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“Oh, good,” said Schiller ironically, “that’s all we need. A gangland killing.”
There were two telephone extensions in the flat, but Schiller, even with gloved hands, used neither. They might have prints. He went down and borrowed the bookseller’s phone. Before that, he posted two uniformed men at the door of the house, another in the hall, and the fourth outside the apartment door.
He called his superior, Rainer Hartwig, Director of the Murder Squad, and told him there might be gangland ramifications. Hartwig decided he had better tell his own superior, the president of the Crime Office, the Kriminalamt, known as the KA. If Wiechert was right and the body on the floor was a gangster, then experts from other divisions besides Murder Squad—robbery and racketeering, for example—would have to be consulted.
In the interim Hartwig sent down the Erkennungsdienst, the forensic team, one photographer and four fingerprint men. The apartment would be theirs and theirs alone for hours to come; until, in fact, every last print and scraping, every fiber and particle that could be of interest, had been removed for analysis. Hartwig also detached eight more men from their duties. There was a lot of door-knocking to be done, the search for witnesses who had seen a man or men come or go.
The log would later show that the forensic men arrived at 11:31 A.M. and stayed for almost eight hours.
At that hour Sam McCready put down his second cup of coffee and folded up the map. He had taken Morenz carefully through both rendezvous with Pankratin in the East, shown him the latest photograph of the Soviet general, and explained that the man would be in the baggy fatigues of a Russian army corporal with a forage cap shading his face and driving a GAZ jeep. That was the way the Russian had set it up.
“Unfortunately, he thinks he will be meeting me. We must just hope he recognizes you from Berlin and makes the pass anyway. Now, to the car. It’s down there in the parking lot. We’ll go for a drive after lunch, let you get used to it.
“It’s a BMW sedan, black, with Würzburg registration plates. That’s because you’re a Rhinelander by birth, but now live and work in Würzburg. I’ll give you your full cover story and backup papers later. The car with those number plates actually exists. It is a black BMW sedan.
“But this one is the Firm’s car. It has made several crossings of the Saale Bridge border point, so hopefully they’ll be accustomed to it. The drivers have always been different because it’s a Company car. It has always driven to Jena, apparently to visit the Zeiss works there. And it has always been clean. But this time there is a difference. Under the battery shelf there is a flat compartment, just about invisible unless you really look for it. It is big enough to take the book you will receive from Smolensk.”
(On a need-to-know basis, Morenz had never known Pankratin’s real name. He did not even know the man had risen to Major-General or was now based in Moscow. The last time he had seen him, Pankratin was a colonel in East Berlin, code-name Smolensk.)
“Let’s have lunch,” said McCready.
During the meal, from room service, Morenz drank wine greedily and his hands shook.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” asked McCready.
“Sure. This damned summer cold, you know? And a bit nervous. That’s natural.”
McCready nodded. Nerves were normal—with actors before going onstage. With soldiers before combat. With agents before an illegal run into the Sovbloc. Still, he did not like the shape Morenz was in. He had seldom seen a case of nerves like this. But with Pankratin unreachable and twenty-four hours to the first contact, he had no choice.
“Let’s go down to the car,” he said.
Not much happens in Germany today that the press does not hear about, and it was the same in 1985, when Germany was West Germany. The veteran and ace crime reporter of Cologne was and remains Guenther Braun of the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger. He was lunching with a police contact who mentioned that there was a flap going on in Hahnwald. Braun arrived outside the house with his photographer, Walter Schiestel, just before three. He tried to get to Commissar Schiller, but he was upstairs, sent word he was busy, and referred Braun to the Präsidium press office. Fat chance. Braun would get the sanitized police communiqué later. He began to ask around. Then he made some phone calls. By early evening, well in time for the first editions, he had got his story. It was a good one, too. Of course, radio and TV would be ahead of him with the broad outlines, but he knew he had an inside track.
Upstairs, the forensic team had finished with the bodies. The photographer, Schiestel, had snapped the corpses from every conceivable angle, plus the decor of the room, the bed, the huge mirror behind the headboard, and the equipment in the closets and chests. Lines were drawn around the bodies, then the cadavers were bagged and removed to the city morgue, where the forensic pathologist went to work. The detectives needed the time of death and those bullets—urgently.
The entire apartment had yielded nineteen sets or partial sets of fingerprints. Three were eliminated; they belonged to the two deceased and to Frau Popovic, now down at the Präsidium with her prints carefully on file. That left sixteen.
“Probably clients,” muttered Schiller.
“But one set the killer’s?” suggested Wiechert.
“I doubt it. It looks pretty pro to me. He probably wore gloves.”
The major problem, mused Schiller, was not lack of motive but too many. Was the call girl the intended victim? Was the murderer an outraged client, a former husband, a vengeful wife, a business rival, an enraged former pimp? Or was she incidental, and her pimp the real target? He had been confirmed as Bernhard Hoppe, ex-con, bank robber, gangster, very nasty, and a real low-life. A settling of accounts, a drug deal that went sour, rival protection-racketeers? Schiller suspected it was going to be a tough one.
The tenants’ statements and those of the neighbors indicated no one knew of Renate Heimendorf’s secret profession. There had been gentlemen callers, but always respectable. No late-night parties, blaring music.
As the forensic team finished with each area of the flat, Schiller could move around more and disturb things. He went to the bathroom. There was something odd about the bathroom, but he could not figure out what it was. Just after seven, the forensic team finished and called to him that they were off. He spent an hour puttering about the gutted flat while Wiechert complained that he wanted his dinner. At ten past eight, Schiller shrugged and called it a day. He would resume the case tomorrow up at headquarters. He sealed the flat, left one uniformed man in the hallway in case someone returned to the scene of the crime—it had happened—and went home. There was still something that bothered him about that flat. He was a very intelligent and perceptive young detective.
McCready spent the afternoon finalizing the briefing of Bruno Morenz.
“You are Hans Grauber, aged fifty-one, married, three children. Like all proud family men you carry pictures of your family. Here they are, on holiday: Heidi, your wife, along with Hans Junior, Lotte, and Ursula, known as Uschi. You work for BKI Optical Glassware in Würzburg—they exist, and the car is theirs. Fortunately, you once did work in optical glassware, so you can use the jargon if you have to.
“You have an appointment with the director of foreign sales at the Zeiss works in Jena. Here is his letter. The paper is real; so is the man. The signature looks like his, but it is ours. The appointment is for three P.M. tomorrow. If all goes well, you can agree to place an order for Zeiss precision lenses and return to the West the same evening. If you need further discussions, you may have to overnight. That’s just if the border guards ask you for such a mass of detail.
“It’s extremely unlikely the border guards would check with Zeiss. The SSD would, but there are enough Western businessmen dealing with Zeis
s for one more not to be a cause for suspicion. So here are your passport, letters from your wife, a used ticket from the Würzburg Opera House, credit cards, driving license, a bunch of keys including the ignition key of the BMW. The baggy raincoat—the lot.
