The Sleepwalkers (7 page)

“Yes, of course I did. But surely you’d be the first to admit”—Willi’s voice was not as harsh as he’d have liked—“that what one
sees
and what really
is
are not always the same.” Despite himself he liked this man. Something about his off-stage persona was
downright sympathetic. “Sorry to have disturbed you, Herr Gustave,” he concluded. “Your show was most enlightening. Most enlightening indeed.”

He’d seek a warrant at once, he decided, to search the King of Mystics’ home.

It was all meetings the next morning. Meetings with the unit heads. The division heads. Those above him. Those below. And then a most enlightening meeting with Gunther in the early afternoon, who’d just returned from Charité Hospital’s medical archives.

“I finally got something on bone transplants.” Gunther’s face had lost the wolfish lust Willi’d seen creep through it last night. He was simply good old Gunther again. The wolf in him asleep. “A major address in 1930 at the Medical College of Leipzig. It focused specifically on the possibility of implanting human bones, and utilizing grafting techniques to allow their regeneration in a host body. Take one guess who made it.”

Willi just loved when the kid got playful at moments like these.

Gunther leaned forward, his blue eyes sparkling. “Dr. Hermann Meckel.”

Then it
was
all related! A thunderclap shook Willi. Meckel
was involved both with the Mermaid and the Bulgarian princess. Something big was in the works here.

Terribly big.

“And not only that,” Gunther added, “but Meckel’s file’s also missing from the Charité archives. He’s on their board, but there’s not a single record of it. The clerk assured me the file had been there, but now again for some reason, it’s gone.”

“There could only be one reason,” Willi said, feeling a sudden darkness looming. “Because someone’s taking them before we get there, Gunther. Someone, or something, is keeping one step ahead of us.”

Gunther swallowed, his enormous Adam’s apple dropping down his throat. “Maybe that gold pin they found on the Mermaid’s clothing will give us a lead.”

“What gold pin?” Willi looked at him.

“You didn’t know? I saw Dr. Shurze from Pathology. He told me they’d discovered a gold Nazi Party pin in the fabric of that gray smock the Mermaid was wearing.”

An alarm went off in Willi’s head. “Dr. Hoffnung never mentioned any gold pin. And who is this Shurze?”

“The new head of Pathology. Hoffnung’s retired.”

“Retired? But that’s—” Willi spotted one of his Detektivs, little, black-mustached Herbert Thurmann, lingering near the door. “Very interesting.”

Alone finally, Willi leaned back in his office chair and stared out the window. He was sane enough to realize that it was delusional to imagine a Jewish inspector could take on an SA general single-handedly. But it didn’t mean the guy was untouchable. Just that it was time to call for bigger guns. Fritz. One of Germany’s most famous journalists. There wasn’t a soul in Berlin he didn’t know. Not so much because of his incisive political analyses but because his last name was Hohenzollern. Same as that of
the deposed royal family, of which he was some kind of cousin. Deposed or not, the name opened any door in Germany.

Willi reached for the phone.

“For God’s sakes where have you been?” Fritz was thrilled as always to hear from him. Willi had saved his life not once but several times in the war. Fritz would do anything for him. “I have the most marvelous woman I want you to meet. Smart as a whip—”

“Fritz, listen: I need an interview with von Schleicher. Urgent.”

“Von Schleicher. Tall order. But if it’s really urgent—”

The whole thing was set up by the time Willi had returned from the men’s room.

“No one gets things done like you.
You
ought to be appointed chancellor, Fritz.”

“Never mind that. We’ve got to meet up for coffee. I must tell you about this wonderful woman, Willi. Before some swine grabs her up.”

At von Schleicher’s chambers in the Ministry of War, the general’s desk was an enormous gilded affair, perhaps two-thirds the size of Hindenburg’s, Willi calculated. In Germany, everything was ranked according to status, from your desk to the entrance you walked through each morning. Unfortunately his own rank, he couldn’t help but feel, was slipping the longer he went on.

The minister looked more incredulous by the moment. An SA general? Medical experiments? Willi felt sweat dripping down his back. The man was shrewd, he knew. Able to play both sides of a coin. Where would he come down?

At last the general tore off his monocle. “The army will support you!” His blue eyes crackled with what seemed a thousand hatching schemes. “If this Meckel proves guilty of the crimes you suspect, the entire nation would be scandalized. Exactly the excuse I’ve been looking for, Kraus. Very good. Very good.”

Von Schleicher appeared to see it all before him. “These Nazi swine must be stopped with the only thing they understand:
force! Roehm and his henchmen have been dreaming for months of doing away with me and co-opting the army. This will enable me to move first. I’ll crush them. Annihilate them. Grind them into horse fodder.”

It seemed a bit extreme to Willi, except in the context of German political discourse, in which bloody solutions had become as commonly discussed these days as the weather. But he felt an enormous weight lift from his midsection. With von Schleicher and the army on his side he stood a chance at taking down this sick SA surgeon. Until he heard the minister say he would contact Ernst Roehm at once. And the weight returned.

“Herr General, I was hoping to keep this between the army and the police. Why bring in the SA führer?”

“Because Ernst Roehm happens to be a buddy of mine. A little queer, but a solid soldier. A man with whom I can do business.”

“You just finished telling me you want to crush him. Annihilate him. Grind him up for horse fodder.”

Von Schleicher looked at Willi as if he were a little boy. “Herr Inspektor, what does one thing have to do with the other?”

Thus went the forked-tongued, double-dealing, backstabbing, two-faced world of politics in the Wilhelm Strasse. Exactly the way the World War had begun, Willi grimly recalled.

Von Schleicher picked up the phone and vehemently clicked the receiver for the operator. The SA leader was unavailable. “Never mind.” He hung up. “I’ll take care of it. Roehm will work with us on this, I assure you.”

“Superb.” Willi barely made it sound as if he meant it.

Before he rose to leave, he did something entirely against his principles.

“Herr General—” He kept flashing onto his father-in-law’s desperate face the other day at Café Strauss. And his sons. “Might I take a moment to inquire of you, quite confidentially of course, what you foresee in terms of the next leadership at the Reichs Chancellery?”

Von Schleicher was silent. Willi feared he’d overstepped his bounds. Undermined the foundation of the alliance he’d just forged. But the minister of war banged on the desk again, rising as if to address the nation.

“What Germany needs is a man of iron character and will. A man who will not flinch at taking the necessary action required to get this country onto her feet. A man of steel, like Russia’s Stalin. Whom the people will tremble before and respect as a father.”

Who? Willi kept thinking.

“Don’t you worry.” Von Schleicher put his monocle back in and stared directly at him. “I have a plan. Stick with me, Kraus. You won’t regret it.”

“I regret day I am stepping feet into this cursed city.”

Konstantin Kaparov was furiously packing in his suite at the Adlon. Since he’d been so close by, Willi had dropped in for a few more questions. But Kaparov was having a Bulgarian fit. His face bruised. His eye blackened.

“Yesterday I walk in Tiergarten, get jumped by Nazi animals who think I am Jew. Imagine me Jew.”

“Anyone with dark hair . . . ,” Willi stammered apologetically.

“I leaving. No come back. You not find Magdelena after four days, you no find at all. This city—it killed her. This city—hell!”

“Speaking of which,” Willi interjected, “the hypnotist at Klub Hell the night you were there, did he say anything about the kind of legs Magdelena had? Did he call them Classic? Or Ideal?”

“No. Nothing he call them. I tell you, Herr Inspektor, hypnotist not have nothing to do wit zees. After show Magdelena completely normal. Nothing strange. I know. Am husband. Or . . . was.”

“I’m so sorry, Konstantin, that I haven’t been able to find her.”

“No one find her. She disappear in Berlin. Same as dead.”

Back in the dingy lobby of the Police Presidium, waiting for the ancient elevator to descend, Willi found himself standing next to Wolfgang Mutze of all people, head of Missing Persons. “Well, well, Kraus. How’s ghost hunting? That’s what we call it in the biz, you know.” Mutze’s multiple chins rolled around his collar as he chuckled to himself. “What have you found out so far about this missing Romanian princess?”

“She’s Bulgarian. And not much. Oddest thing though,” he said as the rickety old cage finally arrived. “The last person to see her, the doorman at the Adlon, claims he thought she was sleepwalking.”

“Another sleepwalker?” Mutze bellowed as they stepped in. “Could you press five for me please there, Kraus?”

“What do you mean another?” Willi closed the metal gate.

“Well, we must have had a dozen in as many months.”

“A dozen sleepwalkers, disappearing?”

“Sure. It started early last year. Some strange cult, we think. Berlin’s brimming with them.”

“But I must see all their files. Immediately.”

Mutze’s face stiffened. “Feel free to speak to my secretary then. They’re certainly not all neatly grouped together. We haven’t compiled a Sleepwalker File. They’re simply random cases.”

“You never thought to put them together?”

“Listen, Kraus, they may have made you an Inspektor-Detektiv but you’ve no right to speak to me like that. Do you have any idea of how many people go missing in this city every day? Fifty to sixty. On a slow day. You have it cushy up in Homicide. I don’t think you have one-twentieth the number of cases we handle. And when you solve one, they act like you’re some kind of Hercules.”

The elevator ground to a stop on five. Mutze stormed out.

“I’ll have my boy come to your office at once,” Willi called after him.

“Do that.”

A dozen sleepwalkers. Willi could hardly believe his ears. He reached the sixth floor and was about to shout for Gunther to come immediately when he remembered something else he had to do and hit the button back down, to Pathology.

“Yes, of course.” The new head of the department, Dr. Shurze, rose from the desk Dr. Hoffnung had occupied. Pulling open a wide, thin drawer from one of the medical cabinets, he handed Willi a glass container.

Inside was a sparkling gold men’s lapel pin.

Willi took it out. “These gold pins, if I’m not mistaken, are only given to longtime Party members.”

“Correct,” Shurze replied.

Something about this new guy Willi didn’t quite trust. Perhaps it was the eyeglasses, so thick it was hard to believe he could really perform autopsies.

“The gold pin,” Shurze went on, apparently well versed in Nazi history, “is only bestowed upon those Party members who participated in the Beer Hall Putsch of November 1923. So whomever this belonged to was a high-ranking man.”

“What is this insignia here?” Willi asked of the small staff with a snake wrapped around it embossed just below the swastika.

“This indicates the SA Medical Corps, Herr Inspektor-Detektiv.”

“The SA.”

“Yes. The SA Medical Corps was founded in 1923.”

“And where exactly did you say you discovered this pin?”

“It was stuck—accidentally or on purpose, I couldn’t say—on the inside of the gray garment the victim was wearing.”

Willi found this hard to believe, impossible almost. Dr. Hoffnung would never have missed such a key piece of evidence.
Nor would he retire so suddenly without so much as a word. Might someone, even Shurze, have planted the pin and got rid of Hoffnung? But why?

“Gunther,” Willi said, “we’re going to switch jobs for a while, you and I.”

“You mean,
I
have to order
you
about?” Gunther seemed none too pleased by the prospect.

“No. You are going to pursue the missing Bulgarian princess, and I am going to have a chat with Gina Mancuso’s old roommate. There’s an inn out in Spandau called the Black Stag. I want you to insinuate yourself into the crowd. It may take some time. Don’t rush things. Drink. Be merry with them. And find out whether the Princess Magdelena ever stepped foot in there or not.”

“Jawohl.”
Gunther wrote it all down.

“Plus, there were two fellows there the other night. One named Schumann. The other’s first name was Josef. I want anything and everything you can find about them. I have a hunch they may be doctors. Oh, and, Gunther, be careful. Very careful. It’s a real nest of Nazis. None too friendly to me.”

Gunther’s eyes widened. “Which is why you’re sending me.” His pale cheeks quivered excitedly, exactly the dogged response Willi was counting on. “Don’t you worry, Chief. I’ll find out for you. Everything there is to!”

“Paula, you’re looking for?” The charwoman glanced up in surprise. “You sure as heck won’t find her lounging about at four in the afternoon.” She dropped her brush in the bucket. “She’s a workingwoman, Inspektor. Just like the rest of us.” She stood up, wiping her hands on her apron. “What’s she done now?”

“To whom do I have the honor of addressing?” Willi was well aware that in Germany a building’s cleaning lady knew all there was to know about her tenants. But such information more often than not became ammunition in personal vendettas—and nothing, he’d learned the hard way, could derail an investigation faster.

“I am Frau Agnes Hoffmeyer.” The woman held out her skirt and curtsied, as if being introduced at a ball. “Related to the lady in question by motherhood.”

Like big-city dwellers everywhere Berliners often eased life’s
grind with the lubricant of sarcasm. Willi felt as if he’d known this saucy lady all his life.