City of Shadows (46 page)

Schmidt would have spared her, but there wasn’t anybody else. Mar-lene’s friends had been frightened off, and the upper-class family in England, when contacted, had refused to come. He led her away.

“I don’t know what to do,” she said.

“I’m sorry. My love, I’m so sorry. My fucking fault. I shouldn’t have involved her.”

She looked up at him. “Why do we blame everybody but him? He’s the disease. But, Schmidt, she was so joyful, I couldn’t understand how her family could cast her off and not miss her company.” She began to weep, and he put his arms around her. “It’s like being aboard some hideous Noah’s Ark,” she said. “We send out a raven and a dove to find something for us, and they don’t come back because the something has torn them to bits.”

“Come on, Mrs. Noah, I’ll buy you a coffee.”

In the café she asked, as he had known she would, “How bad was it?”

He wouldn’t lie to her. “It wasn’t good.”

She rubbed her forehead with the heel of her hand. “We’re not going to get him, are we? If the Nazis take power, he’s just going to blend in; he’ll be lost in the bigger evil. They won’t care who he’s killed.”

“They’re not in yet,” he said. “And until they are—
if
they are—he’s as big a menace to them as to anybody else, if they only knew it. Once he’s exposed, he’s hardly going to be a vote getter.”

“Once he’s exposed,” she said.

He took her hand. “I’m getting close. Just one piece of luck, that’s all I need. One lucky break.”

At Schwanenwerder, as they’d followed the police van taking the body to the forensic lab, he’d made Willi stop while he walked back to the column from the Tuileries. “ ‘. . . how quickly luck can change,’ ” he read again.

“And so can yours, you bastard,” he’d said. He’d felt a bit ridiculous as he’d said it, but it needed saying.

“I’ll see to the funeral,” she said. “I’ll talk to the undertaker. I don’t want her buried without makeup.”

“Esther.”

“Yes?”

“Time you moved out of Bismarck Allee.” He expected protests—he was going to override them—but he wasn’t prepared for fury.

“NO.” She attracted the attention of the entire café.

“For God’s sake, be sensible,” he said. “Why not?”

“Because he’ll have won. Because I’m a Jew. Because Jews are always having to run away, get shifted, move on, leave your home and posses
sions and get the hell out. They’re not shifting me—not now, not ever.”

“Not ‘them,’ ” he said. “Him.”

But for her the killer’s shadow was being subsumed in the greater storm cloud; he was among the truckloads that went past singing death to the Jews, in Hitler’s voice on the radio, in the raids on synagogues, the very fear that she found when she visited the Smoleskins in Moabit and that she felt herself—and would not give in to. Here is where I stand. Here, and no further.

“All right,” he said.

She became quieter. “I’d be diminished if I ran away.”

He watched her go back to her work, disappearing into an Alexan
derplatz in which election posters on every lamppost shouted for her vote. A Communist had set up a soapbox and lectern and was doing a good imitation of Lenin at his loudest but was being drowned out by a group of men with swastika armbands blowing whistles.

He tried thinking logically, and logically there was little danger to her. It was doubtful if the killer had even known Marlene’s home ad
dress but rather had been alerted by one of his homosexual friends who’d encountered Marlene at the club when he was showing the pho
tograph around.

But the image of Hannelore spread-eagled on the hallway floor was a persistent terror to him. And Schmidt was no longer the investigating of
ficer on the case. He’d been taken off it. Ringer had insisted that the in
vestigation of Marlene’s killing be handed over to his old enemy, Bolle.

“This sort of killing is not your business, Inspector,” Ringer had said. “Your job is to set up the Multiple Murder Department.”

“This
is
multiple murder, for Christ’s sake. How many more deaths are you going to let the bastard get away with?”

But the fact that Natalya and Marlene had both lived at 29c and that Potrovskov had been its frequent visitor was regarded as an unfortunate nine-years-apart coincidence. In Ringer’s opinion, Natalya, a stripper, Marlene, a transvestite, and Potrovskov, a dealer in everything shady, were the sort of people who, through their very nature, turned up on po
lice mortuary slabs.

Schmidt, Ringer’s manner had indicated, was showing a regrettable tendency to return to the obsession that had gripped him at the death of his wife.

“Fräulein Solomonova seems merely unfortunate in her acquain
tances,” he said. “A personage to be avoided, in my opinion.”

Which told Schmidt that Ringer knew he’d taken up residence at 29c.

The evidence he’d collected in Poland, if anything, made matters worse.

“You went unofficially, without any reference to the Polish police.” Ringer lectured him, “What did you think you were doing?”

“Finding out he killed a woman and a child there, then came to Ger
many, where he’s now committed at least five more murders, let alone the original attempt on the life of Anna Anderson—that’s what I was doing. What are we supposed to do? Let him roam the country slaugh
tering anybody he fancies? How many multiple murders do you want? I thought that was
my
bloody department.”

The kaiser mustache whiffled, but the old man kept his temper. Which—Schmidt reined himself in—was more than
he
was doing.

“I shall, of course, speak to my opposite number in Warsaw,” Ringer said, “and I shall attempt to present matters in such a way that we re
ceive Polish cooperation. In the meantime I suggest you contact the Immigration Department.”

Schmidt already had. “Immigration hasn’t got an entry for a Ryszard Galczynski. Not under that name. He came in illegally.”

It wouldn’t have been difficult; the country had become awash with illegal immigrants from the east—a fact that was causing dissatisfac
tion and swelling the ranks of the Nazi Party. Buying the requisite pa
pers wasn’t difficult either, if you had the money; Potrovskov hadn’t been the only one who supplied forged identities.

“Indeed?” Ringer handed him back the Anastasia file that Schmidt had resurrected from Records. “You will pass this over to Inspector Bolle. By all means bring it up to date with your Polish findings if you think it necessary. Discuss it with him, but it is his responsibility now, not yours. Confine yourself to setting up the new department.”

The one concession Schmidt had been able to extract from the chief had been a uniformed officer detailed to patrol Bismarck Allee
and keep a watchful eye out for any unauthorized person approaching number 29.

In his office Schmidt attached the case notes on Marlene’s murder to the file and added the statement by Father Teofil he’d made the priest sign before he left Bagna Duze, along with another from the count. He put the resultant bulging folder on Frau Pritt’s desk. “I want everything in here duplicated,” he told her. “Everything.”

He went down to the Alex’s new photo lab. “Can you make copies of these, Hugo?” He handed over the two pictures of the killer as a boy and the killer as a storm trooper.

“You’ll need to sign a form for Department 1A.”

He signed it. When he had duplicates of notes, statements, photo
graphs, lab reports, then—and only then—did he take the original down to Bolle’s office and give it to him.

Bolle was a pipe smoker and one of those men who refuses to show surprise. Having to explain all over again to that smoke-wreathed, stolid face the motive for Marlene’s murder and the probable identity of the killer reinvoked a nine-year-old anger in Schmidt. This stupid, slow sod wouldn’t see the links, hadn’t believed him over Hannelore’s death, wouldn’t believe him now.

“So that’s the case,” he said, finishing. “Or is this another accident, and the poor bastard cut off his own balls while shaving?”

“No need for that,” Bolle said, removing the pipe from his mouth. “I’m not saying you’re right. I think this was a queer killing pure and simple. But it was nasty, and if you’ve got a line on the fuckers who did it, we’ll go after them.”

“Really?” Schmidt hadn’t put Bolle down as a champion of the trans
vestite community. He said so.

“I’m not,” Bolle said. “Unnatural bunch of shits in my opinion, but there’s too many SA gangs barging into places and hauling people off. It’s getting out of hand. At least this pansy’s body turned up; some never do.”

“Really?” Schmidt hadn’t put Bolle down as anti–storm trooper either.

“Old fellow lived down my way,” Bolle said, “trade-union man, a docker at the Westhafen. He’d been calling for the ban to be put back on the SA. Three weeks ago they broke into his house and took him
away. Told his wife he was Communist scum. Not been seen since. I got my boys on it, but so far we haven’t been able to make an arrest. They scared the wife so she couldn’t identify her own mother.” He wagged his pipe at Schmidt. “Opinionated old codger, Jan was, and I’m not saying we didn’t have our arguments, but he wasn’t a Red—he was a Roman Catholic
and
he fought for his country in the war, which is more than these young bastard Brownshirts ever did.”

Schmidt left Bolle’s office with an apology owing and an unspoken
nunc dimittis
on his lips. It was the election, he thought. The stridency of hatred made you forget some people still believed in law.

Bolle even allowed him to sit in on the interrogation of the men who’d invaded the Pink Parasol—on the understanding that question
ing was left to Bolle.

All of them were young and came from outside Berlin. Not one pro
fessed to know the name of the man who’d turned up in plainclothes at one of their meetings and said something along the lines of “Let’s go, boys, and strike a blow for the Fatherland by destroying a nest of queers.”

“You obey any civilian who turns up?” Bolle asked.

“He wasn’t a civilian. He was Intelligence; he had authority from Munich.”

“And you didn’t ask his name?”

“Not necessary. We obey orders.”

Shown the photograph of the 1923 sports conference, they recog
nized Ryszard’s face but confessed to not having seen him before the incident.

“He spoke with a bit of a foreign accent,” one of them admitted.

“Not a German, then.”

“Neither is our Führer.” The youth gave a Hitler salute. “We are still proud to serve him.”

“By beating up nancy boys,” Bolle said. “Who was with him? Who helped him kidnap the one dressed as a woman?”

“They were all stinking women,” the youth said, and spit.

“The victim was killed, you know that? Tortured to death. You were accomplice to a murder.”

“Trash like that deserve it.”

“Where did they get the car they used to take him away?”

“What car? We came to Berlin in a truck.”

The boy had a lovely complexion, cream tinged with russet; he should have been herding cows on the farm his father owned outside Potsdam.

Bolle asked, not unkindly, “What the fuck are you doing here, son?”

Red flooded the boy’s skin, and he hammered on the table. “Because it is necessary. Germany is in the hands of degenerates. My father’s gone bankrupt; the stinking Yids own our farm now.
It is necessary.
”

When they got outside the interrogation room, Bolle said, “I’m going to have to let them out on bail. Their lawyer’s screaming about decent boys like that being in jail while perverts pollute the streets.”

“Decent? Let me take the little shit down to the morgue and show him the body and ask him if
that’s
decency. What about the kid whose back was ripped to shreds?” But he knew and Bolle knew that the youths’ like
liest sentence was a fine. Their lawyer would emphasize the Pink Para-sol’s wickedness. They’d be dressed in suits, the flower of German youth carried away in a campaign against indecency. The farm boy would re
turn to his village and be greeted as a hero.

In a disintegrating situation, where beatings, battles, woundings, and killings were reaching record levels, Nazi propaganda was present
ing the storm troopers as a form of auxiliary police—indeed, in some areas they had more or less become such—the only force capable of standing between good Germans and the powers of darkness as repre
sented by sin, inferior races, and, above all, Bolshevism.

Bolshevism. The death of millions of Russian
kulaks
from starvation owing to Stalin’s collectivization was a terror stalking a Germany that still regarded itself as an agricultural nation. The Nazi Party was enforcing the message with energy—going door-to-door, holding rallies, meetings, leafletting. Hitler had taken to the sky and was flying from city to city, wooing massive crowds in the machine-gun voice that never gave out.