Alex Glauberman Mysteries Vol 1-3

by Dick Cluster

  “Would Jack be above having people killed, if they double-crossed him or got in his way?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “And so, supposing your father decided to hold on to some valuable financial paper, instead of sending it on to a customs official in Hamburg? Supposing he planned to cash it in himself— or send it in a registered parcel to his daughter?”

  “It doesn’t seem as if that would be very smart.”

  No. It hadn’t been. Alex chewed a corner of his lip and then got down to what was bothering him.

  “You and Jack— that seems an odd alliance to me, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

  Blood rushed to her face but subsided quickly. Alex watched her carefully in a split second of indecision that followed. Her cheeks sagged, and for the first time a furtive quality came into her eyes. She finished her beer while her legs under the counter grew still.

  “You have a daughter, but you did not say how old. I told you Jack liked to act as a stand-in for my vanished father. Teenage girls are often very angry at their mothers. I was no exception. I blamed her for the fact of my not having a father— something I am very sorry for, and one of the reasons Gerald Meyer’s death doesn’t fill me with sadness, whoever was responsible. As to Jack, he was delighted to help me get away from home for a while…”

  Alex felt a little firmer grasp on things. Particularly on that chance meeting— if it was chance— in which Jack and Jerry had caught up on their lives over gin and beer on Threadneedle Street.

  “Do you mean that you and Jack Moselle are ex-lovers?”

  “Lovers?” Cynthia pounced on the word, and her ironic tone came back. “Love had nothing to do with it, on either side, you can be sure. But to accept your euphemism, yes. It might be more accurate to say we hated together, for a while.”

  “Hated what?”

  “My mother, of course. Women didn’t reject Jack often, particularly those who were in his debt. Don’t be awkward, Alex. Turning a knife is not generally a good way to get people to open up.”

  No, thought Alex, it’s not. But it’s often a good way to keep them on a leash.

  Oh, and Jerry, Jack would have said. Let me tell you, you have one hell of a fine daughter. What she lacks in experience, she makes up in fire. Or better words, to the same effect. Meyer would have hated the coarseness, hated Jack for flaunting this at him, but he would have sat still for it because he didn’t have any right to protest. Alex wondered just how Gerald Meyer would have nursed the grudge. Would he have done what Jack wanted, and made a profit, but also waited for a time, and a way, to get even?

  19. Aunt Frieda’s Tale

  The West Berlin station, unofficially, is always referred to as “Berlin Zoo.” The nickname comes from what’s located across the street, where the big Tiergarten comes to a point like an arrow stabbing into the commercial heart of the city. Alex and Cynthia’s train pulled into the Zoo just after six, when it was too late to collect registered mail if any was waiting. Alex excused himself to call Trevisone, who might soon be heading out to lunch. He wasn’t surprised to find the German pay phones new, shiny, and easy to use.

  “Glauberman,” Trevisone said. “Nice of you to call every day.”

  “I thought you might want to know about the daughter. I checked her passport, and she’s clear.”

  “Is that so? And this thing Meyer mailed before he got shot, have you checked into that?”

  Alex couldn’t help feeling that Trevisone was more sarcastic, and less curious, than he had been the day before. Something had happened to change the chemistry, he feared, but he couldn’t tell what. “Not yet,” he said. He tried to make his next statement dramatic. “Last night, somebody tried to keep me from getting to it.”

  “Glauberman, look,” Trevisone replied. Now he just sounded tired. “I talked to your lawyer. For a guy that works with a wrench, you’ve got a pretty fancy one. I talked to your doctor. I talked to the girl you got to follow Meyer out to the airport, and I even talked to your ex-wife. My advice is, come home. If you won’t come home, stay the hell away from this Meyer business.”

  “Wait a minute,” Alex said. “You mean I’m not a suspect anymore?”

  “Disappointed? If I could get hold of you, I’d slap you with something just to keep you still. Like the weed the Somerville police force found when they looked around your shop. But as far as who pulled the trigger next to Meyer’s head, right now I’ve got a suspect that’s a lot better than you.”

  Uh-oh, thought Alex. There goes our beautiful relationship.

  “You mean the airport mystery lady?”

  “There’s no more mystery.”

  “Who is she?”

  Trevisone might have hesitated, or it might have been the time delay.

  “It’s none of your business, but she’s just Meyer’s girlfriend, all right?”

  “Oh. Well, did you check into the suggestion I made about the bank?”

  “I called, yeah. New York bankers don’t exactly bare their souls to a guinea cop from out of town. They raised their eyebrows over the phone and said they’d investigate.”

  “Sergeant,” Alex said, “do you remember our little conversation about names? I want to tell you where mine comes from, if you don’t mind.”

  Alex could see Trevisone narrowing his sharp eyes and stroking his Billy Martin mustache. Whatever he had figured out, or thought he had, he wouldn’t be one to throw away any loose ends.

  “If it’s quick. As long as you’re paying for the call.”

  “This story comes from my Aunt Frieda. My great-great-grandfather, or whoever it was, worked in the slaughterhouse back in the time when they were handing out last names. His job was to make sure the animals got killed in the kosher way. He was the— I don’t know what it was called officially, but he was like the umpire. If he said it was kosher, it was. If he said it wasn’t, it wasn’t. There was no appeal, he was it. So they named him Gloibermann, from gloibn, it means ‘believe.’ It got changed from Yiddish back into the German somehow, when my grandfather came over. But I’m still the Glauberman, Sergeant, do you see what I mean?

  “No.”

  “Death-by-mistress may be nice and neat, but I’m telling you something’s not kosher. Now I’ve got some names for you to dangle in front of those closemouthed bankers: Interface, Incorporated, in London. And the head man, whose name is Moselle. Originally Mazelli. See whether those names make any bankers jump.”

  “And supposing I say that security frauds, or whatever you’re driving at, aren’t in my jurisdiction? Supposing I tell you I already got a call from a federal government agency, reminding me of this?”

  Knowledge, persistence, trial and error. Alex smiled almost shyly to himself. He remembered the customer who’d brought in the last ailing Volvo, pleading for a quick repair job before Alex’s vacation. The man had been certain the frightening noises meant a bent push rod, a demolished bearing, or worse. But Alex had listened, placed the tip of a big screwdriver to the gear cover, and listened again. Then he’d loosened the fan belt and given the crankshaft pulley a little twist. He’d felt the give, and he’d known what it was. Now he saw his hypothesis about Meyer confirmed in the same way.

  “Thank you, Sergeant. Of course they did. That would mean your federal agency had already been looking into some unusual paper that went across Meyer’s desk. Which might explain one of the things Meyer was afraid of. Okay. I gave you the names. I can give you a supposition, too, and maybe that’ll be the excuse you need to follow them up. Suppose I don’t take your advice. Suppose I keep messing with this, and I screw it up, and somebody pulls a trigger next to my head. Won’t that be your job to look into? If you do what I suggest now, you’ll have a head start.”

  “Yeah,” Trevisone said. “I appreciate you thinking that out for me. You’re a really generous guy.”

  * * *

  At this hour, on the Ku-Damm, the neon was just coming into its own. Cynthia gave the commercial sprawl a dismissive wa
ve.

  “That’s the real zoo,” she said. “Everything for sale, and everyone looking to buy or to sell. I am taking you to see a different Berlin, the other way, toward the Wall. The Kreuzberg, where I live, is the… the Haight-Ashbury, I used to say, but that’s not really it. We are an old respectable neighborhood that is now also a beacon for squatters and foreigners and the alternative culture. While it lasts. This is a city with no room to expand, and the specter of no place one can afford to live threatens us all. Berg means ‘mountain,’ you understand, though the district is mostly flat. Our Gasthaus is at the foot of the hill, close by the Victory Park.”

  “Which victory?” Alex asked when she paused. He knew how to be star pupil, when appropriate.

  “Over Napoleon. It was the Russian winter’s victory, really. The Prussian army fell on him as he retreated from that disaster. But the monument will not tell you that.”

  In Berlin, entrance to the U-Bahn was by the honor system. Some passengers shoved tickets into an automated orange pillar to be punched. Others, including Cynthia, did not. The station where she and Alex exited, two trains later, was decorated with grainy enlargements of black-and-white photographs. On one wall, an elevated railway ran on stone arches past nineteenth-century buildings, pseudo-baroque. On the next wall, the buildings were reduced to shells and the railway bridge had collapsed. Half the arches were gone. Twisted steel rails and a mangled, windowless car dangled from the wreckage.

  Alex and Cynthia climbed the stairs to the surface, where a scene greeted them that bore no resemblance to either photo. Across a traffic circle rose a mammoth poured-concrete structure, surrounded by high chain-link fencing and topped with radio and microwave towers.

  “Polizeipräsidium,” Cynthia said. “Central police headquarters. Behind it is the military airport, site of the Airlift, you know. Maybe the pictures are supposed to remind us of the folly of war, or maybe the error of defeat. Come on. I’ll take you by the scenic route.”

  The scenic route led past a small shopping district and then up a winding blacktop road through surprisingly dense woods. Alex’s breath came harder, and the weight of his bag seemed to pull at his stitches. Cynthia stopped in a clearing, near the top, where a stream burbled out of a concrete pipe half-camouflaged by shrubbery.

  “The brook isn’t natural, of course. It was built by a famous engineer in the last century. From an engineering point of view, why waste a hill? But it’s a very pretty park. We have a community center down at the bottom, in the old caretaker’s building. They don’t give us any funds, but we’ve managed to set up a coffee shop, and some rooms for classes and meetings and films. We’re hoping to start offering some child care. There’s a small zoo, even, that’s been there forever. It gives the place a certain friendly smell of shit. Like a farm.” Alex tossed a rock in the stream, watched it splash and disappear under the surface. It was nice to be here, on the scenic route, where nobody but Cynthia could know where he was. It was pleasant to listen to her ramble on about these community details, these mildly brave facts of daily life. In the twilight, in the artful tranquility of this wooded spring, the scene did not match his image of Berlin. It was not the Prussian capital, not Hitler’s city, not the headquarters of the Holocaust.

  “Cynthia,” he interrupted, “could there still be a Jewish cemetery, Jüdische Friedhof, somewhere in Berlin?”

  She tossed a rock that landed close to where he’d landed his.

  “One that I know of, where I’ve sent Jewish visitors quite a few times before. It’s in the East Zone. You can go quite easily. You have to be out by midnight, and you have to fork over twenty-five marks.”

  “I’d like to see it.” He tossed a last pebble into the flow. “Your father told me I’d find something interesting there. The identity of his killer, maybe. Does that make any sense to you?”

  “None,” she said, standing. “But I think that it’s getting to be time to go on.”

  Alex gave her his hand, to be helped up, but this time he kept hers as they walked. They came out into the setting sun, on a grassy hillside with a partial view of the city to the west. Cynthia pointed the other way, to a wooden fence surrounding a stone tower at the hill’s summit. Spray-painted graffiti covered the fence, among them, in black letters, the rallying cry Turken Raus! Fifty years earlier, it would have been painted with a brush. Juden Raus!, it would have said.

  “You know what this is?” Cynthia said. “It’s a frightened city. Under all the showy stuff, Berliners are frightened of so many things.”

  Right, Alex thought, and the bloodhounds are asking your home address. You and I are both frightened, though we don’t say so, about what we find ourselves in the middle of. His hand tightened on hers, and as they turned and kissed, Alex felt suddenly that maybe this was what Gerald Meyer had sent him to do. He had sent him to stand in, a generation late. Or, somehow, to repeat his follies, in a shiny new Berlin that was back on its feet. Or… Alex closed his eyes and slid his hands up into Cynthia’s hair, cradling her head, exploring her mouth with his tongue, trying not to think at all about any corpses, or any whys.

  Footsteps made him open his eyes and glance sideways at a man with a brown beard, a dog, and two children. The children pointed and shouted some kind of singsong rhyme in German. The father tried to quiet them but grinned. The dog, however, came as close as it dared. It barked and barked, and, despite the father’s commands, it would not stop barking until they moved on.

  20. Even Cowgirls

  Mockernstrasse ran due north from the bottom of the park. It was a street neither wide nor cramped, running straight as a rail. The houses were three stories, narrow, of graying, square-cut stone. To Alex it felt almost like Brooklyn, in the forties, say— when Brooklyn boys like his father rode in tanks or trucks, or trudged, rifle in hand, across a muddy Europe eastward toward Berlin.

  Number 58 did not stand out from the others. Its large wooden door was opened by a thin, white-haired woman in a dark skirt and sweater.

  “Cynthia, du kommst so spät,” she said. “Wir haben auf dich gewartet.”

  Her German was musical. She did something with her r’s— a combination of a trill and a swallow— that Alex had heard actresses do in Fassbinder movies. Literally, her welcome did not translate as much: So late— we’ve been waiting. The tones translated as caring, reproof, and an underlying fear.

  “I wanted to show Alex the park,” Cynthia said lightly.

  “Alex, this is Marianne, who has known me since I was a baby and put up with me, too.”

  “Guten Tag,” said Alex, shaking a hand that was crisp and lively. He stepped through the street door toward a steep, stone stairway paralleled by a large green arrow painted on the wall. Red letters with black shadow declared the Gasthaus to be one flight up. A smaller wooden door, before the steps, seemed to go to a first-floor apartment.

  “That’s Marianne’s,” said Cynthia, and indeed the older woman disappeared behind it. “Come on up.”

  Upstairs, the Gasthaus entryway was decorated with pop and political posters in a profusion of languages. The dining room, however, might well have been unchanged since Cynthia’s mother’s time. China cups and saucers sat on white tablecloths, each table adorned with a single candle in a brass holder. Oil paintings of country scenes looked down, rich but sedate, from the walls. A small spinet piano seemed to be waiting for a woman in a high lace collar or a man in a black bow tie to bring it to life. Only the dark-skinned man with long, curly hair, no collar, and a bushy mustache seemed out of place. He swooped a hand-painted pitcher of coffee down in front of a few guests still at supper. He wrapped Cynthia in a bear hug and covered her neck with kisses.

  “And this,” she said, laughing, “is Cenap, the master chef and well-known agitator of the Kreuzberg. This is Alex, who fixes German and Swedish cars in America.”

  Cenap embraced Alex too, planting a formal kiss on each cheek. He disappeared to the kitchen and returned with two skewers of kebabs and two serving
s of baklava. Greeks and Turks— like Israelis and Arabs— enjoyed the same food. Alex sat at a table by himself, picking at the food, while Cenap recounted the doings of the past few days in rapid if strangely accented German. The narrative seemed to revolve around the personal crises, political meetings, and social gossip of a sizable community. The guests, two Japanese men and three Caucasian women of undetermined nationalities, finished their coffee and drifted out. One of the women, with a choppy hairdo tinted orange, greeted Cynthia fondly. When Cenap was done, Cynthia took her plate and said she was going down to talk for a moment with Marianne. The Turk cleared tables and left.

  So this is the Gasthaus Mockernstrasse, Alex thought, this curious overlay of the bohemian on the genteel. There was a solidity, and a solidarity, that he liked very much. He was pleased to have made it here, in spite of all advice, and in one piece. All that remained was to understand what for. In a little while, Cenap came back. In his odd accent he picked up the thread of a conversation that he hadn’t begun. For Alex’s benefit, he spoke more slowly. Helping the guest feel comfortable, Alex supposed.

  “We’re all refugees here, one way or another,” Cenap said. “Marianne came from the East Zone long ago, before the Wall, and Cynthia’s mother took her in. When my turn came, Marianne put me up in her extra room until I got my feet. I lived in a squat, when I first came. A big old building, not so bourgeois as this. They’d painted murals on every inch of wall, inside and out. But the police finally cleared us all away. Soon apartments will be renting there for two thousand marks.”

  Alex wondered whether Marianne had hidden other fugitives, in other eras. She reappeared then, as if on cue. “Cenap does not mention that he was a wanted man for the first month. He kicked a policeman who had taken aim with his nightstick at a pregnant woman.” She gave the Turk a look of exasperation, but a jerk of her white head toward the next story showed that the sentiment was not directed at him. “Sie ist so…ich weiss nicht,” she began, then paused and looked around as if for inspiration. Apparently their conversation— not for the first time— had not gone very well. Her eyes fixed on Alex and she pounced on a word.