Babylon Berlin (18 page)

What Jules Marx had done with the former station concourse was impressive. An enormous auditorium opened out above Rath. With no corners, only a series of soft curves,
Plaza
had almost three thousand seats, and tonight it looked as if almost all of them would be filled. There were already more than a thousand people inside and the orchestra was playing, though the music was scarcely audible amongst the clamour of the audience.

Rath looked around. How Marlow was supposed to recognise him in a crowd of three thousand people was a mystery. He took his seat and leafed through the programme, at the same time fiddling conspicuously with a photo of Kardakov.

‘Is he appearing too?’ his neighbour enquired, a thin woman with glasses who looked like a recorder teacher.

Rath mumbled something about an acquaintance and the lady blushed and turned away. He could tell what she was thinking. His other neighbour showed no interest whatsoever. Perhaps he had overheard the short conversation with the recorder teacher. Rath put the photo away angrily. In the meantime, the lights had gone out. The first act on stage was a magician who looked like a witch doctor, followed by lasso acrobats in cowboy costumes, and a knife thrower dressed as an American Indian. When yet another cowboy began singing a lament about loneliness on the prairie, Rath wanted to throw tomatoes at him. He gritted his teeth, but stuck it out until the interval.

As the rest of the audience made its way to the foyer, he stayed put and gazed around. People pushed past but, in amongst the melee, there was no-one that stood out. He didn’t know what he was looking for, didn’t even know what Marlow looked like. What was he expecting? A gangster boss like Al Capone? A fat man in a white suit, flanked by two heavyweight wrestlers? He didn’t see anyone who set his alarm bells ringing. In the meantime, the auditorium had almost emptied. He followed the others into the foyer.

Once again he held the photo casually alongside the programme as he strolled through the groups of smoking, drinking and chattering people. Obviously the portrait of Alexej Kardakov left the people here cold. Why had Gloria sent him to
Plaza
? What did Dr M. have to do with the variety theatre? Perhaps it belonged to him and Jules Marx was just a front man? Then Dr M. would hardly visit every performance. More likely he’d be in an office somewhere. He should have pumped Gloria for more information in
Eldorado.

Maybe he should go upstairs and take a look at the office.

‘Stop, you can’t go up there!’

He had scarcely taken three steps before one of the tail-coated ushers whistled him back.

Rath tried his best to come across like a businessman. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘but I would like to speak to someone from management…’

‘Are you unhappy with the line-up?’

‘It’s not that,’ he lied. ‘I need to speak to Herr Marlow urgently. I was told I might find him here.’

‘I’m afraid you’ve been misinformed. There’s no Herr Marlow working here.’

‘Dr Marlow, then?’

The usher raised his right eyebrow. ‘As I said just now, you must have been misinformed. Now might I ask you to get down from the steps?’

‘The name means nothing to you?’

‘Not that I’m aware of.’

He had reached the end of his tether. The audience was already streaming back into the auditorium. He let the rest of the show wash over him, without seeing a Great Marloni pull a rabbit out of his hat or a Dr M. turn in a sparkling display of knife throwing.

He hadn’t seriously expected to find Marlow amongst the performers, but there had to be some connection between Dr M. and
Plaza
, he thought, as he trudged back to the city railway with a herd of audience members. Or else Gloria had fooled him. Would she have dared? Unlikely. At
Eldorado
, they relied on Vice cops being friendly. Perhaps he was just here on the wrong day. That, or Marlow had found him a long time ago and had no intention of speaking to him.

With several hundred people streaming towards
Schlesischer Bahnhof
from
Plaza
Rath didn’t notice the one on his tail.

12

There was a general air of depression at the Castle on Monday morning. The grey corridors appeared even greyer than normal. The large-scale action around May Day had lasted three days and turned into a disaster for police command. Press reaction was devastating and Berthold Weinert wasn’t the only journalist to condemn their actions. The word
Blutmai
was doing the rounds, just as
Vossische Zeitung
had conceived it.

There had been twenty-two recorded fatalities, and many of the wounded were still critical. The police had used huge amounts of ammunition: 7,885 shots had been fired from police pistols, and a further 3,096 from rifles and machine guns. The Berlin police accounts were a model of Prussian exactitude.

As far as confiscated weapons were concerned, however, officers had less counting to do. They could have spared themselves the house-to-house searches in Wedding and Neukölln. Though it had been a large-scale action, with hundreds of flats thoroughly searched, the yield had been negligible, perhaps a dozen revolvers and pistols, two or three rifles. There were more weapons in the shooting gallery at the funfair.

On the command floor they were already hard at work constructing the story of a communist coup that had been prevented by the brave efforts of police officers. Since early morning, they had been searching communist offices not only in Bülowplatz but across the whole city using the register of names. The Prussian Interior Ministry had used the May disturbances as a pretext for banning the RFB.

Shortly after work began, a meeting was called for officers from all departments and Commissioner Zörgiebel greeted them personally in the large conference room above the main entrance. Dörrzwiebel had hardly changed since his Cologne days, an obesity-prone former union secretary who had been entrusted with running the police force because the social democrats were in power and had offices to fill. He was a politician rather than a criminal investigator, even after all his years as police chief, and rarely seen by officers. Normally, he sent his deputy to meetings such as this. Dr Bernhard Weiß was the leading specialist at the helm of the Berlin police, and an outstanding criminal investigator, too perfect to be popular with colleagues but universally respected. That gave him a distinct advantage over Zörgiebel. Weiß had expressed reservations about upholding the demonstration ban on the first of May, but Zörgiebel had wanted to push it through with consequences that, by now, were well established.

After the police chief had thanked the officers for their commitment during the ‘communist riots’, he changed topic. Zörgiebel knew that CID didn’t enjoy being roped in to political work and felt that such work should be carried out by Section 1A alone. The majority of officers gave a satisfied nod when he revealed that he had gathered them for a different reason. The latest unsolved fatality required everyone to pull together, its swift resolution was of the utmost importance to demonstrate that the police still called the shots. Zörgiebel appealed to CID to display a united front and requested that all divisions from Section IV aid Homicide wherever possible, so long as they didn’t neglect their day-to-day duties. ‘You all get about in this city, gentlemen,’ he concluded, ‘so make the most of your contacts!’

DCI Böhm approached the lectern. Rath would have liked to bombard him with paper balls, like when he was at school. With
wet
paper balls, that is. He looked for Charlotte Ritter but there wasn’t a single woman there. Well, someone in A Division had to be working, he thought, if the men were all present in the conference room looking important. Buddha Ernst Gennat wasn’t up on the podium either, but he knew the chief of homicide preferred investigative work to noisy gatherings such as this.

And it really was noisy.

‘Gentlemen!’ Böhm barked so loudly that his colleagues in the first row visibly winced. ‘Thank you first of all for appearing in such numbers. We are still pursuing all lines of inquiry. Our biggest problem is that we are yet to identify the deceased. Our number one priority, therefore, is to establish who we dredged from the Landwehr canal.’

The DCI held the newspaper photo in the air. ‘This picture was published in all major newspapers at the weekend. We have had a few responses from the public, but unfortunately nothing we can use. No-one seems to have known this man. At least, no-one who will admit it. We believe it is possible that he doesn’t come from Berlin at all. That he was the victim of a violent crime is beyond doubt and his injuries cannot have stemmed from the car accident. The autopsy…’

Rath had already heard most of what the DCI was reeling off. There hadn’t been any major developments over the weekend. Two assistant detectives went round distributing photos, the same ones that were in the papers but a good deal sharper. Rath could now see that a wet lock of the Russian’s hair was hanging down over his forehead. His skin was glistening in the flashlight.

König’s women were putting them to a lot of trouble. They had remained resolutely silent to this point, but now it all came gushing out. For this they had a new member of the group to thank, part of the yield they had harvested from Old Fritz’s breakdown. Unlike the men in König’s photo stories, who were cast in their roles because of their similarity to prominent Prussian figures, the women were all professionals, prostitutes from Unter den Linden or Friedrichstrasse. They had been identified beyond doubt, and subsequently given a good grilling. The breakthrough came when Rath managed to make Sylvia Walkowski, or Squealing Sylvie, believe that her arrest had come about solely as a result of Red Sophie’s loquacity. Red Sophie, or Sophie Ziethen, had dazzled as Mata Hari on the day of the raid.

Then the floodgates really opened. When Sophie heard that Sylvie had blabbed, she started talking too, angering the women in the neighbouring cells. Little by little, they learned that the majority of the women didn’t just earn their money through prostitution and pornography but also in illegal nightclubs – most of them by dancing nude. Two of them worked in
Pegasus
, whose speciality was women parading in the uniforms of the various Prussian wars – bottomless – while gentlemen from the audience pinned medals on their most voluminous body parts. Currently the ladies were all in police custody, wishing death upon one another. No-one envied the female wardens in the women’s wing, where Squealing Sylvie was living up to her name.

There were eight illegal nightclubs on their list, their locations spread across the city. A huge amount of work lay ahead. They had to discreetly assemble information, as well as prepare and plan the raids. They wanted to raid all the clubs in a single evening, before word of the operation got round.

‘Just like in the old days.’ Uncle had telephoned Lanke and requested that twenty police vans be placed at their disposal next Saturday evening. ‘Back then, these sorts of operations happened regularly. We’d cart people back to Alex by the vanload, and in the main conference room, where Dörrzwiebel just preached his sermon, we would separate the wheat from the chaff.’ He rubbed his hands.

‘Picking up in pick-ups,’ Jänicke joked.

‘No time to enquire about some dead man,’ said Wolter. ‘A Division can get their shit done on their own.’ He took the photo from the conference room, ripped it in two and threw it in the wastepaper bin. Jänicke had carelessly flung his photo on the desk. Rath, meanwhile, had stowed his copy in his jacket pocket. He had no intention of throwing it away.

Bruno fixed him with a sidelong glance, but didn’t say anything, just got back on the phone. Uncle wasn’t stupid, but Rath didn’t think he had become suspicious during his surprise visit the day before. Rath was still new to the city. Why shouldn’t he have a map on his wall? There was no way Bruno had been able to see the pins from the door. Nevertheless, he did know that Rath had once worked in Homicide.

Shortly afterwards, once Jänicke had left, Wolter took him to one side.

‘Have you tasted blood, Gereon? Want to show those glamour boys in Homicide that you’re a glamour boy too?’

Rath wasn’t about to let himself be intimidated. Böhm distributing the photos gave him an excuse to continue investigating Boris’s death. ‘The commissioner has officially requested that we support A Division in their efforts to solve a particular case,’ he said, alarmed by how bureaucratic he sounded. ‘And that is precisely what I intend to do. No more, no less.’

‘You don’t have to prove anything to me, Gereon. You’ve already shown that you’re a good cop, and it’s my assessment that goes into your personal file.’ Wolter gave a brief pause before uttering his next sentence. ‘Or is it that sweet little stenographer you’re trying to impress? In which case I’m afraid I can’t help you.’

That hit him like a blow to the solar plexus. Inside, Rath had to gasp for air. Why did Bruno want to hurt him? Because he felt hurt himself? Because he sensed that a colleague whom he had to come to appreciate in a short space of time, felt drawn towards the other side of the glass doors? He had probably experienced that all too many times before.

‘Look at the facts, Bruno,’ he said. ‘If I can help solve a murder inquiry, then I will. You can’t ask me to defy the instructions of the commissioner.’

‘I only ask that you place yourself fully at the disposal of E Division. What do you think is going to happen if you help Böhm with that stupid corpse of his? You’ll do well to get a thank you! He’ll take your information and use it to solve the case and it’ll be him Dörrzwiebel pats on the shoulder.’

Bruno was probably right, but Rath had no intention of helping Böhm. He just had to be careful that he didn’t put Bruno’s nose out of joint. ‘The commissioner’s orders apply to everyone.’ He was already behaving like his father, hiding behind official regulations when he didn’t want to give anything away.

‘Not so formal, my boy. As long as you are committed to our work you can do as you please. Just don’t forget who you’re working for. If I think you’re confusing the letters E and A too often, I might not be so willing to stick my broad shoulders between you and Lanke.’