A City of Broken Glass (Hannah Vogel)

by Cantrell, Rebecca

“Good morning. What did the embassy say?” I asked.

  He sighed, a long windy exhalation that told me the news was bad. “They are not inclined to help you, but I am exerting pressure. It may take a few more days.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “I am sorry to have dragged the paper into this.”

  “A daredevil reporter trapped in Nazi Germany will be a top story,” he said. “Once you get back out. Keep a journal.”

  Ever the newsman. “I shall.”

  “In the meantime, try to stay out of trouble. Call immediately if your situation changes.”

  “I intend to.”

  “Good girl,” he said. “Keep your chin up. We’ll get you out of there, eventually.”

  I thanked him again and rang off. If something went awry with Lars’s plan with the lorry, I hoped that Herr Knecht might help us escape, although it seemed less likely with each call.

  I stood alone in the phone booth. I had two things that I needed to do for Paul. This was least important, but perhaps most dangerous. But I owed it to Paul. That and much more besides. I braced myself against the wooden side of the booth and dialed the Berliner Zeitung.

  I asked the chirpy secretary for Maria, giving my name as Petra Weill, which would make Maria angry enough to take my call. She would hate the thought of anyone poaching on her Peter Weill pseudonym.

  “Yes?” Maria asked peremptorily as soon as she got on the line. I relished the familiar sound of her irritation.

  “Petra Weill here,” I said. She would recognize my voice.

  “How kind of you to telephone, Petra.” Sarcasm overlaid her words. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

  “I have news for you.”

  When she paused, I knew she tried to decide whether I might have useful information. I forced a carefree tone. “It has been such a long time, but I remember the good times we had, you and I, and our good friend Paul?”

  “Fine,” she said flatly.

  What else could she say? By bringing up Paul’s name, I had reminded her that I knew enough to cause her trouble. “Where should we meet?”

  “Let’s have dinner tonight at the restaurant where I broke the strap on my shoe. What’s it called?” she said.

  She had once broken the strap on her shoe when we were at the Ufa-Palast am Zoo movie theater. We were standing in line to see Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel. Maria had been furious about the broken strap. She probably would have gone straight home if she had not been too jealous to leave us alone at the cinema. It had been an unpleasant night. She wanted me to meet her there. The restaurant was code so that no one overhearing the call would know where she was headed.

  I played along. “I remember. The restaurant was called the Angel.”

  “Exactly!” she said. “I’ll see you there at around seven.”

  So, we would meet in the theater at the Palast am Zoo during the showing closest to seven. I rang off.

  Lars and Anton practiced boxing moves on the sidewalk. I did not like to see Anton fight. But he had good reach, and Lars appeared to be giving him solid tips about increasing his punching power.

  I had one more thing to do for Paul. I had to explain his death to his father. I called, and Herr Keller asked that I meet him at Saint Hedwig’s, the largest Catholic church in Berlin.

  I stepped into the brisk fall air. The boxers had taken off their coats and sparred in rolled-up shirtsleeves. Their faces glowed from the exercise.

  Anton gauged my reaction. “Bad news?”

  “The newspaper confirms that vom Rath was shot last night, probably too late for our note writer.”

  “That’s good news,” Lars said.

  “You made three calls.” Anton crossed his arms. “I counted.”

  “You will make a fine detective one day,” I said.

  “The second call?” he persisted.

  “Later,” I said.

  “The third call?” Lars shrugged his coat back on.

  “To Paul’s father. I must go meet him now.”

  Lars put his hand on the small of my back. I savored how it felt there.

  “Why must you notify them yourself?” Lars said. “It might be dangerous, and the police will have informed his parents of his death.”

  “The police.” I swallowed. “The police told them that their son committed suicide. His parents are practicing Catholics.”

  “I thought that Paul was Jewish,” Anton said.

  “Half Jewish, but he was raised Catholic,” I said. “His mother was born Jewish, and that is enough for the regime, even though she converted to Catholicism when she married Paul’s father. Catholics believe that you go to hell if you commit suicide. I cannot let his parents add that to their grief.”

  “Where are you meeting?” Lars asked.

  “Saint Hedwig’s.”

  He stared off into the distance. “It’s a bad idea.”

  “Regardless,” I said.

  “You’ll never win when she uses that voice.” Anton pulled his coat back on. “Even if you are married.”

  A muscle twitched under Lars’s eye. “Thank you for the tip, Anton.”

  “Would you care to come with me?” I patted Lars’s arm.

  “I would like to follow up on Paul’s death.” Lars donned his fedora again.

  “What does that mean?” Anton asked. “How do you follow up?”

  “If I were still in the police force, I would interview the suspects, see if they had alibis for the time of Paul’s death, and check those alibis. Check their fingerprints against the scene. Check their weapons to see if they matched the bullet that killed Paul. Talk to the people in Paul’s building. Look for eyewitnesses. Go over the scene again and see what else I could find.”

  “Can you do all that?” Anton asked.

  A woman dressed all in blue walked by, carrying two shopping bags from Wertheim, a formerly Jewish-owned department store. Like everything else, it had been Aryanized. She paid us no heed.

  “No, but I can consult with someone who has.”

  “Who?” Anton clearly wanted to get going. I wished that he were not so enthusiastic about looking for a killer, but I said nothing. The alternative might be a child properly frightened out of his wits. Better for him to think that there were things that he could do.

  “Whom can you consult with?” Anton repeated.

  “An old friend,” Lars said. “He works for the police.”

  “May I come, too?” Anton asked.

  “I’m afraid not,” Lars said. “I have to do this by myself.”

  We separated and agreed to meet back at Friedrichstadt subway station, not far from the church, in a few hours.

  Anton and I took the subway to Saint Hedwig’s. He told me all about his shooting trip with Lars and the boxing techniques he had just learned. I pretended to listen, my mind already with Paul’s father.

  Across the square stood the cathedral. It had been modeled after the Pantheon in Rome. My brother always called it “the Catholic breast.” When we neared the curved cathedral, I interrupted Anton. “We will go in separately. You go in first and sit in a pew on the left-hand side. I will come in a few minutes later and, if I can, I will sit on the right-hand side a row behind you. I can see you, and you can see me without too much trouble. But do not look at me. Wait quietly until you see me get up to leave. Then follow. Do you understand?”

  “Will you be long?” Anton’s eyes darted around the square, suddenly looking for enemies.

  “I do not know.” I stopped. Cooing pigeons flew around us. Errant feathers floated to the ground.

  “What if something bad happens?” Anton looked into the gray sky as if he expected a soldier to appear there.

  “I doubt that anything will.” I put a reassuring hand on his shoulder. “If it does, take the side door. Meet up with Lars as we planned. He will know what to do.” By the time he met up with Lars, it would most likely be too late to do anything, but Lars would get Anton out of Berlin safely.

  Anton looke
d as if he knew that, too. “But—”

  “This is the time to be a scout,” I said. “And bring back reinforcements. Scouts do not enter the battle. That is not their mission.”

  He dropped his eyes, and I knew that he understood, and hated it.

  He walked ahead of me and disappeared into the cathedral. I dreaded losing sight of him, even for a minute, but I counted to sixty and followed him through the arched doorway.

  22

  I walked slowly around the inside of the church, aware of Anton every second. My eyes were drawn to the curved ceiling, with its strong ribs and the circle of light at the top. I wished I could have told him that Lorenz Adlon, owner of a hotel where Anton had once stayed with his purported grandmother, was buried in the cemetery in the back. Herr Adlon died in a car accident. A devout monarchist, he refused to enter the Brandenburg Gate using the middle line, as that was once reserved for royalty. For his pains, he had suffered two car accidents at the Brandenburg Gate, the final one fatal. It was exactly the kind of story that Anton enjoyed.

  I kept an eye on his blond head, which faced obediently forward, as I searched for Herr Keller. When I was certain that he was not there, I sat at a pew to wait. I curled my hands around the aged oak back of the pew in front and breathed in the smell of stone dust and the lingering traces of incense. My thoughts turned to Ruth, the child that Paul had loved, in spite of her parentage. She was too young to remember him long.

  Where was she? Paul had told me that she was with someone who could provide more for her than he could. Was that true? I did not entirely trust his judgment, and I would rest easier if I could see her safe and sound for myself.

  Would Herr Keller know? I prayed so. I said a prayer for Paul, too. I hoped that he had found peace, and I promised him, as I had promised his wife, that I would help Ruth if I could.

  A figure sat next to me. I unfolded my hands and sat back to look at him. Herr Keller looked so much like Paul that tears jumped into my eyes. He had aged much in the past ten years and looked as if he had not slept, but his familiar brown eyes studied me with curiosity and suspicion.

  “Good evening, Fräulein Vogel.” His deep voice was quiet.

  “Hello, Herr Keller.” I held out my hand, and he took it. He shook it once, then held on to it.

  “Why are you here? Paul said that you escaped. Proud of you for it, he was.”

  “I am here only for a few days.” I hoped. “I want to talk to you about your son.”

  “I suppose you heard that he’s dead? Took the coward’s way out, the police tell me.”

  “They are wrong.” My words swelled in the empty space.

  “You know better than the police? They said he’d tried the night before, too. I always knew they’d kill him before this ended.”

  “I—” I cleared my throat. “I was there the night before, and he did try. I bandaged his wrist. By the next morning, he knew that what he had done was wrong, that he had to take care of Ruth. He said he would make sure she was safe.”

  “Why would Ruth not be safe?” He let go of my hand and lowered his eyebrows.

  I kept going. I would never get through it if I stopped. “The night that he died, I was the first one to come upon his body and—there was no gun in the room. He could not have shot himself without a gun.”

  Herr Keller raised his long elegant hands to his face and ran them down his cheeks. “You told this to the police, I imagine?”

  “I cannot.”

  He put both hands on the back of the pew in front of us and gripped it tightly. “Don’t suppose you’ll tell me why not?”

  I shook my head.

  “You always were a closemouthed one.” He leaned back. We sat together in silence. Anton bowed his head in front of us. From what I could tell, he read the Bible.

  “Still, my son loved you. Should have married you. Hard to imagine now, but we worried that you weren’t Catholic. I wasn’t so happy when he dated that hard number from the newspaper. She turned out all right, in the end, I think.”

  I did not think that Maria had turned out all right, but I did not contradict him.

  “In the end, when he married, it was a Polish girl. Turned him into a devout Jew. He would have been better off letting you turn him into a Protestant or an atheist, or whatever it is you are.”

  “Herr Keller—” I did not know how, or if, to defend Miriam or myself.

  “Where’s his wife got to? I visited the apartment to—to collect some things, but no sign of her.”

  I briefly told how she had been deported to Poland and died there.

  “Little Ruth?” he asked. “Is she in Poland, too?”

  “No. Paul said he knew where she was. Did you speak to him in the last few days? Did he tell you?”

  He squeezed the pew so hard that his knuckles whitened. “Not in the last few weeks. Not since Ruth’s second birthday. How did he lose track of her? Do you know where she is? Is she safe?”

  “Paul thought she was safe.” I wished I had a better answer.

  Herr Keller’s grip on the pew did not loosen. “Have you told the police?”

  “I cannot.”

  “I will,” he said. “Today.”

  That might open an investigation into Paul’s death. But if there was a chance they might find Ruth, it had to be done.

  “My wife and I adore that girl. Bundle of trouble she is. Parents always fighting over her. Her mother wanted her to be a little lady. Paul wanted to let her run a little wilder, feel the mud between her toes.”

  I studied tall arched windows. They had beheld much grief since they were built, and they were likely to see much more. “Do you know where she might be? Perhaps with Miriam’s family?”

  “They’re all dead, so far as I know,” he said. “This whole Nazi business has gone too far. I’ve been trying to convince Paul to leave for years. He wouldn’t budge. But we’ll take Ruth out, Frau Keller and I, if you bring her to us.”

  They had been good parents to Paul. Ruth would be safer with them than hiding in a box being smuggled across the Swiss border, and I worried that Lars’s shell shock was not something that a young girl should see. Anton probably should not either.

  “If I find her,” I said, “and I can, I will bring her to you.”

  “Bless you.” He wrapped his arm around my shoulder and drew me close. He smelled like Paul. He felt like Paul. I closed my eyes and pretended that he was.

  I sat back up before I started to cry. “What about Miriam’s friends?”

  “I don’t know of any,” he said. “She spoke only Polish, so we never had a proper conversation.”

  Miriam and I had had only one conversation, too, where I promised her to help Ruth. So far, I had failed at that.

  “About Paul.” He paused.

  “Yes?”

  He drew a packet of letters tied with a green ribbon out of his pocket. I recognized my handwriting on the envelopes. Love letters that I had written to Paul twenty years before. He had saved them all this time. Herr Keller handed me the packet. “I found these in the cupboard in the bedroom. I couldn’t go into … the kitchen.”

  I turned the envelopes over in my hands, a lump in my throat. I had been so young, battered by my childhood and Walter’s death, but still so much more hopeful than now.

  “I didn’t think you would want anyone to read them,” he said. “So I took them. Paul would want you to have them.”

  I stroked my thumb down the stack. I had purchased the cream-colored paper and envelopes in Herr Silbert’s shop, long before I was a reporter and before his first arrest for forgery. Memories and these pieces of paper were all that remained of Paul for me. That and his little girl, Ruth.

  I turned into Herr Keller’s arms and cried for Paul. For the years we had, for the years we had lost, and for all the years he would never see.

  Eventually I wiped my eyes and sat back up. “I am sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” he said. “It’s good to know he’ll be missed.”


  “Thank you for the letters.” I blew my nose on my handkerchief.

  A priest in a cassock stopped at the end of our pew. He inclined his balding head toward us. “Herr Keller?”

  “Everything is fine, Rector,” Herr Keller said. “She is an old friend of Paul’s.”

  “You have my condolences,” the rector said. “Paul was a good man.”

  He turned and walked silently toward the altar. “Was that Rector Lichtenberg?”

  “A friend to Christians and Jews,” Herr Keller said. “He has spoken out against the mistreatment of the Jews since the beginning.”

  A brave stance, and one that not many Catholic or Protestant priests were prepared to take under Hitler. I hoped it would not get him killed.

  “Who would want to kill Paul?” he asked. “He was a good boy. Doing the best he could.”

  I had hoped that he would have an answer to that question. Paul was not a man who accumulated enemies. Unlike me. “Do you know anyone who might have had a grudge against Paul, or against Miriam?”

  He looked at me sharply. “I thought you said that she died in childbirth.”

  “I am taking nothing for granted,” I said.

  He ran his hands down his face again. “I don’t know who would want to kill either one.”

  I had little idea either. But both of them were dead.

  “If you find out who killed him,” he said raggedly, “tell me. Please.”

  “I will.” I gripped the letters tightly.

  “And, please, find Ruth. She loves our house. My wife and Ruth have so many tea parties together.” He swallowed heavily. “She has her own set of dishes with butterflies on them. For her birthday I bought her a matching set for her house.”

  An image out of the sketch I had drawn flashed in my mind. A plate on the floor with a butterfly on it. Had Ruth been at the table when Paul was killed? Or, perhaps, I was remembering it wrong. I had to go back and see. But I could not drag Anton back there. If it was a murder scene, I might be able to get past the policemen on my own, but not with Anton in tow. “But first you must do me a favor.”

  “Anything.”

  I pointed to the back of Anton’s head. “Take him to the Friedrichstadt subway station in two hours. He will be met by a man named Lars.”