Garden of Beasts (15 page)

The telephone buzzed and he picked it up. “This is Kohl.”

“Inspector, it is Schreiber, the clerk you spoke to today. Hail Hitler.”

“Yes, yes, hail.” On the way back to the Alex from the Summer Garden, Kohl and Janssen had stopped at the haberdashery department at Tietz, the massive department store that dominated the north side of Alexander Plaza, near Kripo headquarters. Kohl had shown the clerk the picture of Göring’s hat and asked what kind it was. The man didn’t know but would look into the matter.

“Any luck?” Kohl asked him.

“Ach, yes, yes, I have found the answer. It’s a Stetson. Made in the United States. As you know, Minister Göring shows the finest taste.”

Kohl made no comment on that. “Are they common here?”

“No, sir. Quite rare. Expensive, as you can imagine.”

“Where could I buy one in Berlin?”

“In truth, sir, I don’t know. The minister, I’m told, special-orders them from London.”

Kohl thanked him, hung up and told Janssen what he’d learned.

“So perhaps he’s an American,” Janssen said. “But perhaps not. Since Göring wears the same hat.”

“A small piece of the puzzle, Janssen. But you will find that many small pieces often give a clearer picture of a crime than a single large piece.” He took the brown evidence envelopes from his pocket and selected the one containing the bullet.

The Kripo had its own forensics laboratory, dating back to when the Prussian police force had been the nation’s preeminent law enforcer (if not the world’s; in the Weimar days, the Kripo closed 97 percent of the murder cases in Berlin). But the lab too had been raided by the Gestapo both for equipment and personnel, and the technical workers at headquarters were harried and far less competent than they had once been. Willi Kohl, therefore, had taken it upon himself to become an expert in certain areas of criminal science. Despite the absence of his personal interest in firearms, Kohl had made quite a study of ballistics, modeling his approach on the best firearms laboratory in the world—the one at J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington, D.C.

He shook the bullet out onto a clean piece of paper.

Placing the monocle in his eye he found a pair of tweezers and examined the slug carefully. “Your eyes are better,” he said. “You look.”

The inspector candidate carefully took the bullet and the monocle while Kohl pulled a binder from his shelf. It contained photographs and sketches of many types of bullets. The binder was large, several hundred pages, but the inspector had organized it by caliber and by number of grooves and lands—the stripes pressed into a lead slug by the rifling in the barrel—and whether they twisted to the left or the right. Only five minutes later Janssen found a match.

“Ach, this is good news,” Kohl said.

“How so?”

“It is an unusual weapon our killer used. Look. It’s a nine-millimeter Largo round. Most likely from the Spanish Star Modelo A. Good for us, it is rare. And as you pointed out, it is either a new weapon or one that has been fired little. Let us hope the former. Janssen, you have a way with words: Please send a telegram to all police precincts in the area. Have them query gun shops and see if any have sold a new or little-used Star Modelo A in the past several months, or ammunition for such a gun. No, make that the past year. I want names and addresses of all purchasers.”

“Yes, sir.”

The young inspector candidate took down the information and started for the Teletype room.

“Wait, add as a postscript to your message a description of our suspect. And that he is armed.” The inspector gathered up the clearest photographs of the suspect’s fingerprints and the inked card of the victim’s. Sighing, he said, “And now I must try to be diplomatic. Ach, how I hate doing that.”

Chapter Ten

“I am sorry, Inspector Kohl, the department is engaged.”

“Entirely?”

“Yes, sir,” said the prim bald man in a tight suit, buttoned high on his chest. “Several hours ago we were ordered to stop all other investigations and compile a list of everyone in the files with a Russian background or pronounced appearance.”

They were in the ante-office of the Kripo’s large identification division, where fingerprint analysis and anthropometry were performed.

“
Everyone
in Berlin?”

“Yes. There is some alert going on.”

Ah, the security matter again, the one that Krauss had deemed too insignificant to mention to the Kripo.

“They’re using
fingerprint
examiners to check personal files? And
our
fingerprint examiners, no less?”

“Drop everything,” the buttoned-up little man replied. “Those were my orders. From Sipo headquarters.”

Himmler again, Kohl thought. “Please, Gerhard, these are vital.” He showed him the fingerprint card and the photos.

“They are good pictures.” Gerhard examined them. “Very clear.”

“Put three or four examiners on it, please. That’s all I’m asking.”

A pinched-face laugh crossed the administrator’s face. “I cannot, Inspector. Three? Impossible.”

Kohl felt the frustration. A student of foreign criminal science, he looked with envy at America and England, where forensic identification was now done almost exclusively by fingerprint analysis. Here, yes, fingerprints were used for identification but, unlike in the United States, the Germans had no uniform system of analyzing prints; each area of the country was different. A policeman in Westphalia might analyze a print in one way; a Berlin Kripo officer would analyze it differently. By posting the samples back and forth it was possible to achieve an identification but the process could take weeks. Kohl had long advocated standardizing fingerprint analysis throughout the country but had met with considerable resistance and lethargy. He’d also urged his supervisor to buy some American wire-photo machines, remarkable devices that could transmit clear facsimile photographs and pictures, such as of fingerprints, over telephone lines in minutes. They were, however, quite expensive and his boss had turned down the request without even taking the matter up with the police president.

More troubling to Kohl, though, was that once the National Socialists came to power fingerprints took on less importance than the antiquated system of Bertillon anthropometry, in which measurements of the body, face and head were used to identify criminals. Kohl, like most modern detectives, rejected Bertillon analysis as unwieldy; yes, each person’s body structure was largely different from another’s, but dozens of precise measurements were needed to categorize someone. And, unlike fingerprints, criminals rarely left sufficient bodily impressions at the scene to link any individual to the site of the crime through Bertillon data.

But the National Socialists’ interest in anthropometry went beyond merely identifying someone; it was the key to what they termed the “science” of criminobiology: categorizing people as criminal irrespective of their behavior, solely on their physical characteristics. Hundreds of Gestapo and SS labored full-time to correlate size of nose and shade of skin, for instance, to proclivity to commit a crime. Himmler’s goal was not to bring criminals to justice but to eliminate crime
before
it occurred.

To Kohl this was as frightening as it was foolish.

Looking out over the huge room of long tables, filled with men and women hunched over documents, Kohl now decided that the diplomacy he’d summoned up on the way here would have no effect. A different tactic was required: deceit. “Very well. Tell me a date you can begin your analysis. I must tell Krauss
something.
He’s been nagging me for hours.”

A pause. “Our Pietr Krauss?”

“The
Gestapo’s
Krauss, yes. I’ll tell him… what shall I tell him, Gerhard? It will take you a week, ten days?”

“The Gestapo is involved?”

“Krauss and I investigated the crime scene together.” At least this much was true. More or less.

“Perhaps this incident relates to the security situation,” the man said, uneasy now.

“I’m sure it does,” Kohl said. “Perhaps those very prints are from the Russian in question.”

The man said nothing but looked over the pictures. He was so slim; why did he wear such a tight suit?

“I will submit the prints to an examiner. I will call you with any results.”

“Whatever you can do will be appreciated,” Kohl said, thinking: Ach,
one
examiner? Most likely useless, unless he happened to find a lucky match.

Kohl thanked the technician and walked back up the stairs to his floor. He entered the office of his superior, Friedrich Horcher, who was chief of inspectors for Berlin-Potsdam.

The lean, gray-haired man, with a throwback of a waxed mustache, had been a good investigator in his early days and had weathered the seas of recent German politics well. Horcher had been ambivalent about the Party; he’d been a secret member in the terrible days of the Inflation, then he quit because of Hitler’s extreme views. Only recently had he joined again, reluctantly perhaps, drawn along inexorably by the course the nation was taking. Or perhaps he was a true convert. Kohl had no idea which was the case.

“How is this case coming, Willi? The Dresden Alley case?”

“Slowly, sir.” He added grimly, “Resources are occupied, it seems.
Our
resources.”

“Yes, something is going on. An alert of some sort.”

“Indeed.”

“Have you heard anything about it, I wonder?” Horcher asked.

“No, nothing.”

“But still we are under such pressure. They think the world is watching and one dead man near the Tiergarten might ruin the image of our city forever.” At Horcher’s level, irony was a dangerous luxury and Kohl could detect none in the man’s voice. “Any suspects?”

“Some aspects of his appearance, some small clues. That’s all.”

Horcher straightened the papers on his desk. “It would be helpful if the perpetrator was—”

“—a foreigner?” Kohl supplied.

“Exactly.”

“We shall see…. I would like to do one thing, sir. The victim is as yet unidentified. This is a handicap. I would like to run a picture in
The People’s Observer
and the
Journal
and see if anyone recognizes him.”

Horcher laughed. “A picture of a dead body in the paper?”

“Without knowing the victim we are largely disadvantaged in the investigation.”

“I will send the matter to the propaganda office and see what Minister Goebbels has to say. It would have to be cleared with him.”

“Thank you, sir.” Kohl turned to leave. Then he paused. “One other matter, Chief of Inspectors. I am still waiting for that report from Gatow. It’s been a week. I was wondering if you perhaps had received it.”

“What was in Gatow? Oh, that shooting?”

“Two,” Kohl corrected. “Two shootings.”

In the first, two families, picnicking by the Havel River, southwest of Berlin, had been shot to death: seven individuals, including three children. The next day there’d been a second slaughter: eight laborers, living in caravans between Gatow and Charlottenburg, the exclusive suburb west of Berlin.

The police commandant in Gatow had never handled such a case and had one of his gendarmes call the Kripo for help. Raul, an eager young officer, had spoken to Kohl, and had sent photos of the crime scene to the Alex. Willi Kohl, hardened to homicide investigations, had nonetheless been shocked at the sight of the mothers and children gunned down. The Kripo had jurisdiction over all nonpolitical crimes anywhere in Germany, and Kohl wished to make the murders a priority.

But legal jurisdiction and allocation of resources were two very different matters, particularly in these crimes, where the victims were, Raul informed him, Jews and Poles, respectively.

“We’ll let the Gatow gendarmerie handle it,” Horcher had told him last week.

“Homicides of this magnitude?” Kohl had asked, both troubled and skeptical. The suburban and rural gendarmes investigated automobile accidents and stolen cows. And the chief of the Gatow constabulary, Wilhelm Meyerhoff, was a dull, lazy civil servant who couldn’t find his breakfast zwieback without help.

So Kohl had persisted with Horcher until he got permission to at least review the crime scene report. He’d called Raul and coached him in basic investigation techniques and had asked him to interview witnesses. The gendarme promised to send the report to Kohl as soon as his superior approved it. Kohl had received the photographs but no other materials.

Horcher now said, “I’ve heard nothing, Willi. But, please—Jews, Poles? We have other priorities.”

Kohl said thoughtfully, “Of course, sir. I understand. I only care that the Kosis don’t get away with anything.”

“The Communists? What does this have to do with them?”

“I didn’t form the idea until I saw the photographs. But I observed there was something organized about the killings—and there was no attempt to cover them up. The murders were too obvious to me. They seemed almost staged.”

Horcher considered this. “You’re thinking the Kosis wanted to make it appear that the SS or Gestapo were behind the killings? Yes, that’s clever, Willi. The red bastards would certainly stoop to that.”

Kohl added, “Especially with the Olympics, the foreign press in town. How the Kosis would love to mar our image in the eyes of the world.”

“I will look into the report, Willi. I’ll make some calls. A good thought on your part.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Now, go clear the Dresden Alley case. If our chief of police wants a blemish-free city, he shall have one.”

Kohl returned to his office and sat heavily in his chair, massaging his feet as he stared at the photographs of the two murdered families. It was nonsense what he had told Horcher. Whatever had happened in Gatow, it was not a Communist plot. But the National Socialists went for conspiracies like pigs for slop. These were games that had to be played. Ach, what an education he’d had since January of ’33.

He put the pictures back into the file folder labeled
Gatow/Charlottenburg
and set it aside. He then placed the brown envelopes of the evidence he’d collected that afternoon into a box, on which he wrote
Dresden Alley Incident.
He added the extra photographs of the fingerprints, the crime scene and the victim. He placed the box prominently on his desk.

Ringing up the medical examiner, he learned the doctor was at coffee. The assistant told him that Unidentified Corpse A 25-7-36-Q had arrived from Dresden Alley but he had no idea when it would be examined. By that night possibly. Kohl scowled. He had hoped the autopsy was at least in progress, if not finished. He hung up.

Janssen returned. “The Teletypes went out to the precincts, sir. I told them urgent.”

“Thank you.”

His phone buzzed and he answered. It was Horcher again.

“Willi, Minister Goebbels has said that we cannot display the picture of the dead man in the newspaper. I tried to convince him. I was at my most persuasive, I can tell you. I thought I would prevail. But in the end, I was not successful.”

“Well, Chief of Inspectors, thank you.” He hung up, thinking cynically: most persuasive, indeed. He doubted the call had even been made.

Kohl told his inspector candidate what the man had said. “Ach, and it will be days or weeks before a fingerprint examiner can even narrow down the prints we found. Janssen, take that picture of the victim…. No, no, the other one—where he looks slightly
less
dead. Take it to our printing department. Have them print up five hundred etchings. Tell them we’re in a great hurry. Say it’s a joint Kripo/Gestapo matter. We can at least exploit Inspector Krauss since it was he who made us late for the Summer Garden. About which I am still perturbed, I must say.”

“Yes, sir.”

Just as Janssen returned, ten minutes later, the phone buzzed once more and Kohl lifted the handset. “Yes, Kohl here.”

“It is Georg Jaeger. How are you?”

“Georg! I am fine. Working this Saturday, when I’d hoped for the Lust-garten with my family. But so it goes. And you?”

“Working too. Always work.”

Jaeger had been a protégé of Kohl’s some years before. He was a very talented detective and after the Party had come to power had been asked to join the Gestapo. He’d refused and his blunt rejection had apparently offended some officials. He found himself back at the uniformed Order Police—a step down for a Kripo detective. As it turned out, though, Jaeger excelled at his new job too and soon rose to be in charge of the Orpo precinct in north-central Berlin; ironically he seemed far happier in his banished territory than in the intrigue-mired Alex.

“I am calling with what I hope is some help, Professor.”

Kohl laughed. He recalled that this was how Jaeger had referred to Kohl when they were working together. “What might that be?”

“We just received a telegram about a suspect in a case you are working on.”

“Yes, yes, Georg. Have you found a gun shop that sold a Spanish Star Modelo A? Already?”

“No, but I heard of some SA complaining that a man attacked them at a bookshop on Rosenthaler Street not long ago. He fit the description in your message.”

“Ach, Georg, this is most helpful. Can you have them meet me where the assault occurred?”

“They won’t want to cooperate but I keep the fools in line if they’re in my precinct. I’ll make sure they’re there. When?”

“Now. Immediately.”

“Certainly, Professor.” Jaeger gave the address on Rosenthaler Street. Then he asked, “And how is life back at the Alex?”

“Perhaps we’ll save that conversation for another time, over schnapps and beer.”

“Yes, of course,” the Orpo commander said knowingly. The man would be thinking that Kohl was reluctant to discuss certain matters over a telephone line.

Which was certainly true. Kohl’s motive for ending the call, though, had less to do with intrigue than with the pitched urgency he felt to find the man in Göring’s hat.