But whatever made him tick, the man was smart and ambitious and Kohl was very fortunate to have him. Over the past several years the Kripo had been hemorrhaging talented officers to the Gestapo, where the pay and opportunities were far better. When Hitler came to power the number of Kripo detectives around the country was twelve thousand. Now, it was down to eight thousand. And of those, many were former Gestapo investigators sent to the Kripo in exchange for the young officers who’d transferred out; in truth, they were largely drunks and incompetents.

The telephone buzzed and he picked it up. “This is Kohl.”

“Inspector, it is Schreiber, the clerk you spoke to today. Hail Hitler.”

“Yes, yes, hail.” On the way back to the Alex from the Summer Garden, Kohl and Janssen had stopped at the haberdashery department at Tietz, the massive department store that dominated the north side of Alexander Plaza, near Kripo headquarters. Kohl had shown the clerk the picture of Göring’s hat and asked what kind it was. The man didn’t know but would look into the matter.

“Any luck?” Kohl asked him.

“Ach, yes, yes, I have found the answer. It’s a Stetson. Made in the United States. As you know, Minister Göring shows the finest taste.”

Kohl made no comment on that. “Are they common here?”

“No, sir. Quite rare. Expensive, as you can imagine.”

“Where could I buy one in Berlin?”

“In truth, sir, I don’t know. The minister, I’m told, special-orders them from London.”

Kohl thanked him, hung up and told Janssen what he’d learned.

“So perhaps he’s an American,” Janssen said. “But perhaps not. Since Göring wears the same hat.”

“A small piece of the puzzle, Janssen. But you will find that many small pieces often give a clearer picture of a crime than a single large piece.” He took the brown evidence envelopes from his pocket and selected the one containing the bullet.

The Kripo had its own forensics laboratory, dating back to when the Prussian police force had been the nation’s preeminent law enforcer (if not the world’s; in the Weimar days, the Kripo closed 97 percent of the murder cases in Berlin). But the lab too had been raided by the Gestapo both for equipment and personnel, and the technical workers at headquarters were harried and far less competent than they had once been. Willi Kohl, therefore, had taken it upon himself to become an expert in certain areas of criminal science. Despite the absence of his personal interest in firearms, Kohl had made quite a study of ballistics, modeling his approach on the best firearms laboratory in the world – the one at J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington, D.C.

He shook the bullet out onto a clean piece of paper.

Placing the monocle in his eye he found a pair of tweezers and examined the slug carefully. “Your eyes are better,” he said. “You look.”

The inspector candidate carefully took the bullet and the monocle while Kohl pulled a binder from his shelf. It contained photographs and sketches of many types of bullets. The binder was large, several hundred pages, but the inspector had organized it by caliber and by number of grooves and lands – the stripes pressed into a lead slug by the rifling in the barrel – and whether they twisted to the left or the right. Only five minutes later Janssen found a match.

“Ach, this is good news,” Kohl said.

“How so?”

“It is an unusual weapon our killer used. Look. It’s a nine-millimeter Largo round. Most likely from the Spanish Star Modelo A. Good for us, it is rare. And as you pointed out, it is either a new weapon or one that has been fired little. Let us hope the former. Janssen, you have a way with words: Please send a telegram to all police precincts in the area. Have them query gun shops and see if any have sold a new or little-used Star Modelo A in the past several months, or ammunition for such a gun. No, make that the past year. I want names and addresses of all purchasers.”

“Yes, sir.”

The young inspector candidate took down the information and started for the Teletype room.

“Wait, add as a postscript to your message a description of our suspect. And that he is armed.” The inspector gathered up the clearest photographs of the suspect’s fingerprints and the inked card of the victim’s. Sighing, he said, “And now I must try to be diplomatic. Ach, how I hate doing that.”

Chapter Ten

“I am sorry, Inspector Kohl, the department is engaged.”

“Entirely?”

“Yes, sir,” said the prim bald man in a tight suit, buttoned high on his chest. “Several hours ago we were ordered to stop all other investigations and compile a list of everyone in the files with a Russian background or pronounced appearance.”

They were in the ante-office of the Kripo’s large identification division, where fingerprint analysis and anthropometry were performed.

“ Everyone in Berlin?”

“Yes. There is some alert going on.”

Ah, the security matter again, the one that Krauss had deemed too insignificant to mention to the Kripo.

“They’re using fingerprint examiners to check personal files? And our fingerprint examiners, no less?”

“Drop everything,” the buttoned-up little man replied. “Those were my orders. From Sipo headquarters.”

Himmler again, Kohl thought. “Please, Gerhard, these are vital.” He showed him the fingerprint card and the photos.

“They are good pictures.” Gerhard examined them. “Very clear.”

“Put three or four examiners on it, please. That’s all I’m asking.”

A pinched-face laugh crossed the administrator’s face. “I cannot, Inspector. Three? Impossible.”

Kohl felt the frustration. A student of foreign criminal science, he looked with envy at America and England, where forensic identification was now done almost exclusively by fingerprint analysis. Here, yes, fingerprints were used for identification but, unlike in the United States, the Germans had no uniform system of analyzing prints; each area of the country was different. A policeman in Westphalia might analyze a print in one way; a Berlin Kripo officer would analyze it differently. By posting the samples back and forth it was possible to achieve an identification but the process could take weeks. Kohl had long advocated standardizing fingerprint analysis throughout the country but had met with considerable resistance and lethargy. He’d also urged his supervisor to buy some American wire-photo machines, remarkable devices that could transmit clear facsimile photographs and pictures, such as of fingerprints, over telephone lines in minutes. They were, however, quite expensive and his boss had turned down the request without even taking the matter up with the police president.

More troubling to Kohl, though, was that once the National Socialists came to power fingerprints took on less importance than the antiquated system of Bertillon anthropometry, in which measurements of the body, face and head were used to identify criminals. Kohl, like most modern detectives, rejected Bertillon analysis as unwieldy; yes, each person’s body structure was largely different from another’s, but dozens of precise measurements were needed to categorize someone. And, unlike fingerprints, criminals rarely left sufficient bodily impressions at the scene to link any individual to the site of the crime through Bertillon data.

But the National Socialists’ interest in anthropometry went beyond merely identifying someone; it was the key to what they termed the “science” of criminobiology: categorizing people as criminal irrespective of their behavior, solely on their physical characteristics. Hundreds of Gestapo and SS labored full-time to correlate size of nose and shade of skin, for instance, to proclivity to commit a crime. Himmler’s goal was not to bring criminals to justice but to eliminate crime before it occurred.