The Sleepwalkers (2 page)

What really got him though, like a hammer blow, were the legs. Stretched out before her as if she were napping, they seemed almost supernaturally misshapen. He crouched toward the orange glare of the water, holding his breath against her stench. The feet were normal, but from the knees down all the way to the ankles, the bone structure appeared . . . backward. As if someone had taken giant pliers and turned the fibula around.

“Like a mermaid, eh?” Schmidt smirked.

“That’s what we’ve been calling her, sir.” Another cop made it clear the joke was not Schmidt’s.
“Fräulein Wassernixe.”

“Never mind that. Has the pathologist been sent for?”

“
Jawohl,
Herr Inspektor-Detektiv.” Schmidt saluted. “He should be here momentarily.”

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Dr. Ernst Hoffnung declared minutes later, after Schmidt and the others had lifted the poor girl onto the back of the ambulance.

Willi watched the senior pathologist give the body a quick going over.

“Suture marks,” Hoffnung said with certainty. “Somebody’s tampered with these legs. It’s extraordinary. From the feel of it . . . well, I don’t even want to say. I’ll have to open them up and look.” Hoffnung’s gloved fingers pressed and poked the entire length of the corpse, ending with a quick tour inside the mouth. “I’m not sure yet what the cause of death is, but I can tell you this. She’s almost certainly not German.”

Willi had worked with Hoffnung enough times not to underestimate his talents, but this was magic. “What tips you off?”

“Wisdom teeth all removed. Not one in a thousand German girls could afford it.”

“Any guesses where she’s from?”

“The only place they routinely work on teeth like that is America.”

Willi looked across the wide, gray expanse of water where the two rivers converged. Rain was coming in from the west, making a silvery sheet as it moved across the dense network of islands and inlets on the opposite shore. Somewhere out there, he ruminated, feeling a dozen eyes upon him, this girl had breathed her last.

“Who did you say called this in?” He turned to Schmidt.

“A Frau Geschlecht. Lives in that house, over there. Kroneburg Strasse seventeen.”

He handed Willi a report. The handwriting was blurry. Or was it Willi’s eyes?

Unable to look at it, he glanced across the street.

The house was more like a compound, several old buildings behind a high, white wall. Squinting he could just make out a sign above the doorway:
INSTITUTE FOR MODERN LIVING
. A sudden pounding filled his skull. Thunder. The first drops of rain. Checking his watch, he saw it was after six. At seven he had a dinner appointment he couldn’t miss. He’d have to come back in the morning.

The rain caught up with him, and by the time he reached Kurfürstendamm, the Ku-damm as natives called it—Berlin’s Great White Way—his speedy little BMW was hopelessly stuck in traffic. When he was a kid, motor vehicles were a rarity even on the Ku-damm. Now, despite the traffic signals, between the autos, trucks, streetcars, motorbikes, and double-decker buses, it was faster to walk than drive the grand boulevard. On the buildings all the plaster decorations, the scrolls and shells and roses of the past, had been stripped away for streamlined glass and steel. A thousand neon advertisements flashed from the sleek façades, their blues and reds blurring in the rain, bleeding across puddles, mesmerizing him as he inched past sidewalks thronged with people pouring from movie palaces, overflowing cafés, eddying around blazing department-store windows. Crowds. Neon. Noise. Berlin carried on. Despite all reason.

His throat never failed to tighten up when he passed Joachimstaler Platz, where Vicki had been killed. A truck jumped the curb one morning and crashed into the café window where she’d been sitting. Glass slashed her carotid artery. Two years and the pain had just slightly eased. Only the thought of Stefan and Erich a few blocks farther cheered him on.

He was a good half an hour late when he entered Café Strauss, a colossal affair on Tauentzien Strasse with seemingly hundreds of white-gloved waiters. Even across the crowded dining hall, though, the boys spotted him and began shouting, “
Vati! Vati!
Over here!” Willi could see their maternal grandmother, Frau Gottman, in her black hat and fur-trimmed suit, frowning at them for such a display, drawing attention to themselves like pygmies. And then at him . . . for being late. Stefan, eight, and Erich, ten, however, never ones to be stifled by etiquette, jumped from their chairs, napkins still tucked to their collars, and flung themselves into his arms.

After Vicki had died, he and the Gottmans had agreed it was probably healthier if the boys came to Dahlem to stay with them. They had a big villa with a large garden, and Vicki’s younger sister, Ava, could care for them while completing university. Miraculously, the arrangement had worked. The boys were thriving. And the miracle worker was Ava. How she gleamed at the boys’ happiness, Willi saw as he hugged them. He had always thought she looked like Vicki, if a slightly more down-to-earth version. But her love of the children made her appear even more similar.

As Willi sat between the boys, their little arms hooked through his own, Frau Gottman adjusted her black feathered hat. A great beauty, once an actress on the Viennese stage, she possessed a skilled repertoire of subtle emotive abilities. “You knew of course dinner was for seven.” Guilt being one of her best.

Generally Sunday dinner was at their house, and every once in a while he was late. Okay. It was a far drive from town. They forgave him. But today the Gottmans had taken the boys
into
town, to see the Ishtar Gate. Ergo, no reasonable reason to Frau Gottman for Willi’s tardiness, since he lived a few minutes’ walk from the restaurant.

“If you must know,” he said with greater terseness than he intended, “it was police work. A young lady’s body in the Havel.”

His mother-in-law’s eyes widened. That he could say such a thing in front of the children! But his children weren’t the ones disturbed by his work, Willi knew. When she started fiddling with her pearls, he reached across the table and squeezed her hand, earning a slight smile. They’d both lost Vicki, after all.
And they both lived in a Germany growing worse by the week for people like them.

To the Gottmans, to most German Jews—his own parents had they lived long enough—it was incomprehensible that he’d become a Detektiv. Centuries of oppression made careers in law enforcement anathema. Police were the enemy. The tools of tyrants. If he really was so interested in the law, why hadn’t he become a lawyer? But a cop he’d become. A famous one at that. And to a man rooted in practicalities like Max Gottman, founder of Gottman Lingerie, achievement was what mattered, not bourgeois sensitivities.

“Goodness knows, Bettie”—he shot his wife the severest of looks—“it is the police alone keeping any stability in this country. The man is serving the republic, not the czar.” He turned to Willi with a look of concern. “How are you, my son? How was that terrible cold you had?”

After the boys had recited a roster of school achievements—Erich the highest grade on a geography exam, Stefan a part in his elementary school’s winter festival, Willi asked Ava how things were at the university.

“Willi. Don’t tell me you forgot. I graduated. A year and a half ago.”

His face turned red. “Yes, of course. How dumb of me.” He examined his plate as if something were written on it. “What are you doing now then? Besides raising the boys so superbly, I mean.”

Sometimes he really found it hard to look at Ava, so similar was she to his lost wife. Same velvet skin. Same chestnut eyes. That long, sleek curve to her neck.

“I’ve told you a dozen times. I have a part-time job.”

“Yes. Sorry. Doing what, again?”

“I’m a stringer, Willi. I send in reports about what’s going on at the university to one of the big Ullstein papers.”

“That’s fascinating. You know my old war pal Fritz—”

“Yes, I know, you goose. It’s Fritz I work for.”

He noticed Ava’s bemused smirk.
How you live in your own little world,
it seemed to say.

Vicki’d had such a natural air of glamour about her. Ten times a day Willi had looked at her and thought they ought to put that pose on a billboard in Potsdamer Platz. It was so perfect, so full of unconscious grace. Ava, he’d always thought, belonged more behind the camera than in front of it. Not that she was any less lovely, just endowed with a different elegance: that of keen intellect and artistry. It pleased him to know she was pursuing her writing. What she was doing with Fritz was another matter.

“So then . . . how
are
things at the university?”

The chestnut in her eyes quickly darkened. “Positively awful. A year ago I’d never have believed it. The whole student body’s stampeded to the Nazis. Anti-Nazi faculty are being boycotted. Jewish teachers and students get hate mail telling them to get out. It’s no different in the high schools. Erich hasn’t complained about it yet, but I’m the one who picks him up at
Volksschule
. Every week more students show up in Hitler Youth gear. I don’t know how much longer things will stay tolerable for him there.”

Willi felt like a man on an ocean liner who suddenly finds water around his feet. “But . . . what are you suggesting, Ava?”

“I don’t know.” She lifted one eyebrow just the way Vicki used to. “Maybe we’ll have to send him back to Young Judea, with Stefan.”

“Erich.” Willi looked at his oldest son. “Are you having trouble at the
Volksschule
because you’re Jewish?”

Erich turned white. He seemed about to say something, then stopped. He was not a child reticent with words.

To Willi this said more than enough. “Can you finish the semester out?” he asked, alarmed. “It’s only, what . . . another two weeks?”

Erich shook his head. “It’s not so bad,
Vati
. Really.”

“Then over recess we’ll assess the situation and take appropriate action. How does that sound?”

Erich nodded.

Willi noticed him quickly rub away tears.

After the main course Grandpa ordered the boys to go have a look at the dessert counters. “Take your time. Examine each one carefully before you choose,” Max instructed, knowing that dozens of creamy tarts and intricately layered cakes were on display.

As soon as they were gone, the jovial smile dropped from his face. “Willi, listen to me.” His voice descended to a tremulous whisper. “I know you’re not involved in politics, that you are merely an Inspektor-Detektiv with the police. But you do serve the government, and I know you have friends. So I’m asking you, begging you really, if you have or ever get even the least hint of information as to what is going to happen . . . you will promise to let me know, won’t you? It’s just that all our money is tied up in the business. If something were to happen, well . . . I’m thinking of the boys. Their future. If the time has come to pull out, I want to know, before it’s too late.”

“Pull out? What do you mean?”

“Sell the firm. Liquidate my assets. Transfer them abroad.”

“Why on earth would you do that?” Willi’s throat constricted. “Everyone’s in the same boat. England, France, even America, have all got just as many unemployed.”

“But they haven’t got Nazis.” Max’s eyes widened. “What if, God forbid, those maniacs manage to take over? The things they promise! How can one make rational choices in an atmosphere like this, never knowing what tomorrow will bring?”

Willi respected his father-in-law greatly, but inside him an anger exploded that made him feel like grabbing the man’s lapels and shaking sense into him. Pull out? What was he talking about? Had fear overcome all logic? They still had a constitution, yes?
An army. Laws. Had Max so little faith in Germany, in his fellow Germans, that he thought they’d sell themselves out to a gang of criminals? Had men like Willi fought and bled and died in the Great War, won an Iron Cross for bravery behind French lines, so that men like Max had to pack up and run?

Alexanderplatz—or the Alex—was the great traffic hub of central Berlin, a sprawling plaza crisscrossed by streetcar lines, swarming with motor vehicles, bicycles, and pedestrians, and framed by two of the city’s largest temples of mass consumption: the Wertheim and Tietz department stores. Beneath all this was the new U-Bahn station, a juncture of several of Berlin’s busiest subway lines, and overhead the S-Bahn station, which sent elevated trains hurtling to every far corner of the metropolis. The Alex was also home to the vast, old Police Presidium building, occupying one full corner on the southeastern side of the square, a soot-covered behemoth built in the 1880s, half a dozen stories tall with several churchlike cupolas. Coat and hat already in hand, Willi entered Entrance Six at precisely 8 a.m.

As an Inspektor-Detektiv he was head of one of numerous units in the Homicide Commission, with three Detektivs and a
staff of fifteen working under him. As the only Jew in the commission, in the entire building practically, he felt it imperative to maintain an air of authoritarian distance with them all, except, that is, for his secretary, Ruta, and his junior apprentice, Gunther—both of whom he treated more like family than underlings.

“What news, Ruta?” he asked the sexy grandma of six, who despite the new longer skirts managed to show most of her leg. Years ago, she claimed, she’d been a Tiller Girl at the Wintergarten.

“All quiet on the western front, boss,” she replied, grinding away at her little wooden coffee mill. Every morning she made the most delicious fresh brew on the small gas stove Inspektor-Detektivs received. When she was in a good mood, they got hot
Brötchen,
too, from the Café Rippa downstairs. “No casualties since Miss Mermaid.”

Somehow, she always knew about things practically before they happened.

“Oh, and Pathology called. Dr. Hoffnung wants you to drop by as soon as you can.”

“Excellent. Gunther in?”

“Not yet.”

“Send him down to Hoffnung’s when he comes.”

The pathologist, smoking a pipe in his white smock, was staring out a window when Willi arrived. The moment Hoffnung turned around, Willi was struck by the dark disquiet in his eyes.