Children of Wrath (13 page)

“Tell me, this time … what’s the cover-up?”

Heilbutt’s lips clenched.

Another loud, shrieking whistle of steam, and the very deck began to rumble. The anchor, Willi realized, was being drawn in.

He grabbed Heilbutt’s lapels. “Tell me!”

The older man shook his head. “They swore they’d break my legs.”

“They’ll never find out.”

“These are powerful men.”

Willi stared at him, making it clear he had no choice but to answer.

Heilbutt inhaled. “There was never any
Listeria
found at Slaughterhouse Seven. No
Listeria
found anywhere at the
Viehof
. The reports were total forgeries.”

“What?” Willi pictured Dr. Riegler’s cheek twitching like mad little bacteria under a microscope. “But why?”

“There hadn’t been a new case in weeks. The industry and trades unions were frothing for us to lift the ban. Word finally came from above we had to do it. We couldn’t just tell the public, ‘Okay, back to normal. We don’t know what happened—we never found a trace of the bacteria we’ve been hunting across Berlin for the past six weeks, but now it’s fine to eat sausage.’ It doesn’t work that way. Somebody’s got to take blame. They paid Kleist-Rosenthaler a hell of a lot to be the ones. Even the workers got a nice shake. All Henrietta and I got were midnight calls from an anonymous ‘friend’ who suggested we might be happier if we left the country awhile.”

“Who was this friend?”

“Who? What difference?
They
. Thugs. Union thugs. Management thugs. Everyone wanted it hushed up.”

Whoever
they
were obviously also made sure the phony lab reports disappeared.

Willi could hear banging against the hull. The mooring lines were being unbound. A rising tide of excitement swept the deck.

Something struck him: as outrageous as what Heilbutt had just confessed, it still didn’t explain why Riegler’s cheek had been twitching from the very first time he’d met her.

Another earsplitting blast of steam.

Bells clanging. Corks popping.

The whole deck gave a mighty shudder.

The motors were on.

“Separate from
Listeria,
though … having nothing to do with it,” he guessed, knowing he had about ninety seconds to turn and leave if he didn’t want to sail to New York, “there was something else you found in sausages, wasn’t there, Heilbutt? Just like the dog meat.”

Heilbutt’s face went as gray as the smoke curling from the great stacks.

Suddenly Willi wasn’t sure he really wanted to hear this.

Heilbutt seemed unable to spit it out. Tears rose in his eyes. “It wasn’t even in the same sausages making people sick.” He shrugged at the irony. “We found it incidentally. Riegler and I were the only two who knew. But we found it, all right.” He nodded, squinting, wincing, seeming to see it again.

Willi stepped backward, stumbling slightly, thinking he understood.

“Take this.” Heilbutt thrust a card at him. “How to reach me in New York.”

Willi’s limbs wouldn’t cooperate. “How”—he forced out the words—“did you know?”

“Under a microscope,” Heilbutt whispered tensely, shooing him away, “there’s no mistaking it. Human fat, Kraus. And bits of human flesh. Now go, for Christ’s sake!”

Book Two

THE SWEETER THE MEAT

Ten

BERLIN
APRIL 1930

The bell clanged. The streetcar doors flung open. Willi stepped into the sunshine. It had been a long, hard winter. Like everyone else in Berlin he was grateful it was over. But as he wandered back to work after lunch, despite a warm breeze blowing across Alexanderplatz, he couldn’t shake the chill from his bones.

Passing the rubble field that used to be the Grand Hotel, he recalled his amazement the other morning at the sight of a real
Zigeuner
encampment that had appeared there overnight, a dozen Gypsies with house wagons and horses, cooking breakfast over open fires. By lunch they’d rather brutally been expelled by police, and now a colorful billboard replaced them, he saw—depicting two gleaming structures soon to be the cornerstones of the New Alex. When complete in 1932, the Alexander and Berolina houses would have second-story glass galleries overhanging a ground level of shops and restaurants, their own entrances to the U-Bahn station, floors full of sunlit offices. If only things materialized as portrayed in artists’ renditions, he thought, admiring the modernist designs. The future’d be so rosy. But how little seemed to turn out as advertised.

This bright new decade, for instance. So far it stank.

The Big Slump, as they were now calling it, was dragging down the whole world, nowhere faster than in Germany. In Berlin companies were failing left and right, production shifting into low gear. Every week thousands were getting thrown out of work. Willi could see a long line even now—not just laborers and factory workers but salesmen, accountants, business owners, executives, all queuing across the street for unemployment insurance, which was about to get cut off by the new government, the Grand Coalition of center and liberal parties having collapsed a few days ago—another victim of the Slump. The new chancellor, Brünning, a hard-line conservative, was the first head of government not from a majority party but installed directly by the president of Germany, a decidedly antidemocratic development according to Fritz, from whom Willi’d just gotten an earful.

“I interviewed Brüning the other day at his new office in the chancellory.” Fritz shrugged as he bit into a forkful of shrimp cocktail at the Excelsior. “An absolute authoritarian. Told me he planned to ram through his austerity program with or without the Reichstag.”

“I thought we had a constitution.”

“Yes, but under dire conditions Article Forty-eight allows the president to take ‘emergency measures’
without
parliament.”

“Hindenburg’d back him?”

“They’re in it together, kid. Plum reactionaries. At best they want a rewritten constitution limiting parliamentary rights. At worst, an end to democracy. What they’d seriously like is my third cousin back in his goddamn palace.”

Willi’d stared at Fritz as if he were telling a fairy tale. It seemed impossible history could take such a backward leap. The kaiser again?

But a year ago, who’d have imagined the Big Slump?

And when he was a kid, who’d have imagined anything that lay ahead?

If you’d told them in July 1914 that they were on the precipice of the greatest conflict in human history, it would have seemed as ridiculous as the discovery of leprechauns. And defeat? Revolution? A liberal republic?

An organ-grinder’s melody drew Willi’s attention back to the sidewalk: “Yes! We Have No Bananas.” A crowd applauded the monkey on a leash dancing in a grass skirt. Willi could barely make his way through all the hawkers out here, one after the next.

There’d always been vendors on the Alex, selling inexpensive neckties, underwear, bras, offering shoeshines or your weight from a scale. On weekends there were jugglers, mimes. Men on stilts. But since the crash the salesmen had trebled and their offerings degenerated. Now every step you took another hand was shaking a cup of pencils at you, or rubber bands, or shoelaces. The saucy sarcasm that once prevailed—
Come on, fella, face reality. See how much you weigh!
—had completely given way to despair:
Just a penny a pencil, sir. What’s that to you? Surely you could use a—

Willi held his head low.

Every time he passed beneath the fluttering awning of Aschinger’s, one of the city’s most popular eateries, a sickening feeling crept through his gut. For all he knew, hanging in that window, in those long, luscious-looking salamis …

But how could he do any more than he already was?

Naturally, as soon as he’d gotten back from Bremerhaven he’d gone straight to the Kommissar.

“Human flesh, in sausages?” Horthstaler seemed too preoccupied with a long list of figures on his desk to look up. “Quite an assertion. You have evidence, Kraus?”

The problem was, Willi didn’t.

The lab reports, Heilbutt had shouted to him in those last seconds before the ship sailed, had disappeared along with the rest of the
Listeria
files. Willi tried to explain this, but his superior grew unwilling to devote even a pretense of interest.

Two years ago Willi had been placed under the Kommissar’s command without the least input on Horthstaler’s part, and the Kommissar had never taken pains to hide his antipathy. Generally this took the form of strict indifference, as in this interview when he never for a second stopped scribbling, erasing, or licking at his pencil. At other times it was outright hostility, such as when he joined in on the humiliating jokes at the weekly lunch meetings. Still, he could hardly help acknowledging Willi’s skill or his series of victories.

“Well, at least you’re keeping your big nose where it belongs, for once. Oh … for Christ’s sake, do whatever you think is necessary, Kraus. Just keep me posted.”

On one hand Willi’d learned to appreciate Horthstaler’s disdain. Being a pariah held certain advantages. Horthstaler never wanted to waste time on him or involve the rest of the unit in Willi’s cases, as he did with the others. So Willi was able to operate in the margins, without anyone hanging over his shoulder. He worked well that way. He’d had to more than once behind enemy lines. On the other hand, going solo made things that much more difficult. In this case, the legwork alone was overwhelming. Plus, it always helped to have backup.

“By the way, regarding an assistant…?”

“Still working on it, Kraus. Still working. I’ve had half a dozen men in for interviews. Unfortunately once they find out you’re a Jew…”

“Perhaps the Kommissar needn’t mention it?”

Now Horthstaler’d looked up. Human meat in sausages didn’t get to him, but this had.

He tossed down his pencil and stared at Willi with a look of real disappointment. “You can’t be serious. What an awful thing to do to someone, Kraus.”

*   *   *

A door down from Aschinger’s, in the window of the World Wide Fur Salon, a saleswoman was lovingly draping a fox stole around a mannequin’s shoulders. Willi’s tenth anniversary was coming up, he remembered. What to get Vicki? The beady eyes of the fox seemed to stare back at him as he looked in the window, trying to imagine various furs on her. Black mink? Russian sable?

He knew very well he should have reported Heilbutt’s confession to the Ministry of Public Health. But he hadn’t. If the government became involved, the meat industry would get wind of it, and he didn’t want any midnight calls from any “friends” advising him to leave Germany, thank you. It’d be far more expedient, he’d decided, to handle this on his own.

Lynx? Chinchilla? Nothing seemed right for Vicki.

He trusted his own judgment, generally.

Even after all these weeks he wasn’t sorry he’d abstained from recommending homicide charges in the
Listeria
case. Dr. Riegler may have succumbed to a guilty conscience, but his didn’t trouble him. Theoretically Strohmeyer Wurst might have been charged for its failure to test purchased products, but they had broken no laws—only their own security policy. Anyway, the company, as he had foreseen, had folded; the Wurst King and his family had fled to Paraguay.

Giving up on furs, he took advantage of World Wide’s window to straighten out his tie. During the war it had been hammered home that one had to pick one’s battles wisely or risk being spread too thin. He tilted his hat slightly and continued walking. Fighting the meat industry, no matter which way he’d cut it, hadn’t seemed worth it. Yes, they’d pressured the ministry to fabricate a story to deceive the public that sausages were safe. But by the time they had, the sausages
were
safe. So what the hell?

Up ahead he saw the Zwilling J. A. Henckel sign.
WORLD’S FINEST KNIVES
.

On the other hand, that fiend peddling human flesh needed to be stopped.

More than ever Willi was convinced it had to be the same person who’d made the bone art. In other words,
Der Kinderfresser
.

The two cases were one.

Absently he stared at the glistening displays slowly rotating in Henckel’s window, going over for the thousandth time how everything pointed to the
Viehof
. The boiled bones. The storm canal. Heilbutt’s claims about the sausages. Unfortunately, with so many companies and so many thousands of employees, it required painstaking effort. The logical place to start, he’d figured, was not at the
Viehof,
but where the dog meat had shown up. And where he was sure the
Listeria
had originated from.

The peddlers’ market.

It hadn’t taken long for the main one off Landsberger Allee to reopen after the raid last November. He could hardly forget the grimy knife he’d faced in there. Since he had no intention of repeating that folly, after cautious reconnaissance he’d utilized an old warehouse along the market perimeter with a back staircase nobody seemed to know about, fixed himself a camouflaged perch on the roof, then gone out and gotten top-of-the-line binoculars. Now he could see people’s tonsils down there.

Once in a while, such as today, he showed his face at the office so they wouldn’t forget him. But basically for two months now he’d been crouching up there. The hardest part was the cold and the snow. And the rain. Bit by bit, though, he’d pieced together a picture of how the place worked. Who the operators were. How the products were delivered. By tracing the license-plate numbers on the trucks, he realized that even after the
Listeria
nightmare, all the big sausage producers continued purchasing cheap fillers from these vendors. There were dozens of stalls on the most crowded day, hundreds of customers, and no way of telling which slime-filled barrel might contain bits of children. But the man who seemed to pull the weight, Willi saw, was the same one who’d pulled the knife on him. A massive, bald ox with arms the size of beef shanks. Drove a small, enclosed truck with no plates at all. Obviously Willi was going to have to trail him. But he’d like to get to know half a dozen other creeps as well.