“Nah, fire gutted it, whole nurses’ building.”
Zaitsev looked to Heller. “Nu, i seychas?”
Heller considered his next move. Glöckner was still alive but had disappeared. It would be impossible to find him, considering the general state of things, even if he were still in the city. That left the saliva evidence and those strange noises.
“We need to have a look at the last crime scene. And we need to find out where the last victim was living,” he said in a resolute voice, hoping to hide his uncertainty from the Russian.
“Fine. The driver will take us. We go to the crime scene.”
After briefing the driver, Zaitsev lit up a cigarette, and Heller tried to see what brand it was. Zaitsev misread Heller’s expression and offered him one.
“Is it all right with you if I take one without smoking it?” Heller asked. Zaitsev gave a terse nod and shook a cigarette out of the pack. Heller took it and stowed it away.
“So you’re serving a new master now?” Heller heard a woman say.
He hadn’t dared to hope that he’d ever hear that voice again. He turned around.
“Nurse Rita!” he said, but Rita Stein’s scrutinizing look spoiled his delight. “I’m still just doing my job.”
Nurse Rita had become thinner, her face a little harder. He didn’t want to imagine what suffering she’d been forced to see. “I hear it’s another young nurse.”
Heller nodded. “Erika Kaluza.”
“Don’t know her. It supposed to be the same killer? The Jew from Berlin?”
Heller didn’t answer.
Rita softened her expression, as if realizing she might’ve gone too far. “It’s completely crazy, isn’t it? I’ve lost so many friends, so many lovely people, while others are spared. There’s Nazis, the war profiteers, and that crazy Fright Man out there. Right when we all start forgetting about him, he returns. Suddenly everyone thinks they’ve seen him or heard him.”
“He got away from me the night of the bombing,” Heller said. “I almost had him. I even shot and wounded him.”
“What Nazis?” asked Zaitsev. He offered Rita a cigarette, but she declined. “You know Nazis?”
“Everyone does, yet no one does!” Rita said. “And no one knows a thing. There’s honor among thieves, as you know. And Professor Ehlig, that ardent Hitler worshipper, he’s doing quite well by your people,” she told Zaitsev. “He’s dining with Colonel General Shishkov. Know the man?”
Heller watched her in awe. She showed absolutely no fear.
Zaitsev nodded and took a drag. “He is a hero.”
“Today’s heroes, tomorrow’s criminals.” Rita spat the words out, taking a big risk.
“What about Dr. Schorrer?” Heller said, trying to moderate.
But Zaitsev took Rita’s lack of respect in stride. “History will decide that. Who is this Schorrer, Heller?”
“Dr. Schorrer was helping us with the autopsies. He’d been a frontline doctor in Poland, got himself transferred here. He’d spoken negatively of the National Socialists to me.” Heller quickly added, “He and Professor Ehlig were not on good terms.”
Rita gave a crooked smile. “Yeah, well. Many a man knows which train to hop on at just the right time. I need to go, duty calls.”
As she moved to turn around, Heller surprised himself by taking her hand and squeezing it longer than necessary. “I’m glad you survived it all.”
And then she surprised him, first by letting him hold her hand without resisting, then by blushing. “I’m glad to see you well too.”
“Admit it: you don’t know what to do next,” Zaitsev said. It was true. Heller had insisted on seeing this soot-blackened cellar where the woman had been found, yet he hadn’t been able to uncover any clues or leads that could help him. As for any saliva traces on the sandy floor, those had either been brushed away or dried up long ago. The crime scene only left him feeling more perplexed. Zaitsev stood inside the entrance to the cellar, smoking.
“Uhlmann said the victim was still breathing,” Heller said.
“I have no idea. I first heard of this case because of you, Heller. We could ask my comrades who apprehended Uhlmann.”
“I have to go back to the hospital and find out who knew Erika Kaluza. I need to question those people. I’m hoping your driver can help out.”
Zaitsev flicked his cigarette butt toward the cellar entrance, looking annoyed. “Takes too long.”
“That’s how an investigation works. We don’t have any new leads, which means we’ll need to—”
Zaitsev held up a hand. He waved Heller over and whispered, “Here she is again.” Then he stepped further back into the shadows and pointed outside. Heller recognized the young woman in her gray overcoat. She was hiding among the remains of brick walls and a ten-foot-tall interior wall that could topple any moment. She’d taken off her white cap.
Heller thought he might have seen that face somewhere before. But he didn’t know where.
“I do not trust her,” Zaitsev said, and drew his pistol. Heller knew what the Russian meant by that: Zaitsev didn’t trust him.
“Let’s find another exit. We’ll creep up on her. There . . .” The Russian pointed behind them, into the darkness.
Heller shook his head. “I, I can’t go in there.”
“You have to.”
“Please, you have to understand. I can’t do it, I . . .” A massive ache filled Heller’s chest.
Zaitsev extended his arm and pressed the muzzle of his gun right where Heller was aching. “Listen to me, nemets. I was buried alive in a foxhole for half a day, and I nearly went mad. But I’m still alive. My mother got ripped to shreds by a German shell, right before my eyes, and my sister was hanged by people like you—people just doing their job. Now follow me and help me catch this woman, otherwise I must conclude that you are conspiring together. Understand?” Zaitsev pushed hard, and Heller stumbled along.
“Now you listen to me,” Heller muttered in anger, “I’m old enough to be your father.”
“My father’s dead too,” Zaitsev hissed.
“After you,” Heller said after a moment.
The Russian stepped back and grinned. “But of course.”
It smelled of death and decomposition. They crawled through a narrow gap and blindly felt their way forward, shuffling. A vise had formed around Heller’s chest and pressed on him until he couldn’t seem to get any air. From somewhere far off, he heard explosions getting louder and the screams from another war. His boots were sinking into deep mud all over again, getting sucked down, and he couldn’t move. He felt hands grabbing at him, grasping him tight, wanting him to remain here in this cellar, in this tomb stinking of soot, of burned flesh and hair. Heller grit his teeth and tried to remain calm, to keep breathing, even though the air was now filling with chlorine gas, acrid, poisonous. He clawed at his neck; the pounding artillery commenced. Mud was suddenly sloshing down on him. Someone grabbed at his neck, and he wheezed in horror.
But it was only Zaitsev’s hand, shaking him.
“Come on, I found an exit.” Zaitsev pulled Heller along behind him, Heller staggering as something crunched under his feet, cracking like a dry branch, and scattered into the air. Then he saw something. Light. He frantically gasped for the fresh air.
Zaitsev eyed him. “Go around that way, I go this way. Try and cut her off.”
Heller crawled out of the hole. They had come out the other side of the destroyed row of buildings, and he breathed a deep sigh of relief. His panic had shaken him to his core. He unbuttoned his overcoat, took off his cap, and tried to hurry on, but rubble blocked his way. Just a narrow path passed through the mountains of debris, and every gust of wind could make a wall collapse. The pain in his ankle came roaring back as if reawakened by the bad memories, thirty years after the severe wound.
His route through seemed to last forever, and he couldn’t imagine having to retrace his steps back through the connected cellars. He looked around. Suddenly he
heard bricks knocking, breaking apart. He pivoted but missed the young woman by an arm’s length. She’d evidently been hiding nearby, waiting for him to pass, and she was now running down what was left of the street. Zaitsev came over a mound of rubble, leaped, and slid down. The woman had already disappeared into a gap in the rubble. Zaitsev sprinted after her, but then he stopped. It wasn’t wise to follow the woman alone down into a cellar, possibly into an ambush.
“Why did you let her get by?” the Russian barked in anger as he returned to Heller. “If it turns out you conspired with her, I will have you both shot! Now come with me, and tell me what you know about this Professor Ehlig. And what does the saying mean—‘honor among thieves’?”
May 17, 1945: Shortly before Noon
“Back again already?” Nurse Rita asked Heller as he crossed the hospital grounds. She was holding a heel of bread. She looked Heller over, then broke off half and handed it to him. Heller wanted to decline, but she stubbornly held out the bread until he took it.
Heller, exhausted, sat down beside her on a low stretch of wall. The chunk of bread was small—he could eat it in two bites, but he only stuck a crumb in his mouth. Zaitsev had gone to speak to Professor Ehlig. It was becoming clear to Heller that the Russians were less concerned with solving a murder than with tracking down Nazis in hiding. And Zaitsev’s driver supposedly hadn’t been able to find out anything about Erika Kaluza either.
“Every day I’m hearing such horrible stories,” Rita said. “Did you know about the concentration camps?”
Heller nodded. Many of the Jews who were sent to Theresienstadt, he knew, had allegedly died of typhoid fever or heart failure only a few weeks after arriving. Boys and the healthy even. It was obvious what was really happening there.
Rita looked him in the eye. “They were killing people, according to a system. Not hundreds. Thousands. I have patients here who are former concentration camp inmates. They’re nothing more than skeletons. They’re going to die, and you can’t do anything for them. Most of them have failing kidneys. And the things they talk about, such hunger and thirst and torture . . .” She lowered her head, gnawing at the piece of bread. “What about you? How’s your case going? Making any progress?”
Heller sighed. “There are no clues, it’s all destroyed. The Russian doesn’t trust me. I’d really like to take another crack at the Bellmann case, go look up her relatives sometime. They must have survived; her neighborhood was pretty well spared. You know anything about Glöckner?”
Rita nodded. “He was helping out where he could after the air raids. Then he disappeared—the day before the Russians came.”
“Wonder if he’s still in the city.”
“Why would he be?”
“His wife? His dog?”
“Both are dead.” Rita stared at the ground.
Heller observed her carefully. Something had changed in the last four hours. “Did the Russians harm you? Are you not feeling well?”
Rita reached into the pocket of her smock and pulled out an envelope.
“I just got this. A soldier returning home was able to send it to me.”
It was a yellow envelope. She handed it to Heller. The paper had taken a long journey. There was a photo inside, of a clearing marked off in the middle of desert sand, showing pristine white crosses. Army helmets rested on most. One cross read, in nice, neat letters, “Staff Sgt. Helge Stein, Aug. 25, 1908–Feb. 20, 1943.”
Something made gentle contact with Heller’s shoulder. It was Rita’s forehead.
She had been fooling herself after all.
They sat there for a while. Heller didn’t dare move. Then Rita sat upright and wiped at her face.
“Good thing he doesn’t have to see all that’s happening here,” she said, taking the photo from Heller and stuffing it back into the envelope. “I was asking around for you earlier and found a nurse who was friends with the dead girl. She works in building 7, in the eye clinic. The building is half-destroyed; they made an emergency entrance on the side facing the river.”
Rita handed Heller a piece of paper with a name: Irma Braune. “If you need me again, I’m now living in building 14 with most of the other nurses until our regular quarters are back in working order. Fourth floor, end of the hall to the right.”
“I’m sorry, I can’t find Nurse Irma,” said the ward nurse, a stout woman of around fifty.
“She’s supposed to be here.”
“According to the schedule she is. And she was here earlier. This morning she came to tell me that the police wanted to question her about Erika. Maybe that’s where she is now?”
Heller doubted that. “Where exactly is that?”
“At the police station.”
“I am the police,” Heller said. “When did you last see Irma Braune?”
“Two hours ago. But after that? Not that I can remember.”
“Where does she live?”
“In Räcknitz, as far as I know. She was living there with Erika. I’d need to check . . .”
Heller stared at her to do so; she only stared back. He eventually won the staring contest, and she went off to the nurses’ station.
“This street must’ve been Zeunerstrasse, there’s a sign there.” Heller pointed over Zaitsev’s shoulder as the Russian gave the driver instructions. What used to be a short trip through town had turned into nearly forty-five minutes. They probably could’ve traveled faster on foot.
Here too was destruction wherever Heller looked. More than half of the buildings were fire-gutted; others had collapsed. Yet people had built makeshift lodgings, wooden sheds, shanties, tents. Others had set themselves up in bombed-out residences, covering the shattered windows with cardboard or boards. Laundry dried on lines as children played among the rubble. Looming on the building walls were those inescapable messages from survivors, written with chalk and white paint. The streets had been cleared just enough for vehicles to pass through.
“I’m looking for an address—number 8,” Heller said to an older woman. She pointed at a building.
As the car halted, Zaitsev leaped out first but stayed in the background and let Heller do the questioning.
An old man was knocking bricks apart, stacking them neatly in front of the building. “Do an Irma and an Erika live here?” Heller asked him.
“They workin’,” the old man said in a Saxon accent.
“Does Erika have relatives living here?”
“Nah, they come alone.”
Heller wished he had a photo of Glöckner with him. “Have you seen any strangers around here in the last few days?”
“Strangers always comin’ round. The authorities, they made bombed-out folks live here with us even though we bombed out ourselves.”
“Did the two women have any male visitors? Maybe a man who has a pronounced limp, wearing a prosthesis?”
The old man shook his head. “Not seen a thing like that.”
“Can I take a look at where they’re living?”
“Sure, second floor on the right. Careful, though, stairs got a hole in it.”
The women’s lodgings consisted of two rooms. The doors were missing, the windows broken. Blankets and drapes kept it from being too drafty. The wallpaper had burned away. Two mattresses lay on the floor, and Heller found the nurses’ few belongings in a trunk. A washbowl stood on a chair, a jug next to it still holding a little water. Heller found a few letters under the mattresses, then two hundred Reichsmarks under the trunk.
“It can’t be coincidence that the Braune girl is gone as well,” Heller told Zaitsev outside the building.
The Russian waved away the notion. “She got scared and took off. But she won’t stay away forever. I will put sentries here and at the hospital.”
They didn’t have to wait long before a truck approached on patrol. Zaitsev signaled for the truck to halt, and two soldiers jumped out.
“Let’s go, back to the hospital,” he ordered Heller.
The trip back took even longer. Count
less people and vehicles blocked the streets. Extensive repairs were being done to power lines. Red Army soldiers were out distributing food, large groups had formed at every soup kitchen, and just as many people waited around the freshwater tanks, holding their metal buckets and bowls. Off to the west, a large cloud of dust was rising. Yet another building wall had likely collapsed; that, or they were tearing another down. Nearly every week they were detonating another dud shell. More and more Russians were coming into the city, either to be stationed here or to be redirected to other cities. The columns of trucks, tanks, and ever-present horse-drawn carts blended in among the endless masses of refugees still trying to get to the west. And there was so much theft, plundering, rape, murder, again and again. Heller didn’t want to think about all the madness. Instead, he couldn’t stop thinking about that jug in the two nurses’ room, how it still had water in it. Zaitsev had the car’s top down, and the sun was beating down on them. Heller, who hadn’t drunk a thing for hours, was incredibly thirsty but didn’t want to admit it to Zaitsev.
They inched toward the hospital, which appeared in the distance like an oasis in a desert of rubble even though it was nearly destroyed itself. The streets were becoming more crowded, and they made even less progress. The Red Army soldiers had their hands full, directing traffic, redirecting trucks, waving through the cars carrying their officers.
As they crawled along, the driver steered into Fiedlerstrasse for the main entrance, slaloming around bomb craters, jolting them over potholes patched however possible, honking constantly, cursing and screaming. Zaitsev took it all with stoic indifference while Heller, who already had a headache, would’ve rather gotten out and walked the rest of the way.
The windshield suddenly burst, and the driver slumped over. The car hurtled out of control, crashed into a cart, and the engine died. Only now did Heller hear the shots.
“Get down!” Zaitsev shouted as he opened the passenger door and rolled out. More rounds struck the car, a tire burst, and another, and the engine hissed.
Heller got down low between the rows of seats but still felt exposed and defenseless. He too wanted out of the car yet didn’t want to leave his cover. Another shot shredded the back of the driver’s seat, and the driver, who Heller had thought was already dead, uttered a final moan and toppled to the side. More rounds pelted them. Zaitsev fired back as return fire from Russian rifles filled the air.
The Air Raid Killer (Max Heller, Dresden Detective Book 1) Page 18
