Besides, if the man had come to town only yesterday, as it now seemed, he most likely hadn’t bought the gun himself. (Though the list might yet prove valuable: The killer could have stolen the gun, taken it from the victim himself or gotten it from a comrade who had been in Berlin for some time.)
Understanding the inexplicable…
Still hoping for the passenger manifest for the Manhattan, Kohl had sent telegrams to port officials in Hamburg and to the United States Lines, the owner and operator of the vessel, requesting a copy of the document. But Kohl wasn’t optimistic; he wasn’t even sure if the port master had a copy. As for the ship line itself, they would have to locate the document, create a copy and then post or Teletype it to Kripo headquarters; that could take days. In any event, there’d so far been no response to these requests.
He had even sent a telegram to Manny’s Men’s Wear in New York, asking about recent purchasers of Stetson Mity-Lites. This plea too was presently unanswered.
He glanced impatiently at the brass clock on his desk. It was getting late and he was starving. Kohl wished either for a break in the case or to return home for dinner with his family.
Konrad Janssen stepped into his doorway. “I have them, sir.”
He held up a printed sheet of the street artist’s rendering, fragrant with the scent of ink.
“Good… Now, sadly, Janssen, you have one more task tonight.”
“Yes, sir, whatever I can do.”
One further quality of serious Janssen was that he had no aversion to working hard.
“You will take the DKW and return to the Olympic Village. Show the artist’s picture to everyone you can find, American or otherwise, and see if anybody recognizes him. Leave some copies along with our telephone number. If you have no luck there, take some copies to the Lützow Plaza precinct. If they happen to find the suspect tell them to detain him as a witness only and to call me at once. Even at home.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Thank you, Janssen… Wait, this is your first murder investigation, is it not?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Ah, you never forget the first one. You’re doing well.”
“I appreciate that, sir.”
Kohl gave him the keys to the DKW. “A delicate hand on the choke. She likes air as much as petrol. Perhaps more.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’ll be at home. Telephone me with any developments.”
After the young man had gone Kohl unlaced and removed his shoes. He opened his desk drawer, extracted a box of lamb’s wool and wound several pieces around his toes to cushion the sensitive areas. He placed a few strategic wads in his shoes themselves and, wincing, slipped his feet back inside.
He glanced past the picture of the suspect to the grim photographs of the murders in Gatow and Charlottenburg. He’d heard nothing more about the report from the crime scene or interviews of any witnesses. He supposed that his fiction about the Kosi conspiracy he’d pitched to Chief of Inspectors Horcher had had no effect.
Gazing at the pictures: a dead boy, a woman trying to grasp the leg of a man lying just out of reach, a worker clutching his worn shovel… Heartbreaking. He stared for some moments. He knew it was dangerous to pursue the case. Certainly dangerous for his career, if not his life. And yet he had no choice.
Why? he wondered. Why this compulsion he invariably felt to close a murder case?
Willi Kohl supposed it was that, ironically, in death he found his sanity. Or, more accurately, in the process of bringing to justice those who caused death. This was his purpose on earth, he felt, and to ignore any killing – of a fat man in an alley or a family of Jews – was to ignore his nature and was therefore a sin.
The inspector now put the photographs away. Taking his hat, he stepped into the hallway of the old building and proceeded down the length of Prussian tile and stone and wood worn down over the years but nonetheless spotlessly clean and polished to a shine. He walked through shafts of low, rosy sun, which was the main source of illumination at headquarters this time of year; the grande dame of Berlin had become a spendthrift under the National Socialists (“Guns before butter,” Göring proclaimed over and over and over), and the building’s engineers did all they could to conserve resources.
Since he’d given his car to Janssen and would have to take a tram home, Kohl continued down two flights to a back door of headquarters, a shortcut to the stop.
At the bottom of the stairs signs pointed the way to the Kripo’s holding cells, to the left, and to the old-case archives straight ahead. It was in this latter direction that he headed, recalling spending time there in his days as a detective-inspector assistant, reading the files not only to learn what he could from the great Prussian detectives of the past but simply because he enjoyed seeing the history of Berlin as told through its law enforcers.
His daughter’s fiancé, Heinrich, was a civil servant but his passion was police work. Kohl decided he would bring the young man here sometime and they could browse through the files together. The inspector might even show him some of the cases Kohl himself had worked on years ago.
But, as he pushed through the doorway, he stopped fast; the archives were gone. Kohl was startled to find himself in a brilliantly lit corridor in which stood six armed men. They were not, however, in the green uniforms of the Schupo; they wore SS black. Almost as one, they turned toward him.
“Good evening, sir,” one said, the closest to him. A lean man with an astonishingly long face. He eyed Kohl carefully. “You are…?”
“Detective Inspector Kohl. And who are you?”
“If you’re looking for the archives they are now on the second floor.”
“No. I’m simply using the rear exit door.” Kohl started forward. The SS trooper took a subtle step toward him. “I’m sorry to report that it is no longer in use.”
“I didn’t hear about that.”
“No? Well, it has been the case for the past several days. You will have to go back upstairs.”
Kohl heard a curious sound. What was it? A mechanical clap, clap…
A burst of sunlight filled the hallway as two SS men opened the far door and wheeled in dollies holding cartons. They turned into one of the rooms at the end of the corridor.
He said to the guard, “That door is the one I’m speaking of. It appears to be in use.”
“Not in general use.”
The sounds…
Clap, clap, clap and, beneath it, the rumbling of a motor or engine…
He glanced to his right, through a partially open doorway, where he glimpsed several large mechanical devices. A woman in a white coat was feeding stacks of paper into one of them. This must be part of the Kripo’s printing department. But then he observed that, no, they weren’t sheets of paper but cards with holes punched in them and they were being sorted by the device.
Ah, Kohl understood. An old mystery had been answered. Some time ago he’d heard that the government was leasing large calculating and sorting machines, called DeHoMags, after the firm that made them, the German subsidiary of the American company International Business Machines. These devices used punched cards to analyze and cross-reference information. Kohl had been delighted when he’d learned of the leases. The machines could be invaluable in criminal investigations; they might narrow down fingerprint categories or ballistics information a hundred times faster than a technician could by hand. They could also cross-reference modus operandi to link criminal and crime and could keep track of parolees or recidivist offenders.
The inspector’s enthusiasm soon soured, though, when he learned that the devices were not available for use by the Kripo. He’d wondered who’d gotten them and where they were. But now, to his shock, it seemed that at least two or three were less than a hundred meters from his office and guarded by the SS.