The Divided City

by Luke McCallin

  “Drowned,” answered Weber quickly, a twist of scorn to his face as he looked at Reinhardt.

  “Suffocated,” Reinhardt corrected him, watched the other men for a sign, any sign, but could see nothing, see no deeper than the seamed, tired lines of the faces of four ordinary-looking men of middle age.

  “Please,” said Bochmann, looking across them, “the owner and myself invite you to help the police in their inquiry.”

  “Can you give Inspector Weber and myself some personal details? Anyone who knew Zuleger?”

  “I knew him pretty well,” said a man who had a patch over one eye. “Name’s Dorner. We flew together. Same squadron. Until I lost this,” he said, pointing at the patch. “There was nothing wrong with him, if that helps. He was his normal self last week.” The others nodded agreement.

  “Anyone know if he had plans for the weekend? A party? Dinner.” Again, a round of negative answers, although Reinhardt sensed a certain shiftiness, and Weber seemed to sense it as well.

  “Did anyone know a pilot named Andreas Noell?” One or two nodded, including Dorner. Reinhardt gestured for him to go on.

  “I knew him. Not well. We were in the squadron about . . . about a year together.”

  “And . . . ?” shot Weber.

  “And what?” Dorner shot back. “He was just a normal bloke. I haven’t seen or heard of him since nineteen forty bloody two, when I got this!” he spat, another jerk of his fingers at his eye patch. “I mean, what do you think? That we all of us spend our free time drinking and reminiscing about the old days?”

  “‘All’,” Reinhardt asked. “Just how many of you here in the factory are ex–air force?” Reinhardt asked Dorner. The question seemed to leave Dorner short of words, and he looked desperately to Bochmann.

  “A large number of the staff has that honor. Von Vollmer takes seriously his duties toward not only his own former men, but those of the same service. He has strong principles of solidarity.”

  “How many?” Weber pushed.

  “The majority of the workforce,” Bochmann answered.

  “We’ve got nowhere to go,” Dorner said. “We can’t work anywhere else. No union will have us.”

  Weber’s face seemed to lighten. “How’s this? Veterans congregating together? You know damn well that’s illegal.”

  “We stick together,” said another. “We have to.”

  The secretary poked her head into the room and beckoned to Bochmann. “You have had a call from your headquarters, Inspector,” he said, glancing at a slip of paper the secretary had handed him. “A Professor Endres has important information for you. He asks can you come to him as soon as possible.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Bochmann.” Reinhardt looked at Weber, then back at Bochmann. “I think we are finished, here, in any case.”

  “Finished? Reinhardt, there is much more we can inquire into,” protested Weber.

  “Finished, Weber,” said Reinhardt, firmly. The other men shuffled their feet, looking interested despite themselves in this show of division, and Reinhardt silently cursed this impetuous officer, this—callow—youth who could not seem to master himself, could not seem to understand the value of a united front.

  19

  In the cold outside, Reinhardt paused to light a cigarette. He offered one to Weber, but the detective only sneered at Reinhardt’s Luckies and lit a cigarette of his own, shifting his weight from foot to foot in his excitement. Reinhardt cupped a hand around his match at a sudden swirl of wind through the factory’s courtyard.

  “What did you make of that, Weber?”

  “I think we left a lot undone and unsaid,” Weber replied, as Reinhardt unfolded the piece of paper Weber had given him in von Vollmer’s office. “What is that, anyway? And don’t say ‘it’s an address’ because I know it’s an address.”

  “Well, it’s an address,” Reinhardt said with equanimity, unable to resist that little dig. “I found an address at Zuleger’s apartment, on an invitation. I wanted to compare it with von Vollmer’s.”

  “Why?”

  “To eliminate possibilities, Weber. It’s police work. Basic police work.”

  “You hoped it would match.”

  “I didn’t ‘hope,’ Weber. That’s not how this works.”

  “There’s more going on here, isn’t there?” Weber’s voice was excited.

  “Like what?”

  “Like . . . like political . . . stuff. That literature you found. That manifesto. There’s ex–air force and ex-who-knows-who-else in there. They’re not supposed to be gathering together.”

  “They’re working, Weber. Not plotting to bring back the Third Reich.”

  “Says you.”

  “The laws forbid the formation by veterans of any association or organization with a military or militaristic character . . .”

  “Like what we just saw in there?”

  “. . . but they say nothing about who a businessman can hire or not.”

  “Oh, listen to yourself, Reinhardt. You’re a bloody apologist for them. It’s true what they say, isn’t it? You officer types all stick together and watch each other’s backs. What do you do for fun? Reminisce about the bloody Kaiser and how to bring back yesterday’s politics?”

  “Why are you so excited about the politics? And what’s that you mentioned about political police?” Weber gave an angry sigh as he pulled on his cigarette. “Weber, what did I tell you about keeping your mouth shut in there?” Weber colored, the red rising unpleasantly up his neck. “Did you have to be so unpleasant?”

  “I have to ask you, Reinhardt,” Weber said, his nose twisting as if at the scent of something unpleasant, “where your loyalties lie? Unpleasant?” He seemed to swell up, all teenage anger with no clear outlet for whatever moved him except Reinhardt, and he stepped up close, poking a finger into his chest. “Unpleasant, you say? To men like von Vollmer? It was men like him,” he spat, poking Reinhardt again, “that got us into the war.”

  “Will you calm down, Weber,” Reinhardt said quietly, but it only seemed to infuriate Weber further. Instead of poking him, Weber closed a white-knuckled fist into Reinhardt’s coat and pushed him step-by-grudging-step back against the wall. As he did so, Weber seemed to grow, as if through the shame that stung the back of Reinhardt’s eyes at being manhandled thus, manhandled by a mere boy, Weber became more focused, a proclamation of the harm men could do—that a man could do—given the wrong means in the right circumstances. Reinhardt felt a shiver of fear, suppressing the instinct to slap Weber’s hand away, but the humiliation was worse. Humiliation at being manhandled around by someone like Weber, but aware—so aware—that the man in front of him was not just some young man, barely out of adolescence. Despite the sanction imposed upon him by Ganz, Weber was someone. Moreover, he was something. Reinhardt was honest enough to admit he was scared of Weber’s callow strength, and through him of Ganz, and of his blatant opportunism. And through Ganz . . . Behind Ganz there was the communist-dominated hierarchy of Berlin’s police, and Reinhardt was aware, painfully aware, of his place in that. Unbidden, his tongue began to stroke the gap in his teeth.

  “These are new times, Reinhardt,” Weber hissed, his breath acid with bad tobacco.

  “What color are you, Weber?” Reinhardt cast it out as if to throw Weber offtrack, unbalance him, but Weber frowned, his face untwisting itself. “Are you brown? The Nazis were brown. Are you red? Are you old enough to understand what that means? Are you one of those who changes his colors? There are plenty of them around. You’d be in good company.”

  “Fuck off, Reinhardt.”

  “And where are you from? I can’t place your accent. You’re not from Berlin. And you’re not from Saxony. There’s a lot of Saxons sitting in the Soviet sector, starting with Ulbricht at the top. Are you one of them? Are you one of those that came back with the Red Army?”

  “Li
sten, Captain Crow,” Weber snarled, both fists coming up to grip Reinhardt’s coat, thrusting hard against him. “You need to watch your mouth. Never mind my history. What about yours? I’ll bet there are parts of yours that might not stand up to scrutiny either.”

  “‘Either’?” repeated Reinhardt. Weber went white, then red, a flush that subsumed the splotched archipelago of his face into a wash of blood. His hands tightened on Reinhardt, twisting. Without thinking, Reinhardt lifted his hands to cover Weber’s fists, clenched his thumbs hard against the ends of the other man’s little fingers where they curled into his palms. Weber frowned a moment, then his face creased with pain and he tried to pull himself back, but Reinhardt held him tight, held him tighter until, just for a moment, he felt something deep inside, a sudden serpentlike coiling. As if something old and hoary had turned over, giving him a glimpse of a darker nature, mud-smeared and with the mad rolling eye of an animal gone wild. Reinhardt squeezed tighter still, frightened as always by that glimpse inside himself, of how he imagined and internalized what he could do as something awful rising from ruined ground, then released the pressure. Weber pulled his hands away as if burned, stumbling back.

  “We’re finished here. I’m going to go back to the morgue to see Professor Endres. You can come with me. But if not, you can visit this place,” Reinhardt said, holding out the invitation he had found at Zuleger’s apartment. His eyes were flat, as if daring Weber to come back at him, and effectively ignoring the other man’s display of aggression.

  Weber blinked, flexing his hands against his pain, looked down at the paper. His face twitched, and he shook his head. “You bloody go. I’m going back in there for a look around.”

  “Suit yourself,” Reinhardt said, dropping his cigarette butt on the ground. “Get some dates. Squadron postings. Times those pilots were all together. Something factual,” he finished, walking away, feeling Weber’s furrowed astonishment as he did so, but he had neither the time nor the patience for him, and right then he could not have cared less for Ganz’s inevitable anger at his having left Weber behind. Weber was a big boy. He could look after himself.

  Reinhardt walked quickly out of the factory, pain stabbing his knee with every step as if it could feel his intention to try and outpace his own frustration and was warning him against it. He waited for what seemed like a long time for a train, smoking, cursing Ganz for not giving him a vehicle. When one finally came, he squeezed himself into it, worming through the press of people until he found a corner to wedge himself into and take the weight off his leg, letting his mind go blank, feeling it as the only way he could calm himself down.

  His mind stilled, but it was a viscous stillness, torpid, heavy with introspection, thoughts adrift and lost somewhere between here and there, between now and then. Between the Berlin he had known, and the one that stumbled before him through the clouded glass of the train’s windows. Between the man he had been, and the man he was now. Always, he thought, always this seemed to come back to haunt him. The fact he could not be the man he wanted to be. Time and circumstance never seemed to permit it, and he never seemed to find a way to fit himself into where and when he was.

  The war was over, but it would not leave him alone. He was not the only one feeling that, he knew, and he felt no temptation to self-pity, but he could not help a mounting fury and frustration at how he, an individual, was being subsumed into the mass of those men who had fought the war so badly, so awfully, so criminally. Thinking of reflections again, thinking of the times as a policeman when he had held up the truth of a suspect’s actions only for that person to reject it, he knew men could not be prodded to truth. They had to come to it themselves, and he could not see truth in the eyes of the people all around him.

  He had once thought of reflections. On a mountainside in Bosnia, listening to Partisans as they sang the night in and watched the sun set across a horizon of knuckled mountains, he had thought of reflections, the truths they could sometimes give back. He had thought back then there would be a reckoning when the war ended. Every man would have to stand face-to-face with judgment of some kind, and often the hardest judgment came from the face you saw reflected back at you every day. A face you saw reflected everywhere, in mirrors and windows, in metal and water, sharp-edged or sunken, chopped or blurred. The splintered facets of yourself that stared back at you from a thousand pairs of eyes. A face you saw reflected within you.

  Reflections were everywhere, he had thought then, but he knew better now. Berlin was closed to him, shattered in on itself, and its walls gaped blind. Its people were closed to him, and to themselves. They reflected nothing, except the stunned labor of living. The city reflected nothing except the damage men had done it.

  20

  He stayed like that, like a wheel running itself down, until something, a flicker of light, perhaps, a word spoken that slipped out of the crowd into his ear, made him lift his head and realize he could swing past the address that Leena had given him for Kausch before going to the morgue. He switched trains at Pulitzerstrasse, catching another one toward Wedding Station in the French sector, where he made his way by memory and directions from passersby to Plantagen Strasse, which ran along what used to be, he remembered, an elegant, shaded cemetery.

  His memory of the layout of the place served, but of the cemetery not much remained except a swath of ground rutted by the tilt of shattered tombstones and the stumps of trees. Remembering what Leena had said, he watched the street from the far side of the cemetery, behind the chipped façade of an old tomb, listening to the quiet. There were three buildings on the street, all apartment blocks, all with façades scored and scorched by fire. A few windows reflected the sky, but most were covered with wood or cardboard. He scanned along the rooftops, but could not see any movement, although there were enough dark holes in the tiled roofs where roofs still existed, or enough hiding places in the saw-backed jumble of ruins where there were none, to hide an army of spotters.

  “It’s the middle one.”

  Reinhardt jumped, turning to see two boys crouching down behind a grave. They grinned at him, clean flashes of teeth amid the grime of their faces, clearly pleased at having snuck up on him.

  “You’ll give someone a heart attack doing that,” Reinhardt grunted, lightening his words with a rueful shake of his head and smile.

  “Leena said to watch for you,” one of them said. He pointed. “The middle one. And there’s someone watching the road from the roof, up there.”

  Reinhardt nodded. He shook out a few Luckies and left them on the tomb. There was no door at the entrance to Kausch’s block and no superintendent. Although the rooms for one were there, they were abandoned, the angles of floors, walls, and corners softened with rubbish. There were letterboxes by the stairs, but Kausch’s name was not on them. Nor was there a Kessel. The whole building felt abandoned, no sounds, no smells beyond a cold scent of waste and neglect. But at the first floor, an old lady answered his knock and gestured at him with two fingers pointing upward when he asked for Kausch. She said nothing, but her rheumy eyes blinked quickly at him as she shut the door.

  On the second floor, only one apartment had a door. He knocked, waited, knocked again, calling “police.” He leaned close to the door, listening to the kind of silence that wrapped itself around those who wished not to move. The silence that accompanied a policeman’s knock at the door. He knocked again, louder, calling again, hearing finally a shuffle of feet from inside. The door cracked open to a man’s face, clean-shaven, with heavy-lidded eyes.

  “I’m looking for a Mr. Kessel.”

  The man shook his head. “He’s not here.”

  “How about Kausch.” The man blinked. “Are you Mr. Kausch? I am Inspector Reinhardt, with the Kripo. May I come in?”

  The man moved his mouth, as if around a dry tongue. “Why?” he managed, after a moment. “What is the matter?”

  “May I come in, please? It would be easier to
talk. Are you Mr. Kausch?”

  The man nodded after a moment. “Yes. But I’m sick, can’t you see?” Kausch said, rucking the blanket he wore higher up around his shoulders. The man’s fingers were long, the fingernails filed and clean, and his hair was streaked with gray about his ears. “What do you want?”

  “Do you know a man named Andreas Noell?”

  Kausch coughed, hunching further into the blanket. A cold wind feathered the hair on Reinhardt’s head, blowing from within Kausch’s apartment, bringing with it the musty odor of damp, of unwashed clothes, of badly cooked food. But from Kausch came a faint, but distinct, odor of soap.

  “I did, yes,” Kausch coughed again.

  “You did? You knew him from where?”

  “I knew him from before.”

  “From before . . . ?” Reinhardt said, beneath a smooth brow, keeping his eyes level on Kausch.

  “Before. We were in the same apartment before.”

  “You? Or Mr. Kessel?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes?”

  “Me.”

  “Kausch, then. So is there a Kessel?”

  “No. Yes.”

  “But he’s not here. So you said. Where did you know Noell from then?”

  “In Neukölln.”

  “You lived in the same apartment?”

  “Yes. No. I lived there. He needed a place. After the war. We discussed it, I left him the apartment to come here.”

  “Why? Why would you do that for Noell? Did you know him well?”

  “Not very well, no.”

  “Have you heard from him lately?”

  “No.”

  “When was the last time you heard from him?”

  Kausch shrugged. “A few months ago, perhaps.”

  “You weren’t friends.” Kausch shook his head, a slight twist to his mouth.

  “So why the arrangement with the other apartment? So far as I can see, unpleasant as it was, this is worse.” Reinhardt put levity into his voice he did not feel, all the while watching Kausch’s eyes, and listening as hard as he could for sound.