Babylon Berlin Read Free Page A

With a single leap he cleared the banister and jumped down nearly half a floor. He continued with a crash, footsteps descending in jerky staccato.
    Rath took up the chase instinctively, no time to tell his colleagues. It was so dark in the stairwell that he could scarcely make out the stairs. He stumbled more than he ran, but finally reached the ground floor. The daylight was blinding and he almost tripped over an officer who was picking himself up from the floor.
    ‘Where is he?’ Rath asked, and the young policeman, who only moments before had been cracking jokes about copulating Kaisers, gazed apologetically in the direction of Hermannstrasse.
    ‘I’ll deal with the fugitive. You call it in,’ Rath yelled, bounding through the archway towards Hermannstrasse. It had stopped raining, and the pavement was glistening. Outside the tenement he saw the Black Maria, but where was Wilhelm II? There were building materials everywhere along the street, half on the pavement and half on the road: a mixture of beams, steel girders and pipes that pedestrians and cars were forced to make their way past, all set aside for the construction of the underground under Hermannstrasse. In the meantime the driver of the prison van emerged to give Rath a sign. Cursing, he clambered over a pile of wooden planks and spotted the porn Kaiser ducking and weaving down Hermannstrasse towards the square, his braces still hanging loose.
    ‘Police, stay where you are!’ Rath shouted, but his cry had the effect of a starting pistol on Wilhelm II. The Kaiser shot across the road and onto the pavement, effing and blinding as he careered past a handful of pedestrians.
    ‘Stop that man,’ cried Rath. ‘This is a police operation!’ Not one of them reacted.
    ‘Save your breath,’ he heard a familiar voice say from behind. ‘People around here don’t help cops.’ Wolter tapped him on the shoulder. ‘Now run,’ said Uncle, and sprinted ahead. ‘Together we can catch this rat.’
    Rath was astonished at the speed with which the sturdy Wolter made his way down the slope at Hermannstrasse. Despite his colleague’s extra bodyweight, Rath could scarcely keep pace. It wasn’t until they had reached Hermannplatz that he finally caught up.
    ‘Can you see him?’ Rath panted. A stitch in his side forced him to lean against a streetlamp. Only then did he notice he was still holding his hat in his hand. He returned it to its rightful place on his head. Wolter signalled with a nod towards Hermannplatz.
    The colossal shell of the Karstadt building towered above them. It was hoped the new department store would lend a touch of New York to provincial Hermannplatz. The official opening was planned for the summer, but for now all that could be seen was an enormous scaffolding, flanked by freight elevators and cranes. The two towers, on the north and south sides, reached sixty metres into the sky. Wilhelm II was racing towards the southern corner, moving diagonally across the intersection past a series of hooting cars, and only narrowly avoiding the number 29 tram as it made its way up Hermannstrasse, waiting until the last moment to execute a full-length dive across the path of the squealing brute before disappearing from the officers’ view. They had no choice but to wait until the train rumbled past, and with that they lost sight of their man.
    Across the intersection they surveyed the square.
    ‘He couldn’t have made it down to the underground,’ Wolter said. ‘There wouldn’t have been time.’
    ‘But there would’ve been time for that ,’ Rath said, pointing towards the construction fence, a hoarding plastered with posters and measuring several metres in height.
    They approached together, searching for somewhere he might have clambered over. Someone had painted Exercise your rights and march on May 1st in red across the hoarding, ruining several advertisements in the process.
    Rath looked at Wolter but he must have seen it in the same instant.