Five Past Midnight - James Thayer [95]
Peter Hilfinger demanded, "What are you doing here?" Berlin police detectives could spot a Gestapo agent as readily as blood on snow.
Koder grinned, a malevolent crease that split in half his narrow head. "Detective Dietrich, you were a little too clever, shaking our car outside the medical examiner's office. So General Müller has ordered me to assist you."
"To watch me," Dietrich corrected.
Koder pursed his lips. "Your organization and mine have different methods, to be sure. We in the Staatspolizei are a bit more"—he hesitated, apparently searching for the precise word—"direct. But I can be of help in your search." He added pleasantly, "While I watch you."
Dietrich stared at his tormentor. Then he reached into his coat pocket, pulled out Himmler's letter, and held it up so Koder could read it. "Now go away"
"That's truly impressive. I wish I had a letter like that." The Gestapo agent shook his head with transparent sadness. "But I report to General Müller, and can't take orders from anyone but him."
Koder lowered himself to a captain's chair below a bulletin board. To his right was a floor-to-ceiling map of Berlin, with colored pins stuck here and there. A row of lockers lined the north wall. Three other detectives were at their desks in the room. Somewhere nearby the telephone poles were down, so lines had been jury-rigged through a window near Dietrich's desk. A wadded coat had been plugged into the gap around the phone lines. Because the office had no heat, the detectives were wearing overcoats. Around Hilfinger's neck was a blue scarf his mother had knitted.
"I'll ask again, Inspector," Koder said. "What else do you know?"
Peter Hilfinger's face had gained the pink hue of anger. He had learned his craft from Dietrich and revered the man. Like all detectives in the room, Hilfinger knew the circumstances of Dietrich's disappearance into the Gestapo dungeon. And here was one of the devils, in their own midst, bullying the great man. Hilfinger's hand slid toward the lead-filled sap in his coat pocket as he sidled toward the agent. A look from Dietrich froze him.
"I've learned nothing else," Dietrich answered.
"And is that why, even though a barbarous killer is roaming the city, you and your boys are sitting here, rather than out on the streets looking for him?"
Reassured that Koder had not arrived to escort him back to Lehrterstrasse Prison, a modicum of courage returned to Dietrich. "Koder, how many reliable people do you have reporting to you on, say, the Schiffbauerdamm?"
This street, near the Spree, was where Berlin shipwrights had lived and worked during the reigns of the Great Elector and Frederick the Great.
Koder studied Dietrich, perhaps wondering how he was being asked to incriminate himself. "Three or four."
"Three or four in the entire neighborhood." Dietrich glanced at Hilfinger. This lesson was for him and Haushofer and the others. Rudolf Koder was beyond lessons. "In the summer of 1941, I arrested Gotthard Henneberg, a house painter who had murdered three young women on the street over the prior twelve months. Henneberg was convicted of the murders and executed."
"Is there a point to this nice little story?"
"The neighborhood was relieved and grateful, and now I have two hundred people on the Schiffbauerdamm who report to this office the slightest of peculiar circumstances. You rely on fear. I rely on respect."
"Jack Cray is still out there," Koder said flatly.
"But he can't evade me long. Not in Berlin. I have thousands and thousands of pairs of eyes looking for him."
When the telephone sounded, Dietrich lifted the handset to his ear. "This is Dietrich... Yes, I remember you, Captain."
The detective grabbed for a pencil and rose from his chair as he dashed off notes on the back of an envelope. "Von Tornitz ? I don't know that name..,. His widow? Are you sure?"
Dietrich dipped his chin at Peter Hilfinger, who picked up an extension to listen in.
"And