The Night of Shooting Stars

by Ben Pastor

  “Ditto.”

  “By association, though – unlike you, more by accident. Risk makes a man skittish and suspicious, no matter how he dresses up his anxiety in stoicism or humour, or whatever. We grew up in this system. It’s all we professionally experienced, although sometimes we just couldn’t go along with its demands. Watch out, I say. Act as though the suspects are the suspects, and find evidence that one of them carried out the murder. Now, tell me the real reason why you’re here.”

  Bora had prepared for this moment, but did not answer at once. He chose one of the magazines he’d taken along – it was the June issue of Niemeyer’s Beyond Ostara – and laid it in Lattmann’s lap. “There are two. The first is that I lunched with Salomon yesterday: you cannot imagine what he asked me to do.”

  “Ha! Whatever it is, if the old codger is on an assignment in town the air raids have had all the time in the world to get on his jangled nerves.”

  Bora wagged his head. “It isn’t that. I’m fairly sure he abuses Pervitin, Eukodal and sleeping pills, among others. But he did overhear something, over at the Bendlerblock, and now wants out of Germany. There, the monthly on your knees … Open it.” He watched Lattmann leaf through the magazine, see the letter found at Kupinsky’s, read it, and go white. “Sent by Niemeyer to his lawyer the day before he died, but never delivered.”

  Now that the pink had left Lattmann’s cheeks, freckles stood out like age spots on his skin. “Does anyone know you have this?”

  “No one who will tell. You never saw it, of course.”

  “Is it the only copy, or are there more?”

  “I have no idea. I bet on a carbon copy in Niemeyer’s safe, although the Kripo found it empty. The lawyer died on the night of the murder, and Niemeyer’s villa was torched.”

  Whispering was difficult in his agitation; Lattmann’s voice sounded whiny and hoarse. “Jesus, Martin. What will you do?”

  “I don’t know. I’m trying to sort things out.”

  “And now you’ve got mixed up with Salomon? Stay the hell away from him!”

  “It may not be possible.”

  “Fucking stay away. The fact that he sought you out is already a problem: what an inconsiderate, self-serving fool he is.”

  Bora deftly recovered the letter and slipped it into his sleeve. “I’ve read enough of Niemeyer’s writing to recognize his style, let alone the paper and violet ink he favoured. He surely typed this. The question is interpretation. ‘The deal is still ongoing’, he writes. It suggests he was in the middle of an arrangement previously mentioned to his lawyer, who, however, might have ignored the counterpart’s name. Niemeyer was evidently worried about the outcome, to the point that he considered ‘the unfortunate possibility of a sudden demise’. In that case, Ergard Dietz should assume foul play and immediately bring ‘the material entrusted to you in May’ to the Reich Security Central Office.”

  “In a sealed box, yes. I read that. Does it mean the lawyer was not privy to the contents?”

  “That’s what I think. It seems the box was kept outside Berlin, because a trip is implied. It remains to be seen whether Dietz expected a letter of the kind. To be sure, he fell victim to a bloody assault before having time to fetch the box and deliver it to the Reich Security Central Office. The worst of it is that Niemeyer’s reference to the papers as having ‘a literally explosive nature’ might or might not be a metaphor carried too far.”

  Lattmann was slowly regaining his colour and his temper. He was on the point of reverting to the nervous habit of chewing his nails, so he tightened his fists to resist temptation. “Shit. Niemeyer must have had solid evidence in his hand, to declare an impending risk to the State – involving the army, no less. He couldn’t realistically claim a vision, could he? The information leaked through ‘a young female client under hypnosis’ – how credible is that?”

  “Credible, if the girl is as well known in Berlin circles as he suggests.” Bora was thirsty. He poured some lukewarm tea into Lattmann’s cup and downed it without even tasting it. “Why not? Niemeyer states he treated her for debilitating migraines over a number of weeks, in secret, because her friend – who happens to be the head of Berlin police, Count von Heldorff – would not approve of such a cure. We live in a paranoid world. Loose talk by women and men has brought a few to the guillotine already.”

  Lattmann folded his arms tightly, his fists under his armpits. “If Niemeyer does not hesitate to spell out Heldorff’s name, it stands to reason that the head of police is in the middle of a major inquiry. Not concerning a foreign plot either, because that’s not his purview … Naturally he would not appreciate having his chatty sweetheart undergo hypnosis.”

  For his friend’s sake, Bora hoped not to appear as careworn as he felt. The aftertaste of the artificially flavoured drink was unpleasant on his tongue. He said, carefully choosing his words, “Unless Count von Heldorff’s involvement in the scheme is of a different nature.”

  “What?” Lattmann looked around the deserted veranda as if listeners could suddenly rise out of thin air. “That’s enormous, Martin!”

  “Is it? You cannot take over Berlin without having the city’s police on your side. It would explain in part why Nebe chose an outsider like me to look into his colleague’s doings. Police, even when they are SS group leaders, do not investigate policemen.” Weary of sitting in the wicker chair, Bora ached to move around, but showing restlessness would not do. “Look, Bruno, it doesn’t even matter whether we face a home-grown conspiracy, or only rumours of it. The SS or the Reich Security Service would have cracked down on it already, had a copy of the letter surfaced after Niemeyer’s murder. Had Dietz not died in such a timely fashion, I’d have assumed that it was lost when the villa burned down.” A slight dangling of his crossed leg was all he conceded to his anxiety. “What do you make of this lunacy, Salomon’s included? You worked at Central Division. I need to know if we’re thinking the same thing.”

  Lattmann cringed. At first, arms crossed and head sunk between his shoulders, he seemed altogether unwilling to run the risk. He came round quickly enough, but could not bring himself to speak the words out loud.

  Bora watched him mouth “Hans Oster”. The name of the former counter-intelligence chief of staff, sacked and bluntly discharged from the army months before, was what he’d dreaded to hear.

  “So for once Benno von Salomon isn’t making a mountain out of a molehill.”

  “Damn him, I almost forgot. Where is he now? He can’t be trusted, going around on his own!”

  “He left the Adlon before I did. I couldn’t keep him from going, could I? If I track him down, I’ll think of a way to handle him somehow.” Bora took out cigarette and lighter, but remembering Lattmann’s lung injury he immediately pocketed them again. “What to do about the investigation – that’s another matter. By rights, I cannot keep the letter from Nebe, although I cannot exclude the possibility that it could all be just Niemeyer’s vengeful invention, after the failure of a moneymaking scheme with Heldorff or persons unknown. It would not be an isolated case. As for Salomon’s ravings, I don’t know what’s true and what isn’t. But I need to hear all that you know.”

  “Blast, Martin. I’m not spelling it out.”

  When the devious Sister Andreas came within earshot, supposedly to shake out a towel onto the sunny greenness of the park, Lattmann reverted for a surreal moment to the most unrelated, crudest of chats. “Really? Really? Russki fugitives in our neck of the woods, no less! I’m glad they incinerated them. I was telling my boys, before you came …”

  Bora closed his eyes. From among the trees below, waves of summer air wafted to him. For once, after so many months, he felt exceedingly well. Physically, at least. If he didn’t open his eyes, he could delude himself into believing that he was in a safe place at a safe time. Reality disappeared in the calming warmth of his closed lids, in the tender familiarity of bird calls rising from the old Beelitz trees.

  Why did such a load of worry have t
o land on him at this time?

  “Coast is clear: she’s walked away.” Lattmann’s voice floated to him disincarnate across that flesh-coloured blindness, and then, when Bora looked, everything seemed green. “I will tell you what I know, but only if you swear you won’t go and do something foolish.”

  “Have you ever seen me do something foolish?”

  “I’ve lost count. Walk me over there while we’re still alone.”

  Bora escorted him to a corner of the veranda where they could breathe the fresh air and also see who entered and left the place. They sat down.

  “Remember when you came back from volunteering in Spain back in ’38? In those days, those of us who were cranking out papers in the counter-intelligence’s Central Division in Berlin seemed frazzled to you.”

  “Was that the word I used?”

  “Something to that effect. Well, Martin, we had good reason to be. We had serious misgivings, because it was conceivable that a world war might follow the Reich’s military provocations. The concern was, of course, that if you wave a stick at too many dogs —”

  “I had volunteered in Spain, remember? I get the general idea.”

  “Yes, well. There was no doorbell we ‘Oster boys’ left alone, in or outside the country. Seeking diplomatic alternatives, possible agreements – you name it, we rang them: military, civilian, diplomatic, industrial, religious authorities. Even our old man baulked at some of the contacts we initiated.”

  Bora stood with his back to the railing, close enough not to have to raise his voice to be heard. “It explains some of the goings-on I saw in Rome during the Führer’s visit later that year. But you left Central Division of your own accord.”

  “Two years later. Shortly before General Oster was called in and ordered to ease off, he was getting ready for a step I didn’t have the stomach for. It’s one thing to try to avoid a world war; it’s another to leak information to the enemy that may cost the lives of countless of your own. It’s true, Martin, so help me God. I came within a hair’s breadth of resigning from the ‘shop’ altogether. I stayed because you stayed, but I have been keeping my nose clean since. The last I heard, those sensitive documents left the vault of the Prussian Bank in 1942. I’d give an eye tooth to know where they might be now.” Frowning, Lattmann looked years older than the merry friend Bora knew in Russia. “Some colleagues talk too much, Martin. They talk to wives, girlfriends, who in turn lightly let things slip to others. Then there’s chauffeurs, maids, orderlies … I was here on leave in September of last year – just in time to go back to the Russian front and be shot – when Ambassador Solf’s widow incautiously invited a Gestapo informant – who passed himself off as a Swiss national – to one of her exclusive tea parties. You can imagine the rest. Two of those who attended regularly, Schwartzenstein and the industrialist Nikolaus von Halem, both close to our own General Tresckow from Army Group Centre and already arrested in ’42, were sentenced to death a month ago.”

  “Tea parties may work for American revolutionaries, but not here. Berlin in 1944 is not eighteenth-century Boston.”

  “Maybe. Whatever that horse’s arse Salomon overheard, it could be the same sort of talk Oster and the Abwehr paid dearly for: proposing a surrender, or worse.”

  Bora expected it, but it still came as a blow. He had to turn away from his friend to regain his composure. Leaning on the railing, he lit a cigarette and took a couple of avid drags before putting it out, lest the nurses – who have a sense of smell like no other – detected tobacco smoke and came in to reprimand him. Salomon’s trepidation, the edgy staff officers at the Adlon, old Beck coming out of retirement to visit Berlin, Niemeyer’s last note to his lawyer … The pieces of the puzzle cascaded over one another, and the clairvoyant’s death became merely a negligible detail of the riddle. All this, with the Americans in Normandy for the past six weeks and advancing into France. He returned to Lattmann’s side.

  “You left the Central Division in the spring of 1940, right? I’m glad no one sounded me out then.”

  “You were up to your gills in Poland, exposing the doings of the SS to the War Crimes Office; our Central Division wasn’t looking for outspoken people then. Now, if they offer you a job in Berlin, take it. Or if the Americans do you the favour of breaking through across the Arno, go back to Italy as quickly as you can. Me, I’m ready to build a monument to the Russki who shot me and pulled me out of the game. I’ve decided I’m going to live through this war. For my family and for whatever will be left after this war is over. I’m not relinquishing Germany into the hands of whatever comes next.”

  Bora could no longer stand still. He went over to Lattmann’s table to retrieve the magazines, as an excuse to discharge some energy.

  “And you?” his friend confronted him, as soon as he was back.

  “I’m reconciled to something else entirely.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Nothing.” Unexpectedly, Bora smiled. “I told you I’ll clam up if you push me.”

  Patients were meanwhile filing back to the veranda. When the mannish Sister Velhagen came to fetch Lattmann for “your afternoon check-up, Major”, Bora asked her if he could smoke out in the park, and when she said yes he promised his colleague that he would wait outside, and not leave the sanatorium until they had time to say goodbye.

  3:45 P.M.

  Bora stood on one of the garden paths, angrily smoking.

  There were moments when he longed for darkness, and not just physical darkness. I don’t want to see, don’t want to know. I know enough. Salomon’s anguished, unshaven face, the shifty glance common to so many, fear nestling in men’s eyes like rheum that cannot be wiped away … For years, Bora had come to terms with fear. Seeing it in others always annoyed him, and occasionally alarmed him. Alarm, however, is not the same as fear. It is readiness to fend off the blow. If only he could believe that Salomon had nothing but personal reasons for his distress, he’d make an effort to understand him. But there was so much more, even before Bruno’s revelations. He remembered his colleague Ralph Uckermann a month earlier, in the mountains east of Rome. How he vented his hatred for the regime – not expecting that Bora would react; it was not like Bora to emote – and then commended his wife and sons to him, in case anything should happen to him “in the coming weeks”. He made Bora swear on his mother’s head, something that was unsoldierly and un-German. Bora had consented out of friendship, fully aware that Uckermann meant something bigger and worse than the impending retreat from central Italy. And weren’t these “the coming weeks”?

  He was beginning to trust his anger, to count on it as an antidote to discouragement. Waking up every day with a pang of hostility for the circumstances was definitely helpful. At times it was impatience that led to anger; other times something he witnessed, or heard, sufficed to make him see red. He kept up an apparent composure as a means of protecting his inner world, where he could keep his store of outrage undisturbed. What was odd was that he hadn’t been this angry since childhood: those days it’d been a matter of feistiness, but even then he’d been able to conceal it beneath a veneer of compliance. Early sexual experiences had defused his anger, so that he’d been an unusually well-adjusted adolescent. At the university and in military school, they’d judged him to be level-headed, self-assured. Poland had been the turning point, and two stints on the Russian front after that. He fully understood what Oster and his colleagues found revolting about those experiences. But conspiracy was not his way. He’d made early use of his outrage by acting, whenever possible – often daily – in such a way that counteracted things. If what they say about them is true, the SS have compiled a dossier on me that must be a mile long by now.

  “Am I speaking to Martin-Heinz von Bora? My name is Wilhelm Osterloh – we have Benedikta Coennewitz in common.”

  The man in the wheelchair had followed a gentle grassy incline, so that Bora had not heard him coming.

  Being caught unawares nettled him. As for the name, Wilhelm
Osterloh … Willy. “Willy from Hamburg” – that was how Dikta always referred to him. The last Bora had heard of him was that he had been working on the North-South Axis road project in Berlin, and that was months before the war started. He could have ignored the engineer, or pretended he didn’t know of him. Instead, he said, “I am Lieutenant Colonel von Bora, and as far as I know Fraulein Coennewitz belongs to herself, not to either one of us.”

  “Well, we both shagged her, didn’t we?”

  The malicious words nearly made Bora lose control, a process so sudden that he was unable to guard against it. The idyllic garden view swam before his eyes as the blood rose to his head. Either he thinks I won’t strike a cripple, or else he hopes I will, thus creating an incident.

  Osterloh sneered when he saw him resist the urge. Settled with his wheelchair on the gravel path, he occupied the entire width of it.

  “So.” He lifted a pair of bloodshot grey eyes at Bora. “So, you are the stud who took her from me. What is it they say? ‘Fancy meeting you here.’ I knew it the day she came back from Leipzig seven years ago. I knew there was someone else. It bothered me, you know. She said nothing, but she’d changed. Then one day, after a row, she told me, ‘I’ve fallen in love with someone else, and there’s nothing you can do about it.’ Can you believe that?”

  Bora could. It was like Dikta to inform a man that he could do nothing about her choices; she’d done it to him in Rome, speaking of the annulment. Willy from Hamburg. That explained the long, moody stares the amputee had cast towards him during his first time here. Bora could not say that he hadn’t been curious about Dikta’s lover at the beginning, although the gist and extent of his conversations about him with her had been, “Will you leave him now?”

  She’d bedded both of them off and on over a period of several months, eventually choosing Bora, as she said, because of “the great sex, your looks, your cleverness and your love of horses”. Finding Osterloh here, in such a state, moderated the displeasure he’d anticipated feeling if such a meeting ever took place. Not that he cared about him, not in the least.