City of Shadows

by Ariana Franklin

  “You’ll need to sign a form for Department 1A.”

  He signed it. When he had duplicates of notes, statements, photographs, lab reports, then—and only then—did he take the original down to Bolle’s office and give it to him.

  Bolle was a pipe smoker and one of those men who refuses to show surprise. Having to explain all over again to that smoke-wreathed, stolid face the motive for Marlene’s murder and the probable identity of the killer reinvoked a nine-year-old anger in Schmidt. This stupid, slow sod wouldn’t see the links, hadn’t believed him over Hannelore’s death, wouldn’t believe him now.

  “So that’s the case,” he said, finishing. “Or is this another accident, and the poor bastard cut off his own balls while shaving?”

  “No need for that,” Bolle said, removing the pipe from his mouth. “I’m not saying you’re right. I think this was a queer killing pure and simple. But it was nasty, and if you’ve got a line on the fuckers who did it, we’ll go after them.”

  “Really?” Schmidt hadn’t put Bolle down as a champion of the transvestite community. He said so.

  “I’m not,” Bolle said. “Unnatural bunch of shits in my opinion, but there’s too many SA gangs barging into places and hauling people off. It’s getting out of hand. At least this pansy’s body turned up; some never do.”

  “Really?” Schmidt hadn’t put Bolle down as anti–storm trooper either.

  “Old fellow lived down my way,” Bolle said, “trade-union man, a docker at the Westhafen. He’d been calling for the ban to be put back on the SA. Three weeks ago they broke into his house and took him away. Told his wife he was Communist scum. Not been seen since. I got my boys on it, but so far we haven’t been able to make an arrest. They scared the wife so she couldn’t identify her own mother.” He wagged his pipe at Schmidt. “Opinionated old codger, Jan was, and I’m not saying we didn’t have our arguments, but he wasn’t a Red—he was a Roman Catholic and he fought for his country in the war, which is more than these young bastard Brownshirts ever did.”

  Schmidt left Bolle’s office with an apology owing and an unspoken nunc dimittis on his lips. It was the election, he thought. The stridency of hatred made you forget some people still believed in law.

  Bolle even allowed him to sit in on the interrogation of the men who’d invaded the Pink Parasol—on the understanding that questioning was left to Bolle.

  All of them were young and came from outside Berlin. Not one professed to know the name of the man who’d turned up in plainclothes at one of their meetings and said something along the lines of “Let’s go, boys, and strike a blow for the Fatherland by destroying a nest of queers.”

  “You obey any civilian who turns up?” Bolle asked.

  “He wasn’t a civilian. He was Intelligence; he had authority from Munich.”

  “And you didn’t ask his name?”

  “Not necessary. We obey orders.”

  Shown the photograph of the 1923 sports conference, they recognized Ryszard’s face but confessed to not having seen him before the incident.

  “He spoke with a bit of a foreign accent,” one of them admitted.

  “Not a German, then.”

  “Neither is our Führer.” The youth gave a Hitler salute. “We are still proud to serve him.”

  “By beating up nancy boys,” Bolle said. “Who was with him? Who helped him kidnap the one dressed as a woman?”

  “They were all stinking women,” the youth said, and spit.

  “The victim was killed, you know that? Tortured to death. You were accomplice to a murder.”

  “Trash like that deserve it.”

  “Where did they get the car they used to take him away?”

  “What car? We came to Berlin in a truck.”

  The boy had a lovely complexion, cream tinged with russet; he should have been herding cows on the farm his father owned outside Potsdam.

  Bolle asked, not unkindly, “What the fuck are you doing here, son?”

  Red flooded the boy’s skin, and he hammered on the table. “Because it is necessary. Germany is in the hands of degenerates. My father’s gone bankrupt; the stinking Yids own our farm now. It is necessary.”

  When they got outside the interrogation room, Bolle said, “I’m going to have to let them out on bail. Their lawyer’s screaming about decent boys like that being in jail while perverts pollute the streets.”

  “Decent? Let me take the little shit down to the morgue and show him the body and ask him if that’s decency. What about the kid whose back was ripped to shreds?” But he knew and Bolle knew that the youths’ likeliest sentence was a fine. Their lawyer would emphasize the Pink Para-sol’s wickedness. They’d be dressed in suits, the flower of German youth carried away in a campaign against indecency. The farm boy would return to his village and be greeted as a hero.

  In a disintegrating situation, where beatings, battles, woundings, and killings were reaching record levels, Nazi propaganda was presenting the storm troopers as a form of auxiliary police—indeed, in some areas they had more or less become such—the only force capable of standing between good Germans and the powers of darkness as represented by sin, inferior races, and, above all, Bolshevism.

  Bolshevism. The death of millions of Russian kulaks from starvation owing to Stalin’s collectivization was a terror stalking a Germany that still regarded itself as an agricultural nation. The Nazi Party was enforcing the message with energy—going door-to-door, holding rallies, meetings, leafletting. Hitler had taken to the sky and was flying from city to city, wooing massive crowds in the machine-gun voice that never gave out.

  And I’ve got to go back to Bismarck Allee and tell Mrs. Noah that her dove’s killer is still free.

  Nevertheless, it hadn’t been a fruitless exercise. He was throwing aside the branches hiding the killer crouching in cover; he was getting glimpses of the thing that had followed Natalya into Charlottenburg Park, that had carried Hannelore’s shopping for her. Every time it sprang out to kill, it was more difficult for it to reconceal itself.

  In fact, he didn’t have to tell Esther anything, because she wasn’t home when he got in. A note on the kitchen table read “Couldn’t get you on the phone. Anna returning tomorrow on the Deutschland. A friend’s flying me to Hamburg to meet her. Love.”

  He went back downstairs to find the patrolman whose job it was to keep an eye on number 29.

  “Left in a car with a man.” The patrolman checked with his watch. “About half an hour ago.”

  “A big man?”

  “Biggish. On the fat side. They were laughing together.”

  It wasn’t the killer; Ryszard could never have made anyone laugh. Going back upstairs, Schmidt told himself he had to stop being frightened for her; she’d lived nine years without him keeping an eye on her. And if she wanted to go off with jovial fat men, why should anyone stop her?

  Searching in a badly stocked refrigerator for something to eat, he found himself answering his own question.

  I should. I can’t do without her.

  21

  THE CONTACT IN the New York Port Authority who’d cabled Howie Meyer with the tip-off that Anna Anderson was on the Deutschland’s passenger list had neglected to say whether she was traveling first, second, or third class.

  He also appeared to have tipped off half the German press, to judge from the crowd of reporters and cameramen also waiting in the rain on the dockside, a fact that annoyed Howie. “I wanted an exclusive.”

  “I don’t know why you’re bothering,” Esther told him, “or them either. She won’t talk to you. She hates the press.”

  “But she’ll talk to you, kid,” Howie said. “Why d’you think I brought you along? Where the hell is she? They’re letting steerage off now.”

  It was extraordinary, Esther thought. There’d been halfhearted flurries of activity by the press corps as a minor film star and an auto-racing playboy had descended the gangplank, but the person for whom the cameras and notebooks were patiently poise
d on this wet Hamburg morning was an ill-tempered, untidy, nervy little woman who didn’t want anything to do with them.

  To Howie she was even important enough for him to have hired a private plane to fly them up to Hamburg in time to meet her.

  A nice man, Howie Meyer, one of the slangy, cultured Americans. Esther had taken a liking to him—and he to her—when she’d provided the pictures for one of his features for Collier’s magazine. Even so, she wouldn’t have told him of her connection with Anna; Frau Schinkel had done that while chatting to him in the hall of number 29 one morning, boasting of the famous grand duchess who’d once lived upstairs.

  He’d badgered her ever since. “Is she Anastasia or isn’t she? You can tell me, kid, I’m a reporter.”

  “No comment, Howie.”

  “Where the hell is she?” he said now.

  “Hiding on board, I expect,” Esther said.

  “The hell with it. I’ll find her.” Howie shoved his umbrella into Es-ther’s hand. “Keep a lookout.” He put up his coat collar and went off.

  Esther found herself looking carefully at the backs of big men in the crowd, edging around to see their faces just in case this one or that should belong to the man who had climbed the staircase of the Green Hat all those years ago.

  It was the reason Esther had agreed to come when Howie’d asked her along, to make sure the killer wasn’t waiting for Anna.

  For God’s sake, she’d told herself, you’re getting paranoid again.

  She’d gone along anyway. It was one thing to theorize that Anna was safe from the killer, that the two of them balanced each other’s hidden identity. But for her, Anna and danger had been synonymous from the beginning. Olga had been the first who’d died for her, then Natalya, Schmidt’s wife, Nick. And now Marlene. It had reinforced the fear. And the grief. Sheltering under Howie’s umbrella, the rain fenced Esther around with tears for unnecessary, ubiquitous death.

  “You’ve got to stop being afraid,” Schmidt had said. “He’s not a superman.”

  Maybe not, but he was everywhere. Maybe here, among the rain-soaked welcomers, blank-faced and lethal, waiting.

  She wondered if Anna was even now peering out from behind one of those portholes, as she’d peered from number 29c’s kitchen window all those years ago.

  The last of the steerage passengers were coming off. She wasn’t on board. It was a mistake. She wasn’t coming. Thank you, God.

  Somebody put a hand under her elbow, making her jump. “She’s gone,” Howie said.

  “Gone? Where?”

  “Sshh.” Howie steered her away. “Let’s have some coffee.”

  They found a table in the arrivals hall’s large and dreary café. “I crossed one of the stewards’ palms with dollar bills,” Howie said. “The ship docked in the early hours, and she was taken off right away.”

  “Who took her?”

  “Hush, will you?” Howie looked around. “I don’t want anybody else to get this. Seems she was shanghaied over in New York. Who was it putting her up in the States—somebody called Jennings?”

  “Miss Burr Jennings.”

  “Annie Burr Jennings?” Howie whistled. “Daughter of the American Revolution and Standard Oil, one very rich old bird. She can sure pick ’em, your Anna.”

  “More that they pick her. What happened?”

  “Seems she outstayed her welcome.”

  “Yes, she does that.”

  “Boy, did she outstay it. The Jennings clan had her smuggled on board in charge of a Finnish nurse—a lady with muscles, my guy said. She was locked in her cabin the whole passage over, never allowed out. Five o’clock this A.M. she was smuggled off again, still in the charge of the muscle-bound Finn, and taken away to”—Howie consulted the back of his hand—“the Ilten Sanatorium, near Hanover. The Finn was heard to say her patient was crazy and the Jennings family’d had enough and was committing her to a German asylum where she belonged.”

  “Can they do that?”

  “They done it, kid.” Howie grinned. “Unusual way to get rid of a difficult guest, but effective—slam her in the nuthouse.”

  “It’s not funny,” Esther said. She was thinking. “Hanover ...I have a friend who knows Hanover pretty well, and he’s got authority. Find me a phone.”

  Howie and the American dollar could find anything. Esther, settled in an office of the Hamburg-American Line, phoned Schmidt. “Yes, it looks as if she’s been committed, practically kidnapped. Somewhere called the Ilten Sanatorium. Can you find out what’s happening and call me back? Oh, shut up.”

  She put down the phone. “He thinks it’s funny, too.”

  “Who is he?”

  “A police inspector. Name of Schmidt. He was in Hanover on the Haarmann case, and then Düsseldorf—he specializes in mass killers.”

  “Siegfried? Siegfried Schmidt? Whaddaya know? An old pal of mine. We watched the guillotine take Peter Kurten’s head off together.”

  “For God’s sake.”

  “He had to be there officially,” Howie protested, “and I had to be there because, hell, it’s big news when the biggest mass murderer in the world goes to his end hoping he’ll hear the sound of his own blood gushing from his neck. He murdered more people than anybody, and I said that was a record, and Siegfried said no, the record was held by Gilles de Rais five hundred years ago, and I said it was nice to meet an educated cop, and he said it was nice to meet an educated hack, and we exchanged hats. Good man.”

  “Yes, he is,” Esther said, and paused. “I’m living with him.”

  “Aw, shit, Esther.”

  She smiled at him. She wouldn’t hurt him for the world, but Howie fell in love the way a speculator gambled on the stock exchange: if one company failed, there were always others.

  They went to the bar, and she bought him a drink to cheer him up while they waited for Schmidt to phone back.

  HAARMANN, “WEREWOLF OF Hanover,” had not only killed his victims by biting through their windpipe in a sexual frenzy but had subsequently sold their flesh to the town’s meat peddlers. At his trial it had become apparent that several of Hanover’s citizens had probably eaten their own children—an aftermath that had caused its mental homes to be particularly busy and brought Schmidt into contact with most of them.

  He remembered the superintendent of the Ilten Sanatorium as a man devoted to the welfare of his patients. He still was. The voice coming down the telephone line expressed outrage that one of them had been virtually kidnapped in the United States and sent across the Atlantic to arrive at his establishment like a parcel.

  “It is so irregular, these Americans. It is immoral. The poor woman . . . She has no medical records with her. I have no idea of her history, who has treated her and how—if indeed she has been treated at all.”

  “What does the Finnish nurse say?” Schmidt asked.

  “She has gone, just dumped her patient on us and disappeared. I have never—”

  “What are you going to do with her—Fräulein Anderson?”

  “We have admitted her, of course, what else? She is in a state of collapse. We have not had time to observe her, but I hope that time and rest—”

  “I’d be obliged if you’d keep her arrival quiet, Doctor. I don’t want the press or anybody else getting in to see her.”

  “Neither do I, Inspector. She will need calm, regularity, time.”

  And lots of it, Schmidt hoped, putting down the phone. The longer Typhoid Anna was hors de combat, the better. He refrained from saying so when he rang Esther back. “She’s in good hands, and she’s going to stay there. There’s nothing more you can do. Come home.”

  Bolle peered around the office door. “I’m off to SA Headquarters and have a search through their records for this Intelligence fella that young Nazi told us about. You reckon your man’s stationed in Munich, do you?”

  “I think he travels back and forth. Liaison, maybe.”

  “Want to come along?”

  Schmidt reached for his coat, th
en thought better of it. “The SA guys aren’t exactly fans of mine. You’ll do better without me. But take some strong-arm boys with you. The last time Willi and I ventured into an SA nest, we had to make a run for it.”

  “I’m not standing for any of their nonsense,” Bolle said stolidly. “Mine’s a lawful police inquiry.”

  “So was ours.”

  If he’d thought that Bolle was going to get any answers, he would have gone with him, but he didn’t—he’d made a few inquiries of his own. Captain Schwerte, Röhm’s friend and the same bastard who’d been in charge of the Kreuzberg SA nine years before, had risen to the rank of colonel and was now a power to be reckoned with in the national storm-trooper hierarchy. The man hadn’t cooperated with the police in 1923, and, the SA being even more rampant than it had been then, he wasn’t going to cooperate now. Bolle wouldn’t get anywhere.

  So Schmidt reckoned, as he followed other lines of inquiry. What he hadn’t foreseen was that Bolle would be taken off the case altogether.

  “They haven’t.”

  “They have. I got in to see this Colonel Schwerte,” Bolle said. “Told him I wanted a look at his list of military personnel. He laughed at me.”

  “Did he, now?”

  Bolle lit his pipe, blank-faced as ever, but the match in his hand shook as he applied it. “ ‘I am an officer of the law, sir,’ I told him. ‘You are required to answer my questions.’ And he laughed. He picked up the phone and asked to be put through to Department 1A. ‘I have an officer here wanting to look at military records. Some case he says involves one of my men.’ ”

  Bolle pursed his lips, and a drift of Old Lüneburg wafted into the air to join Schmidt’s cigarette smoke. “Next thing I know, the bastard’s grinning again and handing me the fucking phone, and it’s Diels on the other end, and what the hell am I doing, and return at once and report, Inspector. And I did.” Another waft of Old Lüneburg. “And I’m off the case.”

  “Who’s on it, for Christ’s sake?”