City of Shadows

by Ariana Franklin

  It was a warm night for October, but Esther sat at her window watching it turn into day, wrapped in a blanket because she was so cold.

  STRETCHING INTERDEPARTMENTAL COOPERATION to the limit, Willi managed to stay on the case with him. “Finding that car is Traffic business,” he said.

  “Anastasia case,” he said when Schmidt had explained the circumstance. “Like old times. Um, Bismarck Allee . . . you living there now, boss?”

  “Any objection?”

  “I ain’t, no. But I was thinking ...in view of the lady’s, um . . .”

  “She’s a Jew, Willi. You can say it.”

  “I’m not saying anything. It’s just that . . . our Major Diels . . .” He jerked his thumb in the direction of Department 1A. “Might be wiser to give a different address, for every day, like. They reckon he’s got every Yi— Jew in the city on file.”

  “Major Diels can go fuck himself.”

  The Silver Arrow had been seen heading west. It had passed along Bismarckstrasse, Kaiser Damm, and onto Heerstrasse, where a police car had pursued it because it was going too fast but had lost the chase to the Mercedes’s superior speed. The police driver thought it might have turned left into Grünewald Forest; he’d taken its number, though. A Reichstag deputy had reported it stolen.

  Just after dawn a foot patrolman on the banks of Havel reported having seen a silver car going over the bridge leading to Schwanenwerder; he’d been too far off to tell the make or license plate, but he’d noticed it because it had driven only a little way onto the island before turning around and speeding off again.

  Almost immediately there came another report: the car had been found abandoned near Tempelhof Airport.

  “Airport, boss?” Willi asked as they set out.

  “No,” Schmidt said, “Schwanenwerder. That’s where he’s dumped the body.”

  “How do you reckon that?”

  “I’m getting to know him.” And he’s getting to know me.

  Autumn was extending itself in the latest and longest Indian summer Berlin had known for years. Tapestry-colored leaves still clung to the trees of villas that became bigger and more widely spaced as Willi drove westward.

  “Schwanenwerder,” he said. “Yid country, ain’t it? Oh, sorry.”

  “It’s all right. It is Yid country,” Schmidt said. “Exclusively and exclusive.” Once inhabited only by rabbits and landscape painters, it was now home to some of Berlin’s wealthiest Jews, who’d built mansions on it. “It’s our man’s little joke.”

  “Their joke, boss. There was two of them took the homo out of that club.”

  “He’s getting help. And he’s getting careless.” Literally without care, he thought. The more power the Nazis got, the more R.G. gained confidence that he was untouchable.

  The radio crackled the car’s call sign. “To Inspector Ritte. Body found on Schwanenwerder.”

  Willi clucked with admiration and stepped harder on the pedal. “On our way.”

  They had to slow down through Grünewald behind horses and riders out for a morning canter and parties of young men and women with picnic hampers going out to the lake for a swim while the weather lasted.

  “Had my first girl here,” Willi said lovingly. “Bivouacking with the Wandervogel, I was. Getting back to nature, the leader called it. And a camp of female Wandervogel not far away. Lotte, she was called. Never forgotten her. We got back to nature under the trees, all right, her and me.” He sighed.

  Schmidt nodded, trying to tell himself that there was still health in the world. He thought of the forest vibrating with Berlin slums’ randy adolescents under the Grünewald trees, the only beauty and greenery available to them. Probably still was, except he couldn’t imagine Fascist youth having beautiful moments.

  He’d had a girl here himself, though she wasn’t his first. Trudi Menzel, bless her. He’d borrowed a bicycle so he could bring her here, and she’d sat on the handlebars all the way, his chin resting on her plump shoulder while he pedaled, getting hotter and hotter and more and more lustful. He remembered the effect of sun coming through the leaves onto Trudi’s skin. Like Willi said, beautiful.

  They were running past Havel now, its water dotted with little sailboats. Willi wrenched the steering wheel to the right, and they were over the bridge onto the island.

  Somebody’d hung up a piece of canvas, a sail from the look of it, between two trees at the lake’s edge, and a policeman in a skiff had stationed himself on the water itself to keep boat-owning onlookers away from what lay in between.

  Some uniforms were having a smoke nearby and tossed the butts away as the car drew up. One of them saluted and came forward.

  “Was it you found him?” Schmidt asked.

  “Yes, sir. It was me saw the car, sir, and so I come over to have a look. Seems like they tried to chuck the body in the water, but I reckon it got caught on a tree root as it rolled down the bank.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Baum, sir.”

  “Well done, Baum. Is Dr. Pieck here?”

  Baum wiped his hand across his mouth. “Just arrived, sir. Examining now. We caught him before he left home.” The police surgeon lived nearby in Wannsee.

  “Is that your vomit?” Schmidt pointed to a small heap by one of the trees.

  Baum nodded. “Sorry, sir. Thought I’d seen everything, sir, but this . . .”

  “Does you credit,” Schmidt said. He walked around the canvas. Kneeling by the body, the police surgeon nodded to him and sat back so that he could see better. His assistant stood by, looking over the lake.

  They’d left Marlene clothed, which he hadn’t expected, but had ripped the long, slinky, pink satin gown she’d worn for her act from neckline down to the mess at her crotch, exposing the large, flesh-colored falsies with which she’d padded its bust, a shaved chest, and a hairy belly, all now crusted with blood from her cut throat, where flesh gaped open on the left side. Presumably agony and then rigor mortis had kept her teeth clamped on the genitalia that had been stuffed into her mouth, so that, unwillingly, irresistibly, Schmidt was reminded of a dog carrying some smaller animal’s entrails to its master.

  Her right hand lay stretched out where the tree root had interrupted her body’s roll, and water was gently lapping against long, red fingernails.

  A coot came bobbing out of the reeds and set off farther down the lake. A slight southerly breeze brought the shrieks of the bathers from the Wannsee beaches.

  “What’s that across the head?” Schmidt asked.

  “Yes, I had difficulty with that,” Dr. Pieck said. He stood up, brushing his knees. “Done with the same knife that severed the carotid artery, and he’d have been struggling at the time, of course, but you can just make out letters.” He addressed the corpse: “Somebody carved the word ‘filth’ into your poor, bald head, didn’t they?”

  “Struggling?”

  “Oh, yes. All the injuries were inflicted before death, except of course the one to the neck that caused it. Water, Plancke, if you please.”

  His assistant had a kidney basin and soap ready. Pieck washed his hands and dried them on a small white towel. The basin was emptied, more water poured in from a jug, and Pieck washed his hands again and, again, dried them. “A transvestite, one presumes. Dear, dear, how these sorts of fellows hanker to become women. Prepared to go to Cairo for the operation, I’m told.” He looked benevolently down at the thing at his feet. “Didn’t want it done this way, though, did you, old chap?”

  “Sir.” The policeman in the boat had retrieved something from the water that hung from the oar like a dishrag. It was a wig.

  “Send it with the body when they take it in,” Schmidt told him. Whoever came to do the official identification should see Marlene as she’d wanted to be seen. Oh, Christ, he thought. It’ll probably be Esther.

  Raised voices were coming from behind the canvas. When Schmidt appeared around it, Willi said in the monotone he reserved for the unwelcome, “This is Herr Fuchs, sir. H
e’s a banker. He lives in that house over there”—Willi pointed to a richly chimneyed house among distant trees—“and he wants us to go away.”

  “I didn’t exactly say that.” Apart from being short, Herr Fuchs was not the Nazi depiction of a Jewish banker. He was slim. His speech was cultured and without lisp. He was dressed for tennis. “I do appreciate that you have your work to do, Inspector, but if you could speed this up.”

  A jackass, Schmidt thought. “It’s a murder case, sir,” he said stolidly.

  “Exactly. My wife and daughters want to come down here and take our boat out.” He pointed a few yards along the lake to where a gleaming launch was moored to a small pier. “I just wondered how long you’re going to be.”

  “As long as it takes, sir.”

  “Mmm.” Herr Fuchs lingered. “I just wish these gangs would keep to the streets and not intrude their . . . machinations into our little haven.”

  “Yes, sir.” Schmidt had lost interest. Why here? he was thinking, looking around. Why dump her here? Long way to drive. Risky. There was something else. “What’s that, sir? That thing there, near the bridge?”

  “Ah, a little bit of our German history.”

  They strolled together to look at it, a single Corinthian column of stone to which a broken piece of architrave was still attached.

  “A fragment from the Paris Tuileries,” Fuchs said. “It was brought back by our soldiers after the Franco-Prussian War. Rather amusing, don’t you think? Read it.”

  Schmidt peered at the brass inscription. THIS STONE FROM THE BANKS OF THE SEINE, PLANTED HERE IN GERMAN SOIL, WARNS YOU, PASSERBY, HOW QUICKLY LUCK CAN CHANGE.

  So there it was.

  “Pity that poor fellow over there didn’t take the warning,” said Fuchs.

  “It’s a warning to all of us,” Schmidt said. To me, he thought. That’s why he brought Marlene here. So that I’d read it.

  Fuchs raised his eyebrows. “Very well, Inspector, I’ll leave you to hurry things up. I’ll send one of the servants down with a drink for your men, lemonade or something.”

  Schmidt watched him go, so agile and smug in his shining whites, so sure he was divorced from the horror that lay at the bottom of his garden. What do you read? The financial pages? Try Mein Kampf, where Hitler says you’re a disease. Do you think this silk cocoon of yours will protect you from storm troopers?

  He went back to the lake’s edge.

  IN THE POLICE morgue in the basement of the Alex, Esther looked down at Marlene’s bewigged head where it lay outlined against the sheet. “Yes,” she said obediently, for the record. “That is William Edward Leicester.”

  Schmidt would have spared her, but there wasn’t anybody else. Mar-lene’s friends had been frightened off, and the upper-class family in England, when contacted, had refused to come. He led her away.

  “I don’t know what to do,” she said.

  “I’m sorry. My love, I’m so sorry. My fucking fault. I shouldn’t have involved her.”

  She looked up at him. “Why do we blame everybody but him? He’s the disease. But, Schmidt, she was so joyful, I couldn’t understand how her family could cast her off and not miss her company.” She began to weep, and he put his arms around her. “It’s like being aboard some hideous Noah’s Ark,” she said. “We send out a raven and a dove to find something for us, and they don’t come back because the something has torn them to bits.”

  “Come on, Mrs. Noah, I’ll buy you a coffee.”

  In the café she asked, as he had known she would, “How bad was it?”

  He wouldn’t lie to her. “It wasn’t good.”

  She rubbed her forehead with the heel of her hand. “We’re not going to get him, are we? If the Nazis take power, he’s just going to blend in; he’ll be lost in the bigger evil. They won’t care who he’s killed.”

  “They’re not in yet,” he said. “And until they are—if they are—he’s as big a menace to them as to anybody else, if they only knew it. Once he’s exposed, he’s hardly going to be a vote getter.”

  “Once he’s exposed,” she said.

  He took her hand. “I’m getting close. Just one piece of luck, that’s all I need. One lucky break.”

  At Schwanenwerder, as they’d followed the police van taking the body to the forensic lab, he’d made Willi stop while he walked back to the column from the Tuileries. “ ‘. . . how quickly luck can change,’ ” he read again.

  “And so can yours, you bastard,” he’d said. He’d felt a bit ridiculous as he’d said it, but it needed saying.

  “I’ll see to the funeral,” she said. “I’ll talk to the undertaker. I don’t want her buried without makeup.”

  “Esther.”

  “Yes?”

  “Time you moved out of Bismarck Allee.” He expected protests—he was going to override them—but he wasn’t prepared for fury.

  “NO.” She attracted the attention of the entire café.

  “For God’s sake, be sensible,” he said. “Why not?”

  “Because he’ll have won. Because I’m a Jew. Because Jews are always having to run away, get shifted, move on, leave your home and possessions and get the hell out. They’re not shifting me—not now, not ever.”

  “Not ‘them,’ ” he said. “Him.”

  But for her the killer’s shadow was being subsumed in the greater storm cloud; he was among the truckloads that went past singing death to the Jews, in Hitler’s voice on the radio, in the raids on synagogues, the very fear that she found when she visited the Smoleskins in Moabit and that she felt herself—and would not give in to. Here is where I stand. Here, and no further.

  “All right,” he said.

  She became quieter. “I’d be diminished if I ran away.”

  He watched her go back to her work, disappearing into an Alexanderplatz in which election posters on every lamppost shouted for her vote. A Communist had set up a soapbox and lectern and was doing a good imitation of Lenin at his loudest but was being drowned out by a group of men with swastika armbands blowing whistles.

  He tried thinking logically, and logically there was little danger to her. It was doubtful if the killer had even known Marlene’s home address but rather had been alerted by one of his homosexual friends who’d encountered Marlene at the club when he was showing the photograph around.

  But the image of Hannelore spread-eagled on the hallway floor was a persistent terror to him. And Schmidt was no longer the investigating officer on the case. He’d been taken off it. Ringer had insisted that the investigation of Marlene’s killing be handed over to his old enemy, Bolle.

  “This sort of killing is not your business, Inspector,” Ringer had said. “Your job is to set up the Multiple Murder Department.”

  “This is multiple murder, for Christ’s sake. How many more deaths are you going to let the bastard get away with?”

  But the fact that Natalya and Marlene had both lived at 29c and that Potrovskov had been its frequent visitor was regarded as an unfortunate nine-years-apart coincidence. In Ringer’s opinion, Natalya, a stripper, Marlene, a transvestite, and Potrovskov, a dealer in everything shady, were the sort of people who, through their very nature, turned up on police mortuary slabs.

  Schmidt, Ringer’s manner had indicated, was showing a regrettable tendency to return to the obsession that had gripped him at the death of his wife.

  “Fräulein Solomonova seems merely unfortunate in her acquaintances,” he said. “A personage to be avoided, in my opinion.”

  Which told Schmidt that Ringer knew he’d taken up residence at 29c.

  The evidence he’d collected in Poland, if anything, made matters worse.

  “You went unofficially, without any reference to the Polish police.” Ringer lectured him, “What did you think you were doing?”

  “Finding out he killed a woman and a child there, then came to Germany, where he’s now committed at least five more murders, let alone the original attempt on the life of Anna Anderson—that’s what I
was doing. What are we supposed to do? Let him roam the country slaughtering anybody he fancies? How many multiple murders do you want? I thought that was my bloody department.”

  The kaiser mustache whiffled, but the old man kept his temper. Which—Schmidt reined himself in—was more than he was doing.

  “I shall, of course, speak to my opposite number in Warsaw,” Ringer said, “and I shall attempt to present matters in such a way that we receive Polish cooperation. In the meantime I suggest you contact the Immigration Department.”

  Schmidt already had. “Immigration hasn’t got an entry for a Ryszard Galczynski. Not under that name. He came in illegally.”

  It wouldn’t have been difficult; the country had become awash with illegal immigrants from the east—a fact that was causing dissatisfaction and swelling the ranks of the Nazi Party. Buying the requisite papers wasn’t difficult either, if you had the money; Potrovskov hadn’t been the only one who supplied forged identities.

  “Indeed?” Ringer handed him back the Anastasia file that Schmidt had resurrected from Records. “You will pass this over to Inspector Bolle. By all means bring it up to date with your Polish findings if you think it necessary. Discuss it with him, but it is his responsibility now, not yours. Confine yourself to setting up the new department.”

  The one concession Schmidt had been able to extract from the chief had been a uniformed officer detailed to patrol Bismarck Allee and keep a watchful eye out for any unauthorized person approaching number 29.

  In his office Schmidt attached the case notes on Marlene’s murder to the file and added the statement by Father Teofil he’d made the priest sign before he left Bagna Duze, along with another from the count. He put the resultant bulging folder on Frau Pritt’s desk. “I want everything in here duplicated,” he told her. “Everything.”

  He went down to the Alex’s new photo lab. “Can you make copies of these, Hugo?” He handed over the two pictures of the killer as a boy and the killer as a storm trooper.