Текст книги "Rosa"

Автор книги: Jonathan Rabb

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“Someone’s been taking care of her,” he finally said. He let the hem fall back. “Flip her over,” he said as he stood.

Fichte peered up at him. There was a momentary plea in the boy’s eyes, as if to say, They told us we were off this today. Then, with a conscious resolve, Fichte reached under her shoulders and slowly pulled her over.

“Oh God” was all he could get out.

FROM THE LANDWEHR CANAL

Police headquarters were a disaster.

Hoffner hopped out of the ambulance and motioned for the medic to continue driving through the main gate, or at least what was left of it. For a place he had been coming to six days a week for the past eighteen years, it was almost unrecognizable. The once-imposing line of redbrick archways looked ashamed of itself. Four days removed from the final assault, and the crumbling masonry-chalk-white-was doing little to hide the naked slats of wood that pockmarked the faade. Worse were the iron gates that skulked behind, all at wild angles, bent like spoons for a child’s amusement. And along the lower floors, turreted windows peered out blindly from empty sockets, shards of broken glass still clinging to their disfigured panes. Such was the crowning achievement of Alexanderplatz in the wake of revolution.

A trio of soldiers stood lazily by the gate, guns resting on the ground, their collars pulled up tight to fight back the chill. Each sucked on a cigarette, though the tobacco-where they had managed to scavenge that was anybody’s guess-was clearly too harsh for their young lungs. For a fleeting moment Hoffner thought of his own boys, younger still. He would have to teach them how to smoke properly one of these days. None of the soldiers took even a moment’s notice as the ambulance moved past them.

Hoffner had lost track of the different uniforms now strewn about the city-Guard Fusiliers Regiment, Republikanische Soldatenwehr,Section Fourteen of the Auxiliary, so forth and so on-the names and insignia all melding into one another. The majors and colonels who had once led them no longer seemed to matter. These were simply boys with guns in a once-civilized city.

The trouble had all begun quite innocently some ten weeks ago, when the sailors and stokers in Kiel had decided that they, like the great General Ludendorf, had had enough. Ludendorf had fled to Sweden at the end of October. They, unwilling to suffer through another humiliation at the hands of the British, had simply left their ships. On the fourth of November-in a moment of genuine socialist spontaneity-they formed a Workers’ and Sailors’ Council and took their defiance beyond the naval base to the city hall. Naturally, soldiers were sent in to suppress the uprising, but when the boys arrived-for they were mostly boys, after all-they discovered that it was not a wild mob that they had come to destroy, but a group of the dedicated proletariat. And so the soldiers joined them, and the word spread: Munich, Bremen, Hamburg, Dresden, Stuttgart. By the time the Kaiser declared the armistice on the eleventh, Germany was already comfortably ensconced in revolution.

Berlin, of course, was not one to miss out. On the ninth, Karl Liebknecht-son of the late socialist leader Wilhelm, and himself a recent political guest of Luckau prison-took to the streets with a legion of striking workers behind him. They marched under the banner of Spartakus-the new communist party-and declared the birth of the Free Socialist Republic from the balcony of the Royal Palace. Within days, Rosa Luxemburg was with them. She had spent the better part of four years in Breslau prison, her virtual isolation having done nothing to shake her devotion to the cause. There had been rumors-bouts of hysteria, the possibility that little Rosa had slipped off into madness while caged at the far reaches of the Empire-but she showed none of it on her return to Berlin. She had come to take the revolution as far left as humanly possible, and it was there that the real difficulties had begun.

Had the revolutionaries been of one mind, thousands of innocents might have been spared the fighting. But the revolutionaries were socialists: Karl and Rosa wanted the genuine article, workers of the world rising as one, the death of capitalism, so forth and so on; Chancellor Ebert and his Social Democrats-terrified of a Soviet-style putsch-wanted a National Assembly, elections, and perhaps even a bit of help from various capitalist concerns so as to get the country up and running again. They might have called themselves socialists, but they were a peculiar breed willing to bring back the monarchy-in name only-in the hopes of restoring order. And then there were the sailors-the People’s Naval Division-just back from the front, leftists through and through, so long as they got their pay.

Revolution, however, matters only when the soldiers decide to take sides. In early December Prince Max von Baden and the General Staff chose Ebert, and while there were brief moments of hope for Spartakus after that-Christmas Day on the Schloss Bridge, cannons at the ready, hundreds of armed civilians forcing the government troops into retreat; January sixth, thousands more marching along the broad Siegesallee toward the War Ministry-they were only moments. Karl and Rosa made speeches and printed articles and convoked meetings, but in the end they were left to live on the run and on borrowed time. Troops had been spilling in from the front like so much dirty scrub water since late November. They were hungry for a fight, and needed someone to blame for their recent defeat. Who better than the Soviet-styled Spartakus? Oddly enough, it was Police President Emil Eichorn who was the one to give Ebert his opportunity to mop everything up. Eichorn’s allegiance to the Spartakus movement had never been much of a secret. The new government could ill afford that kind of official opposition, and so, on the eleventh of January, it was Eichorn’s politics that ultimately turned the police buildings on Alexanderplatz into the last battleground of the revolution. Refusing to leave his desk after receiving his dismissal papers-and with a group of Spartacists on hand to defend him-Eichorn gave Ebert no choice but to send in a battalion. It was only yesterday morning that the morgue had removed the last of the corpses.

The men of the Kripo had been elsewhere on the fateful day: they had known what was coming and had left Eichorn alone with his revolutionaries. Even so, there was still bad blood between the government soldiers and the men of police headquarters. It was why Hoffner now chose not to meet them head-on.

He sidestepped his way through several clumps of fallen brick and, turning right with the building, headed down Alexanderstrasse. Hoffner pulled open the outer gate and then made his way to the third door down. The building had lost power on the twelfth, the corridors once again lit by gas lamps. Hoffner followed his shadow to the back stairwell and headed up.

It was on the third floor that he finally ran across another human being. As it turned out, first contact came in the form of Ludwig Groener, distant nephew or cousin or something of the great General Wilhelm Groener, who had played so pivotal a role in December by placing the army in Ebert’s hands. Unlike his epic forebear, however, Groener the lesser marched to the rear, still a detective sergeant at fifty-one, with fewer and fewer cases coming his way. He had become quite proficient with paperwork, and now rarely left the building. Not that he was unpleasant, or embittered by his place in the grand scheme: he was, but that wasn’t the problem. Groener simply had the most notoriously foul breath. It seemed almost inconceivable that such a small man could produce so overwhelming a stench. Hoffner kept to his side of the hall as they passed.

“I hear you’ve found another one.” Groener’s voice trailed after him.

Hoffner stopped and turned around. Groener had gotten the hint over the years: he kept at a healthy distance during these conversations. “Really?” said Hoffner. “And who’d you hear that from?”

“The KD wants to see you.”

“The KD? Dropping off some files, were you, Groener? Overheard a little something?”

Groener ignored the comment. “He’s waiting in his office.”

Hoffner turned and headed down the corridor. “Then it’s lucky I ran into you,” he said over his shoulder. “Otherwise I would have been completely at a loss.”

The men of the Kripo-known within police circles as Department IV-worked entirely out of the third floor, all four sides around the great courtyard given over to their offices, examination rooms, and archives. Hoffner’s office was along the back of the building, tucked safely away within the one spot that had managed to avoid the two-day battle for headquarters.

Stepping into the cramped space now, it was as if the first weeks of January had never taken place at all. Everything was as it had been, as it would be: open files littered the desk; bound casebooks, along with assorted editions of statutes and codes, stood in high columns along the bookshelves that ran the length of the far wall; two plaster casts of battered human skulls-evidence for upcoming court appearances-nestled between a stack of newspapers and two odd volumes of Brockhaus’s Konversations-Lexikon,for some reason Hoffner having taken a specific liking to the encyclopedia’s Eand Sinstallments; and, rounding it all out, a cup of something stale and cold-coffee was his best guess, but the color was wrong-sat at the center of his desk. Hoffner would have loved to have blamed his office on the revolution; he just couldn’t.

The one piece of perfect coherence in the room stretched the length of the wall across from his desk. It was a map of Berlin, clean, crisp, its few markings penned in a surprisingly neat hand. This was a custom with Hoffner: a new map for each new case. In that way he could allow the city to assert herself, fresh each time, her moods invariably the single most important clues to any crime. Each district had its own temper, a personality. It was simply his task to watch for the variations, find what did not belong, and allow those idiosyncrasies to guide him. Berlin called for deviation, not patterning. It was something so few in the Kripo understood. To his credit, young Hans Fichte was slowly not becoming one of them.

Hoffner stood in the doorway, as yet unable to see the incongruity in the four pins sticking out from the map: the Mnz Strasse roadwork, the sewer entrance at Oranienburger Strasse, the Prenzlauer underpass, and the grotto off Blowplatz. And now another in the Rosenthaler Platz station. There was something odd to that one-as he had known there would be-the feel of it forced as he drove the pin through the paper. He stared at it for nearly a minute before moving to the desk.

The place was still an icebox as he pulled his notebook from his pocket: someone had promised a delivery of coal by the end of the week, but Hoffner knew better. Picking up the cup on his desk, he sniffed at the contents and then took a sip: something to mask the brandy. With a wince, he swallowed and headed for the corridor.

The KD was behind his desk and on the phone when Hoffner pulled up and knocked at the open door. KriminaldirektorEdmund Prager looked up and motioned Hoffner inside. Like his own appearance, Prager kept his large office sparse: a long wooden desk-phone, blotter, and lamp-with two filing cabinets at either end, and nothing more. More striking, though, was the absence of anything that might have indicated that a battle had been fought on these floors in the last week. Whatever remnants might still be in piles of debris around the rest of the offices, here there were none. Prager had insisted on it. If the revolution was over, it was over. He had no desire to be reminded of it.

Hoffner watched as Prager continued to nod into the receiver, an occasional “Yes, yes, of course,” or “Quite right,” poking its way into the conversation. Another half-minute and Prager again motioned to Hoffner. Not knowing what to do, Hoffner moved over to the window and gazed out, his eyes wandering across the wreckage in the square below.

Willingly or not, Hoffner now saw the Alex as if through a sheet of fine gauze, all of it familiar, real, yet profoundly not. In a single moment it had changed forever. Whether over hours, days, weeks, Hoffner had discovered that, in revolution, the passage of time is instantaneous, the reality of the sequence irrelevant and irrevocable: perspective made the sensation only more acute. He had felt something similar to this once before, the same distortion, the same jarring disbelief. Then, he had not thought himself capable of striking Martha-he wasn’t-and yet, in that one infinite moment, he had sent her to the ground, his oldest boy watching in horror, the reality of it now lost, only its shame lived over and over: one moment, all as it was, as it had been; the next, fine gauze, and with it a sense of helplessness so deep as to make it almost illusory.

“She has the same markings?” said Prager.

Hoffner turned. The KD was off the phone and was busy writing on a pad as he spoke. “Yes,” Hoffner answered. “Identical.”

A nod.

“You’ve heard the rumor, of course,” said Hoffner. “We’re due for another new chief, any day.” He moved toward the desk. “What does that make-four, five in the last month?”

Still preoccupied, Prager said, “And when were you planning on starting this rumor?”

Hoffner smiled quietly to himself. “As soon as all the bets were in.” He thought he saw the hint of a grin.

“So this makes five,” said Prager as he flipped through the papers.

“Yes.”

“And that makes your maniac rather special, doesn’t it?” Prager stacked the pages, then placed them in perfect alignment along the top right-hand corner of his desk.

“Yes.” Hoffner waited for Prager to look up. “This one looks to be his first. She might even have had a personal connection with our friend.”

“Personal?”

“He’s preserved her. My guess is at least six weeks. That makes her different.”

“Different is good. And how’s Fichte working out?”

“Fine. He’s with the body.”

“Yes, I know. Allowing someone else to take care of your evidence. How far we’ve come, Nikolai.”

“A brave new world, Herr Kriminaldirektor.”

Prager motioned to the chair by the desk. “I need you to finish this one up.”

Hoffner sat. “I don’t think he meant for us to find this woman,” he said, as if not having heard the request. “The others, yes. This one, no.” Hoffner pulled open his notebook and flipped to a dog-eared page. “Preliminary guess is that she was asphyxiated like the others, then-”

“How close are we, here?”

Hoffner looked up. That wasn’t a question one asked in cases like these. In cases like these, one had to let it play itself out, each one unique, like the men and women who committed the crimes: degree was never an issue, and Prager knew that. Hoffner did his best to let the question pass. “As I said, we might have someplace to go with this one-”

“I need this finished,” Prager cut in. He waited. “Do you understand what I’m saying, Nikolai?”

Hoffner remained silent. “No, Herr Kriminaldirektor,I do not.”

Prager began to chew on the inside of his cheek: it was the one lapse in composure he permitted himself. “Almost half a dozen mutilated women in just over a month and a half,” he said, his tone more direct. “I’m not sure how long we can keep this out of the press. The distractions of revolution are beginning to fade.”

“They’re also not going to be getting in the way of an investigation anymore. And,” Hoffner continued, “correct me if I’m wrong, Herr Kriminaldirektor,but we’ve always been very good at using the newspapers to our advantage.”

“As you said, Nikolai, a brave new world.”

For the first time today, Hoffner was genuinely confused. “You’re going to have to make that a little clearer, Herr Kriminaldirektor.”

Prager’s tone softened. “Once in a while, Nikolai, you need to consider the world outside of homicide. You need to consider the repercussions.”

Hoffner had no idea where Prager was going with this, when the KD suddenly stood, his gaze on the door. “Ah.” Prager moved out from behind his desk. “Herr Kriminal-Oberkommissar,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting you quite so-promptly.”

Hoffner turned to see a tall, angular man in an expensive suit stepping into the office: a chief inspector with a thin coating of meticulously combed jet-black hair atop a narrow head. Hoffner stood. He had never seen the man before.

Prager made the introductions. “ Kriminal-OberkommissarGustav Braun, this is-”

“ Kriminal-KommissarNikolai Hoffner,” said the man, a strangely inviting smile on his lips. “Yes, I know your work well, Inspector. A most impressive rsum.”

With a slight hesitation, Hoffner nodded his acknowledgment. “I wish I could say the same of you, Chief Inspector.” Hoffner then added, “I mean, that I know your work well. I don’t.”

Still coldly affable, Braun said, “No, no, of course not. We tend to keep ourselves to ourselves, upstairs.”

And there it was, thought Hoffner. “Upstairs.” Of course.

A step up from the Kriminalpolizei,both by floor and autonomy, were the detectives of Department IA, the political police. Hoffner had never figured out whether they had been created to combat or augment domestic espionage. Whichever it was, he had learned to keep his distance from the men on the fourth floor. Their influence, never lacking under the Kaisers, had grown by leaps and bounds during the last few months. It was simply a question of how far it would ultimately take them. Why they should be showing any interest in his case, however, was not at all clear. The first four bodies had been those of a sales clerk, two seamstresses, and a nurse, no connections among them-except perhaps that they had all lived solitary, isolated lives-but nothing to pique the curiosity of the Polpo: unless the boys upstairs knew something about number five that Hoffner had failed to see, which meant that Prager was obviously in on the secret.

“Yes, well,” said Prager, predictably less poised: seniority of rank never seemed to matter when IA was involved. “I can assure you that the Chief Inspector has an equally impressive record, Herr Detective Inspector. Although, of course, one never knows how much more has been left out of the file that would be even more impressive had it been in the file”-Hoffner enjoyed watching Prager flounder-“but, of course, it couldn’t be-coming from upstairs.” Prager nodded once, briskly, as if to say he had finished whatever he had been trying to say, and that, whatever he had been trying to say, it had been good. Very good.

Unnerved still further by the ensuing silence, Prager awkwardly motioned toward the door. “We’ll go down, then. At once.” Prager nodded to Braun, who headed out. He then turned to Hoffner and, with a strained smile, indicated for him to follow. No less confused-though rather enjoying it all-Hoffner moved out into the corridor.

The morgue at police headquarters-more of an examination room, and nowhere near as extensive as the real thing across town-sat in the sub-basement of the southwest corner of the building, in better days a quick jaunt across the large glass-covered courtyard, and then down two flights. For the trio of Prager, Hoffner, and Braun, however, it was more of a trek, the courtyard having taken the brunt of the recent fighting. Mortar fire had shattered several sections of the glass dome, allowing individual columns of rain to pour down at will, the echo, in spots, overpowering. Cobblestone, where it remained, was perilously slick; elsewhere, one was left to navigate through tiny rivulets of mud. Herr Department IA seemed little inclined to get his boots dirty.

“I could always carry you,” said Hoffner, under his breath.

“Pardon?” said Braun as he hopped gingerly from one spot to the next.

“What?” said Hoffner innocently.

“I thought you said something.”

“No, nothing, Herr Kriminal-Oberkommissar.” Hoffner looked at Prager. “Did you say something, Herr Kriminaldirektor?”

Prager quickened his pace and, still a good ten meters from the door to the lower levels, stuck out his arm. “Ah, here we are,” he said. “That wasn’t so bad.”

Three minutes later, all three stepped into the morgue’s outer hallway, the air thick with the smell of formaldehyde. An officer sat at a desk. He nodded them on.

Visible through the glass on the far doors were six tables in a perpendicular row along the back wall. Sheeted bodies occupied the two tables at the far ends; the four inner ones remained empty. Along the other walls, bookcases displayed a wide array of instruments and bottles, the latter filled with various liquids and creams. Above, the old gas lamps had once again been called into service. Hans Fichte was by one of the shelves, holding an open bottle in his hands-sniffing at its contents-as the three men pushed through the doors and stepped into the room. Momentarily startled, Fichte tried to get the lid back on as quickly as possible. “Ah, Herr Kriminaldirektor,” said Fichte, “I didn’t expect-”

“You’ve been down here alone?” asked Prager.

“Yes, sir,” answered Fichte, still having trouble with the lid. “Except for the medic. But he left once the body. . 0A0; Yes, sir. As you directed. Alone.”

“Good.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Hoffner leaned into Fichte as he passed by him. “Hand in the cookie jar?” It was enough to stem any further fidgeting.

Prager led Hoffner and Braun toward the body on the far right table. He was about to pull back the sheet when Fichte interrupted. “No, no, Herr Kriminaldirektor.” All three looked over at him. For a moment Fichte seemed somewhat overwhelmed, as if he had forgotten why he had stopped them. Then, moving toward the table on the left-bottle still sheepishly in hand-he said more quietly, “Ours is this one here.”

Prager continued to stare at Fichte. “No,” said Prager, his tone almost apologetic. “It’s not, Herr Kriminal-Assistent.” He then turned to Hoffner. “The repercussions, Nikolai. Fished from the Landwehr Canal this morning.” Prager pulled back the sheet.

There, lying facedown on the table-with the all-too-familiar markings chiseled into her back-was the lifeless body of Rosa Luxemburg.

THE DIAMETER-CUT

It was a good hour and a half before Fichte placed the bottle back on the shelf, and then wiped his hands on his pants. His nose had gone a nice pink from the chill in the room.

“You were holding it the whole time they were here,” said Hoffner, who was peering over Rosa’s body. He was in shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow, with thick rubber gloves extending halfway up his forearm.

Fichte sniffed at his fingers as he walked back to the examining table. “Well, I couldn’t have stepped away.”

“With the lid open.” Hoffner continued to trace the incisions on her back with what looked to be a thin steel pointer.

Fichte took a moment to answer. “Yes.”

Not looking up, Hoffner added, “Feeling a bit faint, are you?”

“No. Why?”

“You might want to read a label now and then, Hans. Sniffing isn’t actually a science.”

“I did read it.”

Hoffner bent over a particularly intricate patch. “Really?” He nodded to himself. “So you’re comfortable inhaling a solution of arsenious acid. Glad to hear it.”

Fichte was about to sniff at his fingers again; he thought the better of it.

“It’s actually illegal now,” Hoffner continued, his eyes fixed on the series of narrow grooves. “Even at that dilution. But, of course, you knew that.” Fichte said nothing as Hoffner dabbed at a bit of swelling. The skin had retained a surprising elasticity. “Used to be that arsenic was a wonderful thing for preserving a body. I suppose there were too many of those side effects, though. Bleeding mouth, sores, vomiting. Don’t know why it’s still on the shelf.”

Fichte’s face turned a shade paler. “. . Right.”

Hoffner stood upright. He wanted some confirmation. “There’s something different about these.” He used the pointer to draw a circle in the air above several of the slices. “You see what I mean?” Fichte was off in his own thoughts. Hoffner enjoyed the teasing, even if Fichte always took it too seriously, but Hoffner needed the boy to see the corpse, not the woman. Over the last two months, Luxemburg had been a mainstay on the front page of every newspaper in town. This morning they claimed that she had been dragged off by an angry mob. The markings on her back, however, said otherwise. “You’ll be fine, Hans. I promise. Now, put on some gloves.”

Fichte looked over and did as he was told. With a newfound caution, he leaned in over the body and cocked his head to the side so as to get a better angle.

Hoffner waited. “Well,” he said, trying not to sound impatient. “What do you make of them?”

After several false starts, Fichte finally looked up from across the body. “They’re. .” He chose his words carefully. “More jagged. On an angle.”

“Which?”

“Which cuts?”

“No”-a hint of frustration in his voice-“which is it, jagged or at an angle?”

Fichte stood upright. His eyes remained on the body as if he thought it might twitch one way or the other with the answer. “I think-both.”

Hoffner would have liked to have heard more conviction in the voice, especially when Fichte had gotten it right. Instead, he leaned in and scanned across the carvings: he could sense Fichte’s gaze following his own. Shifting his attention to the far table, Hoffner stood and moved over to victim number five, today’s discovery. A nice glob of the preserving grease, which still covered most of her upper body and thighs, sat in a jar at the edge of the table. Hoffner handed the jar to Fichte, then turned up the overhead lamp. He pulled back the sheet. “Make sure it’s properly labeled,” he said as he bent over to examine the back. “We’ll need someone to take a look at it tomorrow morning.”

Fichte handled the jar with great care as he placed it on a nearby shelf. He jotted a few words of detailed description on the label, then wiped his gloved hands on his pants.

Hoffner continued to scan along the grooves. “That’s a nice eye, Hans. This one’s smooth all the way across.” Hoffner shifted his perspective. “As it was with ladies one through four.” He stood and peered over at Rosa. “But not with our Frulein Luxemburg,” he said as if to himself. “Why?” It was not the only dissimilarity Hoffner had seen: Rosa had not been asphyxiated like the other victims, and there was a nice crack to the top of her skull. It might have been from a rifle butt, but Hoffner was only speculating there.

Fichte stared at Hoffner as Hoffner stared at Rosa. After several seconds, Fichte said, “She was pulled out of the canal. Maybe-”

“No,” said Hoffner, no less intent on her corpse. “The water’s not going to have made that kind of a difference.”

“A different knife, then?”

Again, Hoffner shook his head as he moved back to Rosa. This time he used his gloved little finger to highlight the most dominant marking on her back, a straight rut of perhaps eight or nine centimeters in length, a centimeter in width. All the other rivulets spoked out or crisscrossed this central line, which ran between her shoulder blades. Hoffner had come to call it the “diameter-cut.” “It’s got the same little bumps every two centimeters”-he pointed with his finger-“here, here, and here. The same flaw in the blade.” He shook his head. “No, it’s the same knife.”

Fichte moved to the other side of the table and both men stood peering down at Rosa’s back. “Maybe,” said Fichte hesitantly, “he realized who she was after he’d killed her. He panicked and rushed the artwork.” When Hoffner said nothing, Fichte added, “It does have that kind of forced look to it.”

The word “forced” struck Hoffner. He looked up with sudden interest. “Why do you say that?”

Fichte nearly beamed at the encouragement. “Well,” he said, tracing a section. “These bits here. Our boy’s usually much neater in this part. See how the line lightens up and runs off just at the end.”

Fichte was right. Up by the left shoulder blade, one of the incisions seemed to tail off to the right as it joined the diameter-cut: not in keeping with the strict precision of the other lines.

“Here, as well.” Fichte pointed to another section.

Hoffner had noticed it fifteen minutes ago while under the watchful gaze of Herr Kriminal-OberkommissarBraun. It was only now, though, hearing the word “forced,” that he began to see something else. His eyes moved along the ruts as he spoke: “Bring over a bottle of the blue dye and a thin brush,” he said distractedly as he leaned closer into the body. “And grab one of those short blades.”

Fichte quickly found the items and brought them back to the table. Hoffner dipped the brush into the dye and gently ran it along the areas Fichte had just traced. As he got to the tail-off point-where the dye brought out the detail of the lighter strokes-Hoffner’s eyes widened. For several seconds he held his hand out over the area, his palm facing up. He stared at his own hand.

With a sudden urgency, Hoffner stepped farther down the body and drew a wide circle of blue on Rosa’s untouched thigh. He held the knife out to Fichte. “All right, Hans,” he said. “I want you to hold it in your open palm, with the blade facing away from you, your thumb on the knife’s midpoint. And with the flat of the blade parallel to your palm. As if you were going to jab it at me.” He waited until Fichte held it correctly. “Good. Now, carve out a small rut inside the circle.” Hoffner pointed to two spots on the thigh. “Start here, end here. Carve up and away from yourself.”

Fichte stared at him incredulously. “You want me to disfigure the body?”

“She won’t mind,” said Hoffner, his eyes still on the thigh. “Trust me.” He made a sweeping movement with his hand. “Up and away. Keeping the flat of the knife against the skin. Anytime, Hans.” The discussion was over.

This was not the first time that Fichte had been handed his fate. With no other choice, he slowly placed his free hand just above the back of Rosa’s knee and, pulling the skin taut, began to carve out a rut. The sensation was strangely calming, the cold flesh giving way easily to the run of the knife. To Fichte’s surprise, the sliced skin held together like pencil shavings, curling upward, then spiraling down over the thigh before crumbling onto the table. Reaching the endpoint, he stood back and placed the knife next to the body. Hoffner was already leaning in, staring up along the newly made groove.