A Death in East Berlin (Peter Ritter thriller series Book 1) Page 2

  I climbed down the steps gingerly by torchlight and walked on the paths past the massive white marble tombs, each bearing an inscription signed by Stalin. Some were just to honor the different Soviet republics that lost soldiers in the fight for Berlin. But there were Stalin quotes etched in marble all over the place, everywhere you turned. Like this:

  “For two decades, the Red Army protected the peaceful reconstruction work of the Soviet people. But in June 1941 Hitler's Germany attacked our country word-breakingly, violating the Non-Aggression Pact in a brutal and wicked manner, and the Red Army was forced to go out into the field to defend its homeland.”

  J. Stalin

  Then there was this one:

  “Now all recognize that the Soviet people with their selfless fight saved the civilization of Europe from fascist thugs. This was a great achievement of the Soviet people to the history of mankind.”

  J. Stalin

  It went like that, on and on and on. After walking the 200 yards, it was up the steps at the other end, at the base of the statue, up and up. Slightly out of breath when I reached the top, I showed my identification to the two coppers on the scene and asked them when they got off shift.

  “Not till eight,” one of them said. A sergeant. He looked at me a little funny in the darkness and took an extra few seconds, examining my badge. A lot of them never got used to a murder detective who was 15 years younger than they were, and they especially never got used to taking my orders. But besides all of that, it was a bit of a stupid question that I had asked. If they were working overnight in a Berlin police station, they were working midnight to 8. Everybody in the city probably knew that — every cop, for sure. But it was a sign, at least to me, of how lacking in confidence I still could be. For me, stupid questions were like nervous tics sometimes. In the time it took to ask one and then hear the answer, I was screwing up my courage for the real business that needed to be conducted.

  “Okay, if you want to grab a coffee or a piss, you've got a half hour,” I said. “Then you start searching the area for anyone and anything. The next shift will do the door-knocking. Make sure your boss knows we need at least 10 men out here at 8 a.m.”

  They half saluted and walked away. I took the half-salutes and declared victory, and then I climbed the last few steps and arrived at the body. The third man with a torch was examining it.

  4

  Dr. Frederick J. Mann was the murder squad’s lone criminal investigator. He always wore a three-piece suit, even when elbow deep in a dead man’s entrails. His fingernails always looked as if they had been professionally manicured, although that wasn’t a thing for men. His ink pen looked as if it might have cost a week’s salary back in the day — likely pre-war — and his handwriting was tiny and precise. And because of that overall aura of fastidiousness, and because policemen generally detested fastidiousness, everyone skipped right past “Dr. Mann” and “Frederick” and called him Freddy.

  He was crouched next to the body, doing his best not to touch anything important. He saw me and pointed over his shoulder.

  “Know who that is?”

  I looked up at the statue — the soldier, the girl, his sword, the swastika beneath his boot. “Nope. Just a symbolic character, I assume.”

  Freddy sighed and said, “Didn’t they teach you anything in school? He is Sergeant Nikolai Masalov, and he is said to have rescued the girl after her mother was lost during the battle for Berlin.”

  I looked up again. “I must have missed that day. But, you know, I think the key words you just spoke were ‘is said to have.’”

  “Such a skeptic.”

  “Said the scientist,” I said.

  Freddy enjoyed the banter, keeping it up as he moved around the body. The other detectives in the murder squad didn’t have much time for him and his modern ways. As far as they were concerned, fingerprints were fine, but the rest of what Freddy was selling was, in the words of Kleinschmidt, the oldest detective in the squad, “egghead bullshit.”

  I once argued about this with Kleinschmidt, but only once. I half got him to concede the value of blood typing, but that was it. Blood spatter patterns? Fiber analysis? Forget it. As Kleinschmidt said, “I have 30 years on the job, 30 years of experience, and I don’t need this goddamned textbook jockey to tell me the difference between blood spurting out of a chest wound and blood dripping out of a leg wound. It’s just fucking blood in the end, anyway. Fucking egghead bullshit.”

  Kleinschmidt was the most colorfully vociferous, but the rest of them all pretty much felt the same way. They tolerated Freddy’s presence at their crime scenes, accepted his reports, and promptly ignored them. They had their eyes and their experience, and they had the coroner’s examination, and that was enough.

  What made me different was my age, my outlook, and my utter lack of confidence in my investigative abilities — a lack of confidence borne out of a true lack of ability. I was too young for the job, and everybody knew it, me included. I was learning every day, and Freddy was my best teacher. I think he knew it, too. So we had an unspoken deal: he would guide me provided that I let him verbally abuse me.

  “So what do you see, Sherlock?” is what he said to me.

  The body was right outside the little chapel at the base of the statue, although chapel was probably the wrong word, seeing as how this was a Soviet memorial and all, and seeing as how the Soviets weren’t big on the whole religion thing. Maybe it was the tomb. Anyway, there was an iron fence that prevented entry, but you could look through the bars. I shined the torch inside and a mosaic depicting a bunch of people surrounding something or other shined back at me, the golds and the reds and the oranges and the blues all transfixing me for a second.

  “I mean on this side of the gate, Sherlock,” Freddy said.

  On this side of the gate, the body was laid out with what appeared to be some care.

  “It’s like he’s sleeping comfortably,” I said. “Except for, you know, having had his hands and feet chopped off.”

  “Very good, Little Shit,” Freddy said. Little Shit is what he called me when he wasn’t calling me Sherlock. They were terms of endearment, I thought. I never got an Under Lieutenant, or Comrade Detective, or even Comrade out of him.

  “Meaning what?” I said.

  “Meaning the killer laid the body out very carefully. He didn’t just dump him.”

  “Did he do it here?” I said.

  “I’ve been looking, but it’s too dark to be sure. My guess is no, that he was killed and then brought here.”

  “To make a statement? That’s a lot of damn steps to carry a body just to make a statement. And what statement?”

  “Soviet monument, you can guess,” Freddy said. “Me, I won’t make that guess. I would advise you not to make that guess. But I think it’s almost a certainty that somebody from The Firm will be here before breakfast, just to have a look.”

  “Shit.”

  “How do you know I’m not one of them?” Freddy said.

  “You’re too big of an independent asshole. You’d never survive an hour in the Party education sessions.”

  “And you would?”

  “For me to know and you to find out,” I said. “But you seriously think they’re coming?”

  “Are you kidding me? Whoever the overnight officer was has almost certainly been having kittens ever since the teleprinter spat out the first report. Dead body at the Soviet War Memorial? The Stasi wouldn’t be the Stasi if they didn’t at least come over for a sniff.”

  “I’ll deal with that if it happens,” I said.

  “When it happens.”

  “Okay, when it happens.”

  I pulled out my notebook and wrote down a few of the things Freddy had told me. Then I looked down at the poor bastard lying there and wrote down, “no hands, no feet.” Why I needed to write that down was beyond me. They weren’t details I was likely to forget, after all.

  “Is there anything else I should know? Pockets were empty, I assume.”
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  “You assume correctly,” Freddy said. “I’ll have a better idea when the sun comes up about if this was the killing place. And one other thing. No hands, no feet, you saw that. I’ll wait for the doctor to strip off the clothes, but based on the bloodstain — he shined his torch on the body’s crotch — my guess is that he doesn’t have Johnny and the boys attached to his person anymore, either.”

  “Another statement?”

  “Would seem to be,” Freddy said. “What statement, though, I couldn’t say.”

  And yes, I wrote down in the notebook, “no cock and balls?” And, yes, I underlined the question mark.

  That this had been the start of what would be a very long day went without saying. I needed to get cleaned up and then brief the boss on what we knew, and what the Stasi might want to know, and then I needed to get back to the memorial to help supervise the daylight searches and neighborhood interviews.

  Shower first, then. The drive back to the apartment was as uneventful and unimpeded as the drive over — still dark, streets still empty, traffic lights still nothing more than a suggestion, especially for someone with police identification. Back at the apartment, I turned the lock as quietly as I could and tiptoed to the bedroom. But Elke was gone. She’d made the bed, which was a nice touch — and the first time the bed had been made in a week. She’d also appended a note below my note. It said, “Movie next Friday, whatever is playing at the Atelier am Zoo, first showtime after 8 p.m.” It was a statement. There was no question mark.

  5

  At the office on Keibelstraße, parking could sometimes be at a premium, but never that early. In a few hours, though, the curbs would be filled and the detectives’ cars would be arrayed every which way on the sidewalks.

  There were 11 of us in the murder squad: the boss, eight detectives, Freddy Mann as the lone criminalist, and a stenographer named Gretchen, who was famous more for the curves of her hips than the accuracy of her dictation. Or, as Kleinschmidt once said, “I always manage to find at least one mistake in the letters she types, just so I get a chance to see her walk away from my desk a second time.”

  Gretchen had been to my apartment, once. She seemed less impressed with the surroundings than Elke had been. The sex was not reputational, just normal, and normal apparently fell short of expectations. It was a one-timer, and Gretchen made sure of it. When I broached the possibility of a return visit, she pretty much laughed in my face. And then she said, “And if you even think about telling these animals about it, I can promise you that you’ll regret it for the rest of your sorry-ass career.” I didn’t doubt it, either — she controlled every scrap of paperwork in or out of the office — so the best way I had to impress the rest of my co-workers had been denied to me.

  As you came off the staircase and turned left, the office space consisted of eight small offices, all in a row, taking up half the width of the room. The walls between the offices were thin, but they were walls. And if the doors on the offices didn’t lock, they did close. Inside each was a desk and chair and another two chairs for visitors — suspects arriving for interviews, mostly. The custom was to keep the doors open at all times, except during interviews. The doors also were to be left open at night.

  Outside the row of offices was a narrow corridor defined on the other side by a line of file cabinets. Each detective had a couple of drawers for himself, with the rest holding a general compendium of old case files and lists of suspects organized in two different ways, by names and dates. There were other files in other places in the building that were also organized by the type of crime, but seeing as how we were murder detectives, that wasn’t as important for us, given our limited space. All of our crimes were murders, after all.

  At the end of the room, past the little offices and the file cabinets, the boss had a big office behind glass that ran the full width of the room. Gretchen had a small desk just outside. Freddy worked in his own area, in another room with the other criminalists.

  Each detective’s desk featured a calendar, an ashtray, a typewriter, and at least one pile of paper. Most of the desktops would be classified as somewhere between a city dump and a sty. I would have completely cleaned off my desk every day if the rest wouldn’t have made fun of me. I did it once, the first week I was on the squad, and the rest of them gave me so much grief that I never did it again. If I closed my eyes and thought about it, I could still hear Kleinschmidt sing-songing, “Peter Ritter, such a pussy about litter.” He had gone on for days with it. He only stopped after he found Krinsky asleep at his desk and started in on him: “Alex Krinsky, snoring and boring.” The truth was, my tune was catchier, but I was glad for Krinsky nonetheless.

  Still, I had only two piles on my desktop, never more, and they were stacked neatly. There were no old newspapers or half-typed warrants. I didn’t smoke, either, the only one, so my ashtray was usually pristine. And I could type — the only one of the eight detectives who could. Sometimes I thought that the only thing keeping me in the job was that my reports were both filed on time and readable.

  I was sitting at my desk, just starting in on the coffee and donut I had purchased in the lobby canteen, when the boss arrived in my doorway. Captain Frederick Greiner was well taller than six feet and well heavier than 200 pounds. He had the bearing of a former beat cop, which he was — the kind who had taken no back talk on his beat in Wedding and who was not unfamiliar with the use of a wooden baton when the situation called for it. And given the number of obstreperous Communists in Wedding back when Greiner walked his beat, back before the war, the situation likely called for it fairly often.

  But the imposing physical presence was only half of Greiner’s story. The man obviously had serious political skills. Somehow, he managed to move from Nazi-era beat cop to GDR-era Kripo murder squad captain, an impressive bit of bureaucratic navigation that just didn’t happen very often. Almost all of the other bosses were new to the department in the late ‘40s — because so many of the old-timers were either sacked or crossed the border. The force was dying for new recruits in the early and middle ‘50s, which was how I got in. Somebody with Greiner’s kind of history was beyond rare. Between that and his physical bearing, well, let’s just say that nobody called him Freddy.

  “What are you doing here?” That was Greiner’s version of hello. He stood, hands on hips, and pretty much filled the office doorway. I always felt as if I should stand in his presence, but no one else did, so I resisted the urge. Still, I put down my donut and sat up a little straighter.

  “I’ve been to the scene, Captain,” I said. Greiner interrupted before I could get out a second sentence.

  “And?”

  “You’ve heard the basics?”

  “No hands, no feet,” he said. “Got it.”

  “Freddy Mann was on site when I got there. But it was pitch-dark. Hard to get much done.”

  “Well, it’s not pitch-dark now.”

  “Cops from the local station have been organized for the search,” I said. “We’ll see what they find.”

  “And you’re just going to sit here on your ass and wait?”

  “No, sir. I figured I’d come in and see if you had any particular instructions, considering…”

  “Considering what?”

  I hadn’t been able to shake the notion that the Stasi would be poking its immense nose into the case any time now. Part of me wanted to say something to Greiner, not so much to give him a heads-up — a heads-up he didn’t need, because the Stasi’s involvement would have been obvious to someone with the boss’s experience — but to make sure that it had been obvious to me, too. You know, even though it hadn’t been obvious to me until Freddy Mann said something.

  But then I decided just to sink back into my chair. If there was one thing I had learned in my time on the murder squad, it was the danger of saying too much in pretty much every situation.

  “Uh, nothing, I guess. So?”

  He was pretty much all the way out of my office and heading toward his wh
en he half turned and barked over his shoulder, “Just get the hell back there.”

  Which I did.

  6

  It was nearing 7:30 a.m. when I arrived back at the memorial. The sun had been up for an hour, although leaden gray clouds obscured it. There were many more spectators than when I had left, gathered around the periphery of the massive site — dog walkers, older couples out for their morning constitutional, and the genetically nosy. They were the ones who always fascinated me the most. It was as if they could whiff the controversy in the air and just followed the smell. They just appeared out of nowhere, and they all had opinions if you bothered to ask — which I didn’t. Instead, I shouldered my way through the pack of them. One of the uniforms minded them.

  I caught his eye, and he said one word as I slipped by: “Vultures.”

  The neighborhood canvassing by the precinct cops would not begin until the shift change at eight. But at the base of the statue, the two uniforms I had met the first time had some information for me. A wallet, specifically.

  “How’d you find it in the dark?” I said.

  The one looked at the other, and then he said, “Just luck, Comrade Detective. I went for a piss and, well, there it was.”

  “You didn’t—“

  “Nope,” he said. He handed it over to me, and the wallet was, indeed, dry.

  “But here’s the thing, if you don’t mind,” the other uniform said. He was the sergeant.

  “No, go ahead.”

  “You know how much it’s been raining the last week, right? Well, this thing was right on the edge of the woods. There wasn’t any cover to speak of. So how could it be so dry—”

  “Unless it was dropped there in the last, what, 18 hours?” I said.

  “Exactly,” the copper said.

  “Exactly,” I said. “Really good work, uh, what’s your name?”