Probably the rain didn’t help, either. It had been warm and dry for several weeks, but that day it rained heavily and Berlin cops never did care to get wet. Something to do with all that leather on the shako helmets they wore. There was a cover you were supposed to put on it when the weather was bad, but no one ever remembered them, which meant you had to spend ages cleaning and polishing the shako afterward. If there was one thing guaranteed to piss off a Berlin bull, it was getting his hat wet.
I guess the Reds decided they’d had enough. Then again, they were always shouting about police dictatorship, even when the police were behaving with exemplary fairness. The local police had been threatened before, but this was different. The talk was about killing policemen. About eight o’clock that evening, shots were fired and a full-scale gun battle between police and the KPD kicked off in a big way—the biggest we’d seen since the 1919 uprising.
News started to come in to Police Headquarters on Berlin Alexanderplatz at around nine o’clock that several officers, including two police captains, had been shot and killed. We were already investigating the June murder of another cop. I’d helped to carry his coffin. By the time I and some other detectives reached Bülowplatz most of the crowds had left, but the gunfight was still very much in progress. The communists were on the rooftops of several buildings, and cops with searchlights were returning fire while, at the same time, they were searching apartment houses in the area for weapons and suspects. A hundred people were arrested, maybe more, while the battle continued. This meant that we couldn’t get near the bodies, and for several hours we traded shots with the Reds; one time a rifle bullet clipped off a piece of brickwork just above my head and, more in anger than the hope of hitting anything, I let fly with the Bergmann until the magazine was empty. It was one in the morning before we got to the stricken police officers who were lying in the doorway of the Babylon Movie Theater, by which time one communist had been shot dead and seventeen others wounded.
Of the three policemen in the doorway, two were dead. The third, Sergeant Willig, “the Hussar,” was seriously wounded. He’d been shot in the stomach and in the arm, and his blue-gray tunic was purple with blood, not all of it his own.
“We were set up,” he gasped as we sat with him and waited for the ambulance. “They weren’t on the rooftops, the ones who got us. The bastards were hiding in a doorway and shot us from behind as we walked past.”
The officer in charge, Detective Police Counselor Reinhold Heller, told Willig to save his breath, but the sergeant was the kind who couldn’t do anything until he’d made his report.
“There were two of them. Handguns. Automatics. Shot my pistol at them. A full clip. Couldn’t say if I hit either of them or not. Young they were. Tearaways. Twenty or so. Laughed when they saw the two captains hit the ground. Then they went into the theater.” He tried a smile. “Must have been Garbo fans. Never much liked her myself.”
The ambulance men arrived with a stretcher and carried him away, leaving us with the two bodies.
“Gunther?” said Heller. “Go and speak to the theater manager. Find out if anyone saw something more than just the movie.”
Heller was a Jew, but I didn’t have a problem with that. Not like some. Heller was Bernard Weiss, the Kripo head’s golden boy, which would have been fine but for the fact that Weiss was also a Jew. I thought Heller was good police, and that was all that mattered as far as I was concerned. Of course, the Nazis thought differently.
The movie was Mata Hari, with Garbo in the title role and Ramón Novarro as the young Russian officer who falls in love with her. I hadn’t seen it myself, but the movie was doing well in Berlin. Garbo gets shot by the treacherous French, and with a plot like that, it could hardly fail with Germans. The theater manager was waiting in the lobby. He was swarthy and worried-looking, with a mustache like a midget’s eyebrow, and to that extent, at least, rather resembled Ramón Novarro. But it was probably just as well the blonde from the box office didn’t look like Garbo, at least not like the Garbo on the lobby card; her hair was frightful-looking, like Struwwelpeter.
Everything around us was red. Red carpet, red walls, red ceiling, red chairs, and red curtains on the auditorium doors. Given the politics of the area, it all seemed appropriate. The blonde was tearful, the manager merely nervous. He kept adjusting his cuff links as he explained, loudly, as if he were a character in a play, what he’d seen and heard:
“Mata Hari had just finished seducing the Russian general, Shubin,” he said, “when we heard the first shots. That would have been at about ten past eight.”
“How many shots?”
“A volley,” he said. “Six or seven. Small arms. Pistols. I was in the war, see? I know the difference between a pistol shot and a rifle shot. I stuck my head through the box-office door and saw Fräulein Wiegand here on the floor. At first I thought there had been a robbery. That she’d been held up. But then there was a second volley and several of the bullets hit the cash window. Two men ran through the lobby and into the auditorium without paying. And since they were both holding pistols, I wasn’t about to insist that they buy tickets. I can’t say that I got a very good look at them, because I was scared. Then there were more shots, outside. Rifle shots, I think, and people started running in here to take cover. By now the projectionist had stopped the movie and switched on the lights. And the people in the auditorium were going through the exit door, onto Hirtenstrasse. It was plain from the noise and the crowd that the movie wasn’t going to continue, and before one of your colleagues came in here to tell me to stay inside, almost everyone had left the auditorium through the back door. Including the two men with guns.” He left his cuff links alone for a moment and rubbed his brow furiously. “They’re dead, aren’t they? Those two police officers.”
I nodded. “Mmm hmm.”
“That’s bad. That’s too bad.”
“How about you, Fräulein?” I said. “The two with guns. Did you get a good look at them?”
She shook her head and pressed a sodden handkerchief to her red nose.
“It’s been a great shock to Fräulein Wiegand,” said the manager.
“It’s been a great shock to us all, sir.”
I went into the auditorium and walked down the center aisle toward the exit. I pushed open the door and was on a small red staircase. I tap-danced my way down to another door and then out onto Hirtenstrasse just as an underground train passed beneath my feet, shaking the whole area as if it hadn’t been shaken up enough already. It was dark and there wasn’t much to see in the yellow gaslight: a few discarded red flags, a couple of protest placards, and maybe a murder weapon if I looked hard enough. With so many cops around, it didn’t seem likely that the killers would have risked holding on to their guns for very long.
Back in the movie theater doorway they were establishing a crime-scene gestalt, which is to say they were hoping that the whole could be bigger than the sum of its parts.