A City of Broken Glass (Hannah Vogel)

by Cantrell, Rebecca

  “Frieda is tiresome,” he said. “By tonight she will be very jealous of you.”

  “The way you spoke to me on the telephone, I can hardly blame her.”

  “Stirring up a little jealousy in her for another woman will do her good,” he said.

  We passed the German luggage store. The shop window contained open red umbrellas with swastikas on them. I looked back at Wilhelm. “Your child?”

  “It’s a boy, as I hoped,” he said. “I named him Ernst.”

  For my brother. My eyes teared. Wilhelm had loved my brother very much. “He would be proud of that, I think.”

  He barked out a laugh. “Proud of me married to a woman when I should have been with him? Not likely.”

  To that I had no ready answer. We strolled to the end of the block and turned to walk back. We stopped in front of the plate glass window of a fashionable dress shop. The dresses were boxy, utilitarian, and there were no trousers for women in the store at all. Nazi fashion, again. I studied Wilhelm’s reflection in the mirror. He was grown up, to be sure, but still so young. I remembered how young I had once been, even when I thought myself grown, and all the boys I had nursed back to health after the men in charge had sent them to play and die at war. Would that be Wilhelm’s fate, too?

  “Tell me your troubles,” he said. “Mine bore me.”

  “I need to know if there is anyone with a first name of Ivona who might be related to the men who died in the warehouse in 1936.” Back then, he had checked their files for me, and mine and Lars’s, to see if we were under investigation for those murders. He might be able to look at them again.

  “I don’t need to check for that,” he said. “Which is just as well, since I can’t.”

  “Why not?” I stopped, suddenly worried.

  “My friend in Records has been reassigned.” He pulled me closer to him to let group of young women enter the dress store. One of them eyed him appreciatively. He touched the brim of his uniform cap, and she giggled.

  I made a tsking sound. “You are married to one woman, out with another, and making eyes at still a third.”

  We were well away from everyone else. “And for all that,” he said, “I’m not interested in any.”

  I nodded ruefully. “You said you did not need to check for an Ivona. Why not?”

  “I remember it. It’s an unusual name. Dirk Hahn’s daughter was named Ivona.”

  My heart raced. I was correct. Fräulein Ivona had targeted me because she thought I had killed her father. And I had.

  I knew my enemy now. This was my first real lead. Now that I had named her, I would catch her. She would pay for what she had done, somehow. And Ruth would walk free. I hoped.

  Wilhelm steered us down the sidewalk, but I no longer saw the bright shops. I was thinking about Ivona Hahn. How had she known to come after me? The letter. Herr Marceau had quoted it to me when I phoned in the orphanage story, but I had given it little thought after. What had he said? He wrote her and said that he would meet with you that day. Hahn must have written a letter, either to Fräulein Ivona or her mother, telling her of the meeting he was to have with me on the last day of his life. The meeting from which he had never returned.

  Paul and Ruth had not earned her wrath, but I had.

  “Before my friend left, I checked your files again, and Lang’s. They noted you as residing in Switzerland and separated from your fiancé.” He chuckled. “I rather thought it wouldn’t last with Lang. Did it at least end well?”

  I thought of Lars’s activities over the past years and said nothing.

  “According to the file, after he left you, he was arrested in Russia.” Wilhelm walked faster than I, and I found myself taking extra steps to keep up. “He spent over a year in a Russian prison, before being traded to the SS for a Russian political prisoner.”

  I felt relieved that his story tallied with what Lars had told me and chastised myself for a lack of trust in Lars. “Oh.”

  “He was apparently quite badly tortured, and spent several months in an SS hospital near Munich.” I sensed that even Wilhelm did not want to talk about Lars’s experiences in prison.

  “Did he?” So, it had taken him months to recover enough to make his mystery trip to Russia.

  Wilhelm guided us around an old woman carrying a vase wrapped in brown paper before speaking again. “He left the SS and seemed to fall off the map. Are you still in touch?”

  “I have no idea where he is now,” I said. “But I am curious.”

  Accurate, if not entirely truthful.

  “He had quite a time in Russia, did you know?” We stopped at a traffic light.

  “I did not know.” At least not until last night.

  He hesitated. “Do you want to?”

  “Not particularly.” I longed to ask for details, but I could not snoop on Lars that way. I would have to wait until he was ready to tell me. If he ever was.

  We crossed the street to circle the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, which sat like an island on the Kufürstendamm, across from Haus Vaterland. Wilhelm stopped to stare at the grand rose window. Last time I had stood here I had admired it myself, shortly before I entered the church, and Frau Röhm told me that Anton had been killed. A lie, but one powerful enough to almost destroy me.

  Wilhelm pulled on his lip, as he had when he was thinking since he was just a boy. “I don’t know, Hannah.”

  “About what?”

  He leaned in close, and I wondered what Lars would think. “About it all.”

  He glanced around the square. I followed his gaze. No one close. Or at least no one who seemed to be watching. “Wilhelm?”

  “I’m sick to death of the whole thing.” He sounded sad, and a little angry.

  He had a love of the dramatic, but this time the emotions felt true. I waited.

  “You were correct. About the Nazis. I used to see just the strength and pageantry. Now—” He spread his strong fingers out as if casting a net and drawing it in. “Now I see behind it. I see the weakness. The meanness.”

  “You do?” He had always been a devout party member.

  “When it was a revolution to sweep away corruption, to make Germany strong again, it made sense.”

  He felt nostalgia for the early days of Nazism. “Did it?”

  “I know it never made sense to you. But it did to me. Now it doesn’t.”

  I almost felt proud of him.

  “I’m married to a woman I don’t love to satisfy a party I don’t believe in.” He spoke more to the church than to me, as if confessing. “He’ll know.”

  “Who?”

  “Little Ernst.” He seemed surprised that I could imagine him speaking of anyone else. “When he gets older. He’ll know I don’t love Frieda, and that she doesn’t love me. That it’s based on lies and rot. I can’t bear the thought of him looking at me and knowing. I want to leave it behind and be authentic again. Divorce Frieda and start over.”

  We crossed the street and entered the park.

  “What does Frieda think?” We walked among bare trees now, sometimes hidden from view. I wondered what Lars thought of that.

  “I don’t know what Frieda thinks. About anything. I sometimes think we’ve never exchanged a single honest word.”

  “What if you start?” I asked.

  “If only it were so simple.”

  I had no answer for that. Nothing was simple anymore.

  “Enough self-pity.” He ran one hand through his thick blond hair. “Now, in case anyone is watching me, I’d like to establish a useful reason for this meeting.”

  He gave me what from a distance must have looked like a passionate kiss. I hated to think of Lars’s reaction to that.

  He moved his mouth away from mine. “The idea that I’m meeting an attractive blond piece over lunch is too good an opportunity to pass up.”

  “I am flattered,” I said, rather breathless. “But I have always been far too old for you.”

  “Your most important quality is that you are
a woman, and a mysterious one at that.”

  He positioned a tree between us and the street, and stayed close. I was concealed, but he was mostly visible. It must look like a quick tryst in the trees, barely discreet. I leaned back against the tree trunk, hoping my shoes would not get muddy. I imagined that Lars must be livid, but then again, he had slept with a raft of women since we parted, so he had no right to be jealous. On the other hand, I would have to explain it to Anton. We kept our heads close together.

  “Do you have an address for Ivona Hahn?” I asked.

  “I don’t remember one. I think she lived with her mother.”

  “Can you get me her file?”

  He moved closer. “As I said before, I don’t have the access to the file room that I once did.”

  His tone told me that it would make no sense to argue. Besides, I suspected that Fräulein Ivona was too smart to take Ruth to her own home, in case Lars or I knew someone who could find it.

  We talked about my brother and the old days. Eventually, he stepped back and adjusted his suit. I brushed off the back of my dress.

  “Maybe next time we should rent a hotel room.” He picked a piece of bark out of my hair.

  “I am hopeful that there will not be a next time.”

  “Aren’t you always?” He smiled. “If there is, we shall rent a room.”

  I had to smile back. “How extravagant!”

  He kissed the top of my head. “I have to get back to work.”

  “Well, that was certainly quick.”

  He gave me a lazy smile. “I got what I needed, and so did you.”

  “I suppose that is the best one can expect of any rendezvous.”

  “Take care of yourself, Hannah.”

  We embraced. I held him for a long while, wondering if it would be the last time.

  “Until we meet again.” He gave me a mock salute.

  As I watched his tall, strong form lope off, I wondered what would become of him. Germany marched toward war. Chamberlain would not keep handing Hitler territory forever, even if he had traded those bits of Czechoslovakia easily enough a little more than a month ago. The Sudetenland and Austria would not suffice for Germany’s former corporal. Eventually someone would have to fight back. I hoped that Wilhelm would not be sacrificed on a battlefield for the Nazi cause, one he no longer believed in.

  I walked slowly back to the street. Once I reached the sidewalk, I bent to fiddle with my shoe. Anton darted over.

  Without Lars.

  28

  I stood and nodded to Anton.

  Where was Lars? How jealous was he? Would it keep him from believing what I had uncovered about Fräulein Ivona?

  “That was not what it looked like,” I said to Anton.

  “I understand.” He fiddled with something in his pocket. “It’s the most logical thing for a man and woman to do in the woods in the middle of the day.”

  Sometimes I forgot how much he must have learned in his years with his prostitute mother. “But we did not.”

  He laughed. “I know, but Lars doesn’t. His head got very red. He looked as if he would explode. He said we are to meet him at the Wild West Bar. He will join us soon. He’s going to follow Herr Lehmann first.”

  I imagined that he needed to calm himself, too, and was grateful for the reprieve. I was also impressed that he had thought to choose the Wild West Bar. Years ago, I had vowed to take Anton there if we ever returned to Berlin together. I suspected that this might be our only opportunity.

  Rain drizzled down. I hurried across the square. We stopped at the traffic light. “That was the first traffic light installed in Europe,” I said. “In 1924, a few years before you were born.”

  He studied it with interest. “How do you know?”

  “I came to marvel at it,” I said. “It was news.”

  “A stoplight?” He shook his head in disbelief.

  “Technology marches on,” I told him. “Someday your child will be amazed that you rode in something as old-fashioned as a zeppelin.”

  We crossed with the light and walked toward the curved front of Haus Vaterland. I had rarely come to this building of themed restaurants when I lived in Berlin. Since I left, it had practically become my home away from home. I had met Wilhelm at the Wild West Bar to exchange information in 1934 and Lars at the Türkische Café in 1936.

  We paid our entrance fee, trotted up the ugly staircase, and marched through swinging saloon doors into the Wild West Bar. It had changed little since 1934. Anton gaped as a cowboy in a ten-gallon hat strode over. I smiled to see Anton happy.

  “Howdy, ma’am,” the cowboy said in English. He touched the brim of his felt hat with two fingers and a thumb. Anton was enchanted.

  “A table for three,” I said.

  “Follow me.” He stepped past a brass spittoon to a round table with poker chips and playing cards painted on it.

  He pulled out my rough-hewn wooden chair, and I sat. Anton scooted his chair forward and studied his painted cards.

  “I win,” he said. “Full house. Three jacks and a pair of deuces.”

  “When did you learn to play poker?” I asked.

  The cowboy handed me a menu full of American specialties and left.

  “At riding school,” Anton said. “Back of the stable.”

  “I am glad to hear that they are broadening your education.”

  “You don’t sound glad.” He counted his painted chips.

  “You do not play for money, do you?”

  He shook his head. “Not yet. No money.”

  “That is not so reassuring,” I said.

  The waiter returned. “Something to wet your whistle?”

  Our waiter in 1934 had used just those terms.

  Anton ordered a High Noon, lemonade with a shot of cola. It sounded terrible. I had a tea, straight up.

  Lars slid in next to me and ordered a Schultheiss beer with no Western pretense.

  The waiter sauntered off.

  Lars picked up his menu without meeting my eyes. He barely glanced at the menu before dropping it on the table.

  “Poker,” Anton said, pointing to the cards.

  Lars looked at his cards and moved to my other side.

  “Why did you move?” Anton asked. “I already have the best hand.”

  Lars pointed to his first cards. “A pair of aces and a pair of eights. That’s called the ‘dead man’s hand’ because that’s what Wild Bill Hickok was holding when he was shot.”

  “How do you know that?” Anton asked.

  “I make it my business to know things.” Lars gave me a meaningful look.

  “Sometimes,” I said. “Things slip through. Wilhelm said—”

  The waiter returned and set down my thick mug of tea, Anton’s tin one frothing over with a fizzy brown mixture, and Lars’s familiar beer glass.

  “Know what vittles you’ll be needing?” The waiter hooked his thumbs in his braces and leaned back as if he had just jumped off his horse on the trail.

  Lars and I each ordered a plate of beef stew. Anton asked for the pork and beans with sourdough biscuits.

  I decided to ask Lars a few questions before revealing Fräulein Ivona’s identity. I expected that to render him speechless, at least for a while. “Was Wilhelm followed?”

  “Inexpertly. By his wife.” Lars drank a long swallow of beer.

  “He is married?” Anton asked.

  “And he has a little boy,” I told him. “Did anyone else follow him?”

  “Not that I could see. I tailed him after you parted as well. His wife left when you started your performance in the woods.”

  I blushed and looked over his shoulder at a cactus. “That is all it was.”

  “What information did you extract from him?” Lars clipped off each word angrily.

  “Ivona’s last name is Hahn.”

  Lars rocked back in his chair. He looked as if he might be ill on the table.

  I drank my strong tea and waited for him to collect himsel
f. Anton stared at his painted poker chips.

  The waiter clanked tin plates in front of us. The beef stew looked better than I had expected. I tasted it. Salty, but edible. I took a few bites, watching Lars.

  Anton pretended to ignore both of us and swabbed his biscuit through the sauce on his pork and beans. I supposed that was standard manners in the Old West and said nothing.

  “Lars?” I asked. Finally, he had outwaited me.

  He pushed his plate away untouched. “I’m sorry, Spatz.”

  I pulled a handful of coins out of my pocket and handed them to Anton. “Please select a song on the player piano and stay next to it until the song ends.”

  Anton jumped to his feet, clearly eager to have a good excuse to get away from the argument he knew must be coming. He hurried across the room. Seconds later, a Western-style song plonked away.

  “I should have checked further,” Lars said. “I didn’t, and that’s landed us all here.”

  “Hopefully there will be time for self-recrimination later,” I said. “Now we need to find Ruth. What do you know about Fräulein Ivona?”

  “I knew her only three weeks,” he said. “I did a quick check on her file and it seemed fine. We shared drinks, meals. I slept with her because she resembled you.”

  I winced.

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’ll say it a thousand times if you like.”

  “I do not like it.” I spoke too loudly. I brought myself back under control. I had to stay calm. “Please, I want to focus on Ruth and only Ruth. Where would Fräulein Ivona take her?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Hahn is dead. I don’t know where her mother lived.”

  I kept my voice even. “Do you know where Hahn lived?”

  “Yes.” He tapped his spoon against his tin plate. “But his wife did not live with him. I went back to his apartment after I was released from the hospital, as part of my sanctioned but unofficial investigation into his death. His apartment had long been rented to someone else.”

  I stopped his spoon from tapping. “Did you find out much about his wife or daughter in your investigation?”

  His lips thinned. “Obviously not. They were not suspects in his death.”

  Across the room, Anton fed another coin into the piano. He looked like he wanted to stay there all day. I wanted to join him.