Jonathan Rabb - Rosa

“Yes. Exactly.” Kroll stood and motioned to the door. “Shall we?”

Hoffner hesitated. “You mean now?”

“Yes.” Kroll was already out from behind the desk. “He’s expecting us. Please.”

The glass on the fifth floor office had the word DIREKTOR stenciled across it: Kroll knocked, then stepped through to an anteroom fitted with desk, chairs, and several filing cabinets. A plump woman, with her hair pulled back in the tightest bun Hoffner had ever seen, was seated behind the desk: he was amazed that the skin had yet to tear on her forehead. She stood.

“Good afternoon, Frau Griebner,” said Kroll, with a quick click of the heels: his anxiety had mutated into a strict Germanic decorum.

“Good afternoon, Herr Doktor Kroll.” She offered an equally perfect nod: her manner was as efficient as her hair. She took no notice of Hoffner. “I will tell the Herr Direktor you are here.” She stepped out from behind her desk and disappeared through a second door. Almost immediately she returned. “The Herr Direktor will see you now, Herr Doktor. ” Hoffner followed Kroll into the office.

The room was large and filled with lamps, though the light seemed inclined to shine on only a few select areas. The rest of the space lay in half-shadows, less the result of poor positioning than of an ominous afternoon sky that hovered outside the four vast windows. The gloom seemed to be drawing the light out through the glass: Hoffner wondered if closing the drapes might, in fact, have helped to brighten the place up.

The Direktor had done his best to construct a small preserve of light for himself across the room. He got to his feet. “Herr Doktor Kroll,” he said. “Hello, hello.” He came out into the shadows to greet them. The Direktor was much younger than Hoffner had expected, a man of perhaps forty with a somewhat unruly moustache beneath a wide nose and basset hound eyes. Even more unexpected was the remarkable smile that seemed so out of place in the impressive, though dour surroundings.

“Herr Direktor, ” said Kroll. “Allow me to present Herr Kriminal-Kommissar Nikolai Hoffner. Herr Hoffner, this is Herr Professor Doktor Albert Einstein.”

Hoffner recalled Kroll having mentioned Einstein once or twice, over the years. The man had come up with some theory that Kroll had described as either ludicrous or genius. Hoffner couldn’t remember which. The three shook hands and retreated to the desk. Einstein did his best to expand the pocket of light; even so, Hoffner and Kroll were forced to lean in over the edge of the desk in order to escape the shadows.

Einstein reached down and opened the bottom drawer. He pulled out a thin file with the word RESTRICTED in bold type across its front. There was also a long paragraph describing the penalties for disseminating the material, written in much smaller print below. “This is for a criminal case?” said Einstein.

“Yes, Herr Direktor, ” said Hoffner.

Einstein nodded. “I’ve always been fascinated by criminal cases. They’re like little puzzles. Quite a bit like what we spend our time on.”

“Except no one ends up dead, Herr Direktor. ”

Again Einstein nodded. “How little you know about science, Herr Kriminal-Kommissar. ” He paused, then added, “Anyway, you wanted to hear about something that was meant to be helpful on the battlefield.” He slid the dossier over to Hoffner. “It was called Ascomycete 4. One wonders what happened to numbers one through three.” Einstein was the only one to enjoy the joke.

Hoffner took the folder and opened it. Kroll quickly interrupted: “That’s all very technical stuff, Nikolai. Formulations and so on.” Kroll reached over and flipped to the last few pages. “The gist of the thing is at the back. This bit here.” Again, Hoffner began to read, and again Kroll cut in. “It was developed for trench fatalities,” said Kroll. “And, on occasion, no-man’s-land retrievals.”

Hoffner looked up. Evidently there would be no need for reading. “For men already dead,” said Hoffner, inviting more of the lesson.

“Yes,” said Kroll. “During the beginning of the war-and later on, during the worst of the fighting-it was impossible to transport the dead back to the field hospitals in order to prepare them for burial. Too many bodies were rotting on the front. Not only was contagion an issue, but morale, as well. Men needed to know that if they went down, at least an entire corpse would be returned to their families. The military decided that it needed something to keep the bodies as fresh as possible so that, during those periods of isolation, they could minimize the distraction and disease produced by the corpses, and also treat the dead with as much decency as possible. So they came to the Institute.”

“And”-Hoffner scanned the front page-“to Doktors Meinhof and Klingman.”

“Two very capable chemists,” said Kroll. “They came up with the solution. Meinhof is now in Vienna, at the Bielefeld Institute. Klingman passed away about a year ago.”

“So how did you know it was this”-again Hoffner read-“Ascomycete 4 from the sample I gave you?”

“Actually,” said Kroll, “it didn’t take me that long. Once I separated out the components, there were trace elements of an unguent I’d seen only once before. It was in a sample that I’d been asked to analyze during the war.”

“A military request?” said Hoffner.

“Yes. How did you know?”

“You made the connection and it brought you to the restricted files.”

Now Einstein was impressed. “You’re very good at this, Herr Kriminal-Kommissar. ”

“No, Herr Direktor, ” said Hoffner, “just impatient.” He turned to Kroll. “And the components were the same?”

“Identical.”

Hoffner flipped to the back of the file; he scanned a few of the paragraphs. Kroll had been right to give him the condensed version. “And this compound,” said Hoffner. “It’s now available outside the military?”

“That’s where the difficulty lies,” said Kroll. “All of this is still under lock and key here at the Institute. More than that, the research was discontinued in the middle of 1917. They stopped producing it. I won’t ask you where you got your sample.”

“Stopped?” said Hoffner. “Why?”

“Because they discovered that too much of it, if inhaled, acted as a very potent hallucinatory stimulant.”

This seemed to perk Einstein up a bit. “Not a bad little side effect, eh, Kriminal-Kommissar ?”

Kroll continued: “Once the men on the line discovered its other use-well, how can you blame them, really? The General Staff did its best to restrict access-select doctors were the only ones who could get hold of the stuff-but then it no longer served the purpose for which it had been designed.”

“For a time,” added Einstein, “it actually became more popular than morphine. You can only imagine the embarrassment Meinhof and Klingman went through.”

“I’m sure,” said Hoffner as he tried to digest all of the information.

Einstein said to Kroll, “You know, it just now occurs to me that that was probably the same problem you were looking into when they gave you the original unguent to analyze. The hallucinogenic side effects.”

Kroll nodded, considering it for the first time himself. “That’s probably true, Herr Direktor. I never thought of that.”

“Yes,” said Hoffner, interrupting the riveting sidebar. “But would they have destroyed the stock they still had?”

Einstein said, “Oh, I doubt that. Too much potential as a weapon, don’t you think? The chance to develop it into a hallucinatory gas, that sort of thing.”