The Night of Shooting Stars

by Ben Pastor

  Grimm waited for him at the gate. He still held the Sauer in his hand, and kept fingering the safety catch. “What did the Russki tell you just now?” he enquired.

  “That Eppner and his wife lead practically separate lives under the same roof. The sister-in-law was so nauseated by the tense situation that she took a job as a tram conductor, so that she could be out of the house as much as possible.”

  “And what did you tell her?”

  Bora calmly watched the play of fingers on steel. “That she is lovely. For a Russian, that is. Are you going to put that away, or should I take mine out too?”

  Grimm pocketed the pistol. “The moment they find the hunting rifle in this house or in one of Eppner’s shops, he’s done for.”

  “Well, there are some calls we need to make before we leave the neighbourhood. This is a list of three people who supposedly were with the Eppners when the murder took place.”

  To Grimm’s disappointment, the first two of the three guests confirmed the watchmaker’s alibi, a birthday party that lasted all night because of the curfew. Bora tried to think of a way to make a detour to the Beelitz sanatorium, without Grimm wondering why.

  He had to consider that there was a fair chance the Criminal Police had kept an eye on him ever since the funeral. They might have simply placed someone at the Adlon, timing my arrival and then my departure, when I travelled out of town to visit Bruno. There’s nothing out of the ordinary in going to see a wounded colleague. If they clocked me in again at my return, all I did then was meet Nina at the hotel, and from there I went straight to Nebe’s office. Grimm took over the shadowing this morning, so he most likely only knows what I’m up to when I’m in his company. However, if Nebe, for whatever reason, decided to have me closely followed, he will be aware that Dr Olbertz approached me before Uncle’s funeral, and – worse luck – that I met Salomon twice in the space of twenty-four hours. Consorting with a former commander is not suspicious per se, unless, as an SS Group Leader, Nebe is on that blabbermouth’s trail as well, for political reasons. I say “Nebe”: what if it’s the Gestapo?

  The possibility made him cringe. Suddenly he realized that the plan to travel to Beelitz next was foolhardy, and scrapped it. Bora settled for checking Eppner’s alibi with the rector a few streets away, while he devised a pretext to be on his own for the time he needed to track Goerdeler down and ask what was really going on.

  6:50 P.M.

  After the rector confirmed the alibi of the two Eppners, the investigators returned to Berlin. Crossing Bülowstrasse, Grimm said he needed to make a phone call. “I’m expecting a colleague’s report on Kupinsky’s whereabouts and details about a parcel deposited at Anhalt station.”

  Bora wondered why he hadn’t been told earlier. “Is the parcel in Kupinsky’s name?”

  “No, the editor’s, Roland Glantz. He sent the receipt to himself at general delivery, poste restante, but we easily traced the parcel to him all the same.” Grimm saw a telephone booth and braked. Finding that it was out of order, he said he’d make his call from the police station on Linkstrasse. “It might take a bit, Lieutenant Colonel. No need for you to come in, unless you want to.”

  Linkstrasse, in other words, was Potsdamer Platz – and from there it was a short walk to the Potsdam and Anhalt train stations. Bora saw his opportunity to seek Goerdeler out, away from Grimm’s watchful eyes. “I have plenty of reading to catch up on,” he answered. “I’ll stay.”

  He waited in the car until the policeman turned the corner. When he was still serving at Abwehr headquarters on Tirpitzufer, he’d known the names of those in the ordinary police and Criminal Police who informed for the Gestapo. But four years had gone by. Oster and Canaris had been thrown out one after the other; the Abwehr itself as Bora knew it was gone. And now Nebe had paired him up with a former thug from the SA. “A faithful Old Warrior”, in Nebe’s words, could only mean that during the Night of the Long Knives ten years ago he’d turned up and taken arms against his own comrades.

  He left the car and started out on foot. The sun was still strong, throwing pailfuls of blinding light onto the street. In the immediate vicinity of the stations, where prostitution had thrived years before, Bora could name at least six hotels from memory, although it was difficult to say how many were still standing after the November raid. One day, at the beginning of the war, he’d casually run into Goerdeler at the clinic at the Askanischer Hof.

  Asking the front desk about a guest could be problematic or impossible, depending. Concierges were required to exhibit their registers to the Gestapo, but not to an army officer; trying to buy the information could result in a formal charge, or even arrest, if plainclothesmen were present. Bora decided to try a third option.

  Since the clinic was still standing and open for business, he simply entered and said that he had a business appointment with Dr Carl-Friedrich Goerdeler. He was told to leave a written message. This did not in itself prove or disprove Goerdeler’s presence, and the concierge’s discretion could also indicate that the guest had asked not to be disturbed. Bora did not want to leave messages; on the other hand, he could not any waste time there. “Never mind,” he said casually, “I will call again.”

  He fared no better in the other hotels nearby, although at the Stuttgarter Hof they at least told him there was no guest registered under that name. Three quick and fruitless visits later (the destruction of other establishments spared him further calls), a disappointed Bora walked back to Linkstrasse to wait for Grimm’s return.

  He did so just in the nick of time, because the policeman soon rounded the corner with his flat-footed step, wiping sweat from his sunburned neck. “Aren’t you warm?” he asked, as he crashed behind the wheel. “You sat in the car all this time and you’re not warm?”

  “I’m not warm.”

  “I’m as uncomfortable as hell.” Grimm loosened his wilted tie around his fat neck, and ran his soaking wet handkerchief between cloth and skin. He removed his badge and tossed it into the glove compartment.

  Bora looked away from him. “What news from your colleague?”

  “Kupinsky has been seen in his old neighbourhood, near the bus depot by the cemetery. The depot is over in the Treptow quarter. He has friends on Persiusstrasse, working at the municipal garage across the Spree. He’s drifting. I wrote down his movements across the Horst Wessel quarter all the way to the city slaughterhouse. You know where that is?”

  “Vaguely.”

  “They’re working overtime butchering eastern cattle,” Grimm went on. “That’s why in Berlin you find more meat nowadays than you did a year ago.”

  The thought of stockyards and what went on there was depressing to Bora. “So, do we have a precise address?”

  “We pinned him down to a square block in Neukölln. Won’t go anywhere between today and tomorrow.” Grimm mopped his face with the handkerchief spread open, as if he were trying to print on it a holy shroud of sweat. “We should look into the matter of the parcel at Anhalt station now, instead. It’s actually a small trunk, left there in Roland Glantz’s name on Friday, the seventh of July.”

  Bora slipped the papers he pretended to have been reading in Grimm’s absence into his briefcase. Surely the phone call to headquarters did not last more than fifteen or twenty minutes, but he was gone nearly twice that time. What else did he do at the police station? I bet that he didn’t insist on taking me along because he was going to report to his superiors about our day so far, including my talking to the Russian girl.

  “Fine, I’ll walk from here,” he announced.

  Grimm’s scowl trailed him as he left his seat. Bora heard the engine start and assumed the policeman would drive to the station ahead of him. The Olympia overtook him, however, and halted a few feet away, where it was already shady at this time of day. A resigned Grimm got out, and began to walk.

  6:37 P.M.

  The goods-and-freight section of Anhalt station was in ruins, and so was the locomotive depot at the nearby Potsdam
station. The surviving service areas, though the worse for wear, remained relatively busy. Uniforms outnumbered civilian clothes, and among the civilians the majority were women. Signs of hasty maintenance – the odour of plaster, paint, freshly cut timber and plywood – filled the greasy air. Behind the counter of the luggage deposit, a policeman stood waiting for Grimm and Bora, with the parcel at his feet. Twenty-five or thirty inches in length and half that in width and height, it rather resembled a shoemaker’s box, or another sort of toolbox. It featured no visible lock, but was bound up in wire, here and there secured by lead seals. After a brief confabulation, they agreed to carry the parcel out of the station and find a vacant area where they could open it.

  The policeman suggested that a bomb disposal crew handle the job. Bora remembered the explosion of his first evening in Berlin; no matter how careful you are, at war disaster can strike. “It was safely taken down from the shelf, wasn’t it?” he said, impatiently. “The wire is not connected to the interior in any way, so cutting it could never prime a charge.” But he granted that the presence of a time bomb could not be ruled out.

  For the moment, they settled on a careful transfer to the empty plot south of the Potsdam depot. There, Bora – who was slipping more and more into one of his “I don’t care what happens” moods, and had enough of tiptoeing caution – stared at the innocuous-looking container on the mangy grass. It annoyed him that they might think he was showing off, because he had better reasons than most to fear a blast, but he really saw no reason why a bankrupt editor should leave an explosive device of any kind in a luggage deposit.

  “How much would you say it weighs?” he asked the policeman, who’d grudgingly carried the parcel under his arm.

  “Box included, maybe ten, eleven pounds, Lieutenant Colonel. We’d better wait before we open it.”

  “No. I’ll open it now. Step back.”

  Grimm, hitching up his pants with hooked thumbs, did not say anything. He had the face of one who had decided that, if he could not call Bora’s bluff, he could at least let him know he didn’t care either way. He nodded to the policeman. Both withdrew to a distance of twenty or so yards, under a sky that seemed immensely wide and serene.

  Bora crouched by the box and used his fingers to unwind the wire. As expected, nothing bad occurred. He easily opened out the hinged cover, and all he saw inside was firmly packed wood shavings. They weighed close to nothing and the box had thin walls, so the heft and bulk belonged to the object or objects nesting below. He put his hand inside and fumbled around, wondering if Cleopatra had felt as fatalistically carefree as he did right now, when she reached for the asp among the figs. He, who supposedly no longer cared for his surroundings, was suddenly aware of every detail around him. For ever lost to trees felled God knows where, the blond and frail wood shavings swam around his fingertips; a scent of forest still rose from them as they spilled over and fell onto the mangy grass. Faint city sounds floating across had the muffled quality of noises heard in a dream. Above, the summer sky would soon change colour as the day began to drain from it. I see, hear, smell everything, yet I’m ready to leave it all behind.

  The object was metal, at any rate. And wood. And under his fingertips it felt like a strange kind of rifle barrel.

  The three of them were soon observing a disassembled weapon neatly arranged on Grimm’s store-bought, sweat-stained jacket; Bora had some familiarity with it, but had never used it.

  “Nee, so was!” The policeman whistled. “If that doesn’t top it all. It’s a combination rifle.”

  “A huntsman’s Drilling. But not for civilian use.” Grimm pointed with a stick at the letters punched onto the breech. “It’s marked L. W.”

  Bora had nothing to add. His brother’s bomber crew had occasionally carried it on board over southern Russia, although it was at first only issued to downed pilots in Africa and the Mediterranean, to defend themselves against wild animals. The weapon’s peculiarity was its three barrels, a pair of twelve-gauges and, below them, a rifle barrel for a rimmed 9.3 cartridge. Stags, boars and even lions could be brought down by its fire.

  “Both calibres were present in Eppner’s house too,” Grimm mumbled.

  “Are the editor’s fingerprints on record anywhere?”

  Grimm told Bora he’d have to check. Surprise had given way to a sort of wild glee in his small eyes, a vicious foretaste of victory. “I’m taking this to headquarters, Colonel. By tomorrow morning at the latest we’ll have what it takes to place Glantz under arrest.”

  Still shaken, the policeman wanted to put in his twopenn’orth of wisdom. “You really shouldn’t have risked it, Colonel. Could have been an explosive device.” Bora nodded at the words, but his attention was still on Grimm’s malicious expression. I shouldn’t have touched the barrel, that’s what I shouldn’t have done. Grimm used his handkerchief to handle the weapon, and the policeman never laid his hand on it. Now my fingerprints, or part of them, are readable on the metal shaft for future reference. Christ. No wonder the minion is smiling.

  He watched Grimm start out for the Potsdamer depot, trailed by the policeman with the box still under his arm.

  “Should I take you back to the hotel before I head out to HQ, Colonel?”

  “Yes, please.”

  A handful of the wood shavings lying in the grass trembled when a breath of warm wind swept the empty plot. Bora stooped to pick them up as if they were in need of salvation, but then crushed them in his fist. Walking unhurriedly behind the policemen, he thought, I would not hesitate to kill him, if needed. There is a considerable feeling of freedom knowing that you could – without making it into a question of conscience – eliminate the man at your side. Especially when, as in Grimm’s case, the feeling is reciprocal.

  8:09 P.M.

  At the Adlon, two messages awaited Martin Bora. A telegram from his mother, confirming her safe arrival in Leipzig, and a verbal communication from the concierge, looking unusually contrite. “A reservation has been made for you at the Leipziger Hof, Lieutenant Colonel. Herr Adlon himself took the phone call.”

  So that was where Arthur Nebe wanted him to stay. Bora did not comment. An apologetic Louis Adlon, who’d known his natural father during his glorious musical tours in Berlin, stepped out of his office to say, “We’re sorry to lose you and regret the inconvenience, Lieutenant Colonel Baron von Bora. We will of course look after the transfer of your luggage first thing in the morning …”

  “No inconvenience,” he replied politely, “and no need to transfer my luggage. I’ll see to it tomorrow.”

  The Leipziger Hof was a small, elegant hotel that never cared to compete with the large establishments in Berlin. Bora had assumed it’d been bombed, because of its proximity to the main rail line to the south, but if it was indeed standing and serviceable, it might just be where Goerdeler was staying. Located in the neighbourhood of the Heinrich von Kleist Park, it looked on Potsdamer Strasse where the latter became the wide, old highway leading to Magdeburg and Leipzig. Behind it, the imposing civil and criminal court faced the park, along with other government offices, a classical colonnade and that abominable leviathan that was the Pallasstrasse’s multi-storeyed concrete bunker.

  Once he’d retrieved his diary from the hotel safe, Bora showered, changed, called down to have his laundry done and ready by morning, and descended to the lower level for dinner.

  The clique of staff officers he’d seen nervously chatting in the morning was occupying a long table at the end of the room. They seemed to be having a much jollier time now. They ate, drank and conversed in a jolly mood that looked like relief to Bora’s eyes. They act like schoolboys who dreaded flunking an exam, and instead passed it with flying colours. Or … No. No, something slightly different: like students who heard that the exam was cancelled, or postponed. There was nothing forced about their merriment, quite the opposite. If anything, it ran through the table like an electric current.

  Bora sat alone, as always taking care that he faced the
hall and the people in it. He’d taken along his briefcase so that he could read more of the printed matter on the Weimar Prophet.

  Gossip, starry-eyed reviews and photos of pre-war parties were the side dishes to his meal. He saved the lengthy article signed by “Kolo”, Max Kolowrat’s pseudonym as a journalist, for last. Like all other press items featuring Niemeyer, the article was stapled to the cover of the magazine it’d been published in, in this case the November 1923 issue of the Berlin Illustrirte, priced one billion marks at the height of inflation.

  The piece, apparently one of a series covering the esoteric aspects of Berlin during the Republic, bore the title “Stars over Berlin – Part 7: Sami Mandelbaum”. The synopses of subjects already dealt with were listed in italics under the title: “How mysterious are Berlin’s Mysterious Places?”; “Erik Jan Hanussen: Forecast or Fraud?”; “The Capital’s Dubious Horoscope: The Disappearance of Berlin’s Ghosts”; “Nostradamus in a Skirt: The Seeress Elsbeth Ebertin”; “Jazz: Crimes, Champagne and Predictions”. All promised a fairly cynical and amused point of view.

  Bora began to read:

  Berlin is a metropolis where the young woman about town can, on the same morning, munch on Stullen in her favourite café on the Ku’damm, have her best pair of stockings mended at the “Stocking Clinic”, and listen to a man who will disclose her sentimental destiny to her. Empires may crumble, financial tides may rise to wash over Atlantis many times over, but to the young woman about town in this capital city all that seems to matter are the morning treats, the precious silk hose repaired for another turn of the foxtrot, and Sami Mandelbaum’s predictions. No, she will not enquire about the bond market, or starvation in China, or women’s rights. The crime rate and the moral state of the Nation do not concern her. She longs to learn if the gentleman in whose company she danced the night before is “the right one”. If one thinks of it, all her morning errands lead to this momentous question: the sugar lumps that will charmingly round out her figure, the stockings returned to tip-top shape, and a magic key that will unlock the door of the future.