The Butchers of Berlin

by Chris Petit

  They were driven back to Grosse Hamburger Strasse. Sybil tried surreptitiously to reach for Lore’s hand and sensed her withdrawing it.

  An extra bed had already been put in the room. Sybil didn’t know what to say now they were alone. Lore sat mute and flinched as Sybil reached out.

  They still had each other, Sybil said.

  Lore, eyes downcast, searched for her words. ‘My love for you knows no bounds but I feel my soul has been cast into a darkness where no contact or reassurance is possible.’

  Sybil was taken aback by her strange, biblical language, but saw how what once was whole had been split asunder. They had been transformed into damned monsters out of all proportion to what they really were.

  The heat of the moment that had sustained them melted away, passion reduced to clumsy embrace, as if some malignant presence clung to them. They created falsely cheerful cutouts of themselves, playing table tennis in the day room, laughing self-consciously and making a show of being entertained, under the watchful eye of Stella Kübler, queen of the catchers, whose friendship was like being brushed by death. Stella made a point of recruiting them into her social circle. Lore told Sybil that the brightness of Stella’s eyes and film-star smile eclipsed everything around her until she wore a halo of darkness.

  Stella was quick to remind Sybil they in fact knew each other quite well from the Feige-Strassburger school of design. She told them she was first arrested in the same café where Sybil and Lore had nearly got caught. She had lived a life of adventure. Brutal beatings, escape, recapture. Her parents were being held as hostages in the same building, on the other side of the dividing wall. She sounded quite resigned about it.

  Stella insisted Lore come and work with her. She talked of the sexual thrill of catching and how she often needed a man afterwards and being taken from behind was best because it turned fucking into pure sensation, with none of the usual bother of address. Stella seemed utterly without illusion, saying they were all running scared but why pretend.

  Sometimes Sybil looked at Stella in awe.

  Lore’s mouth turned into the memory of her mouth, even as they kissed. Blood no longer coursed through them as it once had. They stored their love for whatever fragile future they might have. They would escape. They would survive. Delivering Lore to Sybil, Gersten had returned the one person he could have held and used against her.

  They talked about Grigor. Sybil remembered him, which she had not let on to Schlegel.

  Grigor had been older, one of the aloof, arrogant ones, able to take his pick. He had a temper and used his fists. Their only acquaintance had been in a kitchen five years before, after Grigor had been street fighting during the November pogrom. Sybil remembered days of shock and high drama, of nervous gatherings, and on that occasion the smell of witch-hazel as Grigor’s wounds were treated by a beautiful young woman who dabbed uselessly at a graze.

  Grigor cultivated a look of the French anarchist actor Artaud, a big rebel star for the students. The girl with the witch-hazel looked helpless and Sybil took over. She at least had some first aid. Grigor complained of his hand hurting. She made him move his fingers and said no bones were broken, which was about the extent of their exchange. He asked her name and said in an ominous way he’d heard of her. He didn’t thank her afterwards, only looked at her in a smouldering fashion that she remembered and thought he would instantly forget. Afterwards it was said Grigor had killed one if not two brownshirts and had been forced into hiding.

  Based on what Gersten had told her, and her single observation, Sybil supposed Grigor could have become transformed into this dramatic killer. There always had been something uncontrolled about him. One or two each year used the persecution to fuel delinquent fantasies. Normally it was a pose; with Grigor she was not sure. Perhaps he had become tempered since by all the cruelty. Sybil had witnessed enough unthinkable change for Gersten’s theory to hold.

  She’d heard how Grigor used and discarded women in an animal way that made Alwynd appear sophisticated. Franz had known him slightly and aspired to the same pose. Much late-night discussion took place, with candles stuck in empty bottles, about the validity of the anarchist soul versus the sterile regimentation of the new order. Sybil noted such talk was always about the men.

  Lore fell into Stella’s bright and amoral orbit, leaving Sybil jealous. Stella had highly developed antennae to anything hidden. Other girls shared rooms but Lore suspected Stella guessed their secret. Stella encouraged Lore to become more feminine, forcing her to dress in a way Sybil hated.

  During the day Stella and her catchers swept through the city, with a checklist of addresses. They hung around cafés, parks, theatres, embassies and cinemas. Stella’s beat was around the Kurfürstendamm, with its once smart shops. She had the authority to check the papers of anyone she thought Jewish. She taught Lore what telltale signs to look for. Any suspect should be treated to a friendly approach with an offer to help and given a rendezvous, where police would be waiting. Stella said it was OK to line their pockets with the possessions of anyone they found hiding.

  One night they trooped off to the theatre where Stella spotted people in the audience and made the necessary telephone call during the interval, and afterwards they were arrested. When one tried to run away Stella shouted at the top of her voice, ‘Stop him! Jew!’ They all travelled back in one of the Gestapo removal vans, catchers and caught alike, and Lore burned with shame under the fright and contempt of those they had snatched. Stella was chatty and cheerful, saying she thought the play quite good.

  On the first day Lore was out with Stella, Sybil had nothing to do until the evening. She tried to sleep. She visited her mother again and asked her to do a reading. Her mother refused, saying it was all nonsense. She wore a housekeeper’s coat. She said she was well looked after, all things considered, although her host made physical demands.

  Perhaps her mother was smarter than she thought, selling her placebo to gullible power brokers. They sat undisturbed in a comfortable kitchen in Dahlem where the bigwigs lived. She was touched and surprised when her mother took her hand and asked if she was all right. They had never been close. Yes, she said, not meaning it any more than the insincerity of the question. It was just another rehearsed gesture. Sybil said nothing of Gersten.

  Sybil wanted only to be honest but lacked Stella’s forthrightness and said nothing about her and Lore and love and what she thought about life and all the things people were supposed to discuss. She decided she probably would be capable of betraying her mother after all, for the sake of Lore. It would take perhaps as little as a few weeks to become as hardened and polished as Stella. Sybil recoiled from Stella’s naked gaze, knowing it was only a matter of time before she acquired that look.

  Sybil introduced herself to Herr Valentine, the manager at Clärchens, as told to by Schlegel. The waiter didn’t show. She waited two hours, refused invitations to dance and went home, a short walk of a few minutes. Lore appeared to be asleep. Sybil told her to stop pretending but Lore refused to budge. It was barely nine. She was too tense to go to bed but could not face the Kübler woman downstairs. She lay down and the night stretched ahead, her world closing down.

  Gersten had talked of the killings as a virus. Equally, he had infected them by the act of cutting them, turning them into his contaminated creatures.

  The next night the waiter was at Clärchens. The man clearly expected a favour for his information. Sybil felt good and bad showing her card that said she worked for the Gestapo. It was pitiful. Flash a card and they backed down. She experienced some of the Kübler woman’s contempt: honour and loyalty were indulgences; animals took evasive action to survive and morality had nothing to do with it.

  Her dislike of the waiter grew so she could barely question him. Was the information she came away with any use? Grigor worked part-time as a cinema projectionist. Sybil thought it pathetic, the great rebel reduced to showing phantom images.

  Lore didn’t come back until late. This time S
ybil was the one pretending to be asleep even as she lay awake listening to Lore’s near silent crying.

  45

  Otto Keleman telephoned Schlegel in the office for an apparently inconsequential chat until, sounding scared, he hinted at information that made what they were talking about last time look like child’s play.

  They met, both already drunk, at the bar with the green door, where, in a hoarse whisper, Keleman told such an outlandish story of bribery and corruption that Schlegel told him to ignore it.

  Too late, he said. Someone had already tried to push him under a train.

  Schlegel wasn’t sure whether to believe that either. It sounded more like being jostled on a crowded platform, which happened every day.

  Keleman’s extraordinary claim was almost every single Party member of consequence was paid a monthly tax-free bribe out of a slush fund. This extended to top military as well. The size of the bribe depended on seniority. Minister of Propaganda Goebbels received 7,500 marks a month.

  ‘No fucking around with the revenue. Now someone is saying every single one of these cases should be investigated for unpaid back taxes!’ Keleman gave a sharp bark of disbelief. ‘It is impossible to say whether this is mischief on the part of the paymaster, to embarrass those taking the bribe, or a campaign against those making the payments.’

  ‘Who is pushing you?’

  ‘I don’t know! And equally someone seems to want me dead for even knowing.’

  ‘How is the information being fed to you?’

  ‘A combination of letter and telephone calls in the middle of the night.’

  ‘What is your reading?’

  ‘As before. Power struggle at the top.’

  Schlegel asked whether Keleman was saying they both knew who was responsible but it was in their interests not to. Keleman nodded. Neither Bormann nor his paymaster, Lammers, were among those being bribed.

  Then it had to be Chancellery, said Schlegel. No one else was in a position to make such payments.

  ‘That’s the last we say about it. Apply for leave and make yourself scarce.’

  ‘It’s too late for that.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘That fancy grocer Nöthling and the ration card scandal.’

  ‘What about him?’

  Keleman had been told if he provided evidence of his corruption the rest would take care of itself. Nöthling was on the list. He received a monthly payment to subsidise his supplies.

  ‘What’s your point?’

  ‘Nöthling has an illegal supply of pigs coming in tonight.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘The Landsberger Allee marshalling yard.’

  Where the first flayed body had been found. Again, Schlegel thought. He should have seen it coming that Keleman was bound to ask for help.

  Keleman said he could still just about drive if Schlegel got a car. Schlegel thought, Stoffel’s Opel again, and sighed.

  Schlegel, sobering up fast, was running on Pervitin, which Keleman was shovelling down too.

  ‘Been taking them for years. Dutch courage.’

  A night mist reduced visibility more than usual, which, combined with Keleman’s drunk driving, made Schlegel a nervous passenger. The car’s cowled headlights showed nothing but white.

  He yawned, exhausted yet wide awake.

  They parked away from the siding. Mist turned to fog. Any worse and they wouldn’t be able to see. From up ahead came the clank of shunted wagons, shouted orders, the panicky clatter of animal hooves and occasional squeal as one fell off the unloading ramps. They passed the stationary silhouette of a parked van. Keleman pointed to Nöthling’s name, just discernible on the side.

  Schlegel groped his way forward until he reached a fence. The pigs passed beneath, barely visible. He moved on, startled by a figure coming out of the mist, who seemed not to see him.

  He came to what felt like a larger area, presumably pens, where the animals’ confusion was evident, and realised he had lost Keleman.

  A lorry pulled up further down the track, followed by more shouted orders. Keleman swam back into view. Schlegel suggested they investigate. Keleman nodded uncertainly as two Hitler Youths marched past with antiquated rifles.

  Taking his bearings from the train, he walked towards where he had heard the truck. The mist rolled in thicker until he could barely see his hand. Keleman was gone again.

  A bolt slid on the other side of the truck he was next to. Crouching down, he could see nothing and felt his way between the wheels. A succession of handlers’ boots clumped on the wagon floor above, then down the ramp. He heard whatever they were carrying being flung onto the lorry.

  They worked in silence, as though not wishing to draw attention.

  Approaching footsteps crunched on aggregate. Something was put down. Schlegel crawled forward, trying to see. He could make no sense of the blurred image that looked like an enormous white worm or larvae, or even the remains of a snowdrift.

  Whatever it was groaned and he realised the cargo must be human. The train shifted forward and stopped. Time to get out. Keleman was probably a liability wandering around on his own.

  Conditions made distance impossible to judge. The scrape of a match sounded like it was being struck in Schlegel’s ear, yet when he called Keleman’s name it died in the air.

  A figure loomed and ran past, leaving Schlegel with the impression of a toothless, gaping mouth, and a reek of paraffin. He was contemplating the unsettling combination of fog and Pervitin when a man shouted. There was the noise of a scuffle. Someone called for help, followed by a report, more a dry mechanical cough than gunshot, then running footsteps.

  Schlegel charged after. The footsteps stopped. Schlegel saw a yellow flash, and another. Only when the bullets sang past did he understand they were meant for him. The shooter ran off. Schlegel chased on, the pill giving him a wild determination.

  The man ahead entered a building. Schlegel followed, skidding through the doorway. The train started to move out, the engine and the grind of the wagons drowning everything. Schlegel hit his shin against something hard and cried out. He was being reckless. He wasn’t carrying a gun. Adrenalin and panic overrode caution.

  The other man seemed unbothered about making a noise now.

  Schlegel reached the end of the building. A door was open. The smell said he was at the entrance of the pig shed. The pill told him he was invincible, however much the counterargument in his head warned that jittery alertness was no substitute for stealth.

  He stood in the middle of the shed, hearing only pigs. He hurried on, afraid of losing his quarry.

  He came to, aware of the pungent smell of shit filling his nostrils. He was lying face down in the stuff while being pressed and prodded from above. A light was on that hadn’t been before. He decided he must have been drinking and the hangover accounted for his head feeling split open, and the smell was some terrible practical joke perpetrated by Stoffel after another staff binge.

  He couldn’t breathe. He was aware of being walked over and something sharp nipping at him. Teeth; he was being bitten and tried calling out. He was too weak to stand. He struggled to gain his breath. He made it to his hands and knees and found himself face to face with a pair of pale blue eyes that stared back implacably.

  He understood. He had been chucked unconscious into a pen, and had he not regained his senses the pigs would have eaten him in their prosaic thorough way, simply because he was there.

  Keleman was so covered in muck he was barely recognisable. Schlegel saw the man’s dead eyes, open in terror and surprise, as though the last thing he had been conscious of was the bolt of the animal gun driving its way into his brain.

  The pigs had already made a meal of him. A shoe lay discarded. His foot and his cheek had been chewed to the bone.

  He dragged Keleman’s body away from the pens and left it on the concrete.

  It took ages to find the night watchman, who looked at him in disbelief. Schlegel told him to call the
police and get Stoffel.

  He cleaned himself up as best he could in the slaughterhouse washrooms. He showered in cold water. His coat was beyond saving, the trousers too, but the rest was just salvageable. He got the worst of the shit off his shoes using the tap. He found a workman’s boiler suit hanging on a peg and took that. He thought he had lost his hat again.

  Stoffel arrived, grumbling at having been dragged out, annoyed that Schlegel had taken his car yet again and even more furious to discover it had been driven by an uninsured civilian.

  ‘A dead uninsured civilian,’ said Schlegel wildly.

  A carload of uniformed cops turned up and muttered about flayed bodies and cannibal pigs. Keleman wasn’t where Schlegel had left him. Stoffel’s scepticism shone like a searchlight.

  ‘Get this straight for me, son. You woke up to find yourself being eaten by pigs, and the other fellow was lying half-eaten after a bolt had been put through his head.’

  Of his own survival all Schlegel could think was even death had washed its hands of him.

  ‘Then where is he now?’

  ‘Ask Haager who kills the animals. He once snuck up behind me with a stun gun.’

  Haager lived only a street away and came to the door in his pyjamas, with his hair sticking up. He said he had been home all evening and had family to prove it.

  Afterwards Stoffel said, ‘Give me one good reason why I should give you a lift home.’

  Schlegel protested that a man was dead. They should be making a proper search. Stoffel sighed and asked if Schlegel was taking pills.

  ‘You’re staring like a madman. Psychotic episode, bad hallucination. It happens a lot. Gets harder to sleep. Gets harder to catch up, and you end up seeing all sorts of things. Don’t deny it.’