The Jewish Policeman (Adam Lapid Mysteries #9 ) - Large Print Hardcover

Chapter 1:

The street lay in ruins, and it filled my heart with joy.

To my left was a line of damaged buildings, their windows blown out, their facades pocked and pitted by shrapnel. To my right hulked a hill of rubble twice my height, and next to it stood a building missing its roof and most of its front walls. It looked like a body that had been stripped of its flesh, offering a view of its innards. But this body was missing its internal organs as well. Most of the floors had collapsed, and those that remained had been emptied of all the furniture that had once given the now-exposed rooms character. Either to be used for its original purpose elsewhere or to be chopped into kindling. Because it was October, and winter had begun to bite.

It was an imposing building, even in its current flayed state. Five stories tall and wide, with ornamental touches near the surviving window frames.

Affluent people had lived here. People with connections. Guilty people.

There was no sign of them now. The building was vacant of inhabitants. They had either moved away to more modest lodgings, or they were dead.

I heard a voice at my back. “Awful, isn’t it?”

Turning, I saw a middle-aged woman in a coat a couple of sizes too big for her. It was a fine coat, or it had been once. Now, there was a tear near the hem, and streaks of dirt were embedded in the black fabric. The woman shared the coat’s status. She had been fine too at one time. Her bearing hinted at a good upbringing and a comfortable life. Until recently, that is. Now, I wagered, her quality of life was much reduced.

Whatever her station had been, she had fallen from it like most local people of her caste. Her features had not escaped this downfall. While they still held intimations of the beauty she had once possessed, they had been thinned out by a shortage of food, and worry, grief, and deprivation had gouged deep lines near her eyes and down her cheeks and across her forehead. But even if she had retained her former looks, she would have been too old to trade on them for the comforts only her new masters could provide. There were plenty of desperate women half her age who would take precedence over her.

“Yes,” I said, though my meaning was the opposite of hers. She lamented the damage the building had suffered, while I wished the devastation had been even greater.

“There’s nothing beautiful anymore in this city,” she said. Her voice was devoid of vitality, even that of grief. She wasn’t looking at me now. Her eyes were fixed on the mangled building; her mind, I guessed, riveted on memories from before the war. “Nothing beautiful.”

I made no comment, though I was of a different opinion. I saw much that pleased my jaded eye and warmed my cold and shattered heart. But it wasn’t the sort of beauty that healed or brought solace. It only made me want to add to the destruction.

“I used to live here,” she said, her gaze elevated.

“Oh?”

“On the fourth floor.”

I looked, but where she saw happy memories of lavish dinner parties and pleasant evenings, all I saw was ruined walls and a partially collapsed floor.

My eyes returned to her, this tarnished Frau with the graying blond hair, high cheekbones, and glazed blue eyes. She still held herself erect, despite everything. If she had been of a different country, a different people, I would have felt respect toward her. But all I felt was satisfaction with her humiliation and loss.

“I lived here with my husband and two sons,” she said, oblivious of my thoughts, and I realized she was not really paying me much attention at all. I was just a random person, likely not the first, in whose ear she could boast of better and prouder days, a time that suited her image of herself more than her current circumstances.

“What did your husband do for a living?” I asked, sensing a potential opportunity.

“He was a high-ranking official in the local government.”

I didn’t need to ask her if he had been a member of the Party. He must have been. And an esteemed one at that. A spark of excitement blossomed in my chest. Could I really be so lucky? Here on the trail of one quarry and another was going to fall into my lap?

“My sons, Willie and Gerhard, were fine men,” she said. “Brave soldiers. You should have seen them in their uniforms. So handsome. They were both heroes. That’s what the authorities said when they informed me of what happened. Both heroes. Willie died on the Eastern Front, at Kursk. He was in the Panzer Corps. Gerhard in France, fighting the Americans.” She gave a shudder, her thin body quaking, and then she was still again. Her eyes remained riveted to where her home had once been.

I didn’t care about her sons. I didn’t care about any dead Germans.

“And your husband? You said he was a high-ranking official?”

“Yes.”

“Where is he now?”

She blinked and slowly turned her gaze from the ruined building to my face. Her eyes contracted in wariness. She appeared to be seeing me truly for the first time. “Where are you from? You’re not from Munich. Not from Bavaria.”

My accent had told her that. I had been working at softening it over the past few weeks, and had made some strides, but no one would mistake me for a local.

“No, dear lady, I’m not. I come from the Sudetenland. Have you ever been there?”

“No.”

I let out an inner sigh of relief. “A beautiful land. Now lost, I’m afraid.”

She made no comment. Perhaps my words hadn’t registered. Her attention had returned to the gaping hole in the street-facing side of her former building.

“There’s nothing beautiful anymore,” she said, reverting to her earlier detached voice. “They ruined it all.” Without a farewell, she started walking away.

I matched her step. She had yet to answer my most important question. “Your husband. Where can I find him?”

Her voice was as lifeless as her answer. “He’s dead. My husband is dead.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, and ceased walking.

“Thank you,” she answered, and carried on down the street.

She shouldn’t have thanked me, because I wasn’t sorry her husband was dead. I was sorry I wouldn’t get to kill him myself.

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