Children of Wrath (22 page)

“Here, Gunther, a present for you.”

She was trying hard, Willi could see, to reconcile herself to a situation she was anything but pleased with. His assignment to the
Kinderfresser
case had made everyone happy but her.

“Come. I bet you look divine in it.”

“You’re giving this to me?” Gunther couldn’t believe it.

“Well, my husband won’t wear it.” She feigned a look of despair, though Willi was only too well aware of the real thing lurking just below the surface. “He thinks anything lighter than dark gray’s too bright.”

“But I’d always heard Jews were so cheap.”

She just stood there slack-jawed as Gunther took the scarf.

The kid didn’t even realize he’d said anything wrong. “Thanks so much, Frau Kraus.” He wrapped the silk around his neck, touching it like a golden fleece. “I’ve never had such a beautiful garment.”

On the walk back to the U-Bahn Willi felt the need to put his cards on the table.

“Look, Gunther, we could find ourselves in some tight spots ahead, you and me. Trust might mean the difference between life and death. If you’re to be my backup, I need to know: can you say with one hundred percent certainty you’re behind me?”

Gunther was obviously caught by surprise at such forthrightness.

“Well…” He opened his palms, seeming to weigh the situation. “I was taught to judge a man by what I see, not by what I hear. You and your family”—he held out one of the huge, bony hands—“are all right.” He clasped Willi’s hand tightly. “I can say I’m behind you, yes, sir. One hundred percent.”

*   *   *

Left. Right. Left. Right. The carnival staircase shifted whichever way you stepped on it, until at the bottom, a huge blast of air shot from the floor, blowing up the ladies’ skirts, and sending the kids into further spasms of hilarity.

By now, everyone was dying for a swim. For ten pfennig each they got suits, towels, and admittance to the famous Sea-Pool, with its ever-so-much-fun-to-jump artificially generated waves. In the locker room, chubby little Heinz had to sit on the toilet forever from all the excitement. Then his zipper got stuck and Erich and Stefan got cranky having to hang around, so while Willi, hot and tired himself, helped Heinz, he told his sons to wait outside by the changing-hall door. Under no circumstances should they venture farther, especially not down to the pool. A poor choice. Moments later when he and Heinz came out, Erich and Stefan weren’t there.

Willi’s eyes darted back and forth. Swarms of people surged in and out of the changing hall, overflowing the paths to the pool. Keep calm, he told himself. They couldn’t have gone far. But if his stomach had gone into his heart on the roller coaster, now it burst through his throat. That the boys were together, normally reassuring, didn’t help at all.

Illusory though she seemed, Willi knew the Shepherdess was definitely real. And definitely still out there doing her dirty work. At least he could take pride in one small accomplishment—since word had gone out among street kids to travel only in groups of three or more, not a single one had gone missing. Unfortunately, now kids had started disappearing from orphanages.

The progressive government of the German Republic prided itself on its social-welfare programs, from modern health care and penal reform to homes for unwed mothers. None was more touted than the progress made under the Youth Welfare Law. Although countless kids remained on the streets, half a dozen first-rate facilities had opened around Berlin for orphans lucky enough to get in. Now, though, three of these had reported missing boys.

Kopenick Haus was typical. A bright, sunny facility with grassy gardens, game rooms, dormitories filled with cots and fresh linen, all under the watchful gaze of women in white uniforms. But the place was packed to the rafters. Kids in the gardens. Kids in the dorms. Kids in the playpens and cribs. Row after row, room after room, of them.

Nurse Wolff summed it up: “The facility’s superb. It’s just that we’re bursting at the seams. With the economic crisis, not merely infants but school-age children are turning up practically by the busload. We do our best, but it’s impossible to keep an eye on them all. At night of course we lock up, but during the day anyone can walk in.”

Two boys, seven and eight, had vanished yesterday. The janitor claimed to have seen a woman walking out with them but hadn’t thought anything about it because she was wearing nurse’s whites. Willi spoke to him.

“Is there anything you can remember about how she looked or spoke or acted? You must try to recall even the smallest detail. It could be terribly important.”

“Just that she was kind of ugly for such a young gal.”

“Ugly? How? And how young would you say?”

“My daughter’s age, maybe. Twenty-four, -five. Slim as a broomstick, but spongy face, pockmarked. Was the eyes made her ugly, though. Ice-cold. Gave me a real bright smile as she passed. Acted charming, but underneath…” He shook his head. “Oh, and one of them little red-and-black twisted-cross buttons on her uniform lapel.”

“Interesting. Did you happen to notice her hair color?”

“Hair? She had a nurse’s cap, like I said. But underneath, why I believe it was—red.”

So there it was. The first real sighting of the Shepherdess.

And that’s how she got her kids. One way, anyway. A nurse. Turned on the charm when she wanted. Nazi to boot.

The information was a huge step forward.

But cold comfort now that he couldn’t find the boys.

As he scanned the crowds heading to and from the pool, there wasn’t so much as a sight of them. It was Vicki’s eyes he saw staring back at him, dark with accusation.

“Why? Why?” She’d cried the night he’d been given the
Kinderfresser
case. They’d already climbed into bed when he told her. “What is driving you to do this? Isn’t the danger you usually face enough? Do you have to take on extra? Are you trying to prove something? Is it because you’re Jewish?”

“Someone’s out there, Vic, abducting little kids. Doing terrible things to them.”

“You have children too!”

She’d no idea he’d never lived up to his promise to stay away from the case all this time. But Freksa’s murder sure didn’t help her warm up any to the idea of his taking over now.

“I can’t say no, honey. And besides, honestly, I want to. So help me. I’m sorry.”

“Sorry? Crazy is what you are.”

She threw her feet from the bed and jammed them into slippers. “You want the case, fine. I’m leaving. Taking the boys and going to my parents. I don’t care if they do have school. Their lives are more important. I’ll register them out there. You want to get killed, I can’t prevent you. But I sure as hell am not letting you—”

“Listen.” He’d stopped her, making her face him. “I understand your fear, Vic. Honest. And I think you’ve every right to it; whoever’s committing these crimes is crazy. And dangerous. But remember the old saying: ‘Fear makes the wolf look bigger.’ The boys will be safe as long as they’re watched. From now on, we’ll make sure they are. Every minute. Every day. No more walking to or from school without adult accompaniment. No more unsupervised play—not in the park or even the courtyard. The Winkelmanns will pitch in, and when I take them to school in the morning, I’ll go to the headmaster and make sure he understands. Until this case is solved, Erich and Stefan are never to be out of adult sight. Ever. But you can’t run away with them, honey. The whole city’s looking to me for reassurance. If I send my wife and children packing…”

She wouldn’t turn around. But she didn’t reach for her robe, either.

“I know it’s a lot to ask. I really need you, though. Please don’t pull back.”

But she had. She didn’t leave. But she had pulled back. He could feel it in a dozen ways. And if anything ever happened to Erich and Stefan …

Like any nine-year-old, Erich could get mischievous, especially under the sway of a long day at the amusement park. Though explicitly warned not to, Willi found it hard to believe he could have taken his younger brother anywhere but the pool. Grabbing Heinz by the hand, he hurried down the path to look for them. Unfortunately, Luna Park’s famously gigantic pool was crammed on this broiling summer day with what looked to be hundreds of people. “Keep an eye out for them would ya, Heinzie?” Willi said as they headed toward the shallow end.

For a moment, he allowed his darkest fears to bubble up. But a tide of such black grief swept him, only the next-door neighbor boy’s chubby little hand kept him from going under. He had to force himself not to start running around, shouting Erich’s name. Surely they had a loudspeaker system here. Erich and Stefan could not be the first lost boys in Luna Park. But as he scrutinized the pool, looking at the countless heads in the artificially generated waves, and all the moving figures on the walkways, he found himself sinking in desperation—searching not only for his son, but any glimpse of a redheaded nurse. Might he have been, as Vicki feared, specificially targeted? How would anyone even know they were here?

Frantically scanning face after face, he couldn’t keep out the recollection of his recent meeting with Dr. Hoffnung.

After all these months the pathologist had finally determined a cause of death in the burlap-sack victims. Highly advanced techniques in spectrophotometry, he’d explained, which used wavelengths of infrared light to identify substances otherwise invisible to the naked eye, had uncovered tiny specks on the evidence. Seven, to be exact: five on bones, two on the burlap. All turned out to be blood. Further testing through something called chromatography, which heated tiny fragments of these samples into a gaseous state and measured their composition, had revealed that all the blood contained massive amounts of HbCO, or carboxyhemoglobin, unambiguously proving the cause of death to be hypoxia, a pathological condition that starved the body of oxygen.

Willi’d worked with Hoffnung a number of times and never known him to soft-shoe around. Now, though, he was clearly so uncomfortable with what he was trying to say he couldn’t even look at Willi.

“Plain German please, Doctor. I’m sorry. I’m just not following.”

“How exactly it might have been executed, or why”—Hoffnung’s voice cracked as he averted his eyes, clenching his pipe—“I simply cannot ascertain, of course.” He struggled with a little burp. “But before their flesh got chopped up and used, as you tell me, for sausage filler, and before their bones got boiled”—he managed a fast, unhappy glance at Willi—“these boys were murdered by carbon monoxide poisoning, Sergeant. In other words, gassed.”

Willi thought it couldn’t get worse, but Hoffnung looked away again.

“Plus the spectrophotometry revealed multiple tiny grooves caused by human incisors. Whoever did this may have chopped up the flesh, but they also gnawed directly on the bones. There’s no doubt about it, Kraus. We’re dealing with a cannibal here.
Kinderfresser
’s no misnomer.”

The recollection made Willi feel faint. In desperation he turned from the pool back up toward the changing-hall entrance, squinting through a sheen of tears, needing to blink. Exactly where they were supposed to be, Erich and Stefan had suddenly rematerialized. His heart pounded wildly as he dragged Heinz over. They’d just gone around the corner to the drinking fountain, they cheerfully explained when Willi got there, having no idea he’d even missed them. He could have strangled them both.

Eighteen

Thundering drums shook the Sportpalast. Trumpets and fifes and jolly glockenspiels blared a pounding march. Tides of red and black swastikas swept the aisles.
“Heil, heil, heil!”
Thousands greeted the arriving youth brigades. Caps and boots, straps and epaulettes—they made their Communist counterparts look like rabble. Hardly your run-of-the-mill campaign rally, Willi thought.

And sure as hell nothing to snicker about.

“What a circus,” Fritz had proclaimed yesterday over lunch when five or six open trucks had roared past Café Kranzler filled with these Hitlerites tossing leaflets:
TOMORROW: THE FÜHRER SPEAKS!
The Ku’ damm was ankle-deep in paper. Someone was bankrolling the circus, big-time.

“You remember my old school chum, von Hessler?” Fritz glanced at a leaflet, grimacing. “He’s conducting some kind of scientific experiment at this thing, measuring brain energy, he claims. Needed a ton of equipment so I wrangled him a press box, best in the house. He was so grateful he begged me to join. Promised a once-in-a-lifetime show. Why not come too, Willi?”

Sounded like a fun night out. Willi knew precious little about Nazis—other than that they believed Germany’s greatest misfortune was Jews. How entertaining. But the fact that the Shepherdess kidnapped orphans while brazenly wearing their swastika pin made him take Fritz up on it. Knowledge was power, and he needed all he could get on this case. Three more boys had just gone missing. This time right out of grade schools.

The Bismarck School in working-class Schöneberg was in the middle of summer session. The principal couldn’t grasp it. “No one saw a thing. The kids lined up after recess and our count showed two missing. I take full responsibility. But how did it happen, Detektiv? We’re all in shock.” It was similar at the Lessing Academy miles away in Friedrichshain, the teacher beyond consolation. A missing boy, barely seven, waiting out front for his mother to fetch him after school, and that was it. Last anyone saw of him. The Shepherdess was clearly roaming ever farther afield, seizing targets of opportunity. And ever-younger boys.

How the hell did she get away with it?

“Heil, heil, heil, heil!”

Nazis were the tiniest of the Reichstag parties, Fritz explained as they awaited its leader. In the last election they’d managed to eke out twelve seats—one held by their talented propagandist, Joseph Goebbels.

Goebbels, Willi thought. Small world. Dr. Weiss had won his libel case against that man. But it barely even slowed the pit bull down. When kicked, Goebbels only chomped harder, ratcheting up the viciousness of his attacks. Weiss was having to take the son of a bitch to court all over again.