Authors: Volker Kutscher
‘From the house-to-house searches in Neukölln,’ he said. ‘Happened to be on-site when the two women were hit.’
‘Very good,’ Böhm said, pleased. He would teach this conceited arsehole some manners. Now kindly take your load and be on your way. As you’ve just heard, this is not a good time.’
The tall detective seemed not to have heard. Instead he moved closer to the marble table and stared at the corpse, wide-eyed, as if he had never seen a dead body.
‘What are you still doing here?’ Böhm yelled. ‘Did I ask you to identify the body?’
‘Of course not, Detective Chief Inspector!’ Rath stood erect once more.
‘Then scram! You’re holding things up.’
‘That’s right,’ Dr Schwartz waded in, shifting his weight impatiently from one foot to the other. ‘I must ask you to leave the autopsy table so that we can continue.’ He pointed towards the clock on the front wall. ‘I still have a lot to do today.’ He gave the men in white coats a sign. ‘Take these two women down to the cellar. I’ll deal with them tomor…’
‘Stop!’ Völcker interrupted. The two men, who had already started to wheel the stretchers out, stood where they were. Schwartz looked at his colleague indignantly. ‘Please excuse me, Dr Schwartz,’ Völcker continued, calmer now, ‘it wasn’t my intention to interrupt you but, as it happens, I’m not here as anybody’s gofer. I came to attend the examination of the two female corpses.’
Schwartz raised an eyebrow. ‘As you can see, Dr Völcker, I still have a corpse to examine. The public prosecutor has ordered the autopsy. This takes priority.’
Völcker wouldn’t let go. ‘I have strong reason to suspect that these two women were purposefully killed by police. If you postpone the examination, it might look as if the police and the public prosecutor’s office have something to hide.’
‘I’ll leave that to others to decide. I’m a doctor.’ Schwartz could barely conceal the anger in his voice. ‘As are you, Dr Völcker, need I remind you? It would be better if you refrained from expressing your suspicions.’
‘The public prosecutor will order an autopsy anyway,’ Völcker said.
‘For the time being, the police have only requested that the body be examined. You know yourself that I do not have the authority to open up a corpse of my own accord.’ He gazed at Völcker almost sympathetically over the rim of his glasses. ‘An examination only, Dr Völcker, and if I do manage to get it done today, then it’ll be for your sake. For old time’s sake, let’s say. If you would like to attend, then you’re going to have to exercise a little more patience.’
Völcker didn’t appear to notice the irony in Schwartz’s voice. At any rate, he sat on the wooden bench that ran along the tiled wall. The two white coats disappeared without the bodies.
Böhm had had to be very careful not to give the communist doctor a piece of his mind. The man was disrupting things. Just like the cop from Vice who had dragged him here. When Dr Schwartz peeled back the sheet, the pain in the arse just stared at the dead man’s mangled hands. The tall detective hadn’t moved a millimetre from the marble table.
‘Looks almost as if he was tortured.’
Böhm exploded. Enough was enough! Why did this man always have to have his two pennies’ worth?
‘You work in Vice,’ he barked at the Clever Dick. ‘Do you think that because this man is naked, that makes it your case? If you don’t want to see someone actually being tortured, then I suggest you let us get on with our work. Do I make myself clear?’
‘Yes, Detective Chief Inspector!’ The tall detective stood to attention and performed an about turn.
Böhm’s anger subsided as he turned back to Dr Schwartz. The vice detective took a seat on the bench next to the communist doctor, but the pair didn’t speak.
‘So, Doctor,’ Böhm said, clearing his throat. ‘Shall we continue? Where were we?’
‘The injuries,’ Schwartz said. ‘They were most likely inflicted by professionals, and definitely before he died, as the haemorrhaging shows.’
‘When did he die, and how?’
‘The precise time of death is impossible to determine. I’d say the man has been dead for two or three days at the most. I’m afraid I can’t say anything more for the time being.’
‘So he was already dead when he entered the canal yesterday?’
‘100%,’ Schwartz nodded. ‘He certainly didn’t drown. We haven’t found any trace of water in his lungs.’
‘I didn’t think it was a floater,’ Böhm growled. ‘If memory serves, you confirmed that last night. Don’t keep me in suspense, Doctor. Enough of my time has been wasted today already.’
‘The cause of death is astounding, however. You’ll be surprised when you hear it. The man didn’t die as a result of his injuries.’
‘Surprise me, Doctor. I’m waiting.’
‘Heroin,’ Dr Schwartz said simply.
‘Heroin?’
‘Respiratory failure, caused by an overdose of diacetylmorphine; that is, heroin.’
‘The cough medicine?’
Schwartz nodded. ‘Cough tablets for morphine addicts. It used to be prescribed as an anti-asthmatic. Until people realised it was addictive. A particularly strong opiate, very hard to procure on the legal drugs market. On the illegal market, however… If you take too much of it, you stop breathing, but by that stage you won’t notice a thing.’
Rath paused for a moment in front of the main gate to arrange his thoughts. The cool air did him good. He felt as if he had awoken from a morbid dream where a dead face had been staring at him. Something that could only be caused by a visit to the morgue. Before descending the steps, he lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply.
There was no doubt about it. It was definitely the Russian lying on the marble table. The man who had visited him a few nights before. The drunk who had wrecked his wardrobe. One moment alive, the next a case for Homicide. He took another long draw, turned up his collar and set off towards Oranienburger Tor.
Why hadn’t he said anything? It was too late now. They would ask him why he had withheld the information and then – at the very least – institute disciplinary proceedings.
Rath felt his carefully suppressed rage returning. DCI arsehole! If everybody in A Division was as much of a bulldog as DCI Böhm, he wondered if it really was such a desirable place to work. He was yet to meet a bigger idiot in the whole of the Castle. In comparison even Lanke seemed like a charming, sympathetic paternalist. Naturally he hadn’t told the bulldog anything, but it was more of a reflex than a rational decision.
What kind of information could he have passed on anyway? He knew almost nothing about the dead man. Boris had been in his flat that one time, a few days before this death, drunk, screaming and flailing his arms about. Rath wasn’t even sure that Boris was his name; he only knew that he had been searching for a fellow countryman who had once lived in Nürnberger Strasse. And that he was now dead.
Heroin! A drug addict, driving into the Landwehr canal? How had the dead Russian sustained the injuries to his hands and feet? A very strange case, Rath thought. It was a strange case though none of his business.
At Oranienburger Tor he ignored the steps to the underground. Instead he lit a cigarette and continued to Friedrichstrasse station. The crowd of people on Weidendammer Bridge had grown since he’d driven over it in the mortuary car. Most of them had finished work for the evening and were on their way home or to the nearest pub, already thinking about dinner, families, their wives or a beer with friends. Here the city seemed frighteningly normal. How many of these people could imagine what was happening in Neukölln or Wedding? Whether shots were still being fired in Hermannstrasse? The events of the day had given Rath an upset stomach and only now did he realise that he hadn’t eaten anything. There was an Aschinger here, directly behind the railway underpass on Friedrichstrasse. He decided to have a snack before heading home, and a beer or two. He flicked his cigarette into the Spree and fought his way through the crowd. In front of Friedrichstrasse station, the paperboys were crying out the evening’s headlines. ‘New street battles!’ – ‘Further deaths in communist disturbances!’ – ‘RFB to be banned?’
‘Strange!’ Elisabeth Behnke lifted the broken padlock from the damp cellar floor. Someone had broken into Kardakov’s storage area. ‘That’s my padlock,’ she explained. ‘I locked his cellar two or three weeks ago, so he couldn’t sneak out his things without paying his final month’s rent.’ She held out the cheap, misshapen brass lock. ‘I wonder who it was?’
Rath shrugged his shoulders and stepped into his predecessor’s cellar. There was barely any light from the dim 40 watt cellar bulb and the air was musty.
‘When was the last time you were down here?’ he asked.
Elisabeth Behnke considered for a moment. ‘Maybe last week.’
‘The lock was still intact?’
‘No idea. I wasn’t paying any attention. My cellar is over there.’ She pointed towards a few wobbly shelves, upon which a number of jars were gathering dust. Next to them was a big crate of potatoes.
‘Does Kardakov still have a key to the main door?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Then it wasn’t him picking something up.’
‘It doesn’t look as if anyone’s ever picked anything up.’
Junk was piled to the ceiling. Along the back wall stood an old cupboard with a few framed pictures leaning against it, while the side wall housed a rusty bicycle. But for the most part it was boxes: box upon box, stacked one on top of the other.
‘How long did he live here?’ Rath asked.
She shrugged. ‘Maybe three years.’
‘Three years and all that junk!’ He shook his head. ‘You need an expert to go through that. Lucky I’m a police officer.’
‘I’ll go upstairs and make us a tea,’ she said. He tried not to think what that might mean, and lifted the first box from the pile.
It had been his idea to look in the cellar. His interest in Kardakov had grown enormously since his unexpected encounter with Boris in the morgue. He couldn’t get the image of his battered body out of his mind.
Only a few hours ago, his guilty conscience had been eating away at him, on account of his silence. Then he had sat at the counter of Aschinger’s in Friedrichstrasse and dulled his conscience with a few beers. He tried to view things objectively, and realised that it was a sign. He knew a little more than Homicide. He knew that the dead man had been looking for someone in Berlin. Maybe this was his chance. Why shouldn’t he take advantage of it? It was what life was about, after all. He only had to think back to Bruno’s words.
Gennat’s boys are hand-picked. You have to
land something really big.
No, he wouldn’t do Böhm any favours, wouldn’t confide the little he knew. He wouldn’t break the rules either though, quite the opposite. He would present the commissioner with a solved case. And in order to do that, he would need to learn a little more about his mysterious predecessor. Handy, when you could begin the search in your own cellar.
After half an hour, all the boxes stood open in front of the wooden shed. Most of them had contained books. Book after book, almost exclusively in Russian. Rath couldn’t even make out the titles. He didn’t know a lot about the Cyrillic alphabet. The only thing that meant anything to him was a coffee-table book about St Petersburg, or Leningrad as people said these days. He was surprised that an author should have abandoned his books for so long and stored them in the cellar. There was only one box of personal items, a few letters that Rath could make neither head nor tail of, all in Russian again. The only thing he could halfway make out was the date. He noticed that the letters weren’t in chronological order but were bundled together higgledy-piggledy. In the middle of the pile was a number of programmes from the
Delphi Palace
in Kantstrasse. The artist Lana Nikoros, who was heavily billed, wore a mysterious smile in her photo. The Mona Lisa had nothing on her. Kardakov seemed to be a fan of the singer. He had collected programmes from several months, from October 1928 to March 1929.
In addition, Rath had also uncovered a few manuscripts. If Kardakov had use of a typewriter with Cyrillic keys he must have taken it with him. At least, it wasn’t here. Amongst the manuscripts was a folder containing photos of a young man. Above a big nose, the dark eyes were deep in their sockets. Hollow cheeks and a mouth that twisted sadly. Elegantly curved lips. There was something almost feminine about that face and Rath suspected that Alexej Ivanovitsch Kardakov himself was staring back. If the man wanted to look like a poet he was succeeding. That melancholy Russian gaze.
Rath took the photos, pocketed one of the Delphi programmes, packed the rest of the junk back into the cellar and climbed the stairs. He hadn’t found a great deal, nothing of much use anyway, but it was a start.
Elisabeth Behnke looked disappointed when after a cup of tea – without rum – Rath got to his feet and reached for his hat and coat.
‘It’s half past nine,’ she said. ‘Where are you going at this time of night?’
‘It’s Friday,’ he said. ‘I’m going dancing.’
‘With whom?’ She actually sounded a little jealous.
He showed her the photo of Kardakov.
The night was advancing towards dawn and the silhouette of the Memorial Church towered over the brightly lit mass of houses, the only building in the neighbourhood that wasn’t drowning in neon light. It seemed to serve as a warning to revellers, with its dark, silent mountains of stone in the midst of the night-time racket. Rath walked past the church and went up the Kurfürstendamm, squeezing through a group of noisily laughing, drunk tourists he guessed were from somewhere near Stuttgart. He heard a strong southern German accent, at least, when one of the men made an indecent offer to a young woman walking by.
‘Learn some German first if you want to pop your cherry,’ the woman replied, suddenly no longer so coy.
The Swabian loudmouth blushed and fell into hurt silence while his companions grinned inanely. Rath was annoyed. For some reason, everyone from the provinces seemed to think they could let it all hang out in Berlin. In a way he was happy that, aside from his parents, nobody from Cologne knew he now lived here. It meant that no-one would be visiting. He could imagine some of his friends – his friends from before, mind – behaving in exactly the same way as the merry Swabian.