“How’d it go?”
“Awful.” She took off her hat. “Boris was crying, everybody was.”
“Do they know anything?”
“No.” She’d found all Nick’s staff gathered at the club, but the Green Hat wouldn’t open tonight, partly out of respect for its late owner but mostly because, from Boris the manager down to the lowliest cigarette girl, the staff was too devastated by his death to function. Nick had underpaid them, shouted at them, slept with and then abandoned quite a few, but one and all wept for him as they got drunk on his vodka.
“To Prince Nick,” Boris said, sobbing, throwing another glass into the Hat’s huge and artificial fireplace. “No one fucking like him, Esther. Couldn’t beat him. Remember how he palmed an ace at poker? Beautiful it was, beautiful. To Nick.”
“To Nick.” Her glass shattered. “What was he doing in Munich, Boris?”
“ ’Zactly. What was he doing there?” He tottered toward her, steadying himself on her shoulder. “ ‘I’m off to make a killing, Boris,’ he said. ‘We’re going to have good days from a bad man.’ That’s what he said, ‘good days from a bad man.’ I told him, I said, ‘Nick,’ I said, ‘Little Father, don’t you have anything to do with bad men.’ He just laughed, you know the way he did. ‘Boris,’ he said, ‘Boris, my trusted friend, any fish is good if it’s on a hook. That’s what my father, Prince Wladislaw, told me.’ Bless him.” Boris wiped his eyes on Esther’s sleeve. “He never knew his father. Lying to the last, he was, may he join the holy martyrs.”
“Why on earth would anyone kill him?”
“They got husbands in Munich, Esther, lots of husbands, thousands, thousands Bavarian bastards. Martyred by a fucking husband, bless him.”
“Is Vassily here?”
“Vassily? No, Vassily found a boyfriend and happiness and fucked off to America. Why?”
“He told Nick something. I think that’s why Nick went to Munich.”
She’d gone upstairs to the office. His diary told her nothing except that by flying to Munich, Nick had missed a dentist’s appointment, a Grand Lodge meeting, a summons to his bank, and a tryst with someone called Wanda (“Send orchids”).
She gave up the search among his papers; he’d always kept details of his more nefarious activities in his head. There was no correspondence with anyone in Munich.
You went after him, didn’t you? You found something out, somebody said something. A bit of blackmail, Nick? Oh, Jesus, why does it hurt so badly? You stupid, stupid, second-rate crook, why have you taken so much of me with you?
The silence became unbearable, and she’d gone downstairs to smash more glasses to his memory before she left.
Marlene was calling again from the bathroom.
“What?”
“A man phoned for you.”
“Who was it?”
“Didn’t say, dear. The bastard woke me up. Nice voice. Says he’s coming around at seven.”
Oh, God, no. She was too tired for visitors.
All at once she was on her feet. Nine years. She’d been expecting him for nine years. She looked at her watch. Half past six.
“Marlene.”
“What, dear?”
She had to make him pay for those nine years, but she had to look her best to do it. “Get out of that goddamn bathroom.”
SHE OPENED THE door and looked at him without surprise, as if she’d been expecting him. There was no greeting. She just said, “Do you think it was Natalya’s killer?”
“Yes.”
“So do I. Come in.”
She’d changed quite a bit. She’d had something done about the scar—it was still there, but not so prominent, less a badly mended wound, more a plain scar. Her bouncy hair had been beautifully cut. Her ears were studded with plain gold disks, matching the buttons of her dress. She looked groomed, svelte—he supposed, fashionable.
She led him into the living room. Like her, it had become very modern, very smart. The furniture was streamlined, and instead of being gathered around a stove—there was no stove, just white radiators—it stood back to permit a centerpiece of an enormous round rug in geometric patterns of cream and red on which stood a similarly round glass table with some art books stacked on its top.
The walls were hung with huge and arresting photographs; one of them—a portrait of Potrovskov—was lit by a globular lamp placed below it. At the other end of the room, she’d installed French doors where the window over the courtyard had been, and they were open onto a small balcony, letting in the last of the July light and the mixed smells of summer and city.
Snatches of song in a contented baritone, such as a man emits when he’s dressing, came from the room he remembered as Natalya’s. She didn’t comment on it.
He felt rabid contempt. No need to offer consolation on Potrovskov’s death, then; the poor bastard had already been swapped for somebody else. Not that he’d been about to sympathize; he’d disliked condolences from people who hadn’t cared about Hannelore—and he sure as hell hadn’t cared about Potrovskov.
“Cocktail?”
“Beer if you’ve got it. You never moved, then?”
“No, I stayed to annoy Frau Schinkel. The place suits me.” No need to tell him that one of the reasons she’d stayed was so that he would find her again.
He was given a beer and a chair. She perched on the table as if their interview were to be short.
“I won’t stay long,” he said. “I came to see if Potrovskov told you why he was going to Munich. Did he say who he was going to meet there?”
“No.”
“Oh.”
So that’s that, Esther thought. See you in another nine years. Why else would he have come? Death was his business.
He’d changed; the gentleness she remembered had gone, presumably with the loss of his wife. She’d seen his name in connection with the murders in Düsseldorf when they’d been headline news—“Inspector Schmidt of the Berlin police, who is in charge of the case”—and had wondered at the time what that involvement would do to somebody. It wasn’t that he’d aged, she thought, more that he’d set in concrete, thinner but somehow heavier, like a man who’d built an inward bulwark against intruders. He’d come trailing ghosts: Natalya, his wife, the dead of Düsseldorf. And angry, so angry.
Well, if he was nothing else, he was a policeman, and there was a killer to be caught. She said, “About Nick. He mentioned the Sturmabteilung and Munich in the same breath.”
He watched her as she related the conversation she’d had with Potrovskov, then the one with the Green Hat’s manager. She was being brisk about it, efficient. Couldn’t wait to get rid of him before her man emerged from the bedroom.
She said, “He used the same phrase to both Boris and me. He was going to ‘make a killing.’ ” She sneered, and he saw how badly hurt she was. “There’s irony for you.”
“Blackmail?”
“I imagine so. When I told him you’d thought the man was SA, it seemed to confirm something for him. He knows a lot of Nazis.” Her fist clenched. “I should have kept on asking. I . . .”
A bee had come into the room and was blundering. She urged it toward the balcony, closing the French doors behind it. She hung on to the door for a moment, her back to him. “Stupid,” she said. “Stupid. He was so stupid.”
From the other room came a spirited burst of “What Is This Thing Called Love” in English.
He saw the shake of her head. She turned around, came back, and stood in front of him. “All right,” she said. “What are the police doing about it?”
“Not much. No clues. In Munich they think it’s a random killing.”
“But you don’t.”
“No.” He gave her his reasons; he supposed she had the right to know.
“All right,” she said again. “What are you going to do about it?”
“Officially? Nothing. I’ve been transferred to a new department.”
“And unofficially?”
He said, “He was always going to ki
ll again if anybody got too close. That’s why I didn’t want you meddling in the case.”
“Oh, how nice,” she said brightly. “You’ve been worrying about me for nine years. You should have said.”
He nearly shouted, I was keeping you safe, woman. Hannelore died because I was getting too close, because she was there, something to be smashed because I valued it. He’d ensured Solomonova’s safety by staying away from her.
“This funny thing called love,” sang the singer.
He said, “They won’t let me touch the case. I reacted badly when he killed my wife.” He wanted to punish her with it.
“He killed her? He killed her?”
“I’d tracked him to the SA. I was on his trail. He pushed her down the stairs. A warning.” He spoke in staccato to get it over with. “And it worked. I was taken off the case. They kept me busy with other murders. There was no proof anyway. But it was him. She was pregnant.”
Her shoulders slumped. “I didn’t know.” After a while she got up and fetched him another beer. She pushed a cigarette box toward him, and a table lighter. “Do you want something to eat? An omelette? I’m good at omelettes.”
“No, thank you.” Solicitude to the bereaved. Why the hell had he told her?
She went into the kitchen and made him one anyway; she had to do something for him.
He sipped his beer, looking at the portrait of Potrovskov, wondering what her new man was like, all at once too tired to care.
She came back with the omelette and set the tray on his lap. “Eat.” Very Jewish. She watched every mouthful and saw some energy come back. “You’re going after him on your own, I imagine,” she said.
“Yep.” He told her about R.G. of Munich. He wanted more information from her, and the only way to get it was to give it.
“So all we’ve got to do is go through the Munich telephone directory for men with the initials R.G.,” she said.
“That’s it.”
“Well, I’ve got a contribution.” She told him about Franziska Schanskowska. “I’m pretty sure that’s Anna’s real name. When she signed the adoption papers at the Elizabeth Hospital, she had to sign them in the name under which she’d given birth—and she’d had the baby in Poland. The name wasn’t in the hospital records as such; I was lucky to find someone in the almoner’s office who’d made a mental note of it. I told Inspector Bolle at the time, but he didn’t seem to think it was relevant.”
Parroting her, he said, “So all I’ve got to do is search through old Polish telephone directories and see if a Franziska Schanskowska was ever listed.”
“We,” she said. “We’ve got to search.”
“No.”
Her head came up. “I’m involved in this. He’s killed two people I care about, three when you count Olga. He’s picking us off. He’s got to be finished. He’s Argus—he’s got eyes everywhere. How do I know he’s not out there now, watching us?” She got up and went to the windows, opening them wider. “I can’t go on like this. He’s got to be gotten rid of. He’s invisible, but I can smell him; he stinks of death. Sometimes I think I’ve never known anything else.”
His anger was almost uncontrollable. “He’s not Argus. He’s not superhuman, for Christ’s sake. He’s just another fucking killer. He kills when he’s frightened. He stinks because he stinks. And I can get him.”
They heard the man in the bedroom call, “Anything up, sweetie?”
“Nothing, lovie,” Esther called back. She gathered herself together. To Schmidt she said, “I’m going to make some coffee.”
She went into the kitchen. Does he think it’s my fault? I’m alive and his wife’s dead? I’m sorry, I’m sorry. But I can’t take that on; I gave up feeling guilty just for surviving a long time ago.
He’d done one thing, though: he’d diminished the killer for her. Nick’s death had sent the shadow looming over her head again, and she’d cowered under it, helpless. Schmidt had cut it down to size. The killer wasn’t some arbitrary force of nature; he had initials, weaknesses, he was afraid. He was gettable.
When she came back with the coffee, Schmidt said more quietly, “He’s not out there. He’s in Munich and what he’s got is a damn good spy network—two spy networks. He’s a homosexual—at least I think he is, because he’s under Röhm’s protection—and he’s a Nazi.”
“Which makes him almost universal.”
“No,” Schmidt said, “it doesn’t. It gives him access to two societies who’ll go to considerable lengths to protect their own. Röhm knows that our man killed Natalya because I told him, and he doesn’t care—it was Röhm who set him onto me. He’s not all-powerful, he’s just very well-informed. He’s like a rat—when he’s threatened, he kills. So far he’s gotten away with it, but sooner or later he’ll make a mistake.”
“But why? Why does he kill? This isn’t one of your random murderers. This man’s selective.”
“Ask your Anna Anderson,” he said. “She knows. She was his first victim. He chucked her in the canal, and when that failed, he came after her again. She knows whatever it is he wants to keep quiet; she’s got something on him that even the Nazis wouldn’t tolerate. Maybe he once spoke slightingly of Hitler’s mustache. If she’s Franziska Schanskowska, whatever-it-was happened when she was Franziska Schanskowska. And if she’s Franziska Schanskowska, she can’t expose our friend without admitting that she’s not Anastasia.” He realized he was pounding on the table, and stopped.
“Yes,” she said quietly, “I’d worked that out.”
“They’re locked together,” he said. “He knows that by now. He won’t try for her again, only for anyone getting too close.” He added, “Or their wives.”
“Don’t blame Anna,” she said quickly. “She doesn’t calculate like that. In her mind she is Anastasia; her fear of him is ...well, a sort of residue from her past, a reasonless terror that she doesn’t analyze. It’s not her fault.”
Of course it’s her fucking fault, he thought. The woman’s a carrier infecting anyone she comes in contact with. She’s Typhoid Mary.
Instead he said, “Anyway, she’s been safe enough these last nine years—so have you, and you’ll oblige me by keeping it like that and staying out of it. Just get on with whatever you’re doing.”
He was making her as furious as he was. “If you don’t want my help, why the hell are you here?”
“I told you. To find out if you knew why Potrovskov went to Munich.”
“Well, I don’t.”
He shrugged. “In which case I’ll drink my coffee and be on my way.”
“By all means.”
“You do something to me.” Natalya’s door was thrown open, and a man came out. Six foot two in high heels with the build of a coal heaver, scarlet lips, platinum hair, and a smart, short-skirted two-piece dress in pink velvet. “Oh,” he said, then fluttered his lashes. “Ooh-er.”
“Inspector, this is Marlene Leicester,” Esther said. “Marlene, this is Inspector Schmidt of the Berlin police.”
“So this is the famous Schmidt, is it?” Marlene said. He put out a manicured hand. “How do you do, darling. And little me off to work, what a shame. Well . . . ” He looked from Esther to Schmidt and back again. “I sense atmosphere, so I’ll leave you two alone. But you, my dear inspector, can inspect me anytime.” He pranced off, taking most of the ghosts with him.
Esther said tenderly, “She’s not always like that. She just tends to show off when she meets new people.”
Schmidt felt anger seeping away like bad weather, leaving a laundered blue sky under which he could have slept for a week. A homosexual transvestite, bless her. That’s all right, then. He tried to show interest. “How did you acquire her?”
“She does an act at the Pink Parasol—it was one of Nick’s clubs in the old days. Her landlord turned her out. I was glad of her company and her rent. Funnily enough, Frau Schinkel adores Marlene. It’s me she can’t stand. Give her a transvestite Aryan over a heterosexual Jew any day. And Marlene�
�s aristocratic, an English milord’s son, German mother. Went to Eton, everything. She was just born into the wrong body. Berlin’s been heaven for her.” She squinted at him. “She manages to shock most people.”
“Not me,” he said sleepily.
“I know. Why not?”
He roused himself. “Oh, Hanover and Düsseldorf. Murderers who were freaks of nature, mental mutants. When you’ve been wading through atrocity for nine years, you’re grateful for every human quirk that doesn’t involve killing somebody.” He yawned. “Anyway, in the Haarmann case kids died because their parents didn’t like to admit that their son was homosexual.”
He thought, Marlene’s all right by me. I love her. “I’d better be going,” he said.
And if he hadn’t looked so damn tired, she’d have let him. She was still angry; he’d got what clues she could give him—it was all he’d come for. But apparently the meal had done him in; with his legs stretched out and his head resting against the back of her most comfortable chair, his eyes kept narrowing and then opening as he tried to remain awake.
She lunged to take the coffee cup from his hand before it dropped.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Where are you staying?”
“I don’t know. I only got in from Düsseldorf today.”
She clicked her tongue at the inefficiency. “There’s Marlene’s room. She won’t be back until the morning.” She told herself she’d have done as much for a dog.
She pointed him in the right direction and went off to find a pair of Nick’s pajamas that were still in a drawer somewhere, but by the time she got back with them, he’d fallen onto Marlene’s bed and was asleep.
Strange, strange man, she thought. One minute I was something the cat threw up, and the next I wasn’t.
Nine years, she thought. She stood looking down at him for a moment, replaying their conversation in her head. Good God, she thought, that’s why.
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