A Quiet Flame

The colonel nodded. He drew open a little drawer in the table, from which he removed a leather briefcase. From one of the pockets in the briefcase, he took out a pistol before emptying the rest of the contents onto the table.

“One Smith and Wesson semiautomatic pistol. One box of ammunition. One shoulder holster. One driver’s license in the name of Carlos Hausner. One SIDE identity warrant in the name of Carlos Hausner. One security pass for the Casa Rosada in the name of Carlos Hausner. One SIDE manual—make sure you read it carefully. One hundred thousand pesos in cash. There will be more when you need it. Naturally, receipts are required where possible. The manual will tell you exactly how to fill out an expense form. You’ll find everything else—DAIE files on German immigrants, KRIPO and Gestapo files from Alexanderplatz—in your filing cabinet at the Casa Rosada.”

I nodded silently. There didn’t seem to be any point in mentioning the fact that all of this had been ready before I walked into the police station. He’d been so sure I’d agree that I almost told him to go and screw himself. I hated him taking me for granted like that. But I hated being ill even more. So how could I say no? We both knew I had no choice. Not if I wanted to receive the best medical treatment.

He fiddled in his pocket and handed over some car keys. “It’s the one outside. The lime-colored Chevrolet we came in.”

“My favorite flavor,” I said.

He stood up. “You can drive, can’t you?”

“I can drive.”

“Good. Then you can drive us to Retiro.” He glanced at his watch. “They’re expecting us, so we had better be getting along.”

“Before we go, I’d like to take another look at that dead body.”

The colonel shrugged. “If you like. Was there anything that you noticed?”

“Nothing apart from the obvious.” I shook my head. “I wasn’t really paying attention before. That’s all.”

6 BERLIN, 1932

IN A MANUAL of forensic medicine that Ernst Gennat gave all the bulls that joined Department IV, there was a photograph that always caused a certain amount of mirth the first time you saw it. In the photograph, a naked girl was lying on a bed with her hands tied behind her back, around her neck was a ligature pulled tight, and half of her head had been blown off with a shotgun. Oh yes, and there was a dildo up her ass. Nothing funny about any of that, of course. It was the caption underneath the picture that was the funny part. It read: “Circumstances Arousing Suspicion.” That used to kill us. Whenever any of us who were assigned to D4 saw an atrocious and obvious case of homicide, we used to repeat the words of that caption. It helped lighten things up.

The body was found in Friedrichshain Park, close to the hospital, in the eastern part of Berlin. The area was popular with children, because of the fairy-tale fountain that was there. Water flowed down a series of shallow steps that were flanked by ten groups of characters from stories each of us had heard at his mother’s knee. When the call came into the Police Praesidium on Alexanderplatz, it was hoped that the dead girl might have drowned, accidentally. But one look at the body and I knew different. She looked like the victim of the wolf from one of those old fairy tales. The kind of big bad wolf who might have tried to eat any one of those little limestone heroes and heroines.

“Bloody hell, sir,” said my sergeant, KBS Heinrich Grund, as we shone our flashlights over the body. “Circumstances arousing suspicion, or what?”

“Sure looks that way, doesn’t it?”

“Only a bit, yeah. Shit. Wait till the boys at the Alex hear about this one.”

There was not a permanent staff of detectives for homicide investigations at the Alex. D4 was supposed to be only a supervisory body, with three rotating teams of cops from other Berlin inspectorates. But in practice it didn’t work like that. By 1932 there were three teams on active duty, with nothing left in reserve. That night I had already driven over to Wedding to take a look at the body of a fifteen-year-old boy who had been found stabbed to death in a bus shelter. The other two teams were still out on cases: KOK Müller was looking into the death of a man found hanging on a lamppost in Lichtenrade; and KOK Lipik was in Neukölln, investigating the fatal shooting of a woman. If this sounds like a crime wave, it wasn’t. Most of the murders that took place in Berlin that spring and early summer were political. And but for the tit-for-tat violence carried out by Nazi storm troopers and Communist cadres, the city’s crime figures would have shown a declining murder rate during the last months of the Weimar Republic.

Friedrichshain Park was a leafy mile north west of the Alex. After the call came in, we were there in less than twenty minutes. Me, district secretary Grund, an ordinary criminal secretary, an assistant criminal secretary, and half a dozen uniformed polenta from the protection police—the Schutzpolizei.

“A lust murder, do you think?” asked Grund.