A Quiet Flame

6 BERLIN, 1932

IN A MANUAL of forensic medicine that Ernst Gennat gave all the bulls that joined Department IV, there was a photograph that always caused a certain amount of mirth the first time you saw it. In the photograph, a naked girl was lying on a bed with her hands tied behind her back, around her neck was a ligature pulled tight, and half of her head had been blown off with a shotgun. Oh yes, and there was a dildo up her ass. Nothing funny about any of that, of course. It was the caption underneath the picture that was the funny part. It read: “Circumstances Arousing Suspicion.” That used to kill us. Whenever any of us who were assigned to D4 saw an atrocious and obvious case of homicide, we used to repeat the words of that caption. It helped lighten things up.

The body was found in Friedrichshain Park, close to the hospital, in the eastern part of Berlin. The area was popular with children, because of the fairy-tale fountain that was there. Water flowed down a series of shallow steps that were flanked by ten groups of characters from stories each of us had heard at his mother’s knee. When the call came into the Police Praesidium on Alexanderplatz, it was hoped that the dead girl might have drowned, accidentally. But one look at the body and I knew different. She looked like the victim of the wolf from one of those old fairy tales. The kind of big bad wolf who might have tried to eat any one of those little limestone heroes and heroines.

“Bloody hell, sir,” said my sergeant, KBS Heinrich Grund, as we shone our flashlights over the body. “Circumstances arousing suspicion, or what?”

“Sure looks that way, doesn’t it?”

“Only a bit, yeah. Shit. Wait till the boys at the Alex hear about this one.”

There was not a permanent staff of detectives for homicide investigations at the Alex. D4 was supposed to be only a supervisory body, with three rotating teams of cops from other Berlin inspectorates. But in practice it didn’t work like that. By 1932 there were three teams on active duty, with nothing left in reserve. That night I had already driven over to Wedding to take a look at the body of a fifteen-year-old boy who had been found stabbed to death in a bus shelter. The other two teams were still out on cases: KOK Müller was looking into the death of a man found hanging on a lamppost in Lichtenrade; and KOK Lipik was in Neukölln, investigating the fatal shooting of a woman. If this sounds like a crime wave, it wasn’t. Most of the murders that took place in Berlin that spring and early summer were political. And but for the tit-for-tat violence carried out by Nazi storm troopers and Communist cadres, the city’s crime figures would have shown a declining murder rate during the last months of the Weimar Republic.

Friedrichshain Park was a leafy mile north west of the Alex. After the call came in, we were there in less than twenty minutes. Me, district secretary Grund, an ordinary criminal secretary, an assistant criminal secretary, and half a dozen uniformed polenta from the protection police—the Schutzpolizei.

“A lust murder, do you think?” asked Grund.

“Could be. There’s not much blood around, though. Whatever lust might have been involved must have happened elsewhere.” I looked up and around. The road junction at Königs-Thor was only a few yards to the west of us. “Whoever it was could have stopped his car on Friedenstrasse, or Am Friedrichshain, lifted her out of the trunk, and carried her here just after it got dark tonight.”

“With the park on one side of the road and a couple of cemeteries on the other, it’s a good spot,” said Grund. “Lots of trees and bushes to keep him covered. Nice and quiet.”

Then, somewhere to the west of us, in the heart of the Scheunenviertel, we heard two shots fired.

“Although not so as you’d notice,” I said. Hearing a third shot, and then a fourth, I added, “Sounds like your friends are busy tonight.”

“Nothing to do with me,” said Grund. “More likely the Always True, I’d have thought. This is their patch.”

The Always True was one of Berlin’s most powerful criminal gangs.

“But if it was a Red who just got shot, then presumably that would be to your lot’s advantage.”

Heinrich Grund was, or had been, just about my best friend on the force. We had been in the army together. There was a picture of him on the wall in my corner of the detectives’ room. In the picture, no less a figure than Paul von Hindenburg, the president of the republic, was presenting Heinrich with the victor’s plaque for winning the Prussian Police Boxing Championships. But the previous week I had discovered that my old friend had joined the NSBAG—the National Socialist Fellowship of Civil Servants. As he was a boxer with a reputation for using the head, I had to admit that being a Nazi suited him. All the same, it felt like a betrayal.

“What makes you think it was a Nazi shooting a Red, and not a Red shooting a Nazi?”

“I can tell the difference.”

“How?”

“It’s a full moon, isn’t it? That’s usually the time when werewolves and Nazis creep out of their holes to commit murder.”

“Very funny.” Grund smiled patiently and lit a cigarette. He blew out the match and, careful not to contaminate the crime scene, put it in his vest pocket. He might have been a Nazi but he was still a good detective. “And your lot. They’re so different, are they?”

“My lot? What lot is that?”

“Come on, Bernie. Everyone knows the Official supports the Reds.”

The Official was the union of Prussian police officers, to which I belonged. It wasn’t the biggest union. That was the General. But the important names in the General’s leadership—policemen like Dillenburger and Borck—were openly right-wing and anti-Semitic. Which was why I’d left the General and joined the Official.

“The Official isn’t Communist,” I said. “We support the Social Democrats and the republic.”

“Oh, yeah? Then why the Iron Front against Fascism? Why not an Iron Front against Bolshevism, too?”

“Because, as you well know, Heinrich, most of the violence on the streets is committed or provoked by the Nazis.”

“How do you work that out, exactly?”

“That woman in Neukölln that Lipik’s investigating. Even before he left the Alex, he reckoned she had been shot dead by a storm trooper who was aiming at a Commie.”

“So. It was an accident. I don’t see how that proves the Nazis organize most of the violence.”

“No? Well, you want to come round our way and take a look out of my apartment window on Dragonerstrasse. The Central Offices of the German Communist Party are just around the corner, on Bulowplatz. So that’s where the Nazis choose to exercise their democratic right to hold a parade. Does that seem reasonable? Does that sound law-abiding?”

“Proves my point, doesn’t it? You living in a Red area like that.”

“All it proves is that the Nazis are always spoiling for a fight.”

I bent down and flicked my flashlight up and down the dead girl’s body. Her upper half looked more or less normal. She was about thirteen or fourteen, blond, with pale blue eyes and a small galaxy of freckles around her pixie nose. It was a tomboyish sort of face, and you could easily have mistaken her for a boy. The matter of her sex was only confirmed by her small, adolescent breasts, the rest of her sexual organs having been removed along with her lower intestines, her womb, and whatever else gets packed in down there when a girl gets born. But it wasn’t her evisceration that caught my eye. In truth, both Heinrich and I had seen this kind of thing many times in the trenches. There was also the caliper on her left leg. I hadn’t noticed it before.

“No walking stick,” I said, tapping it with my pencil. “You’d think she’d have had one.”

“Maybe she didn’t need one. It’s not every cripple that needs a stick.”

“You’re right. Goebbels manages very well without one, doesn’t he? For a cripple. Then again there’s a big stick inside almost everything he says.” I lit a cigarette and let out a big, smoky sigh. “Why do people do this kind of thing?” I said to myself.

“You mean, kill children?”

“I meant, Why kill them like this? It’s monstrous, isn’t it? Depraved.”

“I should have thought it was obvious,” said Grund.

“Oh? How’s that?”

“You’re the one who said he must be depraved. I couldn’t agree more. But is it any wonder? I say is it any wonder we have depraved people doing things like this when you consider the filth and depravity that’s tolerated by this fag end of a government? Look around you, Bernie. Berlin is like a big, slimy rock. Lift it up and you can see everything that crawls. The oilers, stripe men, wall-sliders, boot girls, sugarlickers, Munzis, T-girls. The women who are men and the men who are women. Sick. Venal. Corrupt. Depraved. And all of it tolerated by your beloved Weimar Republic.”

“I suppose everything will be different if Adolf Hitler gets into power.” I was laughing as I said it. The Nazis had done well in the most recent elections. But nobody sensible really believed they could run the country. Nobody thought for a minute that President Hindenburg was ever going to ask the man he detested most in the world—a guttersnipe NCO from Austria—to become the next chancellor of Germany.

“Why not? We’re going to need someone to restore order in this country.”

As he spoke, we heard another shot travel through the warm night air.

“And who better than the man who causes all the trouble to put an end to it, eh? I can sort of see the logic behind that, yes.”

One of the uniforms came over. We stood up. It was Sergeant Gollner, better known as Tanker—because of his size and shape.

“While you two were arguing,” he said, “I put a cordon around this part of the park. So as to keep the pot-watchers away. Last thing we want is any details of how she was killed getting into the newspapers. Giving stupid people stupid ideas. Confessing to things they haven’t done. We’ll have a closer look in the morning, eh? When it’s light.”

“Thanks, Tanker,” I said. “I should have—”

“Skip it.” He took a deep breath of a night air made moist by water a light breeze had carried from the fountain. “Nice here, isn’t it? I always liked this place. Used to come here a lot, I did. On account of the fact that my brother is buried over there.” He nodded south, in the direction of the state hospital. “With the revolutionaries of 1848.”

“I didn’t know you were that old,” I said.

Tanker grinned. “No, he got shot by the Freikorps, in December 1918. Proper lefty, so he was. A real troublemaker. But he didn’t deserve that. Not after what he went through in the trenches. Reds or not, none of them deserved to be shot for what happened.”

“Don’t tell me,” I said, nodding at Heinrich Grund. “Tell him.”

“He knows what I think,” said Tanker. He looked down at the girl’s body. “What was wrong with her leg, then?”

“Hardly matters now,” observed Grund.

“She might have had polio,” I said. “Or else she was a spastic.”

“You wouldn’t have thought they’d have let her out on her own, would you?” said Grund.

“She was crippled.” I bent down and went through the pockets of her coat. I came up with a roll of cash, wrapped in a rubber band. It was as thick as the handle of a tennis racket. I tossed it to Grund. “Plenty of disabled people manage perfectly well on their own. Even the kids.”

“Must be several hundred marks here,” he muttered. “Where does a kid like this get money like that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Had to manage,” Tanker was saying. “The number of maimed and injured we had after the war. I used to have the beat next to the Charité Hospital. Got quite friendly with some of the lads who were there. A lot of them managed with no legs, or no arms.”

“It’s one thing being crippled for something that happened fighting for the Fatherland,” said Grund, tossing the roll of cash in his hand. “It’s something else when you’re born with it.”

“Meaning what, exactly?” I asked.

“Meaning that life’s difficult enough when you’re a parent without having to look after a disabled child.”

“Maybe they didn’t mind looking after her. Not if they loved her.”

“If you ask me, if she was a spastic she’s better off out of it,” said Grund. “Germany’s better off in general with fewer cripples around.” He caught the look in my eye. “No, really. It’s a simple matter of racial purity. We have to protect our stock.”

“I can think of one cripple we’d all be better off without,” I said.

Tanker laughed and walked away.

“Anyway, it’s only a caliper,” I said. “Lots of kids have calipers.”

“Maybe,” said Grund. He threw the money back. “But it’s not every kid that’s carrying several hundred marks.”

“Right. We’d better have a look around, before the site gets trampled over. See what we can find on our hands and knees with the flashlights.”

I dropped onto all fours and slowly crawled away from the body in the direction of Königs-Thor. Heinrich Grund did the same, a yard or two to my left. The night was warm, and the grass felt dry and smelled sweet under my hands. It was something we had done before. Something Ernst Gennat was keen on. Something that was in the manual he’d given us. How it was small things that solved murders: bullet casings, blood spots, collar buttons, cigarette ends, matchbooks, earrings, hanks of hair, party badges. Things that were large and easy to see were usually carried away from a crime scene. But the small stuff. That was different. It was the small stuff that could send a man to the guillotine. Nobody called them clues. Gennat hated that word.

“Clues are for the clueless,” was what the Full Ernst would tell us. “That’s not what I want from my detectives. Give me little spots of color on a canvas. Like that Frenchie who used to paint in little dots. Georges Seurat. Each dot means shit on its own. But when you take a few steps back and look at all of the dots together, you see a picture. That’s what I want you bastards to do. Learn how to paint me a picture like Georges Seurat.”

So there we were, me and Heinrich Grund, crawling along the grass in Friedrichshain Park, like a couple of dogs. The Berlin polenta trying to paint a picture.

If I had blinked, I might have missed it. As spots of color go, this one was as small as anything you might have seen on an Impressionist’s canvas, but just as colorful. At first glance I mistook it for a cornflower, because it was light blue, like the dead girl’s eyes. It was a pill, lying on top of a few blades of grass. I picked it up and held it up to my eyes and saw that it was as immaculate as a diamond, which meant it couldn’t have been there that long. There had been a brief shower of rain just after lunch, so it had to have fallen on the ground some time after that. A man hurrying back to the road from the fountains where he had dumped a body might easily have taken out a box of pills, fumbled it in his nervous state, and dropped one. Now all I had to do was find out what kind of pill it was.

“What have you got there, boss?”

“A pill,” I said, laying it on his palm.

“Kind of pill?”

“I’m not a chemist.”

“Want me to check it out at the hospital?”

“No. I’ll get Hans Illmann to do it.”

Illmann was professor of forensic medicine at the Institute for Police Science in Charlottenburg, and senior pathologist at the Alex. He was also a prominent member of the Social Democratic Party, the SDP. For this and other alleged character failings he had been frequently denounced by Goebbels in the pages of Der Angriff, Berlin’s Nazi newspaper. Illmann wasn’t Jewish, but as far as the Nazis were concerned, he was the next worst thing: a liberal-minded intellectual.

“Illmann?”

“Professor Illmann. Any objections?”

Grund looked up at the moon, as if trying to learn patience. The white light had turned his pale blond head a steely shade of silver, and his blue eyes became almost electric. He looked like some kind of machine-man. Something hard, metallic, and cruel. The head turned, and he stared at me as he might have stared at some poor opponent in the ring—an inadequate subspecies of man who was not fit to enter a contest with one such as him.

“You’re the boss,” he said, and dropped the pill back in my hand.

But for how much longer? I asked myself.

WE DROVE BACK to the Alex, which, with its cupolas and arched entranceways, was as big as a railway station and, behind the four-story brick façade, in the double-height entrance hall, very nearly as busy. All human life was in there. And quite a bit of pond life, too. There was a drunk with a black eye, who was unsteadily awaiting being locked up for the night; a taxi driver making a complaint about a passenger who had run off without paying; an androgynous-looking young man wearing tight white shorts, who was sitting quietly in a corner, checking his makeup in a hand mirror; and a bespectacled man with a briefcase in his hands and a livid red mark across his mouth.

At the bunker-sized front desk, we checked through a file containing a list of missing persons. The desk sergeant who was supposed to be assisting us had a big handlebar mustache and an eleven o’clock shadow that was so blue it made his face look like a housefly’s. This effect was enhanced, because his eyes were bulging out of his head at the sight of two tall boot girls a cop had shooed in off the street. They were wearing thigh-high black leather boots and red leather coats, which, thoughtfully, they had left undone, revealing to anyone who cared to look that they were wearing nothing underneath. One of them was carrying a riding crop that the arresting officer, a man with an eye patch—a man I knew, named Bruno Stahlecker—was having a hard job persuading her to give up. Clearly the girls had had a drink or two and probably quite a bit else besides, and, as I flicked through the missing-persons reports, half of me was listening to what Stahlecker and the girls were saying. It would have been hard not to hear it.

“I like a man in uniform,” said the taller of the leather-booted Amazons. She snapped her riding crop against her boot and then fingered the hair at the base of her belly, provocatively. “Which one of Berlin’s bulls wants to be my slave tonight?”

Boot girls were the city’s outdoor dominatrices. Mostly they worked west of Wittenbergplatz, near the Zoological Gardens, but Stahlecker had picked up this pair of whores in Friedrichstrasse after a man had complained of being beaten and robbed by two women in leather.

“Behave yourself, Brigit,” said Stahlecker. “Or I’ll throw the rules of the medical profession at you as well.” He turned to the man with the red mark on his face. “Are these the two women who robbed you?”

“Yes,” said the man. “One of them hit me across the face with a whip and demanded money or she’d hit me again.”

The girls loudly protested their innocence. Innocence never looked quite so venereal and corrupt.

Finally I found what I’d been looking for. “Anita Schwarz,” I said, showing Heinrich Grund the missing-persons report. “Aged fifteen. Behrenstrasse 8, flat 3. Report filed by her father, Otto. Disappeared yesterday. One meter, sixty centimeters tall, blond hair, blue eyes, caliper on left leg, carries a walking stick. That’s our girl, all right.”

But Grund was hardly paying attention. I thought he was looking at the free nude show. And leaving him to it, I went to one of the other filing cabinets and found a more detailed report. There was a star on the file and, next to it, a letter W. “It would seem that the deputy police president is taking an interest in our case,” I said. Inside the file was a photograph. Quite an old one, I thought. But there could be no doubt: it was the girl in the park. “Perhaps he knows the girl’s father.”

“I know that man,” murmured Grund.

“Who? Schwarz?”

“No. That man there.” Leaning back on the front desk, he flicked his snout at the man with the whip mark on his face. “He’s an alphonse.” “Alphonse” was Berlin criminal underworld slang for a pimp. One of many slang words for a pimp, like “louie,” “oiler,” “stripe man,” “ludwig,” and “garter-handler.” “Runs one of those bogus clinics off the Ku-damm. I think his racket is that he poses as a physician and then ‘prescribes’ an underage girl for his so-called patient.” Grund called out to Stahlecker. “Hey, Bruno? What’s the citizen’s name? The one wearing the spectacles and the extra smile.”

“Him? Dr. Geise.”

“Dr. Geise, my eggs. His real name is Koch, Hans Theodor Koch, and he’s no more a doctor than I am. He’s an alphonse. A medicine man who fixes old perverts up with little girls.”

The man stood up. “That’s a damn lie,” he said indignantly.

“Open his briefcase,” said Grund. “See if I’m wrong.”

Stahlecker looked at the man, who held the briefcase tightly to his chest as if he really did have something to hide. “Well, sir? How about it?”

Reluctantly, the man allowed Stahlecker to take the briefcase and then to open it. A few seconds later, a pile of pornographic magazines was lying on the desk sergeant’s blotter. The magazine was called Figaro, and on the cover of each copy was a picture of seven naked boys and girls, about ten or eleven years old, sitting in the branches of a dead tree, like a pride of small white lions.

“You old pervert,” snarled one of the boot girls.

“This puts rather a different complexion on things, sir,” Stahlecker told Koch.

“That is a naked-culture magazine,” insisted Koch. “Dedicated to the cause of free life reform. It doesn’t prove anything of what this vile man has alleged.”

“It proves one thing,” said the boot girl with the whip. “It proves you like looking at dirty pictures of little boys and girls.”

We left them all in a heated argument.

“What did I tell you?” said Grund as we went back to the car. “This city is a whore and your beloved republic is her pimp. When are you going to wake up to that fact, Bernie?”

ON BEHRENSTRASSE, I parked the car in front of a glass-covered arcade that led to Unter den Linden. The arcade was nicknamed the Back Passage, because it was a popular pick-up spot for Berlin’s male prostitutes. These were easily identifiable thanks to the short white trousers, sailor shirts, and peaked caps many of them wore to appear younger to the tree stumps—their middle-aged clients who, until they had made their selection, would walk up and down the passage pretending to look in the windows of the arcade’s antique shops.

It was a warm night. By my reckoning, there were at least eighty or ninety of the city’s sultriest boys milling around underneath the famous REEMTSMA sign—one of the few left unbroken by the Nazi SA. Storm troopers were supposed to smoke a Trommler brand called Story, so, being Nazis and, therefore, very brand-loyal, they often took exception to other brands of tobacco, of which Reemtsma was perhaps the best known. If the SA did show up, all of the sultry boys would take to their heels or risk a beating—perhaps worse. The SA seemed to hate queers almost as much as they hated Communists and Jews.

We found the apartment above a café in a smart-looking Romanesque building. I pulled the polished brass bell and we waited. A minute later we heard a man’s voice above our heads, and we stepped back on the sidewalk to get a better look at him.

“Yes?”

“Herr Schwarz?”

“Yes.”

“Police, sir. May we come up?”

“Yes. Wait there. I’ll come down and let you in.”

While we waited, Heinrich Grund fulminated against all the sultries we’d seen. “Russian fairies,” he said.

Immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution, many of Berlin’s prostitutes, male and female, had been Russians. But this was no longer true, and I did my best to ignore him. It wasn’t that I liked queers. I just didn’t dislike them as much as he did.

Otto Schwarz came to the door to let us in. We showed him our KRIPO warrant discs and introduced ourselves, and he nodded as if he had been expecting us. He was a big man with a belly that looked as if a lot of money had been poured into it. His fair hair was cut very short at the sides and wavy on top. Underneath a swinish nose that was almost divided in two by a thick scar was a nearly invisible toothbrush mustache. That he reminded me strongly of Ernst Röhm, the SA leader, was a first impression—reinforced by the uniform he was wearing, illegally. There had been a ban on Nazi uniforms since June 1930, and as recently as April, in a campaign to reduce Nazi terrorism in Berlin, Reich President Hindenburg had dissolved the SA and the SS. I wasn’t much good at recognizing the shoulder and collar insignia on their uniforms, but Grund was. The two of them made polite conversation as we tramped upstairs. That was how I came to learn not just that Schwarz was an Oberführer in the SA but also that this was the equivalent of a brigadier general. There was a small part of me that wanted to join in this polite conversation. I wanted to say I was surprised to find an SA Oberführer at home when there were Communists to lynch and Jewish windows to smash. But since I was about to tell Schwarz that his daughter was dead, I had to make do with an observation about his wearing the uniform of a proscribed organization. Half of the polenta in Berlin would have looked the other way, ignored it. But then half of the cops in Berlin were Nazis.

Many of my colleagues seemed quite happy to be sleepwalking their way to a dictatorship. I wasn’t one of them.

“You know that since April 14 of this year, it’s illegal to wear that uniform, don’t you, sir?” I said.

“Surely that hardly matters now. The ban on uniforms is about to be revoked.”

“Until then it’s still illegal, sir. However, under the circumstances, I’ll overlook it.”

Schwarz colored a little and then squeezed his fists, one after the other. These made a noise like a noose tightening. I imagine he was wishing there was one around my neck. He bit his lip. It was easier to reach than my face. He pushed open the apartment door. Stiffly, he said, “Please. Come in, gentlemen.”

The apartment was a shrine to Adolf Hitler. There was a portrait of him in an oval frame in the hall, and another, different portrait of him inside a square frame in the sitting room. A copy of Mein Kampf lay open on a book stand that was on the sideboard, next to a family Bible, and behind these was a framed photograph of Otto Schwarz and Adolf Hitler. They were wearing leather flying helmets and sitting in the front seat of an enormous open-top Mercedes with cheesy grins on their faces, as if they had just won the ADAC Eifelrennen, and in record time. By one of the armchairs on the floor lay a dozen or so copies of Der Stürmer, the vehemently anti-Semitic newspaper. I’d seen election posters for Adolf Hitler that were less obviously Nazi than the Schwarz family home.

In her own sweet, big-breasted, blond, and blue-eyed way, Frau Schwarz looked no less of a Nazi than her storm trooper of a husband. When she put her arm through her husband’s arm, I half expected them both to shout “Germany, awake!” and “Death to the Jews” before breaking up the furniture and then singing the “Horst Wessel Song.” Sometimes it was only these daydreaming little fantasies that made my job at all bearable. It certainly wasn’t two hundred fifty marks a month. Frau Schwarz wore a full, gathered dirndl skirt with traditional embroidery, a tight-laced-up blouse, an apron, and an expression that was a combination of fear and hostility.

Schwarz put his hand on top of the hand his wife had threaded through his ham hock of an arm, and then she put her other hand on his. But for their grim and resolute faces, they reminded me of a couple getting married.

At last they looked like they were ready to hear what they knew I was going to tell them. I’d like to say I admired their courage and that I felt sorry for them. The truth is, I didn’t, very much. The sight of Schwarz’s illegal uniform and the battalion number on his collar patch made me almost indifferent to their feelings. Assuming they had any. A very good friend of mine, POWM Emil Kuhfeld, a first sergeant with the SCHUPO, had been shot dead at the head of the detachment of riot police trying to disperse a large group of Communists in Frankfurter Allee. A Nazi commissar at Police Station 85, who had investigated the case, had managed to pin the murder on a Communist. But nearly everyone at the Alex knew he had suppressed the evidence of a witness who had seen Kuhfeld shot by an SA man with a rifle. The day after Kuhfeld’s murder, this SA man, one Walter Grabsch, was discovered dead in his Kadinerstrasse flat, having conveniently committed suicide. Kuhfeld’s funeral had been the biggest ever given to a Berlin policeman. I had helped carry the coffin. Which was how I knew that the battalion number on Schwarz’s blue collar patch was the same battalion to which Walter Grabsch had belonged.

I gave Herr and Frau Schwarz all of the hard words of grief straight from the holster. I didn’t even try to rub them in the snow first.

“We think we’ve found the body of your daughter, Anita. We believe she was murdered. Obviously I’ll have to ask you to come down to the station to identify her. Shall we say tomorrow morning, ten o’clock, at the Police Praesidium, on Alexanderplatz?”

Otto Schwarz nodded silently.

I had retailed bad news before, of course. Just the previous week I’d had to tell a mother in Moabit that her seventeen-year-old son, a schoolboy at the local Gymnasium, had been murdered by Communists who’d mistaken him for a brown shirt. “Are you sure it’s him, Commissar?” she asked me more than once during the course of my lachrymose time with her. “Are you sure there hasn’t been a mistake? Couldn’t it be someone else?”

Herr and Frau Schwarz seemed to be taking it on the chin, however.

I glanced around the apartment again. There was a little embroidery sampler in a frame above the door. It read WILLINGNESS FOR SELF-SACRIFICE and was stitched in red, with an exclamation point. I’d seen one before, and I knew the quotation was from Mein Kampf. I wasn’t surprised to see it, of course. But I was surprised that I could see no photographs of their daughter, Anita. Most people who are parents have one or two of their children around the place.

“We have the photograph you gave us, on file,” I said. “So we’re quite sure it’s her, I’m afraid. But it would save time if you could spare us some others.”

“Save time?” Otto Schwarz frowned. “I don’t understand. She’s dead, isn’t she?”

“Save time trying to catch her murderer,” I said coldly. “Someone may have seen her with him.”

“I’ll see what I can find,” Frau Schwarz said, and left the room, quite composed and less upset than if I’d told her that Hitler wouldn’t be coming to tea.

“Your wife seems to be taking it very well,” I said.

“My wife is a nurse at the Charité,” he said. “I suppose she’s used to dealing with bad news. Besides. We were sort of expecting the worst.”

“Really, sir?” I glanced at Grund, who stared balefully at me and then looked away.

“We’re very sorry for your loss, sir,” he told Schwarz. “Very sorry, indeed. Incidentally, there’s no need for both of you to come to the Praesidium tomorrow. And if tomorrow’s not convenient, we can always do it another time.”

“Thank you, Sergeant. But tomorrow will be fine.”

Grund nodded. “Best to get it over with, sir,” he said, nodding. “You’re probably right. And then you can get on with your grieving.”

“Yes. Thank you, Sergeant.”

“What was the nature of your daughter’s disability?” I asked.

“She was a spastic. It affected only the left side of her body. She had trouble walking, of course. There were also occasional seizures, spasms, and other involuntary movements. She couldn’t hear very well, either.”

Schwarz went over to the sideboard and, ignoring the Bible, laid his hand fondly on the open copy of Hitler’s book, as if his Führer’s warm words about the National Socialist movement might afford him some spiritual and philosophical solace.

“What about her capacity for understanding?” I asked.

He shook his head. “There was nothing wrong with her mind, if that’s what you mean?”

“It was.” I paused. “And I just wondered if you might be able to explain how she came to have five hundred marks on her.”

“Five hundred marks?”

“In her coat pocket.”

He shook his head. “There must be some mistake.”

“No, sir, there’s no mistake.”

“Where would Anita get five hundred marks? Someone must have put it there.”

I nodded. “I suppose that’s possible, sir.”

“No, really.”

“Do you have any other children, Herr Schwarz?”

He looked astonished even to be asked such a thing. “Good God, no. Do you think we would have risked having another child like Anita?” He sighed loudly, and suddenly there was a strong smell of something foul in the air. “No, we had quite enough to do just looking after her. It wasn’t easy, I can tell you. It wasn’t easy at all.”

Finally, Frau Schwarz returned with several photographs. They were old and rather faded. One was folded down at the edge, as if someone had handled it carelessly. “These are all that I could find,” she announced, still quite dry-eyed.

“All of them, did you say?”

“Yes. That’s all of them.”

“Thank you, Frau Schwarz. Thank you very much.” I nodded curtly. “Well, then. We had better be getting back to the station. Until tomorrow.”

Schwarz started to move toward the door.

“It’s all right, sir. We’ll see ourselves out.”

We went out of the apartment and down the stairs to the street. The Café Kerkau, beneath the apartment, was still open, but I was in the mood for something stronger than coffee. I cranked up the car’s two-cylinder engine and we drove east along Unter den Linden.

“I need a drink after that,” I said after a few minutes.

“I suppose it’s lucky you didn’t have a drink before,” observed Grund.

“Meaning?”

“Meaning, you were a bit hard on them, sir.” He shook his head. “Christ, you didn’t even rub it with snow. You just gave it to them, grit and all. Right between the eyes.”

“Let’s go to the Resi,” I said. “Somewhere with lots of people.”

“And we all know how good you are with people,” Grund said bitterly. “Was it because he was a storm trooper that you treated him and his wife like they had no feelings?”

“Didn’t you see that collar patch? Twenty-first Battalion. That was the same SA battalion Walter Grabsch belonged to. You remember Walter Grabsch? He murdered Emil Kuhfeld.”

“That’s not what the local police said. And what about all the polenta the Commies have murdered? Those two police captains, Anlauf and Lenck. Not forgetting Paul Zankert. What about those fellows?”

“I didn’t know them. But I did know Emil Kuhfeld. He was a good cop.”

“So were Anlauf and Lenck.”

“And I hate the bastards who murdered them every bit as much as I hate the man who killed Emil. The only difference between the Reds and the Nazis as far as I’m concerned is that the Reds don’t wear uniforms. If they did, it’d be a lot easier for me to hate them on sight, too, the same way I hated Schwarz, back there.”

“Well, at least you admit it, you uncaring bastard.”

“All right. I admit it. I was a bit out of line. But it could have been a lot worse. It’s only out of sympathy for that Nazi sod’s feelings that I didn’t pinch him for wearing the SA uniform.”

“That was big of you, sir.”

“Assuming either of them had any feelings. Which I very much doubt. Did you see her?”

“How do you work that out?”

“Come on, Heinrich. You know the play as well as I do. Your daughter’s dead. Someone murdered her. Cue handkerchief. ‘Are you sure?’ ‘Yes, we’re sure.’ ”

“She’s a nurse. They can take it.”

“My eggs. Did you see her? Her tits didn’t even wobble when I told her that her daughter was dead. They were good tits. I liked looking at them. But they didn’t so much as tremble when I gave it to them. Tell me I’m wrong, Heinrich. And tell me I’m wrong that there weren’t any photographs of Anita Schwarz on the sideboard. Tell me I’m wrong that she spent at least ten minutes trying to find one. And tell me I’m wrong that she said she’d given me all the photographs of her daughter.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Wouldn’t you want to keep at least one photograph to remember your dead daughter? Just in case some dumb cop like you lost them?”

“She knows she’ll get them back. That’s all.”

“No, no. People aren’t like that, Heinrich. She’d have kept one back. At least one. But she gave me all of them. That’s what she said. I asked her about it. And she confirmed it. You heard her. Not only that, but these pictures aren’t in the best of condition. Like they’ve been kept in an old shoe box. A Commie kills you tonight and someone asks me for a picture of you for the police newspaper, I can give them a nice one, in a frame, in twenty seconds. And I’m not even related to you. Thank God.”

“So what are you saying?”

I pulled up close to the Residenz casino. It was well past midnight, but there were still plenty of people going into the place. One or two of them cops, probably. The Resi was popular with KRIPO from the Alex, and not just because of its proximity.

“I’m saying what you were saying back in the park.”

“What did I say back in the park?”

“That maybe they’re both of them glad the kid’s dead. That maybe they think she’s better off. More important, that they’re better off.”

“How do you work that out?”

“It’s Nazi policy, isn’t it? That cripples are a waste of all our tax marks. That’s where I assumed you’d got all this racial-purity shit from. Hell, Heinrich, you saw that photograph of Schwarz with Hitler.” I lit a cigarette. “I’ll bet you anything Hitler would probably like Otto Schwarz a whole lot better if it wasn’t for his gimp daughter.”

We went inside the Resi. The spanner on the door knew our faces and waved us past the ticket booth. None of the clubs made cops pay to get in. They needed us more than we needed them. Especially when, as with the Resi, there were more than a thousand people in the place. We found ourselves a little loge in the balcony and ordered a couple of beers. The club was full of alcoves and booths and private cellars, all of them equipped with telephones that encouraged patrons to flirt at a safe distance. These telephones were also one of the reasons the place was popular with detectives from the Alex. Informers liked them. The whores liked the telephones, too. Everyone liked the telephones at the Resi. The minute we sat down, the phone on our table started to ring. I picked it up.

“Gunther?” said a man’s voice. “It’s Bruno. Down here by the bar in front of the shooting gallery.” I glanced over the edge of the balcony and saw Stahlecker waving up at me. I waved back.

“For a man with one eye, you do all right.”

“We booked that alphonse. Say thanks to Heinrich.”

“Bruno says thanks, Heinrich. They booked the alphonse.”

“Good,” said Grund.

“On my way out of the Alex I saw Isidor,” Bruno said. “If I saw you he told me to tell you he wants to see you first thing in the morning.”

Isidor was the name by which everyone called the DPP, Dr. Bernard Weiss. It was also the name by which Der Angriff called him. Der Angriff didn’t mean the name to sound affectionate, just anti-Semitic. It didn’t bother Izzy.

“Did he say what about?” I asked, although I was pretty sure I knew the answer.

“No.”

“What time is first thing for Izzy these days?”

“Eight o’clock.”

I looked at my watch and groaned. “There goes my evening.”

HE WAS A SMALL MAN with a small mustache, a longish nose, and little round glasses. His hair was dark and combed back across a head full of brains. He wore a well-cut three-piece suit, spats, and, in winter, a coat with a fur collar. Easily caricatured, his Jewishness exaggerated by his enemies, Dr. Bernard Weiss cut an odd figure among the rest of Berlin’s policemen. Heimannsberg, who towered over him, was everyone’s idea of what a senior policeman should look like. Izzy’s appearance was more that of a lawyer, and indeed, he had once been a judge in the Berlin courts. But he was no stranger to uniforms, and returned from the Great War with an Iron Cross, First Class. Izzy did his best to seem like a hard-bitten detective, but it didn’t work. For one thing, he never carried a gun, not even after he was beaten up by a right-wing uniformed cop who claimed he’d mistaken the deputy police president for a Communist. Izzy preferred to do his fighting with his tongue, which was a formidable weapon when deployed. His sarcasm was as caustic as battery acid and, as he was surrounded by men of much lesser intellectual abilities than himself, it was frequently splashed around. This did not make him loved. That would hardly have mattered for most men in his elevated position, but since there were no men in his elevated position who were also Jewish, it ought to have mattered more to Izzy. His lack of popularity made him vulnerable. But I liked him and he liked me. More than any other man in Germany, it was Izzy who had been responsible for the modernization of the police force. But much of the impetus for this had come from the assassination of the foreign minister, Walther Rathenau.

It was said that everyone in Germany could remember exactly where they were on June 24, 1922, when they heard the news that Rathenau, a Jew, had been shot by right-wingers. I had been in the Romanisches Café, staring into a drink and still feeling sorry for myself after my wife’s death three months before. Rathenau’s murder had persuaded me to join the Berlin police. Izzy knew that. It was one of the reasons he liked me, I think.

His office at the Alex resembled that of a university professor’s. He sat in front of a large bookcase full of legal and forensic tomes, one of which he himself had written. On the wall was a map of Berlin with red and brown pins indicating outbreaks of political violence. The map looked like it had the measles, there were so many pins. On his desk were two telephones, several piles of papers, and an ashtray where he tipped the ash from the Black Wisdom Havanas that were his one apparent luxury.

He was, I knew, under enormous pressure, because the republic itself was under enormous pressure. In the March elections, the Nazis had doubled their strength in the Reichstag and were now the second-largest party, with eleven and a half million votes. The chancellor, Heinrich Bruning, was trying to turn the economy around, but with unemployment at nearly six million and rising, this was proving almost impossible. Bruning looked unlikely to survive now that the Reichstag had reconvened. Hindenburg remained president of the Weimar Republic and leader of the largest party. But the aristocratic old man had little liking for Bruning. And if Bruning went, what then? Schleicher? Papen? Gröner? Hitler? Germany was running out of strong men who were fit to lead the country.

Izzy waved me to a chair without looking up from what he was writing with his black Pelikan. From time to time he put down the pen and lifted the cigar to his mouth, and I amused myself with the vague hope that he might put the pen in his mouth and try to write with the cigar.

“We must continue to do our duty as policemen even though others may make it difficult for us,” he said in a voice that was deep and full-bodied, like a lager darkened by colored malts—a Dunkel or a Bock. He put down the pen and, sitting back on the creaking swivel chair, fixed me with an eye as pointed as the spike on a cuirassier’s Pickelhaube. “Don’t you agree, Bernie?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Berliners still haven’t forgotten or forgiven their police force for what happened in 1918, when the Alex surrendered to anarchy and revolution without a shot.”

“No, sir. But what else could they do?”

“They could have upheld the law, Bernie. Instead they saved their own skins. Always we uphold the law.”

“And if the Nazis take over, what then? They’ll use the law and the police for their own ends.”

“Which is exactly what the Independent Socialists did in 1918,” he said. “Under Emil Eichhorn. We survived that. We shall survive the Nazis, too.”

“Maybe.”

“We must have a little faith, Bernie,” he said. “If the Nazis do get in, we shall have to have faith that, eventually, the parliamentary process will restore Germany to its senses.”

“I hope you’re right, sir.” Then, just as I was beginning to think Izzy had summoned me for a lesson in political science, he came to the point.

“An English philosopher named Jeremy Bentham once wrote that publicity is the very soul of justice. That’s especially true in the case of Anita Schwarz. To bowdlerize a phrase from another English jurist, the investigation into her murder must not merely proceed, it must be seen to proceed vigorously. Now let me tell you why. Helga Schwarz, the murdered girl’s mother, is Kurt Daluege’s cousin. That makes this a high-profile case, Bernie. And I just wanted to let you know that the last thing we want right now is Dr. Goebbels arguing in the pages of his tawdry but nonetheless influential newspaper that the investigation is being handled incompetently, or that we’re dragging our feet because we have some anti-Nazi ax to grind. All personal prejudices must be put aside. Do I make myself clear, Bernie?”

“Very clear, sir.” I might not have had a doctorate in jurisprudence like Bernard Weiss, but I didn’t need to have it spelled out with umlauts and ablauts. Kurt Daluege was a decorated war hero. Currently in the SS, he was an ex-SA leader in Berlin, not to mention Goebbels’s deputy. More important for us, he was an NSDAP member of the Prussian State Parliament, to which the Berlin police owed its first loyalty. Daluege could make political trouble for us. With friends like his, he could make trouble in a hospice for retired Benedictine monks. The smart money in Berlin said that if they ever got into power, the Nazis were planning to put Daluege in charge of the Berlin police force. It wasn’t that he had any experience of policing. He wasn’t even a lawyer. What he did have experience of was doing exactly what Hitler and Goebbels told him to do. And I presumed the same was true of his relation by marriage Otto Schwarz.

“That’s why I’m organizing a press conference this afternoon,” said Izzy. “So you can tell the newspapers just how seriously we’re taking this case. That we’re pursuing all possible leads. That we won’t rest until the murderer is caught. Well, you know the kind of thing. You’ve handled a press conference many times before. On occasion, you’ve even handled them quite well.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“However, you have a natural wit that sometimes you would do well to restrain. Especially in a political case like this one.”

“Is that what this is, sir?”

“Oh, I’d say so, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Ernst Gennat and I will attend the conference, of course. But it’s your investigation and your conference. If questioned, Ernst and I will confine ourselves to statements regarding your competence. Commissar Gunther’s impressive reputation, his extraordinary perseverance, his keen psychological insights, his cleanup record. The usual crap.”

“Thank you for your confidence, sir.”

Izzy’s lips puckered, as if savoring the taste of his own intelligence like a freshly made matzoh ball. “Well, what have you come up with so far?”

“Not much. She wasn’t killed in the park, that’s for sure. We’ll know more about the cause of death later on today. Hard to say if it was a lust murder or not. Maybe that was the point of removing all her sexual organs and everything that was attached to them. On the face of it, you might say that’s the most remarkable feature of the case. But you might just as easily point to the reaction of Herr and Frau Schwarz themselves. Last night, neither of them seemed particularly upset when I told them that their daughter was dead.”

“God, I hope you’re not suggesting you think they did it?”

I thought for a moment. “Maybe I’m misjudging them, sir. But the girl was disabled. Somehow I got the feeling that they were glad to be rid of her, that’s all. Maybe.”

“I trust you won’t be mentioning any of this at the press conference.”

“You know me better than that.”

“It’s true, some Nazis do have a few ruthless ideas concerning the treatment of society’s unfortunates. People who are physically and mentally handicapped. However, even the Nazis aren’t stupid enough to think that’s a vote winner. Nobody’s going to vote for a political party that advocates the extermination of the sick and the infirm. Not after a war that left thousands of men disabled.”

“No, I suppose not, sir.” I lit a cigarette. “There’s one other thing. The murdered girl had five hundred marks on her. That’s a lot more pocket money than I used to get when I was her age.”

“Yes, you’re right. Did you ask the parents about it?”

“They suggested there must have been some mistake.”

“I’ve heard of money disappearing from a dead man’s pockets. But I’ve never heard of money being planted on one.”

“No, sir.”

“Ask the neighbors, Bernie. Speak to her school friends. Find out what kind of girl Anita Schwarz was.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And Bernie. Get yourself a new tie. That one looks like it’s been in your soup.”

“Yes, sir.”

BEFORE THE PRESS CONFERENCE I went and had my hair cut at the KaDeWe. Henry Ford himself couldn’t have arranged the business of cutting German hair more efficiently. There were ten chairs, and I was in and out in less than twenty minutes. The KaDe We wasn’t exactly around the corner from the Alex. But it was a good place to have a haircut and buy a new tie.

As always, the conference itself took place in the Police Museum at the Alex. This was Gennat’s idea following the Police Exhibition of 1926, so that KRIPO might present itself to the world among the photographs, knives, test tubes, fingerprints, poison bottles, revolvers, rope, and buttons that were the exhibits of our many proud investigative successes. The modern face of policing we were keen to display to the world might have looked a bit more efficient had the glass cases containing this assortment of forensic trash and the heavy curtains that shrouded the tall windows of the exhibition hall not been so dusty. Even the most recent photograph, of Ernst Gennat, looked like it had been there for a hundred years.

There were about twenty reporters and photographers gathered among our previous triumphs. Behind a table that had been cleared of a selection of curious murder weapons, I sat between Weiss and Gennat. As if we had been arranged in ascending order of size. The men of Berlin’s press heard me appeal for any witnesses who might have seen a man behaving suspiciously in Friedrichshain Park on the night of the murder and then go on to assure the Berlin public that we were doing all in our power to catch the killer of Anita Schwarz—which, of course, was something I was determined to do. Things seemed to be going quite well until I uttered the usual bromides about interviewing known sex offenders. At this, Fritz Allgeier, the reporter for Der Angriff, a boss-eyed specimen with a gray beard and arms that seemed longer than his legs—hardly master-race material—said that the German people demanded to be told why known sex offenders were allowed to walk our streets in the first place.

Later on, I agreed with Weiss that my next comments could have been a little more diplomatic:

“The last time I looked, Herr Allgeier, Germany still has a system of criminal justice in which people are brought before the courts, tried, and, if found guilty, serve a prison sentence. After they’ve paid their debt to society, we let them go.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t let them go at all,” he said. “It might be best for the German people if these so-called known offenders were put back in prison as quickly as possible. Then this kind of lust murder might never happen.”

“Maybe. That’s not for me to say. But where do you get off thinking that someone like you can speak for the German people, Allgeier? You used to be a jack, in Moabit. A backstreet turk working the three-card trick. The German people might equally demand to know how you turned into a journalist.”

Several of the non-Nazi newspaper reporters thought this was very funny. I might have got away with it, too, if I’d left it there. But I didn’t. I was warming to my subject.

Germany had always had the death penalty for murder, but for several years, the newspapers—the non-Nazi newspapers—had waged a vigorous campaign against the guillotine. Lately, however, these same papers had bowed to Nazi influence and refrained from writing editorials urging the commutation of a murderer’s sentence. With the result that the state executioner, Johann Reichhart, was working once again. His most recent victim had been the mass murderer and cannibal Georg Haarmann. A lot of cops, myself included, didn’t much like the guillotine. More so since the senior investigating officer was called upon to attend the executions of murderers he had arrested.

“The plain fact of the matter is that we’ve always relied on known offenders to give us information,” I said. “There were even murderers serving sentences in prison who were once prepared to help us. Of course that was before we started executing them again. It’s hard to persuade a man to talk to you when you’ve chopped his head off.”

Weiss stood up and, smiling patiently, announced that the conference was over. On our way out, he said nothing. Just smiled sadly at me. Which was worse than a lashing from his tongue. Gennat said, “Nice work, Bernie. They’ll eat your eggs, son.”

“Just the fascist newspapers, surely.”

“All newspapers are fundamentally fascist, Bernie. In every country. All editors are dictators. All journalism is authoritarian. That’s why people line birdcages with it.”

Gennat was right, of course. He usually was. Only Berlin’s evening newspaper Tempo gave me a good press. It used a picture of me that looked like Luis Trenker in The Holy Mountain. Manfred George, Tempo’s editor, wrote a piece in which he described me as one of Berlin’s “finest detectives.” Maybe they liked my new tie. The rest of the republican papers were like a cat creeping around the milk: they didn’t dare say what they really thought for fear that their readers might not agree with them. I didn’t read Der Angriff. What was the point? But Hans Joachim Brandt in the Nazi Völkischer Beobachter referred to me as “a liberal, left-wing stooge.” Probably the truth lay halfway between the two.