The Night of Shooting Stars

by Ben Pastor

  Bora could have left the neighbourhood at this point, but he re-entered the house and climbed to the upper floor. Blood drops on the stairs and on the floor tiles on the landing above led him to the right place even without seeing the shattered glass panel of its door. It was stuffier, smellier, as if the building were a carcass whose entrails sat here, up one flight of stairs.

  Before Bora had time to knock, as soon as she discerned his outline through the broken glass a girl hurried to open the door. Her face was swollen with weeping and bruised, her lower lip cut and raw. She uselessly tried to protect her man, he reasoned, and received enough to end any further opposition.

  She did not enquire why he wanted to come in. She stepped back into a parlour similar to Kupinsky’s, except for the faded wallpaper. Bora saw family photographs, an unlit stove, and a shelf from which books and a dictionary had tumbled to the floor. Sheets, pillows, utility bills, various objects, even a small flowerpot with a sprig of mint, lay where they’d been thrown. A bloodstain on the jamb of the bedroom door might well mark the spot where the man’s head had been shoved. You do not always need to bloody your hands to break someone’s nose.

  The girl had been in the process of filling a cardboard suitcase. A pair of rope sandals were still out, a white cotton bra and a petticoat with a torn shoulder strap lay on the bare mattress.

  “What happened?” Bora enquired as if an answer were due to him, and the battered girl – she was no Ida Rüdiger, with her protectors and highly placed friends – muttered that the tenant “knew by sight” a couple of people arrested the previous week. An old excuse, that of casual acquaintance: even in Berlin, unmotivated police interventions were not a daily event. Bora understood that there was more. He noticed that she wore no wedding ring (though she could have sold or pawned it). “What’s your husband’s name? I might be able to enquire after him.”

  “He’s not my husband, I just met him. I’m only subletting here.”

  It was probably a lie, but no matter. Bora reached for one of the utility bills on the floor and read the name on it. “Do you at least know what Anton Reich’s occupation is?”

  The girl, who would be attractive but for the blows and her cheap summer dress, did not know or did not want to say anything else. She furiously thrust sandals, bra and petticoat into the suitcase. “He does occasional chauffeuring, mostly for doctors of the Charité hospital – if there’s a car to drive and fuel to drive it.”

  It did not sound like an illegal job, but a squad of plainclothesmen doesn’t come out with four cars without a good reason. As for the Charité, it was nowhere around Köpenicker Landstrasse, the address quoted by the man as they hauled him away. “He used to drive cabs, until his big mouth lost him his job.”

  She added the detail unrequested, out of frustration. Bora did not feel like threatening her in order to learn more. A big mouth usually meant merely griping about politics, not enough to call in the Gestapo. Anyway, whatever the fellow named Anton Reich had done to deserve arrest, it was of no interest to him. Bora watched the girl look around in search of something else to take along and – discovering nothing useful – snatch the sprig of mint, shake dirt from its roots, and put it in with her rags.

  Bora left the house for good. He would have continued towards the closest bus stop, had he not glimpsed the object of his visit limping up the street with his hands in his pockets, from the direction of Hermannplatz. Bora turned back and hastily re-entered 17B, not to alarm Kupinsky and lose him again.

  “Hello, Kupinsky.”

  Startled as he was, the young man gave up any attempt to escape; he stepped in, and after a glance up the stairwell (you could hear the girl sobbing upstairs), he closed the door behind him. Difficult to say what crossed his mind: he must have waved away at once any hope that the athletic army officer had come for reasons as shameful as they were out of the question. The second sobering thought, probably, was that more questions would follow, and he might as well fabricate something.

  Bora saw through him. “It is best if you don’t make anything up.”

  The less than subtle passage from the formal “Sie” to the rough familiarity of “Du” meant it would not be easy for him to wriggle through the interrogation. Self-consciously, Kupinsky drove his fists into his pockets, with the dark stare small crooks assume when they’re under pressure.

  “If it was you who turned in the fellow upstairs, Kupinsky, you came home a little too early not to raise suspicions.”

  “Me? No, sir. What are you thinking? I just stepped out —”

  “Who came to fetch you this morning?”

  “It’s just that I’m out on parole …”

  “I can easily check whether that is true or not.”

  Kupinsky tightened his fists in his pockets. His hooded eyes wandered to the window, in front of which Bora had positioned himself to conceal his expression from the brightness of the day.

  “Well, it’s all legal,” he said. “I barely had time to get settled in this hole, and I’m told to observe and report on the fellow upstairs. There’s no block warden here, and a man has to live.”

  Bora knew why he was staring towards the courtyard, and let the fear grow in him. Of course the Gestapo would use him as a spy. Kupinsky has been dangling from a thread for years. Yet he hid the letter from them as well; and now he doesn’t know whether I or they searched around and found it. He’s dying to climb out and see if it’s still there. For all he knows, I too may be reporting to the Gestapo.

  Kupinsky pouted. Unwisely, he tried to sidestep the officer and reach the window. Bora blocked his way. “Closing the window, with this heat …? Mind you, I can tell when someone’s keeping information from me.”

  Now that his hands were out of his pockets, Kupinsky seemed not to know what to do with them. He waved them about as he walked around with an anxious grin on his face. “No, no. I told you all I know, Colonel. I can’t figure out what else …”

  “Tell me about ‘E. D.’”

  “Who?”

  “Tell me about ‘E. D.’, and the questions end here. I know the rest.”

  It was not even close to the truth, but Bora’s claim drove a wedge into Kupinsky’s reticence. He stood there in his mix of rags and costly hand-me-downs, teetering slightly, suspicious and hopeful. “And that’s all?”

  “That’s all.”

  “Jesus, I carried the load all these days, when I have nothing to do with anything.”

  “I’m waiting.”

  “There’s hardly anything to it, Colonel. The day before his murder, Herr Magnusson hands me the letter and tells me to memorize an address on Herderstrasse, in Charlottenburg. Ergard Dietz is the name. He also gives me the money to get there on public transport, and everything. All I’m told is that the letter is to be hand-delivered to a lawyer’s office, but wouldn’t you know, he’s out of town for a few days. Since I was not to deliver it to anyone else, I took it home for the time being. That same night, what happened at Villa Gerda happened. I was scared stiff. I kept asking myself if I should deliver the letter anyway, throw it away or keep it a bit longer. I just sat on it. When I had the courage to try the delivery again, there was a funeral wreath on the office door, a lawyer’s office. How was I to know that Russian runaways cut his throat at his country place?” Bora did an appreciable job of concealing his surprise. “I never opened the letter or breathed a word about it, Colonel. I wish I’d never laid my eyes on it, that’s all.”

  Bora agreed. “As far as I’m concerned, you never laid your eyes on it. It ends here.”

  “It takes a big load off me, Colonel.”

  11:15 A.M.

  With the day still young, Bora meant to make the best use of it. From a public telephone, he called the Leipziger Hof to enquire whether Grimm had checked in. Hearing that he had not, he decided not to leave a message for him, in case he should turn up at the hotel. He then looked up Ergard Dietz in the directory, phoned his Herderstrasse office under an assumed name, and receive
d confirmation of his death from a secretary. Sounding appropriately shocked at the news produced more information. Yes, she said, it’d happened on the night of 3 July. Poor Dr Dietz had barely settled for a few days of relaxation in his cottage near Grossbeeren, when murderous Russian fugitives broke in before dawn. Bora sympathized.

  “Was it robbery?”

  “That’s what we think. Do you wish to speak with the firm’s junior partner?”

  “No, thank you.”

  Time to knock once more on Bruno’s door for advice.

  BEELITZ HEILSTÄTTE, 2:14 P.M.

  Despite German efficiency, that day it was not easy to reach the Beelitz sanatorium by train. The engine of the southbound train broke down near Kleinmachnow, and after half an hour of waiting in the overheated cars, the passengers were informed that repairs would take a long time. Bora alighted. He followed a dusty lane to the nearest village on foot, in search of a police station or an army post where he could secure assistance. All he found was a couple of Air Raid Warning Service non-coms, willing but unable to help. Despite being in the vicinity of the Bosch works, not even a calling card with Nebe’s name on it could create a means of transportation out of nothing. He asked for a horse, to no avail. He was still nearly an hour from his destination, and the idea of going back to wait with the frustrated and overheated travellers was out of the question.

  Having Niemeyer’s letter on him added to his apprehension. When he succeeded in getting a ride in a decrepit farm lorry, Bora was glad for the dreary trip to Stahnsdorf, where he bought some periodicals and a ticket to the Beelitz Heilstätte. From the modest station, aware that even without Grimm the Kripo would not be long in providing alternative transportation for him, he called the Leipziger Hof on a hunch. As he’d expected, a driver named Trost had reported for duty at the hotel twenty minutes earlier. Bora skipped any explanation for his trip, and left instructions for the man to fetch him at 5 p.m. at the gate of the sanatorium.

  Not far from the sanatorium, the SS and their shorn, vicious dogs had caught up with the runaway Russian prisoners. As Bora walked the last stretch to the gate, he heard from a farmer how the SS found them on the grounds of an abandoned farm and besieged them inside a barn, which they finally set on fire.

  “Was about time,” the old man grumbled, standing there with an unlit pipe in his mouth. “You wonder what took them so long to corner them, for Christ’s sake. It’s a scandal that the louts could have been running loose so close to Berlin.”

  Bora did not comment. Fugitives, Russian or not, could and did commit crimes: who better than them to take the blame for any wrongdoing? The acrid smell of smoke, and of bodies burning, was the same of Poland, Ukraine and, before then, Spain. We are that, Bora told himself. We are also this. Or maybe this is all we are.

  The SS men drained their canteens in the shade; smoke dirtied the air but its shadow was delicate, nearly diaphanous; handfuls of straw and burning rags dangerously floated in the air, and could start other blazes. The farmhands blasphemed, tossing pailfuls of water on the hedge dividing the old man’s property from the abandoned barn, to keep the branches from catching fire. The shorn dogs ran in circles.

  Small, slender-winged hawks, merlins or stone-falcons shuttled around the barn skimming the ground, chasing field mice and insects as they fled from the blaze. They gave the impression was that in any case there was no escaping death, in any case.

  7

  faust: A door creaks on its hinges and no one enters. Is someone here?

  concern: The answer to the question is yes!

  faust: And you, who are you?

  concern: Someone who is here.

  faust: Go away!

  concern: I belong here.

  GOETHE, FAUST, PART TWO, ACT V

  BEELITZ HEILSTÄTTE, 2:40 P.M.

  “What is this, Christmas in July? I thought you’d flown back!”

  Bora laid an armful of newspapers and magazines in Lattmann’s lap. “Something intervened.”

  “Well! Eva and our two older boys were here just now; you missed them by a hair. The wife would have been glad to see you.”

  “And I her. Sorry, Bruno.” Bora sat down opposite his friend on the veranda overlooking the park. Hiding his anxiety from Lattmann was not impossible, but more difficult than with anyone else, including his mother. “You’re a Berliner. Did you ever hear of the Weimar Prophet?”

  Eyeing the headlines, Lattmann wrinkled his nose. “Who, the fellow who could ‘mind-read and perplex the weaker fair sex’, as the vaudeville song goes?” He glanced up. “All his shows sold out while I was growing up. Don’t tell me he read it in the stars that you’re to stay in town.”

  “I doubt it. His murder is the reason Nebe called me in.”

  Summarizing his task took Bora a few minutes, during which his friend looked alternately curious and baffled. “… So, you see, the groundwork produced a shortlist of possible suspects. I cannot reject it outright, although it skews my research. Given the ambiguous character of the man and the thousands he entertained in over twenty-five years, those four people may not represent all who held a grudge against him. I could be barking up the wrong tree.”

  “Why? Like him or not, Arthur Nebe is considered the shrewdest policeman in Germany, if not in Europe. If he came up with a list of suspects you can probably trust it.”

  “I don’t deny that any of them, save perhaps Eppner, could be guilty.” As was his habit, Bora discreetly surveyed the long, covered space. Few patients were around at this time, most of them preoccupied by their illnesses or visibly bored by inaction. Only the sullen man in the wheelchair – the same who had glared at him so insistently the first time – acted as if the visitor’s presence, stirring him out of lethargy, were both intriguing and an irritant. From afar, Bora granted him an indifferent nod. “Still, Bruno, I wonder if they might merely be expendable. A fellow called Kupinsky is certainly … But more about him later, there’s something I have to show you. Even a hairdresser to the rich and influential could be privy to dangerous gossip, and had best be put away. The others – a cuckolded watchmaker and a bankrupt publisher – I wonder …”

  “Well, you have – what did you say – a week in Berlin? Do what you can, Martin.”

  “And that is another matter for concern. After he left the stage, the clairvoyant’s ‘private practice’ turned even more lucrative. Many who would not be seen in public with him sought him in the privacy of his villa, or of their own homes. Did he keep notes? I’m sure he did. In Germany? Probably not. His trips abroad could have allowed him to stockpile embarrassing personal profiles and deposit his wealth in foreign banks.”

  When a buxom nurse’s assistant placed a teapot and a cup on the wicker table next to him, Lattmann displayed an innocent grin. “Thanks for remembering that I like to take it out here. You’re an angel,” he told her. After she left, he voiced his objection to Bora’s argument: “A showman doesn’t enjoy diplomatic immunity. His bags could be checked at any time, coming and going.”

  “That’s true. But as far as storing sensitive data, there are safes and vaults in Germany too, and trusty lawyers to keep them.”

  “To whom does his money go?”

  “Don’t know. No children, no immediate family. I read of distant relatives scattered around Hamburg. His bank account in Germany alone allegedly tops a million marks, although there’s no trace of it.” Bora paused while the invalid, staring ahead, wheeled himself past them with a singularly malicious grin on his face. “Bruno, I literally haven’t the time for an investigation worthy of the name. What if I reach the conclusion that the culprit is not on the shortlist? I can’t understand why on earth the Kripo would pick an ordinary lieutenant colonel to investigate a high-profile case. Nebe won’t tell.”

  Lattmann rested the dailies and magazines on the table, next to the teapot and cup on their aluminium tray. “You’re not exactly ordinary, and for all we know someone high up may have recommended you for a home assignment: counte
r-espionage does equip you for investigative work. That’s where a good word from your fellow Leipziger Goerdeler would come in.”

  It was possible. Not informing him outright could have been a way to prevent his resisting reassignment away from front-line duty. Hadn’t Nebe spoken of “young colonels, who dig their heels in like schoolboys”? And hadn’t the succinct message in his Adlon pigeonhole read, “It is necessary. At least come to terms with it philosophically, and good luck”? The idea made Bora cringe.

  “I will not leave the front,” he protested. “I will not leave my men.”

  “You will if they make you. Drop of tea? Here they soak us in mint tea as if we were old ladies.”

  “No, no.”

  The patients – both those who could walk and those who had to be escorted – were leaving the veranda for an afternoon snack in the vaulted, aquarium-green halls. Lattmann waited until they were alone before becoming conspiratorial.

  “Martin,” he said, “you and I have been friends for years. A big part of our friendship, because of our duties, because of the ‘Shop’, has been not to ask questions. But the ‘shop’ as we knew it doesn’t exist anymore.” He touched the paunchy teapot with his fingertips, and once he’d made sure the liquid inside had cooled, he drank directly from its spout, holding down the lid with his forefinger. “I could always tell when you’d got yourself in trouble.”