Read Online The Sleepwalkers by Paul Grossman - Free Book Online

overstepped his bounds. Undermined the foundation of the alliance he’d just forged. But the minister of war banged on the desk again, rising as if to address the nation.
    “What Germany needs is a man of iron character and will. A man who will not flinch at taking the necessary action required to get this country onto her feet. A man of steel, like Russia’s Stalin. Whom the people will tremble before and respect as a father.”
    Who? Willi kept thinking.
    “Don’t you worry.” Von Schleicher put his monocle back in and stared directly at him. “I have a plan. Stick with me, Kraus. You won’t regret it.”
    “I regret day I am stepping feet into this cursed city.”
    Konstantin Kaparov was furiously packing in his suite at the Adlon. Since he’d been so close by, Willi had dropped in for a few more questions. But Kaparov was having a Bulgarian fit. His face bruised. His eye blackened.
    “Yesterday I walk in Tiergarten, get jumped by Nazi animals who think I am Jew. Imagine me Jew.”
    “Anyone with dark hair . . . ,” Willi stammered apologetically.
    “I leaving. No come back. You not find Magdelena after four days, you no find at all. This city—it killed her. This city—hell!”
    “Speaking of which,” Willi interjected, “the hypnotist at Klub Hell the night you were there, did he say anything about the kind of legs Magdelena had? Did he call them Classic? Or Ideal?”
    “No. Nothing he call them. I tell you, Herr Inspektor, hypnotist not have nothing to do wit zees. After show Magdelena completely normal. Nothing strange. I know. Am husband. Or . . . was.”
    “I’m so sorry, Konstantin, that I haven’t been able to find her.”
    “No one find her. She disappear in Berlin. Same as dead.”
    Back in the dingy lobby of the Police Presidium, waiting for the ancient elevator to descend, Willi found himself standing next to Wolfgang Mutze of all people, head of Missing Persons. “Well, well, Kraus. How’s ghost hunting? That’s what we call it in the biz, you know.” Mutze’s multiple chins rolled around his collar as he chuckled to himself. “What have you found out so far about this missing Romanian princess?”
    “She’s Bulgarian. And not much. Oddest thing though,” he said as the rickety old cage finally arrived. “The last person to see her, the doorman at the Adlon, claims he thought she was sleepwalking.”
    “Another sleepwalker?” Mutze bellowed as they stepped in. “Could you press five for me please there, Kraus?”
    “What do you mean another?” Willi closed the metal gate.
    “Well, we must have had a dozen in as many months.”
    “A dozen sleepwalkers, disappearing?”
    “Sure. It started early last year. Some strange cult, we think. Berlin’s brimming with them.”
    “But I must see all their files. Immediately.”
    Mutze’s face stiffened. “Feel free to speak to my secretary then. They’re certainly not all neatly grouped together. We haven’t compiled a Sleepwalker File. They’re simply random cases.”
    “You never thought to put them together?”
    “Listen, Kraus, they may have made you an Inspektor-Detektiv but you’ve no right to speak to me like that. Do you have any idea of how many people go missing in this city every day? Fifty to sixty. On a slow day. You have it cushy up in Homicide. I don’t think you have one-twentieth the number of cases we handle. And when you solve one, they act like you’re some kind of Hercules.”
    The elevator ground to a stop on five. Mutze stormed out.
    “I’ll have my boy come to your office at once,” Willi called after him.
    “Do that.”
    A dozen sleepwalkers. Willi could hardly believe his ears. He reached the sixth floor and was about to shout for Gunther to come immediately when he remembered something else he had to do and hit the button back down, to Pathology.
    “Yes, of course.” The new head of the department, Dr. Shurze, rose from the desk Dr. Hoffnung had occupied. Pulling open a wide, thin