by Ben Pastor
Nebe’s and Heldorff’s names were just two among the hoard that she flashed at him, loosened from the elastic band that held them together.
“Had I wanted to get rid of Walter, I’d have turned him in for drafting horoscopes in violation of the law. The night he died, Colonel, I was with this gentleman.” She took out the card of an assistant to the Propaganda Minister. “Surprised? I dress Frau Magda Goebbels’s hair, and lovely Reichsmarschallin Göring’s as well. Don’t waste your time here: go ask the hag Walter’s been bedding lately. Or rather, ask her husband. Eppner’s the name.” She tapped her chin with her manicured finger, as you do when you call another’s attention to his own face. “Know what, though?” she commented. “You shouldn’t do your own shaving.”
When Bora and Grimm left the apartment, the policeman trailed an odour of lotion and slightly singed hair down the stairs, from his interrogation in the salon. “I told the three young helpers to remain available,” he said, “and I’ve phoned the station and told them to send two men for a thorough search of the premises. They will be here in half an hour, but I doubt there’s much to be gained from it.”
Bora quietly noticed that Grimm was holding a folded piece of paper in his right hand. “Well, what do you think overall?”
“Other than that she wears costly Italian shoes? She does well for herself, and there’s no sign of a man’s presence in the flat.” Grimm stopped on the landing, where an open window let some air into the stuffy stairwell. “Her young helpers are intimidated. By her, not by us. Not that they would tell, but for my money they really have no idea what Ida Rüdiger does once they leave work – incidentally, the girls all live together, since two of them are evacuees. Their homes were bombed out. They can’t tell if or when Madame went to visit the victim, although they’re aware that she’d lived with him. The other tenants are respectable state employees and pensioners, and when we sent for him the block warden had nothing to report about them or Ida Rüdiger. The penalty is severe, if he’s found to withhold information, so it must be that she’s very prudent, or on the level.”
Bora nodded. The scrupulous cleanliness of the stairwell contrasted with the loss of plaster here and there due to bombs having fallen nearby. “She declares that she spent the night of the murder with an official from the Propaganda Ministry. Here’s his card. Above our station, I’m afraid. Freely admits she knows how to shoot a rifle, and claims Eppner the watchmaker is our man. What do we know about her estranged husband?”
“He’s serving at the front in France. There’s also a grownup son, under arms and assigned in the east somewhere.”
Bora started down the next flight of steps. “Somewhere.” That’s how they referred to us when we were in Russia. “In the east somewhere.” Why not? We often didn’t know ourselves where we were.
“An interesting titbit, Colonel, is that pansies come to get their hair done here as well.” Because Bora was watching him, Grimm kept the slip of paper in his hand, rather than putting it into one of his pockets. “The wealthy ones who’ve got good protection, anyway. I showed the girls Kupinsky’s photo and they burst out laughing because of his forelock. They’ve never seen him.”
“Is the Rüdiger telephone being monitored, by any chance?”
“Was. The ‘service’ was discontinued months ago, after a request from upstairs. Obviously a side effect of her cheating on Niemeyer with high-ranking government blokes. As for the Niemeyer residence, his extensions were obviously all tapped.”
“And?”
“Waste of time. Too clever to discuss anything controversial down the line.” Grimm slowly crumpled the piece of paper. “I supervised the installation of listening devices in Greater Berlin for a while. Before the war, it was easy to pass yourself off as a telephone company worker. For the past five years everything’s had to be done in the absence of owners or tenants, because the moment you enter a house wearing overalls or carrying a toolbox they know what you’re there to do.”
This wasn’t news to Bora. Wherever he travelled, he was in the habit of checking the room where he stayed, looking for signs of concealed microphones. He’d removed or put out of operation several of them, and – like Niemeyer – never spoke of topics that could be used against him. At the Adlon, he’d inspected Nina’s suite before chatting with her, and both had lowered their voices when discussing Uncle Reinhardt-Thoma.
“What about Eppner, Inspector, is he around?”
“More’s the shame – another evacuee. I’ll have to go back to headquarters to track him down.” Grimm halted on the step, pulled out a pocket watch and contemplated it. “Might as well do that next. Drop you somewhere for lunch?”
“The Adlon, please.”
Noticing that Grimm was lagging behind, Bora turned. He saw him conceal the paper along with the watch inside his pocket. Caught in the act, the policeman automatically took it out and showed it to him.
It was a note, scribbled in a girl’s childlike handwriting. “Since we were there, I asked one of the helpers for a recipe. My wife needs a fixer you can make at home.”
Bora read: Hydro-alcoholic preparation – rectified alcohol, 2.8 millilitres, Lavender water 3.2 millilitres, water 20 millilitres, sodium borate 20 grams, glycerine 30 grams. “She says it can last months, once you bottle it. You use it with an eyedropper.”
A weathered limousine was pulling up to the kerb as the two men left the house. Here came Ida Rüdiger’s clients: a trio of middle-aged ladies with heads of improbable colours and impossibly tight curls. How women got themselves up, even in times like these… Not my mother, Bora thought, British in this as in many other regards, who wears her naturally wavy hair parted on one side. Nor Dikta, who let hers down only when she came to bed. The thought of his women could have made him melancholic, but his attention shifted to a man in civvies, standing on the doorstep of the post office across the street. The attitude, lazy and stock-still, was not that of a mere onlooker. Keeping an eye on a high-ranking official’s lover, or her clients, or …?
Bora glanced at Grimm, who headed for the parked Olympia seemingly unaware of the observer. But the fact that he was acting oblivious didn’t mean that he was.
Before they pulled away from the kerb, the policeman turned the car radio on. They’d missed the midday news broadcast by a few minutes. The pretentious notes of Liszt’s ‘Prelude’ were already fading into the usual report from the High Command: “Das Oberkommando der Wehrmacht gibt bekannt …”
“Leave it on,” Bora said.
News about the battle around Minsk made his stomach sink. He saw through the sober euphemisms and was not deceived: place names did not lie, and they spelled a rout. Having trundled on horseback through Belarus three years earlier at about this time of year, when German progress seemed unstoppable, he knew the course that the loss of Bobruysk and the crossing of the Pripet marshes would draw on the map. Our family place in East Prussia is twice as far from Berlin as it is from Minsk.
“Just you watch, we’re letting them approach before we spring the trap on them,” Grimm said, boldly turning the car around on the soft asphalt.
Bora had nothing to say.
Predictably, Salomon changed his mind. At the front desk of the Adlon, Bora found a sealed envelope containing the scribbled address of an open-air restaurant not far from the hotel. Free of Grimm’s presence until two, before emerging once more into the heat of the day, he spoke to the concierge: “I don’t know if I will stay on here. I’m expecting a telegram from my mother, so please put it aside for me. Don’t assign my room to anyone else yet. If necessary, I’ll be back later to retrieve my things.”
In the lobby were stationed a handful of General Staff officers, chatting among themselves. Bareheaded, they were clearly hotel guests congregating before lunch in the dining room below. Was their presence the reason why Salomon had chosen to eat elsewhere? Two of them glanced over, rather nervously, in Bora’s opinion. They replied to his nod in a hurried, mechanical way and ostensibly
turned their backs again. It was what you do to send a clear signal that you’re not inviting familiarity.
Bora had seen similar edginess before, something between the clannishness of classmates and the hostility of a pack of wolves.
He walked out, baffled rather than hurt. What is going on? Naturally, there might be worse news from any one of the three endangered front lines, but the officers’ response had a different flavour, somehow immediate, closer to the skin. At the “shop”, they’d taught him to “mark the day and hour” whenever he noticed uncharacteristic behaviour among colleagues, for future reference. And that was what Bora did: 12:30 p.m., 11 July 1944.
12:57 P.M.
The difference between the haves and the have-nots had not been so blatant in years.
Gone were the days of river cruises for labourers and excursions abroad for lower-class youngsters, of the affordable amenities and mass participation in the German good life. A few blocks away from where Bora sat, coupons and queues for simple foodstuffs represented the daily grind, jarringly incidental to this all’aperto restaurant shaded by camouflage netting. But even in the handful of remaining luxury spots in Berlin, menus contained more and more unprecedentedly homely dishes. Cabbage, potatoes, pork and the ubiquitous Eintopf (which contained everything but the kitchen sink) had ominously made their way to this once charming establishment.
Bora’s mind was focused not on the lunch, however, but on the reason for this meeting. He waited for his table companion, caught between annoyed curiosity and the temptation to resume the interrogator’s habit of wheedling the truth out of his counterpart. Truth be told, he wasn’t sure that he wanted to learn what Salomon might have overheard, and perhaps misread, at headquarters.
He watched the colonel appear on the restaurant terrace in a summer suit – officers in civilian clothes were a common sight in Berlin. The now disgraced General Oster had made a practice of it. What troubled Bora was Salomon’s guardedness, so obvious that it made him stand out even more.
The edgy General Staff officers at the Adlon came back to mind. Bora knew headquarters, its rules and foibles, the danger of entropy. He’d served under certain members of the General Staff; others he’d known for other reasons, not all work-related. The years spent in military counter-espionage meant that he’d learned more about his colleagues and superiors than he cared to know. He’d stumbled on baffling wire-tap transcriptions, reports, recordings of radio exchanges (coded or not), titbits like fragments after a shipwreck or a blast: unrecognizable and irrelevant unless one kept them in mind to piece together later.
Thus, he knew all too much about some of them: about the Schulenburgs, from his days at the embassy in Moscow, between 1940 and ’41; about others – like Oster – he recalled disquieting tales, hints dropped over cognac at the officers’ mess, ever since returning from Spain in 1938. But among comrades and brother officers, often of the same social class, mouths remained shut, no conjectures were made. True, a few openly expressed their feelings about the war and even politics. In Russia, he once overheard a general grumbling to his aide, “That arsehole, Hitler …”, but griping is typical of soldiers. Surely Labienus complained about Caesar at times during the Gallic war. And eventually Labienus did betray Caesar.
Salomon saw him rise from his chair. He ordered him to sit down again with a short nod, like a nervous tic. Bora counted the seconds as he watched him approach tentatively, until, as God willed, he reached the haven of their table.
“At ease,” he whispered, to keep Bora from greeting him. “I thought you were leaving Berlin. Have you ordered? No? Order at once – anything. No wine for me.” He sat down and immediately took out a round little box, whose contents he emptied out on his plate: at least five different pills, which he arranged in a row according to size. “I don’t know if it’s harder for me to fall asleep or to stay awake.”
It was typical of the colonel to ignore others during his tormented moments. If he noticed Bora’s mutilation, he disregarded it completely. After Bora had ordered, he waited impatiently, darting quick, distracted glances across the tablecloth. When the waiter arrived with bottled water, he asked him to pour at once, and swallowed all the pills together.
Bora waited. Outwardly unflinching, he read with increasing concern the signs of mental strain in Salomon’s grim silence. The first course came, and still the colonel said nothing. Yet Bora judged the open-air restaurant reasonably safe: he couldn’t exclude the presence of government agents among the customers, but the tables were spaced far apart enough to permit free conversation.
“Sir, I have exactly forty minutes,” he began. “Please tell me what is happening.”
It was not at all the preamble he had been planning, but never mind. Better be direct.
“Are you mad?” Salomon scolded him. “As if I could tell you what is happening!” He spoke under his breath, but emphatically, looking over his shoulder like a schoolboy who fears that someone will copy his paper.
Hasn’t shaved since yesterday, Bora noted, and probably hasn’t slept in his bed at the Adlon, either. What the devil is with him, and how do I get him to talk?
“In that case, sir, acquaint me with the circumstances that led the officers you mentioned yesterday to speak my name. I have a right to know.”
“Fritz-Dietlof heard about you —”
“This I’m aware of, and also from whom he heard. Tell me where, and why.”
The food could have been cardboard, for all the distraught Salomon cared: he ate merely to keep his countenance. Between apathetic mouthfuls, he lost himself in innuendos, metaphors, but Bora was beginning to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Knowing the man, he was not yet ready to worry. Aware of the effect a listener’s attitude can have on a nervous speaker, he calmly interjected, “You did not answer my question. At any rate, I fail to see how a few discouraged words from men exhausted by long working hours can in any way implicate you. Have you considered asking for a furlough?”
Salomon nearly choked as he drained his glass. “What are you saying? Don’t you understand? It is … It is about high treason, and they saw me!”
Bora went ice-cold. “They saw you – where?”
“At Home Army headquarters.” (Yes, of course, Bora thought, in his capacity he would visit the Bendlerblock from his office in Zossen.) “The two officers I spoke of are privy, more than privy …”
Jesus Christ, I can only play things down, and keep my head while he loses his. “And what do I have to do with it?”
They fell silent while the waiter brought the second course. Salomon refused it with a disgusted wave; not Bora, who was hungry, and continued to eat under the colonel’s resentful stare.
“The same arrogance,” Salomon hissed. “The same overconfidence that will ruin us all. But remember that ‘Rebellion is worse than murder, and is the gravest of sins. Neither injustice nor tyranny justify rebellion.’”
As a Protestant, he’d naturally appeal to Martin Luther. Bora swallowed his mouthful, dabbed his lips with the napkin and for nearly a minute simply stared at the colonel. He might well have given an impression of condescending haughtiness, but in fact he needed that pinch of time to sketch out a plan.
“I have no knowledge of the things you’re referring to,” he stated. “I am a soldier, and my duty is to fight.” As a sign of unconcern, he allowed himself to watch an attractive woman walking by. “Did you simply wish to inform me, or is there something else?”
“Don’t toy with me.” Salomon vibrated with anxious rage. “Whatever the reason is for your presence in town, I’m on to you. Clear? You served under me in the Ukraine. I’m not blind.”
The fork Bora had in his hand noiselessly came to rest on the edge of his plate. “Anything you think you know about me, Colonel, is certainly no mystery to the secret police. And here we are. You sought me out, you said what you wanted to say. Did you simply wish to inform me, or is there something else?”
Just as quickly as he’d
lost his temper, Salomon caved in. Tears filled his eyes. He had to sham a coughing fit to conceal his turmoil. But he was crying out of fear, and something had to be done quickly. Bora summoned the waiter to pat the colonel’s back, as is customary when a morsel sticks in someone’s throat. Then he took the situation in hand; he rose from the table and firmly steered Salomon towards the men’s toilets. There, he compelled him to rinse his face and remain seated on the toilet for a few minutes. If there ever was a room where a listening device could be hidden, a toilet was it, so Bora commanded silence by placing his forefinger on his lips.
Aloud, he instructed him: “Now we’ll go back to our table and order a digestif. If you have something for your hay fever with you, it is best if you take it now.” Another pill emerged from Salomon’s pocket, and was gulped down at once.
Whatever the medication contained, together with a shot of brandy it ended the crisis. Bora calmly finished his meal, declined coffee and liquor, and since his drowsy colleague kept rummaging through his pockets for his wallet, he paid for both.
As they parted ways, he expected to hear from Salomon anything other than what the man said: “You must help me to escape from Germany.”
4
Cassandra did not change the fate of Troy, and the living demand their due.
MAXIMILIAN SLADEK, ‘OUR SHOW’
1:59 P.M.
“How did it go, Inspector? Did you find Eppner?”
Bora sounded controlled, almost easy-going, when they met in front of the Adlon. Grimm nodded. Perspiration was streaming from his closely cropped skull down his forehead; only a pair of tobacco-coloured brows kept it from dripping into his eyes. “Looks as if he ended up at his sister-in-law’s at Bergholz, out in the sticks.”