The Air Raid Killer (Max Heller, Dresden Detective Book 1)

by Frank Goldammer

  Heller stood yet the doctor strode right by him to his chair, pulled his white coat tight, sat down, and with a curt gesture instructed Heller to sit back down. Dr. Alfred Schorrer leaned back in his chair. He was in his late forties like Heller, maybe a little older. His hair was clipped short, military-style. His mustache was trimmed down to little more than a silvery veil. His eyes were gray, flashing bright and sharp.

  “You’re correct in your assumption, unfortunately. It was indeed one of our nurses. Klara Bellmann. She hadn’t been here long. Maybe three months. She was working in the women’s clinic.” Dr. Schorrer propped his elbows on the armrests of his chair and placed his fingertips together. “I’m afraid she must have endured terrible suffering before the Lord took mercy on her. None of her wounds appear to have been fatal. Her heart is unscathed. There is a stab to the lungs, but usually this only results in the particular lung filling with blood. A very slow death by asphyxiation. Happens often enough at the front. You fought on the front lines?”

  Heller cleared his throat. “Yes. In the last war.”

  Schorrer perked up. “I was there too. Fifth Guard Grenadiers. And you?”

  “Hundred and First Grenadiers.” It was all he was going to say about it.

  Schorrer seemed to sense this and got back on topic. “Laceration wounds to the abdominal wall always involve a great deal of pain, and there were deep cuts to the arms and legs as well. She must have screamed, unless she lost consciousness quickly. Her death occurred from either shock or blood loss. The latter seems more likely.” He tapped his fingertips together.

  Heller wanted to rub the back of his neck but didn’t want to look uneasy before the doctor’s commanding presence. Heller wasn’t feeling too well; he was getting chills, and his shoulders chafed under his suit. He could tell he wasn’t going to sleep well tonight.

  “Do the results show if she was inebriated, unconscious, numbed in some way? Wouldn’t she have put up a fight? She certainly wouldn’t have entered that boathouse willingly.”

  Schorrer leaned forward and looked at a document. “A blood sample has been taken. Any other questions?”

  “You help manage this hospital? I was told you’re a pathologist.”

  “That I am. But current times require special measures, so they expanded my duties beyond the pathology clinic.” Schorrer shrugged. “Now, Herr Detective Inspector, I have much to do.”

  Heller got the message and stood. “Thank you very much for your help on such short notice. Could I come back for more advice if necessary?”

  “Any time. I live on the grounds. They freed up two rooms for me in the nursing school.”

  Schorrer stood. They faced each other to say goodbye, each man hesitating.

  “Heil Hitler,” Heller said. He raised his arm yet didn’t extend it fully before letting it drop.

  Dr. Schorrer did the same, and for a moment they searched each other’s eyes.

  Out in the waiting room, Schorrer’s secretary gave Heller his overcoat back, now dry and pleasantly warm. He thanked her and left.

  Out in the corridor it smelled of dinnertime, of bread and broth. Heller hadn’t eaten since his meager lunch of a few potatoes and salted turnips. The staff, indifferent, kept going about their work. He had to get out of the way a couple of times, pressing himself to the wall as carts of food and beds rolled by.

  He didn’t wait for the elevator, opting for the stairs instead.

  “Tell me,” he asked a nurse rushing by on the ground floor, “where can I find the personnel department?”

  “The administration building is just over there, but everyone’s left by now.” The nurse pointed at the building.

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.” The nurse headed up the stairs.

  Heller felt a twinge of guilt and turned around. “Heil Hitler,” he added.

  The nurse paused and turned to look at him. Then she continued up the stairs.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Karin asked as she took Heller’s overcoat. She placed it on a hanger and brought it into the kitchen, where she hung it next to the oven. Then his wife came back out into the hallway. Heller had sat down on a little bench and was wearily pulling off his shoes. Karin frowned. “Your cap?”

  “Forgot it at the office.” He slipped his right shoe off with a jerk, which made him grimace.

  “What am I going to do with you? Last thing we need is you catching cold.”

  Heller didn’t like it when she got like this, but she was right, and he was annoyed with himself. He decided not to tell her he was getting the chills.

  Karin sat next to him. “So. What’s going on?”

  “A woman was murdered near here, fifteen minutes by foot. A hideous crime. Really ghastly. Someone had . . . sliced her open.”

  “A robbery?”

  “No, this had nothing to do with robbery, Karin. This was the work of a madman.”

  “Is there anything you’re able to do?”

  Heller snorted. “No staff, no gas, no flashbulbs, no time. Klepp thinks it was just someone passing through.”

  “Then he’s an idiot.”

  Heller placed a hand on her forearm and gently squeezed. She shouldn’t talk so loudly near the door and the hallway.

  “It’s true, though,” Karin whispered.

  “What’s there to eat?” Heller said.

  “Stew—potatoes and turnips.” Karin got up, and Heller followed her into the kitchen. “I stood in line for four hours at Kiebels because people said there was fat, but I was too far back.”

  “Anything else happen?”

  “Nothing,” Karin said without looking at him.

  This was both good and bad. It meant they hadn’t gotten one of those so-called hero letters, stating that one of their boys had fallen for the Führer, Volk, and Vaterland. It also meant there was still no mail from the front. For months now, the letters they’d written had all come back marked “Return to Sender, Await Further Correspondence.”

  They sat at the dinner table in silence, hearing only the gentle clanking of spoons on soup plates. The radio stayed off. Heller liked classical music—Handel and Vivaldi—yet he couldn’t listen to the inane babble between the music, always the same old clichés.

  Karin finished first, having put far less on her plate. She carefully set down her spoon so it didn’t make noise. “Today, Frau Lehmann was saying that they’re on the advance again in Russia.”

  Heller finished eating, tipping the plate to spoon up the last of the broth. He set his spoon down carefully too. “People are claiming the most ridiculous things. If they really were making progress in Russia, it would make headlines on the front page.” He stood to go into the living room. He’d read the newspaper, now down to just a few small pages and nearly half-filled with death notices. Karin would clean up and join him soon. And there they would sit, in candlelight, waiting to find out whether the air raid siren would sound tonight. Only when they were certain the English weren’t coming would they go to bed. Heller turned to Karin from the kitchen doorway. “Has Frau Lehmann ever mentioned something called the ‘Fright Man’?”

  Karin was clearing the dishes. She paused in thought before shaking her head. “The Fright Man? No.”

  Heller was annoyed with himself for bringing it up, just like he’d gotten annoyed with himself for calling after that nurse with a much too loud “Heil Hitler.” He read in the newspaper about yet another “heroic battle.” The heroic battles were everywhere, just another of so many empty slogans. Everyone knew—everyone had to know—just how little worth news like this had. None, to be exact. And yet people craved reading it, searching for the tiniest clue as to what was actually going on. In the war he’d fought in, they too had fought heroic battles. They had lain in the mud so heroically, cowering as shells landed all around them, their faces pressed into the mud.

  “What’s that mean anyway—the Fright Man?”

  Heller started; he hadn’t heard Karin coming. “The woman tod
ay. Well, two boys found her, and one of them was really terrified by it. He asked me if it had been the Fright Man. That’s all I know.”

  Karin moved the candles to the coffee table, turned off the overhead light, then sat on the sofa and threw a blanket over her legs.

  “You said they sliced her open.” She paused. “Who could do such a thing?”

  Heller gave her a contemplative look. “I don’t know. This is no normal murder. Definitely not robbery. This is something different, I can feel it.”

  “Listen, Max,” Karin whispered, her face barely visible just beyond the candlelight. “Don’t you go getting too involved, especially if this Klepp doesn’t want you to.”

  “It’s a murder, and I have a job to do.”

  “This wouldn’t be the first time you did more than necessary.”

  “I only ever did what was necessary.”

  “But right now—”

  “Right now is exactly the time not to start throwing the rules out the window, to go losing any common decency we have left.”

  “Don’t interrupt me! I’m just concerned, Max. You might wind up the only decent one left among all these maniacs.”

  “What are you trying to say? I’m supposed to behave like a maniac too?”

  Karin shook her head, annoyed. “Don’t act dumb. You know what I mean.”

  The warning siren sounded at 10:03 p.m., the full alarm siren a few minutes later. Heller, who’d dozed off in the armchair, stood and fetched his overcoat from the kitchen. Then they grabbed the suitcase they’d packed weeks ago and had already carried down to the cellar twenty times now.

  In the stairway, they joined their neighbors and the renters from the top floor. All mumbled greetings and went down into the cellar. No one joked anymore or dared claim that Dresden was going to be spared. Not since the seventh of October, when bombs had fallen for the first time. It hadn’t been a lot of bombers. A few buildings had collapsed, and there were several dozen dead. Yet those few bombs had been enough to destroy all illusions.

  Down in the cellar, each person sat in their customary spot. All light came from a single bulb. They’d have to wait until the all-clear siren sounded. No one spoke a single word. Heller knew why. He was the reason. He was a policeman, and the regime had strongly advised all police to join the SS or its security service, the SD. No one had dared trust him from that point on, just as he no longer dared trust any of them.

  December 1, 1944: Early Morning

  “I’m sorry, Herr Detective Inspector, but Nurse Klara moved out of the nurses’ quarters. Unfortunately, no one noted her new address.” The middle-aged woman, her hair parted and braided into a severe wreath, flipped once more through the three whole pages making up Klara Bellmann’s file. She ran a finger along the lines of text only to look diligent, Heller saw. Her gray skirt and white blouse, buttoned to her neck, gave off a strong odor of mothballs. Dark rings showed under her eyes. She clearly hadn’t slept well in months. Behind her, three other women banged away at their typewriters. “She came from Berlin, twelve weeks ago. I could call the nurses’ quarters or her department?”

  “Thank you, Frau Schmitt, I’ll find my way over there instead.” Heller took his cap from the table and stood. “Maybe Nurse Klara simply didn’t report her current residence?” he said. “Or maybe the record got misfiled?” He deliberately phrased this in an unfavorable way.

  “Well,” Frau Schmitt snapped, “it’s certainly not my fault if Frau Bellmann didn’t do her duty to notify authorities.”

  The other three women kept their heads lowered, not daring to make a sound. With that, Heller left the office.

  “Are you here about Klara Bellmann?” a young woman asked him out in the hallway. She wore a nurse’s uniform and seemed to have been waiting for him.

  Heller studied the young woman. She didn’t have a hint of local Saxon dialect, no accent at all. He noticed something else too. “Aren’t you that nurse from yesterday evening?”

  “You here about Nurse Klara or not?”

  Heller straightened; he wasn’t used to this kind of disrespectful tone. “I’m Detective Inspector Heller. And, yes, I was trying to find out where Nurse Klara lived, but no one can tell me. You knew Frau Bellmann?”

  The nurse nodded. “We’d become friends. I know where she was living.”

  Heller took out his notebook and pencil, then licked the lead tip. “Tell me your name and address, please.”

  “Rita Stein. Klara was living with relatives a few days ago—name is Schurig, 17 Jägerstrasse.”

  Heller wrote fast. “When was the last time you saw Frau Bellmann?”

  “The evening before last, when our shift ended.”

  “She have anything planned? Make any kind of remark? Maybe shared a sense that someone was following her?” Heller studied Nurse Rita. She didn’t seem as young as she’d looked at first glance. He took her to be older than thirty. He could see dark hair under her cap, her eyes were bright and didn’t look tired, and there was something about her that intrigued him.

  Rita shook her head. “No, nothing.”

  “Why didn’t she keep living here at the nurses’ quarters like you?”

  “Because they need every room they can find, and they’re urging anyone who can get accommodation elsewhere to take it.”

  “Jägerstrasse is way over in Albertstadt, though. Did she come by streetcar?”

  “She came by bicycle. It was a men’s bike, a Diamant, silver. She bought it off some woman who didn’t need it anymore.”

  The rest was clear enough. The crime scene would’ve been on Klara Bellmann’s way home, since the shortest way to Albertstadt from the hospital was over Albert Bridge. It was entirely possible that the murderer had been stalking her for several days.

  “We didn’t find a bicycle,” Heller said.

  “So it was a robbery?”

  “I’m fairly certain the killer wasn’t after the bike. Why did she leave Berlin?”

  “She’d been bombed out and lost everything there. All her possessions. Even the hospital where she was working was destroyed. She had relatives here, so she left.”

  Heller paused. “So why would she bother living in the nurses’ quarters first?”

  “Well, I can only venture a guess . . .” Rita drew back a little, as if suddenly realizing whom she was speaking to.

  “Feel free to let me in on it,” Heller prodded.

  “All right, fine. She was married to a man who wasn’t exactly pure racially. They got divorced in ’38. Her relatives wanted to be sure it was true, so they demanded she get new divorce records from Berlin since all her documents were lost in an air raid.” Rita snapped her mouth shut, as if frightened that her knowledge might lead Heller to jump to conclusions.

  “How did you two become friends?”

  “Is that important? Like always, you find things in common. You share the same worries.”

  Heller shut his notebook and stuffed it and the pencil into his overcoat pocket.

  “Thank you very much. I’ll go and visit the Schurigs later. First, though, I need to see Schorrer again.”

  “Dr. Schorrer? I’m supposed to go to his office too. He apparently wants me to work in one of his departments.”

  “That’s a compliment to your work.”

  “Is it? I don’t even know him.”

  Rita headed for the stairway at a fast pace.

  Heller followed her down the stairs at a distance and only caught up with her once they were in front of the building. They walked in silence past the buildings leading to Schorrer’s office.

  Heller stopped. “Wait,” he blurted out, “that men’s bike was yours, wasn’t it?”

  Rita kept going, yet her pace slowed. She stopped when they reached the front door.

  “My husband is an artillery staff sergeant in Africa. I haven’t heard from him in nearly two years. He’s considered missing.”

  “That doesn’t necessarily mean anything,” Heller said. He didn’t bo
ther adding the usual encouraging smile.

  Rita looked him in the eye. “I’m not going to fool myself.”

  Dr. Schorrer’s conduct had made it clear that he thought Heller was wasting his time. Still, Heller insisted on seeing Klara Bellmann again.

  Her body lay on the dissecting table, eyes closed. Her head was untouched, but long, deep slash wounds covered her body from the neck down. The lamp’s bright light revealed every horrible detail. A sickly sweet odor filled the air.

  Heller scrutinized everything. The smallest detail, even a chipped fingernail, could hold meaning. “He didn’t violate her?”

  Schorrer stood watching with his hands clasped behind his back. “I’m certainly not a medical examiner, yet I can say with reasonable certainty that this did not occur.”

  “And you see no signs of anything cannibalistic?”

  Schorrer shook his head as if insulted by the question. “Herr Detective Inspector, the hospital is overflowing with patients. This is a horrific act, without a doubt, but do you really require my presence here any longer?”

  “It’s likely the killer had some need to make the victim suffer. He reveled in her pain, in her fright. I’m wondering whether the crime was aimed at Klara Bellmann—if the killer was venting his rage specifically on her.”

  Schorrer thrust his hands into the pockets of his lab coat. “I’m not a psychologist. I’m a doctor. I attempt to heal the sick and patch up the wounded. At the front, I did nothing else for years. I stopped wondering about motives a long time ago. And I’ve seen so many opened bodies that I could not tell the difference between an Aryan, Russian, or Jewish body. Here I can’t plan more than a few days ahead, and we’re lacking everything. Soon constant shortages won’t be the rule—soon it will be having nothing at all. We’re hurtling toward our own destruction, with our eyes wide open. So this deceased woman is just one among so many. Her killer as well.”