Children of Wrath Read Free Page B

new traffic island, which would distribute the flow from five major streets.
    “ Guten Morgen, Herr Sergeant-Detektiv.”
    Frau Garber, the unit secretary, had come around with her wooden cart. A slender, sexy grandma in her forties, she was one of the few people on the floor who didn’t give him a cold shoulder. More than two years after Willi’s promotion from Local 157 in Wilmersdorf, he remained the department pariah. In numerous ways, his colleagues had made it clear that was exactly how it was going to remain.
    Because of the dark hair and dark eyes and the circumcised prick.
    “Oh, Dr. Hoffnung called.” She poured from a steaming pot, smiling. “Says he’s ready whenever you are.” A cup came toward him the way he liked it, black with a touch of sugar. “New beans, from Brazil.”
    “Your coffee’s always best, Frau Garber.”
    “By now it’s quite permissible to call me Ruta, Herr Sergeant.”
    Hoffnung, the pathologist, was among the most competent specialists Willi’d come across at headquarters. Smart. Straightforward. Cool as a cucumber, normally. But this morning, Willi could see, the doctor was perturbed.
    “One of the more peculiar and, I’d even go so far as to say, heinous cases I’ve come across in twenty years.” Hoffnung stuck a black pipe in his mouth. Grunting, he yanked aside a bedsheet. Willi’s throat constricted. Laid out in a row on a stainless-steel counter were the burlap sack and multiple bone arrangements.
    “It’s no joy to report my initial assessment was correct.” The doctor’s pipe hung from his jaw, his eyes fixed darkly on the clean white remains. “These are boys’ bones, all right. Five boys in all. Ages approximately nine to fourteen. Impossible to determine an exact time of death. But”—he slipped on a pair of cotton gloves—“one telling detail.” Gently opening the ruined Bible, he used his pipe stem to point out a still-legible publication date. Berlin. 1929 . “This ‘burial,’ therefore”—he shrugged theoretically—“if that’s what the contents of the sack may be termed, took place within the last nine months.
    “The sack, as you can see, is manufactured by a firm called Schnitzler and Son. The burlap fibers still contain bits of animal feed. Probably for cattle, maybe goats, swine; I don’t know. I’m no farmer. This is what it looks like.” Hoffnung used a tweezer to pick up some grain for Willi’s inspection. But Willi was no farmer either.
    “What about that material binding these bones?”
    “Muscle, all right.” Hoffnung pulled a leather pouch from his lab coat. “But … not animal. That, I’m guessing”—he sighed, dipping his pipe in, carefully filling the bowl with tobacco—“is the same muscle once attached to those bones. Dried out. Hand spun. Woven almost like a thread. Whoever did this is quite a craftsman.”
    Willi felt a shiver of dread. Human muscle, rolled into thread?
    “There’s more.” Hoffnung anxiously rifled his pockets. “These bones, for lack of a better word”—he looked relieved to find his matches—“have been … cooked.”
    Willi’s throat closed. Like during the war, when the gas shells came.
    “I couldn’t find so much as a microscopic shred of tissue on them.” The orange flame trembled as the doctor lit his pipe. “And there’s only one way bones get that clean, Herr Sergeant-Detektiv.” Hoffnung’s eyes blackened as he puffed. “You would have to boil them.” His face disappeared behind a cloud of smoke. “For many hours.”
    *   *   *
    The pile driver below knocked beams into the soggy Berlin subsoil as if into Willi’s skull. From his desk, he could see to the open cut across the street where the underground station was beginning to take shape. Eventually, all the layers of traffic in Alexanderplatz would be so intricately organized that not one line would cross another on the same level. How much less complex could the mind of a person be who’d boil the