by Ben Pastor
“Osterloh, Wilhelm.” The nurse glanced at Bora’s gloved left hand. It was a habit with medical personnel, which he’d grown used to during the past year: to them, you are your wounds and scars. “Are you a relative? A colleague?”
“We used to have a mutual friend.”
The sentence alone suggested nothing. Why was it, then, that she seemed to grasp what lay behind it, just as Bora had seen the unquenched fire beyond the screen of trees? She perceives that we were rivals, and that – for whatever it’s worth – I won.
“The infections keep coming back,” she said, “and they keep cutting his leg further. Medically, the doctors cannot make sense of it.”
“And you?”
“I think resentment is eating him alive.”
5:14 P.M.
The car was the same – the lovingly kept Olympia – but the plainclothesman at the wheel did not resemble Florian Grimm in the least. Slope-shouldered and lean, Trost gave the German salute with such officious indolence that Bora berated him for it and immediately wondered if it was a ruse to ferret out lukewarm officers. Nebe the SS man, if not Nebe the policeman, would not shrink from such methods.
What the policeman thought on, or might report from, the shared ride was the last of Bora’s concerns. Waiting for his accidental passengers, he asked Trost about Grimm. He learned – in that order – that Inspector Grimm had suffered minor injuries, and would resume service as soon as possible; that the house destroyed in the raid was not his but his brother’s; that both families were there at the time, and they were all trapped in the collapsed basement until midday.
When the time came to leave, Bora let the SS man sit in front, because of the crutches and bulky cast, while he less than comfortably rode in the back – with the physician, a swarthy Chilean named Ybarri, in the middle, and Staff Leader Pletsch on the Chilean’s other side. The Chilean smelled strongly of phenol, an odour you don’t usually associate with radiology but which reminded Bora of his hospital stays.
They had to roll up their windows when the road took them by the smouldering barn. Reduced to blackened stumps in a bed of fat smoke, it reeked of death. From a safe distance, a handful of tow-headed farm boys contemplated the scene; their faces were blank, yet far from innocent. Bony and barefoot, they weren’t any different from the Russian youngsters eating sunflower seeds while Peter’s downed plane steamed in the summer heat with its dead flyer inside it. Lonely fields, smoke, stench: Bora still carried those inside him. The boys are – what – twelve or thirteen years of age? War has been their life for the past five years. Next door, their mothers sell eggs on the black market; their grandfathers doused the hedge to keep the flames away and will later dig the ground to shovel what remains of the fugitives into a shallow hole. Their fathers have died at the front, or may yet die – and foreign lads will stand around them, gawking.
From the corner of his eye, Bora glimpsed the passengers’ reaction to the scene: the men stared with a kindred lack of expression; like an insomniac, Emmy Pletsch wearily rested her forehead in her hand.
During the trip, scarred by the usual showing of papers, halts and detours, the conversation in the car stayed sketchy, banal. The SS man, an avid sportsman, sounded very concerned about the state of his shin bone and kept badgering Ybarri for details on fractures and their healing. He was young, of the ambitious type that starts off sanguine but turns whiny as soon as he’s hurt. Ybarri heard him out, answering noncommittally and smoothing his pomaded head with his waxy left hand. Eventually the turn came for vacuous comments about the weather, the heat, the road, the season. Anything but the war. At one point, Emmy asked the doctor how he liked Berlin.
Ybarri turned to her. “Except for the air raids, very well. I’m obliged to you for asking.” He admitted to suffering from claustrophobia, which precluded him from seeking refuge in underground shelters. Emmy said she understood: it was the same for her.
“Would you prefer the window seat, Doctor?” Bora proposed, but the Chilean declined. “No, no. Muy obligado, coronel. It’s below ground that I can’t stand it.”
Bora was relieved. After Emmy’s uncooperative answer to his request for an interview with Stauffenberg, he had no great desire to sit elbow to elbow with her. The truth was that Lattmann’s dramatic disclosures weighed on him, killing off any interest in conversing. As for Trost, he now and then darted wary glances through the rear-view mirror.
Ybarri’s halting German, on the other hand, had no effect on his loquacity. He asked Emmy Pletsch about the circumstances of her fiancé’s illness, thinking, as he said, of transferring him for an extended round of X-rays to the Red Cross hospital, where he’d been working for months. Thus, Bora learned how Obersturmführer Leo Franke, an Old Warrior, had suffered a stroke on 20 April, after a ceremony honouring the Führer’s birthday. At the NSKK barracks where he served as a driving school instructor, his comrades didn’t realize until the day after that he’d gone from sleeping off the parade into a coma. Telling the story, Emmy passed no judgement; her voice was caring and calm. She gravely pointed out that Franke tried to save her father’s life in 1933, when the old man died a “martyr’s death” for the Party.
“Leo took the first bullet for him. He and I have been together ever since.”
She could be no more than twenty-seven or twenty-eight now, which meant that she was probably sixteen or so when she’d started going out with Franke. Bora grew curious. He reasoned that “being together” covers a vast range of intimacy, and does not necessarily imply sexual relations. But when the engaging Ybarri enquired whether they had children, Emmy replied “Not yet.”
So she habitually went to bed with her head-bashing hero. Bora turned to the window. Does it necessarily follow that she needs someone else now?
*
With most of the journey finally behind them, they made a detour through Grossbeeren, the area where the unfortunate Ergard Dietz owned his summer cottage. The sight of the needle-like memorial to the battle against Napoleon prompted the SS lieutenant to brag to Ybarri about a German victory. Bora, whose ancestors had fought there, kept quiet and watched sparse chalets file past the car with their leafy gardens. If Dietz never received Niemeyer’s letter, there was no reason to think he’d delivered the unknown contents of his client’s box to the authorities. He’d simply taken a few days out in the country, missing Bubi Kupinsky and the role history had set aside for both of them. Only the timeliness of his death at the hands of shadowy attackers, a handful of hours after Niemeyer’s, made the coincidence implausible. After all, whoever killed Niemeyer could have found a copy of the letter on the premises. Provided he identified the addressee, he’d either have alerted the government or taken immediate action against the lawyer, in the hope that he hadn’t received the original message.
Bora met Block’s eyes in the rear-view mirror, a brief glance that said absolutely nothing. It was warm and uncomfortable in the car, a perfect metaphor of the quandary he was in now that the murder investigation and highest political stakes potentially coincided. As for Russian fugitives, he reasoned, they are the scapegoat for the day: whatever happens, we can blame it on them. Why, I’m sure the State has a detailed plan for quenching revolt and disorder by blaming it on foreign nationals – or Germans. Niemeyer’s murder in Dahlem was simply too egregious to pin on bloodthirsty prisoners of war, while out here, where houses are few and far between …
A roadblock ahead indicated another delay. Kleinbeeren, where they now sat waiting, seemed deserted. The SS lieutenant dozed with his shorn head against the half-open passenger window. Ybarri prattled on endlessly. Emmy Pletsch limited herself to nodding occasionally to whatever he said, but her mind was elsewhere.
During the last leg of the trip, Bora had time to go from dismissing the plump, affable Chilean as a monopolizing encumbrance, to watching him play ladies’ man as only southern men can do. And Emmy? Her absorbed, vulnerable profile gave the impression of reticence and at the same time of well-guarded fondnes
s. Or something that Bora would not hesitate to term fondness. It explains why Bruno thinks she needs a man. Well, it does show a little: she has that wistful reserve typical of good girls, really quite attractive.
RED CROSS HOSPITAL, LANDHAUSSTRASSE, WILMERSDORF, 6:32 P.M.
It’s a fact: sometimes a moment is enough. Usually it is a moment that lasts a fraction of time beyond what we expected, and says many things. Or else it suggests just a single, unmistakable thing. Emmy Pletsch looked at Bora as she left the car – with a polite “Thank you for the lift, Lieutenant Colonel” – and something in the way she paused before turning away and reaching the pavement made his heart skip a beat. Bora realized that he held her glance as she was about to turn away, and although he did not intend to let Lattmann play go-between, he betrayed himself by staring at her that one instant longer.
Had Lattmann kept quiet, it wouldn’t have happened. Exchanging glances with women was nothing new, at least ever since Dikta left him. But tonight there was that unexpected crumb of complicity in the way they looked at each other, as if to say: The two of us, among all others in the car, with their banalities, stand apart. How? It did not matter.
Bora was the first to avert his eyes, in his reserved, stern way. He told himself, I will never see her again. The world is full of glances, and this did not differ substantially from all the others. But it did, and suddenly nothing was as before.
No one else noticed, not even Trost. Ybarri helped the SS man climb the hospital steps, while Emmy Pletsch held the door open for them. Already she and Bora were ignoring each other, although he was unexpectedly glad to have her phone number in his pocket. Why? She was neither friendly nor helpful when I asked her to set up an appointment for me, although I do plan to contact Stauffenberg with or without her. What, then? I don’t care for women in uniform, let alone a girl whose lover is half-dead! Reticence, tenderness, the way her mismatched eyes send out different messages … Purely my interpretation. Or is it because Bruno has a point? A point about my sexual needs, and the fact that she won’t wear a uniform in bed. Right. As if she’d go for it. As if there were time enough. Well, there is, for a quickie. There comes a point during a war (and in life, I may add) when, as my stepfather told me once, everything accelerates. Our existence and the events around us accelerate, and so do our responses. Love and hatred develop and grow faster, your needs demand immediate attention, because as a soldier you cannot afford to waste time. I wonder where she lives. No. No. Hold back, Martin. She is a headquarters auxiliary you’re also trying to use to obtain an interview. There’s military etiquette, there are principles. Slam on the brakes.
All Trost saw was a frowning young man who left the back seat and got in next to him.
“Where to, Colonel?”
“To drink something cold.”
He’d given up hoping for it, but at his return to the hotel he found a message from Olbertz, setting up an appointment in a small café (La Scala was its name, no less) near Potsdam station. The concierge also informed him that a lady had telephoned, asking for him.
For a moment, Bora thought that it might be Staff Leader Pletsch – and immediately discarded the idea, since she couldn’t have had enough time to set up an appointment for him to see Stauffenberg; besides, he’d never told her where he was billeted. His mother was back in Leipzig and Dikta lived abroad: both would identify themselves when calling. Ida Rüdiger, maybe?
“Did she leave a name, number or address?”
“No, sir. She did say she would call again.”
Bora even imagined a ruse by Salomon, using a female friend to stalk him here, of all the hotels in Berlin. Unlikely – no. He decided not to worry about a female caller for now. He climbed to his room to shower and change his sweaty shirt, careful not to lose at any time sight of the tunic where he kept Niemeyer’s letter. It was, all the same, unthinkable to keep carrying it around in Berlin. Even leaving it in the hotel safe was out of the question. Bora discarded the nooks and crannies in the room that he himself would be the first to search, as he’d done at Kupinsky’s. Doors locked, curtains drawn, he emptied the boxes of mostly useless papers and cuttings from Niemeyer’s house, and laid out the contents on the floor. For days he’d sieved through the material the Kripo had handed over to him, to the point of knowing at a glance what this or that folder contained. It was inside one of several nearly identical sleeves of assorted items that he clipped the letter to a sheaf of innocuous self-promoting fluff.
He then sat for a few minutes at the foot of the bed, tracing with his eyes the pattern of stylized pineapples on the wallpaper. They resembled eyeless, exotic faces with a wild knot of hair on their heads; a strangely calming, blind audience converging where the walls met. Before leaving, he opened the windows wide enough to let the air circulate, but not so wide that they let the evening warmth flow in.
Outside the hotel, Trost was waiting in the car. He jumped out to open the door for his passenger, and when Bora – instead of climbing in – deliberately pushed the door closed, he stood there, half at attention, half slouching. In his inexpressive face, scarred by small blemishes like a teenager’s, his eyes were brown, round like chestnuts, warm for a German. He was dutiful to the point of obstinacy. Hearing Bora’s demand for the keys, he baulked without actually saying no. He’d need permission from half a dozen supervisors, he claimed. At least.
“I was assigned Florian Grimm,” Bora replied, as if speaking of an object handed out to him. “Not you. Until Florian Grimm returns, leave the keys here. Unless you have orders to keep me under observation – which is preposterous, since I am in charge of the investigation. Are there any objections,” he added, “to my use of the car?”
Unconvinced, Trost remained silent. Judging by the oblique look he stole at Bora’s artificial hand, perhaps he feared for the Olympia.
“Is that it?” Bora laughed openly, something he seldom did these days. “I perfectly manage driving up and down mountains with my one hand. In comparison, Berlin is child’s play.”
There was no way to change Trost’s mind, however, before he’d had a lengthy phone conversation with his Alexanderplatz supervisor. In the end he sulkily relinquished the keys; while he turned the corner to catch the tram, he was still looking over his shoulder.
Bora had his reasons for wanting to take advantage of Grimm’s absence, even if it lasted only ten or twelve hours more. For the moment, he did no more than park the car near the side entrance of the hotel. He chose to walk to the La Scala café, which was near the battered Potsdam train station.
7:45 P.M.
The lengthening shadows only accentuated the glare of the low sun. The crowded café was dim by comparison. Bora had never been to it. There were green upholstered benches along the walls, faced by rows of small tables: benches and tables, like everything else in a quarter familiar with air raids, had seen better days. Framed photos of opera singers and famous musicians – including Bora’s father – hung in an arrangement that disguised the cracks in the walls. The autographs on them were forged, at least as far as the Maestro was concerned: Friedrich von Bora didn’t sign portraits for just any of his devotees. At this hour, the place was filled mainly by women, office employees or shop clerks who treated themselves to the small luxury of a cold drink after work.
Bora found the secrecy of this meeting frankly excessive, but played along. He recognized Olbertz when the latter, discreetly moving aside a flat leather bag, had already made room for him to his left. An inconspicuous gesture, since there were no other free seats at this time. Two men who’d never met before might behave the same way. Bora nodded a greeting and sat down.
At first Olbertz looked at the partly filled beer mug in front of him as he spoke. “Let’s get it out of the way, Colonel. Your uncle injected himself with a lethal dose of morphine. What else do you expect to hear?”
Bora found the introduction incongruous. “At the funeral you suggested that his act might not have been altogether voluntary. Let me at least
understand if there were personal reasons, or —”
“No.”
“‘No’ in the sense that the reasons were not personal, or in the sense that you decline to answer?”
“I decline to answer.”
Impatience was something Bora reserved for other things. “Fine,” he said. “Did my uncle’s position on euthanasia play a role in his demise?” Silence was a reply in itself. “I take that as a yes,” he said. “In combination with his having adopted a Jew, maybe.”
“If you know the answers, you shouldn’t ask.” Smoothing the leather bag on his knees, the physician continued to face the table, as if the mug were his interlocutor. “All your uncle said is that he was ready to accept the idea of suicide, although it did not originate with him. I tried to talk him out of it. Half-heartedly, I admit, because it seems he really had no choice.” The beer, some of which had spilled onto a cardboard coaster, let out a bitter odour Bora could smell from his seat. “This is not a good time for us to discuss this. Not a good time at all.”
“Why are we meeting, then? You could have ignored my phone calls.”
“I did. I am here for a different reason.” A double snap of the buckles allowed Olbertz to slide his hand under the flap of his leather bag. Out came two sheets of carbon paper, typewritten and stapled together. “A copy of the Weimar Prophet’s post-mortem minus the omissions, which if I am not mistaken could be useful to you.” Bora glanced over it. Saying that the existence of an unofficial report came as complete news would be pointless. “May I ask about their source?”
“Dr Wirth from the Charité hospital, where the autopsy was performed. Wirth heard that you questioned his wife about the night of the murder, and concluded that you weren’t simply curious. He worries that you might have got an impression of hostility from Frau Wirth, so given that we both worked with your relative he encouraged me to bring you this. You can have it.”