‘Did I scare her off?’ Fritze asked.
‘It’s fine. She was starting to get on my nerves. Wouldn’t like to think of how many cupboards and drawers she stuck her nose inside while she was making the tea.’
‘Then you’d be glad of a little time on your own, Aunt Charly?’
She had grown accustomed to being Aunt Charly. As if he really were the poor orphan child of her – completely fictional – sister from Zehdenick.
‘Well, I had only just sat down when the doorbell rang.’
‘It’s just… I wouldn’t mind heading out for a bit by myself.’
‘Of course.’
She realised they’d been together for more or less the entire week, at home, visiting local authorities, even walking Kirie. No wonder the boy needed a little space.
She heard the door click shut, then the clatter of footsteps and felt almost as if it were her own child heading out to play.
With Fritze gone, her eye fell on the brown envelope. Post from Halle. The Criminal Record Office. It was a good thing they hadn’t opened it in G. There’d be trouble if it became known that she’d been assisting with a Homicide case in Gereon’s office.
Dear Fräulein Ritter, she read, following our telephone conversation of the twenty-first of this month, I hereby enclose all relevant documents pertaining to one Krumbiegel, Gerhard.
Petzold had taken his time, but proved more thorough than she had anticipated following their brief conversation, which, after a series of abortive attempts, had finally come about on the Day of Potsdam. The man from Halle had sent on everything, not just the police files. Even a photo!
The aforementioned Krumbiegel was involved in a barroom brawl in ’16, whereupon he was fingerprinted and photographed, making it possible, on this occasion, to enclose his negative.
The image was attached by paperclip. A standard police photo, taken from three sides, dull gaze, bitter expression. No doubt the poor bastard would have preferred jail to another stint on the Front.
Charly could hardly believe it. She recognised this man gazing into the camera as though he were drunk, which he probably was, having been picked up following a brawl while on army leave. He wasn’t yet disfigured or scarred, but his features left her in no doubt.
It couldn’t be…
… yet no matter how she spun it, the explanation was always the same. It shed new light on the Alberich case, not to mention the man they had cast into the Spree.
86
Rath hadn’t parked outside the furniture store, but a little out of the way on Friedensplatz. Just after ten, he saw the image of the green Opel reflected in the display window and congratulated himself on a good decision. His colleagues were taking their work seriously. Despite never having met them in person Rath pulled his hat a little lower over his forehead.
You really couldn’t miss the Rheinisches Möbelhaus with its brand new signboards and neon letters. Outside a shop a troop of brown-uniformed SA officers were glueing posters.
The doorbell rang as he entered the store. Staff were consulting with clients in hushed tones. He felt almost as if he were in a library. It didn’t take long for someone to approach. Management was on the first floor.
The assistant led him up a dark, wood-panelled staircase, through dark, wood-panelled corridors and an atmosphere of sedate respectability. Eva Heinen’s office, smaller than anticipated, but likewise dark and wood-panelled, exuded the same quality. Two windows faced onto Brückenstrasse and a huge swastika that served to evoke the new age. He didn’t like it but couldn’t get worked up in the same way as Charly. Her outrage when, with a single stroke of his pen, Hindenburg had outlawed the red-black-and-gold of the Republic! The Jew flag or flag of the November criminals, as it was known, and not just by Nazis. For Rath the German colours had always been black-white-and-red. What he couldn’t understand was Hindenburg’s decision to accord the swastika the same status as the imperial flag.
‘Take a seat, Inspector,’ Eva Heinen said, once the assistant had closed the door. Rath kept his distance from the window, thinking of the green Opel on the other side of the road. ‘You’ve gone to a lot of trouble to reach me.’
‘Let’s hope it’s worth it.’ He took out his cigarette case, having replenished his stocks on Friedensplatz. ‘Do you mind?’
‘Go ahead.’
‘Already I’ve learned how your husband survived the war.’
‘He didn’t.’
‘I’m sorry, I thought…’
‘Benjamin is just as much a victim of war as those to whom we erect monuments and dedicate speeches. No one thinks of the living dead who returned; they get in the way of our hard-won rhetoric of valour and sacrifice.’ Surprised by her own anger, she lowered her voice and continued. ‘Benjamin survived the explosion, yes. But in reality it only prolonged his death. It took ten years for the shrapnel to find its way to his heart.’
‘That’s how he died?’ Rath couldn’t conceal his surprise. ‘Did you realise he was doomed? Is that why you told your children their father had been killed in action?’
‘I thought Benjamin was dead, for years. It was only for the children’s sake that I kept up the vague hope he might still be alive. I tried to carry on the store as he would have wished and, despite some lean years immediately after the war, business was good. Then came the inflation. What can I say? I had just been forced to sell the family home, and was about to put the proceeds back into the store when it happened. Bankruptcy seemed only a question of time.’
Eva Heinen looked out of the window, as if at the past. ‘It was my husband that saved us,’ she continued. ‘I don’t know how he learned of our troubles. It was as if he had been watching over us all that time, like a… guardian angel.’
Schutzengel. Todesengel. For Eva Heinen he was a guardian; for Roddeck an angel of death.
‘Did he make contact with you?’
‘Yes. He donated a large sum of money, which allowed me to refloat the company and buy back the house in Gronau. The family home was the most important thing for the children.’
‘You’re telling me that years after the war, your husband simply waltzed in, placed a large suitcase of money on the table and went on his way?’
‘In all those years, I never saw my husband face-to-face.’ Rath looked at her in disbelief. ‘He didn’t want me to. He didn’t want anyone apart from me to know he was still alive.’
‘I don’t understand. Why weren’t you allowed to see him?’
‘So I could remember him as he was, before war got in the way.’
‘Was he so badly disfigured?’
‘I don’t know, Inspector. Christmas 1916. The photographs with him and the children under the tree are etched forever in my mind.’
She leaned forward and opened a drawer in her desk, placing a mask on the table. A half mask, the right side of a face, to be precise.
‘That’s… your husband,’ Rath said.
‘His prosthetic face. It’s all I have of him. Sometimes I look at it and try to imagine how he looked after the war.’
It was a good piece of work. Propped up by a pair of spectacles the right eye seemed almost real. Rath got the feeling that Benjamin Engel was looking at him with an expression of mild reproach. Eva Heinen replaced the prosthesis and closed the drawer.
He cleared his throat. ‘There’s one thing I still don’t understand. Why, no sooner than you learned that against all expectations your husband had survived the war, did you have him declared dead?’