The Sleepwalkers (20 page)

Willi’s vision filled with light.

A long, bony face looked down at him.

“Chief . . . it’s me. Gunther.”

Why am I home in bed? Willi wondered. Gunther in my chair?

He sprang from the pillow, remembering. “What time is it?”

“Relax, sir. Take some hot broth.” Gunther’s eyes brimmed with doctorly concern. “It’s not even two o’clock yet. Happy 1933.”

Willi took the broth. There was reason for gratitude, he realized.

Just not quite enough of it.

The
Wandervogel,
some thirty in all, had made their appearance not a moment too soon. These student hiking groups had been a passion for decades now, embodying the ideals of romantic German youth: Comradeship. Nature. Wanderlust. Increasingly though they’d become politicized, more and more merging with
the Hitler Youth. He had to thank his lucky stars these were the old-fashioned kind, rucksacks and hiking poles, singing away with buoyant spirits as they completed the first leg of their twenty-kilometer New Year’s Day hike. In minutes they had a stretcher fashioned for Fritz from their hiking poles and branches. A delegation carried him back to the forest station where they’d begun their trek.

An hour later Fritz was in surgery at the Brandenburg Medical Center in Potsdam. As far as Willi knew, he was there still, recovering in stable condition. A sergeant from the Potsdam garrison drove him back to town. It wasn’t even 9 a.m. Gunther was waiting in front of Willi’s apartment building, half-crazed with fear.

“When we lost contact, we didn’t know what to do, Chief—”

Now, Willi was the one who didn’t know what to do.

Paula. Those goddamn animals had her.

“Gunther.” He put down the broth, trying to swing his legs off the bed, realizing how weak he was. Exposure, the doctors had told him. A day or two in bed, at least.

“Help me get dressed. I’m going after that son of a bitch Gustave.”

“But, sir—”

“Never mind.”

Outside, it was cold and windy. Willi’s head was throbbing. When they reached his little silver BMW, he handed Gunther the keys.

The kid’s bony face reddened. “You’re kidding, right?”

“Just don’t get us killed. I’ve had enough aggravation for one day.”

“Yes, sir!”

The Great Gustave’s palatial apartment was on Kronprinz Strasse, just off the Tiergarten. Gunther pounded on the door. A petite French maid with big, wide eyes answered.

“Oui, messieurs?”

Unfortunately the King of Mystics wasn’t home. He’d been
out already several hours. Where? She certainly had no idea. But she’d be terribly happy to tell him the
messieurs
had paid a visit if they wished to leave their—

Never mind.

Far down the road, the winged statue of Victory waved her golden laurel wreath from her column in the Plaza of the Republic.

It seemed to be Paula calling him:

“Willi—how could you do this to me? When I trusted you?”

He had to find Gustave.

Kai. At the Café Rippa the other day the SA dropout had promised his Red Apaches gang would keep an eye on the showman.

“Gunther,
mach schnell.
To the Alex.”

The problem now was finding the Wild Boy.

Street by street the little BMW circled the enormous Alexanderplatz. Past the department stores and cafés, the beer halls and the S-Bahn station. People by the hundreds milled about on the sidewalks. Whole clans of working-class families out for a holiday stroll. Street hawkers. Cardsharps. Beggars and prostitutes. But no Kai. Where would a kid such as him hang around today?

The choices were substantial.

“Gunther, prepare yourself. I foresee an eye-opening New Year’s Day in store for you.”

“The farther open the better.” Gunther laughed, shifting into third.

Their first stop was nearby Alexandrinen Strasse 108. La Petit Maison. The entrance in a garbage-filled alley. Behind a black door, a silver lamé curtain opened into a small room decorated like a French bordello: red velvet couches, fake chandeliers. A dozen or so overdressed girls, mid-to-late twenties, sat around courted by gangs of older men, who practically clawed each other over them.

“All these dames are hookers?” Gunther whispered, clearly believing himself finally wising up to ways of the world.

“The actual question, Gunther, would be whether these dames are dames at all.”

The kid’s eyes widened all right, to twice their size.

Willi went to the burly bartender to ask if he’d seen Kai around.

The guy shook his head.

“If you do, tell him Kraus is looking for him.”

“You’re kidding, aren’t you?” Gunther grabbed Willi’s arm back out in the alley. “Come on, Inspektor, the truth. Jeez. Some of them were cute.”

Next stop, the Adonis, a few blocks farther down Alexandrinen Strasse, no. 128—a little lounge for local Line Boys, truly seedy. Smoky room. Bare tables. Walls covered with cheap landscape paintings. A score of predatory eyes followed their arrival.

Line Boys—male prostitutes, heterosexual teens of the poorer classes—got their name from the lines they formed along walls in bars or back alleys. Since the Depression they seemed to lurk everywhere, almost uniformly dressed the way their customers most liked—as sailors. A rough-and-tumble lot, they gave the Berlin police their share of headaches. The swankier hotels often had to call out whole squads to chase them away.

Willi saw several now going around trying to sell packs of cocaine or black opium to the “aunties” who made up their clientele. One of these older gents, stoned, was banging away on an upright piano, while a gray-haired friend dreamily danced with a sailor. The piano player started singing:

Somewhere the sun is shining
So, honey, don’t you cry!

Gunther seemed unable to take another step. Willi had to nudge him through the crowd.

“No, sir. Sorry, sir,” a skinny waiter said. “Haven’t seen Kai in a while, sir.”

“Tell him Willi Kraus is looking for him.”

“Yes, sir, Inspektor. Sir.”

At Nollendorf Platz they entered a vast dance hall swept by colorful lights from a dozen revolving mirrored balls. Berlin of the republic was renowned for its open-mindedness, and men who liked men flocked here from around the globe. Nowhere was the freedom they sought more in abundance than at the Nollendorfer Palast. If Gunther had been shocked before, here he was stupefied.

The place was cavernous, filled wall to wall with a New Year’s Day “tea dance” in full tempo. Countless hundreds of men swayed cheek to cheek to a dance orchestra playing “Love Is the Sweetest Thing.” Tough types. Girlie types. Older couples in tuxedos and top hats. College kids with bow ties and big lapels.

“Mingle,” Willi commanded.

“But, sir—”

“What?”

“I don’t have to dance, do I?”

“Only if you’re mad about the boy, Gunther.”

Half an hour later though, not a sign of Kai.

Willi and Gunther went back outside. Evening was falling. A crescent moon had risen. Music drifted from the club.

“How about it, sir?” Gunther held out his arms.

“No jokes. We’ve got to find this kid.”

At Cosy-Corner, blond men in their thirties wore schoolboy uniforms with little peaked hats as they leaned against the bar smoking. At the Magic Flute there was a floor show: Luziana, the Mysterious Wonder Woman—or Man, appearing with the Zusammen Bruder, a song-and-dance act of allegedly cojoined twins. The Mustache Lounge was filled with heavy drinkers sporting facial hair of extraordinary proportions, from elaborate sideburns to walrus whiskers.

But no one, absolutely no one, had seen Kai.

Finally it was getting late. Willi would have given up if he didn’t keep seeing Paula in front of him, looking around for help.

One last place, he told himself.

Far down Friedrich Strasse, past the nightclubs and the cabarets, the greasy restaurants and sex bookshops, was a creepy leftover from the previous century, a grimy glass-roofed shopping arcade called the Passage, which even on the brightest days was daubed in gloom. Inside its peeling cast-iron colonnades, dozens of musty-smelling shops sold everything from paintings of the Virgin Mary to French ticklers. At night it became home to the saddest of all the city’s kids on the make: the Doll Boys. These were Berlin’s youngest hustlers, preteens, eleven, twelve, most of them scrambling to get something to eat or a place to rest their head at night. Their hangout was at the Anatomical Museum in the center of the Passage, a seedy exhibition hall of mannequins and real body parts illuminating every grotesque deformity known to man. Out front, the boys stood by the dozens, schoolboy hats and short trousers, dirty-faced and desperate, tussling over every man that came by.

“Any of you kids seen Kai of the Red Apaches?”

Their faces blanked simultaneously.

“Chief,” Gunther whispered, “all this time we’ve spent looking for him . . . we could have been staking out Gustave’s apartment. For all we knew he’s home by now.”

“Five marks to the kid who can bring me to Kai.” Willi gave it one last try.

Half a dozen boys stepped forward.

It cost him thirty marks, but he got his answer.

And where was the chief of the Red Apaches?

La Traviata
was letting out for intermission as Willi and Gunther screeched up to the grand old Opera House on Unter den Linden. Among the ladies and gentlemen pouring from the eighteenth-century building—one of Berlin’s prize Schinkel masterpieces—Willi finally spotted the kid, all decked out in a shiny white
tuxedo, smiling as he strolled down the main staircase with a rich-looking man. Willi quickly recognized him as the prince of Thuringia.

“Imagine this. Hello there.” Willi pretended to have met accidentally. Shaking Kai’s enormous hand, he leaned to his ear and added, “I must find Gustave.”

“Give me a minute,” the kid whispered back.

Willi and Gunther stood aside, awkwardly pretending to mix with the crowd of opera fans, fascinated by the sight of the chiseled eighteen-year-old at work on the wrinkled old prince. A minute later he was back.

“I convinced him to ditch the second act, thank God. I was dying of boredom anyway. He’s taking me to this party; Gustave’s supposedly there. Don’t try to come in. There’s a little park across the street. Keep in the shadows. I’ll lure the son of a bitch over.”

Willi’s heart sank. “It won’t work.” He remembered the dozens of beautiful women Gustave liked to surround himself with.

“Inspektor”—Kai’s eyes sparkled intuitively—“trust me. He’s not the only one with hypnotic powers.”

Willi and Gunther watched the kid slip a thick arm around the prince’s waist and get him into a taxi.

They followed behind in the BMW.

The party turned out to be at the home of Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS. Willi’s throat clenched as he counted half a dozen black-uniformed troops patrolling the perimeter. Through binoculars he made out an insignia on their caps he’d never seen before—a silver skull and crossbones. The death’s head.

The big house was lit up like a bonfire, raucous laughter pouring from the windows, a dance band blaring, women shrieking. It made Willi’s stomach turn. All these swine, living it up. And where was Paula? What were they doing to her?

At least they’d get Gustave, he consoled himself. The King of Mystics had sent his last sleepwalker on a voyage of no return. But what if he didn’t cooperate?

“Gunther, take my key. Go to my apartment. Get my camera. It’s in the front closet. And don’t forget flashbulbs.”

While Gunther was gone, the cold began to get to Willi. During the war he’d spent weeks out of doors. That was fifteen years ago already. He wasn’t a kid anymore. His hands and feet were getting numb. More exposure. But think about Paula. Lord knew what she was enduring by now.

It was forty-five minutes before Gunther returned. Luckily he’d brought along a hot thermos of the broth from earlier. Willi was grateful, but even the delicious heat down his gullet didn’t cheer him up. Surely Kai had overestimated his talents.

“Don’t worry, Chief.” Gunther seemed to read his mind. “One way or another Gustave’ll be caught . . . in a web of his own making.”

Inside they were singing Nazi songs at the top of their lungs.

Germany, awake from your nightmare
Rise up against the Jews!

The volume amplified as the front door opened.

In the light, an apparition: Kai in his white tuxedo . . . followed by a man in a shimmering black cape . . . Gustave! Willi and Gunther crouched in the shadows as the two crossed the street, Gustave, with his white gloves, carrying a walking stick, casually glancing about as if he were out for a breath of fresh air.

Always two-faced, Willi thought.

“You gotta admit the kid’s good, heh?” Gunther whispered.

“I’ll be damned,” Willi said, watching them enter the park. “Got that camera ready?”

The rest was child’s play.

Once in darkness the Great Gustave leaned against a tree and nonchalantly undid his tuxedo zipper. Gunther was about to step in but Willi held him back. Another second and Willi had the hypnotist exactly where he wanted him.

FLASH!

The King of Mystics turned to the light, his face a poster from a silent-screen melodrama. Eyes bulging. Mouth wide open.

As if he were about to be hit by a freight train.

“You’ve got to be kidding. If you’re not with the vice squad . . . there must be some—Wait a minute . . . I recognize you. Aren’t you—”

“Kriminal Polizei.” Willi flashed the badge. “You’re under arrest for kidnapping.”

“Impossible.”

“We know all about it,
Freund.
From the Czechoslovakian track team to Melina von Auerlicht.”

Willi nodded to Gunther, feeling the first real pleasure in days.

“Cuff him.”

“But you’re crazy . . . I don’t know anything about any kidnappings.”

They spirited him off to his swank apartment building on Kronprinz Strasse.

Upstairs, the French maid seemed instinctively to grasp what was happening and made a lunge for the telephone.