City of Shadows (18 page)

“Murder. Holy God, it could ruin me. I can grease palms against most everything, but
murder.
”

“Nick.”

“Okay, okay, I’ll see to it. Listen, Esther, don’t say anything. Give me a couple of hours to get her away, and then we’ll see.”

“Just do it.”

Then she’d gone downstairs to Frau Schinkel and virtually hauled the woman up to 29c. “Something terrible has happened. I’ve got to go out. Stay here and don’t open the door to anybody unless it’s me or Prince Nick, not a crack, do you hear me?”

She’d managed to frighten Frau Schinkel. “Do we call the police?”

“They know.”

In the street, people were going to work. Shopkeepers were sweeping snow from their sidewalks. It’s Monday, she’d thought, surprised at the banality of time’s persistence. He doesn’t kill on Mondays. Then she thought, I can’t rely on it. Anna can’t rely on it.

Housewives were setting up stalls to sell their possessions on the road
side; she’d done that, a million years ago. The everydayness of things shifted her mind into a no-man’s-land between hope and awful certainty. Perhaps it isn’t her. Natalya wouldn’t go to Charlottenburg. Why would she? Natalya’s preference was to go east, toward the city, where she felt at home; Charlottenburg’s quiet gardens weren’t Nasha’s thing.

Yet at the same time, she knew it was Natalya they’d found, because it was the answer, the hideous logic of the fear that had attended her for two days, for months.

She knew when she saw the little crowd gathered at the gates to the park, had slowed because she knew. Almost strolled toward them, not wanting to know. And been slammed with confirmation, again and again, her head like a boxer’s being rocked back and forth as a woman told her, “They say it’s a foreign girl.” Somebody else: “One of them blondes from the east.” And a policeman not letting her go and see. And the terrible little group among the trees.

Ice. Not feeling anything really; metallic lips answering questions as if somebody else pulled the lever that moved them. Sure of only one thing: Anna must be got away. Once the story was out, the delay would be ex
tensive, the questions, the disbelief attendant on her answers, the “don’t leave town,” the reporters, photographers. Anna’d be exposed to people going in and out—and one of them a man with a knife. A man who was ubiquitous and, it seemed to Esther, with a longer arm than the police.

So now she said again to the police inspector, “I don’t know.” And thought, Tomorrow. I’ll tell you tomorrow. Then she said, “What did he do to her? She wasn’t . . . tortured?”

He wondered if that was a euphemism for rape. “Her throat was cut. It was very quick. If it’s any comfort, I don’t think he interfered with her.”

“I see,” she said.

“Did she have any money in her purse?”

“No.” He saw her lip twist. Even in Bismarck Allee, nobody had money anymore.

He said, “Why do you think she came to these gardens?” It was un
likely she’d been carried here to be killed. Either she’d walked here with her murderer or she’d come on her own.

“I don’t know.” That at least was true. Warmer now. The man beside her was thawing her with kindness. He’d put a hot drink in her hands. She turned in her seat to look at him; very ordinary, very German, hair the color of dishwater, mustache ditto, somehow familiar.

He said, “Fräulein, the last time we met was at the Green Hat when you were attacked. Do you remember?”

She nodded; she did now.

“I mistrust coincidence. You must tell me if there is a connection.”

She temporized. “What?”

The stupidity of shock, Schmidt thought. They weren’t going to get anything out of her until it had passed off.

Willi was tapping on the window. “Dr. Pieck’s finishing up, boss,” he said. “The ambulance is here. And there’s this.” He’d put gloves on and was holding up a handbag, shaking it free of snow.

“Is this your friend’s?” Schmidt asked.

At once Natalya was dead. The moment that comes, delayed but un
avoidable, arrived with an imitation-crocodile handbag, her second-best because the best was pawned, slightly scuffed around the clip, held in somebody else’s official hand. Natalya joined the roll call of those who would never answer to their name again.

As he leaned over to reach for the evidence bag in the backseat, Schmidt’s arm touched Fräulein Solomonova’s shoulder. She was shak
ing. He took the cup out of her hand before she spilled it. “Are you up to identifying her?”

She nodded.

“We can do it later, if you’d rather.”

“Now,” she said.

They were bringing the sheeted body to the gates on an old army stretcher. He got out of the car to turn back the sheet, exposing the face but covering the throat. Dr. Pieck had closed the eyes.

She looked calm and very young, and, as always, Schmidt felt the surge of not just anger but astonishment at the effrontery and ease with which one person could erase the teeming complexity of life in an
other. He beckoned Solomonova, and she came over, hands in her pockets. He knew it was to stop them from trembling, but it looked ca
sual. So did her glance down at the body.

“Yes,” she said without tone. “That is Natalya Tchichagova.”

Schmidt heard Willi shuffle; Willi liked tears at this point. Bloody kikes, Willi would be thinking.

“Take her home,” Schmidt told him. “I’ll see her later. And, Willi . . .”

“Yes, boss.”

“Look after her.”

10

He had the
usual game with Dr. Pieck. “Just give me an idea, Albrecht. I won’t take it down in evidence.”

The doctor’s thin nose whiffled with enjoyment. “If pressed, I should say that someone who is right-handed, and considerably taller than our victim, cut her throat.”

“Oh-thank-you-Doctor. What with?”

“A knife.”

“And I thought it was rhubarb.” His shoes were letting the snow in. “What sort of knife?”

“On the record? I have no idea as yet. Off the record? No idea either. It might have been a trench knife. I’m not saying it
was,
but the cut indicates something of that curved shape. And I thought I got a whiff of cold bluing when I sniffed her neck. We’ll see what the microscope shows.”

“That’s my boy.
Dinter.
”

“Yes, Inspector?” Dinter stopped shoveling snow and put his hand to his lumbar region.

“It’s probably a trench knife.” Pieck knew his war wounds; he’d been an army surgeon.

“Yes, sir.” Dinter relayed the information to the other uniforms and went back to shoveling.

Schmidt returned to Dr. Pieck. “When?”

“Do you mean at what time did death occur?”

“Come on, Albrecht, I’m getting bloody cold.”

“My dear Siegfried, it is
because
you are cold that I am unable to venture a viable opinion as yet. The external temperature, you see, has affected the usual postmortem processes.”

“Yesterday? The day before yesterday?”

“Forty-eight hours. Possibly longer.”

“Gratis tibi maximus, Pieckus.”

The doctor bowed.
“Principus placuisse vivis non ultima laus est.”
It was their little joke.

Schmidt took Willi with him to the schloss and in the kitchen inter
viewed the caretaker, learning nothing that he didn’t know already; Arnie had seen nobody hanging about. He’d stayed indoors, out of the snow.

It was warm in the kitchen and Mrs. Arnie was offering coffee, so they took the opportunity to examine the contents of Natalya’s hand
bag, spreading them out on a long pine table that had become grooved with Mrs. Arnie’s scrubbing.

A cheap powder compact; a worn-down orange lipstick; a white, neatly ironed handkerchief; a knitted purse containing a thousand marks—of less value as monetary exchange than the handkerchief; a comb. Nothing of value, but all of it scrupulously clean.

And a note. There was a doubled piece of blue writing paper tucked into a pocket in the bag’s faux-silk lining.

Schmidt teased it out with gloved fingers and flipped it open.

“I can authenticate you. Come to Charlottenburg Schloss at mid
night, but come alone, no prompters.”
It was signed
“Prince Yusupov.”
No date.

He handed it to Willi.

“What’s it mean, boss?”

“I don’t know, but it brought her here on Saturday night.”

Willi said, “Yusupov, Yusupov? Only Yusupov I ever heard of was the Russki as shoved that Rasputin under the ice.”

“Only one I ever heard of as well.”
God,
he loved this. Some men stalked deer over the mountains; he stalked mysteries—and this was a ten-point-antlered beauty.

He took the note back from Willi. The paper was the sort sold in a million stationery shops. Writing: a careful sloping hand, light on up
strokes, heavy on downstrokes, as taught in a million schools.

“She was lured,” he said. “He was waiting for her.”

No envelope, a pity. She’d left it at home, maybe.

On the way back, he stopped beside a sweating Dinter. “Sergeant, I want you and your boys to knock on every door of every road in the vicinity and find out who was walking or driving around them on Satur
day night, especially between the hours of ten and midnight.”

Was he right? He became the man he was tracking. Dinter, watching him, saw the inspector’s eyes dull and the sense go out of his face; he wondered if the man was having a mild fit.

I’m carrying my knife to the rendezvous. I’m going to kill her. I can’t wait long in the grounds—too cold—therefore I shan’t arrive too long be
fore her. But I’m nervous that she’ll be early. Do I have a car? Too notice
able, too traceable, too loud. I’m on foot, so I’ll walk around, letting the snow camouflage me, turn me white
.. . .

“Yep,” he said, briskly. “Between ten and midnight, Saturday. Con
centrate on the pedestrians. All right, Dinter?”

“Yes, sir. This digging for the weapon, sir ...there’s acres.”

“I don’t know why you’re bothering. He took it home with him. If he dropped anything, we’ll have to wait for the thaw. Good man, get on with it.”

Typical bloody
Geheimpolizistkommissar,
Dinter thought, watching him go.
Took it home with him
. And us digging up half Charlottenburg for it. No thought for poor buggers in uniform and their backs. And knock on every door in the vicinity. In this weather. Typical Alexander
platz, the creeps.

Before he did
anything else, Schmidt went back to the Alexander
platz to have lunch. He needed to do some research. And you didn’t pass up a hot meal—not when you’d had birdseed for breakfast.

Since Willi’d taken the car, he had to walk, but he liked walking, and the feet of those going to work had cleared the pavements for him.

Thinking of his wife, he went into every food shop he saw on the way that didn’t have a line outside it, asking for whatever they had and being told that the reason there wasn’t a line outside was that they didn’t have anything.

Usually he strode the streets of Berlin like a landlord; it was his city. He boasted that, even if he were blindfolded, his nose and ears would tell him where he was—heated, rich air issuing from the hotels in the Friedrichstrasse, automobiles passing the Brandenburg Gate puffing exhaust fumes, the stink of blood and the lowing from the abattoirs of the Thaerstrasse, the milky churning of Bolle’s dairy in Moabit, green smells from the forests and the lakes, lime and coal dust from the barges chugging up the canals—but it wasn’t really true. It was always changing. This was a town that kept you on your toes. Turn your back a minute and, wallop, they’d torn something down and something else was going up in its place. No dignified sense of history here like they said there was in Paris or London. In Berlin history kept happening: Napoleon came and went again. Kaisers flattened elegant eighteenth-century buildings to put up monstrosities to their own glory, but the last kaiser and his war hadn’t been glorious, merely monstrous, and Berlin had revolted.

Schmidt had missed most of the revolution; on leaving the army, he’d gone down to Bavaria to get married. He’d brought his bride back to a different Berlin. The kaiser had gone, and a government that believed in liberation had come in. Buildings had disappeared, streets had altered.

He’d loved it all the more. The place where East met West, the heart of a railway and waterway system that went out to the world and brought it in. A great stew of a city. French Huguenots, Viennese Jews, Bohemian Protestants, Wends, Poles, Hungarians, Romanians, Russians—they’d all hopped into the pot to escape persecution at home, adding variety to the stock—and staying. When Napoleon occupied the city, the Huguenots had resisted his blandishments to join him. “We are Berlin
ers,” they said. “We want to remain Berliners.”