Reinhardt shivered. Endres had a way of demonstrating his findings on you, and although he had never liked it, it was always instructive. He opened Berthold’s file to the photographs showing where they thought the man had lain after being attacked. “The evidence suggests an attacker who used a lot of force, and knew how to use it.”
“Yes. From the wounds, I suspect the attacker used his forearms to strike.” Endres raised his right arm as if it were a club, and swung it down slowly at Reinhardt’s head. The professor’s hand rested lightly on Reinhardt’s brow, the length of his forearm along Reinhardt’s face. He pushed, lightly, drawing his arm down, his hand rasping softly across Reinhardt’s skin. He stepped back, and then mimed swinging his arm back across Reinhardt’s throat. “All blows were extremely forceful and precise. They would have caused severe pain and disorientation, probably even loss of consciousness. He would have been in terrible pain when he awoke. The blow to his sternum would have made it difficult to breathe. His neck was broken, his balance would have been off, and his voice box was crushed. He would have been disoriented and confused, so not surprising he fell down the stairs, where the fall finished off what the blows had not.”
“His blood work?”
“It was O positive.”
“The same as the blood found upstairs in Noell’s apartment,” said Reinhardt, reading from Berthold’s report. He looked up. “Alcohol level?”
“Low. Certainly not enough to have him falling down the stairs. And no sign of drugs. There was more alcohol on his clothes than in his system.”
“And no sign of defensive wounds,” said Reinhardt, his eyes on the man’s jaw, and he shivered again, imagining the killer’s hands closing on him. Whoever he had been, he had been a fairly young man, well-built, clean-shaven, and with dark hair cut short.
“None.”
“And the other one?”
“Mr. Noell. Yes. Quite interesting. Observe again,” he said, pointing out the huge bruise that purpled Noell’s sternum and then the bruising on each arm above the elbows. “Whoever attacked Noell, it was very fast, and very precise, leaving him no time to defend himself. Whoever did it, again, the person knew how to incapacitate someone fast and efficiently.”
“The same man?”
“In my opinion?” Reinhardt nodded. “Undoubtedly.”
“Cause of death?”
“Asphyxiation. The signs are clear, around the nose and mouth, a hand clasped tight, fitting like the tightest of lids.” Lifting the back of Noell’s head, he showed Reinhardt where the scalp was bruised and bloodied from the head being pressed into the floor by the weight of the assailant, and presumably the victim shaking his head from side to side in a vain attempt to throw the attacker off. The bruising on the arms was from the weight of the assailant bearing down on Noell, holding him to the floor. Both of them were silenced by the mental images this threw up, until Endres cleared his throat. “But I have not shown you the most interesting thing yet.”
He showed Reinhardt a jar, filled with a cloudy fluid.
“It is water,” Endres said.
“You took it from Noell’s lungs,” Reinhardt guessed, remembering what he had seen and felt under his feet as he moved around Noell’s head.
“Yes. This,” Endres continued in his elegant, throaty voice, “would have been poured down Noell’s throat while he was still alive. It was ingested into the stomach, and it was in the lungs. The killer held him down to choke and suffocate. To drown, in essence. I would think—indeed, I would hope—that Noell was all but unconscious when it started, due to the blow to his sternum. But the act of suffocating—of drowning—would have roused him, thus the signs of restraint around his mouth, the bruising to the back of the head, and the bruising on the arms. I found bruising to the back of the throat and the esophagus consistent with something like a funnel being pushed in. Without that, I don’t think the killer would have been able to force Noell to ingest as much as he did, and there would have been far more of a mess around the body than you say you found.”
“My God,” Reinhardt murmured. “So the attack was fast, but his death was not.”
“Most definitely.”
With that, Endres seemed to lapse in on himself. Reinhardt recognized it as a sign he was finished talking. The professor lit one of the cigarettes Reinhardt had given him, leaning back against the autopsy table with a long, satisfied sigh. Another of his little habits, to smoke when he was finished talking. Reinhardt felt momentarily and absurdly comforted by the gesture, as if it were a firm anchor to the past, to a different, a better, time.
Reinhardt, leaving Endres to smoke, looked from body to body and to Berthold’s report. “Professor, is it just me, or is one of Noell’s legs thinner than the other?”
“It is. It’s polio, a mild case of it.”
Precision, Reinhardt thought. “And intimacy,” he said, aloud. Endres turned his head, the light running up and over the thin strands of his hair. “Apart from the precision of the blows, with Noell there is the intimacy of the act. The killer would have had to have knelt over the body, holding it down, coming close to Noell’s face as he suffocated him . . . Professor, have you ever heard of anything like this?”
“Before the war, never,” Endres answered eventually, his eyes on the tip of his cigarette. “Since then, anything is possible. The difficulty would be in finding anything in this city anymore that could pass for records. I can check for you, if you would like.”
“I very much would, Professor. I have a feeling that something similar has indeed happened, but I cannot seem to remember what, or when. Or even where. There is one last thing. This photograph was found at the scene. Balled up and thrown down the back of a sofa. It looks like the victim. Like Noell. Wearing what I think’s an air force uniform. The rest, I can’t make out . . .”
Reinhardt offered the file to Endres, who leaned over to look, and something strange happened. The cigarette stopped halfway to his mouth, and he did not breathe for a long moment. “You found this at Noell’s apartment?”
Reinhardt nodded. Endres looked at Noell’s body, then slowly put the cigarette in his mouth and finished it in one long drag.
“Berthold’s report says Noell’s prints were on it, as were others. Not his,” Reinhardt said, gesturing at the other body. “Do you know what it is?”
“No, but that is a man in the water, inside that . . . thing. That suit.” Endres looked at the photograph a long moment, his eyes roving to Noell’s body, then lit another cigarette. “There were rumors in the camps,” he said, finally, “of things done during the war. Terrible things. To prisoners. Rumors of human experimentation. I never saw anything like the rumors, so I don’t know if they were true or not, but I believe them, nonetheless. If only half of what we hear, and what the Allies tell us, is true, then anything could have happened. And probably did,” he finished. He looked away, taking another deep draw of his cigarette.
“How would one follow up on this?” Reinhardt asked.
Endres shook his head, breathing smoke up and away. “You could try the Berlin Document Center,” he said, referring to the location where the Allies had stored all the Nazi party and SS materials they had captured at the end of the war. “That photograph shows something that looks like it could have been linked to party-sanctioned activities. Legal, then, illegal now. But they don’t let just anyone into the Center. However,” he said, pausing, his mouth moving. “I think I know someone who might be able to help. Give me a day or so, will you?”
An attendant put his head into the room. “Professor, there is someone . . .”
“Not now, Gerd.”
“Yes, now, Professor.” Ganz pushed his way into the room, a second man on his heels. Ganz’s eyes fixed Reinhardt where he stood. “You. Did you or did you not receive messages we were looking for you?”
“Only recently. From the professor,” Reinhard
t answered, hating the tone and wishing the words back as soon as he had said them.
“Who is that?” Endres asked, pointing at the man who had come in with Ganz. He was a compact man in a dark overcoat belted around his waist, a head of black, closely cropped hair runneled with gray. He walked with a rolling limp to stand over the body of Noell, then over to the unidentified man, tilting his head to look down at him. The man’s mouth twisted, then he nodded at Ganz.
“Professor, your records for these autopsies. Reinhardt, you are coming with me back to Gothaerstrasse.”
“What is going on, Ganz?” Endres demanded.
“Nothing to concern you, Professor. Reinhardt, if you’ve quite finished playing forensics, you’ve got friends waiting,” said Ganz, his eyes narrowing at the other man, who was still looking at the body of the man found on the stairs. “The Allies have arrived.”
8
The Allies in question had a car, a big American vehicle with seats as wide and deep as a sofa. A British sergeant drove, the other man sitting in the front, Reinhardt in the back with Ganz. No one spoke all the way back to the station, and Reinhardt was content enough to sit and be driven, watching Berlin unfurl in front of him. The driver sped down Luisenstrasse, then through Pariserplatz and under the Brandenburg Gate, past the Soviet sentries, skirting the eastern edge of the Tiergarten Park, which, devoid of its trees and with its vast expanse turned over to cultivation, looked profoundly wrong. They swung across and through the blasted acreage of Potsdamerplatz, round the swirling edges of the permanent black market, and then the driver floored it down Potsdamerstrasse, and finally back to the station in Schöneberg.
They followed Ganz up to the chief’s office, which occupied a corner of one of Gothaerstrasse’s upper floors, in one of the building’s corner turrets looking across the road to the Magistrates’ Court. It was spartan in terms of decoration—just a desk, a pair of chairs in front of it, an old table for conferences, nothing on the walls—and it usually gave a sense of space, but not when Reinhardt stepped into it followed closely by Ganz and the other man.
Tanneberger sat near one end of the conference table, Ganz taking the place to his right. The other man took a seat on the side that ran down the wall, where another man was already sitting. He placed Berthold’s and Endres’s files in front of him. Between the two of them sat a young woman with a purse on her lap, the lines of her body and clothes severe, straight, all seeming to rise up to the point at the back of her head where her hair was tightly bound back. A third man was sitting with his back to him, but Reinhardt knew him anyway from the roundness of his shoulders to the brilliantined sheen of his hair.
Two other men made up the group. Walter Neumann, Schöneberg’s chief of police, and Bruno Bliemeister, the sector assistant chief. Neumann was a grizzled old copper, a no-nonsense character who had walked a beat in Weimar Berlin and had been a bit of a living legend when Reinhardt was a young detective. Bliemeister was a political appointee, one of four assistants the Allies had imposed upon Margraff—upon the Soviets, if truth be told—during the big reform of the police in October 1946, the same reform that had brought Reinhardt back. The assistants were supposed to stay out of operational police work, but they did have a responsibility to keep an eye on issues of potential concern to the Allied sector commanders. The pair of them, Bliemeister and Neumann, had been dredged up out of the pre-Nazi past where the Allies went looking for anyone perceived to be uncorrupted or untainted. If Bliemeister was here, whatever this was that Reinhardt had been called to was political, or had the potential to be.
“Reinhardt, at last,” Tanneberger barked. “Sit there, please,” he pointed at the end of the table. The supplicant’s place, all eyes focused upon him. “These gentlemen have been waiting to speak with you.”
“No harm, no foul, Councilor,” the man with his back to Reinhardt drawled, his German heavily accented. He turned and flashed a smile at Reinhardt, his teeth very white and even, as the woman whispered a translation to the two other men. “The inspector and myself are old friends.”
“That’s right, you and Mr. Collingridge know each other,” said Tanneberger. Ganz said nothing, his chin sunk on his chest as he stared at Reinhardt. If Collingridge noted anything in the mood of the Germans, he ignored it, carrying on brightly.
“I’m just here as a courtesy, purely a courtesy,” smiled Collingridge.
“And as a liaison,” murmured Ganz, his head still sunk low. Bliemeister said nothing, his face stiff. He looked, to Reinhardt, like a stenographer in a court. Right in the middle of it all, but detached.
“That, too, seeing as the bodies were found in the US sector. Inspector Reinhardt, these are two esteemed colleagues from the British authorities.” Collingridge smiled at them, his hand coming palm up toward the man who had already been waiting for them when they arrived.
“Harry Whelan,” he said, around a slight cough, as if he were uncomfortable. He was a middle-aged man, hefty and round in a tweed suit, his cheeks flushed high over a tightly knotted tie, banded in what Reinhardt took to be regimental colors.
“James Markworth,” the third man introduced himself, looking up from the files. He sat very still with his eyes steady and narrow on Reinhardt, before dropping them back down to his reading. His eyes were peculiarly hard, like chips of stone or colored glass. His skin was quite tight across his face and his hands hard-edged where they lay next to the files. Markworth’s right hand was rippled with scars along the outer edge, from the tip of his little finger to where his sleeve began, as if his hand had been held to a fire.
“A pleasure, gentlemen,” said Reinhardt. He had only a vague idea of what was going on. “What exactly is it you do in the Occupation authorities?”
As the woman translated, Markworth’s head came up from the files, his eyes heavy, a deep glitter of consideration in them.
“I work for the British representative on the Public Security Committee of the Allied Control Council in the Kammergericht,” answered Whelan through the translator, referring to the old Prussian supreme court building where the council met.
Reinhardt’s eyes flicked to Markworth, who was still looking back at him, and there was a different cast to them, as if he challenged Reinhardt to question what Whelan had said. “Are we to wait for a French and Soviet representative as well?” he asked, somewhat disingenuously. He watched Bliemeister as he said it, but the old man showed no reaction, even as Neumann’s jaw clenched at Reinhardt’s insolence and Tanneberger colored. Collingridge chuckled.
“Gentlemen,” Neumann said, his voice deep and scratchy, “I do apologize for keeping you waiting while we searched for Inspector Reinhardt.”
“That’s quite all right. I understand you have the investigation into those murders last night, Inspector,” said Whelan. His translator kept her eyes on the table as she talked, keeping very still. Whelan glanced at Markworth, who nodded, his eyes leaving Reinhardt finally to go back to the files. “What you do not know is that the man you have not identified was, in fact, a British officer. His name was David Carlsen. And it is something of an embarrassment that he was found where he was, and the way he was.”
There was a silence around the table, the Germans looking at one another. Reinhardt waited for any of them to say something, for Tanneberger or Ganz to say something, but they all remained silent, seemingly content to wait on Reinhardt.
“Before I ask why it might be embarrassing,” he said, after a moment, “may I ask how you found out about this?”
“Well, that would be us, Reinhardt,” said Collingridge as he laid a silver cigarette case and lighter on the table. He flipped the lid open and offered it round. “Our MPs had their own photos, and your police department also circulated information throughout the city. Our MPs talked to the Royal Military Police, and they figured out pretty quick that one of your stiffs was Carlsen.”
“And he is British?” asked Reinhardt.
“Yes,” said Whelan.
“Is there a ‘yes, but’ in there, somewhere?”
“Reinhardt!” Neumann snapped. The translator twitched at the noise, sitting up straighter as she talked quietly.
“It’s quite all right, Chief,” said Whelan, a placatory hand raised, but Markworth’s head came up from the files again, and this time his eyes stayed focused on Reinhardt. “No, there is no ‘yes, but,’ Inspector. Carlsen worked for us in the Occupation authorities. He was a military lawyer. Rather a good one, worked very hard, but had a bit of a weakness for the bottle, and the ladies, you see. They sort of went to his head.” He paused.
“All that freedom and responsibility,” said Reinhardt.
“Quite. All that. I shall have to write to his father. Poor chap,” Whelan said again, although if he was referring to Carlsen or Carlsen’s father was not clear.
“Bottles and women?” prompted Reinhardt into the short pause.
“Why do I get the sense you are being rather flippant about this, Inspector?”
It was Markworth who spoke, and his voice was a bit like the way he moved: restrained, but with a coiled impression of energy behind it. Markworth’s eyes were very hard now, and Reinhardt knew them for judging eyes, eyes that measured him, people like him, Germans, and found them wanting every time. He stared back, stared past, through Markworth, his mind working over the fact that Markworth had spoken before the translator had.
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