by Ben Pastor
Bergholz, in fact, was not far from the Beelitz sanatorium. Although the ten or so minutes Bora spent calming himself after confronting Salomon had failed to obliterate the traces of his irritation, he needed to consult with Lattmann again. “No time like the present,” he said, getting into the car. “Let’s go.”
During the first part of the trip he read more of the Niemeyer material, setting aside the items that deserved a closer analysis. He tried to remind himself that Salomon was a pessimist, prone to let his imagination run wild; he’d been placed under medical observation after his nervous breakdown years earlier. High treason! Undoubtedly, he’d heard a couple of indiscreet High Command colleagues say something, and his tendency to jump to conclusions had probably done the rest. Still, in his present state he was a loose cannon who could create complications. Having served two years at the Abwehr headquarters, Bruno Lattmann was likely to have privileged information he might be convinced to share. Why was he so insistent that I stay away from Salomon? And why do I keep thinking of the jumpy officers at the Adlon, and the man watching from the post office on Landgrafenstrasse? I shouldn’t do what Salomon does – make mountains out of molehills. All the same, I need to hear what else Bruno has to say.
Near Schöneberg’s central police station, they had to wait for the manoeuvring of some heavy equipment ahead. Grimm turned off the engine and sat wedged behind the wheel, fanning himself with a folder.
“Gerd Eppner,” he informed Bora, “is only distantly related to the famous watchmaker brothers who had their shop on Charlottenstrasse, but he’s done well for himself. Anything you need to know about his wife’s affair with the victim is in this folder, courtesy of the Dahlem police department.” He gave Bora the contents of the folder, keeping the cardboard cover so that he could continue to fan himself.
When the officer returned the police report after reading through it, Grimm replaced it in the folder. He then left the car to chat with the policemen down the road, and when he returned he said, “It’ll take a while. We might as well make ourselves comfortable.”
“Are there no alternative routes?”
“No. Now there’s a house-to-house search ahead too. We have to wait.”
Whether to kill time, or to contribute to the case with a personal recollection, he then said, “You know, from my days in Neukölln, I can tell you lots about the Son of Asia.”
“I’m listening.”
“Sure, he went by Magnus Magnusson later on, but at the start of his career, roughly from ’22 to ’32, we all knew him as ‘Mandelbaum the Son of Asia’, a Galician Jew.”
“I’d heard.”
“Ah, but you may not know that he passed himself off as a lapsed Jew who’d been turned out by his folks because he broke the Sabbath and such. Matter of fact, he told how his old man once found him eating a piece of sausage with a Polack child his age, and beat him black and blue. But it was all a story, understand? All made up. He was not a Jew!”
“This I also know.”
“Can you imagine an Aryan who pretends to be a Jew, who makes up a whole past in a shtetl, complete with your fallen-down huts and noisy neighbours, your pious rebbe and suffering at the hands of those mean Polacks?” Grimm snorted. “You had to hear his sing-song: ‘I was born twelfth of twelve children, like the tribes of Israel!’ During the Republic, Jewish quacks and magicians were all the rage, and he tugged at the heartstrings of his public with those tales. All lies, but after the war the fat merchants, the profiteers and those who’d stabbed the Fatherland in the back … well, they liked to sit in their warm furs and listen to the woes of the poor little Jew Mandelbaum, who owned nothing in the world but his ‘great gift’. You almost felt like you were there, with him in that muddy handful of huts, with the shul at the end of the street where the geese honk, and the overbearing Polack farmers on the other side. I myself, who was then an apprentice and a regular of circuses and cabarets, drank up all those lies of poverty and redemption … By God, you almost wanted to be there with him, in the filthy shtetl with a father who’s a tailor and ruins his eyes at the sewing machine, and on holidays slaps the ratty shtreimel of wild mink tails on his head. We ate it all up, us dumb Aryans. Me, he didn’t fool me too long. Those days, me and my Party comrades broke heads in back alleys when it was called for. I don’t scare easy. I performed a tour of duty in Russia and have no problem admitting that I killed my share of real Jews in the East.” Grimm interrupted himself, because Bora said nothing. “You aren’t batting an eye, Colonel. Don’t you like to hear comments like this? You may belong to the old-fashioned army, but we each have the experiences we have.”
“There is just one army, and it’s the German army.”
“Right you are. Anyhow, you won’t believe this – or maybe you will – it was the Yids themselves who unmasked him one fine day. My favourite story! It must have been late in ’31, at Oppeln, where the Party had sent me. He was already famous there and soon he would be even more so, as he’d predicted. What he didn’t foresee was that there would be two real Jews from Lodz in the audience. At some point they’d had their fill of all that bullshit about the shtetl, so they up and asked him one or two questions of the kind only a Yid can answer. Well, Mandelbaum didn’t know the answer. He tried, but failed miserably. With the entire hall in a hubbub, at the end of the show there was so much confusion that the Yids – they were strong like bulls – were able to catch him and pulled down his pants, to see how much exactly he descended from David. And he didn’t! By God, he didn’t! He was no schejner Jid! The roof all but came down, people were laughing so hard. That too was a show, and of the most amusing sort. Anyway, when all was said and done, it ended well for our hero. After a week spent in a cheap little hotel to lick the wounds sustained by his self-love, he got a call from the folks at the Circus Kludsky, and shortly thereafter by a big impresario who even back then already knew the difference between Christians and Jews. The Son of Asia had the bright idea of making a confession of sorts before his next show – he published it as a booklet, and distributed it widely. He explained how the popularity of the Yiddish singers and entertainers from the Pale of Settlement had convinced him that that was the only way to obtain favour with the public. Cripes, did it work! I wasn’t present, but I know some who heard that public confession, and it went over so well that a couple of females started bawling. After several cases of beer had circulated, we all went to beat up the Yids living in the neighbourhood, just to teach them right from wrong.” Grimm sighed at the fond recollection. “That was how we learned his ‘true life story’, which was every bit as interesting as the first one. Magnus Magnusson was the son of a poor sailor from Sweden, who’d worked his way through a university degree. Except that he wasn’t from Scandinavia at all; he just fed us more bullshit. But at least, given that things were starting to change in Germany by then, he never tried the Jewish ruse again.” He watched Bora, who seemed unmoved. “This was just a long story to explain to you what went through my mind when I heard he died. So many lies. That’s what he died of.”
“Lies, and a couple of shots from a hunting rifle.”
The traffic slowly began moving again.
BERGHOLZ, 4:02 P.M.
The cottage had a vaguely oriental appearance, due to the way the gables sloped and then curled up at the bottom edge, over the gutter. A semicircular porch lined with ivy formed a two-storey front part, whose upper floor resembled a glorified dormer with four windows; a short flight of steps led up to the entrance; the rest of the façade was dressed in bright green creepers. It was the type of spacious porch where wicker furniture and flowerpots are arranged in the good season; none were present now, perhaps for fear that they might be stolen.
When Bora neared the entrance, the furious yapping of a small dog intensified within. Grimm followed half a step behind, to his right, as he probably did with a partner on patrol.
In those days of intermittent power supply door-ringing often came to nothing, and the Eppners had solve
d the problem by installing an old-fashioned bell, complete with a shiny brass chain and an ornate little plaque that read Please pull. The single toll aroused a paroxysm of barking, which a woman’s gentle, accented voice tried to soothe. The door opened; the girl standing there with a pug in her arms did not look German. Her round face, with its high cheekbones, blushed with astonishment on hearing Bora address her in Russian.
“Zdravstvutye,” she answered, after a moment. To the question of whether the Eppners were in, she answered that “Mistress” wasn’t, but “Master” was.
Twenty-seven years after the October Revolution, more or less her age – and here she is, calling those she works for “masters”. Bora pointed this out to her with a smile, and she grew more confused than before.
“No need to announce us,” he added, urging her to take a step back to let him in. There was no question that the bespectacled man of around sixty, in shirtsleeves and with a callipers in his hand, was Herr Eppner in person, come to scold the girl for speaking Russian. At the sight of the strangers, he went from crossness to alarm.
“Get out!” He dismissed both maid and dog. “Gentlemen …?”
On principle, Bora didn’t usually stand on ceremony with civilians: imagine a murder suspect in a satin house jacket. He curtly explained what they were here to discuss, and once Grimm had identified himself Eppner had no objection. He led the visitors beyond a well-lit breakfast room, to what he called his “laboratory”.
The room, clearly a former parlour, was now crowded with metal shelves on which odd instruments of all kinds, lathes, vices and boxfuls of wheels, screws, knobs, tweezers, magnifying glasses and miniature anvils shared space with finished clocks and watches, all deadly still.
They all marked different, silent hours, as if in more than one sense time had stood still. At each of these hours something happened or will happen to me, Bora told himself. If I really knew how to read these clock faces I would understand what, remember what. It was 16:27 when the grenade struck the car last September. I’d just checked my wristwatch, and it’s the last thing I remember. When the shooting was over, it seems I sought my wedding ring in the dust, because my hand was no longer there, and neither was the wristwatch. It’s true what I told Nina, that I don’t recall any pain. But each of the hours on these clock faces, randomly, matches a precise time from my past and future, and everybody’s.
“You’re wondering why I don’t wind them,” Eppner volunteered, “but you see, we ourselves are guests here, and my sister-in-law’s nerves fray easily. This is a temporary accommodation for us. Our home is far more spacious. I assure you, however, that every one of these instruments is functioning, very much functioning.”
Was he making conversation to gain time? Bora did not look amused, so there came a generic apology: “I really don’t know how I can be of use to you, gentlemen. I am not even acquainted with the person whose death you are here to discuss.”
Bora was on the verge of saying, “Your wife knew him well enough.” But he had no time for games. “Where is Frau Eppner?”
“At our shop on Breitenbachplatz. Someone has to mind the shop while I recover from colic. What does Frau Eppner have to do with — whatever the name of the deceased is?”
Bora quickly listed Niemeyer’s aliases, and since the watchmaker still pretended not to understand, he added, “Well, Walter Niemeyer was killed, and for reasons possibly obscure to you but not to us, you are among the possible suspects.”
Eppner rested the callipers on his cluttered worktable. “What? I live out here in the country, how could I ever —” He stopped, because Bora had never mentioned the victim’s address. He awkwardly tried to correct himself. “If as you said they called him the Weimar Prophet he must have lived in Weimar, no?”
“Not at all.” Bora took out his notebook. “According to our information, after leaving your bomb-damaged home in the centre of Berlin, you spent ten days in the quarter of Steglitz.”
“Ah, then the crime happened in Steglitz.”
“No, not in Steglitz. In nearby Dahlem. Don’t you read the papers?”
“I do not.”
Bora stared at a series of carved clocks from the Black Forest, decorated with an array of dead hares and pheasants, stag horns, game bags and hunting guns. “But you listen to the radio.”
“No.”
“And you never even go to the post office, the bakery or the tobacconist’s …”
Eppner stiffened. When the satin cord around his house jacket came undone, he swept it up before it reached the floor. Brandishing it like a whip, he carefully picked his words: “I do not engage in gossip with shopkeepers. The chores I leave to the servant, or to my lady wife.”
“A foreign worker is not a servant,” Bora snapped back, “and I rather doubt your wife is a lady.”
Grimm, who was poking around the instruments on the shelves, burst out laughing at the words.
Bora’s briefcase came to rest on the worktable, scattering the diminutive tools. He took out a typewritten sheet. “Here’s a complaint for disturbing the peace, filed at the Dahlem police station on Cecilienallee. Your name is on it. You may not have known Niemeyer as thoroughly as other members of your family, Herr Eppner, but you still parked not one but six times in front of the victim’s property, ‘repeatedly’, as you can read here, ‘activating the car-horn instrument known as Schalmei at all hours, causing not only annoyance but outright alarm to the whole neighbourhood’.” Grimm laughed; Bora turned around crossly, but the policeman was having such a fit that he had to leave the room. “Furthermore, a witness testified that at least on one occasion you threatened to kill your wife and Niemeyer. Before you deny it, consider that it was your wife who shared the threat with someone, who then reported it to the police station down the street from here.”
A punctilious Eppner tried to put his disarranged table in order. “That someone is my sister-in-law, who cannot be trusted. I deny …” Without glancing back, Bora could read on his face that Grimm must have quietly come back in, and replaced laughter with a look of physical threat. “I do not deny” – the watchmaker had changed his tune – “that past indiscretions have led to a misunderstanding with my wife. But I resent that idle gossip is deemed more credible than the word of a faithful taxpayer and Party member.” While he spoke, he tied the satin cord around him with three knots, tight enough to make it virtually impossible to undo. “As for my family situation, unless you’re married, you can’t understand —”
Bora cut him short. “Enlighten me, then.”
It took an agitated Eppner a good half hour to provide an alibi and tell his version of the story, while Grimm disappeared again to search the house. Bora heard drawers being yanked out, the trampling of feet overhead; the little dog, relegated to a closet somewhere on the ground floor, alternatively whined and scratched at the door to be set free. At one point Bora summoned the Russian girl to fill in some details.
The tiresome narrative of the watchmaker’s self-defence (“Spoiled wives, when their men work as hard as I do … three shops in Berlin alone … The so-called Prophet was a true hoodwinker, let me tell you …”) was winding down when the policeman marched back in and placed a Sauer automatic and a box of ammunition in front of Bora. “They were stuck inside a disconnected boiler, wrapped in cellophane. The gun’s loaded. The ammo is a mixed bag. One of them” – he did not say which – “matches.”
A sudden change came upon Eppner. “Match? Match? Match what? Give it back!” He uselessly tried to snatch the gun from the policeman. “You are looking at a second lieutenant in the Berlin Garde-Regiment zu Fuss, who earned his right to bear arms thirty years ago! I will be goddamned, do you hear me? I will be goddamned before I give up my self-defence and let anyone harm me and mine, in my shops or in my home!”
Grimm sneered. “Liar. In the time it’d take you to fish the gun out and unwrap it, an intruder would riddle you like a sieve. This,” he said as he weighed the pistol in his fist, “and the fac
t that you violated the law on foreign workers by keeping an Ostarbeiter in your home, is enough for me to take you to Alex for a talk.”
Bora examined the pistol and returned it to the policeman. It was not the murder weapon, and until a rifle was discovered on the premises he’d lost all interest in this lead, thanks to the alibi provided by Eppner in his long-winded tale. From the breakfast room, Grimm phoned the closest police station to get men sent over for a thorough search of the house. Eppner frantically scribbled the names and addresses of those who could verify his alibi on a slip of paper. “They’re all neighbours, Colonel, all respectable: one of them is the rector of the local parish … Do you think they’ll let me call a lawyer?”
Bora said he didn’t know.
The local police took less than ten minutes to arrive. Grimm gave them their orders, and while the pug barked up a storm in the closet, the young Russian saw him and Bora to the door and out into the garden. She must have been frightened by the goings-on, but had enough sense to stay quiet and lie low, like all small animals intent on survival. Bora stopped to converse with her by a flower bed, in the full sun, asking questions and receiving answers. She savours her sweet mother tongue as she addresses me; and yet her eyes are fearful because of the police, and because my knowledge of Russian tells her I’m one of those who invaded her country. It reminded him of another day, little more than a year earlier: another garden and another farm girl, looking at him with trepidation. Nyusha, her name had been, and she had been taking care of his father’s old lover, Larisa Vassilievna. Ten months since we pulled back from Kharkov. I wonder what happened to them. Did Nyusha, whom Larisa loved well enough to bequeath everything to, protect or betray her? And this clear-eyed girl – even if she survives the war, what will happen to her if the Red Army should reach Berlin? He felt a sudden, inexplicable pity for her. Although there was no one around who could understand them, he bowed his head to whisper in her ear, “Do not let anyone convince you to go back home. I know what happens to those who go back.”