Lost Kin Page 9

  He pressed on through the northern edge of Old Town, his hands deep in his pockets to stave off the wind and the chill it carried.

  He considered marching right into the Polizeipräsidium, but his reasoning won out. It would help no one to make a scene.

  Near the main train station the night was coming alive with people, carousing, nightclubs. He peeked in bars, beer gardens, and cabarets, scanning the crowds. He recognized faces. But not the face he needed to see.

  He backtracked toward police headquarters. A couple side streets over was a club that didn’t have a name. Different types slapped different nicknames on it. The building’s outward-facing facade made it look like a charred hull. A neatly swept path through the rubble ran deep inside to an inner courtyard. Officers came and went, Fräuleins on their arms. Harry stuck to the darkness of the courtyard’s arched entrance. Three young toughs stood watch at a nondescript red door, the usual United Nations of bouncers—a foreign DP, a German, and an ex-GI, all wearing suits worth more than their life savings before the war. Harry slapped his face and hair into place. He put his horn-rims on. Another group passed through heading for the door, shouting and laughing. Harry gave one of the young American officers a good slap on the back, and the poor sap was so full of booze and wild visions of naked blondes that he took Harry for someone he must’ve been drinking with all afternoon and evening already.

  And Harry was in. The door led to a cellar, which cleaned up all right. They even had a chandelier. Harry sat at the bar, a slab of cool gray marble. He rested a hand flat on the calming surface while his other hand cradled his second whiskey. The place was trying to be more than it was, and the action was no different. On one end, a band of elderly Germans (classical musicians, Harry guessed) sweated to keep up with their bandleader, a black American. At this early hour the small dance floor in the middle held only Fräuleins with painted faces who shuffled together out of boredom, casing the scene. At the other end was a card game at an oval table—boyish American lieutenants, gaunt civs in rumpled suits, and a sole Soviet liaison officer at one end with only a frown for company. More painted Fräuleins worked the perimeter eyeing any winners, but they mostly got each other’s eyes and they weren’t too friendly. A mishmash of poker chips, European currencies, and occupation dollars lay before each player, and Harry guessed the biggest pile added up to less than a carton of stale Camels.

  Hartmut Dietz, with his modest pile of mishmash, occupied the end opposite the Soviet. He hadn’t seen Harry over in the dark at the bar.

  Harry turned away from the room and stared at the bar mirror, his reverse image just another object among the bottles and glasses and revelers reflected. He reconsidered how to handle this. Major Joyner had warned him, sure, but the major never said he couldn’t do a little cleaning up. A hard case like the major would understand—he’d make a kraut squirm a little, see what shook out. Joyner would certainly want to know the score if he was in Harry’s brogues.

  Harry downed the rest of his whiskey, pushed off the bar and onto his feet. He swayed a little—he hadn’t eaten for hours and the juice had gone straight to his head. He shouldered through the crowd into the light of the room, parted the two Gretchens zeroing in on Dietz, and placed a hand on Dietz’s shoulder. Dietz turned and seeing Harry, rose up. His chair leg caught Harry in the shin and Harry stumbled back, pulling on Dietz’s shoulder for support.

  Dietz fell down with him. A Fräulein screamed. Men shouted. Dietz howled for air but nothing came out—the fall had knocked the wind out of him.

  “It’s okay, folks, I know the man,” Harry said, holding up a hand and forcing out a chuckle, his face reddening.

  Pretending to help Dietz up, he pulled the detective close by the lapels and growled, “What’s the idea, selling me out like that?”

  Hands clamped on Harry’s shoulders and jerked him backward—two big goons were pulling him out of there. “He’s a friend of mine, we stumbled is all,” Harry told them but they said nothing. They had him by the arms, his heels off the ground. “Big idea? Givin’ a kraut the benefit of the doubt over me?” he joked in desperation.

  They pulled him up the cellar stairs, heaved him out into the courtyard, and then joined the bouncers to light up, ignoring Harry now as if he was a bag of garbage they’d set out.

  The cold sobered Harry up. He shared a laugh to himself as he smoothed out his wrinkles. He guessed it could have been worse. He could be holding his jaw right now—in pieces.

  He decided to wait ten minutes tops. After about five, Dietz emerged from the cellar and stood off to the side in silhouette. His overcoat collar was pulled up high, and his hat leaned forward shielding his eyes. Harry could almost see him as a Gestapo man he never was, or at least the young cop he used to be. He was watching Harry like Harry didn’t know he was there—like he stood behind one-way glass.

  Harry held up a hand. Finally, Dietz walked over. “What happened in there?” Dietz said softly in English as if reading a letter aloud to himself. “I did not understand what you meant.”

  “What I meant?” Harry said. “The corpse—it’s gone. That’s what.”

  “Gone?” Dietz’s hands sprung from his pockets. He put an arm around Harry and led him out onto the street.

  Harry halted Dietz and stood him against the building’s scorched facade. “Military Police have it,” he said, keeping it vague—he’d let Dietz show his stripes.

  The detective switched to German. “You say that like the stiff just got up and walked away.”

  “I wish that were true,” Harry said. “But here’s the thing: Someone tipped them off.”

  “What? Well, it wasn’t me, I can assure you.” Dietz looked both ways down the street and over Harry’s shoulder. He pushed back his hat, exposing his eyes glossy with anger. “Who the hell would do this? I want to know.”

  “That’s just it, isn’t it? I don’t even know. Anonymous tip, they say.”

  Dietz snorted a laugh, shaking his head.

  “You can laugh. Surprised I’m not in the hoosegow.” Harry’s face was in silhouette now, and Dietz searched its darkness. Harry gave him nothing.

  “I tell you. I did not tip them off.”

  “Prove it,” Harry said.

  “Am I not proving it?”

  “You tell me.”

  “I’ll try, Harry,” Dietz said. “But you’ll have to come with me.”

  Dietz walked Harry in silence through the dark streets.

  “Where we going?” Harry said.

  “Home. I’m tired,” Dietz said.

  Harry waved down two GIs in a jeep who dropped them a block from Dietz’s street. Harry had not expected to go home with Dietz. Few Germans wanted their occupiers to see inside their hovels, for they offered windows onto their true lives. Harry had seen fur-wearing opera stars harboring whole families in helpless squalor and what looked like hobos out on the street living in princely comfort.

  Dietz’s floor was the third of six. The old egg crate of an elevator wasn’t working so they trudged up the stairs in the dark, Harry having to feel his way with starts and stops but Dietz climbing with an even, deliberate rhythm. From the floors they passed, Harry heard cackling, music playing, arguing. He smelled cheap perfumes, sundry tobaccos, mold, and that unmistakable fetor of rotting vegetables. Dietz’s floor was quieter. He knocked at his door in a pattern of two short knocks, then three shorts. They waited. From inside they heard the same knocks in reverse. Dietz opened the door.

  The front room was dim, illuminated only by the low light from an adjoining room. A woman stood before them wearing a plain dark apron over a pale dress. Her features were too hard and bony for attractive, but her wide smile made up for some of it. She shook Harry’s hand. “Frau Dietz. Welcome,” she said.

  “My wife, Lila,” Dietz said.

  “Nice to meet you,” Harry said, turning away to see four small children peeking around the doorway of the adjoining room, their sexes indistinguishable because of their towhea
ds and bowl haircuts. Harry waved at the kids and they vanished. Dietz didn’t call them back out. There might even be more kids back there, even a complete other family or two.

  Harry turned to catch the sharp look Dietz’s wife shot at her husband. She excused herself and Dietz followed, excusing himself for a moment, and Harry, his eyes adjusting, inspected the goods lining one wall: a few worn burlap sacks and old suitcases full of who-knew-what, several pieces of tarnished silver and porcelain, what looked like cheap paintings, and some of that ubiquitous Nazi kitsch (daggers, medals, armbands, caps) the newer GIs liked to send home. These were standard black market goods and Dietz looked to be doing all right, but it was no El Dorado. And who knew how much it cost to feed those kids alone? Their ration cards certainly weren’t cutting it. A dark mood fell over Harry. He felt a fool for barging in on Dietz at that card game. Who the hell did he think he was? He had a mansion all to himself. And he had gotten Dietz into this in the first place.

  When Dietz came back in, Harry was eyeballing a small print of Hitler defaced with bullet holes. “You’ll get a lot for that Adolf print,” he said.

  Dietz nodded. “The vandalized kitsch is the height of fashion now. You need a drink?”

  “Last thing I need. I might attack you again.”

  Dietz led Harry through a narrow galley kitchen to a classic German eating nook of etched wood, the benches built into the wall on three sides like a booth out of an old pub. On the small table stood a small electric heater unit with no housing—it must have been ripped from a German jeep or car and rewired. Dietz switched it on and his wife brought them ersatz coffee. Harry only took half a cup so that they wouldn’t run out as soon. There was always that fine line between charity and condescension; the only thing worse was to refuse the hospitality. He wouldn’t drink it in any case. Lila could discreetly reuse it.

  “I found you down at that card game,” Harry said once Dietz’s wife left the room. “That right there could confirm you sold me out. Says, you’re an operator first, a cop second.”

  Dietz laughed. “Did you see my winnings? Dead currencies and cracked chips worth no more than cig stubs. I’m just getting by, Captain. Would I live here if I was not?”

  Dietz showed Harry papers confirming this was Dietz’s family domicile since before the war. He showed Harry photos of his wife looking twenty years younger though most were only taken six, seven years before.

  “How did you know I was in that club?”

  “A hunch. I knew they sometimes let in Germans but only ones with respectable jobs.”

  “I see.”

  “I didn’t mean to bowl you over,” Harry said. “Just clumsy of me.”

  “I know.” Dietz sipped his coffee.

  “I was worried I couldn’t get in,” Harry said. “But they let you in.”

  Dietz sighed. “I play cards, yes. To survive. Some of the winnings I spread around, to make my job—my life—easier. How do you think I kept that corpse on ice as long as I did?”

  It wasn’t every day a German admitted how they had to please and even kowtow to keep the wheels greased. Dietz was trying his best. But he needed coaxing.

  “You have certain friends,” Harry said. “That what you’re telling me?”

  “I wouldn’t call them that.” Dietz spoke lower. “How should I say this? I have a suspect background, Captain. The report on me you saw? It was—how do you say?—favorably corrected. There, I said it. I was never in the Party, that much is true. But before, in the first couple years of the war, I was in a military police battalion. In the East. I didn’t like what they were doing so I managed somehow to get transferred to the Navy of all things. As far away as I could.”

  “How did you pull that off?”

  Dietz shrugged. “Quit doing your job. Run card games on duty. Get in a fight or two, preferably with an NCO. All the sudden they don’t want you. I was lucky. Some end up in a penal unit.”

  Harry nodded. No one was a saint. Saints were for suckers. “Since I got you on the level, let’s talk about the corpse. Funny thing was, they never asked me my police contact—who I asked to keep the corpse. That means they already knew, or they don’t care.”

  Dietz slumped. “Isn’t it obvious? They must know or assume I was the contact.”

  “Then why not go after you? You don’t seem too worried—”

  Dietz banged on the table. “Worried? What do you know about it?” he growled. “It’s well beyond your ‘worried,’ I can tell you, and it’s like this every waking moment …” He let the words trail off. He rubbed his fingers through his hair, and Harry could see his head through the thinning strands—pale, clammy skin that didn’t look comfortable to wear at all.

  “All right, all right,” Harry said. He set his hand on Dietz’s forearm. Dietz let it stay. He mumbled something in Bavarian dialect that Harry didn’t catch. It almost sounded like praying. Harry removed his hand and said, “The way it looks to me? They’re keeping it low-key for now.” By they, he only meant Joyner, but Dietz didn’t need to know that. Joyner had given Harry a break, and Harry felt a loyalty to this major who was really another loner like him. “They didn’t ask me too many questions, don’t seem to be making a case of it,” he added. “I expect they’ll want to know whatever I find out—even though they told me to quit searching.”

  “Well? That’s authority for you,” Dietz said. He made a gesture with his index finger, revolving it around as if spinning a globe.

  He scooted closer. He held up a cigarette, his hand shielding his lips, and spoke English in a whisper—not even his wife should know what he was about to say: “You want to know about my so-called ‘friends’? I do help out your brass from time to time, and even your intelligence. But it’s more like an informant—on Germans, yes, but often on Americans and everyone in between.”

  “Sure. Who doesn’t?” Harry quipped.

  “Gottverdammt, listen,” Dietz snarled. “What you should know? I could have turned you in for your ridiculous stunt. Holding on to a corpse—how foolish? But I believe in what you see in that girl—in Irina.”

  It sounded less like a warning than a cry for help coming from Dietz. “I appreciate that,” Harry said.

  “Good. Because I would lose my status if anyone knew I was telling you this, Captain.”

  They were staring at each other, eyes level. “So I guess we’re on even ground,” Harry said.

  “We will never be that,” Dietz said. “But, it’s the little things that matter in the long run,” he continued. “That’s what I found out during the war. It’s not what such and such a bigwig says, or what two or three nations’ big dogs boast about around a table. They’re just taking care of themselves. It’s what happens here on this uneven ground that makes a difference. It doesn’t always conform to the big dogs’ so-called pledges and treaties, their so-called decisions and principles. But you know what? They can go piss themselves.”

  “Fair enough.” Harry picked up his cup, then set it back down. “Can you tell me any more about Irina?”

  Dietz shook his head. “She paid me to help find you that night. That’s it.”

  “And you don’t know why she came looking for me?”

  “All I know is that a fellow was killed. I’m like you. I don’t think she did it—at least not alone. There’s more to it. Someone behind it. You know it, and I know this. So you must keep searching for her.”

  “Who says I’m not?”

  “Please. Captain. I only mean, you seem to hide it. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

  “Who says I’m ashamed?”

  “Very well. Let’s call it agitated.”

  “Have it your way,” Harry said.

  Dietz was rubbing at his leg.

  “I didn’t hurt you back there, did I?” Harry said.

  “No, no. You could have hurt yourself worse, what with those bulls they have for guards.” Dietz shook a hand as if it got burned.

  “Yeah, guess I’m a lucky Joe tonight.” Ha
rry stood and picked up his cup to help clear the table, but Dietz waved him off the chore—Harry was his guest here. “Thanks for inviting me into your home,” Harry said. “And do thank your wife.”

  Dietz stood. “Very well. But it was nothing.”

  “And, promise me you’ll tell me anything you know. Or find out.”

  “I will, Captain. And you tell me if you discover who sold you out.”

  “Deal.”

  Dietz held up a finger. “Wait, this reminds me—about those sabers? I asked around a bit. Word is they’re probably something like, how do you say? Cossack.”

  Nine

  SO MUCH FOR DIETZ SELLING ME OUT, Harry thought. He had no other suspects. There was no reason to consider Maddy Barton. She would sell him out in anger; he didn’t doubt that. But she couldn’t have known about the corpse, since she didn’t stoop to know any Germans who might have tipped her off let alone resort to a vulgar cowboy like MP Major Joyner.

  Besides, Maddy’s social schedule hadn’t given her the time for it. As he expected, she never returned from the party that night they fought. He couldn’t blame her. He had lost his head and loathed that he had. He understood that, down deep, his harsh reaction to her probing likely stemmed from wanting to conceal Max. He still had not told Maddy he had a brother. All it took was one reckless soul to point a finger at him or Max. Such were the times. The war didn’t end fear and want. Some needed a scapegoat to stay alive while others stood to gain from it. It didn’t matter if the pointing was so off-target it was like a B-17 dropping its load on a hospital.

  Maddy’s tenacity wasn’t that different from his, just turned on its head. The more a person had to lose, the sharper the claws. So Harry employed thicker armor against her stabs. On Friday the twentieth—a week since he asked Dietz to hide the corpse, and two days since the party—he instructed Gerlinde to have the contents of Maddy’s room packed away in the mansion’s garage. He told Gerlinde to enlist trusted help and make sure none of Maddy’s belongings were missing, not even a hairpin. The garage was safe and watertight. Both Harry and Gerlinde had keys for Maddy in case she showed up demanding entry. Meanwhile, Harry had a letter sent to her office and her apartment. In case she missed those, he copied the letter a third time, put it in an envelope with her name on it, and taped it to his mansion’s front door: