Torsen Heinz sat at his large wooden desk, surrounded by his officers. The station was housed in a baroque-style building in the Potsdam district of East Germany, and for equipment there were a half dozen old typewriters and an obsolete telephone system incapable of connecting with West Berlin without interminable delays and disconnections. The principal piece of modern technology was a microwave oven, recently installed to heat up the officers' lunches.
Torsen and his men had been unable to keep up with the sharp increase in criminal activity since the fall of the socialist regime. Previously East Berlin's criminal incidences had been hushed up by the Stasi secret police or played down by the state-controlled media. Now, Polizei Oberrat Heinz and forty-odd uniformed officers had to learn fast to make their own decisions.
Sitting with his microwave-heated breakfast sausages, Heinz felt swamped. There was little to report from any of the officers he had assigned to the Kellerman case, because after their day's work they had clocked out promptly at six o'clock. No matter how much Torsen argued that they were no longer working from nine to six but if necessary around the clock, they were too used to the old regime to change their working habits. There was not one man on duty yet, and it was half past eight!
Alone, Torsen sifted through the statements and facts he had gathered so far about the dwarf. He thought that Kellerman was probably an American citizen since, according to the hotel manager, he spoke with an American accent. Without a passport or other documents to substantiate this, he decided he should first contact the U.S. embassy to see if they had any record of his arrival in Berlin. The next call would be to the circus which was being heralded as the biggest event of the season. He tried to contact the embassy, but the station's telephone switchboard was still closed. He finished his breakfast and looked at the photograph of his father on the wall behind his desk. Gunter Heinz's picture was brown with age. Torsen gave the photograph a small nod and determined that until it was absolutely necessary he would not go hat in hand to the West Berlin police. They had already assisted him on a number of cases, and he had taken a lot of ridicule from his "colleagues" with their high tech computers and fax machines. He wondered how well they would cope without so much as one single telephone connected after 6 p.m. or before 9 a.m.! He swiveled in his chair and looked at the memo taped to the wall under his papa's severe face. "Accept no coincidence — only facts." He had put up this admonition after he had been promoted to chief inspector at exactly the same age as his father had before him. The memo had been written when Torsen first made the decision to follow him into the Polizei.
Suffering from senility, Gunter Heinz, Sr., was now residing in a home for the elderly, most of the time happily unaware of his surroundings — or for that matter of who he was. But there were the odd flashes of recall. In these moments Torsen was able to talk with him, even play chess. Torsen had arranged for the nurses to call him whenever his father was lucid. However, the last time he had hurried over for a visit, the old man had glared at him and asked who the hell he was. Torsen had replaced his chessboard in its case.
The nurse had apologized, whispering that she was sorry, but earlier that day his father had asked to speak with his son on an important matter. During Torsen's conversation with the nurse, his father ripped small pieces of tissue paper from a box, carefully licked each tiny scrap, stuck them on his nose, and blew them off like snowflakes. A spectacle that would have been comic were the man not his father.
Torsen called the U.S. embassy. They had no record of a Kellerman in residence in East Berlin, but suggested the border patrols be contacted. The flow of refugees arriving in Germany was causing mayhem, but there was an attempt to record everyone coming in by automobile or train. There was a possibility that Kellerman had landed at the main airport and crossed to the East; the airport authorities, too, should be contacted.
Torsen sent two officers to try and discover Kellerman's origins, and then set off with Sergeant Volker Rieckert for the circus.
The patrol car labored through the mud, but the attendant would not let them come close to the private trailers and the performers' parking lot. The long walk to the trailer sections and big tents was hazardous. Their trousers were soaked at the bottom, their hair plastered to their heads as they made their way toward the cashier's trailer.
The cashier had bright red-dyed hair with a pink comb stuck in the top that matched her pink lipstick. She looked at Torsen's ID and blew a large pink bubble with her gum, then pointed toward the manager's building. Torsen swore under his breath as he felt the mud squelch into his hand-knit woolen socks.
The circus's administrator welcomed the men into his office. It was tiny and overheated, in a small building at the side of a massive tent. It was filled with filing cabinets, and the walls were covered with large circus posters. Romy Kelm, the administrator, a balding bespectacled gentleman, introduced himself to the detectives and ordered tea.
The two officers were settled on folding chairs, and Mr. Kelm seated himself behind his pristine desk. He told Torsen the dead man could very well be Tommy Kellerman. Kelm hastened to add that Kellerman was not employed by the circus, but had been more than twenty years earlier. He knew also that Kellerman had been in jail in the United States, was prone to fighting and drunken brawls, and was a thief. Kellerman had absconded with the company's wages eight years previously when he was associated with the Kings Circus, a smaller touring company. A circus trade paper had given the details of his theft and subsequent jail sentence. Kelm suggested that there were a number of people who resented Kellerman, because he owed them money.
Torsen was given a list of all the performers who might have known Kellerman. Kelm told him that the dead man's ex-wife, Ruda, a star performer, was still using the name Kellerman, although she had remarried long ago.
Torsen's head was reeling. He and his sergeant spent more than two hours in the little office, and the small room became so overheated that they could feel their socks and shoes drying out, along with the bottom of their trousers.
Finally, Torsen was helped into his raincoat and handed a layout of the trailers. The circus did not want any adverse publicity, because their biggest show of the season was to open in a few days' time. Kelm made it clear that if anyone from his company was involved in the incident he wanted it dealt with as quietly and as quickly as possible.
As he ushered them into the corridor, he said he was sure no one in the company was involved in the murder.
Torsen suggested that surely if many people detested Kellerman, perhaps one could have wanted to kill him. There was no reply, just a cold stare from Kelm, who smiled perfunctorily.
Torsen eased open the exit door and looked at the downpour. He swore, then hunched up his shoulders and stepped out. His sergeant followed, tucking his thick notepad into his pocket, along with the free posters and cards that had been pressed into his hands by Kelm for his children.
"Las Vegas, you see that poster on the high-wire act! How much do you think a setup like this costs?" Rieckert asked. He received no answer from Torsen. "That Kelm was pretty helpful, wasn't he?"
"Yeah, he was, wasn't he! It's called get off our backs, schmuck! We've got our work cut out for us."
A herd of horses was led past them, draped in protective covers, led on a single rein by a young sour-faced boy. Rieckert stared with open curiosity, and then looked at four equally sour-faced men wearing dark blue overalls. They carried pitchforks, and one promptly cleared away some horse dung as the others hurried on toward the practice arena. Rieckert's jaw dropped again as coming up behind him were five massive elephants. He shouted to ask Torsen if he had seen them. Torsen looked at him — it was exceptionally hard to miss five fully grown elephants.