The Night of Shooting Stars

by Ben Pastor

  Grimm might be the man to ask, however touchy the subject might be for one who’d shared a professional life with Gustav Kugler. Until Grimm’s return, the allegation added grist to the mill, but little more.

  Bora checked the time. Army offices were open for business now, so he might as well venture to contact army headquarters at Zossen to enquire after Salomon. He chose a public phone he knew to be working to place the call, and truthfully identified himself as a former officer on Salomon’s staff. “I’m in town on furlough, and would like to say hello to him if possible.”

  The news that the colonel was on medical leave did not surprise him; but it deeply worried him. “Nothing serious, I hope,” he said. “Has he checked into a hospital where I might visit him?”

  No information was available about a hospital he might have checked into. Why not try the Adlon, where he’d been staying until recently?

  Bora promised to do so, although he knew the colonel had left the hotel. As far as he knew, Salomon had no relatives in Berlin. He’d been estranged from his wife ever since the first Russian tour of duty; there would be no point trying to trace him through her. Hell, he thought, should I bring him up with Claus von Stauffenberg this afternoon? After all, it’s from him that Salomon heard about me. He might know.

  It was quickly growing warm. In the phone booth, Bora turned his back to the sun to leaf through his notebook. While interrogating Roland Glantz, he’d jotted down his home number – the same his concerned spouse had been calling him from. If he was back from Alex, Glantz was surely not in the best mood to chat, but would hardly dare slam down the receiver on an investigator.

  The phone rang for some time (Bora counted seven rings) before his wife picked up the receiver. From her voice, he realized at once that things had got worse for the Glantzes. He expected that the publisher had not been released, but had to ask, and did. Frau Glantz started to sob. Through her broken words, Bora learned that Glantz was not only still under arrest, but had attempted suicide again last night. It was altogether possible, given the state of the man, although Bora suspected the immediate trigger could have been mistreatment at the hands of the Kripo interrogators.

  It occurred to him now that although he’d given his name, he had not identified himself to the wife as the officer who first questioned Glantz. He did so, adding, “I was at the Sternuhr office when you phoned your husband on Wednesday. To your knowledge, is Herr Glantz still held at the Criminal Police headquarters?”

  “I wish I knew,” she moaned. “I’m afraid they’ll take it for an admission of guilt on his part. He shouldn’t have done it, Colonel, he shouldn’t have done it!”

  Bora agreed, in principle. What he said, however, was, “Can you confirm that your brother left something at your house before he was killed in action? I have a particular reason for asking.”

  “It must be that damn gun! I told Roland to get rid of it, after Seppi was shot down near Tobruk … I could only convince him to put it away in a safe place, poste restante. Good God, he lost his mind after the trick Magnusson, or Niemeyer, or whatever his real name was, played on us … I wanted to make sure he wouldn’t be tempted to use it to avenge himself.”

  The rest of the call yielded nothing else of use. Frau Glantz had never heard her husband mention a particular repository where Niemeyer kept copies of his manuscripts, including the Encyclopaedia of Myth. On the point of hanging up, Bora tried a last card. “Did you ever hear of a solicitor by the name of Ergard Dietz?”

  “No. Is he someone who could help my husband?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Can you help my husband, then?”

  Bora had anticipated the tearful request. “What I can do is call in to enquire about his state of health, and perhaps learn where he is now. I will only ring back if I have any information to share with you.”

  An odour of warm asphalt and open sewers – the latter unthinkable in Berlin before the bombs – accompanied the rise in temperature when Bora left the booth. The third call would take longer, and was not to be attempted from a public phone. He returned to the Leipziger Hof and, from his room, dialled Arthur Nebe’s personal number.

  The SS Group Leader and chief was not in. Had he been sitting at his desk, he’d have answered his private line. Bora then tried the Kripo headquarters’s central exchange and asked for Nebe’s assistant. The man confirmed that the chief was out of the office, and gave no information about his routine for the day; to the question tactfully put by Bora about the detainee Roland Glantz, he replied with the annoyance of a bureaucrat who sees no reason why he should answer.

  “What about the detainee Roland Glantz, Colonel?”

  Bora explained briefly, although he doubted an attempted suicide inside Alex would come as news to Nebe’s right-hand man.

  “Ah, yes. He tried to hang himself again.”

  “And did not succeed?”

  “He did not succeed in hanging himself, but struck his head in the fall and is unconscious. Our physicians at the infirmary fear he might not come to any time soon, if at all.”

  Not what Bora wanted to hear. “Is he still at the infirmary?”

  “He is not … Look, Colonel, I don’t know where they took him – there’s a myriad of hospitals and clinics in Berlin.”

  This could only mean that Glantz had passed into the hands of the Gestapo. “May I leave a message for the Head of the Criminal Police?”

  “You seem to have his private number. Try him tonight after six.”

  Two calls, two failures. Bora had a little more luck when he enquired about Florian Grimm.

  It was Trost – he was apparently Grimm’s subordinate – who picked up the phone. Yes, Inspector Grimm was quickly recovering, and expected to report for duty the following morning. (Bora was not enthusiastic about this; he’d hoped to have more time to himself, and the car at his disposal for longer.) He asked that Grimm bring along detailed information on the interrogation of, statements by, state of health and location of the detainee Roland Glantz, and hung up in a vexed mood.

  He was rather hopeful about the next call, mostly because it was not strictly business-related. He took Emmy Pletsch’s number out of his breast pocket. In the process, one of the condoms fell out, a small incident that might be telling but did not embarrass him very much. What he had in mind was to thank her, without adding any details: she’d understand that it was about setting up his interview with Stauffenberg.

  A colleague of Staff Leader Pletsch answered the phone. Staff Leader Pletsch had just left her desk. Would the lieutenant colonel care to try again at ten?

  Such recurrence of absenteeism made one doubt the much-vaunted efficiency of German office workers. Bora was disappointed but replied that yes, he would do so.

  In the interval, he ventured another round of calls intended to discover Salomon’s whereabouts. The Charité hospital had a reputation for the treatment of nervous diseases, so he began there. When that failed, he went down the list of other medical centres, military and private, that he knew to be still standing. Whether his interlocutors disbelieved that he was merely seeking his former commander, and would for that reason not release the information, or whether Salomon really had not checked himself into any one of them (having perhaps left the capital), Bora’s effort availed him nothing. The sole element that kept it from being a complete waste of time was that it brought him up to ten o’clock.

  Once more, he phoned Reserve Army headquarters.

  This time Emmy was in. She responded in a not entirely terse voice to his thanks (he could imagine her face, looking as if her mind was elsewhere). Unwilling to let it go at that, on an impulse Bora took his plan one step further. He asked, “May we have lunch together today, Staff Leader Pletsch? I could come and pick you up.”

  She hardly let him finish. “No, Colonel. I don’t think so.”

  Bora found that he was more frustrated than he had a right to be. “Very well, then,” he said, and was about to hang up.

/>   He was not used to rejection by women, and gave rather too much importance to Emmy’s refusal. On the other hand, she could not be so naive as not to recognize a certain longing in the tone of his voice, underneath the absolute correctness of his words. Not taking no for an answer wasn’t like him, so he couldn’t believe that he actually said, “What about a cup of coffee?”

  She did not answer at once, giving him time to regret his perseverance. Then she simply said, “Yes, thank you.”

  With an hour to spare, Bora sat in his freshly made room (a luxury he would soon forget, if he made it back to the Italian front) thinking over the news gathered thus far this morning. What he had learned from Max Kolowrat about Kugler’s moonlighting as a semi-official assassin in the Weimar days threw a welcome wrench in the machine.

  Grimm had told him nothing about it – but he might not necessarily have known or had any reason to see a connection between his old partner and Niemeyer’s death. After all, when Bora had asked him about notorious Berlin murderers, the inspector had not hesitated to identify the S-Bahn murderer with Paul Ogorzow, his old SA companion. The Kugler lead was as far-fetched as it was intriguing. Still, even supposing that for whatever reason the investigator had played a role in the murder, he certainly did so on someone’s orders. According to Lattmann, the gossip eleven years earlier pointed to the debtridden Heldorff as a possible instigator in the shooting of Jan Hanussen, whose place as a Party mystic Niemeyer had taken up afterwards. Heldorff was deep in city politics even then. Had Kugler been in his employ somehow, and continued to be? In its ambivalence, the mention of “Berlin’s police chief, Count von Heldorff” in Niemeyer’s letter had its significance. It was Heldorff’s girl who had unwittingly fed Niemeyer with hints on a conspiracy by the army … Bora drew a triangle in his mind, whose angles read ‘Hanussen’, ‘Heldorff’ and ‘Kugler’, and another labelled ‘Niemeyer’, ‘Heldorff’ and ‘Kugler’; the third one, the one he was most hesitant to imagine, read ‘Niemeyer’, ‘Heldorff’ and ‘Conspiracy’.

  Of the three, this last one was fraught with danger, whether or not Niemeyer had made everything up, and whatever role Heldorff played in it: blackmailed debtor, sleuth or conspirator. If he owed Niemeyer money, as he’d owed Hanussen, the discovery (how? From Niemeyer himself?) that his girlfriend had leaked information about an ongoing inquiry into high treason offered the perfect opportunity to eliminate him. On the other hand, someone else could have been the object of Niemeyer’s blackmail – members of the conspiracy, such as those whom the terrified Salomon had overheard.

  Bora felt the sweaty army shirt stick to his underarms and stomach. He recovered Niemeyer’s letter from the anonymous folder where he’d placed it, slipped it into a waterproof pouch along with his diary, and prepared to take a shower while keeping an eye on them, as in his paranoid Moscow days.

  He unbuckled the prosthesis, a chafing nuisance around his wrist in the heat of the season. What if he was wrong? Niemeyer could have made up the contents of his letter, at least as far as his knowledge of an army plot. He could have passed off a vision or an intuition for a credible rumour, so that after his murder his enemy (or enemies) would be crushed. The words you leave behind in case of a violent death cannot lie. Or can they?

  I could burn the damn letter to ashes and be done with it. Bubi Kupinsky would never tell that he had it, or that I saw it. Should I mention it to Stauffenberg, or would that be my undoing? If I had no scruples, I could even use it as Niemeyer tried to. Except that I’m up to my neck in scruples.

  Bora stood under the gushing cold water, unspeakably anxious about his two o’clock meeting – oddly, for a completely different reason, also about sitting with Staff Leader Pletsch in half an hour. In fact, among the many questions he rolled around in his mind, there was an innocent one to himself, left unanswered: was he showering and changing for the deputy chief of the Reserve Army or for Emmy Pletsch?

  At any rate, for good luck he would put on the tailored army shirt his mother had brought him from home.

  Minutes later he picked up the prosthesis from the bedside table and contemplated it, a strange new part of him he still had to get used to seeing, to using, fiercely determined as he was not to think of his loss. During the withdrawal from Rome he’d thrown away all his musical scores, including those his father had composed or arranged for piano. On the Eastern front he’d been ready to die, so he’d never entertained the thought of mutilation, or of surviving it. True, with his right hand he could move or close the fingers of the artificial one into a fist, finely articulated inside the handsome black glove. In cold weather, when gloves were worn, it was at first sight undistinguishable from his live hand. Not so during the summer.

  “You could have lost your forearm, or even the whole arm,” they’d said at the hospital in Verona, trying to cheer him up. “Be thankful that it’s only your hand that is gone.”

  Well, thankfulness took odd shapes these days. With his back to the mirror, Bora fastened the prosthesis back on. I believe in fortitude, he told himself, and try to live by it. But what is this injury doing to me deep down, how does it affect my temperament?

  Claus von Stauffenberg lost an eye and his right hand, and three fingers are all that remains to him of the left one.

  At the last moment, a quarter of an hour before meeting Emmy at a small, exclusive café off Bülowstrasse, Bora decided to take Niemeyer’s letter with him. Dangerous as the choice was, he felt that – whatever happened with Stauffenberg – he had to find a better hiding place for it before nightfall. As he quickly went downstairs, he discarded his grandfather’s apartment, which was out of the question just like his Uncle’s clinic, whose key he had in his pocket. Not even banks, not even churches were secure, and at this point, many of his former Abwehr colleagues could not necessarily be depended on either; the people he most trusted he didn’t want to put at risk. As he walked out to the car, Bora even thought of the Japanese officer he met at the Adlon, whose sense of caste loyalty could be relied on as absolute, and who was not afraid to die. He was his best bet, if he was still alive.

  Enough brooding for now. He didn’t want to meet Staff Leader Pletsch over coffee and abject anxiety.

  DIE DAME CAFÉ, 11:05 A.M.

  In the days Kolowrat wrote of, the café was called Kaugummi, and William Wrigley himself invested American money in the establishment, designed for the young and fashionable German consumers of chewing gum. The Brownshirts had devastated it and jailed its Jewish manager. Since the beginning of the war it had reopened, with Biedermeier décor, a bill of fare richer than most and a new management rumoured to have Hermann Göring as its secret shareholder. Its full name was now Die Fliegende Dame, after a large canvas depicting Europa riding a white bullock, but everyone knew it as just Die Dame.

  “How beautiful,” Emmy said of the painting. Seeing the choices available on the menu (Bora had chosen the place because of its first-rate service), she asked him, “May I order a cup of real coffee with real cream? I haven’t had any in over a year. You’ll think me provincial, but I do miss some of our tasty everyday things, like buttery poor knights at breakfast.”

  “You may order anything you wish.”

  She did not look straight at him, while Bora watched her closely. I may be making her uncomfortable, but that’s how it is. In observing her this way, I give the impression that I can afford to, because I’m not desperate. She praises a peacetime breakfast of bread fried in butter, yet in the end, if she said yes over the phone it’s because she wanted to see me again. He kept telling himself that he liked a different sort of woman, but it was a fact that at least two of those he’d fallen for – Remedios and Nora Murphy – were petite.

  She put away her reading glasses. The delicate blonde down on her forearms reminded him of the girls in Russia and Ukraine, from whom he’d stayed away for Dikta’s sake – and because their fairness and throaty singing had been dangerously attractive. The small watch on her left wrist was modest, with a strap
of imitation leather. If she wasn’t wearing a uniform at this hour, it meant that she probably had the afternoon off because of her boyfriend’s illness. Her white blouse, devoid of embroidery except for a diminutive string of off-white flowers bordering her collar, seemed to him home-sewn, perhaps by a friend, or by Emmy herself.

  The waiter came; Bora ordered coffee and cream for her, and iced coffee for himself. Asked if she wanted anything to eat, she glanced up, smiled and shook her head.

  He wondered whether she slept poorly, or cried often. Possibly both. Under her eyes, there stretched a tender blue shadow that only youth kept from being a flaw. Yes, if she did not look at him, his scrutiny was the reason. Am I doing something contemptible? Does she really believe I invited her to thank her? She might. I’m a lieutenant colonel, she does not expect to be flattered by me. I only wanted her to make amends for declining my lunch invitation, because an auxiliary cannot reply to an officer as she would to her equals.

  Is she passive? Didn’t her man teach her anything? No. She knows that, by her silence, she is forcing me to wonder about her. She asks nothing about me, not only because of her subordinate rank, but to lay claim to that small, untouchable feminine space of hers, that compels us men to try to break into it.

  “So, tell me about you,” he encouraged her, once the waiter had left. “Where are you from, and what brought you to Berlin?”

  “I don’t sound like a Berliner, do I?” She smiled self-consciously, still looking down. “I grew up near Breslau, which is where my family still lives. There isn’t much to say about me: I was at secondary school and doing well, when my father, who headed the local SA, was killed. So I left school and took a typewriting course: the sort of career choice a girl from my background is likely to make, you’ll say. Not that I lacked ambition, but Mother wanted me to stay close to home, and so on.”