The Night of Shooting Stars

by Ben Pastor

  Bora stepped in front of Grimm. As he turned the knob, the policeman urged him on from behind: “Is it open?” Inside the outer door, a wooden threshold formed a space delimited by a second door, in opaque glass, locked from the inside. Bora didn’t hesitate, and fired a bullet into the steel lock to smash it; the ricochet missed him by a hair.

  Inside, blinding daylight flooded a room lined with empty desks. The men’s attention was drawn to a large window, wide open to the summer sky. “That’s that, then,” Grimm muttered, and stuck his head out to see what remained of the publisher after plunging down four storeys. He immediately turned back and cried: “He isn’t there! The son of a bitch didn’t jump.”

  “Is there a ledge below the window?”

  “No.”

  “Where is he, then?” Bora turned and looked down a passage to his left which led to another office, and was alarmed to see a man jump off his desk with a noose around his neck.

  “Halt, Criminal Police!” Grimm shouted as he sprinted in, as if the warning could stop a man who’d already hanged himself.

  The bracket holding the rope, however, was not up to par. As the heavy-set Glantz plummeted, his weight yanked the hot-air duct from the ceiling, which fortunately wasn’t in operation at this time of year.

  Grimm rushed to the fallen man and grumbled something about a fractured hyoid bone or first vertebra. Glantz, however, at once started struggling against him, labouring for breath yet trying to keep the policeman from loosening the slipknot around his neck.

  A step away, Bora had a mean urge to kick the unsuccessful suicide about.

  Grimm carried a liquor flask in his coat pocket; he roughly handed it to the shivering Glantz, who – judging by the ease with which he emptied it – could not be wholly new to strong drink.

  He’d struck his head in the fall. His left eyebrow was bleeding, and a bruise sprang up across his forehead. Only now did he seem to realize that he was facing a policeman and a lieutenant colonel. As Grimm sprang up with unexpected agility and pulled Glantz to his feet at the same time, Glantz saw Bora sweep a sealed envelope from his desk. “Those are private matters!” he protested. “Private matters!” But a wrestler’s hold kept him from intervening.

  “Not that private, judging from the audience you drew.” Bora cut open the top edge of the envelope with Glantz’s letter opener, which was shaped like a stiletto, the handle a dainty Florentine lily. “If we hadn’t dropped in, the crowd would have smashed the glass door just to see you die.” He unfolded the sheet and scanned it quickly. Then he handed it to Grimm without comment. “I detest amateurs,” he said with a frown. “One look at those ducts is enough to know they could never hold your weight. The window was wide open: why didn’t you use it, to make sure?”

  Once free from Grimm’s clutch, Glantz sheepishly massaged his neck. The stress, effort or compression of the windpipe had brought about a loss of urine, so that he faced two very unsympathetic men in embarrassingly stained trousers.

  “Have you something else to wear?” Bora said sourly. “If not, take this.” He tossed a grey dustcoat from the coat stand at him. “Compose yourself.”

  Once he recovered his grasp of the situation, Glantz seemed crushed. He fumbled around on the desk for his glasses, and tied the dustcoat around his waist by the sleeves. “My God,” he groaned, “This is the most grotesque thing that could have happened to me.” The way he looked at the open window in the other room prompted Grimm to go and lock it, but it was probably just a passing regret for his failure. “I imagine you were called in … the confusion … I am mortified, thank you.”

  “Wait before you thank us,” Bora replied. “We are here to question you regarding the death of Walter Niemeyer, or Magnusson, or whatever the Weimar Prophet went by.”

  The words, connecting the events that led to the authorities’ intervention like dots, petrified Glantz. “What? You certainly cannot believe —”

  “We do believe,” Grimm cut matters short. “You try to kill yourself only days after the murder of a man you argued with, and on top of that you leave this kind of note.” He waved the sheet on his face.

  “The note? The note has nothing to do with it —” The phone rang, interrupting Glantz’s explanations. Grimm lifted the receiver, and when he heard something like a series of yelping sounds down the line, he let the publisher take the call.

  “No, dear,” Glantz said, rolling his eyes. “Nothing has happened. No, dear, no, it’s not true. No. I’m here with two gentlemen. I’ll tell you about it later.”

  After this brief exchange, he turned to the two men and said – as if the mention of Niemeyer were an unbearably sore point – “‘For what I have not done’ perfectly illustrates the way I feel, not having had the gumption to kill the Jewish bastard.”

  “Niemeyer was not Jewish,” Bora observed.

  “And anyway,” Grimm chimed in, “here you wrote ‘For what I have done’. Look.” Glantz adjusted the glasses on his nose, read the note, and angrily burst out laughing. “As if going from tragedy to farce were not enough! It beats everything, that someone in my profession would leave a suicide note with a goddamn mistake in it!”

  Bora said that he was not amused.

  “Pardon me, Colonel, but who are you? You don’t belong to the Criminal Police.”

  “Suffice to say, I’m the one who will question you.” Standing behind the desk, Bora was methodically emptying its drawers, stacking objects and papers on top of it. “I have neither the time nor the inclination to waste time on chatter.”

  “Right.” Grimm, meanwhile, was searching through the wastepaper basket. “Did you or did you not send yourself a Drilling rifle to Anhalt station, poste restante?”

  Glantz stared at him with glassy eyes. “That I did. Yes. I didn’t want to be tempted to use it on myself. The rifle belonged to my brother-in-law, a flyer who recently died in action. Yes, I know it is illegal to own weapons, thank you very much. All the more reason for me to hide it, after the murder.”

  “The method of Niemeyer’s murder wasn’t made public,” Grimm whispered to Bora. Out loud, he asked Glantz, “Where were you during the night between the third and the fourth of July, and who can support your alibi?”

  “I was nowhere near Dahlem, if that’s what you mean. For the rest, what I was doing is my business: a private life is not yet forbidden, is it?”

  Grimm’s response was to stomp into the other room and throw the window open on those four storeys of empty space.

  The threat deprived Glantz of what little energy he had. “May I … I need to use the toilet,” he whined.

  “Looks like you already did,” Grimm sneered, stepping back into the office. “If the john is nearby, I’ll let you go, provided you leave the door open. And both hands on your bird while you do what you must.”

  “No, no, I only want to wash my face. There’s a sink in the next room, inside a closet.” Grimm followed him out of the office. Bora used those minutes to search through the papers he’d found in the drawers, mostly overdue utility bills, final notices and letters from exasperated suppliers.

  Glantz returned with a piece of blotting paper stuck to his wounded eyebrow. Judging from the redness of his cheek, Grimm had used the brief interval to try to make him talk, or at least to make him pay for forcing him to race up several flights of stairs.

  “What else happened to your face?” Bora asked, not because he anticipated an answer from Glantz, but to inform the inspector that he disapproved of his methods.

  The ownership of a rifle, compatible with the murder weapon to boot, was enough for an immediate arrest. Once they’d brought Glantz in, they could extract from him an admission of guilt. Bora cynically told himself that it was not what he wanted, because he couldn’t be sure that it’d be the truth. Now that Ida Rüdiger and the watchmaker are sitting on the back-burner of the investigation, as long as we don’t find Kupinsky the publisher is our chief suspect. I don’t know if Nebe expects a quick and handy solution
from me, but if he does, he won’t get one.

  “Can you write shorthand?” he asked Grimm, who hadn’t expected the question and blandly said that he did not.

  “Well, I can. Hand me some blank sheets from the desk, and get a chair for this man.”

  “Wait, Colonel.” Grimm angrily took him aside. “This violates all the rules. According to regulations, interrogations are to take place at headquarters.”

  As he’d done with Salomon, Bora scowled at the ringed hand clasping his elbow, so that Grimm let him go. “The chief himself, Group Leader Nebe, has entrusted me with this case,” he told him. “I make the rules. Do me the favour of finding a chair for this man, and let us begin.”

  It was difficult to say whether Glantz had expected to be questioned about the murder, now or any time. Uncomfortably seated, with the dustcoat still tied to his hefty waist, he soon admitted that he knew more details than those released by the press. He did not specify his sources, but it was possible that, as a former reporter, he had some police contacts, possibly in the Dahlem police. Bora planned to find out later.

  “Tell me everything you know. I want all the details.”

  Glantz blinked several times. He had bulging blue eyes, and behind the lenses of his glasses one could see the white around his irises veined with red, as if he’d wept, or walked through a sandstorm. “I heard that he was shot with a hunting rifle, so I decided to pack the Drilling and leave it at the station in my name. It was common knowledge that we’d had a disagreement. I had already sued the bastard in a court of law.”

  Grimm could not help himself. “But why did you keep a Drilling in your home in the first place?”

  Bora let him speak, because the same question had been on the tip of his tongue.

  “Because my brother-in-law – his name was Flight Lieutenant Welzer, Seppi Welzer – brought it back from the front in North Africa. See, we’d been hunting together in the good old days, big game hunting was what we liked best. He’d been forced by an enemy fighter to crash-land west of Tobruk, and since the Drilling is a very fine rifle … well, he made out that the Drilling was lost in the incident. With help from a comrade – don’t ask me his name, because I don’t know it – he set it aside until his next furlough to the homeland. When he came to visit last Christmas he left the Drilling at ours, because he was a bachelor and had no other place to keep it. You understand, I couldn’t very well go to the authorities, because I had already brought in all the weapons I owned. It’d have raised suspicions if another rifle cropped up, and one made for the Luftwaffe to boot.”

  Rapidly taking notes, Bora asked, “Why didn’t you get rid of it altogether?”

  “Get rid of it, Colonel? It’s worth a fortune! It’s a rare piece. Anyhow, after my brother-in-law died in a dogfight over Brunswick last February, the best thing was for me to keep it, that’s all. Less complicated than explaining why I had it. Of course, when I heard about the murder, I realized how dangerous owning that rifle could be, given my run-in with the bastard. So I mailed it to myself, poste restante. I had no other plans.”

  “And in case the police were on to you, as in fact they were?”

  “I would seem even more suspicious if they saw me throwing the rifle in the river or the canal. Don’t you agree?”

  Bora numbered the first sheet, and started the second. Nothing Glantz had said thus far exculpated him. When he added a shaky alibi (he was at home with his wife, who, however, had taken a sedative for her toothache and been deep asleep), his whereabouts during the night of the murder remained doubtful.

  He lived in a small villa on Stendaler Strasse, north of the Spree; the absence of a porter on the premises allowed him to come and go as he pleased, the distance from Niemeyer’s house was manageable by public transport, and as far as the curfew went even Grimm had to admit that it was occasionally violated.

  Bora said, “You will admit that your suicide note is not helpful.”

  “Yes,” Grimm echoed him. “It’s practically an admission of guilt.”

  “I beg your pardon, it is no such thing. Aside from writing the opposite of what I meant to say – I wanted to die because I’m ruined, and did not have the guts to follow my first impulse, which was to kill the bastard. I’d even confided the possibility of murder to my wife, because the money I used to open my publishing business came from her family.” Glantz rested his forehead against his open hand, as if the weight of his anguish were in need of support. “I committed the beastly error of offering Magnusson a huge advance to secure the exclusive publication rights to his Encyclopaedia of Myth. A massive opus, each volume was 1,200 pages long. The year was 1938, you understand, and the best editors in Germany were wooing him. Originally, the title was supposed to be Encyclopaedia of the Occult, but during the first draft, given the new laws on astrology and similar sciences, we opted for the term ‘Myth’ instead. Magnusson authored several articles on the subject through the years, both in his magazine Beyond Ostara and his quarterly Siegfried Lives. The encyclopaedia was to consist of twelve volumes in alphabetical order, plus an index, enriched with maps and four-colour illustrations. The entire set, in an edition of twenty thousand copies, was to be bound in Japanese silk, while a limited number of a hundred copies would have a parchment binding and lettering in pure gold. All hundred of these copies had already been reserved, you understand.” Glantz’s hand closed into a fist, which he banged against his forehead. “I was so sure of the deal that, God forgive me, I immediately acquired the silk from the Tomioka silk works in the Japanese prefecture of Gunma, not to mention the Italian paper – glossy 90-gram paper – bought from the Miliani paper mill in Fabriano.”

  Such an investment was inconceivable these days, when newspapers were down to four or even two pages. Bora’s grandfather, the publisher, would have been horrified at the thought of such naivety. “The volumes would be published gradually, or together?”

  “Together, Colonel.”

  “And was there a date agreed on, for the delivery of the text?”

  “The twentieth of this month, for reasons – well, I don’t want to say of an astrological nature, but Magnusson considered it the most propitious day. I anticipated that publication would occur on 20 April 1945 – in record time, given the war. The Minister of Propaganda himself was to present the first copy to the Führer on his birthday.”

  Bora did not want to stop to think where all of them, the Führer included, might be in the spring of 1945. “It is physically impossible to print twenty thousand copies of twelve volumes in nine months,” he observed.

  “Do you think I wasn’t aware of that? Not even by using forced labour from the camps in Poland, which was my plan. I was ready to limit my ambition and publish the first three volumes in three thousand copies: Aa to Baldur, Baucis to Celts …”

  “I get it. What happened next?”

  “What happened? The bastard never completed more than two hundred pages, that’s what happened! Every time we met, he acted mysterious: he showed me stacks of typewritten material, letting me read only a few entries: Asian Divinities, or The Medieval Wheel of Fortune, or The Swastika Cult in the East and West … They seemed excellent. He was the Weimar Prophet! He owned a huge personal library, all sources were at his fingertips, why should I doubt him?”

  “You should have at least insisted on a review of the entire text!”

  Glantz’s bloodshot eyes gave him a demented air. “You know, come to think of it I deserve to be arrested and beheaded, just because I let the bastard make a fool out of me.”

  Bora struggled to understand. “I have a hard time believing that you did not seek the advice of academics and other experts on the material he did give you.”

  Glantz put his chubby face in his hands. He rocked back and forth in that pose, moaning to himself. “You want to see what he gave me? You want to see it? It’s on that shelf, in the sky-blue folder.”

  Bora gestured to Grimm, who retrieved the folder and handed it to him. Inside the car
dboard cover, sprinkled with gold dust like a printed starry sky, Bora saw about a hundred pages, typed on both sides. The typing was faultless (probably a secretary’s work), but the contents struck him as banal at best. Anyhow, the text came to less than a fifth of what would be needed to fill even one of the twelve volumes.

  Staring at his feet, with his hands still on his cheeks, Glantz shook his head. “It was my good wife who convinced me not to commit murder, and insisted that I deposit her brother’s rifle at Anhalt station. But thanks to my idiocy I ruined her life as well, see?”

  “You can sell the silk and the paper,” said Grimm.

  Glantz looked at him wildly. “Gone up in smoke. I had them in storage, and the air raid of 21 June wiped them out. Gone! Fire finished what bombs had begun. My father-in-law was right, gentlemen. When you’re a loser, you’re a loser. I didn’t even succeed in killing myself.”

  The policeman snorted. On his shirt front, the bright green of his tie resembled the skin of a lizard draped around his neck. He picked up the noose and put it on the desk, as evidence in a possible trial. “All the same, your alibi doesn’t stand,” he charged. “If your wife was fast asleep and there are no other witnesses to support your story, who says you didn’t go to Lebanonzederpfad that night? The fact that the Drilling has been cleaned recently only makes things look worse for you.”

  Glantz shrugged. “Either way, my life is over,” he said darkly. “I’ve lost everything. My house has been repossessed, in my pocket is an eviction order for this office, and if I ever had a professional reputation, the damn bastard destroyed it. Do you wish to arrest me for his murder? Be my guests.”

  “For now you’re going to jail.”

  Glantz nodded towards the telephone. “Make the call then, quickly, Inspector, before they disconnect the service!”

  Bora was still pensively reading the text in the blue folder. He glanced up to say, “You sued Magnusson: when was that, and how far have the proceedings got?”

  He did not anticipate Glantz’s show of hilarity. He laughed bitterly, and looked so ridiculous – with the blotting paper on his eyebrow, the dustcoat around his hips and his red eyes – that he gave the impression of a malicious clown. “How do you like the expression ‘dead in the water’? I have no more money to pay the lawyers, and even if I had my day in court, Magnusson’s fortune has disappeared. Oh, you didn’t know about this detail? No funds in his name are registered within the Reich, and God knows he made millions through the years.”