Captain Anlauf had been shot twice in the neck and clearly had bled to death. He was about forty, heavyset, with a full face that had helped earn the Seventh Precinct commander his Pig Cheeks nickname. His weapon was still in his holster.
“It’s too bad,” said one of the other detectives. “His wife died three weeks ago.”
“What did she die of?” I heard myself ask.
“A kidney ailment,” said Heller. “This leaves three daughters orphaned.”
“Someone’s going to have to tell them,” said someone.
“I’ll do that.” The man who spoke was in uniform, and everyone straightened up when we realized it was the commander of the Berlin Schupo, Magnus Heimannsberg. “You can leave that to me.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Heller.
“Who’s the other man? I don’t recognize him.”
“Captain Lenck, sir.”
Heimannsberg leaned down to take a closer look.
“Franz Lenck? What the hell was he doing here? This kind of police work wasn’t his sort of thing at all.”
“Every available man in uniform was summoned here,” Heller said. “Anyone know if he was married?”
“Yes,” said Heimannsberg. “No children, though. That’s something, I suppose. Look, Reinhard, I’ll tell her, too. The widow.”
Lenck was also about forty. His face was leaner than Anlauf’s, with deep smile lines that were no longer being used. A pince-nez was still on his face, just about, and the shako remained on his head, with the strap tight under his chin. He had been shot in the back and, like Anlauf, had his weapon holstered, a fact that Heimannsberg now remarked upon.
“They didn’t even have a chance to get their weapons out,” he said bitterly. Nodding at a Luger by his boot, he added, “I assume this is Sergeant Willig’s gun.”
“He got off a whole clip, sir,” said Heller. “Before they ran in here.”
“Hit anything?”
Heller looked at me.
“I don’t think so, sir,” I said. “Mind you, it’s a little hard to tell in there. Everything’s red. Carpet, walls, curtains, you name it. Hard to see any bloodstains. They ran out the rear exit on Hirtenstrasse. Sir, I’d like a couple of men with flashlights to help me search the length of the street. People have chucked away red flags and placards; it’s possible they might have thrown the guns, too.”
Heller nodded.
“Don’t worry, lads,” said Heimannsberg, who, having started his career as an ordinary patrolman, was enormously popular with everyone in the police. “We’ll catch the bastards who did this.”
A few minutes later, I was walking along Hirtenstrasse with a couple of uniformed men. As we went farther west toward Mulack Strasse and the territory of the Always True, a notorious Berlin gang, they started to become nervous. We stopped next to Fritz Hempel, the tobacconists. It was closed, of course. I pointed my flashlight one way and then the other. The two Schupo men came toward me, relaxing a little as, in the distance, a police armored car pulled up on the corner.
“This close to Mulack Strasse and the Always True, they must have figured they could hold on to their guns,” said one of the bulls.
“Maybe.” I started to retrace my steps along Hirtenstrasse, still searching the ground until my eyes caught sight of a drain cover in the gutter. It was a simple cast-iron grate, but someone had lifted it, and recently: The dirt was missing from two of the bars where someone might have grasped it. One of the Schupo men pulled it up while I was removing my jacket and my shirt; and then, inspecting the cobblestones around the open drain, I decided to remove my trousers as well.
“He was a dancer at the Haller Revue before he was police,” said one of the cops, folding my clothes over his arm.
“Versatile, isn’t he?”
“If Heimannsberg were here,” I said, “he’d make you do it, so shut up.”
“I’d put my whole fucking head down that drain if I thought it’d find the Jew bastard who killed Captain Anlauf.”
I lay down next to the drain and plunged my arm into thick black water, right up to the shoulder.
“What makes you think it was a Jew?” I asked.
“Everyone knows that the Marxists and the Jews are one and the same,” said the Schupo man.
“I wouldn’t repeat that in front of Counselor Heller if I were you.”
“This town is sick with Jews,” said the Schupo man.
“Don’t mind him, sir,” said the other cop. “Anyone with a hat and a big nose is a Jew in his book. See if you can find any war reparations while you’re down there.”
“Funny,” I said. “If I wasn’t up to my shoulder in stagnant water, I might fucking laugh. Now put the cork back in.”
I felt a hard, metallic object and fished out a pistol with a long barrel. I handed it to the cop who wasn’t holding my clothes.
“Luger, is it?” he said, wiping some of the filth off the gun. “Looks like an artillery-corps version. That’ll put an extra keyhole in your door.”
I kept on searching the bottom of the drain. “No commies down here,” I said. “Just this.” I brought up the other gun, an automatic with a curious, irregular shape, as if someone had tried to break the slide from the muzzle.
We carried the two weapons over to a street water pump and washed some of the filth away. The smaller automatic was a Dreyse .32.
I washed my arm and put my clothes back on and took the two guns back to the Seventh Street Precinct Station on Bülowplatz. Back in the detectives’ room, Heller hailed my arrival with a verbal pat on the back.
“Well done, Gunther,” he said.
“Thanks, sir.”
Meanwhile, other cops were already gathering boxes of photo files to take over to the State Hospital for Sergeant Willig to look at when he came out of surgery. And after a while, I said, “You know, that’s going to take a while. I mean, before he’s conscious again. By then the killers will be out of the city. Maybe on their way to Moscow.”
“Got a better idea?”
“I might. Look, sir, instead of showing Sergeant Willig a picture of every Red who’s ever been arrested in this city, let’s just pull a few.”
“Like who? There are hundreds of these bastards.”
“The chances are the attack was probably orchestrated from K.L. House,” I said. “So how about we pull the records of just seventy-six Reds? Because that’s how many Reds were arrested when we raided K.L. last January. Let’s stick to those faces for now.”
“Yes, you’re right,” agreed Heller. He snatched up the telephone. “Get me the State Hospital.” He pointed at another detective. “Get onto IA. Find out who was on that raid. And tell the records boys in ED to find the arrest files and to meet us at the hospital.”
Twenty minutes later we were on our way to the State Hospital in Friedrichshain.
They were just wheeling Willig into the operating theater when we arrived bearing the K.L. House arrest files. The wounded man had already received an injection, but in spite of the opposition of the doctors, who were anxious to operate as quickly as possible, Willig understood immediately the urgency of what was being asked of him. And it took the sergeant no time at all to pick out one of his attackers.
“Him, for sure,” he croaked. “That one pulled the trigger on Captain Anlauf, for sure.”
“Erich Ziemer,” said Heller, and handed me the charge sheet.
“The other one was about the same age and build and coloring as this bastard. They might even have been brothers, they looked so alike. But he’s not here. I’m certain of it.”
“All right,” said Heller. He spoke some words of encouragement to the sergeant before his doctors took the patient away.
“I recognize this man Ziemer,” I said. “Back in May, I saw Ziemer in a car with three other men. They were outside K.L. House, and according to Sergeant Adolf Bauer, who was on patrol in Bülowplatz, one of those others was Heinz Neumann.”