The Night of Shooting Stars

by Ben Pastor

LANDGRAFENSTRASSE, 3:16 P.M.

  Ida Rüdiger was dressed to kill. The plunging neckline dropped so temptingly between her breasts that it was impossible for Bora not to steal a glance. A wide-brimmed hat with a cluster of silk poppies sat on her coiffure; in her hand, a hatpin with a garnet head seemed long enough to stab him in the heart, if she got that idea.

  “I didn’t expect to see you again,” she huffed.

  Bora apologized. I thought she was on her way out, but she’s just come back. She’s overheated, there’s perspiration on those impressive teats of hers.

  “Only a couple more questions, please. Herr Niemeyer held private hypnosis sessions at his home, isn’t that so?”

  Perhaps because her lover’s duplicity was her obsession, she saw through his enquiry. “Yes, but not for women.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that his hypnosis sessions were reserved for male clients.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?” Ida Rüdiger dabbed her bosom with a tiny handkerchief. “Because I insisted on it.” She nodded towards the stack of magazines on a shiny credenza. “Open any of those at page 6, where the advertisements are.”

  At random, Bora chose a periodical whose coloured cover featured a winsome girl scaling – God knows why (if not to show her thighs) – a street light. The advertisement in question occupied the entire bottom of page 6. It announced hypnotherapeutic sittings and consultations “on professional matters and matters of business, debility, mental fatigue, et cetera”. A note in bold specified: “Only for a distinguished male clientele.”

  “It does not say who the therapist is,” Bora observed.

  “Of course not. It would be gauche for Dr Prof. Magnus Magnusson to run his advert next to those for depilatory cream and hair lotion. You’ll notice the address and phone number correspond to Villa Gerda’s.”

  “Yes, I see that.”

  “Call it a small victory, Colonel. We’d broken up, but Walter kept to the rule, at least officially.”

  Bora nodded. If so, it was even less likely that just any girl could be a client in that sense. Was she well known, which was why Kugler erased her features? Or rather, was she the wife or lover of a powerful man? He wondered whether Kugler had shared the photos with Ida Rüdiger (he didn’t think so), and for the moment he made no mention of them.

  “May I keep this announcement?”

  She looked at the back of the page to see if there were any articles she meant to save. “Not this one, but you can tear the page from another magazine. The advertisements are all the same.”

  Bora did as she said. Ida watched him awkwardly tear out the page with one hand.

  “You know, I put the fear of God into that minion of yours,” she said.

  It was easy for Bora to smile (and he knew the effect his smile usually had).

  “But I do not suspect you in the least, madam. I recognize my mistakes when I commit them.”

  With enviable precision, she tossed her hat across the hallway into a dainty armchair.

  “Are you trying to tell me, then, that there was one woman in particular? Was Walter killed by one of his sluts?”

  Her reaction suggested that Kugler had kept the photos to himself.

  “I mean to find out. Incidentally, why did you fire your investigator only in late May, if you’d met Niemeyer for the last time on the sixth?”

  Grown impatient with his fumbling as he tried to fold the page up with one hand, Ida Rüdiger snatched it from his fingers and did it for him.

  “Here.” She eyed him knowingly. “Questions, questions. You’re army intelligence, aren’t you. Or used to be. See, I’ve known men in power for a long time; you don’t pull the wool over my eyes.”

  “I’m not army intelligence. Why did you fire Gustav Kugler only in late May?”

  “Because I was still curious about Walter’s doings, but Kugler was getting nowhere. In three months, all I got were five lousy pictures of a brunette meeting Walter at this or that café. Her, I knew of. She is an extra at the UFA Studios. The same who left her underwear behind, which was a pleasure to burn in the tub of the guest bathroom – just as I burned her pictures.”

  It did not sound like the girl in Kugler’s photos. In a wig, maybe …

  “Tall?” Bora asked.

  “What do you mean, tall? She’s little more than a midget. I don’t know who killed Walter, but one thing I can tell you: with or without women, he’d started getting in trouble from the day he passed himself off as a Jew.”

  The unexpected comment made Bora think of a question so impertinent that he hesitated to pose it. But she was a worldly-wise woman. It was enough for her to hear a neutral “Speaking of which …”, to take up the subject.

  “Naturally. If, during the autopsy, they wondered why he had that ugly job done to him, know that it happened in Cairo, before the war, because of an infection he got who knows from where. Jews have nothing to do with it.”

  “Well, his first autobiography was rather convincing.”

  “Up from the Shtetl? Rubbish. You don’t really think I’d fall for a Jew! Walter did say that he really had lived that life, though. Another life, understand? A previous life.”

  Bora didn’t comment on the fact that Niemeyer had carefully avoided the subject in his amended autobiography as a Scandinavian sage.

  Before he could step away, Ida Rüdiger cheekily walked around him, as if to judge his haircut.

  “Starchy and hidebound,” she taunted him. “If you discover that it was a female who killed him, let me know. I want a front-row seat at the trial.”

  3:41 P.M.

  Only the modelling agency whose card he found in Kugler’s folder (Thulestrasse, on the corner of Schönhauser Allee in Pankow) was missing from his list. Bora, still annoyed by Ida’s familiarity, chose to call from a nearby telephone booth. He introduced himself generically as the admirer of a girl who had given given him that number, adding that he hadn’t heard from her in some time.

  “I was wondering whether she’s in.”

  Laughter came from the other end of the line.

  “We don’t run a boarding school here! We take fashion photos; lots of girls come and go. What’s the name of yours?”

  “Well, she never did say. We only met one evening.”

  “Can you describe her, at least?”

  Bora did his best, based on Kugler’s photos. “Please understand: I have to see her. I’m going back to the front tomorrow.”

  “Sorry. Your description fits several of our models. Without a surname, there’s no point. Maybe if you give me yours …”

  Shamelessly, Bora continued the fiction. “She doesn’t know it, either. I said ‘one evening’, but one night is actually what we spent together. I’d love to see her again before I leave.”

  Which, thinking of another girl, was the only detail that came close to the truth.

  This time, there was a sympathetic pause. “Well, there was a girl who left without notice, but she’s been gone from Berlin over a month. She didn’t even pick up her cheque for the last photo shoot. Not that she wanted for money, if you get my meaning. I don’t wish to disillusion you, but the young lady did not need the job. She came to work in a private chauffeured car. That is … if I were you, I would not get my hopes up. No, I can’t give you her name, the information is private. If you care to have some pictures of hers as a keepsake, buy the June issue of Berlinerin. I think she’s featured from page 16 to page 19. Sorry. Good luck at the front.”

  Bora hung up. A private car? In Kugler’s surveillance notes, he’d read private car – different chauffeurs – leaves her at the corner of Lebanonzederpfad – picks her up 1 hour later, parking no less than a block away. That was all. The number of the licence plate was not recorded: why? An investigator would always jot down a foreign or diplomatic plate too. Unless, of course, the car bore an unnumbered plate, the privilege of ministers and top officials.

  He walked to a newspaper stand across fro
m the telephone booth. The June issue of Berlinerin had sold out, but the seller indicated a better-equipped stand not far away. Bora went over to it, and once he’d secured the magazine he flipped it open on page 16.

  The title of the photo story was “Do You Really Know Her?”

  How fitting. The girl was no doubt the one shadowed by Kugler. Posing under flattering lights, she enjoyed the sort of exposure one was able to admire in peacetime periodicals, and even in Signal and other military monthlies at the start of the war. In July 1944, such extravagance seemed very much “after its time”. Nineteen black-and-white poses occupied three full pages. In every one of them, the same unnamed model – between twenty and twenty-five years of age, Bora estimated – wore different make-up and headwear, from a toque to a tiara to a farm girl’s chequered kerchief. In one, she sat with a thread of pearls around her forehead, like a woman in a Renaissance portrait, in another she mimicked Marlene Dietrich, in a third one she reminded Bora of the Soviet film star Lyubov Orlova in Volga, Volga. In these days of drastic paper shortage, publishers would not grant such space to just any girl.

  Bora put away the magazine in his briefcase. Damn, he thought, if fair Helen’s face “launched a thousand ships”, this could be the face of someone who in her imprudence can send us all to the gallows. Forget Bubi Kupinsky, drowned (or not) in the Spree! If what Niemeyer wrote to his lawyer is only half true, not even the bones of this dumb blonde exist anymore.

  Bora then phoned his hotel. Still no Grimm, and no messages from him. He left word at the front desk that if Inspector Florian Grimm or anyone else came looking for him, he could be found at the Catholic church on Winterfeldtplatz.

  ST MATTHIAS’S, SCHÖNEBERG, 4:18 P.M.

  He did not pray, did not think. He simply sat in the refreshing twilight of the papist church Bismarck had allowed them to build in arch-Protestant Berlin, until now spared by the war.

  Years earlier, while attending the Military Academy and when he worked for Canaris, he used to come here to listen to organ music. Today, a handful of elderly people were kneeling in the first rows, whispering the rosary together.

  Bora stared at the main altar without seeing it. Nothing could keep him from thinking about the storm circling oppressively over their heads. Even without the enemy at the gates, out there Germany’s fate was being played out – at least, the attempt was afoot. He didn’t know what to wish for.

  When an elderly priest approached him and asked if he was waiting for confession, Bora realized that he’d been sitting opposite a confessional. He shook his head without opening his mouth. I cannot tell him that I haven’t the slightest desire for it. In Rome, he’d gone back to attending mass and taking communion, mostly because he worked as a liaison with the Vatican, and churchmen make you buy a ticket if you want to talk to them.

  The priest slowly shuffled to the main altar, genuflected in front of it and joined the rosary group. The muttered Latin words reached Bora like the droning of bees. “Stella matutina … Foederis arca …” – as if the Mother of God really were a star heralding daylight, or the repository of an irrevocable, eternal pact.

  What is irrevocable? Everything is falling apart. Bora made the sign of the cross – deliberately, unlike most men, who are furtive about it – and left the church as disquieted as when he entered it.

  LEIPZIGER HOF, 5:34 P.M.

  As it turned out, Grimm phoned ten minutes after Bora walked back into his hotel. There’d been a delay, the policeman said concisely, this was the earliest he could call. Unwilling to conjecture the cause of the delay, Bora kept his part of the conversation down to monosyllables. He waited for Grimm in the lobby as if he’d done nothing else all day, with a selection of newspapers around him. To his left, elbow to elbow on a small sofa upholstered like all others in bright yellow, sat three laughing Bavarians of the type that would not lose their job or good humour, not even after a coup d’état, the perfect fellows to be found chatting with.

  Only after more than an hour did Grimm enter. In a bad humour, and with the look of a battered draught animal expected to show up for work even with a broken head, he explained that a practice alert had held him up. He added no details, and Bora did not ask for any. Once he’d blamed his tardiness on the service, Grimm did not apologize for leaving the officer without a car and without information, but the awkward gesture with which he handed him the Eppner papers did it for him.

  “A fine state of affairs. You left me without a car and without information. I wasted nearly an entire day.” Bora knew when to play the Prussian. He jumped up from his seat, put his cap on and grabbed his briefcase by the handle. Brusquely holding it out towards the policeman, he said, “Carry this, at least.”

  A contrite Grimm preceded him out to the car. “Where to, Colonel?”

  “Where can we go, at this time? I have to review the watchmaker’s file. What about Glantz?”

  “The chief himself is seeking his release back to us tonight. There’s news about Kupinsky as well.”

  Bora’s antennae went up. “Did you find him? Dead or alive?”

  “I wish. Looks like the queer faked his suicide, and is on the lam. We got a tip-off and missed him by this much.” He pressed his fleshy thumb and forefinger tightly together. “It’s only a matter of time before we catch him.”

  It was not the news Bora wanted to hear. Now there’s a poor bastard I should have killed, to save everyone worse trouble. Kupinsky in the hands of the law, or God forbid the Gestapo, could unravel matters more quickly than Benno von Salomon. “Are there new charges against him, other than that he’s escaped while on probation?”

  “Fleeing while on probation is indicative of something.” Grimm sat at the wheel, waiting to be told where to go. “I wonder if we underestimated him.”

  In his view, Grimm had a point. By comparison, Eppner’s deposition was bizarre. Bora read how, unlike Glantz, the watchmaker at first succeeded in pleading his case for possessing a pistol and keeping it concealed in his house, thanks to the presence of a former Foot Guards official at Kripo headquarters. The question of the foreign worker Paulina Andreyevna Issakova, staying at his residence against all regulations, proved harder to resolve. However, what complicated matters was the sworn statement by one of the guests at the birthday party that —

  “What?” Bora interrupted his reading. “Someone decided not to support Eppner’s alibi?”

  “Worse. It seems Eppner made some disparaging remarks about our air force that evening, and not only that.”

  Bora read on. During the party, due to the conviviality and bootleg alcohol, the conversation around the table became unguarded. Complaints were voiced by everyone whose house or business (or both) had been bombed in June. Everyone had probably pitched in, but once news of Eppner’s arrest had surfaced, a guest rediscovered his patriotic strain and spontaneously showed up at Alexanderplatz to help to sink him. The Luftwaffe was only one of the branches of the armed forces berated by the host, and the government itself hadn’t been spared.

  “At the moment,” Grimm said, as he loosened the knot of his ugly tie, “he’s out of our hands at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.”

  That, too. What an idiot Eppner was, and what a can of worms … Bora put away the folder, feeling unhappy. Two days to go, nominally at least, and no solution in sight. He was dying to know what had delayed Grimm at headquarters, but the policeman seemed intent on keeping mum about it.

  “Back to Kupinsky, Colonel – now that we know that he isn’t feeding the fish in the river, we can’t deny he’s the cleverest of the four. Why, the communist queer could be a sly coldblooded killer. I’ve seen my share of murderous weaklings.”

  “Yes, well, at this point anything is possible.”

  Grimm seemed to be angling for ideas that would be welcome to the officer, or cheer him up at least. “Should I drive to the watchmaker’s main shop, in the city centre? We’re running late, but it’s on Krausenstrasse, and we might catch Frau Eppner behind the
counter.”

  It’d be a miracle if she hadn’t been arrested too, and their three shops requisitioned. Convinced that there were too many trees, and that barking up any of them was turning out to be a waste of time, Bora said yes anyway.

  The shop – which he recognized after Grimm parked in front of it, because he’d gone there once with Dikta, who’d fallen in love with a gold watch in the window and then typically changed her mind about it – was about to close for the day. Grimm sprinted with unexpected zest from the Olympia to keep the shop clerk from rolling down the shutter all the way.

  When Bora joined them, he heard that Frau Eppner had moved to Nassenheide to be closer to her husband. She’d engaged Ronge to plead his case and save the family business from being seized, and that’s all he knew.

  Ronge (one of the intimidating names in Ida Rüdiger’s calling-card collection) was a star-quality lawyer, likely to cost the Eppners all they had anyway. With an annoyed wave, Bora recalled the inspector, and off they went the way they’d come.

  Shortly after eight Bora ordered Grimm to leave the Olympia with him. Grimm could not object.

  “Just in case more exercises or bombs intervene. Is there enough fuel?”

  “The tank is nearly full, Colonel.”

  “Good. See you tomorrow, at eight sharp.”

  It was little more than a pulling of rank on his part. But if, as he believed, the practice alert had signalled a last-minute scrapping of Stauffenberg’s plan for the day, Bora was curious to go see what went on among the General Staff officers who might still be housed at the Adlon. He waited until Grimm’s tram chucked away, and drove to Pariser Platz.

  Right away, he noticed that Namura was still out. The key to his room was hanging behind the concierge’s desk. Downstairs, a glance around confirmed a sparse presence of officers having dinner. At the table, so full of brass in the past few days, sat four colonels with a blank look on their faces, as if a train long awaited had left without them. If it hadn’t been a real practice alert, unrelated to the conspiracy, theirs was the despondent attitude of men whose hopes have been dashed or once more delayed.