Prague Fatale (3 page)

‘Perhaps. Only of late I’ve had a lot of competition. There are plenty of cops out east, young cops, who know a lot more about murder than I do.’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Lehnhoff.

‘Take my word for it. There’s a whole new generation of police experts out there.’ I let this remark settle for a moment before adding, very carefully, for appearance’s sake, ‘I find that very reassuring, sometimes. That there are so many good men to take my place. Eh, Sergeant Stumm?’

‘Yes sir.’ But I could hear the doubt in the uniformed sergeant’s voice.

‘Walk with us,’ I said, warming to him. In a country where ill-temper and petulance were the order of the day – Hitler and Goebbels were forever ranting angrily about something – the sergeant’s imperturbability was heartening. ‘Come back to the bridge. Another pair of eyes might be useful.’

‘Yes sir.’

‘What are we looking for now?’ There was a weary sigh in Lehnhoff’s voice, as if he could hardly see the point of investigating this case any further.

‘An elephant.’

‘What?’

‘Something. Evidence. You’ll certainly know it when you see it,’ I said.

Back up the track we found some blood spots on a railway sleeper and then some more on the edge of the platform outside the echoing glasshouse that was the station at Jannowitz Bridge.

Below, someone aboard a river barge that was quietly chugging through one of the many red-brick arches in the bridge shouted at us to extinguish our lights. This was Lehnhoff’s cue to start throwing his weight around. It was almost as if he’d been waiting to get tough with someone, and it didn’t matter who.

‘We’re the police,’ he yelled down at the barge. Lehnhoff was yet another angry German. ‘And we’re investigating a murder up here. So mind your own business or I’ll come aboard and search you just because I can.’

‘It’s everyone’s business if the Tommy bombers see your lights,’ said the voice, not unreasonably.

Wurth’s nose wrinkled with disbelief. ‘I shouldn’t think that’s very likely at all. Do you, sir? It’s been a while since the RAF came this far east.’

‘They probably can’t get the petrol either,’ I said.

I pointed my flashlight on the ground and followed a trail of blood along the platform to a place where it seemed to start.

‘From the amount of blood on the ground he was probably stabbed here. Then he staggered along the platform a ways before falling onto the track. Picked himself up. Walked a bit more and then got hit by the train to Friedrichshagen.’

‘It was the last one,’ said Sergeant Stumm. ‘The one o’clock.’

‘Lucky he didn’t miss it,’ said Lehnhoff.

Ignoring him, I glanced at my watch. It was three a.m. ‘Well, that gives us an approximate time of death.’

I started to walk along the track in front of the platform and after a while I found a greyish green passport-sized book lying on the ground. It was an Employment Identification Document, much like my own except that this one was for foreigners. Inside was all of the information about the dead man I needed: his name, nationality, address, photograph and employer.

‘Foreign worker’s book is it?’ said Lehnhoff, glancing over my shoulder as I studied the victim’s details under my flashlight.

I nodded. The dead man was Geert Vranken, aged thirty-nine, born at Dordrecht in the Netherlands, a volunteer railway worker; living at a hostel in Wuhlheide. The face in the photograph was wary-looking, with a cleft chin that was slightly unshaven. The eyebrows were short and the hair thinning to one side. He appeared to be wearing the same thick flannel jacket as the one on the body, and a collarless shirt buttoned up to the neck. Even as we were reading the bare details of Geert Vranken’s shortish life, another policeman was coming up the stairs of Jannowitz Station with what, in the darkness, looked like a small round bag.

‘I found the head, sir,’ reported the policeman. ‘It was on the roof of the Pintsch factory.’ He was holding the head by the ear, which, in the absence of much hair, looked as good a way to carry around a severed head as any you could have thought of. ‘I didn’t like to leave it up there, sir.’

‘No, you were right to bring it along, lad,’ said Sergeant Stumm and, taking hold of the other ear, he laid the dead man’s head carefully on the railway platform so that it was staring up at us.

‘Not a sight you see everyday,’ said Wurth and looked away.

‘You want to get yourself up to Plotzensee,’ I remarked. ‘I hear the falling axe is very busy these days.’

‘That’s him all right,’ said Lehnhoff. ‘The man in the worker’s book. Wouldn’t you say?’

‘I agree,’ I said. ‘And I suppose someone might have tried to rob him. Or else why go through his pockets?’

‘You’re sticking to the theory that this is a murder and not an accident then?’ enquired Lehnhoff.

‘Yes. I am. For that reason.’

Sergeant Stumm tutted loudly and then rubbed his stubbly jaw, which sounded almost as loud. ‘Bad luck for him. But bad luck for the murderer, too.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘Well, if he was a foreign worker, I can’t imagine there was much more than fluff in his pockets. It’s a hell of a disappointing thing to kill a man with the intent of robbing him and then find that he had nothing worth stealing. I mean, these poor fellows aren’t exactly well paid, are they?’

‘It’s a job,’ objected Lehnhoff. ‘Better a job in Germany than no job back in Holland.’

‘And whose fault is that?’ said Sergeant Stumm.

‘I don’t think I like your insinuation, Sergeant,’ said Lehnhoff.

‘Leave it, Lehnhoff,’ I said. ‘This isn’t the time or the place for a political argument. A man is dead, after all.’

Lehnhoff grunted and tapped the head with the toe of his shoe, which was enough to make me want to kick him off the platform.

‘Well, if someone did kill him, like you say, Herr Commissar, it’ll be another of them foreign workers that probably did it.
You see if I’m wrong. It’s dog eat dog in these foreign-worker hostels.’

‘Don’t knock it,’ I said. ‘Dogs know the importance of getting a square meal now and again. And speaking for myself, if it’s a choice between fifty grammes of dog and a hundred grammes of nothing then I’ll eat the dog anytime.’

‘Not me,’ said Lehnhoff. ‘I draw the line at guinea pigs. So there’s no way I’d ever eat a dog.’

‘It’s one thing saying that, sir,’ said Sergeant Stumm. ‘But it’s another thing altogether trying to tell the difference. Maybe you haven’t heard, but the cops over at Zoo Station are having to put on night patrols in the zoo. On account of how poachers have been breaking in and stealing the animals. Apparently they just had their tapir taken.’

‘What’s a tapir?’ asked Wurth.

‘It looks a bit like pork,’ I said. ‘So I expect that’s what some unscrupulous butcher is calling it now.’

‘Good luck to him,’ said Sergeant Stumm.

‘You don’t mean that,’ said Lehnhoff.

‘A man needs more than a stirring speech by the Mahatma Propagandi to fill his stomach,’ I said.

‘Amen,’ said Sergeant Stumm.

‘So you’d look the other way if you knew what it was?’

‘I don’t know about that,’ I said, getting careful again. I might have been suicidal but I wasn’t stupid: Lehnhoff was just the type to report a fellow to the Gestapo for wearing English shoes; and I hardly wanted to spend a week in the cells removed from the comfort of my warm, night-time pistol. ‘But this is Berlin, Gottfried. Looking the other way is what we’re good at.’

I pointed at the severed head that lay at our feet.

‘You just see if I’m wrong.’

About a lot of things I’m not always right. But about the Nazis I wasn’t often wrong.

Geert Vranken was a voluntary worker and had come to Berlin in search of a better job than the one that was available to him in Holland. Berlin’s railway, which was experiencing a self-inflicted crisis in recruiting maintenance staff, had been glad to have an experienced track engineer; Berlin’s police was less keen to investigate his murder. In fact, it didn’t want to investigate the case at all. But there was no doubting that the Dutchman had been murdered. When eventually his body was given its grudging, cursory examination by the ancient doctor brought back from retirement to handle forensic pathology for the Berlin police, six stab wounds were found on what remained of his torso.

Commissioner Friedrich-Wilhelm Lüdtke, who was now in charge of the Berlin Criminal Police, wasn’t a bad detective. It was Lüdtke who had successfully headed the S-Bahn murder investigation that led to the arrest and execution of Paul Ogorzow. But as he himself explained to me in his newly carpeted office on the top floor of the Alex, there was an important new law coming down the pipe from the Wilhelmstrasse, and Lüdtke’s boss, Wilhelm Frick, Minister of the Interior, had ordered him to prioritize its enforcement at the
expense of all other investigative matters. Lüdtke, a doctor of law, was almost embarrassed to tell me what this important new law amounted to.

‘From September 19th,’ he said, ‘all Jews in Germany and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia will be obliged to wear a yellow star inscribed with the word “Jew” on their outer garments.’

‘You mean like in the Middle Ages?’

‘Yes, like in the Middle Ages.’

‘Well, that should make them easier to spot. Great idea. Until recently I’ve found it rather hard to recognize who is a Jew and who isn’t. Of late they do look thinner and hungrier than the rest of us. But that’s about it. Frankly I’ve yet to see just one who looks anything like those stupid cartoons in
Der Stürmer
.’ I nodded with fake enthusiasm. ‘Yes, this will certainly prevent them from looking exactly like the rest of us.’

Lüdtke, looking uncomfortable, adjusted his well-starched cuffs and collar. He was a big man with thick dark hair neatly combed off a broad, tanned forehead. He wore a navy-blue suit and a dark tie with a knot that was as small as the Party badge in his lapel; probably it felt just as tight on his neck when it came to speaking the truth. A matching navy-blue bowler hat was positioned on the corner of his double-partner’s desk, as if it was hiding something. Perhaps it was his lunch. Or just his conscience. I wondered how the hat would look with a yellow star on the crown. Like a Keystone Kop’s helmet, I thought. Something idiotic, anyway.

‘I don’t like this any more than you,’ he said, scratching the backs of his hands nervously. I could tell he was dying for a smoke. We both were. Without cigarettes, the Alex felt like an ashtray in a no smoking lounge.

‘I’d like it a whole lot less, I think, if I was Jewish,’ I said.

‘Yes, but you know what makes it almost unforgivable?’ He opened a box of matches and bit one. ‘Right now there’s an acute shortage of material.’

‘Yellow material.’

Lüdtke nodded.

‘I might have guessed. Mind if I have one of those?’

‘Help yourself.’ He tossed the matches across the desk and watched as I fished one out and put it in the corner of my mouth. ‘I’m told they’re good for your throat.’

‘Are you worried about your health, Wilhelm?’

‘Isn’t everyone? That’s why we do what we’re told. In case we come down with a dose of the Gestapo.’

‘You mean like making sure Jews wear their yellow stars?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Oh sure, sure. And while I can see the obvious importance of a law like that, there’s still the matter of the dead Dutchman. In case you’d forgotten, he was stabbed six times.’

Lüdtke shrugged. ‘If he was German it would be different, Bernie. But the Ogorzow case was a very expensive investigation for this department. We went way over budget. You’ve no idea how much it cost to catch that bastard. Undercover police officers, half the city’s rail workers interviewed, increased police presence at stations – the overtime we had to pay out was enormous. It really was a very difficult time for Kripo. To say nothing of the pressure we came under from the Propaganda Ministry. It’s hard catching anyone when the newspapers aren’t even allowed to write about a case.’

‘Geert Vranken was a rail worker,’ I said.

‘And you think the Ministry is going to be happy to learn that there’s another killer at work on the S-Bahn?’

‘This killer is different. As far as I can tell nobody raped
him. And unless you count the train that drove over him, nobody tried to mutilate him either.’

‘But murder is murder, and frankly I know exactly what they’ll say. That there’s enough bad news around right now. In case you hadn’t noticed, Bernie, this city’s morale is already lower than a badger’s arse. Besides, we need those foreign workers. That’s what they’re going to tell me. The last thing we want is Germans thinking that there’s a problem with our guest workers. We had enough of that during the Ogorzow case. Everyone in Berlin was convinced that a German couldn’t possibly have murdered all those women. A lot of foreign workers were harassed and beaten up by irate Berliners who thought that one of them must have done it. You don’t want to see any more of that, do you? Christ, there are problems enough on the trains and the underground as it is. It took me almost an hour to come to work this morning.’