‘That would explain a lot.’
‘Someone stabbed him. Several times.’
‘Evidently not his lucky day.’
I slid the blade into one of the more obvious wounds in the dead man’s pale torso. ‘Before the war you used to get a proper lab report with photographs and descriptions so that you didn’t have to do this kind of thing.’
‘Before the war you used to get beer that tasted like beer.’ Remembering who and more particularly what I was, he added quickly, ‘Not that there’s anything wrong with the beer now, of course.’
I didn’t say anything. I was glad he’d spoken out of turn. It meant I could probably avoid filling out the morgue’s paperwork – Commissioner Lüdtke had told me to drop the case, after all – as a quid pro quo for ignoring the attendant’s ‘unpatriotic’ remark about German beer. Besides I was paying nearly all of my attention to the knife in the stab wound. I couldn’t say for sure that it was the murder weapon, but it could have been. It was long enough and sharp enough, with just one edge and a blunter upper side that matched the wound almost perfectly.
I pulled the blade out and looked for something to wipe it with. Being a fussy type, I’m particular about the switchblades I keep in my coat pocket. And I figured I’d already encountered enough germs and bacteria just walking through the hospital without squirrelling away a private cache of my own.
‘Got anything to wipe this with?’
‘Here,’ he said, and taking it from me he wiped it with the corner of his lab coat.
‘Thanks,’ I said.
I could see that he was anxious to get rid of me and when I suggested that there was probably no need to bother with the paperwork, he agreed with alacrity.
‘I don’t think he’ll tell, do you?’ said the attendant. ‘Besides, I don’t have a pen that works.’
I went outside. It was a nice day so I decided to walk back to the Alex and eat lunch at a counter I knew on Karl Strasse, but that one was closed because of a lack of sausage. So was the one on Oranienburger Strasse. Finally I got a sandwich and a paper at a place near the Stock Exchange, only there was even less of interest in the sandwich than there was in the paper, and probably in the Stock Exchange, too. But it’s foolish to give up eating bread because you can’t get the sausage to put in it. At least I was free to still think of the bread as a sandwich.
Then again, I’m a typical Berliner, so maybe I’m just hard to please.
When I got back to the Alex I had the files on all of the summer’s S-Bahn murders sent up to my office. I suppose I wanted to make doubly sure that Paul Ogorzow was the real killer and not someone who’d been made to measure for it. It wouldn’t have been the first time that a Kripo run by the Nazis had done something like that. The only surprise was that they hadn’t already tried to pin the murders of Wallenstein, Baldur, Siegfried and Cock Robin on some hapless Jew.
It turned out that I wasn’t the first to review the Ogorzow files. The Record Memo showed that the Abwehr – military intelligence – had also looked at the files, and recently. I wondered why. At least I did until I remembered all the foreign workers who had been interviewed during the course of the investigation. But Paul Ogorzow had been a German railway-worker; rape and a violent hatred of women had been his motive; he hadn’t stabbed any of his victims, he had battered them to death. There was no telling if Fräulein Tauber’s attacker would have battered her or stabbed her after he’d finished raping her, but from the blow he’d given her face there could be no doubting his dislike of women. Of course, lust murders were hardly uncommon in Berlin. Before Paul Ogorzow, there had been other violent, sometimes cannibalistic killers; and doubtless there would be others after him.
Much to my surprise I was impressed at the thoroughness and scale of Commissioner Lüdtke’s investigation. Thousands of interviews had been conducted and almost one hundred suspects brought in for interrogation; at one stage male police officers had even dressed up as women and travelled the S-Bahn at night in the hope of luring the murderer into an attack. A reward of ten thousand Reichsmarks had been posted and, finally, one of Paul Ogorzow’s workmates – another railway employee – had fingered him as the murderer instead of one of the many foreign workers. But among those foreign workers who had been interviewed was Geert Vranken. I shouldn’t have been surprised to discover his name on the list of those who had been interviewed; and yet I was. I read the transcript with interest.
A science graduate from the University in The Hague, Vranken had been quickly eliminated from Lüdtke’s inquiry when his alibi checked out; but, hardly wanting to rely on this alone – after all, his alibi relied on other foreign workers – he had been at pains to adduce evidence of his good character, and to this end he had offered the name of a German whom he’d met before the war, in The Hague. Lüdtke’s team of detectives, several of whom I knew, had hardly needed to take up this reference because, a week or so after Vranken’s interview, Paul Ogorzow had been arrested. The certainty – on my part – that for once the right man had been sent to the guillotine at Plotzensee, in July 1941, gradually gave way to a feeling of pity for Geert Vranken and, more particularly, the wife and baby he had left behind in the Netherlands. How many other families, I wondered, would be similarly destroyed before the war was over?
Of course, this was hardly normal for me. I’d seen plenty of murder victims in my time at the Alex, many of them in even more tragic circumstances than these. After Minsk I suppose my conscience was easily pricked. Whatever the reasons, I determined to find out if, as Commissioner Lüdtke had said it would, the State Labour Service had yet informed Vranken’s family that he had met with a fatal accident. Thus it was that I spent a fruitless hour on the telephone being rerouted from one bureaucrat to another before I finally gave up and wrote a letter myself, this to an address in The Hague that was in Vranken’s work book and which, prior to its issue by the State Labour Service, was where previously he had been employed. In my letter I made no mention of the fact that Geert Vranken had been murdered, only that he had been hit by a train and killed. His being stabbed six times was more than any family needed to be told.
CHAPTER 5
I had an office in the Police Praesidium, on the third floor – a small room on the corner underneath the tower and overlooking the U-Bahn station on Alexanderplatz. The view out of the window on a late summer evening was the best thing about it. Life didn’t look quite so dismal at that kind of altitude. I couldn’t smell the people or see their pale, undernourished and sometimes just plain hopeless faces. All the streets came together in one big square just the same as they had done before the war, with trams clanging and taxis honking their horns and the city growling in the distance the way it always did. Sitting on the windowsill with my face in the sun, it was easy to pretend there was no war, no front, no Hitler and that none of it had anything to do with me. Outside there wasn’t a swastika in sight, just the many varieties of specimen in my own favourite game of girl spotting. It was a sport I was always passionate about and at which I excelled. I liked the way it helped me tune in to the natural world, and because girls in Berlin are visible in a way that other Berlin wildlife is not, I never seemed to grow tired of it. There are so many different girls out there. Mostly I was on the lookout for the rarer varieties: exotic blondes that hadn’t been seen since 1938 and fabulous redheads wearing summer plumage that was very nearly transparent. I’d thought about putting a feeder on my windowsill but I knew it was hopeless. The climb up to the third floor was simply too much for them.