought I could catch one of them.”

  “That was clever.”

  “I thought it would be better.”

  “I told you to talk to them. That was all,” Reinhardt sighed. He screwed out his cigarette on the wall, leaving the butt on the remnants of the balustrade at the building’s entrance, where he knew someone would find and take it. He switched on his flashlight and crossed the street, picking his way carefully into the slew of debris. No one had cleared a path here, and the building in front of him was a checkerboard of holes and spaces that gaped dark and wide, as if they were mouths sucking down the night itself. By the fissure that passed for an entrance, Reinhardt stopped and shook some cigarettes from a packet into his hand. He placed them carefully on a stone with a flat surface, and then stepped well back, leaving his light shining on them, and lowered himself carefully onto the rubble.

  “I just want to talk to you,” he called, quietly. “Just talk.”

  There was no answer, no sound, but he could feel he was being watched. He let a few moments pass, then called again.

  “The cigarettes are for you. They’re good. They’re Luckies. The real thing.”

  He waited a while longer. Although there were far fewer of them now, gangs of children still haunted some of the ruins, especially those swaths that had been condemned as uninhabitable, impossible to reconstruct.

  “There’s three of them. Think of what you can trade for them.”

  A grating of rubble, the softest hiss of sound. Something moved in the darkness of the entrance.

  “What d’you want, bull?” a girl’s voice.

  “Just talk.”

  “S’never just talk with you bulls.”

  “It is with me.”

  “You always try to take us away.”

  “I won’t, don’t worry.”

  “Turn the light off.”

  Reinhardt was plunged into dark. He felt a moment of apprehension as the rubble seemed to come alive with sounds, small sounds, the whisper of little feet, a low snatch of words. Children they were, and he always wished more could be done for them—even if most of them wanted nothing to do with people like him and this new world and, really, who could blame them for that—but they could be menacing on their own ground, very dangerous if they felt themselves provoked or threatened. He could just make out the shape of something that flitted out of the night, and his cigarettes were gone.

  “All right, bull, so talk.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “What’s it matter?”

  “Nothing. It’s nice to know who I’m talking to. My name’s Gregor.”

  There was silence. “I’m Leena.”

  “You know about what’s happened across the street, Leena?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you see anything? See anyone?”

  “Like what?”

  “Anything or anyone strange.”

  “Strange?”

  “People coming or going. People you’ve never seen before. The sounds of argument. People fighting.”

  Reinhardt waited, hearing the children whispering.

  “Sometimes Poles’d come and watch.”

  “Poles? How do you know?” Reinhardt asked the night.

  “Poles kicked us out of our house in Breslau.” It sounded like a young boy. “Poles took my mother and my sister. Poles put me on a train. I know Polish.”

  “You’re
saying Polish men came to watch the building?”

  “Been a while since they was here. Weeks. They would watch. I heard ’em talking. They were looking for soldiers. From the war. Soldiers that done bad things to ’em.”

  “I saw a man I ain’t never seen before.” A new voice, another boy.

  “When did you see him?”

  “I don’t know that, bull. I ain’t got no watch.”

  “S’about midnight,” interrupted the girl. “The moon was just over the middle of the street.”

  “Right. So this man come out of the building,” the boy continued. “He were all dressed up in his coat like the Russians wear. And a hat. I never got a good look at him.”

  “What did this man look like? Was he big, this man?” Reinhardt asked to the darkness.

  “He weren’t big, but he . . . he moved all funny. That’s why I spotted him.” More whispering, and the voice came back, feeling aggrieved over something. “He moved funny,” the boy insisted.

  “Funny how?” Reinhardt asked, quietly.

  “Like he was part of the night.”

  “Only thing funny here’s your brain,” a child laughed. A rude name was called, and there was a furious scrabble of feet and cursing, until the girl’s voice cut across the noise.

  “There’s something might interest you, bull, ’side from men who move funny. The last couple of days, s’been a man coming here. First time he came, he watched the building from in here, but he never saw us. About three times he’s come. We saw him go in and out. He never stayed long. We saw him go in tonight, but he hasn’t come out, yet.”

  “Thank you. Is there anything else?”

  “That’s not enough?” came the belligerent reply.