by Dan Vyleta
‘What will happen to Söldmann?’ she asked.
‘Söldmann is no longer any of your concern.’
‘Good,’ she said. ‘I never want to see him again.’
I wonder whether she meant it. It is human nature to grow fond of those we fondle, no matter the reason.
The next night, at ten, Söldmann stood outside Sonia’s apartment, his hair slicked back with French pomade and a bouquet of tulips in his arms that had cost him dear. The door stood ajar for him, as it had so many times before. He won’t have seen his assailant. The sap struck as soon as he was through the door. Söldmann carried a little leather pouch. Inside was the merchandise. No sooner was it found than the midget was killed. A stiletto thrust to the kidney. The killer threw the body on the bed, threaded two red stars through the holes of his collar, placed a call to Fosko and let it ring one-two-three times. Then he took off.
Don’t worry – the nameless assassin, it wasn’t me. The Colonel judged me too clumsy for a job such as this: blindsided, my dexterity blighted by gout. I daresay he was right.
Fosko and Sonia had been sitting in his drawing room when the phone rang. He counted off the rings, checked his wristwatch, and then gave Sonia instructions to call Boyd at the brothel. ‘Tell him you are in trouble. Tell him you need him there right away. Be convincing, so he can’t say no.’
She did what was asked of her. What else could she do? To her credit, she did not go as far as sobbing down the phone. All she said was: ‘Boyd, it’s me, Belle. I need you. At the flat. Something terrible has happened.’
That’s all it took. He promised her he would ‘fly like the wind’ and blew her a kiss. She thanked him and put down the phone.
‘Now, how long do you think it will take him to drive over to the flat?’ Fosko mused. ‘Three, four minutes?’
He waited for two, then placed another call. This one went out to the police station five blocks from where the midget was filling his coat with blood. The officer on duty answered. Fosko got his attention immediately.
‘ Hilfe. Help. Mein Gott. Das Mann ist tot. He killed him. A Russian officer. Ruskie Offizier. I saw it through my window. It was terrible. Schrecklich, my good man.’
He smacked his lips and waited for an answer.
He got one.
‘ Ja, ja.’ The German kept repeating it. ‘ Ja, ja.’
It made him sound a right idiot.
Fosko hoped it wouldn’t preclude him dispatching a patrol. He passed on the address, house and flat number, asking the man to repeat it back to him.
‘ Lützowstrasse. Neunundzwanzig. Nine and two.Ja, ja.’
When the police officer asked him to pass on his personal details, Fosko hung up.
‘Crikey,’ he said. ‘If I had known they were this dim, I wouldn’t have given Boyd any head start at all.’
What happened next is subject to some conjecture, though I did my best to verify the facts. Boyd rushed over to rescue his damsel in distress. The girls at the brothel said he tried to call her back, but nobody picked up the phone. To be on the safe side, he took a gun along. He had his own set of keys, and when nobody answered the bell, he burst in without further ado, gun in hand. What he found was a dead midget: pencil moustache and blood on his cashmere. There was no sign of his beloved. A bouquet of tulips lay trampled in the hallway.
As he stood there contemplating the red stars upon Söldmann’s collar, he suddenly became aware of a racket across the road. He went over to the window and looked out. The police were in the street, two, three cars that blocked off the road. Within minutes they were joined by a patrol car full of Russian soldiers. They were busy raiding house twenty-nine. Boyd was standing in house ninety-two. The Berlin street system had house numbers run up one side, and down the other. Twenty-nine and ninety-two were virtually opposite each other. ‘ Neun-und-zwanzig.’ Nine-and-twenty. The bloody Germans count their numbers from the back. When the Colonel learned this, I thought he would never stop laughing.
Anyway, so there he was, standing in a room with a corpse on the bed and the coppers across the road. Boyd was none too stupid; he figured out where they’d been heading before a flawed translation had tripped them up. The way he saw it, he had five minutes, ten tops. If they found him with a dead man in an apartment rented in his name he was as good as done for – especially if they thought the corpse a Russian. If, on the other hand, all they found was a blood stain on a whore’s fragrant sheets, he might just be able to talk his way out of it. So he picked up the body, threw it into the trunk that he had used to move Sonia’s belongings, lugged it down the stairs, out the back door, across the yard and over the wall. Thankfully, he had parked his car out back in the first place, from a long habit of caution. The engine caught despite the cold. He did not turn on the headlights until he was well out of the sector.
Boyd drove to a bar, called a friend, had a drink, and shoved off. Outside the snow kept piling up. It made him think of cats, for some reason. To make things convincing he worked over the midget with a car jack in a back alley, and even gave his fender a good whopping. When we searched his car two days later, it really did look like it had been in an accident, though I doubt a midget would have made that big a dent.
Meanwhile, back in Lützowstrasse, watching the shenanigans of the German policemen and Russian Military Police who searched first one house and then – a lieutenant’s superior intuition – the other, was a lone man in a car, freezing, and puzzled as to what the hell was going on. He had dropped off his diminutive boss some fifteen minutes previously, and had been instructed to wait for him until he had brought to completion his amorous errand. We have met him before, albeit briefly, on a grainy photograph in the Russian interrogator’s office, where Pavel first learned Söldmann’s name: a beefy young tough with a handlebar moustache and a big scar running down his cheek. He was the mobster’s right-hand man, had been since the organization’s earliest days, and answered to the aristocrat name of Arnulf von Schramm, though he was the most proletarian of punters, and stupid to boot. Schramm waited half the night, conscious that his boss had missed his appointment with the Russian. Söldmann never returned, nor did Schramm see the police cart out a half-sized body, which would have settled the matter, albeit grimly. Eventually he drove home, hoping against hope that the mystery would resolve itself. One should have thought he would keep an eye on the situation; track the potential re-emergence of the merchandise, dig around for Söldmann’s sources. As a matter of fact, he did none of the above; went to ground instead, and got himself drunk five days running, sliding further out of our story with every swig. I don’t regret it. Schramm’s people had lost the war. Berlin would tolerate them only at the margins.
While Schramm was waiting in his car, the midget’s killer arrived back at the villa, carrying the leather pouch like a bloody talisman. The Colonel subjected its contents to a thorough investigation, the results of which were that Söldmann had carried in his bag what in this line of business is conventionally called a ‘ringer’. If he’d carried the merchandise on him at all, he still had it. For a glum few hours Fosko assumed the Russians must have it, since he expected them to have taken possession of Söldmann’s body. Some hours after dawn, his informant with the Wilmersdorf police let him know that no corpse had been recovered. It is the only time I have seen the Colonel break into open jubilation. He even went so far as to offer me one of his prized cigars. We sat and smoked and had kippers for breakfast.
From here on in, things should have been easy. Boyd White had the merchandise, or at the very least he had the body. Fosko had Sonia call Boyd midday on the nineteenth of December:
‘Someone killed Söldmann,’ she whispered. ‘I found him dead in my bed.’
They agreed to meet in a quiet alley that very evening.
I will keep short the details of my interrogation of Boyd. I had some others help me (the man with the knife was there, and Easterman, the big oaf) and it must be said that Boyd squealed almost at once, even befor
e we had pulled so much as a single nail. The problem was that we did not understand his screeches, and took them for mockery. He kept giving us the same address over and over: Seelingstrasse 21, the apartment on the fourth floor. Fosko got so annoyed after a while, he put a bullet through him, right through the throat, where it made a hell of a hole. Then he instructed us to continue working on the body. He wanted it to look rough, too rough for western hands. There was a lot of racism in those days concerning the ‘Asian’ propensity for violence. To us, all Russians were brutes, apart fromthose we met in novels, for those of us who liked to read.
Seelingstrasse 21, fourth floor. We thought Boyd was giving us Sonia’s address, letting us know that he knew about the Colonel’s setup. Nobody even dreamed that he might know somebody one floor down, and that Americans keep their floors in different order. I mean, Christ Almighty, it’s not something you think about when you are busy sticking wires into a man’s flesh.
The rest you already know. We thought we had lost the scent for a while, but then Pavel showed up on the scene, with his kidneys, and Fosko put on that show in the morgue. Now that I knew him I realized it had been naive to assume he would take fright and give up the midget. We thought he must either be a civilian who wanted no trouble, or that he was in on the game and had squirrelled away the merchandise. It turned out that he was something else altogether. An interesting man. I loved talking to him.
Boyd, by comparison, did not compare.
I only talked to Boyd once, and even then he had nothing interesting to say.
On the third of January the Colonel returned from his travels, a few hours after his wife and children had been driven off to the airport in Berlin-Gatow to fly back to England. He returned in the midst of our talking, and was in what can only be described as a crabby mood – a circumstance that changed when he received a telephone call a little later that day that rang like a theatre bell announcing the final act. I was dimly aware that I was partaking in tragedy, and fully expected to find the stage littered with bodies by the time the curtain fell. All I could hope (this must have been Rosencrantz’s prayer, and Guildenstern’s) was that I would not be one of them.
Part Three
Haldemann
1
25 December 1946
Sonia woke early that morning, anticipating the sun by several hours. The room lay dark around her, its quiet punctured only by the monkey’s snore. There was, in the first moment of her waking, no memory yet of the previous day’s events. She stretched out an arm and stroked the pillow next to her; rubbed her eyes with the base of one palm. When her mind came into focus, she thought first of all of their kiss; held off all other thought until she had savoured it, the touch of his fingers at the nape of her neck. Then it came to her that the man who had kissed her might be dead; might be beaten, bleeding, spitting teeth. She pushed back the blankets reluctantly, found her slippers and pulled a coat over her nightdress. Outside in the corridor, all was quiet; Christmas morning and not a shadow in the stairwell. She returned to her bedroom for a moment to pull on tights and two pairs of socks. Then she climbed down the stairs and put an ear to Pavel’s door.
It was his smell that drew her, though she could hardly have said why. There was a vague notion in her mind of lying down in his bed and wallowing in his smell before it dissipated in the cold. She pictured herself, supine across the mattress, sniffing at his underwear, and almost laughed.
‘Oh Pavel,’ she whispered. ‘The things you make me do.’
Her eyes were dry when she said it. She opened the door.
Inside she found the boy, asleep and wrapped in Pavel’s blankets. He was wearing a coat made of wolf’s fur, much too big for him, its buttons carved out of wood. Above him, at the window, hung a frozen noose in silent invitation. On Pavel’s desk Sonia noticed two camera lenses, a pair of scissors, and a military flashlight. She wondered what use they had been put to, if any. She glanced in the waste basket, but found it empty save for a crumpled page of typewritten notes.
The boy was hard to wake. She shook him twice, but he barely opened an eye. His brow was hot and clammy. Sonia gathered him up in her arms, turned to carry him downstairs, then stopped and laid him down on the bed once more. It had occurred to her that she would never return to this room. In Pavel’s closet she found one of his shirts, worn and wrinkled. It had been bleached too often and was threadbare at the elbows. She wrapped it around her neck like a shawl, and picked up the boy once more. When she closed the door behind them, he nestled his head against her breast.
‘Don’t you get comfortable there,’ she mumbled.
He was much heavier than she had anticipated.
Upstairs, she tucked Anders into her bed, along with a hot-water bottle. His hat had slipped down over his brow; she made to move it, but found herself reluctant to touch the boy more than was necessary. The boy’s teeth were dug into his lips, dark with old blood. She stood for a moment, listening to him breathe through one half-clogged nostril; stooped to lay a hanky next to his grubby hand. Then, another pot of water on the cooker, Sonia stepped over to her display cupboard and retrieved the china teapot. Inside, a pair of Nordic socks. She placed them on top of the dining table, ground coffee beans in a little wooden mill, brewed up. It filled the apartment with the most wonderful smell.
He came in just as she was taking her first sip. It scalded her gums, it was so hot. She must have forgotten to lock the door behind her when she had returned with the boy. The man who entered was hardly more than a boy himself, a ruddy-faced youth in a fur-lined leather coat and similar cap. His eyes, Sonia noted, were almost transparent. It was as though they had been drawn into his face with watercolours; their blue bled into their whites. In his hand he held a gun. It was pointed at Sonia.
‘You have fresh coffee?’
His German was good, but she immediately knew him for a Russian. There was not a woman in Berlin who didn’t know the accent.
‘You forgot your uniform,’ she said.
He slid a palmover his expensive coat. ‘It is Colonel’s sector. Better not be noticed.’
He glanced around the apartment and whistled appreciatively when he saw the piano. ‘Nice Klavier for kurva.’ The way he said it, she did not think he meant it as an insult.
‘What do you want?’
‘Information. We want to know where is Söldmann. And merchandise.’
‘Get out.’
He wagged his chin as though he was looking over a horse he was thinking of buying. In his left cheek there bulged a wad of tobacco.
‘How about cup of coffee? It is cold morning.’
‘I will fetch you one.’
She rose from her chair and walked over to the kitchen. As she walked, she drew her coat tight around her frame. The presence of a Russian in her living space made her uncomfortable. It brought back memories she had long thought banished.
He followed close behind her. When she reached around for a cup, he gently stopped her other hand from clasping a knife. Her eyes appraised the frying pans for their weight and heft while she poured sugar into a dish, but he caught her glance and tutted his disapproval.
‘You better talk,’ he urged her. ‘One of our men is missing. If he’s dead, we will kill you.’ He shrugged like it was too bad.
‘I don’t know what you are talking about.’
‘I don’t know what you are talking about. You sound like movie.’ He spat, tobacco discolouring his phlegm. It sat brown and viscous upon her kitchen tiles. ‘These days, movies full of people who don’t know what talk is about. And half hour later they shoot one another.’
He looked at her as though he expected a response; some sort of verdict on the state of cinema. Dinner-party talk in front of a loaded gun. He held it waist-high, the barrel pointing at her abdomen.
Sonia ignored him, threw a dish towel over the gob of spit at her feet. She took hold of cup and saucer, the dish full of sugar, and moved to step past him, back into the dining room. The Russian wa
ited until she was level with him, then pushed her back into the kitchen. Her back collided with a cupboard door and slammed it shut.
‘Talk, kurva,’ he said. His eyes sat like marbles in his knotty head.
‘Talk, or I’ll make you. You fucked Soöldmann. We have pictures.’
It might have been her fear, but she thought she saw his hands inch towards his fly.
The boy saved her. He was there, all of a sudden, pointing a gun with both of his hands. His feverish cheek burned quite as bright as the Russian’s.
‘Leave her be.’
The voice quivered in its childish timbre. He might have done better, she thought, not to speak.
The Russian began to turn, first one foot and then the other, shoulders bulky under his leather coat. His pistol was still in his hand. On his lips, an affable smile.
‘Boy,’ he said. ‘You want no trouble with me. Not over her. She’s no good.’
He said no more, because that’s when her frying pan caught him at the back of his skull, twisting her wrist upon impact. He crumpled like a leaf.
‘Help me tie him,’ she ordered Anders. They strapped him to a chair with some belts and scarves. The blood ran freely from the Russian’s head and dyed his blond hair ginger. Up close she could smell the tobacco on his breath and in his sweat.
Quickly, with new-found clarity, Sonia grabbed the Nordic socks from the dining table and unwrapped their content. In her rage she almost burned it: threw it in the oven, and watched it burn. Instead, she started pulling on clothes and ordered the boy to pack a bag for her.
‘Take all valuables. Two pounds of coffee, my cigarettes and underwear, especially the silks. The winter coats and all the stockings you can find. The bedding, if you can fit it somewhere. Don’t forget the silver cutlery.’
The boy stared at her climbing into her tweed skirt, then did as he was bidden. They were ready to go in less than half an hour.
‘Will he freeze to death?’ the boy asked at one point, pointing at the Russian. The monkey had climbed onto his lap and was chewing on his coat.