White Rose Black Forest(72)

It was just after two in the afternoon when the phone rang. Vogel pushed aside the paperwork threatening to overwhelm his desk and reached for the receiver. It felt cold against his ear. It had taken him some time to grow accustomed to the greeting he used all the time now.

“Heil Hitler.”

“Herr Vogel, this is Frau Berkel.” It wasn’t difficult to detect the anguish in her voice. “Do you know where my husband is? He never came home from work last night, or this morning. I’ve known him to stay out before, but never this late. I’ve called and called his desk, but no answer.”

Vogel promised to find Berkel and hung up. He had no wish to speak to Berkel’s wife, particularly when she was in a mood like this. His own wife was annoyance enough. He stood up for the first time in several hours, his joints cracking as he straightened himself. Berkel’s office was next to his. The door was shut. He let himself inside and found it empty. Berkel’s desk was in a similar state to his own, but he kept his appointments written in a leather-bound planner. He found it in seconds, leafing through the pages until he found the entry for the day before. Berkel was meticulous in every part of his job, and sure enough, the address of the cabin was scrawled in the space for the previous evening.

“You went to see Franka Gerber, did you?” Vogel said out loud. “Berkel, you old dog.” He placed the planner back down among the clutter on the desk, determining to wait an hour before investigating any further.

Berkel’s wife called again fifteen minutes later. Vogel didn’t have quite the same ease in getting her off his ear this time and had to promise he would look into her husband’s disappearance immediately. He didn’t inform her that Berkel had gone seeking out his attractive ex-girlfriend from his teenage years. With no phone number in Franka’s file and only an address, Vogel had little choice. He made his way out to the car, wondering if Berkel was going to leave his wife. There were ways and means of doing these things, and dragging his partner into his love life wasn’t one of them. Despite the niggling thought in the back of his mind about the crutches Franka had acquired, Vogel spent much of the drive up to the mountains cursing his colleague’s inability to keep his pants tethered.

It was past four o’clock when Vogel arrived at the cabin. He swore out loud as he got out of the car, knowing that he’d have to drive back in the dark. The cabin seemed deserted, but the footprints and tire tracks in the snow revealed something else. Someone had been here. He kept his eyes trained on the ground and noticed at least two different tracks. Several people had been here, and probably two or more cars. There were no lights on in the cabin, and only silence in the air. No phone calls, no wife nagging, no suspects crying under torture. This peace was something to savor. He’d not felt this alone in years. He rapped on the door once and then again. No answer. It was locked. He moved around to a small window and peered into a bedroom that was almost clean enough to suggest no one had slept there recently, but the bedclothes were creased, and the candle-wax stains on the bedside table were fresh. He went back to the front door and kicked it in. It clattered open on the third try. He was proud that at almost fifty he still had it in him.

The cuckoo clock in the hall greeted him with incessant ticking, and he called out, knowing that no answer would come. He tramped down the hallway into the living room and saw a clean patch on the floor, clearly distinguishable from the rest of the wooden boards. He reached down to touch it with the tips of his fingers and felt the smooth surface.

After getting up from his haunches, Vogel lit an oil lamp in the corner. He ducked his head into the kitchen. It was spotless, but the ashes in the stove were fresh, not more than a day or two old. Vogel emerged from the kitchen into the living room and studied the bare walls. It took him about five minutes of scanning the room before he saw the tiny hole in the back wall. He put a finger over it and felt the hole where a bullet had gone through. This bullet hole was already enough to go back to the Gestapo with, but he knew there was more, and he continued his search. Whoever had been here had left in a hurry. They’d done well in covering their tracks, but there was always something they overlooked, no matter how meticulous they thought they were.

Vogel went into the main bedroom, going through the closets, looking under the bed, finding nothing apart from some old clothes hanging in the wardrobe and some ladies’ essentials. He went to the other bedroom. The closet opened with a bang, and he rummaged through old clothes for both sexes, coming up with little. He spent another five minutes rifling through the dresser and bedside table, before sitting on the bed to gather his thoughts. The bedsprings creaked under his considerable weight, and then he felt the breeze, the tiniest lick of cold air on the skin above his socks where the fabric of his pants didn’t cover. He peered at the floor and noticed a gap between the floorboards. He stood up and pushed back the bed, revealing the full length of the floorboards. He went to the kitchen for a knife to pry them up, and soon afterward found himself staring into the bloodied, dead eyes of Daniel Berkel.

Karoline Biedermann considered herself a good person, a caring neighbor. At first, it was a sense of duty that brought her to the old man’s house, but in time, she developed a genuine affection for Hermann and even looked forward to seeing him on her regular visits. Her husband preferred to sit at home, reading the newspaper or listening to the radio between sips of homemade schnapps. Her sons had given their lives for the Reich, and her daughters had long since gone, one married to a civil servant in Bremen, the other engaged to an army captain in Freiburg, so it felt good to have someone to look after. She visited Hermann most days of the week and made his dinner as he sat recounting stories of better times. His political views were verging on liberal—a dirty word in today’s society, but she paid them little mind. Old men were entitled to their ramblings. They had earned that much.