The Pale Criminal

  ‘I imagine that will upset your sensitive inspector,’ chuckled Illmann. ‘The one with the daughter. From what he was saying to me earlier, he was quite sure that it was only a matter of time before you had a case against him.’

  ‘Almost certainly. He views the Czech’s conviction for statutory rape as the best reason why I should let him take the fellow into a quiet cell and tap dance all over him.’

  ‘So strenuous, these modern police methods. Wherever do they find the energy?’

  ‘That’s all they find energy for. This is well past Deubel’s bedtime, as he’s already reminded me. Some of these bulls think they’re working banking hours.’ I waved him over. ‘Have you ever noticed how most of Berlin’s crimes seem to happen during the day?’

  ‘Surely you’re forgetting the early-morning knock-up from your friendly neighbourhood Gestapo man.’

  ‘You never get anyone more senior than a Kriminalassistent doing the A1 Red Tabs. And only then if it’s someone important.’

  I turned to face Deubel, who was doing his best to act dog-tired and ready for a hospital bed.

  ‘When the photographer has finished his portrait, tell him I want a couple of shots of the trunk with the lid closed. What’s more I want the prints ready by the time the left-luggage staff turns up. It’ll be something to help refresh their memories. The professor here will be taking the trunk back to the Alex as soon as the snaps are done.’

  ‘What about the girl’s family, sir? It is Irma Hanke, isn’t it?’

  ‘They’ll need to make a formal identification, of course, but not until the professor’s had his way with her. Maybe even smartened her up a bit for her mother?’

  ‘I’m not a mortician, Bernie,’ he said coolly.

  ‘Come on. I’ve seen you sew up a bag of minced beef before now.’

  ‘Very well,’ Illmann sighed. ‘I’ll see what I can do. I shall need most of the day, however. Possibly until tomorrow.’

  ‘Have as long as you like, but I want to tell them the news this evening, so see if at least you can nail her head back on to her shoulders by then will you?’

  Deubel yawned loudly.

  ‘All right, inspector, you’ve passed the audition. The role of the tired man in need of his bed is yours. God knows you’ve worked hard enough for it. As soon as Becker and Korsch turn up you can go home. But I want you to set up an identity parade later on this morning. See if the men who work in this office can’t remember our Sudeten friend.’

  ‘Right, sir,’ he said, already more alert now that his going home was imminent.

  ‘What’s the name of that desk sergeant? The one who took the anonymous call.’

  ‘Gollner.’

  ‘Not old Tanker Gollner?’

  ‘Yes, sir. You’ll find him at the police barracks, sir. Apparently he said he’d wait for us there as he’d been pissed around by Kripo before and didn’t want to have to sit around all night waiting for us to show up.’

  ‘Same old Tanker,’ I smiled. ‘Right, I’d best not keep him waiting, had I?’

  ‘What shall I tell Korsch and Becker to do when they arrive?’ Deubel asked.

  ‘Get Korsch to go through the rest of the junk in this place. See if we might not have been left any other kind gifts.’

  Illmann cleared his throat. ‘It might be an idea if one of them were present to observe the autopsy,’ he said.

  ‘Becker can help you. He seems to enjoy being around the female body. Not to mention his excellent qualifications in the matter of violent death. Just don’t leave him alone with your cadaver, Professor. He’s just liable to shoot her or fuck her, depending on the way he’s feeling.’

  Kleine Alexander Strasse ran north-east towards Horst Wessel Platz and was where the police barracks for those stationed at the nearby Alex was situated. It was a big building, with small apartments for married men and senior officers, and single rooms for the rest.

  Despite the fact that he was no longer married, Wachmeister Fritz ‘Tanker’ Gollner had a small one-bedroom apartment at the back of the barracks on the third floor, in recognition of his long and distinguished service record.

  A well-tended window box was the apartment’s only concession to homeliness, the walls being bare of anything except a couple of photographs in which Gollner was being decorated. He waved me to the room’s solitary armchair and sat himself on the edge of the neatly made bed.

  ‘Heard you was back,’ he said quietly. Leaning forwards he pulled out a crate from under the bed. ‘Beer?’

  ‘Thanks.’

  He nodded reflectively as he pushed off the bottle-tops with his bare thumbs.

  ‘And it’s Kommissar now, I hear. Resigns as an inspector. Reincarnated as a Kommissar. Makes you believe in fucking magic, doesn’t it? If I didn’t know you better I’d say you were in somebody’s pocket.’

  ‘Aren’t we all? In one way or another.’

  ‘Not me. And unless you’ve changed, not you either.’ He swigged his beer thoughtfully.

  Tanker was an East Fresian from Emsland where, it is said, brains are as rare as fur on fish. While he may not have been able to spell Wittgenstein, let alone explain his philosophy, Tanker was a good policeman, one of the old school of uniformed bulls, the firm but fair sort, enforcing the law with a friendly box on the ear for young rowdies, and less inclined to arrest a man and haul him off to the cells than give him an effective and administratively simple bedtime-story with his encyclopaedia-sized fist. It was said of Tanker that he was the toughest bull in Orpo and, looking at him sitting opposite me now, in his shirt sleeves, his great belt creaking under the weight of his even greater belly, I didn’t find this hard to believe. Certainly time had stood still with his prognathous features — somewhere around one million years BC. Tanker could not have looked less civilized than if he had been wearing the skin of a sabre-toothed tiger.

  I found my cigarettes and offered him one. He shook his head and took out his pipe.

  ‘If you ask me,’ I said, ‘we’re every one of us in the back pocket of Hitler’s trousers. And he means to slide down a mountain on his arse.’

  Tanker sucked at the bowl of his pipe and started to fill it with tobacco. When he’d finished he smiled and raised his bottle.

  ‘Then here’s to stones under the fucking snow.’

  He belched loudly and lit his pipe. The clouds of pungent smoke that rolled towards me like Baltic fog reminded me of Bruno. It even smelt like the same foul mixture that he had smoked.

  ‘You knew Bruno Stahlecker, didn’t you, Tanker?’

  He nodded, still drawing on the pipe. Through clenched teeth, he said: ‘That I did. I heard about what happened. Bruno was a good man.’ He removed the pipe from his leathery old mouth and surveyed the progress of his smoke. ‘Knew him quite well, really. We were both in the infantry together. Saw a fair bit of action, too. Of course, he wasn’t much more than a spit of a lad then, but it never seemed to bother him much, the fighting I mean. He was a brave one.’

  ‘The funeral was last Thursday.’

  ‘I’d have gone too if I could have got the time.’ He thought for a moment. ‘But it was all the way down in Zehlendorf. Too far.’ He finished his beer and opened another two bottles. ‘Still, they got the piece of shit who killed him I hear, so that’s all right then.’

  ‘Yes, it certainly looks like it,’ I said. ‘Tell me about this telephone call tonight. What time was this?’

  ‘Just before midnight, sir. Fellow asks for the duty sergeant. You’re speaking to him, I says. Listen carefully, he says. The missing girl, Irma Hanke, he says, is to be found in a large blue-leather trunk in the left-luggage at Zoo Bahnhof. Who’s this, I asks, but he’d hung up.’

  ‘Can you describe his voice?’

  ‘I’d say it was an educated sort of voice, sir. And used to giving an order and having it carried out. Rather like an officer.’ He shook his large head. ‘Couldn’t tell you how old, though.’

  ‘Any accent?’

/>   ‘Just the trace of Bavarian.’

  ‘You sure about that?’

  ‘My late wife was from Nuremberg, sir. I’m sure.’

  ‘And how would you describe his tone? Agitated? Disturbed at all?’

  ‘He didn’t sound like a spinner, if that’s what you mean, sir. He was as cool as the piss out of a frozen eskimo. As I said, just like an officer.’

  ‘And he asked to speak to the duty sergeant?’

  ‘Those were his actual words, sir.’

  ‘Any background noise? Traffic? Music? That sort of thing?’

  ‘Nothing at all.’

  ‘What did you do then? After the call.’

  ‘I telephoned the operator at the Central Telephone Office on Französische Strasse. She traced the number to a public telephone box outside Bahnhof West Kreuz. I sent a squad car round there to seal it off until a team from 5D could get down there and have it checked out for piano players.’

  ‘Good man. And then you called Deubel?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  I nodded and started on my second bottle of beer.

  ‘I take it Orpo knows what this is all about?’

  ‘Von der Schulenberg had all the Hauptmanns into the briefing-room at the start of last week. They passed on to us what a lot of the men already suspected. That there was another Gormann on the streets of Berlin. Most of the lads figure that’s why you’re back on the force. Most of the civils we’ve got now couldn’t detect coal on a slag heap. But that Gormann case. Well, it was a good piece of work.’

  ‘Thanks, Tanker.’

  ‘All the same, sir, it doesn’t look like this little Sudeten spinner you’re holding could have done it, does it? If you don’t mind me saying so.’

  ‘Not unless he had a telephone in his cell, no. Still, we’ll see if the left-luggage people at Zoo Bahnhof like the look of him. You never know, he might have had an associate on the outside.’

  Tanker nodded. ‘That’s true enough,’ he said. ‘Anything is possible in Germany just as long as Hitler shits in the Reich Chancellery.’

  Several hours later I was back at Zoo Bahnhof, where Korsch had already distributed photographs of the trunk to the assembled left-luggage staff. They stared and stared, shook their heads and scratched their grizzly chins, and still none of them could remember anyone leaving a blue-leather trunk.

  The tallest of them, a man wearing the longest khaki-coloured boiler coat, and who seemed to be in charge of the rest, collected a notebook from under the metal-topped counter and brought it over to me.

  ‘Presumably you record the names and addresses of those leaving luggage with you,’ I said to him, without much enthusiasm. As a general rule, killers leaving their victims as left-luggage at railway stations don’t normally volunteer their real names and addresses.

  The man in the khaki coat, whose bad teeth resembled the blackened ceramic insulators on tram cables, looked at me with quiet confidence and tapped the hard cover of his register with the quick of a fingernail.

  ‘It’ll be in here, the one who left your bloody trunk.’

  He opened his book, licked a thumb that a dog would have refused, and began to turn the greasy pages.

  ‘On the trunk in your photograph there’s a ticket,’ he said. ‘And on that ticket is a number, same one as what’s chalked on the side of the item. And that number will be in this book, alongside a date, a name and an address.’ He turned several more pages and then traced down the page with his forefinger.

  ‘Here we are,’ he said. ‘The trunk was deposited here on Friday, 19 August.’

  ‘Four days after she disappeared,’ Korsch said quietly.

  The man followed his finger along a line to the facing page. ‘Says here that the trunk belongs to a Herr Heydrich, initial “R”, of Wilhelmstrasse, number 102.’

  Korsch snorted with laughter.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said to the man. ‘You’ve been most helpful.’

  ‘I don’t see what’s funny,’ grumbled the man as he walked away.

  I smiled at Korsch. ‘Looks like someone has a sense of humour.’

  ‘Are you going to mention this in the report, sir?’ he grinned.

  ‘It’s material, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s just that the general won’t like it.’

  ‘He’ll be beside himself, I should think. But you see, our killer isn’t the only one who enjoys a good joke.’

  Back at the Alex I received a call from the head of what was ostensibly Illmann’s department — VD1, Forensics. I spoke to an SS-Hauptsturmführer Dr Schade, whose tone was predictably obsequious, no doubt in the belief that I had some influence with General Heydrich.

  The doctor informed me that a fingerprint team had removed a number of prints from the telephone box at West Kreuz in which the killer had apparently called the Alex. These were now a matter for VC1, the Records Department. As to the trunk and its contents, he had spoken to Kriminalassistent Korsch and would inform him immediately if any fingerprints were discovered there.

  I thanked him for his call, and told him that my investigation was to receive top priority, and that everything else would have to take second place.

  Within fifteen minutes of this conversation, I received another telephone call, this time from the Gestapo.

  ‘This is Sturmbannfuhrer Roth here,’ he said. ‘Section 4B1. Kommissar Gunther, you are interfering with the progress of a most important investigation.’

  ‘4B1? I don’t think I know that department. Are you calling from within the Alex?’

  ‘We are based at Meinekestrasse, investigating Catholic criminals.’

  ‘I’m afraid I know nothing of your department, Sturmbannfuhrer. Nor do I wish to. Nevertheless, I cannot see how I can possibly be interfering with one of your investigations.’

  ‘The fact remains that you are. It was you who ordered SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer Dr Schade to give your own investigation priority over any other?’

  ‘That’s right, I did.’

  ‘Then you, a Kommissar, should know that the Gestapo takes precedence over Kripo where the services of VD1 are required.’

  ‘I know of no such thing. But what great crime has been committed that might require your department to take precedence over a murder investigation? Charging a priest with a fraudulent transubstantiation perhaps? Or trying to pass off the communion wine as the blood of Christ?’

  ‘Your levity is quite out of order, Kommissar,’ he said. ‘This department is investigating most serious charges of homosexuality among the priesthood.’

  ‘Is that so? Then I shall certainly sleep more soundly in my bed tonight. All the same, my investigation has been given top priority by General Heydrich himself.’

  ‘Knowing the importance that he attaches to apprehending religious enemies of the state, I find that very hard to believe.’

  ‘Then may I suggest that you telephone the Wilhelmstrasse and have the general explain it to you personally.’

  ‘I’ll do that. No doubt he will also be greatly disturbed at your failure to appreciate the menace of the third international conspiracy dedicated to the ruin of Germany. Catholicism is no less a threat to Reich security than Bolshevism and World Jewry.’

  ‘You forgot men from outer space,’ I said. ‘Frankly, I don’t give a shit what you tell him. VD1 is part of Kripo, not the Gestapo, and in all matters relating to this investigation Kripo is to take priority in the services of our own department. I have it in writing from the Reichskriminaldirektor, as does Dr Schade. So why don’t you take your so-called case and shove it up your arse. A little more shit in there won’t make much of a difference to the way you smell.’

  I slammed the receiver down on to its cradle. There were, after all, a few enjoyable aspects to the job. Not least of these was the opportunity it afforded to piss on the Gestapo’s shoes.

  At the identity parade later that same morning, the left-luggage staff failed to identify Gottfried Bautz as the man who had deposited the trunk containing
Irma Hanke’s body, and to Deubel’s disgust I signed the order releasing him from custody.

  It’s the law that all strangers arriving in Berlin must be reported to a police station by their hotelier or landlord within six days. In this way the Resident Registration Office at the Alex is able to give out the address of anyone resident in Berlin for the price of fifty pfennigs. People imagine that this law must be part of the Nazi Emergency Powers, but in truth it has existed for a while. The Prussian police was always so efficient.

  My office was a few doors down from the Registration Office in room 350, which meant that the corridor was always noisy with people, and obliged me to keep my door shut. No doubt this had been one of the reasons why I had been put here, as far away from the offices of the Murder Commission as it was possible to be. I suppose the idea was that my presence should be kept out of the way of other Kripo personnel, for fear that I might contaminate them with some of my more anarchic attitudes to police investigation. Or perhaps they had hoped that my insubordinate spirit might be broken by first being dramatically lowered. Even on a sunny day like this one was, my office had a dismal aspect. The olive-green metal desk had more thread-catching edges than a barbed-wire fence, and had the single virtue of matching the worn linoleum and the dingy curtains, while the walls were a couple of thousand cigarettes’ shade of yellow.

  Walking in there after snatching a few hours of sleep back at my apartment, and presented with the sight of Hans Illmann waiting patiently for me with a dossier of photographs, I didn’t think that the place was about to get any more pleasant. Congratulating myself on having had the foresight to eat something before what promised to be an unappetizing meeting, I sat down and faced him.

  ‘So this is where they’ve been hiding you,’ he said.

  ‘It’s supposed to be only temporary,’ I explained, ‘just like me. But frankly, it suits me to be out of the way of the rest of Kripo. There’s less chance of becoming a permanent fixture here again. And I dare say that suits them too.’