“I thought nothing of it and continued scrubbing.” He proved this by pointing to his damp shirt and trousers. “Then ten minutes later I heard a whistle.”
“Whistle? A police whistle?”
“No, sir, I mean, as someone would make through his teeth. It was quite loud. I glanced up and saw a man walk out of the alley. The whistle was to hail a taxi. It stopped in front of my building and I heard the man ask the driver to take him to the Summer Garden restaurant.”
Whistling? Kohl reflected. This was unusual. One whistled for dogs and horses. But to summon a taxi this way would demean the driver. In Germany all professions and trades were worthy of equal respect. Did this suggest that the suspect was a foreigner? Or merely rude? He jotted the observation into his notebook.
“The number of the taxi?” Kohl had to ask, of course, but received the expected response.
“Oh, I have no idea, sir.”
“Summer Garden.” This was a common name. “Which one?”
“I believe I heard ‘Rosenthaler Street.’”
Kohl nodded, excited to find such a good lead this early in an investigation. “Quickly – what did the man look like?”
“I was below the stairs, sir, as I said. I saw only his back as he hailed the car. He was a large man, more than two meters tall. Broad but not fat. He had an accent, though.”
“What kind? From a different region of Germany? Or a different country?”
“Similar to someone from the south, if anything. But I have a brother near Munich and it sounded different still.”
“Outside the country, perhaps? Many foreigners here now, with the Olympics.”
“I don’t know, sir. I’ve spent all my life in Berlin. And I’ve only been out of the fatherland once.” He nodded toward his useless arm.
“Did he have a leather satchel?”
“Yes, I believe so.”
To Janssen, Kohl said, “The likely source of the leather flakes.” He turned back. “And you didn’t see his face?”
“No, sir. As I say.”
Kohl’s voice lowered. “If I were to tell you that I won’t take your name, so you would not be further involved, could you perhaps remember better what he looked like?”
“Honestly, sir, I did not see his face.”
“Age?”
The man shook his head. “All I know is that he was a big man and was wearing a light suit… I can’t say the color, I’m afraid. Oh, and on his head was a hat like Air Minister Göring wears.”
“What kind is that?” Kohl asked.
“With a narrow brim. Brown.”
“Ah, something helpful.” Kohl looked the janitor up and down. “Very well, you may go now.”
“Hail Hitler,” the man said with pathetic enthusiasm and offered a powerful salute, perhaps in compensation for the fact he needed to use his left arm for the gesture.
The inspector offered a distracted “Hail” and returned to the body. They quickly collected their equipment. “Let’s hurry. To the Summer Garden.”
They started back to the car. Willi Kohl winced, glancing down at his feet. Even wearing overpriced leather shoes stuffed with the softest of lamb’s wool did little to help his distraught toes and arches. Cobblestones were particularly brutal.
He was suddenly aware of Janssen, at his side, slowing. “Gestapo,” the young man whispered.
Dismayed, Kohl looked up and saw Peter Krauss, in a shabby brown suit and matching felt trilby hat, approach. Two of his assistants, younger men, about Janssen’s age, held back.
Oh, not now! The suspect might be at the restaurant this very moment, not suspecting that he’d been detected.
Krauss walked toward the two Kripo inspectors leisurely. Propaganda Minister Goebbels was always sending out Party photographers to stage pictures of model Aryans and their families to use in his publications. Peter Krauss could easily have been a subject for a hundred such pictures: He was a tall, slim, blond man. A former colleague of Kohl’s, Krauss had been invited to join the Gestapo because of his experience in the old Department 1A of the Kripo, which investigated political crimes. Just after the National Socialists came to power the department was spun off and became the Gestapo. Krauss was like many Prussian Germans: Nordic with some Slav blood in his veins but office gossip had it that he’d been invited to leave the Kripo for the job on Prince Albrecht Street only after changing his first name from Pietr, which sniffed of the Slavic.
Kohl had heard Krauss was a methodical investigator though they had never worked together; Kohl had always refused to handle political crimes, and now the Kripo was forbidden to.
Krauss said, “Willi, good afternoon.”
“Hail. What brings you here, Peter?”
Janssen nodded and the Gestapo investigator did the same. He said to Kohl, “I received a phone call from our boss.”
Did he mean Heinrich Himmler himself? Kohl wondered. It was possible. One month ago, the SS leader had consolidated every police force in Germany under his own control and had created the Sipo, the plain-clothed division, which included the Gestapo, the Kripo, and the notorious SD, which was the SS’s intelligence division. Himmler had just been named state chief of police, a rather modest description, Kohl had thought at the time of the announcement, for the most powerful law enforcer on earth.
Krauss continued. “He’s been instructed by the Leader to keep our city blemish-free during the Olympics. We’re to look into all serious crimes near the stadium, Olympic Village and city center and make sure the perpetrators are swiftly caught. And here, a murder within shouting distance of the Tiergarten.” Krauss clicked his tongue in dismay.
Kohl glanced obviously at his watch, desperate to get to the Summer Garden. “I’m afraid I have to leave, Peter.”
Examining the body closely, crouching down, the Gestapo man said, “Unfortunately with all the foreign reporters in town… So difficult to control them, to monitor them.”
“Yes, yes, but-”
“We need to make sure this is solved before they learn of the death.” Krauss rose and walked in a slow circle around the dead man. “Who is he, do we know?”
“Not yet. His ID is missing. Tell me, Peter, this wouldn’t have anything to do with an SS or SA matter, would it?”
“Not that I know of,” Krauss replied, frowning. “Why?”
“On the way here, Janssen and I noticed many more patrols. Random stops to check papers. Yet we’ve heard no word about an operation.”
“Ach, that’s nothing,” the Gestapo inspector said, waving his hand dismissively. “A minor security matter. Nothing the Kripo need worry about.”
Kohl looked again at his pocket watch. “Well, I really must go, Peter.”
The Gestapo officer rose to his feet. “Was he robbed?”
“Everything’s missing from his pockets,” Kohl said impatiently.
Krauss stared at the body for a long moment and all Kohl could think of was the suspect sitting at the Summer Garden, halfway through a meal of schnitzel or wurst. “I must be getting back,” Kohl said.
“One moment.” Krauss continued to study the body. Finally, without looking up, he said, “It would make sense if the killer was a foreigner.”
“A foreigner? Well-” Janssen spoke quickly, eyebrows rising in his youthful face. But Kohl shot him a sharp look and he fell silent.
“What’s that?” Krauss asked him.
The inspector candidate made a fast recovery. “I’m curious why you think it would make sense.”
“The deserted alley, missing identification, a cold-blooded shooting… When you’ve been in this business for a time, you get a feel for the perpetrators in murders such as this, Inspector Candidate.”
“A murder such as what?” Kohl could not resist asking. A man shot to death in a Berlin alley was hardly sui generis these days.
But Krauss didn’t respond. “A Roma or Pole very likely. Violent people, to be sure. And with motives galore to murder innocent Germans. Or the killer might be Czech, from the east, of course, not the Sudetenland. They’re known for shooting people from behind.”