by Joseph Kanon
“Lots, but you’ve got a meeting to get to,” Jake said, standing up. “I don’t want to wear out my welcome.”
“Any time,” Muller said pleasantly, also getting up, relieved. “That’s what we’re here for.”
“No, you’re not. I appreciate the time.” Jake folded the flimsies into his pocket. “And these. Oh, one more thing. Can I see the body?”
“The body?” Muller said, literally taking a step back in surprise. “I thought you had seen it. Isn’t that why we’re here? It’s—gone. It was shipped back to Frankfurt.”
“That was fast. No autopsy?”
“No,” Muller said, slightly puzzled. “Why would there be an autopsy? We know how he died. Should there have been one?”
Jake shrugged. “At least a coroner’s report.” He caught Muller’s expression. “I know. You’re not Scotland Yard. It’s just a little skimpy, that’s all,” he said, patting the sheets in his pocket. “It might have helped to examine it. I wish you’d waited.”
Muller looked at him, then sighed. “You know what I wish, Geismar? I wish you’d never gone to Potsdam.”
Jeanie was arranging her set of carbons when he came out. She looked up and smiled without stopping, like a casino dealer, shuffling the third sheet to the bottom, then tossing the folder into an out box for filing. “All set?”
Jake smiled back. The army never changed, a world run in duplicate. He wondered if there was another girl to do the filing to save those wonderful nails. “For now,” he said, still smiling, but she took it as a pass, arching her eyebrows and shooting him a look.
“We’re here nine to five,” she said, a dismissal.
“That’s good to know,” he said, playing along. “Colonel keep you pretty busy?”
“All the live-long day. Stairs are down the hall to your right.”
“Thanks,” he said, lifting his fingers to his forehead in a salute.
On the entrance steps he was blinded by the light and shaded his eyes to get his bearing. The sun, already hot, was streaming in from the east, filtering through the dust that hung over the ruins beyond the graceful colonnades. The work party, bent over their rakes, had got rid of their shirts but not, Jake noticed, their initials, P on one trouser leg, W on the other. The war had branded everybody, even Tully, now just some initials on a carbon flimsy.
He stood for a minute, his mind full of engraving plates and watch prices, all of which led him nowhere. Which was probably where Muller wanted him to go. He smiled to himself, thinking of Jeanie—two brush-offs in one morning, one more direct than the other. It was Muller who’d taken the circular way around, leaving him back on the steps not even sure he’d been through a revolving door. Except something nagged, a missing crossword piece that would leap to the eye if you looked at it long enough. He told the driver he wanted to walk.
“Walk?” the soldier said, amazed. “You mean back?”
“No, meet me at Zoo Station in about an hour. You know where that is?”
The soldier nodded. “Sure. It’s a hike from here.”
“I know. I like to walk. Helps me think.” Explaining himself. He made a mental note to ask Ron for his own jeep.
But the soldier, like Jeanie, had been around. “I get it. You sure you don’t want me to drop you? I mean, I don’t care, it’s your business.”
Everybody does it, Jake thought as he headed across the battered park; a lot of small money that adds up. So whom had Tully done business with? A gun-happy Russian? A DP with nothing to lose? Anybody. Five thousand dollars, more. People got killed every day in Chicago for less, just for skimming a numbers collection. Life would be even cheaper than that here. But why come in the first place? Because the Russians were here, flush with cash. Not porcelain knickknacks and old silver to trade. Cash. Honey for bears. Everybody does it.
The park gates opened onto lower Potsdamerstrasse and a small stream of military trucks and civilians on rickety bicycles, all that was left of the traffic that used to roar by to the center. On foot Berlin was a different city, not the spectacle he’d seen from a touring jeep but something grittier, a wreck in closeup. He had loved walking in the city, exploring the miles of flat, irregular streets as if just the physical touch of shoe leather made it personal, brought him into its life. Sundays in the Grunewald. Afternoons wandering through districts where the other journalists never went, Prenzlauer or the tenement streets in Wedding, just to see what they were like, his eyes gliding from building to building, oblivious to curbs. Now he had to step carefully, skirting clumps of broken cement and picking his way through plaster and glass that crunched underfoot. The city had become a trail hike, full of obstacles and sharp things hidden under stones. Steel rods twisted into spiky shapes, still black from fire. The familiar rotting smell. At the corner of Pallasstrasse, the remains of the Sportpalast, where bicycles used to whiz by in the racing oval and Hitler promised the faithful a thousand years. Only the giant flak tower was standing, like the ones at the zoo, too sturdy even for bombs. A soldier was propped against the wall with one hand, talking to a girl and fondling her hair, the oldest black market in the world. Across the street, a few other girls in thin dresses leaned against a standing wall, gesturing to convoy trucks. At ten o’clock in the morning.
The side streets were clogged with debris, so he kept to the main roads, turning left on Bülowstrasse for the long walk up to the zoo. This was a part of town he’d known well, the elevated station hulking over Nollendorfplatz, with its ring of bars. A movie marquee had slid down to the pavement nearly intact, as if the building had been whipped out from under it, like the magic trick with a tablecloth. A few people were out, one of them pushing a baby carriage filled with household goods, and Jake realized that the dazed, plodding movement he’d seen from the jeep two days ago was the new pace of the city, as careful as his own. Nobody walked quickly over rubble. Why would anyone come to Berlin? Had Tully been before? There must be traveling orders, something to check. The army ran in duplicate.
More blocks of collapsed buildings, more groups of women in headscarves and old uniform pants, cleaning bricks. A woman in heels stepped out of one building, smartly dressed, as if she were heading up the street as usual for some shopping at KaDeWe. Instead she wobbled over some broken plaster to a waiting army car and straightened her nylons as she pulled her legs in, a different kind of excursion. And KaDeWe, in any case, was gone, ripped through by bombs and sagging into Wittenbergplatz, not even a window mannequin left. They used to meet here sometimes, by the wurst stands on the food floor, where you were likely to run into anybody, then leave separately for Jake’s flat across the square. Taking different sides so that Jake could see her through the crowd as he waited at the stoplight, watching to see that no one followed. No one did. A game to make it more exciting, getting away with something. Then up the stairs where she’d be waiting, a ring to make sure Hal was out, and inside, sometimes grabbing each other even before the door clicked shut. The flat would be gone now too, like the afternoons, a memory.
Except it wasn’t. Jake looked across the street, shading his eyes again. A piece of the building had been knocked out, but the rest was there, with his corner flat still facing west onto the square. He took a step, elated, then stopped. What would he say? ‘I used to live here and I want to see it again’? He imagined another Frau Dzuris, looking puzzled and hoping for chocolate. A woman came to the window, opening it wider to the air, and for an instant he stopped breathing, straining to see. Why couldn’t it be? But it wasn’t Lena, wasn’t anything like Lena. A truck went by, blocking the view, and when it passed, the broad back was turned to the window so that he couldn’t see her face, but of course he’d know, just the movement of her arm at the window, even from across the square. He dropped his hand, feeling foolish. A friend of the landlord’s, no doubt, eager to snap up the flat when Hal finally left. Someone who wouldn’t know him, might not even believe he’d been there at all. Why should she? The past had been wiped out with the streets. But
the flat was there, real, a kind of proof that everything else had happened too. If he looked long enough, maybe the rest of the square would come back with it, busy, the way it all used to be.
He turned away and caught a glimpse of himself in a broken shard of plate glass from the store window. Nothing was the way it used to be, not even him. Would she recognize him now? He stared at the reflection. Not a stranger, but not the man she had known either. A lived-in face, older, with two deep lines bracketing his mouth. Dark hair thinning back from the temples. A face he saw every day shaving, without noticing it had changed. He imagined her looking at him, smoothing away lines with her fingers to find him. But faces didn’t come back either. They got cluttered with assignments and frantic telegrams, squint lines from seeing too much. They’d been kids. Only four years, and look at all the marks. His face was still there, like the flat, but scarred now too, not the one he’d had before. But the war had changed everybody. At least he was here, not dead or turned into a set of initials. POWs. DPs.
He stopped, a tiny, nagging jolt. Initials. He took out the carbon sheets and scanned them again. That was it. He put the top sheet under, glanced over the second, then automatically shuffled for the third and stopped, empty-handed. But Jeanie had had three carbons. He squinted, trying to remember. Yes, three, like a stacked deck. He stood for another minute thinking, then put the sheets away and started up the street again toward the zoo, where small amounts of money were being made.
The driver took him back to Bernie’s office, a small room in the old Luftwaffe building crammed with files and stacks of questionnaires that spilled off the couch and rose in piles on the floor, a mare’s nest of paper. How did he find anything? The desk was worse. More stacks and loose clippings, stale coffee cups, even an abandoned tie—everything, in fact, but Bernie, who was out again. Jake flipped open one of the files, a buff-colored fragebogen like one Lena might have filled out, a life on six typed pages. But this was Herr Gephardt, whose spotless record deserved, he claimed, a work permit.
“Don’t touch anything,” said a soldier at the door. “He’ll know. Believe it or not.”
“Any idea when he’ll be back? I keep missing him.”
“You the guy from yesterday? He said you might be by. Try the Document Center. He’s usually there. Wasserkäfersteig,” he said, breaking it into syllables.
“Where?”
The soldier smiled. “Mouthful, huh? If you hold on a sec, I’ll take you—I was just going myself. I can find it, I just can’t spell it.”
They drove west past the press camp to the U-bahn station at Krumme Lanke, where a handful of soldiers and civilians huddled in a miniature version of the Reichstag market, then turned right down a quiet street. At the far end Jake could see the trees of the Grunewald. He thought of the old summer Sundays, with hikers in shorts heading out to the beaches where the Havel widened into the series of bays Berlin called lakes. Today, in the same hot sun, there were only a few people gathering fallen branches and loading them into carts. An axe chipped away at a broad stump.
“Pathetic, isn’t it?” the soldier said. “They chop down the trees when nobody’s looking. There won’t be anything left by winter.” A winter with no coal, according to Muller.
At the edge of the woods, they turned up a narrow street of suburban villas, one of which had been turned into a fortress with a high barbed-wire double fence, floodlights, and patrolling sentries.
“They’re not taking any chances,” Jake said.
“DPs camp out in the woods. Once it’s dark—”
“What’s in there, gold?”
“Better. For us, anyway. Party records.”
He showed a pass at the door, then led Jake to a sign-in ledger in the entrance hall. Another guard was inspecting the briefcase of a soldier on his way out. Neither spoke. The council headquarters had had the busy shoe-clicking hum of a government office. This was quieter, the locked-in hush of a bank. One more ID check took them into a room lined with filing cabinets.
“Christ. Fort Knox,” Jake said.
“Bernie’ll be down in the vault,” the soldier said, smiling. “Counting the bars. This way.”
“Where’d you get it all?” Jake said, looking at the cabinets.
“All over. The party kept everything right to the end—membership applications, court records. Guess they never thought they’d lose. Then they couldn’t destroy them fast enough.” He spread his hand toward the cabinets as they walked. “We got the SS files too, even Himmler’s personal one. The big haul, though, that’s downstairs. Index cards. The central party registry in Munich kept duplicates of all the local cards—every single Nazi. Eight million and counting. Sent them to a paper mill in Bavaria finally, to pulp them, but before the owner could get around to it, the Seventh Army arrived. So, voilà. Now we’ve got them. Here we go.” He went down a staircase to the basement. “Teitel, you here? I found your guy.”
Bernie was bent over a broad table whose littered surface was a mirror image of the mess in his office. The room, an alcoved cellar that might once have held wine, was now walled from floor to ceiling with wooden drawers, like card catalogues in a library. When he looked up, his eyes were confused, as if he had no idea who Jake was.
“Sorry to barge in like this,” Jake said. “I know you’re busy. But I need your help.”
“Oh, Geismar. Right. You’re looking for a friend. I’m sorry, I forgot all about it.” He picked up a pen, ready to work.
“Don’t forget to sign him out,” the driver said to Bernie, drifting back up the stairs.
“What was the name?”
“Brandt. But I need something else.”
Bernie looked up, his pen still poised to write. Jake pulled out a chair.
“A soldier was killed in Potsdam yesterday—well, killed the day before. He washed up on the conference grounds yesterday. Hear about it?”
Bernie shook his head, waiting.
“No, I guess not,” Jake said, “not down here. Anyway, I was there, so I got interested. He had some money on him, a lot, five thousand, maybe closer to ten. I thought that was interesting too, but apparently I’m the only one. MG just gave me the brush this morning—polite, but a brush. This one came with a lecture. Happens all the time. Black market’s a nickel-and-dime game, no big players. Nobody gets excited when a Russian shoots one of our men, just when they do anything else. So go away, please. Now I’m even more interested. Then I hear the body’s already been shipped back to Frankfurt. That’s a little too efficient, especially for MG. Following me so far?”
“Who was the brush?”
“Muller,” Jake said.
Bernie frowned. “Fred Muller? He’s a good man. Old army.”
“I know. So they say keep a lid on it and he keeps a lid on it. Look, I don’t blame him. He’s a time-server and he doesn’t want any trouble. He probably thinks I’m a pain in the ass.”
“Probably.”
“But why keep a lid on it? He promises me an exclusive and gives me a casualty report. But not all of it. There’s a sheet missing.” Jake paused. “The kind of thing the DA’s office used to pull.”
Bernie smiled. “So why come to me?”
“Because you were a DA. I’ve never met one yet who stopped being a DA. Something’s funny here. You can feel it in your gut.”
Bernie looked over at him. “I don’t feel anything yet.”
“No? Try this. Muller wants me to think it’s a GI making a few bucks on the side. Okay, not nice, but nothing special, either. But he wasn’t just a GI. PSD, that’s Public Safety Division, isn’t it?”
“That’s what it says on the charts,” Bernie said slowly.
“Well, that’s what it says on the casualty report too. PSD. He was one of you. Ever met a police department that couldn’t be bothered when a cop got shot? That’s one organization takes care of its own.”
Bernie looked at him again, then reached over for his coffee cup. “We’re not exactly a police department, yo
u know,” he said carefully. “It’s not the same.”
“But you run the MPs, you run the local police, you’re responsible for law and order. Such as it is.”
“I don’t run anything. You’re asking the wrong guy. I’m Special Branch. I just—”
“Chase rats, I know. But you’re still in the department. You must know people. Anyway, you’re the only one I know. So.”
Bernie took another sip of coffee. “Berlin PSD?”
“No, he flew in from Frankfurt. Another interesting point, by the way.”
“Then no wonder Fred sent him back. Put it in somebody else’s in-box. It’s the MG way.” He paused. “Look, I don’t have time for this, whatever it is. You want somebody over in CID. Criminal Investigation.”
Jake shook his head. “CID’s army, not Military Government. Knife fights. This is being handled by Public Safety.” He took the sheets out of his pocket. “Here, see for yourself.”
Bernie put his hand up in a stop sign. “No, I mean it. I don’t have the time.”
“Somebody else’s in-box,” Jake said.
Bernie put down the cup and sighed. “What are you looking for, anyway?”
“Why nobody wants to know. The way the story’s supposed to go is the Russians loot, we just liberate a few souvenirs. I’ve told it that way myself. And Public Safety? The last place you’d expect to find a bad apple. Wrong barrel. But my guess is that he had something going, not just a couple of cartons of cigarettes, and I’ll bet it’s Muller’s guess too. The difference is, he doesn’t want to know and this time I do. So would a DA. Man’s dead.”
Bernie ran his hand through the tight waves of his hair and stood up, as if the chair had been confining him. He moved a folder onto a pile, then walked over to another, pretending to be busy. “I’m not a DA here,” he said finally. “I’m MG too. Maybe Fred’s right, you know. The guy closed his own case. Maybe we’re all better off.”
“Except for one thing. What if he wasn’t acting solo? A man comes to Berlin to make a deal and ends up dead. So who was he coming to see?”