The Butchers of Berlin

by Chris Petit

  After the strain of anticipation the anticlimax of finding the platform empty. Perhaps he was meant to leave the money for collection and go home.

  He was briefly aware of the city in the distance, covered in moonlight.

  He heard the lift go back down, taking its time, then it started to come back up, seeming to go on forever.

  On the corner of the platform stood a low elevation with a concrete roof, to accommodate the stairwell. Schlegel crouched beside it, feeling foolish, thinking better safe than sorry.

  Footsteps rang on the metal steps. The man was taking no precautions. Schlegel saw his outline pause, look around then go and lean on the far parapet, seeming at ease.

  After a while, he said, ‘Coming, ready or not. I know you’re up here.’

  It was Gersten.

  ‘Let’s not waste time. I am in harmless mode tonight. Can we be friends again?’

  Gersten had known whom to expect. Did that mean he was higher up the chain?

  Schlegel told him to stay where he was and put up his hands. He frisked Gersten, who protested he was not armed. Schlegel made him lift up his trouser legs to show he was not carrying a knife.

  ‘Now you are being ridiculous. I was hoping you would tell me what’s going on.’

  Schlegel told him about Lipchitz.

  Gersten sounded put out. ‘Really?’

  ‘I am not joking. What is your part in this?’

  ‘Acting on orders.’

  ‘Whose?’

  Gersten seemed surprised he didn’t know. ‘Morgen’s, of course.’

  ‘Who is ordering what, exactly?’ asked Schlegel, trying to keep a level voice.

  ‘Nöthling’s pig train in reverse. It’s still standing in the goods yard. Back to Sweden with a consignment marked tinned peaches. They have a shortage, apparently.’

  ‘What’s in it for you?’

  ‘I am surprised he hasn’t told you, being his pet. I get a fresh start. Trieste. What are you being offered?’

  The prospect of immunity made Gersten expansive. He admitted Metzler had got the better of him.

  ‘Twice. First forging money I didn’t know about. Then coming up with the perfect note. Who wouldn’t be interested? Metzler’s new star forger could produce fake money indistinguishable from the real thing.’

  Schlegel didn’t tell Gersten the money had been real. ‘What about the accident?’

  ‘What accident was that?’ asked Gersten, all innocence.

  ‘The warden Metzler shot was working for you. You were together in the east.’

  ‘Oh that,’ said Gersten, sounding bored.

  ‘What about the accident at the slaughterhouse?’

  ‘You are insistent. No idea. I delegated everything to Baumgarten and Reitner. Reitner especial ly. Barely controllable.’

  ‘Is he responsible for the flayings?’

  ‘You worked that out? I am impressed. I have no proof, but I suspected. I did my best to protect them.’

  ‘By framing Lazarenko?’

  ‘Lazarenko was the one who taught them how to do it. He was the first to have blood on his hands.’

  He had been their expert in local atrocity. He knew how to dress and display killings with the correct Bolshevik trademarks.

  ‘From the start we had information Lazarenko was secretly working against us, but he was too good to lose and our general intelligence was poor so we ignored it. Nothing was black and white, you know that.’

  ‘What about the accident at the slaughterhouse?’

  ‘Sorry to repeat myself, but no idea. Ask Baumgarten and Reitner. Metzler paid, I told Reitner and they fixed everything on the ground. Any accident, they would have kept me in the dark.’

  He looked at Schlegel and slowly recited, ‘Men used to acting on their own initiative. Finer troops you couldn’t ask for, and all that. Dangerous men. Keep your distance.’

  He stared at Schlegel with apparent regret. ‘Maybe I should have paid more attention. I was distracted. Greedy too. I was trying to recruit Grigor. He thought I was after him. I sent Abbas in waving a white flag. What a fucking disaster. Cuts off his cock, if you please. No wonder I was upset the day you and Morgen turned up. The woman too. He was supposed to listen to both of them. He wasn’t meant to kill them. I thought he was going to be our pension fund. You have to agree, a man who can forge a perfect note is worth something. Isn’t there any way we can keep this going? Why don’t you come in with me?’

  Schlegel’s head swam. He supposed beyond a certain level this kind of switchback ride went on every day.

  The latest safe train out was a mystery to Gersten.

  ‘Haven’t the faintest. They’re involving me but it’s gone up to a whole other register. US dollars! Where are they getting those, unless someone is giving them? Have we arrived at the stage of philanthropy? Buy in to save a Jew?’

  He snorted and suggested they go down together.

  ‘I’ll take the case now.’

  Schlegel was relieved to see it go.

  ‘Split? Fifty-fifty.’ Gersten laughed. ‘For a moment you thought I was serious. Admit you were tempted.’

  Gersten’s hatchet-faced henchman waited obediently by the lift.

  ‘Just in case of monkey business,’ said Gersten smoothly. ‘Nothing meant.’

  He told the man to take the stairs.

  With the lift doors shut, he said, ‘I say we trade. Give me Grigor and I give you Sybil.’

  ‘We have Sybil.’

  ‘Ha-ha, no, dear heart, you don’t. Who has been sleeping in your bed? Herr Valentine at Clärchens keeps me posted.’

  Gersten paused, letting the implication sink in. ‘So sweet.’

  Schlegel took a swing but there was no room for the punch and Gersten was quick to grab his wrist.

  ‘Pull yourself together. You’ll get her back. Morgen is offering her a place out. That’s fine by me. I bring her to the train, you bring Grigor. Straight swap. He’ll work for us evermore and we will all be rich and happy. Time to put something aside for a rainy day. You and I will meet when this is over and sort something out. We should work together more. Have Morgen arrange to send you to Trieste. Frontier town, wide open. We could have fun. Relax. It will work out fine.’

  Schlegel’s apartment was empty, as though Sybil had never been. He crawled under the covers not bothering to undress. He smelled the pillow for a trace of the woman and found none. Despite his exhaustion, he fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.

  56

  Morgen looked at his watch and said they should be out of there in twenty minutes.

  The train stood down the track. Schlegel saw steam, smoke and night. Next to the wagons stood the removal van, which screened the transfer from one to the other. It was all done so easily there might have been nothing going on. The only additional sound was hammering. Two to a crate. Schlegel wasn’t sure if his own nerves would stand hours trapped in the dark, whatever hope lay at the other end.

  There had been a last-minute panic over a missing export stamp, which had been obtained minutes before the office shut. Schlegel was struck by the discretion, the boring regulation of the bureaucracy, proving the legality of the false order, the lack of excitement, however much Morgen said the clock was ticking.

  The day had started dramatically with Schlegel summoned to Haager’s cell where Haager remained hanging from the bars by his trousers.

  ‘Voluntary or assisted?’ asked Morgen. ‘Is this Gersten’s work? The start of his clean-up?’

  Schlegel stared at the grim figure of Haager, tongue lolling, eyes popping, white knees, varicose veins, ending in pigeon-toed feet. Had Haager been got rid of because it was feared he would talk? Was the story of Morgen’s ruthlessness in Weimar going the rounds? Morgen said nothing other than to tell the guard to cut the man down.

  Morgen remained irritable. Schlegel was forced to spend most of the day scrounging rudimentary food packages and chasing buckets for toilets, thought of at the last moment, and prov
ided by the Grunewald railway depot, with the chit showing them as loaned for ‘special consignment’.

  Thirty-six ‘pieces’ for transport; eighteen crates, two to a crate, with extra ballast to correspond to the correct load of tinned goods shown on the dispatch sheet. Schlegel had no idea how it had been decided who should go. All he knew was he knew too much even knowing the train was sanctioned at the highest level. He’d had to liaise with Gersten on the telephone, as the man was nominally in charge, agreeing a time of departure, and so on, including the wagon numbers. The train would leave from what Gersten called the Nöthling siding. He would provide transport to the station and use one of his men. He made no mention of Sybil and Schlegel didn’t ask.

  Morgen drove just the three of them there, with Grigor handcuffed and surly in the back. Morgen told him his chances were good because Gersten still believed he was producing the perfect note. He thought it probably explained this latest round of shenanigans.

  ‘You are of value to him.’

  It was a dubious swap at best from what Schlegel could see. Morgen considered Gersten one of those men who had to introduce an extra little kick to everything, which might yet be his undoing.

  When he asked about the side deal with Gersten over Trieste he was told not to be naive. When he said he thought Gersten was getting ready to leave and about to jettison his old comrades, Reitner in particular, Morgen picked up on that and said, ‘Really?’

  He saw Sybil only briefly, during an almost wordless exchange. Gersten turned up with his hatchet-faced assistant, who took Grigor off. Gersten said he would walk Sybil to the train. Schlegel wanted to say Gersten couldn’t be trusted, but Morgen had already left in a hurry. Sybil avoided his eye. Gersten smirked, looking high and pill-bright. He was wearing Lazarenko’s coat.

  Sybil stared away when Schlegel wished her good luck. He watched her walk off, carrying no luggage.

  He was about to follow when he heard what no one had allowed for. Away in the distance the wail of sirens started to fill the skies. The first pinpricks of the searchlights appeared on the outer edges of the city.

  Gersten turned back and shrugged, as if to say whatever else Morgen had in mind, his plans were spoiled. He walked on with a spring in his step.

  Schlegel stood torn. He didn’t like the way Morgen had disappeared, leaving Sybil with Gersten.

  The sky was getting lighter by the minute. The sirens droned on. The train would have to go now or not get out. All that appeared to hold it up was Sybil, standing in front of the last open wagon. What Schlegel saw made no sense to him. She looked animated, happy even, in urgent conversation with Gersten. She nodded, agreeing. Gersten tapped his watch.

  The hatchet-faced assistant took Sybil and they ducked down between the wheels and passed under the wagon. Gersten closed the door, blew on a whistle and waved the train out. Wheels slowly turned. By the time the wagons passed, Sybil and the man were gone.

  A battery of lights came on over the other side of the embankment, making it almost as bright as day. Gersten turned and walked towards Schlegel, with the same easy spring, and gestured, showing empty hands.

  Schlegel couldn’t see what Gersten had to offer Sybil. Unless . . . he thought, struggling to make sense of what he had just seen.

  He stood mesmerised by Gersten’s approach. The chapstick came out of nowhere; the lips moistened; it was gone again.

  The only reason for Sybil not to take the train was if Gersten had Lore.

  Gersten looked as though he was about to shake Schlegel by the hand, to say no hard feelings, until at the last second he dropped his outstretched arm, and without breaking stride twisted and slashed upwards. Schlegel instinctively recoiled. He felt the thin draw of the cut across his cheekbone, saw the blade flash by the corner of his eye, narrowly missing.

  Schlegel was left bent double from the shock. The blade had barely scratched the skin, a sign of the man’s artistry. Schlegel could tell it hadn’t been done to kill and was more a mark of farewell.

  Elation, trepidation, a terrible sinking feeling; Sybil’s heart beat wildly. She had difficulty breathing. She grew so dizzy she thought she would fall over.

  She had never really believed in the train. It was no sacrifice not to be on it. Such a journey was beyond imagination, and in the back of her mind she had always discounted it. When Gersten told her, there hadn’t been a moment’s doubt. She dismissed all her obvious misgivings about the man’s intrinsic untrustworthiness, duplicity and the punishment he had put her through, not telling her he had Lore, as well as using her right up to the last minute to get Grigor.

  The whole episode would turn out to be another trap, she had no doubt of that. But seeing Lore was enough. They could do what they liked after that.

  Gersten’s assistant, with his dead eyes and irritating, persistent cough, evidently regarded her as harmless because he didn’t bother walking behind her. She wanted to pick up a discarded shaft of wood and swing it at his head until she saw brains, but followed meekly because he knew where Lore was.

  Past a foul slurry pit and a hangar-like building that stank of animal refuse, they came to an external flight of stairs. The man stepped aside to let her pass, close enough for her to see his look of cruel amusement.

  Sybil went upstairs. She called Lore’s name. There was no answer. She called again and heard a whimper. She found Lore lying mute on the floor, curled into a ball. Sybil kept repeating it was her, but Lore only wound herself tighter. Sybil had to use all her strength to unlock her body. She lay on top of her, trying to calm her, feeling her uneven breathing. She knew Lore’s body as well as her own, yet it was somehow not her. She was aware of the thug’s indifferent coughing. She grasped Lore’s head and raised it to look at her and screamed.

  The limousine stood parked discreetly under the glass awning of one of the markets. Schlegel drew back. People were in the car, a driver and two men in the back, one of them Morgen.

  The man in the back nearest Schlegel wore a hat and civilian clothes. He did the talking, quietly and emphatically, in no hurry, as the sirens continued. There was no mistaking that white potato of a face, with its eyes as calculating as an adding machine. His official portrait hung in their building. In Nebe’s office there was a signed photograph on his desk, sincerely, Heinrich Himmler.

  Himmler said in his chatty, rather dull way, ‘I want this place cleaned up tonight. A lorry-load of men will be here to assist.’

  Morgen wondered how practical the Reichsführer was, with the small matter of an air raid imminent.

  Himmler picked up a bound document resting on his knee.

  ‘Published by the Ministry of Food and Agriculture.’ He waved it in contempt. ‘If it’s supposed to be secret why commit to paper? Don’t they know anything?’

  He removed his spectacles and cleaned them with a silk handkerchief; he looked at Morgen with myopic eyes. One thing Morgen had learned about the man was he was frighteningly literal, almost childishly so.

  Himmler sighed. ‘Two years ago the same ministry instigated a policy of official starvation known as the Hunger Plan for those designated useless eaters, not worth feeding. Are you familiar?’

  Morgen said he wasn’t; always the safest answer. In fact, it was well known as the work of a clever idiot named Backe, one of those dangerous high-flyers who had acquired a name through daring academicism and currying Himmler’s favour. From what Morgen had seen of Russia, the policy hadn’t worked, not least because the local peasantry was endlessly cunning. Himmler had been blamed and now Backe was virtually a minister, from what Morgen had heard, and estranged from Himmler, who drew the line at the latest adventure of feeding human remains to pigs.

  ‘Can you believe this? I quote: “in order to alleviate short-ages suffered by our people”. Next he will be suggesting we turn our glorious dead into sausages and we all eat each other. Do we wear bones through our noses? What if it were to get out that our reward for the fallen is to turn them into animal fodder?’
>
  Cannon fodder to animal fodder, thought Morgen grimly.

  Turning to look out of the window, Himmler said, ‘This place is out of control. Feeding the dead to pigs. Boys being allowed to run around conducting executions. I am recently informed of a highly irregular practice involving sending condemned men from our own camp at Sachsenhausen to be killed at this . . .’ He broke off and cast around with an expression of appropriate disgust. ‘Meat factory. No more. You did a good job in Weimar. I will be sending you to other camps. The importance of our task is such that we must remain pure when faced with the greatest temptation. I am making you my conscience, Morgen.’

  Who flayed? Schlegel asked himself. Gersten liked to cut; he had evidence of that. But he wasn’t sure he did the flaying. He thought Gersten internalised. Perhaps knowing was enough.

  Morgen was walking towards him and Schlegel wondered whether to give him an official salute, to show his contempt. A ground tremor signalled the crump of the first bombs before the report of the distant explosions.

  ‘The deals one has to do with the devil,’ growled Morgen. ‘What happened to your face?’

  One, two, three cuts. Down the arm. Cutting the Achilles tendon; painful that. The slow draw across the scrotum while reminding the man of what he had done to Abbas.

  Gersten was in the steam room with Sepp, who was on the bottle. Grigor stood half-naked and defiant.

  Gersten said he was about to embark on the psychological equivalent to making him come. He wanted him to admit there was no perfect note.

  It took ten minutes. Gersten informed Grigor he had just made himself redundant. In an uncharacteristic fit of petulance he ground his heel into the man’s hand, listening to bone snap, and announced, ‘No more perfect note. A pity. I had high hopes.’

  Gersten nodded at Sepp. Grigor was dragged to his feet and stood swaying with pain, unbowed.

  ‘I will execute you myself. Face the wall.’

  Grigor said he preferred to look at him.

  ‘Then die like a dog in a ditch.’