‘Why would you want to save me, Lapke?’
‘It isn’t out of the goodness of my heart.’ He looked Leo in the eye. ‘Think of it as a small token for disbanding Berolina and transferring your men to me. I promise I’ll look after them.’
‘Berolina has existed for more than thirty years, and you want me to disband it?’
‘The Ringvereine are history anyway. Wake up, Leo! There’s no place for them in the new Germany.’
‘But there is a place for the Pirates? Are you trying to tell me you’re not a Ringverein?’
‘The Nordpiraten have recognised the mood of the times. They’ll continue to do business long after Berolina has disappeared.’
‘That’s what you dream of each night? I always wanted to know what you jerked yourself off to.’
Lapke turned to Sperling, who sat behind the desk as before. ‘I thought you’d softened him up. Still has a pretty big mouth on him.’
‘We haven’t released him yet,’ Sperling said, examining his fingernails. ‘We can always soften him up a little more.’
Damn it, Leo thought. For once in your life, just keep it shut.
Lapke continued. ‘Mark my words, Leo. Soon you’ll do exactly as I say.’
Leo said nothing. They wouldn’t get to Vera. If she was smart, she’d have skipped town already – as he’d told her to if there was ever trouble with the Pirates or the cops. Were they planning on beating him to death? Then someone else would take his place. Berolina wouldn’t let itself be crushed like that. They had managed just fine after Red Hugo’s death.
Lapke gave Sperling a wave and reached for the telephone. ‘Round up the prisoners. Tell SA officer Kaczmarek we need him after all.’
So that was their secret weapon, Leo thought. Thugs like Katsche had never bothered him in the past. The two SA men who had led him upstairs yanked him from the chair and dragged him back down into the basement. Leo told himself things might get bloody, but he was just as sure they wouldn’t kill him.
‘Phew! It stinks down here,’ he heard Lapke say, a few steps behind. ‘Did you shit yourself already, Leo?’
‘Maybe if you shut your mouth, the smell wouldn’t be so bad.’ He felt a truncheon in his side, but he didn’t care anymore.
Down in the basement Horst Kaczmarek waited with a morbid grin. Behind him the prisoners stood in rank and file. They had even fetched the women from their cells. Everyone looked anxiously towards Leo and company. A good dozen SA officers stood alongside, arms folded, gazing out of curious, sceptical eyes.
‘Hello Katsche,’ Leo said. ‘I hear you want to dance. Didn’t realise it was ladies’ choice.’
‘Very funny. Shall I land him one, chief?’
Lapke shook his head and lit a cigarette. ‘No, no, Katsche. It’s time for your party trick. You have your audience, and a volunteer.’
Katsche took off his uniform cap and handed it to one of his comrades. ‘Hold him,’ he said, and the grip of the SA officers on either side grew tighter.
Katsche swept a strand of hair from his forehead and approached, mouth almost at eye level. Then he seized Leo’s head with both hands, so suddenly and unexpectedly that Leo barely knew what was happening. Katsche pressed his fleshy lips on Leo’s right eye, as if leaning in for a kind of warped kiss. Instinctively Leo had closed his eyes, but even so he felt the suction, an unbelievable force that triggered a searing pain in his head, directly behind his eye. Katsche sucked with all his might, and the pain grew. Leo’s eyelid began to flutter. He tried to escape the awful suction, but Katsche held his head for all he was worth, the brownshirts held his arms and legs, and then everything happened impossibly fast. There was a kind of plop, and Leo’s eye slid out of its socket. Katsche clenched his teeth, and a sharp pain shot through Leo’s head, worse than anything he’d experienced before. He screamed, but it was no good.
Katsche detached himself and spat. Leo heard a few men jeer and applaud. Most were speechless.
He screamed and turned into the arms of his captors, but they held him fast. Warm blood ran from his right eye socket down his cheek; the left eye, still intact, was weeping, and through the blur of tears and pain Leo caught sight of something on the concrete floor. A little ball streaked with blood. He needed a moment to understand what it was that lay there like a bloody marble. The optic nerve hung from its blood-smeared eyeball like an umbilical cord. Only after this realisation, which shot through him like dark lightning, did the pain die enough for him to faint.
38
Rath never thought he would see the man again, but here he was. A gaunt figure slumped on the chair opposite with vomit in his goatee beard, and the cheekbone under his left eye swollen. But it was him, no doubt about it.
‘Dr Völcker, Peter, Neukölln,’ the guard announced, as he led the Communist doctor in from the cells.
Völcker hört die Signale. So comrades, come rally. For some reason Rath remembered this sentence from years before. Dr Peter Völcker, Communist and member of Neukölln district council, was an arrogant trouble-maker who never stopped insisting on ‘rights’, and had thus driven many an officer to the brink of despair.
Nothing remained of that man. The only despair came from Völcker himself. Rath felt ashamed, and was relieved that the Communist doctor, with whom he had quarrelled in a mortuary car during the May riots of 1929, didn’t recognise him.
This was his fourth day working alongside Erwin Zientek and already his new partner was driving him up the wall. With each Communist interrogated Rath felt more alienated. They had to be finished soon. He was starting to feel as if he knew every KPD member in Berlin. Couldn’t Gennat take on a homicide that demanded the recall of his men? Rath was almost willing to commit it himself!
He still stopped by A Division every morning to leave Kirie with Erika Voss, before making his way upstairs. On one occasion Erika mentioned a message from Warrants, and he’d prayed it was something important, a response from the Reichswehr perhaps, or some witness that necessitated his immediate return from 1A, but all they had done was pick up the trail of the fugitive girl. If he understood correctly, a nightshirt had been found in a wastepaper basket belonging to the Jonass Department store. The girl had nothing to do with the Wosniak investigation.
As if that wasn’t enough, his work with the Political Police still hadn’t helped him establish the whereabouts of Long Leo Juretzka.
Right now, however, that was the least of his concerns. His problem was that he felt so utterly ashamed in front of the broken Communist doctor. He felt caught out, almost as if Charly were looking on with disapproval. He still hadn’t told her how he was spending his days. ‘Interrogations,’ he had said, the one time she’d attempted to probe. ‘I’ll be glad to get back to Gennat at last.’
Like the many others who had sat before him on this chair, Dr Völcker’s only crime was to be a member of the KPD. It was becoming increasingly clear to Rath that there was no Communist conspiracy. If, as Charly claimed, even Rudolf Diels, the head of the Political Police, thought the Dutchman had acted alone, then why all the games? For the sake of Göring, who needed additional suspects for the trial, or simply to further intimidate the Communists? Most of them seemed pretty intimidated already. Peter Völcker, whom Rath remembered as a serious pain in the arse, perched on his chair with all resistance beaten out of him. Even then he wasn’t about to admit to a conspiracy that didn’t exist.
The interrogation – during which Rath held back as usual and handed the floor to Zientek – had just finished when the telephone rang. To Rath’s surprise it was his secretary. ‘Erika? Is something the matter with Kirie?’