City of Shadows (50 page)

Berlin had never given the Nazis a majority anyway, and when, des
perate to bring down the government, they had allied themselves with the Communists in a transport strike, they had scared off the middle-class voter. A low turnout and a national vote of 11.7 million compared to 13.7 million the previous July reduced the party’s representation in the Reichstag to 196 seats. It was still the largest group by far, but the combined seats of the other parties well outweighed them.

Schmidt took Esther out dancing to celebrate at a party given by some of her arty friends, where champagne corks popped like rifle fire against deafening salvos of jazz.

Howie Meyer joined them at their table. Esther was asked to dance, and the two men watched her—she was a good dancer.

“I love her! I love that woman,” Howie shouted above the noise. “But she won’t leave you.” He was slightly drunk.

So was Schmidt. “Best man won,” he shouted back. He liked Meyer, the only journalist that had attended the Peter Kurten trial whose re
porting of it he’d been able to stomach.

“You want to take her away, pal,” Howie said. “Get her out of the country. Before Hitler gets her.”

“Howie, old friend, we’re celebrating the fact that he won’t. Hinden-burg’s said no. Won’t make him chancellor now.” Schmidt had no re
gard for his president, but the latest storm-trooper atrocity had awakened even that old fart to the Nazi threat.

Meyer shook his finger under Schmidt’s nose. “Want to bet? Little Adolf ’ll be chancellor within the year, maybe quicker.”

“No. Hindenburg’s found backbone from somewhere.”

“Sure, Hindenburg’s said boo to his goose,” Meyer said. “Only Hitler ain’t no goose, and boo ain’t going to stop him. You analyzed the elec
tion results?”

“No.”

“I have. I’m Nazi watcher for my American readers, who, I may say, can’t get enough of it. Want another Scotch?”

“Sounds as if I’d better.” He was sobering.

Meyer lumbered back with the drinks, dodging the dancers. “See, it may have escaped your notice in the euphoria, but the Communists in the Reichstag are vetoing anything that’ll get this fucking country back on track. Reds? Reds don’t give a shit about stabilizing the situation. What they’re good at is yelling Marxist and Trotskyite slogans at the Nazis across the floor. You come to the public gallery sometime—just you come; it ain’t a parliament, it’s a zoo. Scares the hell out of me and scares the hell out of the voting public. And when people are scared, they want a leader.”

“Not Hitler, for Christ’s sake.”

“Why not?” Meyer suddenly stood up and put his forefinger across his upper lip. “ ‘We will silence the Bolsheviks. We will not rest until every German has a job. Jews who control the banks will threaten our farmers no longer. We will protect German family life; mothers will stay at home to bring up the country’s children without fear of crime or pornography. Foreigners will be denied citizenship.’ And that’s word for word, folks.” He bowed to the laughing, booing crowd on the dance
floor who’d paused to listen to him. “Vesuvius is going up, my friends,” he shouted at them. “You’re dancing in Pompeii. Get out, get out. The lava’s coming.”

He sat down. “He’ll be chancellor, pal. Depend on it.”

“Fuck,” Schmidt said.

“My sentiments exactly,” Meyer said, and he tossed back his drink.

Schmidt waited until the stares attracted by Meyer’s performance had gone. “Do something for me, Howie, will you?” He outlined the case against his killer. “I think he’s in Berlin now, I think he’s an officer in the SA, and I think his initials are R.G. Reinhardt Something-beginning-with-G. This is his photograph.” He handed over copies Esther had made for him, the face of the killer circled on both of them.

“Gloomy-looking bird,” Meyer said. “Want I should show this around my Nazi pals?”

“Jesus, no.” Schmidt paused. “Have you got any?”

“I use a long spoon,” Meyer assured him.

“Well, don’t. Last person who did that got his throat slit and his balls cut off.”

Meyer handed the photos back. “Did I mention I’m attached to my balls and all Nazis look alike to me?”

“What I wondered was ...You know people at your embassy. They must keep a list of Nazi activists. What I need to know is—”

“If American intelligence has come across the fucker?”

“I want to bring him to trial, Howie. I don’t want the Nazis finding him first and getting rid of him because he’d give them bad press. I want justice, and I want it seen to be done.”

“You sweet, old-fashioned thing, you,” Howie said, taking the photo
graphs. “Did I tell you I’m in love with your woman?”

“Yep. And I’m taking her home.”

Esther, busy in
her darkroom at 29c, heard a knock on the downstairs door and knew that Frau Schinkel, who’d gone out shopping, couldn’t answer it. She stood for some minutes, adjusting the wet prints hanging on the line. It was too early for Schmidt to come back from work, and she was expecting nobody else to call.

Damn it, she thought. I’ve got to stop this. I will
not
be afraid. He won’t make me afraid. She went downstairs and nearly called out, “Who’s there?” through the door, and then didn’t.

She jerked the door open. “Yes?”

A small face glared out at her above one of the loveliest mink coats she’d ever seen. “You take a long time,” the person said crossly. “They let me out. I tell them I am not mad, and now they believe, but there’s reporters and reporters all the time, so I got to stay with you. Nowhere else to go.”

Esther started to laugh, and Anna Anderson pushed past her. “Left my suitcase in the cab,” she said. “You have to fetch it—too heavy for me.”

22

“Does she have
to stay here?” Schmidt wanted to know.

“Yes,” Esther said.

“Well, does she have to be so untidy?” He wasn’t a tidy man himself, but Anna took disarray to championship levels. It wasn’t that the woman intruded; she spent most of her time in her room and was virtually monosyllabic—to Schmidt at any rate—when she didn’t. And usually she’d been fed by the time he got back, so that he and Esther could eat alone. She was just there. Or had been there—he’d arrive home to find Esther clearing up the mess Anna had left behind like a Hansel and Gretel trail of bread crumbs leading into the chaotic forest she was creating out of Marlene’s room.

“She really
must
be royalty,” he said.

“That’s what Natalya used to say. Natalya tried putting peas under her mattress to see if they made her uncomfortable, like the Hans Christian Andersen princess.”

“And did they?”

“She didn’t notice them.”

He was, he realized, taking up the position Natalya had occupied
when the three women shared the flat, and with much the same resentment; it irritated him to see Esther, who was busy, waiting on someone who was not.

He looked toward the door of the silent bedroom. “What does she do in there?”

“Nothing much.”

It was a nothingness that intruded as if the woman inside were pounding a drum kit.

“Look,” Esther said, “she’s got nowhere else to go, and the press doesn’t know she’s here, so nobody can bother her. I don’t mind, and I don’t see why you should.”

Apart from the fact that he was paying half the bills, he didn’t see why he should either, but he did.

“And she’s company when you’re away,” Esther said.

He was away a lot now. His new multiple-murder section—now gen
erally known as Department MM—entailed his traveling around the country, giving lectures, setting up training courses, advising. Whether there were more multiple killers on the loose than there ever had been or whether he was being alerted by the various police forces dealing with them, he wasn’t sure. The former, he thought—political violence was unleashing individual savagery.

A national rage made them almost coincidental. He would be taken to police morgues to look on the slashed, often dismembered, victim of a murderer and find that lying on a neighboring cart was a body riddled with bullet holes sustained in a riot. A killer in custody slavered the same loathing for mankind that he heard over the radio in the voice of a politician. In the Reichstag, deputies fought like rats in a cage.

Only at 29c did the air remain unpoisoned. Perhaps, he thought, it was why he minded the presence of Anna, as if her breath took away some of the freshness he found in it.

Esther had abandoned the Latin poets for Goethe. “ ‘Know you the land where the lemon-trees bloom? / In the dark foliage the golden or
anges glow; / a soft wind hovers from the sky, the myrtle is still / and the laurel stands tall—do you know it well? / There, there, I would go, O my beloved, with thee!’ ”

“Would you?” he asked.

She snapped the book shut. “No. It’d give me hay fever.”

Howie Meyer kept urging him to take her out of the country. “Don’t wait till Hitler’s ax falls—and, believe me, it’s poised over the head of every Jew in the country. Take her now.”

“She won’t go.”

“She won’t go without you, you mean.”

“Keep an eye on her while I’m out of town, Howie, if you can.”

“I do,” Howie said. “And you might have the goddam grace to be jealous.”

This was the rub. If he went, she’d go with him, but there were some things you couldn’t live with, and, for him, leaving the killer uncaught was one of them.

The only solution was to find Reinhardt G. of Munich—and quick.

So far he wasn’t making any progress in doing it. No record of an SA officer with the first name of Reinhardt had come to the attention of the Intelligence Department at the U.S. embassy. Nor had Howie Meyer, who, like most American correspondents, was being courted by the Nazis, seen him at any of their functions to which he was invited.

The burglar sent into SA headquarters to steal its list of personnel not only had come away empty-handed but considered himself lucky to have come away at all. “They got trip wires, they got alarms, they got guards with fucking guns. I didn’t get close. What they got in there? Give me a nice quiet bank any night.”

“Thanks for trying, Mo-mo.”

Esther twitted him for upholding the law by illegal means, so he didn’t tell her that, through Ottmar, he had made contact with a young corporal in the SA.

“Friend of Marlene’s, he was,” Ottmar had said.

“How can he have been a friend of Marlene’s
and
a storm trooper?”

Ottmar’s world-weary eyes looked on him as on a child; obviously the one did not exclude the other. “I’m not saying he’ll do it, but he’s a Berliner, see, not like the fucking clodhoppers that tore into the Para
sol. And he cried when I told him about Marlene.”

A meeting was set up at the Wrestlers. The young man’s name was Wolf; he was large and surly looking, and his Brownshirt uniform
caused the same flutter of unease among the bar’s clientele as would the sight of a fox in a turkey shed.

“All I want you to do is keep a lookout for an officer with the first name of Reinhardt, fair-haired, big, in Intelligence,” Schmidt told him. “If you see him or hear of anyone with that description, come and tell me. Nothing more.” He handed over an envelope of bills.

Wolf took it. “He the one cut up Marlene?”

“Yes, so be careful.”

After the boy had gone, Boxer came over. “Can’t say I like that class of customer, Inspector.” When storm troopers ran out of Jews and ho
mosexuals and Communists, they’d been known to rampage into the smaller police stations and attack those confined in the cells.

“Who?” asked Schmidt innocently.

“Ah.” Relieved, Boxer tapped the side of his nose. If the meeting had been illicit, that was all right, then.

What the hell am I doing? Schmidt wondered. And then answered himself: he was doing his job, and doing it in the only way left to him. The thought that the faceless agents of Department 1A might have se
cretly done it for him, that his killer was already dead from a bullet in the back of the neck—
and he would never know it
—kept him awake at night.

With Esther asleep beside him, he wove fantastic ideas into more fantastic plans; using Nick Potrovskov’s forger to devise papers that would get him into SA headquarters in some capacity or another—letters from Röhm, perhaps, demanding a list of officers. Or setting himself up as a target that would tempt the killer into the open. An entry in the per
sonal columns along the lines of
“Reinhardt, I know who you are. Come and get me.”

But I
don’t
know who he is. And the bastard knows I don’t.

In the meantime he could only cast his bread upon the waters, get on with his official job, and hope that the men of Department 1A were kept busy with theirs—whatever that was.

At Christmas he
took Esther and a wreath to the Jewish cemetery in Weissensee. “It isn’t the anniversary of his death or anything,” he said. “I just come at Christmas. He used to enjoy Christmas, Ikey did.”