Children of Wrath (34 page)

Vicki and Willi’d looked at each other as if to decipher if this was a birthday joke or something. “Breaking relations?”

Irmgard’s fingers, Willi’d noted, were digging into the vines along the terrace wall. Once, he recalled, she’d fallen off the stepladder out here fiddling with those vines and dislocated her shoulder. Having faced many injuries like it in the war, he’d quickly gotten it back into place, and she hadn’t stopped thanking him since, especially as she’d never had to pay a doctor.

“If we’ve offended you in some way, Otto…” Vicki rasped.

“No, no.” Otto shook his head. “It’s nothing you’ve
done
. It’s who you
are
. Not Germans. Blood-wise, I mean. People are throwing in now with the Nazis left and right, even in this building. We simply can’t afford to associate with you any longer. It’s how it’s got to be.”

Normally Willi would find it impossible to accept that a man such as Otto, who’d only last year rushed Erich in his arms to the hospital gushing blood, could bend so totally to political pressure. But having witnessed that spectacle at the Sportpalast, Willi understood the force at work. At least, he told himself, his neighbor was acting out of necessity, not conviction. A practical compromise might be possible.

“Well, then, Otto”—the pain, though, was no less intense—“what choice have we but to accept your wishes?” Willi, feeling his eyes burn, held his wife with one arm, embracing his children with the other. “Surely, though, you can’t mean the boys?”

“Oh, yes.” Otto nodded definitively, stifling a choke in his throat. “The boys especially. Heinz will be allowed no further contact whatsoever with Erich or Stefan.”

Heinz, who’d grown up almost as much in their apartment as his own, tried to hide the fury raging in his chubby cheeks until he could no longer stand it.

“But I don’t want to.” He raised his head in a grief-stricken howl.

Irmgard turned and smacked him in the face, stunning the boy. “We’ve explained it all to you already, Heinz.”

Erich let out an audible gasp. Stefan started to cry.

Vicki’s chest heaved. “Irmgard”—she turned to her fellow mother—“you simply can’t just—”

But their neighbor’s face had hardened to steel. Whether Irmgard believed or not, wanted or not, thought it fair or not, no longer mattered. This was how it was. And she made her cut as swiftly as chopping off a chicken’s head.

“It’s nothing personal.” She ripped a long strip of vines from the wall, creating a harsh demarcation where for years there’d been entwinement. “Purely a matter of health.” She tossed the clump of leaves over the railing. “We wish to stay away from you”—she wiped her hands with grim necessity—“as we would any harmful bacteria.”

Twenty-nine

Autumn mist draped Alexanderplatz. The afternoon hung thick and cold. Only a few hearty souls braved the open tops of the double-decker buses. As he stepped from the Police Presidium, Willi felt his very bones weighing him down, as if he were getting a flu. More than likely, he reflected, yanking on his hat and tilting the brim, given the sort of week it’d been, it was melancholia.

Almost everyone in Germany was down, except of course Herr Hitler and his masses. A week after the election, aftershocks still rattled, the national parliament reduced to a standstill, a sense of crisis looming, Nazi and Communist militias upping the ante from clubs and brass kuckles to knives and guns, business failures forever expanding the ranks of misery.

Crossing Dirksen Strasse, he was glad at least of one thing: no reporters on his butt anymore. It might have been a lonelier trek, but he preferred going about his business unobserved. It felt a hell of a lot safer. On the far side of the street he turned his collar up, taking a moment to peer into the abyss. Beyond the guardrail the future subway station was a pit of dark, wet slime. Massive pipes had been installed on the lowest levels, but the giant trench still seemed light-years away from its billboard depiction: silver escalators leading down to platforms tiled in beige or aquamarine, passageways lined with vendors. Eventually, he knew, he’d be able to ride from here almost directly home. Until then, though, he still had to hike the whole Alex to get to the S-Bahn.

It was 3:00 p.m. Saturday, the weekend officially under way, the sidewalks packed with the usual bedlam of hookers, pushers, hucksters—all overlooked, figuratively and literally, by the Police Presidium. In front of one of the larger beer halls, a contortionist was drawing a real crowd, his legs completely tucked behind his arms so that when he stood on his hands, his rear end practically jutted under his chin. It was bizarre and almost immediately pulled Willi back to a similar moment from childhood.

He couldn’t have been more than five or six when, walking somewhere right around here with his mother, he’d seen a Gypsy in a headscarf pounding a drum and dragging behind him a huge dancing bear. What fascination and horror that towering, smelly creature had held: its snout muzzled, a thick iron chain around its neck, prods from a pole forcing it on hind legs. Every so often the Gypsy shouted at it, and the beast would swivel its furry hips or wave its paws. The fear, the pity, it evoked in Willi seemed to rise in his heart all over again, along with cruel mental images from this week’s newspapers.

After the Nazi explosion at the polls, something not seen here for centuries had erupted with a vengeance: Jew baiting. Daily reports flooded from the provinces, and sometimes larger cities too, of Jews being pulled from bed, humiliated, beaten, homes ransacked, businesses torched. In town after town, rabbis and community leaders were forced to run gauntlets, pelted with excrement, not merely by neighbors but by local police, who gladly joined in. Berlin papers were filled with stories, and photos, sometimes close-ups of the victims’ faces, their eyes like those of forlorn beasts. In Russia, Poland, Ukraine, these things had gone on for centuries. But here in the most civilized, most modern of all nations?

Nothing could have driven home the rising tide of anti-Semitism, though, more forcefully than the Winkelmanns. Even now, days later, on a crowded sidewalk filled with sausage vendors and organ-grinders and ladies beckoning with painted smiles, Willi could feel the sting. From years in the army and on the police force, his skin had at least had a chance to toughen. But Vicki’d never endured such treatment and hadn’t taken it well. She’d lost her appetite, could hardly sleep. Erich and Stefan were merely sulking, but Willi feared in the long run it might be they who suffered most. People said children got over such things easily, but he wasn’t so sure. To one degree or another it might haunt them the rest of their lives. And as long as he lived, he could never forgive the Winklemanns for inflicting such—

“Herr Inspektor!”

He turned, surprised to recognize a slim, mascaraed figure leaning against an advertising column. Kai looked older somehow, more mature than when he’d seen him just few weeks ago. But not happy. If only he’d quit with all that makeup. It made him look like a porcelain doll.

“How’s it going, Kai?” Willi swallowed, knowing it always took a moment to get past the embarrassment of being seen with him. “Everything all right?”

“A little grouchy’s all.” The kid shrugged, his gold earring swinging. “Business wanting, if you know what I mean.”

Willi knew precisely what he meant: the kid hadn’t eaten today.

He glanced at his watch. Before leaving work he’d spoken to Vicki and everything was fine. He couldn’t imagine she’d mind if he got home a little late.

“How about a nice fat lunch at Aschinger’s, Kai—on me?” Willi asked, ashamed for hoping there’d be a table somewhere far in the back, with no light. “For all your help catching
Der Kinderfresser
.”

The kid’s whole face lit.

An institution since the 1890s, with over a dozen locations, Aschinger’s was Berlin’s mecca of fine dining at cafeteria prices. Dishes were displayed in long cases numbered for easy reference and served by uniformed attendants who looked like servants for the rich. The selection was immense—case after case, shelf after shelf of schnitzels, cutlets, ragouts, fillets, purées, roasts, goulashes. Kai helped himself to a chicken fricassee with sides of creamed potato and corn, and a large glass of beer. Willi took a hearty bouillabaisse. Both got sugared plums for dessert. When they took a table, Willi didn’t even mind that it had to be on the center aisle. Enough eccentrics were in the place—men who mumbled to themselves, women with crooked wigs—that Kai barely stuck out.

“Mmmm. Thanks, Inspektor. This is dandy.” Kai dug in joyously.

Plus, Kai’s spirits had risen so dramatically it was a pleasure to witness.

“The best fricassee I’ve had all week. Hey, I hear you got a promotion. Good for you. You deserve it! I may get one too, of sorts.”

“Really. How’s that, Kai?”

“Our chief went out and found himself some big tycoon to set him up, so he’s abdicating—leaving us.”

“Oh, I see.” Willi figured this must have been Kai’s “friend.” He detected a shade of grief in the kid’s eyes.

Kai threw his hands up, revealing his painted fingernails. “I don’t think I can fill his shoes.” He sighed, his mood plummeting. “It’s too much responsibility.” Beneath all the makeup, his adolescent face, Willi saw, had flushed with adult anxiety. “We’ve got ten boys in the gang. Chief is responsible for everything. Food. Clothing. Place to sleep. Plus, we keep an eye out for five or six Doll Boys, the little ones. The problems never stop. Uwe was a natural. Me?” Kai took a deep slug of beer.

Willi felt his throat tighten. It was hardly the sort of thing he was experienced at. But the kid, he saw, wasn’t seeking approval. Just a word of encouragement. Willi thought about it a moment, then shared with Kai the only thing that came to mind.

“During the war, I was in a squad that penetrated enemy lines, Kai. We trained six months for our first operation, but hadn’t made it halfway across no-man’s-land when our sergeant and corporal both got killed by incoming mortar. The five left were all privates, none qualified to command—none wanting to. It was clear, though, that if someone didn’t take charge, we were never going to make it. And I didn’t want to die. So I stepped up. I hadn’t a clue what I was doing, just acted like I did. Made the best decisions I was able. We accomplished our mission, and for the rest of the war I stayed squad leader. Eventually I wound up getting a medal for it—an Iron Cross, First Class.”

The boy was silent a long while, then offered Willi a quick grateful look.

After they’d finished and were readying to leave, Kai’s face painted an expression of curiosity mixed with caution.

“Inspektor, I certainly don’t mean any disrespect. I know you accomplished so much. But you never caught
her,
did you? The Shepherdess, I mean.”

A feverish chill ran through Willi’s body. “We got her siblings, Kai. Their operation’s all washed up. But she’s a slippery one, it’s true. We’ll get her, though. You’ll see.”

The look of trust in the kid’s eyes was frightening.

*   *   *

Parting from Kai and continuing past fields of new construction, Willi reflected on how the
Kinderfesser
case remained, in some ways, nearly as mysterious as the first day he’d seen that burlap sack. He’d learned where the victims came from. How they were abducted. How and where they ended up. But he still had no idea who’d administered fatal doses of carbon monoxide to their lungs—or how or where this atrocity even occurred. Two hundred and forty-four times. Plus, he still had no idea what the hell Tower Labs was, or what it had wanted with all those boys.

Passing a set of giant pneumatic hammers poised to resume pounding Monday, his head ached with frustration. A huge steam shovel, though, at half gnaw in the earth, seemed to shout encouragement:
Just keep digging!

From the moment they’d first found reference to it in Axel’s ledger, he and Gunther had been trying to unearth Tower Labs. In all 883 square kilometers of greater Berline, however, only one company had that name—beneath a set of ten-story gas towers, a firm in Treptow that manufactured everything from beakers and flasks to agar plates. But there was nothing shifty about Tower Laboratory Glassware. They’d searched high and low.

After that, they’d started in on records at every lab in the city,
A
to
Z
—private labs, hospital labs, university labs, even the labs at the Ministry of Public Health.

Two days ago he’d finally stumbled onto something. Housed in a warehouse on the Landwehr Canal, Tower Toys popped up in the files of one of Germany’s largest electronics manufacturers. Siemens lab records showed that six years earlier, in 1924, this alleged toy company had custom-ordered a complex apparatus for chemical distillation that technicians knew could never be used for toy production. Siemens had put in a report with the Berlin police, but no action had ever been taken. Willi’d soon found this same toy company listed in files of a major pharmaceutical firm, which made yearly deliveries, also since 1924, to 146 Maybach Ufer, the address of Tower Toys—substantial quantities of a substance called hydrochloride salt, definitely not for children’s playthings. Then, just tonight, after surveying the address for two days, Gunther came back and reported he’d seen two black vans pulling into the rear of the warehouse, neither of which had license plates. Black vans with no license plates?

Inside them—heavily armed men.

In another few days, Willi told himself, fixing on the long, arched roof of the S-Bahn station ahead, he’d be able to make some kind of move against Tower Toys. Right now he needed to rest. His whole being was slipping into torpor. In another forty minutes he’d be taking a nap, if he didn’t fall asleep on the train and wind up in Potsdam.

*   *   *

Vicki was the one taking a nap when he got home, under the blankets, sprawled diagonally across the bed. He didn’t have the heart to wake her. The radio was on in the kids’ room, and for a second he just stood in the hall deciding whether to pour some whiskey or take a nice hot bath. Then the doorbell rang. Answering it, he was more than surprised to find Irmgard Winkelmann hunched there, stone-faced.