Children of Wrath Read Free Page A

through his waves of dark hair. What a holiday, not having the kids around. If only Heinz Winkelmann had more birthdays. Except for that damned party at four … and today half a workday … no escape.
    Vicki dropped the bananas. “What’s this?” She grabbed the newspaper out of his hands. TAINTED SAUSAGES! HUNDREDS SICKENED! Off went the flame under the Wurst . “Even during the war I never heard of such a thing.” She squinted intensely under her dark fringe of hair. “Infected meat—here in Berlin? With all the controls we have?”
    “Anything can happen in this world, sweetheart.” Willi calmly took the paper back. “Even with the best controls.” Another story had caught his eye, a smaller one at the bottom of the page. Apparently, the stock exchange in New York had had a bad day.

 
    Two
    They were tearing up the Alex—big-time. After two centuries of hodgepodge growth, order was being imposed on the jumble of streets that comprised the old commercial hub just east of the city center. Alexanderplatz, with all its hotels and grand department stores, famous restaurants and nightmarish traffic, was going to become an “architecturally coherent” square, with multilayers of unimpeded traffic and bright modern buildings. In the meantime, all was chaos. Jackhammers. Steam shovels. Pile drivers slamming relentlessly. Willi had to hold his ears. Pedestrians were being forced down narrow gangplanks onto convoluted courses that had them all but colliding with the convoluted courses forced on cyclists, cars, trucks. The path to paradise evidently ran through purgatory. Even on Saturday morning.
    When he reached the end of Königs Strasse, the air itself shook from pounding wrecking balls. The Grand Hotel, where his grandfather had his eightieth birthday party in 1911, was on its last legs. Already felled was Haus zum Hirschen, with its dining hall boasting ninety-nine deer heads. His cousin Kurt had his wedding dinner there. A storied yesterday was being hammered to dust for a drawing-board tomorrow. Pity the Police Presidium hadn’t been consigned to the hit list, Willi thought, making his way toward it through the swarms of early shoppers. Its menacing façade and sullen cupolas loomed over the whole southeast side of the Alex like a dead whale. Six floors, 605 rooms, third-largest building in Berlin after the royal palace and Reichstag, its real bloodred color barely discernible under decades of soot. As he reached the massive iron doors at Entrance Six, though, how grateful he felt to have made it here. Not many officers ever did. Even the best. Even after years of service.
    Riding the brass-caged elevator up, crushed with a dozen others trying to make the eight o’clock shift, Willi acknowledged he wasn’t the most likely candidate for the Berlin police. His parents, may they rest in peace, certainly never imagined it. A Jewish detective? Who ever heard of such a thing? For centuries Jews had stood on the wrong end of a billy club. But those days were gone, Willi was certain. And he truly loved his work. Believed in justice and the law. Which was very Jewish, as he understood it. Not that it made a huge difference.
    He certainly wasn’t ashamed of his ethnicity, but he hardly considered it the keystone of his identity. He enjoyed celebrating traditional holidays with the children: lighting candles at Hanukkah. The Passover seder, liberal as theirs were. He loved reading about the towering achievements of his people and its long trails of tears. But in everyday life in modern Berlin, being Jewish held little more significance to him than his wavy, dark hair, dark eyes, or his circumcised prick.
    The Homicide Commission was on the top floor. Willi’s desk was right up against a window. From his chair you could see half of the Alexanderplatz. When you stood, you could see the whole thing, the whole master plan being overlaid on it. The new subway station that would connect to the elevated station, under the