City of Shadows

by Ariana Franklin

  “You bastard.”

  “ ‘Sir’ to you, Sergeant.”

  “You bastard, sir.”

  On the way back to Alexanderplatz, they stopped at the cabstand to ask Count Chodsko one more question and receive an answer.

  The canteen, which was supposed to offer refreshment around the clock, had closed for lack of anything to refresh anyone with. A watercooler had been placed on an otherwise empty counter for those with a thirst.

  “Go home,” Schmidt told Willi. “Wait a minute—before you do, try to find me a dictionary. I’ll be upstairs.” He settled himself in his office. It was cold and smelled of the cigarette butts piled in his ashtray. Hannelore would be waiting supper for him, if she had any, but there were reports to read and another to make before the night ended.

  He was hungry, and his brain ached with Russian voices clamoring for its attention, most of them saying significant things. Overriding all of them was the flattest: “Because every now and again he fucks me.”

  Uncalled for. An unprovoked attack. Like a bloody sniper bullet. He’d merely been showing concern for her—and why he’d felt it in the first place, he couldn’t now remember. Potrovskov was welcome to her; they could fuck each other until their eyes popped, and good luck to ’em.

  Willi came in with the dictionary. “Pinched it off the desk of some

  little bastard in Accounts trying to improve himself.” “Thanks, Willi. Good night.” “Boss . . .” “What?” “All these bloody foreigners today ...We’re getting overrun.” Schmidt regarded him cautiously. “We’re not going to be discussing

  Volkstodt this time of night, are we?” An obsession of Willi’s, and one so general they’d stuck a label on it: Volkstodt, the extinction of the German race. It wasn’t just alarm that the death of so many men in the war had caused a drop in the birth rate—which it had—but that better living standards were fostering the survival of people who, in the good old bad old days, would have been weeded out by natural selection. There was an uprush of fear that the country would be overrun by a spawning of the weak, the ill, and the backward. And, of course, foreigners.

  “No, boss, but what I’m saying is, this country needs more Germans.

  Good stock, before we’re swamped by the other sort.” “I’m doing my bit for the Fatherland, Willi.” “That’s what I mean. That’s the sort of baby we need, and there’s

  Frau Schmidt not getting the proper food.”

  “Nobody is.” Newspapers were reporting that tuberculosis was once again becoming the scourge it had been in the last century. Malnutrition was giving children rickets. When he thought about Hannelore and the baby, he panicked. “What can I do? No point in talking about it.”

  “Tell Frau Schmidt to drop by my place. My missus’ll see to it.” Bless him. “We’re not taking your rations.” They were alone in the room, but Willi looked around like a conspir

  ator. “We’ll just ask for a bit extra. We got an arrangement with greengrocer.” He paused. “And the wholesale butcher. Can’t get you eggs, though.”

  “What arrangement?” “Well, you know....” “What arrangement?” Willi shifted. “It’s nothing. I paid a call on ’em one day and looked at

  their books, that’s all. They’re all on the ramp.” “And you overlooked it.. . . Shit, Willi.”

  “How’d you think I’m feeding my five little brats? Six if you count their mother?” Willi was suddenly angry. “Don’t you ‘shit’ me, Inspector. You see the cigarette case that ponce produced from his pocket today? Gold, that was, and don’t tell me he got that by paying his fucking taxes. Him and his whores. Look at those greasy kikes who run the banks with their mansions and motorboats. You don’t see any government minister’s missus taking in washing like mine’s doing, do you? And we’re supposed to say yessir, nosir, and watch our kids starve. I tell you, they’re all at it. Corrupt, all of ’em.”

  Yes, thought Schmidt, looking at him, they probably are. That kind always were. It’s when decent men like you and me join the corruption that woodworm eats into the whole goddamn system.

  Willi took his silence badly. “Suit yourself, sir,” and went out.

  Shit, shit, fuck it.

  After a while Schmidt lifted his head from his hands. Thank God for the escape that was his job, his Hans Christian Andersen country. He picked up the dictionary. It didn’t look like a particularly comprehensive volume, but it had the word he wanted in it. He’d known what it meant in general; he just wanted to see its particular definition.

  “Pogrom: 1905. Russ:= destruction. An organized massacre in Russia for the annihilation of a body or class, esp the Jews.”

  Yes, that’s what he’d thought it was.

  He turned his attention to the papers lying on his desk.

  Dr. Pieck had worked all day and turned in his usual punctilious and pedantic report. “A postmortem investigation on the corpse of the female alleged to be Natalya Tchichagova found it to be the body of a young woman between twenty-one and twenty-five who had died from a hemorrhage caused by severance of her carotid artery.” (Sharp, these scientists.)

  She hadn’t been a virgin, but neither had she been pregnant, nor had she given birth at any time. Condition of the corpse showed she had been somewhat undernourished but was otherwise healthy.

  The fingerprint department had discovered no prints on the note other than those of its recipient, suggesting that the sender had worn gloves while writing it. No prints on the handbag either, other than Na-talya’s own.

  To judge from their preliminary report, the Charlottenburg boys had spent the day slogging round the streets, asking at doors. They’d concentrated on Spandauer Damm to the south of the schloss and Tegeler Weg to its east, both large thoroughfares, but what with the snow and the blackout on that Saturday night, they were having little result. Most people had been in bed, trying to keep warm.

  In Tegeler Weg, however, near midnight, a dogged postman had been delivering mail that had been delayed by the snow. He’d been tracked down and interviewed and had provided a list of the few pedestrians he’d noticed on otherwise empty roads.

  There’d been a Jew having trouble pushing a handcart of old clothes northward through the drifts; he’d turned left along Mierendorffstrasse. A large woman had been hurrying south from the direction of the Westhafen Canal. Three urchins had been throwing snowballs at people’s windows—the postman had corrected them and sent them home. He’d also witnessed a short, sharp altercation between two men with Communist armbands and a man on the opposite side of the road wearing an SA armband, but all parties had passed on and it had come to nothing.

  In Spandauer Damm the police had been fortunate enough to find an elderly female insomniac who passed the night looking out her second-floor window. Just before midnight she’d seen the Jew with his handcart making his way toward Tegeler Weg, a pair of lovers who’d lingered for a while in an opposite doorway, a night tram driver coming off duty early because of the electricity failure—but he was a regular, and she knew him slightly—and a tramp with a long beard that, as he’d passed, the moonlight had shown to be parted, like a sailor’s.

  Police suspicion had fallen on the Jew and the tramp, and efforts were being made to trace both.

  Schmidt scribbled a note: “The tramp is Rudi the Flasher, surname Mach. To be found lurking in Moabit Market most days. Well done, gentlemen, keep it up.” He put the note in his out-tray ready to be sent back to Charlottenburg next day.

  He sat back, lit his last Manoli, and considered. The Jew. How had they known he was a Jew? By the handcart of old clothes—the two were synonymous; poor Jews had virtually cornered the secondhand-clothes market. But you didn’t have to be a Jew or a secondhand-clothes dealer to push a barrow in order to seem like one.

  The large woman coming from the Westhafen Canal? How large? What was a lone woman, however large, doing on a lonely, icy, unlit street at night? Again, you didn’t have to be a woman because you were wearing women’s clothes. And Nat
alya’s killer didn’t have to be a man either—he must rid himself of the conviction that it had been.

  He leaned across and added to his note: “Try to trace all the pedestrians mentioned except Mach.” On second thought he crossed out the “except Mach.” Could just possibly be Rudi had graduated from flashing at girls to killing them.

  As for the two Communists and the SA man they’d quarreled with across the street, they were less suspicious. Schmidt would have expected such men to be in that area. In the nineteenth century, Charlottenburg, once a small and elegant village gathered around the castle, had been invaded by industrialization, bringing with it a working class forced to live without electricity or sunlight in the back courtyards around Wallstrasse. Inevitably it had become a stronghold of the Communist Party, which, in turn, made it a target for raids by the growing Sturmabteilung—the SA, storm troopers, the upholders of the Right, capitalism, kaiser, and the damn traffic.

  The two Communists would have been on their way to a late-night meeting and the solitary SA man on his to join a gang of fellow Fascists who would try to break it up. If there’d been more of each, the postman would have witnessed not just name-calling but another of the running street battles that were turning Berlin into a zoo.

  Jesus, why didn’t they stop? Hadn’t they had enough with the war? Of the two organizations, the Fascists repulsed him most, Jew-hating, foreigner-baiting, muscle-bound, Mussolini-loving cretins that they were. But the Communists were little better. Couldn’t the bastards see that Soviet totalitarianism was just Fascism in another hat?

  After the war, ex–Lance Corporal Siegfried Schmidt had joined the police force in order to protect an ideal formulated in the small town of Weimar, a democratic ideal, the third wonderful thing to come out of Weimar—Goethe and Schiller being the other two.

  The Republic hadn’t proved itself to be perfect, God knows. At the moment it was proving itself bloody incompetent, but it was the first democracy a unified Germany had ever known, a chance to snatch the frail maiden of civilization from the jaws of dragons. Between them, Communist and Fascist were ripping the poor bitch apart before she could draw breath. Bastards. If he had his way, he’d arrest the lot.

  Suddenly he realized what it was about Natalya’s murder that made him angry. He was used to death; he’d seen bodies of small children raped and mutilated, and that had sent him mad with despair, but the monsters who’d done it were driven monsters, sating some urge that they themselves didn’t understand. It was as if those boys and girls had been victims of a blind primeval force, ripped apart by a hurricane.

  In Natalya’s case there’d been planning. Somebody had deliberated over it quite sanely, like the staff officers in war headquarters considering whether the next push would be convenient—“We can expect forty percent casualties, old boy.” “That’s all right, old boy, we should inflict sixty percent on the enemy”—wiping out in a couple of sentences the lives of men who’d wanted to study, marry, start a business, return to their children and wives, to their quiet farms. He hated the bastards.

  Taking from his pocket the packet of Natalya’s letters, he saw her murderer as another staff officer. The man had thought it out, weighed the percentages, sent the note, waited, killed. A trivial death, just another to add to the trivial millions murdered by the generals.

  And you got it wrong, you fucker. Like they did. You got the wrong woman.

  This was no good; he was tired and not making sense. Keep your mind on the job, or you’ll miss something.

  He took the rubber band off the packet. If Natalya’d had a boyfriend, he hadn’t been a letter writer. Most of these were notes, some of them scrawled on Purple Parrot napkins from men in her audience: “Greetings, beautiful. Come and have a drink. Table Three.” “Hello, pretty one, let me take you to dinner after the show. Table Eight.” All different handwritings. None of them showing the persistence of obsession. Had she gone with any of them, he wondered, or merely kept the notes as tributes?

  None of them either in the same hand as the one that had lured her to Charlottenburg.

  There were two magazine clippings, both identical, which stated that “the sauciest show in Berlin is presently at the Purple Parrot where customers can be delighted by seeing a great deal of Mesdames La Bon-Bon and Frou-Frou.”

  “Frou-Frou” had been underlined in pen, presumably Natalya’s stage name.

  He yawned and got up. Time to report to Ringer. The captain was a stickler for hearing from his inspectors about their cases before the day ended. Which, thought Schmidt wearily, was bully for him; he hadn’t been up since the crack of bloody dawn.

  They were never happy interviews, his and Ringer’s. Schmidt’s fast rise through the ranks had occurred because, as a young policeman on the beat in 1919, he’d come to the notice of a Social Democrat member of the Reichstadt—he’d saved the man from injury during a riot—and thereby to the attention of the government’s chief of police.

  In any case, with 13 million men lost to the war, there had been room for swift promotion. This had not, however, endeared Schmidt to the Old Guard, mastodons like Ringer, who’d had to wait out the years stipulated by a creaking prewar bureaucracy before they’d achieved their present positions.

  Some minutes passed before his knock on Ringer’s office door gained him admittance. More minutes while Ringer ignored him in favor of some papers he was pretending to read.

  Schmidt spent them speculating on how the man remained so fat when everybody else was losing weight. Ringer disapproved of the can-teen’s democracy and was never seen in it. The rumor was that he fed on orphans fried and served in his office with parsley.

  As usual, his rigid collar cut into his neck so that his head looked like an overlapping piece of roast beef cooked rare. His mustache was waxed into points sharp enough to pick snails out of their shells.

  “Well, Inspector?” Ringer initialed a piece of paper. He sat back and looked at Schmidt with disfavor, allowing his gaze to travel from the rimed shoes up to Schmidt’s hair, which, for lack of time to go to the barber, was beginning to rest on his ears. “This prostitute— Natalya Something-or-Other—we needn’t spend manpower on her, need we?”

  “She wasn’t a prostitute, sir.” And what if she had been? Did that make her expendable?

  “Nevertheless . . .” Ringer consulted his paper. “I see you’ve asked for house-to-house inquiries. I’ve told you before, in these hard times—”

  Schmidt interrupted. “She wasn’t the intended victim, sir. And there’s Russian royalty involved.” He hadn’t made the rank of inspector by neglecting the art of manipulating his superior’s prejudices.

  “Really?”

  “Yes, sir.” He got Yusupov’s name and title into the story quickly, moved on to Count Chodsko and Prince Nick, weaving in the two mysterious Russian women of 29c Bismarck Allee on the way. He needed men for those house-to-house inquiries—all the alibis required checking.

  After a while he wondered if he could sit down. He dragged up a chair, still talking, and experienced a moment of triumph when Ringer didn’t object. I’m Scheherazade enchanting the fucking sultan, he thought.

  “Fascinating, fascinating,” the sultan said when Scheherazade paused.

  “Yes, sir. You see, I know what they’re up to, Prince Nick and Fräulein Anderson.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes, sir. It’s fraud. Any moment now she’ll be presented to the world as the long-lost daughter of the czar.”

  Ringer surprised him. “Which one, Inspector? There were four grand duchesses: Olga, Tatiana, Marie, and Anastasia.”

  So Ringer’s bedside reading wasn’t only police statistics; it included popular magazines; there was hardly one that hadn’t displayed the picture of the four young girls in white dresses.

  “Anastasia, sir. There’s money to be made. Yusupov thinks there’s a cache in England, and presumably she’d be entitled to it—if she can convince everybody she’s the czar’s surviving child
.”

  “You’re sure of this, Inspector?”

  “Pretty sure, sir.” He started building the bricks of his argument: (a) Prince Nick’s shady reputation.

  (b)

  Solomonova’s reluctance to cooperate—“She’s in on it, I’m afraid, one of Prince Nick’s women. He pays her rent.”

  (c)

  The note itself: “I can authenticate you.” “It was for Anderson— the killer knew enough to think that would tempt Anderson into meeting him, but Tchichagova picked it up and acted on it. She was an ambitious young woman, and I think she saw her way to film stardom.”

  (d) Anderson’s fear that she would be assassinated. “She talks about

  the Cheka wanting to get rid of her.” “The Cheka, eh? Nasty.” “Yes, sir.”

  (e) Czarskoe Selo. “It was the czar’s favorite palace, sir.” He’d asked Chodsko about it. “Natalya’s parents were servants there, familiar with royal procedure. Ideal for grooming somebody for the role of a grand duchess.”

  (f ) Yusupov’s account of the boy claiming to be the czarevitch. “You see, sir, the White Russians were advancing on Ekaterinburg at the time the Romanovs were killed. Ekaterinburg was the place—” “Where the Reds shot the czar and his family. I know that, Inspector. Frau Ringer was very upset by it.”

  Good God, there was a Frau Ringer? He’d never thought of Ringer as having a wife, especially one with susceptibilities. “Yes, well. A White Russian force was advancing on the place. Which was why the family was killed, to stop them from being rescued. And there’s a strong rumor that one of the Romanovs got away.”

  He looked up from his notebook. “In my view, because of that belief, we’re going to see a spate of impostors saying they escaped the slaughter and claiming to be the czarevitch or a grand duchess or some damn thing. There’s already been one. Anna Anderson will be another. Prince Nick’s got her under his thumb. She’s not very stable.”