Entwined (12 page)

Franks gave a pleading look to Maja.

"And you have another appointment in half an hour, Doctor!" Maja closed the door.

Franks rose to his feet, and the baron was already by the door, his hand on the handle.

"Thank you for your time, I appreciate it."

Franks clasped the baron's hand in a firm handshake. "I thank you for your honesty, and let us hope we will achieve some results."

At last Franks was alone and he slumped into his chair, buzzing the intercom for Maja. She appeared almost immediately, and smiled. "My, that was a long return visit! I hope it was fruitful!"

Franks laughed, and rubbed his belly. "I need food; I am starving to death!"

Maja brought in a tray of sandwiches and coffee, and the evening paper. He settled back, making himself comfortable, his eyes skimming the headlines, and then he flipped the paper open to the second page, glancing over the ads for the circus, paying no attention to the late afternoon news bulletins. One small five-line article stated that the Polizei had discovered a body in a small East Berlin hotel that evening.

The chambermaid had not changed the bed linen of Room 40, because the do not disturb sign was hanging from the door. It was not until later in the afternoon when she was vacuuming the corridor that she tapped on the closed door, and, receiving no reply, entered using her master set of keys. The curtains were drawn and the television set turned on, the sound so low it was hardly audible. The room was neat, except for the unmade bed, its coverlet bunched on the floor.

The maid fetched clean towels, sheets, and pillowcases, and went back into the room. She tossed the clean linen onto the chair, and drew back the curtains. She went into the bathroom, collected the dirty towels, and dropped them onto the floor. Two were bloodstained and she picked them up distastefully between finger and thumb. She then replaced the towels with fresh ones, and was washing down the sink and bath when a friend popped her head around the door to ask if she was nearly through for the day, as it was after three.

Both women got off at two-thirty, they each had other jobs in the evening. Together they began to clean the room, and one pulled the sheets back.

"It's not been slept in. Christ! it's freezing in here, they must have turned off the heat. Some people are weird."

Together they bent down to the rolled bedcover, and tugged it from underneath the bed. And screamed virtually in unison.

Tommy Kellerman's body rolled out of the cover, the section over his head dried hard with dark blood.

Screaming at the top of their lungs, the women ran down the corridor. A waiter carrying a loaded tray of dirty dishes was about to step out of the elevator when they appeared, shouting garbled words as they pointed frantically to the room. The man ran into the room and was in no more than a few seconds. When he came out, his face drained as he whispered: "Dear God, it's a child—somebody's killed a child in there!"

♦ ♦ ♦

By the time the Polizei arrived, the corridor was filling with gaping onlookers and guests. The manager of the hotel tried to keep some semblance of order, shouting for people to stand back. He looked disheveled, having just been dragged out of his quarters. His collarless shirt hung out over his hurriedly pulled-on pants.

Polizei Oberrat Torsen Heinz pushed his way through the throng, holding up his badge. Three uniformed officers followed behind him. Torsen was the first of them to arrive at the open bedroom door. He asked if the doctor or forensic team had been there. He could see the tiny body, the small foot in the red sock, and his stomach turned over. He did not attempt to remove the congealed mess beneath the bed cover as he walked gingerly around the body.

The manager hung in the doorway, demanding to know who had torn pages out of his register.

The doctor arrived and took only a second to certify the body as deceased. The pathologist scuttled in, followed by two lab boys from the forensic department. They began yelling for everyone to clear out of the room.

Oberrat Heinz checked the room quietly, using a pencil to open a couple of drawers. The doctor looked over to him as he departed. "It's not a kid, it's a dwarf or a midget and he's taken one hell of a beating, but that's stating the obvious. G'night."

The pathologist carefully slipped plastic bags around the tiny red socks; he applied a bag to Kellerman's right arm and hand, then reached for his left. He stood up rubbing his knee and, looking down, realized he was kneeling on a set of broken dentures. He gestured to Heinz.

"I'm sorry, I think I may have broken them; my mistake, but someone should have checked this area."

Heinz stared at the broken teeth, and then stepped out of the way as the pathologist continued his work, about to wrap Keller-man's left arm in a protective plastic bag.

"Jesus, look at his arm, it's been hacked, a big chunk of skin removed, just above the wrist."

Heinz sent one of the uniformed officers out to check for any garbage that might have been removed.

The pathologist's team slipped a plastic sheet beside Kellerman, rolled him on top of it, then tied all four ends and lifted up the body.

"He booked in early yesterday, according to the chambermaid," Torsen Heinz said to no one in particular. He tugged at his blond hair, watched as two men dusted door handles and the mirror, then made his way down to the reception area. The manager, now wearing a jacket, insisted he had been on duty and had seen no one come in other than official guests. Heinz listened, knowing that local prostitutes used this hotel, but said nothing; he simply asked to see the guest book. The manager shoved it toward him, pointing with a dirty fingernail to the torn pages. He scratched his greasy head, and tried unsuccessfully to recall the dead man's name.

"What about his passport, did you see his passport?"

The manager was sweating. "I saw it and checked it. I know the rules. He had luggage, a sort of greenish carryall. Did you find it?"

"But you don't recall his name?"

"No…he just signed, and I gave him the key. I was on the phone when he checked in."

"What nationality?"

"American. Kellerman!" The manager beamed. "I remember, it was Kellerman!"

No one Heinz questioned had seen anyone entering his room. Heinz and his sergeant took off for the morgue.

The morgue had closed for the night.

Heinz returned early the following morning. Tommy Keller-man's naked body was even more tragic in death than in life, his stubby palms turned upward, his legs spread-eagled, his pride exposed. It was a wicked freak of nature to give this small, stunted body a penis any man would be proud to boast. The penis dangled virtually down to the kneecaps on his twisted legs.

The bed cover had to be cut away from his head, because the blood had congealed like glue. There was hardly a feature left intact; blood clotted in his eyes, his nose, his ears, and his gaping mouth; the bottom row of false teeth had cut into his upper lip, giving him the look of a Neanderthal man, a chimp, even more so as his thick dark curly hair was spiky with his own blood.

The pathologist was able to ascertain that Kellerman had died close to midnight and had eaten some four hours before he was killed. The pathologist had spent considerable time over the open wound on Kellerman's left forearm. He could tell that the skin cut away from Kellerman's arm was probably a tattoo, judging by the faint tinge of blue left along one edge. The pathologist added that whoever murdered Kellerman must have been covered in blood, since the main artery had been severed on the once tattooed wrist.

Kellerman's clothes were spread out on the lab tables; again they gave a tragic impression of the wearer, so small and childlike. His underpants were disgusting, semen stains mingled with the death throes of his bowels.

His pockets were empty, apart from a rubber band and a Zippo lighter. His clothes were labeled and listed, his body washed and tagged, placed in a child's morgue bag, and then laid on a drawer and pushed into the freezer.

Kellerman's terror of being shut in small spaces, his fear of the darkness couldn't hurt him now: It was all over for him.

Heinz hung around for a while, then returned to the hotel to question the janitor.

The toothless man could not recall anyone entering the hotel during his shift, or at least no one who warranted special attention. He did remember seeing a big man outside the hotel, wearing a black hat. In fact the man could possibly have just come out of the main entrance, he couldn't be sure, he had simply passed him on the street as he emptied the trash. He could not describe him in any detail, just that he was tall, wore a black hat, and that it was around eleven or perhaps a bit later.

Torsen Heinz sat at his large wooden desk, surrounded by his officers. The station was housed in a baroque-style building in the Potsdam district of East Germany, and for equipment there were a half dozen old typewriters and an obsolete telephone system incapable of connecting with West Berlin without interminable delays and disconnections. The principal piece of modern technology was a microwave oven, recently installed to heat up the officers' lunches.

Torsen and his men had been unable to keep up with the sharp increase in criminal activity since the fall of the socialist regime. Previously East Berlin's criminal incidences had been hushed up by the Stasi secret police or played down by the state-controlled media. Now, Polizei Oberrat Heinz and forty-odd uniformed officers had to learn fast to make their own decisions.

Sitting with his microwave-heated breakfast sausages, Heinz felt swamped. There was little to report from any of the officers he had assigned to the Kellerman case, because after their day's work they had clocked out promptly at six o'clock. No matter how much Torsen argued that they were no longer working from nine to six but if necessary around the clock, they were too used to the old regime to change their working habits. There was not one man on duty yet, and it was half past eight!

Alone, Torsen sifted through the statements and facts he had gathered so far about the dwarf. He thought that Kellerman was probably an American citizen since, according to the hotel manager, he spoke with an American accent. Without a passport or other documents to substantiate this, he decided he should first contact the U.S. embassy to see if they had any record of his arrival in Berlin. The next call would be to the circus which was being heralded as the biggest event of the season. He tried to contact the embassy, but the station's telephone switchboard was still closed. He finished his breakfast and looked at the photograph of his father on the wall behind his desk. Gunter Heinz's picture was brown with age. Torsen gave the photograph a small nod and determined that until it was absolutely necessary he would not go hat in hand to the West Berlin police. They had already assisted him on a number of cases, and he had taken a lot of ridicule from his "colleagues" with their high tech computers and fax machines. He wondered how well they would cope without so much as one single telephone connected after 6 p.m. or before 9 a.m.! He swiveled in his chair and looked at the memo taped to the wall under his papa's severe face. "Accept no coincidence—only facts." He had put up this admonition after he had been promoted to chief inspector at exactly the same age as his father had before him. The memo had been written when Torsen first made the decision to follow him into the Polizei.

Suffering from senility, Gunter Heinz, Sr., was now residing in a home for the elderly, most of the time happily unaware of his surroundings—or for that matter of who he was. But there were the odd flashes of recall. In these moments Torsen was able to talk with him, even play chess. Torsen had arranged for the nurses to call him whenever his father was lucid. However, the last time he had hurried over for a visit, the old man had glared at him and asked who the hell he was. Torsen had replaced his chessboard in its case.

The nurse had apologized, whispering that she was sorry, but earlier that day his father had asked to speak with his son on an important matter. During Torsen's conversation with the nurse, his father ripped small pieces of tissue paper from a box, carefully licked each tiny scrap, stuck them on his nose, and blew them off like snowflakes. A spectacle that would have been comic were the man not his father.

♦ ♦ ♦

Torsen called the U.S. embassy. They had no record of a Kellerman in residence in East Berlin, but suggested the border patrols be contacted. The flow of refugees arriving in Germany was causing mayhem, but there was an attempt to record everyone coming in by automobile or train. There was a possibility that Kellerman had landed at the main airport and crossed to the East; the airport authorities, too, should be contacted.

Torsen sent two officers to try and discover Kellerman's origins, and then set off with Sergeant Volker Rieckert for the circus.

The patrol car labored through the mud, but the attendant would not let them come close to the private trailers and the performers' parking lot. The long walk to the trailer sections and big tents was hazardous. Their trousers were soaked at the bottom, their hair plastered to their heads as they made their way toward the cashier's trailer.

The cashier had bright red-dyed hair with a pink comb stuck in the top that matched her pink lipstick. She looked at Torsen's ID and blew a large pink bubble with her gum, then pointed toward the manager's building. Torsen swore under his breath as he felt the mud squelch into his hand-knit woolen socks.

♦ ♦ ♦

The circus's administrator welcomed the men into his office. It was tiny and overheated, in a small building at the side of a massive tent. It was filled with filing cabinets, and the walls were covered with large circus posters. Romy Kelm, the administrator, a balding bespectacled gentleman, introduced himself to the detectives and ordered tea.

The two officers were settled on folding chairs, and Mr. Kelm seated himself behind his pristine desk. He told Torsen the dead man could very well be Tommy Kellerman. Kelm hastened to add that Kellerman was not employed by the circus, but had been more than twenty years earlier. He knew also that Kellerman had been in jail in the United States, was prone to fighting and drunken brawls, and was a thief. Kellerman had absconded with the company's wages eight years previously when he was associated with the Kings Circus, a smaller touring company. A circus trade paper had given the details of his theft and subsequent jail sentence. Kelm suggested that there were a number of people who resented Kellerman, because he owed them money.