He didn’t quite know why he’d come; it would have been more sensible to go with Willi and get a sniff of the man who’d been hanging around the asylum. Or examine the Olga Ratzel file. Or put Potrovskov to the inquisition. Instead he was leaning on a bridge inhaling the smell of canal silt. But he loathed the pain in mental asylums. And, according to Solomonova, the inquiry into the Ratzel death hadn’t got anywhere. And it probably wasn’t a good idea to interview Prince Nick while he wanted to thumbscrew the bastard for maneuvering women like chess pieces and getting one of them killed.
Anyway, the thing about canals, he decided, was that bad men could push people into them. And this one was where the woman at the center of his case had suffered a reverse baptism—her identity, if not her sins, washed out of her.
He roused himself and went down the steps to the concrete canal path along which, among flaking buildings and shops, stood a small police station. A smart little launch with POLIZEI painted on its cabin was moored to a landing stage, its fenders gently bumping against the canal wall from the wash of more barges going by. The station itself, however, was reminiscent of a stable and probably had been one in the days of horse-drawn shipping.
Behind the table that served as a reception desk was a long, rectangular room, at the end of which uniformed men were sitting around a stove, their collars undone, smoking their pipes, lucky bastards. Probably tobacco they’d confiscated off some unfortunate, smuggling bargeman.
He raised his hat to the desk sergeant, showed his warrant card, and explained his mission, without much hope. The written record of Anna Anderson’s salvation would be extant somewhere, but what he wanted was living memory. Cooperation wasn’t too likely either; canal and river police led a life apart and frequently resented having their more interesting cases transferred to a stuck-up Geheimpolizistkommissar. This case, he presumed, hadn’t been overly interesting, since they’d been left to deal with it.
The sergeant was not encouraging. “Jumper,” he said without tone. “Get a lot of jumpers here, especial nowadays. Drop in like raindrops.”
“This was a woman,” Schmidt said helpfully. “Nearly always is.” “Didn’t have a name, refused to say who she was.” “Often don’t.” “Frau Unbekkant, they called her at the hospital she was taken to.
Sometime in 1920.” “February,” said the sergeant gloomily. “Youngish, blue eyes— What?” “It was February. Not sure of the date. Let’s have a look.” Marveling, Schmidt watched him lumber over to a cupboard, choose
a key from a ring attached to his belt, open the cupboard, and select one of the black ledgers lining its shelves. He brought it back to the table, blowing the dust off it, sat down, and, licking his thumb, began turning pages. He swiveled the incident book around so that Schmidt could see it.
A date, 18 February 1920, had been carefully inscribed at the top of the right-hand page. A busy day on the canal, that. Two drunks had been arrested in the morning for fighting on the towpath, a dredger propeller had got fouled on a tree branch, a bargeman’s child had fallen in and been fished out, two of the station’s policemen had been required to help riot police during a workers’ demonstration in the Tiergarten and a counterdemonstration by Right-wing militia that had got out of hand, an old-clothes man had been charged with peddling along the bank without a license, someone had been fishing for eels—also without a license—more drunks had been restrained as the night went on.
And at 2345 hours . . .
“Unknown young woman, about 20 years, jumped off Herculesbrücke, saved by Sergeant Hallman patrolling the canal bank at the time. Sgt Hallman successfully administered artificial resuscitation. She was admitted to the Elizabeth Hospital in Lützowstrasse. No papers or money found on her person. She refused to give her name or make a statement.”
The sergeant said, “Be written up proper in the official report to
headquarters, but that’s the gist.” “Is Sergeant Hallman still around?” Schmidt asked. “Retired.” “Does anyone remember the incident. Do you?”
“Off duty that night, I reckon.”
Schmidt nodded; it had been too much to expect.
“But Gustl probably remembers,” continued the amazing sergeant. “You could ask him. Hey, Gustl.” He escorted Schmidt to the group around the stove. The seating was varied—an old chintz settee, lopsided armchairs—but comfortable. Schmidt took the arm of the settee, and introductions were made.
River Policeman August Schulz did remember the incident—a feat Schmidt found curious; after all, it had been nearly three years ago, and, if the desk sergeant could be believed, female suicide was a local industry.
He was a huge man, Schulz, and, considering the time he spent puffing his pipe before he uttered them, one of few words. He remembered that night, he said eventually, because if he hadn’t heard Sergeant Hall-man’s bellows for help, the good sergeant would have drowned alongside the girl he was trying to save.
“February,” he said. “Weren’t warm.”
Schmidt could imagine it. The water would have been as cold as it was now; death for the two people in it would have been quick. Only a man of Gustl Schultz’s strength could have hauled a policeman in a heavy uniform and a girl in woolen petticoats—Anna had been well wrapped, apparently—up the sheer sides of the canal.
“Is there any other reason you remember the incident?” Schmidt asked, accepting a cup of coffee. After a while he was forced to wonder out loud whether Gustl had heard him, but his neighbor, grinning, said, “He’s thinking about it.”
Eventually Gustl took his pipe from his mouth. “Something about her,” he said.
“What? Was it because she wouldn’t give her name?”
There was an enormous shrug. “She were scared.”
“Of what?”
Another shrug. “Scared.” Whatever the “something” that had made the girl and her fright unusual, Gustl didn’t have the vocabulary to express it.
Schmidt said carefully, “Was there anything, anything at all, suggesting she hadn’t been trying to commit suicide?”
This would be a long wait, he could tell by the puffing. One of the other policemen, somewhat tentatively, held a small tin out to him. It contained cigarettes, lots of them, Wimpels. He took one and realized at the same time that the coffee he was drinking had been made from coffee beans. He lit up, luxuriously. “Should’ve joined the canal police,” he said, and felt the atmosphere relax.
“Funny, that,” Gustl said.
“What? What was funny?”
“As Sergeant Hallman wondered the same thing. Kept asking her was she pushed, did someone push her in.”
“And?” God, he would grow old in this place.
“They didn’t.”
“How do you know, if she didn’t say anything?”
“Kept shaking her head.”
“Well, did Sergeant Hallman see something, or hear something, that made him think she was pushed?”
But that was it. Sergeant Hallman had been shivering, the girl had been shivering, it had been necessary to deal with them both before they got pneumonia. Unbekkant had been taken to the hospital, Hall-man to his home. The incident had been filed as an attempted suicide.
A request for Sergeant Hallman’s home address elicited the fact that the man had fulfilled a dream and retired with his wife to the Black Forest.
Shit.
As he got up to go, the policeman with the cigarettes took a small handful of them from his tin and dropped them neatly into Schmidt’s Burberry pocket. “There y’are, son, compliments of the canal.” He’d made a good impression. Accepting illicit goods, this was; he was becoming an old hand. Conspiratorially, he patted his pocket. What the hell.
Before he left, he copied down the incident page for February 18, and, on the off chance, made a note of Sergeant Hallman’s address; perhaps he could write to him. The man had suspected that Anna’s fall into the canal wasn’t suicide. Which, Schmidt was nearly becoming sure, it wasn’t. Were you th
at scared if you’d attempted suicide and been rescued? Bewildered and shocked, perhaps. Unhappy, certainly. But frightened?
He buttoned up his coat against the cold and wandered back to the bridge. Why hadn’t she given them her name? Had she even then been planning on resurrecting herself as the grand duchess? Doubtful. According to Solomonova, that bright idea hadn’t occurred to her until two years later, when she was in Dalldorf. So why hadn’t she given her name?
They’d sat her in the warmth, Schmidt thought, seeing it. Probably on the settee he himself had just vacated. Concerned, homely faces around her asking questions, telling her she was safe now. But she hadn’t felt safe. Why?
Because whatever was out there was still there. And whatever it was out there was so dreadful that it terrified her to this day.
Who is he, Anna?
14
WHEN ESTHER FINALLY caught up with him in his office at the Green Hat, Nick was throwing things. He’d been to see Anna at the von Kleists.
“Know what that bitch did to me? Cut me dead! Do you believe it? Me, who took her out of the loony bin. Had to report to some sort of guard. Then I’m kept waiting in the fucking hall, and a flunky comes up and says, ‘Her Imperial Highness is not at home.’ Not at fucking home—and I heard her voice coming from the next room!”
“Oh, dear.”
“Yes, oh, dear.” He turned on Esther. “So now I’m not good enough for her. Christ, if they’d have let me at her, I’d have done the Cheka’s job for them. You smiling, Esther?”
“No.” Her lip was being firmly bitten. “I gather you didn’t go quietly.”
“You’re fucking right I didn’t. Von Kleist comes out and says Her Imperial Highness is not well and can’t receive visitors. Her Imperial Highness is as tough as old boots, I tell him. Don’t be fooled by I’m-so-scared-and-on-the-edge-of-fucking-breakdown, I tell him. She’ll outlast you and me. Pity the poor Cheka agents try to do her in. They’re welcome, I tell him.”
Esther swiped up the only object remaining on the desk, a nice little Degas bronze it would be a pity to see broken.
Nick flung himself into his chair. “I spoiled the cow, that’s what I did. Put her with some fucking baron and she thinks she’s in shit-shovel city.”
Which, Esther thought, was probably true. Anna was discovering Anastasia’s milieu; she wouldn’t want to be reminded of the crook who’d put her there. Or, for that matter, the stripper and the Jew who’d helped him. “They believe in her, then?”
“Believe in her?” Nick’s head went up like a wolf ’s. “She’s got them eating out her fucking hand. Told them some tale about Grand Uncle Ernest Ludwig going to Russia during the war that had ’em gasping. Kleist’s checked up on it with some of his diplomat pals, and turns out it could be true, only no fucker knew.”
“It’s put her in good odor with the von Kleists?”
“Like the smell of sainthood. Christ, they got more guards around her than Fort fucking Knox.”
“Good. She’s safe.”
“Good. Lovely. Perfect. They’re starting to look for lawyers to get at the Romanov fortune for her. And where’s that leave me? Me, who’s paid out good money for the hag, taught her everything she knows.” He was on his feet again. “I should have married her, Esther. I should have had a fucking contract. Who said, ‘Put not thy trust in princes’?”
“A psalmist.”
“Well, he knew what he was fucking talking about. She’s not going to get away with it. What was Her Imperial Highness doing in the time between Ekaterinburg and jumping into the canal? We need to find out— you need to find out. I want a lever for some of that inheritance money.”
“That’s blackmail,” Esther said, shocked.
“It’s insurance. What you sitting there for?” he shouted at her. “Start, start.” He flapped his hands.
After all, she thought, continuing to sit, the inspector wasn’t the only one with investigative resources in this city—Nick had contacts among the men who ran it that Schmidt could only dream of.
“Start where?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Just start.”
“If I do, it’s only to protect Anna, Nick, not so you can get your hands on the czar’s jewels and not so you can threaten her with exposure.”
“Sure, sure.” He was calming down now that he had a plan.
“Do you know anybody in Immigration? Perhaps they have more information than they put on her papers.”
Nick peered at her. “You going gaga on me, Esther?”
Esther sighed. “She didn’t have any papers.”
“Of course she didn’t. Frau Unbekkant, wasn’t she? That’s another thing she owes me for—I had to pay Solly Hirsch for a rush job.” Solly was Nick’s forger.
“So all we know is, she was dragged out of a canal in 1920.”
“The Landwehr, so Clara said.”
“Which hospital did they take her to? Before she went to Dalldorf?”
“How the hell should I know? The Elizabeth, I think. Have I got time to sniff around? Use your bloody initiative. Find out.”
She felt this wasn’t the time to tell Nick she was leaving him; in this state he wouldn’t even hear her.
HE WAS ON the trail now. Schmidt’s nose led him along the route that had been taken by the ambulance carrying an unnamed, half-drowned young woman from the canal to the Elizabeth Hospital in Lützowstrasse three years before. He hated hospitals; their universal smell of disinfectant and suffering took him back to the bedside of Ikey Wolff dying from a British bullet in the stomach as the crowds in the streets outside celebrated the signing of the Armistice.
A nurse at a desk sent him to the matron’s office down a corridor lined with mothers and children.
The matron refused his request. “Patients’ records are the responsibility of the superintendent. I’m sorry, I have no authority to open them for the police or anyone else.”
“Can I talk to the superintendent?”
“He’ll be here tomorrow.”
As she showed him to the door, he nodded at the crowded corridor. “Epidemic broken out?”
“Malnutrition,” she said.
AT ALEXANDERPLATZ, Willi had returned from interviewing Clara Peuthert. He was sitting in Schmidt’s chair, ostentatiously fanning himself with his notebook. “I want danger money.”
“Bad time?” Schmidt asked.
“I had to track her down, boss. She’s been let out, Christ knows why—she bloody near raped me. I don’t know how long she was in the bin, but ...You know how men come out of prison desperate for a bit of the other? Seems it’s the same with women. I had to fight her off.”
“It’s your sexual magnetism, Willi.” Schmidt took off his coat. “I hope she’s as pretty as Yusupov.”
“She ain’t Clara Bow, I can tell you that.” He surrendered his chair to Schmidt and found another.
Clara Peuthert, discharged from the hospital, had found a room in a cousin’s house, from which she was continuing her campaign to gain recognition for her protégée, the grand duchess.
“Does she know where Anderson has been living?”
Willi shook his head. “No, but she knew she was with Prince Nick.”
“And told somebody.”
“Didn’t keep it secret,” Willi said. “If there’s a crowned head in Europe she hasn’t written to, I’d like to know who it is.”
“It wasn’t a crowned head cut Natalya’s throat,” Schmidt said. “Not that I’d put anything past them. Who else has she talked to?”
“Reporters, mainly. This Anastasia business is starting to get attention. She had a copy of the Double Eagle with a story in it that she’d given them.”
“Double Eagle, Double Eagle,” Schmidt muttered. “I’ll remember it in a minute.”
“Magazine of sorts,” Willi told him. “Published by the Supreme Monarchist Council, whatever that is.”
“Ah, yes. Exiled Russians politically to the right of Attila the Hun.”
/> Willi nodded. “Thought it went a bit strong on the Jews, the copy I saw. And another reporter turned up at the house while I was there.”
“Did he now?”
“A she, it was. Lady representing an American paper, she said, wanting to write a piece on ‘Anastasia, Europe’s Deepest Mystery.’ I told her to shove off. Ought we to say Anderson’s a fake, boss? I did wonder.”
“It’s not our business unless she tries to get money out of it.”
“And we don’t really know she is, do we?”
Et tu, Brute?
Schmidt said, “Did you stop flirting long enough to get a description of the man in the grounds? Peuthert must have seen him. She’s supposed to have frightened him off at some point.”
“Yeah, well, descriptions ain’t Clara’s strong point. She gave me all that stuff about him turning up every sixth weekend, but she couldn’t tell me his coloring, what he wore, how old—not anything. She may say she scared him off, but I reckon he scared her a good deal more. Seems nervous now she hasn’t got the protection of the asylum. All she’d say was . . .” Willi paused from reluctance.
“What?”
“She just said he reminded her of me. Or I reminded her of him.”
“You?”
Willi turned pages. “Her exact words: ‘He was something like you, Sergeant.’ ”
“And what’s that like when it’s at home?”
Willi shrugged. “Good looks, charm.”
Schmidt thought, I should have gone myself. “And she couldn’t remember anything else?”
Willi shook his head. “Like I say, she’s difficult to pin down. And half the time I was having to fend her off. They shouldn’t’ve let her out.”
Schmidt pondered on a man who so frightened women that they couldn’t describe him. Even the self-possessed Solomonova had been unable to say much more than that the man was big. Olga Ratzel’s file had got him no further; apparently nobody had seen anything.
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