Children of Wrath (25 page)

Not necessarily, Willi was thinking. If the people were, for example, siblings.

The Ox had said those bags had been made by his sister.

Two years’ hard labor.

“But these aren’t straitjacket cases, Kurt. They’re out there running some kind of business. Operating under everyone’s noses—for years now. I have a feeling they might even be related: brother and sister.”

“Fantastic.” Kurt’s leather chair squeaked. “But certainly not outside the realm of possibility. And there are plenty of schizoids who present engaging, interactive personalities, Willi. That’s just it. They appear interested. Make normal eye contact. But internally, they’re so cut off”—Kurt leaned forward, squinting behind his clean, clear lenses—“outer reality’s not just frightening to them, Willi. It’s genuinely life-threatening. Their social behavior’s pure survival instinct. Animal camouflage.”

*   *   *

“Hermann Braunschweig?” Vicki said, putting down the
Tage Blatt
. “Isn’t that the poor pastor you told me about?” She handed him the page, pointing to a black-bordered announcement. Willi looked. Baden-Baden had evidently failed the reverend. His funeral was Thursday. How sad. He felt oddly obligated to go.

Up in Pankow at the Evangelische Friedhof that day, just as he was getting out of his rickety Opel, a long, white Daimler pulled up. Zoltan’s red turban was visible at the wheel. From the back, High Priestess Helga emerged in a black dress fringed with beads. Even behind dark glasses she seemed relieved to see him, her glossy lips tilting in a smile.

“Kraus, I didn’t expect you.” She let him accompany her down the ivy-laced path through the headstones.

“I might say the same about you, High Priestess.”

“Yes, well.” She cast him a glance, carefully negotiating the vines in her high heels. “Death transcends even divorce.” Her confidential tone implied Willi’d become a dear old friend by now. “I was married to Braunschweig eleven years.” She inhaled with what seemed disbelief. “Six, actually. The rest I was married to a bottle of schnapps.” She stopped, turning to Willi, her rows of beads shimmying. “Listen, Sergeant, I’ve got to say—that lampshade business the other night.” She held her hand over her heart, swallowing. “It was too much. Even for me.”

She took off the dark glasses, and for the first time Willi saw something like authenticity in her eyes. “I don’t feel safe here anymore. Everywhere I turn, I think she’s lurking. So I’m closing up shop. Taking the show on the road, so to speak. Getting as far away from Ilse and Germany as I can—southern California. See if I can’t give that Sister Aimee a run for her money.”

Willi couldn’t say he blamed her.

They walked together down the lane of headstones. Halfway she took his arm.

“Gee”—she shrugged, throwing him a girlish smile—“you’re the nicest cop I ever met; too bad you’re so happily married.”

At Braunschweig’s grave they joined the small crowd, Helga’s dress dancing with the dry summer breeze.

As for man, his days are like grass …

the wind blows over it and it is gone.

When they lowered the coffin, she leaned on Willi for support. He gave her his handkerchief to wipe her face. Each threw a rose into the pit, then they returned together along the viny path. But when a little gray rabbit jumped ahead of them, Helga suddenly gasped and froze solid, as if it were a wolf.

“Dear God.” She held her chest, breathing deeply. Willi kept waiting for a word of explanation, but she seemed unable. Finally she shook her head. “All of a sudden I remember something. And I’ve no idea why.” She turned to Willi. “That town Ilse said she came from.” Her voice lowered. “She went on about it like there was no worse place on earth. Practically foamed at the mouth when she told us about it. Wanted to
rid
the world of the slime who lived there, she said. That’s how she put it too—
rid the world.
Makes me shiver now. But back then—we thought she was just an unhappy kid. Wasn’t eighteen when she joined our congregation. Hermann and I practically adopted her. Didn’t have parents. Only siblings.”

Siblings? Willi felt his heart quicken.

“What were they, Helga? Brothers, sisters?”

“I don’t know.”

“Think. It could be crucial.”

“I have no idea.”

“Then tell me exactly, when did she first come to you?”

“When?”

“The day, the month. Anything.”

“Oh, why do you torture me?” Helga clutched her throat. “I can barely remember what year we’re in now.” She balled her fists, sighing, then popped her eyes wide. “Wait a minute, the end of the inflation. What year was that, ’24, right? That must have been it. I’m sure now. They’d just introduced the reichsmark—and Ilse brought us steaks to celebrate. We’d never seen such juicy cuts.”

Memory was indeed inscrutable. Willi scribbled in his book. Everything was down there, somewhere. Called up by the most random things sometimes. Or were they even random?

“Okay, now tell me—what was the name of the town?”

Helga held her stomach, her glossy lips twisting as if her appendix had burst. “I never knew where it was exactly, somewhere in the provinces. Saxony, I guessed from the accent. But whenever she mentioned it she used that same creepy windup doll’s voice—like she was casting a curse …
Niedersedlitz
 …
Niedersedlitz
. The devil himself, she told me once, had moved there straight from hell.”

Clenching her bosom, Helga reeled, stumbling into Willi with a muffled yelp, as if she saw Ilse right there in the cemetery, wielding a bloody knife. “Keep her away!”

Willi had to help her back to the limousine, Zoltan holding the door. Before she climbed in, she grabbed one of Willi’s lapels. “God, Kraus.” Her voice was hoarse with fear. “If that crazy bitch ever found out I talked to you— You’ve got to get her!”

*   *   *

There was indeed a town in Saxony named Niedersedlitz—just south of Germany’s beautiful city of art and music on the Elbe River, Dresden, and Willi and Gunther set off there by train first thing next morning. Vicki’d hardly been thrilled to hear he was leaving her with the children, even though she wouldn’t be alone because her sister was coming. When he’d gone to kiss her, she’d turned a cheek. He got angry and asked if she preferred he arrange for armed protection. She didn’t reply, and he left. She had a melodramatic streak, he knew. Like her mother. She was overacting, but he felt lousy anyway, getting her upset. Not enough to make him stay, though.

Entering Saxony, fertile farmland rolled past the dining-car window.

“Needle in a haystack,” Gunther mumbled, dropping bits of a roll from his mouth. “Worse. We don’t even know it’s a needle we’re after.”

“Well, the bone doesn’t come to the dog, Gunther. And better one-eyed than blind.” Willi appreciated his assistant’s enthusiasm, if not his table manners. “In terms of hard facts, it’s true we don’t have much. But a good detective must try to fit together even the loosest pieces. And if you think about it, we’re not doing badly. Niedersedlitz, the ‘haystack’ as you call, isn’t terribly large. And we know that by the time she was eighteen, Ilse had a violent hatred toward it. So much so that she told Helga she wanted to ‘rid the world’ of its inhabitants. That ‘the devil himself had moved there straight from hell’—a rather extreme posture in regards to your hometown, wouldn’t you agree?”

Gunther nodded wide-eyed, chewing. “I only hated how ugly the girls were.”

“Clearly the place was connected with some prolonged trauma, child battering probably—which nobody rescued her from. If the Ox really is her brother, then it’s not a needle we’re seeking at all—but a pair of very sick siblings. And if in fact they did grow up in town, somebody in Niedersedlitz will remember them.”

“You know, boss”—Gunther swallowed hard—“I learn more from you in an hour than all my textbooks put together.”

Dresden, Germany’s Florence on the Elbe, was a storybook city of chocolate and porcelain, Wagner and Strauss. Towering baroque cathedrals and palaces. The long glass
Hauptbahnhof
from 1892 was among Europe’s finest. But when they arrived, the main hall overflowed with dusty, slump-shouldered figures, the unemployed. In front of the station, dueling phalanxes of uniformed Nazis and Communists were forcing campaign literature on everyone passing by. Willi and Gunther had to run a raucous gauntlet to reach the #6 tram.

Forty minutes later they were on a little green streetcar rattling through Niedersedlitz, a picturesque mix of pastures and heavy industry, wide fields golden with rye framed by mile-long factories. Off they got at the town center and headed straight for the
Rathaus
, a mélange of Gothic, Renaissance, and art nouveau. First stop—the Hall of Records.

A sallow-faced clerk manning the front desk didn’t even look up when Willi asked how they could find any tanneries or leather works, and if there were documents pertaining to battered children from twenty years ago.

“Room 2D, Commerce and Industry. Legal’s down in—” He stopped, checking to see who would ask such a question, a swastika pin all but blazing from his lapel. “No Jews allowed.” He looked back at his paperwork.

Gunther’s eyes widened. “What’d you say?”

“You heard me: no Jews.”

“You stupid ass.” Willi was shocked to see Gunther reach over and threaten to grab the clerk by the collar, his whole face flashing red. “You’re addressing a Sergeant-Detektiv of the Berlin Kriminal Polizei here, working on a case of national importance. So unless you feel like having your ass raked over hot coals…”

The guy admitted them, but muttered loud enough to hear, “Just what stinks in this republic, Jew detectives.”

“Never mind.” Willi restrained Gunther, delighted by his assistant’s show of support, but concealing it. Once again he found himself appreciating Gunther’s fervor more than his finesse. Saxony was known for its illiberality. Plus they only had twenty-four hours here. Barely enough time to get into fisticuffs with the local Nazis. “You go downstairs; I’ll go up.”

The mustached clerk in room 2D, by contrast, Herr Eisenlohr, all but shined Willi’s shoes when he learned he was a Kripo agent from Berlin.

“Oh, yes, sir, Herr Sergeant-Detektiv. Here we are.” He bowed like a waiter bringing the house specialty as he handed Willi a leatherbound volume:
Major Industry in Niedersedlitz—1900 to Present.

Willi’d barely gotten the huge book open, though, when Gunther was back over his shoulder.

“Fräulein down in Legal says she needs special keys to unlock police files. Thing is, fellow who authorizes them’s all the way down in—”

“Gunther,” Willi cut him off, “I don’t have time for this. Figure it out.” He thumbed down the list of key industries. “We’ve got to see those files.”

Gunther just stood there.

Willi glanced up. “Remember the Kripo manual? In addition to
Zuverlässigkeit
and
Unbestechlichkeit,
an ideal Kripo agent possesses
Findigkeit
. Ingenuity. In other words, kid, use your brain.”

Gunther smiled sheepishly, lumbering off.

Poring through the massive volume, Willi saw that Niedersedlitz had manufacturers of refrigerators, locomotives, world-class cameras, and macaroni, but no tanneries or leather works. Anymore. There had been a sizable firm here for decades. But Amalgamated Leather burned in 1916, during the terrible “Turnip Winter” at the height of the war. An asterisk on the matter caught his eye. The plant foreman had, apparently, been convicted of setting the blaze and sentenced to twenty-five years hard labor. Willi inhaled, closing the volume, deciding to find out more downstairs and see how Gunther was making out.

Not badly, apparently.

In the basement corridor a tall, gawky young woman who could have been Gunther’s twin rushed past him, smoothing her hair and then ducking into the ladies’ room. When Willi walked into Legal, Gunther looked up, restraining a grin.

“Mission accomplished.” He dangled a set of keys, oblivious to the lipstick on his mouth. The kid obviously felt he’d found his forte. Willi didn’t have the heart to lecture him about discretion too.

Gunther’s use of ingenuity unfortunately yielded few results—even with the help of his newfound darling, Ingeborg. They uncovered plenty of files on children hit by cars, drowned in wells, murdered by itinerant foreigners. But in all the reams of police files for the past quarter century, none reported a parent hurting his own child. Not that it was all that surprising, Willi bore in mind. Only recently had they begun reporting such cases in Berlin. Still, he had to ask himself, might someone other than a family member have been the “devil” the Shepherdess hated? Nothing they came across in the files suggested that, either. Perhaps the origins of her trauma had been purely psychotic.

Going through birth records based on the High Priestess’s memory, Ingeborg produced a list of seven girls given the name
Ilse
from 1905 to 1907. They weren’t sure the Shepherdess was even born in Niedersedlitz, and with no last name it didn’t much matter. But Willi read and reread the list hoping something might click. Finally, though, sighing, he shoved it aside. Any one of these could be the Shepherdess—or all this could be a big waste of time. It was pure luck.

An hour’s search, though, and not a single file on the Amalgamated Leather factory fire had nothing to do with luck, he knew. Someone had clearly tampered with the records. A trial had to have documents. Ingeborg called in Herr Eisenlohr, but the man could only yank out his hairs at not being able to further assist.

“If I had a
shred
of information, so help me, Herr Sergeant, I’d hand it to you on a golden platter. All I can tell you is this: during the war, if anything even hinted at civilian sabotage, it was removed by military authorities. Those files could be buried somewhere with the kaiser’s love letters.”

“We could try the jail.” Gunther calculated on his fingers. “There’d still be another … twelve years on his sentence.”

“Problem is, which jail?” Willi wondered. “In a city the size of Dresden there’s got to be half a dozen. We don’t even have a name to ask about. But maybe—” He straightened up. “The local paper. They must have covered the story. I’ll bet they keep archives.”