A man sat on the visitor’s chair in the outer office, head bowed and folding his hat. Rath couldn’t hide his surprise. ‘Ede!’ he said. ‘What are you doing in Berlin?’
‘A promise is a promise, Inspector.’
Erika Voss watched with curiosity as Rath guided Eduard Schürmann into his office and shut the door.
‘Nice view you’ve got here, Inspector,’ Ede said, looking out of the window.
‘The court building?’
Ede rummaged in his coat pocket. ‘You shouldn’t have said that stuff about the SA in my shop. I can understand a man being suspicious, but the SA… Inspector, that lot are no joke.’ He fished a crumpled note out of his pocket. ‘You can trust old Ede. No need for threats, or the SA and their auxiliary police.’ He unfolded the note and handed it to Rath. ‘Fifty marks! Here they are.’
Rath hadn’t taken Ede’s promise seriously, putting it down to the man’s chronic fear of the SA. Yet it was precisely this fear that had compelled the notorious pickpocket to visit Berlin Police Headquarters of his own accord. Rath examined the note. The watermark looked genuine.
‘What about interest?’ Rath asked. ‘This was months ago.’
Ede’s eyes opened wide. ‘Inspector, it’s a lot of money as it is.’
‘All right. It was good of you to stop by.’
‘Cologners have to stick together.’
‘Right.’ Rath stowed the money. ‘Just promise no relapses, even if you get an itch.’
‘Course, Inspector, course. You think a man like me acts the whiz of his own accord? These days your jack can be long gone and the fuzz still bring you in. They don’t need evidence anymore.’
Ede Schürmann was outraged. Once upon a time it had been tricky to move against a pickpocket. Experts like Ede would operate as part of a trio. The jostler distracted the victim by shoving or colliding into him, before, quick as a flash, the whiz worked his sleight of hand and passed the spoils to the jack, who carried them away. Even if the victim realised their wallet was missing straight away, nothing could be done. Neither the jostler nor the whiz would be carrying the stolen item, and the police would be forced to release them. These days the need for evidence was lost on the police, and the SA most of all.
Rath felt uneasy thinking about it and, for the second time that day, the suspension monorail flashed through his mind. Grimberg. Wosniak. Roddeck. Jostler, whiz, and jack. Before he could finish the thought, however, there was a knock and Erika Voss poked her head through the crack in the door.
‘Apologies for interrupting, Sir, but we have another visitor. Or rather, an addition.’
She opened the door to reveal Andreas Lange wearing an embarrassed smile. In his hand was a cardboard box identical to the one Gräf had filled that morning. Only, Lange’s was chock full with papers and other junk.
‘Lange!’
Andreas Lange had worked in Homicide before putting himself up for inspector. ‘Sorry, Sir. I thought someone would have told you.’
‘Someone did, after a fashion,’ Rath said. ‘Come in, Lange. My guest was just leaving.’
Ede took the hint. ‘If there’s anything else, I’ll be at the Hotel Alhambra.’
‘What was all that about, Sir?’ Lange asked after Ede had bowed backwards through the door.
‘An old acquaintance, from Cologne.’
So, this was his new partner. A good man. An ambitious man. More ambitious than Gräf. Hopefully not too ambitious. ‘Do you know what a whiz is, Lange?’
‘Should I?’
‘Not in Homicide.’ Rath pointed to Gräf’s old desk. ‘Welcome back to A Division. Word is you came to regret your political sojourn.’
‘Like you, Sir. Am I right?’ Lange tried to sound flippant but his eyes told a different story.
‘Just like me. No politics here. In this office we work unexplained deaths.’ He stretched out a hand. ‘Here’s to a successful partnership!’
Lange cleared his things into Gräf’s old desk while Rath returned to his pencil, and gazed out of the window. The greyness over the court building was slightly brighter. The sky still seemed leaden and immovable, but it wasn’t. It was moving, as it always had, and always would. Everything was in a state of flux. Everything, and suddenly Rath finished the thought he had started that morning.
The jostler, the whiz, the jack. You just had to know which one was which, then it was obvious…
102
The sky was almost cloudless, the weather ideal. Grimberg’s gaze wandered beyond man-made cliffs carved out of limestone to the narrow stacks of the Dornap ring oven. It was time to sound the warning horn. Most workers had already sought cover, but he could make out three stragglers including the shift supervisor.
How gratifying to see battle-hardened men flee, just as they had in the war, and the same man in control of them. Himself, Friedrich Grimberg.
Without him no one would have dared to bury the gold. Roddeck would have transported it behind the Siegfried Line next morning as Captain Engel had instructed. Grimberg despised the lieutenant as a pretty boy utterly unworthy of being his superior officer. In the years he had known him, never once had Achim von Roddeck proved to be what he claimed, neither soldier, officer, nor socialite. What he understood best was how to inhabit a role. He was an actor, and his latest persona of author was no different. It was scarcely credible that his so-called writings had struck gold.
It was a panicked Roddeck who had called him in Elberfeld nine months earlier and harangued him almost every day since, his noble heart in his mouth because a man had risen from the grave. He had received a letter from Benjamin Engel, and there was no doubting it was genuine. Engel, the captain whom the world and his wife thought was dead, hinted that he knew what they had done all those years ago. It had taken a lot of words to calm Roddeck; to make him see the letter as their final chance at the gold.
Grimberg looked again at the quarry. The danger zone was clear. He sounded the horn for a second time, and only then connected the ignition wires to the blasting machine. Misfires could be fatal, and in the course of his long career Friedrich Grimberg could honestly say he had never been responsible for one. Not even during the war.
It had almost physically pained him to read the word misfire in the official investigation notes, even if it was only one possible explanation for Captain Engel’s failure to return from his inspection rounds. British artillery fire, or a stray animal, a rat perhaps or a pigeon, were the others. Wilful destruction didn’t figure anywhere in the report. Even so, as many as half the unit suspected a ruse to get rid of an unpopular captain, including the men present at the gold strike, most of whom would die in action before the year was out.
Lieutenant von Roddeck had been hard on his troops in the remaining eighteen months of war. As Grimberg hammered home to his eternally dithering superior: the fewer men that survive, the more there will be for us. The scattered band of soldiers who, after years in jail, or in the service of some volunteer corps or other, had come together in the former Alberich territory to collect their spoils, had amounted to just five men. Of these five, only three remained. Roddeck, Wosniak and Grimberg himself.
He and Heinrich had lost touch following the abortive recovery mission, and God knows his friend had suffered in the intervening years. Having failed to find his fortune in Berlin, Heinrich had been forced to eke out his existence as a beggar and almost burned to death in a dilapidated old shack before deciding to return home.
At first Grimberg didn’t recognise the tramp on the suspension monorail, from whose face the other passengers turned away. When this poor man in the soldier’s coat, a painful reminder of Germany’s collective misfortune, staggered towards him, he assumed it was for money, but moments later they reunited under the wary gaze of their fellow passengers.