Фолькер Кучер - The Silent Death

‘I thought I made that abundantly clear. Scene forty-nine was filmed just before eleven o’clock in the morning; the effects lever was still working and triggered the thunder. On the afternoon of that same day, however, while shooting scene fifty-three, the same lever loosened the one bolt still holding the spotlight in place – the mechanism that Kronberg just described. It can’t have been Felix Krempin because by eleven o’clock he was no longer in the studio.’

‘What gives you that idea?’

‘The eyewitnesses Lüdenbach and Krieg. Supported by others who last saw him in the studio around ten.’

‘Perhaps you haven’t heard, Inspector. Since there were a number of conflicting witness statements, we decided to question all parties a little more thoroughly. If you had arrived on time you would have heard all this, but I will repeat it once more for your sake: three witnesses now concede that Felix Krempin could still have been in the studio around twelve. That is to say at the time when everything had already been arranged for the afternoon shoot. Where does that leave your little theory?’

Rath stood there like a star pupil who had just spectacularly failed an important exam, and was now being paraded in front of his gloating classmates by the disappointed teacher.

Böhm turned to face his assembled colleagues. ‘Gentlemen, you know what you have to do,’ he said. ‘To work!’

The silence was broken by loud crashes and a low muttering as the room slowly emptied. Rath packed his things and was about to leave too when Böhm held him back. ‘Where are you going?’

‘To work.’

‘What work? Have I given you an assignment?’

Rath looked the bulldog in the eye. He wasn’t about to kowtow to Böhm.

‘You can hand me your report,’ Böhm said, ‘and then you are temporarily relieved of all duties on the Winter case.’

Rath bit his tongue and handed Böhm the file. ‘What should I do instead, Detective Chief Inspector, Sir?’

‘Go to your desk. You’ll find everything there.’

Rath saw what Böhm meant by everything when he entered his office. There was a stack of files on his desk. ‘What am I supposed to do with these?’ he asked his secretary.

Erika Voss shrugged her shoulders. ‘Fräulein Steiner just brought them. With greetings from DCI Böhm, was all she said.’

According to Böhm’s instructions he was to prepare the Wessel case, chaotic and disordered as it was, for the public prosecutor. It was the first time Böhm had actually entrusted him with the case – save for the ridiculous order to attend the funeral, and it was exactly the kind of work Rath despised: a mindless chore, painstaking and monotonous. A punishment.

There was a knock, and Erika Voss poked her nosy head through the door. ‘Coffee?’

‘No, thank you,’ he said. ‘Where’s Gräf got to? He was at the briefing just now.’

‘He’s gone to Grunewald with Lange, to scour the allotments. Böhm seems to think Krempin’s hiding there.’

Böhm had expressly requested that Rath tack on a report about the Wessel funeral, a report that only Gräf could write, since it was he who had been at the cemetery on Saturday.

‘If he calls, put him through to me right away. See if you can reach him while he’s out and about.’

‘I wouldn’t get your hopes up, Inspector, not if he’s as hard to get hold of as you’ve been in the last few days,’ Erika Voss said, and closed the door.

Rath sorted the papers into stacks of various heights: witness statements, reports, crime scene descriptions, crime scene photos, medical reports, technical reports, evidence logs, summaries, possible conclusions. At one the telephone rang. He was hoping for Gräf but was disappointed. It was Erika Voss, who once again had been too lazy to leave her desk.

‘There’s a Herr Ziehlke here to see you.’

He had completely forgotten. ‘Send him in,’ he said, and moments later there was a knock.

Friedhelm Ziehlke had taken off his hat and was kneading it in his hands. ‘Here I am, Inspector,’ he said. ‘Nice place you’ve got.’

Rath was about to offer the taxi driver a seat, but there was a pile of statements on the visitor’s chair. ‘Why don’t we go out?’ he said. ‘Fancy a beer at Aschinger?’

‘I’m still on duty, but I wouldn’t say no to a Bratwurst.’

It was noisy at Alex. The steam hammer was still driving supporting irons into the ground, although the underground was supposedly as good as finished. Everywhere you looked construction hoardings blocked the view. Rath had the feeling that they moved every day so that you had to negotiate a new labyrinth each time you wanted to cross the square.

‘Haven’t been here for a long time,’ Ziehlke said. ‘Every halfway sensible taxi driver avoids Alexanderplatz.’

Whatever else was being torn down at Alex, Aschinger remained. The old building was scheduled for demolition, but a number of little placards revealed that the restaurant would find a home in one of the new buildings. An Alex without Aschinger was something Rath couldn’t imagine. Half the station ate their lunch or drank their after-work beer here.

As always at lunchtime, it was full to bursting. Rath ordered a Bierwurst with potato salad for Ziehlke, and a Sinalco to drink. For himself he ordered Rinderbraten and potato dumplings with a glass of Selters mineral water. At least the man didn’t want fried liver.

‘Nice of you to invite me,’ Ziehlke said, and began to cut up his Bierwurst. ‘I’m here to look at photos then?’

‘First let’s eat.’ Rath got stuck into his beef. ‘But yes, I’d like you to take a close look at each picture for the man who picked up Vivian Franck.’

‘Why are you looking for her anyway?’ Ziehlke asked between mouthfuls of potato salad. ‘You still haven’t told me that.’

‘Because she’s missing,’ Rath said.

After the waiter had cleared their plates, Rath fetched Oppenberg’s envelope from his bag. There were nearly twenty portraits, not just of actors, but of other men Oppenberg deemed capable of meeting with Vivian in secret. Among them was Felix Krempin, though the photo was better than Bellmann’s Christmas party snap. Ziehlke examined each image thoroughly, hesitating on just two occasions, firstly over Krempin, before realising that he recognised him from the paper. ‘He’s the one you’re looking for, isn’t he?’ The second time it was a dark-haired actor, but eventually he ruled him out too. ‘No, that’s not him. A similar type, that’s all.’

Rath thanked Ziehlke. ‘If you see the man anywhere, be it on a billboard, in your taxi, or on the street, call me immediately. Any time of day.’

Before returning to the Castle, Rath found a telephone box from which to call Oppenberg, and managed to wangle an invitation to dinner from his secretary.

Erika Voss still wasn’t back from her break when Rath sat down at his desk and set about the stack of papers. It was a curious case, this Wessel business, and the Nazis had exploited it to the full: a landlady calls in a few Communist friends to give a defaulting tenant a beating. The situation escalates, and the SA Sturmführer gets a bullet in the face at the door. Conveniently enough the killer, Ali Höhler, is the former pimp of the whore with whom this Wessel now resides.

The bullet had made Wessel a martyr for the Nazi movement, but he was an unlikely saint: a young priest’s son who had jolted the SA in Friedrichshain into action, only to fall in love with a prostitute and start shamefully neglecting his SA. Goebbels didn’t care. For Berlin’s top Nazi, the Sturmführer made the perfect martyr. Nevertheless, it was fortunate that Wessel had finally succumbed to his injuries, otherwise the model Nazi might yet have resigned from the NSDAP. In the last few months, he seemed to have lost all interest in politics. There were even whisperings that he had started playing pimp for his beloved, though such rumours had just as likely come from Communist circles.