The Sleepwalkers (25 page)

“Well, kid”—Willi shifted gears—“better hold on to your hat.”

The Opel took each rut and bump as if its last. Several times
Gunther’s head smacked into the roof. But on they drove, Willi’s nerves getting tauter by the minute. He hated these goddamn gloomy forests. One never knew what was around the next bend. Thankfully they found the turnoff and saw the bridge straight ahead. But a barbed-wire barricade blocked their progress.

Out they got.

A large sign clearly proclaimed
Eintritt Streng Verboten!
It looked relatively new. A second sign beyond the wire showed a skull and crossbones. Next to it, an unmistakable warning: mines!

“It’s a bluff.” Gunther hadn’t a shred of doubt. “Who’d plant mines an hour from Berlin? Where would they even get them?”

He wanted to cut the wire and drive straight through.

Perhaps he’s right, Willi considered. Perhaps it was like people who put up Beware of Dog signs when all they had was a poodle. But one mine was all it took. And he wanted to see his boys again. Something awful.

“Better test it out, Gunther.”

The kid gathered an armful of rocks and began throwing them over the barricade. Rock after rock landed harmlessly.

“You see? A big bluff! Come on, Chief. Let’s cut.”

A loud rustling silenced them. A warthog, of all things, ran from the bushes and scampered toward the bridge, snorting as if furious to have his slumber disturbed. Gunther and Willi burst out laughing.

Until the thing exploded.

They hurried back down the rutted road toward Oranienburg. No wonder everyone’s smile seemed glued on in this town, Willi thought. Whatever hidden hand was pulling the strings, it was damned determined. And well armed. As they reemerged from the woods, it was evident that the weather had worsened. The painted-blue sky had turned stone gray. A wind was gusting from the south.

“Gunther.” He felt his neck hairs stand. “Take a deep breath.”

“Jesus Christ.” Gunther coughed.

There was no mistaking it. He’d smelled it a hundred times. On the Western Front. In the morgues at the Alex.

Putrefying flesh.

Not a soul in town would acknowledge it.

Gunther confronted a young mother pushing a baby carriage. “Can you tell me what that frightful odor is?”

“Sorry.” She pointed at her nostrils. “Terrible cold. Can’t smell a thing.”

“Odor?” The postman looked baffled. “Not unless you mean from the
Italiener
over there.” He motioned toward a restaurant. “Always uses too much garlic. No matter how many times we tell him: ‘Vincenzo, this isn’t Italy. We’re Germans here.’ ”

“These people are out of their minds.” Gunther finally held a handkerchief to his nose. “How can anyone ignore this?”

Willi agreed. They were out of their minds all right.

Scared out of them.

The fairy-tale village had turned gloomy. Darkened by clouds, the whitewashed buildings looked forbidding. The swans had left. For the first time Willi considered the possibility that whatever they were up against really
was
too big, too monstrous, to be stopped anymore. That the only thing left to do was run.

Across the street he noticed a middle-aged woman staring at them from a shop window. When she realized she’d been spotted, she instantly withdrew behind the curtains.

He nudged Gunther. “Let’s try one last place.”

It proved to be a used-furniture dealership, stacked to the ceiling with old desks, lamps, chairs, filing cabinets. The woman from the window busied herself with a feather duster, pretending not to notice them. Plain-faced with short gray hair, she had a nervous tic that shook her cheek as if with an electric shock.

“Nachmittag,”
she finally said when she could no longer ignore them. “Might I be of service?”

Willi couldn’t respond. Across the aisle his eyes had caught sight of what seemed a genuine miracle. Along the side of an old wooden desk, stenciled in big black letters, was unmistakably printed
Property Asylum Oranienburg.

His whole body levitated toward it.

“Asylum Oranienburg.” He did his best not to sound as if he were seeing a vision. “I was under the impression that shut down years ago.”

The lady’s tic grew violent.
“Ach so.”
Her whole cheek convulsed.
“Yes, of course it did. But, well . . . you see . . .” She started banging the customer bell.

“Are you insane, Lisel?” Her husband emerged from a back office. “You think I’m deaf or—” He transformed into a paragon of friendliness.

“Gentlemen . . . how do you do. If it’s office furnishings you’re looking for, you’ve come to the right place.”

She reached a hand out. “But
Liebchen,
these men are—”

“Hundreds of items in dozens of styles.” He brushed her aside. “That’s our motto. Perhaps you’ve heard our radio ads: ‘Greitz: hundreds of items in dozens of styles.’ ”

“I notice you have a desk here from the old Oranienburg Asylum.”

“One? We’ve got
dozens
of desks from the asylum, dear fellow—desks and chairs and filing cabinets. We’ve even got old asylum clocks. And plenty more where they came from—”

The wife yanked his arm, shooting him a desperate, for-God’s-sake-shut-up look.

“If you’re interested in wholesale”—he swatted her away—“I assure you—you won’t do any better.”

“You’ve had this furniture since they closed the asylum, all those years ago?”

“Good heavens, of course not. I bought a big consignment only last year. They’re renovating out there.”

“Renovating? Who is?”

“Who?” The businessman’s smile lost its urgency. “Well . . . whoever took control. Marvelous furniture, don’t you think? Old but sturdy.” He rapped the desk. “Like they don’t make anymore.”

“But who exactly took control? Who sold you the furniture?”

The smile dropped altogether. “I don’t see as how that makes a difference.”

“I’m just curious.”

“Look, if you’re not interested in making a purchase—”

“I didn’t say that. I said I was curious to know who sold you the furniture.”

Greitz rocked back and forth on his toes, shooting his wife a bitter blaming look for not warning him. “I do not discuss my sources, sir. It’s bad business.”

“Sometimes”—Willi broke out the Kripo badge—“it’s good business.”

The man drained of color.

His wife began crossing herself. With a terrible gasp, she broke out sobbing. “For God’s sakes leave us alone! Do you have any idea what they’ll do to us if—”

“Lisel—have you lost your mind?”

Willi fought fire with fire. “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll cooperate,” he threatened. “Unless you want to see the inside of the Alex.”

“Good for me?” Greitz’s face trembled nearly as violently as his wife’s. “If I know what’s good for me, I’d chase you out of here with an iron bar!”

Willi could have arrested the fellow for that. But even on the battlefield he’d never seen two more terrified people. Obviously, whatever coercion they faced here at home was worse than anything he could dish out. He softened his tone.

“If you chase me out, Greitz, I’d only be back tomorrow with more Kripo men to arrest you. And if I arrest you, today, tomorrow, or next week, everyone in this town will know about it. And whoever you’re so afraid of will know about it, too.”

The woman’s tic grew alarming. Willi began to fear she might slip into an epileptic fit. But he wasn’t giving up.

“My partner and I have spoken to dozens of people today. No one need have any suspicion you said anything to us. In fact, if you feel better about it, you needn’t say a word at all. Just . . . show me the bill of sale.”

Willi left Oranienburg like a zeppelin in flight, the whole landscape suddenly laid bare before him. According to the bill of sale, in January 1932 the Greitz Used Furniture Emporium
purchased 250 chairs, desks, and assorted other items from the old Oranienburg Asylum, under new management now by an agency that simply used its initials—IRH. And renamed Camp Sachsenhausen.

He’d found the cursed place.

All he had to do now was pull off a reconnaissance mission that worked.

He still needed to know how many people were out there, how many guards, how heavily they were armed. So that come Thurseblot . . . they could take the whole stinking thing down.

He remembered Fritz. That message yesterday.

“Gunther.” He dropped the kid off in Tegel. “Take the S-Bahn over to the State Library. Don’t stop even for lunch. Get me everything, absolutely everything, you can about that old asylum.”

“Yes, boss.” Gunther’s blue eyes sparkled. “And, boss?”

“What?”

The sparkle got glassy. “Thanks. For everything.”

He surprised Willi with a fierce hug before running off.

Fritz’s big glass house in Grunewald glittered in the woods. The wounded warrior greeted him at the door, his shoulder completely healed he claimed—even though his arm was still in a sling. “For all that blood and gore, the damn thing was just a superficial wound. Come, come. Have a drink. That must have been the
tenth
time you saved my life, Willi.”

Guzzling down a whiskey and soda, Willi filled him in on all that had occurred since that dire morn in the forest. The Great Gustave. His meeting with Frau Meckel. His probation. Paula.

Fritz’s dueling scar blackened with rage. “Dear God. They stop at nothing, these ape-men. And to threaten you—”

“Never mind me.”

“I’m calling von Schleicher.” Fritz reached for the phone.

Willi held him back. “Fritz, what I need from you is help planning another reconnaissance raid. One that works this time.”

Fritz’s face filled with emotion. “You mean . . . you found Sachsenhausen?”

Willi couldn’t help smiling.

An hour later, back at his desk in the Police Presidium, it didn’t take long for his new “deputy” to show up.

“Well, well, Inspektor.” Junior Detektiv Thurmann entered without knocking. “It seems you have friends in high office. The very highest. At least temporarily.”

“I’ve no idea what you’re referring to.” Willi kept sorting through his mail.

“Don’t you?”

Willi looked up long enough to catch the grin beneath Thurmann’s pencil-line mustache.

“You may have won the battle, but you won’t win the war, Kraus, I assure you. The day of reckoning is dawning. Heil Hitler!” An arm thrust up and he was gone.

Willi was stunned.

Obviously Fritz had phoned von Schleicher after all.

His probation must have been revoked.

But he wasn’t sure whether to be more amazed at the chancellor of Germany’s swift intervention on his behalf or that Thurmann, so confident in winning the “war,” had addressed his superior with such outrageous impudence.

The next morning Gunther showed up with a real treasure trove. Not only books but detailed maps and floor plans explaining the whole layout of the Oranienburg Asylum.

“I made friends with one of the librarians.” His jaw lengthened proudly. “What a cutie.”

“A touch of Don Juan never hurt in a Detektiv.”

“Whatever you do”—the jaw slackened—“don’t tell Christina.”

Willi spent all morning with the documents, finding himself quickly absorbed not only in the complex layout of the old facility, but the fascinating rationale behind its construction. Built in 1866 under the reign of Kaiser Wilhelm I, the Oranienburg Asylum for Lunatics and the Feebleminded had, he learned, been
the first in Europe designed according to principles of one Dr. Thomas Kirkbride, an American proponent of environmental determinism. Rational buildings, the good doctor had firmly believed, made for rational people.

According to Kirkbride, an ideal asylum ought to be built in a beautiful setting, along the water or on the crest of a hill, housed in a single giant building of multiple wings dropping back to form shallow V-shapes, so that all the patients could enjoy tranquil views and fresh cross-breezes. A highly structured healthy environment, the doctor had been convinced, would restore a “natural balance of the senses” and create a sense of “family life.” Diet, exercise, and work were essential to his therapy. He’d had his patients out tilling fields, milking cows, feeding pigs. A radical departure from the millennium-old belief that incarceration was the only solution for the insane, Dr. Kirkbride’s philosophy had represented the most advanced thinking of his age—that the mentally ill could actually be treated.

For fifty years Oranienburg had been the foremost asylum in Germany, housing up to two thousand inmates at a time—until the Great War and Allied blockade, when it became unfeasible to maintain such a giant facility on so isolated an island. In 1916, Willi was actually sad to read, it was stripped of all usable metal and abandoned to the elements. Until, he thought, last year, when the Institute for Racial Hygiene moved in.

The phone rang, suspending him for a strange moment between asylum and office. Sometimes he wondered how much difference there was between the two. It was Fritz, insisting on lunch. He refused to take no for an answer. Willi sighed and agreed to meet him in half an hour at the Pschorr Haus. An odd choice, Willi thought, hanging up.

Looming over the Potsdamer Platz like a medieval castle, Pschorr was not just a beer hall but a beer
palace
according to its advertising, catering to Berliners as royalty—en masse. Its Great Hall seated nine hundred, replete with long tables, elaborate wood carvings, and shiny coats of armor. Nineteen kinds of
sausages, sixteen sorts of dumplings, seven varieties of mustard—not to mention its world-famous pickled pork knuckles—at prices even a peasant could afford. It was the great drinking and gastronomic citadel of the petite bourgeoisie. Why Fritz, a champagne drinker for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, would want to meet him here, Willi could not imagine.

The place was as always packed for lunch, peppered with far too many Brownshirts for his taste. Wandering the aisles looking for Fritz, wondering what this was all about, he started getting good and—

He froze suddenly, as if hit in the gut.

Just ahead at a small table were not only Fritz but the other three men of his old reconnaissance unit: Geiger, Richter, Lutz.