The Pale Criminal (18 page)

‘I know of no such thing. But what great crime has been committed that might require your department to take precedence over a murder investigation? Charging a priest with a fraudulent transubstantiation perhaps? Or trying to pass off the communion wine as the blood of Christ?'

‘Your levity is quite out of order, Kommissar,' he said. ‘This department is investigating most serious charges of homosexuality among the priesthood.'

‘Is that so? Then I shall certainly sleep more soundly in my bed tonight. All the same, my investigation has been given top priority by General Heydrich himself.'

‘Knowing the importance that he attaches to apprehending religious enemies of the state, I find that very hard to believe.'

‘Then may I suggest that you telephone the Wilhelmstrasse and have the general explain it to you personally.'

‘I'll do that. No doubt he will also be greatly disturbed at your failure to appreciate the menace of the third international conspiracy dedicated to the ruin of Germany. Catholicism is no less a threat to Reich security than Bolshevism and World Jewry.'

‘You forgot men from outer space,' I said. ‘Frankly, I don't give a shit what you tell him. VD1 is part of Kripo, not the Gestapo, and in all matters relating to this investigation Kripo is to take priority in the services of our own department. I have it in writing from the Reichskriminaldirektor, as does Dr Schade. So why don't you take your so-called case and shove it up your arse. A little more shit in there won't make much of a difference to the way you smell.'

I slammed the receiver down on to its cradle. There were, after all, a few enjoyable aspects to the job. Not least of these was the opportunity it afforded to piss on the Gestapo's shoes.

 

At the identity parade later that same morning, the left-luggage staff failed to identify Gottfried Bautz as the man who had deposited the trunk containing Irma Hanke's body, and to Deubel's disgust I signed the order releasing him from custody.

 

It's the law that all strangers arriving in Berlin must be reported to a police station by their hotelier or landlord within six days. In this way the Resident Registration Office at the Alex is able to give out the address of anyone resident in Berlin for the price of fifty pfennigs. People imagine that this law must be part of the Nazi Emergency Powers, but in truth it has existed for a while. The Prussian police was always so efficient.

My office was a few doors down from the Registration Office in room 350, which meant that the corridor was always noisy with people, and obliged me to keep my door shut. No doubt this had been one of the reasons why I had been put here, as far away from the offices of the Murder Commission as it was possible to be. I suppose the idea was that my presence should be kept out of the way of other Kripo personnel, for fear that I might contaminate them with some of my more anarchic attitudes to police investigation. Or perhaps they had hoped that my insubordinate spirit might be broken by first being dramatically lowered. Even on a sunny day like this one was, my office had a dismal aspect. The olive-green metal desk had more thread-catching edges than a barbed-wire fence, and had the single virtue of matching the worn linoleum and the dingy curtains, while the walls were a couple of thousand cigarettes' shade of yellow.

Walking in there after snatching a few hours of sleep back at my apartment, and presented with the sight of Hans Illmann waiting patiently for me with a dossier of photographs, I didn't think that the place was about to get any more pleasant. Congratulating myself on having had the foresight to eat something before what promised to be an unappetizing meeting, I sat down and faced him.

‘So this is where they've been hiding you,' he said.

‘It's supposed to be only temporary,' I explained, ‘just like me. But frankly, it suits me to be out of the way of the rest of Kripo. There's less chance of becoming a permanent fixture here again. And I dare say that suits them too.'

‘One would not have thought it possible to cause such aggravation throughout Kripo Executive from such a bureaucratic dungeon as this.' He laughed, and stroking his chin-beard added: ‘You, and a Sturmbannfuhrer from the Gestapo, have caused all sorts of problems for poor Dr Schade. He's had telephone calls from lots of important people. Nebe, Muller, even Heydrich. How very satisfying for you. No, don't shrug modestly like that. You have my admiration, Bernie, you really do.'

I pulled open a drawer in my desk and took out a bottle and a couple of glasses.

‘Let's drink to it,' I said.

‘Gladly. I could use one after the day I've had.' He picked up the full glass and sipped it gratefully. ‘You know, I had no idea that there was a special department in the Gestapo to persecute Catholics.'

‘Nor had I. But I can't say that it surprises me much. National Socialism permits only one kind of organized belief.' I nodded at the dossier on Illmann's lap. ‘So what have you got?'

‘Victim number five is what we have got.' He handed me the dossier and started to roll himself a cigarette.

‘These are good,' I said flicking through its contents. ‘Your man takes a nice photograph.'

‘Yes, I thought you'd appreciate them. That one of the throat is particularly interesting. The right carotid artery is almost completely severed thanks to one perfectly horizontal knife cut. That means that she was flat on her back when he cut her. All the same, the greater part of the wound is on the right-hand side of the throat, so in all probability our man is right-handed.'

‘It must have been some knife,' I said, observing the depth of the wound.

‘Yes. It severed the larynx almost completely.' He licked his cigarette paper. ‘Something extremely sharp, like a surgical curette I should say. At the same time, however, the epiglottis was strongly compressed, and between that and the oesophagus on the right were haematomas as big as an orange pip.'

‘Strangled, right?'

‘Very good,' Illmann grinned. ‘But half-strangled, in actual fact. There was a small quantity of blood in the girl's partially inflated lungs.'

‘So he throttled her into silence, and later cut her throat?'

‘She bled to death, hanging upside down like a butchered calf. Same as all the others. Do you have a match?'

I tossed my book across the desk. ‘What about her important little places? Did he fuck her?'

‘Fucked her, and tore her up a bit in the process. Well, you'd expect that. The girl was a virgin, I should imagine. There were even imprints of his fingernails on the mucous membrane. But more importantly I found some foreign pubic hairs, and I don't mean that they were imported from Paris.'

‘You've got a hair colour?'

‘Brown. Don't ask me for a shade, I can't be that specific.'

‘But you're sure they're not Irma Hanke's?'

‘Positive. They stood out on her perfectly Aryan fair-haired little plum like shit in a sugar-bowl.' He leaned back and blew a cloud into the air above his head. ‘You want me to try and match one with a cutting from the bush of your crazy Czech?'

‘No, I released him at lunchtime. He's in the clear. And as it happens his hair was fair.' I leafed through the typewritten pages of the autopsy report. ‘Is that it?'

‘Not quite.' He sucked at his cigarette and then crushed it into my ashtray. From his tweed hunting-jacket pocket he produced a sheet of folded newspaper which he spread out on the desk. ‘I thought you ought to see this.'

It was the front page of an old issue of
Der Stürmer,
Julius Streicher's anti-Semitic publication. A flash across the top left-hand corner of the paper advertised it as ‘A Special Ritual Murder Number'. Not that one needed reminding. The pen-and-ink illustration said it eloquently enough. Eight naked, fair-haired German girls hanging upside-down, their throats slit, and their blood spilling into a great Communion plate that was held by an ugly caricature Jew.

‘Interesting, don't you think?' he said.

‘Streicher's always publishing this sort of crap,' I said. ‘Nobody takes it seriously.'

Illmann shook his head, and reclaimed his cigarette. ‘I'm not for one minute saying that it should be. I no more believe in ritual murder than I believe in Adolf Hitler the Peacemaker.'

‘But there is this drawing, right?' He nodded. ‘Which is remarkably similar to the method with which five German girls have already been killed.' He nodded again.

I glanced down the page at the article that accompanied the drawing, and read: ‘The Jews are charged with enticing Gentile children and Gentile adults, butchering them and draining their blood. They are charged with mixing this blood into their masses (unleavened bread) and using it to practise superstitious magic. They are charged with torturing their victims, especially the children; and during this torture they scream threats, curses and cast magic spells against the Gentiles. This systematic murder has a special name. It is called Ritual Murder.'

‘Are you suggesting that Streicher might have had something to do with these murders?'

‘I don't know that I'm suggesting anything, Bernie. I merely thought I ought to bring it to your attention.' He shrugged. ‘But why not? After all, he wouldn't be the first district Gauleiter to commit a crime. Governor Kube of Kurmark for example.'

‘There are quite a few stories about Streicher that one hears,' I said.

‘In any other country Streicher would be in prison.'

‘Can I keep this?'

‘I wish you would. It's not the sort of thing that one likes to leave lying on the coffee-table.' He crushed out yet another cigarette and stood up to leave. ‘What are you going to do?'

‘About Streicher? I don't exactly know.' I looked at my watch. ‘I'll think about it after the formal ID. Becker's on his way back here with the girl's parents by now. We'd better get down to the mortuary.'

 

It was something that Becker said that made me drive the Hankes home myself after Herr Hanke had positively identified the remains of his daughter.

‘It's not the first time I've had to break bad news to a family,' he had explained. ‘In a strange way they always hope against hope, clinging on to the last straw right up until the end. And then when you tell them, that's when it really hits them. The mother breaks down, you know. But somehow these two were different. It's difficult to explain what I mean, sir, but I got the impression that they were expecting it.'

‘After four weeks? Come on, they had just resigned themselves to it, that's all.'

Becker frowned and scratched the top of his untidy head.

‘No,' he said slowly, ‘it was stronger than that, sir. Like they already knew, for sure. I'm sorry, sir, I'm not explaining it very well. Perhaps I shouldn't have mentioned it at all. Perhaps I am imagining it.'

‘Do you believe in instinct?'

‘I suppose so.'

‘Good. Sometimes it's the only thing a bull has got to go on. And then he's got no choice but to trust in it. A bull that doesn't trust a few hunches now and then doesn't ever take any chances. And without taking them you can't ever hope to solve a case. No, you were right to tell me.'

Sitting beside me now, as I drove south-west to Steglitz, Herr Hanke, an accountant with the AEG works on Seestrasse, seemed anything but resigned to his only daughter's death. All the same, I didn't discount what Becker had told me. I was keeping an open mind until I could form my own opinion.

‘Irma was a clever girl,' Hanke sighed. He spoke with a Rhineland accent, with a voice that was just like Goebbels'. ‘Clever enough to stay on at school and get her Abitur, which she'd wanted to do. But she was no book-buffalo. Just bright, and pretty with it. Good at sports. She had just won her Reich Sports Badge and her swimming certificate. She never did any harm to anyone.' His voice was breaking as he added: ‘Who could have killed her, Kommissar? Who would do such a thing?'

‘That's what I intend to find out,' I said. But Hanke's wife sitting in the back seat believed she already had the answer.

‘Isn't it obvious who is responsible?' she said. ‘My daughter was a good BdM girl, praised in her racial-theory class as the perfect example of the Aryan type. She knew her Horst Wessel and could quote whole pages of the Fuhrer's great book. So who do you think killed her, a virgin, but the Jews? Who else but the Jews would have done such things to her?'

Herr Hanke turned in his seat and took his wife by the hand.

‘We don't know that, Silke, dear,'he said. ‘Do we, Kommissar?'

‘I think it's very unlikely,' I said.

‘You see, Silke? The Kommissar doesn't believe it, and neither do I.'

‘I see what I see,' she hissed. ‘You're both wrong. It's as plain as the nose on a Jew's face. Who else but the Jews? Don't you realize how obvious it is?'

‘The accusation is loudly raised immediately, anywhere in the world, when a body is found which bears the marks of ritual murder. This accusation is raised only against the Jews.' I remembered the words of the article in
Der Stürmer
which I had folded in my pocket, and as I listened to Frau Hanke it occurred to me that she was right, but in a way she could hardly have dreamt of.

A whistle shrieked, the train jolted, and then we pulled slowly out of Anhalter Station on the six-hour journey that would take us to Nuremberg. Korsch, the compartment's only other occupant, was already reading his newspaper.

‘Hell,' he said, ‘listen to this. It says here that the Soviet foreign minister, Maxim Litvinoff declared in front of the League of Nations in Geneva that his government is determined to fulfil its existing treaty of alliance with Czechoslovakia, and that it will offer military help at the same time as France. Christ, we'll really be in for it then, with an attack on both fronts.'