The Sleepwalkers (33 page)

Pushing between a pair of matrons, he felt his head knocked with a pocketbook. “In all my years shopping here!” His ear filled with a vengeful shriek. Passing Ladies’ Lingerie on Two and Men’s Outerwear on Three, similar resistance marred his progress. Punches. Kicks. His pursuers, though, clearly had no better luck against these shoppers, because by the time he’d reached Children’s World on Four, he barely heard Mengele. Unfortunately, two uniformed store guards did hear him and picked up the chase. Sweat drenched Willi’s back, his forehead, his neck.
He was starting to feel like a fox in a hedgerow. Tietz only had six floors.

As he bolted from the moving wooden steps into the crowded aisles of Fifth Floor Kitchen Wares, an ancient voice in him cried,
Hide!
Dive beneath the bins of silverware or those tables piled with iron skillets. Conceal yourself among the dish towels or the stacks of amazing new electric coffeepots. Anywhere, just . . . disappear! But something else in him revolted. Why should he? A furious anger steamed through him. What had he got to hide for? What had he done? There comes a point—he eyed the wall of glistening kitchen knives—when a man’s got to take a stand. No? Grabbing the biggest blade he saw—a meter-long butcher cleaver—he instantly vowed that if he had to go, he’d take Mengele with him. Duck from the guards, wait for the bastard, and in one swift chop—off with his head. For Paula! For the 850! Sweating, he clenched the cleaver, picturing Mengele’s blood spraying across the pyramid of wooden salad bowls, his head bouncing down the escalator. He deserved it. Didn’t he? Didn’t they all? What pleasure it would give him to see their filthy bodies twitching on the ground. Wouldn’t it?

As the store guards appeared, though, rising toward him, he felt himself slowly backing up. If you manage to escape, his conscience asked, could you live with yourself, Willi? If you stooped that low, to cold-blooded murder? Doesn’t even a wretch like Mengele deserve justice, like any criminal?

Dropping the cleaver, Willi flung himself back on the escalator, Mengele coming through loud and clear again: “Stop that thief!” The store guards were only a few people behind as he darted sideways into Home Furnishings, Floor Six. The end of the line. He and Vicki had bought their bedroom set here. He could still picture her sitting on the mattress, feeling around with her soft white hands. “I love it, Willi. We’ll sleep so beautifully.” His mother used to have her chairs restuffed here. “Good as new!” Where the hell were the fire stairs? The aisles were packed with big-hipped women refusing to budge a centimeter. “How
dare you?” “Such manners!” The guards were gaining on him. “Tietz Security—let us through!” If he didn’t do something, they’d be on him soon. From the floor he jumped onto a coffee table, and from there to a sofa, to an ottoman, to a queen-size bed and a love seat, cutting diagonally across the aisles. Salespeople tried to stop him. “Sir, that is strictly forbidden!” Shoppers shrieked. “He’s drunk!” The store guards cursed, falling behind. But as he stumbed along a row of bedroom mirrors, mutliple reflections made amply clear Tietz Security hadn’t given up, and that Mengele and his SS men were on the floor now, too.

He regretted dropping that cleaver. The fire exit, if there was one, was completely obscured by mountains of vanity tables, bookcases, night desks, reading lamps. How lax on the part of management. Someone could get killed! Turning a corner, he found himself lost in a terrain of Persian carpets, hundreds of them draped from display racks in delicate patterns and shimmering colors. If only he could find a magic one and fly away. But fate had other designs.

Directly ahead he spotted a giant figure in a Mexican poncho, gold earring hanging on a chiseled blond head. “Inspektor?” Kai stood by the register holding a receipt, a long Persian carpet rolled over his shoulder. In an instant he seemed to ascertain Willi’s predicament because he let him pass, then stepped out and blocked the aisle. Gasping for breath, Willi turned and saw Kai lift the carpet on one arm and with all the determination of an early Teuton, hurl it spearlike through the air, knocking the first guard into those behind and sending them all, Mengele included, dropping like skewered pigeons. With a similar ferocity Kai grabbed Willi’s arm and dragged him to the fire exit. “You owe me thirty-five marks,” Kai cried as they flew down steps. “That rug was for my mother!”

Thirty-five, Willi thought.

Another bargain at Tietz.

Thunder crashed across Berlin. Wild flashes of lightning ignited the narrow alleys behind Alexanderplatz. It felt as if the city were under artillery attack. Willi held out his hand to shield his face against the blazing wind. The blizzard, if possible, had only worsened. Blinding snow though was a small price to pay for the joy of freedom. Small pain compared to what the rest of me is feeling, he groaned inside.

“Getting old there, Inspektor?” Kai saw him limping as they made their escape along snowy Kieber Strasse, several blocks already from Tietz. What luck the kid knew every back staircase and broom closet in the store. It had taken twenty minutes but they’d lost the SOBs. It was one thirty now, he saw on his watch. He’d been running since he’d left the library at noon.

“You have no idea, Kai.”

That jump to the streetcar would have been a cinch at Kai’s
age. Now every cartilage in him felt crushed. Despite the pain though, he could barely keep from laughing. Mengele must have been shitting in his pants to know Willi escaped. One way or another—he felt the firm outlines of the notebook still in his breast pocket—he was going to get that precious “research” out of the Reichstag. Out of this goddamned country. And into every newspaper around the world.

Call him a thief.

“Kai . . .” He grabbed the kid’s poncho, still trying to catch his breath. “I’ve got to ask you something . . . I have a job coming up. A really big one. I need someone I can trust.”

“Does it have to do with why those Brownshirts were after you?”

“Yeah.” Willi wiped snow from his face. “Everything.”

“Then count me in, Inspektor.”

The weather that February was brutal. Snowstorms. Ice storms. Bitter cold. Hiding by night at Sylvie’s, Willi pushed himself hard each day, studying the floor plans of the Reichstag, working out his strategy. From the warmth of his BMW he followed the route of the white linen truck, observing how at ten each morning, at the southwest service entrance, two uniformed workers removed sacks of napkins and tablecloths used upstairs at the Reichstag restaurant, which remained busy even during the congressional recess. Leaving the south service gate on Sommer Strasse, the truck headed north, crossing the Louisen Strasse Bridge and continuing on to the Amalgamated Laundry Works on Invalieden Strasse, a twenty-minute drive depending on traffic. Another truck returned at night with the bundles of clean linen, crossing the Louisen Strasse Bridge between eight forty and eight fifty, also depending on traffic.

His third day out he noticed a small black Opel
Lieferwagen
several cars behind him and instinctively gripped his steering wheel. Could that be the same one he’d seen yesterday with
the spare whitewalls on the running boards? He knew the model well enough: the Berlin police used it for unmarked vehicles. He’d driven one on a trip to Oranienburg not that long ago, with Gunther. Was someone trailing him? he suddenly wondered, wiping sweat from his forehead. He could easily outrace it if he had to, he knew. The Opel’s maximum speed was only 85 kmh. But the last thing he needed was someone on his tail. Searching his rearview mirror again though, the little black car was nowhere to be seen. Just nerves, he decided. Paranoia. Of course, he recalled the morbid joke his cousin Kurt loved to tell: just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean someone’s not really following you.

Back at the Reichstag he took careful note that the south security gate was manned by two guards during the daylight hours, but only one at night. If he hijacked the night delivery and made it past this checkpoint, he calculated, by nine thirty he could conceivably have all the Sachsenhausen boxes loaded. By the time the people at Amalgamated Laundry began suspecting something had happened to their truck, he’d be halfway to Poland.

He was going drive straight through from the Reichstag an hour and a half north of Berlin to Schwedt, along the River Oder, among the easiest frontiers in Germany to cross, he’d discreetly learned. The guards there were only too happy to open a palm for the lucrative black-market trade. Once on the other side he’d continue five hours northeast to the Free City of Danzig, where he’d ship the boxes by freighter via Le Havre to Paris.

Well, not all. A few boxes he planned to drop off with Sylvie, just for insurance purposes. In case he got caught. “Someplace where no one can find them?” She wracked her brain. “I suppose I can take them to my mother’s. You don’t want to tell me what they are?”

“Personal things, Sylvie.”

Her pretty lips frowned. “You are planning to go. Just like everyone else.”

“Isn’t that what you advised me? Weeks ago?”

“Yes. Of course it is.” She lowered her eyes.

He squeezed her hand to cheer her up.

But his own mood shifts were marking time more regularly than a metronome.

Hope. Despair. Confidence. Dejection. A thousand possible mishaps occurred to him. What if there were extra guards that night? Or the truck broke down? Or there was another blizzard? It had to work. The whole country was depending on him. The whole world. But all he could do was all he could do, he reminded himself. He was only human. And yet . . . yet . . . when he thought of what was in those boxes, and Mengele out there loose again . . . he knew the whole world was really depending on him.

With the elections looming he arranged to meet Kai and finalize their plans in the safety of the ever-crowded Berlin Zoo. Stefan and Erich adored the place. He took them all the time. Or used to. Would again someday. Surely. As he entered from Budepester Strasse below the Chinese Elephant Gate, the most vivid memory suddenly hit him, reverberating gonglike through his brain, echoing back to another icy winter day when he was ten, walking beneath this gate with his father. Even then the carved elephants had stood for years, their long stone tusks dark with soot. “Obviously these fellows don’t brush their tusks very well!” his father joked, squeezing his shoulder.

It was probably the last time he’d seen him.

Such a weak heart, even with all the clinics and medicines, and when Kraus Furriers was held up the next day, he’d literally keeled over. Willi took a deep breath. He hadn’t thought of that in years. A cold breeze stirred from the seal tank. Could that be why he’d become a cop? To make up for his father’s weakness? Avenge the bad guys he blamed for his death? One of the seals rose from the water, barking. Willi laughed, wiping away a tear. Why had that never occurred to him?

Why. The world’s oldest question.

The Monkey House was jammed, the people inside making
more noise than the primates, pounding their chests and scratching their heads cleverly.

“The Reichstag?” Kai’s chiseled face screwed up as they leaned against the rail by the chimp cage. “Why not choose someplace nice and easy, Inspektor, like Hitler’s bedroom.” He puffed on a Juno.

“I’m not doing this for sport, Kai. That’s where the boxes are.”

One of the chimps, reaching though the bars, indicated he would like a smoke.

“Breaking and entering federal property’s treason you know.” Kai stared at the delinquent monkey. Willi noticed the Wild Boy no longer wore his trademark gold earring, or his poncho. Just an old wool coat like everybody else, conformity obviously the latest word in fashion. “Even in the best of times that’s a rotten rap, Inspektor. But now”—Kai crushed his cigarette out to the monkey’s angry shrieks—“rumor has it they’ve dusted off the guillotines.”

Heads would roll, Hitler had promised.

“I never said it’d be risk-free.”

“May I ask how you plan to get from linen supply to the Members’ Storeroom?”

“I told you, it’s right across the hall.”

“But what about the door? It’s sure to be locked.”

“Leave that to me, Kai.”

You couldn’t be a Detektiv without being able to think like a criminal. And act like one, when necessary. Well, it was necessary, Willi knew. They’d turned him into one. So he’d be one.

Five p.m. yesterday he’d waited in the freezing cold outside Entrance Six of the Police Presidium. “Inspektor.” Ruta clutched her heart. “You scared me half to death.” She tried not to show she was checking around to make sure no one was looking. “My God. How are you? You’ve no idea how badly I miss you.”

“Could I buy you a schnapps?”

She took a deep breath, quickly looking over her shoulder again. “Yeah, sure. You bet.”

More than once she’d let Willi know she’d be willing to do whatever was necessary to help him. Now he’d find out how serious she was. He took her to Lutter & Wegner, the city’s historic
Weinstube,
founded in 1807. He could still taste the first sip of wine he’d had there when he was a kid. Rheinlander, extrasweet.

“The Master Set?” she gulped, downing her schnapps in a single swig.

By law, every lock in Berlin was subject to one of eleven master keys—a full set of which hung on a rack above Komissar Horthstaler’s desk. It would mean staying late. Sneaking into his office. And under any circumstances making sure that set was returned the following morning. No doubt she, too, had heard rumors of guillotines.

“Could I have another schnapps?”

“Sure. The whole bottle if you want.”

Ruta lowered her face, slowly shaking her head.

“Willi.” Her eyes turned to him. For a second he could picture her in slinky oriental bloomers kicking her leg in rhythm with thirty other chorus girls at the Wintergarden. “Even without schnapps . . . you know I will.”

Still kicking at forty-nine. He loved this lady.

But what about Kai? Was there a rebel left in him?

Fear worked differently on everyone.

One of the chimps was going ape, banging the wall.

“He wants his swing back.” Kai smiled. “Won’t fight for it though. Chimps never do. Unless”—his smiled faded—“unless they’re absolutely certain of victory. Five or six against one.”