Children of Wrath (14 page)

Around and around the displays of cutlery rotated in Henckel’s window.

Vicki loved cooking, all right, but he needed to get her something … wonderful. Not just because he was feeling guilty even thinking about
Der Kinderfresser
—which he knew would upset her. But my God. Ten years.

It was something seriously to celebrate.

At the corner of Dirksen Strasse he waited patiently with the crowds for the policeman’s signal. The investigation was time-consuming, of course, as most good detective work was. And meanwhile
Der Kinderfresser
remained at large. But Freksa for all his resources hadn’t had any success. A score of men following hundreds of leads turned up nothing all winter. A huge humiliation for the whole Berlin police force.
COPS BAFFLED!
the headlines screamed.
WHAT’S HAPPENED TO OUR KRIPO?
And the whole time bones kept washing up on the banks of the Spree as far away as Spandau.

Halfway across Dirksen Willi got caught on the traffic island and had to wait while a streetcar rattled past, car after bright yellow car with advertisements:
KAFFEE HAAG … JOSETTI CIGARETTEN … NIVEA CRÈME FOR A SOFTER YOU
—

Freksa claimed the new bones were not new but all from the same batch. That one of the burlap bags had torn and sent individual pieces downstream. A clavicle here. A tibia there. No additional children had been victimized, he insisted, according to the newspapers. Yet each new bone triggered hysterical headlines, restoking public terror. And when February became March and no break came, even the press began turning on him—
TIME FOR FRESH BLOOD IN THE KINDERFRESSER CASE?

Crossing the last stretch of street, Willi almost felt sorry for the guy. Golden Boy was under a real rain cloud. A few days ago the same clubfooted dwarf he’d seen once in Freksa’s office was in there again, berating him hysterically behind the closed door.

“You must do something, or I warn you, Freksa, the consequences will be dire. We backed you all the way on this, and now you’re making us look weak, just when the time is ripe for us to grow.”

What had Freksa gotten himself into?

Reaching police headquarters, Willi’s eyes scanned the corner news kiosk, expecting the usual headlines about the slump. But this time his heart nearly leapt into his throat.
KINDERFRESSER CAPTURED!!

He couldn’t believe it.

Upstairs he found out nothing more than what the papers said: that Freksa allegedly had the monster in custody. That a news conference had been called to disclose the details—but that only select press would attend. For reasons of obvious security, the location would be kept a secret except to those invited. So secret even Willi couldn’t find out. And he definitely wasn’t invited. Everyone he asked pretended not to know. He had to call Fritz, who had to call his contacts to get the address.

It turned out to be an old factory complex surrounded by a tall iron fence. In Lichtenberg, just a few blocks north of where the three bags of bones had been found. Freksa was out front to meet the press, some two dozen including photographers, plus Willi, whom he clearly was not thrilled to see. The whole unit was on hand: Mueller, Meyer, Hiller, Stoss. Even Kommissar Horthstaler stood behind Freksa, glaring coldly at Willi. But Willi was too dismayed to care. How had all this happened so quickly?

Against a cyclone of phosphorescent flashes Freksa announced he had the so-called
Kinderfresser
just inside that gate right in the factory courtyard, and that it was not a man at all. It was a band of men. A band of
Zigeuner
. Gypsies!

Gypsies?

Six renegade Roma men kidnapping boys and using their bones in heinous secret rituals.

Willi was dumbfounded.

At Freksa’s urging they were led inside to the courtyard where awaiting them like a set from Bizet’s
Carmen
was a real Gypsy encampment: three gaily painted house wagons—the same ones evicted not long ago from the rubble field on Alexanderplatz—drawn up now on the cobblestoned yard in a semicircle. In the center, six black-haired men restrained by handcuffs, heads hung low.

Far on the other side, locked behind the fence, their wives, children, and extended family members emitted a long, low, collective wail. This plaintive cry, however, was all but drowned out by men in uniform, perhaps a dozen, all wearing brown caps, brown shirts, brown pants, and black boots, standing just opposite the press. “Race shame! Race shame!” they barked with terrible anger, banging snare drums. “Germany, awaken!” Who they were or what they were doing here when the location was supposedly such a secret, Willi had no idea. Only that they added a chilling menace to the scene. He couldn’t help noticing their bright red armbands bore the same black insignia he’d seen on Freksa’s lapel pin. Had Freksa joined some radical party?

With a shrill whistle the men ceased chanting as Freksa stepped before the reporters. Slowly, dramatically, the hero encircled the villains.

“Denounced by members of their own clan”—Freksa raised his arm and seemed to decapitate them all with a mighty blow—“each of these so-called men has confessed to the murder of the twenty-three boys. Irrefutable evidence—the burlap sacks, the cleavers of death, the means of disposal—have all been found right here in this abandoned factory, the nest where these vermin scurry about in their nefarious existence.

“At my feet”—Freksa held out his hand, and Willi noticed for the first time the open manhole cover—“is a sewer that leads directly to Storm Canal Five. It flows below the park near the S-Bahn station where the bags of bones turned up.”

So he
had
listened to me. Willi shivered, astonished.

Could Freksa possibly have gotten this right?

Eleven

“Not in a million years.”

“You think?”

“With that right hook? Trust me: he’ll pulverize him.”

The elevator was packed with shirtsleeved detectives going home, speculating about whether Germany’s new heavyweight boxing champion, Max Schmeling, had a chance at the world title coming up in New York. But Willi, pressed behind Freksa’s big, square shoulders, was too damned angry to care. Every time he thought about those Gypsies, it was this moron he wanted to see pulverized.

A week after that nightmarish news conference he was still ashamed to admit he’d considered the possibility—if only for minutes—that Freksa’d actually solved the case. That the Gypsies had done it. Then halfway home it had hit like a left jab: Freksa’s theory might have held for the burlap sacks found near the Frankfurter Allee S-Bahn station, south of the Gypsies’ factory. But the construction site Willi’d gone to, where the first sack had washed up, was nearly ten blocks
north,
almost at the
Viehof.

Storm Canal Five flowed south.

That first bag, his bag, had not floated upstream.

Now, the recollection of those tear-stained Gypsy faces, the wailing wives and shrieking children, refused to let go. In all his years on the force he’d never imagined, much less witnessed, such an abuse of power. Clearly Freksa’d been pressured, just as Dr. Riegler had, to bring the case to a rapid conclusion. And again the most expedient means had been employed—a scapegoat.

Only these poor Gypsies weren’t getting paid for taking the rap.

It was horrifying to watch how enthusiastically the press, and subsequently the public, had embraced the Gypsies’ guilt, relieved apparently not only that the monsters had been caught, but that they weren’t German, the headlines screaming things like:
GYPSY TERROR PLAGUE!

Zigeuner,
Gypsies, had a long, painful history in Germany. Romanticized as colorful figures in caravans, playing music, dancing with tambourines, or stigmatized as congenital criminals unwilling to do a day’s work, they were in either case shunned and persecuted. Even today, in 1930, although everyone supposedly enjoyed equal rights under the law, Gypsies were subject to special laws: prohibited from roaming in bands, required to provide proof of employment whenever authorities demanded or face forced labor, compelled always to register with the police, to get photographed and fingerprinted, even children, babies. As if the whole race were guilty at birth. It was shameful, Willi thought.

Freksa no doubt had found the police
Zigeuner
files more than helpful in piecing together his cynical ploy. What a desperate tactic, though, Willi considered as the elevator reached the ground floor. It might placate the public for now, but what would happen if more bones showed up?

He let the others go ahead, then followed out to the lobby.

Maybe they wouldn’t. Maybe that was all the bones there were. Maybe whoever the real killer was, he mused, would be glad someone took the blame and quit while he was ahead.

Maybe. But not likely.

He put on his jacket and exited the building. Outside, the five o’clock sun was just kissing the big glass globe atop the Tietz department store, sending orange rays across Alexanderplatz. Breathing in, he watched Freksa up ahead standing on the corner waiting for the light to change. What might he be planning next? To trump up a whole trial against those six poor men? Find them all guilty … have them executed?

Willi couldn’t let things get that far.

But how to expose the awful fraud? he wondered, heading toward the same corner. The media would eat it up, and he had enough connections to get it out there. But Freksa and Horthstaler were sure to know who’d leaked the story. And he couldn’t afford that. Yet. He needed more ammo. All he had so far were theories. If the real
Kinderfresser
thought he was off the hook, he might get sloppy. Make a mistake. So for the time being the poor Gypsys were just going to have to …

He stopped. Freksa was still standing there, being accosted, it seemed, by the strangest-looking half boy, half man … half girl. Weirdly dressed in a poncho and bush hat, he had a gold ring dangling from one ear and more makeup on than a street whore.

“Please, Herr Detektiv,” he was practically begging. “Even now it hasn’t stopped.”

Freksa looked completely repelled, as if the kid had leprosy. “So help me, if I see you out here again,” he called over his shoulder as the light changed and he stormed across Dirksen Strasse, “I’ll book you for vagrancy!”

The boy just stood there.

Willi’d seen him before, he realized, not on this corner but over by Tietz’s. That kerchief … the feathered cap. Wasn’t he the “girlfriend” of the Red Apache chief?

You couldn’t traverse Alexanderplatz long without getting acquainted with the gangs of Wild Boys, homeless teens who worked the different blocks—steering customers to illicit institutions, running shell games, picking pockets, dancing for their supper—so to speak. Among them, the Red Apaches were probably the most visible. They hung around the base of Berolina, the big copper statue on the Tietz department store side of the square, dressed in outlandish outfits, annoying passersby with antics and girly shrieks. It was all but impossible not to notice the handsome “chief” or his lanky mate, who were always the loudest. But what could the kid want so desperately to talk to Freksa about?

Willi decided to find out. As he approached, though, the kid, uncertain who he was, took one look at him and bolted.

“Hey, wait,” Willi cried. But it was too late. In a fraction of a second the boy was halfway down the block. Willi had to decide what to do. He hadn’t gotten where he had in detective work by ignoring his hunches. So he took off after him.

It was rush hour and the sidewalks were dense with people leaving stores and offices. It was almost impossible not to knock into someone. The kid glanced over his shoulder, and when he saw Willi had followed, he really started to run. Willi had to practically machete his way through. People cursed after him. Someone hit his back with a rolled newspaper. But gradually he was gaining, almost in reach of the wool poncho, when the kid darted straight into traffic and grabbed a passing streetcar, leaping and landing between cars, making a getaway. Willi, panting, prayed this was worth it, then, waiting for the last car, leaped too, grabbing the rear door handle and hanging like a fireman en route to a four-alarmer.

The wind nearly blew off his hat as they made a sharp bend onto Kaiser Wilhelm Strasse, and he came close more than once to getting his head knocked off by a tree branch. But the kid didn’t seem to notice he’d been followed. When the tram rattled across the river, slowing by the main entrance to the cathedral, Willi jumped off and followed the boy into the Pleasure Garden, the manicured heart of the old city, a giant square filled with statues and fountains, surrounded by the most monumental buildings in Berlin.

“Hey, hold on.” He finally caught up with him, landing a firm hand on his shoulder. “I just want to talk. I’m from the same unit as Sergeant Freksa.”

The kid froze, then turned around. His eyes, Willi saw, close enough for the first time, were lined with black mascara and purple shadow. His lips glossy pink. The fingernails, dirty green. Something fragile in the blue gaze, though, made Willi see through the costume—and recognize a frightened child, desperate enough to repeatedly approach a threatening figure from the criminal police. But Willi clearly hadn’t won his trust, even after showing him his badge. The kid just stood there staring, his gold earring dangling, chest rising and falling.

“I didn’t do anything,” he finally mumbled.

“I didn’t say you did. I just want to know what you wanted to talk to Sergeant Freksa about. It seemed important.”

The kid’s pink lips tightened.

“Listen,” Willi tried, getting frustrated. “I can only imagine how tough it must be living on the street at your age and everything.” He was in fact nearly physically revolted by the clownish spectacle this boy made of himself, indulging in thoughts of taking him home, scrubbing him up, and getting him something decent to wear. He wouldn’t be a bad-looking kid. “But I can tell you this in all sincerity, son, I understand what it feels like to be an outsider. Really understand. To be mocked and feared and—”