Garden of Beasts (9 page)

“Markings in the shoes?”

Janssen took them off and examined them. “None, sir.”

Kohl glanced at them and then felt the deceased’s jacket. “The suit is made of… ersatz fabric.” The inspector had nearly made the mistake of using the phrase “Hitler fabric,” a reference to fake cloth made of fibers from trees. (A popular joke: If you have a tear in your suit, water and expose it to sunlight; the cloth will grow back.) The Leader had announced plans to make the country independent of foreign imports. Elastic, margarine, gasoline, motor oil, rubber, cloth—all were being made from alternative materials found in Germany. The problem, of course, was the same with substitutes everywhere—they simply weren’t very good, and people sometimes referred to them disparagingly as “Hitler” goods. But it was never wise to use the term in public; one could be reported for uttering it.

The import of the discovery was that the man was probably German. Most foreigners in the country nowadays had their own currency to convert, which meant their buying power was quite strong, and none would willingly purchase cheap clothing like this.

But why would the killer wish to keep his victim’s identity secret? The ersatz clothing suggested there was nothing particularly important about him. But then, Kohl reflected, many senior people in the National Socialist Party were poorly paid, and even those who had decent salaries often wore substitute clothing out of loyalty to the Leader: Could the victim’s job within the Party or the government have been the motive for his death?

“Interesting,” Kohl said, rising stiffly. “The killer shoots a man in a crowded part of the city. He knows someone might hear the report of the gun and yet he risks detection to slice the labels out of his clothing. This makes me all the more intrigued to learn who this unfortunate gentleman is. Take his fingerprints, Janssen. It will be forever if we wait for the coroner to do so.”

“Yes, sir.” The young officer opened his briefcase and removed the equipment. He started to work.

Kohl gazed at the cobblestones. “I have been saying ‘killer,’ singular, Janssen, but of course there could have been a dozen. But I can see nothing of the choreography of this event on the ground.” In more open crime scenes the infamously gritty Berlin wind conveniently spread telltale dust on the ground. But not in this sheltered alley.

“Sir… Inspector,” the Schupo officer called. “I can find no casings here. I have scoured the entire area.”

This fact troubled Kohl, and Janssen caught his boss’s expression.

“Because,” the inspector explained, “he not only cut the labels from his victim, he took the time to find the shell casing.”

“So. He is a professional.”

“As I say, Janssen, when making deductions, never state your conclusions as if they are certainties. When you do that, your mind instinctively closes out other possibilities. Say, rather, that our suspect
may
have a high degree of diligence and attention to detail. Perhaps a professional criminal, perhaps not. It could also be that a rat or bird made off with the shiny object, or a schoolboy picked it up and fled at the terrifying sight of a dead man. Or even that the killer is a poor man who wishes to reuse the brass.”

“Of course, Inspector,” Janssen said, nodding as if memorizing Kohl’s words.

In the short time they’d worked together, the inspector had learned two things about Janssen: that the young man was incapable of irony and that he was a remarkably fast learner. The latter quality was a godsend to the impatient inspector. Regarding the former, though, he wished the boy joked more frequently; policing is a profession badly in need of humor.

Janssen finished taking the fingerprints, which he’d done expertly.

“Now dust the cobblestones around him and take photographs of any prints you find. The killer might’ve been clever enough to take the labels but not so smart to avoid touching the ground when he did so.”

After five minutes of spreading the fine powder around the body, Janssen said, “I believe there are some here, sir. Look.”

“Yes. They’re good. Record them.”

After he photographed the prints the young man stood back and took additional pictures of the corpse and the scene. The inspector walked slowly around the body. He pulled his magnifying monocle from his vest’s watch pocket again and placed around his neck its green cord, braided for him as a Christmas present by young Hanna. He examined a spot on the cobblestones near the body. “Flakes of leather, it seems.” He looked at them carefully. “Old and dry. Brown. Too stiff to be from gloves. Maybe shoes or a belt or old satchel or suitcase that either the killer or victim was carrying.”

He scooped these flakes up and placed them in another brown envelope then moistened the gum and sealed it.

“We have a witness, sir,” one of the younger Schupo officers called. “Though he’s not very cooperative.”

Witness. Excellent! Kohl followed the man back toward the mouth of the alley. There, another Schupo officer was prodding forward a man in his forties, Kohl estimated. He was dressed in worker’s clothes. His left eye was glass and his right arm dangled uselessly at his side. One of the four million who survived the War but were left with bodies forever changed by the unfathomable experience.

The Schupo officer pushed him toward Kohl.

“That will do, Officer,” the inspector said sternly. “Thank you.” Turning to the witness, he asked, “Now, your card.”

The man handed over his ID. Kohl glanced at it. He forgot everything on the document the instant he returned it, but even a cursory examination of papers by a police officer made witnesses extremely cooperative.

Though not in all cases.

“I wish to be helpful. But as I told the officer, sir, I didn’t actually see much of anything.” He fell silent.

“Yes, yes, tell me what you actually
did
see.” An impatient gesture from Kohl’s thick hand.

“Yes, Inspector. I was scrubbing the basement stairs at Number forty-eight. There.” He pointed out of the alley to a town house. “As you can see. I was below the level of the sidewalk. I heard what I took to be a backfire.”

Kohl grunted. Since ’33 no one but an idiot assumed backfires; they assumed bullets.

“I thought nothing of it and continued scrubbing.” He proved this by pointing to his damp shirt and trousers. “Then ten minutes later I heard a whistle.”

“Whistle? A police whistle?”

“No, sir, I mean, as someone would make through his teeth. It was quite loud. I glanced up and saw a man walk out of the alley. The whistle was to hail a taxi. It stopped in front of my building and I heard the man ask the driver to take him to the Summer Garden restaurant.”

Whistling? Kohl reflected. This was unusual. One whistled for dogs and horses. But to summon a taxi this way would demean the driver. In Germany all professions and trades were worthy of equal respect. Did this suggest that the suspect was a foreigner? Or merely rude? He jotted the observation into his notebook.

“The number of the taxi?” Kohl had to ask, of course, but received the expected response.

“Oh, I have no idea, sir.”

“Summer Garden.” This was a common name. “Which one?”

“I believe I heard ‘Rosenthaler Street.’”

Kohl nodded, excited to find such a good lead this early in an investigation. “Quickly—what did the man look like?”

“I was below the stairs, sir, as I said. I saw only his back as he hailed the car. He was a large man, more than two meters tall. Broad but not fat. He had an accent, though.”

“What kind? From a different region of Germany? Or a different country?”

“Similar to someone from the south, if anything. But I have a brother near Munich and it sounded different still.”

“Outside the country, perhaps? Many foreigners here now, with the Olympics.”

“I don’t know, sir. I’ve spent all my life in Berlin. And I’ve only been out of the fatherland once.” He nodded toward his useless arm.

“Did he have a leather satchel?”

“Yes, I believe so.”

To Janssen, Kohl said, “The likely source of the leather flakes.” He turned back. “And you didn’t see his face?”

“No, sir. As I say.”

Kohl’s voice lowered. “If I were to tell you that I won’t take your name, so you would not be further involved, could you perhaps remember better what he looked like?”

“Honestly, sir, I did not see his face.”

“Age?”

The man shook his head. “All I know is that he was a big man and was wearing a light suit…. I can’t say the color, I’m afraid. Oh, and on his head was a hat like Air Minister Göring wears.”

“What kind is that?” Kohl asked.

“With a narrow brim. Brown.”

“Ah, something helpful.” Kohl looked the janitor up and down. “Very well, you may go now.”

“Hail Hitler,” the man said with pathetic enthusiasm and offered a powerful salute, perhaps in compensation for the fact he needed to use his left arm for the gesture.

The inspector offered a distracted “Hail” and returned to the body. They quickly collected their equipment. “Let’s hurry. To the Summer Garden.”

They started back to the car. Willi Kohl winced, glancing down at his feet. Even wearing overpriced leather shoes stuffed with the softest of lamb’s wool did little to help his distraught toes and arches. Cobblestones were particularly brutal.

He was suddenly aware of Janssen, at his side, slowing. “Gestapo,” the young man whispered.

Dismayed, Kohl looked up and saw Peter Krauss, in a shabby brown suit and matching felt trilby hat, approach. Two of his assistants, younger men, about Janssen’s age, held back.

Oh, not now! The suspect might be at the restaurant this very moment, not suspecting that he’d been detected.

Krauss walked toward the two Kripo inspectors leisurely. Propaganda Minister Goebbels was always sending out Party photographers to stage pictures of model Aryans and their families to use in his publications. Peter Krauss could easily have been a subject for a hundred such pictures: He was a tall, slim, blond man. A former colleague of Kohl’s, Krauss had been invited to join the Gestapo because of his experience in the old Department 1A of the Kripo, which investigated political crimes. Just after the National Socialists came to power the department was spun off and became the Gestapo. Krauss was like many Prussian Germans: Nordic with some Slav blood in his veins but office gossip had it that he’d been invited to leave the Kripo for the job on Prince Albrecht Street only after changing his first name from Pietr, which sniffed of the Slavic.

Kohl had heard Krauss was a methodical investigator though they had never worked together; Kohl had always refused to handle political crimes, and now the Kripo was forbidden to.

Krauss said, “Willi, good afternoon.”

“Hail. What brings you here, Peter?”

Janssen nodded and the Gestapo investigator did the same. He said to Kohl, “I received a phone call from our boss.”

Did he mean Heinrich Himmler himself? Kohl wondered. It was possible. One month ago, the SS leader had consolidated every police force in Germany under his own control and had created the Sipo, the plain-clothed division, which included the Gestapo, the Kripo, and the notorious SD, which was the SS’s intelligence division. Himmler had just been named state chief of police, a rather modest description, Kohl had thought at the time of the announcement, for the most powerful law enforcer on earth.

Krauss continued. “He’s been instructed by the Leader to keep our city blemish-free during the Olympics. We’re to look into all serious crimes near the stadium, Olympic Village and city center and make sure the perpetrators are swiftly caught. And here, a murder within shouting distance of the Tiergarten.” Krauss clicked his tongue in dismay.

Kohl glanced obviously at his watch, desperate to get to the Summer Garden. “I’m afraid I have to leave, Peter.”

Examining the body closely, crouching down, the Gestapo man said, “Unfortunately with all the foreign reporters in town… So difficult to control them, to monitor them.”

“Yes, yes, but—”

“We need to make sure this is solved before they learn of the death.” Krauss rose and walked in a slow circle around the dead man. “Who is he, do we know?”

“Not yet. His ID is missing. Tell me, Peter, this wouldn’t have anything to do with an SS or SA matter, would it?”

“Not that I know of,” Krauss replied, frowning. “Why?”

“On the way here, Janssen and I noticed many more patrols. Random stops to check papers. Yet we’ve heard no word about an operation.”

“Ach, that’s nothing,” the Gestapo inspector said, waving his hand dismissively. “A minor security matter. Nothing the Kripo need worry about.”

Kohl looked again at his pocket watch. “Well, I really must go, Peter.”

The Gestapo officer rose to his feet. “Was he robbed?”

“Everything’s missing from his pockets,” Kohl said impatiently.

Krauss stared at the body for a long moment and all Kohl could think of was the suspect sitting at the Summer Garden, halfway through a meal of schnitzel or wurst. “I must be getting back,” Kohl said.

“One moment.” Krauss continued to study the body. Finally, without looking up, he said, “It would make sense if the killer was a foreigner.”

“A foreigner? Well—” Janssen spoke quickly, eyebrows rising in his youthful face. But Kohl shot him a sharp look and he fell silent.

“What’s that?” Krauss asked him.

The inspector candidate made a fast recovery. “I’m curious why you think it would make sense.”

“The deserted alley, missing identification, a cold-blooded shooting… When you’ve been in this business for a time, you get a feel for the perpetrators in murders such as this, Inspector Candidate.”

“A murder such as what?” Kohl could not resist asking. A man shot to death in a Berlin alley was hardly sui generis these days.

But Krauss didn’t respond. “A Roma or Pole very likely. Violent people, to be sure. And with motives galore to murder innocent Germans. Or the killer might be Czech, from the east, of course, not the Sudetenland. They’re known for shooting people from behind.”

Kohl nearly added: as are the Stormtroopers. But he merely said, “Then we can hope that the perpetrator turns out to be a Slav.”