Children of Wrath (23 page)

Extremists of all stripes were feeding off this economic crisis like sharks, Fritz observed. The Nazis dreamed of tripling their strength in the September election. It didn’t seem implausible to Willi, considering how every day another factory shut, another store went bust. In Berlin, everywhere you looked, the
Arbeitslos,
the unemployed, milled about aimlessly, filling park benches, standing in line for charity. Men whose clothes still bore testament to last year’s prosperity, fine suits and leather shoes, tattered now and covered with dust, faces registering a grim metamorphosis from disbelief to resignation. It was appalling to witness the rate at which the misery was compounding.

From 1914 to 1924 Germany’d endured such terrible years. War. Starvation. Revolution. Hyperinflation. A great boom followed, but now the bottom was falling out again, and people were panicked, desperate for leadership. Willi certainly shared that desire, but what he was seeing here wasn’t politics. This was a new religion. And hardly a joke. A quick glance at Fritz revealed, indeed, the smirk had disappeared.

On the stage below, awash in swastikas, the band conductor led ranks of musicians with a murderous conviction, thrusting his baton as if a dagger into someone’s heart. He couldn’t have been more than sixteen. Hundreds of women marched up the aisles in long black skirts halfway to their ankles, white shirts, black scarves.

Might the Shepherdess be among them? Willi searched for red hair.

Hanging thirty feet in the air, parallel to the podium, the press box offered an unrivaled view. “I told you they put on a real show,” von Hessler said without the least interest in it. He’d made perfectly clear he’d come not to see Hitler, but to pursue his own scientific work, and had a curtain drawn over the box door to create a small, private laboratory, where he was busy now fussing over an ordinary-looking woman seated up there with them—the subject of his experiment. The doctor’s silver eye patch glistened as he covered Frau Klopstock with a barber smock and began hooking her to a bizarre-looking piece of machinery it had taken two workers to haul up. Filled with rows of buttons and switches and sprouting dozens of wires, von Hessler claimed it measured “brain waves.”

“If we could see into the cranium, we might view how a person thinks,” he lectured to no one in particular, focusing on attaching wires from the machine to Frau Klopstock’s skull, as she stoically smiled. “Until experiments on live humans are permitted, I’m afraid, though, this is the next-best thing. It’s called an electroencephalogram—EEG. My colleague Hans Berger invented it last year.” Using gel and cotton pads the doctor went on adhering wire after wire to poor Frau Klopstock’s head until she looked like a deep-sea fish. “It detects electrical activity on the scalp produced by neurons firing within the brain. Berger has so far deduced two kinds—alpha and beta waves, each of which gets recorded in separate lines on this machine here, a double-coil recording galvanometer made by Siemens. Frau Klopstock, I believe, has always cast her ballot for the Catholic Center Party. Am I right, Frau Klopstock?”

“Yes, quite, Herr Doktor.” The woman managed a brave face despite her ungainly tiara.

“Given the current situation, she’s become uncertain who will get her vote this September. In recording her brain waves I am attempting to measure her psychic response to this rally. She could, for instance, deny that she is in any way excited by Herr Hitler, but her brain waves might show differently.”

Indeed, as he turned on the machine with half a dozen switches, zigzag waves began appearing on a rolling piece of paper. They moved each time the band below burst into another military march and new uniformed detachments arrived. But sank into inactivity during the long waits between. Von Hessler repeatedly told Frau Klopstock she was doing “just excellently.”

Unfortunately the featured speaker, this Führer, never seemed to arrive. The lines on the double-coil galvanometer were drooping. Willi was envisioning calling it a day, sneaking off to the comfort of home, when suddenly a spectacular explosion of shouting shook the building from outside. With the force of a tidal wave it burst through the doors, filling the arena and instantly sending fourteen thousand people to their feet screaming,
“Heil! Heil!”
Even Frau Klopstock, who had no particular feelings about Hitler, she’d claimed, had to be warned not to pull out the wiring von Hessler’d so arduously placed. Willi had no such constraints. The energy was so intense he jumped to his feet with everyone else to witness this arrival.

“Heil! Heil! Heil! Heil!”

Surrounded by a small entourage, a uniformed figure strutted up the center aisle holding up a palm. The roar grew deafening. Willi’d never heard anything like it. Even the most exciting football match didn’t produce such a din. People were screaming, crying, pressing forward, thrusting out their arms. They were hailing not a politician, he saw, but a savior.

“My God,” Fritz stammered into Willi’s ear. “Europe hasn’t seen anything like this since the messianic cults of the Middle Ages.”

After what seemed like an hour the screaming finally stilled as the head of the Nazi Party reached the podium, the hall silencing in tense anticipation. Willi could clearly see the man’s face. Besides the rectangular “toothbrush” mustache popular among the lower-middle classes, little about it was distinctive. He could have been a grocer or a clerk at the post office. Except for the eyes. Even from thirty feet above Willi could feel their fire.

In his tan uniform and high black boots, thick leather strap across his chest, the Leader stood before his yearning masses and said … nothing. For what felt like eternity he gazed about the auditorium, holding his right arm with left hand, then switching, then folding both arms across his chest. The audience grew guiltily silent, as if it was their fault he couldn’t begin. Then the Führer appeared to remember something and pulled the podium nearer, scanning his notes as if for some essential point—although from Willi’s vantage point it was obvious he wasn’t even reading. From Willi’s vantage point, every movement Hitler made was obviously not merely rehearsed but thoroughly calculated for effect. The longer he refused to begin, as graphically illustrated by Frau Klopstock’s brain chart, the more urgently the audience craved his words.

“Extraordinary, isn’t it?” Von Hessler’s eye patch seemed to radiate enthusiasm, not for the speaker but for the galvanometer. “You may not realize it, gentlemen, but what you’re seeing is a perfect illustration of an internal condition. On that roll of paper is a precise portrait of nervous excitation. Frau Klopstock may be sitting still, but all her peripheral nerve endings are frantically transforming energy, ushering it into the central nervous system. From the motion of that stylus I can safely speculate that she is far more excited by Herr Hitler that she might have expected. Am I right?”

“Oh, quite.” Frau Klopstock could barely tear her eyes from the podium.

Hitler looked around, coughing into his fist. With the same hand he smoothed the flap of hair across his forehead, then coughed a little more. Finally, almost inaudibly, he croaked out, “People of Berlin—”

And the whole arena sprang to its feet.
“Heil, heil, heil, heil!”

It took a few minutes to settle down again so the Führer could commence. When he did, his voice was so quiet the audience had to lean forward.

“Success,” he all but whispered, “is the sole judge of right and wrong. We have only to look at the streets of our capital.” His pitch, almost imperceptibly, began to rise. “At the millions without jobs. Without dignity. Without hope.” Steadily, each vowel seemed to grow in volume. “To understand the hell this republic has brought to us.”

Until at last his words began to thunder from the loudspeakers.

“Not private gain, but common good must be foremost on the minds of those who lead Germany. The day of individual happiness is over. The doom of this nation can be averted only by a storm of passion. By those who are passionate themselves and can arouse passion in others.”

Willi’s throat had gone dry. He found himself strangely moved by the words, conscious of their appeal, even agreeing to some extent. It was no exaggeration to assert that the republic was fraying at the seams, the government paralyzed, the economic crisis apparently bottomless. Perhaps someone with Bismarckian charisma was needed to hold it all together and push the nation back toward prosperity and self-respect. But Hitler’s voice had grown so shrill, so harsh, so aggressive, it began to grate at Willi’s eardrums.

“There must be no more ranks or classes.” He stabbed the air violently. “All Germans are one! And it’s not enough to affirm your agreement. The time has come to fight!”

He turned to the uniformed rows at his feet.

“To my beloved youth—remember always: it’s not by the principles of humanity man lives, but only by the most brutal struggle. You must steel yourselves. What is weak must be hammered away. You are the flesh of our flesh and the blood of our blood. And those who do not want to fight in this world do not deserve to live.”

He was pounding his chest, clutching his throat.

“National Socialism is Germany’s future. Around us marches Germany! In us marches Germany! Behind us marches Germany!”

The whole audience was back on its feet again shouting.
“Heil! Heil! Heil! Heil!”

Hitler, Willi saw, had blasted straight to the central nervous system von Hessler was trying to read, stimulating passions his listeners probably didn’t even know they still had. Bent old women, one-armed veterans, hausfraus, burghers—all staring like teary-eyed lovers on honeymoon. Like toddlers at their stalwart papa. The Leader would pick them up. He would lift them and make them strong. He would make them good again.

“Our enemies think we’re mud to be trampled on.” Hitler reached with both hands, seeming to strangle someone in front of him. “But we are the greatest people on earth! And we will have our place in the sun.” His fingers turned to his own chest, clutching at it as if to tear apart the rib cage and display his naked heart.

“I will lead you there. I swear by God!”

His eyes were rolling, spit drooling down the sides of his mouth.

Willi leaned back, horrified. There was no denying Hitler’s magnetism; his ideas even contained certain truths. But the man was certifiably insane. And this was no political rally but mass hysteria. Even Frau Klopstock in her crown of wires had tears rushing down her cheeks, her EEG readings flying off the paper.

“Fantastic, isn’t it,” von Hessler cried, not just of his test results this time but of the Nazi leader. “Completely validates the theory of energy liberation: the unleashing of heat and force in accordance with laws of physics. The process that enables cells to renew, like a nation must to regenerate!”

Willi wanted nothing more but to get out of this madness.

At least now, though, he grasped the appeal this movement had for a troubled soul such as the Shepherdess. Order. Purpose. A place to lose herself. An idol to worship.

Somewhere in the screaming mobs he could practically feel her out there.

And once he found her, he would find
Der Kinderfresser
.

Nineteen

“How ’bout it, Kraus?” the crowd of reporters shouted as he stepped from the Police Presidium. It was nearly six but heat still beat down on the Alex, the glass globe atop the Tietz department store shimmering like a mirage. The reporters’ faces, Willi noticed, were slick with sweat and tension. How he longed for the day he’d be able to stand out here and tell them—the whole city—what they were waiting to hear.

“Nothing today, fellas. You know I’ll give it to you as soon as I have.”

“But we thought the orphanages were secured,” Woerner of the
Abend Zeitung
shouted as Willi turned away. “How many more kids have to die, Kraus?”

Willi ignored him, walking off. But it felt as if a bullet had hit his gut. As if he didn’t ask himself that every hour. Each disappearance was another torture to him. Even now he could see headlines up at the corner kiosk:
TWO MORE MISSING FROM TREPTOW HAUS.
It was nauseating. He might have been closer than Freksa’d ever gotten. At least he knew what he was looking for. But in this business, close was shit.

“Sorry”—Woerner ran by, jumping onto a passing streetcar—“nothing personal, Willi, you know that. You’re the best Homicide’s got. But a job’s a job.”

“Yeah, sure.” Willi supposed he ought to manage a smile.

Traffic was heavy, the sidewalks packed. Instead of posters for toothpaste and movies, the advertising columns were plastered now with campaign placards, hammer and sickles and pictures of Hitler. It reminded him of that mad throng at the Sportpalast last night, sending a small shudder through him.

Upstairs earlier, he’d overhead Mueller and Stoss in the hallway chiding young Gunther about working for a Jew.

“Ever check your wallet before you go home at night, kid? He might be picking your pocket.”

Gunther hadn’t laughed along, but he hadn’t defended Willi, either.

“Detektiv Kraus,” he heard now, surprised to see Kai emerge from the darkness near World Wide Fur. The place was empty. Out of business.

“You’ve got to come, please.” Even beneath the lipstick and makeup he could tell the kid’s face was white.

At the corner of Leipziger and Charlotten Strassen, in the heart of Berlin’s shopping district, they entered an upscale leather store. Willi’d actually been here once with Vicki, looking for a briefcase. Bei Schröder. He immediately spotted other boys of Kai’s gang bunched around a display case. Although silent, their flamboyant feathers and earrings couldn’t have screamed louder in the understated décor.

“So you’re the detective.” A short-haired woman approached in a sleek black dress and pearls, dropping her head as if ready to gore him. “Get these
things
out of my store! Have you any idea how many customers have left becau—”

“Okay, ma’am.” Willi held out a hand to her. “This’ll just take a minute. Kai, which ones?”