Фолькер Кучер - Goldstein

Goldstein planted himself in front of Gerd.

‘Stop dragging your feet, that means you too.’

‘How am I supposed to walk?’

‘Try hopping or crawling. Your whining is getting on my nerves.’

Moments ago, Little Gerd here had been prepared to smash his face in with a knuckleduster. Now he was behaving like he’d just realised that life was unfair. He pointed the Remington at him. ‘I’d get out of here, unless you want to lose the other foot.’

Gerd gave a cry of pain as he tried putting weight on his left foot for the first time. When he shifted the load to his heel it appeared to work. Slowly he limped towards the beam of light and the gravel path, and hobbled out of sight.

Goldstein went over to the old man and handed him his black hat. He was a little worse for wear, and there was a bruise under his white beard. All in all, though, he wasn’t doing too badly. ‘Up you get, old timer,’ he said, helping the astonishingly light man onto his feet. The Jew dusted the dirt and blades of grass from his caftan, and looked at him as if he were the Messiah.

‘Just so we understand each other,’ Goldstein said. ‘I don’t exist. You never saw me!’

‘But I do see you. You stand here now.’

‘But really, I am somewhere else.’

‘I don’t understand. Who are you?’

‘I could be the Archangel Michael for all it matters. Just to be clear again: this never happened. I’ll take you home to your family, and then you’ll forget about the whole thing, yes?’

‘Many times, thank you,’ the old man said. ‘But you shouldn’t have fired shot.’ He shook his head. ‘Shooting is wrong.’

Arguing with pig-headed old Jews of this kind was a waste of time, as Goldstein knew from experience. He gave the man his arm and led him towards the gravel path.

‘Let me tell you the story of old Rabbi Zanowitsch from Lubowitz,’ the old man said. Goldstein rolled his eyes. He had heard it many, many years before.

The new month began in a crush as Weiss summoned all senior CID officers, from inspector upwards, to the large meeting room.

For once Rath didn’t mind. He pressed Kirie’s lead into Gräf’s hands, dispatched the detective to the Excelsior and treated himself to a coffee. In the cluster of people that formed outside the room were a few familiar faces from A Division, among them Wilhelm Böhm sporting a holiday tan. Rath wouldn’t have begrudged Bulldog Böhm a few more days off, or, indeed, early retirement on full pay. He kept his distance, shuffling forward beside Narcotics, who were bitching about Nebe, their former boss, whom Weiss had made head of Robbery Division a few weeks before. Nebe was ambitious, unpopular, and seen as Bernhard Weiss’s protégé. Those who enjoyed the protection of superiors at the Castle didn’t have an easy time, as Rath knew from experience, having been seen as the darling of the former commissioner, Zörgiebel, when he started in Berlin.

The crowd pushed through the double leaf doors and into the room. Rath found a space at the back and sat down. The air was already sticky. Most officers were smoking, and no one thought to open a window. He yielded to the herd mentality and opened a packet of Overstolz, sniffing the fresh tobacco before lighting up.

Yesterday evening had ended with him and Charly smoking in his flat on Luisenufer, exhausted and resigned after many hours of fruitless door-to-door canvassing. Rath had waited over an hour for her, and was starting to worry when he heard the key turn. Moments later, her disappointed face appeared in the door. She hadn’t found the girl, of course, although she had worked through her entire list. He consoled her with the prospect of tomorrow, and received a tired, battle-weary nod in return.

His telephone call to the Welfare Office had done nothing to assuage his guilty conscience, and the fact that Charly, tired and resigned as she was, had actually believed his threadbare excuses, almost shamed him more than the excuses themselves. He had visited only one Reinhold family and was met by an indignant woman who said she had no daughter by the name of Alex or Alexandra. At the other four addresses, he had claimed – and Charly believed him – no one had been home.

This morning, that same abandoned list had morphed into her final hope. She tore the evidence of his neglect from the notebook almost gratefully, and he said nothing more on the subject. Certainly not his true opinion, which was that the situation was hopeless.

The whispering that filled the large meeting room grew quieter and finally stopped. Rath looked up as the deputy commissioner stepped onto the podium with a grave expression. He threw his cigarette on the stone floor and trod it out with the tip of his shoe. Dr Weiss gripped the lectern and waited. Only when all was quiet in the room did he speak.

‘I have gathered you here today,’ he began, looking around, ‘in light of recent, tragic events. I am sure most of you have heard already.’

His account of the clash on Frankfurter Allee sounded altogether more grave than it had coming from Charly. As expected, the deputy didn’t mention anything about a guttersnipe who had escaped from Lichtenberg District Court. He simply listed the facts: a workers’ demonstration in the middle of a Communist area; sudden escalation, and advancing police officers find themselves in a hail of bullets; a sergeant who storms demonstrators on the front line is hit in the chest, collapses, and dies shortly afterwards.

‘You are no doubt aware, gentlemen,’ Weiss said solemnly, ‘that Sergeant Emil Kuhfeld is not the first police officer to lose his life in the line of duty. Nor, I fear, will he be the last. I know I speak for us all when I say that we , his colleagues, will not forget him.’ He gazed around the room. ‘Gentlemen,’ he continued, ‘Please rise and observe a minute’s silence for our dead colleague.’

Hundreds of chair legs scraped across the floor and the room became eerily quiet. Everybody knew this minute’s silence was no hollow, meaningless gesture, but affected each one of them personally. The much-invoked superiority of CID over Uniform had no place in this room. When it was a question of the mood outside, of the increasingly brutal hostility officers faced every day on the streets, they were all in the same boat, whether in uniform or plainclothes. The only difference was that Uniform had to risk their necks far more often. Out there were people who looked on police officers as fair game.

Rath had never felt drawn to life on the beat; now it seemed less attractive than ever.

‘Thank you, gentlemen.’ Weiss drew the minute’s silence to a close, and the room filled with noise again.

Only now did he mention the state of the investigation. Initial enquiries from Section 1A, the political police, had revealed that the shooting was coordinated by Communist headquarters, and, for this reason, Weiss had ordered a series of searches. The ban on the Spartakiad was now to be implemented in all its force. Weiss had already forbidden the Communist sports event a few days ago, as well as an SA event scheduled for the same day. In his campaign against the violent, so-called politicians who had brought Germany to the brink of civil war, Bernhard Weiss, himself a former chief of the political police, was consistent like no other Prussian officer.

‘Now let us move on to something altogether more agreeable,’ he said, smiling for the first time. ‘There is another reason I have gathered you here. In fact there are several reasons; specifically, the men sitting directly in front of me today.’

Weiss paused, and the atmosphere grew restless as everyone tried to see who was in the front row. Rath craned his neck, but couldn’t see past the bulky Ernst Gennat, who was sitting in the third or fourth row.