The Sleepwalkers (5 page)

Reaching the new housing estates built by Siemens Electronics, the carriage virtually emptied of passengers. On a Saturday night perhaps more people might be on it, Willi considered. But all in all it must have been a lonely ride for the princess. Why had she done it? What could have possessed her? Where had she gone when she reached the station? Forty-five minutes after leaving Friedrich Strasse they ground to a halt in Old Spandau, the end of the line.

Down the steps to the street, darkness engulfed him. After the lights of central Berlin it always took a while to adjust to the dimness of the rest of the world. A single source of illumination caught his attention . . . directly across the street. The inn he’d noticed this morning, with the outdoor beer garden and swastika above the door. The Black Stag, he saw it was called. Unless someone at the station was waiting to pick her up, the princess would almost certainly have gone there. There was simply nowhere else. He headed toward it.

Taking a deep breath, he passed beneath the Nazi flag and entered. Inside, a large, wood-paneled room with twenty or so wooden tables was maybe a third full. A bosomy proprietress, forty-five or fifty, was at the register going through checks, a slightly cross-eyed bleached blonde. She asked Willi what she could get him. Experience had taught when and how his Kripo badge worked to his advantage. Sometimes, such as now, he sensed it better just to hold it in reserve.

“I’m looking for a friend of mine. A woman. I was wondering if she might have come in here the other night.”

The crossed eyes gave him a skewed once-over.

“What are you, an actor from Babelsberg Studios—rehearsing a spy scene? How should I know who is your friend and who isn’t?”

“She’s about twenty-four. Dark hair. Dark eyes. Wearing a leopard coat.”

Now the woman laughed. “A leopard coat, you say. Does this look like the kind of establishment where women wear leopard coats?”

“She might have wandered in here from the S-Bahn station. It’s likely the only place she would have come.”

“Listen, mister”—her voice grew a little sharper as two men in long wool coats entered—“I don’t know what you’re thinking, but this is a family restaurant. Single women don’t just wander in here, with or without leopard coats. Even from the S-Bahn station.”

“What’s going on here, Gretel?” one of the men asked. “A troublemaker?”

“Not exactly.” She made a sour face. “Just bothering me with stupid questions.”

“What sort of questions?”

Willi turned to them. Both were in their thirties, very proper looking in ties and hats. Both with silver Party pins stuck on their lapels.

“I’m looking for a friend. She might have wandered in here Saturday night.”

“Like the lady said.” One stepped forward with an aggressive smirk, removing his hat. He was an Aryan of the nonblond variety, dark, oiled hair brushed straight back off his forehead, with a mocking smile that revealed an exceptionally large gap between his two front teeth. “This is not the sort of place women come in unescorted. It’s a decent place. For decent Germans.”

Willi thought he saw a doctor’s smock beneath the man’s coat.

“Where do you think you are,
mein Herr
?” the fairer-skinned one with black eyes offered with a real sneer. “Perhaps you got out at the wrong S-Bahn stop. The Jew-damm is the other direction.”

At this, the men and the waitress all burst out laughing.

“Jew-damm. Ha, ha, ha! Good one. I must remember that, Schumann,” the first man said, delighted, then returned his gaze to Willi, losing the smile. “Go back to your Jew-damm. Enjoy it while you’re able.”

Willi felt now was the time to call in his reserves.

He broke out his Kripo badge.

It did not produce the desired effect.

The three seemed unsusceptible to the power of the state.

“You think you can scare us with that?” The dark-haired one laughed, showing his teeth. “Your Jew republic with your Jew constitution. We shit on it!”

“
Alles in Ordnung,
Josef?” A man emerged from a back door in black boots and full SA uniform, smacking a wood truncheon against a hand.

Willi calculated he had about thirty seconds to save his skull.

“I was merely looking for a friend,” he said with the friendliest of smiles. “But since nobody seems to have seen her . . . I’ll be on my way.”

It broke the tension long enough for him to beat a tactical retreat. No use getting killed for this princess, logic affirmed. A minute later he was boarding the S-Bahn back for Berlin-Center.

Schumann, one had been called. His friend with the bunny teeth—Josef.

One way or another he’d have to get back into that friendly little tavern.

Half an hour later, Berlin-West whirring past his eyes, he wondered, what could have possessed Princess Magdelena Eugenia to have taken this train alone at midnight? To meet a lover? To purchase narcotics? It all seemed so improbable. And what about this sleepwalking business? Could she have really not been awake?
It seemed even more absurd. Perhaps she hadn’t come to Spandau at all. Perhaps she only took this line and got off at any of a dozen stops along the way. He was just too tired to think.

Like a sleepwalker himself.

Even before dawn his eyes popped open. He’d been dreaming. At the Gloria Palast, Berlin’s most famous movie theater, he’d been watching Marlene Dietrich’s newest Hollywood hit. She was magical as ever, only the audience was horrified. People began running out of the theater, screaming. Willi looked closer and saw the great star’s legs were monstrous. Inside out! Instead of strutting across the screen, she hobbled, her body growing more hideously mutilated every frame.

He was still in a strange state of wide-awake exhaustion when he arrived at the Police Presidium, surprised to find Gunther already in his office. Ruta, whistling, brought in fresh coffee and
Brötchen
.

“You look funny, Gunther,” Willi said, the moment he saw the kid’s expression.

Gunther shot him a troubled glance. “Here.” He slid over a sheet of paper. “The top orthopedic surgeons in Germany.”

Willi didn’t recognize any of the names, but was glad to see all but a few had Berlin addresses. He folded the paper and slipped it in his jacket pocket.

“I haven’t found anything yet on bone transplants. It’s a pretty obscure topic.”

“Try the university medical library. Or Charité Hospital. There’s got to be something.”

“Yes, sir.” Gunther wrote these down. “Now, as far as missing Americans go, there were three in 1932, but only one was female. Her name, Gina Mancuso, from the State of New York, a little town called Schenectady.”

Mancuso. Willi recalled those dark, warm eyes.

“Let’s see her file.”

“It wasn’t there.”

“Come now.”

“Her name and country of origin were on the Central Missing Persons Manifesto, but her file was missing from Archives.”

“Not only she, but her file missing? That’s very odd.”

“You know the pretty one down there, Elfrieda?” Gunther added. “She swore she saw it a week ago realphabetizing the
m’s.
But she searched and searched and it sure wasn’t there now.”

“No one checked it out?”

“Not officially.”

“Well, I’m going to have to put you on this, Gunther, while I go chasing after the Bulgarian princess. You’ve got to find out everything you can about Gina Mancuso, and let’s see if we can’t at least make a positive ID.”

“There’s more, sir. Remember, the Prussian state asylums?”

“Yes, of course. What did you find? Had this Mancuso been institutionalized?”

“No record of that. But regarding the shaving of hair—all state institutions abandoned the practice more than four years ago.”

“I see.” Willi thought about it. On one hand this was good news. On the other, a puzzling bit of information.

“And would you like to take a guess at the number of inmates who’ve gone missing from only one of those institutions, the Berlin-Charlottenburg Asylum, in the past year?”

“I imagine there’s always a fair number.”

“Try two hundred and fifty-five.”

“Seems high.”

Gunther slid Willi a typed list several pages long.

“All these people escaped?”

“Not a single one. They were removed. Eighty-five at a time. In three evacuations. Months apart.”

Willi read the top of each page. “What is this, ‘Special Handling’?”

“No one seems to have any idea.”

“Well, who removed them?”

“No one seems to have any idea.”

“That’s preposterous.” Willi was getting annoyed. Why was Gunther bothering him with this? “Somebody must know who took them. Why do you even say they’re missing?”

“Because that’s exactly it, sir. They are. There’s no record anywhere of where they went.”

“Gunther—” Willi exerted the utmost effort to control himself. “I can’t be worried about this now.”

“But don’t you think I should at least—”

Back in the war, Willi recalled, when they’d penetrated enemy minefields, there was only one way to make it. One foot in front of the other, eyes locked straight ahead, exactly on the spot the next foot had to step. Anything to your left or right was superfluous, a potentially fatal distraction. Even your best friend blowing up.

“You are to drop this matter immediately, Gunther, do you hear me!”

The boy looked at him, astonished. It was the first time since they’d been working together Willi had raised his voice.

“You are to find where Gina Mancuso lived, and where she worked, and whom she knew in Berlin. And nothing else.”

Willi found Konstantin Kaparov a distraught and broken man, weeping in his hotel suite at the Adlon. He had dropped out of the Six-Day Bicycle Race, his team having hopelessly fallen behind. “I no could concentrate. I think only my Magdelena.” Willi wished he could offer some encouraging news, but all he had were questions. This time, at least, Kaparov was in a better state to answer.

“Last time I forget to tell . . . before we go dinner, Magdelena went to doctor . . . for ankle. Very swollen.”

“You went with her?”

“Yes. Doctor say only sprain. No broke. Wrap in bandage. Give pills. We leave.”

“This doctor’s name?”

“This I am not remembering. But hotel recommend.”

“What about the name of the club you say you dined in? Do you remember that now?”

“I find matchbox. Was call Klub Hell.”

Hell. Willi was familiar with it. An expensive tourist trap in the guise of one of Berlin’s great halls of decadence. Naughty floor show. Cabaret acts.

“Also I forget last time to say. Was hypnotist performing at Klub. During act he wants volunteers for stage. Magdelena go up. Always she like silly things. And attention. Love attention.”

“Was he able to hypnotize her?” Willi couldn’t help remembering what Rudy the doorman had said.

“Oh, yes. Yes. Very funny. I laughing so hard. Magdelena, he has her speaking Chinese!”

Willi knew a bit about hypnosis from his cousin Kurt, a doctor at the prestigious Berlin Center for Psychoanalysis. Kurt had been a student of Sigmund Freud himself down in Vienna and employed hypnosis in his work. He loathed shysters who used it for crude entertainment.

“Do you recall this hypnotist’s name?”

“The Great . . . something.”

“The Great Gustave?”

“Yes!”

Most of all Kurt hated the Great Gustave, Berlin’s most famous psychic, the “King of Mystics,” who had recently made headlines—and himself preposterous in many people’s eyes—by predicting a complete Nazi takeover in 1933.

“How was the princess after this hypnotic act?”

“Absolutely normal,” the husband insisted. “Until, like I say, several hours later, when she puts on coat to get cigarettes.”

Willi felt a ray of hope. So, the Bulgarian princess had been hypnotized by this Great Gustave the night she disappeared.

Downstairs, Willi obtained the name of the doctor the princess had been referred to: one Hermann Meckel, orthopedic specialist, with an office several blocks down the Unter den Linden. A chill of astonishment flashed through him when he saw Meckel’s name on Gunther’s list of top orthopedic surgeons. Another coincidence? Was it possible? Twice now something had tied the missing princess to the Mermaid.

The doctor’s office was extremely swank: crystal chandeliers, Persian rugs. Mahogany furnishings. Unfortunately, according to his young, attractive receptionist, he was not in this afternoon. Tuesdays he devoted to volunteer work down at the
Klinik
.

“I see. And what
Klinik
would that be?”

“The SA Klinik. Down by Spittlemarkt.”

“I see,” Willi said.

So the fancy physician was a Nazi, too.

Over lunch in the police cafeteria, trying hard to redeem himself, Gunther proudly delivered the last known address of missing American Gina Mancuso, which he’d uncovered in the 1931 Housing Registry.

“And,” he added, the enormous Adam’s apple jumping around his giraffelike throat, “she had a roommate, Paula Hoffmeyer—still lives there.”

Willi read the address. One of the poorest districts in Berlin-North.

“Excellent. I’ll go myself, at the first opportune moment.” He slipped it in his notebook. “Gunther, tell me something . . . have you ever been to Hell?”

“Excuse me, sir?”

“Hell. The club. Have you ever been there?”

“No.” The lad’s long face broke into a corny grin. “But I sure as heck’d like to.”

“Buy yourself a dinner jacket. We’re going tonight. In the meantime, dig up whatever you can on this Dr. Hermann Meckel.”

The Nazi medical center at Spittlemarkt was more like a small hospital than a clinic, with X-ray equipment, operating rooms, and large wards filled with storm troopers who’d been busted up in street brawls with the Reds. Willi had served in the military long enough to recognize the stripes on the uniform sleeve of the man someone pointed out as Meckel. The good doctor was an SA general.

The
Sturmabteilung,
Storm Division, was not a real military of course. It was only one of several private paramilitary armies the Weimar Republic had allowed to thrive in the name of tolerance, despite that it was committed to that republic’s destruction. In Berlin, the Communist Red Front had been every bit as powerful as the SA. But since the trauma of the Great Depression, under the charismatic leadership of Ernst Roehm, the SA’s expansion had been explosive. Its membership recently eclipsed the half million mark—five times the size of the German army—with their characteristic knee-high boots, wide brown breeches with matching tunics, tall-peaked caps, and bloodred swastika armbands. The original function of the SA had been to guard Nazi political meetings. The Führer however soon discovered the expedience of using it to break the skulls of his opponents, mainly though by no means exclusively Communists. Eventually, under Roehm, the SA developed an extensive social-services system: soup kitchens, skills-training programs, free medical clinics. Not a town or city in Germany today lacked a Brownshirt division.