alternatehistory.com

Author's note - this was written for the Fifth Vignette Challenge over at the Sea Lion Press forums. I've very slightly edited it since then (I changed two character names, corrected to the proper police rank system and did a few other minor tweaks). You can find links to the other entries in this thread. Go check 'em out! Lots of good stuff there.

***

HAKONSHAFEN (previously Molotovsk) – city in REICHSGAU BJARMALAND, the home port of the ARCTIC NAVY GROUP COMMAND and the chief U-BOAT base of the KRIESGMARINE. It is a major naval manufacturing center with a secondary auto industry (both GÖRINGMOBIL and VOLKSWAGEN have factories). Population (2000) – 176,129

Bradley’s Guide to the Reich, Vol. 1 A-M (Leiter & Sons, New York, 2004)

Kriminalassistentin Karin Grundmann stepped over a yellowing newspaper that had been partially caught in the ice covering the sidewalk. She glanced down for a second and saw a cheap ad for cheap cars.

FÜHRERGEBURTSTAG AUTO TAUMEL!

There was, naturally, a prominent swastika to provide proof of the dealer’s loyalty to Volk, Reich, and Führer.

Karin grunted, pressed her hands deeper into her pockets – at this time of year, it was brutally cold in Hakonshafen; the rest of the year, it was just cold – and entered the lobby of the ten-story apartment tower. It was just like a thousand others from the Atlantic to the Urals. A grey monolith built in the 1950s, the tail end of post-war prosperity. There would be a bomb shelter in the basement. In most cities, the bomb shelters had found other uses. In a military city like Hakonshafen, though, there was a 50-50 chance it was still a bomb shelter. Karin always found that somewhat ironic. If war came, a major target like Hakonshafen would be hit by multiple nuclear missiles. A bomb shelter wouldn’t do any good. In a smaller city, less likely to be targeted by the big warheads, a bomb shelter might actually keep you alive, but they were mostly useless or gone now.

Karin wondered what it meant that she more or less willingly lived in one of the major military targets in the Reich.

The lobby lacked much in the way of amenities. There were brass mailboxes on the wall to one side, a giant map of the Reich on the other, a single elevator in the back, and a cheap counter (behind thick glass) in the middle. There were a few cops, green-uniformed Orpo officers instead of Kripo detectives like Karin, milling about.

Karin crossed the lobby to the nearest one, a proud specimen of Germanic manhood – blond like Hitler, tall like Goebbels, slim like Göring. “Where’s the body?”

“Upstairs.”

“Which floor?”

“Fourth. 404.”

Karin stalked around him without another word.

The elevator worked, more or less. It was slow and noisy.

Eventually, it reached the fourth floor and disgorged Karin.

She followed the noise. Put five cops in a confined space and you had a commotion that could be heard for miles.

Two Orpo men were standing guard outside apartment 404. They parted to let Karin enter a crowded apartment. More Orpo officers and a trio of Kripo crime scene technicians. She knew all of them. Hakonshafen wasn’t the biggest city in the Reich, and most of the murders that Karin investigated took place in the same area. She knew most of the players on both sides of the law-crime divide.

Karin ignored all of them for a moment and studied the room. No body to be seen, but it still might be important.

After a minute or so, Karin decided against it. The place might have been described as Spartan, but sparse seemed more accurate to her. There was a small TV, one of the old Brown Tube types, on a cheap plastic stand, a small table, a cheap couch with stained vinyl cushions, and not much else. Off to the side was a kitchenette. A box of pizza lay on top of the counter there. Nothing else.

Nice view, though.

Karin approached the window behind the couch and looked out. She could see a good bit of the waterfront here. The highlight was a huge black cigar laying alongside a long metal pier. One of the u-boats docked at the Kriegsmarine base at the west end of the city. Nearer at hand were cargo boats and icebreakers half-concealed by a forest of cranes.

Nearest of all was the Asenhaus, a imposing building of black granite that took up nearly a city block and was decorated with swastika and runic banners. Karin saw runic banners with Sig and Eif and Leben on them, black on white surrounded by red, and knew the rest of the nine runes would be on the other banners, nine on each side of the building alongside swastikas and broken sun crosses.

“Kriminalassistentin.”

Karin turned away from the sea and street and looked at Kriminalassistent Jörg Seidel. He was young and eager, fresh out of the Waffen-SS, an idealist and a cowboy. He made Karin feel ancient at the age of thirty.

“Let’s see it, then,” Karin said.

“This way. The bedroom,” Jörg said. He turned and crossed the main room of the apartment. There were two doors, one closed, one open. The closed door had to have been the bathroom. The other was the bedroom.

The bedroom was about as sparse as the rest of the apartment. A bed. A plastic night stand. A pressed-wood dresser.

On the night stand, a digital alarm clock with a flickering display, a cheap paperback Volkstestament, last Sunday’s issue of the Hakonshafener Zeitung, and a pornographic magazine.

And, oh yes, a dead body slumped over on the bed.

Karin approached and leaned forward slightly to study the corpse. Rigor had set in and the flesh had a pallor to it.

Granted, in Hakonshafen, people tended towards the pale side, but this was a step beyond even that.

“Björn Mäland,” Jörg said. “We found his wallet in the kitchen.”

Karin nodded. Mäland. A Germanic name but not a German one. Even here on the fringes of the Reich, where a dozen ‘tribes’ were thrown together in a harsh, uncaring environment, that mattered. Officially, there was just the Master Race. Unofficially, it was still Deutschland über alles. “I have my suspicions about the cause of death,” she said after a few seconds.

Jörg looked at her.

“A joke,” she said.

The cause of death probably had something to do with the needle sticking out of Mäland’s intricately tattooed arm.

“Third time this month,” Karin said, shaking her head.

“Fifth. There was a pair overnight,” Jörg said, likewise shaking his head. His lips were pursed in a vaguely hausfrau sort of way. “Degenerates.”

Karin nodded but didn’t engage. Five this month... A war deadlier than the sham war along the Ural border, but one the Reich press was loath to mention, let alone address in depth.

“His boss called it in. Two days missing work.”

“Where did he work?”

“A butcher’s market on Widkun-Quisling-Allee.”

Karin nodded. No surprise there. Widkun-Quisling-Allee was the spine of the city. Half the businesses in Hakonshafen were located along it. “Where did he really work?”

Jörg shrugged. “Maybe with the Krammer gang on Rudolf-Viergutz-Straße. That’s what the landlord says.”

“Where’s the landlord?”

“Downtown already.”

“Where’s the wallet?”

Jörg looked at one of the crime scene techs. “Berni.”

The tech hurried over. He handed Karin a plastic bag with a wallet inside. “Contents, one Ahnenkarte, one driver’s license, one Party membership card, one Strength Through Joy Arctic card, one National Socialist Motor Corps member card, twenty-eight Reichsmarks and sixty-five Reichspfennig.”

“What an individualist,” Karin said. She held the bag in one hand while carefully putting on a pair of rubber gloves. After some deft work, she managed to retrieve the late Herr Mäland’s Ahnenkarte. The ancestry card, a simplified version of the old Ahnenpass documenting the Aryan lineage of all Reich citizens, was the most important identification in the Reich. It listed one's racial type, blood group, and hair and eye color.

Karin’s card showed her as Pure Nordic, A+, blond, blue-eyed, the ideal specimen of Germanic womanhood.

According to his card, which was at least a thirty percent chance of being a forgery, Mäland fell into the same categories. Never mind his hair, shaved to the scalp though it was, seemed more brown than blonde. Today’s Greater Germanic Reich was flexible by necessity.

She returned the Ahnenkarte to the wallet and examined the driver’s license next. The information was consistent between the two. The license offered up more details, though.

Full name: Björn Johann Mäland

Date and place of birth: 17.03.1997; Drontheim, Tröndelag.

Karin tapped the license against the palm of her hand a few times. Another Trönder drawn East in the hopes of making a better life. Considering how awful it was here, she couldn’t imagine what life was like on the northwestern fringes of the Reich. And now look at you, dead at 21.

After a moment, Karin handed the wallet back to Berni.

“Pure Nordic and pure... what is it? Heroin?” she asked Jörg.

He shrugged. “Maybe?”

“Make sure it gets tested for the report,” Karin said.

Jörg nodded. He looked vaguely annoyed at taking orders from a fraulein, but Karin was used to that. As a woman in the Reich, she was used to a lot of things. And in just three years in the Homicide directorate, she’d gone through three male partners, only one of whom had known his ass from a hole in the ground.

“A Renaissance man,” Karin murmured with a nod at the night stand.

Jörg smirked. “Just another idiot from the fjords.”

Karin looked over at him. “That’s not very sympathetic to our brothers in the Volksgemeinschaft,” she said, perfectly straight-faced.

Jörg’s eyes widened slightly and he glanced left and right, the German Look. Nobody was paying attention, fortunately. “That’s not funny.”

“Neither is this,” Karin said, gesturing at the dead Trönder on the bed.

“They should just stay where they belong,” Jörg muttered.

Karin eyed him for a second, then glanced out the window at the harbor and the frozen sea beyond. “Everyone should stay where they belong,” she said. Then, louder, “All right. You guys can roll him up and take him to the morgue. We’re done here.”

“Maybe the next call will be a death that matters,” Jörg said. “Not one of these idiots killing himself and wasting our time.”

“You’re right, that was very thoughtless of him,” Karin said. From the look on his face, it wasn’t clear if Jörg knew he was being teased or not.

Get me out of this lunatic asylum, Karin thought. She glanced one last time at the dead man, then shut her notebook and headed out in silence.

DRONTHEIMER ZEITUNG REAL ESTATE LISTINGS – 08.02.2018

NOW AVAILABLE FOR AMBITIOUS ARYANS:

15 THORIR-HUND-STRAßE, HAKONSHAFEN
RENT 7.500 RM

One bedroom, one bathroom, kitchenette. Conveniently located to bus station. Nearby school, shops and religious site. A fine place to serve the Reich and tame the East!

Inquiries to:

Jörg Woll
Nördlich Grundbesitz Ag
8 Njörd-Straße, Hakonshafen
T: +39 3377-#8421-5375
Top