City of Shadows (45 page)

“Can’t be too many of them about,” Willi said. “Rich man’s auto, that is.”

“
Now,
Willi.” But he knew there wasn’t any rush; the transvestite was probably already dead.

He didn’t say so to Esther when he phoned to tell her. “We’ll find her, darling.”

There was silence at the other end of the line.

“We’ll find her,” he said again. Because she still didn’t say anything, he put the phone down so that he could get on with his job. This was no time to indulge in guilt; she’d flagellate herself enough for the two of them. If it was anybody’s fault, it was his—that’s what came of using unofficial channels. Had he given the photograph to the uniform boys to flash about . . .

He should have known. Giving Marlene the picture had been lethal. The killer had come for her, and he’d gotten her. The poor old queen had shown the sports-club photograph to somebody who’d recognized the face on it. Recently. Very recently.
“Tell the inspector that little Mar
lene of Scotland Yard solved his case yesterday!”
Just now his anger was too great for self-blame; he could feel it licking out of him, lighting up the figure caught in it, scorching it until it shriveled.

You’re in Berlin now. I’m getting close, you bastard, and you know it.

In 29c Bismarck
Allee, Esther continued to hold the phone to her ear long after the connection had been broken. Crazily, the only words in her head paraphrased a line from an English play that had once made her laugh.
“To lose one flatmate, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a mis
fortune; to lose two looks like carelessness.”

After a while she put the receiver back—very slowly. I’m a web, she thought. Everyone dies that gets caught up in me.

She’d heard the fury in Schmidt’s voice and envied it; anger was not an option for her. The massacre of her family would have blasted her apart if she’d given way to it; the crime had been too vast for anger, too impersonal, a political act. She’d disciplined herself to seeing the killing in context, as a legacy of impersonal hatred, czar on Jew, Bol
shevik on czar, Red on White, White on Black. And now that it was personal, now that a malformed mind had slithered out of the Polish marshes and was defending its disguise by striking at other people she loved, it was too late for her to resurrect anger; she could feel only shame that she’d helped to lead it to them. And grief that they were dead.

It was a warm night for October, but Esther sat at her window watching it turn into day, wrapped in a blanket because she was so cold.

Stretching interdepartmental cooperation
to the limit, Willi managed to stay on the case with him. “Finding that car is Traffic busi
ness,” he said.

“Anastasia case,” he said when Schmidt had explained the circum
stance. “Like old times. Um, Bismarck Allee . . . you living there now, boss?”

“Any objection?”

“I ain’t, no. But I was thinking ...in view of the lady’s, um . . .”

“She’s a Jew, Willi. You can say it.”

“I’m not saying anything. It’s just that . . . our Major Diels . . .” He jerked his thumb in the direction of Department 1A. “Might be wiser to give a different address, for every day, like. They reckon he’s got every Yi— Jew in the city on file.”

“Major Diels can go fuck himself.”

The Silver Arrow had been seen heading west. It had passed along Bismarckstrasse, Kaiser Damm, and onto Heerstrasse, where a police car had pursued it because it was going too fast but had lost the chase to the Mercedes’s superior speed. The police driver thought it might have turned left into Grünewald Forest; he’d taken its number, though. A Reichstag deputy had reported it stolen.

Just after dawn a foot patrolman on the banks of Havel reported hav
ing seen a silver car going over the bridge leading to Schwanenwerder; he’d been too far off to tell the make or license plate, but he’d noticed it because it had driven only a little way onto the island before turning around and speeding off again.

Almost immediately there came another report: the car had been found abandoned near Tempelhof Airport.

“Airport, boss?” Willi asked as they set out.

“No,” Schmidt said, “Schwanenwerder. That’s where he’s dumped the body.”

“How do you reckon that?”

“I’m getting to know him.” And he’s getting to know me.

Autumn was extending itself in the latest and longest Indian sum
mer Berlin had known for years. Tapestry-colored leaves still clung to the trees of villas that became bigger and more widely spaced as Willi drove westward.

“Schwanenwerder,” he said. “Yid country, ain’t it? Oh, sorry.”

“It’s all right. It is Yid country,” Schmidt said. “Exclusively and exclusive.” Once inhabited only by rabbits and landscape painters, it was
now home to some of Berlin’s wealthiest Jews, who’d built mansions on it. “It’s our man’s little joke.”

“
Their
joke, boss. There was two of them took the homo out of that club.”

“He’s getting help. And he’s getting careless.” Literally without care, he thought. The more power the Nazis got, the more R.G. gained con
fidence that he was untouchable.

The radio crackled the car’s call sign. “To Inspector Ritte. Body found on Schwanenwerder.”

Willi clucked with admiration and stepped harder on the pedal. “On our way.”

They had to slow down through Grünewald behind horses and riders out for a morning canter and parties of young men and women with picnic hampers going out to the lake for a swim while the weather lasted.

“Had my first girl here,” Willi said lovingly. “Bivouacking with the Wandervogel, I was. Getting back to nature, the leader called it. And a camp of female Wandervogel not far away. Lotte, she was called. Never forgotten her. We got back to nature under the trees, all right, her and me.” He sighed.

Schmidt nodded, trying to tell himself that there was still health in the world. He thought of the forest vibrating with Berlin slums’ randy adolescents under the Grünewald trees, the only beauty and greenery available to them. Probably still was, except he couldn’t imagine Fascist youth having beautiful moments.

He’d had a girl here himself, though she wasn’t his first. Trudi Men
zel, bless her. He’d borrowed a bicycle so he could bring her here, and she’d sat on the handlebars all the way, his chin resting on her plump shoulder while he pedaled, getting hotter and hotter and more and more lustful. He remembered the effect of sun coming through the leaves onto Trudi’s skin. Like Willi said, beautiful.

They were running past Havel now, its water dotted with little sail
boats. Willi wrenched the steering wheel to the right, and they were over the bridge onto the island.

Somebody’d hung up a piece of canvas, a sail from the look of it, between two trees at the lake’s edge, and a policeman in a skiff had
stationed himself on the water itself to keep boat-owning onlookers away from what lay in between.

Some uniforms were having a smoke nearby and tossed the butts away as the car drew up. One of them saluted and came forward.

“Was it you found him?” Schmidt asked.

“Yes, sir. It was me saw the car, sir, and so I come over to have a look. Seems like they tried to chuck the body in the water, but I reckon it got caught on a tree root as it rolled down the bank.”

“What’s your name?”

“Baum, sir.”

“Well done, Baum. Is Dr. Pieck here?”

Baum wiped his hand across his mouth. “Just arrived, sir. Examining now. We caught him before he left home.” The police surgeon lived nearby in Wannsee.

“Is that your vomit?” Schmidt pointed to a small heap by one of the trees.

Baum nodded. “Sorry, sir. Thought I’d seen everything, sir, but this . . .”

“Does you credit,” Schmidt said. He walked around the canvas. Kneeling by the body, the police surgeon nodded to him and sat back so that he could see better. His assistant stood by, looking over the lake.

They’d left Marlene clothed, which he hadn’t expected, but had ripped the long, slinky, pink satin gown she’d worn for her act from neckline down to the mess at her crotch, exposing the large, flesh-colored falsies with which she’d padded its bust, a shaved chest, and a hairy belly, all now crusted with blood from her cut throat, where flesh gaped open on the left side. Presumably agony and then rigor mortis had kept her teeth clamped on the genitalia that had been stuffed into her mouth, so that, unwillingly, irresistibly, Schmidt was reminded of a dog carrying some smaller animal’s entrails to its master.

Her right hand lay stretched out where the tree root had interrupted her body’s roll, and water was gently lapping against long, red fingernails.

A coot came bobbing out of the reeds and set off farther down the lake. A slight southerly breeze brought the shrieks of the bathers from the Wannsee beaches.

“What’s that across the head?” Schmidt asked.

“Yes, I had difficulty with that,” Dr. Pieck said. He stood up, brushing his knees. “Done with the same knife that severed the carotid artery, and he’d have been struggling at the time, of course, but you can just make out letters.” He addressed the corpse: “Somebody carved the word ‘filth’ into your poor, bald head, didn’t they?”

“Struggling?”

“Oh, yes. All the injuries were inflicted before death, except of course the one to the neck that caused it. Water, Plancke, if you please.”

His assistant had a kidney basin and soap ready. Pieck washed his hands and dried them on a small white towel. The basin was emptied, more water poured in from a jug, and Pieck washed his hands again and, again, dried them. “A transvestite, one presumes. Dear, dear, how these sorts of fellows hanker to become women. Prepared to go to Cairo for the operation, I’m told.” He looked benevolently down at the thing at his feet. “Didn’t want it done this way, though, did you, old chap?”

“Sir.” The policeman in the boat had retrieved something from the water that hung from the oar like a dishrag. It was a wig.

“Send it with the body when they take it in,” Schmidt told him. Who
ever came to do the official identification should see Marlene as she’d wanted to be seen. Oh, Christ, he thought. It’ll probably be Esther.

Raised voices were coming from behind the canvas. When Schmidt appeared around it, Willi said in the monotone he reserved for the un
welcome, “This is Herr Fuchs, sir. He’s a banker. He lives in that house over there”—Willi pointed to a richly chimneyed house among distant trees—“and he wants us to go away.”

“I didn’t exactly say that.” Apart from being short, Herr Fuchs was not the Nazi depiction of a Jewish banker. He was slim. His speech was cul
tured and without lisp. He was dressed for tennis. “I do appreciate that you have your work to do, Inspector, but if you could speed this up.”

A jackass, Schmidt thought. “It’s a murder case, sir,” he said stolidly.

“Exactly. My wife and daughters want to come down here and take our boat out.” He pointed a few yards along the lake to where a gleam
ing launch was moored to a small pier. “I just wondered how long you’re going to be.”

“As long as it takes, sir.”

“Mmm.” Herr Fuchs lingered. “I just wish these gangs would keep to the streets and not intrude their . . . machinations into our little haven.”

“Yes, sir.” Schmidt had lost interest. Why here? he was thinking, look
ing around. Why dump her here? Long way to drive. Risky. There was something else. “What’s that, sir? That thing there, near the bridge?”

“Ah, a little bit of our German history.”

They strolled together to look at it, a single Corinthian column of stone to which a broken piece of architrave was still attached.

“A fragment from the Paris Tuileries,” Fuchs said. “It was brought back by our soldiers after the Franco-Prussian War. Rather amusing, don’t you think? Read it.”

Schmidt peered at the brass inscription.
this stone from the banks of the seine, planted here in german soil, warns you, passerby, how quickly luck can change.

So there it was.

“Pity that poor fellow over there didn’t take the warning,” said Fuchs.

“It’s a warning to all of us,” Schmidt said. To me, he thought. That’s why he brought Marlene here. So that I’d read it.

Fuchs raised his eyebrows. “Very well, Inspector, I’ll leave you to hurry things up. I’ll send one of the servants down with a drink for your men, lemonade or something.”

Schmidt watched him go, so agile and smug in his shining whites, so sure he was divorced from the horror that lay at the bottom of his gar
den. What do you read? The financial pages? Try
Mein Kampf,
where Hitler says you’re a disease. Do you think this silk cocoon of yours will protect you from storm troopers?

He went back to the lake’s edge.

In the police
morgue in the basement of the Alex, Esther looked down at Marlene’s bewigged head where it lay outlined against the sheet. “Yes,” she said obediently, for the record. “That is William Edward Leicester.”