The Night of Shooting Stars

by Ben Pastor

  Use it in a girl? I think I began to weep at this point, partly from relief that I wouldn’t die, and partly because of what he’d just said, which horrified me. I felt miserable, and surely said something to the effect that I didn’t know how to mention any of it in confession the following day. Uncle Alfred was a freethinker even then. “Why should you say anything?” he burst out. “Do you tell the priest how many times you sneeze? If you didn’t do anything wrong, there’s nothing to confess. No, no. It’ll remain between us men.” Today I wonder how he could keep from laughing. “But you must have schoolmates who are growing whiskers already, and you must have seen stallions mounting mares. How do you think colts are made?”

  Whiskers, stallions and bleeding girls – one sounded worse than the other that morning. I’d been living in the blessed bubble of childhood and desperately wanted to stay there. The good doctor read my mind, or else I verbalized what I felt. “You can’t,” he said, “it’s done now. The little pot is on the fire, and will brim over now and then.” Brimming over? For God’s sake! I was probably bawling when I begged him not to tell the General.

  “I will not tell the General, or your mother. But now get up. You’re not sick. Blow your nose, shower and go on with your life.” In the time it took him to light a cigar, his eyes swept around the room full of my boyish things. Did he think over the advice he’d given me a moment before? “On second thought,” he added, “my prescription is to remain a child a little longer.”

  I tried, but by the following year I grew to be 5’10”; at fifteen, I was over 6 foot tall, and I believe the only sport I didn’t practise was ladies’ gymnastics. The fire he spoke of was under the little pot, and it’s been on ever since. As long as Dikta was on my horizon, I remained fairly good at keeping it under control. Without Dikta, there are times when I wish there were no little pots and no fires under them.

  Nineteen years have passed since that Sunday in the Leipzig quarter of Lindenau, Uncle. I miss you, and mourn the fact that you had no choice in your solitary death.

  8

  He who has learned to die has unlearned to serve.

  MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE,

  ‘THAT TO STUDY PHILOSOPHY IS TO LEARN TO DIE’

  DOROTHEA REINHARDT-THOMA CHILDREN’S CLINIC, DAHLEM, FRIDAY, 14 JULY, 5:46 A.M.

  Bora had never been to the place before. It was a stately mansion built in the 1920s, with steep gables of moss-green slate crowning the outline of a hipped roof. Pale grey stucco lent a fresh and sober appearance to the four-storey façade. A long L housing the wards extended perpendicularly from the back of the building, invisible to someone facing it directly from across the street. The ground floor, presumably occupied by the main office and Reinhardt-Thoma’s office, had windows topped by low arches; upstairs, Bora identified the consultation rooms by their vast, uncurtained glass panes.

  It surprised him that so early in the day (a dewy mist still hung in the air, the leafy trees along the street quivered with a richness of sparrows) an official-looking van and a lampblack saloon were stationed in front of the clinic. But then, he reasoned, this is Dohnenstieg, where none other than the Commissar of the Reich, Heinrich Himmler, has one of his residences.

  What made him change his mind on the subject was noticing that the clinic’s door was ajar, and movement was perceivable in the twilight of the interior, where electric lamps blinked.

  Bora wasted no time hoping it might be employees of his uncle’s, come to save what was salvageable, on Olbertz’s advice. Olbertz did not even want to meet me, he surely didn’t risk —

  Any doubt ended with a crash of broken glass on the upper floor. A filing cabinet literally flew out, scattering in its fall a storm of folders and loose pages. A desk minus its drawers followed it in the plunge, and the drawers immediately after.

  Brochures, rubber stamps, prescription pads snowed down.

  At the first burst of glass, the sparrows surged from the trees, peppering the ground with their fleeting shadows. Bora followed with his eyes the ripple and twist of this or that piece of paper in mid-air, sailing and coasting upward as if in defiance of the law of gravity. But already another pane shattered with the clattering of smashed ice; chairs and examination couches, sheets and white smocks fell out, each landing in its own way on the grassy space below.

  Between thought and intervention the interval often lasts only seconds. Bora could have asked (but what was there to ask?) the plainclothesmen sitting in the lampblack saloon. Instead – and no one prevented him – he went over to the house and stepped through the open portal into a waiting room unknown to him and yet somehow familiar: it was the prints of famous Saxon views along the walls, fleetingly seen while he raced upstairs, in the same way that landscapes fly backwards in the frame of a train window.

  Compared to the dimness of the stairs, the consultation room was flooded by daylight. A handful of bareheaded thugs wearing Hitler Youth shorts were laboriously unhooking a metal shelf from the wall. A heady odour of spilled disinfectant and phenic acid rose from the slippery floor, strewn with glass shards and surgical instruments.

  A young man in the black Special Services uniform of the same paramilitary corps led the devastation. Confronted by an irate Bora, he growled back, “What business of yours is it what we’re doing? We have our orders!”

  Thank God for hierarchy. Bora struck him a backhanded slap across the face, hard enough to make him stagger in his ill-fitting boots. The others, who were facing away from the room, didn’t notice at first. None of them carried any weapon, save fanaticism.

  Stunned, the young man in black steadied himself. He massaged his left cheek, up and down. Only when he realized that a lieutenant colonel was demanding the name of his direct superior did he seem to emerge from the blind fury that had filled him until a minute ago.

  Standing stiffly to attention, he stammered in his Berlin twang, “Beggin’ pardon, Lieutenant Colonel. We was in a hurry, we was told it was Jewish property …”

  The bare-legged boys from his squad had the look of cats caught stealing. They grew pale when Bora said, “This clinic belongs to the late Doctor Professor Reinhardt-Thoma, whose state funeral last Sunday was authorized by the Führer himself!” Mentioning Hitler to the Hitler Youth was like bringing up the name of God. The young man in black didn’t know what to do with himself. He identified a certain Schmitz, Corps Leader, as his commander, while he gestured for his companions to halt the vandalism. He could not think of a justification other than the one he’d given, but Bora understood that the orders must have originated with the Health Ministry. Perhaps even with its head Leonardo Conti, his uncle’s bitterest foe for many years.

  From the boys, Bora learned that the patients had left the clinic three days earlier. While today’s action was fully authorized by Corps Leader Schmitz, neither the wards nor the ground floor were to be damaged in any way, because the new director would soon move in.

  Below, Bora found the plainclothesmen from the lampblack saloon. They said they were from the nearby Cecilienallee police station, and asked a few formal questions which he had no difficulty answering. They did not seem to be aware that Bora was a relative when they blamed the disaster upstairs on the long friendship between the late owner and “the Jew Goldstein”. In fact, they were here waiting for Dr Wirth, newly appointed head physician of the clinic.

  “And you were simply passing by, Colonel?”

  “I do not believe a German officer has to account for his intervention when furniture rains down from windows in Berlin, and when an insubordinate member of the Hitler Youth dares to disrespect him!”

  With local policemen, the point could be convincing. However, an official protest would make no difference, with them or anyone else.

  Bora left the house. There was nothing there he wanted to rescue from Wirth, not even the prints of old Saxony. He had only come by to see what shape the changing of the guard would assume. The bitter fact that it involved Niemeyer’s neighbour, too stingy to pay hi
s crippled gardener and too cowardly to be here in person, convinced him not to tell his mother about this. Crossing the garden, he changed his mind, and leaned over to pick up a small, empty glass bottle for medicines as a keepsake.

  Useless, and the object of least value there.

  Along the street, the trees were once more loud with sparrows. Bora looked up at the frenzy of grey handfuls of them in the dwarfing tangle of branches. Odd, how trees had not seemed this large to him since he was a child; fringes of morning sun speckled their dark heads as he walked away.

  At the tram stop, he decided against smoking when he already had a cigarette between his lips. He’d quit in June, on the principle that out in the field a keen sense of smell is a plus; he only carried a pack around as currency. But he was still struggling to give up the automatism of reaching for a cigarette when he felt under pressure.

  He could count on the fingers of his one hand the times when he’d struck someone in adulthood. It was so contrary to his nature that the loss of control that generated that sort of aggression troubled him deeply. Nicotine would not help. He grumpily had to accept that both episodes – the wrecking of the clinic, his slapping the Hitler Youth – were further signs that everything was falling apart, heading for dissolution. If Stauffenberg refuses to see me, I may really have to lie in wait at the door to his office. Because if it is true, as Hölderlin writes, that even solid rock has a need of rifts, some things need to be said before it crumbles to nothing.

  Actually, he had no need to resort to such a drastic solution. At his return to the Leipziger Hof, while he breakfasted and drank something that resembled very bad coffee, the waiters told him he was wanted on the phone. The call came from the Reserve Army. It was not Emmy Pletsch speaking, as Bora supposed, but Stauffenberg’s adjutant, Lieutenant von Haeften. Without preliminaries or details, he flatly invited Bora to visit the colonel’s office at 2 p.m. that day.

  “Good,” Bora answered, just as curtly. “I will be there.”

  7:35 A.M.

  Between now and the call at Bendlerstrasse, a little less than seven hours away, Bora had a list of chores to do. Not necessarily in that order, they included enquiring after Salomon at his office (if necessary with a plausible excuse), returning the material borrowed from Max Kolowrat two days earlier, and phoning Glantz’s home in case the Kripo had released the hapless publisher. There was a question he had to ask him, on the surface related to the murder case but, as far as Bora was concerned, also addressing a more political concern. As sponsor of the Encyclopaedia of Myth, Glantz may know of a safe or a deposit box where Niemeyer kept his manuscripts or other important papers – including, perhaps, a copy of the letter meant for the Reich Security Central Division.

  Geographical proximity and the early hour convinced him to begin with a call at Kolo’s flat near Barbarossaplatz, incidentally riding the same tram he’d shared with Emmy Pletsch the night before.

  Once there, Bora did not know what to make of the sight before him. Along the street, cleared of all vehicles but a service van from the Technical Emergency Service, a small group of people, including Max Kolowrat, were bivouacked on the pavement with a few of their belongings strewn around them.

  In Kolo’s case, it was a stool on which sat his typewriter, and Krüger sitting on top of the typewriter with the face of a cat subjected to indignity. The writer himself stood nearby with an unlit pipe in his teeth, looking up at the windows of his flat. He saw Bora approach and answered his greeting with a nod.

  “There was a bit of a shift in the rear of the building overnight,” he explained. “TeNo is checking all the apartments to make sure it’s safe to go back.” He pointed philosophically with his pipe at the other dwellers strung along the pavement. “There isn’t much we can do. At least it’s cool and shady at this hour.”

  Bora looked at the others. An elderly lady in a feather-collared robe and slippers was knitting in an armchair complete with antimacassar; a middle-aged couple sat playing cards on the back of a suitcase; a few steps away a man with the cropped hair of an army veteran cradled a potted fern in his arms. The unforeseen circumstance was welcome: Bora was embarrassed at the thought of speaking to Kolowrat again, so this pavement meeting invited the sort of brevity he preferred. He asked where he should leave the returned material, and Kolo told him to put it down on the pavement. “The technicians will be kind enough to bring it in, just as they took our things out.”

  He was facing him directly as he spoke, so that Bora couldn’t get out of enquiring if he could be of any help.

  “No, thank you. As you see, neither Krüger nor I are upset. He followed me around half the world, and it won’t be a morning on the pavement that daunts him. Rather … Do you have a light?”

  Bora took out his brother’s lighter without thinking. Aware as he must be of Peter’s death, if Kolo noticed the Luftwaffe’s eagle insignia on it he tactfully pretended not to. He kindled a fire in the briar’s bowl, before saying, “The name you indicated the other day, Gustav Kugler … I believe I know who he is.”

  Bora, who until now had been dwelling on a single dilemma (Should I think or should I not think that he likes my mother, and that he hopes to marry her one day, just as I hope – or hoped – to marry Mrs Murphy, someone else’s wife?), felt a bolt of excitement go through him.

  “Really?”

  “Yes. Shady characters of the jazz age couldn’t belong to the Blue-Red Tennis Club or play at the Wannsee golf course, but you may believe that they attended swell parties at the best cabarets. Crime news was not my favourite subject; still, I did take regular notes. The female reading public had a soft spot for criminals like those you read of in Rex Stout’s novels, or the ‘crooked policemen’ you saw at the cinema. American shotguns and sub-machine guns were the rage. After your visit, I looked through my old records, and … As I said, I believe I know who Kugler is. Well – to be precise, I don’t know where he is now, or what he’s doing. But in the Weimar days he was a policeman in the vice squad, not exactly corrupt.”

  Bora had cast his hook the other day, but he’d done it with little or no hope that there’d be fish in the lake. He concealed his enthusiasm by lunging to retrieve the knitting needle the old lady had dropped (she graciously looked up to thank him).

  “‘Not exactly corrupt’, Dr Kolowrat? That is —”

  Kolo shrugged. In daylight, his face showed an outdoorsman’s web of little wrinkles around the eyes; the corners of his mouth, however, reinforced the impression of someone in the frequent habit of smiling. “That is … It seems he took no money from panderers to look the other way, which some of his colleagues did. If he grabbed the chance to have fun with a streetwalker while hauling her in, why, it’d only be seen as a minor infraction. No, the man was crooked in another regard: the gossip was that he ‘removed’ individuals whom the authorities considered expendable or wanted out of the way: callous criminals, double-crossing informants, God knows who else. I never met him in person. In a couple of instances, they pointed him out to me in the crowd, at a bar or during some less than formal get-together. Unnerving, isn’t it? By now, he’s been either dispatched by someone or has made the grade.”

  Bora lifted the Weimar-era material he’d lent him out of his briefcase, and placed it in an orderly stack near the stool. “Your first hypothesis is correct.”

  “Ah, right. Back then, in nine cases out of ten this would mean that his employers unleashed another killer after him.” Like professors and lecturers Bora had known, Kolowrat underlined his words with small waves of his pipe. “That, too, is a way of disposing of rubbish. Not surprising. More than a few Berliners died that way, during the Republic.”

  The way he said this, the slight emphasis, made Bora suspect he was actually implying the opposite, a light-hearted irony you did not meet every day. All the same, his uniform and his role of investigator required that he take the statement at face value.

  “He did not die during the Republic,” he observed. “Kugler w
as killed a few days ago. He ran a private investigation agency.”

  “He did? Interesting. Was Kugler blackmailing a client or had he gone back to his old ways, and someone had orders to empty the rubbish bin with him inside it? One wonders whether a hired killer ever changes his habits.” When a TeNo foreman with a yellow armband leaned out of a window to communicate the “all clear”, Kolowrat nodded. To Bora, who was a step away from him, hanging on his every word, he commented, “I always thought little of contract killers. They’re often no more significant than the weapons they wield, and occasionally just as little conscious of their actions. The rubbish collectors sent after them are less squalid.”

  Suddenly, Bora found himself brooding. He had more familiarity with the process of death illustrated by Kolo than he cared to admit – Russia, Rome … first-hand experiences, best not to remember. The Abwehr called it “cleaning up”. He said, “For me, the most interesting person of all is the instigator.”

  “Or instigators. Only in the case of strictly private murders for hire is the matter so simple as to entail no more than two men.”

  8:37 A.M.

  So Kugler was rumoured to have been an assassin for “the authorities”. Kolo’s expression matched the one he’d used the first time they’d met, when speaking of Niemeyer’s antecedent, Jan Hanussen. Then, he’d said that Hanussen had been liquidated, but “not by the police”. After leaving Kolowrat and his dispossessed fellow tenants, Bora reflected on those separate but somehow related pieces of information. Was it possible that after leaving the Kripo the investigator had become a freelancer again? Max Kolowrat had assigned an unchanged disposition to the hired killer, although it was no more than a reporter’s comment.