Children of Wrath (30 page)

Willi could hardly forget that fateful day, seeing that burlap bag for the first time. The bones so neatly arranged. The circled phrase in the waterlogged Bible. He’d never been certain if someone had actually dumped the burlap bags into the sewers or they’d been swept in accidentally. Eberhard’s description of the flood made the latter appear more likely, which is probably why the Köhlers kept right on with their dirty work, never realizing someone had found the evidence and taken up the hunt.

Now at last the pieces were falling into place.

Minute by minute, Willi was inching nearer.

Viehof
Direktor Gruber himself, of all people, had just come through with an astonishing tip.

Well aware of the mayhem playing out in the streets of his beloved stockyards, Herr Direktor apparently felt it best to fully cooperate finally in hopes of ending the ordeal. He had personally phoned half an hour ago to mention a seemingly insignificant detail.

“Since you’re so damn relentless about this, Kraus, something did occur to me.”

He’d explained to Willi how various reports had reached his ears over the years, mostly of a casual nature, about an incongruous bit of traffic coming in and out of the Muller-Schlosser Fertilizer plant right outside the
Viehof,
on Thaer Strasse. An ice-cream truck—the kind that served children near schools and playgrounds—was seen entering and leaving on one side of the dusty factory complex, apparently disappearing into some kind of underground garage. Since it wasn’t his jurisdiction and didn’t seem to be causing any problems, he’d never paid much attention. Until now. And he thought, well, perhaps it might be of help, Gruber said.

Checking the maps, they’d found the address was outside the
Viehof
wall, all right, but less than thirty yards from Bone Alley. Rollmann and Eberhard both concurred a short vehicular tunnel could easily lead to the Köhlers’ underground lair. A hidden driveway with a disguised entrance.

And an ice cream truck. My God. Willi’d all but gasped when he’d heard. All this time he’d wondered how the Shepherdess lured so many boys off the streets of Berlin and dragged them away without being seen. How fiendishly brilliant, he realized now. He could picture her in a clean white uniform offering a temptation impossible to resist. “Wanna see inside the truck? Right this way, boys.” And bolting the door shut. The last anyone ever saw of those kids … until they turned up as handbags or lampshades.

Plus, no wonder these Köhlers were so difficult to find. They’d furnished their underground lair with an underground passage.

You couldn’t say they weren’t resourceful.

Adrenaline squirted from Willi’s adrenal glands, causing his heart to shoot fire through his veins, incinerating his lethargy. They had it now, two ways in and out.

It was time to move.

*   *   *

A coordinated raid. Group A, including Willi, Gunther, the water engineers Rollmann and Eberhard, Woerner of the
Abend Zeitung,
and a four-man team from Schupo—the security police—were going in at 5:45 through the water tunnels. Group B, a full detatchment of security police, were surrounding the perimeter, then entering the underground drive via the fertilizer plant fifteen minutes later, preventing Magda’s escape and providing backup in case of trouble. Willi wanted to make certain he was the first to penetrate the Köhlers’ lair and oversee Magda’s capture. He had a personal stake, he felt, in taking her unharmed.

Down the long, revolving staircase they came to the ground floor of the pump house, passed the five forty-eight-horsepower generators feeding the
Viehof
hydraulic system, giant turbines whirring, pistons pounding, maximum pressure building for hosing detritus from even the tiniest nooks and crannies.

Through a door marked
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY,
the nine men of Team A descended another longer staircase, Willi modulating his breathing as the air closed in and grew heavy. At the bottom an iron gate blocked their way. While Rollmann opened it, Willi looked at his watch. It was 5:45, precisely.

Right now, he knew, 4 million people in greater Berlin were carrying on as usual. In front of the war memorial on Unter den Linden, goose-stepping soldiers were performing the final changing of the guard to hundreds of clicking cameras. Nearby at the glamorous Hotel Adlon, guests were swigging cocktails at the Grill Room. Along the Spree, coal barges were chugging past the Royal Palace. At Templehof Field, silver planes glided past the semicircular terminal. At Nightclub Resi, maids were polishing the house phones on each table so patrons could call each other and exchange a few whispers tonight. While in the tenements of working-class Wedding, organ-grinders played old chestnuts to housewives who hummed along from courtyard windows. On Koch Strasse, as on every evening, competing newspapers rushed to get out late editions, especially with elections just a week away. And as patrons sat a few blocks north for schnitzel at Lutter and Wegner, worshippers arrived across the street for evening services at the French Cathedral. Or the nearby Hedwigs church. Or the Nikolai church. Or the mosque in Wilmersdorf. Or the great synagogue on Orianienburger Strasse.

But beneath Berlin’s diverse, vibrant streets lurked another, far darker world.

Twenty-five

A dim, low universe of brick.

Sky, horizon, everything, vaulting overhead like a medieval castle, but barely tall enough to stand in. Down the center, flanked by narrow sidewalks, a thin stream of water moving almost imperceptibly. Black, silent. Here and there incandescent bulbs reflecting off slick surfaces. Cold, still. A suffocating catacomb tapering into nothingness.

Sturmwasser Kanal Fünf
.

Brick arch after brick arch lured the nine-man team deeper into this claustrophobic netherworld, every step echoing back. Even Willi’s heart, it seemed, reverberated off the curvatures. And weren’t those his fears dripping down through the drain grates? What if Magda’d been tipped off? What if she was already out of Berlin? What if he was wrong altogether about this underground dungeon? Woerner perhaps liked him personally, but a failure such as that would be front-page news.

A large, brown rat scampered across his foot. Back in the trenches he’d learned to endure their slimy tails and harsh claws. But the newsman behind let out a yelp that wouldn’t stop echoing.

A feeder line forking in from the left added more water to the slow-moving flow. It hadn’t rained for a couple of weeks. The flooding last October, Eberhard pointed out with his flashlight, had completely filled this tunnel.

A thin line of mud still clung to the ceiling.

Willi’s rib cage seemed to contract. If it happened again with them down here—he looked around—there’d be no escape.

His mind filled with images: burlap sacks tumbling through rapids, white bones knocking into each other. Axel crying as he hurtled upside down.

Had that really been just hours ago?

A dim nausea shuddered through his heart.

Suddenly, he felt himself pushing back walls. Ceilings. Everything closing in. He had to command his knees not to buckle. They were going rubbery, like poor Reverend Braunschweig’s, may he rest in peace. An irrational fear skidding through his innards, something about to grab his ankle, drag him under. Never again to see his wife or children.

He forced his thoughts ahead. He couldn’t stumble now. Magda was somewhere just up ahead. A woman raped and tortured by her father, whose baby by him he’d slaughtered like a lamb—grown into a murderous monster herself. No doubt she’d put up a fine fight with a butcher’s knife. Probably skilled as hell with one, he reminded himself. The Köhler kids had been schooled by a master.

You couldn’t overestimate their determination.

He concentrated on placing one foot in front of the next, ignoring the rats, the walls, the water, his nose seeking out whatever fresh air it could find. For a moment he pictured those three children, alone in the dungeon. Days on end. Dying from stench. Their own father, the man supposed to nuture and protect them, threatening to skin them alive and eat them. What worse could a father do to a child?

And Bruno Köhler, what must his father have done to him?

“In here.” Eberhard pointed with his light. “Feeder Line J, right under the old brewery basement.”

Willi had to suppress an urge to punch this guy in the nose. All those maps he’d shown upstairs gave no indication how tight, how airless, these tunnels were. Storm Canal Five was the Grand Canyon compared to Feeder Line J.

But he took in whatever oxygen he could and stooped.

Hunching all the way over at the waist, he felt like a caveman. After a while he realized his knuckles were scraping the floor, as if they were reverting to chimpanzees. What next? Slugs on the sewer bottom?

“Man, my camera better not get ruined,” Woerner moaned.

One of the officers lost control. “I can’t breathe,” they could hear far at the end of the line. “Oh, God, get me out of here!”

“You’re all right,” another officer was trying to calm him. “Take a deep breath. We’re almost there.”

Willi followed the advice too.

But what happened to grates 27–29 that drained the old brewery? They were supposed to open over their shoulders somewhere right about here, easily accessible with the turn of some screws. Suddenly, though, Eberhard and Rollmann weren’t so sure. Apparently the flood last October had washed away not only the burlap sacks but all the sign postings too. The layer of dry muck still coating this section of feeder line was so thick it obscured all evidence there were even drain grates here.

“Clearly your maintenance crews have been asleep.” Rollmann angrily shone his flashlight about the ceiling.

“With all the layoffs,” Eberhard snapped back, “it’s a wonder there are crews left at all.”

Let’s not bicker, gentlemen, Willi was thinking, checking his watch. In three minutes the backup team would penetrate the fertilizer plant and begin descending the underground driveway. It would take approximately four minutes by foot to reach the Köhlers’ hideout, where they would bust in whatever doors they found and enter. If these drain grates remained elusive, Team B was going to beat them in and possibly upset his whole game plan.

Magda may have been psychotic, but she was cagey as hell. She’d already outsmarted Willi once and, along with her siblings, managed for years to carry out some of the most heinous crimes in recent history. Willi didn’t want to think what might happen if she had only security cops to deal with, and not him. But Rollmann and Eberhard couldn’t agree suddenly if this was even Feeder Line J.

Willi wanted to knock their heads together.

While they argued he squeezed past them, resolutely slowing his breathing and roving his flashlight overhead. During the war he’d penetrated no-man’s-land between German and French lines half a dozen times, and he’d never lost the skills he’d had to hone on those death-defying missions—parting barbed wire and slithering into fields raked with machine-gun fire, pregnant with mines. When he aroused full concentration, his vision grew almost microscopelike, able to focus in on even the tiniest objects, his brain swiftly assessing their usefulness or harm. Now, ardently tickling his fingertips along the dry mud, he stopped short at an unmistakable indent—a perfectly straight line. And several inches above it, another one. A grate, all right.

After two minutes’ manipulation they coaxed it open, spraying debris into the feeder line and sending up a cloud of dust. When they squeezed through and pushed themselves up, they were able to stand fully erect on the floor of a dark brick cave.

“This is it,” Eberhard whispered as if they’d entered a pharaoh’s tomb. His flashlight fell on a large stack of wooden kegs still stamped with
TANNHAUSER BIER.
Decrepit equipment lay about: tubing, filters. The fetid air felt as if it hadn’t been changed in a century. An abysmal gloom hovered over everything. Perhaps the place wasn’t even connected with the Köhlers’ bunker after all, Willi feared.

But then he spotted them.

At the far end of the room—burlap sacks. A lot of them. His whole throat clenched when he shone a light and saw on each the now-familiar
SCHNITZLER AND SON.
There must have been scores. Aligned in straight rows. Like headstones in a cemetery. And full, all right. He walked over to one and ripped open the top, then another and another. His stomach turned. Each was stuffed with clean, white bones.

“Hey, look.” Gunther’s flashlight aimed at the wall above.

All the bricks had been scratched with names and dates:

Ernst Adler—6.26.28

Kristof Furth—3.16.29

Someone had taken great pains to knife everything in using elementary-school block letters. Every brick on the entire wall was incribed this way. There had to be a hundred names. The earliest, Willi saw, dated back to 1924. The year the Köhlers had gone from kidnapping dogs to children.

Checking his watch, Willi saw it was now after six. Team B had already set out. Magda was somewhere overhead. He had four minutes to find and grab her before her door burst in and set off every alarm she had. Yet there was no apparent way out of here, as if they were trapped in a well. No stairs. No doors. The ceiling had to be twenty feet high. How the hell did they get these burlap sacks down here?

It was Gunther, again, who spotted it first.

“Look, chief.” He pointed out a set of tracks embedded in the wall leading all the way to a second story, where they could vaguely make out a set of wooden doors. “We had one like it in our barn. A grain elevator.”

“But how does it work? There’s no electricity.”

Gunther began pushing aside bags until he found a rickety wooden platform attached by ropes and wheels to the tracks. “You turn this handle, which yanks these pulleys.” He demonstrated.

Willi swallowed. Not a promising option. Even if the ancient-looking contraption held, only one person at a time could get on. Plus, it hadn’t been oiled in God knew how long and made enough noise to wake the dead.