Children of Wrath (28 page)

It had been a week since he’d gotten back from Niedersedlitz, and he was battling to close in on Magda Köhler—or whatever she called herself now. Based on where he’d seen her that afternoon, he’d narrowed down her workplace to six possible businesses in the
Viehof,
all on one little lane appropriately named Bone Alley. He couldn’t just barge in and search the places; he knew he had to tread carefully. The lesson of Heilbutt’s story on the
Bremen
that day had not been lost on him: during the Great Inflation when they were peddling dog meat for sausage filler, the Köhlers had sensed investigators closing in—and quickly disappeared. Willi had no intention of letting that happen again.

Direktor Gruber was lending support, albeit begrudgingly. He’d provided Willi with blueprints, maps, even informants. But he made it clear he thought it was all a big waste of time. Such characters as Willi described couldn’t possibly be operating out of his
Viehof
because his
Viehof
was too well controlled.

In moments of weakness Willi feared the Direktor might be right.

For three days now he’d had eyes trained on every inch of Bone Alley from rooftops, parked trucks. Even undercover agents inside. A dozen men had the block surrounded. He’d gone so far as to send out scouts to local training gyms in search of Axel. But so far no one’d seen anyone resembling either of the massive twins. And they were hardly easy to miss.

Was it too late already?

One thing was clear: the blueprints he’d gotten from Gruber were useless. The other night he and Gunther had gone in for a predawn reconnaissance raid dressed as municipal water inspectors. Using
Viehof
master keys, they’d entered all six businesses on Bone Alley, beginning with Lutz Brothers Grinders. Finding their way through the gritty facility with flashlights, past big crushing vats and piles of bones, they descended a short flight of steps into a cramped, dusty basement. But no matter how hard they looked, they couldn’t find a trace of the sewer lines indicated on the blueprints. Reiniger Gelatins, Becker Glue, Hansenclever Bristle Works—it was all the same. Either the blueprints were wrong or there’d been some major reconstruction below street level.

He was going to bring it up first thing Monday with Herr Direktor.

*   *   *

Glancing out at white sails skimming across the lake, Willi took in a deep breath. The boys had constructed a rather impressive castle in the style of Antoni Gaudi, he thought, with a swell of fatherly pride. Perhaps they’d become architects. Letting his eyes wander back around to the new pavilions, though, he sat bolt upright.

“Vicki,” he said, squinting to make sure. “Grab your things, darling.”

He jumped from his towel and ran to get the boys.

Even this breezy idyll wasn’t immune to the political whirlwinds battering Germany’s capital. The nearer the election, the more electrified the atmosphere had grown. Barely a day passed without bloody clashes between Nazis and Communists erupting somewhere in Berlin. And Willi got the feeling the combustible mixture had converged right here. Not even a day at the beach could persuade people to put aside politics. Buttons, badges, insignia were pinned to hats and bathing suits. All the maintenance men, he’d noticed earlier, brandished bright red neckerchiefs. The customers at the restaurant pretty much all brownshirts. Several of whom were now gathered around someone on the ground—brutally kicking him.

In the seconds it took for Willi to grab the kids, a loud series of whistles brought reinforcements, both red and brown, running from every direction. An all-out riot broke loose. Chairs flying. Heads bleeding. On the staircase back up to the street Willi had to hold Vicki and the boys to the railing as a small herd of stormtroopers stampeded past, brown boots thundering. Back at Beckmann Strasse later they heard radio reports that fighting at Wannsee had lasted for four hours—and even spread to the S-Bahn heading back to the city. They’d left not a moment too soon. Dozens had been injured, including bystanders on trains who had nowhere to hide.

That night Willi dreamed he and his family were on an ocean liner, steaming somewhere far away.

*   *   *

Gruber’s office was in the first building on the right after the main gates at Eldenaer Strasse, its paneled walls filled with citations and photos of visiting dignitaries. The elephantine
Viehof
Direktor had dropped the fawning attitude of the
Listeria
crisis, finding no reason now for sycophancy.

“That may be.” The very slant of his pencil-line mustache underscored his enmity. Willi was here as a spoiler, out to sully the reputation of his beloved institution—with a gang of criminals that made Jack the Ripper look nice. “I’m afraid what I gave you, though, are the very latest we have, Herr Sergeant-Detektiv. Perhaps”—he turned to a box of bonbons—“there are other municipal authorities with higher budgets for updating their maps and blueprints.”

He offered Willi the box.

Why hadn’t he thought of that? Willi wondered. Municpal water. He had to go right now. They’d know where the feeder lines to
Sturmwasser Kanal Fünf
began.

He declined a candy, then changed his mind, thanking Herr Direktor.

A sweet taste of chocolate still lingered on his lips as he got into his car. It was a fine sunny market day, a relentless stream of vehicles pouring in and out of the
Viehof
. Willi had to sit there waiting for a break in traffic to make the U-turn to leave; all at once his neck went hard. A van turning through the main gates looked familiar. Black, with no license plates. He squinted to see who was at the wheel, but the sun was in his eyes. Forming a visor with his hand, his stomach flipped. It was him, all right.

Axel.

An instant later their gazes interlocked.

Willi saw Axel wonder why he was being looked at and if the face seemed familiar. Clearly, he read the newspapers as well as any Berliner and knew the top cop heading up the
Kinderfresser
hunt. After a flash of perception his face seemed to harden into steel. In what appeared to be slow motion Willi watched his huge hands grab the steering wheel and yank it, hard. Then he saw the black van leap from its lane. Like a projectile it picked up speed—and took aim, he realized, directly at him.

My God. The guy’s insane, Willi thought. Literally.

And trying to kill me.

Inches to impact, Willi saw the enraged eyes still locked onto him. Flooring the gas, the Opel lurched not a moment too soon into traffic. The black van screeched to a halt, nearly hitting a hydrant. In his rearview mirror Willi watched the van manage the turn and take off after him, only vehicles behind.

This is ridiculous, he told himself. I’m supposed to be chasing him.

At the first cross street he made a right, hoping to evade the guy, loop around, and reverse things. But Axel stayed hooked to his tail. Soon, they were both snarled in traffic coming out of the cattle market. In a face-off on foot, Will felt certain, he stood a chance—even with Axel’s size. That Frenchman he’d bested outside Passchendaele had been no slouch. But he’d need a few seconds to position himself, and at the moment Axel had the momentum. Until he found a way to turn the tables, there seemed little choice but to outrun the maniac.

Conditions weren’t favorable. The van was twice the size of his Opel and clearly had the greater horsepower. Even though he was going as fast as he dare in this traffic, the next time Willi looked, the Ox, he saw, was only one vehicle behind. Because of its size the Opel at least was more maneuverable, easily skirting a beer delivery truck while Axel’s fender caught a wooden barrel and sent it shooting torpedolike, exploding against a wall. Willi smirked—until his gaze returned to the road and he saw a wagon piled high with feed hay … way too near. He leaned on the horn, swerving hard left—only a motor scooter was in the way, and a second later a landslide of hay pounded his car. He had to switch on his wipers, praying to see.

He recalled Gruber boasting the
Viehof
had its own fire department. What it didn’t have apparently was its own police—because no one was trying to stop this. People were jumping this way and that—honking, screaming, shaking fists. Yet the chase went on.

Willi made a quick turn down an alley, hoping it might be too narrow for the van. Too bad Axel brought a set of wheels onto the sidewalk and kept right on following. A man trying to get across was clasping what looked like a hundred balloons but were cow intestines, Willi knew, inflated to dry for sausage casings. The poor fellow, not sure whether to run back or forward, panicked and threw everything in the air, sending all his intestines floating away like bubbles.

Axel was right behind Willi now, approaching with deranged fervor. Willi urged on the Opel but it could give only so much. His heart contracted as he could see those insanely glowing eyes again, looming nearer in the rearview mirror. Pointlessly, he swerved back and forth trying to outdance him. With a sudden jolt, though, he found himself having to lock elbows and press back just to keep his head from snapping to the windshield. That maniac had slammed him!

A few seconds later it happened again.

The only way out seemed the tunnel on his left. He spun furiously, plunging into darkness.

Dear God, he gasped when he saw what was ahead. A sea of white sheep filled the tunnel roadway. He hadn’t time to stop. Cringing, he fully expected to feel the thuds of their woolly bodies and see a spray of gore on the windshield. But like the Red Sea they miraculously parted, allowing him to pass. Axel’s van, twice his size, didn’t get the same blessing. Hearing the bleating screams, Willi cringed at the sight in his rearview mirror of sheep being squashed left and right against the tunnel walls.

Finally, as he emerged from the blackness into daylight, his spirits soared. He only needed to reach the by-products zone just past Slaughterhouse Row. There, a dozen men under his command were positioned around Bone Alley. If he could somehow lure Axel into their midst, he might actually bag this son of a bitch. And if he did, he’d soon enough have the two darling sisters as well. Then he could stand before the Kommissar and the press and the whole damn world to announce the long nightmare was over.

Unfortunately, he hadn’t made it past Slaughterhouse One when he realized that if anyone was about to get bagged—it was him.

Axel’s blood-splattered van was out of the tunnel and dead on his heels again. This time, a solid wall of brown-and-white cattle trudging into Slaughterhouse Two was never going to part. In a last desperate effort Willi jammed on his brakes and swung madly left, intending to burst through a wooden gate, but never made it. Axel cornered him on the bend and rammed him at thirty miles an hour. Willi lost consciousness.

When he came to, he perceived a massive figure climbing from the van, turning toward him, eyes aflame, tree-trunk arms lifting a butcher’s hatchet that had to be four feet long. It would be perhaps three more seconds, Willi calculated, before it took off his head. The first of those seconds he used to check what had happened to his car: the van had crushed the entire rear, but the front looked clear. The next second he simply sat there, watching the odious hatchet, sharpened to what looked like a razor’s edge, rise with the massive arms. The third second, just before it guillotined him, he used every ounce of energy he had to throw the door open and smash it into Axel’s stomach.

The blow was strong enough to send the beast staggering, allowing Willi time to slip out of the car—though not enough to reposition himself. A quick glance over his shoulder told him his opponent had stumbled but not gone down. With a shocking dexterity Axel’d managed to regain his balance and pick up his ax, looking even more deranged.

In seven years with Kripo this was hardly the first time Willi’d found himself running for his life. Those white slavers up in Prenzlauerberg had given him quite a go. But he’d never had anyone so beside himself with fury sticking to his skin like this. Axel looked as if he didn’t even need a hatchet to tear someone apart.

Willi realized he’d soon find out.

He’d reached a dead end. Brick walls on two sides. High fence on the other. The only possible refuge was within the mass of spotted bovines clomping toward their doom. To Willi they suddenly appeared like angels, and he threw himself at their mercy, diving deep into their ranks. Though shocked by their stench, he was thankful for each huge, shit-smeared body—especially when he saw that raised hatchet glistening just a beast or two behind. Something knocked hard into his foot, though, and for a second he feared his salvation might prove his doom—huge rib cages pressing from all sides, hooves crashing down. But another fear loomed when he realized his cover was actually thinning out, getting coerced into smaller files by a series of narrowing ramps.

There had to be men around. These animals weren’t just walking themselves into the slaughterhouse, were they? Willi clutched his Kripo badge, ready to enlist the first human he saw. But there were only cows, mooing, bellowing, pink-nosed and brown-eyed, clattering up the ramps. Did any of them realize they were feeling the last few seconds of sunshine on their backs?

For all he knew, so was he.

That possibility seemed horribly real an instant later when he sensed danger in the nape of his neck and, turning, saw Axel a mere foot away. Bending in half and throwing himself under the belly of the nearest cow, Willi popped up on the other side and moved forward as fast as he could until he found himself alone with one particularly enormous creature rushing through a swinging gate. As soon as they were in, the gate shut automatically—and wouldn’t open again despite Axel’s obvious yanking—clearly calibrated to allow in only one steer at a time.

Willi sighed.

He hadn’t had time to catch his breath, though, when two arms reached from the darkness, grabbed the cow by the horns, and threw a harness on its head, immobilizing it. Before Willi could say a word, an enormous mallet smashed between its horns. The cow cried horribly, then all four legs sprang horizontal as if it had learned to fly. Willi got knocked into a corner. The cow crashed to its stomach, and a second pair of arms was instantly sliding chains over its rear hooves, a mechanized pulley hoisting it upside down, the brown eyes still looking about, confused, as it went flying again—down a conveyor belt.