“That’s why I’m organizing a press conference this afternoon,” said Izzy. “So you can tell the newspapers just how seriously we’re taking this case. That we’re pursuing all possible leads. That we won’t rest until the murderer is caught. Well, you know the kind of thing. You’ve handled a press conference many times before. On occasion, you’ve even handled them quite well.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“However, you have a natural wit that sometimes you would do well to restrain. Especially in a political case like this one.”
“Is that what this is, sir?”
“Oh, I’d say so, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Ernst Gennat and I will attend the conference, of course. But it’s your investigation and your conference. If questioned, Ernst and I will confine ourselves to statements regarding your competence. Commissar Gunther’s impressive reputation, his extraordinary perseverance, his keen psychological insights, his cleanup record. The usual crap.”
“Thank you for your confidence, sir.”
Izzy’s lips puckered, as if savoring the taste of his own intelligence like a freshly made matzoh ball. “Well, what have you come up with so far?”
“Not much. She wasn’t killed in the park, that’s for sure. We’ll know more about the cause of death later on today. Hard to say if it was a lust murder or not. Maybe that was the point of removing all her sexual organs and everything that was attached to them. On the face of it, you might say that’s the most remarkable feature of the case. But you might just as easily point to the reaction of Herr and Frau Schwarz themselves. Last night, neither of them seemed particularly upset when I told them that their daughter was dead.”
“God, I hope you’re not suggesting you think they did it?”
I thought for a moment. “Maybe I’m misjudging them, sir. But the girl was disabled. Somehow I got the feeling that they were glad to be rid of her, that’s all. Maybe.”
“I trust you won’t be mentioning any of this at the press conference.”
“You know me better than that.”
“It’s true, some Nazis do have a few ruthless ideas concerning the treatment of society’s unfortunates. People who are physically and mentally handicapped. However, even the Nazis aren’t stupid enough to think that’s a vote winner. Nobody’s going to vote for a political party that advocates the extermination of the sick and the infirm. Not after a war that left thousands of men disabled.”
“No, I suppose not, sir.” I lit a cigarette. “There’s one other thing. The murdered girl had five hundred marks on her. That’s a lot more pocket money than I used to get when I was her age.”
“Yes, you’re right. Did you ask the parents about it?”
“They suggested there must have been some mistake.”
“I’ve heard of money disappearing from a dead man’s pockets. But I’ve never heard of money being planted on one.”
“No, sir.”
“Ask the neighbors, Bernie. Speak to her school friends. Find out what kind of girl Anita Schwarz was.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And Bernie. Get yourself a new tie. That one looks like it’s been in your soup.”
“Yes, sir.”
BEFORE THE PRESS CONFERENCE I went and had my hair cut at the KaDeWe. Henry Ford himself couldn’t have arranged the business of cutting German hair more efficiently. There were ten chairs, and I was in and out in less than twenty minutes. The KaDe We wasn’t exactly around the corner from the Alex. But it was a good place to have a haircut and buy a new tie.
As always, the conference itself took place in the Police Museum at the Alex. This was Gennat’s idea following the Police Exhibition of 1926, so that KRIPO might present itself to the world among the photographs, knives, test tubes, fingerprints, poison bottles, revolvers, rope, and buttons that were the exhibits of our many proud investigative successes. The modern face of policing we were keen to display to the world might have looked a bit more efficient had the glass cases containing this assortment of forensic trash and the heavy curtains that shrouded the tall windows of the exhibition hall not been so dusty. Even the most recent photograph, of Ernst Gennat, looked like it had been there for a hundred years.
There were about twenty reporters and photographers gathered among our previous triumphs. Behind a table that had been cleared of a selection of curious murder weapons, I sat between Weiss and Gennat. As if we had been arranged in ascending order of size. The men of Berlin’s press heard me appeal for any witnesses who might have seen a man behaving suspiciously in Friedrichshain Park on the night of the murder and then go on to assure the Berlin public that we were doing all in our power to catch the killer of Anita Schwarz-which, of course, was something I was determined to do. Things seemed to be going quite well until I uttered the usual bromides about interviewing known sex offenders. At this, Fritz Allgeier, the reporter for Der Angriff, a boss-eyed specimen with a gray beard and arms that seemed longer than his legs-hardly master-race material-said that the German people demanded to be told why known sex offenders were allowed to walk our streets in the first place.
Later on, I agreed with Weiss that my next comments could have been a little more diplomatic:
“The last time I looked, Herr Allgeier, Germany still has a system of criminal justice in which people are brought before the courts, tried, and, if found guilty, serve a prison sentence. After they’ve paid their debt to society, we let them go.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t let them go at all,” he said. “It might be best for the German people if these so-called known offenders were put back in prison as quickly as possible. Then this kind of lust murder might never happen.”
“Maybe. That’s not for me to say. But where do you get off thinking that someone like you can speak for the German people, Allgeier? You used to be a jack, in Moabit. A backstreet turk working the three-card trick. The German people might equally demand to know how you turned into a journalist.”
Several of the non-Nazi newspaper reporters thought this was very funny. I might have got away with it, too, if I’d left it there. But I didn’t. I was warming to my subject.
Germany had always had the death penalty for murder, but for several years, the newspapers-the non-Nazi newspapers-had waged a vigorous campaign against the guillotine. Lately, however, these same papers had bowed to Nazi influence and refrained from writing editorials urging the commutation of a murderer’s sentence. With the result that the state executioner, Johann Reichhart, was working once again. His most recent victim had been the mass murderer and cannibal Georg Haarmann. A lot of cops, myself included, didn’t much like the guillotine. More so since the senior investigating officer was called upon to attend the executions of murderers he had arrested.
“The plain fact of the matter is that we’ve always relied on known offenders to give us information,” I said. “There were even murderers serving sentences in prison who were once prepared to help us. Of course that was before we started executing them again. It’s hard to persuade a man to talk to you when you’ve chopped his head off.”
Weiss stood up and, smiling patiently, announced that the conference was over. On our way out, he said nothing. Just smiled sadly at me. Which was worse than a lashing from his tongue. Gennat said, “Nice work, Bernie. They’ll eat your eggs, son.”
“Just the fascist newspapers, surely.”
“All newspapers are fundamentally fascist, Bernie. In every country. All editors are dictators. All journalism is authoritarian. That’s why people line birdcages with it.”
Gennat was right, of course. He usually was. Only Berlin’s evening newspaper Tempo gave me a good press. It used a picture of me that looked like Luis Trenker in The Holy Mountain. Manfred George, Tempo’s editor, wrote a piece in which he described me as one of Berlin’s “finest detectives.” Maybe they liked my new tie. The rest of the republican papers were like a cat creeping around the milk: they didn’t dare say what they really thought for fear that their readers might not agree with them. I didn’t read Der Angriff. What was the point? But Hans Joachim Brandt in the Nazi Volkischer Beobachter referred to me as “a liberal, left-wing stooge.” Probably the truth lay halfway between the two.