City of Shadows (30 page)

It was an
old fire station, long abandoned by what had been a horse-drawn fire brigade. Both of its two huge and dirty doors were shut. Nailed to the central pillar was an equally dirty piece of cardboard, which said
kreuzberg sports guild.

Like Eisenmenger, Willi was stressing the need for restraint as he and Schmidt awaited an answer to their knock on the great doors. “We don’t want to rile them, boss, not till we find out what we want to know. What
do
we want to know?”

“I’m not sure yet.”

There were sounds of activity beyond the doors, and somebody yelled, “Password?”

“Police,” Schmidt shouted back.

There was no answer, not even to the kick Schmidt applied to the bottom of the door.

They were returning to the street after a fruitless attempt to find a back entrance when they saw a contingent of small boys, led by a tall, skinny youth, marching up to the doors. They reminded Schmidt of the Wandervogel of his youth, though these kids looked even poorer than he’d been; one or two had knapsacks and proper boots, but the rest had homemade sacks strung on their backs and worn-out shoes. Each of them, though, was equipped with a smart khaki peaked cap.

“Wayfarers,” said Willi sentimentally.

“Never liked it,” Schmidt said. “My group didn’t take girls.”

“Mine did. Unofficially.”

On an order from the youth, the urchins lined up in professional mil
itary formation, shuffling into arm-measured distance from one another.

“Atten-
shun
.” They snapped to it. “Hats off.”

The caps were whipped off, collected by a small child with a corpo-ral’s stripe on his ragged sleeve, and handed to the youth.

“Heil Hitler!”

Twenty sets of breath puffed into the cold air, and twenty arms went up in the salute given to Roman emperors. “Return for inspection at five o’clock,” they were told. “Dismiss.”

The children scattered. The youth knocked on the door. They heard his shout: “Robber Baron. Lieutenant Alvens to report.”

As one of the doors grated back, Schmidt and Willi moved up to push in behind the young man. The door swung back on them but was hindered by Willi’s boot, and they went inside.

It was a gymnasium, startling in its size and cleanliness and—consid-ering the poverty of the Kreuzberg district—lavish sports equipment.

Against the white walls were climbing bars, ringed ropes hung from the ceiling, and a vaulting horse stood in the center of the room, sur
rounded by exercise mats. One corner was a boxing area, complete with punching bags and a raised ring in which two boxers, both of them bleeding from the nose, had suspended activity to stare at the two policemen. As had the rest of the occupants—forty or fifty of them, all of them male, most of them young, and none of them showing a wel
come.

It was not a comfortable moment. Ill will emitted by half a hundred youths, all in splendid physical condition, tends to daunt.

Schmidt knew he and Willi had only two advantages. One: they were fully clothed, which gave them the superiority of normality over oppo
nents who wore only breechcloths—a group of boys just emerging from a side door, toweling themselves, were totally naked. Two: they be
longed to a police force that had inculcated respect, not to mention fear, into its law-abiding and criminal citizens alike over many years. A new god was being worshipped in this place, but Schmidt had to count on the fact that the old one still spoke to blood ancestry.

“I am Inspector Schmidt, Berlin City Police. This is Sergeant Ritte. Who is in charge here?” He snapped it out—he wasn’t going to get any
where with this bunch by saying please.

The scales trembled. Glances were exchanged, fists tightened, but in the end nobody moved.

They were fine looking, thought Schmidt. Some, if not all, must have come from the slums, but, if so, the SA had been feeding them well. Where the hell did this organization get its money?

The smell of liniment from their shining white muscles mingled in the air with that of sweat and fresh paint. They looked like a beautiful frieze on a Greek vase; he could have been proud of them if it hadn’t been for the massive swastika that hung from the ceiling.

Menaced though he was, he felt pity—and shame. We let them down, he thought. We lost the war for them, and nobody has pointed out to them that it shouldn’t have been fought in the first place. Instead of the sword-waving, Wagnerian, “Deutschland über Alles” romances their heads have been filled with, we’ve handed them a feeble, poverty-stricken republic that promises nothing. Hitler offers them glory and power.

Eventually the youth that had been leading the wayfarers said sulk
ily, “Captain Schwerte is out.”

“When will he be back?”

“Soon.” It was spit out, suggesting
And then we’ll see.

“And you are?”

“Lieutenant Alvens.”

Schmidt looked him in the eye, stuck his chin up, put a deliberate sneer to his mouth, like an officer, he thought, like a bloody lion tamer. Without moving his eyes, he pointed to a half-glazed door marked
of
fice
. “I’ll wait for him in here.”

“You can’t do that.”

Schmidt strode into the office. “Hold the door, Willi.”

He heard the youth’s voice go high. “He can’t do that.”

And Willi’s: “Oh, yes he can, sonny.”

Schmidt partly closed the door so that it and Willi’s bulk concealed him from outside but enabled him to go quickly to his sergeant’s help if necessary. The office was military in its neatness. An iron table served as a desk. A chair. Army-surplus filing cabinets—all locked. The only books on display were large diaries on a shelf.

A framed picture of Adolf Hitler hung on the wall, looking so like the fishmonger whose stall Hannelore had patronized in the good old days that Schmidt mentally added a large cod to it. Below it were other photo
graphs showing tiered rows of youths and bearing inscriptions: “SA Box
ing team. Berlin. May 1921.” “SA Jujitsu team. Berlin. August 1922.” “SA Rifle team. Berlin. December 1922.” In one, the largest, a line of uniformed men stood behind some squatting boys, all sternly facing the camera—nobody smiled in these photos—taken recently, apparently, at “Sports Conference. Berlin. 1923.” A collection of silver cups and tro
phies on a shelf declared the teams’ successes in various championships.

The only female contribution to all this male achievement was con
tained in an untidy, much less structured photograph, but when Schmidt looked at it closely, he saw that its subjects, who’d been caught in midcaper, were not women but boys with straw wigs for hair and bal
loons stuck down the bodices of their dresses. A high old time was being had by all, and none more than the figure of an older man dressed in hunting clothes, flourishing a horse whip over two grinning “girls” kneel
ing before him, their hands held out in a mock plea for mercy.

Even less healthy was a large cardboard box in one corner with “Erasers!” written on its label. Smith pulled back its flaps; it was full of brass knuckles and rubber truncheons. Storm-trooper humor, he thought.

On the desk, usually the place for a family picture, was a framed black-and-white photo showing two men, both in a uniform Schmidt didn’t recognize but presumed to be brown. One, smaller and fatter than the other, had had to raise his arm to put it around his comrade’s shoulders. Both had adopted a pose for the camera that suggested ei
ther arrogance or defiance. Across the bottom of the photo was a large scrawl:
“Revolverschnauze, herzlichst, Mollenkönig.”

He wondered at the affection existing between two men who knew each other as Revolver Muzzle and King of the Beer Barrels, but switched his attention to the more interesting diaries and took down the one most up to date.

The entries were neat and restrained. Today’s read
“Meet E.R. at An-halter Station 3:00
p.m
.
Sports display 4:30
p.m.
Rally Viktoria P. Dinner with K.”

E.R.? Ernst Röhm? Big day for the SA. He and Willi seemed to have intruded on preparations for a celebration of the Bavarian leader. God, he hoped so.

Activity had resumed in the gym hall. He heard the run and thump of takeoffs and landings over the vaulting horse and Willi calling advice to one of the boxers: “Keep your guard up, son. Watch his left.”

Good old Willi, always made friends.

A young voice sneered, “What do you know about boxing, old man?”

“Me? I taught Manny Finkelstein everything he knows.”

“He is not a boxer.”

“Not a boxer? He’s middleweight champion!”

“He is not a boxer. He is a Jew.”

Schmidt turned back the pages of the diary. What had these likely fellows been doing this last weekend when Natalya was murdered?

Nothing on the Sunday, apparently. The page was empty. But the pre
vious one was headed “January Instruction Conference” and suggested that the Berlin SA had been paid a visit by representatives of its coun
terpart from other cities. Herr Revolver Muzzle (if it was he) had re
minded himself of the arrangements he’d have to make for them.
“Book the Tabagie,”
he’d written.
“Accommodation and transport for T.S. (Ham
burg), W.H. (Stuttgart), B.L. (Leipzig), R.G. (Munich), A.V. (Frankfurt),

J.M.
(Kiel), R.F. (Vienna), P.J. (Potsdam)”
—the list was long.

God Almighty, how far did this bloody organization spread? And screw you, Revolver Muzzle, for using initials. Out of caution, perhaps— some of these men probably had police records.

Schmidt looked around at the other diaries. He took down the one for 1922. When was it Prince Nick had fetched Anna Anderson from Dalldorf Asylum? July. The bastard he was after had been in Berlin in July 1922.

He flipped over pages. And there it was: “July Instruction Confer
ence.”

This time fewer men had come—the right-wing paramilitaries were only just getting themselves organized in ’22; these would be representa
tives of various Freikorps—but A.V. had turned up from Frankfurt, ac
companied by a G.N. Munich had sent R.G. again, this time with E.R. himself. Men with initials differing from those in ’23 had come from Leipzig and Hamburg. Vienna had sent R.F. once more, Stuttgart had sent W.H. Kiel hadn’t sent anybody. P.J. had come again from Potsdam.

Schmidt licked his thumb and forefinger to turn more pages. I’m pinning you down, you fucker. “September Instruction Conference,” “October Instruction Conference.”

Regular meetings. There was a lot to arrange when you were under
mining a government, and, despite the fact that the headquarters were in Munich, it was more convenient for the bastards to meet each other in Berlin, the transport center of Germany.

Regularly.

His hands shaking, Schmidt turned back to the diary’s beginning and then forward, counting. Every sixth weekend.
They met every sixth weekend.

Schmidt straightened his back and expelled a long breath. The Wis
dom of Solomonova. She’d been right: the killer lived somewhere else and traveled to Berlin every sixth weekend.

And
he
was right: the bastard was an SA man.

Names, that’s what he needed, not initials. Maybe Revolver Muzzle had put them somewhere else. He reached for the 1921 book but was disappointed; there’d been no conferences until November 1921, and none of the entries had any relevance he could see, except to indicate that Revolver Muzzle had split his time between Berlin and whatever
Freikorps he then belonged to in order to beat up people, with trips to fellow Freikorps in Munich to help beat up people there.

There was no diary for 1920, when, if his assumption was correct, the first attempt on Anna Anderson’s life had been made at the Landwehr Canal. Which, now he came to think of it, ran not far away from this very gymnasium.

You’re here. You’re in these pages. You’ve been in this room.

With the two relevant diaries open in front of him on the table, he got out his pencil and notebook and copied down the initials men
tioned under all the conference headings, writing fast—Revolver Muz
zle could return with E.R. at any moment.

When he’d finished, he crossed out the initials that hadn’t turned up on up the pertinent dates. What was he left with?

W.H.
ofStuttgart, R.G. of Munich, A.V. of Frankfurt, R.F. of Vi
enna. P.J. of Potsdam.

Shit.
He imagined himself contacting the police forces of five cities and asking them if a particular storm trooper was on their books.
Sorry, old boy, I only know his initials.
They’d love him.

Well, what did he know about Natalya’s murderer? A big man. Aryan. Probably ex-army. And, since he was being sent to Berlin to rep
resent his city’s storm troopers, someone high up in the SA hierarchy.