Hitler's Angel Read Free

the lights were on, making it feel like night indoors.
    The drops of blood grew into blots as he approached the end of the corridor. Another constable stood near the door, arms crossed, straining the shoulders of his greatcoat. He stared straight ahead as if the watercolour above the mahogany table fascinated him. Fritz glanced at the painting: buildings and stairways in old Vienna, done instone browns and greens. The precise lettering on the posters hanging from a gate suggested a young artist’s reluctance to use his imagination.
    The trail on the runner ended near the constable’s scuffed black boots. The blood went inward, through the door itself, into what appeared to be a bedroom.
    ‘Detective Inspector –’
    ‘Yes,’ the constable said. He was young, the neck strap from his helmet pushing up his chin. He smiled as if the movement hurt him. ‘You won’t like this.’
    Fritz didn’t like it. He hated that the Schupo knew him and he didn’t know them. It made him wonder how many people on the street recognised him from the stiff drawings of him the papers had printed when they covered his cases.
    He stepped inside, braced for the smell. Blood, sickly sweet and pungent, but not nearly as strong as he had expected. Old. A dead body had an odour all its own, but blood, blood was the scent of a newly minted crime scene.
    The blood trail led to a stain at the base of a dark blue fainting couch. He crouched. The stain was huge – almost three feet in width and two in length. The edges were dry, but when he pressed on the middle of the stain, blood welled, black and moist. Someone had died here. No one could lose this much blood and live.
    He stood. Curtains covered a single window next to a bed made with military precision. Flowers stood on the nightstands. A door adjoined this room with the one next to it, and in the space between the extra door and the wall stood another end table, this one older and made of cheapwood. Above it hung a formal photograph of Adolf Hitler, head of the NSDAP, the National Socialist German Worker’s Party. The man’s face was thinner than it appeared in person, but the camera had managed to capture the intensity of the eyes. Fritz turned away, hating this reminder that the political police would want a piece of this investigation.
    A dressing table stood beside the fainting couch. Perfume bottles crowded against a wavy mirror. A matching hairbrush and comb still had strands of dark brown hair clinging to them. In the centre of the dressing table, a fountain pen lay across a curling piece of paper. The chair was pushed back at an odd angle, making it appear as if whoever sat in it had been interrupted.
    Fritz turned to the constable. ‘Where’s the body?’
    The constable bit his lower lip. ‘Gone, sir.’
    ‘Gone?’
    ‘Yes, sir.’ Colour stained the constable’s cheeks. ‘It was gone when we arrived.’
    ‘And the gun?’
    ‘There was no gun, either, sir.’
    Fritz sucked in a mouthful of the heavy air, wishing for a cigarette. ‘All right, Constable. Bring me your sergeant.’
    ‘Yes, sir.’ The constable walked along the edge of the runner, careful to avoid the blood stains.
    Fritz rubbed a hand over his face. Now he knew why they had sent him, even though he was one case away from his rotation in Inspectorate A, the Homicide unit. No other detective on the force had the reputation he had for solving difficult crimes. The techniques he had used first inDemmelmayer had become standard in Munich, but they were his techniques – no one else on the force seemed to have the ability to see details and piece them together the way Fritz did.
    All he had been told was that a woman had been shot to death at 16 Prinzregentenplaz. The Chief Inspector had stared at Fritz with an urgency, an intensity, as if he had expected Fritz to gather information just from the address. Fritz had shrugged and said that he was always cautious about crimes committed in wealthy neighborhoods.
    He