‘Bad dog!’ Rath cried. ‘To heel!’
Kirie never paid much attention to such commands. Rushing after her, Gräf and Rath found her in the kitchen, in the corner she used to call her own. It was a year now since Rath had passed on his old Luisenufer flat to Gräf, in favour of his apartment on Carmerstrasse, which was not only bigger but twice as expensive.
Rath crouched and threatened Kirie with his index finger. ‘You should be ashamed,’ he said, and Kirie closed her eyes, less out of shame, Rath suspected, than the need to catch up on sleep. He shrugged. ‘Well, now that we’re inside, I might as well take a coffee. No rush. There’s plenty of time.’
Gräf gave a pained smile and filled the kettle. ‘How about you see to that while I get ready?’ he said, placing the kettle on the stove. ‘You know where everything is.’
Rath went to the cupboard and fetched the coffee grinder. The kitchen door was still open, and he could see the stand in the hall outside. He hesitated. No, he wasn’t imagining things. An SA uniform hung from one of the hooks. He continued as if nothing was wrong. ‘Any joy yesterday?’
‘Come again?’
‘In the homeless shelters.’
‘Nothing. No trace of Heinrich Wosniak anywhere. I’ve scoured all the relevant addresses around Bülow and Nollendorfplatz, but there’s no one who knew him.’
‘A man fights for his country, and ten years later the whole world’s forgotten about him.’
‘There are thousands of them.’
Rath was about to ask about the brown uniform when the bathroom door opened and a man emerged, towel wrapped around his hips, blond hair still wet but perfectly parted, and marched straight into the kitchen. Rath had heard the water running as Kirie charged inside, but thought nothing of it.
Seeing Rath, the blond man stopped in his tracks.
Gräf was visibly uncomfortable. ‘This is Conrad. I mean, Herr Kötter,’ he said. ‘He lives upstairs in the attic room, where that Countess used…’ He cleared his throat. ‘Anyway, Herr Kötter has no running water, which is why…’
‘Burst pipe,’ the blond man said to Rath, but it sounded like: ‘Wanna’ fight?’
In the same instant Rath realised where he had seen him before. On several previous visits to Luisenufer he had run into an SA man in the courtyard who’d greeted him with a dirty look. He didn’t appear much friendlier now.
‘I’ll be off then,’ Herr Kötter said, removing his uniform from the hook. ‘Many thanks, neighbour.’
‘No trouble.’ Gräf smiled uneasily.
No wonder, Rath thought. Imagine letting a Nazi do his morning toilet in your flat.
Kötter slung his trousers and brown shirt over his arm, put on his uniform cap, and picked up his boots. It was strange seeing an SA officer clad in only a towel and peaked cap, but Rath sensed he’d be wise to suppress a grin. The SA wasn’t known for its sense of humour.
‘Just a moment,’ Gräf said and ran into the corridor. He took the swastika brassard from the hall stand and set it on top of the clothes pile on Kötter’s arm. They exchanged another glance, which Rath couldn’t explain, and the door clicked shut.
Rath poured coffee beans into the grinder. ‘Best get in with the new regime. Or did you just fancy seeing a Nazi in his pants?’
Gräf ignored the quip. ‘I’ll get ready,’ he said, disappearing into the bedroom.
Rath cranked the lever, considering the situation as the beans cracked. He knew that Reinhold harboured sympathies for the ‘government of national concentration’, as Hitler’s cabinet termed itself.
‘At last things are looking up,’ Gräf had said back in January, when Hindenburg appointed his new Chancellor. In spite of Reinhold’s admiration for the brownshirts, Rath had hoped he wasn’t a true believer. No one who had kept their sense of humour could be and Reinhold had kept his – until now.
They never really discussed politics when they met, nor did they speak about their private affairs. For a long time Rath hadn’t told Reinhold about Charly, partly out of concern that his colleague might have eyes for her too, but there had been no bad blood when he learned of their engagement and his congratulations had been genuine.
Continuing to crank the lever, Rath’s gaze fell on the breakfast table. It was already laid for two: two coffee cups, two plates, two knives, even two egg cups. It must have looked like this before he and Kirie burst in. The table wasn’t laid for him, it was laid for… Blood rushed to his head. It couldn’t be true, or could it?
Gräf returned to the kitchen, looking immaculate. Even his tie was done up.
‘Could I…,’ Rath said. ‘Would you mind if I used the bathroom?’ He paused. ‘Or do I have to join the SA first?’
‘Very funny.’
Rath set down the coffee grinder knowing he had to get out of the room. Perhaps he was just imagining it. Perhaps Gräf had offered his neighbour a coffee, just as he had his commanding officer. If they really had been meaning to have breakfast together, the detective and his Nazi neighbour, it didn’t have to mean anything. Gräf was embarrassed, naturally, accurately sensing what Rath might say after bursting into the flat. Still, being friends with a Nazi was nothing for a police officer to be ashamed of these days. A year ago the Politicals would have become involved and an internal investigation triggered. Now it was practically a badge of honour.
Reaching Gräf’s bathroom, Rath saw something that rattled him even more, perhaps because the display of intimacy was precisely what his own bathroom lacked whenever Charly decamped to Greta’s. Reinhold Gräf’s bathroom looked as Gereon Rath’s ought to have looked, with two glasses on the shelf in front of the mirror, and in each glass a toothbrush.
19
The awakening city flitted past but all Reinhold Gräf could see was Gereon staring blankly through the windscreen. He had been silent since the flat, saying nothing in the face of what was obvious: nothing about Conny, who’d emerged from the bathroom freshly showered, nothing about the breakfast table, nothing about the idyll they shared like an old married couple. How could they have been so naive?
Returning to the bedroom to get dressed – to dispose of Conny’s things and fix the crumpled sheets – Gräf had slammed his fist against the mattress in anger at his own stupidity.
Why, oh why, had they chosen to play with fire like this? Conny usually crawled upstairs to his attic flat at the end of the evening, but in the last few weeks they had grown careless. Perhaps it was their euphoria at Germany’s change in fortune. Joy at the triumph of the nationalist movement was one of many things they had in common. Even so, they shouldn’t have forgotten that what they were doing was wrong and illegal.
Someone like Gereon Rath, who had previously worked for Vice, wasn’t blind, and he certainly wasn’t stupid. There must be a reason for his silence, or was he simply over-tired? Was Gräf attaching meaning where there was none? Because he had felt caught from the moment Gereon appeared at his front door? Half an hour later and Conny would have been on his way to work.
Ifs and buts… what was done was done.
‘Strausberger Strasse?’ Gereon asked.
Gräf nodded, grateful for even the most banal of utterances. ‘Number seven, second rear building. Silesian Olga.’
‘Doesn’t sound very official.’
‘I’ve been round all the municipal shelters.’
‘So you’re going private?’
‘If you like.’
Gereon stopped outside the house. ‘See you at the Castle.’