The Informer

by Craig Nova

  The people who worked in the precinct were evenly divided, at least as far as politics were concerned, but she was irritated with politics—the Communists were either too cynical or too stupid to see the real enemy was the thugs, the Nazis, the Steel Helmets. After all, from the Communist point of view, if another war broke out in Europe, no matter who won, Europe would be exhausted and easy pickings, that is if the Russians could stay out of it. But how would they do that? Is that the way they thought? Armina assumed it was possible. She thought of a prostitute she had interviewed in a murder investigation who had said she knew the thugs were trouble because when they slept with her it was as though they were trying to fuck her to death. No tip, either.

  Ritter, the head of the Political Section, considered himself a nationalist, a patriot, although this was a nostalgia, for the time before the Great War, when the Kaiser had still been in Germany. And, along with the nostalgia, he had a contempt for the current life in the city (after all, women were holding hands in the street and wearing men’s tuxedos in the nightclubs, where they were hilarious with champagne and cocaine). Ritter was one of the few members of the Berlin Police Department who had been glad to move to the Political Section. Armina guessed he was a member of some pro-Kaiser organization, or something worse. The groups that existed for assassination and revenge killings, such as Organization Escherich, or Organization Consul. The Nazis. He spoke perfect French, was an excellent amateur musician, and he wrote poetry, which he had privately printed on excellent paper and bound in leather.

  Armina’s office had a frosted glass door and one of those large knobs. She went in and sat down while animated shadows passed on the other side of the frosted glass like those one made on a wall to amuse a child. A note on her desk from Ritter said: “Please come up to see me, will you, when you’ve got a moment? Thanks, R.”

  She unfolded a map of the Tiergarten on which she had put crosses, in green ink, where the young women, like Marie Rote, had been murdered. Along the bottom she had written the date that the bodies had been found, and these dates had been put along a line, like a ruler. She added May 14, 1930. The newer dates were pushed closer together, and so the scale had the aspect of an accordion that was collapsed on one side. The new cross added to the pattern the others made, a semicircular array spreading from an entrance to the park, and if the lines were drawn from the entrance to each mark, it would be like an enormous shell, a scallop, say, that had been sketched on the map. Armina made an additional cross, a line over the top to make note of the fact that the faces were now being covered up. She added other marks to show what this one had in common with the others, the wound, the stained underwear left in the bushes.

  Armina folded up the map. It was possible that some of these killings were the work of the Rings, the Berlin gangs, such as Immertreu, that fought over prostitution territory, which they were never able to hold for long, since they were either gaining or losing strength. Of course, the Rings did political killings, too, at a price. Beyond the door of her office men and women went by, their shadows sweeping across the icy glitter of the glass.

  The city had a fascination with the sexual murders of young women, and cabarets had reenactments of some of the most notorious crimes, not to mention that some paintings were done of these assaults. Why, she wondered, were there so many more of them than before? Was there some impalpable quality in the air, some fascination with doing these things, as though the horrible violence of them served as a substitute for some otherwise lacking clarity? But, whatever the reason, she was left to clean up what was left, to go see the parents or boyfriend, to give the news no one ever wants to hear.

  She had given this news on her first day at Inspectorate A, a few years before. A woman had been found in the park and the case had been given to her. The other members of the Inspectorate had other things to worry about. Of course, if she failed, which was quite possible, since these cases were almost always difficult, her job and her prospects would be diminished. But her ambition wasn’t the issue here so much as the moment, which she felt as a weight, when she realized what had happened after dark in an out-of-the-way place. This sensation didn’t vanish but stayed with her like an invisible mist that she could get rid of in only one way—she didn’t know who would have more contempt for her if she failed, the men in the Inspectorate or herself: she’d have to admit that the things that she had seen, the evidence of such horrors, were beyond her, and a sense of incapacity was what she feared the most.

  So, she began. She talked to the friends of the woman who had been found, interviewed those who had worked with her at a typewriter factory, talked to the merchants in the places where the woman had shopped, just as Armina made a catalogue of everything she had discovered. She did this for the next woman who was found and the one after that, all of them with the same marks, a welt on the neck from a cord, cigarette burns, small puncture wounds. The men in the Inspectorate came into her office, looked at her with the blank expression that detectives have perfected and said, as though through a mask, “What have you got on the cases in the park? Nothing? Hmmpf.”

  She went home at night to her apartment or sat in a café, always with the sensation that the evidence of her incapacity or the strength of what opposed her was getting close, reducing her to a sort of accomplice, since the man in the park did his part and then she did hers, like partners of some sort.

  She found that all of the women had bought lingerie at the same store, a fashionable shop that had an antiquated elegance perfectly mixed with the erotic—young women from all over the city came to shop there. Armina talked to the saleswomen, all of whom had an elegant disdain for her, as though Armina’s questions brought an air of the vulgar to a place that was calm, above the reality of what happened to women in an out-of-the-way place.

  Armina’s father and mother were dead, and when she was troubled, as she was now, she went to see a friend of her father’s, a man in his fifties, an engineer, who had a house in a suburb outside of Berlin.

  Michael Freelander was a fisherman, and whenever he had a chance to get away he was off to the Mohne, or a river in Spain or Austria to fish for trout. His living room was filled with a neat adornment of feathers and yarn, stored in a cabinet with small drawers like those in a post office, and when Armina came to talk to him, he tied flies, small ones with a cloud of hackle, upright wings, and a gray body, a tail as fine as a baby’s eyelashes.

  “So,” he said. “You’ve got a woman’s shop and that’s it?”

  “Yes,” said Armina.

  “And what about the dates,” he said.

  Armina read the dates from her notebook. Then she sat with the leather-bound thing in her lap.

  “Are you worried about your job?” said Michael.

  “I’m worried that I can’t do it,” she said. “That this is beyond me.”

  Michael asked her to repeat the dates. He wrote them down and asked her to go through them again before he reached to the shelf where he kept his fishing diaries. He turned the pages, looked at a map, then went back to his notebooks. The women had been found in May and June.

  “He must be a fisherman,” he said. “The hatches of mayflies come at regular times. Not far from here, in Spreeland, for instance, the peaks of various hatches correspond with these dates.”

  “So,” said Armina. “This is how he gets the time? He says he is going fishing?”

  “Yes,” said Michael.

  “He follows a woman from the shop, finds where she lives, and then when he has an excuse, he follows her and takes her into the park.”

  Michael looked in his fishing diaries, the blue ink of his entries in neat lines, the margins with drawings of mayflies—the next hatch, Potamanthus distinctus, was coming at the end of the month. It was a white mayfly, like an apple blossom.

  “Week after next,” said Michael. “I think you’re going to find another.”

  Armina finished her drink and sat while Michael tied another pattern, and as he used his gray
thread, on a bobbin, as he spun some fur for a body, as he set the wings upright, she kept an eye on the certainty of his movements, the precision of his work, just like an engineer making a drawing. It was as though she were watching him make a blueprint for a fly.

  At the lingerie shop Armina talked her way through the disdain of the saleswomen, and when they condescended to speak to her, she found that men occasionally were customers, too. These men looked through the displays of underthings and asked about sizes by saying that a girlfriend had the shape and was the height of one of the women who worked in the shop. Armina explained again about what she had seen in the park, and after going through the details, the saleswomen agreed to say to these men that they were interested in fishing, and that they had always wanted to catch a big, cold trout. In the next week, a man who had come in and browsed through the things on display, said that he was a fisherman and he would be happy to teach a saleswoman how to catch a trout. It was all about presentation, he said, about stalking a fish, of trying not to be seen, of being absorbed by the landscape, and, above everything else, not to frighten the fish before the moment came. He left his card with the saleswoman.

  Armina watched the man’s apartment near the dates when Potamanthus distinctus was going to appear on a stream in the Spreeland. The man left his apartment with some leather cases, one of them a leather tube for a fishing rod, and a large gladstone that was just the thing to hold a fishing vest, waders, and a net. But he only went by taxi to the center of the city, where he checked into a hotel. Then he went to the bar, where he had a drink before he went out to a small park, opposite an apartment building, where he waited like a fisherman on a bank who is trying to see a fish.

  Everything about his posture, his lack of movement, was mesmerizing—he hardly seemed to breathe, and he didn’t flinch at the sounds of a backfire in the street or react to children who chased a ball or a woman who wheeled a baby in a perambulator. Instead, his silent immobility suggested something that coiled, that put itself in a position to gather strength for a strike. He moved his head once to follow the path of a couple, a young woman in a filmy purple dress and a man in a dark suit—the fisherman’s eyes followed them with a hungry glow, a brightness that suggested a coal that had been blown into an orange intensity. Then he went back to waiting.

  A woman came out of the building he watched. She was well dressed, elegant, her dark hair heavy and trimmed so it fell around her face and was touched with filaments of light. The fisherman stood up from the bench. He followed at a distance, but as the woman walked toward the park, he steadily reduced the distance, as though he were reeling her in. He had an almost perfect instinct for this: as the people on the street became more sparse, he closed in, and at the moment, a brief, almost vanishing instant, when no one else was around and when the park was close by, he took the woman’s arm, whispered in her ear, and steered her, with a subdued jerk, into the park.

  Armina came into the miasma of terror on the part of the woman who was almost running on the tips of her toes to keep up as the man pushed her: she seemed to think that if she just went along, if she just tried to be nice, or compliant, if she just gave in, everything would be all right. Armina arrested him and found he was carrying a package of cigarettes of the brand she usually found around a woman who had been left in the park, an ice pick (with a tapped handle to give a better grip), and a silk cord.

  She was promoted, and the men in the Inspectorate took her to a bar, where they all got drunk, Armina, too. Every now and then one of the men who worked in Inspectorate A asked her for help.

  The Fisherman was tried and convicted, but every detail, however horrible, came out at the trial, and given the fascination with this kind of thing, all of these details, every one, were reported in the newspapers. Everyone knew what he had done with an ice pick, the cord, how he had smoked cigarettes and left them where he had done his work. The man had used the cigarettes to make those small marks, but before that he had used the silk cord until the women were almost unconscious, and then finally he got to the ice pick. He had used the cord on himself, too, when he had had trouble keeping an erection. “To keep the hydraulics going” is the way he described it. He had told his wife, a mousy woman with a limp, who sat through the trial and bit her fingernails, that he had gone fishing. “The hatch of Potamanthus distinctus is close now,” he’d say. “The fishing is going to be good.”

  Now, Armina realized that the crimes she looked at could easily be done by a man, or men, who were using the details of what they had read about the Fisherman to mask who they were. She knew that sooner or later, they would add a detail of their own, and that was what she was looking for. A new detail. Well, she had a list to begin. She’d keep an eye out for something unexpected: some correlation, like the mayflies, that suggested some actions that took place with motives disguised by the most ordinary event.

  RITTER’S OFFICE WAS one flight up. She stopped in the stairwell, in the scent of soap that was used to wash the steps every night, and began to think of an excuse. Ritter had a knack, something like the Moth’s: Ritter perceived her in a way that made even her best motives look like ploys, false stances, a ruse of some kind. And the only way to get away from his condescension was to appease him, to do what he wanted, so that he would give her a small, warm, almost friendly smile. Almost. She took some solace in the file that she had in her hand, where she had made a list of the names of men who interested her. And the one woman.

  She went through the stairwell door to the hallway and up to Ritter’s door. The sound of typing was loud here, too, slow, steady, unstoppable as it went through the details of the events that needed to be recorded in the Berlin Police Department each day. A blunt instrument. Evidence of a desperate struggle. She knocked and pushed the door open, leaning into the oak and glass door with the brass fixtures, the knob seeming bigger than ever.

  “Armina,” he said. “How nice to see you. Come in.”

  He came around and closed the door behind her.

  “Well, that’s better,” he said. “Won’t you sit down?”

  She took the chair that was in front of his desk, sat back, tried to smile.

  “How are you doing?”

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  Ritter put a cigarette into his mouth, turned the wheel on a lighter, which made a spark like one from a burning fuse, and the flame looked like a yellow sequin. Armina wished he would come with her to smell the dead leaves, the lingering perfume, to look at the bunched-up skirt….

  “They’re getting younger,” she said.

  “That’s to be expected,” he said.

  “There’s less time between them,” she said.

  Ritter flicked his cigarette against an onyx ashtray.

  “Can we talk frankly?” he said.

  “What other kind of talk is there?” she said.

  He smiled.

  “Yes, of course. What else is there? What are you doing about the women in the park?”

  “I’m looking around,” she said.

  “That’s good to hear.”

  “I don’t think there’s a political aspect to this. So, I don’t think it’s something for you,” she said. “The best thing is to look into what is going on with an open mind.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Of course.”

  The typing from the hall was insistent, as though one letter or number were being typed over and over: 9,9,9,9. She thought of the shape of a young woman at the bottom of a gully, the torn stockings, the pile of yellowing cigarette butts.

  “So, who are you looking at? Have you got some names for me?”

  She opened the file and took out the piece of paper with her neat handwriting on it.

  “Andreas Weber, Alda and Michael Bauer,” she said.

  “Weber?” said Ritter. “A banker? The sniffer?”

  “That’s him,” said Armina.

  “Give him a try,” he said.

  “I intend to,” said Armina. “Edel Arnwolf, Erich Kortig,
Josef Hahn.”

  “Who are they?” said Ritter.

  “They go to dump girls,” said Armina.

  “Hmmmm,” said Ritter. “Scum.”

  “Bruno Hauptmann,” said Armina.

  “Where did you get that name?” said Ritter.

  “I went to the train station,” she said.

  “The Moth,” said Ritter. “He’s still there? That’s who you talked to?”

  “Hauptmann. Bruno Hauptmann,” she said, if only to get out of his office and to go about her work. “He lives in Wilmersdorf.”

  “I know Bruno Hauptmann,” said Ritter. “I went to school with him. The Gymnasium. The university.”

  “Maybe you can help me,” said Armina.

  “Look. Bruno has an organization to help young women get out of the park. That’s why he’s being accused. Well, don’t you see? The dumpy man with the red hair, the Moth, wants to get rid of anyone who would stop girls from working for him. I would have thought you were more adroit than that.”

  “I think we should look into it,” said Armina.

  “No,” said Ritter. “I can vouch for Bruno. Forget it.”

  The typing stopped outside. They waited. A secretary ripped a piece of paper out of the carriage of a typewriter. The sound was like someone skinning a deer and pulling the hide away from the meat.

  “I’m not so sure about that,” she said.

  “I am,” he said. “Drop it.”

  “Look,” she said.

  “There’s no looking,” he said. “I’ll vouch for Hauptmann. That’s enough. Who else have you got?”