The Sleepwalkers (17 page)

“Willi,” he exclaimed, demanding a hug as if they hadn’t seen each other in years. “After how many times I begged you to visit me here.”

Excited as a twelve-year-old, he insisted on giving Willi a tour of Ullstein’s nerve center. “This switchboard,” he boasted, as if he were the sixth brother, “puts through forty-three thousand calls per day. And these pneumatic tubes blow editorial copy down to the composing rooms. On the roof, the largest radio receiver in Europe. And look at these new Teletype machines. They don’t stop even for a moment.”

“I heard Ullstein’s fired half their Jewish employees,” Willi muttered. “Including Ava.”

Fritz hung his head. It seemed as if he had some important message to convey, but all his wires had crossed. “You have to understand,” he stammered, pressing the elevator to the top floor, where both he and the Ullsteins had their offices. “We had a full-scale invasion here just before Christmas.”

As they stepped out into the corridor, Willi saw workers whitewashing several enormous swastikas painted on the walls,
and a giant slogan in what looked like dripping blood: “Down with Jewish Domination!”

“Ullstein represents everything these fascists hate. Democracy. Progress. Intellectual freedom. And of course . . . Jews. The company made a brutal sacrifice, trying to lower its profile. Those let go will be hired back of course, as soon as this blows over.”

If men as powerful as the Ullsteins were trying to duck the Nazis, Willi wondered, who would stand up to them?

Maybe, he thought as they entered Fritz’s office . . . me.

If he could uncover the beasts that mangled Gina Mancuso, perhaps he could undermine their whole lousy operation.

Samson and the Philistines.

Willi and Goliath.

Fritz already had a huge map of Berlin/Brandenburg/Havel River pinned up on his wall. He closed the door behind him and they got to work.

Based on the average river currents for the month of November, he told Willi, he’d calculated that the farthest Gina Mancuso could have entered the river was here: he pointed at the little village of Oranienburg. Some fifteen nautical miles north of Spandau. His finger traced the river south. Both shores were lined for miles with thick forests, dotted with countless inlets, channels, and tiny marsh islands.

Despite a great deal of boat traffic, barges mainly, and in summer recreational boating galore, tour ships, yachts, sailboats, etc., there was little human habitation. A small holiday village here, on the Tegel Peninsula—he pointed. A boathouse belonging to the university rowing team here, about three miles south. And an army installation, the Tegel Firing Range, way out here. Only one road ran the eastern shore, from Tegel to Spandau, and another on the western shore, from Potsdam as far as Pichelsdorf—but no farther. Through the dense Spandau Forest were only utility lanes and hiking trails. It was probably the closest thing to wilderness in metropolitan Berlin.

Willi’s eyes scanned the lines and symbols spread before him,
like a cabalist trying to decipher the universe. Somewhere out here Gina Mancuso had breathed her last. But where?

“Fritz”—Willi found himself mumbling without meaning to—“have you ever heard of a morphine addict kicking the habit?”

Fritz turned to him. “You mean . . . the black gloves?”

Willi nodded.

“I had a feeling.” Fritz shook his head. “Girls like her, Boot Girls especially, always shoot between the fingers. With fetishists all over their feet. But no one kicks that stuff, Willi. I’ve seen plenty try. All those guys that got hooked in the war . . . withdrawal’s worse than combat. It either kills them, or they go back—and the needle does. It’s an ugly fate.”

Yeah. Ugly, Willi thought. She could have been a Dietrich.

“What’s this over here?” His finger landed on two small islands nestled in an inlet several kilometers south of Oranienburg.

Fritz stared at it. One of the islands had building symbols with capital
K’s
for
Krankenhaus.
Hospital. The other had several crosses, indicating a cemetery. Unlike the rest of the facilities featured on the map, however, these had no names.

“That’s strange.” Fritz’s eyes darted around the room. From one of his crowded bookshelves he reached and pulled a giant atlas off the shelf:
Germany, 1900.
Leafing through it, he found a corresponding map of the Havel River. The islands were clearly named—Asylum Insel and Insel der Todt. Island of the Dead.

“A potter’s field and an insane asylum. They must have been abandoned years ago,” Fritz suggested. “I don’t recall ever seeing them from the river.”

“You wouldn’t, unless you entered this channel. The peninsula obscures them.”

“I don’t know.” Fritz shrugged. “It’s just as possible as a dozen spots along our perimeter. The army range. The holiday village. Maybe even the tannery, here.”

Willi put an arm on his shoulder. “Fritz, I’m sending in Paula. It’s the only way. Gustave’s playing at the White Mouse New Year’s Eve. You in?”

From Koch Strasse, Willi took the U-Bahn back to Alexanderplatz. How cheerful it looked under a blue sky, with streams of yellow streetcars and buses sweeping across, the early editions crying out,
Strasser Walks! Nazis in Turmoil!
A surprising confidence lifted him. Fritz’s sources had been right. Perhaps there was hope after all for ’33. Perhaps he’d send in Paula and she’d be fine. The whole operation would work like a glockenspiel. They’d put these criminals on trial, and all Germany would see the kind of creatures they were. The Nazi Party would crumble. The republic would flourish. The world would be set in order. He paused by the cake-filled windows of Café Rippa, remembering the Berlin of a few short years ago—thriving, dynamic. No economic catastrophes. No battles in the streets. But out in front of Wertheim’s Department Store he saw the picket lines again, a score of Brownshirts chanting in unison,
“Every time you buy from Jews—”

Upstairs in the Alexander Haus, he was shocked to discover the damage inflicted by a plague of these troops just before dawn this morning. All the Jewish offices had been broken into, desks overturned, typewriters smashed, papers scattered through the halls. Where had the police been? Outside. Guarding the doors. Poor Bessie Yoskowitz hadn’t been spared. Her entire workshop had been ransacked, her chemicals strewn about, valuable documents trampled.

“Small fry like me.” She looked at Willi bitterly. “You said they wouldn’t bother, heh? So now it’s back to Poland. Anti-Semites they got plenty of, but Nazis, thank God, not yet. Still, you don’t worry, Inspektor. Your work I got done.” She shuffled through the broken glass and came back with an envelope. “Here.” She handed it to him. “Safe and sound.”

“Thank you, Bessie. I’m so . . . sorry about this.”

“Yeah. Sorry. Me, too.”

Willi handed her all the cash in his wallet, almost a hundred
marks. “Take this,” he insisted. “And
sei gesund,
Bess. Be in good health.”

Back outside, the crowds of unemployed milled about in the sunshine, moving unconsciously to the rhythm of the Nazi chants. Willi leaned against an advertising column and opened the envelope.

Yoskowitz had done her job gorgeously, completely lifting the white ink off the black, leaving a legible list of Meckel’s associates from the Institute for Racial Hygiene. There were six. Five he’d never heard of. But the third—well, well. Dr. Oscar Schumann. Associate surgeon of orthopedics at Charité Hospital. It didn’t prove much, he told himself, slipping it back in the envelope and turning toward the Police Presidium. Only that Meckel and Schumann had worked together. But it definitely was a step forward. He reached Entrance Six and pulled open the doors. Now all I have to do is figure out what this Institute for Racial Hygiene is.

And where.

Gunther had more news.

“Remember those two hundred fifty-five inmates missing from the Charlottenburg Asylum?” The kid’s blue eyes flamed. “I know you told me to drop the matter . . . but I just couldn’t. I found out who took them. This wonderful girl I met, see.” His Adam’s apple quivered. “Christina. So pretty. And crazy for me. Anyway, she works in the accounting office out there and—”

“Damn it, Gunther, get to the point!”

The blood was pounding through Willi’s skull. He couldn’t stop picturing those ransacked offices and the pain-filled face of Bessie Yoskowitz. Where would all this end?

“The point, sir”—Gunther swallowed—“is that all those inmates were taken by the same people Meckel was associated with.”

He handed Willi a sheet of paper.

It was a copy of a transport order. Eighty-five inmates of the
Berlin-Charlottenburg Asylum to be transferred for “Special Handling” to a place called Sachsenhausen. No address listed. A black stamp underneath read simply, IRH.

Institute for Racial Hygiene.

“Ernst Roehm had nothing to do with Meckel’s death,” von Schleicher insisted at the Reichs Chancellery the next afternoon. His new desk, Willi noted, was almost as big as Hindenburg’s—but not quite. The Reichs president was still the most powerful man in Germany. He’d appointed von Schleicher with a nod and could just as easily dump him.

Willi was stunned by this assertion. “If not Roehm, who?”

The chancellor removed his monocle and leaned all the way back in his red leather armchair. He looked haggard. Years older than when Willi’d seen him a few weeks ago on Bendler Strasse, a mere minister of war. Now his voice was weak and hoarse. As if he did nothing all day but shout orders—to no avail.

“Whose exact finger pulled the trigger”—the chancellor grimaced as he pinched his nose—“I wouldn’t care to speculate on.”
He glanced dimly at Willi. “Only that in all likelihood the rest of the body was clad in a black uniform.”

“Black?”

Willi was sure it had to have been brown. Since when did the portfolio of the Blackshirts, an intelligence-gathering unit, include assassination?

Von Schleicher gave a grim little grin. “Roehm thinks it was an attempt to discredit the SA.”

“I don’t understand. The SS is part of the SA.”

“Yes. But its leadership would like nothing better than to foment a rupture—and become responsible directly to Hitler. Himmler and his new deputy, Heydrich—a cold-blooded reptile if ever I met one—have this dream, you see. They wish to build an elite Aryan militia.” The general’s gaze filled with contempt. “A Master Army of the Master Race. If that were to happen, of course, the SS and the SA, which as we all know consists largely of the dregs of society, would be, well, shall we say . . . snakes in a basket. Eventually one would have to perish. Perhaps this was a first bite.”

An apt metaphor, Willi thought.

But it only made the knot in his stomach tighter.

This operation was starting to make the hunt for the
Kinderfresser
look like a junior league football match. Back then the whole crowd had been on his side. His quarry had to dart through the shadows alone. Now it was Willi who stood nearly alone. And what he was up against . . . God only knew. He still had no idea where any of these people had vanished to. How many there even were. If Gunther’s asylum inmates had wound up with the Great Gustave’s sleepwalkers . . . this mass kidnapping dwarfed any crime he ever heard of.

Where could they have taken so many people?

And why?

Not merely the logistics, but the motive, as he was starting to grasp it, was of mind-boggling dimension. The
Kinderfresser
had no motive, other than pathological compulsion. But a single afternoon at the Prussian State Library and Willi began to perceive that the insanity he was dealing with this time was nothing irrational. In fact, just the opposite: it was rationality taken to the extreme. A fanatical ideology masquerading as science.

The Institute for Racial Hygiene had been founded by something called the Fraternal Order of Blood Germans—no address listed—but a national organization, according to its newsletter, devoted to the science of “race advancement” through selective breeding. Eugenics. Its twelve-thousand-strong membership firmly believed the German nation was under attack from “inferior genes.” In 1930, their anonymous steering committee had established an anonymous institute of biologists, geneticists, psychologists, and anthropologists charged with the task of formulating concrete proposals to “strengthen the national body through the eradication of degenerating genetic transmissions.”

Among the recommendations put forth in a 1931 manifesto, before the institute seemed to disappear entirely, was something called a Law for the Prevention of the Genetic Disorders. Willi could not believe what he read. Every German who suffered from schizophrenia, manic depression, epilepsy, congenital blindness, deafness, physical deformity, alcoholism, hemophilia—an estimated 4.5 million people, according to the good doctors at this institute—needed to be sterilized, forcibly if necessary, to expunge their genes from the race pool. The most practical method for such a large-scale program, they wrote, was under investigation. Willi’s bones had rattled. They were investigating how to sterilize 4.5 million people?