Rosa (2 page)

Hoffner followed, stopping as he reached the bar. “One more for my friend,” he said. He pushed a coin along the uneven surface, then turned to the young woman’s table and placed several more in a neat stack next to her glass. She continued to stare at her bread.

“It’ll cost you a lot more than that, Herr Detective,” she said.

Hoffner slowly pulled his hand away. “No—I think umbrellas go for about that much in this weather, Frulein.”

She looked up. A kind, if sparing, smile curled her lips.

Hoffner turned back to the bar to find two small glasses filled with brandy. “Come on, Fichte. It’ll do you good. Whatever’s up on the square can wait while you get a bit of warming-up.”

Fichte hesitated, then strode to the bar and downed the brandy in one swift movement. He stood there, awaiting his next assignment. Hoffner did his best to ignore the deferential stare as he sniffed at the liquid and then tossed it back. He placed the glass on the bar. “You’re welcome, Fichte.”

Another moment to consider. “Oh . . . 0A0;    yes. Thank you, Herr
Komm
. . . 0A0;    Hoffner.”

“And to you as well, Herr Economics.” Hoffner tipped his hat to the young lady and motioned Fichte to the door. Together they stepped out into the street.

The brandy, as it turned out, was no match for the city’s infamous
Berliner Luft,
a smack of frigid air just the thing to set Hoffner’s eyes tearing. He turned up his coat collar and pulled his hat down to his face. His wife had insisted he take a scarf, but he had left it back at the office: Martha would find a certain pleasure in that later tonight. Hoffner noticed Fichte was sporting a nice thick woolen muffler. And who’s been taking care of him, Hoffner wondered.

They turned right, the rain spraying up at them through the wind tunnel that was the block of tenements. The street was deserted, its gray stone merely a faade for the life that lay hidden beyond. Too many times, Hoffner had been forced to venture into the inner courtyards, each dripping with laundry—Turkish, Polish, German—endless lines of clothes that spoke to one another in a kind of ragged semaphore. And within the crumbling buildings, the squalor grew only more oppressive, dank hallways leading blindly from one hovel to the next, each filled with the smell of rotting cabbage. The worst was the
“Ochsenhof”
(“cattle yard”), with its dozen entrances and twenty stairways, all leading nowhere, pointless escapades in search of criminals all too secure within its walls. It was a vast, silent place to the men of the Kripo, indecipherable and thus impregnable.

Outside, however, all was serene. The stones blended effortlessly into the darkened haze of sky, only those occasional passersby bold enough to peek out from under the brims of their hats able to determine where one left off and the other began. Hoffner was not one of these: he pressed his head farther down to meet the wind. By the time he and Fichte had made it to the square, his pants were once again damp through from the knees down: at least the exertion was helping to keep him warm.

Surprisingly, the wind was taking no interest in Rosenthaler Platz. People were jumping on and off trams without the least sign of aerial difficulty, and whatever Fichte had thought demanded his immediate attention, Hoffner could find nothing that was even remotely out of the ordinary: like a painted newsreel clip, the square buzzed in accelerated activity. There was the requisite line outside the windowed cafeteria that was Aschinger’s, the hawkers of neckties and sponges and fruit brandies in front of Fabische’s on the corner (“A suit,
mein Herr
? Take one, Ready-To-Wear!”), and the usual mayhem of cabs, horsedrawn carts, and pedestrians darting in and out of one another’s ways. Rosenthaler Platz had taken no time off to breathe during the revolution; why should it do so now?

“Well,” said Hoffner as they maneuvered their way through the crowd, “I can see why you raced back to get me.”

“The building site, Herr Inspector.”

Fichte led Hoffner up toward the subway excavations. The fencing around the northern tip of the square had been there for almost a year, a promise from the Kaiser that his capital would be home to the finest trams and underground trains in Europe. Few Berliners took notice anymore of the wooden slats that sprouted up around the city, most
Stdters
resigned to the ongoing renovations that had been a part of their lives for the past twenty-five years. Wilhelm’s insecurity about his chosen city had led him, over time, to reinvent her as a paean to grandeur in the architecture of her monuments, churches, government buildings, stores, hotels, and, yes, railway stations. It was said of Berlin that even her bird shit was made of marble.

Then again, the slats did make for nice advertising space. A large placard of a cigar-smoking goblin peered down at Hoffner as he followed Fichte toward the site. The lime-green skin against the cerise background, at first off-putting, quickly became hypnotic. The creature had an almost maniacal smile, the cigar evidently just that good to take him to the edge of sanity, although why a goblin would need any kind of stimulus for that sort of behavior had always puzzled Hoffner. A cigar, though, would have been nice right about now.

Fichte and Hoffner moved out into the square, jumping the tram rails as they sidestepped a cab, its goose-squawk horn eliciting a growl from Fichte. A single patrolman stood guard atop the wooden ramp that led up to what, until recently, had been the boarded-up entrance to the pit behind the fencing. He put out a hand as Hoffner and Fichte approached.

“It is forbidden,
meine Herren.
” The man’s German had the precision of working-class Berlin, the extended roll of the
r
’s a pompous display of office. He kept his woolen short-coat buttoned to the neck, its band collar sporting the single stripe of a constable, his lip-brimmed helmet topped by the ubiquitous silver imperial prong. “Please turn around—” The man caught himself as soon as he recognized Fichte. “Ah, Herr Detective.” There was nothing apologetic in the tone.

Hoffner knew this type, a Schutzi-lifer who considered the very existence of the Kripo a slap in the face, even if, every year for the past fifteen years, he had applied and been rejected for transfer. Still, it was the chain of command. Order had to be preserved. The man stepped aside.

Hoffner nodded. “Patrolman.”

A white-gloved finger smoothed through a perfectly pruned moustache. “Detective.”

Hoffner moved past the man and began to make his way down a second ramp behind the fencing. As he did so, he turned his head and corrected, “Detective
Inspector.
”

Inside, the building work was far more extensive than one might have imagined from the square. An area, perhaps twenty meters by ten, extended to the far fencing, most of it still earth. Closer in, however, stood the top staging of a tower of wooden scaffolding that dug deep into the ground. From their vantage point, Fichte and Hoffner could see only a fraction of the edifice, its depth apparent only once they stepped out from the ramp and moved to the ladder at its center. A second patrolman stood directly behind the small hole of an entrance. Hoffner looked at the man, then peered down the shaft. “Must be a good fifteen meters,” he said. Police lamps, recently attached, hung along the rungs, all the way down. Hoffner looked back up, a thoroughly disingenuous smile on his lips. “May we?” The man said nothing as Fichte took hold of the top rung and started down. Hoffner followed.

The air quickly thickened, and the smell of damp earth—at the top quite pleasant—gave way to something less inviting as they descended, familiar, yet nondistinct. It was only when he reached the bottom and stepped away from the ladder that Hoffner recognized the odor. Human feces. Muted, but undeniable.

The two Kripomen were now standing in the first of a series of man-made caverns, wide mining shafts that spoked out from the central area. The subway station at Rosenthaler Platz had evidently been chosen to house an underground arcade—shops, cafés—the skeleton of which had been near to completion before the work had been shut down. All that remained by way of construction material, aside from the timber and steel supports, was the odd piece of wiring and the scrawl on the wooden slats, measurements and the like penned in a dull charcoal. A few of the slats had gone missing, though Hoffner recognized that they had been well chosen; none of the gaps looked to be threatening the pit’s structural integrity. He had to hand it to the poachers.

He never imagined, however, that these poachers would be standing directly behind him, or rather sitting. And yet there, along a narrow wooden bench in an adjoining cavern, sat an utterly unexpected foursome—husband, wife, and two sons of perhaps eight and ten. They were all neatly dressed, considering the circumstances, the man in a worn coat and tie, the woman in a long dress in need of a good cleaning, all with overcoats folded in their laps. The gaunt faces stared straight ahead as if, with a kind of macabre persistence, they were waiting for a train. Off to the side were what looked to be two well-worn feather beds sitting atop several of the absent slats, a small wooden table, a bucket, and a camping fire. A steel trunk rounded out the furnishings.

Two more patrolmen stood at either end of the bench. A third—a sergeant, from the braiding on the brim of his helmet—stood by the fire. He took a step toward Hoffner. “Herr Detective, I am—”

“Yes, I’m sure you are,” said Hoffner as he turned to Fichte. “I think my partner can fill me in.”

The attention seemed to catch Fichte by surprise. When Hoffner continued to stare, Fichte finally said, “Apparently they live down here. The man was an engineer—”

“Division Two,
Firma
Ganz-Neurath.” The voice came from the father. Hoffner turned. “I am a designer for this site,” the man continued in an accent tinged with something other than German. “Under the direction of Herr Alfred Grenander. We have only been living here. Nothing else. Nothing else.” There was a wavering sincerity in his tone, one that Hoffner recognized all too well. It was usually reserved for the third or fourth hour of interrogation, that time when a man tries to convince himself of his own innocence. “I am not ashamed to be here.”

Hoffner kept his gaze on the man, then turned to Fichte. “He’s not ashamed to be here,” he echoed wryly.

Fichte nodded. “From what we can make out, he lost his position. They had a choice. Either hold on to their flat, or eat. They decided to eat. It’s actually pretty livable down here. It’s dry, warm, and except—”

“Yes,” said Hoffner. “I can smell it.”

Again, Fichte nodded.

“And the boys?”

“On the rolls at a nearby school. They haven’t missed a day.”

Hoffner looked back at the family. Again, he waited. “Why am I standing down here, Herr
Kriminal-Assistent
?” Before Fichte could answer, Hoffner continued, enjoying his audience: “He seems like a nice-enough fellow, decent. Amid all the shortages, war, revolution, he’s managed to find a way to keep a—well, to keep something over his family’s head. He sends his children to school. He’s been an engineer with Ganz-Neurath, Division Two, under the tutelage of the great Grenander himself. What more can we ask of him?” Hoffner peered over at the sergeant, then slowly moved toward him. “But, of course, for the Schutzmannschaft, this poses a problem. Criminals everywhere, and they choose to spend their time on—”

“We have no interest in this man,” said the officer.

Hoffner had not expected the response. For a moment he said nothing. Then, with an audible sigh, he turned to Fichte and said, “Why am I down here, Hans?”

Even in the dim light, Hoffner recognized the slight tensing in the younger man’s expression. With a jabbed thumb over his shoulder, Fichte said, “This way.” And without further explanation, he picked up a lamp and started toward the central tunnel. With no other choice, Hoffner did the same.

The air grew still heavier as they made their way deeper into the maze. Fichte stopped at one point to pull a small glass inhaler from his coat pocket, the nebulized liquid making a sharp puffing sound each time Fichte sucked in. Hoffner had learned not to notice these brief episodes; the shame in Fichte’s face was something he didn’t care to see. Hoffner slowed and waited until Fichte had picked up the pace again. Two caverns on, they stopped. A lone patrolman stood at the entrance.

It was the odor that gave it away. Decomposing flesh, when kept moist, takes on a scent not unlike rotting fruit with a bit of sulfur thrown in. Hoffner had actually experimented with various mixtures some years ago. He had kept a number of covered bowls in a remote area of the cellar at police headquarters, all filled with different concoctions. It had taken him nearly two weeks to hit on the right combination. When asked why he was doing this, Hoffner had explained that it could be used to train detectives how to sniff out hidden or buried corpses: take the bowl, place it behind some boards, etc. They had all gotten a good laugh out of it until a young assistant detective by the name of Bauman had cracked the infamous Selazig case of 1911 by nosing around the man’s office. Selazig had been in the pickled-herring business and believed that the smell of his cannery could hide anything he might be keeping behind the walls of his office. Detective Bauman had been doing a routine check of the man—the disappearance of his wife and son, missing money, Herr Selazig distraught beyond all measure—when he happened to detect something of a familiar scent coming from behind a large filing cabinet. So acute was Bauman’s nasal prowess that he had actually distinguished the smell of rancid pears, so he described it, from that of three-day-old fish. The bodies had been found within a small chamber behind the wall, each laid out perfectly on an altar of sorts, bits and pieces of arms and legs having been nibbled away. Selazig had gone to the gallows, Bauman to
Kriminal-Bezirkssekretr
(detective sergeant), and Hoffner back to his experiments, along with a short article titled “The Odor of Death” published in
Die Polizei,
August 11 issue, a framed copy of which still hung in his office.