Storm 33

The body lay face up in a dark cul-de-sc, eight meters off the Hirrenstrasse. The area—near Alexanderplatz police headquarters, was a communist neighborhood of brick tenements and wooden slums. Barlach would never have noticed the corpse had he not stepped away from the street to piss. As a Schupo, Barlach carried a standard police-issue 9mm “08” revolver and a sixteen inch truncheon made from black walnut wrapped with a cowhide grip. From the dark, he conducted a quick census of the commun...