Babylon Berlin (53 page)

‘Because it’s being closely guarded.’

‘By who?’

‘By my people.’

‘What the hell is that supposed to mean? You’re telling me you don’t know where the gold is but are having it guarded all the same? I think you’ve got some explaining to do!’

‘It’s best if you come with me. I’ll show you.’

A few minutes later the three men were walking across railway lines in the dark, having cut across Marlow’s office in Rüdersdorfer Strasse, the converted former
Ostbahnhof
warehouse, and wound up in the
Ostbahn
goods station. Unlike the passenger terminus, it was still in use.

They came to a halt at a goods shed where, by the weak light of the electric lamp, they could make out the words
Marlow Imports Ltd
on the shed wall. As they stepped onto the loading ramp, a shadow emerged from the dark of the shed. The man was clearly carrying a machine gun under his coat.

‘OK, Fred, it’s us,’ Marlow cried and raised his arm.

‘Evening, boss. All quiet,’ said Fred.

Another man emerged from the shed and two more climbed down from the goods wagons, which had been parked on the track by the ramp. All three men were carrying weapons.

‘It’s alright,’ Fred said, ‘go back to your posts.’

Rath gazed after the men as they disappeared into the darkness.

There were four tank wagons on the siding. The rust from numerous locomotives had dyed the white lacquer of the bulbous tanks grey and turned their logo a dirty red.

Vereinigte Ölmühle Insterburg
, Rath read. Insterburg Consolidated Oil Mills.

‘Rapeseed oil?’ he asked. ‘Do you own a margarine factory too?’

Marlow grinned. ‘Margarine from these would be hard to digest. Three tanks contain hydrochloric acid, the other contains nitric acid, around 150 hectolitres per wagon.’

‘So where is the gold?’

‘That’s precisely the question,’ Marlow said. ‘These wagons were part of a goods train that started for Berlin four weeks ago. The one Kardakov was using to smuggle the gold out of the Soviet Union.’

‘But the wagons here are from East Prussia.’

‘The wagons, yes, but not the cargo. Russian goods trains are reloaded at the border because their rail gauges are almost ten centimetres broader than ours.’

‘Why did Kardakov decide on a train to smuggle the gold? You can’t even prepare the cars.’

‘That’s precisely the question we’ve been asking ourselves for weeks. Kardakov and the Countess didn’t appear at the station on the evening the train arrived, as agreed.’

‘Boris came instead.’

‘Right. He was the train’s escort, but also Kardakov’s contact.’

‘Then he must have said something to you.’

‘That would’ve been nice, but the man didn’t speak a word of German. Besides, he thought something was amiss when he didn’t find any of his fellow countrymen, only my people. We tried to calm him down, but then he panicked and ran across the tracks. The next I saw of him was his photo in
Abendblatt.
’

Rath considered briefly.

‘Perhaps Kardakov duped you,’ he said. ‘Gives you some train full of chemicals while he makes off with the gold.’

‘I don’t think so. Without me, he wouldn’t have been able to do much with the gold.’

Marlow lit a cigar and indicated to Fred that he should return to his post. ‘Incidentally,’ he continued, as he smoked, ‘do you know what you can make with three parts hydrochloric acid and one part nitric acid?’

‘I’m no chemist.’

‘Aqua regia.’

‘Never heard of it.’

‘Literally, king’s water. A very aggressive mix. One which even dissolves gold.’

‘What are you trying to say, that the gold is in the acid?’

‘No, in fact. We only have hydrochloric acid and nitric acid in the wagons. Neither acid alone can dissolve the gold. Only the mixture can do that. The gold has to be somewhere else.’

‘It’s not in the wagons?’

‘We’ve searched every millimetre, even though we knew we wouldn’t find anything.’

‘Why not?’

‘How could the gold have remained hidden while it was being reloaded in East Prussia? Quite impossible really. Unless you bribed all border officials and station workers and prepared not only the Russian tank wagons, but the German ones too. Don’t forget that we’re talking about a huge amount of gold here, several
tons
.’

‘Maybe it’s coming with a second consignment: an innocuous cargo, scrap metal or something, in which the gold is concealed. Then you use the king’s water to dissolve it.’

‘That’s exactly what I suspect will happen. Only, there’s been no talk of a second consignment. I only ever spoke to Kardakov about this shipment. He prepared all the paperwork and I signed – he needed someone above suspicion to request the delivery from the chemical company in Leningrad.’

So, Marlow had played the serious businessman to avoid arousing communist suspicion.

‘And did it work?’

‘I had a visitor from the Soviet embassy – this Troschin, who’s now missing – and that was it. Since then I’ve known that the Cheka are on standby. I showed the man the delivery and how corrosive the combination of hydrochloric and nitric acid could be, before he left.’

‘He was probably glad your men didn’t use him to demonstrate.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘There’s one thing I don’t understand, Herr Marlow,’ Rath said thoughtfully. ‘If I’ve been correctly informed, you were supposed to convert the gold into cash for Kardakov. So how come you’re groping around in the dark like the rest of us?’

‘No-one’s privy to everything. Only Kardakov and the Countess knew how the smuggling operation was going to work.’

‘If he was tortured then he must have betrayed the secret.’

‘No, because he only knew half of it. The Countess alone knew all the ins and outs of the operation. The whole thing only worked in combination.’

‘Some combination! Kardakov’s dead. And if the Countess has been carried off too, she’ll take her secret with her to the grave.’

‘Not if the documents turn up again.’

The documents! Rath couldn’t help thinking back to his visit to Tretschkov’s. He knew where one of these documents was, but didn’t say.

‘What documents?’ he asked instead.

‘A kind of map. Kardakov and the Countess hid plans that reveal the secret somewhere – two thin documents that only make sense when you place them on top of one another and hold them against the light.’

Rath whistled quietly through his teeth. ‘If it really was the Black Hundred that tortured Kardakov, they could have taken his half.’

‘So Fallin has it!’

Rath shrugged his shoulders. ‘Perhaps. Or Selenskij’s killer.’

‘I suspect they’re one and the same.’

It was long past midnight when Rath looked in the mirror of his hotel room and barely recognised the man staring back at him. He splashed cold water on his face.

Fatigue had overcome him at some point while they were still at
Ostbahnhof
. Back in the comfortable chair familiar to him from his first visit to Marlow’s office, he was scarcely able to keep his eyes open. Marlow had noticed it too. He reached into his desk and waved a little paper bag in the air.

‘Inspector, you seemed a little sharper last time. Could it have been because of this?’

Rath had looked on in confusion. Then Marlow threw him the little paper bag and he stowed it in his pocket. He hadn’t taken any – that was something, at least. Still, he thought, a little stimulation for the next few days couldn’t hurt. He had so much to do and there was barely any time for sleep.

He hadn’t stayed much longer at Marlow’s, but managed to hail a taxi at Küstriner Platz. The driver looked at him as though he were an apparition. The lights in
Plaza
were out; he had been too late for the final round of theatre-goers, and was eating a sandwich when Rath disturbed him.

No wonder he had taken him for a ghost, Rath thought, as the cold water dripped from his reflection. He rubbed his face with a towel and lay down on the bed. The thoughts were racing through his mind, chaotically, without rhyme or reason.

Bruno Wolter and Josef Wilczek: the unholy alliance. It was easy to imagine them as arms dealers, given Bruno’s numerous links to his old comrades. Were they after the gold too? If they were, they hadn’t a hope. Even if Wilczek hadn’t died, Wolter would have been in over his head against the competition, consisting as it did of the secret service, and career and politically motivated criminals. Unless, that is, he could count on other allies, more black sheep in the force or the
Reichswehr
. Even so, in the race for the gold, there were others who currently had their noses in front. Not the owner of the gold, Countess Sorokina, nor the intimidated
Red Fortress
, nor even Marlow. All he had were a few tank wagons full of acid. Two men had got closer to the gold than anyone else. One was a scar-faced Russian named Nikita Fallin; the other was a Prussian CID officer named Gereon Rath. The Countess no longer had her map. Even if she was in Fallin’s clutches, she wouldn’t have been any use to him. Rath knew this, and yet he had chosen not to allay Marlow’s greatest fear. Namely, that the Black Hundred could still get its hands on the Countess’s map and uncover the location of the gold.

Knowledge is power.

He stared up at the ceiling, as if the solution to the riddle was to be found there. Outside he could hear the first sounds of the dawning city. Yet he was still lying here, incapable of sleep, even though he hadn’t touched the packet of cocaine. It was resting between the pages of the bible on his bedside table, just in case.

He would have been better off asking Marlow for a sleeping pill, he thought, as his eyes finally fell shut.

He didn’t feel as if he had been asleep for long when the sound of the telephone awoke him.

The friendly voice of the concierge. ‘Good morning, Herr Rath. Your wake-up call. It is precisely half past six.’

His fatigue disappeared as soon as he recalled the events of yesterday evening. Adrenaline tingled through his veins. He didn’t need any cocaine; he needed a cold shower.

He was out on the streets before seven, walking down Möckernstrasse. At the bank of the Landwehr canal the warped shore fencing had been replaced, and freshly painted metal gleamed in the morning sun. The scraped tree bark was all that was left to remind him of the accident. Thoughtfully, Rath moved on.

In Yorckstrasse he spied the green Opel already from afar. Gennat had obviously heard about Selenskij and placed Fallin’s flat under surveillance. He wondered whether Buddha had also placed the dead man’s closest friend on the list of murder suspects.

Plisch and Plum were sitting in the car, there was no mistaking it even if Rath couldn’t see their faces. Detective Czerwinski had fallen asleep, his head slumped over the wheel. Rath couldn’t quite make out what Assistant Detective Henning was doing. He proceeded at a blind angle until he reached the car.

‘Morning, gentlemen,’ Rath said and tapped the green tin roof. Henning spun round and looked at him wide-eyed. Czerwinski gave a start and banged his elbows. His hat rolled onto Henning’s lap.

‘Rath, what the hell are you doing?’ Czerwinski sounded genuinely upset. ‘We’re observing a suspect here! Do you want our cover to be blown?’

‘You’re not observing a suspect, but a flat,’ Rath countered. ‘If the man was at home, you’d have hauled him off to Gennat long ago. Am I right?’

‘It’d be good if you made yourself scarce,’ Czerwinski moaned.

‘Maybe you could stop snoring too,’ Rath said, giving the roof of the car a final tap as he went.

At Möckern Bridge, he caught a train and rode out to Luisenufer.

‘What do you want now, Inspector?’ Hermann Schäffner asked as he opened the door, breakfast serviette still tied around his neck. ‘Don’t you think you and your colleagues have asked enough questions?’

‘Just one more,’ Rath said. ‘When is the flat in the rear building available to rent again?’

Schäffner looked at him in astonishment. ‘Well, if your colleagues get their act together, Monday we hope.’

‘I assume you already have a new tenant?’

‘Why?’ Schäffner still didn’t seem to understand.

‘How much did Herr Müller or rather Herr Selenskij pay?’

‘Not a lot. Fifteen marks a week. Is that important?’

‘Furnished?’

‘Of course.’

‘Good. I’ll take it.’ Rath stretched out a hand and Hermann Schäffner shook on it, still a little baffled.

‘I don’t want to take up any more of your time. I’m sure you have things to do. See you on Monday.’ Rath tipped his hat. He had already turned round when he stopped dead in his tracks. ‘Ach,’ he said, turning to face Schäffner once more. The caretaker gawped through the crack in the door like a rabbit through its wire mesh. ‘One more question: I don’t suppose
Sturmhauptführer
Röllecke’s address has occurred to you in the meantime?’

Of course it hadn’t occurred to him. Still, after a moment’s thought Schäffner had at least mentioned that Röllecke probably came from Steglitz, even if he couldn’t say for sure.

It was a start, Rath thought, as he requested the address shortly afterwards in the passports office. This time he didn’t run into the old grouch but rather a helpful, young woman who brought him the card files he required with a smile. There weren’t too many Rölleckes registered in Steglitz; one spelt their name with a ‘k’ only, while two others were under thirty. Rath set them aside for the time being. That left Heinrich Röllecke, resident in Ahornstrasse. Forty-one years old, and therefore probably an ex-serviceman. That was how Rath pictured an SA
Sturmhauptführer
: as a man who couldn’t help himself and had to continue playing soldiers. He noted down the address and proceeded to the records office.

He was looking for the old Selenskij/Fallin file that Böhm had gone through the week before when he had had the two Russians sitting in the interrogation room. Their previous convictions obviously hadn’t been enough for the bulldog to detain them any longer.