Rosa (35 page)

“You shot him?” said Hoffner, still trying to clear his mind.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Tamshik holstered his gun. “Because I thought he would get away,
Kommissar.
”

Again, Hoffner glanced out at the corridor. That made no sense. He thought out loud. “I was behind him. You must have been directly in his path. There was nowhere else for him to go. Except in here.” Hoffner again looked across at Tamshik. It suddenly struck him that Tamshik had shown no surprise at his own appearance. It was as if Tamshik had been waiting for him. Things suddenly began to come clearer. Hoffner’s mind slowed. “Unless you thought he’d overpower you,
Kommissar
?” Hoffner’s tone sharpened. “A man of his tremendous size. Is that it?”

Tamshik stared blankly. “He was a maniac. I didn’t know what to expect.”

Hoffner returned the stare. “And the shot to his thigh wasn’t enough to stop him?”

“No. It wasn’t.”

“I find that hard to believe.”

“Believe what you like.”

“You were waiting for him, weren’t you?”

For just an instant, Tamshik’s eyes narrowed. “The man’s dead,
Kommissar.
You have a strange way of thanking someone for doing your job.”

Hoffner felt a sudden urge to step over and crack a fist across Tamshik’s face. Luckily, Fichte poked his head through the doorway at that moment. Hoffner could hear the wheezing in his breath.

“I heard shots,” said Fichte, catching his breath. He noticed Wouters. “Oh, God.” Fichte laughed nervously through his gasps. “You got him. Good Christ. We got him.”

“Yes, Herr
Assistent,
” said Tamshik from the far corner. “You got him.”

It was only then that Fichte saw Tamshik. He nearly jumped. “
Kommissar
Tamshik? What . . . ?” Fichte looked to Hoffner for an answer.

“Your
Kriminal-Kommissar
has gotten his man,” said Tamshik with mock admiration.

This only seemed to rattle Fichte further. “Yes,” he said uneasily.

Hoffner kept his eyes on Tamshik. “I shot no one, Hans.”

Tamshik said, “It’s a proud day for the Kripo, gentlemen.”

“‘A proud.         .         .         ?’” murmured Fichte. Again, he looked to Hoffner. “I don’t understand.”

Tamshik spoke to Hoffner: “Think of all the money and time saved,
Kommissar.
No need for a trial. No reason to parade out your madman. And all because of your heroics. Well done.”

Hoffner had no idea what game Tamshik was playing. “Who were you pulling the trigger for, Tamshik? You’re not this clever. Who sent you down here?”

“Don’t worry,
Kommissar,
” said Tamshik with his accustomed venom. “This one’s all yours. No one needs to know about all the help you’ve gotten from the Polpo.”

Hoffner had heard enough. He started for Tamshik, but Fichte, still not knowing what was going on, had the good sense to hold him back. “He’s not worth the trouble, Nikolai,” he said in a whisper.

Slowly, Tamshik drew up to them. “Your case is closed, Herr
Kommissar.
Congratulations.” Hoffner managed to pull his arm free. “I wouldn’t do that,” said Tamshik coldly. He stared a moment longer, then nodded to Fichte.
“Assistent.”
Tamshik then stepped over Wouters’s body and headed out into the corridor.

When the footsteps had faded, Fichte released Hoffner’s arm. “What the hell just happened in here?” he said.

Hoffner remained motionless. He stared down at the body. Wouters had nothing to tell them, not now. Tamshik had made certain of that. Slowly Hoffner walked to the back of the room and slammed his hand into the wall.

“
I
t is a bit odd.”

Kriminaldirektor
Präger sat uncomfortably behind his desk. His skin was still pasty from sleep. Polpo
Direktor
Weigland sat across from him. It had been nearly twenty years since either of them had seen the Alex this early in the morning.

“I don’t know what he’s so upset about,” said Weigland. He turned to Hoffner, who was standing at the window. “Nikolai. The case is finished. Tomorrow the papers will call you a hero.”

Hoffner continued to stare out. The dull gray of pre-dawn hung over the square like an unwashed towel: it only reminded him of how tired he was. “I’ll ask one more time, Herr
Direktor,
” said Hoffner as he turned to the two men at the desk. “What was
Kommissar
Tamshik doing in the pit rooms of the
Ochsenhof
?”

Weigland threw up his hands as he looked across at Präger. “There’s no convincing him, Edmund. This is a gift horse. I don’t see what the problem is.”

“I understand,” said Präger: for the first time he was actually holding his own with the Polpo. “
Kommissar
Tamshik obviously had his reasons. We’re not interested in Polpo business. But you can understand the
Kriminal-Kommissar
’s concern.” Präger glanced over at Tamshik. The man stood unnervingly still. Fichte, by comparison, looked almost pitiful by his side. “That said,” Präger continued, “I think we can all take satisfaction in having eliminated this problem.”

Hoffner started in. “That’s not the point, Herr
Kriminaldirektor
—”

Präger put up a hand. “The bodies are here. They’ll be here tomorrow. Whatever else can wait until then.”

Hoffner disagreed. “I’m not sure that’s true.”

“You’re tired,
Kriminal-Kommissar.
” Präger was telling him, not consoling him. “You should take tomorrow at home. With your family. Take two days. The rest can wait.”

Hoffner stared across at Präger. There were any number of things he thought to say, but his mind was a jumble. Exhaustion was getting the better of him. More than that, he knew Präger was right. This wasn’t the time, nor the audience to press things any further. “Fine, Herr
Kriminaldirektor.
”

“Good,” said Weigland, his relief all too apparent.

Hoffner said, “Just so long as no one touches anything. Nothing happens until I see the bodies.”

“Of course,” Weigland said eagerly. “Naturally.” He wanted this done. “Everything stays exactly as it is tonight. No question.”

Hoffner ignored Weigland. He kept his eyes on Präger.

Präger said, “It’s still your case,
Kriminal-Kommissar.
Nothing gets touched.”

Hoffner nodded. He then looked over at Tamshik. “And I want that man nowhere near my evidence.”

Tamshik stared straight ahead as if he had heard nothing. Weigland spun back to Präger.

“Edmund, really!” Weigland’s exasperation had returned. “That tone was completely uncalled for.”

Hoffner said, “I think we’re beyond protocol, Herr
Direktor.
”

“We’re done here, Nikolai,” said Präger, ending any further discussion. Hoffner had overstepped the line. “You did well with this. Take your two days.” He glanced over at Fichte. “You as well, Herr
Kriminal-Assistent.
”

Fichte perked up. He blinked quickly several times. “Thank you, Herr
Kriminaldirektor.
”

There was nothing else to be said. The room became uncomfortably still. Finally, Hoffner picked up his hat and started toward the door. Fichte moved to join him, but Hoffner continued past him. “You get home safe, Hans, all right?” Fichte had hoped for more. Hoffner, however, was not in the mood.

O
ut on the Alex, Hoffner pulled up his coat collar. The air felt somehow kinder; it was of little comfort. Wouters’s eyes were still with him, their silence like a last stroke of the knife.

Hoffner peered up into the first light. Small specks of snow were swirling overhead. Odd, he thought. By nightfall, Berlin would be under a blanket of white.

PART TWO

FOUR

K

T
hey made them into heroes.

The announcement came on Friday, the day of Hoffner’s scheduled return. Rumors had been circulating, but nothing had been confirmed. “You don’t rush these things, Nikolai.” Präger was famous for his timing. “You have to let the city set the tone.” Evidently the city wanted Friday. And so, with the hysteria at just the right pitch, Präger presented Berlin with her new saviors.

From that moment on, Hoffner and Fichte lived on the front pages of every daily in town. Photographs of Wouters’s body—his chest laid bare, the tiny charred hole where the bullet had entered—sat side by side with images of a beaming Fichte and a less than enthusiastic Hoffner. Präger insisted: Hoffner would be a good little soldier. The last of the interviews dragged on into Saturday.

What was worse was how the papers were harping on the fact that Wouters was a Belgian: still more reason to cheer. Some speculated that he might have been an agent sent in during the last days of the war to create mayhem in the capital. Others took it as a sign that German savvy—if not for the incompetence of the generals—would surely have gained the ultimate victory in the war. Even Kvatsch managed to write something mildly favorable. To a paper, though, all agreed on one incontrovertible truth: that Hoffner and Fichte now stood for all that was right with Germany.

Naturally, the directors of Ganz-Neurath invited them to a special luncheon on the following Monday to thank them for their outstanding work. Chancellor Ebert himself put in an appearance to express his faith in the fine men of the Kripo. Ebert, too, needed to align himself with what was right with Germany.

But the crowning moment came on the Tuesday—one week after all the excitement at the
Ochsenhof
—when the Kripo whipped together an elaborate promotion ceremony outside the old Royal Palace: Fichte to detective sergeant, Hoffner to chief inspector. The Alex was still a shambles and hardly the image that Präger wanted to convey. More photographs, more beaming from Fichte, and all the while, the Polpo remained curiously silent.

Martha, on the other hand, was enjoying it all immensely. The neighbors down the hall had sent over a small bottle of kirsch—dreadful stuff, and not even a premium brand—in congratulations. All that business about the flat had been a misunderstanding. No reason to let it spoil things. An invitation to tea was extended. “Certainly,” Martha said. “When my husband can find time in his very important schedule, Frau Rimmler. We should be delighted.”

Sascha, too, was reaping the benefits. Herr Zessner, his physics teacher, had cited Sascha as “a model for us all” in front of the entire class. Herr Zessner lived alone with his mother, and had been hearing the poor woman’s torments over the “chisel murders” ever since the news had broken: she was the same age as the rest; she spent time outside the flat. “You know the boy’s father, Heinrich. Have him do something!” Detective Hoffner had saved Herr Zessner from an early mental breakdown. Young Hoffner would therefore be finishing the year at the top of his class. Good feelings all around, Sascha even managed to put in an appearance at the air show at Johannisthal: a few cold moments, to be sure, but, all in all, the thaw was progressing quite nicely.

And Georgi—the dailies spread out on the kitchen floor—was making a habit of pointing out his own last name in the papers every morning. “Hoffner. Like Georgi Hoffner.” He cut out each one—not the articles, just the names—and kept them in a cigar box under his bed. If Hoffner was being kept from the office, at least Kreuzberg was radiating a very comforting mood.

When Hoffner did finally get back to the Alex in that first week of February, Präger was prepared for him. Cases Fichte would have handled on his own as a detective sergeant suddenly required Hoffner’s expertise. Pimps and whores, bar-front brawls, lowlifes ending up dead, and Hoffner would be called in to clean up the obvious mess. It was a week into it before he began to wonder whether Präger’s intention was to keep him in the papers or out of the office.

Through it all, the snow returned—again and again—as if it knew that Berlin had something to hide. A hint of grime would peek up through the streets, and a new dusting of white would quickly settle from above. Better not to know what lay beneath. It was a popular attitude.

All that began to change on the twelfth when Leo Jogiches—from somewhere in hiding—printed his account of Rosa’s death. The article had appeared in the communist
Die Rote Fahne
almost a week ago. The rest of the city’s papers had failed to pick up on it. Hoffner had seen it for the first time only this morning.

It was a startling tale of Liebknecht and Luxemburg on the run. Hunted down by members of the Cavalry Guards Rifle Division—those charming soldiers who had taken such joy in beating students to death in the last days of the revolution—Karl and Rosa had been snatched from an apartment on the outskirts of town and then brought to the Hotel Eden near the zoo, where a Captain Pabst and a rifleman named Runge had seen to the killings. Jogiches had even included a photograph of the drinking bout at which the murderers had celebrated the deaths. It was all very dramatic, very shocking, and, as Hoffner well knew, not even half the story.

Not surprisingly, the government was showing little interest. They preferred the original reports from mid-January: that an angry mob had ambushed the Reds and killed them in a wild frenzy, a tragedy of the revolution, to be sure, but not all that much of a tragedy. “The proper expiation for the bloodbath that they unleashed,” the
Tgliche Rundschau
had written at the time. “The day of judgment on Luxemburg and Liebknecht is over.” Ebert and his cronies were more than willing to agree. They had no intention of dredging it all up again. There was mention of a possible trial, but no one was all that keen to pursue it, especially as the accusations were coming from the people who had started all the trouble in the first place.

Meanwhile, the Polpo—still silent, and still with Rosa’s body somewhere up on the fourth floor—continued to say nothing. They seemed happy enough to let it all fall at the feet of Pabst and Runge. The Wouters case was closed. Weigland even made a special trip down to the third floor to remind Präger of proper jurisdiction. Luxemburg was a Polpo matter. The men of IA would handle it as they saw fit.

Präger had nodded. He liked a victory—along with the good press—as much as anyone else. However, he also liked his victories clean. Two minutes after Weigland had scuttled back upstairs, Präger called Hoffner into his office.

T
he photograph that Jogiches had printed now stared up at Hoffner from his desk. It was a dreary affair, twenty or so men in gray uniform, another few in black, one little barmaid in white standing at the center with a tray in her hands. Hoffner had been studying the faces for almost an hour. It was the first such block of time he had been able to devote to the case in almost three weeks.

They had let him see the bodies on that first Friday after he returned to work: the woman inside the trunk had been no different from the others, another lonely seamstress with no family to claim her; Wouters had not been much of a surprise, either, except for his hands. Even lifeless, they had shown remarkable strength, especially on so small a man.

More than that, however, was no longer available. The bodies were in the ground; Weigland had made sure of that during Hoffner’s extended absence. It seemed only appropriate given the speed with which the case had resolved itself: Tamshik’s single shot, all discussion closed. Why bother with the evidence?

Hoffner’s eyes continued to drift to the girl in the photo. It was clear that she had been persuaded to pose with the men: she seemed uncomfortable in their presence. The soldiers, however, needed a symbol for what they had been fighting to protect. The entire group stared grimly into the lens, except for one fellow who was seated at the front. He was sporting a tight smirk, with one hand in his coat pocket, the other around a thick cigar. His had been a job well done.

Rifleman Otto Runge and his cohorts looked to be the perfect dupes, posed over a few buckets of beer, and without a spark of intelligence among them. Runge himself had the air of a halfwit, with his drooping moustache and narrow eyes: not difficult to see that the best these men could have managed was a quick crack on the head, or a bullet to the ribs. Hoffner had no doubt that they had killed Liebknecht and Luxemburg, but the etchings on Rosa’s back—and her connection to Wouters and beyond—were clearly far too involved for their simple minds. Like Tamshik in the pit rooms, someone had set them on their task. The question remained: Who?

And yet, the more Hoffner studied the photo, the more he realized that Jogiches was trying to tell him something with it. There was a certain arrogance in the assumption, but Hoffner had not been wasting all of his time in recent weeks. Stealing a few minutes here and there, he had begun to dig deeper into Herr Jogiches’s past. Last Thursday, while rummaging through it, Hoffner had stumbled upon his K.

Naturally, it was Rosa who had led the way: her 1912 journal had held the key. Several of the entries detailed a period during which Jogiches had been living under an assumed name somewhere in the city. Rosa, of course, had never given up the name—Hoffner had admired her discretion—but she had let slip the address of a hotel in two of the passages. Hoffner had paid a visit to the hotel: what he had unearthed was a story worthy of a Rossini libretto.

Years ago—long before her move to Berlin—Rosa had told her family that she and Jogiches had been married in Switzerland. It wasn’t true, and by 1911, when the two were no longer together, it had become something of an embarrassment whenever members of Rosa’s family came to visit. While she had been willing to concoct a sham marriage so as to save face, she was not so eager to present her family with a sham divorce. To maintain the fiction, Jogiches had agreed to leave his name on the lease and to rent a room at the Hotel Schlosspark under an assumed name. Unfortunately, Jogiches’s tailor had never been fully apprised of the arrangement. Hoffner had discovered a receipt—still in the hotel files—for a pair of trousers that had been delivered to the room of a K. Kryzysztalowicz, on the fourteenth of March, 1912. The name on the receipt, Leo Jogiches.

Further proof of the alias came from a much earlier entry devoted to Leo’s brother, Osip, that dated from 1901. According to that journal, Osip had been dying of tuberculosis since the early nineties and, in the last weeks of his life, was advised by his doctors to take a trip to Algiers for his health; naturally, Leo had insisted that he join him. Hoffner had checked the ship’s manifest and, once again, had found meticulous German paperwork up to the task. Osip had indeed sailed for Algiers. Oddly enough, Leo had not accompanied him. A Dr. Krystalowicz, however, had.

Spelling variations aside, Jogiches was his K.

More than just the name, though, Hoffner’s digging had begun to lay bare the man himself, one obsessed with hidden meanings and ciphers. Jogiches inhabited a world built on secrecy and intrigue, and, more often than not, used them as tools to test those closest to him. Not surprisingly, Rosa had been his favorite target over the years. Resilient as she was, however, his incessant goading had ultimately torn them apart.

Why, then, thought Hoffner, would Jogiches treat the recent article and photograph any differently? They were simply the latest pieces in his puzzle: the note to return to her flat; the papers waiting there; the creased letters that had led Hoffner to Jogiches in the first place? Presumptuous as it might sound, Hoffner believed that Jogiches was now testing him, that he had been testing him all along. Jogiches’s inclusion of the photograph—hardly a damning piece of evidence on its own—could only mean that he knew far more than he was willing to print, or that he thought safe to expose. He was simply waiting for Hoffner to contact him. At least that was the theory.

Unfortunately, Hoffner was now alone in his speculations, for while he had been busy unpacking Jogiches, Fichte had been occupied elsewhere.