There was a pair of uniformed policemen at one stop. The policemen surveyed the streetcar as it rolled to a stop. The passengers tried to look as though they didn’t notice. One started to read a newspaper, another checked his watch, meaningless gestures that, if anything, made them look guilty. Maybe not of murder, but of something.
The streetcar stopped at Karolinenplatz. Several men got on, including a man wearing a leather overcoat and carrying a briefcase. He sat two rows behind Willi. The man had the Nazi haircut. He fit the description they had from Erna Raczynski – mid-thirties, regular features, the right height, etcetera. If only it were that easy, thought Willi.
At the next station, two uniformed policemen got on. They walked down the aisle checking everyone’s identification card. ‘Guten Abend,’ they said. ‘Your ID, please.’ They looked at Karl Juncker’s card, looked at Willi’s face, said thank you, and moved on. At the next stop they got off and moved to the second car.
By the time the streetcar reached the end of the line, Willi and the man in the leather coat were the only two passengers left. Both got off the train. The man gave Willi a nervous look before walking off briskly toward home.
Willi waited for the next tram to go back into town. This time he got off at Karolinenplatz and transferred to a different line – three women had been murdered along this line. By now it was after midnight and both cars were sparsely populated. Two women sat together in the front seat of the first car opposite the driver, and three men were scattered about. Willi sat alone in the last car. After four stops, one woman got off. She was young, dark haired and not pretty, not the killer’s type, he thought. A man followed her off the train. The woman walked off, presumably going home, and the man watched her go, then he turned around and walked in the opposite direction. Willi took the train several more stops and was about to get off, when two policemen got on. ‘Your ID, please,’ said one. Once again, Willi gave the policeman his card.
‘Where are you going … Herr Juncker?’ said the policeman. He studied the ID.
‘Visiting someone,’ Willi answered.
‘Visiting someone?’ said the policeman. ‘At this hour?’
‘You know,’ said Willi, and smiled. ‘A certain someone.’
‘Ah,’ said the policeman. He smiled back at Willi and gave the ID back. ‘Well, have a good night.’
‘And you too,’ said Willi. ‘Stay warm.’ He got off the streetcar and waved at the policemen as the streetcar pulled away.
It was after two when Lola finished tallying the books for the night. She checked with her assistant to be sure everything had been taken care of. She pulled on her boots, buttoned her coat, and wrapped the mohair shawl around her neck. The snow had stopped falling. The night was clear and cold. The ground was covered with a glistening white blanket. Lola took a deep breath of the clean night air, pulled her collar tight around her neck, and set off for home.
The city was even quieter than it usually was this late. Every footstep, the noise of every passing car or bus was muffled by the snow. The stores that weren’t shuttered cast light onto the white sidewalks. Lola stopped at a shop window to admire a dress she hadn’t seen before. The shop changed its display once a week and today, Thursday, was the day. The dress was emerald green, a color that went well with her red hair.
Willi got to Lola’s at about two thirty. She wasn’t home yet, so he made a pot of tea and sat down to wait for her. When she wasn’t back by three, he decided to walk out and meet her. He was sure she was fine. She was often late on Thursdays. Thursdays were always busy. There was no reason to worry. Lola’s route didn’t take her anywhere near the streetcar lines in question.
And yet, what difference did any of that make? What good was a theory? When a murderer is at large, all your most convincing theories about how a murder happens, why it happens, who is doing it, about the orderliness and predictability of the crime, seem like nothing so much as wishful thinking. Willi had quickened his steps and was nearly running when he finally saw her coming toward him.
‘What a nice surprise,’ she said when they met. He kissed her a little more vehemently than usual. ‘I saw a dress on the way home,’ she said. ‘I love it. I’m going to stop tomorrow afternoon and try it on.’
‘I can’t wait to see it,’ said Willi.
Degenerate Art
In the House of German Art, Joseph Goebbels and his Propaganda Ministry mounted Die Große Deutsche Kunstaustellung, the Great German Art Exhibition, a spectacular show of the pompous and heroic painting and sculpture favored by Hitler. There were grandiose bucolic landscapes and portraits of blond mothers clutching children lovingly to their ample bosoms. There were statues of gigantic men with strong jaws and bulging muscles straining forward on their way to save the world. The Führer swept through the exhibition with his entourage following behind, stopping by his favorites and holding forth to his bedazzled acolytes on the works’ aesthetic superiority.
Goebbels had also mounted a second show, this one called Entartete Kunst – Degenerate Art – meant to demonstrate to Germans yet again the utter depravity and sickness of modern culture and art, and thereby the moral bankruptcy of the recently departed Weimar Republic. This exhibition had six hundred and fifty paintings and sculptures, which had been removed from Germany’s great museums, jammed together in small, badly lit galleries. The works had disparaging labels attached decrying the ‘sick Hebraic view that distorts and devalues life’ or ‘the failure of the so-called artist to manage even the most rudimentary representational skills.’ Hitler went through this exhibition too, but as quickly as he could, scowling and snarling and denouncing its appalling horrors.
The crowds that followed, once Hitler had left, were enormous, attracted by the chance to see, one last time perhaps, masterpieces by Picasso, Matisse, Chagall, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Renoir, Duchamp. The great German Expressionists were there too – Ludwig Kirchner, Max Ernst, Georg Grosz, Otto Dix, Emil Nolde, Oskar Kokoschka, Ernst Barlach. The crowds remained enormous until November 30, the day the exhibition closed.
Once the show closed, Goering helped himself to several works for his collection of plundered art. So did other officials. The remainder of the work from the show was sold at auction in Switzerland. ‘We might as well make some money from this trash,’ said Goebbels.
Willi could not risk going to see the exhibition. Benno and Margarete went the first day and they described it for him. ‘It’s so crowded you can hardly move. Strangely enough, once inside, people are mostly silent, out of respect, maybe. Or maybe it’s a sense of grief.’
Lola went to see it with her friend Sofia. She couldn’t stop talking about it. ‘I’m sorry you can’t go,’ she said to Willi. ‘I think everyone should see it.’
Heinz Schleiffer did not think everyone should see it. He found the work just as disturbing as the labels said it was. He stood in front of a Picasso painting of ‘Two Harlequins,’ shaking his head from side to side. ‘He can’t even paint,’ he said. ‘It’s dreary and smeared. They don’t look like real people. It’s depressing.’
Tomas Schleiffer stood beside his father. He had come to Munich just to see the show, then had decided – now he wondered what he could have been thinking – to invite his father to go with him. Why not make peace with the old Nazi? he thought. Whatever else he is, he is still my father. Heinz hadn’t even recognized Tomas when he had knocked on the door. It had been that long. ‘Hallo, Papa,’ said Tomas and held out his hand.
‘Ja, Tomas!’ said Heinz. ‘What are you doing here?’
Tomas explained that he had come to Munich to see the big art show, and his mother had suggested he look up his father while he was here, and, well, here he was. ‘Why don’t you come with me?’
‘I can’t, Tomas,’ said Heinz. ‘I’ve got stuff to do. I’m busy.’
‘You’re still in your pajamas, Papa. Please come. We’ll get lunch together. My treat.’
What’s this? thought Heinz. The little pissant has grown up
and learned some manners. Maybe I should go; I’m his father, after all. What have I got to lose? ‘Give me ten minutes,’ he said. It was a beautiful day. Tomas waited on the bench outside on Tullemannstraße.
Heinz got out his brown uniform, laid it across the bed and stared at it for a while before putting it back and taking out his suit and tie instead. He dressed and looked at himself in the mirror. He wet his hair and brushed it across his head, then he went outside. Tomas was standing talking to Frau Schimmel who was sitting on the bench. ‘Herr Schleiffer,’ she said, ‘I’ve just met your charming son. He tells me you’re going to the modern art show.’
‘Yes,’ said Schleiffer. ‘He’s studying art history, you know.’
‘Yes,’ said Frau Schimmel. ‘So you’ve told me.’
‘Oh,’ said Heinz. ‘Well,’ he said after what seemed to him an interminable silence, ‘we better be going.’
‘Would you like to come with us, Frau Schimmel?’ said Tomas.
‘Oh, that’s very kind of you,’ said Frau Schimmel. ‘But I’m a little tired after my walk. I think I’ll just sit here for a while and watch the birds. But thank you, Tomas.’
‘You do that, Frau Schimmel,’ said Heinz, relieved – he wasn’t sure why – that she wouldn’t be with them. ‘You sit there and take it easy.’ They shook hands and parted. ‘I help her out with her groceries sometimes,’ said Heinz. ‘She’s really quite sick. Cancer.’
‘Is she?’ said Tomas, studying his father as though he were seeing him for the first time.
Heinz wanted paintings to be beautiful. He wanted them to look real. He wanted them to make him happy, not depressed. ‘I understand, Papa,’ said Tomas, trying his best to understand. Then he talked to Heinz about Picasso’s ‘Two Harlequins,’ pointing at details as he spoke. He explained that the ‘ugliness’ that Heinz saw in the colors, in the brushwork, in the skinny, awkward, bent figures was intentional. Picasso meant for the two figures to be unsettling. He wasn’t painting two people so much as he was painting their inner lives: their anguish, the pain of their poverty and loneliness and hunger. Here were two ‘clowns,’ whose job it was to entertain us, sharing a meager meal. They had been beaten down. Their lives were hard. They were hungry, maybe starving. The paint was thick, it was applied roughly and quickly, but with great skill to reveal their suffering and to give you a feeling for their world.
Not everything Tomas said made sense to Heinz, but some of it did. It didn’t make him actually like any of the works either. But he did like hearing Tomas talk about them. He watched Tomas while he was talking, gesturing toward the painting. Heinz felt something that resembled pride. This was his son: a man. And he was smart and educated. And he, Heinz Schleiffer, could take at least some credit for what Tomas had become. Couldn’t he?
At lunch at the Three Crowns, Heinz and Tomas talked about Germany and world politics. That was when things got tense. Tomas said he wasn’t political, but in the next sentence he said something about how he didn’t think it was right to censor art and literature. Free expression was important for a people. The right to express themselves freely and without fear in their art and writing was sacred. It was wrong to burn books or paintings; literature and art shouldn’t be disrespected.
‘Listen, Tomas,’ said Heinz, ‘you’re young. You have a lot to learn. Germany has to speak with one voice. We are under assault from all sides. The Jews are undermining our culture. The French and the British have been bleeding us dry with their unjust reparations. We have to be one people under the Führer in order to be a great country again.’
‘We can be one people, Papa, without having only one thought. We can be different and yet united as a people.’
‘Tomas,’ said Heinz, lowering his voice, suddenly aware that they were in a busy restaurant where their conversation could be overheard. ‘Keep your voice down. Remember where you are. People might misunderstand what you’re saying.’
Tomas looked around, and sure enough, the couple at the next table were looking at them. He smiled at them; they didn’t smile back. Both Tomas and Heinz agreed they should talk about other things while they ate. ‘They have a very good roast chicken here,’ said Heinz, so they both ordered chicken and dumplings and beer.
‘You know, Tomas, I’ve been with the Führer for a long time,’ said Heinz, as they walked home. ‘I believe in his vision for Germany.’
‘I know, Papa.’
‘And what about you, Tomas?’
‘I don’t believe in that vision.’
‘You don’t believe in one German people?’
‘Does that include Jewish people?’
‘No, of course not,’ said Heinz.
‘Why not?’ said Tomas.
‘They are an alien culture with different and alien ways,’ said Heinz. ‘You know that. They have polluted our culture with their ways, and our blood with their blood.’
‘You’re just parroting Hitler, Papa. What about …?’
‘I’m not parroting anyone,’ said Heinz, growing angry. ‘Damn it, show some respect. These are my own beliefs.’
‘Show respect? OK. What about old Tante Jolesch?’ said Tomas. ‘Did she pollute our blood, our culture?’
Heinz hadn’t thought about Jolesch for a long time. The old Jew from Prague everyone called Tante Jolesch had lived upstairs when Heinz and Renate had still been married and Tomas was a small boy. Jolesch had been a wonderful neighbor, taking care of little Tomas so Heinz and Renate could enjoy a night out once in a while. She had also cooked delicious meals for them. She would just show up at the door with casseroles, soups, desserts whenever the spirit moved her. When both Heinz and Renate had been sick with the flu during the big epidemic, Jolesch had moved in and taken care of them until they were better. Heinz had wept when Jolesch had died.
‘What about the old Jew Jolesch?’ Tomas said again.
‘What about her?’ said Heinz, truly angry now.
They walked the rest of the way home in silence. When they got there, Heinz went into his apartment and slammed the door.
‘Goodbye, Papa,’ said Tomas, speaking to the closed door.
The Ninth Victim
A young woman’s body, mutilated in the usual way, was found not far from one of the late-night streetcar lines. She had been returning home from an assignation with her boss. The snow was crimson all around where she lay. How could one person have so much blood?
It turned out, however, that the blood was not all hers. When the police moved her body onto the stretcher, they found a small knife. She had apparently carried it to defend herself and, before she perished, she had wounded the killer, maybe seriously. He had not cleaned his knife in the usual manner. Instead, a large piece of fabric had been torn from her dress, possibly as an improvised bandage. The killer had run off, leaving a trail of blood in the snow along with his footprints. He had been running, not staggering, so the wound was likely not mortal. Not immediately anyway.
A streetcar conductor remembered a wounded man getting into his car at exactly three o’clock in the morning. He knew it was three because the nearby church bell was sounding the hour just as the man got on the streetcar. ‘I always listen for the three o’clock bells. That way I know we’re on schedule.’ The wounded man’s right sleeves had been slashed open. He had a bandage of some sort tied around the wound, but it was still bleeding. It had dripped on the floor. A freak accident, the man had said. A lot of blood, he said, but no serious damage.
‘Can I help?’ said the conductor. ‘Don’t worry,’ said the man. ‘I’ll be fine.’ He had smiled, but you could tell he was in pain. ‘Thanks for your concern,’ he had said when he got off the streetcar.
‘Where did he get off?’ said Detlev Lettauer, the detective interviewing him.
‘Why are you asking me all these questions again?’ said the conductor.
‘What do you mean again?’ said Lettauer.
‘Well, another detective interviewed me yesterday, and he asked the same questions
. And then some. I told him everything I know.’
‘Another detective? What was this detective’s name?’
‘I didn’t get it,’ said the conductor.
‘Did he show you his credentials?’
‘Well, he said he was a detective. Who else would be asking that kind of questions?’
Detective Lettauer asked for a description.
‘About your height,’ said the driver. ‘Glasses, a mustache. Is this connected with those murders?’
‘What more can you tell me about the other detective?’ said Lettauer. ‘Where did he interview you?’
‘I was just starting my shift,’ said the driver. ‘Yesterday afternoon, the day after they found her. Five o’clock.’
‘You mean he met you here, at the streetcar yard?’
‘No. He just got on the streetcar.’
‘Where?’
‘Julius-Hemdstraße. First stop out of the yard.’
‘How far did he go?’
‘I think he got off at Dreiheiligenplatz.’
‘Did you see which direction he went?’
‘He may have gone toward the river, but I’m not sure.’
Willi was risking his life. The police now knew somebody was impersonating a detective, and that meant the SS and Gestapo knew. He didn’t need to be told about the danger he was in. Bergemann told him anyway. Lola didn’t know what Willi was up to. But there was no mistaking that he was keyed up and on edge about something. He got out of bed in the middle of the night and sat in the dark. You could almost hear him thinking. She tried to warn him too, but she didn’t even know what to warn him about.
There were five clinics and hospitals along the streetcar line between the scene of the latest murder and Karolinenplatz. After talking with the driver, Willi had retrieved his bicycle and ridden from one clinic to the next. At the very last clinic – a small private one – he struck gold.
The Constant Man Page 11
