Prague Fatale (2 page)

Ersatz or second-rate goods were everywhere. String snapped when you tried to pull it tight. New buttons broke in your fingers even while you were trying to sew them on. Toothpaste was just chalk and water with a bit of peppermint flavouring, and there was more lather to be had in queuing for soap than in the crumbling, biscuit-sized shard you were allocated to keep yourself clean. For a whole month. Even those of us who weren’t Party members were starting to smell a bit.

With all of the tradesmen in the Army, there was no one to maintain the trams and buses, and as a result whole routes – like the Number One that went down Unter den Linden – were simply done away with, while half of Berlin’s trains were physically removed to help supply the Russian campaign with all the meat and potatoes and beer and soap and toothpaste you couldn’t find at home.

And it wasn’t just machinery that went neglected. Everywhere you looked, the paint was peeling off walls and woodwork. Doorknobs came away in your hand. Plumbing and heating systems broke down. Scaffolding on bomb-damaged buildings became more or less permanent, as there were no roofers left to carry out repairs. Bullets worked perfectly of course, just like always. German munitions were always good; I could testify to the continuing excellence of ammunition and the weapons that fired it. But everything else was broken or second-rate or substitute or closed or unavailable or in short supply. And tempers, like rations, were in the shortest supply of all. The cross-looking black bear on our proud city’s coat of arms began to look like a typical Berliner, growling at a fellow passenger on the S-Bahn, roaring at an indifferent butcher as he gave you only half of the bacon to which your card said you were entitled, or threatening a neighbour in your building with some Party big-shot who would come and fix him good.

Perhaps the quickest tempers were to be found in the lengthening queues for tobacco. The ration was just three Johnnies a day, but when you were extravagant enough actually to smoke one it was easier to understand why Hitler didn’t smoke himself: they tasted like burnt toast. Sometimes people smoked tea, that is when you could get any tea, but if you could, it was always better to pour boiling water on the stuff and drink it.

Around police headquarters at Alexanderplatz – this area also happened to be the centre of Berlin’s black market, which, despite the very serious penalties that were inflicted on those who got caught, was about the only thing in the city that could have been described as thriving – the scarcity of petrol hit us almost as hard as the tobacco and alcohol
shortages. We took trains and buses to our crime scenes and when these weren’t running we walked, often through the blackout, which was not without hazard. Almost one third of all accidental deaths in Berlin were a result of the blackout. Not that any of my colleagues in Kripo were interested in attending crime scenes or in solving anything other than the enduring problem of where to find a new source of sausage, beer and cigarettes. Sometimes we joked that crime was decreasing: no one was stealing money for the simple reason that there wasn’t anything in the shops to spend it on. Like most jokes in Berlin in the autumn of 1941, that one was funnier because it was also true.

Of course, there was still plenty of theft about: coupons, laundry, petrol, furniture – thieves used it for firewood – curtains (people used them to make clothes), the rabbits and guinea pigs that people kept on their balconies for fresh meat; you name it, Berliners stole it. And with the blackout there was real crime, violent crime, if you were interested in looking for it. The blackout was great if you were a rapist.

For a while I was back in Homicide. Berliners were still killing each other, although there wasn’t a moment passed when I didn’t think it risible that I should continue to believe that this mattered very much, knowing what I now knew about what was happening in the East. There wasn’t a day when I didn’t remember the sight of old Jewish men and women being herded toward execution pits where they were dispatched by drunken, laughing SS firing squads. Still, I went through the motions of being a proper detective, although it often felt like I was trying to put out a fire in an ashtray when, down the road, a whole city was the scene of a major conflagration.

It was while I was investigating the several homicides that
came my way in early September 1941 that I discovered some new motives for murder that weren’t in the jurisprudence books. Motives that stemmed from the quaint new realities of Berlin life. The smallholder in Weissensee who drove himself mad with coarse, home-made vodka and then killed the postwoman with an axe. A butcher in Wilmersdorf who was stabbed with his own knife by the local air-raid warden in a dispute about a short ration of bacon. The young nurse from the Rudolf Virchow Hospital who, because of the city’s acute accommodation crisis, poisoned a 65-year-old spinster in Plotzensee so that she might have the victim’s better-appointed room. An SS sergeant back on leave from Riga who, habituated to the mass killings that were going on in Latvia, shot his parents because he could see no reason not to shoot them. But most of the soldiers who came home from the eastern front and were in a mood to kill someone, killed themselves.

I might have done it myself but for the certainty that I wouldn’t be missed at all; and the sure knowledge that there were many others – Jews mostly – who seemed to soldier on with so much less in life than I had. Yes. In the late summer of 1941 it was the Jews and what was happening to the Jews that helped to persuade me against killing myself.

Of course, the old-fashioned sort of Berlin murders – the ones that used to sell newspapers – were still committed. Husbands continued to murder their wives, just like before. And on occasion wives murdered their husbands. From where I sat most of the husbands who got murdered – bullies too free with their fists and their criticism – had it coming. I’ve never hit a woman unless we’d talked about it first. Prostitutes got their throats cut or were battered to death, as before. And not just prostitutes. In the summer preceding my return
from the Ukraine a lust-killer named Paul Ogorzow pleaded guilty to the rapes and murders of eight women and the attempted murders of at least eight more. The popular Press dubbed him the S-Bahn Murderer because most of his attacks were carried out on trains or near S-Bahn stations.

That is why Paul Ogorzow came into my mind when, late one night in the second week of September 1941, I was called to take a look at a body that had been found close to the line between the S-Bahn stations at Jannowitz Bridge and Schlesischer. In the blackout nobody was quite sure if the body was a man’s or a woman’s, which was more understandable when you took into account that it had been hit by a train and was missing its head. Sudden death is rarely ever tidy. If it was, they wouldn’t need detectives. But this one was as untidy as anything I’d seen since the Great War, when a mine or a howitzer shell could reduce a man to a mangled heap of bloody clothes and jagged bone in the blink of an eye. Perhaps that was why I was able to look at it with such detachment. I hope so. The alternative – that my recent experience in the murder ghettoes of Minsk had left me indifferent to the sight of human suffering – was too awful to contemplate.

The other investigating detectives were Wilhelm Wurth, a sergeant who was a big noise in the police sports movement, and Gottfried Lehnhoff, an inspector who had returned to the Alex after having retired.

Wurth was in the fencing team, and the previous winter he had taken part in Heydrich’s skiing competition for the German Police and won a medal. Wurth would have been in the Army but for the fact that he was a year or two too old. But he was a useful man to have along on a murder investigation in the event that the victim had skied onto the point of a sword. He was a thin, quiet man with ears like bell-pulls
and an upper lip that was as full as a walrus moustache. It was a good face for a detective in the modern Berlin police force, but he wasn’t quite as stupid as he looked. He wore a plain grey double-breasted suit, carried a thick walking stick, and chewed on the stem of a cherrywood pipe that was almost always empty but somehow he managed to smell of tobacco.

Lehnhoff had a neck and head like a pear, but he wasn’t green. Like a lot of other cops he’d been drawing his pension, but with so many younger officers now serving in police battalions on the eastern front he had come back into the force to make a nice cosy corner for himself at the Alex. The little Party pin he wore in the lapel of his cheap suit would only have made it easier for him to do as little real policing as possible.

We walked south down Dircksen Strasse to Jannowitz Bridge and then along the S-Bahn line with the river under our feet. There was a moon and most of the time we didn’t need the flashlights we’d brought, but we felt safer with them when the line veered back over the gasworks on Holtmarkt Strasse and the old Julius Pintsch lighting factory; there wasn’t much of a fence and it would have been easy to have stepped off the line and fallen badly.

Over the gasworks, we came across a group of uniformed policemen and railway workers. Further down the track I could just make out the shape of a train in Schlesischer Station.

‘I’m Commissar Gunther, from the Alex,’ I said. There seemed no point in showing him my beer-token. ‘This is Inspector Lehnhoff and Sergeant Wurth. Who called it in?’

‘Me, sir.’ One of the cops moved toward me and saluted. ‘Sergeant Stumm.’

‘No relation, I hope,’ said Lehnhoff.

There had been a Johannes Stumm who had been forced to leave the political police by Fat Hermann because he wasn’t a Nazi.

‘No, sir.’ Sergeant Stumm smiled patiently.

‘Tell me, Sergeant,’ I said. ‘Why did you think that this might be a murder and not a suicide or an accident?’

‘Well, it’s true, stepping in front of a train is a most popular way to kill yourself these days,’ said Sergeant Stumm. ‘Especially if you’re a woman. Me, I’d use a firearm if I wanted to kill myself. But women aren’t as comfortable with guns as men are. Now with this victim, all of the pockets have been turned inside out, sir. It’s not something you’d do if you were planning to kill yourself. And it’s not something that a train would normally take the trouble to do, either. So that lets out it being an accident, see?’

‘Maybe someone else found him before you did,’ I suggested. ‘And just robbed him.’

‘A copper maybe,’ offered Wurth.

Wisely Sergeant Stumm ignored the suggestion.

‘Unlikely, sir. I’m pretty sure I was the first on the scene. The train driver saw someone on the track as he started to gain speed out of Jannowitz. He hit the brakes but by the time the train stopped it was too late.’

‘All right. Let’s have a look at him.’

‘Not a pretty sight, sir. Even in the dark.’

‘Believe me, I’ve seen worse.’

‘I’ll take your word for that, sir.’

The uniformed sergeant led the way along the track and paused for a moment to switch on his flashlight and illuminate a severed hand that lay on the ground. I looked at it for a minute or so before we walked on to where another police officer was waiting patiently beside a collection of
ragged clothes and mangled human remains that had once been a human being. For a moment I might have been looking at myself.

‘Hold the flash on him while we take a look.’

The body looked as if it had been chewed up and spat out by a prehistoric monster. The corrugated legs were barely attached to an impossibly flat pelvis. The man was wearing a workman’s blue overalls with mitten-sized pockets that were indeed inside out as the sergeant had described; so were the pockets in the oily rag that was his twisted flannel jacket. Where the head had been there was now a glistening, jagged harpoon of bloody bone and sinew. There was a strong smell of shit from bowels that had been crushed and emptied under the enormous pressure of a locomotive’s wheels.

‘I can’t imagine what you’ve seen that could look worse than this poor Fritz,’ said Sergeant Stumm.

‘Me neither,’ observed Wurth, and turned away in disgust.

‘I dare say we’ll all see some interesting sights before this war is over,’ I said. ‘Has anyone looked for the head?’

‘I’ve got a couple of lads searching the area for it now,’ said the sergeant. ‘One on the track and the other down below in case it fell into the gasworks or the factory yard.’

‘I think you’re probably correct,’ I said. ‘It looks like a murder all right. Quite apart from the pockets, which have been turned out, there’s that hand we saw.’

‘The hand?’ This was Lehnhoff talking. ‘What about it?’

I led them back along the track to take another look at the severed hand, which I picked up and turned in my hands like it was an historic artefact, or perhaps a souvenir once owned by the prophet Daniel.

‘These cuts on the fingers look defensive to me,’ I said. ‘As
if he might have caught the knife of someone trying to stab him.’

‘I don’t know how you can tell that after a train just ran over him,’ said Lehnhoff.

‘Because these cuts are much too thin to have been inflicted by the train. And just look where they are. Along the flesh of the inside of the fingers and on the hand between the thumb and the forefinger. That’s a textbook defensive injury if I ever saw one, Gottfried.’

‘All right,’ Lehnhoff said, almost grudgingly. ‘I suppose you are the expert. On murder.’