When the room had emptied, he walked up to the corkboard to look more closely at the mug shots. He read the names, recognizing two of them. Both of them had worked for Leadfoot Podolski, one of prewar Berlin’s more notorious gangsters, who Reinhardt had helped arrest. Fischer had been a leg breaker, a man Podolski sent round to storekeepers and bar owners who did not pay their protection money on time. Kappel had been a courier for stolen items, usually small ones, like jewelry and watches. He thought of Podolski, not seeing his photo on the wall and wondering what had become of him, and turned to leave.
Ganz was standing at the briefing room’s door, Weber just behind him.
“Something to add, Reinhardt?”
Reinhardt shook his head. “I remember these two from before the war.”
“And?”
Reinhardt looked at Ganz, remembering. Although both had been violent, Fischer especially, neither had been killers, and although the courier had possessed a certain weasel cunning, neither of them had taken a step without being told when and where to go.
“I don’t see either of them beating a man to death like someone did to Carlsen. They weren’t like that then. And they were neither of them into pimping.”
“Wars change people, don’t they?”
Reinhardt nodded, conceding the point.
“So that’s all?” asked Ganz.
“That’s all.” Except it was not, but it was only his intuition that told him Carlsen’s and Noell’s murders were linked.
“Then I haven’t much use for you. Do what you want with Noell.”
Ganz’s eyes seemed to measure Reinhardt to some cut and cloth that only he knew of, and then he was gone. Weber lingered a moment, a grin sparking across his face before he, too, left.
11
Reinhardt felt Ganz’s dismissal eddy across the room, something that sloshed his emotions from side to side and brought a sudden clap of shame to his neck. He breathed deep, surprised he could still feel this way about people he cared little to nothing for, then put it aside, walking back to his desk through the pool of officers and detectives organizing themselves to go out into the city, troubled more than ever by the impression he had heard of something like Noell’s murder before. Of something like it, and besides, he felt the need to focus and anchor himself. Suspicion from within, derision from without, all this, he realized suddenly, on his first real investigation since rejoining the police back in October 1946.
There was, he knew, more than just a little truth to Tanneberger’s accusations about American backing for Reinhardt, and to Ganz’s suspicions. And knowing it had been there, that it still was, in a way, made Reinhardt uncomfortable. It was American influence that had gotten him back in, Collingridge’s influence, really, albeit he had come back at a rank lower than the one he used to have. But then, nearly everyone in the police these days owed his position to luck or patronage of some sort, and almost none of them gave it any thought. But Reinhardt had never wanted to be anyone’s man, save for those he himself had chosen. There had been Meissner, long ago, his colonel from the first war, a man to whom he had owed his life and with whom he had trusted it. There had been something close to that with Scheller, his commander in the Feldjäegerkorps. There had been almost no one else, no one for him to look up to, to respect, only those who had had power and authority over him.
His habitual introspection, he realized with a start, coming back to himself in the squad room, quieter of a sudden now that most of the officers had left. Introspection, and more than a hint of arrogance, he knew. Most men never had a chance to choose those to whom they allowed to have power over them, and most men lived well enough regardless. So why would he think himself any different? Some good old-fashioned, solid paperwork was what was needed—and he was thinking how long it had been since he had pursued a case through paper and records.
The records were in a parlous state, he knew. So much had been destroyed in the bombing and during the Soviet assault, and the new records were not up to the standard of what had been kept before the war. One of the secretaries showed him to the newspaper archives. She started to leave after pointing him into the room, at stacks of cases and boxes, newspapers, leaflets, and magazines heaped and piled on tables and on the floor, all yellow under the weak light. He stopped her, told her what he wanted, and she sighed, beckoning in a couple of her friends while he left her to it.
Back up in the almost empty squad room, he checked the time, then allowed himself a mug of coffee from the urn that someone had refilled, picking up the photograph album from Noell’s apartment. The inside cover had a name—Andreas Noell—in a rich hand, and a date—September 1939. The date the war had started. He began to leaf through the photos, slipping one or two out of the folder to see they had notations on the back. Some were simple, like Paris, 1940. Some of them were more complex, a series of numbers and letters, along with dates and places. On a couple, he spotted that the notations on the back corresponded to elements of the photographs themselves. In one, a group of officers posed beneath something like a regimental shield, and in another, Noell stood with a pilot in front of a fighter plane with a series of numbers on its tail. The numbers on the shield, and those scribed on the back of some of the photos corresponded—IV./JG56.
The numbers made no sense to Reinhardt, but he reasoned it might well have been the designation of Noell’s former unit. Musing to himself, he wondered who here could make sense of them, or who he knew that might, and in the middle of all that, an elderly woman walked into the squad room, saw Reinhardt, and strode determinedly through the jumble of chairs and desks to plant herself in front of his desk.
“Inspector,” she said firmly, the light glistening along the curves of her iron-gray hair, drawn tightly into a bun at the back of her head.
“Mrs. Dommes,” he replied, rising to his feet and inclining his head courteously.
“You’ve got my girls sorting through old newspapers.”
“That’s correct.”
“Did you have authorization to have them do this?”
“Authorization, Mrs. Dommes?”
“Yes, Inspector. Authorization. From me. You don’t think that’s all they needed to do, today, do you?”
Schmidt and Frohnau and a couple of the other younger detectives still in the squad room at an adjacent table paused in what they were doing to watch, grins on their faces.
Reinhardt drew a long, slow breath. Dommes was the redoubtable head of Gothaerstrasse’s secretaries and assistants. It did not pay to circumvent her, and Reinhardt had simply forgotten to go through her as he should have done when asking for the records check earlier that day.
“I’m terribly sorry, Mrs. Dommes. You are correct, of course. I should have arranged things with you. I simply forgot.”
“You forgot, did you?”
“I did. Shall I accompany you to set things straight?”
Dommes’s mouth pursed as she looked back at him, and she seemed to unbend, perhaps mollified by his admission of error. “No. That is all right. Just see that it does not happen again, Inspector.”
“I will be very sure not to overstep my mark again, Mrs. Dommes.”
“Hey, Reinhardt,” said Frohnau in a stage whisper. “Will you be all right? Do you want some help to take care of things?”
“We’re right behind you, Reinhardt!”
Dommes ignored them as she ignored the flush that rose in Reinhardt’s face. She came round his side of the desk, flattening a piece of paper on the desk. “You asked the girls to check the newspapers and police bulletins for the last six months for references to murders or reports of deaths that involve water. Is that right?”
“That is correct. I am interested in cases of asphyxiation that were reported as suspicious, or as sensationalist. But I’m not interested in drownings in lakes or rivers or the like.”
“Across the country?”
“Not limited to Berlin, in any case.”
“You do realize this may take some time?” Reinhardt nodded. “Very well, then, we’ll see what we can find.”
“Well done! You can handle her, Cappie!”
Dommes drew herself up, turning a withering glare on the detectives. “Gentlemen,” she snapped. “You could do worse—far worse—than to emulate the courtesies of a man such as Inspector Reinhardt. Haven’t you anything better to be doing?”
“What, like solving a murder?” retorted Schmidt, but the man looked more than a little shamefaced at talking so to a woman who could have been his grandmother.
“Just think,” Reinhardt said to them, pulling on his coat, “every minute in here, you could be out there canvassing.”
“Don’t worry, granddad. We’ve got plenty of good guys out there.”
“You’re right. With you in here, there’s a much better chance things don’t get screwed up.”
The harsh caw of a crow followed him out of the squad room. He left Gothaerstrasse and made his way back to Noell’s apartment, taking the U-bahn to Kottbusser Tor, then a southbound D line to Schonleinstrasse, from where he walked.
Neukölln had never been the prettiest of Berlin’s boroughs, and a combination of Allied bombing and the Soviet ground assault that had rolled over it had done nothing for its looks. It had always been resolutely working-class, and before the Nazis came to power, it had been a Communist bastion, so much so that he was often surprised it was now part of the American sector instead of the Soviet.
He exchanged a few words with the elderly policeman who had been stationed in front of Noell’s apartment. All was calm, the policeman reported, only a couple of visitors for Ochs, the superintendent. Upstairs, Reinhardt cracked the police seal, the draft gusting up into his face as he stepped inside Noell’s rooms. He stood in the doorway, looking around at the bloodstain on the wall, the bottle on the table, the books, the piled bedding. He walked into the bedroom, putting his head into the kitchen, smelling the faint trace of Berthold’s powders. He forced open the window in the living room, looking out and down. There was no fire escape, and the window had had to be wrenched open.
He found himself standing in the middle of the room, his mind drifting back to the police station. To the drive and energy that was passing him by, the solidarity that he was not a part of. He went back into the kitchen. He stood in the doorway, looking into the little alcove. The plates still sat by the sink, next to the glass, and the cloth still hung from the tap. Something was bothering him, though, but he could not put his finger on it. Frowning, hoping whatever it was would come back to him, he went back downstairs and knocked at the apartment under Noell’s, then knocked again when there was no answer, calling “police” through the door. He waited, finally hearing the heavy tread of someone inside, and the door opened on a big man, his hair twisted up and around, and sleep heavy in his eyes.
12
“Mr. Uthmann?”
The man nodded, and for someone who worked nights and was awakened abruptly, he was civil enough, inviting Reinhardt inside. The apartment was dark and smelled heavy.
“You want to talk about Noell?” Uthmann asked, his mouth turning thickly around his teeth as he worked the sleep out of them. “I don’t know what I can add, really. I didn’t know him that well. Knew him by sight, enough to say ‘hello.’”
“Did you ever hear anything from upstairs?”
“You know I work on the trains, right? I’m a track engineer. I mean, when I come home, I sleep, and I’m a heavy sleeper. Not much gets through to me. But when I was up and about, I’d never hear much, if anything from upstairs. The other night, though, before leaving for work, I heard a fair bit of noise. Sounded like he had company, for once, and I heard him coming home the next day.” That chimed with what others had said, Reinhardt knew, that Noell had had a guest, gone out, and come home early the next morning.
“I hear that you had an argument with Noell on one occasion?”
Uthmann frowned, then nodded. “The kettle,” he said, gesturing vaguely into the apartment. “When I come home from work, I like to heat water for washing, and then I boil some for tea. The kettle sometimes whistles before I’m finished cleaning up. The whistle never usually bothered Noell, except once or twice, when he would come downstairs furious, hammering on the door for the noise to stop. He did it just the other day, after the party upstairs.”
“Maybe, he had a hangover, and the noise was disturbing to him.”
Uthmann nodded, mouth turning around itself, and he yawned, hugely. “In any case,” he observed, “when Noell was angry, he was a changed man. Quite different to his usual self.” Reinhardt indicated for him to go on. “That’s it, really. He was just . . . changed. Sort of, I don’t know. He must have been in a bad way after that party,” Uthmann finished, a small smile on his face.
Reinhardt left him to go back to sleep. Pausing on the landing, he thought a moment, then walked down to the next floor, deciding to canvas the building. He interrupted the ends of meals, doors opening to the flatulent reek of boiling potatoes or cabbage. He saw residual fear at his knocks, too many memories of men in dark coats. He was sent packing in some cases, in others received cordially, in one place even invited in for a drink by a man who looked like he never stopped drinking, and who ventured onto dangerous ground when he began waxing lyrical about the Führer, and how much he had loved the German people and how the German people had let him down. This, as the man sprawled slack-eyed on a sofa with only two legs, and pulled out from under some cushions a portrait of the Führer, his eyes misting over and his words blubbering around whatever emotions moved him.
No one, anywhere in the building, was able to add anything more to what Reinhardt already knew. His last stop was the superintendent’s apartment. Ochs answered his knocking eventually. Curled behind his door, he blinked out at Reinhardt until recognition filled his eyes after a confused moment.
“Inspector,” he said. “Back again?”
“Anyone been up in Noell’s apartment?”
“What? No one.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. I don’t know. Not that I saw. But that said, I do remember something, now. About a month ago, maybe a little more, Noell received two visitors. They were both men, and both German, and one of them had a military bearing, sort of ‘senior officer’ type.”
“How would you know what a ‘senior officer’ type looks like?”
“I was in the first war, Inspector. You remember those sorts of things. The man looked down his nose at me, ordered the other one around, who called him ‘sir.’”
“Who was it came to see you earlier today?”
“What? Oh. Just a couple of old friends.”
“Do you remember anything about that man Noell was subletting from?” Ochs blinked at him. “Kessel?”
“Oh. Yes,” shrugged Ochs, leaning against his doorjamb and breathing heavily. “Sorry. Nothing. Don’t think I ever met the man.”
“The children, living across the street, they say the man found dead on the stairs had come here several times. You’re sure you never saw him?”
“I’m sure, Inspector.”
“They said they saw Poles, as well.”
“Poles? I wouldn’t put too much faith in what those ‘children’ have to say. Pack of lying and thieving little rats; I wish someone would get rid of them. Can’t you do something about them, Inspector?”
Reinhardt looked for the orphans, but their building was empty, no trace of them. He hesitated, intending to make his way back to Gothaerstrasse, but instead he made his way to the bar where Carlsen had supposedly run into trouble. His steps were hesitant, in part because of the stiffness of his knee, but he knew it was more because of the discomfort he felt at all the light and noise. He walked past crowds of people waiting for the irregular public transportation, p
ast a demonstration—mostly women—outside the head offices of the former Nazi welfare organization, past a gang of “rubble women” leaning on their shovels and hammers to rest and who wolf whistled as he limped past, some of them so covered in brick dust and grime, they resembled statues more than women. Their efforts and their good humor gave him a little lift, and he tipped his hat to them, receiving a flurry of invitations and suggestions in return, one of them flipping up the tails of her gray coat at him in a sweep of dust, before turning her attentions on a man wheeling a little handcart in a zigzag line through the debris-strewn road. Reinhardt smiled as he walked on, but it faded as he thought of what they went through every day.
It was not just the labor, backbreaking as it was. It was not just the risks they took—thankfully, now, the more prosaic risks that came with working in and around damaged buildings, rather than the predatory needs of Soviet soldiers in the initial months of occupation. It was what they found too often down in the rubble. Not a day went by that they still did not unearth bodies—the young and the old, alone, in pairs, sometimes whole families, sometimes whole buildings. Up in Mitte, they were still finding dozens upon dozens of bodies in cellars that had served as air raid shelters and which had been caved in or blocked after the heavy American air raids in February 1945. What these women went through on a day clearing rubble, and then went through with a night of taking care of their families, he had little idea, but they had all the respect he could muster.
He found the bar near the Thielen Bridge, which spanned the gray drift of the Landwehr Canal, little more than a stone’s throw from the angle of the American and Soviet sectors at Lohmüllenplatz. The bar was in the basement of a building that bore its battle scars in scrawls of blackened stonework, and he would have walked past it but for the police handbill on the door, stating that the establishment was closed until further notice. No one answered his knocking, and he was about to leave when he heard someone coughing inside. The door jerked fitfully open to his identification as a police officer, and he stared into the gloom at a man in his middle years, a huge bruise purpling his left eye and another swelling up the side of his mouth.
The Divided City Page 9
