A Slow Death (Max Drescher Book 1) by James Craig Page B

Ward, the last thing he had wanted to do was talk to the police. If it had been down to him, he would have just limped out of the hospital and crawled home. Instead, some over-zealous cow of a nurse had called the police and they had dragged him down here, to spend another three hours being moved around a freezing police station trying to find someone willing to take his statement. Eventually, the female officer with the name tag Sammer had typed up his account of the assault in five minutes flat on an ancient-looking typewriter that looked like it belonged to the days of the Weimar Republic. Once the report had been completed, it had taken her longer to find a pen for him to sign the damn thing. Job completed, a glimmer of grim satisfaction flickered across her face as she tossed the carbon in the bin and dropped both copies of his statement into a wire tray overflowing with similar sheets of paper. No one will ever look at that again, Kaspar though wearily, and this whole charade is a complete waste of time.
    After keeping him waiting all this time, the officer was now hassling him out of the building as quickly as possible. That was fine by Kaspar; with bruised ribs and a shitty hangover, all he wanted was to go home, fall into bed and stay there for a couple of days.
     
    Sitting at his desk, the Kriminalinspektor watched the puke-covered guy with the battered face wandering through the station, following in the wake of a very pissed-off looking Martina Sammer. ‘What a smell.’ he groaned. ‘You would have thought that they would have hosed him down in the cells.’
                  ‘The latest victim of the 36Boys,’ Michael muttered, not looking up from his newspaper as he sat with his feet on his desk.
    ‘Another one?’ The 36Boys were a gang of Turkish immigrants from Kreuzberg; taking their name from one of its postal districts, Südost 36. Normally, they got into fights with neo-Nazis. More recently, however, they had branched out into a semi-organised programme of gay-bashing. Not that they were the only ones. The Neo-Nazis, East German hooligans, you name it. No one liked the fags. There had been more than a hundred reported assaults on homosexuals in the city in the last year alone; the number of un reported attacks would be much higher. ‘How many is that now?’
    ‘No idea. I suppose it’s running about three or four a week at the moment. People only really pay attention when someone like Volker gets mugged.’
    ‘Ha.’ Max chuckled. Kevin Volker was a high-profile banker with political ambitions. ‘That was probably a stunt. Only in Berlin could you get beaten up outside a gay club at four in the morning wearing a pair of crotchless leather jeans and boost your chances of getting elected to the city council. It was good for his image.’
    Michael looked doubtful. ‘I’m not sure that his wife sees it like that.’
    ‘She’ll live,’ Max grunted. ‘I hear she’s too busy shagging some lawyer from Charlottenburg to worry too much about what her husband gets up to.’
    ‘Anyway, that was supposed to be the 36Boys as well.’
    ‘You would have thought the Turks would have more important things to worry about.’
    ‘They need someone to bully, why not the gays?’
    Reaching forward, Max picked an eraser off his desk and threw it at his sergeant. It smacked into his paper with a satisfying thwack, before falling to the linoleum.
    ‘Sorry.’ Michael returned his feet to the floor but kept reading. ‘But you know what I’m saying.’
    ‘Yeah,’ the Kriminalinspektor conceded, ‘you’re right. The Nazis attack the Turks, the Turks attack the queers. And the queers just end up in police stations, covered in puke. That’s just the way it is.’
    ‘Everyone’s gotta have someone to hate,’ Michael observed. ‘Plus, for the 36Boys, it’s a way of raising a little cash.’ With the paper, he gestured towards Wuffli, who was slowly disappearing down the stairs. ‘Sometimes,