The Butchers of Berlin

by Chris Petit

  Nebe cracked up. Stoffel as unofficial court jester was allowed to be as crude as he liked. At one of the drunken parties, Stoffel had taken delight in poking Schlegel, who was forced to take it in good humour, showing which parts of the body could be hit without leaving a mark. ‘There, bruising. There, no bruising. The kidneys are always good.’

  ‘The old cunt was sixty-three and her purse was missing.’

  Nebe said, ‘But Jews aren’t allowed to drive and those still with us are being worked too hard to take time off to murder. What are you telling us?’

  Morgen interrupted to ask Stoffel if he intended to link the three killings: the woman in the woods, the dead man with money in his mouth and the most recent female victim.

  Stoffel recited, ‘Strangulation. Strangulation. Strangulation. Money left at two scenes and taken from the other. In all three cases gender parts interfered with.’

  Morgen said, ‘I thought the Abbas case was considered of no consequence.’

  ‘We were told not to waste time on a Yid, but if the case gets solved as part of another investigation that’s different.’

  He made a tick in the air with his finger.

  ‘How much money was stolen from this woman?’ Morgen asked.

  ‘A mark.’

  ‘One mark!’

  ‘That’s how much she had when she left the house.’

  ‘You’re building a case on one mark! Do we ask if the mark was forged?’

  ‘Gentlemen!’ interrupted Nebe. ‘We are here to put our heads together, not bang them!’

  Stoffel, refusing to be outdone, pointed out that the notorious Dusseldorf Vampire had changed weapons and methods all the time.

  Morgen looked incredulous. ‘Is all this because homicide is nostalgic for the golden age of Weimar murder?’

  Stoffel said the case reminded him of Ogorzow, homicide’s biggest case of the last years, with at least eight women bludgeoned, raped and murdered. It had become part of his legend and endless repertoire.

  ‘It’s a psychological game of cat and mouse. We don’t just beat it out of them. The way we turned Ogorzow we could have charged tickets, it was that good.’

  Morgen added, ‘Are we throwing in the flayed corpses for good measure?’

  ‘When it comes to dealing with the sickness of human imagination there are no limits. Kürten, the Dusseldorf Vampire, asked the prison psychiatrist if after the guillotine had removed his head whether he would still be able to hear, at least for a moment, the sound of his own blood gushing from his neck. Imagine a mind capable of coming up with something like that, let alone his answer when told he probably would: “That would be the pleasure to end all pleasures.” ’

  Schlegel remembered the Kürten case. The newspapers had been full of it, with photographs of the cage that held him during his trial. He had been an impressionable fourteen. It was the first time he had come across the word psychopath, after secretly reading The Sadist, bought by his stepfather and written by a psychiatrist who had interviewed Kürten. Schlegel couldn’t get over the man’s ordinariness, compared to the unpredictable viciousness of the crimes. Even his defence counsel had given up. Kürten was quite unlike other dedicated murderers. Haarmann only killed men, Landru and Grossmann only women, but Kürten was a riddle that did the lot, men, women, children and animals. He killed anything he found as well as deriving sexual pleasure from setting things alight.

  Schlegel had gone through a troubling period wondering whether he too was a psychopath, based on what he later dismissed as the pathetic premise of not finding much to excite him.

  ‘Are you saying you are looking for another Peter Kürten?’ asked Nebe, looking suitably grave.

  Stoffel hinted he already had a suspect in mind that would far outstrip Kürten’s notoriety.

  Nebe went on, ‘Kürten was intelligent and well turned-out. He had a job and a wife. So did Ogorzow. A Party member and a wife too. Might your man be like that?’

  Schlegel noted how Nebe in the course of the meeting had gone from describing the killer as a Jewish maniac to Stoffel’s man.

  Stoffel was too fired up to answer, saying Ogorzow had the perfect job where he was free to move around. That was the kind of detail they had been chasing in this case too.

  ‘Ogorzow had a uniform,’ said Nebe, picking up the thread. ‘Yes, a railway uniform.’

  No one bothered to point out nearly everyone had a uniform by then.

  ‘There’s another thing,’ Stoffel said. ‘Ogorzow had a normal sex life with his wife. With his victims he sometimes achieved full intercourse but otherwise did not bother, so we presume he failed to get hard or tugged his pudding.’

  Morgen asked, ‘Are you telling us the amputation of the penis may be inspired by a desire to emasculate the victim because of the perpetrator’s inability to achieve an erection?’

  Stoffel’s cronies made a point of not laughing.

  Stoffel protested. ‘Don’t take me seriously! Semen was found outside the old woman’s vagina, suggesting he was incapable of penetration.’

  ‘And the woman in the bomb site, if intercourse took place?’

  ‘We are not talking about consistency.’

  After the meeting Morgen said to Stoffel, ‘So you are not looking for a Jewish maniac, it’s official?’

  ‘I can tell you something for nothing, it’s not a fucking Russian.’

  Franz suggested they go down to the basement again. Sybil told him she had her period. She presumed he would insist on some other form of satisfaction, but he left it at that.

  ‘For the moment,’ he said.

  After finishing work she stood in the crowd. The first prisoners were being released. A cheer went up as a group stumbled into the last of the light. She drew on the crowd’s strength, trying not to think about Alwynd cornering her in the kitchen to announce that he was drawn to transgression and it was his nature to betray.

  Sybil was aware of his disconcerting habit of starting conversations in the middle, without preamble, then watching the effect of his detonating remark. She presumed he was talking about women, and it was the start of his move on her.

  He was washing dishes when he said, apropos of nothing, ‘I am not against the Jew as such, of course not, but I am against the money he stands for.’

  Had he guessed, she asked herself, nearly dropping the plate she was drying.

  Money wasn’t exclusive to Jews, she said, and left it at that.

  Feeling soiled by Franz, she dealt badly with Lore, and lay awake for a long time thinking about Alwynd. As with Franz, there would be a price to pay.

  Morgen requested to see copies from the evidence section of the photographs taken in the slaughterhouse boxcar and murder room, as well as the forensic report. Taken with a flashbulb and in stark black-and-white the images looked even more graphic.

  Morgen studied them for a long time.

  ‘A human body butchered to look like an animal prepared for eating. Knives for kosher killing. Hebrew writing on the wall. Pig guts in a bucket.’

  ‘Not from the body?’ asked Schlegel.

  Morgen tapped the forensics report.

  ‘It says bucket contents animal rather than human. A pig’s, in fact. Yet to the Jew a pig is an unclean animal, which they refrain from eating. There’s Metzler too, cleaning his dead pigs.’

  ‘Jews have been passive until now. Why start?’

  ‘Rage perhaps on the part of a stronger character or group at the submissiveness of the herd.’

  ‘Herd?’

  ‘We may be rational but our group instinct remains animal. Or perhaps it is intended as a kind of human sacrifice.’

  Schlegel, helpless, said, ‘I am no expert.’

  ‘Perhaps we should take Lazarenko more seriously.’

  ‘Are you saying now the killings are linked?’

  ‘Not the old biddy in the woods.’ He trailed off. ‘The trouble is we all stopped listening to each other years ago. Maybe we should take account of Stoffel
too, who believes they are connected, even when they are not the same.’

  Morgen pointed to the drawing on the wall in the photograph and asked what it was saying.

  It was about exorcism, Schlegel said, and featured pigs, a recurring theme.

  ‘Hurled themselves over a cliff to perish in the waters below.’

  Morgen turned his attention to the details on the draining board.

  ‘A sacrificial offering, with Jewish symbols. Candles. The dead animal, in this case human. Perhaps the situation is allegorical. Or intellectual. The product of an educated mind.’

  The murders struck Schlegel as pretty real.

  ‘What do you know of the Cabalists?’

  Next to nothing, Schlegel admitted.

  Morgen was smoking furiously, lighting another cigarette when he already had one smouldering in the ashtray. His eyes assumed a dreamy expression.

  ‘The Cabalists taught that the allegorical is far superior to the literal. The literal is practical, the allegorical speculative. The practical is restricted – embarrassed even – by circumstances of place and time. The speculative exalts the soul to the knowledge of temporal, celestial and eternal objects, which are the images of the Divine immutability.’

  Schlegel wanted to point out they were not homicide, or a university department of philosophy, but an obscure backwater. He wanted to say life had been much easier before, which wasn’t altogether true. The trouble had been there from that first shot on Saturday morning, like the starting pistol that marked the race.

  He now could think of a dozen ways to have avoided being dragged out by Stoffel – by standing up to the man, for a start – but he hadn’t.

  ‘In plain speaking?’ he asked, desperate for a handle.

  ‘Acts of desperation to appease an angry god. Or despair and desecration at being abandoned by that god. The difference between kosher and ordinary butchering is the animal has to be consciously killed in a precise manner with a special knife by an expert, and the blood not gathered, in contrast to old forms of idol worship. There are calibrated regulations, down to what parts of the animal can and cannot be used.’

  Morgen exhaled, suddenly flat. ‘I don’t know. Sometimes I see this hunted figure as a cornered rat, devoid of imagination, a tool, with someone else’s brain running the show. What I do think is we will soon expect to find a mother and child killed within the same space and on the same day because their rules of animal slaughter prohibit the offspring being killed with the parent.’

  ‘Are you saying this is all deliberate?’

  ‘Nebe is terrified someone wants it to get out. Jews are being relocated. A man or group are doing this because they want people to know, so they seek damaging publicity in the form of sensation.’

  30

  Although Gestapo undercover operations were off-limits to criminal police inquiries, Morgen was curious to test Gersten on the question of forged money. Gersten, affable but brisk on the telephone, told them to come over, but not for long as he was off to the theatre.

  ‘With Frau Gersten?’ asked Morgen politely when he met them in reception.

  ‘Not, as it happens.’

  Gersten led the way upstairs, at home in his manor. The cleaner, a middle-aged woman, was finishing up as he led them into a room smelling of furniture polish. She was a Jehovah’s Witness.

  ‘One of the bible bees. Terrific workers. I wish they were all like that.’

  The woman could have been deaf too for all her reaction. Seeing Schlegel looking at a framed photograph on the wall, Gersten said, ‘Emil and the Detectives.’

  It showed a recognisable younger version of Gersten as a gang member in a scene from the film.

  ‘Aged fourteen, playing eleven.’

  He looked proud. Seeing Morgen was not charmed, he admitted he hadn’t been a very good actor.

  ‘Too ironic for romantic leads. I got cast as the fifth or sixth gangster, once in an Edgar Wallace as the murderer, until I fell out with the boss of the business over an actress we were both seeing.’

  Boss of the business being Goebbels, Schlegel supposed.

  ‘My career came to rather an abrupt end when I realised if you can’t beat them . . .’

  Morgen looked no more persuaded and said, ‘You were right, some of the notes found in Abbas’s mouth were fake. How did you know?’

  ‘Heads up, I was in a state of shock. Abbas had taken a long time to cultivate and just when he was about to yield results . . . Bang! Curtains! The first thought that came to mind was people nowadays can’t afford to leave good money lying around.’

  ‘We found more from the same batch in Metzler’s apartment.’

  ‘Really? I know nothing about that.’

  Morgen grew distracted, feeling down the side of his armchair. He found something. Schlegel couldn’t see, though he caught his expression of puzzled disgust as he palmed it.

  ‘What about Metzler?’

  ‘What about? We all try to do small favours. Metzler came to my attention through an older colleague who was in his regiment. He had gone to complain to him about having some nasty little job. We arranged a move to a clerical desk. Favour to an old comrade.’

  Schlegel said, ‘We think Jews were responsible for the forging.’

  Gersten recrossed his legs, relaxed. ‘Your department, not mine.’

  ‘Have you heard anything about why Metzler shot himself?’ asked Morgen.

  Gersten waved his hand vaguely in the direction of the east and got up saying he didn’t like to be late for the theatre.

  ‘To be continued another time.’

  He paused at the door, thoughtful.

  ‘It only occurs to me now – with this business of fake money – that Metzler might have been using us.’

  ‘How?’ asked Morgen.

  ‘That his approach had an ulterior motive. Perhaps he played me for a fool.’

  Morgen fished in his pockets and said, ‘I found this down the side of your chair. It must have been left for the tooth fairy.’

  He opened his palm to reveal an incisor with the root attached.

  ‘Gestapo property?’

  Gersten took the tooth, inspected it with studied distaste and threw it towards the nearest wastepaper bin where it missed and lay on the rug.

  ‘There is a place for that kind of thing. Not guilty. Not my style.’

  Back at the office there were urgent messages from Lazarenko. Schlegel was inclined to ignore them. Lazarenko beat them to it by telephoning again.

  He was at the paint factory where three workers had been found dead in a vat, overcome by noxious fumes in an apparently routine accident. One was the Russian they had talked to.

  Schlegel motioned for Morgen to pick up his extension so he could listen in.

  Lazarenko said he had been put in charge of the case because it involved Russians. The Gestapo didn’t usually bother with such lowly business.

  Schlegel was sure Lazarenko was overstating his position. Unctuous and untrustworthy.

  Lazarenko whispered down the phone in his sibilant accent, ‘There is more to this than meets the eye.’

  ‘Tell Gersten.’

  The silence was pregnant enough for Schlegel to understand that Lazarenko had reasons for not doing so.

  ‘I wanted to warn you such accidents are easily arranged.’

  ‘We don’t deal with alien crime. There are appropriate channels.’

  ‘No one will listen. There are rope marks where the dead men were tied.’

  Schlegel wanted Lazarenko to talk to Morgen, who took over while he carried on listening.

  Lazarenko sounded increasingly desperate as he insisted Morgen come and inspect the site. Morgen told Lazarenko to file a report and he would look at it.

  Lazarenko muttered in his own language for a while, before coming out in a rush. ‘It will be said among the Russians these men were killed as a result of internal feuds over gambling.’

  ‘How, when they don’t have any money?’


  ‘They are crazy. They run up huge speculative debts and fight over them.’

  ‘And gambling debts are not the real reason?’

  ‘The gang leaders don’t want their men disclosing their involvement in the murder of a Gestapo agent.’

  ‘Did you tell this to Gersten?’

  Lazarenko didn’t answer. Morgen asked if Lazarenko was out of his depth.

  All he would tell them was Gersten had found another interpreter, female and attractive. He sounded miserable.

  ‘They think I know too much, so they will pack me off like all the rest.’

  When they spoke to the waiter at Clärchens that evening he was concerned about being reported by them to the labour office for having an unregistered job. They inspected his papers, which showed he was an ethnic German from Poland. Morgen asked why he wasn’t in the army.

  Because he was a deserter, thought Schlegel. The dealers and hawkers around Alexanderplatz could usually provide a good set of papers. The waiter’s were especially impressive, stating he was a theology student. He told them with a straight face he was going to become a minister.

  ‘You were off last week and sent in a replacement,’ said Morgen, unimpressed.

  The waiter didn’t have more than a first name. Schlegel was surprised the man knew that much. Socially these days it was common not to know people’s names for the simple reason that if it came to answering to the police it was better not to.

  The waiter said the man was an acquaintance he had met through a cinema club, shortly before. All he knew was he was a mature student, of Russian background, from one of the original anti-communist refugee families going back to the 1917 revolution.

  ‘And his first name?’ asked Morgen.

  ‘Grigor.’

  The waiter had been paid by Grigor to stay at home. Two packets of cigarettes and a wristwatch that had since bust.

  Morgen dismissed him. He seemed keen to stay on. Schlegel said he was tired. Morgen offered him one of his pills. Schlegel declined and wished he hadn’t after going upstairs and dreaming of grown men on the point of death, screaming for their mothers.

  31

  Morgen was already in when Schlegel got to the office and he looked like he had been there all night.