The Night of Shooting Stars

by Ben Pastor

  Nina thanked him. She did not bring up the subject they’d so tactfully concluded in the afternoon, but, having himself been very much in love, Bora could intuit just by looking at her that Max Kolowrat had also asked to see her off in the morning. To him, it meant leaving his mother outside the station and losing the last precious moments with her. All the same, as he already stood on the threshold he casually said that it would be impossible for him to stay with her until the train took off. “I am truly unforgivable, Nina.”

  She would see through him, but Bora hoped that she’d let him render her this service. When Nina she asked him to bend down so that she could kiss his cheek – her way of showing unspoken gratitude – it seemed the right time to tell her how much he had grieved, and how much he still grieved. She took his face between her hands, and looked into his eyes.

  “Martin, how do you feel, really?”

  “Fine, Nina. I’m fine.”

  Updated in Berlin, at the Adlon, 11:58 p.m. West of the hotel, five bomb disposal men lost their lives in the explosion, caused it seems by a time fuse. Had they known, they could have simply waited for it to blow up on its own.

  I am writing in brand-new blue ink, even though I made a bit of a mess refilling the fountain pen with my one hand. At dinner, Nina did a wonderful job of not staring at it, although my occasional awkwardness with the cutlery must have distressed her. I tried to laugh it off – saying that it isn’t much different from when I had a broken arm in Russia – but I don’t think my attempt was very successful.

  Anyhow, a godsend from her: two tailored army shirts and hand-sewn underwear. Things she used to provide me with before I married, and with her characteristic discretion refrained from sending during the years I was with Dikta; now the clothes actually come in handy, because I wasn’t equipped for more than a short stay. I feel so far advanced into adulthood that I sometimes forget I’m her boy, and that she still looks after me.

  Enough said. Twelve hours ago, I was leaving Uncle’s memorial service; twenty-four hours ago, we were stuck near G. because of an air raid over the German border. Not for the first time, my orders changed en route, or, for all I know, had changed even before I set off from my post.

  Just like I deemed from the start that taking leave at this point in the war was improbable, I now wonder about this task. Of course, we who belonged to the Abwehr are at present like the ancient Japanese warriors without a master – ronin, as they were called. Whether we deserve it or not, we are mistrusted, but have useful skills.

  Group Leader Nebe forbade me to ask why the inquiry into a charlatan’s death is being contracted out. He has men, informants, every type of means at his fingertips; so does his counterpart in the Berlin police, Count von Heldorff; yet, at least formally, I am to work under the aegis of the Kripo, whose paperwork and logistic support I am being provided with. In the hour or so I spent at Nebe’s office, I got the strong impression that he knew all about me, and spoke to me as he did because of that. It’s no secret that some of those I have worked for, as well as those I’ve had disagreements with, talk to one another. If they haven’t fallen in battle in the meantime, the latter still have an axe to grind with me. Speaking of axes, Colonel (now Obersturmbannführer) Kinzel has buried his hatchet with the Reich Security Service. Not he, not any one of them, would recommend me. Who, then?

  It doesn’t matter. A lieutenant colonel can hardly argue with special orders that come from two generals and two field marshals. In lieu of my three-day pass for a loss in the family, I can now produce a Sonderausweis not even St Peter could object to.

  It’s been a long day and I should be tired, but I’m not. Hearing from the concierge that Salomon has been out since midday and did not return to the hotel for dinner is a relief. Collegiality aside, I’m not in the mood to hear him gripe or fantasize. In Russia, he had a tendency to imagine threats and dangers where none existed. Let’s put it this way: whatever it was that he was so impatient to discuss with me, he has either forgotten about it, or else it has killed him.

  So what? I told Nebe I’m not a complete sceptic, but I can be cynical. Back to my task – here’s a brief outline:

  Last Wednesday, 3 July, the same day when, on the Southern front, Siena (not my sector) fell to the damn French, Walter Niemeyer, born 11 November 1900, was shot to death in his luxurious residence on Lebanonzederpfad, in the south-western quarter of Dahlem in Greater Berlin. Two twelve-gauge slugs were fired, the calibre used on hefty game like deer. From a rifle, which you can hardly carry around concealed about your person. No sign of forced entry, no visible traces on the scene. The photos attached to the file show a half-naked man sprawled on his belly in what seems to be an entrance hall. No bathrobe, just a towel around the waist. Either he had just left a shower or bath, or else he slept unclothed and the killer surprised him when he came downstairs after hearing an alarming noise. Judging by the considerable damage, the first shot was fired from no more than two or three yards away, and the second was inflicted when he was already lying on the ground.

  A.k.a. Mandelbaum and Magnusson, he was officially engaged in his “profession” (the Jews use an appropriate term for people like him: Luftmenschen, “men living on air”) from 1915, when he literally ran away to the circus, to 1941, when he retired from the scene to “recharge his psychic energy” (his words).

  From 1941 until the time of his death, he continued in private practice, mostly acting as a counsellor of sorts and holding hypnosis sessions with hysterics, at the highest levels. A partial list of his clients reads like the Almanach de Gotha of Weimar (and post-Weimar) society and politics. Despite the war, his lavish parties drew the cream of the Berlin crop, as they had ever since 1930, when he built his villa.

  He was married at least twice, once to a Bulgarian acrobat (forsaken after six months, with the excuse of an extended tour abroad), and later to an affluent widow twenty-five years older than him. The latter suddenly died of an asthma attack during a trip in a sailing boat to celebrate their first anniversary, leaving Niemeyer a rich man. He was investigated pro forma, and cleared.

  Judging by the gaps in the paperwork I have read thus far, he must have run into some sort of problem in the mid-1930s. I have my own ideas in that regard, and am leaning towards a political matter, but I need more details. Because of his difficulties, he kept away from Germany for a year, touring South America.

  The most intriguing element of this man’s life, namely his strange choice of aliases, is what fascinates me. Passing himself off as a Scandinavian, and before that as a Galician Jew! It boggles the mind. There was only one image of Niemeyer in this folder (the rest are sitting boxed up in the boot of the car). The portrait, I believe, is an enlargement of his passport photograph, and shows a man in his forties, with rather anonymous features. Given a good disguise and the right accent, I do not doubt that he could masquerade as anybody, except only as an African or Chinese man.

  The folder lists four names of possible suspects (three men and a woman); no details, and no probable motive for the murder. More stuff to find inside the boxes, I suppose. I do not believe in the stars, as I made clear to Nebe, notwithstanding the coincidence that Niemeyer and I share the day and month of our birth, thirteen years apart.

  Time to turn in. Nina leaves at six in the morning and I won’t miss my chance of seeing her to the train station. Should Colonel von Salomon knock on my door in the dark hours, I will turn a deaf ear.

  PS A curious episode tonight, as I reached my floor. I distinctly heard someone sobbing in one of the rooms: a man, not a woman. This in itself is highly peculiar. Hounded as I was by the thought that Salomon might try to pin me down, I recalled that I saw him weep tears of frustration at least twice on the Eastern front, in both cases for minor incidents which most of us would shrug off. Was he by any chance boohooing to himself somewhere? Imagine my surprise when, as I approached my door, I realized that the sounds came from the room next to mine, occupied as far as I know by a Japanese officer. I t
hought the Japanese never cried!

  PPS Sometimes it’d be better if they, and men in general, did.

  3

  Pilgrim, pilgrim, if your dog howls do not leave the house.

  SAXON PROVERB

  HOTEL ADLON, TUESDAY, 11 JULY, 7:38 A.M.

  Bora was not in a good mood when he heard at the front desk that Salomon had called his room several times, beginning at six in the morning.

  “He also left word that he will lunch with you here at one o’clock, Colonel.”

  The concierge wasn’t at fault in the matter, so Bora acknowledged the message, careful not to show how angry he was. Though he’d been away from his family for over ten years, he felt homesick for his mother after seeing her off; that, too, played into his present disposition. If he knew himself, it’d take him an hour or two to regain his comfortable state of a loner.

  “Where is Colonel von Salomon now?” he asked.

  “Out for the morning, sir.”

  Well, for one who is dying to speak to me in private, he does make himself scarce.

  In little more than a quarter of an hour, the car and driver supplied by Nebe would be at the entrance. Real coffee was available at the hotel, so Bora ordered a cup while he waited. From Anhalt station he had taken a circuitous way back, walking south and then back along Kochstrasse, where – at the heart of the Zeitungsviertel, the newspaper quarter – the damage caused by the bombs of 21 June was particularly severe. The building that for the past seventy and more years had housed the Berlin offices of the Bora Verlag was simply no longer there. It was as if a large tooth had been extracted from a line of teeth in various stages of decay. Nina said that for a whole day after the raid everything that had survived, including typewriters and filing cabinets kept in the basement for safety’s sake, had been watched over by the employees, so that it would not be stolen. It now sat in temporary storage at the printing press in Zehlendorf. It was all “very unpleasant”, in his family’s typical understated formulation, but at least there had been no loss of life. Sipping his coffee, Bora wondered which pieces of their art collection his grandparents would have to sell this time, in order to rebuild. According to Nina, all stipends continued to be paid, because you couldn’t simply throw the men and women who’d been with the firm for so long out on their ear.

  After the bombs, the Party-owned Deutsche Verlag offered to buy the Bora trademark and its Leipzig and Munich publishing branches, but Grandfather Franz-Augustus graciously refused. As an old diplomat, he could afford to be gracious; the General, who understood nothing about publishing but was anything but diplomatic, spluttered that “if the Brownshirts get their grubby hands on the firm, they’ll turn it upside down and shake out the whole catalogue”. It was the sort of talk that had for years caused friction with his sons. How it must haunt the old man that Peter had argued with him the last time they’d spoken. Usually Bora was the obstinate one. In Kiev, two weeks before being shot down, his brother had told him, “Father gets on my nerves, Martin. I can’t stand it when he says such crazy and traitorous things, such as that the officer corps ought to take over.” Bora remembered replying: “That generation of old men had their chance to take over twenty years ago, and didn’t.” Now Peter was dead, and Bora still felt the same way.

  Three minutes before eight o’clock, a lumbering fellow in civilian clothes and a garish American tie, every inch a Party henchman, stepped into the lobby. After a quick scan of the vaulted space, he saw Bora, walked up to him and raised his arm in the Party salute: “Lieutenant Colonel Baron von Bora – Lieutenant Florian Grimm, reporting for duty.”

  The first name gave him away as most likely Austrian or Bavarian, but the accent was pure Berliner (Treptow? Neukölln?). A detective inspector, with probably no more than a middle-school education; physically speaking, Bora judged him capable of felling a man with his fist. He was built like a wrestler or bodyguard, his arms hanging awkwardly down at the sides of a large torso; a bulky ring on his left hand circled the finger so tightly that you’d need to sever the gold band – or the knuckle – to take it off. No doubt, as a typical Berliner he proudly saw himself as schlagfertig, always ready to strike.

  Florian Grimm had small, slanting eyes that made him look like a bull terrier, and the same well-planted, sturdy stance. Bora had the impression that he might have served on the Eastern front under Nebe. They sniffed one another like kindred dogs who’d been in Russia together, but not necessarily dogs that got along. There is a vast difference between an armed reconnaissance unit and killing missions behind the lines. Bora nodded an acknowledgement. When Grimm offered to carry the briefcase for him, he declined. Before climbing into the car – an Opel Olympia OL38, lovingly kept when compared to the battered and dusty service cars and taxis, which often had all windows smashed in by explosions – he knocked on the boot as a sign for Grimm to open it. Only after choosing a handful of newspaper clippings from one of the boxes did he take his place next to the driver. He’d have sat there in any case, but the back seat happened to be occupied by maps, folders and a hefty Berlin phone book.

  “Where to, Colonel?”

  “To Lebanonzederpfad, Dahlem.”

  Grimm looked at him.

  “That’s where the crime took place, isn’t it?”

  Having laid the briefcase on his knees (last September, it’d saved him from getting a bellyful of fragments from the grenade), Bora used its surface like a table and leafed through the clippings.

  “The house was destroyed by fire, sir.”

  “We’ll see what’s left in the grounds. You were the first on the scene, as I understand.”

  “Yes and no.”

  Grimm started the car. Dodging the street cleaners still busy removing masonry hurled all the way here by yesterday’s bomb, he explained: “On the fourth, a crew from the gas works was due to check some faulty pipes at the victim’s residence, at his request. When no one came to open the door, naturally the men thought the leak had turned deadly, and alerted the fire brigade. They forced a window open to enter the property, and verified that there was no perceivable gas leak. But a dead body lay in the hall, so they went no further; they called the local police station from the nearest public phone, and they in turn called us.”

  “Well, what were your first observations?”

  “That he’d been shot dead the evening or the night before. That he was caught off guard just as he’d finished bathing. What struck me most was that I knew the man under a different name.”

  “Not ‘the Weimar Prophet’, or ‘Magnusson’?”

  “Not even close. In the days I saw him perform he was ‘Sami Mandelbaum, the Son of Asia’.” When Grimm smiled, he showed a golden canine. “I used to attend magic shows at the circus as a boy. Like most boys, I expect.”

  Bora said nothing. During their childhood, he and Peter had been forbidden to attend the circus, because of the circuses’ treatment of “captive wild creatures”. It’d been a painful ban, because all their friends went and came back with enthusiastic tales. The Circus Gleich’s human cannonball being shot out of a Great War field gun was something Martin would have given an eye tooth to see. But paternal vetoes were the way of life in their household. The garish tie around the inspector’s neck – yellow, with purple swirls – would never make it past a Prussian threshold.

  Grimm’s driving was surprisingly agile for a big man. His familiarity with the state of the streets meant that he took perfect detours to avoid roadblocks and checkpoints. He continued his report.

  “No signs of breaking and entering, except for the window forced by the firemen. The front door had a deadlock. Either the victim let the killer in, who then simply pulled the door behind him when he left, or else he had a key. He must have worn gloves, because we found no fingerprints.”

  “Was anything stolen?”

  “Well, see – that’s a poser. There was so much stuff in the house, the disappearance of a single item would be obvious only to the owner. When we opened it, t
he safe was empty. It was one of those small ones used to store documents.”

  They were heading south-west. Grimm, wedged behind the wheel, spoke as he drove, minding the road when Bora looked at him but secretly staring at Bora when he thought that the officer was engrossed in his papers. Bora, self-conscious about a small razor cut on his jaw from a hasty shave, felt Grimm’s eyes on him. It seemed to him that the policeman slowed down when they’d crossed Uhlandstrasse. There, not far from the bachelor’s flat belonging to Dikta’s hedonistic stepfather, a glum building housed Department IV B of the RSHA – which dealt with the enemies of the regime – and “Gestapo” Müller’s dreaded office. The car virtually crept along in front of it. Is Grimm giving time to those inside to see who’s riding with him, and in which direction we’re heading? I’d put nothing past the Criminal Police.

  “Tell me, Inspector, have there been similar high-profile murders lately in that neighbourhood, or elsewhere in Berlin?”

  Grimm glanced at him.

  “No. The last major case was the Ogorzow murders four years ago.”

  “The ‘S-Bahn murderer’? I remember. I was in Berlin then.”

  “A whole different kettle of fish from this case. The victims were all women, none of them were shot. The crazy thing is that I knew Paul Ogorzow before he started working for the railway. He never did like women, but who ever thought … It’s very satisfying when something you personally know about a fellow helps you to solve a case.”

  Jowly, double-chinned, with his small eyes and short bristle, from this angle Grimm resembled a happy pig more than a bull terrier. “I recalled that Ogorzow underwent treatment for gonorrhoea in our storm trooper days together, so even after he was discarded from the first batch of suspects, I kept thinking about him – that the disease could have really made him go off women. And I was right. No, sir. This killing here is one of a kind.”