by Chris Petit
‘Exactly. He’s only interested in his stories.’ Stoffel was cracking up the men again. ‘He retires in two weeks anyway.’
Schlegel didn’t know. He was surprised. Most of the older ones hung on because of shortages, unless they were ill. Talk of any leaving party usually started at least six weeks before. For the last one there had been a futile search for an old-fashioned stripper.
Gersten said to Lazarenko, ‘Show them.’
Lazarenko had a briefcase. He stooped to rest it on his knee so he could open the lock. What came out was a malevolent object of frightening design, more the size of an axe than a household hammer, though a hammer it was, with a black metal spike and a wedged striking edge.
‘I have kept it as a reminder of what happened to my people. A bad souvenir, you might say.’
On 25 June, two years before, retreating Russians quelled a local uprising with extreme cruelty.
‘They were not satisfied with just killing. They cut off women’s breasts and men’s genitals. Jews crucified children to walls and slit their guts so they stared at their insides spilling out as they died. This mallet is for slaughtering cattle, but its blows killed many men and women and smashed their bones. They did it to German prisoners too. Tied them up and cut off their noses, tongues, cocks and balls, then beat their brains out with this.’
Schlegel stared at the horizon as he struggled to imagine the conspiracy Gersten had in mind, how it really worked and was transmitted.
Gersten said, ‘A rogue agent. Someone with the knowledge of that experience. I would say that’s what we’re dealing with.’
Morgen said, ‘Today’s Tuesday. Herr Lazarenko said the Russians can only kill on Sundays, and we don’t believe his previous suspect was up to the job.’
He doubted if this new body had been lying there since Sunday.
Gersten said, ‘We think they work at night and have access to transport.’
‘Prove it then. I thought they were all locked up after work.’
‘Not in any meaningful way,’ said Lazarenko. ‘There are women in other barracks.’
He thrust his hips obscenely and said guards made use of them too. They were all in it together.
Gersten stepped forward, assuming a confidential manner. ‘You were in Lublin when it was known as Dodge City.’
Morgen looked irritated.
‘You know the score. We know your reputation.’
Morgen turned to go. ‘See Stoffel.’
‘You know the terrain. He doesn’t. He’s barely interested. They’re all as thick as shit. This needs someone with your skills.’
Morgen walked away.
Gersten didn’t appear greatly put out and said to Schlegel, ‘He won’t be able to resist a challenge like this.’
‘What happened in Lublin?’
‘He was known as the bloodhound. He had an eye for big, sensitive cases. But he always ended up offending someone. That’s why they got rid of him.’
Lazarenko claimed to have seen Morgen in Lublin.
‘He wouldn’t remember. I was just a refugee. I worked as a barman in the mess where he ate.’
Schlegel considered Morgen’s new reputation as a supersleuth. He was damned if he would tell Stoffel.
Gersten said Morgen had a habit of getting into trouble. A big investigation into a racket involving stolen Jewish furs became an embarrassment when it was discovered the main suspect was the brother of the mistress of a top official and she was fencing the goods in Berlin.
‘He’ll come round. He needs it as badly as we need him.’
21
‘In four days, gentlemen, four days, we have had a double shooting, two bodies butchered beyond any hope of recognition, and a corpse with its penis cut off. Five bodies in four days. What are we to make of this?’
They were in what Nebe called an emergency conference and everyone else just another boring meeting. There were about ten detectives in the room, the stale old farts; all the good ones had either volunteered or been conscripted.
Despite the indifference of his audience, the occasion showed Nebe at his best: rhetorical, sarcastic, difficult to fathom, possibly vacuous. His best trick was to keep everyone guessing.
Morgen interrupted Nebe’s flow by strolling in late, sitting down and lighting up. Nebe watched with exaggerated disbelief before reasserting himself.
‘This is what Minister Goebbels said to me. “Why, just as I am about to declare the city Jew-free, do the police allow a Jewish maniac to go on the rampage?” ’
Nebe looked around. No answer was forthcoming.
‘I was told this was unacceptable on top of the public relations disaster already faced because of the SS arresting a load of the wrong Jews. These botched arrests have led to an unprecedented demonstration, and Minister Goebbels will not tolerate a second scandal, with news getting out of a Jewish mass killer. Already he has been asked by a Swedish journalist if the city now has its equivalent to London’s Jack the Ripper.’
Schlegel thought it might secretly suit Dr Goebbels to have his Ripper, because it would serve to underline the dangerous and unstable nature of those he wished to be rid of.
Nebe went on to say it had been Dr Goebbels’ greatest wish to declare the city Jew-free after the latest action, which was now not the case because thousands had avoided arrest and gone into hiding.
‘The SS has been given a deadline of six weeks to round up all the strays. Jew-free means what it says. You have a lot less time. Dr Goebbels will not have his plans for a clean sweep undermined by rumours of this Jewish Ripper.’
A wag at the back asked if anyone had found the missing penis. Faced with suppressed titters, Nebe sensed an uphill battle.
‘Help me here. Is this man killing for sadistic pleasure or in desperate protest against the deportations? How many killers are you talking about anyway?’
‘One, sir,’ said Stoffel, quickly.
Morgen said no. While the first two killings – the old man and the warden – cancelled each other out, the others had involved transportation and extra hands to carry the bodies.
Stoffel wanted to know what Morgen and Gersten had been talking about in the park. Morgen said Gersten was given to wild theories and he had told him to take them up with Stoffel.
Nebe held up his hand. ‘One, two, three killers, I don’t care how many. Forty-eight hours to sort it out before you explain yourself in person to Dr Goebbels, who will not view the matter lightly. I want a daily update and you’d better have some news. Dismissed. Schlegel and Morgen to remain behind.’
Nebe didn’t invite them to sit. He placed a fifty-mark note on the desk in front of him.
‘This note is counterfeit. Find out where it comes from.’
Schlegel presumed it came from the money found in the dead man’s mouth, but he deferred to Morgen as the ranking officer, who said nothing and stood looking insolent.
‘You are Financial Crimes, aren’t you?’ asked Nebe, with an attempt at his usual sarcasm.
Morgen fielded with blank sincerity. ‘I believe so, yes, sir, as of Monday morning.’
‘With a history of rank insubordination.’
‘Six months’ Prussian amusements and another six at the front. In winter, sir.’
Schlegel watched out of the corner of his eye. Prussian amusements meant penal colony. Such detention wasn’t unheard of but for it to be followed by combat duty meant Morgen must have annoyed someone very much.
Nebe said, ‘Find out where the money is coming from. That’s all.’
Morgen continued to stand there. Nebe gestured to say they were dismissed.
‘Permission to speak, sir,’ Morgen finally said. ‘To find out we will almost certainly need to know who killed the man, as I presume we are talking about money found about his person.’
Nebe did his best to look stupid.
Morgen said he had no expertise in forgery and it would be helpful to know what they were dealing with.
Nebe consulted
a file on his desk, making a show of opening the folder a crack. He said the forgery was passable to the untrained eye. Fifty-mark notes had a portrait of a woman in a headscarf on the front and Marienburg Castle on the back. Half a dozen flaws pertained to both images, including a missing window in the detailing of the castle.
‘A speck, but absent nevertheless,’ said Nebe. ‘The print dye doesn’t quite match. Some of the tailing of the italic lettering is shorter than the original. The clearest error can be found in the frame around the woman’s head.’
Its detailing included a series of points along the edge of the frame. In the original there were none at the corners, but in the forgery there were.
‘And the verdict, sir?’ asked Morgen.
‘The overall quality is very good and would be much harder to spot were it not for the basic error of the corner points.’
As they were leaving Nebe said to Morgen, ‘I hear your reputation is for rocking the boat.’
‘Isn’t that what I am supposed to do, sir?’
Morgen looked bored. The impression Nebe gave, for all his slipperiness, was of an ineffectual man.
‘Not here. Not with us. What is the real purpose of your assignment?’
‘I have no idea, sir.’
‘Well, we didn’t ask for you.’
‘Nor I to come here.’
‘Can we be honest for a moment?’
That was rich coming from him, Schlegel thought.
Nebe went on. ‘Can we hypothesise?’
Schlegel wanted to say that Morgen did not look like a hypothetical man.
Nebe ploughed on. ‘Do you think it’s possible you are in a situation where you don’t know yet on what it is you are supposed to report?’
Morgen shrugged and said he couldn’t possibly say.
Nebe seized on that. ‘Can’t or won’t?’
Morgen sighed. ‘Are you saying I might be on one of those assignments where the investigator goes in essentially clueless, apart from being nudged to stumble across whatever it is he is supposed to investigate?’
‘Precisely!’
‘I can’t say I have ever heard of such an assignment, but thank you for warning me.’
‘Life would be much easier if I knew,’ Nebe said with consummate vagueness.
‘Me too, sir.’
‘Here’s what I think. All you know is you have been allowed back from Russia on condition you do nothing. This you will ignore because your reputation is as a troublemaker. We both know that. What worries me is that whatever you dig up will be on your own initiative, which will be of benefit to others, possibly this department’s enemies, but you will not find out who they are. Do you understand what I am saying?’
‘That I will get into trouble without understanding why.’
Nebe nodded, looking pleased. ‘Yes, I can work with that. Be careful you don’t turn out to be the mad dog that bites us in the pants.’ He gave a strange whinny that passed for a laugh. He seemed very taken by the idea. ‘Keep me informed of your every move on this and if you discover who you are answering to, tell me immediately.’
‘Who are your enemies, sir, so I know?’
The remark was delivered with sufficient deadpan insolence for him to get away with it. Nebe laughed unexpectedly and waved them from the room.
Outside in the corridor, Morgen looked at Schlegel intently and asked what on earth had Nebe been on about. Schlegel could honestly answer he had no idea.
Morgen left. A man of abrupt transitions; none of the usual hello and goodbye, no formal saluting. There and not there. Schlegel enjoyed watching him go.
As the urinals in that part of the building were better appointed than the smelly toilets on his floor, Schlegel took advantage. He was going about his business when Nebe joined him, leaving a diplomatic space. They stood in a show of attentive silence. Schlegel stared intently at his vanishing piss. It was common gossip that Nebe was inordinately proud of his cock and his opening line in any seduction was quite simply, did they want to see it?
‘Enough to make them goggle,’ was the verdict of his mother, who regarded herself sufficiently well-bred to make a point of vulgarity. ‘But not as big as he thinks.’
Schlegel got away first but Nebe finished quickly and joined him at the basins where he asked whether there might be a connection between the old man who had shot himself and the Jewish butchers, through the slaughterhouse.
Schlegel said carefully that he had been asked to file a report on the old man, and as far as he understood the search for the missing Jewish butchers was a separate issue.
‘That’s your decision,’ said Nebe, sounding lightly sinister. ‘I quite understand.’
The remark was typical of the man’s mind games.
‘What do you make of Morgen?’ Nebe asked, drying his hands and doing up his jacket. Schlegel noticed he hadn’t finished up properly and there was a spot on his trousers where he had dribbled.
He said it was too early to say. Better to volunteer nothing, he thought.
‘Has Morgen said anything?’
‘Not about why he is here. No, sir.’
‘Find out and tell me.’
How many people was he expected to spy for now? He volunteered that Morgen was not showing any signs of being there for underhand reasons. That much was true, for all the speculation. Everyone was projecting onto Morgen, including himself. The man might be odd and mysterious but so far he had not shown his hand, if indeed he had one.
Nebe grew exasperated and asked Schlegel if he had been born yesterday.
Schlegel held the toilet door for Nebe and they went their separate ways until Nebe suddenly turned round and came back.
‘What wild theories of Gersten’s?’ he asked with restrained aggression. He appeared upset.
Schlegel carefully rehearsed his lines in his head first before reciting that Gersten had an unreliable Ukrainian translator who believed the killings had a Bolshevik connection.
‘Russian Jews or Russians and Jews?’
‘He’s not clear. I think it’s more to do with them having killed his people in a similar way.’
Schlegel at first avoided looking at Nebe, addressing the medals on his chest. Now he saw the man’s face was white with anger.
‘Categorically not. I will not have you going down that route. Absolutely forbidden!’
Schlegel wondered what he had said wrong.
Nebe repeated what Stoffel had told him: the hunt now was for any missing butchers.
Schlegel decided to stand up for himself. He had been given the job of finding them because no one was interested. If it was now so important then homicide should take care of its own cases, because he did not have the necessary experience.
His remarks verged on the insubordinate, and he lacked Morgen’s indifference, but he calculated he could get away with it because Nebe deferred to his stepfather. Stoffel would give him hell but it was only for another two weeks.
22
Sybil’s afternoons continued to be spent at Rosenstrasse, helping Franz, without knowing why, other than feeling safe because she had no fear of being unmasked there. Lore anyway seemed content at Alwynd’s, writing the man’s copy and translating it so Alwynd could bill for two fees. Lore and Alwynd were always chuckling together or talking about stuff that went over Sybil’s head. She knew Lore was safe with Alwynd and decided it was easier when she was out of the way.
She felt protected by Franz’s coping. Time to do the job, he said, and they got on with it.
Otherwise she tried to make the most of the isolated pockets of tranquillity that came her way. Sitting alone quietly sewing while Lore slept, until interrupted by the grunting of one of Alwynd’s students being noisily fucked and a bath being run afterwards, the pipes wheezing and hammering as the ancient system tried to cope. Sybil amused herself with the thought that the clanking and sighing was what Alwynd’s fornications would sound like by the time he was an old man. She was as usual a little shocked by the lan
guage she sometimes used to herself.
Where Sybil thought about the future and was too paralysed to do anything about it, Lore insisted their luck was holding and they should ride it. She said Alwynd was a great believer in the drift of currents. Lore once shook Sybil and told her to appreciate what she had. They couldn’t have been more fortunate stumbling across the apartment.
They inevitably quarrelled more, which was compensated for with lingering reconciliations. Sometimes Sybil felt too stupid for Lore and feared she got on her nerves. She felt unsettled about everything: not telling Lore about Rosenstrasse; pretending she was out searching for someone who could find them papers; not getting around to having her pin-up photos done; not making a greater effort to look for her mother. The fate of her mother continued to nag which was perhaps only to be expected; theirs always had been a shrewish relationship. All this Sybil normally would have taken in her stride, but she was often too exhausted to sleep.
To his surprise, as Schlegel was leaving the office he received a call from Francis Alwynd asking what he was doing. Nothing, he said.
‘Come over. We’ll have a jazz evening.’
It was the first time in as long as Schlegel could remember that anyone resembling a friend had extended an invitation.
They played jazz, got drunk and chatted about art, which Alwynd knew about.
He stood up suddenly, and said, ‘There are a couple of girls in the back. We could turn this into a party.’
Sybil heard Alwynd prowling the apartment, standing and listening outside their door. He opened it. They were in bed and the light was out. He had once said to her in his unsubtle way that what he liked best was waking in the night with his cock hard and being able to put himself in a woman and drift off again, feeling truly safe.
Lore stirred in her sleep as Alwynd left. Sybil lay there, thinking about Lore and the give and take of their desire, which was something wholly new after the strange and unsatisfying business of taking a man into her body. She feared Alwynd would yet find a way of insinuating himself. She listened to the world outside, with its weather and traffic, knowing that without Lore next to her life would make no sense.