The computer system informed them that Dieter Waldemar had no children and had never registered as married. Both of his parents were long dead and his next-of-kin was a 38-year-old sister, Katrina, who lived in Kreuzberg and worked as a midwife. Metz was female, more experienced than Rossi, and Erlenbach had long since been banned from doing next-of-kin consultations, so she was driving over there to perform the deed. Erlenbach had taken the keys from the forensic evidence and he and Rossi were making the short drive to Storkower Straße to turn over his flat.
They drove in silence. Erlenbach switched the radio on and caught the tail-end of one of his favourite songs, A Whiter Shade of Pale by Procol Harum, before a news bulletin took over.
‘Police have confirmed the speculation that a body found in Tiergarten early this morning is that of the government minister Uwe Lindemann. A statement released by Kripos detectives said that they are treating the death as suspicious and appealing for anyone who was in the Tiergarten area between five and six this morning to come forward.’
Erlenbach switched it onto a classical music station by accident. At least it wasn’t the news.
‘Uwe Lindemann,’ Rossi said.
Erlenbach pretended to enjoy something written by a dead Austrian.
‘How do I know that name?’
‘He’s an MP,’ Erlenbach said, ‘CDU.’
‘In the news recently?’
‘He made those comments about the whole Martenplatz development thing. He said that the SPD councillors behind it were as bad as the Stasi. Used the word ‘cultural Marxist’ I think. It caused a political shitstorm.’
‘And now he’s dead in suspicious circumstances, spitting distance from the Reichstag!’ Rossi said, slapping the dashboard with an open palm. ‘What a case not to catch!’
Erlenbach slammed on the brakes and turned to him.
‘What have you stopped?’ Rossi said.
‘We’re here. This is Dieter Waldemar’s apartment block.’
Rossi opened his door.
‘Stay in the car.’
Rossi closed the door.
‘Why?’
‘You listen to me. You thank your fucking lucky stars that you’re not on that case. Cause Schroeder and his piece of tits are only going to cause themselves harm, understood?’
‘I don’t get it. Surely such a high-profile - ’
‘It’s all bullshit, ok? This time tomorrow, Schroeder and his cronies will have discovered that Lindemann strangled himself trying to have a stellar wank and then they’ll alienate half the people in this city when that gets made public. No-one gives a shit about junkies and pimps and wasters with bullets in their balls. Apart from us, that is. And that’s the way it’ll always be. Got that? It’s not like Italy where every politician is connected to the Mob.’
‘Fuck you!’ Rossi snapped, ‘I was born here in Berlin, so were my parents. Not everyone can have a name like Erlenbach, you know!’
‘That’s not what I - ’
Rossi opened the door and slammed it shut, heading for the apartment block at a good pace.
Erlenbach got out and followed.
‘You’ll need some keys!’ he yelled.
Erlenbach stood in Dieter Waldemar’s apartment and looked out of the window. The TV-Tower was the one recognisable landmark among the concrete. If the east of the city was a prison, as he’d decided at the murder scene, then that was the tallest watch-tower, with searchlights and rifle-toting guards and all the memories those brought back.
‘What do you need?’ Rossi asked.
‘Get your computer out and go through his finances,’ Erlenbach said. ‘There’s nothing in this apartment worth more than twenty euros.’
Rossi looked around and was forced to agree. No TV, every piece of furniture and clothing at least five years old. He got out his laptop and went to Waldemar’s kitchen, where a box of papers sat on the side. Erlenbach strolled through the place and tried a light-switch. Nothing happened. Nothing either with the gas on the hob and the water from the kitchen sink. All had been switched off. The cupboards were half-stocked with tinned value foodstuffs and five-litre plastic bottles filled with water from some other source.
‘No water, no power, but he’s just about allowed himself food to eat,’ Erlenbach said.
‘With what?’ Rossi said, ‘All of his cards have been cancelled. He has no savings, no cashflow, nothing. Zilch.’
‘Debts?’
‘He had about twelve thousand owed to a variety of banks. But he paid them back.’
‘All of them?’
‘Yes.’
The apartment was briefly filled with the sound of Rossi furiously tapping.
‘When?’ Erlenbach demanded.
‘All of them, three weeks ago. June 20th.’
‘Where does a man who can’t afford electricity source twelve thousand euros?’
Erlenbach sat down in Dieter Waldemar’s kitchen.
‘It wasn’t business,’ he continued, ‘Businessmen don’t shoot people in the balls. Even the less-sanguine types. Waldemar tried to rip someone off.’
Rossi was still looking through the money. Erlenbach thought of the landlord, the need to interview him, and his neighbours, and contact the utility companies to find out when he’d switched off. They had to track his cashflow over at least the past three months. Police work was just like riding a bike.
There was a knock at the door.
Rossi stood up.
‘Stay here,’ Erlenbach whispered. The front door opened directly into an open-plan reception area to which the kitchen was adjacent. Erlenbach stepped gingerly forward and opened the door.
The man was dressed in grey camouflage trousers and a worn, tattered black biker’s jacket. His ponytail and braided beard were competing for which could be the most tattered, and he had an ugly scar of his face. Cyrillic tattoos around his neck and down both arms. Erlenbach decided that this man was not Dieter Waldemar’s landlord.
‘Who the fuck are you?’ he demanded in staccato slavic syllables.
‘Friends of Dieter Waldemar,’ said Erlenbach.
‘Is he here?’
‘Not right now.’
‘Where the fuck is he, then?’
‘Somewhere else.’
The visitor took a heavy step into the apartment, cracking his knuckles.
‘I think you should tell me where.’
‘You seem very eager to see him,’ Erlenbach said, ‘Could I ask why?’
‘Hey, you fucking prick. Tell me where fucking Dieter is before I get really angry.’
Erlenbach took a step back and waved an arm through to the kitchen.
‘In there.’
The man stormed in and headed towards the kitchen. As he stepped past Erlenbach, his jacket rode up and revealed the glazed wooden handle of a revolver sticking out from his waistband.
‘Rossi, gun!’ Erlenbach shouted.
The visitor found himself ambushed in the kitchen, caught between Rossi, who drew his gun, and Erlenbach blocking the exit, one hand on his own service pistol.
‘Police!’ Rossi shouted, ‘Hands on your head!’
The visitor spat on the floor before folding his hands across his ponytail. Rossi stood up, pulled the arms down and handcuffed them together. With a gloved hand, he removed a silver, snub-nosed revolver from the visitor’s waistband and placed it on the kitchen table.
‘Let’s get this son of a bitch into the can and this to ballistics, then?’ Rossi said, putting his service pistol back into his holster.
Erlenbach reached down to his belt and pulled out his own pair of handcuffs, throwing them across to Rossi.
‘Not yet. Take him to the bathroom. Cuff one hand to the shower railing and the other to the door. And bring me back whatever’s in his pockets.’
Rossi looked at Erlenbach for a moment and then started pushing the visitor towards the bathroom. The man with the ponytail spat in his face and swore in a language that he didn’t understand.
Erlenbach went to the sink and held his face under the tap, wiping the spit off with his hand. He turned it, but nothing happened.
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake!’
He was sitting on Dieter Waldemar’s old sofa, having washed his face with stagnant bottled water, with the phone held to his ear.
‘Berlin-Central Forensics Lab.’
‘Has the evidence for the shooting at the building site been arrived yet.’
‘Umm, I think so. But it’s not been processed yet.’
‘I need you to - ’
‘I’m sorry, I don’t think we’ll process it until later today, maybe not even until tomorrow. We’re all incredibly busy, what with the Lindemann case and everything else.’
‘Do you vote CDU? FDP?’
‘Umm… I vote Green, usually.’
‘Then the murder of Uwe Lindemann really isn’t important to you, is it?’ Erlenbach said, ‘You might even stand a good chance in the by-election.’
‘Sorry, who is this?’
‘Erlenbach. I want one thing. I want you to find the shell casings from the shootings, measure them up, hold them against your charts and text me the calibre. That’ll take five minutes.’
‘Fine. You could have just asked.’
‘You could have just listened.’
Rossi sat at his computer, the ID card from the visitor’s wallet sitting on the table in front of him. He was searching the Berlin Kriminalpolizei’s recently-computerised record archives.
‘So Waldemar still had an internet connection, then?’
‘God, no!’ Rossi said, ‘He didn’t even have electricity.’
‘How are you connecting to the database then?’
Rossi tapped a small key protruding from the side of his laptop.
‘I’ve got a dongle.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘A dongle. It’s like a mobile internet key. We’ve all been issued one.’
‘I must have been on holiday,’ Erlenbach said drily.
‘Anyway,’ Rossi said, ‘His name is Pavel Kvitovich. He’s age forty-two, born in Brno, Czech Republic, been living in Berlin for fifteen years. Did a six-year stretch in Mannheim for GBH and has a long rap sheet for other offences, mostly assault and weapons charges. Spent time in prison in Russia as well, a ten-year stretch for drugs.’
‘Vice and Organised have anything on him?’
‘He’s linked with a number of criminal organisations. At the moment he’s an enforcer with an eastern outfit based around Ostkreuz. Smuggling, drugs, guns, whores, all the usual stuff.’
‘Drugs,’ said Erlenbach.
Rossi looked up at him.
‘If you want to be the next big name in Kripos, you’d better start learning that what one doesn’t find at a crime scene or a victim’s house is of equal import to what one does find.’
‘There aren’t any drugs here,’ Rossi said, ‘But I thought you said he was a junkie?’
‘Lembke told me he was a junkie,’ Erlenbach said, ‘I guess he’s not around to defend himself now.’
Rossi stood up and pointed at the screen.
‘Kvitovich form, and he was armed. He could easily be our shooter! We’ve got to take him in!’
‘He’s not the guy,’ Erlenbach said.
Rossi pointed to the gun lying on the table.
‘Let’s get that to ballistics,’ he said, ‘Fifty euros says that’s been recently fired.’
Erlenbach sat down at the table and put on a pair of evidence gloves. He lifted the revolver in both hands and pulled the charging pin, exposing the chamber. Carefully, he removed all five rounds from the cylinder and stood them on end, in a neat row on the edge of the table. He examined the gun for markings and read them out.
‘Smith & Wesson Model 60,’ he said. ‘Google it.’
Rossi did so.
‘What calibre?’ Erlenbach barked.
‘Thirty-eight special.’
Erlenbach reached into the small toolkit he kept on his belt and disassembled the revolver’s breech, pulling out the firing pin and throwing it into Dieter Waldemar’s sink, before reconstructing the assembly, and loading all five of the rounds back into the revolver.
‘Do you know what you’re doing?’ Rossi asked.
Erlenbach levelled the gun at him, cocked the hammer and pulled the trigger. Rossi jumped a foot in the air. Nothing happened.
‘Bloody hell!’ Rossi said, ‘Are you mad? That might be the murder weapon!’
‘It’s not.’
Erlenbach’s phone buzzed. He inspected the SMS and nodded.
‘The bullets that killed Waldemar were nine-millimetre,’ he said. ‘Soviet ammunition. Kvitovich isn’t our shooter.’
‘How did you know?’ Rossi said.
‘Because if you shoot someone for not paying their debts, you don’t turn up at their house the next morning trying to find them.’
Rossi nodded.
‘We still need to take him in. He doesn’t have a permit for that handgun.’
‘Even better,’ Erlenbach said, heading towards the bathroom.
‘What?’
Erlenbach stopped and picked up the gun from the table.
‘At the moment,’ he said, ‘You see that as an illegal weapon. A firearm. A blight on the city’s streets. Five years in this job, and you’ll look at it and see what I do.’
He smiled. It was the first time he’d smiled at work in a long time.
‘Leverage.’
Pavel Kvitovich was anchored to the one wooden chair in Dieter Waldemar’s living room, if it could be called that. Erlenbach thought that “living room” was probably an overstatement. “Existing room” might be a better word.
‘Mr. Kvitovich,’ he said, standing in front of him, doing his best impression of a schoolmaster scolding an errant child. ‘You were found in possession of an illegal firearm. Do you deny this?’
A Czech obscenity.
‘German, please, Pavel. Don’t make this harder than it has to be.’
Kvitovich waited for about a minute. Then Erlenbach turned to leave the room and he started speaking.
‘I have a permit for it!’
Erlenbach turned around.
‘No you don’t. The licensing authority doesn’t grant permits to convicted criminals. People like you can’t be trusted.’
‘It’s not mine! I was carrying it for someone else!’
‘It’s still illegal,’ said Rossi. He was leaning against the back wall of the room, one hand on the curtain rail. ‘You’ll go down for it. Another three years at least.’
Kvitovich swore and spat again.
‘So here’s what we do,’ Erlenbach said. ‘You tell us everything we want to know and that little gun disappears. Falls down a drain on our way back to the car. Incorrectly processed in the evidence room. Or, you can stay silent and get fucked in the arse for the next three years.’
The movement was almost imperceptible: a little flicker of the chin. The man’s eyes betrayed his resignation though, even if he was reluctant to actually nod.
‘Who do you work for?’
‘Marek Nedvyed.’
‘Czech?’
‘Second-generation. He’s German.’
Rossi was making notes in his ever-present notebook, his pen scratching furiously.
‘And what do you do for Mr. Nedvyed?’ Erlenbach said.
‘I’m a financial advisor,’ Kvitovich replied with a slightly smug grin. The subtext was clear, and he obviously enjoyed the euphemism. He advised Mr. Nedvyed’s clients to return their loans, using the incentive of a brass knuckleduster and a snub-nosed revolver.
‘Is Dieter Waldemar one of your clients?’ Rossi said.
Present tense, Erlenbach thought. Impressive.
‘Yes.’
‘How much does he owe Mr. Nedvyed?’ Erlenbach said.
‘Twenty thousand euro?’
Rossi briefly stopped his note-taking, looked up and gave a low whistle.
‘Twenty thousand?’
This nod so small a frame-by-frame camera would have been needed to confirm it.
‘With interest?’
‘He borrowed fifteen thousand in May. With interest it’s twenty.’
Erlenbach was annoyed with himself, terrified that he was getting rusty. He had been quick to rule out Kvitovich as the killer, but that had been before he had known that he worked for a man whom Dieter Waldemar had owed twenty thousand euros. The elimination had been based on just two pieces of information - the gun being of a different calibre to the one which killed Waldemar, and the suspect’s arrival at the flat. But men like Kvitovich could have access to several guns, and it would have been wise to dispose of the murder weapon. Likewise, the latter could be explained as one of those examples of stupid behaviour to which criminals were often prone.
‘What collateral did Mr. Waldemar provide?’ Rossi asked.
‘His life,’ Kvitovich said. Erlenbach thought he had misheard.
‘His life? But how would you collect the money from him dead?’
Kvitovich shook his head.
‘Not his life. His liver. And his kidneys and heart and lungs. Mr. Nedvyed has many friends, some in Russia, some in Poland, some here in Germany. Friends as far away as Hong Kong. White men in decent health, like our friend Dieter, can provide with one good body maybe seventy thousand, maybe more.’
Rossi looked like he was about to be sick. Erlenbach looked down at Kvitovich. Waldemar had not had any of his organs removed. Sickening as it was, Erlenbach’s intuition told him that the Czech was telling the truth.
‘Let me tell you something, Pavel,’ he said. It was his final shot, like playing a card in rummy to see if your opponent would pick it up. Kvitovich looked up.
‘We found Dieter Waldemar dead this morning. He had been shot.’
Erlenbach watched his suspect’s eyes. They were filled with surprise.
‘And then you turn up with a gun at his apartment. A Smith & Wesson revolver. The same type of gun that killed Waldemar.’
‘Fuck off,’ Kvitovich said, ‘Some guy up in Oranienburg’s got a whole crate of them in his cellar.
‘You didn’t kill Dieter Waldemar?’
‘No.’
Rossi cut in: ‘Where were you last night between six and twelve?’
‘Working.’
‘Financial advice?’
‘As security for a nightclub, outside Alexanderplatz. You can call my boss.’
Erlenbach was relieved that he was right. Kvitovich was not their shooter. What had looked like a promising lead had disappeared as quickly as it had emerged. He thought for a while. About whether, should the time come to collect a client’s collateral, Pavel Kvitovich would remove the organs with the client alive or dead. Maybe it wouldn’t be him, maybe it was some sick doctor who was willing to do that. He doubted it. It was probably a man like Kvitovich, a butcher who took it out and passed it to a doctor who didn’t ask questions and thought just about their patient on a waiting list with a week to live.
He wondered if the Vice & Organised Crime Squad knew about Mr. Nedvyed’s activities. If not, an investigation would have to be immediately started.
‘So what other financial advice did you give Mr. Waldemar?’ Rossi asked.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘What was the nature of his debt?’ Rossi persisted. ‘Drugs? Horses? Business ventures?’
‘Oh, he was a gambler alright. But not horses. Stocks, shares, the things you read about in the back pages of the large newspapers with the small print. He cooked up hair-brained schemes where he bet on the stock market, based on these bizarre inspirations he’d get. Once he read that the Weather Office were predicting a cold winter so he bought up stocks of snow shovels.’
‘And that was bad enough to land him twenty thousand euros in debt?’ said Erlenbach.
‘Not twenty thousand,’ Kvitovich said, ‘Closer to sixty.’
Rossi gasped, his mouth wide open. Erlenbach smiled, the pieces all falling into place.
‘You didn’t come here to kill Dieter Waldemar,’ he said, walking forwards and lighting a cigarette. ‘Not here, anyway. You were going to bring him to Mr. Nedvyed, where I have no doubt an amateur surgeon is on-call. You knew full well that you would never get your money back.’
Kvitovich said nothing. Erlenbach was sitting by the side of the lake, the catfish biting on the end of his rod. He pulled in the reel.
‘Who else had Waldemar been borrowing money from?’
‘The Turkish outfit. Some guy in Schöneberg. Look in your records under ‘L’ for loan shark.’
‘When and how did you find out?’
Kvitovich sighed and folded his arms. Erlenbach picked up the evidence bag holding the gun and waved it with his free hand.
‘A few days ago. Friday.’
‘How?’
‘Other financial advisers. We have informal business meetings, you know, the usual stuff. We talk shit and drink beer, and I heard my friend telling some joke about this loser who bought stocks of snow shovels because he heard we were having a bad winter. I asked him how he’d heard that, then I got put in touch with the competition in Schöneberg. He said Waldemar owed their organisation something like fifteen or so.’
‘You said sixty earlier,’ said Rossi.
Kvitovich nodded. ‘We’d rustled Waldemar’s game so we went looking. Asked around and found the Turkish guys. The other twenty-five went to them. They’ve got a similar system to us. If you don’t pay them back then they ship you back to the homeland and you do a year of forced manual labour for every thousand you owe them.’
‘So,’ Erlenbach surmised, ‘You were here to collect collateral. But another financial advisor with a less imaginative employer than our dear friend Mr. Nedvyed beat you to it.’
Rossi nodded emphatically in agreement.
Kvitovich asked, ‘Can I have my gun back now?’
‘Your gun is going straight to an evidence locker at Kripos HQ,’ Erlenbach said. ‘Then you’re having a meeting with our Vice & Organised Crime Squad and telling them everything about Mr. Nedvyed and his organ-donor scheme.’
‘Oh, suck my cock!’ Kvitovich shouted, launching into another Czech rant and spitting all over the floor.
‘Call uniform to come take him in,’ Erlenbach said, ‘He’s not messing up my car.’
