Children of Wrath (4 page)

“I know it’s frustrating, Willi. More than that.” The doctor’s dark eyes rested on him gently, almost lovingly. “It’s downright degrading. Depressing. You become a policeman because you believe in justice and at every turn meet injustice. But a passion for what’s right isn’t the only virtue a good police officer must possess. Patience. Wisdom. A vision of the larger picture. A sense of responsibility.”

Willi could feel that bag of bones slipping farther and farther from his hands.

Why was it so important to him?

Three

“Responsibility”—Otto Winkelmann proudly puffed his pipe—“is nature’s most basic survival precept. Heinz’s gift will help him learn what the word really means.”

Willi’d already gotten an earful about it when he’d arrived home from work earlier, Stefan and Erich all over him about how the Winkelmanns had bought their son a ten-liter aquarium for his birthday, filled with guppies. If only we could get one like that, they’d cried. Now, over dinner, Willi heard how, after the tank had been set up, Heinz had gotten quite a lesson in the birds and bees too—so to speak. In minutes, one of the guppies had gone from big-bellied to bone thin, and a dozen shiny-silver slivers were darting around the water.

“Could that really be true?” Otto’s sister-in-law seemed incredulous, checking with her husband. “Don’t fish lay eggs?”

“Here we go-o-o-o!” Frau Winkelmann interrupted, bursting through the terrace door, practically invisible behind her steaming platter.

Everyone at the table sat up and oohed.

In honor of Heinzie’s birthday she had bestowed the rarefied pleasure on a select few—Vicki, Willi, and her relatives the Klempers—of her deviled ribs.

Despite himself Willi felt drawn into the group trance as she placed the tray down. Not that he had much appetite after lunch at headquarters this afternoon. But some rites were too seductive to resist.

“You’re the
Meister,
Irmgard.” Vicki applauded as if it were opening night at the opera. “Nobody devils a rib like you.”

Their host, Otto Winkelmann, struck a more commemorative note. “Remember how many times we could only dream of such meals? During the war and then the revolution and then the—”

“Oh, really, Otto,” his sister-in-law erupted. “Why must you litanize such things? I can’t stand even to think of them.” Frau Klemper rested her plump fingers on her bosom, sniffing at the beef. “I refuse to ever think of those awful times again.”

“That’s idiotic, Magda.” Her husband rolled his eyes as if she were really too much. “Remembering is all that keeps us from forgetting. Isn’t that so, Otto?” Felix Klemper stuffed a napkin between his bulging neck and collar. A manager at some second-rate insurance firm in the Hermannplatz, he was fond of asserting superiority over his wife with such inanities, Willi recalled. The man was a certified boor.

The wife wasn’t such a treat, either.

But broiled in all that hot pepper, mustard, and horseradish, those ribs looked dandy indeed. And enough to give one dyspepsia for a week. Perhaps irritation was just a natural part of life’s cycle, Willi considered, noticing his gastric juices already pumping as a heaping plate passed his way. He’d never cared a bit for the Winkelmanns’ pompous in-laws, for example, but found himself dining with them regularly enough.

Like most apartment buildings in middle-class Wilmersdorf, 82-84 Beckmann Strasse was built around a central courtyard with a small patch of grass and some trees. For seven years the Krauses and Winkelmanns had lived next door to each other on the third floor. They shared a common terrace. Their boys were the same ages. And although one family was Jewish and the other Christian, their lives had grown as entwined as the vines that ran along the courtyard walls.

Kids’ birthdays were communal affairs. Luckily, it was warm enough to celebrate Heinz Winkelmann’s on the terrace in only light jackets. It had been a warm autumn. Roses still blossomed on the trellis overhead. The kids, who, even on birthdays, didn’t get delicacies such as deviled ribs, had already finished dumpling dinners and were audible below in the yard playing cowboys and Indians. The adults, on their third bottle of Riesling, were more than ready to feast. But just as they were about to dig in, Frau Klemper froze with her knife in midair and looked around red-faced with embarrassment. “Are you really all so convinced the ribs are safe to eat?”

The silence could have knocked down the building.

The horror in Frau Winkelmann’s eyes made plain she thought her sister-in-law might just as well have stuck a knife in her throat. She’d killed the evening certainly, all her hours over a hot oven, Heinz’s entire ninth birthday.

The Kommissar had been right on this one, Willi realized. The sausage scare was terrorizing Berlin.

Two more people had died this afternoon. A dozen more had gone to hospitals. The Ministry of Public Health had officially put a stop to all sausage sales until the source of contamination had been found.
WURST IN BERLIN—AUS!
the afternoon papers screamed in a headline size reserved for events such as the kaiser’s abdication.

Casting a look as if to say she hoped she wasn’t about to betray Willi, Vicki leapt in to attempt a rescue. He’d told her a few details he’d learned since being assigned to the case today, and while she’d normally never dream of bringing up such things in a social situation, this time, her glance pleaded, circumstance demanded it.

“Yes, of course, the meat’s safe, Frau Klemper.” Her eyes glimmered beneath their long, dark lashes. “The problem’s entirely confined to sausages. Isn’t that so, dear?”

The glimmer flashed on Willi.

“Oh, absolutely,” he backed Vicki instinctively. “Our beef could not be safer.”

He had no sure knowledge this was true, only that his word would suffice to end the discussion and rescue the Winkelmanns’ party. Reason enough, he believed, to give it. For seven years the families had seen each other through births, deaths, chicken pox, broken bones, boom times, and economic chaos. A little white lie, a slight abuse of power, seemed hardly out of order. Certainly Frau Klemper took it as the next best thing to an imperial edict, all but curtsying with gratitude.

“Well, then, from a Sergeant-Detektiv in Kripo!” She nodded at Willi repeatedly, but waited for him to dig in first. He obliged, and in seconds everyone was tearing at the ribs. Which did not, however, preclude the discussion of meat contamination.

“The early edition of
Berlin am Mittag
was explicit.” Otto Winkelmann picked up his knife and fork. “The bacteria have been positively identified.” Chewing, he cast his wife a deferential gaze. “My dear, you truly have outdone yourself this time.”

“You mean the E. coli?” Frau Klemper’s eyes fluttered in agreement. “He’s absolutely right, Irmgard. Your sauce ought to be declared a national treasure. Still, I’m quite certain a late edition retracted that declaration.”

“The
People’s Observer
affirmed it’s definitely not E. coli.” Herr Klemper already had Irmgard’s national treasure all over the napkin on his chest. “It is salmonella. Are there no more potatoes? Are we back to war rationing?”

Willi knew it was neither E. coli nor salmonella.

“But why does it take so long to determine?” Frau Klemper opened her chubby fingers, unable to believe such a process could take more than an hour, at most.

“Shocking. Shocking.” Irmgard Winkelmann came around, plunking more potatoes onto her brother’s plate. “That it could happen in Berlin.”

That nothing could penetrate the ring of defenses protecting the city’s meat supply was not a notion entirely without merit, Willi now understood. In the short time he’d spent at the Ministry of Public Health today, he’d learned that the regime of controls established by them decades ago was formidable indeed, and, given the size of the industry, rarely breached. Even during the war, as Vicki had recalled, when four years of Allied blockade had left a million Berliners on the edge of starvation, there’d been no serious contamination of the meat supplies. In fact, there hadn’t been a really major contamination in Berlin since hundreds died in the trichinosis outbreak ninety years ago, which had prompted those public health measures to begin with.

Until now. With all the controls.

As usual, the city’s myriad newspapers had only gotten part of the story right. In this case, the number of victims, their ages, etc. But as far as pathogenic culprits, in their endeavors to outscoop the competition, the headlines all had it wrong. For once, though, it wasn’t their fault. The Ministry of Public Health, Willi’d learned, was intentionally song-and-dancing the public.

Arriving at their big granite headquarters near the Wilhelmplatz shortly after his talk with Dr. Weiss, he’d sensed a real war fever in the air. Technicians flying down corridors. Typewriters banging. No one going home this weekend. His liaison there, head of the medical crisis team, Frau Doktor Riegler, all but pushed him in front of a microscope.

“Big trouble.” She focused the viewfinder for him. “E. coli and salmonella are pussycats compared to this.”

Willi’s vision had filled with jerking rod-shaped figures.

“Listeria monocytogenes,”
she whispered as if it were too terrible to say loudly. “Ten times deadlier than most food-borne pathogens. Those nasty little bugs thrive in the most outrageous heat and cold. Long after you think they’re gone … they’re back. You must keep cleaning. Testing. Cleaning. Testing.”

Willi thought they looked harmless enough, though more than one killer he’d tracked had. The incessant flagellation fixated him.

“What happens when they infect humans?”

“Nausea. Vomiting. Diarrhea. In serious cases—high fever. In the worst, convulsions. We’ve seen it all the last ten days.”

“Ten?” He looked away from the lens. The Frau Doktor offered him a tilted little smile. “How could that be? The first reports came out only yesterday.”

“We don’t report what we don’t know for certain.” Her smile sank away. “Otherwise there’d be mass hysteria. You see what’s happening now as it is, Sergeant.” Her voice swelled with authority. “Like many bacteria,
Listeria
’s ubiquitous. The main route of infection’s through food. But that could be anything from vegetables to meat, poultry, fish, dairy. It took us ten days to get a fix on the sausages.” She clutched her clipboard. “We couldn’t have the whole city too terrified to eat.”

True enough, Willi agreed. And from someone who’d beaten the odds to get where she had, given the number of women doctors in Berlin. Smart, accomplished. Why then the nervous tic? “Because of the fatalities,” she was saying, and just beneath her left eye the muscle was jerking, Willi noticed, like one of those little bugs under the microscope, “the question of criminal intent must be considered.”

She was under great strain obviously, the whole city depending on her, and now having the criminal police to deal with. But back in university, in a course titled Physiology and Psychology, he’d learned that involuntary muscle contractions sometimes confessed what the mouth refused to. He couldn’t help wondering what the Frau Doktor’s might be trying to say.

Why was Winkelmann grinning like that?

“Because now that Kripo’s in on the act”—he was raising a glass at Willi—“you may be certain the tainted-sausage case will proceed to a rapid conclusion.”

“Here, here.” Everyone on the balcony toasted. “To the Kriminal Polizei!”

Willi raised a glass too, hoping his neighbor was right.

*   *   *

Winkelmann of course was Willi’s biggest fan. He loved to boast he’d watched Willi advance from a wet-behind-the-ears cadet to a seasoned detective down at the Alex. All in seven years. Willi always felt obliged to remind him that during the same period Winkelmann had risen from stock clerk to owning his own stationery store. But Willi’s career seemed a real adventure novel by comparison, and retelling chapters was hardly unpleasant with such an enraptured audience. Winkelmann’s eyes would bulge, his feet would twitch, as Willi recounted how he’d had to climb the water tower in Prenzlauerberg to capture the slave-ring conspirators. Or hide in a dumbwaiter to spy on the Neukoln tenement killer. Even Willi’s boys didn’t listen with such intensity. Vicki certainly never wanted to hear his stories. She was proud enough of his profession, but the physical aspect terrified her. Sometimes Willi thought she pretended he was a sales manager at the Tietz department store or something. What had Freud called that—?

“Elsie, I’ll break every goddamn bone in your—”

Along with dusk, the children had crept into the apartment, and the Klemper girl, twelve, was clearly visible from the terrace doing cartwheels across the parlor, flying past the breakfront filled with Irmgard Winklemann’s Meissen figurines. Klemper’s admonition sent the child scurrying animal-like back into the dark.

“See how they listen?” The insurance man adjusted the napkin around his neck. “Because they know … Papa’s boss. And how do they know?”

“Because they’ve been trained,” his wife and his sister blurted simultaneously. Looking at each other, they broke into embarrassed giggles.

“Don’t make fun.” Klemper wagged a finger at them, flushing. Clearly he hated being laughed at and yanked the napkin off his collar. “Had I pulled a stunt like that, my father would have grilled me good. Until my butt smoked.” His eyes flared accusatorily. “And don’t think I’m not the man I am today because of it.”

Alarmed by the unrelieved heat in his voice, Frau Klemper moved to lower the temperature. “You are absolutely right, Felix.” She looked around, enjoining the others to pour a little cold water on.

But it was too late. Klemper was boiling over.

“Just the other afternoon”—his eyeballs rolled—“in the number 41 streetcar—a child was eating one of those disgusting jelly rolls next to me.” His whitened lips began to quiver. “Dripping, dropping, squirting all over my trouser leg. And what did the mother do? Not offer to pay any cleaning bills, I can assure you.” He slapped the table. “I had to refrain from grabbing each of them”—he demonstrated unconsciously on his napkin—“and ringing their necks.”