City of Shadows

by Ariana Franklin

  “No.”

  “Well, who is she? What’s she doing here?” She strode around Nick’s desk and seated herself in his chair. “I shall stay. Somebody has to keep an eye on things.”

  “For God’s sake, Olga . . .” Usually Esther was prepared to put up with a one-sided war in which she was the noncombatant—every organization had its Olga and even needed one—but she was tired, and the thought of spending the rest of the night catering to the woman’s self-importance by feeding her curiosity was intolerable. “This is a nightclub, not a bloody convent. Go home.”

  Boris came in, and Olga appealed to him. “Somebody responsible must stay, Boris. Esther brings a strange woman into the office—how do we know what she may do?”

  Boris’s eyes met Esther’s over Olga’s head. “Nick’s business, not ours,” he said. He went to the safe and began cramming in the night’s receipts—inflation was resulting in so much paper currency that they’d soon need an extra safe to contain it. He straightened up. “Get along home now, Olga.” He put his hand under the woman’s armpits, raised her gently, and steered her to the door.

  “But, Boris, do you know about this?”

  “We don’t need to. Esther’s in charge. Off you go.”

  Olga went, furious.

  Boris said, “Thinks she owns the place. Doesn’t own much else, I guess.”

  “I know. Thank you, Boris.”

  “You all right now? I’ll lock up, then. Good night.” He went downstairs.

  Theo was making a pillow of his jacket on the baccarat table in the gaming room.

  “I’m sorry about this, Theo.”

  “I slept on worse.”

  They all had. There probably wasn’t one among the émigrés who hadn’t bedded down on pine needles or the floor of a truck, a train compartment, or a barn during the flight from Russia—and they thought themselves lucky it wasn’t a Bolshevik execution cell.

  She left the gaming room doors open so that she could call him if necessary and went through her office into Nick’s. Anna’s eyes were still eerily half open, but her breathing was quieter. Esther took off her coat, tucked it around the girl, and switched off the light, relying on the dim glow from the window overlooking the club floor.

  For a while she played Goldilocks, trying to emulate Theo and stretching out on Nick’s desk—but that was too uncomfortable. So was sitting in his chair and putting her legs up on the desk. Eventually she dragged the chair to the window and rested her ankles on its low sill.

  Better, though not much.

  She was tired. Below, light from the entrance hall spilled over the dance floor, leaving the rest of the great room in shadow. Don’t think about Russia. ...But Kandinsky and Nick had done their work well, and the club became a silent, darkened forest through which the great, brown bear lumbered in its search for berries. Her father had made her a present of a cub—“Ursus arctos,” he’d said. “A little Ursus arctos for my little girl”—and taken it away when it got too big. Don’t think, don’t remember....She could almost smell the scent of pine trees trapped in snow.... Clara Peuthert capered naked in the grove playing panpipes to a bear....

  Which had moved.

  Her eyelids went up. One of Nick’s bears, second from the left across the dance floor, was swelling to twice its size.

  IT BECAME TWO. One of it stepped down from its plinth and began padding across the floor toward the foyer. It had something in one of its paws; everything else about the thing absorbed light, but this flashed back a gleam from the foyer chandeliers—a blade.

  Slowly, very slowly, keeping the rest of her body still, Esther’s hand searched for the telephone on Nick’s desk, felt it, lifted the receiver, and found it dead. The receptionist had shut down all the lines except for the one to the switchboard behind the desk in the entrance hall.

  Where the thing below was heading. It would gain the stairs, climb them. It would come in here, where the safe was, sniffing for money.

  She was so frightened she almost had to lift her legs off the sill by hand; they’d frozen.

  Moving fast, she crossed to the gaming room door and hissed: “Theo.” She switched on the light. All the tables were empty. Oh, Christ, oh, God. He wasn’t there.

  She whipped back across the corridor into the office and shook Anna’s shoulder. “Get up, get up, there’s somebody coming.” Her breath was a wisp of sound. Anna didn’t move.

  Lock the doors. She could lock herself and Anna in. But it was big, a big bear, and the doors were flimsy—it would break them down. She couldn’t cower in here waiting for it to burst in on them, its arms wide, blade ready to strike.

  Esther locked the door to Nick’s office and went out of her own, locking that door behind her.

  Movement was good, better. She stood at the top of the stairs and shouted: “Theo!” Then, desperately, added, “Boris, Vassily, Pietr, come here, boys. There’s an intruder downstairs.” Maybe that would frighten him off.

  She heard her voice evaporate into silence.

  Oh, shit, oh, God, there was just her and it.

  It was at the bottom of the staircase. It was coming up. Again a sliver of metal caught the light.

  In brain-melting, bladder-weakening terror, she could have begged it,

  Don’t worry about me, I’ll hide. Break into the office, take what you want.

  But Anna was in the office.

  As it was, she retreated back and back, out of sight, along the curving corridor, past the office, past the empty gaming room, to the door at the end, a broom closet, somewhere to crawl into, some small space where she couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, anywhere that would block out the ascending shadow and the soft touch of shoes on the stair carpet.

  Back, back until her spine encountered the door of the closet. Still facing outward, she felt behind her and turned the handle. She moved out a little so that its door could open enough to let her in.

  Galvanized iron buckets came clattering out, brooms, mops, jangling. The noise clanged through the silent building like lepers’ bells announcing, I am here.

  It released her. Suddenly she was furious. How dare he? She, Esther, had faced greater terror than this one burglar, whatever he was—terror administered by experts. And survived it.

  She looked down at the tangle of buckets and implements at her feet, kicked one of the buckets out of the way, picked up a broom, held it like a spear and ran with it, shrieking, toward the stairs.

  The man was lower down the staircase than she’d estimated—later she thought the clatter had made him pause—so that the broom caught him in the head rather than the body.

  She saw the knife flash upward as the brush went into his face. He was knocked back, but the other hand clutched onto the rail so that he hung in a cruciform across the banister, the knife-hand arm crooked across one eye where the bristles had gone in.

  She began going down the stairs, jabbing to keep him off as if at a giant spider. He was quick and hideously strong; he snatched at the broom and jerked her high off her feet in a parabola that sent her almost to the bottom of the staircase. As she landed, her left shoe was caught in an iron curlicue that sliced the skin off her ankle and left her sprawled with her feet four steps up and the back of her head on the hall floor. Breath went out of her in a whoomph. The pain was electric.

  He was coming down the stairs, slowly, light flickering on the knife as his fist wiped his eyes.

  She tried to hump her body backward, struggling to get away from him, but her foot was stuck in the ironwork of the banister and she couldn’t dislodge it.

  From somewhere to her right came the glorious sound of a lavatory flushing.

  “Theo.”

  “Esther?” The bouncer came running to stand over her, unaware of the man staring down at him.

  “Look out.”

  Bodies clashed together. She was being trampled by feet, and then she wasn’t. Twisting her head, she glimpsed a shadow flip away toward the doors with Theo limping after it, holding
his arm.

  There was a crash of breaking glass.

  She lost interest.

  AS THE POLICE car entered Potsdamer Platz, its driver saw a figure dash across the road from one of the nightclubs into an alley, followed by another—this one staggering.

  He nudged his passenger. “Trouble at the Green Hat, boss. Fella chasing another fella.”

  Inspector Schmidt opened his eyes. “Fuck it,” he said.

  “Fella doing the chasing, he’s bleeding, boss.”

  “Fuck it.”

  “Fuck it we don’t take no notice?” Sergeant Ritte asked hopefully. “Or fuck it we got to stop and deal with it?”

  “Fuck it, fuck it.” Schmidt was tired, they were both tired. A riot on the Western Docks between strikers and the Brownshirts brought in to deal with them had resulted in two deaths. He and Willi had been up all night trying to take statements from wounded and hostile men of both Left and Right.

  He wanted to get home to his wife, Willi wanted to get home to his, and both happy returns must be delayed until they’d made their report at headquarters.

  Bloody Saturday nights. You’d think there was enough blood on the bloody streets without some drunk who hadn’t paid his bill cutting his way out of a bloody nightclub. And now it was Sunday bloody morning.

  But he and Willi were the bloody police, fuck it. This was their job.

  By the time Willi had parked and switched off the engine, the absconder was out of sight with no chance of their catching him—the alley he’d disappeared into was too narrow for a car. The man who’d chased him was leaning against the wall, bleeding heavily, and the small crowd that popped up like bloody fungi on every crime scene was clustering on the pavement. Where did they come from? Café girls, mostly, from the look of them, on their way home, all except for a fancy-looking lounge lizard in white tie and tails who was rapping out questions to the injured man in a foreign language.

  “Call an ambulance, Willi.”

  The frontage of the Green Hat glowed like a diamond from the setting of its glass doors, one of which had a man-size hole in it.

  Willi stepped smartly through the hole, looking around for a telephone—an action that brought White Tie running. “What’s that man doing in my club?”

  “We’re the police, sir. I’m Inspector Schmidt. My sergeant is phoning for help for that gentleman.”

  “Can’t you use a street phone? He’s my bouncer. I look after him. No need for police.”

  “It appears there is, sir.” Schmidt walked to where the bouncer was sliding down the wall onto the pavement. He was in shirtsleeves, and blood was seeping heavily out of a stab wound in his left arm.

  Schmidt knelt down, feeling in his top pocket for the crisp white handkerchief that Hannelore put into it every morning and applied it to the wound. “You’ll be all right, my son. It didn’t touch the artery. We’re going to get you to the hospital. What happened?”

  Flat brown eyes stared expressionlessly back at him.

  “Theo don’t . . . doesn’t speak German,” White Tie said, still displaying less anxiety about his employee than about the fact that a policeman was wandering loose inside his club.

  Schmidt looked up at the women around and chose a couple. “Madam, if you’d hold this man’s arm up in the air, that’s right. And you, madam, press your hand here, against my handkerchief, and keep pressing. Bit harder. Keep pressing. The ambulance will be here soon. Excellent. Thank you.”

  He stood up. “And you, sir, are?”

  “Prince Nikolai Potrovskov, owner of the Green Hat.”

  Russian lounge lizard. Schmidt said, “What happened?”

  “I don’t know. I just arrive. I have been out all night. Maybe the club is closing when this clumsy fellow step through the glass door. Accident.”

  “I don’t think so, sir. He’s been stabbed, and my sergeant saw a man running off. We’d better investigate. If you would lead the way . . .” He gestured courteously toward the club. When the man still hesitated, he stopped being polite. “Get in there.” For all this bastard knew, his club was littered with dead.

  A key was produced, and they crunched through broken glass.

  Like bloody Versailles, Schmidt thought. Nightclubs weren’t his line; the Vice boys usually dealt with them. With its chandeliers and mirrors and indefinable, expensive perfume, this one was a playground for the very rich—a fact that didn’t endear it to him.

  Willi was coming out of a cubbyhole behind the reception desk. “On its way,” he said.

  Schmidt walked through into the club proper. Potrovskov switched on lights and followed him. “What I tell you? Nothing here, no trouble.” Watching Schmidt eyeing some splintered wood in the middle of the floor, he said, “So they break a chair or two. The von Schwerin boys, maybe, having fun. You know Count von Schwerin? Nice man, important. Lot of important people come here, all my friends. Minister of interior, good pal of mine ...chief of police . . .”

  Names buzzed past Schmidt’s ears like warning shots as he peered into the kitchen and came out again. He ignored them. Something had happened in this club, and he was going to find out what it was even if Archangel bloody Gabriel was a regular.

  He toured the dance floor. He didn’t think much of the wall paintings—he wasn’t one for modern art—but he liked the bears.

  From the entrance hall, Willi shouted, “Over here, Inspector!”

  He was pointing toward the stairs, where one of the newel posts had hidden the woman standing silently against it.

  Schmidt’s first sight of Esther Solomonova was almost immediately blocked by Potrovskov, who rushed over to her.

  There was an exchange of Russian.

  “What the hell happened? Can you hear me, Esther? What happened?”

  “A man. He had a knife. He would have killed me—oh, Jesus, he was going to kill me. Theo ...is Theo all right?”

  “Where’s Anna now? Quick, these bastards are police.”

  “In your office. Asleep. I locked her in.”

  “She’s not here. You hear me, Esther? You never heard of her.”

  “I’d prefer it if you both spoke German, sir,” Schmidt said. “Does she speak German?”

  “My secretary, Esther Solomonova. It was a break-in. The man got away with completely nothing.”

  “Perhaps she could tell me herself, sir.”

  Reluctantly, Potrovskov allowed himself to be led away by Willi. The woman’s eyes followed him.

  God, she’s lovely, Schmidt thought.

  Then she turned toward him, and he saw the other side of her face. The worst thing about it was that she didn’t mind if he flinched—which he didn’t; he’d seen worse in the war.

  The scar ran from the outside of her left eyebrow across the cheek almost to the corner of her mouth. No neat Heidelburg dueling scar this; somebody’d taken an ax or a bayonet to her, and somebody else had cobbled the wound together and done it badly. In between the gathers made by rough sutures, the flesh had been allowed to gape. Stretched pale patches showed where the skin had struggled to grow back.

  She demonstrated none of the wary expectancy that most disfigured people did when meeting someone for the first time. But she was in shock; he recognized it. Time would be moving erratically for her, some things happening fast, others extending beyond normal. She’d be very cold without realizing it. Probably incoherent.

  “Frau Solomonova?”

  “Fräulein,” she said—and he revised his opinion about her coherence.

  He took off his jacket and put it around her shoulders. “Let’s sit down before you fall down, shall we?”

  She nodded, and he held his hand under her elbow to ease her onto a step. She winced.

  He sat down beside her. “Are you hurt?”

  “A bit. Not badly.”

  “What happened?”

  “Theo,” she said. “Is Theo all right?”

  So somebody cares, Schmidt thought. “He’ll need stitches, but he’ll recover. Tell m
e what happened.”

  “There was a man. He must have got in when the club was closing and hidden behind one of the bears. When everybody’d gone, he came out.. . .”

  Her account was lucid and cool—though her hands began shaking when she described seeing the bear spawn.

  She’d called for the bouncer, she said, who turned out to have been in the lavatory. She’d shouted for nonexistent help, hoping to scare the man off by making him think the club was populated. After panicking she’d fetched a broom and gone for the man as he climbed the stairs. These stairs. He’d had a knife. The two of them had tussled, the man had thrown her down the staircase, the bouncer had come out of the lavatory. Another tussle, another glimpse of the knife, the man went off, followed by the bouncer, the crash of breaking glass . . . “And then I think I lost consciousness for a bit.”

  No self-pity, he thought. She’d been through the wars before, had Fräulein Solomonova.

  “Can you describe the man?”

  “Big,” she said. “Tall. Not fat but . . . huge somehow. Fairish, I think. The light was bad.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “No.” Her hands began to shake so badly she stuffed them between her knees. “He was silent.”

  “Would you recognize him again?”

  She thought about it. “I don’t know.” She turned to look at him. “How did he get out? The doors were locked.”

  “Crashed through them. If it’s any consolation, he’s probably bleeding more than Theo.”

  “Good,” she said, and tried to smile.

  Schmidt got up and walked over to Potrovskov and Willi. “Sergeant, get back to headquarters—I’ll walk. Alert hospitals and doctors for a big man coming in with cuts.”

  Potrovskov said, “Can I use my own phone now? We got to get that glass mended quick.”