Ostland, p.9
Ostland, page 9
‘Very interesting, Heuser,’ said Heydrich, with a satisfying tone of pleasurable surprise. ‘“It is the scene of the crime that moves …” I like that. You have also described the killer’s likely characteristics. So tell me, are there any conclusions you can draw from them? For example, in racial terms …’
I’d got away with one original opinion. Now it was time to toe the Party line. ‘Yes, General. From everything my instructors taught me, I would say that if one describes a man who lacks morality, or manly courage; who welcomes degeneracy and indecency; who seeks ways to harm good Germans, and yet who possesses, nonetheless, a form of perverted intelligence which displays itself as self-seeking calculation and cunning, then one is describing the Jew.’
Heydrich was delighted. ‘You see! Here is a junior officer, possessed with the clarity of youth, who sees straight to the heart of the matter.’
Wehner, Nebe and Lobbes all nodded in agreement. Zach, it now seemed to me, was too exhausted to care. Lüdtke, however, had a thunderous look on his face. I suddenly realized that in pleasing one master I’d offended another. We both knew that he’d fought against his superiors’ attempts to limit the search for the killer to Jews and foreign workers. If I didn’t want to make another enemy in the homicide department – and one who could do a great deal more harm to my career than Inspector Frei would ever manage – I needed to make amends, fast. Before anyone else could speak, I said: ‘Thank you very much indeed, General. I am honoured by your kind remarks. But I should also add that while the Jews must be seen as suspects, I fully support the actions of my superior, Commissar Lüdtke, in broadening the search to include other groups, including S-Bahn staff. One must consider every possibility. It is possible that this man’s degeneracy arises from causes other than race. He may be a Bolshevik saboteur, for example. His moral sickness may be the result of a physical or mental impairment. Or he may, quite literally be diseased. Syphilis, I believe, can drive a man mad. Perhaps it might drive him to kill.’
This passing afterthought would, in the end, prove to be of far more significance than I could possibly have imagined when I uttered it. For now, however, my immediate concern was Lüdtke. He seemed to have relaxed a little. The look he was giving me was devoid of emotion. He was, at this point, neither an enemy nor a friend. He was also about to have something far more important to think about than me, for Heydrich, having murmured: ‘Thank you, Heuser,’ turned his attention to Lüdtke and continued: ‘So, Commissar Lüdtke, you have heard about our man, what do you intend to do about catching him?’
Lüdtke took a deep breath, sighed, looked Heydrich right in the eye and simply said: ‘I think we should surrender.’
There was uproar in the room. ‘Disgraceful!’ Wehner shouted.
‘Good God, man, you can’t do that!’ Lobbes exclaimed, shocked that a homicide department man should have capitulated so pathetically.
Even Nebe was moved to raise an eyebrow and emit a silent whistle of amazement.
Heydrich, however, retained his composure, though all trace of bonhomie had now disappeared, replaced by a chill as freezing as any snowdrift. ‘Surrender is never acceptable,’ he said. ‘Under any circumstances. So unless you were trying to make some particularly unamusing joke, I’d advise you to come up with something better.’
‘Perhaps I should explain myself,’ Lüdtke said. He seemed remarkably unruffled by the outrage he’d provoked. ‘Let me start by considering what we have done and where it has got us …’
‘Do we really need to repeat what every single one of us already knows?’ Wehner asked crossly.
‘If you don’t mind, General …’ Lüdtke murmured, glancing at Heydrich.
‘Proceed,’ said Heydrich, holding his fire.
‘Very well … For the past month we have poured all our energies into this case. And alongside the work of detection, a huge effort has been made to protect passengers on the Number Three line, lone females in particular. Our men are exhausted. Fewer and fewer are either willing or physically able to undertake night shifts. Last night there were less than half as many officers covering the Number Three line as there had been four weeks previously. And that was when the killer chose to strike again.
‘So I ask myself: is this a matter of chance? Does the killer just happen to attack when we are weak … or does he know precisely what we are doing, when and where we are doing it, and how many people are involved? Heuser here referred to the killer’s animal cunning and, yes, he certainly possesses that. But I believe he has something even more valuable: information. I think he knows precisely what we are doing.’
‘But how?’ Wehner asked indignantly. ‘How could he possibly know our secrets?’
‘Because they are not secrets,’ Lüdtke replied. ‘They cannot be. We have to coordinate our activities with Reichsbahn officials and stationmasters. They must in turn inform their staff of any planned operations that might affect them as they carry out their duties. So plenty of men in S-Bahn uniforms know when we will be flooding the line with police, and when we will only be supplying a minimal level of protection. And one of these men, I believe, is the killer.’
‘Suppose he is,’ said Heydrich. ‘Why should we simply surrender? That would be like an entire army laying down its weapons in the face of a single enemy.’
‘I assure you, General, I have no more intention of giving up than you do. But if this man gets to hear what we are doing, let’s take advantage of that. Let’s feed him false information. Why not call a meeting with the men from the Reichsbahn? Tell them that, regretfully, it is no longer possible to maintain the same police presence on the S-Bahn. We need a form of words, something like: “This is a temporary, tactical withdrawal. We are merely pausing to re-evaluate our operational procedures.” Of course, none of them will believe us. They will all go back to their offices thinking: “These useless coppers are giving up the ghost.”’
‘But what will we actually be doing?’ Heydrich asked.
‘It sounds to me,’ said Nebe, ‘as though we will be re-evaluating our operational procedures.’
A ripple of laughter broke the tension around the table.
‘Quite so,’ said Heydrich, allowing himself a brief, indulgent chuckle. ‘But what form, precisely, will this re-evaluation take?’
‘Ah, that I don’t know – not yet,’ Lüdtke replied. ‘As you can imagine, I have not had much time in the past few hours in which to consider matters of strategy. But I can say this. Whatever we do, it will be a very, very long way from any form of surrender. It will be done under conditions of absolute security, with no confidential information whatever being allowed anywhere near any railway employee, no matter how senior. And everything we do – absolutely everything – will work towards the same end.’
‘Which is?’
‘Very simple, General. I want to lure this beast out of the shadows. I want to spot him, hunt him, corner him and catch him. And then I want to kill him.’
‘I see,’ nodded Heydrich, pensively. Then he looked up and addressed the whole table again. ‘I think we can all agree that the best place for the S-Bahn murderer is beneath the blade of a guillotine …’
There was a murmur of agreement from all the men present. Lobbes and Wehner both banged the table to underline their feelings.
‘… So if that’s what you mean by surrendering, Lüdtke, you’d better go ahead and do it.’
12
When we got back to Alexanderplatz, Lüdtke did not, as I’d expected, head straight back to the squad-room. He didn’t even enter the police headquarters at all. Instead he led me away down the road.
‘You hungry?’ he asked.
So much had happened that I hadn’t even thought about food. But the moment Lüdtke asked the question, I realized I was starving. ‘Yes, very,’ I replied.
‘That makes two of us. Follow me …’
We took a ten-minute walk to a small café on Wassmann-strasse. ‘They know me here,’ Lüdtke said, ‘and it’s far away enough from Alex that it’s not completely overrun by other cops.’
Sure enough, as we walked in, Lüdtke was greeted by a hearty cry of: ‘Commissar! How nice to see you, sir!’ from a plump middle-aged woman behind the bar. She came round into the dining-area and started fussing over us, making sure we had a nice table and collecting our orders for beer.
‘I think we’ve earned it, today, don’t you?’ Lüdtke said, and I only hesitated for a moment – we were still on duty, after all – before I agreed with him.
The manageress was still hovering over us, with the air of someone with vital news to impart. ‘We’ve got something special on the menu today, for our very best customers,’ she said. ‘We call it “Balcony Pig Pie”!’
She looked at us expectantly and Lüdtke played along. ‘Good heavens, Frau Meissner, what on earth is a balcony pig?’
‘It’s what they’re calling rabbit these days,’ she said, delightedly. ‘From all the bunnies people are keeping on the balconies of their apartments. Our son Franz – you remember Franz, don’t you Commissar? – brought us back some lovely bacon from Denmark – he’s been serving over there, you know – and we’ve used some of that, nicely diced, with a couple of rabbits, plenty of potatoes and a bit of onion to make a delicious pie. We’ve only got two slices left, but you’re very welcome to them both. I’ll do you some turnips to go with it. How does that sound?’
‘Like the best meal I’ve had in a very long time. Thank you, Frau Meissner. We’ll both have the pie – is that all right by you, Heuser?’
‘Of course.’
‘My pleasure, Commissar,’ said Frau Meissner and hurried away to get our food.
‘She’s a good soul,’ said Lüdtke. ‘But how about you, Heuser … are you a good soul?’
‘I don’t really know. I try to be, I think. I certainly try to do the right thing.’
‘Yes,’ said Lüdtke lighting a cigarette. ‘And you try to say the right thing, too. That was very clever, the way you handled General Heydrich’s question about the S-Bahn murderer.’ He said the word ‘clever’ as though it were not entirely a compliment. ‘You told him exactly what you knew he wanted to hear, but then you made sure that I was satisfied too. It makes me wonder how you would answer Heydrich’s question if the general himself were not present. What kind of man do you actually think we are trying to find? Forget politics or racial theories. Just get down to the practicalities. Tell me about our killer.’
I was saved from having to provide an immediate response by the return of Frau Meissner with our beers. By the time she’d gone, I’d ordered my thoughts and could reply: ‘I agree with Dr Weimann, Commissar. I think we are dealing with another Peter Kürten.’
‘By which you mean?’
‘A psychopath, someone who has an addiction to death.’
‘I agree. So what does he look like, this psychopath?’
‘Well, we know he wears a uniform. Other than that, it’s hard to say.’
‘Precisely!’ Lüdtke agreed, with an enthusiasm that surprised me. ‘It’s not just hard to say, it’s damn well impossible. You see, Heuser, this is where theory and practice disagree. Your tutors at the Leaders’ School may have all sorts of ideas about what a criminal looks like, but while they’ve been teaching and philosophizing, I’ve been getting on with the tedious, day-to-day task of catching people who kill. And I have discovered, as you will too, in due course, that even the most vicious, sadistic, perverted, monstrous killer can have the annoying habit of looking like a perfectly normal human being. Ah … Here is Frau Meissner, with our balcony pigs!’
Two plates were put in front of us, heaped with hot pie, proper Teltower Rübchen turnips and a dark, meaty gravy. We attacked our plates with gusto, washing the excellent food down with our beer until the edge had been taken off our hunger. The pie was just as good as Frau Meissner had claimed. Just as there had been something magical about the taste of real coffee that morning, so the sensation of eating real food, with tender meat and good, rich flavours, was so intense as to be almost intoxicating. Reality, however, soon butted back in as Lüdtke cleared his plate, took a good long drink of his beer, put down his glass and said: ‘You remember Kürten’s last words, of course?’
I swallowed my mouthful of potatoes and pie and said: ‘Yes. He even regarded his own death with pleasure. He said he hoped that when they cut his head off he would have the time to hear his own blood gurgle from his throat.’ I shook my head at the very thought of it. ‘Even to contemplate such evil is inconceivable. One simply cannot imagine what it must be like to be such a person.’
‘Yet, as you will recall, Frau Kürten described her husband as a good man, who loved children, attended church on a regular basis and was a loyal member of his trade union. His police photograph shows a respectably dressed citizen, with a starched white shirt, a suit and tie. Our man, too, will probably look like the very last person whom anyone would ever think of as a killer. And as for catching him, well, how was Kürten eventually caught?’
‘It was an accident, wasn’t it – something to do with a letter?’
‘Just so: a wrongly addressed envelope in a dead-letter office was opened in case the letter within contained the sender’s address, so that it could be returned. The official happened to read the letter, which was written by a young woman. She described meeting a man in Düsseldorf who had attempted to rape her. The police interviewed her. She gave them the address in Mettmännerstrasse where the attempted rape had occurred. There they found Peter Kürten. Coffee?’
‘Yes please … It’s incredible, the way the Kürten case ended. After so much time, so many deaths, so much work by the police … and what finally gets him is a matter of pure chance.’
Lüdtke had been leaning back in his chair, making hand signals to Frau Meissner to indicate that we both wanted coffee. He turned back to me and said: ‘Chance is what gets almost all of them. But there was something else worth noting in the story of Kürten’s capture: something that I should have thought you would have noticed at once.’
There was the hint of amusement in Lüdtke’s eyes as he said that, as though he was having a little fun at my expense. If so, I wasn’t in on the joke.
‘I don’t understand,’ I said.
‘It was the man in the dead-letter office. He broke the rules. It is one thing to check a correspondent’s return address, but it is quite another to read a private letter unless one has the authority to do so. And there’s a lesson for you in that. I’ve noticed you today, the way you reacted to the state of our squad-room, or being offered a cup of black-market coffee – even my offer of a beer just now. They all made you uneasy. Correct?’
I couldn’t deny it. ‘I suppose so. It’s just …’ I paused, trying to find a form of words that didn’t make me seem like a total prig. ‘Well, it’s just not what I expected.’
‘Because we are the famous Berlin murder squad, who solve 95 per cent of all our cases, and we should be setting an example?’
‘I don’t know, I …’
‘You’ve been taught to obey the rules. I understand.’
Our coffees arrived, smelling of anything but actual coffee. Lüdtke took a sip and grimaced in disgust. He put the cup down with an expression of intense distaste that had still not faded from his face as he looked back at me and said: ‘You’re not in the Leaders’ School now, Heuser. You’re out in the real world and the rules are different here. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not one of those cops who makes himself look good by sending the wrong men to jail when he can’t find the right ones. I could have dragged some pathetic, perverted sex offender off the streets, faked the evidence and paraded him to the world as the S-Bahn murderer. But what good would that have done if the real killer was still out there, ready to strike again? So first, and most importantly, we get the right man. But we use every possible means to get him and to establish his guilt, and if that means bending the rules from time to time, so be it. Was it worth breaking the rules to catch Peter Kürten?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Then it’s worth it for other killers, too. We do what we have to do, and …’ Lüdtke looked me in the eye and jabbed his forefinger for emphasis, ‘we stick together. The squad only works if we can all rely absolutely on one another. I must know that if I give you an order, even if you don’t like it, you will obey it without question and never, for one second, betray any doubt to the other men. And those men – not just now, but throughout your career – need to be certain that you never ask anything of them that you wouldn’t be willing and able to do yourself. Lead from the front and they will always follow.
‘Understand this, Heuser, because this is the key to everything … Without unity and solidarity, we have no hope. We live and work on the dark side of the street, where the most wicked, depraved scum of the earth hide in the shadows. So this job of ours takes its toll on us all. You saw the state that Tietmeyer and I were in this morning. You’ll see other comrades exhausted, drunk, enraged, or even weeping like children. You’ll see them do things you may disapprove of; perhaps even things that disgust you. But as long as they are in the murder squad and you are in the murder squad, you stick together, and whatever you or anyone else may say in the privacy of our squad-room, you never, ever show the slightest disloyalty in public. Do you understand me, Heuser?’
