The Night of Shooting Stars

by Ben Pastor

  Salomon repeated the address like a hopeful schoolboy. “In civvies. Alone. Does that mean you will help me?”

  “For the moment, it means that between now and then you must refrain from asking questions, and from meeting anyone else.”

  “Promise me you’ll help, and I will not leave this room all day.”

  “If you trust me, Colonel, there’s no need of promises.”

  7:01 A.M.

  Staff Leader Pletsch came down for breakfast with other young auxiliaries and members of the German Women’s Association. Seated at his corner table, Bora nodded a greeting to her group. She was as reserved as ever, with that face of a girl whose thoughts are elsewhere. Her companions seemed particularly solicitous towards her this morning. Why? Had she told them anything? He was determined to take his time and have a word alone with her as soon as the others left the table. Grimm would not be there before eight, so there should be time enough.

  Bora made his ersatz coffee last for ever. Within half an hour, when Emmy was the only one left behind, he joined her with his all but empty cup. “Good morning.”

  “Good morning.”

  “May I sit down, Staff Leader?”

  “Please do.”

  The dining hall, down here below street level, was lit artificially even in daytime, but the slight redness around her lips, from kissing, was so telling that Bora thought, I could bed her again, if she let me.

  “Are you off to work?” he asked.

  She looked down as he spoke.

  “Not today. And you?”

  “In twenty minutes.”

  They were once more addressing each other formally, sitting across from each other as they’d done at Die Dame. Both were blushing. Except with Dikta and Remedios, Bora had always felt a little ashamed after making love. She and I may be facing each other properly, but she knows what’s in my breeches, and I know what’s in her pretty cotton knickers. But he liked to rise after a night of sex as he did from the table, with some appetite still unappeased. Yes, I could bed her again if she let me.

  He was unprepared for what Emmy told him next. “Leo died during the night.”

  Her lips went a little tight as she said it, the corners of her mouth drawing downwards, like a child about to cry.

  “When during the night?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Whenever it happened, I wanted to be where I was.”

  “I’m very sorry, Emmy.”

  Using her first name created that little intimacy again, although neither of them knew what use to make of it now.

  “The worst thing,” she said, “is that in ten years …” Her tears came down without sobs, she was disconsolate. “I haven’t even made a child with him. Now I have nothing.”

  They were whispering to each other. In wartime, you saw many such moments, when emotions come through in conversation; the handful of uniformed men sitting around the hall paid no attention to them. Bora watched her with the peculiar sense of helplessness men feel when women weep.

  “I understand,” he said. “Far better than you can imagine.” He did not consider that his next words could be misconstrued – or perhaps he did. “Is there anything I can do?”

  Words have power. Emmy stopped crying like a little girl nursing a hurt, and held her breath. The hall where they sat seemed to fall away, along with the tables and the handful of uniformed men in their chairs, the sepia images of the Pauliner church and the Café Français … When she looked up, Bora saw that the source of her strangeness, the subtle colour difference between her eyes, was nearly gone. Reluctance and yearning no longer divided her against herself.

  “Yes,” she said slowly, returning to him the key to his room. “Yes. There is.”

  Bora felt dazed. He could imagine his friend Lattmann telling him, “That’s not what I meant, when I brought the two of you together. Are you out of your mind?” Well, yes. Things are falling apart, and I am out of my mind.

  “I very much would like to,” he said.

  A number of latecomers were entering the hall for breakfast, including the matrons of the German Women’s Association. Bora and Emmy left the table separately, only to stop on the stairs leading up to the lobby. They exchanged an army salute, and then, overcome by a desire to kiss, they did so quickly, with that crazy promise between them. They did not want to change their minds, so it had to be done soon, as soon as possible.

  “Before noon,” she said in his ear, “because after that I no longer have a reason to postpone my reassignment from Berlin. My train leaves shortly thereafter.”

  Bora could think of nothing else in the minutes leading to Grimm’s arrival. He did not reason beyond the act in itself, as if there weren’t a host of possible consequences other than the one he and Emmy had in mind. As if impregnating a girl whose thighs he’d had to coax open just hours earlier (delightful, delightful) were not the most untimely and inconsiderate proposition he’d entertained, aside from fantasizing a marriage with the very much married Mrs Murphy. Eleven was the time they had agreed on, the place being the room a colleague of Emmy’s had moved out of two days earlier, at Marika’s house a block away from one of the Charlottenburg train stations. Bora would go there now and wait for her, were he not carrying the burden he’d been loaded with by Nebe on the one hand and the conspirators on the other, with Salomon’s fate on top of it all.

  At any rate, his fever was gone. There had been a moment during the night when he actually felt it leave his body. As if sexual relief had the side effect of opening a deadlock in the investigation that had kept him physically burning until now. A chink in the oppressive, airtight circuit of Niemeyer’s murder had become a gaping door while he lay fully relaxed at Emmy’s side. How had he not seen the solution? It’d been right in front of him for days.

  It was high time. Risk – of the deadliest kind – was something he was prepared to brave in the next few hours to prove his point. Fantasizing about leaving something of himself in the belly of a willing girl placed the seal on his readiness to die. Lieutenant Colonel Namura would approve.

  He walked out to place a call to the Adlon from a public phone, with enough time to spare to have Grimm find him standing in the lobby with a cigarette in his mouth.

  The inspector looked like someone who’d come bearing news. He immediately claimed the Kripo’s success in negotiating Frau Glantz’s and Gerd Eppner’s release from the Gestapo. Before nightfall, both would return to their Alexanderplatz cells.

  “What about Roland Glantz?” Bora enquired, while Grimm opened the car door for him. The day was already sultry. At this hour, Emmy Pletsch was riding in the crowded tram, with that blonde nape of hers a little damp with sweat, and with her secret. “Eleven o’clock, at Marika’s,” she’d repeated, running up the stairs from the breakfast room. “Don’t forget.” As though he could.

  “What about Glantz?” Bora repeated, censoring his thoughts as if Grimm could read them. At most, as a henchman trained to read men’s faces, he could sense that he’d had sexual intercourse from the different and diminished quality of his tension. But lovemaking was not yet forbidden in the Reich.

  “Not yet,” Grimm admitted, as he wedged himself behind the wheel. This morning he wore a tie that exceeded all others in garishness, with blotches of bright blue and green, and ink-black outlines of tropical palms. “The chief is still working on it. It is our inquiry,” he groused, although it remained to be seen what more they could squeeze out of a man condemned to die.

  Inside the Olympia, the heat was intolerable. Seat and backrest felt like fire, and so did the wheel, judging by the way Grimm’s paws tapped it a couple of times before grasping it firmly.

  “There’s an additional piece of news, Colonel,” Grimm said, even before the usual “Where to?”, and Bora understood that it had to be something significant.

  “Tell me.”

  “It came in just minutes ago. They fished out a body along the Osthafen. Male, twenty-five to thirty years old. No shoes.”


  “Kupinsky?”

  Grimm shrugged to indicate that he didn’t know. “That’s his old neighbourhood. It’d be best to go check.”

  Despite the open car windows, his overheated bulk let out a fat man’s reek. No matter how clean they are, Bora thought, the obese still have that smell, and they’re the first to be conscious of it.

  From Kleist Park they took Göben, heading east. It was a daily trial finding one’s way among closed thoroughfares, recent cave-ins, working crews busy repairing gas and water mains. You forgot how quickly you crossed Berlin on the underground, or skirted its limits on the train without delays or stops.

  Bora didn’t know whether he should want the drowned man to be Kupinsky. The last time he’d seen him, edgy but thankful to be rid of Niemeyer’s letter, he’d judged him ready to sink back into the anonymity of wartime Berlin – though not literally.

  “Was he the sort that was likely to commit suicide?” he asked.

  They were driving past the massive turn-of-the-century gasometer, for the past two years used as an air-raid shelter.

  “Nah,” Grimm said, without moving his eyes from the road. The gauze taped to his head threatened to come loose in the heat. Sweat implacably streamed down his face, so that he had to keep wiping it with the hairy back of his hand. “But you can never tell for sure.”

  Bora nodded. He saw his partner in a different light this morning. He felt he understood him more, and no longer needed to wonder whether he could trust him. Both had experienced Russia, even if in different ways. There, one learned the value of human life, even when that value was nothing.

  From Hasenheide, they turned left onto Pannierstrasse, past the Catholic church and the city warehouses. In front of this or that shop, queueing housewives fanned themselves or quarrelled, and old men sat on benches blandly staring. The river port Grimm and Bora were headed for lay beyond the Treptow bus depot, where long brick buildings stood in various stages of decay. The Spree wharf north of the small public park had been severely hit during the past winter, even though the number of civilian casualties was almost equalled by the loss of lives among the enemy flyers. Here and there, green spaces that had been well kept until the air raid were now overgrown with weeds (poppies, mullein) or had been seeded. In a long, fenced bed, lettuce and graves vied for a place in the sun.

  A police car and an ambulance were visible on the bank. The rank stench of the water and swarming insects welcomed them at the spot where the body had become anchored. A policeman reported that an employee of the nearby rails had discovered it at seven in the morning.

  “Must have been in the water for a couple of days, so it isn’t easy to figure out where he fell in. He had a letter in his pocket.”

  Without betraying himself, Bora felt his heart leap. What if there existed other copies of Niemeyer’s letter to his lawyer, or other dangerous messages? If the dead man was Kupinsky – if Kupinsky carried such letters on his person – it could spell disaster. He furtively looked at Grimm, to see the expression on his face.

  “What sort of letter?” the policeman enquired, impatiently.

  “The water’s nearly destroyed it. It was handwritten.”

  “Where is it?” It was Bora who asked this time, and the policeman handed him a limp sheet of paper which the sun was quickly drying.

  Grimm looked over Bora’s shoulder. “Did you find it inside an envelope?”

  “Yes, but the envelope was open, and there was no address on it.”

  The ink, black veering into brown, had nothing to do with Niemeyer’s distinctive purple. Bora breathed more easily. The text was brief, a few lines, scrawled and illegible. Likely a farewell note or an explanation. Not even the signature was readable.

  “Did he have other papers on him?”

  The policeman led them across a patch of debris-strewn earth to where the body lay.

  “Only a train ticket and a frilly pocket comb.”

  “Could be Kupinsky.” Grimm quickened his step.

  But it wasn’t. It was an emaciated young man in undershirt and trousers held up by an army-style two-pronged belt. His shoes were missing, and so was half of his face.

  “He must have floated against the jetty’s cement beam as he emerged near the bank. There, Colonel, see.”

  Bora wondered whether he was feeling sad. Ever since Spain, and without ceasing to kill as a soldier, he’d been melancholic in the presence of death. Every time, it had seemed a waste to him, if not a tragedy. At least, that’s how it’d been until Stalingrad. In Stalingrad, he had lost count of the dead, and nearly his sense of pity.

  “He’s not the man we’re looking for,” Grimm told the policeman. “Ours is missing three toes on his left foot.”

  “Ah … Well, if he’s a cripple, it stands to reason that he’d kill himself,” the policeman said, unthinking. Bora pretended that nothing was amiss, even though Grimm warned his blundering colleague with a glance.

  In fact, Bora hadn’t taken any offence. He was so relieved that, for now, no other compromising letters were floating around, that the quip came to him spontaneously.

  “Some cripples can swim. Those will have to shoot themselves.”

  *

  Back from the Osthafen, any remaining sense of humour left Grimm and Bora when they punctured a tyre. Grimm worked on it, wheezing like an ox, after removing his shoulder holster and rolling up his shirtsleeves. As if that weren’t enough, they were stuck for nearly an hour on Dieselstrasse, where the Landwehrkanal bent southwards, due to the discovery of incendiary bombs in the debris. Impatiently, Bora left the car to find out more from the working crews and stayed away a good half an hour, during which Grimm saw him wander among the ruins.

  Out of the blue, while they waited with wide-open doors in an absolute absence of shade, Grimm said, “Are you feeling all right, Colonel?”

  “Yes. Why do you ask?”

  “You seem – I don’t know, a bit under the weather.”

  Now, if there was one thing Bora was sure of, it was that he did not look under the weather. It’d take more than a night of sex to make him look peaky the following day. He judged it a gratuitous and spiteful remark, which might have the magical effect on others of making them actually feel tired.

  “I feel just fine,” he snapped back. “And, unlike you, I don’t suffer in the heat.”

  But he probably did look anxious. He couldn’t wait to call Emmy and confirm their eleven o’clock date, and needed to find an excuse to get away from Grimm. As minutes trickled by, he betrayed himself by constantly glancing at the watch on his right wrist. He obviously had a choice between being asked whether he had an appointment somewhere, and openly volunteering the information. In the end, he said, crossly, “I must place a personal call.”

  “Let’s go back to the hotel, then.”

  There was no complicity in Grimm’s tone, nor could there ever be. No solicitude, either. Had Bora told him he needed to buy matches, the policeman would have commented in the same tone of voice.

  “I don’t see how, the road is blocked.”

  “I’ll drive you to the closest underground station.”

  Emmy’s girlfriend lived in the neighbourhood of the clinic on Sophie Charlotte Strasse, at the northern edge of Charlottenburg, so Bora did not care to return to the hotel, which was quite far away from it. “Take me to the nearest working phone booth, please.”

  The girl whom Bora only knew as Marika – a nurse – answered the call. She fretfully told him that she’d tried to reach him at the hotel for the past hour. Emmy’s train had departed earlier than expected.

  “She’ll be leaving about now, Colonel … From the Westend station, that’s where.”

  Bora called up the station. It wasn’t a large one, but he could imagine Emmy being called to the phone over the loudspeaker, in the confusion of people coming and going (“Calling Staff Leader Emma Pletsch …”), and her hastening to a phone where she could talk to him.

  At the other end of the line
, her voice was so broken with tears that he could barely make out what she was saying. He understood that her train would move out at any moment; her trunk was on board already, there was no time.

  “Oh, Emmy. I’m very sorry, Emmy.”

  They were the same words he had spoken in the morning, only now he meant them.

  “Don’t forget me,” she sobbed, and hung up. The girl in uniform, whom he wasn’t supposed to like, the awkward girl with the strange eyes who was as irrationally ready to have a child as he was, was leaving Berlin for God knows where. I’ll never see her again, Bora told himself, full of sorrow. And we will both forget last night, and each other.

  Berlin looked lonelier and emptier; death felt closer than it had five minutes ago.

  *

  He was despondent, but didn’t want Grimm to see him like that. It took him a few stormy minutes to regain his inscrutable demeanour, but he knew himself all too well – sexual frustration had already played tricks on him (in Poland and Brittany, and elsewhere), and the aggression he normally kept under control was rising dangerously close to the surface. He could say the wrong thing, or do something foolish. What kept him lucid was wondering if Emmy had been spirited away from Berlin because the coup was imminent. A national alert could be declared at any time, and he would be caught in the bloody repression to come, regardless of whether the coup was a success or failure. After all, Salomon was still footloose, and was threatening to squeal.

  In his flustered state, he switched from thinking At this moment, I should be making a son with that girl, to A catastrophe could happen any moment now. Forget Emmy Pletsch. Still, Emmy Pletsch was foremost in his mind; how she must be feeling, boarding the train without seeing him again. She’ll find another. If that’s what she wants, another man to make a son with, she is sure to find him. But it could have been the two of us. Against all reason, Emmy and I could have been each other’s life.