He waited a moment until he was sure Janssen would be in position in the back and then turned the corner. No sign of the suspect from Dresden Alley or the man with the suitcase. Only some teenage boys standing around a pile of wooden milk crates across the courtyard. They glanced up uneasily at the officers and began to walk out of the courtyard.
“You, boys!” Kohl called.
They stopped, looked at each other uneasily. “Yes?”
“Did you just see two men?”
Another uncomfortable shared glance. “No.”
“Come here.”
There was a brief pause. Then simultaneously they began sprinting, vanishing from the courtyard, raising puffs of dust beneath their feet. Kohl didn’t even try to pursue them. Gripping his pistol, he looked around the courtyard. All of the apartments on the ground floor had curtained windows or anemic plants resting on the sills, suggesting they were occupied. One, though, was curtainless and dark.
Kohl approached it slowly and noticed that on the dusty ground below the window were indentations – from the milk cartons, he understood. The suspect and his companion had paid the boys to carry the crates to the window then replace them after the men had climbed into the apartment.
The inspector, gripping his pistol tightly, pressed the button for the building’s janitor.
A moment later a harried man arrived. The wiry, gray janitor opened the door and glanced with a nervous blink at the pistol in Kohl’s hand.
Kohl stepped inside, looking past the man into the dark corridor. There was motion at the far end of the hall. Kohl prayed that Janssen would remain vigilant. The inspector had at least been tested on the battlefield. He’d been shot at and had, he believed, shot one or two enemy soldiers. But Janssen? Though he was a talented marksman, the boy had fired only at paper targets. How would he do if the matter came to a gun-fight?
He whispered to the janitor, “The apartment on this floor, two to the right.” He pointed. “It is unoccupied?”
“Yes, sir.”
Kohl stepped back so he could keep an eye on the courtyard in case the suspects tried to leap out the window and run. He told the janitor, “There’s another officer at your back entrance. Go fetch him at once.”
“Yes, sir.”
But just as he was leaving, a stocky old woman in a purple dress and blue head scarf waddled toward them. “Mr. Greitel, Mr. Greitel! Quickly, you must call the police!”
Kohl turned to her.
The janitor said, “The police are here, Mrs. Haeger.”
“Ach, how can that be?” She blinked.
The inspector asked her, “What do you require the police for?”
“Theft!”
Instinct told Kohl that this had something to do with the pursuit. “Tell me, ma’am. Quickly now.”
“My apartment is in the front of the building. And from my window I noted two men hiding behind the stack of milk crates, which I must point out you have been promising for weeks you will cart away, Mr. Greitel.”
“Please continue. This matter could be most urgent.”
“These two were skulking. It was obvious. Then, just a moment ago, I saw them stand and take two bicycles from the rack next to the front entrance. I don’t know about one of the bicycles but the other was clearly Miss Bauer’s, and she has had no male companion for two years, so I know she would not have been lending him the bicycle.”
“No!” Kohl muttered and hurried outside. Now he realized that the suspect had paid the boys simply to drop a couple of the crates beneath the window to leave the marks in the dust but then to return them to the pile, behind which the men had hidden. The boys then were probably told to act furtive or uneasy, making Kohl think this was how the suspects had gotten into the building.
He burst from the courtyard and looked up and down the street, seeing living proof of a statistic that he, as a diligent police officer, knew well: The most popular form of transportation in Berlin was the bicycle, hundreds of which clogged the streets here, hiding their suspects’ escape as effectively as a cloud of dense smoke.
They’d ditched the bikes and were walking down a busy street a half mile from November 1923 Square.
Paul and Morgan looked for another café or tap room with a phone.
“How did you know they were in the Edelweiss Café?” Morgan asked, breathing hard from the fast cycling.
“The car, the one parked on the curb.”
“The black one?”
“Right. I didn’t think anything of it at first. But something clicked in my mind. I remembered a couple of years ago, when I was on my way to a job. It turned out that I wasn’t the only one going to visit Bo Gillette. Some cops from Brooklyn got there first. But they were lazy and parked outside, halfway up over the curb, figuring it was an unmarked car, so who’d notice? Well, Bo noticed. He shows up, understands they’re looking for him and vanishes. It took me a month to find him again. In the back of my mind I was thinking, police car. So when the younger guy stepped outside I realized right away it was the same man I’d seen on the patio of the Summer Garden.”
“They’ve tracked us from Dresden Alley to the Summer Garden to here… How on earth?”
Paul thought back. He hadn’t told Käthe Richter he was coming here and he’d checked a dozen times to make sure nobody had been following him from the boardinghouse to the cab stand. He’d told nobody at the Olympics. The pawnbroker might have betrayed them here, but he wouldn’t have known about the Summer Garden. No, these two industrious cops had trailed them on their own.
“Taxis,” Paul finally said.
“What?”
“That’s the only link. To the Summer Garden and here. From now on, if we can’t shank it, we have the driver drop us two, three blocks from where we’re going.”
They continued away from November 1923 Square. Some blocks farther on they found a beer hall with a public phone. Morgan went inside to make the call to his contact while Paul ordered ales and, edgy and vigilant, kept watch outside. He wouldn’t have been surprised to see the two cops hurrying up the street, still on their trail.
Who the hell were they?
When Morgan returned to the table he was troubled. “We have a problem.” He took a sip of the beer and wiped his mustache. He leaned forward. “They’re not releasing any information. Word came from Himmler or Heydrich – my man’s not sure who – but no information about public appearances of Party or government officials is to be released until further notice. No press conferences. Nothing. The announcement went out just a few hours ago.”
Paul drank down half the beer. “What do we do? Do you know anything about Ernst’s schedule?”
“I don’t even know where he lives, except somewhere in Charlottenburg. We could stake him out at the Chancellory maybe, follow him. But that’ll be very hard. If you’re within five hundred feet of a senior party official you can be expected to be stopped for your papers and detained if they don’t like what they see.”
Paul reflected for a moment. He said, “I have a thought. I might be able to get some information.”
“About what?”
“Ernst,” Paul said.
“You?” Morgan asked, surprised.
“But I’ll need a couple of hundred marks.”
“I have that, yes.” He counted out bills and slipped them to Paul.
“And your man in the information ministry? Do you think he could find out about people who aren’t officials?”
Morgan shrugged. “I can’t say for certain. But I can tell you one thing without doubt – that if the National Socialists have any skill at all, it is gathering information on their citizens.”
Janssen and Kohl left the courtyard building.
Mrs. Haeger could offer no descriptions of the suspects, though, ironically, this was due to literal, not political, blindness. Cataracts in her eyes had allowed the busybody to observe the men hiding, then and making off with the bicycles but rendered her unable to give any more details.