Фолькер Кучер - Babylon Berlin

‘So he was already dead when he entered the canal yesterday?’

‘100%,’ Schwartz nodded. ‘He certainly didn’t drown. We haven’t found any trace of water in his lungs.’

‘I didn’t think it was a floater,’ Böhm growled. ‘If memory serves, you confirmed that last night. Don’t keep me in suspense, Doctor. Enough of my time has been wasted today already.’

‘The cause of death is astounding, however. You’ll be surprised when you hear it. The man didn’t die as a result of his injuries.’

‘Surprise me, Doctor. I’m waiting.’

‘Heroin,’ Dr Schwartz said simply.

‘Heroin?’

‘Respiratory failure, caused by an overdose of diacetylmorphine; that is, heroin.’

‘The cough medicine?’

Schwartz nodded. ‘Cough tablets for morphine addicts. It used to be prescribed as an anti-asthmatic. Until people realised it was addictive. A particularly strong opiate, very hard to procure on the legal drugs market. On the illegal market, however… If you take too much of it, you stop breathing, but by that stage you won’t notice a thing.’

Rath paused for a moment in front of the main gate to arrange his thoughts. The cool air did him good. He felt as if he had awoken from a morbid dream where a dead face had been staring at him. Something that could only be caused by a visit to the morgue. Before descending the steps, he lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply.

There was no doubt about it. It was definitely the Russian lying on the marble table. The man who had visited him a few nights before. The drunk who had wrecked his wardrobe. One moment alive, the next a case for Homicide. He took another long draw, turned up his collar and set off towards Oranienburger Tor.

Why hadn’t he said anything? It was too late now. They would ask him why he had withheld the information and then – at the very least – institute disciplinary proceedings.

Rath felt his carefully suppressed rage returning. DCI arsehole! If everybody in A Division was as much of a bulldog as DCI Böhm, he wondered if it really was such a desirable place to work. He was yet to meet a bigger idiot in the whole of the Castle. In comparison even Lanke seemed like a charming, sympathetic paternalist. Naturally he hadn’t told the bulldog anything, but it was more of a reflex than a rational decision.

What kind of information could he have passed on anyway? He knew almost nothing about the dead man. Boris had been in his flat that one time, a few days before this death, drunk, screaming and flailing his arms about. Rath wasn’t even sure that Boris was his name; he only knew that he had been searching for a fellow countryman who had once lived in Nürnberger Strasse. And that he was now dead.

Heroin! A drug addict, driving into the Landwehr canal? How had the dead Russian sustained the injuries to his hands and feet? A very strange case, Rath thought. It was a strange case though none of his business.

At Oranienburger Tor he ignored the steps to the underground. Instead he lit a cigarette and continued to Friedrichstrasse station. The crowd of people on Weidendammer Bridge had grown since he’d driven over it in the mortuary car. Most of them had finished work for the evening and were on their way home or to the nearest pub, already thinking about dinner, families, their wives or a beer with friends. Here the city seemed frighteningly normal. How many of these people could imagine what was happening in Neukölln or Wedding? Whether shots were still being fired in Hermannstrasse? The events of the day had given Rath an upset stomach and only now did he realise that he hadn’t eaten anything. There was an Aschinger here, directly behind the railway underpass on Friedrichstrasse. He decided to have a snack before heading home, and a beer or two. He flicked his cigarette into the Spree and fought his way through the crowd. In front of Friedrichstrasse station, the paperboys were crying out the evening’s headlines. ‘New street battles!’ – ‘Further deaths in communist disturbances!’ – ‘RFB to be banned?’

‘Strange!’ Elisabeth Behnke lifted the broken padlock from the damp cellar floor. Someone had broken into Kardakov’s storage area. ‘That’s my padlock,’ she explained. ‘I locked his cellar two or three weeks ago, so he couldn’t sneak out his things without paying his final month’s rent.’ She held out the cheap, misshapen brass lock. ‘I wonder who it was?’

Rath shrugged his shoulders and stepped into his predecessor’s cellar. There was barely any light from the dim 40 watt cellar bulb and the air was musty.

‘When was the last time you were down here?’ he asked.

Elisabeth Behnke considered for a moment. ‘Maybe last week.’

‘The lock was still intact?’

‘No idea. I wasn’t paying any attention. My cellar is over there.’ She pointed towards a few wobbly shelves, upon which a number of jars were gathering dust. Next to them was a big crate of potatoes.

‘Does Kardakov still have a key to the main door?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Then it wasn’t him picking something up.’

‘It doesn’t look as if anyone’s ever picked anything up.’

Junk was piled to the ceiling. Along the back wall stood an old cupboard with a few framed pictures leaning against it, while the side wall housed a rusty bicycle. But for the most part it was boxes: box upon box, stacked one on top of the other.

‘How long did he live here?’ Rath asked.

She shrugged. ‘Maybe three years.’

‘Three years and all that junk!’ He shook his head. ‘You need an expert to go through that. Lucky I’m a police officer.’

‘I’ll go upstairs and make us a tea,’ she said. He tried not to think what that might mean, and lifted the first box from the pile.

It had been his idea to look in the cellar. His interest in Kardakov had grown enormously since his unexpected encounter with Boris in the morgue. He couldn’t get the image of his battered body out of his mind.

Only a few hours ago, his guilty conscience had been eating away at him, on account of his silence. Then he had sat at the counter of Aschinger’s in Friedrichstrasse and dulled his conscience with a few beers. He tried to view things objectively, and realised that it was a sign. He knew a little more than Homicide. He knew that the dead man had been looking for someone in Berlin. Maybe this was his chance. Why shouldn’t he take advantage of it? It was what life was about, after all. He only had to think back to Bruno’s words. Gennat’s boys are hand-picked. You have to land something really big. No, he wouldn’t do Böhm any favours, wouldn’t confide the little he knew. He wouldn’t break the rules either though, quite the opposite. He would present the commissioner with a solved case. And in order to do that, he would need to learn a little more about his mysterious predecessor. Handy, when you could begin the search in your own cellar.

After half an hour, all the boxes stood open in front of the wooden shed. Most of them had contained books. Book after book, almost exclusively in Russian. Rath couldn’t even make out the titles. He didn’t know a lot about the Cyrillic alphabet. The only thing that meant anything to him was a coffee-table book about St Petersburg, or Leningrad as people said these days. He was surprised that an author should have abandoned his books for so long and stored them in the cellar. There was only one box of personal items, a few letters that Rath could make neither head nor tail of, all in Russian again. The only thing he could halfway make out was the date. He noticed that the letters weren’t in chronological order but were bundled together higgledy-piggledy. In the middle of the pile was a number of programmes from the Delphi Palace in Kantstrasse. The artist Lana Nikoros, who was heavily billed, wore a mysterious smile in her photo. The Mona Lisa had nothing on her. Kardakov seemed to be a fan of the singer. He had collected programmes from several months, from October 1928 to March 1929.