A Quiet Flame

I dropped onto all fours and slowly crawled away from the body in the direction of Königs-Thor. Heinrich Grund did the same, a yard or two to my left. The night was warm, and the grass felt dry and smelled sweet under my hands. It was something we had done before. Something Ernst Gennat was keen on. Something that was in the manual he’d given us. How it was small things that solved murders: bullet casings, blood spots, collar buttons, cigarette ends, matchbooks, earrings, hanks of hair, party badges. Things that were large and easy to see were usually carried away from a crime scene. But the small stuff. That was different. It was the small stuff that could send a man to the guillotine. Nobody called them clues. Gennat hated that word.

“Clues are for the clueless,” was what the Full Ernst would tell us. “That’s not what I want from my detectives. Give me little spots of color on a canvas. Like that Frenchie who used to paint in little dots. Georges Seurat. Each dot means shit on its own. But when you take a few steps back and look at all of the dots together, you see a picture. That’s what I want you bastards to do. Learn how to paint me a picture like Georges Seurat.”

So there we were, me and Heinrich Grund, crawling along the grass in Friedrichshain Park, like a couple of dogs. The Berlin polenta trying to paint a picture.

If I had blinked, I might have missed it. As spots of color go, this one was as small as anything you might have seen on an Impressionist’s canvas, but just as colorful. At first glance I mistook it for a cornflower, because it was light blue, like the dead girl’s eyes. It was a pill, lying on top of a few blades of grass. I picked it up and held it up to my eyes and saw that it was as immaculate as a diamond, which meant it couldn’t have been there that long. There had been a brief shower of rain just after lunch, so it had to have fallen on the ground some time after that. A man hurrying back to the road from the fountains where he had dumped a body might easily have taken out a box of pills, fumbled it in his nervous state, and dropped one. Now all I had to do was find out what kind of pill it was.

“What have you got there, boss?”

“A pill,” I said, laying it on his palm.

“Kind of pill?”

“I’m not a chemist.”

“Want me to check it out at the hospital?”

“No. I’ll get Hans Illmann to do it.”

Illmann was professor of forensic medicine at the Institute for Police Science in Charlottenburg, and senior pathologist at the Alex. He was also a prominent member of the Social Democratic Party, the SDP. For this and other alleged character failings he had been frequently denounced by Goebbels in the pages of Der Angriff, Berlin’s Nazi newspaper. Illmann wasn’t Jewish, but as far as the Nazis were concerned, he was the next worst thing: a liberal-minded intellectual.

“Illmann?”

“Professor Illmann. Any objections?”

Grund looked up at the moon, as if trying to learn patience. The white light had turned his pale blond head a steely shade of silver, and his blue eyes became almost electric. He looked like some kind of machine-man. Something hard, metallic, and cruel. The head turned, and he stared at me as he might have stared at some poor opponent in the ring—an inadequate subspecies of man who was not fit to enter a contest with one such as him.

“You’re the boss,” he said, and dropped the pill back in my hand.

But for how much longer? I asked myself.

WE DROVE BACK to the Alex, which, with its cupolas and arched entranceways, was as big as a railway station and, behind the four-story brick façade, in the double-height entrance hall, very nearly as busy. All human life was in there. And quite a bit of pond life, too. There was a drunk with a black eye, who was unsteadily awaiting being locked up for the night; a taxi driver making a complaint about a passenger who had run off without paying; an androgynous-looking young man wearing tight white shorts, who was sitting quietly in a corner, checking his makeup in a hand mirror; and a bespectacled man with a briefcase in his hands and a livid red mark across his mouth.