St Kilda Blues (Charlie Berlin #3)(17)
SEVEN
The constable leaning on the barbecue looked up when Berlin and Roberts walked out onto the terrace. Roberts pointed a finger at him and then flicked his thumb sideways to indicate his presence wasn’t wanted. The constable put on his cap and walked past them back into the kitchen. The axe continued to flash up and down, the split wood tossed onto the ever-growing pile. Summer was coming and right now there was enough split wood stacked up to keep the living room fireplace and the outdoor barbecue blazing day and night until winter came back round again.
Berlin could hear the throb of a pump from the pool house, the chirruping of small birds in the trees and from a neighbouring backyard the sound of children playing. Life goes on. Life always goes on, he knew. Life was a bastard like that.
He watched the axeman, watched his awkward swing, and that disquieting feeling that he knew him from somewhere came back to him again.
‘Mr Scheiner, this is Detective Sergeant Berlin, the one I told you about.’
The axeman glanced over his right shoulder towards Roberts and Berlin. He turned back to the chopping block and placed another log on top before he spoke.
‘Your colleague there tells me you are good at your job, Detective Sergeant Berlin, good at finding people, and also that you have a teenage daughter.’
The man’s English was good though there was definitely a strong German accent. Berlin had plenty of experience of German-accented English.
‘I have a daughter, yes.’
The axe came down, hard. ‘So if you have a daughter you must know how I am feeling right now.’
Berlin hoped to God he never had to experience those feelings. ‘I’m going to do everything I can to find her, Mr Scheiner, that’s the best I can promise you.’
Another log went onto the block. ‘This wood comes from my farm, in the country, where I had planned we should spend the weekend. But this weekend my daughter wanted to go to yet another dance, to this Buddha’s Belly place and I find I can deny her nothing.’
‘You shouldn’t blame yourself.’
The axe came down harder this time. A piece of the split log flew across the patio, slamming hard into the brick barbecue. ‘Who should I blame then, tell me that?’
The flash of anger in Scheiner’s voice was understandable and Berlin didn’t respond to the question. He waited a moment before he spoke again.
‘Do I know you, Mr Scheiner? Have we met before?’
Scheiner glanced back over his right shoulder at Berlin again. ‘I don’t believe so, you do not seem familiar.’ He slammed the axe down into the chopping block and left it there. ‘And I believe, without false modesty, that I have a face you would not quickly forget.’ He turned around to face the two policemen.
Berlin started with the shoes as he always did. These were old, well worn but still in good nick and recently polished. The overalls were the same – worn but neat and clean. Scheiner was around his age or slightly younger, Berlin estimated. He was tall, fit, and his hair, though greying, was thick and glossy. He would have been a handsome man but for the scarring across the left side of his face.
The skin was a ghostly blue-white, puckered, leathery, running from a line just below his eye down to his chin and on to the part of his neck that was visible under the jacket collar. If the scarring continued down to his left arm and the left side of his body it would quite possibly explain the man’s awkward handling of the axe.
‘A Russian Flammenwerfer, Detective Sergeant Berlin, a flame-thrower. My steel helmet saved my head from the worst of the fire, though the others in my bunker were not so fortunate. I suppose I should consider myself lucky that this is the only injury I sustained over the course of the war.’
‘You were in the army, Mr. Scheiner?’
‘A Landser? No, I was not. Not until the end, at least.’
‘A Landser?’ It was Roberts who asked the question.
‘It means a foot soldier, Bob,’ Berlin said, ‘an infantryman. It’s like our word “digger”.’
Scheiner nodded. ‘Exactly so. I was in fact in the Luftwaffe, the air force. In a sane world I would have perhaps been in university or chasing pretty girls but instead I was an anti-aircraft gunner in Berlin, on the Flakturme Tiergarten, the Zoo flak tower.’
Berlin could see Roberts was confused. His old man had been an anti-aircraft gunner in the army.
‘Different way of doing things, Bob. Under the German military system anti-aircraft defence was the job of the German air force rather than the army. The Luftwaffe also guarded captured aircrew in joints called Stalag-Lufts, air force POW camps.’
‘Again exactly so, Detective Sergeant Berlin. However in the last days they issued me a worn-out rifle and a dozen cartridges to use against the Ivans and their artillery and their flame-throwers. The kindersoldaten, the Hitler Youth, took the anti-tank Panzerfausts to use against the Russian T-34s since they were still both young enough and stupid enough to believe the Fuhrer and his Reich were worth dying for.’
On the forced march out of Poland, Berlin’s POW column had passed half-finished bunkers and hastily dug foxholes manned by old men, some still in civilian clothes, and young boys – kindersoldaten, child soldiers. The older men looked tired and seemed resigned to what was coming but he still remembered the young ones, their terrified eyes partially hidden under too-big steel helmets meant for grown men. Berlin thought about young Peter’s war in a far-off place and then made the thought go away.