Children of Wrath (8 page)

Braunschweig tried to aim his bloodshot gaze at Willi, but had a hard time fixing it there. “Their leader’s terribly charismatic, a
very
depraved figure … a former member here, a rather important one I’m ashamed to admit.”

With an uncertain mixture of gratitude and horror, Willi stuck a hand in his coat pocket. Was all this just a drunken rant? It sure sounded like it. But then again … He pulled out a notebook. “Go on, Reverend. You have no idea how much I appreciate this. What’s his name?”

“It’s not a him, Kraus. It’s my former wife, Helga Braunschweig.”

Six

Vicki stuck her head in the bathroom. “Ban’s been lifted.”

Under the shower spray, Willi wasn’t certain he’d actually heard right. “Huh?”

“Sausages … back on sale.”

His eyes widened so far shampoo dripped in. “Ow.” He hurriedly rinsed them. “You positive?”

“Just on the radio. They found the bacteria. Save some hot water for me, will you, darling?”

It would have been nice had someone informed him. Willi shut off the shower.

Over toast at breakfast, Erich looked at him with great, brown eyes.

“
Vati,
I’ve made a decision.”

“Have you.”

“Yes. I know what I’d like for Hanukkah.”

“And what might that be? Mind your crumbs.”

“A model Fokker triplane, like the Red Baron flew in the war.”

At least he was over the aquarium, Willi thought. “Well, I think that’s very wise, Erich. There’s a whole department for model planes at KDW. Surely they’ll have the Red Baron’s. We can go Saturday when I’m finished with work.”

“Can I come too?” the little one wanted to know.

“Of course, Stefan,” Willi assured him, though he realized Saturday was the day he’d hoped to poke around that preposterous “love cult” the reverend had told him about. Could it possibly be true? It seemed too outlandish. Even for Berlin. He couldn’t stop thinking about what Braunschweig had said, though: “With children too.” What exactly could that mean? He was almost too afraid to imagine. Clearly the line between fact and fiction got blurred under all that booze. But he’d given Willi an address card. A completely insane-looking thing with all sorts of pentagrams and Egyptian symbols on it:
DIVINE RADIANCE MISSION, 143 BLEIBTREU STRASSE. CHARLOTTENBURG.
A swank enough neighborhood. Still, the kids came first. Question was, which kids? His, or the ones whose bones had been boiled by a lunatic still on the loose? What he really ought to do was turn the whole thing over to Freksa.

The phone made him jump. So early in the morning?

It was Frau Doktor Riegler.

“Sorry I didn’t inform you, Sergeant.” She sounded a little sheepish. “We only confirmed it yesterday. And then, let’s just say politics was involved.”

Willi didn’t even want to know what she meant by that. Only where they’d found the bacteria. “Was it a peddler?”

“There’ll be a news conference at ten. Ninety-two Thaer Strasse.
Central-Viehof
. You’ll want to be there.”

*   *   *

From the platform of the S-Bahn station Willi could see into the otherworldly landscape of the
Viehof
across a wide river of tracks. Entirely encircled by high brick walls to obscure its more unsavory aspects, the acres of glass-roofed market halls, immaculate stockyards, high ramps, tunnels, and ultra-efficient slaughterhouses were among the engineering marvels of Berlin. This was Willi’s second trip here. How vividly he recalled the first a few weeks ago, a real grand tour. Just two days after visiting Strohmeyer’s
Wurst
works, it had completed his picture of the city’s meat industry, animal to sausage.

Viehof
director Gruber himself had met him at the station in a shiny Daimler, confessing his admiration for the criminal police and a hopeless addiction to detective novels. It was a usual enough tactic to try to sweet-talk Kripo agents who were poking around your backyard, Willi knew. But Gruber had laid it on thick. “You boys at the Alex are the best.” He’d pumped Willi’s hand as if he were meeting a movie star. “And we at the
Viehof
—not so very different, if I may sing our own praises. Healthy meat’s no more a luxury these days than law and order, don’t you agree? We all labor for the public good.”

An elephantine man with a thin mustache, he oozed professional pride.

“Before 1882,” he proclaimed as they were chauffeured down Eldenaer Strasse toward the
Viehof
entrance, “anyone could butcher animals wherever they wanted to in Berlin. Quite a mess, actually. Then everything was brought here, into one municipally run facility. Today we have nearly eleven hundred operators, large and small, leasing space under our rules and supervision. A most propitious arrangement.”

Past the main gates, the avenues, filled with trucks and carts and horse-drawn wagons, were lined with handsome buildings in traditional North German brickwork, from deep reds to honey golds. Gruber pointed out the administrative center, the telegraph offices, the archives, the commodities exchange, the veterinary labs. There were cafeteria-style restaurants, coffeehouses, beer halls. Stores selling every sort of supply from cleavers and hooks to hip boots and aprons. Even a kiosk of Loeser & Wolff, Berlin’s best-known tobacconists, if Willi cared for a cigar.

“We have fifty-seven buildings on a hundred and twenty acres. Fifteen miles of paved streets. Five thousand people who earn their daily bread here. The
Viehof
itself employs veterinarians, meat inspectors, sample takers, even our own fire department.”

On the east side were the stockyards and sales halls. On the west, the slaughterhouses and by-product installations. Joining the two, a series of tunnels enabling livestock to be herded from one to the other. It was Wednesday, market day, so Gruber suggested they stop by and see how it all worked.

The glass-roofed cattle market was so enormous Willi had barely been able to see the other end, and so loud he couldn’t hear himself think. Endless rows of corrals were filled with countless varieties of steer, and an equal number of men in hats and overcoats screaming offers and counteroffers. Gruber’d pointed out how the butchers’ agents examined the gaze, the mouths, even the breaths of the livestock they were interested in. A healthy cow had bright eyes, a moist nose, easy breathing. A sick one had crusty nostrils, heavy eyes, a hanging tongue. The moment a sick beast was detected, it was sent to a special quarantine ward. Executed. Sterilized. Sold to the poor as
Freibank.
But few sick ones ever made it this far, Gruber assiduously assured.

Like everyone on this case, the
Viehof
Direktor had been trying to convince Willi the
Listeria
outbreak could not possibly have originated here—an entirely understandable impulse.

“Our animals arrive from all over Europe. Veterinary and meat inspections are an integral aspect of our work. Before any livestock ever reaches the stables, much less the trading floors, every animal is inspected at the ramp. Come, I’ll show you.”

He’d taken Willi to the
Entladenbahnhof,
the enormous rail station inside the
Viehof
linked directly to the
Ringbahn,
the system of rails encircling Berlin. Here, arriving tracks branched into multiple ramps, each capable of unloading a twenty-wagon freight train. A separate disinfection ramp contained a facility capable of cleaning empty train cars at a rate of fifty per hour. When it functioned as designed, the process went like clockwork, Gruber boasted.

The shrill shriek of a steam whistle turned their heads in unison. A giant black locomotive was pulling in with its load.

“I wish I could say I arranged it for you, Herr Sergeant. But these transports arrive with frequent regularity. Now you can see the whole show.”

The train of twenty wooden freight cars rumbled up, originating, Willi saw, from a town in Poland. The journey, Gruber told him, had taken eleven hours. An ear-piercing screech of brakes brought the whole thing to halt. Jumping from the locomotive, the conductor looked down the length of the train, and when teams of attendants were ready by each wagon, he blew a whistle. Simultaneously all twenty sealed doors were flung open, and like a dam burst, a flood of pink pigs poured from each car, squealing, snorting, screaming, grunting, driven by men with sticks. Channeled down ramps into single files, they were met by teams of veterinary police in long canvas smocks. Before they were allowed into a holding pen, each creature had to pass muster. Most made it inside, awaiting further herding to the stockyards and market day. The few who did not were driven down a ramp directly to oblivion. In either case their fate was sealed. Once they arrived
,
Gruber had chuckled, the only way an animal ever left the
Viehof
was in quarters, hinds, or cutlets.

They’d driven through a gate to the western zone, down avenues lined with giant redbrick structures, each several football fields long with towering smokestacks at the end. They might have been factories, machine shops, or tool sheds. But these, Gruber explained, were the slaughterhouses. Seven of them, processing eight thousand animals per day. Nearly 3 million per year. The shiny black Daimler halted.

Blocking the road in front of them, a herd of sheep had emerged from a tunnel fresh from the market halls. Baying and bleating by the hundreds, they were driven by men with sticks up numbered ramps—26, 27, 28—into the nearest brick building and forced one by one through swinging doors.

“Care to see how it’s done?” Gruber’d asked.

Willi looked at the fleecy, white bodies pushing up against each other as they pressed inside. A man wearing hip boots and a long, white apron was standing at the door smoking. His apron, Willi saw, was splattered with blood. He shook his head no thanks. He didn’t need to see. But for a guy who’d killed his fair share of humans, it was kind of embarrassing.

Gruber just smiled. “Most visitors don’t want to. I understand. I assure you, though, it’s as humane as we can make it. Basically, the animals never know what hits them. They’re isolated by sliding grates. Immobilized, stunned, suspended, bled from the throat. Then they’re flayed, scraped, gutted, hacked. Conveyed by overhead carriers to the cold chambers. Once there, each carcass is inspected for parasites and other signs of disease. Then they’re divided into meat and nonmeat parts. That’s one of the cold-chamber buildings there.” Gruber pointed to a massive windowless structure down the road.

“The temperature never rises above thirty-five degrees. Butchers rent separate areas and draw on supplies as business requires. After leaving the
Viehof,
the better meats go to the wholesale market across Landsberger Allee, where they’re purchased by dealers who ship them to the Central Market at Alexanderplatz or directly to retail shops. Beef, generally, is sold by the side. Pigs, sheep, calves, usually are transported as whole carcasses to be made into sausages, hams, or cold cuts in private shops.”

“What’s that?” Willi’d asked of the hexagonal tower rising seven or eight stories like a medieval castle.

“The old water tower. No longer in use. Kind of creepy, huh?” Gruber’d laughed. “Maybe we should rent it out for one of those vampire movies. The modern one’s over there, above the engine house. Five forty-eight-horsepower engines feed the whole hydraulic system. Naturally, we’re stricter than the army about cleanliness. All our facilities, slaughter, storage, stockyards, are equipped not only with excellent ventilation and light, but plentiful water at maximum pressure. Everything has to be constantly hosed down. Even the floors here have gutters so that drainage can be discharged.”

“Drainage?” Willi felt a strange tingle. “Where does it go, all that runoff?”

Gruber seemed to find the question off point. “The sewer lines, naturally.” He fingered his mustache. “Come let me show you one of our most interesting sectors: the by-product zone.”

Around a bend in the road, in the southernmost part of the
Viehof,
were dozens of businesses specializing in making things out of nonmeat animal parts. Everything but the excrement, Gruber had assured, was collected and utilized. Stomachs, lungs, spleens, kidneys, livers, brains, fatty tissue, hooves, hides, bristles, glands …

“Here we have a whole street of firms that specialize in laundering tripe for sausage casing—so necessary to the process, as you no doubt already saw at your visit to Strohmeyer’s. Over there, a whole block filled with nothing but little shops that melt fats into tallow, for candles and wax.”

The stench was remarkable. The heavy, oily fumes pouring out of some of these places were among the most offensive Willi’d ever encountered. Even on the battlefield.

“That street there is full of tanneries, where hides are worked into leather. And the little alley there has companies that sterilize bristles, for the brush-making industry. That particularly piquant aroma you’ve no doubt noticed is from way down there, the glue factories. And a bit further, the blood works. And further still, the bone boilers.”

Bone boilers? The word sent another strange tingle through Willi.

“Come now, Sergeant, don’t act so surprised. The use of bone grease is as old as civilization. Poor man’s butter. Be thankful if you’ve never had to use it. Plenty in this city do. And marrow, well, I don’t have to tell you … delicious with shallots and wild mushrooms, or grilled with herbs and spread on toast.”

*   *   *

Now, on his second visit, no one came to greet him.

Willi had to walk the long bridge across the tracks from the S-Bahn station into the frigid wind alone, the gray sky ahead smudged with sludge from the slaughterhouse smokestacks. At least, he thought, the source of bacteria had been found. Fifteen dead. Fifteen hundred sickened. Heads were sure to roll.

Passing the main gates and into the
Viehof,
though, it wasn’t
Listeria
but drainpipes and bone boilers floating through his brain. Could there be a link between this place and that burlap sack? The construction site where it’d turned up was less than a mile away.