Фолькер Кучер - Goldstein

‘If you pull out your gun, it’ll be a bloodbath.’

‘My colleagues will be here soon,’ Rath said, more to reassure himself. ‘That will put an end to it.’

Two uniformed officers were already there, but weren’t about to step in. They observed the goings-on cautiously, behaving as if they had mistakenly wandered into the Schlesische Viertel and were at the mercy of Communists and criminal gangs. Only, this wasn’t East Berlin, it was the Ku’damm, and scenes like this were unprecedented.

It shocked Rath to see this elegant, middle-class neighbourhood morph into a riot scene. Other pedestrians were shocked too, not believing their eyes until the toe of a brown boot caught them, or a fist landed in their face, until they had a bloodied nose or broken ribs.

The taxi rank was deserted. Either the taxi drivers had decided to protect their precious vehicles, or they were all gone, hired by fleeing pedestrians. They had to keep going. Marion took off her high heels and ran in stockinged feet next to Goldstein.

Then Rath saw something that gave the lie to later reports of a spontaneous uprising led by young unemployed men. This wasn’t a disaffected populace, not even a mob of brownshirts running wild. They were advancing systematically, giving each other signals, whistling and waving. The commanders were directing them like troops in battle.

The general’s vehicle looked unreal in the middle of it all, a chauferred open car being driven down the Ku’damm. In the back sat a man wearing a Navy cap with gold braid trimming like an admiral, and a brownshirt who looked like his aide-de-camp. The man with the Navy cap kept asking for the vehicle to stop, waving over a Scharführer here, a Gruppenführer there, and distributing orders.

Rath made a mental note of the number plate before hurrying after Goldstein and his friends, shepherding them inside the U-Bahn. He hoped it wouldn’t prove to be a trap, and was relieved to see no brownshirts below ground. Everything seemed normal. If it hadn’t been for the harried faces of fellow passengers, he might have thought what was happening above was a bad dream.

He decided to take his leave from Goldstein at the station. He would be flouting his duty, of course, but he could hardly believe the Yank would willingly stay in this madhouse. Goldstein’s night train left in an hour and a half. ‘I need to take care of this,’ he said.

‘You do that,’ Goldstein agreed. ‘You’re hosting the Olympic Games in a few years. I hope you have that lot under control by then.’

‘We will. This won’t happen again in a hurry, I promise you.’

He wished the three a safe trip and waited until the train disappeared before looking for the nearest telephone booth. He asked to be put through to Alex and requested back-up.

‘You aren’t the first,’ the watch sergeant said. ‘It’s on its way.’

‘Well, it isn’t here!’ Rath shouted into the receiver. ‘We’re losing control of the streets to this brown rabble. Isn’t it bad enough that we’ve no say in Communist areas? Now, get a move on.’

He hung up. There was a knock on the glass pane. Two brownshirts stood tapping coins against the booth and grinning. Rath put them in their early twenties, but one was as spotty as a sixteen-year-old. He opened the door. ‘What’s the big idea?’

‘You’re a Jew’s sow too, are you?’ Spots said, while the other carried on grinning. ‘Called your Isidor, did you, so he’d send the good old German police out to help?!’

‘No need.’ Rath showed his identification, drew his Walther and released the safety catch. ‘You two brown arseholes will have nothing against accompanying me to the nearest station?’

They threw their hands in the air.

‘You can’t speak to us like that,’ Spots said. He seemed to know his rights; probably a law student.

‘Wrong.’ Rath waved his gun, hurrying them on. ‘It’s you who can’t speak to me like that. Insulting a public official is a punishable offence in Prussia. Insulting a couple of arseholes is not.’

Spots and his friend kept shtum as they trotted down the Ku’damm towards the 133rd precinct in Joachimsthaler Strasse.

Rath had anticipated an evening drinking a few civilised cognacs at the bar in Kakadu , missing Charly but, at the same time, listening to the new houseband, which was supposed to have a very good drummer. Instead, he found himself escorting these two idiots to the nearest police station. At least they had resigned themselves silently to their fate.

Later, he emerged from the station and lit a cigarette. On the Ku’damm everything was quiet again, the shouting replaced by the sounds of the city’s nightlife. On the other side of the road the neon of the Kakadu-Bar beamed into the night. He looked at his watch. The Nazis hadn’t completely ruined his evening. He could still drink his cognac.

The red-gold saloon was full to bursting. In here, the mob felt like a bad dream. Only the black eye and slightly dirty suit of the man next to him at the bar reminded him what had happened. The man smiled at his female companion as if all was forgotten. The barman, too, was friendly as ever. Rath ordered his cognac and tried not to think of Charly, concentrating instead on the music and, yes, the new drummer was very good.

He drank hoping, when the time came, to fall pleasantly inebriated into his hotel bed. Meanwhile, the atmosphere in Kakadu was as riotous as ever, and he felt happy to be among these people who just wanted to drink, dance, listen to music and have fun. He wasn’t interested in what was happening outside. Still, Abraham Goldstein was right about one thing: Berlin was a crazy city, and it was getting crazier and crazier.

1929: There is seething unrest in Berlin. When a car is hauled out of the Landwehr Canal with a mutilated corpse inside Detective Inspector Gereon Rath claims the case. Soon his inquiries drag him ever deeper into the morass of Weimar Berlin’s ‘Roaring Twenties’ underworld of cocaine, prostitution, gunrunning and shady politics.

‘An excellent police procedural that cleverly captures the dark and dangerous period of the Weimer Republic before it slides into the ultimate evil of Nazism.’

1930: Silent movie actress Betty Winter is killed on set after a lighting system falls on her. Inspector Gereon Rath suspects sabotage, possibly worse. Meanwhile, the murder of a Nazi named Horst Wessel leads to street riots and Rath’s relationship with Charlotte Ritter is on the rocks. Then another actress is found dead, this time with her vocal cords removed…

‘Conjures up the dangerous decadence of the Weimar years, with blood on the Berlin streets and the Nazis lurking menacingly in the wings.’

Volker Kutscherwas born in 1962. He studied German, Philosophy and History, and worked as a newspaper editor prior to writing his first detective novel. Babylon Berlin , the start of an award-winning series of novels to feature Gereon Rath and his exploits in late Weimar Republic Berlin, was an instant hit in Germany. A lavish television production aired on Sky Atlantic in November 2017. There are now six titles in the series, most recently Lunapark in 2016. The series was awarded the Berlin Krimi-Fuchs Crime Writers Prize in 2011 and has sold over one million copies worldwide. Volker Kutscher works as a full-time author and lives in Cologne.