“Weeds grow tall,” Oppenheimer replied. It was a corny line, but as they were in an allotment garden, this somehow seemed suitable. “I was looking for you. Luckily, I remembered where your garden is.”
“What’s up?”
“It’s about an investigation that I’m advising on. Not officially, of course.”
Billhardt’s jaw dropped. Then he came closer and looked around warily. “I thought you were … you know.” He nodded toward a sign that had been placed at the entrance to the allotments a few meters away. German gardens and Jewish smell do not go together well.
Oppenheimer had always shared everything with him while they were in the force together, but instead of giving a long-winded explanation of his situation, he now resorted to his old white lie. “I converted.”
Billhardt seemed satisfied and opened the gate to his plot. “Well, that was just in time. Come on in. Goodness, we haven’t seen each other in ages.”
At least in the early hours of the morning, it had been a glorious summer’s day and warmer than Oppenheimer had initially expected.
But when he took his jacket off in Eddie’s place, he realized that he had no idea where he should go instead. Finally, he decided to find Inspector Billhardt. He didn’t know whether he was still in the police service, and to be honest, he wasn’t even sure if he was still alive. Oppenheimer made his way to the allotments in Neukölln, where Billhardt used to spend his weekends.
“I feared I might not find you here,” Oppenheimer said after he’d sat down next to him on a bench.
“I’ve only been back a few months. You got lucky, Oppenheimer. Now tell me, what’s this all about?”
Oppenheimer briefly explained the case he was working on, giving the most important facts without disclosing who was involved in the investigation.
“Well, well, a secret investigation?” Billhardt frowned. “Very interesting, but I don’t envy you. It sounds a lot like a madman similar to Großmann. And what’s your problem? Are you stuck?”
“The murderer must have gotten himself noticed before. That’s why I wanted to ask if you’ve ever come across a similar case. Not necessarily in connection with a murder.”
Billhardt nodded. “I know what you mean. It’s about the method he used to attack women, am I right?”
Oppenheimer nodded. “The fact that he strangulated them is not remarkable. I am chiefly concerned with the injuries he inflicted on his victims. On the one hand, the mutilation of the genitals and then the objects in the ears. Have you ever come across anything similar?”
Billhardt went over to his small shed. “Do you want some wine?”
“White wine?” Oppenheimer asked.
Grinning, Billhardt pulled out a bottle. “I also have white wine. I always keep an emergency stash here.”
While Oppenheimer tasted the wine, Billhardt seemed to remember something.
“There was something,” he said hesitantly. “A colleague told me about it. You were still in the force at the time. It must have been just before the National Socialists took over, 1932 or ’33. But I can’t say for sure.”
“What do you remember?”
“It was an injury. A woman. She was attacked with a knife and had several stab wounds to her genital area. No idea if that’s any use.”
Oppenheimer held his breath. This seemed to be a valuable bit of evidence. “What happened in that case? Can you remember anything else?”
Billhardt sighed in frustration. “All gone. Completely. I would have to look in the archives. It hit me quite hard when I heard about it.”
“So you’re still on the force?”
“Yes, if you want to call it that. If you come by next weekend, I can tell you more about the case, provided I find the file. Ever since the police headquarters on Alexanderplatz took a couple of bomb hits, it’s complete bedlam. The individual departments, the files, everything is spread over the entire city.”
“That would be really helpful. It is terrible having to sit idle and wait for the next murder to take place.”
“I understand.” Billhardt took a sip of wine. Oppenheimer couldn’t help looking at the stump that had once been his colleague’s arm.
“What happened with your arm?” Oppenheimer finally asked.
“Left it at the eastern front.”
Oppenheimer nodded thoughtfully. “I understand. You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”
They sat next to each other in silence for a few seconds. But Billhardt seemed to feel the urge to share his story with someone. “You’re the only one I would tell. I think you will understand. The other colleagues—I don’t even know who I can trust anymore. And I don’t want to burden Dorothee with it.”
Oppenheimer remembered Billhardt’s wife. “How is she?”
“She’s lost a lot of weight. There is nothing proper to eat anymore. She’s living with her sister, who has a farm. It’s better that way, definitely safer than here in Berlin. I see her once a month. I haven’t even been able to tell her everything that happened in Poland.” Billhardt fell silent. His face turned pale, and an invisible burden suddenly seemed to weigh on his shoulders. He twisted his mouth scornfully. “I killed. For the Fatherland, they said. Will the threat to the Fatherland really be diminished if you kill a child?”
Oppenheimer got goose bumps at the thought of it. He stared at his old colleague, but the man didn’t notice.
Oppenheimer asked incredulously, “They made you kill children?”
“It happened. Children, old people, men, women, no difference. Immaterial, they were all subhumans. Mostly … we mostly shot them in forest clearings. Outside the city. They dug huge pits. Usually, we had a dozen men carry out the digging. Once we’d taken the shovels off them, they were shot and thrown in. Then the other Jews arrived from the city. We could hear them singing their songs from afar. But people always fell silent quite quickly when they saw the pit with the corpses. Then they realized what was happening. We were told that they were supporting the partisans. But there weren’t only Jews from Poland among them. I once even spotted someone from Berlin. He used to live not far from me. What’s he got to do with Polish partisans, I thought. I tried not to look at him. But at the same time, I saw him staring at me. He recognized me. When the order to shoot came, I shot him first. I just couldn’t stand the way he looked at me.” Billhardt seemed distressed. “Can you understand that? I shot a person because I could not bear his gaze. I didn’t think of it when I was at the front, but since I’m here…”
Oppenheimer tried to wash down his inner turmoil with a gulp of wine, but it didn’t help. Billhardt had gone silent, probably waiting for Oppenheimer to say something.
“If it was an order, then you probably couldn’t oppose it, right?”
“A few comrades didn’t want to do it. They got a serious dressing-down, but nothing more. Somehow … well, yes, I didn’t want to back out. After all, we were all there together, in enemy territory. You have to rely on each other; otherwise, you’re done. I couldn’t just let the others do the dirty work. I can’t tell you if what I did was wrong. You know, the strange thing is that once you’ve done it a few times, the decision is really easy. You just have to be careful when you shoot someone in the head. The skull might explode, and you end up with all the stuff on your uniform or face. There were a few genuine sadists among the men, they really enjoyed it. I wasn’t one of those. I didn’t take any pleasure in it. After the executions, we always got shit-faced. I don’t know where the stuff came from. I drank gallons of it, but I never managed to get properly drunk. At least not as drunk as I’d like to have been.”
“How did you get out of there?” Oppenheimer asked.
“My arm was the price I paid.” Billhardt moved his stump to prove his point. “We were attacked by partisan fighters. An ambush as we were marching through a forest. They came with grenades. One of them hit me. The commander didn’t want to believe it at first. He thought I had the Eastern Meltdown and had
held a hand grenade too tightly in order to get home. Well, I was lucky; I didn’t get court-martialed.”
Oppenheimer took a deep breath, weighed down by what he’d heard. Billhardt was finished with his story. He looked at Oppenheimer nervously, raised his glass, and emptied it in one gulp.
In the ensuing silence, an unpleasant thought occurred to Oppenheimer. Billhardt was without a doubt deeply unsettled by the events, but was he really mourning his victims, or was it the self-pity that bothered him? Billhardt himself probably couldn’t answer this.
* * *
The next day, Vogler appeared with the letters he had managed to get hold of over the last few days. He was still seething with anger when he told Oppenheimer about it. Officially, the police stations were instructed to process all complaints and pass them on to the Gestapo. Usually, the police received anonymous letters from brave citizens who toed the party line, who denounced their friends for offenses against the Treachery Act. But the flood of these letters was so great that the officers couldn’t keep up with the processing.
Vogler had had to exert massive pressure to get the police moving. After numerous officers had been commandeered to go through the mountains of paper, on Saturday, they had finally found two letters from the perpetrator. Judging by the postmarks, he’d sent those letters right after the murders of Christina Gerdeler and Julie Dufour. Initially, Vogler had seriously considered asking Reithermann to have those responsible for the sloppy work sent to the eastern front, but there were so many people involved in the processing that he would have had to redeploy entire departments.
They could have spared themselves the hassle, as there were no significant differences in the letter to the editors at Der Angriff. The murderer raged about prostitutes and blustered about illnesses they spread, according to his opinion. Oppenheimer’s suspicions that the perpetrator had delusions of omnipotence were reinforced. The letters contained invitations to follow suit. After the murder of Julie Dufour, he even called upon Hitler himself to chase all foreigners out of the Reich. This letter was especially insightful to Oppenheimer, as in it he described Ms. Dufour as a “French whore.” This confirmed the theory that he had considered the foreign-language correspondent a prostitute.
On Friday, after Oppenheimer had unsuccessfully tried to speak to Ms. Gerdeler’s flatmate, he had moved on to Horst-Wessel-Stadt to question Reithermann’s neighbor. He had found out that half the district was secretly gossiping about Reithermann and the French girl. Almost everyone who was questioned knew about it and had juicy details to share. So it was conceivable that the perpetrator lived in the same neighborhood. But then, the other two victims lived in different neighborhoods. Oppenheimer went over these facts several times in the living room of the Zehlendorf house, which always ended with him scratching his head in frustration, making more strong coffee. The murderer knew his victims and had clearly followed them for a while. But apart from the assumption that he had submitted them to gruesome torture and then killed them somewhere in the southeastern part of the city, it was impossible to determine a geographic focus. The perpetrator seemed to be everywhere and nowhere.
* * *
“No, I don’t recognize the picture.” Lizzi Ebner looked at the photograph of Reithermann with a blank expression. “But I can’t tell you that she didn’t know him either. She never introduced me to her gentlemen.”
The blaring radio in the background irritated Oppenheimer. “Did she ever mention his name? Reithermann, Günther Reithermann, SS Gruppenführer.”
“Well, I know she knew a couple of SS guys, but I’ve no idea of their names.”
Her answer made Oppenheimer give up all hope of connecting Ms. Gerdeler to Reithermann. Her flatmate had never seen the men she met with and only knew the nicknames that Christina Gerdeler gave them.
It was ten in the morning when Ms. Ebner had received him, wearing a tattered kimono and torn black tights. But her immaculately coiffured hair belied any presumption that he’d woken her. She was roughly the same age as Ms. Gerdeler but weighed about twenty kilos less. Oppenheimer wondered what sort of job she could possibly pursue in an armament factory.
“Just a moment,” she said and turned the radio louder. It was the news. Ms. Ebner had not been able to fully concentrate on Oppenheimer’s questions the entire time. She seemed strangely distracted, constantly listening in to the radio program. In all his time with the police, he had never had such an interview. Lizzi Ebner gave the impression of being otherwise occupied.
“May I know what’s so important about the radio program?” Oppenheimer finally asked, annoyed.
Ms. Ebner looked at him as if she’d completely forgotten he was there. “I just wanted to hear what they say about the invasion,” she replied and turned back to the device.
Even if the party members tended to dismiss the invasion like a bad joke, they had not been able to prevent the entire population being infected by invasionitis now. Oppenheimer, on the other hand, had begun to lose faith. He was surprised that even a young woman like Ms. Ebner was gripped by this hysteria.
“Is there any news?” Oppenheimer asked without real interest. “Have our troops completed yet another new building on the Atlantic Wall?”
Ms. Ebner’s eyes widened in surprise. “But haven’t you heard? They landed last night.”
Oppenheimer jumped up from his chair. “What? How do you know?”
“I have an authentic source. My neighbor, Mr. Blank, he told me. He knocked on my door a couple of hours ago. I remember thinking, what could he want at this hour?”
Oppenheimer paid more attention to the radio broadcast now. But by the time the music came back on, the speaker hadn’t mentioned anything about an invasion.
“Are you sure that’s right?” he asked.
“Yes, I’m sure it is. Mr. Blank works for the papers. He’s the first to find out when such things happen.”
Oppenheimer was suddenly agitated. “If that were true,” he began, but didn’t finish the sentence. After all, he didn’t know which side Ms. Ebner was on.
“Bad day for the Gröfaz,” Ms. Ebner mumbled, meaning Adolf Hitler. Then she realized that she had just let slip the unofficial nickname for the Greatest Field Commander of All Time, as the führer liked to call himself, and winced. “Of course, I mean … umm…,” she stammered guiltily.
Oppenheimer had to smile. “I think we can speak openly.” Ms. Ebner, too, smiled in relief.
“I have nothing to do with the Nazis,” he explained, leaning forward confidentially. “I just want to find out what happened to your friend. If you suspect anyone from the party, you don’t need to worry. I won’t report it. No one will find out. I just need a lead.”
Ms. Ebner looked at him almost beseechingly. “Well, I also want you to catch the bastard who did this. I would really like to help you, Inspector. But I know nothing.”
* * *
There were still many questions Oppenheimer wanted to ask Ms. Ebner, but eventually, he had to accept that there was no point. She was a dead-end lead.
He left half an hour later. Initially, he hadn’t admitted it to himself, but ever since he’d heard the news of the invasion, he’d had trouble concentrating on the interview. Instead, he kept wondering whether the Americans and British had finally attacked. He first headed for the train station at Friedrichstraße. He’d seen unusually large numbers of people at the newsstand asking for a paper when he’d made his way to Ms. Ebner’s. Now he understood why.
When he got to the station, people were still crowding the newsstand. “What’s going on? Aren’t there any papers?” Oppenheimer asked.
A man waiting in line turned and shrugged. “No, they haven’t arrived yet. Been waiting for ages.”
“There they are,” someone murmured. Oppenheimer couldn’t see anything at first, but then he heard the clatter of the delivery van. The vehicle stopped, and a boy threw a bundle of newspapers onto the pavement from the back of the van. People became restless. The owner of
the kiosk heaved the first stack onto his counter so as to cut the string bindings. He was just about the use his pocketknife when two policemen appeared at his side.
“These are confiscated,” one of them explained and reached for two of the bundles. His colleague took the other two. Then they walked away.
The people grumbled. Oppenheimer was angry too. He’d almost gotten hold of a paper, almost seen what it said on the front page. It was like Christmas without presents.
“What a load of rubbish!” someone close to Oppenheimer shouted. “Why didn’t they confiscate them at the printers?” The man being so addressed just shrugged helplessly.
“I don’t give a damn what’s on the front page,” the man said loudly. “They could have left the back section. I just want to know how the story ends! It’s called Adventures on the Lofoten Islands. You have to read it; it’s brilliant.”
* * *
When Oppenheimer questioned his driver, Hoffmann confirmed that the invasion had begun that morning in Normandy. The man’s habitually melancholic gaze became even sadder. Oppenheimer, on the other hand, was electrified by the news. The uncertainty was over. If the attack was successful, then there would once again be a front line in the west, and Germany would be surrounded. The Russians were approaching from the east, and the Americans had made their way to Italy. He had to agree with Ms. Ebner. It really wasn’t a good day for the Gröfaz.
Oppenheimer couldn’t just go back to Zehlendorf and sit in his quiet little room. He made his excuses to Hoffmann, saying that he had decided to have lunch at home, and instructed him to pick him up in two hours. Hoffmann seemed happy with that. Without waiting, he started the engine and raced down Friedrichstraße at breakneck speed. Oppenheimer presumed he had someone to tell about the invasion.
The city center was pulsating with life. It wasn’t just because it was lunchtime. There was something in the air. You couldn’t put your finger on it, and yet it seemed almost tangible. People had caught a whiff of something. Oppenheimer went toward Unter den Linden and felt like a twelve-year-old boy at the beginning of the summer holidays. He felt on top of the world and wanted to kick his heels and run through the Brandenburg Gate to his flat. The world suddenly seemed too small for his energy, which had built up over the years of waiting. Whoopee, here I come, Oppenheimer thought, just like Hans Albers had sung in the film with the Comedian Harmonists many years ago.
Germania: A Novel of Nazi Berlin Page 20
