Field Gray (10 page)

“Have you told the Hussar?”

The Hussar was a uniformed sergeant called Max Willig, who was frequently about Bülowplatz and almost as unpopular as Captain Anlauf.

“I’ve told him.”

“Didn’t he believe you?”

“He did. But Judge Bode didn’t when we went to get a warrant. Said we need more evidence than an itch on the end of my nose.”

“Think they’re planning something?”

“They’re always planning something. They’re communists, aren’t they? Criminals, most of them.”

“I don’t like criminals who break the law,” I said.

“What other kind are there?”

“The kind that make the law. It’s the Hindenburgs and Schleichers of this world who are doing more to screw the Republic than the commies and the Nazis put together.”

“You got that right, my friend.”

I might never have heard the name of Erich Mielke again but for two things. One was that I saw a lot more of Elisabeth and, now and again, she’d say that she’d seen him or one of his sisters. And then there were the events of August 9, 1931. There’s not a policeman from Weimar Berlin who doesn’t remember August 9, 1931. The way Americans remember the
Maine
.

GERMANY, 1931

T
o say the least, it had been a difficult summer. In spite of some new laws that made political violence a capital crime, Nazis were killing communists at the rate of almost two to one. After the March elections, in which the Nazis got more than three times as many votes as the KPD, the communists became increasingly violent, probably out of desperation. Then, in early August, there was a call for an election in the Prussian Parliament. Most likely this was something to do with the world economic crisis. After all, this was 1931 and we were in the middle of the Great Depression. Almost half the banks had failed in America, and in Germany we were still trying to pay for the war with almost six million men out of work. And you can blame the French with their Carthaginian peace for a lot of that.

Prussian elections were always a barometer for the rest of Germany and usually bad-tempered affairs. For that you can blame the Prussian character.
Jedem das Seine
is a Prussian’s motto. Literally it means “To each his own,” but more figuratively it means everyone gets what he deserves. Which is why they put it on the gates at the Buchenwald concentration camp. And probably why, given the peculiar character of the Prussian Parliament, we got what we deserved when, on the ninth of August, the results were announced and it turned out that not enough people had voted to force an election at a national level. With no quorum for a vote, tempers all over Berlin got even worse. But especially on Bülowplatz outside Karl Liebknecht House. Figuring that some sort of dirty deal had been done between the Nazis and the Prussian administration, thousands of communists gathered there. Possibly, they were correct about a deal. But things turned ugly when the riot police showed up and started cracking Red heads like eggs. Berlin cops were always good at making omelettes.

Probably the rain didn’t help, either. It had been warm and dry for several weeks, but that day it rained heavily and Berlin cops never did care to get wet. Something to do with all that leather on the shako helmets they wore. There was a cover you were supposed to put on it when the weather was bad, but no one ever remembered them, which meant you had to spend ages cleaning and polishing the shako afterward. If there was one thing guaranteed to piss off a Berlin bull, it was getting his hat wet.

I guess the Reds decided they’d had enough. Then again, they were always shouting about police dictatorship, even when the police were behaving with exemplary fairness. The local police had been threatened before, but this was different. The talk was about killing policemen. About eight o’clock that evening, shots were fired and a full-scale gun battle between police and the KPD kicked off in a big way—the biggest we’d seen since the 1919 uprising.

News started to come in to Police Headquarters on Berlin Alexanderplatz at around nine o’clock that several officers, including two police captains, had been shot and killed. We were already investigating the June murder of another cop. I’d helped to carry his coffin. By the time I and some other detectives reached Bülowplatz most of the crowds had left, but the gunfight was still very much in progress. The communists were on the rooftops of several buildings, and cops with searchlights were returning fire while, at the same time, they were searching apartment houses in the area for weapons and suspects. A hundred people were arrested, maybe more, while the battle continued. This meant that we couldn’t get near the bodies, and for several hours we traded shots with the Reds; one time a rifle bullet clipped off a piece of brickwork just above my head and, more in anger than the hope of hitting anything, I let fly with the Bergmann until the magazine was empty. It was one in the morning before we got to the stricken police officers who were lying in the doorway of the Babylon Movie Theater, by which time one communist had been shot dead and seventeen others wounded.

Of the three policemen in the doorway, two were dead. The third, Sergeant Willig, “the Hussar,” was seriously wounded. He’d been shot in the stomach and in the arm, and his blue-gray tunic was purple with blood, not all of it his own.

“We were set up,” he gasped as we sat with him and waited for the ambulance. “They weren’t on the rooftops, the ones who got us. The bastards were hiding in a doorway and shot us from behind as we walked past.”

The officer in charge, Detective Police Counselor Reinhold Heller, told Willig to save his breath, but the sergeant was the kind who couldn’t do anything until he’d made his report.

“There were two of them. Handguns. Automatics. Shot my pistol at them. A full clip. Couldn’t say if I hit either of them or not. Young they were. Tearaways. Twenty or so. Laughed when they saw the two captains hit the ground. Then they went into the theater.” He tried a smile. “Must have been Garbo fans. Never much liked her myself.”

The ambulance men arrived with a stretcher and carried him away, leaving us with the two bodies.

“Gunther?” said Heller. “Go and speak to the theater manager. Find out if anyone saw something more than just the movie.”

Heller was a Jew, but I didn’t have a problem with that. Not like some. Heller was Bernard Weiss, the Kripo head’s golden boy, which would have been fine but for the fact that Weiss was also a Jew. I thought Heller was good police, and that was all that mattered as far as I was concerned. Of course, the Nazis thought differently.

The movie was
Mata Hari,
with Garbo in the title role and Ramón Novarro as the young Russian officer who falls in love with her. I hadn’t seen it myself, but the movie was doing well in Berlin. Garbo gets shot by the treacherous French, and with a plot like that, it could hardly fail with Germans. The theater manager was waiting in the lobby. He was swarthy and worried-looking, with a mustache like a midget’s eyebrow, and to that extent, at least, rather resembled Ramón Novarro. But it was probably just as well the blonde from the box office didn’t look like Garbo, at least not like the Garbo on the lobby card; her hair was frightful-looking, like Struwwelpeter.

Everything around us was red. Red carpet, red walls, red ceiling, red chairs, and red curtains on the auditorium doors. Given the politics of the area, it all seemed appropriate. The blonde was tearful, the manager merely nervous. He kept adjusting his cuff links as he explained, loudly, as if he were a character in a play, what he’d seen and heard:

“Mata Hari had just finished seducing the Russian general, Shubin,” he said, “when we heard the first shots. That would have been at about ten past eight.”

“How many shots?”

“A volley,” he said. “Six or seven. Small arms. Pistols. I was in the war, see? I know the difference between a pistol shot and a rifle shot. I stuck my head through the box-office door and saw Fräulein Wiegand here on the floor. At first I thought there had been a robbery. That she’d been held up. But then there was a second volley and several of the bullets hit the cash window. Two men ran through the lobby and into the auditorium without paying. And since they were both holding pistols, I wasn’t about to insist that they buy tickets. I can’t say that I got a very good look at them, because I was scared. Then there were more shots, outside. Rifle shots, I think, and people started running in here to take cover. By now the projectionist had stopped the movie and switched on the lights. And the people in the auditorium were going through the exit door, onto Hirtenstrasse. It was plain from the noise and the crowd that the movie wasn’t going to continue, and before one of your colleagues came in here to tell me to stay inside, almost everyone had left the auditorium through the back door. Including the two men with guns.” He left his cuff links alone for a moment and rubbed his brow furiously. “They’re dead, aren’t they? Those two police officers.”

I nodded. “Mmm hmm.”

“That’s bad. That’s too bad.”

“How about you, Fräulein?” I said. “The two with guns. Did you get a good look at them?”

She shook her head and pressed a sodden handkerchief to her red nose.

“It’s been a great shock to Fräulein Wiegand,” said the manager.

“It’s been a great shock to us all, sir.”

I went into the auditorium and walked down the center aisle toward the exit. I pushed open the door and was on a small red staircase. I tap-danced my way down to another door and then out onto Hirtenstrasse just as an underground train passed beneath my feet, shaking the whole area as if it hadn’t been shaken up enough already. It was dark and there wasn’t much to see in the yellow gaslight: a few discarded red flags, a couple of protest placards, and maybe a murder weapon if I looked hard enough. With so many cops around, it didn’t seem likely that the killers would have risked holding on to their guns for very long.

Back in the movie theater doorway they were establishing a crime-scene gestalt, which is to say they were hoping that the whole could be bigger than the sum of its parts.

Captain Anlauf had been shot twice in the neck and clearly had bled to death. He was about forty, heavyset, with a full face that had helped earn the Seventh Precinct commander his Pig Cheeks nickname. His weapon was still in his holster.

“It’s too bad,” said one of the other detectives. “His wife died three weeks ago.”

“What did she die of?” I heard myself ask.

“A kidney ailment,” said Heller. “This leaves three daughters orphaned.”

“Someone’s going to have to tell them,” said someone.

“I’ll do that.” The man who spoke was in uniform, and everyone straightened up when we realized it was the commander of the Berlin Schupo, Magnus Heimannsberg. “You can leave that to me.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Heller.

“Who’s the other man? I don’t recognize him.”

“Captain Lenck, sir.”

Heimannsberg leaned down to take a closer look.

“Franz Lenck? What the hell was he doing here? This kind of police work wasn’t his sort of thing at all.”

“Every available man in uniform was summoned here,” Heller said. “Anyone know if he was married?”

“Yes,” said Heimannsberg. “No children, though. That’s something, I suppose. Look, Reinhard, I’ll tell her, too. The widow.”

Lenck was also about forty. His face was leaner than Anlauf’s, with deep smile lines that were no longer being used. A pince-nez was still on his face, just about, and the shako remained on his head, with the strap tight under his chin. He had been shot in the back and, like Anlauf, had his weapon holstered, a fact that Heimannsberg now remarked upon.

“They didn’t even have a chance to get their weapons out,” he said bitterly. Nodding at a Luger by his boot, he added, “I assume this is Sergeant Willig’s gun.”

“He got off a whole clip, sir,” said Heller. “Before they ran in here.”

“Hit anything?”

Heller looked at me.

“I don’t think so, sir,” I said. “Mind you, it’s a little hard to tell in there. Everything’s red. Carpet, walls, curtains, you name it. Hard to see any bloodstains. They ran out the rear exit on Hirtenstrasse. Sir, I’d like a couple of men with flashlights to help me search the length of the street. People have chucked away red flags and placards; it’s possible they might have thrown the guns, too.”

Heller nodded.

“Don’t worry, lads,” said Heimannsberg, who, having started his career as an ordinary patrolman, was enormously popular with everyone in the police. “We’ll catch the bastards who did this.”

A few minutes later, I was walking along Hirtenstrasse with a couple of uniformed men. As we went farther west toward Mulack Strasse and the territory of the Always True, a notorious Berlin gang, they started to become nervous. We stopped next to Fritz Hempel, the tobacconists. It was closed, of course. I pointed my flashlight one way and then the other. The two Schupo men came toward me, relaxing a little as, in the distance, a police armored car pulled up on the corner.

“This close to Mulack Strasse and the Always True, they must have figured they could hold on to their guns,” said one of the bulls.

“Maybe.” I started to retrace my steps along Hirtenstrasse, still searching the ground until my eyes caught sight of a drain cover in the gutter. It was a simple cast-iron grate, but someone had lifted it, and recently: The dirt was missing from two of the bars where someone might have grasped it. One of the Schupo men pulled it up while I was removing my jacket and my shirt; and then, inspecting the cobblestones around the open drain, I decided to remove my trousers as well.

“He was a dancer at the Haller Revue before he was police,” said one of the cops, folding my clothes over his arm.

“Versatile, isn’t he?”

“If Heimannsberg were here,” I said, “he’d make you do it, so shut up.”

“I’d put my whole fucking head down that drain if I thought it’d find the Jew bastard who killed Captain Anlauf.”

I lay down next to the drain and plunged my arm into thick black water, right up to the shoulder.

“What makes you think it was a Jew?” I asked.

“Everyone knows that the Marxists and the Jews are one and the same,” said the Schupo man.

“I wouldn’t repeat that in front of Counselor Heller if I were you.”

“This town is sick with Jews,” said the Schupo man.

“Don’t mind him, sir,” said the other cop. “Anyone with a hat and a big nose is a Jew in his book. See if you can find any war reparations while you’re down there.”

“Funny,” I said. “If I wasn’t up to my shoulder in stagnant water, I might fucking laugh. Now put the cork back in.”

I felt a hard, metallic object and fished out a pistol with a long barrel. I handed it to the cop who wasn’t holding my clothes.

“Luger, is it?” he said, wiping some of the filth off the gun. “Looks like an artillery-corps version. That’ll put an extra keyhole in your door.”

I kept on searching the bottom of the drain. “No commies down here,” I said. “Just this.” I brought up the other gun, an automatic with a curious, irregular shape, as if someone had tried to break the slide from the muzzle.

We carried the two weapons over to a street water pump and washed some of the filth away. The smaller automatic was a Dreyse .32.