The Defeated Aristocrat (3 page)

Mouth dry, heart beating a military tattoo, he straightened his helmet and walked out of the main gate. Delivery checked, the duty officer was exchanging jokes with the coal merchant. Blau counted himself fortunate. He’d infringed regulations but there’d been no one around to notice his crime, apart from the officer who’d been too engrossed to give him more than a cursory glance.

He doubted the man would be able to identify him even if asked, because under their helmets, which were slowly – very slowly – being replaced with smaller steel headwear, all officers looked the same. Or so his mother insisted.

Munz Platz, Konigsberg, Saturday January 4th 1919

Lilli didn’t wake until eight o’clock, two hours later than usual. The first thing she did was telephone her assistant, Lotte, to warn her she wouldn’t be in the office until mid-morning. Afraid of aggravating her wounds, she moved slowly. It took her twice as long as usual to wash, dress, brush out her hair and pin it into a chignon at the nape of her neck. She re-read the note Bertha had given her over a cup of coffee, considered and dismissed the idea of telephoning the police.

Since she’d succeeded her father as editor of the
Konigsberg Zeit
, she’d been inundated with hoax tip-offs. Principally sent, or so she suspected, from men employed by the
Zeit’s
rival, the
Konigsberg Sonne
, who thought a woman had no business working as a journalist, much less an editor.

She unlocked the turret room on her way downstairs. Not wanting to see Dedleff or endure a repeat performance of the blubbering apology he’d made the last time he’d beaten her, she didn’t look inside.

She entered her father’s apartment and went directly to his room. She knocked on the door and took a moment to compose herself after her father’s nurse shouted, ‘Enter’. Forcing a smile, she opened the door. The smell of soap lingered in the air. Her father had been washed, shaved, and dressed for the day in plain blue linen pyjamas. He kept his striped nightshirt for the night. He looked clean, comfortable, and cared for, but whenever she saw him she was beset by a pang of conscience that she wasn’t the one looking after him. Although he couldn’t have made it plainer after his first stroke that he would prefer her to manage the newspaper than turn herself into his nurse.

‘Good morning, Sister Matthew.’ She greeted the nun who was feeding her father coffee from an invalid cup with a spout.

‘Good morning, Frau Gluck. Sister Luke said we had a good night. Slept all night, didn’t we?’ She raised her voice as she addressed Lilli’s father.

Lilli cringed. Her father had lost the use of his legs and his right arm after the first stroke and his ability to speak after the second, but he hadn’t lost his faculties, or his hearing, and she could read irritation in his expression, especially when the sister referred to him in the plural.

‘You look well, Papa. Sister Matthew and Sister Luke are doing a fine job of looking after you.’

Her father picked up the newspaper from the bed with his left hand and waved it.

‘I’m going, Papa. The paper will be out on time.’

‘Don’t concern yourself about us, Frau Gluck. As soon as we’ve finished our coffee Ernst will read the paper to us. I enjoy listening as much as your father. The highlight is always your editorial.’

‘Thank you, Sister Matthew, you’re very kind. See you this evening, Papa.’

Lilli was glad to leave. It was hard to see the strong man who had loved her unconditionally since birth, guided her through childhood and assumed the role of both parents after her mother’s death, reduced to a broken shell. The roles of parent and child had been reversed, and she sensed her father hated the change, as much as she did.

She looked into her father’s kitchen. Bertha was mincing veal, onions, capers, and spices for Konigsberger Klopse.

‘You’re late this morning,’ Bertha commented. ‘Not that it’s surprising after his lordship’s performance last night.’

Lilli changed the subject. ‘Did Amalia get to school on time?’

‘Don’t I always get her there on time?’

‘Just checking. Good morning, Ernst.’ Lilli was glad that the caretaker had joined them before Bertha could say any more about Dedleff. ‘Call me a sleigh, please. I need to go to Wasser Strasse.’

Wasser Strasse, Konigsberg, Saturday January 4th 1919

The sign said ‘Hotel’ but given the mound of iced snow in front of the door, Lilli was suspicious. In her experience, hotels cleared their access first thing in the morning for the convenience of outgoing and incoming guests. Fighting pain, she climbed awkwardly from the sleigh, paid the driver and pulled the bell. She rang three times before a slovenly woman in grubby overalls, down at heel slippers and men’s walking socks appeared. She eyed Lilli suspiciously.

‘You want a room? Twenty five pfennigs an hour.’ She confirmed Lilli’s impression the place was a house of assignation, not hotel.

‘I’m Lilli Richter of the
Konigsberg Zeit
.’ Lilli used her maiden name on newspaper business because most people in the city knew her father, at least by reputation. ‘I received a message to meet someone in room 10.’

‘Twenty five pfennigs.’ The woman held out a hand.

‘Whoever sent the message will have paid.’

‘Each!’

Lilli opened her bag, felt in her purse, pulled out two coins and seeing the woman’s blackened fingernails dropped them into her palm.

‘First floor, turn right at the top of the stairs.’

Lilli steeled herself as every step brought increased pain. The dark stairwell stank of cheap perfume and stale fish. She’d interviewed enough prostitutes to recognise the smell of sex. She found the room and knocked the door. There was no answer. She knocked again. The door swung inward.

She called out, ‘Hello,’ stepped inside, retched and reeled.

The woman who’d let her in shuffled up the stairs. ‘What’s going on?’

Lilli leaned against the wall in the passage. ‘You have a telephone?’ she whispered when she could speak.

‘What’s it to you?’

Lilli retched again.

The woman pushed past Lilli into the room. She swayed and dropped in the doorway.

Lilli crouched beside her. Mesmerized, she couldn’t stop staring at the bed.

The bloodied, hacked, and mutilated remains of a naked man were sprawled over the quilt. Between his legs was a bloody pulp of raw flesh. But it was his head that commanded her attention.

It was locked in a rusting metal bridle. Lilli had seen one like it in the town’s castle museum. A long narrow central guard covered the nose. Two circular discs with hollow centres obliterated all but the hazed opaque eyes. Jagged pointed metal ‘teeth’ projected over both lips. Dangling from them hung the man’s flaccid, uncircumcised penis. Below it spilled his scrotum, an obscene hairy pouch of wrinkled skin that rested on the rusting metal bar that encircled his neck.

The woman moaned. Lilli shook her.

‘Telephone the police. Ask for Kriminaldirektor Georg Hafen. Give him this address. Tell him Lilli Richter needs him here, urgently.’

CHAPTER THREE

A train travelling east from Berlin, Friday January10th 1919

KONIGSBERG SONNE MONDAY JANUARY 6th 1919

GRUESOME MURDER. MUTILATION OF POLICE OFFICER.

CITY IN SHOCK

Are there bloodthirsty demons at work in Konigsberg?

That is Max Meyer’s question after the desecrated remains of an as yet unnamed police officer were discovered strewn inside a house of ill repute on Wasser Strasse on Saturday morning: Mutilated and savagely dismembered, his corpse had been subjected to atrocities too abominable to mention to our readers. We can however reveal that the officer’s private parts had been slashed from his body and stuffed into his mouth. Our sources confirm that other parts of his corpse are missing.

The maid who stumbled across the horrific scene said the room was mired in “more flesh and blood than a slaughterhouse”. She confirmed that his genitals had been sliced from his body. Our experts have stated that the missing organs are frequently used in Black Arts and Devil Worship.

Yet the Konigsberg Police under the direction of Kriminalrat Dorfman are no closer to discovering the perpetrator or perpetrators of this revolting crime than they were two days ago. As usual they appear to be more concerned with harassing and silencing hardworking journalists than finding the killer.

KONIGSBERGER ZEIT MONDAY JANUARY 6th 1919

TRAGIC DEATH OF POLICE OFFICER

In the early hours of this morning the remains of a police officer were found in a hotel room in Wasser Strasse. A spokesman for Kriminalrat Adelbert Dorfman refused to confirm or deny rumours that the victim had been mutilated. He stated that the victim’s name was known to the authorities but would be withheld until his relatives had been informed of his demise. He added that the victim was an exemplary officer, personally known to him, who will be greatly mourned and missed by all his family and colleagues.

‘You’re so hard up for news you have to scour five-day-old newspapers?’ Helmut Norde taunted Wolf Mau.

‘Says something for your companionship, doesn’t it, Helmut?’ Wolf folded the papers he’d found abandoned on a bench in Berlin railway station.

‘Keeping them as a blanket in case your wife doesn’t want you back?’

‘I may have told you our respective ranks are irrelevant now the war is over, but the common courtesy and respect due every man still applies, Helmut,’ Wolf warned.

‘If you don’t knock it off, Helmut, I’ll use those newspapers to make your shroud,’ Ralf snapped.

‘Knock what off?’ Helmut demanded.

‘You know,’ Ralf growled.

The five German officers had been discharged from a POW camp in Wiltshire, England seven weeks before, Lieutenant Helmut Norde, Captains Ralf Frank and Josef Baumgarten, Major Peter Plewe, and Colonel Wolfgang von Mau. They’d been travelling across the frozen wastes of Northern Europe ever since. Lack of onward transport had delayed them at every connection. They’d spent a week cooped up in a church hall close to Victoria station in London waiting for a boat train to take them to Dover. When they eventually reached the port they’d been forced to spend a further ten days living – if you could call it that – under dripping canvas in a field waiting for a ship to take them across the channel.

They’d been delayed twice in France, both times for over a week, and again in a Berlin so impoverished they’d had problems recognising the capital from the place of their pre-war visits. At every stop they’d received apologies and the excuse: ‘There are simply too many defeated German soldiers travelling to their homes in the east.’

The Red Cross met, deloused, and fed them, in that order, at every transit point. The chemicals used to kill the lice stank, the soup was thin, the bread half sawdust, but they’d eaten and drunk worse. For the past five days they’d been allocated bed space, but no bed or bedding, on the stone floor of a third-class station waiting room in Berlin, but, unlike other stops, after the ritual delousing they’d been given riches. Five marks each. One for each day the authorities had warned them they’d have to wait for seats on a train to take them on the last leg of their journey into East Prussia.

Peter spent twenty-six pfennigs a day on a loaf of black bread, and the remaining seventy-four on a chunk of blood sausage; Wolf added jugs of beer, which made for decent suppers for the five of them. Ralf used his marks as a stake in a card game and won enough to treat them all to midday meals in a restaurant for the duration of their stay in the city. Wolf knew Ralf had cheated but that didn’t stop him or the others from enjoying the best food they’d eaten since they’d been captured in Flanders on Tuesday April 16th 1918. Helmut bought a single bag of biscuits from an old woman in the street for fifty pennies, and hid the rest of his money. The biscuits were stale.

Josef saved two marks and spent three buying bread for their breakfasts. He kept two back because ‘none of us know what we’ll find at home’, for which he earned considerable ribbing. As his family owned three department stores and a chain of haberdashery shops in East Prussia they felt he had more than most to return to – if he or any of them ever got there. ‘I can’t believe I’ll sleep at home tonight.’ Peter looked out of the window for familiar landmarks.

‘Don’t speak too soon,’ Ralf warned. ‘We could still be held up.’

‘You tempted fate,’ Helmut grumbled when the train stopped.

‘We’re at Mehlsack,’ Peter announced. ‘Next stop Lichtenhagen Halt, Wolf.’

Wolf avoided Peter’s eye. Now the moment he’d been waiting for was imminent, he wished he could keep travelling. It had been over a year since he’d received a letter from home. Anything could have happened to his wife and son in that time. Everywhere they’d stopped since they’d crossed the border into Germany they’d seen homeless malnourished men, women and children who were clearly starving, yet long trains of carriages loaded with agricultural produce had snaked past them, bearing signs that read ‘WAR REPARATION AND COMPENSATION’. The Allies were taking the phrase ‘to the victor the spoils’ literally. Everything Germany possessed down to the food needed to feed its children was being exacted and paid to France, Belgium, and Britain.

Would he find Konigsberg, like Berlin, full of queues of the disinherited, homeless, and desperate – at soup kitchens, hospitals, hostels, orphanages? Were his wife, child, brothers, and sisters alive? Had Lichtenhagen survived unscathed by the tragedy of war?

‘I don’t know why you’re grinning like a clown, Peter,’ Helmut sniped. ‘No soldier will be welcomed home although it wasn’t the military who surrendered but the damned cowardly government who signed away the respect we paid for in blood. The victory would have been ours in another month. We should be marching home with honour, instead of slinking back like rats …’