The Divided City

by Luke McCallin

  So that you may live in ease,

  We now further here reward you:

  Let you crank songs in the streets.”

  The cripple nodded his thanks to him, something in his eyes, veteran to veteran, but Reinhardt walked on, not wanting any contact. There was something wrong with him, he thought, as he turned aside for the station. Something wrong with him that he could not look at his city, at his people, without seeing them through a patina of suspicion, or worse, that he could not seem to see past a veneer of distrust. That he was surprised when he broke down the human tapestry around him into discrete parts—a face, a smile, the sound of laughter, the play of light on a woman’s hair—and found humanity there. Even at the worst of times during the war, even during the very worst of times in the first war, in the trenches, he had found humanity, or he had found the strength in himself to look for it.

  Now he could not find it. He did not have the energy to look for it. It was as if he could not let himself go again and just become one of them. A person. A Berliner. A German. He wanted to believe what he had done during the war lifted him up and above. He wanted to believe he did not bear what he saw as their stain, when he knew he looked and walked and sounded no different from them. Just a tall, shabbily dressed man with a face drawn through tiredness and hunger, and his hair streaked with gray. When he knew the surest path to a place of loneliness and ostracism was to think that he was better than those around him, these people who swayed from side to side with the U-bahn’s motion, shoved together on the carriage’s benches or hanging from its leather straps.

  Markworth looked at Germans and saw no hope. More and more, Reinhardt believed that. What, he asked himself, not for the first time, was he doing back here . . . ?

  “You always did have a soft spot, Gregor.” Brauer had appeared beside him, all rumpled clothes and stubbled cheeks. “That organ grinder, wasn’t he there before the war?”

  “Who gave you that shiner?” Reinhardt asked, pointing at a bruise that purpled Brauer’s temple.

  “Eastern Front veterans with chips on their shoulders. Forget it. I’ve got news about Friedrich.”

  “That was quick.” Reinhardt nodded Brauer to go on, his guts notching themselves tight.

  “Bad news isn’t hard to find, Gregor. Friedrich’s not a popular man. It was asking about him that got me into trouble. No one who’s come back wants to remember the east, and none of them want anything to do with the Ivans. Friedrich’s not living in that halfway house, he works there. Word is, Friedrich’s a snitch for the Ivans. That he keeps an eye on what veterans are up to, and an ear to what they’re saying.”

  “Go on.”

  “No one knows for sure, right, but they say he was turned during the war. That he couldn’t handle the POW camps. There’s a whole bloody value system and pecking order among the survivors from the Eastern Front, particularly among the officers and the SS, and Friedrich and those like him are at the bottom.”

  “Is my son in danger?”

  “More because of what he’s doing rather than what he might have done.”

  “Like what?” Reinhardt asked, regretting the snap in his voice but it seemed to roll off Brauer, or else his old friend understood the stress he was under.

  “He strikes up conversations, they say. Like he was testing the waters. He passes out Socialist Unity Party literature. Encourages veterans to attend Party meetings. He’s close to a couple of Party councilors, both of whom were prisoners, and both of whom came back with the Soviets and who were put into power right after the fall of the city.”

  “Enough,” Reinhardt said, raising a hand. “Enough,” he repeated, weakly.

  “Look, Gregor . . . Friedrich’s not doing anything wrong. It’s not like he’s breaking any laws, or hurting anyone. It’s just . . . I mean . . .”

  “It’s not very aught-eight-fifteen, you might say.”

  “I might say that, indeed. Look, keep your ears stiff, all right?” Reinhardt nodded. “I’ll keep an eye on him a bit longer. But nothing will come up, I’m sure. He’ll be round the house again, soon enough, and you can talk this out with him.”

  —

  Reinhardt made himself stop outside the morgue and smoke another cigarette, calming himself and trying to lighten his mood. Endres, for all his professionalism, was no bundle of laughs, and Reinhardt needed time to try and sort out what Brauer had told him about Friedrich’s situation. He waited in the professor’s office while Endres finished an autopsy of a woman. He joined Reinhardt a short time later, bringing with him a touch of the morgue, of solvents and chemicals, of human rot.

  Snap out of it, Reinhardt swore to himself. He blinked, as if to clear his mind and sight of the sludge of his thoughts. For a moment it seemed as if Endres had caught a glimpse of something, perhaps something that fled into the corner of Reinhardt’s eyes, perhaps some straightening of the rigor that tautened his face. The professor’s eyes considered, but he said nothing.

  “Thank you for coming, Reinhardt,” Endres said. Reinhardt blinked. This was not how conversations with the professor usually started. “You will recall our conversation about that photograph you showed me? Yes? Well, that person is willing to meet with you. Now, if you agree.”

  “Right now?” asked a surprised Reinhardt. Endres nodded. “Very well, yes, then. I was expecting something else.”

  “News of the autopsy of that body that was brought in earlier? Stresemann? I have something for you, yes. Shall we go?”

  Reinhardt blinked back further surprise, but followed Endres’s tall, angular frame out of the morgue, and then had to keep up a smart pace to stay abreast of the professor, who seemed to devour the corridors of the hospital with his long strides.

  “Stresemann first,” said Endres, tipping his hat to the guard at the hospital gate, who ducked behind his post and reemerged with a pair of bicycles. “We’ll take these. We’ve not that far to go, but it’ll be faster this way. It’s all rather bizarre,” continued Endres, as he began pedaling. “I checked the bruising on the body and, I’m afraid to say, the strike marks are characteristic of an extendable baton, the type,” he said, glancing over at Reinhardt, “I am told you carried. An old SiPo model, correct? Indeed, the bruising shows the evidence of the individual segments of the baton as they struck the flesh. So instead of one long strike mark, the mark is broken in two or, in some cases, three. There is also another characteristic, which is that the baton was also flexible, and would ‘wrap’ around the body,” Endres said, demonstrating with one hand in the air before him before snatching it back to his handlebars when his front wheel wobbled precariously, ignoring the startled look a pair of pedestrians gave him. Reinhardt smiled, then grimaced as his knee began to hurt from the pedaling. “The baton also had a weighted tip at the end, and there are distinctive signs of that injury as well.”

  They cycled past the Charité hospital complex and crossed the Spree at Kronprinzen Bridge. Over the bridge, Endres angled right across Königsplatz, with the blackened hulk of the Reichstag off to their left and just beyond it, absurdly pristine amid the drear expanse of the remains of the Tiergarten, the Soviet war memorial glittered white and gold.

  “Reinhardt, are you listening?”

  “My apologies, Professor. Please continue.”

  “You were not listening. Otherwise you would have heard me say that none of the wounds he sustained from the beating killed this Stresemann.” Reinhardt’s pedaling slowed, and Endres’s balance teetered in front of him. “Keep up,” he chivvied Reinhardt. “I am quite surprised at you for not seeing it yourself. A detective of your experience, you should have seen the clue in the photographs. Especially the one of the back of the skull, the apparently fatal wound.”

  “It had not bled,” Reinhardt blurted out. Of course, he should have seen it.

  “It had not bled,” Endres repeated. “All of the strike wounds were receive
d postmortem. Whoever did it struck at areas primarily showing high degrees of lividity. He obviously thought striking there, where the blood had pooled after death, would leave more traces and cause more damage. In both assumptions, he was right.”

  Endres led him down paths and roads that paralleled the flow of the Spree to their right. “So what killed him, Professor?”

  “A knife wound. Very precisely delivered to the back of the neck. Up under the skull. A very sharp, thin knife. Death would have been instantaneous, and there would have been minimal bleeding. Furthermore, the exact entry point of the wound would have been obscured by the later blows that split the skull. In essence, I believe the killer was quite literally covering his tracks.”

  “The time of death?”

  “Sometime between Monday and Tuesday, I would say. Lastly, there were ligature marks on wrists, ankles, and knees. Stresemann was tied up and also gagged. And now, please, I should save my breath.”

  They pedaled on, a fairly easy pace, but still Reinhardt’s knee began to throb at the unaccustomed strain. They passed through the Tiergarten, stripped almost bare of its trees and foliage, and much of its area given over to vegetable allotments. Once hidden by hedges and decorative shrubbery, statues and memorials poked up incongruously across the churned expanse of the park. And yet, in the middle of it, the Victory Column still stood, blackened and scarred but upright, which was more than could be said for most of the rest of Berlin, and Golden Lizzy—the name Berliners had given to the angel at the summit—still watched over the city. Off to the west, another flak tower hulked out of the wrecked remnants of the Zoo. Endres led them up Altonaer Strasse, finally bringing the bicycles to a breathless halt in front of a big block of a building on Lessingerstrasse. “Here we are,” he said, panting over his short breath.

  “And here is?” wheezed Reinhardt, rubbing his knee and then fumbling for a cigarette.

  “The Luftwaffe-Lazarett.” Endres breathed deeply, frowning disapprovingly at Reinhardt’s cigarette. “The air force hospital.”

  33

  The man would give no name, but he reminded Reinhardt of someone he had met in Sarajevo, in the 999th Balkan Field Punishment Battalion. Kreuz had been a convict in the battalion he was investigating, a man with a loaded past, a live wire, a man constantly in need of being grounded.

  This man wore the white coat of a medical officer, and had a faintly cadaverous air about him, with a sharply receding hairline and a chipped line of yellow teeth. He would say nothing about whether he was a doctor or a nurse or neither but that, and the way in which the man’s heavy black eyes remained fixed on a point just out of sight, told Reinhardt he, too, had a heavy past.

  “Before you ask,” the man said, “I’ve been denazified. All right? The professor here’s seen my certificate, so we’re aboveboard on that. I’m not giving you my name . . . because . . . I don’t want any part of a police investigation. All right? My name goes nowhere. It stays with me.”

  “That’s fine,” said Reinhardt quietly. They were sitting in an abandoned office that reeked of something chemical. The building echoed with noise, and smells and scents tangled across Reinhardt’s nose. He hated hospitals, and this place was redolent with the smell of old blood, of misuse and disuse, of men’s misery. He pushed a packet of Luckies onto the table, and then the photograph of Noell, kneeling with another man over something in what looked like a tank of water. “What can you tell me about that?”

  The man recoiled from the photograph, lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, then picked up the photo in both hands. The cigarette smoked gently over one corner of the photo as he looked at it. Then he nodded to himself, his nose crinkling. He took another long drag of the cigarette and began to jiggle his legs, tapping his heels against the floor.

  “All right. I know what this is. I saw it. I didn’t have any part in it though.” The man’s heavy eyes swung across the space between Endres and Reinhardt without ever quite focusing on either of them, as if searching for the contradiction in what he had just said. Reinhardt said nothing, waiting. “What do you know about the various experiments the Nazis conducted, using human beings as the test subjects?”

  It was not a rhetorical question. The man waited, going very still, until Reinhardt’s mouth moved around words he did not want to speak. “I’m not sure I know that much. I heard rumors when I was a POW. That some of the camps did . . . things. Before the war, there was the euthanasia program. My wife’s cousin was . . .” He tailed off, but it seemed to be enough for the man as he juddered back to life, jiggling his legs up and down, up and down with his heels.

  “Well, whatever you heard, however far-fetched, they were all true. All right? All the rumors. Everyone was involved in some way. The civilian administration, the navy, the air force, the SS—everyone—was involved in some way. Everyone wanted something. All right? Everyone had some idea that needed to be tested, some cure that needed support. Illnesses. Battlefield trauma. Eugenics. Sterilization. Curing homosexuality. Testing racial theories and vaccines and blood coagulation. You name it, everyone had a need or a project, and there was a never-ending pool of subjects to try them on.” He went still, again.

  “Prisoners of war,” said Reinhardt.

  “Millions of them. We took Christ knows how many millions of prisoners in the USSR, right? Hundreds of thousands of Poles. And not just prisoners. Jews. Homosexuals. Political dissidents. The elderly. Women. Children.” The man’s hands shook and he trembled to a stop. Reinhardt’s mouth was dry, as if he had been talking a long time. All three of them pulled on their cigarettes at the same time, letting the smoke fill the silence, until the man quivered again and resumed talking.

  “All right,” he said, stabbing the photograph where it lay with his cigarette jutting at right angles from between his fingers. “Judging from the people in it, their ranks, what I can see of what’s happening, this particular photograph was probably taken at Dachau concentration camp, sometime in 1943. There was a Luftwaffe facility there that conducted experiments on human beings. These experiments were under the direct authority of Erich Hippke, the Luftwaffe’s general surgeon. Its chief medical officer. There were a variety of projects, particularly those linked to the impact of pressure and of survival in extreme conditions. All right? So, one of the two men in the photograph is Dr. Sigmund Rascher. Him, there,” the man said, pointing at the man next to Noell, with his face down looking at whatever they were doing. “He led the experiments. Rascher was a doctor. He was an ardent Nazi. He was an arch self-promoter. But he may as well have been insane.”

  The man drew another long, shuddering breath, then drew deeply on his cigarette. “What you are looking at is an experiment in survival times of a human being in water chilled to Arctic temperatures. All right? Various iterations were run. With the subject naked. Clothed. Or in a flight suit. Or clothed in different versions of specially designed survival gear. Like that one is wearing. It’s a survival suit. The man inside it is probably a Polish prisoner. It’s doubtful he survived, but there was a recovery element to the tests. After a certain amount of time, subjects would be removed from the water and immersed in warm water, or water at body temperature, or water that was slowly warmed up, or wrapped in various kinds of blankets or other materials. Sometimes they’d get a couple of women prisoners, strip them naked, and make them lie on either side of the test subject to see if that would help. Or not. It didn’t.” He tailed off again, drew on his cigarette, his feverish quivering winding to a stop.

  “Go on,” Reinhardt said.

  The man nodded, lighting another cigarette from the stub of his first. “Rascher worked on that stuff for about a year. All right? He also worked on special tests that aimed at establishing the effects of pressure on human beings. Pressure like that experienced at high altitude. Consider,” the man said, seeing Reinhardt’s frown of incomprehension, “a pilot bailing out of an aircraft at great altitude, the body will experien
ce extremes of pressure, from low to high, as it falls. What effect does this have? Are the effects permanent? Long lasting? Short term? There were also experiments to determine the effects of a sudden loss of pressure in a pressurized environment. They called it ‘explosive decompression.’ The results were . . . unpleasant,” the man finished, clamping his mouth around his cigarette.

  “What did all this work lead to?”

  “I don’t know. There was an element of the research that took the results of the experiments and trialed various products with actual pilots, in proper conditions. But I was not familiar with that.”

  Reinhardt frowned again, parts of the mystery beginning to coalesce around him. “You’re saying there was a, a flight unit attached to this? That would have made it a sort of test unit?” The man nodded.

  “Yes,” the man said. “For example, one of the demands was to increase the survival rates of pilots shot down on operations over the North Sea and the Arctic. Survival times for airmen shot down over water was very low, and attrition was high.”

  Reinhardt toyed with the cigarette packet, thinking of that gap in Noell’s soldbuch. “Would that unit have been secret?”

  “Probably. Everything was secret. Everything was secret from everything. The air force from the army. The army from the navy. Everyone from the SS. Everything was broken down. Compartmentalized. Feudal. No one had the whole picture.”

  “You did, apparently.”

  The man’s face twisted inward, as if he wanted to swallow himself, swallow his shame, but then he stilled himself with a visible effort, smoothing his hands across the tabletop in front of him. “I had a good part of it. All right? I made myself useful. And when you make yourself useful, you hear things. You learn things.”

  “I’m sorry,” Reinhardt hesitated. “I understand you don’t want to give your name. But how can I trust you? How do I know you know what you’re talking about?”

  “All right. All right,” the man jiggled in his seat, lighting another cigarette. “I was there. Yes. At Dachau. But I didn’t have much choice. I was a lab technician before the war. I worked for the air force’s medical research center. I got sent up to Dachau in ’39.” He paused, jiggled his knees again, then made a sign against his chest with one finger. “Pink triangle. All right?” Reinhardt nodded. The man was a homosexual. “Dachau was . . . it was fucking awful. All right? You had to survive. Any way you could. All right? I managed to catch the eye of one of the SS guards. I managed to get into the hospital wing. I made myself useful. All right? Useful. I made myself useful to them,” he finished, pointing at the photo. “To anyone who would keep me alive another day.” His legs thudded furiously under the desk. “Then, when Rascher turned up and began experimenting, I got myself transferred. As I was ex–air force, it wasn’t too hard. I just had to stay alive.”