‘So you’d look the other way if you knew what it was?’
‘I don’t know about that,’ I said, getting careful again. I might have been suicidal but I wasn’t stupid: Lehnhoff was just the type to report a fellow to the Gestapo for wearing English shoes; and I hardly wanted to spend a week in the cells removed from the comfort of my warm, night-time pistol. ‘But this is Berlin, Gottfried. Looking the other way is what we’re good at.’
I pointed at the severed head that lay at our feet.
‘You just see if I’m wrong.’
CHAPTER 2
About a lot of things I’m not always right. But about the Nazis I wasn’t often wrong.
Geert Vranken was a voluntary worker and had come to Berlin in search of a better job than the one that was available to him in Holland. Berlin’s railway, which was experiencing a self-inflicted crisis in recruiting maintenance staff, had been glad to have an experienced track engineer; Berlin’s police was less keen to investigate his murder. In fact, it didn’t want to investigate the case at all. But there was no doubting that the Dutchman had been murdered. When eventually his body was given its grudging, cursory examination by the ancient doctor brought back from retirement to handle forensic pathology for the Berlin police, six stab wounds were found on what remained of his torso.
Commissioner Friedrich-Wilhelm Ludtke, who was now in charge of the Berlin Criminal Police, wasn’t a bad detective. It was Ludtke who had successfully headed the S-Bahn murder investigation that led to the arrest and execution of Paul Ogorzow. But as he himself explained to me in his newly carpeted office on the top floor of the Alex, there was an important new law coming down the pipe from the Wilhelmstrasse, and Ludtke’s boss, Wilhelm Frick, Minister of the Interior, had ordered him to prioritize its enforcement at the expense of all other investigative matters. Ludtke, a doctor of law, was almost embarrassed to tell me what this important new law amounted to.