Metropolis Page 13

  “Any comments, gentlemen?” asked Weiss.

  “It’s been two years since we had the Murder Commission,” said Trettin. “He’s not very up-to-date with current police practice.”

  “Perhaps that’s just as well,” said Weiss.

  “I’ve a comment,” said Gennat. “And it relates to the very peculiar sort of anti-Semitism that’s demonstrated in this letter.”

  “There is no anti-Semitism in that letter,” observed Weiss.

  “That’s what’s peculiar about it. This must be the first time anyone made a criticism of Kripo and the Murder Commission that didn’t make mention of the fact that there’s a Jew in charge of this department. Specifically, you. Especially when they’ve signed off with a Heil Hitler.”

  “Yes, that’s true,” admitted Weiss. “I never thought of that.”

  “In every other respect he sounds exactly like a Nazi,” added Gennat.

  “Or someone who wants to sound like a Nazi,” I said. “But I agree with Ernst. It’s curious that a Nazi of all people should miss out on a good opportunity to libel you, sir. They’re not normally so careless about such things.”

  “Especially that bastard Goebbels,” agreed Trettin. “Hey, wouldn’t it be great if a Nazi really had killed these men? Hitler loves to pose as the veterans’ friend. Something like this would truly embarrass him.”

  Weiss said nothing but I could tell he was thinking the same thing.

  “You know, boss,” added Trettin, “listening to that letter reminded me of how you described those two doctors at the Oskar-Helene Home in Zehlendorf. You said they were eugenicists. Only more so. That they believe in the extermination of those who serve no useful purpose in society.”

  “Sadly, this kind of perverted science is a commonly held view today,” said Weiss. “Especially in Germany. And among some quite respectable people, too. Until his death a few years ago, Karl Binding was a leading exponent of ‘mercy’ killing, as he called it. And psychiatrist Alfred Hoche has been advocating euthanasia for the disabled and mentally ill for many years.”

  “Nevertheless,” said Trettin, “maybe there’s some useful purpose in seeing if Doctors Biesalski and Wurtz are somehow involved in these killings.”

  “You mean, in seeing if they’re murderers?”

  “I’m not sure I would go that far. No, in seeing if perhaps they counseled others at the home to carry out the murders.”

  Weiss frowned. “I think it’s highly unlikely. I didn’t like them. I didn’t like them at all. But I don’t think there’s any German doctor who would put a gun to a man’s head and pull the trigger in the name of so-called racial hygiene, or ask someone else to do so. Things are morally bad in Germany, yes, but they’re not that bad. But by all means pursue it as a possible lead if you think it’s worth it, Otto. It’s not as if we have a lot of other theories to work with right now. Only do it discreetly. I don’t want them complaining to the Ministry.”

  Gennat came back to the meeting table and clasped his pink hands in front of his belly, like an innocent choirboy. He didn’t sit down. Looking as if he wished to make a point, he addressed the table with the air of an angry chairman berating a board of directors.

  “If you ask me, it’s teenagers who are behind these killings,” he said. Gennat seemed a little more red-faced and pop-eyed than usual, and his voice could have blunted the edge of a saber. “That’s right. Our delightful, all-important, patriotic German youth who don’t know anything and want to know even less. Lazy little bastards. Most of them regard cops as figures of comedy.” He stared up at the ceiling with a look of sarcastic innocence and tried to speak like an adolescent. “‘What, me, Officer? I really don’t know what you’re talking about, Officer. No sir, I can’t remember where I was last night. And I wouldn’t dream of doing what you suggest. As a matter of fact, I’ve just come from church, where I was praying for my grandmother.’

  “They make me puke.” Gennat caught the smile on the face of Bernhard Weiss and pointed his cigar holder the boss’s way. “And why not them? You know what I’m talking about, boss. A gang of juveniles looking for amusement. And what could be more amusing than murder for the hell of it, especially when you’re just killing off a few old men who’ve outlived their usefulness? That’s just Darwinism, according to some lawyers I’ve spoken to.”

  “You’re exaggerating a bit, Ernst,” said Weiss. “Young people are really not as bad as that, are they?”

  “No, they’re far worse than that. You don’t believe me, then go down to the Juvenile Court and take a good look for yourself, Bernhard. They have no souls, half of them. But why should that be a surprise to anyone? Many of them have grown up without any kind of discipline in their lives because their fathers were killed in the trenches.”

  “What about the letter? Are you seriously saying a juvenile could have written that?”

  “Excuse me, chief, but why not?”

  With a magnanimous gesture of his hand, Weiss encouraged Gennat to continue.

  “They can write. They’ve been educated. Some of these teenage swine are a lot cleverer than you think, chief. Paul Krantz, for example. Remember him? He was attending a good school, a gymnasium, and would have got his Abitur but for the small matter of a murder trial.”

  Paul Krantz was a juvenile whose case had recently come before the Berlin courts; he’d been accused of murdering two of his teenage friends, youngsters from a nice, middle-class home in Berlin-Steglitz, along with another boy who was his rival for the affections of a local girl. The murders had been a source of enormous fascination in the Berlin newspapers.

  “But Paul Krantz was acquitted of murder,” protested Weiss.

  “All the worse. But everyone in Berlin knows he did it. Three murders and all he gets is a rap over the knuckles; three weeks in the cement for the illegal possession of a .25-caliber pistol. That’s what I call clever. You think I’m exaggerating? Well, I’m not. I seem to recall the trial judge in his case referring to dangerous tendencies that are present in the German youth of today. Frankly a lot of German teenagers are communists or Nazis and don’t even know it yet. Maybe Dr. Gnadenschuss is just one of those: young Pifkes the Nazis are working hard to recruit because none of them possesses so much as a vestigial conscience. The ideal Nazi.

  “And by the way, you notice I made mention of Paul Krantz owning a .25-caliber pistol. That’s because lots of kids in juvenile gangs have them. Forget about knives and saps; a lot of these wild boys own small automatics. It’s a status symbol. Like an earring, a good pair of leather shorts, or an old tuxedo. They’re a lawless breed bent only on their own lawless pleasure.”

  “So what are you suggesting?” asked Weiss, fiddling with his immaculate shirt cuffs. He seemed like a study in patience—the very opposite of his more passionate deputy.

  “Let’s have Schupo round them all up for questioning early one morning. See what we can shake out of their lederhosen pockets. If nothing else it will look to the minister like we’re doing something. Who knows? Maybe we’ll get lucky. It’s about time we did. We find one kid in possession of a typewriter that has a misaligned G and we’re laughing all the way to the falling ax.”

  “But where are they? These gangs of teenagers?”

  “They’re easy enough to find. They hang out in encampments in park sites, abandoned warehouses, and old beach huts on the outskirts of Berlin, mostly to the west. Did you know that some of these gangs even call themselves after names in Karl May’s novels?”

  “How do you know all this, Ernst?” asked Weiss.

  “Because there’s a fourteen-year-old runaway in a cell over in Charlottenburg who stabbed another gang member in a knife fight. A vicious little queer who thought he was playing bare-arsed Boy Scouts. He just happens to be my brother-in-law’s cousin. My sister telephoned to see if I could help him and I told her she could forget it. Help was somethi
ng he needed a year ago in the shape of a thick ear; now he needs a good lawyer. Besides, I’m a detective, not a damn psychiatrist.”

  “We had noticed,” said Heller.

  “So what do you say, boss? Shall we round them up for questioning?”

  “I don’t like the idea of mass arrests,” said Weiss. “It smacks of the Freikorps and the right wing. But if you think it’s worth a shot, then let’s do it. I’ll speak to Magnus Heimannsberg and see when we can arrange it.”

  “The sooner, the better,” said Gennat. “The last thing we need is another letter, let alone another murder.”

  “Yes, indeed,” agreed Weiss. “It’s awkward the way this letter puts Kripo on the spot. It makes it harder for us to deflect criticism from both conservatives and communists. I think perhaps I shall have to write a newspaper article for the Tageblatt myself. Dr. Gnadenschuss isn’t the only one who can command some newspaper space. I’ll speak to Theo Wolff.”

  Gennat looked as if he were about to say something but Weiss silenced him with a raised index finger.

  “I know you’ll say I should pick a newspaper that isn’t run by Jews, but the Berliner Tageblatt has a circulation of a quarter of a million. And the others are bound to pick it up. It’s high time we persuaded our citizens that they should become the eyes and ears of their own police force. Maybe we can persuade the people to catch Dr. Gnadenschuss for us.”

  “‘Good luck with that’ is actually what I was going to say.”

  “You don’t think such a thing is possible?”

  Gennat looked momentarily exasperated. “Newspapers are in the business of creating mass hysteria,” he said. “They don’t give a damn if we catch this bastard. All they care about is stoking fear and spreading panic and selling even more newspapers. You write an article in the paper about Dr. Gnadenschuss, then you’re showing the world that we’re taking this lunatic seriously.”

  “What’s wrong with that?” asked Weiss.

  “It’s as good as telling every spinner and nutcase in this city that he’ll be taken seriously, too. It was before your time, chief, but the last time the newspapers published a murderer’s letter to the editor was the Ackermann case in 1921. There was a press conference then, too, after which we had two hundred people who walked into this police station, each of them claiming to be the murderer. All of whom had to be checked out, of course. It was as if all the metronomes in Berlin suddenly started to swing in time with one another. Not to mention the three copycat murders that followed. In my opinion, public enthusiasm to catch a murderer can hinder progress as much as it can promote it.”

  “I hear what you say, Ernst. But we can’t have it both ways. Public apathy or public hysteria—we have to choose the lesser of two evils here. Yes, I feel we have to do something. At the very least, the honor of the department demands that I answer this man’s taunts. And, of course, disabled veterans need to be warned to take precautions, to stay off the streets if they can. Not to mention the fact that we need to mobilize their help as well.”

  “They’re beggars,” objected Gennat. “Most of them don’t have much choice but to beg on the streets, let alone enough money to buy a newspaper.”

  “Nevertheless, we’re going to need their help,” said Weiss.

  For the rest of us seated around the table in Ernst Gennat’s office, seeing these two men argue was like watching Dempsey versus Firpo, but on the whole it was easier for me to agree with Gennat than with Bernhard Weiss: Gennat was the older dog who knew all the tricks of the trade. Weiss commanded attention, but Gennat commanded respect. Not that I would have commented either way; it certainly wasn’t for me to offer my opinion on the arguments of my superiors. Still, I thought it was greatly to Weiss’s credit that he tolerated—even encouraged—his deputy’s dissenting view, like Wilhelm I and Bismarck perhaps, except that Gennat didn’t threaten to resign if he didn’t get his way.

  But in truth, most of my mind was still back at the Oskar-Helene Home in Zehlendorf. Some of the things I’d seen in that creamy-white building on the edge of leafy Dahlem had left me feeling profoundly depressed and wondering how it was I’d been lucky enough to come through the whole war with a face, two eyes, and four limbs. Almost ten years had passed since the 1918 armistice, but what had happened in the trenches was still powerfully inside my head, as if it had been yesterday. Where did it come from, this sudden recrudescence of horror, this revival of mental anguish and pain that I thought had been long forgotten? For the life of me I couldn’t explain it, but seeing all those badly maimed men had brought things flooding back so powerfully I’d barely slept since our visit. Now, whenever I went to bed, I encountered the prologue to a nightmare that was indelibly printed on the inside of my eyelids—grotesquely vivid images of myself back in the trenches, the complete mud-encrusted disaster. In particular there were three silent films that kept coming back to haunt me: my best friend’s brains in my hair after a stray bullet from a Lewis gun shattered his skull; a man screaming his last breath into my face, followed by most of his blood and guts; a field surgeon amputating wounded limbs with a guillotine, to save the time a surgical saw would have demanded.

  And because of this, ever since our visit to the home, like some shaky neurotic trying to stave off madness, I’d been drinking more than was good or usual for me—with Rankin; with Gennat; with Trettin; but mostly on my own. Whiskey, schnapps, and rum, it was all the same to me. Drinking so that I was always on the edge of being drunk, sucking lots of mint PEZ to try to hide the booze on my breath, and saying very little in case I spoke one adventitious word that would give the game away. But there was no hiding that kind of thing from a man like Ernst Gennat, who knew a bit about drinking himself. After the meeting in his office he took me aside.

  “Tell me, Gunther, did you always drink a lot?”

  “I don’t drink a lot. Just often. And lately, more often than I should, perhaps.”

  “Why’s that, do you think? Is the job getting to you already? It’s the most interesting job in the world, but the pressure it creates can break a man.”

  “It’s not the job. At least not directly. The fact is, I’ve been drinking much more since I visited that damned home for the disabled in Zehlendorf. It awoke all sorts of bad thoughts—things from the war I thought were asleep forever. Being at the home just reminded me of how many had gone. Comrades. Friends. Men I cared about. I still see their faces, you know. Hundreds of them. I heard a car backfire last night and I damned near shit myself. You’ll laugh but I saw a ditch today in the Tiergarten and wanted to climb in and get my head down. A ditch looks like somewhere nice and safe. Getting into a glassful of schnapps looks a bit cleaner, that’s all.”

  Gennat nodded and put an avuncular hand on my shoulder. It felt as heavy as a military kit bag. “I don’t trust a man who doesn’t drink,” he said. “It means he doesn’t trust himself and I’ve no use for a man who doesn’t trust himself. You can’t rely on a man like that. Not in this business. But there’s a drink and then there’s drinking. One’s a cop’s good friend and the other’s a cop’s worst enemy. You know that, of course, otherwise you wouldn’t have tried to cover it up with those mints you keep sucking on, not to mention that terrible cologne. And because you know that, you also know it’d be best if you were to try and put the cork back in the bottle, lad. Get over it. Sooner than later. You’ll have to try to live with those trench demons of yours without the help of the holy spirit. Because neither I nor the chief has any use for a man who smells like a bar towel at eleven o’clock in the morning.”

  But as things turned out he was wrong about that.

  * * *

  —

  “WEISS IS QUITE RIGHT, you know,” said Trettin when, toward the end of the day, he and I were ensconced in the Zum. “If we’re ever going to catch Dr. Gnadenschuss we are going to need the help of the city’s vagrants and beggars. It stands to reason that one of them m
ust have seen something. But I’m afraid Gennat is also right. Those people don’t buy newspapers. And plenty of them don’t even speak German, let alone read it. As I see it, there’s no point in interviewing them one at a time. That would take too long. So we should go to the barrel and talk to them in number.”

  “The barrel?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ll see.” He looked at his watch. “I think we’ll be just in time.”

  We finished our drinks and then Trettin drove us northwest to Weissensee and parked on Fröbelstrasse, next to the gasworks. A long line of the city’s poor, some of them barefoot, were waiting to get inside the building opposite while a couple of SA men did their best to recruit new members for the Nazi Party.

  “The Palme,” I said. “Of course.”

  With five thousand beds, the Palme was Berlin’s oldest and largest night shelter for the city’s homeless. Support was limited to the bare necessities: accommodation in one of the dormitories for no longer than five consecutive nights, disinfection of clothing, access to personal-hygiene facilities, a plate of soup and a piece of bread mornings and evenings. Berliners sometimes called it the pauper’s Adlon. It was almost as inaccessible: more than two kilometers northeast of the Alex, it was far enough away from any respectable people that no one could have complained.

  “You know, it doesn’t matter where you go,” I said, “it seems there’s a Nazi there ahead of you.”