‘Who’s that?’ Weinert asked, thinking he recognised the civilian.
‘A colleague,’ Gereon whispered. ‘Give Schorsch a fiver and let’s be on our way.’
The blinds on the glass door of the senior duty editor’s office were down, as usual, but a light burned inside. Hiding away like this, chances were Hefner’s mood wasn’t great. Weinert knocked on the glass and a droning sound came from within. With a little imagination, it might have been an enter.
Harald Hefner’s long, thin body was folded behind a desk that appeared much too small, partly on account of its owner, partly on account of the reams of papers spilling everywhere. The universe must have looked something like this before the Earth was created but, with a kind of somnambulistic self-confidence, Hefner knew exactly where to find whatever he needed, forging a new, printed world from the chaos each day.
‘Where have you been, Weinert? I’ve been looking for you. You have the honour of putting together Hitler’s birthday edition, but you’ll need to get a move on or the man will be forty-five before we get anything in print.’
‘The amount we’ve published you’d have to be illiterate not to know even he gets older each year.’ Hefner screwed up his face. ‘All right,’ Weinert conceded. ‘I’d be glad to, but first I want to tell you why I was late. I was meeting an informant. The Alberich murders…’
‘That’s old hat.’
‘What if I told you Benjamin Engel isn’t responsible.’
Harald Hefner reached for his cigar box, fished one out and offered one. ‘Ten minutes,’ he said, cutting off the tip.
Weinert was done in seven when the duty editor thundered: ‘Are you telling me everything we… everything you wrote last week, was rot?’
‘It came from police headquarters’s official statement. The commissioner spoke at the press conference himself.’
‘The police commissioner, Herr Weinert, is an upstanding National Socialist. Our paper is not about to take a stance against the national-socialist revolution.’
‘It doesn’t have to. Just against sloppy police work.’
Hefner drew on his cigar and considered, the old-school journalist in him battling against the editor obliged to conform with Goebbels’s wishes.
‘Perhaps…’ he muttered at length, ‘…you can bring Isidor Weiss into it as the man responsible for this sloppy police work.’ A jolt passed through Hefner’s body and he pounded his fist on the table. ‘But, not right now. Right now, you need to take care of this!’
He pushed across a press release with the letterhead of the NSDAP Reich Chief Press Officer. Weinert skimmed the text, written by Otto Dietrich himself: a gushing tribute to the birthday boy who, tomorrow, would celebrate the culmination of his forty-fourth year, and in whose honour every German paper was publishing a slew of articles. Last year Hitler’s birthday hadn’t even made the Angriff, although back then the Nazi paper might still have been banned. Now, in emotive language, Dietrich outlined everything that had happened since. The Führer’s Kampfjahr, or year of struggle had been, without question, an eventful twelve months.
‘One more thing…’ Weinert turned around at the door. ‘I want to read your Alberich article before anyone else. You understand? Not a word about it in the meantime.’
‘Of course.’
‘You make inquiries at your own risk. If you should tread on the wrong people’s toes I know nothing. Clear?’
Weinert nodded and left the office. It was better than nothing. At least for a few days he could feel like a real journalist again.
100
Grey clouds hung oppressively over the city. Rath sat in his office, gazing across Reinhold Gräf’s abandoned desk and fiddling with a pencil. The file on his desk ought to have interested him, but didn’t. Another unexplained death, probably a suicide. Three years ago, when share prices hit rock bottom, suicides had boomed. People had ruined themselves through speculation, these days political ruin was to blame.
Here, at last, was a case that made sense and might actually lead to a result, unlike the ridiculous task of finding a link between Ohligs Cabinetmakers and the Rheinisches Möbelhaus. The Alberich file was as good as closed and, according to Gräf, the only thing left was the hunt for Wosniak. Still, Rath couldn’t focus.
He could have spoken up at morning briefing, voiced some doubt, shaken Gräf and Steinke out of their self-satisfaction, but hadn’t and now it was too late, the case was gone. He would have to speak with Gennat to get it reopened, but what could he say without dragging Dr Schwartz or himself into it? For Buddha, it was enough to know the killer was out of action, whoever was responsible for his death.
It was five or six days since he’d met Weinert, but Der Tag still hadn’t published anything on the Alberich case, let alone the article he’d been expecting. Nothing was happening, his hands were tied, and what could he do with facts that couldn’t be corroborated? Whatever he had on Roddeck was either inadmissible in court or easily challenged by a lawyer. It was as if the case were jinxed, and it had started to weigh on his soul. Like the sky above: impassive, grey, and immovable.
More and more he understood Charly’s indignation, and was beginning to dread his work at the Castle. For someone who hated and avoided everything political, the place had grown unbearable.
Ernst Gennat seemed to feel likewise, refusing to bow and scrape to the commissioner like so many others. The leader and founder of A Division was a living legend and it would be easier to send Grzesinski or Bernhard Weiss packing than Buddha. While the world erupted around him he ensured that things carried on as before. Even so, the atmosphere in Homicide had changed. Suspicion and mistrust were everywhere, and the fate of Wilhelm Böhm had shown where denunciation could lead.
Rath looked out of the window. Nothing was happening. Things couldn’t go on like this, he had to do something. He opened the door to the outer office. ‘Erika! Take a trip to Registry and see what you can find out about…’ He looked in the file, still not having internalised the name of the potential suicide. ‘…Herr Ruland, Ferdinand, who last resided in Derfflingerstrasse, Tiergarten.’
He waited until she had left the office before reaching for the telephone, and two minutes later had arranged a lunchtime meeting. He had just hung up and was fiddling with his pencil again when there was a knock at the door. It was always the same, the moment Erika Voss left the office. Before he could shout Enter! the door opened.
Reinhold Gräf cast Erika Voss’s abandoned desk a brief, almost startled glance, and crossed the outer office, a cardboard box under his arm. ‘Hello Gereon. Hope I’m not interrupting?’
‘Moving back in?’
Gräf began clearing his desk. ‘On the contrary. I’m moving out for good. You’re getting a new colleague.’
‘No one said anything to me.’
‘Gennat didn’t want to shout it from the rooftops. Lange is returning from 1A. Steinke and I are leaving A Division in exchange.’
‘You’re joining the Politicals? Permanently?’
‘Apparently Diels requested me himself. The Political Police need more officers, he said, and they could use a man like me. Levetzow said a promotion’s in the offing if I agree.’
‘All these years you’ve refused to put yourself up for inspector and now…?’