Children of Wrath (27 page)

“You did grow up next—”

“Door. Yeah, sure. But it won’t help you find them now.”

“Never know. Sometimes the smallest detail…”

Bachmann’s lips tightened on the cigar. “Anyway, I’m kind of busy today. My schedule’s all booked up. Try again tomorrow.”

“You and Axel must have been pretty good buddies then, huh?”

“Buddies.” The eyes flashed back on Willi with a strange derision. “From the day I could walk till the day I went into the infantry, that bastard was my best friend. And I was”—his lips trembled slightly—“his whipping boy. And his slave and confidant all in one.” Bachmann’s nose flared as he fingered his cigar. “I know what he’s capable of. What they all are. The little one most of all. She made the rest look sweet.”

“How about let’s start at the beginning.” Willi grabbed his notebook.

“No thanks.” Bachmann shook his head.

“Alfred.” Willi felt it was time to lay it on the line. “They’re killing little kids. A lot of them.”

Bachmann’s harness twisted. “You mean
Der Kinderfresser
?”

Willi nodded ever so slightly.

Bachmann swallowed hard. “Well, then”—he shrugged, inhaling—“guess there’s nothing I can’t reschedule—except maybe my enema at four.”

Twenty-two

Several minutes into the story Willi understood why High Priestess Helga, without apparent cause, had so suddenly recalled the name of Ilse’s hometown. It wasn’t without cause at all. It was that little rabbit hopping by.

“Perfect Niedersedlitzers those Köhlers were.” Smoke from Bachmann’s cigar rose curtainlike, seeming to draw him back. “Father had a good job. Mother on the church committee. Walked to services every Sunday together. Made quite a picture with the twins.”

“Twins?” Willi and Gunther looked at each other.

“Didn’t you know? For years no one could tell them apart, Magda and Axel. She always wore her hair extra-short. Talked real deep. So boyish everyone mistook her for him.”

Then that must have been her in the
Viehof
that day dressed as a man. No wonder he’d mistaken her for the Ox, Willi understood. My God, he’d almost had her. But she’d sweet-talked her way out of it.

A schizoid’s social skills, Willi … pure animal camouflage.

“That father, though”—Bachmann contorted in his harness—“two people all in one. He used to take me and Axel fishing when we were real young. Some of the best fun I ever had. But by third or fourth grade, I’d run at the sight of that man. My pa could strap me with the best of them, but once I saw Axel’s rear end, I never complained. In public he was so considerate and concerned. Everybody loved him. Axel used to tell me stories, though, made my skin crawl. Believe me, that man did things no parent ought.”

Bachmann’s eyes shrouded. “Below the kitchen he dug out this chamber. Used to lock them down there as punishment. No food, no water, total darkness, two, three days sometimes. When we were thirteen, Axel told me he nearly died from the stench of his own shit. Said if he cried, his father’d come down and chain him to the wall, take a knife to his throat—and threaten to skin him alive.”

Gunther’s jaw hung.

Willi’s heart raced. He could practically hear his cousin Kurt at the Institut:…
a ritualizing reenactment of the tortures he himself once endured. I suspect that as a child, our murderer must have felt as if he were being virtually dismembered.

“How come you never told anyone, Alfred?”

“Are you kidding?” The eyes snapped out of the past. “Axel made me swear on a stack of Bibles. Said his father’d really skin them alive if he ever found out.”

“Bruno Köhler did this to both his twins?”

“Regularly.” The corners of Bachmann’s lips bunched.

“The little one too, Ilse?”

“She got it full brunt.” The lips thrust forward. “Bruno blamed her for killing his wife. The twins at least went to school. Not her. My younger sister her age never even saw Ilse. I remember Axel once said she got real sick, whole face covered with pustules. Pox, he called it. Didn’t kill her. Tough, she was. Got tougher too. And mean. Oh, boy, I’ll never forget the time Ax and I heard such terrible screaming from their backyard. We went down and there she was, long and skinny with great big eyes, couldn’t have been more than nine. Had a rabbit strung up, alive, pulling its skin off, like a mother yanking clothes off an uncooperative child. I can still hear that poor thing’s screams, Sergeant. Had to club it with a rock to put it out of its misery. Ilse said her sister promised to make her a purse if she brought the hides.”

With a shudder, it occurred to Willi that Ilse’d probably told this story, or others like it, to Helga, who’d pushed it as far back into her subconscious as she could, until that day at the cemetery when that little rabbit hopped by. No wonder she’d gotten hysterical. Ilse had threatened the same to her. Skin her alive.

“Did the twins have jobs at their father’s leather plant?”

“All of us did. Two years almost, from when the war bogged down to when Ax and I got call-ups in ’17. He never went, of course—after what happened with his pa, as I’m sure you heard. Pretty creative, huh? It always impressed me the way they left him strung up for the whole town to see, as if it was a big ‘Fuck you, Niedersedlitz.’ I mean, people knew. They had to. Everybody beats their kids. But that…”

“You remember what kind of jobs at the plant they had?”

“Yeah, sure.” Bachmann didn’t grasp the point of this question but had no trouble answering. “Ever see a picture of Axel? Built like a bear. Magda too. Ilse was scrawny. But Axel’s arms—twice the size of mine, even before he lifted weights. Had him doing manual labor naturally, lifting bales of hides. But as the war went on, we all did whatever necessary—purchasing, ordering, delivering goods. Magda was made an apprentice craftsman.” The recollection seemed to please Bachmann. “Got taught all the finest points … dyeing, finishing, fancy stitchwork. Could have had a real profession if only—”

Schmidt was standing over them suddenly with a short hose and rubber bag full of water. “Four o’clock.”

Willi tried smiling at her. “This is kind of an important police investigation. Might it wait?”

“Sorry, Sergeant.” She rolled up her sleeves. “Got a dozen more on line. They talk tough, but they’re just big, helpless babies, is all. Can’t even evacuate without my help. Don’t let me stop you, though.” She spit on her hands and gave a hard yank, shifting the harness so Bachmann’s face tilted to the mattress. His hospital gown fell down, revealing his hairy rear end. “No room here for daintiness.”

She nodded by all means to carry on, as she hooked her contraption up.

Bachmann’s face turned on the mattress so he could keep talking. “Most guys drafted before ’16 never realized how harsh things became at home.” He winced as Schmidt let loose a big gob of spit, then shoved in the nozzel, working it up with sharp, staccato twists, like a sink plunger. Willi winced too, while Gunther turned almost canary yellow. But a serene gaze washed over Bachmann’s eyes as she let go of the hose and began squeezing the bag. “In the army at least you got fed twice a day. Not in Niedersedlitz. You’d think with all the farms here, but every morsel was requistioned. If they found you with so much as an unauthorized grain…”

When the bag emptied, Schmidt plucked out the hose and hoisted Bachmann to an upright position again.

“Naturally everyone began losing weight.” He went on casually, his face flushing pink. Reaching for his cigar in the ashtray he indicated to Gunther he’d appreciate a light. “The weakest started really starving: old women with sunken cheeks, kids with swollen bellies. At the factory they gave us enough to keep going. So when Magda’s belly started swelling, everyone knew it wasn’t starvation. Schmidt…”

The dour-faced
Krankenschwester
hoisted his harness and shoved a bedpan under him, while Bachmann, eyes rolling, released a noisy gusher. It came out in thick, black, heavy clumps, making Willi and Gunther both lean back as far as possible.

“She was a huge girl, of course, so no one really could tell until the last month, and then, the gossip.” Bachmann went on while Schmidt wiped his rear end with a towel. “Wasn’t even seventeen.”

Swinging Bachmann down again, face to the bed, Schmidt began another round.

“Everyone was certain it had to be one of the Polish guest workers.” Bachmann yelped at the insertion this time. “But that wasn’t the case.” He fell silent while Schmidt pumped the bag, then hoisted him again. “Well, there’s just no nice way of putting it, Sergeant,” he said, wiping sweat from his face. “Bruno Köhler fucked those kids. And I don’t mean symbolically. Axel used to come to school so sore he couldn’t walk. And Magda’s baby wasn’t any guest worker’s.”

Willi just sat there for a minute.

“Did she have it?” he finally managed to ask.

“Oh, yeah.” Bachmann seemed to feel the liquid in his innards this time, closing his eyes and taking a deep breath. “She had it, all right. But that son of a bitch”—the eyes slowly opened, twitching slightly—“said it was a devil’s spawn. Schmidt, love!” The nurse waddled over. “As soon as Magda gave birth”—a fresh pan came under him, and a loud sigh accompanied a second release, only slightly less foul smelling—“that fucker took his own newborn babe to the backyard and”—Bachmann’s finger made a slitting motion straight across the base of his throat—“like a suckling pig. That’s just what Axel told me—he had no reason to lie. Magda went nuts for real because she was religious, see, and the baby never got—”

“Baptized.” Gunther completed the sentence for him. “So she thought it was lost for all eternity.”

“Very good.” Bachmann nodded.

“Total Depravity,” Gunther said to Willi.

The nurse, taking a glance in the pan, gave a satisfied grunt. “Okay, majesty, one more should do it. Make it nice and clear for me, huh?”

Clear indeed, Willi was thinking. That Bible passage.
Children of wrath
. It wasn’t Ilse, it was Magda who’d circled it. And Magda’s sack of bones.

And Magda’s purses.

Ilse was shepherding these kids to her sister. And her brother was dealing the body parts.

*   *   *

“Where did they go when they left Niedersedlitz?”

“Berlin.”

“You’re certain?”

“I saw Axel the night they left.” Bachmann relished the last of his cigar. “Still had blood under his fingernails. Told me Berlin was the only place they could disappear. That Magda’d gone completely daft and Ilse was out of control. That he was going to try to find work to support them, at the
Central-Viehof
maybe. They needed forged papers. New identities. A draft deferment for him. He could afford them now, though, he said, because they had eleven hundred marks—from their father’s safe.”

“But how can you be certain they wound up in Berlin?” Willi had to know. “You went to Flanders, didn’t you? Got injured.”

“One thing I’ll say about Axel.” Bachmann blew a perfect smoke ring. “Loyal as a dog. Showed up here one day to visit.”

“Here at this hospital?”

“In that very chair, Detektiv.”

“How long ago?”

“During the inflation. I remember distinctly he told me it cost him fifty million marks to take the train. That was what, seven years ago? Just opened my eyes and there he was. Huge as a steer. Arms the size of tree trunks. Said he lifted hundreds of pounds a week at the gym. Never intended to let any bastard get the better of him again.”

“What was he doing? Did he work at the
Viehof
?”

“Magda did. Posing as a man. Made me laugh so hard when I heard. Axel had a number of shady schemes going. Ran a peddlers’ market of some sort. Plus the little one, Ilse, had a connection at a lab that used dogs for experiments. Paid five marks a head, so they went all over Berlin, stealing dogs. Imagine? Same lab paid them another five to remove the dead dogs, full service. Axel didn’t want to tell me what they did with the carcasses, but somehow he made a profit off them too. Never lived better, he told me. Decent apartment. Plenty to eat. Joked and said if only the lab switched to human beings, he could make a real killing.”

Twenty-three

“Sure it’d be nice.” Vicki flipped her magazine pages. “A lot of things’d be nice, Willi. But a month in America?” She sat up in her beach chair, checking to see if he was watching the boys as closely as he ought. “All four of us? Come on.” She leaned back with a sigh. “It’s rare you even take a day off.”

Lying on a towel at her feet, Willi took a breath, understanding but not exactly appreciating her attitude. You couldn’t blame him for fantasizing a little, he thought, running sand through his fingers. The pressure he lived under was relentless; the whole of Berlin hanging on him, waiting for his big breakthrough. Plus the boys were right in plain view, not ten feet away, building a castle. Despite that nothing even vaguely untoward had disturbed their home life, Vicki persisted in fearing every second pulsed with mortal danger.

Willi gazed around the crowded lakeshore and did every so often feel a little twist of angst … not that one of the Köhlers would show up and slit their throats, but that someone would recognize him even under dark glasses, a parent of one of the murdered children, God forbid, and ask what the hell he thought he was doing at the beach when
Der Kinderfresser
was still on the loose.

If only he were a machine. He’d never have to rest. Or fantasize.

It was the first weekend of September, a cool breeze fanning the sunny bay along the Wannsee. The huge, shiny lake reflected puffs of clouds in the sky. Behind, four new pavilions in sand-colored brick—shops, restaurants, changing halls—were portraits of the new International Style being pioneered in Germany: sleek and functional. They had long, flat roofs doubling as sundecks, which nationalists complained looked “un-German.” For the thousands who’d flocked here by car or S-Bahn today, it hardly seemed to matter. Framed by shady green forests on one side and countless sails skimming the glassy water on the other, the bathing beach at Wannsee was Berlin at its most sublime.