City of Shadows

by Ariana Franklin

  You stayed away for nine years in case what happened to your wife happened to me. She turned off his light and went to bed but not to sleep, listening to the rattle of the late-night trams in Bismarckstrasse. In Schmidt’s dream Solomonova fell downstairs, her limbs flailing and

  breaking while Peter Kurten stood in the shadows on the landing above. The door opened. “Are you all right?” “Shit,” he said. “Yes. I’m sorry, I get these nightmares.” She said, “There isn’t much time, is there?” “Time for what?” “For us.” She came to him, and it turned out he wasn’t as tired as he’d thought

  he was.

  SHE WATCHED HIM wake up. It was a pleasure. He looked better. And

  so he should, she thought. It had been an invigorating night. “Good morning.” “Good morning.” She said, “In view of the circumstances, calling you ‘Inspector’

  seems somewhat formal. What’s your first name?” “Siegfried,” he said. “My parents believed in joy through victory. Boy, did they get that wrong.”

  His eyes took in Marlene’s befrilled bedroom. Pink was not just the motif, it was the only color: walls, curtains, ruched valance, cupboards, bedclothes, bed, the tasseled tester above it—all ranging the pink spectrum from light blush to damn nearly mauve. “Good God,” he said.

  “Marlene likes pink,” she said. “I thought I was waking up in someone’s entrails.” To get it out of the way, she said, “I never loved Nick; you ought to

  know that. I was fond of him, and he was kind to me. I owed him a lot.

  In a way he was my best friend.” “I didn’t love my wife enough,” he said. “She deserved better.” “We never love anyone enough.” He reached for her. “We’re going to change that.”

  She would have stayed in bed forever, but he was worried that Marlene would return and find them in it. “How very bourgeois of you,” she said, reluctantly clambering out.

  “Where I come from it’s called respectable.”

  He helped her strip the bed and put on clean sheets, and then she made him breakfast—another omelette.

  It was luxury to see him in her surroundings. She sat at the table in the kitchen, her chin in her hands, watching him eat and look around at its modernity, its only color the green-and-yellow chinaware. He pointed at a potbellied machine rumbling away in a corner. “What’s that?”

  “A washer-dryer,” she said. “It’s doing your shirt and pants so you can go to work. Pink’s not your color.” He was wearing one of Marlene’s negligees. Actually, she thought he looked wonderful in it.

  “My old mother had to make do with a boiler and a mangle.”

  “Good for your old mother,” she said.

  “Seems funny to ask,” he said, “but what do you do?”

  “Well, I’m not a kept woman, haven’t been for nine years—not that I ever was, really. All this is the fruit of my own labors. So’s the flat—I bought it.”

  She conducted him into the living room. “My showcase,” she said. She’d framed some of her best studies in metal, putting a full-length shot of Marlene the transvestite against one of Marlene the film star. Apart from Potrovskov there were black-hatted men emerging from the Moabit synagogue, a landscape, a shot of the futuristic Karstadt department store in Neuköln.

  “You’re a photographer.”

  “Your powers of detection amaze me, Inspector,” she said. “Have you heard of Cicatrice?”

  “No.”

  “It’s me. French for ‘scar.’ It’s my professional name. I’m highly thought of in artistic circles.”

  He shook his head in wonder. “What started you on that?”

  “Nick. He gave me my first camera. A Leica, thirty-five-millimeter.” It had been Parsifal finding the Holy Grail, Wellington meeting Blucher. “I left his employment and his bed when Natalya died and began earning my own living. I didn’t want to be involved after that.”

  “Was it hard going?” That had been 1923. All Germany had nearly died in 1923.

  “Hard.” She’d started with happy-snaps, shivering in the Tiergarten while she took photographs of tourists and developed them by night in a primitive darkroom she set up in Anna’s old bedroom.

  Then, merely because it made a terrific picture, she’d photographed some street children using packets of currency to build a playhouse. She’d taken it to an American news agency in Fischerstrasse, which had sent it to Collier’s magazine in New York, which had paid her for it.

  “After that I just recorded Berlin life—wheelbarrows filled with banknotes, the breadlines, Wandervogel kids without shoes, prostitutes, Einstein—”

  “Einstein?”

  “Through the synagogue. He’d just had his breakdown and was taking things easy on the lake at Caputh. It made my name.”

  “I didn’t know he’d had a breakdown.”

  “Lovely man,” she said. “I like people who have breakdowns.”

  She amazed him. While he dressed, he kept coming into the living room to watch her tidy the place up. Cicatrice, he thought. It was typical of her to make a virtue of her scars. In the night he’d found that her upper body was pitted with old wounds. “Who the hell did this to you?” he’d asked.

  “Pogrom,” she said. “Not worth talking about. Don’t let them put you off.”

  They hadn’t.

  “Tut, tut,” she’d said. “There’s a name for men who are excited by disfigured women.”

  “It’s ‘lover,’ ” he’d told her, and it was true. For him the flaws highlighted the beauty and mystery of the rest of her; she made other women look dull.

  He wasn’t going to be much use at work today; when they hadn’t been making love, they’d been talking.

  “Was it awful?” she’d asked. “Haarmann and then Kurten? I read about them.”

  “If you want an authority on how flesh gets torn apart and how to tell the mothers it’s been torn and wait to find the next one and tell that mother, send in a request. I’m setting up a department in it.” He had

  memories that were beyond discussion.

  She said gently, “But you caught them in the end.”

  “They caught themselves. And you know what? They were glad. I saw the relief in their eyes; they were tired of it.”

  Heaven would have consisted in neither of them having to go to work, but through the euphoria came the drum of duty.

  As she buttoned him into his shirt, he said, “Did you ever get Anna to say where she came from?”

  “No.”

  “Franziska Schanskowska,” he said, musing. “Christ, there’s got to be some record of where she was born. I’ve got to go back to her beginnings.”

  “We,” she said. “We’ve got to go back to her beginnings.”

  “No.” He was suddenly furious with her. “He killed my wife because I was meddling. I’m not having it happen to you. Jesus Christ, don’t be stupid. In fact, I want you to move out of here.”

  “I’ll do no such thing,” she said. “He’s forgotten about me. He can’t possibly know that we’ve been to bed together—you said yourself, he’s not superhuman.” She said more gently, “I’ve got my darkroom here. This is my business address. I’m damned if he drives me out.”

  He supposed he didn’t have the right after just one night to insist, but she frightened him. “We’ll see,” he said.

  After a while she said, “Nick couldn’t find out, but I was thinking.. . .”

  “Thinking what?”

  “The agency that dealt with the adoption of Anna’s baby. They might know—if you could use your clout to discover which one it was. Might have been German, might have been Polish.”

  “I’ll find it.” He kissed her, picked up his coat, and moved toward the door. “Just don’t talk to any strange men.”

  “I’ve got two of them living here,” she said. “At least ...I suppose there will be two.” She gave a marked cough. “I’m a busy career woman. I just need to know—are you coming back?”

  “I am. Get something nice f
or dinner.” He half closed the door and opened it again. “Not omelettes.” And went out.

  “Oh, thank you,” she said.

  18

  GOING ALONG the third-floor corridor toward his office, Schmidt was waylaid by Eisenmenger. Literally waylaid; Eisenmenger had been waiting for him. “I expect you want to buy me a drink on my retirement,” he said.

  He took Schmidt by the arm, and they went on, not downstairs to the hall but toward the door leading to the fire escape that in turn led to the police parking lot.

  That a man of Eisenmenger’s dignity and bulk should lurk, let alone use a fire escape, indicated that something was up.

  A hut was up, for one thing—new since Schmidt’s day—at the entrance to the parking lot. Men were working on it and a barrier. “Note that,” Eisenmenger muttered as they walked around it.

  “What we want is a beer cellar of dubious reputation. Noisy if possible,” Eisenmenger said. It was like accompanying a cartoon conspirator who had a bomb peeping from his cloak.

  There were plenty of old-fashioned dives near the Platz. Schmidt chose the Wrestlers on the grounds that, even though he’d arrested its owner several times for fencing stolen goods, they’d maintained mutual respect.

  Apparently they still did. “Nice to see you back, Inspector.”

  “Nice to be back, Boxer.”

  It was too early for the quartet and crooner that usually covered the denizens’ conversations, but the place was dark enough. They ordered beers—Eisenmenger added a schnapps chaser to his—and took them to a corner table.

  “To your retirement,” Schmidt said. “Bit young, aren’t you?” Eisenmenger was of the ilk to have looked fifty when he was eighteen and would continue to look fifty when he was eighty.

  “Dear boy,” Eisenmenger said, and Schmidt suspected he was drunk, “I am fifty-six, and I intend to become older, a happiness that may be denied me if I stay.”

  “Nonsense. You’re the doyen of the political department. Nobody knows where more bodies are buried than you do.”

  “Indeed. However, since I fear that the body count will rise to a level which not even I can countenance, I am going.” His enunciation was as perfect as ever, but he was definitely drunk. “I am taking myself and my wife to Tübingen, where I intend to grow orchids, reflect on the works of Marcus Aurelius, and thank God that we had no children.”

  “Christ, Carl, what’s . . . Is it this fellow Diels?”

  “Ah, yes, Colonel Purely-a-Courtesy-Title Diels.” Eisenmenger looked long into his beer, then drank it. “Did you see the new addition to the parking lot?”

  “The hut? Yes.”

  “A guardhouse. Have you used the phone since your return?”

  “Once.”

  “Note the double click as the operator connects you to your number. Not only is your call—and the person to whom it is made—being registered, but somebody is listening to every word you say.”

  “For goodness’ sake.”

  Eisenmenger looked up and raised an eyebrow. “You think I fantasize?”

  “Frankly, yes.”

  “What a remarkably fine establishment this is.” Eisenmenger screwed his monocle into his eye socket to look around at the fly-ridden sausages hanging from the beams and the cauliflower ears and tattoos of the clientele. “The beer is excellent. You may get me another.”

  Schmidt fetched the drinks. “I’m glad we met. I was going to ask you about Röhm’s SA in Munich—”

  Eisenmenger waved a hand. “Already an anachronism, dear boy. Röhm has become too powerful and therefore, like all threats to Herr Hitler, will be dealt with. He’s a homosexual anyway, and our Adolf loathes queers. The SA will be used as auxiliary police. No, if we are trading initials, I suggest you consider the new force, Hitler’s own, the SS, the Schutzstaffel, for which happy band our own Department 1A and Major Diels serve as an instrument.”

  Schmidt’s mouth, open for follow-up questions, closed.

  “We are being infiltrated,” Eisenmenger said. “I consider it my duty to warn such honest men as still remain. Has your new department been allocated staff?”

  “I’ve got a secretary who clicks her heels.”

  “Party member,” Eisenmenger said. “She will report back on your every move to Diels with a salutation of ‘Heil Hitler.’ ”

  “Report what, for God’s sake? I’m just doing my job.”

  “So is Diels. His task is to prepare a new police force for a new Reich. A secret state police, the Geheime Staatspolizei, or, to use its acronym, the Gestapo.”

  Schmidt looked into eyes that were suddenly as sober as his own. “Is Hitler that close to getting the chancellorship?”

  “Depending on the next election, or certainly on the one after that, an Austrian housepainter will be declared chancellor of Germany. Nearly all the center parties are caving in to him; the nationalists think that if he is allowed the respectability of power, they can control him.”

  For the first time, the acidity of Eisenmenger’s speech left it and he sounded merely humanly troubled. “They don’t believe him, you see. They don’t believe in him—none of us really do. We think him merely mad. We refuse to recognize a phenomenon the world has never seen before.” He took a deep breath, and the old tone was back. “Oh, yes, my boy, there is nothing to stop him. Diels, a farmer’s son, or someone of equal breeding, will be made minister of the interior. Almost immediately a new bill will be passed, the Enabling Act.” Eisenmenger’s hand gripped Schmidt’s. “I tell you, I’ve seen the draft. If you are acquainted with a trade unionist, liberal, Communist, beggar, homosexual, alcoholic, Jew, Jehovah’s Witness, Gypsy, anybody mentally afflicted, or any bastard just too clever, I suggest you say good-bye to them now.”

  Schmidt grinned. “That’s half the population. I can’t see—”

  “They’re setting up camps,” said Eisenmenger. “SS camps, SA camps, correctional camps, camps where those who stray from the Nazi path can be . . . corrected. Also killing grounds. That’s where they take the worst strayers. The ultimate correction.”

  Schmidt was silenced.

  “Jews especially,” Eisenmenger said. “I hope you are not on friendly terms with any of God’s Chosen?”

  “As a matter of fact, I hope to marry one.”

  “Unwise,” Eisenmenger said.

  Schmidt was suddenly sick of the man, his snobbery, his monocle, the measured sentences, the smell of fear that emanated from him like a contagion; sick of being frightened by warnings in the moderate newspapers so poundingly repetitious that, merely to continue to work, he’d dulled himself to them; sick of living through crises; sick of political broken reeds; sick that he hadn’t even voted in the last election because his chosen Social Democrats had proved themselves unfit to be voted for.

  “There’d be civil war,” he said, and drank the last of his beer.

  Eisenmenger’s fingers still gripped his hand. “And who is to provide the other side in this conflict?”

  “Well, the workers, the Communists.” Fine thing, he thought, when you started looking to the Reds for a safeguard to democracy.

  “The clenched fist. Of course. The hammer and sickle. The fact that they are attached to a limp wrist does not concern us.” Eisenmenger leaned forward until his sweating face was close to Schmidt’s. “They’re terrified, man. They have come up against a force even more brutal than their own. Watch the Nazis in action, see the stomping jackboots, listen to the abuse. We are witnessing something new: terror as a political ploy.”

  “Well . . .” Schmidt said, fetching money from his pocket.

  “There’s a killing ground, you know,” Eisenmenger said. “They take them there and shoot them.”

  “Shoot who?”

  “The disappearers. Awkward buggers, troublemakers. Debris to be cleared away so that our Führer’s got a nice clean space to move into. One place where SS and SA meet in unanimity, the burial ground.”

  He wagged a finger. “Under the greenwo
od tree—lovely phrase, that. That’s where the bodies are buried, my son.”

  “I’ve got to go,” Schmidt said.

  Eisenmenger didn’t move. “Get out of the country, Inspector. There’ll be no place for honest men in the new Reich. And take your Jewess with you.”

  As Schmidt paid for the beer, Eisenmenger lumbered beside him to the bar and demanded to be introduced. “Herr Boxer? Allow me to shake the hand of an honest crook.”

  The last Schmidt saw of him, he was embracing the barman and advising him to get out of the country.

  Schmidt went back to the Alex in a temper unimproved by the clusters of men gathered around every litfass apparently mesmerized by screaming red posters with a black swastika. Hadn’t they anything better to do?

  Probably, he thought, they hadn’t. Six million unemployed.

  Fuck ’em; they were poisoning a morning that had begun in Arcadia. He’d been going to phone her every hour, like a moony adolescent, just to hear the sound of her voice. Now he wanted to phone her every hour to make sure she was safe, not from Natalya’s killer but from Jew haters. Now, thanks to fucking Eisenmenger, he didn’t dare phone her at all—at least not from the Alex.

  He was brusque with Frau Pritt. “I want the telephone number of every adoption agency in Berlin. Start with the Roman Catholics. If necessary, we’ll move on to the Polish agencies.”

  She was emptying his ashtray, one of her activities to show her disapproval of his smoking. She flapped the air a lot with her handkerchief. Schmidt had been tempted to give up cigarettes lately but had decided that to stop annoying Frau Pritt was too big a price to pay.

  “It would help if I were acquainted with the circumstances, Inspector,” Frau Pritt said.

  “I’m thinking of having you adopted. Now, get on and do it.” He congratulated himself on not saying “please” and then thought, Christ, I’m getting as bad as they are.

  Give the woman her due; she was efficient. By noon he had a list as long as his arm. He retired with it to the Wrestlers, commandeered its phone, and began dialing.

  ESTHER SPENT the morning in her first-floor studio in Cicerostrasse, photographing a film director who wanted a decent portrait for the publicity for his next movie, The Last Testament of Dr. Mabuse. He said it would be his final film in Germany; he was getting out.