A Thousand Devils (Max Heller, Dresden Detective Book 2)

by Frank Goldammer

  The album was filled with photos of people who had been hanged, shot to death, and beheaded. It wasn’t clear where these executions had taken place, but he guessed Serbia, since Heinz Seibling had mentioned it. Swoboda himself wasn’t visible in any of the photos, which could mean that he had been the photographer. Heller recognized the Waffen-SS uniforms the men wore. Some posed next to the dead, next to people hanged and possibly still struggling as they died; others stood nearby, some grinning, some looking into the camera with indifference. Heller looked into the faces of the dead men, women, elderly, and the young. He could make out large pits with people lined up at the edge, rifle barrels aimed at them. If these had only been a few shots among many photos of fellow soldiers, of countrysides, of destinations, Heller might have tried to dismiss them as shocking souvenir photos from an abnormal past. But this was different. This was sick. Swoboda’s tidiness and orderly manner stood in stark contrast to his cruel and inhuman photo collection. It didn’t take much for a person to lose all decency. It was true that Swoboda was dead now and hopefully had received his just punishment. He was only one of so many. And Heller’s job now was to find the murderer of this sociopath.

  Heller left the attic room and put his shoes back on, desperately trying to think of anything else. He had to reach Medvedev. He couldn’t be sure if it would be as easy as it had been before. Though maybe Medvedev was just as interested in talking with him again too.

  Medvedev either couldn’t or wouldn’t see Heller. According to the guards out front, the commandant wasn’t in the building. Heller had come all this way for nothing. His right foot ached, the pain in his ankle now rising to his knee. This horrible cold weather! The persistent freezing cold in the teens and lower devoured his willpower and strength and life. Heller had been counting on being able to warm up a little in the SMAD building and was even hoping that Medvedev would invite him to eat again. And he wasn’t planning on holding back this time, no matter what the Soviets thought of him.

  Disappointed now, he turned away and walked over to Unity Square to take the 11 streetcar line to Nordstrasse. He was going to see Frau Schlüter.

  Right before Heller reached the intersection of Hospitalstrasse and Unity Square, a black Mercedes braked hard and blared its horn. One of its rear doors opened. “Were you coming to see me?”

  Medvedev. Heller nodded.

  The Russian waved Heller over, then slid to the other side of the rear seat to let Heller climb in. He gave a terse order to the driver, who climbed out. “You must call! Are there developments?”

  “The head belongs to a German named Franz Swoboda. He hasn’t been one hundred percent identified, but it’s looking certain. He worked in the bar that was attacked. Apparently, the only customers are officers of the Soviet Army and—”

  “It’s a bordello,” Medvedev said. “So what? So that’s your news?”

  Heller didn’t answer. Medvedev snorted and folded his arms across his chest. Heller searched for words to loosen the tension but couldn’t find any.

  Medvedev suddenly turned to him. “I will give you some advice, Herr Oberkommissar. I know that you are older than I and that we are not supposed to lecture our elders. But I advise you to let this matter rest. Men do what they need to do. You can forbid it, you can punish them for it, but they will do it anyway, and at some point you realize that you cannot punish them all. What else do you expect them to do, so far from their homeland, without their women? Concentrate on that other matter, so that Ovtcharov is satisfied.”

  Heller side-eyed the Russian with irritation. “But didn’t you tell me there’s a feud between certain officers? Maybe it has something to do with the bordello. I’d have to know if Berinov and Cherin had been there, and if they’d regularly visited the establishment. Isn’t that a lead you’d want me to pursue?”

  Medvedev laughed, his expression switching between amusement and anger. “Heller, you never know when enough is enough. Yes, I did say that. Do what you have to—but leave the bordello out of it.”

  February 8, 1947: Afternoon

  Heller was frozen stiff by the time he reached the Schlüters’ villa. There had been another power outage, and after the streetcar hadn’t moved for ten minutes he decided to walk the last two stops. As a shortcut, he made his way uphill along Radeberger Strasse.

  Outside the villa, he took one of his two patrolmen aside.

  “You spot any suspicious movement?”

  “Some people left the building, but they were only carrying empty bags with them. No boxes, no heavy objects,” the policeman said. He appeared to be freezing despite his warm clothing. His nose was red, and he could barely speak.

  “You see Frau Schlüter?”

  “Someone who fit the description, yes. She’s been gone about an hour.”

  Heller looked at his watch: 4:00 p.m. The days weren’t quite as short now, yet they were still gloomy. The sky appeared as a uniform gray, growing dim in the east. He would be getting home in the dark again. He hadn’t eaten today, apart from Heinz Seibling’s strawberries. And those were just a faint dream to him now.

  “You’re not certain it was Frau Schlüter?”

  “I only had the description. About fifty, blonde hair, an elitist look to her.”

  Heller knocked vigorously. He heard voices and footsteps inside. A man opened the door.

  “Take me to Frau Schlüter, please,” Heller said.

  “She’s not here. She’s running errands.” The man went to shut the door, but Heller stopped it from closing.

  “Please, I have an appointment with her. She must be coming back any minute. I’m from the tax office. Klein’s my name. Can you let me wait inside?”

  The man hesitated, not sure how to handle the situation.

  “I’ll wait by her apartment door. If she’s not back in ten minutes, I’ll leave. Please? It’s very cold outside.”

  “All right, fine,” he said and let Heller inside.

  “Thanks, I know the way.” Heller nodded, rushed past the man, and went up the stairs. He waited at Frau Schlüter’s door until the man returned to his apartment.

  Then Heller knocked on the door.

  “Frau Schlüter?” he said in a low voice, then listened. He bent down and looked through the keyhole. There didn’t seem to be anyone home. For a moment, he entertained the idea of forcing his way inside. Instead, he quietly went down the stairs and found the cellar door.

  It wasn’t locked. Heller opened it and glanced down the dim, narrow stairs. The staircase had no light, and dusk was already falling outside. Heller could just make out the first four or five steps before everything got lost in the dark.

  He hesitated. He wasn’t scared of the dark, wasn’t afraid of ghosts, didn’t believe in evil spirits, but he knew that if he descended into that darkness something would happen to him. He would start hearing sounds that had long since faded, seeing things that no longer existed, start smelling fire, burned flesh, scorched hair. The darkness was already reaching out to grab him, wanting to creep up and drag him down. Heller straightened his shoulders and shuddered. He wanted to move, but he couldn’t. He was frozen.

  Noises from behind made him whip around. They were coming from the nearest apartment. “Be careful out there,” someone said. “Don’t walk through the ruins.”

  Heller couldn’t let anyone spot him here. He quietly closed the cellar door behind him. The top of the stairs submerged him in utter darkness. He heard things out in the hallway. He pressed himself against the moldy-smelling wall, breathed shallowly, and searched for the door handle with his fingers. But it had disappeared, all transforming into stone. He was walled in.

  Heller forced himself to breathe calmly, but it was as if the walls were pressing in, trying to crush him. Blindly, he groped around, touching the cool walls, the crumbly plaster, hearing the particles trickling to the floor. You’ll get through this, he told himself. You’ve gotten through worse hells than this.

  He felt the edge of the stair wit
h his foot, then slowly glided onto the next step, his back pressed to the wall, as if fearing the next step would lead to a bottomless abyss.

  He descended the ten steps this way, in slow motion, and only felt relief once he landed on solid ground. He spotted a weak beam of light. There was a small window, or even a door, possibly leading outside. Heller used the light to guide him. In the semidarkness he could make out furniture, baskets, and cardboard boxes. Everything dusty, coated with a thick layer of grit. The next room had a small window with light seeping in. He could see an old workbench, the wood warped and moldy. But in the next passageway Heller spotted clues in the dust, footprints that were damp, as if someone had recently been here. He drew his pistol from his overcoat and followed the prints until he came to a door. He touched the handle, feeling how cold it was. It led outside, likely into the backyard. Heller cracked the door open and looked out. The snow had been trampled down and was dirty—the door was frequently used. He shut the door again, then reconsidered and opened it wide. This gave him enough light to find his way around the cellar and follow the damp footprints. They led to another section of the cellar. He pulled off a sheet of cardboard tacked onto a metal gate and immediately realized that the little room beyond it had recently been emptied. There had clearly been crates or boxes in there, their contours still outlined in the dust, and the wooden shelving on the wall had been cleared. The floor still had a few boxes and crates, including an ammo crate, a metal toolbox, and some cardboard boxes. Heller discovered papers there. He took a few pages out, folded them, and stuffed them into an inside pocket of his overcoat. The other cardboard boxes held tools, pipe clamps, and door hardware. The ammo box was empty. Heller put his pistol away, bent down, and sniffed inside it. As expected, it smelled of metal and gun oil, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. Crates like this could be found in thousands of households these days, as stools, tables, firewood. The other boxes had old editions of Der Stürmer newspaper, a stack of booklets from the German Youth War Library, and other Nazi propaganda.

  Heller was kicking himself now for not demanding an immediate search of the building. In the meantime, Frau Schlüter had apparently arranged for incriminating materials to be removed from her home despite two policemen keeping watch. Either the two cops didn’t realize there was a path through the backyard or they weren’t paying attention. The main thing now was to seize what was left before it could be removed. Heller squatted down to open the toolbox as well.

  Before he could give much thought to the four hand grenades inside, something distracted him. The doorway had darkened for a second, it seemed. He quickly straightened up, pulled out his pistol again, and looked around. Nothing moved. He stepped silently to the side so he could peek down the passage. It looked empty and unchanged. Heller darted toward the door and stood still, waiting. If someone was trailing him, the passageway was a decent place to be. He bounded out in two quick steps and checked left and right, but he was alone.

  Aiming his pistol, he crept back over to the stairs. He’d obviously been deceiving himself. He lowered his pistol. He would have to send one of the two policemen to stand watch at the cellar door and the other back to the station for reinforcements. Oldenbusch had surely gone home by now. That meant he’d have to delay the forensics work until tomorrow. Heller didn’t trust anyone else, as most of the staff working criminal investigations was new and inexperienced. This was why he’d insisted on keeping Oldenbusch as his assistant detective in addition to his role as Heller’s lead forensics man.

  As Heller exited the cellar door to the backyard, he found himself face-to-face with a young man who stared back at him in shock. He was right on the cusp of adulthood and already quite big. He wore a dark-blue jacket and a stocking cap with blond hair showing underneath. The boy spun around and ran off. Heller grabbed at him but missed. The boy scurried across the snow-covered lawn toward the bushes.

  “Halt, police! I’ll shoot!” Heller shouted and kept running after the boy. Then he raised his pistol and fired twice.

  The boy dropped to the ground in fright. Heller had aimed high into the air.

  “Over here! Police!” Heller shouted louder so the uniformed cops could follow his voice. The boy had jumped up again. He slipped and stumbled near the thicket at the edge of the property.

  “Stay where you are!” Heller fired again. But the fleeing boy wasn’t intimidated now. He busted through branches and brush and disappeared. One of the cops appeared on the path next to the house.

  “There, down that street. He’s getting away!” Heller ordered, running to the spot where the boy had vanished. He hesitated, not wanting to get surprised by the boy fighting back from the cover. Yet the boy was gone. Heller squeezed through the thick bushes, stumbled out the other side on the debris behind the elderly woman’s house, and followed the boy’s footprints in the snow. They disappeared in more thicket up ahead. The boy had gained even more distance on Heller and could have gone in any direction. Suddenly the old woman appeared in her apron.

  “What are you doing here again?” she snapped at Heller. She held something, possibly an iron bar, though it could have been a gun. “You the one shooting?”

  “I’m a police officer! A boy came through here, from the Schlüters’ house.”

  “Didn’t see him.”

  “He went through that underbrush. Where was he heading?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t see him.”

  Heller gritted his teeth. There was no point in chasing the boy now. He was sure to know his way around the area, and it would have taken ten policemen to catch him. He approached the woman and saw that the object in her hand was a bar.

  “You know who that was?”

  “You’re police, you said? What did he do?”

  That angered Heller. He didn’t much like having his questions countered with questions. And he was mad at himself for letting the boy get away. Maybe he should have aimed lower. At a leg. Maybe he was just too kind?

  “Oberkommissar Heller. I’m a detective. The boy was fairly tall, blond, maybe fourteen, sixteen at the most. Do you know him, ever seen him around? He was trying to enter the Schlüters’ house.” Heller looked back that way. A dozen pairs of eyes watched from windows.

  “That’ll have been young Friedel.”

  “Friedel?”

  “Son of Frau Schlüter.”

  “I was told all the sons died.”

  “Two, yes, the older ones. Young Friedel was supposed to join the Volkssturm, but by then it was already over.”

  “He live here? With his mother?”

  “Of course he does.”

  “So you know if he—”

  “I know nothing! Right here is where I live, and all I worry about is myself—as you yourself have seen.”

  “Don’t get smart with me!” Heller thundered. “Now let me get my questions out.”

  Defiance showed on the old woman’s face, her eyelids twitching. She appeared to be thinking something over. She nodded as if talking to herself. Then she set the iron bar against her house.

  “You’ll have to excuse me, Herr Oberkommissar,” she said, sounding far more obliging. “All kinds of people hang around here. The tiniest piece of bread isn’t safe. I only know the Schlüters by sight. They were always looking down on everyone. Once they reported us for not properly displaying the flag on Hitler’s special birthday. When our house was hit, they didn’t do a thing to help us. They were dispossessed, I hear, which served them right. They used Jews as forced labor, and Russian prisoners. None of them fared too well with the Schlüters, I can tell you. Sometimes I saw them having to do yard work. One was supposedly shot for stealing an apple from a tree.”

  “You said ‘us.’ Someone else living here?”

  “No, just me. My husband died in April of ’45, from his wounds. People who’d been renting from me have all headed west.”

  “You’ve been living here alone ever since?”

  “I’m doing all right, better than
many others. I can still get around, and sometimes people give me a little something.”

  “Have you happened to notice when and how often Friedel leaves the house?”

  The old woman shook her head.

  Heller took out his notebook. “Your name, please?”

  “Dähne, Sigrid.”

  “Comrade Oberkommissar!” someone shouted from the street.

  Heller slapped his notebook shut. “Thank you very much, Frau Dähne, and please excuse the disturbance.”

  “Gone, without a trace!” the exhausted cop said to Heller out on the sidewalk in front of Frau Dähne’s house.

  “Your fellow officer?”

  “Went around back, tried cutting him off at Jägerstrasse. Said he’d whistle once he spots him. But there’s so many hiding places and ways out between houses that it won’t do any good. The kid’s gone.”

  February 8, 1947: Evening

  It was already dark when the squad car pulled up with four more policemen. The gas streetlamps hadn’t come on yet. They had already secured the cellar, so Heller assigned a cop to stand guard outside the Schlüters’ apartment. He posted the other three at various locations outside and instructed them to detain Frau Schlüter, as there was a risk of her escaping or suppressing evidence. He had to assume she knew of Friedel’s arms cache in the cellar. As required, Heller had informed Colonel Ovtcharov’s office. Men from the MVD could show up any minute. He was hoping Frau Schlüter would come back before then, if she even intended to return.