A City of Broken Glass (Hannah Vogel)

by Cantrell, Rebecca

  But Ruth could hide. She looked Aryan. And, as a girl, she was not circumcised. As much as it pained me to think it, perhaps Paul was correct to let her go.

  16

  Lars and I came to the blanket. I took one end, Lars the other. We shook off the grass and folded it in half, then stepped close together. Our knuckles touched. I admired the way his eyes crinkled in a little arc in the corners when he smiled like that. It was his first real smile since before Poland. I smiled back.

  “Spatz.” His voice was low. “You never answered my question.”

  I glanced over his shoulder at Anton halfway up a tree.

  I took the blanket from his hand and completed the final folds before giving it back. I did not know what to say, and I could not even begin to discuss it with Anton seconds away.

  I cleared my throat. “I need someone who can make inquiries without being suspicious. A policeman.”

  “Despite what I just said,” he said. “I am no longer a policeman.”

  “I know,” I said.

  He hung the blanket over his arm. “But I can make inquiries.”

  “Not you.” I pulled my gold watch out of my satchel. “I need to run an errand, alone.”

  “Dare I ask what it is?” He straightened his hat again, a nervous habit.

  “I want to talk to a friend and find out where Herr Silbert is. Can you mind Anton?”

  “I have sources I could contact about Herr Silbert.”

  “As do I.” I did not trust his sources, and I was still unsure if I trusted him, in spite of what he had said on the blanket. He had told me that he loved me before, but it had not been enough for him to meet me in Switzerland, or even to tell me that he was still alive.

  I could see that he wanted to argue the point, but he merely said, “How long do you need?”

  I watched Anton climb down the tree with the rescued kite. “A few hours?”

  “Some days,” Lars said, “I feel like an errand boy.”

  “But a reliable one?” I asked.

  He smiled. “Full service. And don’t forget it.”

  Anton jogged across the field, winding up the kite string. “Really?” I asked.

  Lars touched my shoulder. “Oh, yes.”

  Anton reached us. “The rib cracked when it hit the ground.”

  “We can repair it later,” Lars said. “I believe your mother has a mission.”

  “A mission?” Anton smiled conspiratorially. “What’s my part?”

  “Helping me take a stolen lorry to an illegal shop to have it painted,” Lars said.

  Anton looked delighted.

  “Lars,” I said, “could you not think of something more—?”

  “You have errands to perform,” he said. “As do I.”

  I put his Lars Lang and Lars Schmidt passports in my satchel. With luck, Herr Silbert could use the German entry stamp on the Lars Lang passport for both Schmidt passports, and Anton’s. I had a goodly amount of Swiss francs. If I found Herr Silbert, it ought to be all he needed.

  We arranged to meet at five o’clock at the Brandenburg Gate. I kissed Anton good-bye, and he let me. I did not kiss Lars, although I was tempted when he proffered his cheek.

  Before I went down the stairs to the subway, I turned around to wave good-bye one last time.

  When I got to Alexanderplatz, I checked my watch. I had ten minutes. Plenty of time. I took the steps up to the daylight, emerging a block from the police station. I sat on the bench at the bus stop, drew out my sketch pad, and sketched an old Alsatian dog resting under his master’s table at a café across the street. White fur stippled the black on his muzzle. Careful to appear engrossed while watching the street, I took my time with the drawing. But because I could not control the pencil properly with my hand in a cast, the picture was terrible.

  I had not sketched anything in a long time, and I missed it. When I worked in Berlin as Peter Weill, I drew courtroom sketches every day for the newspaper. All those criminals seemed small time, now that the real criminals were in charge.

  If Fritz Waldheim followed his old patterns, he would come by soon, smoking his after-lunch cigar and taking his after-lunch walk. If he did not arrive, I would have to go to his home and leave a message with my friend, Bettina. I hoped it would not come to that, as on my last visit they had sung the praises of the Nazi regime, and I did not trust them not to turn me in. The memory still stung. The Nazis had robbed me of my oldest friend, and I would not forgive them for it.

  But here he came. His rolling gait was unmistakable, even though he wore a long brown overcoat and a new fedora, pulled low like Lars’s. My hand sketched a nervous line on the paper, ruining the shading. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched his approach. What came next had to be handled delicately.

  “Excuse me,” I said when he was only a few steps away. “Would you care to buy my drawing?”

  “No, thank you.” He touched his hat politely before he recognized me. He faltered, but covered for it by sitting next to me on the bench. “Perhaps I will have a look at it.”

  “It looks a bit like your dog, Caramel.”

  “He died.” Fritz’s gray eyes were hard.

  I slid my palm across the paper. “How are Bettina and the children?”

  “Better than you,” he said. “Someone who knows that we were friends from before showed me your file. You are wanted for murder. Double murder.”

  “They threw me in the trunk of a car in Poland,” I said. “They intended to kill me.”

  “I don’t want to know any of that,” he said. “Get the hell out of Germany.”

  “I cannot,” I said. “My passport was not stamped when we crossed the border because I was, as I said, in the trunk.”

  He bit down on his cigar. “What do you need?”

  “Information on the whereabouts of Herr Silbert, the forger I did that piece on in the twenties. Do you remember him?”

  “I’ll get a look at his file,” he said. “Meet me two blocks farther south in half an hour.”

  “Thank you, Fritz,” I said. “You might be saving my life.”

  “I might not be either.” He took the cigar out of his mouth and pointed it at me. “Don’t hold out too much hope. If he was arrested these days, he’d need a wily lawyer to get back out.”

  “How is it here?” I asked.

  “It’s bad. Loyalty to the Party is everything.” A shadow passed across his eyes. “The children are part of the Nazi machine now. Soon enough, they’ll send my boys off to war.”

  I ripped out the sketch. “Tell Bettina I said hello.”

  “I’d rather tell her you said good-bye.” He took the sketch and handed me a ten-mark note before marching down the sidewalk toward Alexanderplatz.

  I drew another sketch, this one of a young couple lingering late over coffee. The picture could have been drawn any time in the last twenty years. I liked that about it. If I had done a better job of it, I would have offered it to them.

  Instead I closed the sketchbook and left for Fritz’s suggested rendezvous point.

  Once I arrived, I found little to draw to keep me occupied, but it would not do to be seen as loitering suspiciously, so I drew a section of cobblestones with a cigarette butt lodged between stones. I sketched and shaded happily, glad to be doing something innocent and mundane. I was getting better at working with the cast, too.

  A shadow fell over my picture. I looked up to see Fritz’s back retreating down the sidewalk. I stood to follow and noticed a scrap of white paper on the ground. I dropped my pencil next to the paper and picked up both. The paper contained only an address. And that, I suspected, was all I would get out of Fritz.

  I packed everything back into my satchel and took the subway to Kreuzberg, and the address Fritz had left for me.

  Dark trees stood sentinel on the sidewalk. I stood between them in front of a brown brick building of four stories capped by a high copper roof. The building was well kept, stoop newly swept, curtains drawn to keep in the warmth.


  I scanned the names on the bells, stopping at SILBERT. I rang his bell and waited. No answer. I rang again and again. Perhaps he was away at a job; it was the middle of the day. I smiled at the thought of Herr Silbert toiling behind a desk at a legitimate job.

  I rang the landlady’s bell.

  A woman with a back bowed with age came to the door. She held the door with one gnarled hand and stood in the threshold. “We have no free apartments.”

  “I am here looking for someone. A Herr Silbert.”

  She angled her head to look at me. Milky cataracts covered one blue eye, but I suspected that she saw fine out of the other. “What for?”

  “We are old acquaintances,” I answered. “May I leave him a message?”

  “He’s not here,” she said. I could not tell if she told the truth. “Perhaps he’ll pick it up when he gets back.”

  I scribbled a quick note on a page torn from my notebook, telling him that I was in town and would love to meet him. I wrote the number of the paper in Switzerland and asked him to leave a message with a suggested meeting time. I suspected that Herr Silbert, being rather an expert in the field, would recognize my handwriting, but I signed it only Weill. That, he would know for certain. He had saved the articles I wrote about him as Peter Weill in a scrapbook.

  I folded the note and handed it to the old woman. Her swollen fingers unfolded it. She settled a pair of wire-framed glasses on her nose and read it in front of me while I stared at her incredulously. I had assumed she would read it, but had expected at least a pretense of privacy.

  “Like Peter Weill, from the newspaper?” she asked.

  I stepped back in shock, glad that she looked at the paper and not my face. “Similar.”

  “Paper’s garbage now,” she said. “Used to enjoy his stuff.”

  I wished that Maria could have heard that. I had written under the Peter Weill byline before her, and she wrote under it now, but all I said was, “I believe it is a pseudonym that the newspaper owns, so the writer can be changed.”

  “A good alias.” She dropped the note into the pocket of her faded yellow dress.

  “When is Herr Silbert expected to return?”

  “Don’t know,” she said. “Before you ask, I don’t know where he’s gone. Keeps his own hours and keeps his business to himself. Pays his rent promptly.”

  “Will you see that he gets my note?” I wondered if she even knew Herr Silbert.

  She studied me with her good eye before answering. “I will.”

  I thanked her and returned to the sidewalk. I leaned against a cold streetlamp and waited, in case Herr Silbert was inside and would come out in response to my note or send me a note himself.

  I could not stand too long without attracting suspicion and had decided to find a stoop and pull out my sketch pad when curtains on a window on the fourth floor twitched. Someone watched the street, and me. I returned to the door and rang the Silbert bell again. This time the door swung open, and I stepped through.

  The landlady stood in the hall. She held up four fingers and pointed to the stairs. I plodded up. My tired legs asked why he had to live on the top floor instead of the bottom. When I arrived at the landing, I hurried to the single door that stood ajar.

  Suddenly conscious that it might be a trap, I hesitated. But I had to have valid papers. I went in.

  No one stood in the darkness in the hall. I waited, one hand on the cold door handle.

  Someone whispered my name.

  “Herr Silbert?” I whispered back. I let out my held breath when I recognized him. He wore an immaculate white shirt, as always, although he had lost a great deal of weight.

  “How did you find me?” His usually perfectly coiffed hair was longer than I had ever seen it. He had not been taking care of himself as well as he usually did.

  “The police.” I stayed near the door in case I needed to leave quickly. “An old police friend gave me this address.”

  “Who?”

  “You know I cannot tell you that.”

  “Put down the satchel,” he said. “Face the wall.”

  Fear coursed through my limbs. “Herr Silbert—”

  “Quickly,” he said. “I am no longer the patient man that you remember.”

  I slowly bent my knees and lowered my satchel to the ground, then turned to face the dingy gray wall.

  He stepped close and ran trembling hands over my coat. I submitted. I could do little else.

  He stepped back and held out his hand. When I shook it, his handshake had none of its usual strength.

  “What do you need?” he asked.

  “Exactly what I needed the last time I visited.”

  He wiped his hand on his fine tweed pants. They, too, hung loosely on his gaunt frame.

  “Have you been ill?” I asked.

  “I’ve been in a concentration camp,” he said. “So I’ve been more than ill. Come along and leave the satchel there.”

  He led me out of the hallway and into a bare living room. It contained two leather club chairs and a coffee table, but none of the books or tools of his trade that I had expected.

  He sank into one chair and gestured to the other.

  I sat, aware that my satchel was not close to hand. When I was in Germany, it never left my side.

  He leaned back in his chair with his eyes closed. He looked frail and weak. “I do not have the … facilities that I once had.”

  “What can I do for you?” I asked. “Do you have medication?”

  He shook his head once and pointed his finger to a door. “Water?”

  I hurried through that door and into a kitchen. In the cabinet I found a single glass, a single plate, and a single cup. He must live quite alone here. With growing uneasiness, I opened a bottle of mineral water and filled the glass.

  When I brought it out and handed it to him, he took a sip and leaned back in his chair again.

  “You should see a doctor,” I said. “I can call a taxi and take you there myself.”

  He shook his grizzled head.

  I knelt next to his chair and took his pulse. Fast, but slowing. “Do you have a heart condition?”

  He slid his arm back so that I held his hand instead of his wrist. “Such a surprising one you are.”

  “Herr Silbert, your heartbeat is dangerously erratic, you must—”

  “I know what you think I must do.” He squeezed my hand. “Your kind heart will be your undoing.”

  “Your heart may be your undoing as well.”

  “Tell me why you are here,” he asked.

  “I have need of your expertise.” I moved my fingers up to his wrist again to take his pulse. “I require passports for—”

  “I no longer have the equipment for that.”

  I lifted my chin. “Can you recommend someone else?”

  “No.”

  I could think of no other way to procure passports for Anton, and perhaps for Paul and Ruth. Perhaps, if Paul wanted to leave, they would all fit in the compartment Lars had promised to build. If so, I needed only to get my and Lars’s passports stamped to show that we had entered Germany legally so that we could present them at the border. “Can you put stamps in existing passports?”

  “For that I need only ink,” he said. “Show me what you require.”

  I took out the Hannah and Lars Schmidt passports and handed them to him. He opened them and smiled. “You are still together. When I saw your reaction to the marriage certificate, I thought perhaps I had made a mistake.”

  I had no desire to explain my complicated relationship with Lars. I took out his Lars Lang passport and flipped it open to the last stamp, showing that he had entered Germany legally on the night I was kidnapped. “This is what I need to have copied.”

  Herr Silbert drew a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles from his shirt pocket and studied the stamp. “Of course.”

  We haggled over the price, as we so often had in the past. I paid him with Swiss francs that I had not yet exchanged.

&nb
sp; “You may wait here, if you wish.” He stood, seemingly steady on his feet.

  “I think my time would be better spent making soup,” I said.

  “Ach, Frau Schmidt,” he said. “You should have told me that before we agreed on the price.”

  I returned to his kitchen and made a quick soup, using a withered carrot, one old onion, potatoes, and a yellowed stalk of celery, seasoned with a couple of beef Maggi cubes. It was the first meal that I had cooked in days, and I realized how much I missed the everyday feeling. Setting the pot to simmer, I made a list of groceries that I thought he might eat and presented it to him.

  “I have finished the passports.” He handed them to me. “Would you care to stay for dinner? It smells wonderful.”

  “I have an appointment soon.” I thought of Anton and Lars waiting for me. “But I can spare a few minutes.”

  I had dished him out a large bowl of soup, me a small one.

  I remembered one more thing in my satchel. “On the way over, I picked up your favorite cigarettes,” I said. “Ravenklaus.”

  I had brought him those cigarettes when he was in prison for forgery and I had visited him as Peter Weill. Cigarettes for interviews.

  He smiled, and new, deep wrinkles appeared around his eyes. “Bless you, Fräulein Vogel.”

  We ate our soup with little conversation and he saw me to the door. “I will be leaving Germany soon, and for good,” he said.

  “Good for you.” I did not think he would live long enough to leave Germany. “I shall, too.”

  “Thank you for the soup,” he said.

  “Not my best meal,” I said. “But I work with what is at hand.”

  We shook hands. I wondered if I would ever see the charming criminal again.

  * * *

  It was dark when I reached the Brandenburg Gate. I turned my side to the cold rain and paced anxiously next to the stone pillars. Punctual, Lars drove up in a black Opel Blitz lorry. The streetlights showed a tarp tied tightly over the contents of the lorry’s bed. When I got close, I smelled a whiff of new paint.

  Lars got out, and I slid in the driver’s side to the middle of the seat. He piled in and slammed the door.

  “Hello!” Anton said. “Isn’t the lorry beautiful?”