The Agony of France (Alex Kovacs thriller series Book 6)

by Richard Wake

  Anyway, Harald became Cobra, and Cobra became Cobie, and by the time we were about 18 — a decade earlier, and the last time we ever really ran together — Cobie began to notice that, after his first intimate encounter, a lot of other girls were lined up for their opportunity. It was a long damn line, too. I had not seen him in years when we bumped into each other in the bar on Ku’damm, but I assumed it was still a long damn line when I saw the quality of the one he was with, the one whose name didn’t matter.

  Back when, he would shrug and smile. “What can I say? Reputational sex is the best sex. I mean, they don’t even care that I’m getting fat.”

  And now, all of these years later, I was beginning to understand what he meant. Because as it turned out, Elke was a friend of a certain Karin, who was briefly under my spell a few months before. And Karin had told Elke about my apartment, and Elke was here to see it. I think it would have been okay if I was getting fat, too.

  The apartment was in Prenzlauer Berg, the Berlin neighborhood that was mostly spared — by accident, probably — from the Allied bombing at the end of the war. It was actually two apartments that had been knocked into one, on the second floor of a brownstone.

  We walked from room to room, and neither of us said anything. The kitchen wasn’t the typical galley, but a room with enough space for a table for four. It also had a gleaming white refrigerator —- which at the moment contained two bottles of beer and a jar of pickles. The living room was twice the size of a typical East Berlin living room, seeing as how it was what typically took up the space of a typical East Berlin living room and two small bedrooms.

  Down the hall, there were two bedrooms and a decent-sized library, although it was mostly empty shelves. My wife took the books when she moved out. The library did have a desk and chair, and another overstuffed chair with another lamp and a table at its side. Just no books.

  Also, there were two bathrooms. When Elke saw the second one, off of the master bedroom, well, that single sight and the luxury it represented really did more to get her to pull the red sheath over her head than anything I had said or done. In the calculus of the moment, I was pretty sure that the master bathroom was even more important that the vodka.

  There was reputational sex, and then there was reputational sex again, and then there was sleep — tired, peaceful, natural, wonderful sleep that lasted maybe three hours. Because the phone rang at just after 4 a.m., blasting the bliss out of my body. I picked up the receiver and mumbled something. It was the duty sergeant.

  “Detective Ritter, is that you?”

  I mumbled again.

  “Come on, Peter. Is that you.”

  “Yes, sergeant. What is it?”

  As it turned out, there was a body in Treptower Park.

  Chapter 2

  The only good thing about driving at 4 a.m. in East Berlin in the summer of 1961 was that nobody else was driving — and I mean nobody. Even at the busy times, it really wasn’t busy. It wasn’t as if we had traffic jams at any time of day, not like in the West. It could get pretty clogged up around Alexanderplatz in the morning and late afternoon, but that was really about it. And at 4 a.m., there wasn’t a soul. I could run the lights without a care.

  It was maybe six miles from my place to Treptower Park. I spent the first five of them mourning the exit from my warm bed, and the warm, naked body I left behind. I managed to get dressed in the dark, and Elke never woke up. I scribbled her a note — “Duty calls. Sorry.” — and left it on the hall table by the apartment door. I would have set out a little breakfast snack for her, but beer and pickles seemed a bit much for the morning.

  This was the second time in July that I had been dragged out of bed in the middle of the night, and the month wasn’t even half over. Three times in March, three in April, five in May — damn May — one in June, and now two more in July. Most of them were dead prostitutes in dark alleys, likely killed by customers who preferred not to pay for service rendered. Some were dead men in dark alleys, likely killed by prostitutes in pursuit of some cash on top of what had been agreed. Three were floaters in the canal, jumpers — and at least they were self-evident. The rest were entirely unsolvable, either because the loved ones of the dead men didn’t want them solved, or because the loved ones of the dead prostitutes were non-existent. In either case, it all it meant was paperwork — and another lost night’s sleep.

  I had argued about all of this with the boss. There were eight of us, after all, but only one of us received the phone calls in the middle of the night. He said, “You’re the youngest, by far. You’re the only one who isn’t married, the only one who doesn’t have children.”

  “But I have a life, too.” That’s what I managed to blurt out in my defense. I could almost hear the whine in my voice. The boss responded by making a wanking motion.

  “Some life,” he said. At which point he returned to whatever paperwork had been occupying his attention when I walked into his office. Meeting over.

  This call was a little farther out than most of the late-nighters. As I drove through the dark streets, as I got closer to the park, I skirted the neighborhood where I was born. The apartment house on Bootsbauerstrasse was gone, and it was nowhere near being rebuilt the last time I had driven past. The building was gone. Everybody was gone.

  I arrived at the small parking lot nearest to the monument and checked my watch. It was 4:35. The lot was empty. There was no sign of another police car or of anyone. I doused the lights and just sat for a minute.

  The only clear memory of my father — really clear, like I could still see his face — came from our times in Treptower Park. I looked out through the windscreen and did a mental calculation. If the memorial was over to my right and a little behind me then, yes, it was probably in that field straight ahead. I could see a couple of football goals in the distance, lighted by the moon. We probably went there a dozen times.

  My mother was home pregnant with my little brother, so it was just me and him and a football and a paper sack containing two liverwurst sandwiches, two bottles of lager, and an orange soda, a special treat.

  We played and laughed, and then we sat and ate. After a while, I would climb into his lap, and he would let me have a sip from the beer bottle. On the way home, he would always have to carry me the last bit at the end — I would insist, and he would pretend to resist, and then he would scoop me up with a great flourish. It was 1940. I was seven.

  Five years after that, we lived in the same apartment but my father was long gone, dead at Stalingrad. My mother kept the telegram and reread it almost daily, it seemed, the edges frayed, the creases starting to wear through, the paper stained. But she stopped crying after only a couple of weeks.

  By 1945, the war was over except for the final punishment. Hitler was in a bunker somewhere near the Wilhelmstrasse, and we were in our apartment a few miles away. If he was terrified or defiant or somewhere in between, we did not know. The only thing we shared for certain was the rain of Russian bombs.

  By then — actually, long before then — we had no proper heat in the apartment except for what was left after dinner from the cooling stove in the kitchen — and that was on the nights when we had food and a rock of coal. My mother and my brother, who was then five years old, slept together in the bedroom, together for warmth and also to calm him. I was 12, the man of the house, scrounging for food during the day and sleeping in a little nest I would make by the stove at night. If I was lucky, it would still be just a bit warm when I fell asleep. I remember that it was warm that night. I remember reaching out from beneath my quilt and feeling the stove — and it was warm. It wasn’t much, but it was something.

  The bomb, as it turned out, landed on the roof of the apartment building. I didn’t remember hearing it fall — sometimes there was a whistling kind of sound, but if this one whistled, it did not wake me. I didn’t remember hearing it, or hearing the explosion, or feeling anything. All I knew was what they told me later. We were on the fifth floor, the top floor, and
the bomb crashed right through the roof and into the bedroom.

  Chapter 3

  I grabbed the torch from the glove box and switched it on. The light was bright and steady. Good batteries. My lucky day.

  The memorial was separated from the car park by a stand of trees. A narrow path marked the way. The torch managed to illuminate a few of the exposed tree roots, saving me from a face-plant that would have been especially embarrassing, seeing as how I was still half-drunk, and maybe visibly so. The last thing I needed was to have people talking about me at headquarters after showing up at a crime scene with a bloody, busted nose. Which reminded me; I reached into my pocket and fished out a breath mint. It turned out to be more linty than minty.

  When I was through the trees, the scene opened up, even in the darkness. The Soviets built the memorial in the late ‘40s to honor their war dead, and the damn thing was massive. Why they built the other one in the Tiergarten, I think in the American sector, made no sense to me. Then again, I was a teenager during the construction and wasn't consulted.

  After getting through the trees in one piece and on two feet, I arrived at the beginning of the memorial and shined my torch on the big red marble wings that formed the entrance to the site. Two carvings of Soviet soldiers, each on bended knee, formed the inside of each wing and invited you inside. Each of the wings featured a hammer and sickle carved into the stone, as well as a quote — German on one side, Russian on the other:

  “Eternal glory to the fighters of the Soviet army, who gave their lives in the struggle to free humanity from fascist bondage.”

  The monument itself was probably 200 yards away and on top of a mound that took 50-odd steps to climb. It was a gigantic statue, maybe 40 feet tall, of another Soviet soldier, this one cradling a German child in its arms while stomping on a swastika.

  There was very little moonlight, but the silhouette of the statue was still so familiar, and almost as impressive as when it was bathed by the sun. I had been there dozens of times over the years, watching the construction as a kid and then, in the years after, for the big commemorations that really meant nothing to me, other than the fun of being part of a big crowd.

  In the darkness, and in the distance, I could see one, two, three men with torches at the base of the statue. Their lights were bigger than pinpricks from where I stood but not a lot bigger. That must have been where the body was.

  Between the entrance and the statue was the vast open space, sunken below, where thousands of Soviet soldiers were said to be buried, the ones who died saving the city from Hitler and prepared the ground for their raping brethren who followed. From teenage to old age, no German woman was safe after the Soviets took the city. Every one of my friends whose mother was alive could tell of her having been raped by a Soviet soldier, along with all of the sisters and grandmothers who they couldn’t hide. There were times back then when I was actually glad that my mother was dead. And it was why some people I knew insisted on calling the place “The Tomb of the Unknown Rapist,” even all of those years later.

  I climbed down the steps, gingerly by torchlight, and walked on the paths past the massive white marble tombs, each bearing an inscription signed by Stalin. Some were just to honor the different Soviet republics that lost soldiers in the fight for Berlin. But there were Stalin quotes etched in marble all over the place, everywhere you turned. Like this:

  "For two decades the Red Army protected the peaceful reconstruction work of the Soviet people. But in June 1941 Hitler's Germany attacked our country word-breakingly, violating the Non-Aggression Pact in a brutal and wicked manner, and the Red Army was forced to go out into the field to defend its homeland."

  J. Stalin

  Then there was this one:

  “Now all recognize that the Soviet people with their selfless fight saved the civilization of Europe from fascist thugs. This was a great achievement of the Soviet people to the history of mankind.”

  J. Stalin

  It went like that, on and on and on. After walking the 200 yards, it was up the steps at the other end, at the base of the statue, up and up. Slightly out of breath when I reached the top, I showed my identification to the two coppers on the scene and asked them when they get off shift.

  “Not till 8,” one of the said. A sergeant. He looked at me a little funny in the darkness and took an extra few seconds examining my badge. A lot of them never got used to a murder detective who was 15 years younger than they were, and they especially never got used to taking my orders. But besides all of that, it was a bit of a stupid question that I had asked. If they were working overnight in a Berlin police station, they were working midnight to 8. Everybody in the city probably knew that — every cop, for sure. But it was a sign, at least to me, of how lacking in confidence I still could be. For me, stupid questions were like nervous tics sometimes. In the time it took to ask one and then hear the answer, I was screwing up my courage for the real business that needed to be conducted.

  “Okay, if you want to grab a coffee or a piss, you’ve got a half-hour,” I said. “Then you start searching the area for anyone and anything. The next shift will do the door-knocking. Make sure your boss knows we need at least 10 men out here at 8 a.m.”

  They half saluted and walked away. I took the half-salutes and declared victory, and then I climbed the last few steps and arrived at the body. It was being examined by the third man with a torch.

  Again, if you enjoyed this excerpt, A Death in East Berlin is available for advance purchase now. You can find the link, along with the links to my other books, at https://www.amazon.com/author/richardwake.

  Thanks again for reading!