Death in Focus

by Anne Perry

  “I didn’t murder him! I saw the gun and I was afraid. I just ran, because I couldn’t prove to anyone that I knew nothing about it.” She heard the desperation in her own voice. Why did he not believe her? Or was it that he really didn’t care? Innocent or guilty, she was the one they were looking for. Or perhaps anyone would do, if they satisfied the crowd. A hideous thought. It filled her with fear, and drove out everything else. Victory was not in getting the right person, it was in getting anyone who could be made to look right. She must get rid of illusions. These people would kill her, and they would kill others, too.

  How easy it was to blame someone else when you were sick with fear, the sweat breaking out on your skin and instantly going cold.

  The second man was nodding slowly. “You panicked, because you realized that the gun had been used to assassinate one of the Führer’s best men? You had not the courage to hand the gun over and trust our justice.”

  Another trap. “I didn’t think,” she said, as if it were an admission. Did she have to apologize to these arrogant men? “I should have trusted.”

  “Perhaps English police are not so trustworthy as we Germans?”

  She looked at his face, his eyes, and had no idea if he was being sarcastic or not. She did not doubt he would do whatever he thought was in his own interest. Perhaps he was too afraid of whoever was higher up the chain of command? Perhaps they were all afraid, of one thing or another?

  She said nothing.

  “Are English police trustworthy?” he said more loudly.

  “I don’t know.” She fumbled over the words. Her mouth hurt, her whole face hurt. “I have friends who say they aren’t.”

  A tiny victory. It had given him no leverage.

  “So, when your friends did not answer, where did you sleep? What did you eat? It has been several days. Someone helped you. Who?”

  “Different people. I begged.” Did that sound believable?

  The first man looked her up and down. “Don’t be stupid,” he said contemptuously. “She earned it on her back!” His meaning, and his disgust, were both plain.

  Elena felt the heat rise up her cheeks. It was humiliating to be taken so easily for a whore, or perhaps just a desperate woman! How many such women might have slept with men for their own survival? Or even, more likely, to feed their children, or save someone else’s life. Wouldn’t a woman with a child to protect do anything necessary, no matter how repulsive? A child alone would die. Or worse.

  She nodded her head very slightly. It was believable. Good, if he accepted it.

  “Put her in the cells,” the second man ordered and turned away, clearly thinking of the next task.

  It was a very ordinary cell: bare stone floor, one small window high up in the wall. Nothing to see out of it but sky. There was a cot along one side, and a bucket. Nothing else. They had searched her handbag and kept it, along with the photographs of the assassination and her passport. At least Jacob had copies of the pictures. They would be safe, as long as Eli and Zillah were. Perhaps Jacob would be safe because he was American? If he kept his activities quiet, wrote for American newspapers only, then his U.S. citizenship might protect him.

  But her British citizenship had not protected her!

  Was that because they really thought she had killed Scharnhorst? Would she have been all right, but for that?

  Jacob was a Jew. She felt despair well up inside her as she thought of people she had seen beaten and humiliated in the street. Why? Just because they were Jews.

  For the love of heaven, Christ himself had been a Jew! So had the Virgin Mary, and all the Apostles. Hatred was a kind of insanity, and there was no reasoning with it. It was corrosive like acid, burning all it touched, destroying in the cause of…what, inadequacy? People who were filled with rage because they had failed, they could not cope with defeat, hunger, or most of all, the consuming darkness.

  Wasn’t she afraid? Yes. She was in a police cell, accused of something she had not done. The Nazis were terrible, beyond terrible. There was no word for them.

  But they were still a minority. She knew the German people. They were as decent as anybody else. She had lived here and been happy. Stop the imagination. Think what to say when they questioned her again.

  * * *

  —

  That time came sooner than she expected. She had gone over and over the possibilities in her mind. Her head ached from where the man had hit her, and from the turmoil of her own thoughts.

  She was taken back to where she had been before, or a room exactly like it. She had been too frightened to take much notice. The same two men were there, and both of them looked in ill temper.

  “Commandant Beimler wants to see you,” the man who had hit her said angrily. He seemed to resent the fact. Perhaps it was a reflection on his competence that she was taken out of his hands. Elena had no idea whether it would be better or worse for her. Perhaps it made no difference, except that this senior man might be cleverer, far more difficult to mislead.

  She did not speak. Nothing could make it better, and a mistake would make it worse.

  Elena was marched in silence, her hands manacled behind her back, along several corridors, across an open space almost like a barrack yard, and in through another door. This new building was cleaner and rather better cared for. The commandant must definitely be senior.

  They stopped and one of the policemen knocked sharply on a door. Neither of the men reached for the handle to open it, until a voice from inside gave them permission.

  She was pushed in roughly enough to feel the tweak of a muscle in her shoulder, but she tried to give no sign that it hurt.

  Beimler, if it was he behind the desk, stood up, looking first at her, then at the two policemen who had brought her. He was tall with fair hair and strong features, the perfect Aryan type. He held out his hand.

  “Sir?” The younger policeman gestured.

  “Keys,” Beimler said a little impatiently. “You have her manacled. I want the key.”

  “Sir, she could be violent. She already shot Herr Scharnhorst, and from a considerable distance. She’s probably trained in unarmed combat, too.”

  “I don’t see any bruises on your face, while there’s a pretty large one on hers. Looks as if you won that fight,” Beimler responded with a twisted smile, more irritation than humor.

  “I’ve more sense than to let her trick me,” the man replied tartly.

  “So have I,” Beimler snapped back. “Keys!”

  He handed them over.

  “Thank you. You may go. I’ll send for you if I need you.”

  “We can wait outside, sir.”

  “No, you cannot. You will go back and continue with your duties.”

  Reluctantly, they both saluted, perhaps not quite as smartly as they could have, and went out, closing the door behind them with a sharp snap.

  Beimler released Elena from the manacles. “Sit down,” he invited, relaxing and resuming his own seat. “Do you prefer to speak in English or German? I’m afraid my English is not very fluent.”

  “German is fine, thank you.” She sat down, but well toward the front of the chair, uncomfortably. She did not know if his outward good manners made him better, or worse.

  He sat quite still, apparently studying her. She did not stare back at him; it would be bold, and challenging. Instead she looked around the room. It was sunny. Outside, beyond the window, the sky was blue. The office was very tidy. No papers lying around, but lots of books on the pale wooden shelves. Presumably they were all books the Führer approved of. There would be nothing dangerous to the mind, no new or uncensored ideas.

  She saw on the shelf nearest to his desk, where he could see it every time he looked up, a photograph of a pretty blond woman, holding a little girl of perhaps two, who was smiling at whoever had been holding the camera, showing white ba
by teeth.

  Elena found herself looking away. She could not think of this man having a wife and a child who looked at him with such trust.

  She waited to be interrogated, perhaps hit again. She glanced at the smiling child. Elena was not so close to her father. She had never felt she knew him well. Margot was his favorite, just as Elena was Lucas’s. It might be too late now to mend that. It was a shame, a part of her life that would always be missing.

  She thought of all the things she had shared with Lucas: the laughter, the exploration of ideas, the freedom of being safe and certain of love.

  Would Lucas even know what had happened to her? If he did, at least she would not have to say she had betrayed anyone—not even herself.

  She looked at Beimler again.

  “Why did you come back to Germany, Miss Standish? Why now?” he asked.

  What was he looking for? A reason for her to have killed Scharnhorst? “I had the opportunity,” she replied. “I was photographing people at an economic conference in Italy. I decided not to go straight home.”

  “Ah yes, the photographs.” He gave a bleak smile.

  She thought she could see actual humor in it, not something Hitler’s followers were known for. If you could laugh, you had a sense of proportion, and of absurdity.

  “You’ve seen them?” she asked. She dared not hope. And yet she did! She felt a lurch of pain inside her as she thought again of what she could lose. And there was a burning anger as well, rage for everyone who had been terrified and humiliated.

  “Yes. You took them?” the man continued.

  “Yes.” She stared straight back at him.

  “They are excellent. You are professional, yes? It shows in the composition. How many did you take of Scharnhorst’s death?”

  “Only one of the exact moment. A few around it. If you have seen the photograph I took you must know that I cannot possibly have shot Herr Scharnhorst.”

  “Did you know it was going to happen?” He was looking at her very closely. Would he see a lie? This was his job, interrogation.

  Should she tell him the truth? That she had warned Cordell, and he had done nothing? Better not to bring MI6 into it at all. It was too hard to explain. And if he questioned Cordell, even graciously, as a foreign diplomat, he would say that he was embarrassed for His Majesty’s Government, and yes, she could be guilty.

  “No.”

  “And yet you very carefully photographed him, just at the right instant. Are you always so…fortunate?” His expression was unreadable.

  “I took several. I always do. I was lucky enough to have caught the exact moment in one of them. All the rest did not.”

  He smiled. It was a warm, easy gesture. Was he actually quite a decent man, in other circumstances? Did most of these men have a side to them that was as human as anyone else?

  And did not even the nicest people have a dark, hidden side that their friends had no idea existed? She forced the idea away. She was overthinking it.

  “It takes a lot of work, and luck, to get just the right one, doesn’t it?” he said casually.

  Had he taken that picture of his wife and child? Without deliberately doing so, she glanced at it, then away again. Was it there precisely to lull whomever he was questioning into thinking of him as a human being, a man gentle with those he loved? What a hideous use of that most beautiful thing.

  He saw her eyes hover on his family’s portrait. “It’s not hard to photograph babies like that.”

  “Your wife and daughter?”

  “Yes. What do you know of Scharnhorst, Miss Standish? Why did you go to the rally? Is he someone you admire?” There was a shadow in his face as he said that. Was it clever acting, or did the dip in his voice, the instant of harshness, give him away?

  How much should she lie? How ugly would it be if she said she admired Scharnhorst, or agreed with anything he said? Could she make herself do that? “I heard him,” she said simply. “He wants to exterminate the Jews, the Gypsies, the trade unionists, and all homosexuals. He said it would cleanse Germany and be the beginning of a new age, a kingdom that would last forever.” She had intended to keep her voice neutral, but her loathing, and perhaps her fear, too, came through all too clearly in her words. The edge of sarcasm was razor sharp.

  “It shocked you?” he asked, his own voice carefully neutral.

  What should she say? Did her life depend on it? Or was she going to be blamed for killing Scharnhorst regardless of what she said? Would they be any gentler with her? That was an idiotic thought to play with. Mike would be ashamed of her. She thought of him because thinking of Lucas was too much. She would end up weeping in front of the commandant.

  “Yes, it shocked me,” she admitted, meeting his clear eyes. They were not blue, as she had thought, but gray. “He spoke of them as if they were an infestation in the house, termites, or dry rot in the walls.”

  “I think that was how he saw them,” Beimler replied. A flush of color spread up his cheeks. “Where did the rifle come from, Miss Standish?”

  “I’ve no idea. It was there in the room when I got back.”

  “How long after Scharnhorst was shot? Be careful what you say. The rifle still smelled of gunpowder.”

  “I don’t know. The crowds were pretty hysterical. It wasn’t easy to get through them. And…and I waited long enough to get a pretty good picture of them…carrying him away.”

  Was that ghoulish? Would he think of that as a terrible intrusion into death?

  He appeared not to have heard her. “Ten minutes? More? Say…fifteen?”

  “Yes, I think so. Time is different when something shocking happens.”

  “The hotel receptionist doesn’t recall anyone else going up to your floor,” he observed.

  “Well, he wouldn’t, would he?”

  “Not if he has any sense, no,” he agreed. He looked at her, and for an instant she saw the bitter humor in him, and the pity; and something deeper, a grief for things that were lost. Did he know what was happening to his country, and hate it? And yet what could he do?

  There were a hundred answers to that, all of them terrible. Was it absurd to sit in this office while he interrogated her about them? The murder of Scharnhorst, whom both of them despised, and both knew she had not killed.

  Beimler asked her more questions about how she had come to Berlin, and she thought of Walter Mann and his help. She told Beimler she had traveled alone. He asked why she had chosen that hotel. Then, of course, why she had run away and where she had gone. Who had sheltered her, fed her, kept her safe.

  Elena lied where necessary about that, too, and felt that he probably knew it, even expected it. But as long as she did not say anything that would lead to Jacob or Eli and Zillah, it did not matter.

  Oddly enough, he did not suggest that she had prostituted herself to get either money or protection. He assumed she had sought the help of friends from her earlier stay during her father’s appointment at the embassy, and he did not press her for their names. Did he assume she would not tell him? She hoped so. On the other hand, maybe he already knew them?

  In between the questions, they spoke of how order had returned to the country. There was work again, and hope. Certainly, there was more food, even if still not enough. And the despair was gone.

  She agreed with him and saw a misery in his eyes that he did not give words to.

  Every so often he glanced at the photograph. She did not ask their names; she did not want to know. In a way, they stood for all the innocents who had no idea what lay ahead, what future guilt or grief.

  When he looked across the polished wood desk at her, was that what he was thinking also? Of course, neither of them would ever say.

  They mentioned music, briefly. He said his wife played the piano. He wished he could.

  “It would be a wonderful thing to re-crea
te such beauty,” he said with a wry, almost dreaming smile. “To reach back into the past and build such glory, dreams in the air, almost as if the soul of the composer still lived. It is a…place to go to…to be…”

  She knew exactly what he meant. There was no need to say so. Why use words when silence was more fitting.

  Before they could speak further, the other police came for her, the manacles were replaced, and she was returned to her cell. She heard the iron lock shoot home into its place like the weight of a dead thing.

  CHAPTER

  26

  Margot was not going to wait sitting around in her hotel while Cordell, from whom she had heard nothing, looked for Elena. She would at least call on the people she knew best. She had a list of her own, and money for taxis to take her anywhere she wanted. She hailed a cab and set out for the smart Charlottenburg district to the west.

  The grand houses looked run-down even here. Margot tried first one address and then another. At each, the door was answered by a housekeeper who said she did not know of the former residents Margot sought. At the third place Margot was invited in and offered coffee by Frau Kopleck, who remembered well Charles at the embassy and had been a friend of Katherine’s. When Margot outlined her mission and her fears for Elena, the redoubtable Mitzi Kopleck sympathized. She thought killing Scharnhorst was an excellent thing, but she also thought Elena would not have the courage or the skill to do it.

  “Little Elena? Such a big thing to do—a political assassination! I cannot believe the Gestapo really think she did this. They are using her as a scapegoat, I’m afraid, my dear. How did she get caught up in all this anyway?”

  “I’m not sure, Frau Kopleck. I…”

  “Go to the embassy and see what they can do there, Margot. You are powerless on your own and so many things in Berlin are different now from when your father was here. I’m sorry, I cannot advise you any other way.”

  Margot drank her coffee, exchanged news about their families, and surreptitiously checked the current whereabouts of other people on her list by asking after them. Mitzi Kopleck knew so many people, and she was no fool.