got himself murdered. Maybe you read about him in the
ONCE A HUGE, LANDSCAPED GARDEN, the Lustgarten was enclosed by the old royal palace-to which it had formerly belonged-and the Old Museum and the Cathedral, but in recent years it had been used not as a garden at all but for military parades and political rallies. I’d been part of a rally there myself, in February 1933, when two hundred thousand people had filled the Lustgarten to demonstrate against Hitler. Perhaps that was why, when they came to power, the Nazis ordered the gardens to be paved over and the famous equestrian statue of Frederick William III removed-so that they could stage even larger military parades and rallies in support of the Leader.
Arriving in that great empty space, I realized I had forgotten about the statue and was obliged to guess where it had been so that I might stand there myself and give Kriminalinspector Richard Bomer half a chance to find me in accordance with Liebermann von Sonnenberg’s arrangements.
Before he saw me, I saw him-a tallish man in his late twenties, fair-haired, carrying a briefcase under his arm, and wearing a gray suit and a pair of shiny black boots that might have been made to measure for him at the police school in Havel. Deep laugh lines bracketed a wide, full mouth that seemed on the edge of a smile. His nose was bent slightly out of shape, and a thick scar ran through one eyebrow like a little bridge over a golden stream. Except for his ears, which were unscarred, he looked like a promising, young light middleweight who had forgotten to remove his gum shield. Seeing me, he approached unhurriedly.
“Hey.”
“Are you Gunther?”
He pointed southeast, in the direction of the palace. “I think he used to face this way. Frederick William the Third, I mean.”
“Sure about that?”
“Yes.”
“Good. I like a man who holds on to his opinions.”
He turned and pointed to the west. “They moved him over there. Behind those trees. Which is where I’ve been waiting for the last ten minutes. I decided to come over here when it occurred to me that you might not know that he’d moved.”
“Who expects a granite horseman to go anywhere?”
“They’ve got to march somewhere, I guess.”
“That’s a matter of opinion. Come on. Let’s sit. A cop never stands when he can sit.”
We walked up to the Old Museum and sat on the steps in front of a long facade of Ionic columns.
“I like coming here,” he said. “It makes you think of what we used to be. And what we will be again.”
I looked at him blankly.
“You know, German history,” he said.
“German history is nothing more than a series of ridiculous mustaches,” I said.
Bomer smiled a crooked, bashful smile, like a schoolboy. “My uncle would love that one,” he said.
“I take it you don’t mean Liebermann von Sonnenberg.”
“He’s my wife’s uncle.”
“As if having the head of KRIPO holding a sponge in your corner wasn’t enough. So
He looked sheepish. “I just want to work homicides. To be a good policeman.”
“One thing I learned about being a good policeman. It doesn’t pay nearly as well as being a bad one. So who’s your uncle?”
“Does it matter?”
“It’s only that Liebermann wanted me to be your uncle, so to speak. And I’m the jealous type. If you’ve got another uncle as important as me, I want to know about it. Besides, I’m nosy, too. That’s why I became a detective.”
“He’s someone at the Ministry of Propaganda.”
“You don’t look like Joey the Crip, so you must be talking about someone else.”
“Bomer. Dr. Karl Bomer.”
“These days it seems everyone needs a doctorate to lie to people.”
He grinned again. “You’re just doing this, aren’t you? Because you know I’m a Party member.”
“Isn’t everyone?”
“You’re not.”
“Somehow I never got around to it. There was always a big line of people outside Party headquarters when I went to apply.”
“It should have told you something. That there’s safety in numbers.”
“No, there isn’t. I was in the trenches, my young friend. A battalion can be killed just as easily as a single man. And it was the generals, not the Jews, who made sure of that. They’re the ones who stabbed us in the back.”
“The chief said I should try to avoid talking politics with you, Gunther.”
“That’s not politics. That’s history. You want to know the real truth of German history? It’s that there’s no truth in German history. Like me at the Alex. None of what you’ve heard about me is true.”
“The chief said you were a good detective. One of the best.”
“Apart from that.”
“He said it was you who caught Gormann, the strangler.”
“If that had been difficult, the chief would have put me in his book. Did you read it?”
He nodded.
“What did you think?”
“It wasn’t written for other cops.”
“You’re in the wrong job, Richard. You should be working in the diplomatic corps. It was a lousy book. It tells you nothing about being a detective. Not that I can tell you much. Except this, perhaps. It’s easy for a cop to recognize when a man is lying. What’s harder is to know when he’s telling the truth. Or maybe this: A policeman is just a man who’s a little less dumb than a criminal.”
“Your investigative method, perhaps? You could tell me something about that.”
“My method was a bit like what Field Marshal von Moltke said about a battle plan. It never survives contact with the enemy. People are different, Richard. It stands to reason that homicides are different, too. Perhaps if you were to tell me about a case you’re working on now. Better still, if you brought me the file, I could take a look at it and offer my thoughts. The chief mentioned one case that needed warming up. The murder of that cop. August Krichbaum, wasn’t it? Perhaps I could suggest something there.”
“That’s no longer a cold case,” said Bomer. “Looks like there may be a lead, after all.”
I bit my lip. “Oh? What’s that?”
“Krichbaum got himself murdered in front of the Kaiser Hotel, right? Pathologist reckoned someone clouted him in the gut.”
“Must have been quite a punch.”
“I guess if you’re not ready for it, it might be. Anyway, the hotel doorman got a look at the main suspect. Not much of a look, but he’s an ex-cop. Anyway, he’s looked at the photograph of every crook in Berlin, and no luck. Since then he’s been racking his brains and now reckons that the fellow who hit Krichbaum might have been another cop.”
“A cop? You’re joking.”
“Not at all. They’ve got him looking over the personnel files of the entire Berlin police force, past and present. As soon as he thumbs the right mug, they’ll have the guy, for sure.”
“Well, that’s a relief.”
I lit a cigarette and rubbed the back of my neck uncomfortably, as if I could already feel the blade of the falling ax. It’s said that all you ever feel is a sharp bite, like the angry nip of the electric clippers in a gentlemen’s hairdressers. It took me a moment or two to remind myself that the hotel doorman’s description of the suspect had been of a man with a mustache. And it took me a while longer to remember that in the original photograph on my own police personnel file I had been wearing a mustache. Did that make it more or less likely that he could identify me? I wasn’t sure. I took a deep breath and felt my head swim a little.
“But I brought the file on something else I’ve been working on,” said Bomer, unbuckling his saddle-leather briefcase.
“Good,” I said, without enthusiasm. “Oh, good.”
He handed me a buff-colored file.
“A few days ago, there was a body found floating in the Muhlendamm Lock.”
“A Landwehr Top,” I said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Nothing. So why didn’t the Muhlendamm Murder Commission deal with it?”
“Because there was some mystery about the man’s identity and about the cause of death. The man drowned. But the body was full of seawater, see? So he couldn’t possibly have drowned in the River Spree.” He handed me some photographs. “Plus, as you can see, an attempt had been made to weigh the body down. The rope around the ankles probably slipped the weight.”
“How deep is it there?” I asked, leafing through the pictures taken at the scene and in the morgue.
“About nine meters.”
I was looking at the body of a man in his late fifties. Big, blond, and typically Aryan, except for the fact that there was a photograph of his penis, which had been circumcised. Among German men that was a little unusual.
