I took out my pocket knife, unfolded it carefully and, starting at the cuff I began to cut up the length of the dead man’s trouser leg, but only because I didn’t want to start unbuttoning his fly buttons. Generally speaking, I prefer to know a man a little better before I will do that. On the left thigh there was another heavy bruise that matched the broken rib and the contusion on the head. I was trying not to appear nervous, but on top of the bad feeling I had most of the time I now had a bad feeling about the dead man, too. The distance between Kleist Park and Nollendorf Platz was about a kilometre, and even a man who had collided with a taxi on the corner of Motz Strasse might have staggered to the park in less than thirty minutes. This wouldn’t have been the only traffic accident in Berlin that night but it was almost certainly the only one likely to have gone unreported.
‘You want to know what I think?’
‘Of course.’
‘This man has been involved in a road traffic accident. Of course that’s hardly uncommon what with the blackout and Berlin drivers.’
I was quite certain I was looking at the man who had attacked Fräulein Tauber and who had collided with the taxi. A hundred different thoughts started to run through my mind. Did the Gestapo know that already? Was that what this was all about? To see how I would react when presented with the dead body, like Hagen’s treachery uncovered when he stands beside Siegfried’s bier? No. How could they know? None of the other parties involved – Fräulein Tauber, Frau Lippert, the taxi driver – even knew I was a cop, let alone my name. But for a moment my hand started to shake. I folded the knife and returned it to my coat pocket.
‘Anything wrong, Gunther?’
‘No, I like working with the dead. On most nights when I’m not contemplating cutting my own throat you can catch me down at the local cemetery with my good friend, Count Orlok.’ Biting my lip I steeled myself to go through the dead man’s pockets.
‘We’ve searched his pockets,’ said Sachse. ‘There’s nothing important left in them.’
From the dead man’s pocket I took out a packet of Haribos and showed them to the two Gestapo officers.
‘I don’t know what that tells us,’ objected Wandel.
‘It tells us that the man had a sweet tooth,’ I said, although it told me a lot more than that. Any doubts that this was the man who had attached Fräulein Tauber were now removed. Hadn’t she mentioned the smell of Haribos on his breath?
‘Apart from the false documentation,’ said Sachse, ‘and the gun, of course, all we found was a money clip, a door key, and a pocket diary.’
‘May I see them?’
I stood up. The money clip was silver and in its fold was about fifty Reichsmarks in twenties and ones, but it was loose on the notes and made me think that it had held more money than was now present; and it was all too easy to suppose that the policemen who had stolen Franz Koci’s watch had also relieved him of at least half of his cash. That would only be typical. The door key was on a steel chain that must have been attached to his belt: it was a key for an old mortise lock made by the Ferdinand Garbe Lock Company of Berlin. The diary was the most interesting item. It was a red-leather Army pocket diary for 1941 that they handed out to German officers: there was a little wallet at the front and at the back there was a useful guide to recognizing German army ranks and insignias. As a boy I’d had a diary with a similar guide for recognizing the footprints of animals – almost invaluable in a big city like Berlin. I turned to the current week and noted the only entry for the last forty-eight hours: ‘N.P. 9.15 p.m.’ It had been nine-thirty when I had interrupted Franz Koci’s attack on Fräulein Tauber, which was time enough for them to meet on Nolli at nine-fifteen.
But why would a Czech terrorist intent on avoiding the attention of the police risk carrying out a sexual assault on someone at an S-Bahn station? Someone he had arranged to meet there. Unless the person he had arranged to meet hadn’t turned up and, in frustration, he had attacked the girl. But that made no sense either.
I handed the diary back to Sachse. ‘These diaries are even more useful to spies than they are for our men, don’t you think? They tell the enemy who’s worth killing and who’s not.’
‘I imagine he must have stolen it,’ said Wandel, redundantly. ‘Our intelligence suggests that some of these Czechos are damn good pickpockets.’
I nodded. That sounded fair enough to me considering that we had just stolen their country.
I had a lot of thinking to do and I decided to do it at the Golden Horseshoe. That was probably against the rules. Anyone with a thought in his head wouldn’t ever have gone to the Golden Horseshoe so I figured a man with my chequered history was worth a discount.
