Even so, all bank counters would remain closed for the next few days. Arrogant bastards, Rath thought. He didn’t have much time for the financial industry, which he had never understood anyway. He knew even less about the financial crisis, which now seemed to have pulled the banks into its maelstrom. Only two years ago, any number of shares on the New York Stock Exchange had fallen through the floor, and speculators had jumped out of the windows of the city’s skyscrapers. Why enterprises that had nothing to do with New York should be affected, honest German companies for example, even German public servants such as himself who had seen their salaries cut, was a mystery to him.
To the economics editor of the Vossische too, it seemed. What we lack, was the title of his lead. What has happened? The factories, on which Germany’s economic strength has been built, are still standing, as they were four weeks ago. The German soil has yielded the same harvest as last year, if not better than in many previous years. Our reserves of coal and iron remain intact beneath the ground. In all these ways Germany is no poorer, so why the alarm? Because, although the German economy is as strong as ever in itself, we lack the fuel to drive it forward. We lack money.
How true, Rath thought, we lack money. Isn’t that what so many people have always lacked?
This catastrophe is upon us, the journalist continued, and it would be cowardly to turn a blind eye to the gravity of this unique situation. The collapse of a major German bank is without precedent in the country’s economic history.
What we are now experiencing is not inflation, but its exact counterpart.
Rath didn’t quite know if that was good news or bad. At first glance it sounded good: no inflation. That was something, surely. Nevertheless, it didn’t change the fact that money was in short supply. What a lousy world, he thought, remembering what Alex had said in the stairwell.
When he returned to the bedroom, Kirie was waiting eagerly. Charly was still fast asleep. ‘You dogs have it good,’ he said, stroking Kirie’s fur, ‘and not just when it comes to affairs of the heart.’
He sat beside Charly. She briefly opened her eyes and snuggled up to him, reaching for his hand. ‘I didn’t tell them anything, Gereon,’ she mumbled, more asleep than awake. ‘Not a thing!’ She closed her eyes as Rath pulled the covers over her shoulders and kissed her on the cheek.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he said, though he wasn’t sure she could hear him. At least it made it easier to admit his error. ‘If I had believed you none of this would have happened.’
He sat on the chair next to her bed and placed the Walther on his lap. He gazed at her, fast asleep in broad daylight. No one would ever take her away from him again.
118
Dusk was falling as the police vehicles pulled up. The enormous silhouette of the gasometer stood against the westerly glow of the night sky. It had rained in the early afternoon, and the pavement was glistening dark and wet. A great number of people and addresses stood on their arrest lists, stretched across all four corners of the city. Even so, Rath had opted for Schöneberg, just like Gennat. Böhm had gone to the West End, which made the decision easier still.
Right now, police units were stationed at seventeen different locations throughout the city. At eight on the dot they would swoop, so that those under arrest would be unable to warn each other. At seventeen different addresses in Berlin, the illusion that police officers were above the law was about to shatter.
Rarely had Rath found the passage of time so torturous as in these last few days.
Even after Charly’s release, little had changed. As far as possible he had kept his distance from Sebastian Tornow, though they had crossed paths on a number of occasions at work. Everyone was working with great zeal to make the chain of evidence in the case against Abraham Goldstein as tight as possible.
Everyone except Gennat, Böhm and Grabowski.
Rath was the only one who knew. Everyone else assumed they were looking into the Goldstein affair. No one suspected that they were actually conducting interrogations in an undisclosed location. Even less, that Helmut Grabowski was the man being interrogated by Homicide’s two oldest hands. They had needed three days to crack him, but then Grabowski started talking. Seventeen names, and enough background information to justify today’s arrests.
Now, they stood at the base of the stairs: Gennat, Rath and the squad leader with his men. They had taken a dozen uniform officers along with them. Every so often the wooden stairs emitted a tired protest, as if unused to carrying so much weight.
Rath and Böhm had discovered that Assistant Detective Grabowski must be the Castle’s leak at more or less the same time. Böhm, still angry that confidential information pertaining to the Goldstein investigation had been passed straight to the press, narrowed the list of suspects one by one. Only seven people had known what Abraham Goldstein looked like: Gereon Rath and his three men, Deputy Police Commissioner Bernhard Weiss, CID Chief Scholz and the female employee who had received the telex from America and passed it on.
At first Böhm focused on Rath and his men, whom he obviously thought capable of such indiscretion. He even briefly considered Weiss and Scholz for different, no doubt politically motivated, reasons. The one person he hadn’t reckoned with was the girl from the teleprinter’s office, an innocent in her mid-twenties. Eventually, however, she had been the only possibility remaining, and, after a marathon interrogation, had confessed to having mentioned Goldstein’s imminent arrival to a fellow officer in the canteen.
That fellow officer had been Assistant Detective Helmut Grabowski. The same assistant detective whom the porter at the Scherl building recognised as the man who had delivered the mysterious envelopes to Stefan Fink.
At first Grabowski stubbornly maintained that he had acted under his own steam, but when Gennat confronted him, bit by bit, with the statements Lanke junior had already made, he cracked. Gregor Lanke, whom Rath had softened up the week before, appeared to be a relatively small cog in the machine.
Then there were the names Charly had been able to throw in. Over the past few days she had gazed at hundreds of police portraits. Gennat hadn’t summoned her to Alexanderplatz but to a safe house. His co-conspirator was his trusted secretary Trudchen Steiner, with whom Charly continued to live for security reasons, and with whom she would stay until Scheer and Tornow were safely behind bars.
The picture they put together was shocking. Die Weisse Hand. The White Hand. A secret band of frustrated police officers, who were tired of the judicial system releasing people onto the streets after they had bust a gut to put them behind bars. Police officers who had resolved to go over and above the call of duty, and play judge, jury and executioner. Their aim: to eliminate the most notorious criminals in Berlin’s underworld.
Police officers who were moments away from being arrested.
They arrived upstairs. Everything in the attic flat was dark. They hadn’t switched on the light in the stairwell. Only a little twilight filtered through from outside. It took a lot of effort but Rath could just about read the nameplate on the door. S TORNOW. Only a week ago, he had been here thinking he had made a new friend. How quickly things changed.