A Quiet Flame

We were there in a matter of minutes. Market days were Wednesdays and Saturdays, so the place was closed and deserted. But the restaurant was open, and some of the patrons—wholesale butchers mostly, from Pankow, Weissensee, and Petershagen—reported seeing three men chasing the girl into the yards. But the descriptions were vague. Too vague to be worth writing down. The body itself was in the slaughterhouse. She looked about twenty. She’d been shot in the head at fairly close range. There was a brown mark around the bullet hole. All the clothing below her waist was gone and, from the smell of her, it seemed probable she’d been raped. But that was it. There had been no amateur surgery on this poor creature.

“Circumstances arousing suspicion, right enough,” said Grund after quite a while.

I would have been surprised if he hadn’t said it.

“Nice-looking box on her,” he added.

“Go ahead and give her one, why don’t you? I’ll look the other way.”

“I was just saying,” he said. “I mean, look at it. Her box. It’s been shaved, mostly. Not something you often see, that’s all. Bare like that. Like a little girl.”

I rifled through her handbag, which one of the uniformed SCHUPOs had found a short distance away from the body, and found a Communist Party card. Her name was Sabine Färber. She’d worked at KPD headquarters close to where I lived. Her home was in Pettenkoferstrasse, on the edge of Lichterfelde, just a hundred yards east of where she’d been murdered. Already it seemed abundantly clear to me what had probably happened.

“Fucking Nazis,” I said with loud disgust.

“Christ, I’m fed up with this,” Grund said, frowning. “How do you work that out? That they were Nazis who did this. You heard the descriptions given by those butchers. No one mentioned seeing any brown shirts or swastikas. Not even a toothbrush mustache. So how do you figure that they’re Nazis?”

“Oh, it’s nothing personal, Heinrich.” I tossed him Sabine Färber’s party card. “But they weren’t Jehovah’s Witnesses trying to find a convert.”

He looked at the card and shrugged, as if allowing only the possibility that I was right.

“Come on. It’s got their fingerprints all over it. My guess is that the three men the butchers reported seeing were storm troopers wearing plain clothes so as not to draw attention to themselves. They must have been waiting for her when she came out of the KPD headquarters on Bulowplatz. It’s a nice day, so she decided to walk home and didn’t notice that they were following. Waiting for a good opportunity to attack her. When she spotted them, she ran in here, hoping to escape. Only they cornered her and then did what brave storm troopers do when they’re fighting a terrible menace like international Bolshevism. Heinrich?”

“I suppose some of that might be right,” he said. “More or less.”

“Which part do you agree with less?” I asked.

Grund didn’t answer. He put Sabine Färber’s card back in her bag and stared down at the dead girl.

“What is it that Hitler says?” I asked. “Strength lies not in defense but in attack?” I lit a cigarette. “I always wondered what that meant.” I let the smoke char my lungs for a moment and then said, “Is this the kind of attack that he means, do you think? Your great leader?”

“Of course not,” muttered Grund. “You know it isn’t.”

“What, then? You tell me. I’d like to know.”

“Give it a rest, why don’t you?”

“Me?” I laughed. “It’s not me who needs to give it a rest, Heinrich. It’s the people who did this. They’re your friends. The National Socialists.”

“You don’t know any of that for a fact.”

“No, you’re right. I don’t. For real vision you need a man like Adolf Hitler. Perhaps he should be the detective here. Not a bad idea—I’m sure I prefer the idea of him as a cop to the idea of him becoming the next chancellor of Germany.” I smiled. “And it’s an even bet he’d have a superior cleanup rate to me. Who better to solve a city’s crimes than the man who instigates most of them?”

“Christ, I wish I didn’t have to listen to you, Gunther.”

Grund spoke through gritted teeth. There was color in his face that ought to have warned me to be careful. He was a boxer, after all.

“You don’t,” I told him. “I’m going back to the Alex to tell the political boys that this is one for them. You stay here and see if you can’t get some better witnesses than those sausage-makers. I dunno. Perhaps you’ll get lucky. Perhaps they’re Nazis themselves. They’re certainly ugly enough. Who knows? Perhaps they’ll even give you descriptions of three orthodox Jews.”