The Night of Shooting Stars

by Ben Pastor

  But no. Before long, it is flashy Ida who packs her bags, after making sure that water is running from every tap in the house. Luckily for Niemeyer, water is supplied only at certain times during the day, so the damage to furniture and knick-knacks is contained. Still, some of the wooden floors are ruined. Workers come and go at the house, a few cases of pilfering ensue; the police are called, but Kupinsky is never suspected, et cetera, et cetera. The interesting thing is that, when Florian Grimm left the room (the beer he drank at lunch had to go somewhere) and I became insistent with Kupinsky, he looked at me slyly and pursed his lips, meaning that there was something he didn’t want to tell us. My impression is that he did plenty of eavesdropping, and knows more than he says.

  Even Grimm will admit that telephone surveillance does not discover everything. Besides, the listening devices were removed from the residence in February this year. By whose authority? Count von Heldorff’s, no less, the Berlin police chief. That’s all the information Grimm has on it. Should I deduce from this that Frau von Heldorff is one of Rüdiger’s clients, and asked her powerful husband to ensure that her hairdresser’s privacy was not violated? Possibly.

  Rüdiger had Heldorff’s calling card in her collection. This does not explain Kupinsky’s secret. I rate myself an excellent interrogator, with Soviet colonels and generals in my bag: I trust that if I have another meeting with him – face to face from beginning to end, this time – I will have no trouble making Kupinsky spill the beans. But first I have to rid myself of Grimm’s continuous presence.

  Back to the question of Kupinsky’s involvement in the murder. If I can believe all I hear, a few things are certain: a. the relationship between the prophet and the gardener was not of a sexual nature (though the gardener might well have wanted it to be); b. Niemeyer’s privileged status granted him privacy, if not immunity; c. Ida Rüdiger broke up with him after tumultuous fights that included throwing dishes, burning underwear belonging to a young rival in the bathtub, and finally her hiring of Kugler, the late private eye. Kupinsky, like Frau Wirth, noticed the car discreetly parked in the neighbourhood. At first he thought it might be the Gestapo, but then he recognized Kugler, the former Kripo man, known to Kupinsky since the unfortunate Fritsch affair.

  Unfortunately, when Ida Rüdiger put the capstone on her relationship, she also fired Kugler. We’re talking here about the third week in May, thus in the last forty or so days before the night of his death, when Niemeyer was freed from surveillance and could invite whomever he pleased to his home.

  Why then was Kupinsky included among the suspects? Because he has no alibi for the time of the murder (says he was at home, alone). As far as anyone knows, however, he did not harbour any resentment towards the victim, and it seems unrealistic that a man of his physique could have crossed Berlin with a hunting rifle of any kind. We know Glantz owned a Drilling. Kupinsky never served in the army, and even though his father was a trigger-happy communist, he was only a boy during the Republic. Even if there is a remote possibility that he had access to a weapon, why would the victim open the door to him late at night? So far, he seems the least likely among the suspects, although I have learned not to readily believe appearances.

  During the interrogation, there were moments when Grimm seemed tempted to wring Kupinsky’s neck because of what Kupinsky was (or is). Yet the police make use of such people as informers. And not only the police. In Russia, at the beginning of the war, one of my commanders relied on information we received about the enemy from a Ukrainian transvestite named Ludmila!

  Added later, at 6:17 p.m. Free of the policeman until tomorrow morning, I’m preparing to visit Maximilian Kolowrat, who lives an easy walking distance from here. What I know about Kolo comes from the Berlin Illustrirte’s biographical note, and what I recall from reading his books. He’s fifty-three, from ancient Austrian stock, and has a law degree. After serving in the Great War as a company commander, he was briefly imprisoned by the Italians. Once repatriated, he left for South Africa, where he met his Afrikaner wife (the marriage lasted seven years, and ended first in divorce, then even more absolutely in her death during an epidemic). I’d call him a conservative nationalist, although as far as I know he abandoned politics years ago and then made his living as a widely published war correspondent (Spain, China, Mussolini’s African campaign) and travel writer. Having lost his family fortune after Austria’s defeat, he wrote for nearly every magazine published in Germany in the Weimar days, and thus painstakingly rebuilt his finances. Owned his own aeroplane when he covered the Ethiopian war (interesting photos from the air illustrate his chronicle).

  Titbit: during the Berlin Olympic Games, he argued with our star filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, which cost him his privileged seat in the terrace reserved for the press. I will have to summon all my strength in order not to show how nervous I am to meet him.

  Note: before returning to the Leipziger Hof for the evening, although it was well out of our way, I had Grimm drive me back to the Adlon. My ostensible reason was that I’d forgotten the precious bottle of blue Pelikan ink. In fact, I went downstairs, to the dining hall – where the tables were already set for dinner, but no guests were around – in search of the head waiter. He’s the same Alsatian from my good old days with Dikta, when handsome tips made him loquacious. Seeing me come in, he promptly approached to ask if there was anything he could do. I repeated my question about Salomon’s whereabouts, which had gone unanswered at the reception desk hours earlier.

  As expected (the concierge does not share information with the dining-hall staff), the head waiter didn’t know that the colonel and I were not dining at the hotel, and sympathized with my having been stood up. He also said that Salomon’s sudden departure from the Adlon coincided with additional demands on the kitchen, due to the arrival of several General Staff officers. Really? I was all ears. Imagine when, bless his heart, he saw no harm in adding that Salomon’s vacated table had been occupied at midday by no less than the former chief of the General Staff. He beamed. “The Adlon is still the Adlon, Lieutenant Colonel!”

  Yes, it is. So, Ludwig Beck is the retired general of the chauffeured car. I know him well by sight, and do not recall him among the officers dining at the Adlon. Two questions puzzled me as I walked out of the hotel: what’s old Beck doing in the middle of Berlin, and why would he send his chauffeur to follow me? I thought that, after his resignation and his cancer surgery, he had withdrawn to his home in Lichterfelde.

  I still have no idea of Salomon’s whereabouts, but this piece of news will give me food for thought for the next several hours.

  To Grimm, waiting for me by the car, I showed none of my perplexity. I even stopped to buy tinnies from a Hitler Youth boy, old enough to be destined for far riskier things in the next few months than selling propaganda pins for the Fatherland.

  6

  Thirty spokes meet the hub, but it is the void between them that makes the wheel.

  HEIDEGGER, SOJOURNS, CITING THE TAO TE CHING BY LAO TZU

  NEAR BARBAROSSAPLATZ, SCHÖNEBERG, 7:10 P.M.

  It’s not the sort of place you routinely bring women to. Along with an aroma of pipe tobacco, after the briefest of introductions that was the first thing Bora noticed about Kolowrat’s apartment. Small, if beautifully appointed (the books and sophisticated artwork had to have come from a much larger place; there wasn’t a free space on the walls), you could encompass it at one glance. Stepping past the bedroom to reach the parlour, Bora glimpsed a spartan single bed through the partly open door. Made squarely, he judged, army-style. The kind of bed I’d sleep in, if I had a place of my own.

  Boxed books, framed oils and sketches leaning against the walls further restricted the useable space. The telephone was on hand in the hallway – no wonder it’d seemed as if Kolowrat had been sitting on top of it.

  Dark-eyed and dark-haired, lean in a casual, English-looking cardigan, Kolowrat preceded him along the hallway.

  “Frankly, Colonel, he was a despicable man.” T
he unexpected opening comment about Niemeyer came as they stepped into the book-lined parlour. “How can such a despicable man possess such a gift?”

  It was a rhetorical question, which left Bora waiting for more.

  “Saints ought to be equipped with supernatural qualities, not be snake charmers who grow rich living off those so gullible as to see the greatness of the gift and not the paltriness of the man behind it. There is a great injustice in all this.”

  Facing the guest in the space that now doubled as a study, Kolowrat had the appearance and easy manners of a world traveller, yet as far as Bora remembered none of the photos of his celebrated journeys to distant lands had portrayed him. Had he made the choice to consider himself a seeing eye, rather than a protagonist? It could be telling, and make a difference.

  “I do not consider myself more cynical than most of my colleagues,” Kolowrat now added. “But believe me when I say that I agreed to attend one of his shows only because some trusted friends insisted. After all, I was writing a series of articles exposing the credulity underlying our jazz age.” He nodded towards a number of publications on the coffee table, next to a typewriter with a half-written sheet of paper in it. Because Bora chose not to sit down (there were only two small armchairs, one of them occupied by an old tabby), Kolowrat remained standing as well, with his hands in his pockets. “If you read my editorials, you’ll know that I have a strong dislike for stupid, gullible women.”

  He didn’t add But I admire intelligent ones, but Bora understood that this was what he was implying.

  “And for stupid men?”

  “Even more so. Like every man worthy of the name, I fought in the war. I travelled, seeing at first hand the misery and despair in places far away from here, and in places closer than we’d like to admit. The majestic sight of what we call ‘unconquered heights and depths as yet unsounded’ left me – how to put it? – impatient with the egotistical cares of many people. Not that I particularly scorned the Weimar Prophet, however wasteful with his psychic qualities he was. His unrestrained hedonism irked me. The young female dupe you read of in my article has no name, simply because she stands for hundreds of similarly affected sisters. Charwomen or field marshals’ wives, all ready to see through someone else’s eyes in order not to look with their own. All ready to pay for that privilege, although many could hardly afford it.” Unlike many men who had faced him, Kolowrat gave Bora the impression of someone refusing completely and confidently to engage in comparison or challenge. He was wholly at ease with himself. “Before him, they said of Hanussen that he foresaw the burning of the German Parliament building, or else knew of it from simple hearsay and dared to speak of it. Well, the Reichstag burned either way, and Hanussen died.”

  “So did the arsonist Lubbe, by execution. Yet, credulous girls aside, it seems that both Hanussen and the Weimar Prophet were consulted by a male clientele from all levels of society.”

  “True, and more’s the pity.”

  “You never had any use for his advice?”

  Kolowrat laughed. “Absolutely not.”

  “But you attended his shows, and for a while you did frequent him.”

  “I was bored to death, writing society columns and crime news. It’s true that I engaged him for a few days, in the hope of unmasking him.”

  “And did you succeed?”

  “Yes and no.”

  Kolowrat invited him to sit, and Bora politely refused.

  “I admit I was anxious to tear the Son of Asia – as he was known at first – to shreds. It was one winter, at Resi’s on Neumannstrasse, that we were being treated to ghostly voices, fortune telling, messages from the Great Beyond … I watched widows and flappers swoon at his theatrics, laughed in my sleeve and took notes. Didn’t his predecessor Hanussen turn a goat into a dwarf, and hypnotize a perfectly respectable lady into acting out an orgasm on stage? Well, under our man’s spell a retired non-com laboriously laid a particularly large phantom egg, and a colleague of mine, materialistic to the core, sang the ‘Magnificat’ in a falsetto voice. You do well to smile, it was meant to make you smile.” Gently Kolowrat eased the cat off his armchair and sat down, so that Bora would do the same. “Miracle worker, my foot. Mine was the only open laugh in the astonished audience – well, imagine my surprise when he stepped up to me, stared at me and said in an undertone that before the end of the week news would reach me of the death of a woman who had once been dear to me in Africa! There was no way in the world he could have knowledge of my ex-wife’s passing, Colonel. Not even through spies and informers unleashed across Berlin could he have discovered it, simply because it had not happened yet and no one knew it would happen. She was in perfect health then, and the epidemic that killed her in a few hours did so unexpectedly on the following Saturday. For me it was a philosophical turning point, I admit it. Not a psychological one, but a philosophical one, definitely. The Monday after, I sent for him. We sat in my Drakenstrasse study for over six hours, and at the end of the session I wrote him a cheque for a significant sum. He took it without batting an eyelid, as if it were due to him.”

  “And it wasn’t?”

  “Maybe.” Kolowrat wagged his head. “Yes, it was. And I could afford it.”

  Straight-backed in his armchair, Bora was the picture of attentiveness, and yet he couldn’t keep his mind from drifting. Less than a year ago, seeking out my natural father’s ageing lover near Kharkov, I closed one circle of family history. Today … Aside from my role in this criminal case, I wonder what my role is, vis-à-vis Max Kolowrat. Factually, he’s nothing to me, and I’m nothing to him. Yet if Nina’s life had turned out differently, he could have been my father, or at least my stepfather.

  “You see, Colonel, during those six hours packed with sleight of hand and melodrama, the man exhibited a knowledge of details so private that I’d never disclosed them to anyone; later, he shared with me episodes of my own life that I alone could know. And to think that I was determined to unmask him! To use an old Hasidic expression, I faced a mirror of the soul.”

  In Berlin in 1944, few people quoted Jewish mysticism. Bora was quietly impressed. “May I ask why exactly you define him as ‘despicable’?”

  Without openly staring at him, he was memorizing Kolo’s face and mannerisms – a professional habit that often was an end in itself, but not tonight. As for Kolo, he seemed perfectly aware that he was undergoing scrutiny and did nothing to elude it. His self-assurance held up without visible effort.

  “Because he not only squandered pearls on swine: he also put a hefty price tag on cheap stage tricks. His serious moments were few and far between, and instead of prizing them, he held them in contempt.”

  “Magicians earn higher wages than saints,” Bora observed.

  “Precisely. Like Hanussen, outwardly Niemeyer was a showman. Unlike Hanussen, he hankered after real power.” When the tabby jumped in his lap, Kolo let it paw around until it found a comfortable position. “For instance, Colonel von Bora, wherever it is that you were wounded, I assure you that if you had met him beforehand you’d have been able to evade the place. He’d have described the location and circumstances so vividly that you could have avoided them.”

  Bora had not intended to frown, but did. “I might have gone down that Italian country lane regardless – minus my men, maybe, because I lost some of them in the attack. Are you suggesting that Niemeyer occasionally withheld details in order to let his predictions hit the mark?”

  “I know it, yes. One example: having flown my own plane for years, I always pay attention to news of air crashes …” Yes, Bora told himself, no doubt. Including Peter’s, which deprived Nina of her youngest son, and gave you a reason to see her again. “… Well, our Weimar Prophet was well acquainted with the Reichsminister and Inspector General Fritz Todt, and habitually advised him on his travels. So, when they wiped out Todt —”

  “Forgive me. What do you mean, ‘when they wiped out Todt’?”

  Kolowrat’s grin for a moment made him
look younger than his age. “The air crash, of course, as he was taking off from the Führer’s headquarters in East Prussia two years ago – you don’t think it was accidental?”

  “Of course it was.” At risk as he was of liking the man, Bora went out of his way to mitigate his impulse, to the point of contradicting him for the sake of doing so. “The only reason that there wasn’t an official investigation was that it was evidently an accident!”

  Kolowrat did not reply. Without chasing off the tabby, he leaned forwards and began placing neatly cut strips of paper inside the magazines, as bookmarks. Bora was left to mull over the fact that a dead inspector general means an opening for someone else; that it was Todt’s successor, Albert Speer, who officially declared the event a calamity, so that they could say “The king is dead: long live the king.”

  “According to your interpretation, Dr Kolowrat, Niemeyer could, by design or on a whim, choose not to warn Fritz Todt of impending disaster, or me about the partisan ambush. This makes him a dabbler in destiny rather than a prophet. Is this why some may have detested him enough to suppress him?” As he spoke, Bora felt his host’s cool, searching gaze on him, and decided to stare back. He doesn’t know (or trust, or believe) what the real reason for my visit is, and is doing some analysing of his own. Naturally. I struggle to feel comfortable, or to appear more at ease than I am. In front of my stepfather, I am never at ease. Not even when I argue with him and win the argument.

  “‘Suppress him’ is an interesting choice of words, Colonel. Maybe. Whoever did it was someone who did not fear him. Yes, I say fear him: many of my once sceptical acquaintances were secretly unnerved by the showman’s gift, and I myself never sat alone with him again.”

  “‘Someone who did not fear him’. That is interesting.”