Authors: Volker Kutscher
Rath left the two squabblers to their own devices. A short time later, he was standing in Wilhelm Prokot’s shop for a second time. The butcher gave him a broad grin as he showed him to the telephone.
‘Was the doctor able to help?’
Prokot had known exactly what he was doing when he pointed Rath in the direction of Dr Völcker. Rath would’ve liked to have slammed a fist into that grinning face but, instead, composed himself and asked to be put through to the Charité.
The black car could not have travelled faster if the two women in the zinc coffins at the back had still been alive. After they left the restricted area the driver put his foot down like a getaway car driver. Rath looked across at him.
‘Slow down,’ he said. ‘Two corpses are more than enough.’
The driver muttered and laid off the gas a little. He had started grumbling when he heard they were going to the morgue in the Charité. Dr Schwartz was otherwise engaged but had requested that the two dead women be brought to him. Wolter had stayed behind in the flat, while Rath had been obliged to travel in the mortuary car with Dr Völcker between him and the driver. The Red doctor had insisted, and Wolter had given his consent. Thus Uncle was rid of the troublemaker, and Rath was lumbered with him.
The co-driver had groaned when he heard how many people were accompanying the two corpses. ‘This isn’t a police van, it’s a mortuary car.’ Grumpily he had cleared his space, and was now sitting in the back between the coffins, cursing at each bend.
Although his eyes were open, Rath was scarcely aware of the world outside the car windows. He saw the traffic on Kottbusser Damm, saw the Friday hustle and bustle on Oranienstrasse, but it all seemed like a dream. Outside of Neukölln everything seemed normal again, but that normality was at the same time unreal. It hardly seemed credible that only a few kilometres away a state of emergency had been declared and shots were being fired, that people were dying. The image of the dead women had been burned into his brain. The younger of the two was only twenty-six years old, the older of the pair fifty. Their papers felt so heavy in the inside pocket of Rath’s coat it was as if they were printed on lead.
Since the mortuary car had set off from Hermannstrasse, he hadn’t exchanged a single word with Völcker. He observed the doctor’s gaunt figure out of the corner of his eye, sitting in a creased grey coat that was slightly too big for him. There was a tinge of grey stubble on his pointed chin, and his eyes were focused on the road ahead.
Rath finally broke the silence. ‘You’re a doctor,’ he asked, so suddenly that Dr Völcker gave a start, ‘so why did you become a communist?’
For the first time since they had left Neukölln, Völcker looked at him. ‘It doesn’t tally with your world view, does it?’
Rath was annoyed by the doctor’s self-righteous tone, and even more annoyed that Völcker was, in a way, correct. It always surprised him when academics called themselves communists. For Rath, communists grew out of the lumpenproletariat. People raised in an environment like that barely stood a chance. Either they became communists or they became criminals, or both. Criminals, communists – for many policemen they were one and the same. Didn’t communists also want to steal? To dispossess the middle classes using violent means? The Penal Code called that robbery; the Commune called it revolution.
While Rath could half understand some poor devil pinning his last hopes on the communists, it made the intellectuals who preached revolution even less fathomable. They were the ones elevating robbery to an ideology. As long as it occurred on a mass scale, you could call it a revolution and justify it academically. It was these ideologues in particular that Rath couldn’t stand, muddleheads who always knew best, who believed they had a monopoly on the truth. Völcker was someone he placed in this category, although the doctor didn’t give the impression of being particularly muddled – just of being even more of a know-it-all.
‘Have you ever been to some of the damp-infested hovels that certain people in this city still use to extract money from the working classes?’ Völcker dug a little deeper when Rath didn’t respond. ‘Do you know the conditions some people are forced to live in?’
Rath was annoyed at having entered an unnecessary discussion with this intellectual Clever Dick. Of course he was aware of the tenement houses in the city’s workers’ districts, in the north, east and south: real slums, a disgrace, no question about it. But what did that prove? It was a reason to build bright, new estates for the workers – something that was happening too – but not to become a communist! He knew about the downsides of progress, the negative aspects of civilisation; he was a police officer. But he also knew about the communist agitators who preached the fight against the exploiters when they meant the fight against the police. How was the world supposed to become a better place with these loudmouths in charge? He had no wish to discuss this question with one of them.
‘That doesn’t give anyone the right to break the law,’ he said simply. He was a policeman and it was his duty to maintain law and order. And the communists? Only today they had proved once again that they held neither sacred.
‘Break the law?’ Völcker’s voice grew louder. The driver stared stubbornly ahead and stepped on the gas again. He obviously wanted to get this journey over as soon as possible.
‘What kind of laws,’ the doctor continued, ‘prevent people from taking to the streets and expressing their opinion and…’
‘Shooting police officers,’ Rath finished the sentence.
Völcker gave him an angry look. ‘The two women in the back of this car weren’t killed by communists. That was the work of your esteemed colleagues!’
‘If your people weren’t constantly preaching violence the streets would be more peaceful.’
Now Rath was getting louder too. The thing that annoyed him most was that the doctor was probably right. The pointed bullet looked exactly like those used by the Prussian police force.
They were used in Cologne too. He thought back to the hearing and the evidence on the judge’s bench. A bullet from a rifle had blasted a hole in the shoulder of the gunman, and would probably have been enough to put him out of action, though it hadn’t actually killed him. It was another bullet that had dealt the fatal blow, one that had struck him right in the heart. 7.65 calibre. The ballistics report had revealed beyond any doubt that it had been fired from the service weapon of Detective Inspector Gereon Rath.
The hearing in Cologne wasn’t even half a year past, and now the very same Gereon Rath was driving through Berlin in a mortuary car, accompanying two dead women to the morgue. Time and again, he was confronted by death in this job and he just had to deal with it. He had known that when he decided to become a police officer, but since the episode in Cologne it seemed as if every dead person he encountered was accusing him. The communist doctor saw things differently. Rath was a police officer, the police had shot the women, the police were guilty and therefore the detective inspector was guilty as well.
Rath looked out of the side window as they crossed the Spree, taking no notice of the people on Weidendammer Bridge. The silence between him and Völcker was icier than before, but there was no point talking to the man. They lived in different worlds. The driver sounded his horn as a pedestrian crossed Friedrichstrasse too slowly. The man looked round in horror, shaking his head as he gazed after the mortuary car.
At Oranienburger Tor the black car turned into Hannoversche Strasse. Shortly afterwards a yellow-brick building appeared on the right hand side of the road. The Charité morgue received them with Prussian indifference and sobriety, with a shrug that had turned to stone. The building had seen so many dead bodies come and go, more tragic cases than two women who had been shot on a balcony.
The driver negotiated the entrance with aplomb. In the back of the car, the zinc coffins made a clattering sound. The driver uttered yet another curse.
Only when they were on Dr Schwartz’s marble table did the dead finally look dead. That morning, Wilhelm Böhm had thought the pictures Gräf had taken of the corpse from the Landwehr canal could be mistaken for passport photos – assuming you cropped the image to leave out the mangled hands. The deceased appeared almost friendly.
Here on the table the dead man looked different from yesterday, the head peering out from under the white cotton sheet Dr Schwartz had placed over it. Böhm cast an eye over the corpse and suddenly knew why: the dead man’s body was now dry.
Despite Gräf’s passport-like images, they still hadn’t made any headway with the identification. The dead man hadn’t been carrying papers and there was nothing in the pockets of his fashionable, double-breasted jacket, absolutely nothing. In all his years of service, Böhm had never seen anything like it. Even victims of robbery homicides had a handkerchief, a sweet wrapper or something that offered at least a tiny clue. Nor was the car any help. The Horch was registered to a Dr Bernward Römer, a lively character who had reported it stolen in the 113th precinct a week and a half before.
Charly had discovered that the vehicle had scraped past a car parked on Möckernstrasse and Böhm had found a metal rod in the footwell, which he had initially taken for a faulty car part, a piece of the steering rod perhaps, that might have caused the accident, but there was nothing missing. Apart from the dents from the canal fencing, the Horch was as good as new. Yet the solution was obvious: the rod had been wedged against the accelerator in order that a dead man might drive. Gräf and Charly were still trying to establish its origin.
This morning they had begun to scour the rectangle between Möckernstrasse, Tempelhofer Ufer and Grossbeerenstrasse for further witnesses. Böhm hadn’t been assigned many men today, again, as most officers were in Neukölln or Wedding cleaning up the trouble spots. The accident at the Landwehr canal probably had nothing to do with the May disturbances. Böhm was still calling it an accident, even though he was now certain it wasn’t. The poor guy on the marble table had been murdered. At the very least, someone had wanted to dispose of his corpse instead of giving him a proper burial. That much Böhm could say already – without recourse to Dr Schwartz’s wisdom.
He was thinking that he ought to have a couple of portraits made from Gräf’s crime scene photos and send his men out again, when he heard the deep voice of Dr Schwartz as he entered the room at a brisk clip.
‘Good morning Böhm. Sorry I’m late, but we’re getting dead body after dead body at the moment. All hell is breaking loose in the city.’ He shook Böhm’s hand. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, when he saw the DCI’s concerned face, ‘none of them are yours. Most likely Reds, but a few women too. Seems like things are getting a little out of hand.’
‘It was no different ten years ago. Almost always the wrong people die, and they’re almost always killed by accident.’
Dr Schwartz pulled on a pair of gloves, approached the marble table and pulled back the cover. ‘We can safely say that our friend from last night wasn’t killed by accident. He was roughed up quite deliberately. There’s almost no part of his wrists and ankles that hasn’t been damaged: broken bones, torn ligaments, lacerations, a real mess. It looks as if someone fixed his hands and feet to a firm support and then struck with a heavy, blunt object. I’d guess with a hammer.’
‘Dear God,’ Böhm whistled through his teeth. ‘These here?’ The dead man’s entire body was covered in bruises.
‘Harmless in comparison. Haematomas that probably stem from physical blows. The mark on his chest could be from a cudgel. This one was probably from a kick. The man has been given a good beating by people who knew what they were doing.’
‘You’re saying there were several perpetrators?’
Schwartz nodded. ‘Probably. It looks as though they spared his face. Professionals.’
‘Career criminals?’
‘They’re not the only ones who know how to administer a beating. Could be boxers. Or policemen,’ Dr Schwartz said. It was the kind of joke he always made.
‘So what do you recommend?’ Böhm asked. ‘An internal investigation or a warrant for Max Schmeling?’
‘All jokes aside, the people who did this were sadists. They have no…’ Schwartz broke off as the big swing door suddenly opened and two covered corpses were rolled in.
‘More May corpses?’ Dr Schwartz asked.
One of the two men in white coats pushing the stretcher nodded. ‘From Neukölln. Seems life expectancy is back on the rise in Wedding. They’ve had their big day already.’
‘These are dead people you are talking about, gentlemen!’ The reproachful voice came from one of two men who entered the room behind the white coats, a gaunt, strict-looking man in a creased grey suit. ‘You ought to show more respect for the dead.’
‘Especially when they’re proles, isn’t that right Dr Völcker?’ said Schwartz. ‘Long time no see. To what do we owe the pleasure?’
‘Police bullets,’ the gaunt man said tersely.
Völcker? The infamous communist doctor? Böhm rolled his eyes.
Völcker’s tall companion intervened. ‘These two women died as a result of gunshot wounds in Hermannstrasse,’ he said. ‘They were most likely caught by a stray bullet.’
Even before the tall man displayed his badge, Böhm knew that he was a colleague, even if he was rather too elegantly dressed for a police officer. Only cops talked like that, and tax officials.
‘Rath, Detective Inspector Gereon Rath, E Division,’ the policeman said. ‘We spoke on the phone just now.’
Dr Schwartz gave him a nod and scratched his chin.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘But now is not a good time. I’m in the middle of a meeting with DCI Böhm.’
Böhm thought he recognised the tall detective from the Castle, the newbie Lanke was talking about in the canteen. A careerist who was crawling up the arse of the commissioner.
‘E Division?’ Böhm grunted. ‘What brings Vice to the morgue? Dead bodies aren’t part of your remit, or are you responsible for the corpses yourselves?’ The vice detective said nothing. ‘I asked you a question, man,’ Böhm roared, ‘are you deaf?’ Inspector Rath gave a brief start and stood to attention. Obviously a soldier with good old Prussian training.