City of Shadows

by Ariana Franklin

  She’d seen something. Esther got up to take another look out the window, waiting for the moon to appear. Still no one there. Had it been real or a phantasm?

  Oh, Jesus Christ. She hurried into the living room and snatched up her diary. What’s the date? With Nick away, she’d lost track. What’s the goddamned date?

  It was January 13. She did a quick calculation. Six weeks ago would be ...? He was here. “What you doing?” Anna had followed her, clutching her drink. “I’m phoning the police.” Anna, Clara—the madwomen had been

  right all along. “No.” Anna snatched the receiver out of her hand, spilling the vodka.

  “No police.” “Of course the police. What else can we do?” “Theo. Get Theo. Police ...they check my papers. They ask ques

  tions.”

  “And about damn time you gave some answers.” Esther was afraid and furious. She snatched the phone back and began dialing. “Inspector Bolle, please.”

  She heard the policeman on the other end of the line call across what sounded like a large and busy room, “Inspector Bolle, off sick, ain’t he?” There was a reply. “Sorry, madam, he’s not here. This is the desk sergeant. Can I help you?”

  She wished she could remember the name of the inspector who’d been kind to her at the Green Hat, but she couldn’t; the desk sergeant would have to do.

  “Yes. There’s a man outside our house.” God, she thought, how often had some hysterical woman phoned in with that complaint? She tried to make her voice matter-of-fact. “He’s dangerous. I have reason to believe that he’s committed murder.” Oh, God, Esther, can’t you put it better than that? What way was there to put it?

  She glanced toward Anna, but Anna had curled up on the sofa and was holding a cushion over her head and ears as if against bombardment.

  “Your name, please. Address?”

  She told him.

  “Ye-es,” said the voice at the other end of the line. She could hear a pen scratching, other voices. “And what’s this man’s name?”

  “I don’t know.” She said desperately, “He’s a big man.”

  “I see. A...big ...man.” More pen scratching. “Who did he murder, madam? And when?”

  “A woman called Olga Ratzel. It was . . .” When was it? “It was in September. September ninth or tenth.” Four months ago. She could hear her credibility thinning to wispiness, even to herself.

  “Ye-es. And he’s back again, is he? After you, this time, is he?”

  “No, my flatmate. Look, I know it sounds ridiculous, but I’m not making this up. He’s outside in the street. My flatmate’s just seen him. You could catch him. I can make a statement.”

  “Is he trying to get in?”

  “Not at the moment.”

  She thought, And he can’t, thank God, not unless he’s prepared to ax down two solid doors or clamber over garden walls around the back of the house and rise like a vampire to a third-floor window. Nevertheless, she looked down, out the rear window. Snow was beginning to settle, tipping the tops of walls and trash cans as if with an outline of white paint. The thin covering on the yard below was without footprints. “But I want him caught. He’s dangerous. Can’t you send a patrol?”

  “We’ll try, madam, but we got a riot at the Brandenburg Gate, half our men’s down with the flu, and we’re working by candlelight here.” He went on, playing to his own gallery. Esther could hear somebody in the background laughing bitterly. “You just lock your door now, and maybe he’ll go away.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” Esther said. She slammed down the phone. “All right,” she yelled at Anna. “We get Theo.”

  But the Green Hat’s line was busy. She waited a moment and tried the number again. Still busy—a jumping night at the club, Saturday.

  Dialing and redialing, Esther watched Anna, still crouched on the sofa with the cushion over her head. What the hell is worth all this? she asked herself. Terrified of the hunter who knew who she was, terrified of the police who might find out who she was, the girl was being kept in a suspension of fear by two opposing forces. And Esther with her.

  The Green Hat was still busy.

  Putting the phone back, Esther went downstairs to tell Frau Schinkel not to open the front door if the bell rang.

  Frau Schinkel, who rarely had visitors, especially at this time of night, was aggrieved. “I can’t open my own door now?”

  “I want to see who it is first.”

  “We never had this trouble in Berlin until you foreigners came.”

  Suppressing a desire to point out that several capital cities could have said the same about the Germans during the Great War, Esther went back upstairs and persuaded Anna to go to bed.

  “He can’t get in. When Theo comes, I’ll make sure it’s him before I open the door.”

  The girl had recovered slightly; the cunning was back. “Is the Cheka, you know. They want to kill me.”

  “Yes, I know. Get to bed.”

  The compliance with which Anna obeyed was awful, as if Esther were her lone champion against the forces of darkness surrounding them.

  Which, at this moment, she was.

  She tried ringing the Green Hat again. Still busy. Wrapping herself in a blanket, she sat by the kitchen window, looking down on the deserted sidewalks, watching snow drift gently against the gape of the book-seller’s doorway, waiting without hope for the police, waiting for Natalya to come home, responsible for two madwomen. What was I doing to let this happen? Three madwomen . . .

  Something woke her, and she ran to the door to open it. “Nasha?” But her voice echoed down into an empty hallway.

  She made another failed attempt to get through to the Hat.

  In the kitchen Frau Schinkel’s wall clock said it was half past ten. “Send her home, God, please.”

  She settled back by the window and tried concentrating on some plan whereby the three of them could earn their living now that their connection with Nick was severed. Natalya would have to go back to stripping. And little Esther could join a freak show. But that left Anna. Maybe the three of them could make a virtue out of these past months and become a singing group, wear kokoshniks: the Anastasia Sisters. Mileage in that.

  This time when she jerked awake, there really was someone at the front door. She heard the key turn. “Nasha?” She leaned over the banister.

  “Yes.”

  She still couldn’t see her; Natalya had paused out of sight on the threshold; a draft of cold air came racing up the stairwell, flecks of snow blowing in on Frau Schinkel’s brown linoleum. “Where’ve you been?”

  “What?” Natalya sounded preoccupied. “Oh, the Parrot. Saying good-bye. It’s closing tomorrow.” The front door shut.

  Of course. Of course she had. “Are you all right?” Maybe she was drunk. Esther started down the stairs. Natalya was still in the doorway, reading something, a letter. Her hair was covered in snow, and she had a man’s coat on. Seeing Esther, she put the letter in its pocket. “Yes, I’m all right.” She gave a defiant sniff. “Had a nice time, actually. Old friends.”

  “Where’d you get the coat?”

  “Vlad at the Parrot lent it to me. One of the customers left it behind.”

  They went upstairs together. Natalya was drunk, not very much, but so preoccupied that every answer to every question came after a delay. Esther’s account of how they’d looked for her, how they’d worried, how they’d been chased by the press, was met with lack of interest.

  “And Anna said a man was watching the house.”

  “There is,” Natalya said. “Saw him when I came in. Standing in Ull-stein’s doorway. Big man.”

  Oh, God. Esther lifted the curtain. The snow was thick now, obliterating everything. “It’s the man who killed Olga. I’ve been trying to get hold of Theo all night, but there’s something wrong with the line. I’ve rung the police.”

  “They coming?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Don’t blame ’em. Did you tell ’em your six-we
ek theory?”

  “No.”

  “Of course you didn’t,” Natalya said. She jerked her head toward the window. “He’s a reporter, bound to be. The press followed you, didn’t they?” She picked up Anna’s glass from the desk, went into the kitchen and filled it with the last of the vodka. She came back, grinning. “Got them interested, didn’t I?”

  “Oh, the hell with it.” Esther was suddenly sick of other women and their troubles; she had enough of her own. Whoever was outside, the bastard could freeze. “I’m going to bed.”

  The snow fell steadily all night, smothering the city like a soft white hand over its mouth.

  Hunger woke Esther up, and she dressed to go out; sometimes on Sundays farmers brought produce from the countryside to sell in the streets. From the window she saw other shoppers with the same idea silently struggling through the snow. A perfect curve of white piled up against the bookseller’s doorway showed that no watcher had stood there for some time.

  If there ever was one, she thought. Hysteria, that’s what it had been. Anna’s and hers. She was sorry now that she’d called the police; if they should turn up, she’d look like an even bigger fool than she’d sounded on the phone.

  She was collared in the hallway by Frau Schinkel. “I won’t put up with this, Fräulein. Such a night I’ve had. Don’t answer the door. People going in and out, letters delivered, like it was daytime. I need my sleep. My doctor insists on it.”

  “What letters?”

  “Letters, letters, pushed under the door. Late last night. It was on the mat. I’m not bringing it upstairs with my legs. And Fräulein Tchichagova banging the door as she goes out at midnight—it is unbearable.”

  “Natalya came in soon after half past ten, Frau Schinkel, quite a suitable hour.”

  “Am I a liar? She went out again at midnight. Well, nearly it was midnight. I looked at the time—half past eleven.”

  Esther turned and ran upstairs.

  Natalya’s room was empty. The man’s coat she’d worn the night before was hanging from a hook by the flat’s front door. Anna’s coat was gone.

  She woke Anna up. “Did Nasha tell you she was going out?” She had to pull the covers down and reassure the girl that nobody was outside before she got an answer.

  “Maybe the Cheka get her.”

  “Oh, stop that.”

  Anna shrugged. “She has a man, maybe.”

  That could be the answer; it was the most obvious one.

  There was no point in ringing the Purple Parrot if it had just closed. Instead she went out foraging, but even the purchase of four large potatoes from a farmer’s stall in Cauerstrasse failed to lighten a worry that persisted all day.

  She cleaned the flat, gave Anna her English lesson, and then was left with nothing to do but to start reading War and Peace for the fourth time.

  Snow made a hypnotic, moving curtain outside, turning the room’s daylight a dingy yellow. She had to sit by the window to see to read and eventually became so cold she was forced to move.

  At five o’clock she tried phoning the Hat to see if anyone there knew any of Natalya’s friends. No reply. At six o’clock she called again. She spoke to the hatcheck girl, Mariska, who gave her some telephone numbers. She phoned them all. Nobody had seen Natalya.

  She tried Nick. He hadn’t seen her, didn’t want to. “I am completely finished with the blackmailing bitch,” he said.

  “I’m worried about her, Nick. She was very strange.”

  “You tell me?” He hung up.

  She heard Frau Schinkel clearing snow in the backyard and went down to help her; together they set a little iron table in the center on which to put a wreath in remembrance of the young Schinkel who’d died of wounds on board the flagship Seidlitz during its sea battle with the British at Dogger Bank in 1915.

  After that she shoveled snow off the pavement outside the front door. After that she did nothing. The tick of Frau Schinkel’s large round clock on the kitchen wall was like a cleaver chopping up the seconds— until it became the click of rifles being cocked.

  Dear Christ, she thought, fighting memory, my time has stopped. Other people’s years are moving on without me. For the rest of my life, I will be trapped in a moment that has gone.

  At ten o’clock she began putting on her coat. “You don’t leave me again.” Anna began to breathe fast. “I’ve got to find her. There’s something wrong.” “You know where to look?” “No.” She took off her coat. “Dirty girl,” Anna said, grinning. “She has a man.” “Maybe.” But there was something.. . . It persisted, a perpetual and

  growing fear.

  At three o’clock in the morning, she dialed the police. This time it was a different desk sergeant. He took down Natalya’s name and description but was manifestly of Anna’s opinion.

  Five hours later the phone rang. It was the police. They’d found Natalya.

  “MAKES A DAMN change, straightforward murder,” Sergeant Willi Ritte said as they drove toward Charlottenburg that morning.

  Inspector Schmidt agreed that it was. Their last three cases had been political killings, always tricky.

  He told Willi to use the klaxon, more to announce a police presence than to clear other cars out of the way. Theirs was virtually the only automobile on the road. No gasoline, no traffic. With tram fare into town costing anything up to ten thousand marks, people with jobs were choosing to walk to them. There was a guilty schadenfreude in being driven through those cold, laboring streets, even if heat from the engine enhanced the smell of Willi’s feet, which hadn’t recovered from the rot they’d acquired in the war.

  Early-morning faces looked tired already from the effort of getting to work through the snow, from the sheer, teeth-gritting awfulness of surviving coalless, inflation-hit days that went on and on, scything the young and the old as they passed.

  Everybody thought that the economy had hit bottom in 1922. “Can’t get any worse,” they’d said.

  But 1923 was proving them wrong; this city was suddenly full of gaps—the deserted corner of the street where, until last week, Schmidt always bought his Berlin Tageblatt from the elderly newspaper seller, the depleted numbers of children on their way to school.

  Willi’s driving reflected his fury at it all. “Where’s the bloody farmers? That’s what I want to know. Where the hell are they?” At this time in the morning, the roads should have been filled with carts and trucks bringing food into the city.

  Schmidt sighed at the forthcoming exchange. Willi knew where the farmers were; they were staying on their farms, refusing to sell their produce to shops for worthless paper money or waiting until prices went even higher.

  “The wife stood in line for four hours yesterday and got two eggs. And us with five kids. Know how much those eggs cost?”

  “Yes.”

  “Two thousand marks.”

  “I know.”

  “Each.”

  No point in explaining that prices weren’t going up but the mark was plummeting down. Willi didn’t understand hyperinflation. Schmidt didn’t understand it himself. “We lost the war, Willi.”

  “We were fucking stabbed in the back, that’s what we were.” Willi subscribed to the view that if it hadn’t been for “the enemy within”—that is, Communists and other revolutionaries—Germany would have won.

  Schmidt had long decided Willi had been in another war altogether. “We lost the war, Sergeant,” he said. “We just lost it.” And the Ruhr, and all the German colonies, and the Rhine ports—everything that would make it possible to pay the reparations demanded by the victors. They were still demanding them, nevertheless. Who was it had said Germany was being squeezed until the pips squeaked? Damn right, whoever he was.

  “Know who I blame, boss?”

  “Yes.”

  “The fucking kikes.”

  He’d had to stop being angry with Willi at this or he’d have been angry with half the population, including his own wife. Willi was by no means the worst offender; the fac
t that the middleweight boxer Finkelstein was a Jew didn’t stop Willi being his greatest fan and cheering him from the ringside. But in bewildering times people reverted to the simplicity of the Middle Ages. They needed someone to blame—and Jews, the old, old scapegoat, fitted the bill. They were different, they were here. Inflation? Fucking kikes. Bad harvest? Fucking kikes. It was easy.

  He’d been lucky. He’d had Ikey Wolff in his regiment; a man like Ikey changed your perceptions. Wearily, he said, “It wasn’t the fucking kikes. We were on the wrong fucking side, Willi—like we are now, so shut up and look where you’re going.”

  There’d been birdseed for his breakfast.

  “What the hell’s this stuff?”

  “It’s porridge,” Hannelore had said. “I made it out of birdseed. It was all the grocer had in his shop. It’s not too awful, is it?”

  “It tastes like the birds ate it first.” Then he was sorry and ate it up; Hannelore had stood in line even for this, which wasn’t good for either her or the baby she was expecting. Her first pregnancy had ended in miscarriage.

  The gaps in the soles of his shoes were going to let in snow the moment he set foot in the Charlottenburg Gardens. He thanked God for his overcoat ...well, not God. He thanked Thompson, J., for that— the poor bloody British lieutenant he’d stripped it off when he found the man’s corpse lying in a shell hole at Passchendaele in 1917. A good coat, that. The maker’s name, Burberry, was sewn into the lining along with the name Thompson, J.

  There were times when he felt closer to Thompson, J., than anybody else. It had been like that on the Western Front; only those fighting— German, French, or British—had known the atrocity that war was. Everyone else was a bunch of tricoteuses knitting around the fucking guillotine.

  It was a relief to draw up outside the Charlottenburg with this straightforward murder to investigate instead of trying to make sense of it all.