A Quiet Flame

“Could be. There’s not much blood around, though. Whatever lust might have been involved must have happened elsewhere.” I looked up and around. The road junction at Königs-Thor was only a few yards to the west of us. “Whoever it was could have stopped his car on Friedenstrasse, or Am Friedrichshain, lifted her out of the trunk, and carried her here just after it got dark tonight.”

“With the park on one side of the road and a couple of cemeteries on the other, it’s a good spot,” said Grund. “Lots of trees and bushes to keep him covered. Nice and quiet.”

Then, somewhere to the west of us, in the heart of the Scheunenviertel, we heard two shots fired.

“Although not so as you’d notice,” I said. Hearing a third shot, and then a fourth, I added, “Sounds like your friends are busy tonight.”

“Nothing to do with me,” said Grund. “More likely the Always True, I’d have thought. This is their patch.”

The Always True was one of Berlin’s most powerful criminal gangs.

“But if it was a Red who just got shot, then presumably that would be to your lot’s advantage.”

Heinrich Grund was, or had been, just about my best friend on the force. We had been in the army together. There was a picture of him on the wall in my corner of the detectives’ room. In the picture, no less a figure than Paul von Hindenburg, the president of the republic, was presenting Heinrich with the victor’s plaque for winning the Prussian Police Boxing Championships. But the previous week I had discovered that my old friend had joined the NSBAG—the National Socialist Fellowship of Civil Servants. As he was a boxer with a reputation for using the head, I had to admit that being a Nazi suited him. All the same, it felt like a betrayal.

“What makes you think it was a Nazi shooting a Red, and not a Red shooting a Nazi?”

“I can tell the difference.”

“How?”

“It’s a full moon, isn’t it? That’s usually the time when werewolves and Nazis creep out of their holes to commit murder.”

“Very funny.” Grund smiled patiently and lit a cigarette. He blew out the match and, careful not to contaminate the crime scene, put it in his vest pocket. He might have been a Nazi but he was still a good detective. “And your lot. They’re so different, are they?”

“My lot? What lot is that?”

“Come on, Bernie. Everyone knows the Official supports the Reds.”

The Official was the union of Prussian police officers, to which I belonged. It wasn’t the biggest union. That was the General. But the important names in the General’s leadership—policemen like Dillenburger and Borck—were openly right-wing and anti-Semitic. Which was why I’d left the General and joined the Official.

“The Official isn’t Communist,” I said. “We support the Social Democrats and the republic.”

“Oh, yeah? Then why the Iron Front against Fascism? Why not an Iron Front against Bolshevism, too?”

“Because, as you well know, Heinrich, most of the violence on the streets is committed or provoked by the Nazis.”

“How do you work that out, exactly?”

“That woman in Neukölln that Lipik’s investigating. Even before he left the Alex, he reckoned she had been shot dead by a storm trooper who was aiming at a Commie.”

“So. It was an accident. I don’t see how that proves the Nazis organize most of the violence.”

“No? Well, you want to come round our way and take a look out of my apartment window on Dragonerstrasse. The Central Offices of the German Communist Party are just around the corner, on Bulowplatz. So that’s where the Nazis choose to exercise their democratic right to hold a parade. Does that seem reasonable? Does that sound law-abiding?”

“Proves my point, doesn’t it? You living in a Red area like that.”

“All it proves is that the Nazis are always spoiling for a fight.”

I bent down and flicked my flashlight up and down the dead girl’s body. Her upper half looked more or less normal. She was about thirteen or fourteen, blond, with pale blue eyes and a small galaxy of freckles around her pixie nose. It was a tomboyish sort of face, and you could easily have mistaken her for a boy. The matter of her sex was only confirmed by her small, adolescent breasts, the rest of her sexual organs having been removed along with her lower intestines, her womb, and whatever else gets packed in down there when a girl gets born. But it wasn’t her evisceration that caught my eye. In truth, both Heinrich and I had seen this kind of thing many times in the trenches. There was also the caliper on her left leg. I hadn’t noticed it before.

“No walking stick,” I said, tapping it with my pencil. “You’d think she’d have had one.”

“Maybe she didn’t need one. It’s not every cripple that needs a stick.”

“You’re right. Goebbels manages very well without one, doesn’t he? For a cripple. Then again there’s a big stick inside almost everything he says.” I lit a cigarette and let out a big, smoky sigh. “Why do people do this kind of thing?” I said to myself.

“You mean, kill children?”

“I meant, Why kill them like this? It’s monstrous, isn’t it? Depraved.”