8
Bauer residence
Oberfohring
Munich
DETECTIVE INSPECTOR THOMAS BAUER lay awake, eyes wide open, listening to the sweet, raspy breathing of his wife, Amalie, her auburn hair swept across the pillow.
The Bauers lived in a small flat in Oberfohring, a quaint neighborhood of mostly rental apartment buildings, the most a police officer and a schoolteacher could afford.
Though Bauer tried to raise himself from bed as gingerly as possible, her eyes popped open. “Are you okay?” she mumbled.
He didn’t want to wake her. But she had a mother’s ear; the tiniest stirring roused her from sleep.
“I’m fine.” He leaned over and kissed her. “I told you I needed an early start.”
“What time is it?” She started to raise her head.
“Shh. It’s three thirty. I’ll be back before you’re up. I promise.”
She seemed content with that, settling back in. She was not unaccustomed to Bauer’s odd hours as a cop. Some of his best work, he always told her, happened when decent people were sleeping.
He threw on a dress shirt and hiked up his trousers. As he headed to the door, he heard his wife mumble something. It was barely audible, but that didn’t matter; he knew what she always said to him when he left for work.
“Come home to us, Tom.”
Bauer traveled in darkness through the cobblestone streets of northeastern Munich.
Shadowy figures receded into alleys or sublevel porches, and the homeless, whose numbers had swollen to overwhelming proportions since the economic crash of 1929, huddled under blankets outside the city’s overcrowded shelters.
People slept in alleys and train stations, on the trams that wound through the streets, sometimes in the kripo jails if arrested for vagrancy.
The lighting was poor; nearly half the city’s streetlamps were busted out, courtesy of marauding Nazis who drove through the streets after hours, shattering the windows of Jewish shopkeepers and painting their trademark red swastikas.
Bauer wrapped his scarf around his face, lifted the collars of his trench coat, and wore his gray trilby hat low, bracing himself against a fierce wind as he walked along the empty sidewalk toward the municipal square that housed his branch of the police department—Directorate 22, the Bogenhausen District.
The presence of the Nazis in Munich was more than evident here.
Wrapped around streetlamp posts, inside storefronts, draped along brick walls, were propaganda posters for NSDAP: one of a worker raising a swastika flag and declaring “The people will rise!”; one advertising NSDAP under the words Freedom and bread; one showing a soldier giving the Hitler salute behind the words The German who loves freedom belongs in the National Socialist S.A.
The worst poster, in Bauer’s view, was of a Nazi sword plunging through a red Star of David that took the form of a snake’s head.
Spilling out of the snake’s corpse were words representing everything for which the Nazis blamed Jewish people: usury, the Treaty of Versailles, unemployment, the loss of the Great War, Marxism, Bolshevism, betrayal, inflation, prostitution, financial inequality, and scandal.
Bauer ripped down the poster and shredded it to pieces.
Rather than walk through the plaza to enter headquarters, he entered through the courtyard to the west. The outside door was locked, but Bauer had a key.
It was a key he was probably supposed to have returned at some point, but Bauer had become quite the expert in cutting silly bureaucratic corners that prevented him from doing his job efficiently.
The heavy door opened into a basement, a series of dank, musty corridors with little signage, though Bauer knew the way.
He unwrapped his scarf and unbuttoned his coat as the heat intensified while passing the boiler room.
Then it was just another short staircase until he reached the metal door with the warning, LEICHENHALLE: ZUTRITT VERBOTEN. Morgue: Entry prohibited.
He braced himself, though by now he should have been accustomed to the smell of death, after his two tours in the infantry and many years with the kriminalpolizei. Still, he was hit by the pungent, sickly odor of decomposing flesh combined with disinfectant.
Smells like rotting eggs with a heavy dose of garlic and shit, he thought.
“Who is there?” a voice called out. “Who is there, please?” The voice sounded scared.
“Charlie Chaplin,” said Bauer.
The door to the morgue’s principal examination room popped open and the rechtsmediziner—the medical examiner—walked out. His old friend, the stooped and curmudgeonly Dr. Elie Achterberg, wagged a finger at him.
Bauer had suspected Achterberg would be working the overnight shift. Despite his advancing age, he often worked those hours since being widowed three years ago. Nights without his wife were the hardest, he’d said.
“Even now, he jokes,” said Achterberg. “Even now, when he is not supposed to be here.”
“News travels fast.”
“Is it true you have been suspended? That you punched the chief?”
Bauer couldn’t help but chuckle. “I still have my card, Elie. At least for now. So where is she?”
He looked around the room. The body on the slab was a hairy, overweight man who, judging from the peeling skin at the extremities, had probably been found in one of the canals. A large surgical saw lay next to his swollen head. Bauer was glad to have gotten here before the dissection began.
“By ‘she,’ you mean the niece? The Raubal woman. No, she is not here.”
Bauer did a double take. “What? How could she not be here? I ordered her to be brought here for a postmortem—”
“And she was.”
“Well? Did you perform it?”
Achterberg’s skinny shoulders rose. “And now the inspector will get me in trouble.”
“I was never here.”
“But what if someone knows you were? And then I lie and say you weren’t?”
“Very well—I was here, but you refused to talk to me.”
Bauer’s old friend seemed to deflate. “I did not get very far at all before I was ordered to stop. Her body was moved.”
“Who ordered it moved? Chief Müller?”
Achterberg shook his head. “This goes higher than our chief.” He let out a shaky sigh. “The body was moved on orders of the justice minister.”
Franz Gürtner, he meant. The Bavarian minister of justice.
“So, there isn’t a postmortem report?”
“Oh, there’s a report.” Achterberg flipped his hands. “Would you like to see?” He angled past Bauer and pulled a document out of a basket. “Here,” he said. “Here is your report.”
Bauer looked it over quickly. He couldn’t believe what he was reading:
The fall forward to the floor caused a fracture in the nasal septum, resulting in antemortem edema and swelling.… The trajectory of the bullet’s path suggests self-infliction.… The stippling around the dress suggests a gunshot at close range.
By the time Bauer got to the conclusion, it was anticlimactic:
Cause of Death: Self-inflicted gunshot wound
Manner of Death: Suicide
Bauer shook the paper in his hand. “Do you agree with this, Elie?”
“Does it look like I agree with it?” Achterberg’s eyes were watering, his lips quivering.
Bauer checked the signature line. “You didn’t sign this.”
“I would not. No.” Achterberg shook his head.
Bauer put a hand on his shoulder. “Just tell me, no one else,” he whispered. “Do you think the broken nose came from the fall?”
Achterberg shuddered, as if shaking away a memory. “The angle of the break… it’s all wrong. No, she was struck.”
“And the swelling?” said Bauer. “That came before the gunshot?”
“That is almost… inescapable.” The old man spoke so softly that Bauer had to draw closer.
“What about the range? Close range, like the report said?”
Achterberg raised a wrinkled hand to his face. “Intermediate range. One meter, maybe one and a half, based on the stippling.”
Too far away to be self-inflicted, in other words.
“And the trajectory of the bullet?”
Achterberg looked up at Bauer, his eyes tearing up, his mouth twisted in a frown. “I could not examine the body conclusively. But judging from the entry wound, a downward trajectory is overwhelmingly likely. It is almost impossible to believe it was self-inflicted.”
Bauer nodded. “You never said a word of this to me, understand? If anyone asks, I came here, and you sent me away. That will be my story if asked. Okay?”
Achterberg wiped away a tear. “I am sorry I cannot be brave. I’m an old man.”
He was braver than he credited himself. He had refused to sign a bogus autopsy report and, in doing so, surely had endangered himself.
“You’re a good man, Elie.” Bauer placed the report back in its basket.
“Be careful, Tom,” Achterberg whispered. “Everyone will be watching you.”
Bauer left the same way he entered. As he walked out into the courtyard, closing the heavy door behind him, he felt the chill of the wind in a way he hadn’t earlier.