The Divided City

by Luke McCallin

  Reinhardt stood up, asking one more question of his hidden audience, receiving a curt reply. He made his way back across the street, his feet scraping and turning on the detritus. The ambulance men were bringing Noell down and loading him into an ambulance with white sides that glimmered with all the dents and bangs the vehicle had ever had. They protested at Reinhardt’s request, finally acquiescing and putting the stretcher with Noell on the ground, and heaving out the other body. They stood there with the stretcher between them as Reinhardt shone his flashlight on the man’s face for a slow count of ten.

  He stood in the quiet street, waiting, until a voice came out of the dark.

  “That was him,” said the girl. “The one who came before.”

  “Thank you, Leena,” said Reinhardt. He shook a few more Luckies from his pack. “You come and find me at the Schöneberg station if you remember anything more. On Gothaerstrasse. You ask for Inspector Reinhardt. Or if you need anything.”

  “We don’t need nothing, bull,” came the whisper from out of the night. Reinhardt left the cigarettes on a stone, walking back into the building and not turning at the patter of feet across broken stone.

  4

  Dawn was breaking across Berlin, the city’s wrecked skyline marching torturously across a deepening wash of sky, and Reinhardt felt the tickle of unease he always felt at seeing Berlin by day as the ambulance dropped him off at the Schöneberg police station on Gothaerstrasse, before it continued on to the morgue up in Mitte, in the Soviet sector. The station was a Wilhelmine-era building, rectangularly rigid. Reinhardt thought of it as a monstrous pile of stone that had come through the war more or less unscathed because it was too obtuse to be damaged. Along with the even more spectacularly proportioned Magistrates’ Court opposite, the two buildings towered over the ruins around them. Some people might have found their permanence somehow reassuring, throwbacks to a calmer, more certain era. Reinhardt found them oppressive, purveyors of a false sense of certainty and continuity.

  The morning shift was starting to trickle in, but it was still fairly quiet, quiet enough for Reinhardt to start writing up his report with an hour to go before roll call. He kept his head down, and his focus on his papers as he felt the squad room fill up, surprising himself by how far he had gotten with his notes and how focused he had been when someone jostled him on the shoulder.

  “Oh, sorry. Didn’t see you there,” said the man who had bumped into him. The man looked down, feigning astonishment. “Reinhardt? Look, boys, look who it is!” Three detectives, younger men, were standing or sitting around him.

  “Bugger me, it’s Reinhardt!”

  “The Captain!”

  “Captain Crow!”

  “He liiiives!”

  The detectives were men Reinhardt hardly knew and barely cared to. They were new men, mostly, men brought in by the Soviets in the months following their conquest of the city, when they did as they wished. By their accents, none of them were from Berlin, and Reinhardt could not tell where the Soviets had found them, nor what any of them had done during the war. They were old enough to have been called up toward the end, and so they were old enough to have faced the Red Army in combat. Most Germans who had, had either been killed, captured, or escaped somehow. So far as Reinhardt could tell, officers like these contributed very little in actual police work, and half of them were barely literate.

  To Reinhardt’s mind, they were all placemen, put into the police by the Soviets, therefore considered reliable, therefore Communist in outlook, if not in belief. They made a strange complement to the holdovers from the Nazis, or even the pre-Nazi period, men from heretofore antagonistic systems, between them making for a schizophrenic atmosphere. On top of that, the Western Allies, when they arrived in Berlin in July 1945, had not done much to curtail the implicit Soviet influence in the police in their sectors. One might even have said they had made it worse, leaving the Soviet placemen where they were and adding a fair sprinkling of their own.

  Reinhardt knew that because he was one of them.

  “What on earth are you doing here, Reinhardt?” one of them asked sardonically, the one who had jostled him. His name was Weber. He was a tall, rawboned young man, all sharp angles and heavy joints, his skin stretched tight around the curves and hollows of his head, all topped off with a shock of poorly cut blond hair that made him look much younger than Reinhardt suspected he was.

  “Working,” said Reinhardt levelly, putting his head back down to his notes. “Why, what are you doing here?”

  There was a chorus of oohs and aahs from the man’s friends, a flurry of elbows poking into ribs as they settled themselves in for a bit of fun.

  Weber’s jaw tightened. “Working on what?”

  “A murder investigation.”

  “A real investigation. Dammit, boys, what did I say?” Weber’s eyes glittered. “Reinhardt always has all the luck.”

  “That’s because there must be Americans involved. Right, Captain?” asked another officer, his eyes wide with a feigned interest. His name was Schmidt, Reinhardt thought.

  “Not yet, no,” he answered.

  “Shame. All your friends must all have gone home by now, I would have thought.”

  “Back across the ocean. To New York, or Chicago,” one of them gushed. His name was Frohnau. The two of them—Schmidt and Frohnau—were Weber’s shadows. “They don’t stay long, do they? Still, you must have made some new ones.”

  “As you say,” Reinhardt said equably, feeling the heat rising in his blood at this baiting. It never got any easier to bear, however much he tried to let nothing show.

  “Listen to him. ‘As you say.’ Is that how you all talked when you were bloody officers? Fighting the good fight?” Weber’s jaw was clenched as he stared at Reinhardt.

  “You lot playing nicely, I hope?”

  It was a newcomer who had spoken. Another detective stood behind Reinhardt. He was an elderly man, stout, even fat, if a Berliner these days could be said to be fat, with a stringy fringe of hair combed over the bald dome of his skull, but a magnificent Hohenzollern-style mustache that frothed and curled around his mouth. Ganz had already been a long-serving detective back in the ’20s, during the Weimar years when Reinhardt had first joined the police. Although the detective had retired in 1936, in the last great Nazi reform of the police, it had never seemed to Reinhardt that Ganz had had a problem working for them. That said, he had not worked through the war, and that had to be a point in his favor with Germany’s new masters. When Reinhardt had come back to Berlin he had found Ganz back out of retirement, a chief inspector, second in command of the division’s detectives.

  “Everything all right, Reinhardt?” Ganz asked.

  “Fine,” Reinhardt said, shortly.

  Ganz said nothing, just stood over Reinhardt’s desk until he looked up at him. “Something strange must be going on to see you here, Reinhardt, I thought to myself,” said Ganz, reaching out one finger to rest on Reinhardt’s baton, which he had left on his tabletop, rolling it from side to side. “Then I heard you got called out. Where did you get this? I didn’t think there were any of them still around.”

  “In the ruins of the Alex, down in one of the armories,” Reinhardt replied. He got up and went to the back of the room where an urn of coffee had just been brought in by one of the kitchen staff, his ear catching the mutter of conversation behind him. He poured himself a cup, eschewing the powdered milk, and even if there had been any sugar it would not have made the coffee any better. He stood quietly a moment, remembering Sarajevo and the coffee he would take on Baščaršija, the sun on his face as he would watch the city ebb and flow past him, waiting for the moment when the muezzin would cry the call to prayer from the mosque on the corner of the square.

  Ganz followed him, pouring himself a cup.

  “Something the matter, Reinhardt?”

  “I’m always surprised to se
e you back on the job, Ganz.”

  “Yes? Well, no timid dog ever got fat, eh?” Ganz replied, straight-faced. For a second, he sounded just like Becker, and Reinhardt froze, remembering the sound Becker had made as he died in that hut in the Bosnian forest, the laugh that had fallen back in his throat, choking out the last of his breath. Becker and Ganz had been, if not friends before the war, then close, Reinhardt remembered. Ganz had often taken the younger Becker under his wing, covering for him more than once. Why had he remembered that?

  “Something the matter, Reinhardt? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” Reinhardt stared at him unseeing, until his eyes focused, and he swallowed. Had he spoken aloud, had he panicked? That memory had been so vivid . . . Ganz was watching him with those beady eyes, and Reinhardt knew that behind their glitter they were calculating, considering, probing for weakness. “So? Nothing you want to share?”

  “Nothing.”

  Someone made a cawing sound, like a crow’s, a bray of laughter from behind turned him round. Ganz turned to look as well, his face expressionless, but his eyes gleamed over the swell of his cheeks. If the detectives around Reinhardt’s desk were taking their cue from him, Ganz was doing a good job of hiding it.

  “Well, whatever you say, Reinhardt. Tanneberger will want you to brief at roll call. You ready?”

  “Yes,” Reinhardt said. He walked back to his desk, and he knew he must be coloring. His old nickname, Gregor the Crow, had surfaced, and Reinhardt knew it had to be one of the older men who had resurrected it. Captain Crow they called him, sometimes, making a mockery of his old army rank, as so much was made a mockery of that had had anything to do with the armed forces. To hear people now, officers were a gang of criminals who had either failed to kill Hitler or who had managed to lose the war. Reinhardt subscribed to neither view, and his war was not one he would willingly share with anyone, but faced with this constant level of hostility and mockery, he too often found himself, in his mind, taking the side of those who had, indeed, been criminals or who had acted like them.

  It was a defensive reaction, he knew. There was no doubt for him about the army’s role—and the officer class’s in particular—in the horrors of the war, and too many men like him either thought they had done nothing wrong and would do it all again—preferably with the British and Americans at their side—or refused to think of it at all. He shunned their company whenever and wherever he found them, but yet found himself prodded into thinking for them and against what he knew when faced with the antagonism of those he worked with. It was only proof of being human, he supposed. A man alone could not help but turn inward, seek reassurance in whatever way he might find. But Reinhardt could not help thinking there was something instinctively weak in himself that he thought that way.

  The squad room’s door opened, and Tanneberger walked in.

  “Roll call,” Ganz shouted, pointing at the detectives’ small meeting room. Reinhardt rose, gathering his papers. He squeezed past the desks, and somehow he knew that Weber would put his foot out, try to trip him. He felt as much as saw it happening, such that he pointed his foot and kicked hard and sharp at Weber’s ankle, watching the other man’s face change from a feigned surprise to a real twitch of pain.

  “How clumsy of me,” Reinhardt murmured as he walked past.

  5

  Reinhardt sidled up against the back wall in the small meeting room, favoring his left leg. The room was packed with plainclothes policemen wrapped in a fug of cigarette smoke. Around the room, men caught his eyes. Most looked away, disinterested, but here, there, those who remembered Reinhardt, who Reinhardt remembered from before the war, looked at one another across the heads and shoulders of their colleagues, and in the lackluster gleam of their eyes, they remembered other times, other days, other places, even if one or two of them nodded civilly enough to him.

  Tanneberger was up at the lectern, a sheaf of papers in his hand. He blinked at the room, then down at his papers, and launched into a droning recital of the happenings the day before and overnight, a monotonous litany of really nothing very much at all: a black market ring broken up, prostitutes dragged in, drunks sleeping it off downstairs. Reinhardt listened with half an ear, shifting his weight to ease the pain of his knee, more interested in what was not mentioned. No missing persons. Nothing of relevance from the Soviet sector.

  Tanneberger held the rank of police councilor. Ostensibly, he was the Schöneberg division’s chief of detectives, placed here by the Allies in the big police reform of October 1946. Reinhardt remembered Tanneberger vaguely from before the war as some mid-level bureaucrat in Berlin’s police administration, and Reinhardt did not know what Tanneberger had done during the war. The man had been dredged up from somewhere, and his Fragebogen—the denazification document any and all Germans had to complete for any kind of posting in government—must have passed Allied vetting and the subsequent bickering on the Allied Control Council as each of the occupying powers maneuvered their men into position. Ganz, who stood next to Tanneberger, was the one who really ran the detective squad, and Reinhardt could still not figure him out.

  Tanneberger invariably deferred to him on anything operational and technical. The two went well enough together, Reinhardt admitted, Ganz never contradicting Tanneberger in public, and Tanneberger rarely overruling the way Ganz kept things moving. They made for one of those schizophrenic instances that seemed to characterize the police, though: both of them in their different ways Nazi-era holdovers, both of them now in higher positions of authority under the Occupation than they had ever attained, or ever would have. Reinhardt had left Berlin’s police before the war to escape the Nazis. He had come back after it to a police force dominated by communists instead, but there were still too many faces he remembered, who seemed to have that ability he had never had. The ability to bend with the wind, to find accommodation with whatever force or power that held sway and serving all with equal excesses of zeal. Or the minimum needed to get through the day, like he used to do, he remembered, and was in danger of doing again. His gaze drifted to Ganz. Ganz had to have some kind of political connection or line, either to the Soviets or to the Americans, but if it was to the latter, Reinhardt had never discovered it and it had never been revealed to him.

  On the other hand, Reinhardt’s own American connections were all too painfully obvious.

  As if he heard Reinhardt’s thoughts drifting, Ganz looked back at him, and there was a sardonic gleam in his eyes, such that Reinhardt knew straightaway something was wrong.

  “Reinhardt!”

  He straightened, realizing he had missed something. Tanneberger was looking at him. The whole room was looking at him.

  “Reinhardt?”

  “Chief.”

  “I know you’re usually tucked up in bed at this time, Reinhardt.” A low chuckle ran around the room, like a wave washing over a pebbly shore. “But perhaps you might like to fill us in on your case, seeing as you’re the only one who seems to have had any excitement lately.”

  “Yes, sir. I responded . . .”

  “Up front, Reinhardt. Up here,” Ganz interrupted.

  “Two bodies in a building in the US sector,” Reinhardt said, looking out over the rows of seated officers, at those standing along the back wall, feeling the lodestone weight of Tanneberger and Ganz behind him. He felt nervous, and his tongue stroked the gap in his teeth where the Gestapo had knocked one out. “One found dead at the foot of the stairs, a broken neck sustained in an apparent fall, but the man had been badly injured before then. Upon inspecting the building, I discovered a second body. From what I could tell, this second victim had been asphyxiated. In the apartment, which showed no signs of disturbance, there was a streak of blood on the wall that I suspect was blood from the man found on the stairs. I was told by the building’s supervisor that the apartment’s tenant, the man I found asphyxiated, was named Noell, although I found no identification for him anywhere. The
man on the stairs remains unidentified. Forensics is going over the apartment, and Professor Endres will autopsy the bodies.”

  “Theories, Reinhardt?” interrupted Ganz, from where he stood to one side.

  “Too early to tell. I did have an impression, though . . .”

  “Yes?” Ganz’s face was flat.

  “Noell’s murder had an air of ritual about it. The way his body was laid out on the floor, with water around his head. I think, although I can’t be sure, but it reminds me of something I have heard or read recently.”

  “Ritual?” repeated Weber. His voice was lazy, but the sparkle in his eyes glittered the lie of his apparent disinterest, as did the way they roved left and right, gathering in support. There was a shift in the room, heads coming up, a charge in the air like the expectation of a confrontation.

  “Ritual,” Reinhardt said, again. “I think it would be useful to look into other, similar cases.”

  “If there are any,” murmured Weber.

  “Any leads?”

  “Several. Noell’s neighbor works nights. I will go back to question him. As well, Noell was sub-letting the apartment from a Mr. Kessel. We need to find him and question him.”

  “Anything else?” asked Tanneberger, eyes down on his papers.

  Reinhardt knew he was being goaded, made fun of, but there was no way to avoid it, so he simply continued. “There is a group of children, probably orphans, living in the ruins opposite the building. I managed to talk to them. They said they had seen the unidentified man on several previous occasions over the past several days.”

  “And?”

  “I suspect this man knew or was meeting with Noell, or was looking for him.”

  “Ritual and suppositions,” Weber carped. “‘Suspect’ this and ‘believe’ that.”

  “They may also have seen the murderer and gave me a description of what they saw,” said Reinhardt, dreading the next question.