The Silent Death Read online

  She shouldn’t have telephoned him at the office. She didn’t get it. She had been trying to do him a favour, just as she was always trying to do him favours he’d never asked for. That was the only reason she’d wanted to go to the Resi with him. Surely he must approve, she had said, flourishing the tickets for the costume ball. He was a Rhinelander after all.

  Fasching! The word alone was enough, but that was what they called Carnival in Berlin, Fasching. Rath could guess what awaited him there: the obligatory costume, the obligatory wine, the obligatory good mood, the obligatory I-love-you, the obligatory we-belong-together-for-evermore.

  The abortive telephone call had been a cruel reminder of what his relationship with Kathi really was: a New Year’s Eve acquaintance that had survived too long into the New Year.

  He had met her just before midnight and they had toasted the coming year, both of them already somewhat worse for wear, before spontaneously locking lips. Next they had made a move for the punchbowl, where some clever clogs was holding forth, destroying everyone’s hopes for the new decade by claiming it wouldn’t really begin until 1931 since, mathematically speaking, 1930 was, in fact, the final year of the Twenties.

  Rath had shaken his head and refilled their punch glasses while Kathi listened, spellbound by the mathematician’s missionary zeal. He actually had to drag her away, back onto the roof garden and into a dark corner where he had kissed her again while, all around them, people laughed and cried out as the fireworks whistled and banged in the night sky above Charlottenburg. He kissed her passionately until she let out a short, sharp cry of pain. Her lip was bleeding, and she gazed at him with such surprise that he began to apologise. Then she laughed and pulled him towards her once more.

  She took it for passion, but really it was rage, an unspeakable aggression that was blazing its own trail, venting itself on an innocent party, later too, when she took him back to her little attic room and he spent himself, as if he hadn’t known a woman for a hundred years.

  She called it lovemaking, and his rage she called passion.

  She had been wrong about everything that came after too. Their love, as she called it, whatever existed between them, something he could find no name for, which had begun with fireworks and hopes for the future, had never had a future, not even at the start. He had sensed it even during those first kisses, as alcohol and hormones swept aside all reservations. He had known it at the latest by the next morning, when she had brought him fresh coffee in bed, and gazed at him adoringly.

  At first he had been delighted at the smell of coffee, but then he had seen her lovestruck face.

  He had drunk the coffee and smiled at her wearily.

  That first lie was the first of many to come, sometimes without his meaning to lie, sometimes, indeed, without his even knowing that he was lying in the first place. With each day the lie grew bigger, and with each day more unbearable. He should have said something a long time ago.

  Her voice on the line just now, her forced merry chatter about the Fasching ball, about arrangements, fun and fancy dress, and other trivial matters, had opened his eyes. It was time to put an end to it, but not over the telephone, and certainly not his work telephone. Rath had peered over at Gräf, as the detective leafed intently through some file or other, and without further ado asked Kathi to join him in Uhlandeck. So that they could talk.

  ‘What business do you have on the Ku’damm? We need to get to Schöneberg,’ Gräf had said, without looking up.

  ‘You’re going to Schöneberg.’

  Rath had handed his car keys to the detective, and hitched a ride to Uhlandeck. Kathi’s workplace was nearby. Even so, there was no sign of her.

  Rath reopened the Kriminalistische Monatshefte, the journal he had been reading before the waiter came. Superintendent Gennat, his boss at Alexanderplatz, was reporting on the spectacular investigation in Düsseldorf, a series of gruesome unsolved murders, in which he and a few hand-picked Berlin colleagues were assisting the local CID. Rath had declined the opportunity to go with them, despite knowing that his refusal disappointed Buddha and would most likely stall his own career.

  Being chosen by Gennat was an honour, something you couldn’t turn down so easily. Rath’s father, however, had advised against a return to the Rhine Province, even if it was Düsseldorf and not Cologne. Too dangerous, Police Director Engelbert Rath had said, LeClerk and his news-papers could get wind of the fact that Gereon Rath was still working as a police officer, and everything they had put in place a year before would be for nothing.

  But how frustrating! The Düsseldorf case was the most spectacular in Prussia for years: nine murders allied to a number of attempted murders within the space of a few months. The Düsseldorf police had assumed it was a lone perpetrator and in so doing triggered uncontrollable hysteria throughout the city. Gennat didn’t believe in drawing such hasty conclusions, and had set out the specific features of each individual Düsseldorf murder.

  It was the perfect case for the Monatshefte. In each edition Gennat reported on the state of the investigation, which, despite the high-profile assistance of his Berlin team, was still going nowhere. Lacking concrete results, he had painstakingly listed the victims: the nine deceased, but also four with serious and five with minor injuries, all recorded in the Düsseldorf area during the past few months. The 26-year-old domestic servant, Sch., whose fate he had so vividly described, had only survived with serious injuries because the perpetrator had been interrupted.

  Rath had read each instalment while holding the fort at Alex, making do with the scraps that Detective Chief Inspector Böhm fed him under the table. Of all people, it was the bulldog Böhm whom Gennat had entrusted with leading the Homicide Division at Alex during his absence. For Gereon Rath that meant running tedious errands or, at best, accepting cases no one else wanted. Like that of Isolde Heer, who had turned on her gas stove in Schöneberg two days before without lighting it. There were any number of cases like that at the moment. Suicides were enjoying a boom this winter. They were hard work, and investigating officers had little opportunity to cover themselves in glory. Most cases were handled by local CID in their individual precincts, but every now and then a few found their way to headquarters. Once there, they landed unerringly on the desk of Gereon Rath.

  He leafed through the journal to where his reading had been interrupted.

  Thereupon, Sch. felt the sudden thrust of a knife to her throat, and cried loudly for help. She thought her cries were immediately reciprocated. ‘Baumgart’ again stabbed at her, wounding her seriously in the back. As mentioned elsewhere, at this point the tip of the dagger broke and became lodged in her spine . . .

  ‘Telephone for Inspector Rath!’ A boy moved through the rows of tables, carrying a cardboard sign containing the word Fernsprecher in big block letters. ‘Telephone, please, Inspector Rath!’

  It took Rath a few seconds to realise who the boy meant, then he raised his hand as if he were in school. A few customers turned to face him as the boy approached his table.

  ‘If you would be so kind as to follow me . . .’

  Rath left the journal face down on the table to save his place. As he followed the cardboard sign to the booth, he speculated on whether it was Kathi cancelling by telephone. Well, if that was how she wanted to play it . . .

  ‘Cabin Two,’ said the boy.

  He was immediately confronted by two public telephones behind glazed doors made of dark wood. A lamp was shining over the one on the right. The boy pointed towards the gleaming brass ‘Two’ located next to the lamp.

  ‘You just need to lift the receiver,’ he said. ‘Your call has already been put through.’

  Rath closed the door behind him. The murmur of voices from the café could now scarcely be heard. He lifted the receiver, took a deep breath and identified himself.

  ‘Rath? Is that you? At last!’

  ‘Chief Inspector?’ He knew only one person who barked like that into the telephone. DCI Wilhelm Böhm.
r />   The bulldog had an uncanny knack of catching him on the hop. ‘What are you up to, man? You should brief your colleagues a little more thoroughly! Fräulein Voss couldn’t even say what you were doing out west!’

  ‘Isolde Heer,’ Rath muttered, ‘her suicide has been confirmed. The report is as good as done. It’ll be on your desk tomorrow.’

  ‘Have you joined the literati? Or perhaps you can explain why you’re writing your reports in a café?’

  ‘A witness works close by and suggested that we mee . . .’

  ‘Doesn’t matter anyway. Forget all that and grab that assistant detective of yours . . .’

  ‘You mean detective . . .’

  ‘And head out to Marienfelde. Terra Studios. Fatal accident just come in. Our colleagues in 202 have asked for assistance. Seems more complicated than they first thought.’

  Or they’re worried about knocking off on time, Rath mused. ‘An accident,’ he said. ‘Sounds exciting. What was the name of the studio again?’

  ‘Terra. The film lot. Someone’s fallen from the scaffolding or something. I’ve sent you a car, your colleagues know the way.’

  ‘How can I ever repay you?’

  Böhm pretended not to notice Rath’s sarcasm. ‘Oh, Inspector,’ he said. ‘One more thing.’

  Shit! Never get on the wrong side of your superiors.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘That Wessel is being buried tomorrow at five. I’d like you to keep an eye on things. Discreetly of course.’

  Well, of course, the bulldog had found another way to ruin his weekend! The ideal combination: a thankless task, perfectly timed for his Saturday afternoon off, and of guaranteed insignificance to further investigations.

  ‘And what exactly am I supposed to be keeping an eye on, Sir?’ Rath didn’t see the slightest use in hanging around the cemetery in such a politically charged case, whose sequence of events had long been established. It might be something for the political police, but not for a homicide detective in A Division.

  ‘I don’t have to explain how CID operates,’ Böhm snapped. ‘It’s routine! Just keep your eyes peeled!’

  ‘Yes, Sir.’

  The bulldog hung up.

  Visiting the funerals of murder victims was indeed part of A Division’s routine – only it was clear that tomorrow wouldn’t resemble a funeral so much as a political rally. Nor would it shed any new light on a case that was already crystal-clear. A few weeks ago, a pimp had fired a bullet into the mouth of a young SA Führer who had liberated one of his ‘girls’. On Sunday the Stormtrooper had died, and Goebbels’s newspaper Der Angriff had made a saint of the youth who had fallen in love with a whore and paid for it with his life, a martyr for the movement, or Blutzeuge as the Nazis called it.

  The pimp had been in custody for six weeks and already confessed, citing self-defence, although he and his Communist pals had forced their way into the victim’s flat. The public mood had been stirred and the police, expecting violence between Nazis and Communists, had stood a few hundred uniformed officers at the ready. This was where Böhm was sending him! Into this seething cauldron. Perhaps the DCI was hoping that some Nazi or Commie would fell him by mistake.

  Rath stayed on the line and put a call through to Schöneberg, reaching Gräf in Isolde Heer’s flat. Five minutes later, he was standing on the pavement by Uhlandeck waiting. Kathi still hadn’t materialised but, by now, it was too late for a heart-to-heart.

  Böhm hadn’t let him use the murder wagon. A green Opel from the motor pool was double-parked on the Ku’damm. Detective Czerwinski peeled his overweight body from the passenger seat and opened the door to the back. Assistant Detective Henning was at the wheel.

  Rath sighed. Plisch and Plum, as the inseparable duo were known at the Castle, were hardly the most ambitious investigators at Alex, which was probably why Böhm kept foisting them on him. Henning briefly tipped his hat as Rath squeezed into the back seat. Long, sturdy wooden poles and a cumbersome-looking crate meant he barely had any room.

  ‘What the hell is that?’

  ‘The camera,’ Henning said. ‘Shitty Opel can’t fit it in the boot!’

  ‘It would have fit in the murder wagon!’

  Henning shrugged his shoulders apologetically. ‘Böhm needs it.’

  ‘To drive to Aschinger, or what?’

  Henning gave a deliberate laugh, as was expected of an assistant detective when an inspector cracked a joke. No sooner had Czerwinski reclaimed his place in the passenger seat than his partner stepped on the gas. The Opel performed a screeching U-turn and switched to the oncoming lane, banging Rath’s head on the roof hinge. As the car turned into Joachimsthaler Strasse, he thought he could just make out Kathi’s red winter coat in the rear-view mirror.

  4

  The studio was situated near the racetrack. Henning parked next to a sand-coloured Buick in the courtyard. Gräf had hurried over, spurred on by the prospect of working on something other than Isolde Heer’s suicide. A death in a film studio. Perhaps they would run into Henny Porten.

  The studio rose a short distance from the road and looked like an oversized greenhouse, a glass mountain that seemed out of place in the midst of the bland industrial Prussian architecture surrounding it. A long brick wall lined the site, with a police officer from the 202nd precinct standing guard so discreetly it was barely possible to make out his blue uniform from the road.

  ‘This way, gentlemen,’ he said when Rath showed his badge, gesturing towards the large steel door. ‘Your colleague is already inside.’

  ‘What happened?’ Rath asked. ‘We only know there was an accident.’

  ‘An actress copped it in the middle of filming. That’s all I know.’

  Behind Rath a panting Henning struggled under the weight of the camera. The officer opened the steel door and the slight assistant detective manoeuvred the camera and its bulky tripod through. Rath and Czerwinski followed.

  Inside, they couldn’t make out the enormous windows that moments ago had made the building seem like a palm house. Heavy cloths hung from the ceiling and the walls were covered in lengths of material so that Henning had to take care not to come a cropper. There were cables snaking every which way over the floor.

  Rath moved carefully through the cable jungle and looked around. The place was crammed with technical devices: spotlights on tripods, in between them a glazed cabinet reminiscent of a plain confessional. Behind the thick yet spotlessly clean pane of glass Rath discerned the silhouette of a film camera. A second camera stood on a trolley with tripod, this time enclosed in a heavy metal casing with only its object lens peeking out. Next to it was a futuristic-looking console with switches, pipes and small, flashing lights, on which there lay a pair of headphones. A thick cable led from the console to the back, where a set of thinner cables connected it to a kind of gallows from which hung two silvery-black microphones. Expensive parquet, dark cherrywood furniture, even a fireplace – it looked as if an elegant hotel room had got lost and wandered into the wrong neighbourhood. There were no cables on the floor of the set.

  The cluster of people seemed just as out of place amidst the elegance: scruffily dressed shirtsleeves alongside grey and white workers’ overalls. The only person wearing respectable clothing was dressed in a tuxedo and sitting apart on one of the folding chairs between the tripod spotlights and cable harnesses, a blond man sobbing loudly into his hands. A young woman in a mouse-grey suit leaned over him, pressing his head against her midriff. The crowd on the parquet floor talked quietly among themselves, as if the stubborn claims of the flashing warning sign above the door still held. Silence, it said, filming in progress.

  Rath squeezed behind Henning, past a bulky tripod spotlight and onto the set. The assistant detective dropped the heavy camera stand onto the floor with such a crash that everyone looked round. The crowd parted and when Rath spotted Gräf next to two officers he understood the quiet, why the most anyone dared to do was whisper. Dark green silk glistened by Gräf’s feet,
the folds almost elegantly arranged, as if for a portrait, but in reality shrouding the unnaturally hunched body of a woman. Half of her face had suffered scorched skin, raw flesh, seeping blisters. The other half was more or less obscured, but hinted at how beautiful the face must once have been. Rath couldn’t help but think of Janus, of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The blonde hair, perfectly coiffed on the right-hand side, had been almost completely burned away on the left. Head and upper body glistened moistly, the silk clinging wet and dark to her breast and stomach. A heavy spotlight pressed her upper left arm to the floor.

  Gräf made a detour of the corpse to get to him.

  ‘Hello, Gereon,’ he said and cleared his throat. ‘Nasty business. That’s Betty Winter lying there.’

  ‘Who?’

  Gräf gazed at him in disbelief. ‘Betty Winter. Don’t say you don’t know who she is.’

  Rath shrugged his shoulders. ‘I’d need to see her face.’

  ‘Best not,’ Gräf swallowed. ‘The spotlight caught her square on. It fell from up there.’ The detective gestured towards the ceiling. ‘Comfortably ten metres, and the thing’s heavy. Apart from that, it was also in use. It would have been scorching.’

  Rath craned his neck upwards. Under the ceiling hung a steel truss, a network of catwalk grating to which entire rows of different-sized spotlights had been attached. In between were dark lengths of cloth like monotonous, sombre flag decorations. In some places, the heavy fabric hung even lower than the lighting bridges it partially obscured. Directly above the corpse was a gap in the row of spotlights. Only the taut, black cable that must have still been connected to the mains somewhere above indicated that anything had ever hung there.

  ‘Why do they need so many spotlights?’ Rath asked. ‘Why don’t they just let the light in from outside? That’s why film studios are made of glass.’

  ‘Sound,’ Gräf said, as if that explained everything. ‘Glass has bad acoustics. That’s why they cover everything. It’s the quickest way to turn a silent film studio into a sound film studio.’