wall. He placed his lamp to the side and waited for Hoffner to draw closer. He then began to pull back the tarp.
Hoffner leaned over. “I’m surprised he didn’t post another moustache back here.”
“He tried,” said Fichte. “I told him that wouldn’t be advised.”
“Good. Who found it?”
“The older boy. He was rummaging.”
Hoffner crouched down and drew his lamp closer in to the corpse. Fichte had learned to take careful note of his partner at these moments. Gone was the waggish smile. In its place, a concentrated gaze lingered over the body and the areas just around it, every inch cataloged for later use. Without warning, the eyes would dart to a wall, or the space by the entrance, hold for a moment, then return for more probing. Fichte knew to say nothing.
Hoffner’s first inclination was to flip her over, check her back, look for the markings that had been so much a part of his life-their lives-since that first grisly discovery in early December. But this woman was too young to have anything to do with that. Strange to feel relief at the side of a murdered woman, he thought. “So,” said Hoffner, his tone matching his focus, “how many have been back here?”
“The boy and the father, and one or two of the patrolmen.”
“One or two?”
“They’re not convinced it’s our case. Keeping their mouths tight. They’re waiting for a
“Right. We’ll need shoe molds from each of them to match against all of this. And photos of everything before the body is moved.” Fichte jotted down a note in his pad as Hoffner continued to speak. “The boy, the father. They’ve seen no one else down here?”
Fichte shook his head. “It turns out there might actually be another three or four ways down into the site. It’s impossible to know how many, or where. According to our ex-engineer, the station promenade was to have extended as far east as Blowplatz.”
“Blowplatz? That’s over half a kilometer. Wonderful.”
The clothes were in surprisingly good shape. In cases like these, they were either missing entirely-the motive for the killing-or had succumbed to the elements-caked-on mud, gnawing rats, etc. Not so here. The woman’s skirt and bodice looked almost new, and she was wearing a pair of intricately woven lace gloves. That seemed odd. “And nothing’s been moved?” said Hoffner.
“As far as I can tell, no. The boy said he saw her, then ran for his father. They brought the moustache. I followed.”
Hoffner nodded slowly. “And how long do we guess she’s been down here?” He took a pen from his coat pocket and brushed the hair back from her face.
“Rate of decay, rats. I’d say about a week, week and a half.”
“Good.” Hoffner liked it when Fichte got something right. He moved farther down the corpse. “But the clothes say otherwise.” Hoffner used his pen to lift the hem of her dress and examine the legs. What he saw momentarily startled him. The flesh on the legs was almost entirely rotted through, with a small puddle of worms and crawling ants camped in between her knees. In an odd way, it looked as if they had been placed there, caged by the legs, and given free rein to go about their business, but only as far as the mid-thigh. There, Hoffner noticed something slick on the flesh, something that was keeping the worms at bay.
Fichte had seen it, as well. It was as if they were looking at two entirely different corpses, one a week postmortem, the other at least six. For several moments Hoffner said nothing as he stared at the strange sheen.
“Someone’s been taking care of her,” he finally said. He let the hem fall back. “Flip her over,” he said as he stood.
Fichte peered up at him. There was a momentary plea in the boy’s eyes, as if to say, They told us we were off this today. Then, with a conscious resolve, Fichte reached under her shoulders and slowly pulled her over.
“Oh God” was all he could get out.
Police headquarters were a disaster.
Hoffner hopped out of the ambulance and motioned for the medic to continue driving through the main gate, or at least what was left of it. For a place he had been coming to six days a week for the past eighteen years, it was almost unrecognizable. The once-imposing line of redbrick archways looked ashamed of itself. Four days removed from the final assault, and the crumbling masonry-chalk-white-was doing little to hide the naked slats of wood that pockmarked the faade. Worse were the iron gates that skulked behind, all at wild angles, bent like spoons for a child’s amusement. And along the lower floors, turreted windows peered out blindly from empty sockets, shards of broken glass still clinging to their disfigured panes. Such was the crowning achievement of Alexanderplatz in the wake of revolution.
A trio of soldiers stood lazily by the gate, guns resting on the ground, their collars pulled up tight to fight back the chill. Each sucked on a cigarette, though the tobacco-where they had managed to scavenge that was anybody’s guess-was clearly too harsh for their young lungs. For a fleeting moment Hoffner thought of his own boys, younger still. He would have to teach them how to smoke properly one of these days. None of the soldiers took even a moment’s notice as the ambulance moved past them.
Hoffner had lost track of the different uniforms now strewn about the city-Guard Fusiliers Regiment,
The trouble had all begun quite innocently some ten weeks ago, when the sailors and stokers in Kiel had decided that they, like the great General Ludendorf, had had enough. Ludendorf had fled to Sweden at the end of October. They, unwilling to suffer through another humiliation at the hands of the British, had simply left their ships. On the fourth of November-in a moment of genuine socialist spontaneity-they formed a Workers’ and Sailors’ Council and took their defiance beyond the naval base to the city hall. Naturally, soldiers were sent in to suppress the uprising, but when the boys arrived-for they were mostly boys, after all-they discovered that it was not a wild mob that they had come to destroy, but a group of the dedicated proletariat. And so the soldiers joined them, and the word spread: Munich, Bremen, Hamburg, Dresden, Stuttgart. By the time the Kaiser declared the armistice on the eleventh, Germany was already comfortably ensconced in revolution.
Berlin, of course, was not one to miss out. On the ninth, Karl Liebknecht-son of the late socialist leader Wilhelm, and himself a recent political guest of Luckau prison-took to the streets with a legion of striking workers behind him. They marched under the banner of Spartakus-the new communist party-and declared the birth of the Free Socialist Republic from the balcony of the Royal Palace. Within days, Rosa Luxemburg was with them. She had spent the better part of four years in Breslau prison, her virtual isolation having done nothing to shake her devotion to the cause. There had been rumors-bouts of hysteria, the possibility that little Rosa had slipped off into madness while caged at the far reaches of the Empire-but she showed none of it on her return to Berlin. She had come to take the revolution as far left as humanly possible, and it was there that the real difficulties had begun.
Had the revolutionaries been of one mind, thousands of innocents might have been spared the fighting. But the revolutionaries were socialists: Karl and Rosa wanted the genuine article, workers of the world rising as one, the death of capitalism, so forth and so on; Chancellor Ebert and his Social Democrats-terrified of a Soviet-style putsch-wanted a National Assembly, elections, and perhaps even a bit of help from various capitalist concerns so as to get the country up and running again. They might have called themselves socialists, but they were a peculiar breed willing to bring back the monarchy-in name only-in the hopes of restoring order. And then there were the sailors-the People’s Naval Division-just back from the front, leftists through and through, so long as they got their pay.
Revolution, however, matters only when the soldiers decide to take sides. In early December Prince Max von Baden and the General Staff chose Ebert, and while there were brief moments of hope for Spartakus after that- Christmas Day on the Schloss Bridge, cannons at the ready, hundreds of armed civilians forcing the government troops into retreat; January sixth, thousands more marching along the broad Siegesallee toward the War Ministry-
