City of Shadows

by Ariana Franklin

  Anna and Esther were shown upstairs to where the Nazi entourage had taken over an entire floor. Esther heard ticker tape clicking in one room, typewriters going in another marked PROPAGANDA. Female clerks scurried quietly in and out of doors; uniformed men stalked the carpeted corridors. The air smelled cleanly of paper, good cigars, and suppressed excitement.

  The money, Esther thought. She compared it to the Moabit Communist Party HQ, where a disused factory contained the phones, typewriters, ticker-tape machines, fierce argument, and cigarette smoke thick enough to choke you, all on one open floor and where nobody could afford more uniform than an armband.

  And the discipline. Their Führer was in office at last—the day they had worked and waited for had dawned after years of planning—but that same planning now moved them forward as if on ball bearings. That’s the terrifying thing, she thought. They know where they’re going. They’re programmed.

  She and Anna were put into an anteroom to wait, sustained with a tray of tea and the assurance by a butler that the Führer was sorry, he was naturally very busy and would attend to Her Imperial Highness as soon as he could.

  There were men in the room, wing-collared, bemedaled, some with sashes, one or two in uniform with ceremonial swords getting in the way of their thighs, few of them talking, inhibited by the presence of the butler standing at the door. Every five minutes the door would open and let an ambassador out before the butler ushered another one in. “His Excellency the Italian ambassador . . .” “His Excellency this.” “His Excellency that.”

  All going in to congratulate Hitler on behalf of their country, she supposed. And all being given exactly five minutes. Could she get her picture in five minutes? Should she start clicking the moment she went in? Would he let her?

  Half an hour went by, and the door kept on opening for another dignitary to be announced, then closing as he went, opening again.. . .

  Esther worried about the light and kept wandering to the window as if that would encourage it to stay in the sky. If the grand duchess were this bloody important to him, she shouldn’t be kept cooling her heels. On the other hand, all these representatives were kept waiting—it was probably deliberate.

  Anna enjoyed it, sipping her tea and glancing through the Fascist Der Stürmer, absolutely at ease.

  Waiting on Hitler, Esther thought. Everybody’s waiting on Hitler.

  “The Führer will see you now.”

  Esther and Anna got up.

  THEY LINED the hall to say good-bye to Ringer, those who’d been sacked and some of those who hadn’t. But the old man didn’t look at anybody, just walked past them and out onto the steps. They saw him dither for a moment, accustomed to having the police limousine waiting for him, then square his shoulders, signal to one of the taxis in the stand opposite the Platz, and step out toward it.

  There it goes, Schmidt thought, Old Germany with its waxed mustaches, marching steadfastly into oblivion.

  He felt a deep pang of grief, the first time since the list had gone up that he’d felt anything. Shock and anger—though they would unseat everything else in a minute—were being overridden by numbness. No, disbelief. Not just at the sacking of some of Berlin’s best policemen, himself included, but at the brutality of it. Nobody, not Hermann Göring in whose name it was being done, not Diels, no official of the new order, had put in an appearance. Just storm troopers with lists. And guns. The maximum of humiliation with the minimum of effort.

  He lingered at the doors for a moment before going upstairs to fetch his coat and hat. Snow fell clearly in the shrill, flashing light sent out by signs for Pilsner, Opel cars, for the latest American movie, 42nd Street. A pretty young woman in a beret was wearily taking off the cardboard sign that had hung around her neck saying HELLO, I’M LOOKING FOR WORK, I CAN DO SHORTHAND, TYPING, AND I CAN SPEAK FRENCH AND ENGLISH. Sparks flew out from underneath the trams as they crossed connecting lines. Soon people would be going home.

  Gunpoint, Schmidt thought. Didn’t they see policemen being threatened with guns?

  Across the Platz, outside a bookshop, he could see a storm trooper watching the sullen owner remove a display of books from its window.

  Schmidt had been meaning to buy Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz for some time—probably couldn’t now; Döblin was a Jew.

  He waited for anger, but all he could summon up was awe.

  THEY WERE SHOWN into a large and beautiful room with an enormous table desk against the big window at its far end. The single occupant was out of proportion to it, too small, the sleeves of his brown uniform just slightly overlong, giving him the look of a child in hand-me-downs.

  “Yes,” it said, “the woman I most want to see.”

  Hitler crossed the floor swiftly and clasped Anna’s hands in both of his own, staring intently into her eyes as if reading her soul.

  Rasputin’s trick, Esther thought.

  She was introduced—“My lady-in-waiting”—and he repeated the maneuver, though not for as long, and this time merely shaking her hand.

  “I hope my people have looked after Your Imperial Highness. You have had refreshment? I would not have kept you waiting.” He clapped his little hands together. “But this is a special day; business must come before pleasure.”

  He’d learned it all, the graciousness of a tyrant. Where had this common, unsophisticated little man got his impenetrable self-belief? And the ability to impose it? Genius, Esther thought. Criminal genius. It was the confidence trick of all time.

  “Yes, this is a great day, a great day—not for me but for Germany. And for you, too, madam. For Russia. Let me tell you . . .”

  They were signaled to sit down. He remained on his feet, pacing, giving Anna the benefit of his worldview.

  Esther tried to concentrate; Howie would want her to remember every word, but at the same time she must assess angles, the pearly natural light from the windows, the planes of the face, the eyes, blue as Anna’s and her own, the silly mustache, the hand-me-down sleeves.

  Anyway, the voice that enraptured masses didn’t work with an audience of two, not for her; it was machinery. Occasionally it rattled out something so staggering it caught her attention: “Russia must be cleansed of Jewish Bolshevism, that racial tuberculosis threatening the globe. ...The Bolshevik commissars are Jewish.. . . England will change her attitude when she sees that such is my aim and will join us in the enterprise. ...Old Russia must learn Nationalist Socialist principles.. . .”

  At last he said, “The throne shall be returned to the last of the true Romanovs.” He bowed to Anna, who inclined her head, smiling.

  He has no perception of her, Esther thought; he doesn’t see people except in relationship to himself. He looks, but he doesn’t see. She’s what he wants her to be—perhaps she is.

  Ten minutes gone. She’s being given more time than the others.

  “But I should tell Your Highness, Germany’s need for living space is predominant; much of western Russia is ethnically German and must be returned to the Fatherland.”

  This was what he meant by Lebensraum, then. Russia. He actually is insane.

  Anna nodded graciously. He could have Russia’s ethnic-German bits.

  “Russia must look eastward for her own expansion.”

  Oh, all right, Anna’s nod said, she’d look east.

  Children, that’s what they are; not just her, the two of them. I’ve seen children play like this. You be Russia, I’ll be Germany.

  “I have Your Imperial Highness’s blessing, do I not?”

  “Of course, my Führer.”

  Where did she learn to do that? Extend her hand like a queen?

  Hitler shook it in both of his. He was pleased.

  “Allow me to present you with a copy of Mein Kampf.” He and Anna moved toward the desk, and Esther, recovering, said, “Sir, Her Imperial Highness would very much like a photograph of you and her together.”

  Hitler wagged his finger at Anna. “A snapshot for your personal album? Ver
y well, then. Soon you and I shall have our official portrait taken.”

  I’ll give him damn snapshots. She maneuvered them into position by the desk, metered the light, and started clicking. “A handshake, thank you. Now a little farther apart. ...Sir, if you’d move to your right as you sign, just there, wonderful.” She changed lenses. The light wasn’t bad. “If you’d just rest on the desk, that’s very nice, and perhaps put your chin in your hand. Oh, that is so . . .” Anna was out of the shot now, and he knew he was her sole subject, but he liked it.

  She went on shooting, grateful for every second. He continued posing. She even changed film, and it could have gone on, but there was a tap on the door and the butler put his head around it. “I am sorry, my Führer, but Major Günsche is back from Munich and says it’s urgent.”

  Hitler raised his hands in mock dismay. “Forgive me, my dear Anastasia. But we shall meet again. Soon, soon.”

  Esther, still standing by the desk at the window end of the room, took another shot of their farewell. A couple more of them moving together toward the door. And another one as Anna stopped.

  Hitler, who’d taken two steps forward, had to pause and turn around to her. “What is it?”

  It was a man who’d taken the butler’s place in the doorway. He was big and dressed in the uniform of an officer and carried a folder of papers under one arm. He’d taken off his cap, ready to salute his Führer, displaying fair hair and the Slavic slant of his cheekbones.

  It was as if the Medusa stood between him and Anna, invisible to all but the two of them. They had become stone.

  Somehow—and for what remained of her life, Esther was proud of possessing the wit to do it—she lifted her camera to her eye, focused, and took a picture of Hitler, Anna, and, clear in their background, the man who’d killed Natalya.

  “WHAT ABOUT MY pension?” Bolle asked. “Twenty-four years, I’m entitled.” He slammed his hand on the table. “I’m entitled to respect. Not . . .” He pointed to the list still on the noticeboard.

  They’d gone back to the canteen and made themselves coffee, because Bolle couldn’t yet bear to go home and tell his wife he’d been sacked.

  Schmidt nodded and sipped his coffee, some sense beginning to return. Lists, he thought. Christ, they’ll have access to all my files.

  Bolle buried his head in his hands. “They can’t do this.”

  “They’ve done it,” Schmidt said. “They’ve changed the world. And all in one day.” He still marveled at it.

  “Never mind a fucking day,” Bolle said, “I’ve been a policeman twenty-four years. Quarter of a century of duty. Shit, I even voted for ’em. What’ve I done, that’s what I want to know? How do I tell the wife? How’ll we manage if they don’t give me a pension?”

  His voice mingled with the distant screech of S-bahn trains entering and leaving Alexanderplatz Station, a lament for a city that, outside, insisted on going about its business as if nothing had happened.

  Schmidt was able to think now. He’d gone from shock to anger—his hands were still shaking from both—and eventually into coherence. His detective mind began fitting things together, his own personal abasement—a mere dot—sprouting lines that went out and out, curling, entangling, into a bigger picture that formed the mouth of the abyss. Eisenmenger had been right, Meyer had been right, even he himself had been right—merely hadn’t applied it, hadn’t believed.

  In a minute he would go upstairs and phone Esther. We’re going, he would tell her. Draw out any money you’ve got, I’ll withdraw mine, and we’ll go; it doesn’t matter where. They’re taking over the police; law has broken down. He wouldn’t say there was no safety anymore, especially for her. She’d know that.

  He imagined her saying, “You can’t leave Germany. You love Germany.”

  He would say, “I don’t love it more than I love you. Besides, it isn’t Germany anymore, it’s another country.”

  At the table Bolle maintained a savage keening, reluctant to face his wife and the outside world. “Why me?” he kept asking. “Why me?”

  Yes, why him? Most of the others whose names had been on the list were Social Democrat voters, like Schmidt himself. They certainly had reason for firing Inspector Siegfried Schmidt, known liberal, consorter with Jews, a man who in Ringer’s words was “a good detective but a bad policeman,” unreliable when it came to obeying orders.

  Bolle, however, was a good policeman, not an imaginative one but stolid, dutiful, typical of a middle class that, with its memory scarred by 1923, had voted National Socialist in a time of trouble.

  Would Bolle have obeyed their orders if they’d kept him on? Probably. Asked to arrest radicals, Jews, queers, and Bolshies without charge, he would have drawn no parallel with the arrest of his unionist friend by the storm troopers. It would have seemed to him merely a way of establishing stability—until it dawned on him that his stability was a

  tyranny that could arrest any protester—his own son, even.

  So why Bolle? Why Bolle and him?

  The Anastasia case. It was the only common denominator. Bolle had worked on the Marlene murder, had the description of a killer the Nazis wanted left undescribed, had read the Anastasia file.

  Christ, they’re efficient, Schmidt thought. Take no chances, take no prisoners. “Time we went,” he said gently. But Bolle shook his head.

  There was no comfort to be given; Schmidt rested his hand on Bolle’s shoulder for a moment and left him sitting alone in the corner of a huge and empty canteen.

  A storm trooper standing at the bottom of the stairs stopped him.

  “I’m going up to my office to fetch my hat and coat,” Schmidt said.

  “Wait.” The man got out his list to consult it.

  “Oh, fuck off.” Schmidt pushed past him and went up the stairs. He’d had enough of lists.

  Nobody shot him.

  It was getting dark, and he had to switch on his office light.

  He picked up the phone, surprised it was still connected, and phoned Esther’s number, hearing it ring and ring. She wasn’t in.

  Outside, in the parking lot, an armored car, known accurately but without affection at the Alex as “The Kettle,” was grinding past the barrier, on its way to break up some demonstration or another.

  God, he thought, let there be demonstrations somewhere, riots, protest. Let somebody fight back—they’re snatching the law. The Law. They’ve stolen it, like a goddamn necklace. Who is protesting? The minister of justice? The Reichstag? Where are they? Criminals are taking over the country. It’s a fucking putsch, and they’re getting away with it; they’re stealing Germany. Cassandra must have felt like this, seeing that the Greeks were coming and not a single fucker listening to her. Well, they’re in now. The Alex is their Trojan horse.

  And what are you doing about it?

  He felt under his desk for the metal wastepaper can, took it out, then went over to the filing cabinet and the drawer that contained his personal files, records of old arrests, old contacts, informants. He scooped them out and carried them over to the can, stuffing them into it.

  Thieves, queers, prostitutes, con men—not the new chancellor’s favorite people, but, compared to him, clean and upright men and women. Schmidt would be damned if he left their addresses for the SS. He took out one of the sheets at random and saw that it was the record of Rudi the Flasher, Rudi who’d been stalking the streets around Charlottenburg on the night Natalya Tchichagova had been killed, Rudi now an impotent old man.

  He got out his lighter, lit a cigarette, and then applied the flame to poor old Rudi and dropped him, burning, into the can.

  Frau Pritt was in the doorway. “Stop it. What are you doing? Stop it.”

  He began shaking paper out of the other folders and stuffing them into the fire in the can.

  “Stop it,” Pritt screamed. “You are destroying government property. It is against orders. Stop it.” She lunged at the can, trying to lift it off the desk, but an eruption of flame drove her back.


  He heard her running down the corridor shouting.

  Not much of a protest, this. Not much to weigh down his end of the unbalanced scales, but, Christ, he had to do something to put a spoke in their wheel and prove he was a man and not a dog they’d kicked out of its home.

  It was quiet on this floor. Virtually all the officers and men who hadn’t been sacked were being briefed in the lecture hall on their duties for the forthcoming victory parade.

  Victory parade.

  He kept grabbing more folders, amazed at the number of people he’d persuaded, bribed, or blackmailed into giving him information over the years: small-time crooks, mainly, Winkelbankiers, illegal backstreet currency dealers, pickpockets, Gypsies, smugglers, counterfeiters, unlicensed hawkers—Jews, mainly—racketeers, bigamists.

  Innocents, all of them, their combined sins a mere peccadillo compared to the political crime about to overwhelm them.

  The smell was making him cough, so he raised the window just a fraction to cause a draft. Smoke from the can poured toward the wintry outside air as if along a chimney. Pinched faces were transferred out of his memory and onto paper, where the heat curled and flared them into ash; he might have been burning them alive.

  “Stop that, please,” Busse said. He was in the doorway, wearing an SS uniform. Light glinted off his spectacles, and he had a Luger pistol in his hand.

  ENTERING THE FLAT, and finding that Schmidt wasn’t in it, Esther went straight for the phone to call him at the Alex. All the way back in the car, she’d been desperate to tell him: I’ve seen him. I know his name.

  I’ve got his picture.

  The same idiot on the switchboard, obviously a trainee, insisted that Inspector Schmidt did not work for the police, so for now she slammed the receiver down and set about the other thing she’d been dying to do. She went into her darkroom with her camera. Then she popped her head around the door. “Anna, I’m developing. Do not, repeat not, come in.” It was a prohibition Anna had twice broken, to the ruin of some spectacular film.