“She wouldn’t be, would she?”
Schmidt sat up. “Beg your pardon, sir?”
“After all she’s been through, if she is the grand duchess,” Ringer
said. He waggled a reproving finger. “We can’t rule it out, Inspector.” Schmidt said, “I don’t think she can be, sir.” Nobody got out of that cellar.
The finger wagged on. “They haven’t found the bodies. One at least might have survived—with the aid of a servant, perhaps, and...and helpful people sympathetic to the czar who were living nearby.”
Jesus, he wanted it to be true.
Then and only then did Schmidt fully believe in the structure he’d made from his bricks. Its cement had consisted of a good deal of intuition; he’d believed it but had reckoned on having trouble persuading Ringer. Now he knew his case was solid, not because Ringer had followed his reasoning but because Ringer was prepared to buy what Potrovskov would be selling.
His respect for the crook went up. Potrovskov had seen what he hadn’t—that it would be easy. It was the perfect confidence trick: people wanted to believe it. The age of fairy tales still spun its magic in the hearts of men, even bureaucratic old farts like the one opposite him. This fairy tale had ogres. Red ogres. A princess escaping from them through Siberian wastes, disappearing into the wild woods, popping up again to claim her inheritance. Hans Christian Andersen was nowhere. Schmidt wondered if, as in all good fairy tales, any of the grand duchesses had possessed a birthmark to identify her.
Potrovskov’ll tattoo one on, he thought.
He heard Ringer say, “It seems we must look deeper into Romanov history for our killer. Do you want any assistance from the Counterespionage Section?”
“What for?”
“Well, if it is the Bolsheviks who are on her trail . . .”
He does, Schmidt thought, he loves it. Communist assassins are the icing on his bloody cake. He said, “We’ll see how it goes, sir, shall we?”
“Very well, Inspector.” Ringer went on, “You may have what men I can spare. And keep me informed—this promises to be interesting.”
Dazed, Schmidt had reached the door before he remembered to turn around and salute. He’d been expecting a battle; he hadn’t even had to argue.
But if Ringer thought he was going to waste time buggering about with cloak-and-dagger crap and inquiries into Russian royalty, Ringer had another think coming. “Nobody got out of that cellar.” Yusupov had said it, and Schmidt believed him; butchers weren’t in the business of allowing lambs to escape the shambles.
Anna Anderson was an impostor. Maybe—maybe—she was being targeted because she was an impostor, but it was much more likely that the killer had emerged out of the apparent no-man’s-land that was her past.
But we don’t know it, Potrovskov had said.
About time they did.
NICK POPPED INTO Bismarck Allee after he’d settled Anna with the von Kleists to tell Esther that it had gone well and to see if she wanted to go to bed with him.
“Not tonight, Nick.” She was too tired to tell him that she would be neither working for him nor sleeping with him again. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. And this, if any, had been an evil day.
“Okay.” He never pressed her; his sea was full of amenable ladyfish.
She warned him again: “I’m telling the police everything, Nick.”
“Sure, sure. I’ve got nothing to hide.” He was restive. “You think it was Cheka did in Natalya?”
“There is no Cheka,” she said wearily. “You know that.”
“I don’t,” he said. “I completely believe in Her Imperial Highness. Completely.”
“But what?” There was something bothering him; she knew him well.
“I need insurance. Maybe we ought to find out a bit more about her.”
SCHMIDT WENT UP the stairs leading to his apartment with much use of the handrail, not because he was weary, though he was, but because Hannelore insisted on polishing the wood of each step until it shone like ice—and was as slippery. He’d tried pointing out the hazard to his and her neck and that of every visitor, but she held to the view that unpolished stairs were un-German and disgraced her.
“Sorry I’m late.” He always said it, though she never complained.
“Hard day?”
“Fairly.”
As always, the table was prepared for dinner. His slippers awaited him at the door. Artistically crumpled red paper in the fireplace did its best to simulate the flames they could no longer afford. She’d found ivy from somewhere, and it trailed with brave artistry along the mantel shelf that used to hold her pieces of Dresden.
He kissed her; invariably a pleasure, but her freshness made him realize that he smelled of sweat and cigarettes—and something meaty. Reminded, he brought a nasty-looking napkin out of his pocket. “Some hare stew, madame, and a dumpling. For madame’s dinner.”
She took it but stood still, smiling expectantly at him.
He sniffed. “Pork?” he said. “Pork?”
“And potatoes,” she said.
“Good God, woman, have you been sleeping with the butcher?”
She’d stopped being appalled at jokes like that. “I didn’t have to. A consignment came in just as I reached the head of the line.”
“How long did you have to wait?”
“It doesn’t matter,” she told him. “Go and wash, and I’ll serve up.”
She was an excellent cook and had stretched the small piece of pork as far as it could go; it was also one of her tenets that the man should have the lion’s share, so he had to make sure she gave herself a decent portion. “You’re eating for two, woman.”
“I know. Siegfried, isn’t it wonderful?” To be childless was another state she regarded as un-German, a conviction she shared with, and was supported in, by almost the whole nation. Even left-wing public-health reformers were urging good German couples to start families. Magazines and newspapers were full of advice on eugenics counseling, how to raise children, on breast-feeding, potty training, preventive medicine, and the general production of improved human beings.
To Schmidt, in the first two years of their marriage during which Hannelore had not conceived, this propaganda had been a vague irritant; to Hannelore it was a dagger in the heart. It had been gall and wormwood for her to watch the shiftless Lammers family across the road produce more and more babies on welfare.
When she’d become pregnant, she’d said, “Now I am a proper woman.”
“You were always proper woman enough for me,” he’d said, but she wouldn’t have it. The consequent miscarriage had nearly sunk her. This time she hadn’t told anyone she was pregnant again until the three-month point had well gone by.
It had caused Schmidt to wonder at the burden this imposed on all the leftover women whose prospects of marriage and children had died on the battlefields. If you weren’t a virtuous hausfrau with a Teutonic pedigree having babies on a production-line basis, you weren’t doing your bit for the nation.
Tonight he found himself speculating on how it also isolated already-isolated women like the Jewish Solomonova who didn’t qualify under any of those categories.
Hannelore was full of news. Frau Busse in the ground-floor apartment had offered the youngest Busse’s baby clothes and might barter its carriage for something—they could keep it in the entrance hall. She had already unraveled a primrose-colored jersey of her own and was knitting a baby jacket from it.
“Siegfried, I am considering selling my hair. What do you think?” She had wonderful hair, ash blond and wavy; she kept it long, plaited around her head.
“How do you feel about it?”
But it was no good trying to get her to make her own decisions; she had to have his approval—he liked her hair spread about them both when they were naked in bed—so they spent time analyzing her motive. Fashion? Or what a wigmaker would pay for it? She wouldn’t say, so eventually he took the initiative and told her to keep it, which pleased h
er.
He’d known he wanted to marry her the moment he saw her in 1916, a nervous, adolescent, honey-colored confection in Bavarian national dress sitting with her mother at a dance put on for soldiers, like him and Ikey Wolff, who were recovering in a Munich convalescent home after the Somme. He and Ikey were still trying to get used to their survival from the 142 days that had claimed 650,000 German soldiers. Hannelore had appeared as a seraphim to one rising from a muddy grave. He’d said to Ikey, “That, my son, is going to be my bit of home comfort.”
He’d pursued her with ferocity for three years, against her parents’ hopes for her—they were small-time winegrowers and wanted her to marry the local vintner’s son, not a damn Prussian without a penny to his name—holding her image in his head while up to his thighs in filth, writing her letters under bombardment, thinking of her even when he was with other women, using everything he knew to outbid his rival.
After the war he’d brought her back to a Berlin so changed even he’d barely recognized it, to find that the greatest change of all had taken place in its women—a new breed accustomed to working, managing, making decisions, who’d cast off corsets and hampering skirts along with deference, who had opinions and the vote, who smoked and swore and generally kicked over the traces of an older generation that had expected its daughters to remain untouched by the war it had inflicted on them.
Hannelore, having been insulated from all conflict on her mountain farm, rosy with homegrown food and brought up to respect her elders, was a Sleeping Beauty in comparison; waking up to Berlin had shocked her.
It had been unfair on her, Schmidt realized—not that it occurred to her to complain that she’d been landed in a bankrupt city with a poorly paid, often absent husband.
She’d adapted to his vagaries, learned not to be repulsed by his Jewish friends, probably voted SPD in elections, as he did, put up with his swearing, his bad jokes, his sympathy for the detritus of society with whom he dealt, but she’d done so on his account, because it was a wifely thing to do; husbands were to be catered to. He was, he sometimes felt, her standard issue and that she’d have adapted equally sweetly to the lifestyle of a red-kneed, red-necked Bavarian.
For his sake she tried to read translations of his loved Latin poets and had tackled Shakespeare, but literature was their dividing ground, as was music—she liked waltzes and oompah bands, he preferred Beethoven.
“Where did you get all this from?” she’d once asked, as if he’d caught some disease while in foreign parts.
“A godless radical,” he told her. Which is what Herr Müller, his ele-mentary-school teacher, had been and why, after their first five years together, Herr Müller had been dismissed by the school board. By that time, however, the two of them had caught each other’s attention, and for a few of his mother’s hard-earned pfennigs a week, the young Schmidt had continued his education during the evenings in the garret in which Herr Müller had paced and talked and read aloud and played his gramophone and opened the gates to anarchic, terrifying, entrancing, jaw-dropping wonders of the mind and, eventually, smoked himself to death.
To get a job hadn’t occurred to Hannelore—not that he’d suggested it; she’d been brought up to be a wife and mother, job enough for anybody. In the last year, her friend and neighbor Frau Busse had tempted her into the volkisch movement, and she’d joined one of its women’s groups—Daughters of the Teutonic Dawn, he thought it was; the name kept changing—where like-minded females alternated jam making and sewing pot holders with pagan-looking dances around a campfire and discussions about the future of the Aryan race.
All very harmless, and if that’s what she wanted, fine—though Schmidt was uneasy with the Daughters’ stenciled newsletter in which editorials about the Aryan race seemed to take it for granted that other races, especially the Semitic, didn’t actually have a future.
What concerned him more was that she seemed to block out the reality that faced him every day or, rather, to think there were simple solutions to it. “But how are they allowed?” she would ask of the prostitutes, homosexuals, rapists, murderers, burglars, fraudsters, and general evildoers with whom he had to deal—as if a good spring cleaning would get rid of them.
Eventually, to close the gap, he stopped talking over his cases with her and kept the discussion at dinner to matters of mutual concern.
Tonight, though, knowing she was fascinated by royalty and without mentioning names, he said, “Strange case today. I met a woman who thinks she’s the grand duchess Anastasia.”
She was gripped immediately, asked questions, fetched her scrapbook in which the familiar picture of the four girls in white dresses had been pasted. “Does she look like her?”
“She does a bit.”
“Oh, Siegfried, perhaps she is.”
He had another Ringer on his hands; the whole world was prepared to be conned. “And I’m the bloody pope,” he said.
“Siegfried.”
“What? All right, I won’t say ‘bloody pope’ to little Bocksbeutel.” They’d agreed the child was to be brought up in her religion, as a Roman Catholic.
“Bocksbeutel,” she said with pleasure—it was the rounded bottle into which her home region put its wine. “We’ll have to think of a proper name soon.”
“I don’t know. Bocksbeutel Schmidt—got a ring to it.”
She laughed, and he thought, What the hell have I got to complain about? She was the wife he’d dreamed about in the trenches. He was the envy of Alexanderplatz; at police get-togethers everybody loved her. He loved her. She loved him, and if their marriage was not the meeting of true minds that somebody—possibly Shakespeare—had talked about, it was still a happy one.
He offered to wash the dishes, but she wouldn’t have it—this was the time when husbands sat by the fire and read the paper.
When she came in, he made her put her feet across his knees so that he could massage them. “Your poor ankles are swollen.”
“It’s only from standing in the lines.”
“Only?”
Bless her, she looked exhausted; the once-rounded cheeks were showing their bones. He was swept by a caveman savagery. Christ, why should she suffer because he had scruples? What sort of man allowed his pregnant wife to go without when others were not? She wasn’t going to lose this baby, too. The particular little Isaac in her womb wouldn’t be laid on the sacrificial altar its father had built to the demanding deity of virtue. He was no Abraham—never liked the nasty old bugger.
He said, “Tomorrow I want you to go to Frau Ritte’s and tell her we’ll go in on Willi’s arrangement.”
He wasn’t even stricken by conscience. What else could he do? But he was sorry, very sorry. Weimar Germany had come to this—its police forced to join the ranks of its crooks. Fuck it, fuck it.
He was haunted by Latin. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
13
WHEN SCHMIDT ARRIVED at his office in the Alexanderplatz the next morning, his wife was much on his mind.
He couldn’t look his sergeant in the eye. He said, “If it’s all right by you, Willi, Hannelore will be calling on your wife today. We’d like to come in on the arrangement.”
Willi held out his hand, Schmidt shook it, and that was that.
Willi said, “The piece from Bismarck Allee, the kike with the scar—she’s downstairs, boss, waiting to see you.”
“Let her wait.”
He gave orders for the house-to-house around Charlottenburg to be continued and a new one to be instituted in Bismarck Allee. He sent two men off to roust out of their beds those who’d been at the Green Hat on Saturday night in order to account for every minute of Prince Nick’s and Yusupov’s presences at the party. Another uniform was dispatched to find employees of the Purple Parrot and get information about Natalya. “And while you’re about it, I want the names and addresses of the men who were with Yusupov at the Green Hat and who went on with him to the Pink Parasol. They won’t want to give them—they’re probably homosexuals—b
ut every one of the bastards is going to be interviewed.” Schmidt had more or less eliminated Yusupov—and Potrovskov—but he was a thorough man.
He thought about Solomonova, Anderson, and Tchichagova, those three Russian witches stirring their cauldron in 29c Bismarck Allee. For all he knew of their past, they’d arrived in Berlin on broomsticks— he sent to Immigration for details of their entry papers.
Was he missing something by automatically assuming that Anderson was a fake? Perhaps he was; every other bugger was showing an open mind on the subject; maybe he should. “There are more things in heaven and earth ...than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Shakespeare said every frigging thing.
Finally he acknowledged that by keeping Solomonova waiting downstairs he was cutting off his nose to spite his face; of all the people in this inquiry, she was the most likely to give him the information he needed.
You’ve gone beyond punishing people for their way of life, he told himself. What do you care who she sleeps with?
“Show her up.”
Regulations stated that witnesses and suspects be seen in the interview rooms, but interview rooms were on the ground level and cold, whereas his office was two floors up from the canteen and absorbed some of its rising heat.
He cleared papers off his desk so that Hannelore’s picture could stand more prominently on it, emptied his ashtray, put a chair on the opposite side to face the window, and set another one farther back for Willi.
He reached for a cigarette and remembered he didn’t have any. He’d stopped to buy some this morning, to find that a packet of Manoli cost 3,800 marks. He’d sworn at the shopkeeper and left, vowing to give up tobacco. He fought down the impulse to grub among the butts in the wastepaper basket and see if any were smokable.
“Good morning, Fräulein.” He didn’t get up.
She wore two scarves Russian peasant style, one straight across the forehead and the other around so that it framed the face. The snow-reflecting light coming through the window from the parking lot outside was hard on her, showing every detail of the scar and emphasizing her pallor, but her eyes were more alive than they’d been yesterday, as if she’d joined the rest of the human race sufficiently to take part in it. She wasn’t nervous either, and whatever it was about her presence that activated politeness in Willi was still working; he held the door and then the chair for her.
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