The Ice Queen: A Novel (9 page)

He went into the bathroom and was shocked to see his sunken cheeks and bloodshot eyes in the mirror. Was there any way back for him, if no one found out about what he’d done? Did he even
want
to go back? He undressed, got in the shower, and turned on the water. Cold. Ice-cold. He had to be punished. He gasped through his clenched teeth as the icy spray hit his sweaty skin. He couldn’t prevent the images from last night from crashing in on him. The way he had stood in front of him and looked at him, astounded—no, horrified! Without turning his eyes away, he’d then slowly knelt down before him, turned his back, and, trembling, waited for him to … Sobbing convulsively, he put his hands over his face.

“Marcus?”

He gave a start when he saw the figure of his grandmother through the wet shower door. He hurriedly turned off the water and slung the towel he’d hung over the glass door around his hips.

“What’s the matter?” asked Auguste Nowak with concern. “Don’t you feel well?”

He stepped out of the shower and met her searching look.

“I didn’t want to do it again,” he blurted out in despair. “Really, Oma, but … but I…”

He stopped, searching in vain for an explanation. The old woman took him in her arms. At first, he resisted her embrace, but then he leaned against her, inhaling her familiar smell.

“Why do I do these things?” he whispered, filled with despair. “I just don’t know what’s wrong with me. Maybe I’m not normal.”

She took his face in her calloused hands and gave him a worried look from her surprisingly youthful eyes.

“Stop tormenting yourself, my boy,” she said softly.

“But I just don’t understand myself anymore,” he said in a strained voice. “And if anybody finds out, then—”

“How would anyone find out? Nobody saw you there, did they?” She sounded like a coconspirator.

“I … I don’t think so.” He shook his head. How could his grandmother possibly understand what he’d done?

“Well then.” She let him go. “Now get some clothes on. And then come downstairs and I’ll make you some hot chocolate and a good breakfast. I’m sure you haven’t had anything to eat.”

Against his will, Marcus Nowak had to laugh. That was his grandmother’s standard remedy: Food always helps. As he watched her go, he actually did feel a little better.

*   *   *

Herrmann Schneider’s house was a typical but run-down hipped-roof bungalow located right at the edge of the woods, surrounded by a large, rather untidy yard. Schneider’s body had been discovered by a person who did community work for the Maltese Relief Service and came to check on the old man every morning. Oliver von Bodenstein and Pia Kirchhoff experienced a gruesome déjà vu. The man was on his knees on the tile floor in the foyer of his house, and the fatal bullet had entered through the back of his skull. It looked like an execution, the same as with David Goldberg.

“The deceased is Herrmann Schneider, born March second, 1921, in Wuppertal.” The young female officer who was the first on the scene with her partner had already done the preliminary research. “After his wife’s death a few years ago, he lived here alone. Home care came by three times a day, and he received Meals on Wheels.”

“Have you questioned the neighbors already?”

“Of course.” The efficient policewoman shot Bodenstein a somewhat annoyed glance. As in other areas of life, animosities also existed within the police force. The cops on the beat thought that the Kripo detectives considered themselves superior and looked down on them, and basically they were right.

“The woman who lives next door saw two men visit Schneider around eight-thirty last night. They left a little after eleven, making quite a ruckus.”

“So someone was targeting pensioners,” her colleague remarked. “For the second time in a week.”

Bodenstein ignored the flippant remark.

“Any signs of forced entry?”

“At first glance, no. Looks like he let his murderer in the front door. And nothing seems to have been disturbed in the house,” the officer replied.

“Thank you,” said Bodenstein. “Good work.”

He and Pia pulled on latex gloves and bent over the corpse of the old man. In the dim light of a forty-watt ceiling lamp, they both saw simultaneously that the apparent repetition of events was no accident: In the blood spatter on the floral-patterned rug someone had written five numbers: 11645.

Bodenstein looked at his colleague. He said firmly, “I’m not going to allow this case to be taken away from me.”

At that moment, the medical examiner arrived. Pia recognized him. It was the gnome who had done the autopsy on the body of Isabel Kerstner a year and a half ago. She turned a grimace into a tight smile.

“Out of the way,” he grumbled rudely. Either that was his personality or he still bore a grudge. Back then, Bodenstein had given him a piece of his mind regarding his indifference.

“Be careful not to destroy any evidence,” Bodenstein said with equal lack of courtesy and got a dirty look in reply. He motioned for Pia to follow him into the kitchen.

“Who called this guy?” he asked in a low voice.

“Must have been our colleagues who were the first responders,” she said. Her gaze fixed on a bulletin board hanging next to the kitchen table. She moved closer and removed a card of handmade paper that was pinned among the receipts, recipes, and a couple of postcards.
Invitation,
it said. Pia opened it and gave a surprised whistle. “Take a look at this!” She handed the invitation to her boss.

*   *   *

Pia ascertained from a look around that the bungalow from the early seventies combined all the stylistic tastelessness of that era in its old-fashioned furnishings. Rustic oak veneer in the living room, vapid landscape pictures on the walls that gave no hint of the preferences of the man who’d lived there. The floral pattern on the wall tiles in the kitchen hurt her eyes, and the guest toilet was done in a dusty rose color. Pia entered the sparsely furnished bedroom. On the nightstand beside Schneider’s bed stood a couple of medicine bottles, and next to them an open book. A well-worn copy of Marion, Countess Dönhoff’s
Names That No One Mentions: People and History of East Prussia.

“And?” Bodenstein asked. “Find anything?”

“Zip.” Pia shrugged. “No workroom, not even a desk.”

As the body of Herrmann Schneider was being transported to the forensics lab, the evidence techs packed up their tools. Even the ME had left after taking the rectal temperature of the corpse and estimating the time of death at about 1:00
A.M.

“Maybe he had an office in the basement,” Bodenstein said. “Let’s go downstairs and look.”

Pia followed her boss to the basement. Behind the first door was a room with a modern oil furnace. In the room next to it, carefully labeled cartons stood on shelves; on the opposite wall were wine bottles stored in wooden crates. Bodenstein looked more closely at the wine bottles and gave an appreciative whistle.

“He had a small fortune stored here.”

Pia was already at the next door. She turned on the light and stopped short in astonishment.

“Boss!” she called. “You’ve got to see this!”

“What is it?” Bodenstein appeared behind her in the doorway.

“Looks like a screening room.” Pia studied the walls covered in dark red velvet, the fifteen comfortable plush easy chairs arranged in three rows, and the closed black curtain at the other end of the surprisingly large space. By the wall next to the door stood an old-fashioned film projector.

“Let’s see what kind of movies the old boy watched in his quiet little chamber.” Bodenstein stepped up to the projector, in which a reel of film was threaded, and pressed a couple of random buttons. Pia tried the switch plate next to the door, and suddenly the curtain parted. Both of them gave a start when gunfire and martial music resounded from hidden loudspeakers. They stared at the screen. Tanks rolled across a snowy landscape; in flickering black and white, the grinning faces of young soldiers crouched at antiaircraft cannons and machine guns. Airplanes flew across the gray sky.

“Newsreels,” Pia said in astonishment. “Here in his private theater he watched newsreels? How sick is that?”

“He was young back then.” Bodenstein, who had feared they would find an archive of porn films, merely shrugged. “Maybe he just liked to remember those days.”

He looked through the vast number of meticulously labeled reels of film stored on shelves and discovered countless episodes of the weekly German
Wochenschau
newsreel from the years 1933 to 1945: movies of Goebbels’s speeches at the Sport Palace, films of the National Socialist Party national conventions in Nürnberg, Leni Riefenstahl’s
Triumph of the Will, Storm Over Mont Blanc,
and other rarities that a collector would pay a fortune for. Bodenstein switched off the projector.

“He probably watched these movies with his visitors.” Pia pointed to three used glasses, two empty wine bottles, and an overflowing ashtray, all on a little table between the first two rows of seats. She carefully picked up a glass and inspected it closely. Her suspicion was confirmed: The dregs at the bottom of the glass had not yet dried. Bodenstein went out to summon the officers from the evidence team to the basement; then he followed Pia into the next room. Its furnishings left him momentarily speechless.

“For heaven’s sake,” Pia blurted out in disgust. “Is this a movie set?”

The windowless room, which seemed even lower than it really was because of the fake wooden beams on the ceiling and the maroon carpet, was dominated by a massive desk of dark mahogany. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, document cabinets, a heavy safe, on the walls a swastika banner and several framed photos of Adolf Hitler and other Nazi big shots. In contrast to the upper part of the house, which seemed impersonal and almost unlived in, the legacy and evidence from a long life were abundantly present here. Pia looked closely at one of the photos and shuddered.

“This one has a personal inscription from Hitler. I feel like I’m in the bunker under the Reich Chancellery.”

“Look around on the desk. If we’re going to find a lead, it would be here.”

“
Jawohl, mein Führer!
” Pia stood at attention.

“Quit joking around.” Bodenstein looked around the overcrowded, gloomy room, which was exerting a claustrophobic effect on him. Pia Kirchhoff’s comparison to a bunker was not that far-fetched. As she sat down at the desk and opened one drawer after another with her fingertips, Bodenstein took files and photo albums at random from the shelves and paged through them.

“My God, what’s all this?” Kröger, from the evidence team, stepped inside the room.

“Creepy, isn’t it?” Pia glanced up. “Could you please pack up all this stuff after you take pictures of the room? I don’t want to stay in this place any longer than necessary.”

“We’re going to need a truck for all this.” Kröger looked less than enthusiastic and grimaced. Pia came upon carefully filed account withdrawals from various banks in the second drawer from the top. Herrmann Schneider had received a sizable pension, but in addition there were regular payments of five thousand euros a month from a Swiss bank. The current balance in these accounts stood at 172,000 euros.

“Boss,” Pia said. “Somebody was transferring five thousand euros a month to him. KMF. I wonder what that stands for?” She handed Bodenstein one of the printouts.

“War Ministry Frankfurt,” Kröger guessed.

“My Führer’s account,” his colleague joked. Bodenstein felt the uneasiness inside him growing stronger, because the connection could no longer be ignored. The invitation upstairs in the kitchen, payments from the KMF, the ominous numbers that the perp had left behind at both crime scenes. It was high time they paid a visit to a very respected lady, even if it might be just a coincidence.

“KMF means Kaltensee Machine Factory,” he told Pia in a low voice. “Schneider knew Vera Kaltensee. Just as Goldberg did.”

“She obviously had very refined friends,” Pia replied.

“But we don’t know whether they were really her friends,” Bodenstein remarked. “Vera Kaltensee enjoys an irreproachable reputation, and there is absolutely no doubt about her integrity.”

“Goldberg’s reputation was also irreproachable,” said Pia, unconvinced.

“What are you trying to say?”

“That not everything is what it seems at first glance.”

Bodenstein looked pensively at the account payments.

“I’m afraid there are still thousands of people in Germany who sympathized with the Nazis in their youth, or even were Nazis themselves,” he said. “But all this was over sixty years ago.”

“That doesn’t justify anything,” Pia retorted, getting up. “And this Schneider was no mere sympathizer. He was a full-blooded Nazi. Just take a look around.”

“But we can’t automatically conclude that Vera Kaltensee knew about the Nazi past of two of her friends,” said Bodenstein with a big sigh. A gloomy premonition filled him. No matter how impeccable Vera Kaltensee’s reputation might be, as soon as the press connected her with this offensive muck, some of it was bound to rub off on her.

*   *   *

At the parking lot in Königstein, he got off the bus and strolled down the pedestrian street. It was a good feeling to have money. Robert Watkowiak contentedly observed his reflection in the shop windows and decided the first thing he’d do with Uncle Herrmann’s dough was have his teeth fixed. With the new haircut and the suit, he no longer stood out in a crowd; none of the passersby turned to look at him and shake their heads. That was an even better feeling. To be honest, he was sick and tired of the life he’d been more or less forced into. He needed a bed, a shower, and the comfort he had been used to in the past, and he hated having to shack up with Moni. Yesterday, she’d probably thought he was going to beg for a place to crash at her place again, but she was wrong on that score. Even though she was no more than a lying slut who let herself be fucked by anybody for money, she thought she was something special. Sure, she wasn’t bad-looking, but as soon as she opened her mouth, it was obvious that she was just a low-class chick, especially if she’d been drinking. A couple of weeks ago, she’d provoked him so much in front of his pals at the Brake Light bar that he’d had to belt her one. Then she’d finally shut her trap. After that, he’d hit her whenever he felt like it, sometimes for no reason at all. He liked the feeling of having power over somebody.