City of Shadows (19 page)

Somebody’d once said Berlin wasn’t a city, it was a situation. And Berliners were good at coping with situations. Terrible things happened
to them, but after they were over, the Berliners settled back to doing what they were good at: eating, drinking, working, and making little Berliners. Basically, for all its variation, it was a mundane city—which, a mundane man himself, was what Schmidt liked about it.

But it’s being tried too hard, he thought. Today its people were gray from fatigue under a grayer sky threatening more snow. A piano was be
ing lowered from a third-floor window onto a cart below, watched by a little girl in tears. Middle-class housewives wrapped in shawls were set
ting up tables on the sidewalks to sell their possessions. Outside the Quakers’ and Salvation Army’s soup kitchens, well-dressed elderly men and women waited in line with tramps.

Tempers were as sharp as the cold. Exchanges between buyers and sellers were shouted; a couple of men tussled over a bag of coal. From the open door of a café came steam and the sound of an altercation over a cup of coffee that had been five thousand marks when it was or
dered and eight thousand by the time it was drunk.

And probably, he thought as he passed, it wasn’t even real coffee. Not even acorn ersatz. Nowadays ersatz was ersatz-ersatz.

A statue of Frederick William I lacked its nameplate, as did every other statue in the Tiergarten—brass could be exchanged for potatoes. The British embassy had complained to Alexanderplatz headquarters that not even its illustrious name had been spared.

Farther along the street, a group of wing-collared businessmen were despairingly pointing out to a policeman that the roof of their office building had been stripped of lead. Burglaries and theft had doubled, street crime trebled. Violence between the Communists and the ex
treme right wing was an everyday event. This, in what had once been one of the most law-abiding capitals in Europe.

It’s not crime, he thought, it’s desperation. It’s what happened when the basket you carried your wages home in was worth more than the currency inside it. And what the hell was the government doing about it, apart from printing more and more paper money? The million-mark note was expected any day.

When he thought of Hannelore and the little Schmidt she carried in
side her and the nourishment they should both be getting and weren’t, he wanted to kill—he just didn’t know whom.

God send us a leader who knows what he’s doing.

The Communists thought they’d found one; the usual pictures of Lenin were pasted up on walls everywhere under signs saying it was verboten to stick bills. But the posters that really caught the eye were bloodred with a huge and hinged black cross. He regretted the adop
tion of the swastika, that symbol of light, by the National Socialist Ger
man Workers’ Party; now it was the trademark for a bunch of gorillas whose only idea of spreading light was to make holes in the heads of those who didn’t agree with them. He didn’t like the vicious little shit who’d become their leader either. Eye-catching, though, he gave them that; the poster seemed to drag the only color in the city into itself.

Still, whatever happened, whatever government came into power, policemen like him had to be paid and fed—not much, not well, but enough. Children could become malnourished, old people die of cold, the middle class’s pensions, insurance, and savings be wiped away, but if the police didn’t survive, neither did the government.

The canteen was crowded and steamy with drying cloaks, thick with cigarette smoke. One of the liberal reforms introduced by the Weimar Republic had been to do away with the old headquarters’ segregated dining rooms that had provided varying comfort according to rank, and replace them with a vast hall in which inspectors of the Kriminal-Abteilung, like himself, even higher commissioners, were expected to eat in fraternal companionship alongside beat-pounding, uniformed Schutzmannschaft.

Nobody liked it. The place had been tiled in the public-urinal school of design; it was noisy and uncomfortable. The lower orders were con
strained by the presence of officers; officers, mostly ex–military men, hated having to eat like ordinary mortals in front of their subordinates. The food was bad and getting worse.

However, at a time when Germany was starving, when a third of the population was unemployed, a third on strike, and a third having to take their pay partly in potatoes, it didn’t do to be picky.

He fought his way through the crush to the counter. “What we got today?”

An officer of the Fraud Squad nodded gloomily at a vast shape be
hind the counter. “She says it’s hare stew, but I just heard it bark.”

“Dumplings,” Schmidt said winningly. “Nobody makes dumplings like you, Rosa. I’ll have three.”

“You’ll have two.” Rosa was one of only five women employed at headquarters, all of them, so it was said, chosen for their ability to tear men’s arms off. “And you’ll eat them here.” She pointed her ladle at a sign saying it was verboten to carry food off the premises. Men had been taking it home to their families.

He carried his plate to a table occupied by a group of Meldewesen, the division in charge of immigrants and refugees, and insinuated his chair between two of them. “This taste as bad as it smells?”

“Worse.”

After a period of communal, reflective chewing, he said, “Otto, any Yusupovs in Berlin just now?”

“Two.” Otto Steiber knew his lists like a housewife knew her grocery cupboard. “Yusupov, Felix, and Yusupov, Irina. Prince and Princess re
spectively. Renting number 42 Pariser Platz. Three-week visas each.”

“So he
is
in Berlin. What’s he doing here?”

“Officially, he’s visiting friends.” Steiber spread out his napkin on the table and forked a piece of meat onto it. “That’s not hare. That look like hare to you?”

“No.” Schmidt did the same with his. “And unofficially?”

“Unofficially he’s here to see his lawyers. Some Yusupov jewels from his czarist days have surfaced in town. He’s claiming they’re his; the Soviet government says they belong to the proletariat.” Steiber folded up the meat in the napkin and put it in his pocket. “The courts will have to decide whether they belong to a fucking assassin or the fuck
ing Bolsheviks—and good luck to ’em. What’s your interest?”

“His name’s come up in an inquiry. I need to see him.”

“Keep me informed. And keep your back to the wall.” Steiber crooked his left hand on his hip and flirted the fingers of his right in the air.

“One of them, is he?”

“Duckie, he invented it.”

“Otto, while we’re about it, what have you got on Prince Nick Potrov
skov?”

Steiber laid down his fork. “Am I to be allowed to eat this meal in peace?”

“Do you want to?”

“Probably not. Well, then, Prince Nick ...Arrived in Berlin five years ago without a rag to his ass. Now owns three nightclubs here and another in Hamburg. We’ve got him down as an illegal dealer in foreign currency, he’s on the Vice Squad’s books as a procurer, Customs’ as a source of stolen passports, while the Fraud Squad’s looking hard at his tax returns, and all any of us have pinned on him is a breach of fire regulations.”

“A real prince?”

“Just some bloody jumped-up lieutenant out of the Cossack army with an eye to the main chance.”

“How does he get away with it?”

“His clubs provide spare-time activities for the rich—and that in
cludes Reich ministers. The bastard’s got friends in high places with low tastes.”

Schmidt folded up his napkin with the saved meat and one of the dumplings in it, put it in his pocket, and went upstairs to his office to start writing his report.

Willi joined him. “You ought to see the kike’s flat in Bismarck Allee, boss. Massive. Real wages of sin, it is. And there’s me and my missus and the kids with hardly a place to park our butts.”

“Was she all right?”

“Didn’t say much. Thanked me when I made her some tea.”

Schmidt brought him up to date.

Willi rubbed his hands together. “Getting good, this. A regular Hans Christian Andersen, this is shaping up to be.”

Complete with Snow Queen, Schmidt thought. “What do you think, Sergeant?” He liked Willi’s opinions, often in order to compare his own, sometimes as entertainment. Usually the foreigner did it.

“Yusupov,” Willi said immediately. “He’s our man.”

“So he murdered Natalya, did he?”

“Yep. He’s in town. Our Natalya’s trying to sell some jewels she smuggled out of Russia but doesn’t know how. Contacts Yusupov. Lit
tle Felix says he’ll authenticate them, meet me tonight at the schloss. He says they’re mine, she says finders keepers, and—
schlipp
—bye-bye, Natalya.”

“Hmm. The note said, ‘I will authenticate you.’
You
. A person, not jewels.”

“Slip of the pen. Bad grammar.” Willi liked his script and was run
ning with it. “We know he’s a killer. Did he use a knife on Rasputin?”

“Can’t remember. Poisoned him first, I think, shot him, then bat
tered his skull in and shoved him under the ice. Took a bit of getting rid of, did Rasputin.”

“What did he get for it? Yusupov?”

“Got off free, I believe.”

“Fucking Russkis,” Willi said. “Boss, let’s go get him. Think of the pub
licity. I can see the headlines now: ‘Murderer of Mad Monk Strikes Again.’ Pictures of the arresting officers, Inspector Schmidt and Sergeant Ritte, looking stern but modest.”

“Bismarck Allee first.” If Yusupov was their man, the case against him would have to be watertight. The six years since the Russian Rev
olution had done nothing to abate interest in the Romanovs or the peasant monk believed to have been their evil genius—nor the man who’d assassinated him. Yusupov attracted publicity like a dog did fleas, and he was quick to bring actions when he considered himself li
beled or slandered. A wrongful arrest didn’t bear thinking about.

Willi was still speculating. “Or it could have been that Prince Nick forged Yusupov’s name. If he was keeping three women in sin in one flat, he was asking for trouble; Natalya’s jealous of the other two, gets the goods on his nefarious activities, threatens to tell—
schlipp
—bye-bye, Natalya.”

“A happy thought.” Schmidt liked it. However, the same applied; everything to be done by proper procedure.

On the way to Bismarck Allee, he made Willi stop at the dairy around the corner from Alexanderplatz but came out empty handed.

“Trying to find some milk for Hannelore,” he said, getting back in.

“How far gone is she now?” Willi, father of five, was an expert on gynecology.

“Four months.”

“Should be getting plenty of milk.”

“I know.”

“Listen, boss . . .”

“What?”

“Nothing.” Willi drove on.

They stopped again at a taxi stand in Friedrichstrasse, where Schmidt got out and walked down the line to the fourth cab. The driver was smoking and reading the
Sovremennye Zapiski.

“Good afternoon, Count.”

Count Chodsko, formerly of the czar’s Imperial Guard, leaped out and opened the passenger door with a loud “The Linden, sir? Yes, sir,” and a hissed “Sacred God, get in.”

Imprecations from drivers at the head of the line followed them as they drove off. Chodsko replied with finger gestures. He yelled at Schmidt over his shoulder, “Do I put up a sign? Paul Chodsko is a po
lice informer? You want my balls before my compatriots cut them off?”

“Keep ’em. But I need what you know about Prince Yusupov.” He’d found it useful to have his own contacts among the White Russians in Berlin, independent of the Meldewesen’s, just as he did among all the other émigré communities; Chodsko owed him his cab license.

The count knew a great deal about Prince Yusupov, all of it scur
rilous and most of it involving removing his hands from the steering wheel to clutch his hair.

“And a woman called Natalya Tchichagova. Know her?”

“No.”

“Esther Solomonova?”

“A Zhid? I know nothing of Zhids. Zhids are all our misfortunes.”

“Badly scarred on the right side of her face.”

Chodsko said reluctantly, “Sometime I see freak at the Green Hat. She is Prince Nikolai’s woman, I think. He has thousand. You pay me for ride?”

“No.”

“Shit. Try look like American. Only American
touristi
afford cabs nowadays.”

“What’d the Russki say?” Willi asked when he got back.

“He blames Yusupov for the revolution. He says if the bastard had killed Rasputin more quietly, or if the czar had punished him properly...and on and on. Anyway, it was all Felix’s fault. He’s a bum-licking, ass-fucking, skirt-wearing lizard, slippery enough to go down
sewer pipes, only stopping to bugger the rats on the way—and that’s the edited version.”