City of Shadows

by Ariana Franklin

  “Keep an eye on her while I’m out of town, Howie, if you can.”

  “I do,” Howie said. “And you might have the goddam grace to be jealous.”

  This was the rub. If he went, she’d go with him, but there were some things you couldn’t live with, and, for him, leaving the killer uncaught was one of them.

  The only solution was to find Reinhardt G. of Munich—and quick.

  So far he wasn’t making any progress in doing it. No record of an SA officer with the first name of Reinhardt had come to the attention of the Intelligence Department at the U.S. embassy. Nor had Howie Meyer, who, like most American correspondents, was being courted by the Nazis, seen him at any of their functions to which he was invited.

  The burglar sent into SA headquarters to steal its list of personnel not only had come away empty-handed but considered himself lucky to have come away at all. “They got trip wires, they got alarms, they got guards with fucking guns. I didn’t get close. What they got in there? Give me a nice quiet bank any night.”

  “Thanks for trying, Mo-mo.”

  Esther twitted him for upholding the law by illegal means, so he didn’t tell her that, through Ottmar, he had made contact with a young corporal in the SA.

  “Friend of Marlene’s, he was,” Ottmar had said.

  “How can he have been a friend of Marlene’s and a storm trooper?”

  Ottmar’s world-weary eyes looked on him as on a child; obviously the one did not exclude the other. “I’m not saying he’ll do it, but he’s a Berliner, see, not like the fucking clodhoppers that tore into the Parasol. And he cried when I told him about Marlene.”

  A meeting was set up at the Wrestlers. The young man’s name was Wolf; he was large and surly looking, and his Brownshirt uniform caused the same flutter of unease among the bar’s clientele as would the sight of a fox in a turkey shed.

  “All I want you to do is keep a lookout for an officer with the first name of Reinhardt, fair-haired, big, in Intelligence,” Schmidt told him. “If you see him or hear of anyone with that description, come and tell me. Nothing more.” He handed over an envelope of bills.

  Wolf took it. “He the one cut up Marlene?”

  “Yes, so be careful.”

  After the boy had gone, Boxer came over. “Can’t say I like that class of customer, Inspector.” When storm troopers ran out of Jews and homosexuals and Communists, they’d been known to rampage into the smaller police stations and attack those confined in the cells.

  “Who?” asked Schmidt innocently.

  “Ah.” Relieved, Boxer tapped the side of his nose. If the meeting had been illicit, that was all right, then.

  What the hell am I doing? Schmidt wondered. And then answered himself: he was doing his job, and doing it in the only way left to him. The thought that the faceless agents of Department 1A might have secretly done it for him, that his killer was already dead from a bullet in the back of the neck—and he would never know it—kept him awake at night.

  With Esther asleep beside him, he wove fantastic ideas into more fantastic plans; using Nick Potrovskov’s forger to devise papers that would get him into SA headquarters in some capacity or another—letters from Röhm, perhaps, demanding a list of officers. Or setting himself up as a target that would tempt the killer into the open. An entry in the personal columns along the lines of “Reinhardt, I know who you are. Come and get me.”

  But I don’t know who he is. And the bastard knows I don’t.

  In the meantime he could only cast his bread upon the waters, get on with his official job, and hope that the men of Department 1A were kept busy with theirs—whatever that was.

  AT CHRISTMAS HE took Esther and a wreath to the Jewish cemetery in Weissensee. “It isn’t the anniversary of his death or anything,” he said. “I just come at Christmas. He used to enjoy Christmas, Ikey did.”

  She read the inscription on the gravestone as he propped the wreath against it. “So he got the Iron Cross,” she said.

  “Yes, his father’s very proud of that.”

  She read the inscription: “ ‘He died for Kaiser and Fatherland.’ ”

  “His father’s proud of that, too.”

  FOR MOST OF January Esther was occupied at her studio in Cicerostrasse preparing for her exhibition at the Kronprinzenpalais. It was also a particularly busy month for Schmidt, and the only way he was going to be able to attend her opening party was by flying into Tempelhof in the evening and catching an overnight train back to Bremen later.

  Since Esther could not, Howie Meyer met him at the airport with a car. Howie was wearing a dinner jacket, making Schmidt conscious that he wasn’t. “It’s an Event, pal,” Howie said reprovingly. “The Kronprinzenpalais doesn’t give up one of its rooms to any old happy snapper. Don’t you read the art pages?”

  Schmidt usually flicked through them as he turned to the sports section. “I don’t know much about her work,” he said. “I’m ashamed.”

  “You should be. She’s a first-class camerawoman. Collier’s takes anything she sends, you know that? Cicatrice—jeepers, that’s style. My little secretary was going to paint a scar on her face the other day so’s she’d look like Esther. Save it, kid, I told her, you need mystery and cheekbones. That’s the thing about Esther—there’s all these lousy Russians claiming Peter the Great’s their great-granddaddy, but don’t none of ’em have what that woman of yours has got.”

  Schmidt’s focus was suddenly on Meyer, fat, funny, with the gloss that all educated Americans had. He told himself he wasn’t jealous; at least, this wasn’t the jealousy he’d felt for Potrovskov and the shameful shot of relief he’d experienced in the first moment when reading of the Russian’s death. This was envy. Meyer could offer her what he couldn’t—security, prosperity, a new life in the Land of the Free.

  The brightly lit room at the Kronprinzenpalais was crowded. Smartly dressed men and women that Schmidt felt he ought to recognize were studying the pictures, wineglass in hand. Peter Lorre and the man who’d directed M, Fritz Lang, were the only two he could put a name to, and they were engaged in discussion with other people.

  Howie grabbed a drink and disappeared into the crowd. Schmidt grabbed another, looked for Esther, couldn’t see her, and started studying the photographs.

  He didn’t like them too much—he wasn’t meant to; Esther’s photography hurt. Here was Berlin’s underbelly, the toppling cards of the Weimar’s paper republic. No landscapes, no studies of film stars. Instead a barefoot toddler in a roadway raised its arm in a Hitler salute to storm troopers’ marching boots. An old woman dragged herself through the puddles of a Moabit alley, Communist flags strung like washing above her head. A long, magnificent shot over massed steel helmets and, at the far end of the ranks, outlined against swastikas, a tiny, screaming, gesticulating figure.

  Somebody next to Schmidt addressed somebody else. “She’s putting the branding iron to our eyeballs again. Isn’t she marvelous?”

  Peter Lorre came up and insinuated Schmidt to a quieter corner. “May I ask you something, Inspector?” The froglike little face looked shiftily worried, but it always did. “Dr. Goebbels has let me know I’m on his list. He is saying I should get out of Germany. Can he do that?”

  A few months ago, Schmidt would have said no. Now he found himself saying, “Christ, I hope not.”

  “Lang thinks he will go,” the soft, breathy voice went on, almost to itself. “Maybe I should.”

  What can I say to him? Schmidt wondered. Stay, the country needs you? They couldn’t mean it; get rid of Jews and the gap would be ruinous. It had to be merely an election ploy, an appeal to anti-Semitic panic. You couldn’t exile people because you didn’t like them; it was against the law.

  The law. The great governess, upholding, upheld. For the first time, it came home to him, really came, like a shrieking succubus sinking its claws into his entrails, how frail she was; he saw her in the dust, her gray head kicked in by jackboots. It could happen. Was happening.

&n
bsp; He stared down at Lorre, dumb.

  The actor nodded, shook Schmidt’s hand, and turned away, bumping into Esther. “Wonderful shots, my dear. You should be in cinema. You

  have the eye.”

  “Thank you,” Esther said. She faced Schmidt. “What do you think?”

  He wanted to kiss her in front of them all. No, he wanted to pick her up and walk off with her, growling his ownership like a Neanderthal.

  She snuffled and fluttered her eyelashes; they hadn’t been to bed together for three days. “I know,” she said.

  He smiled back at her. “You don’t go in for sunsets, do you?”

  “It is a sunset,” she said. “I’m merely recording it.” Her gaze went past him to a group just coming into the gallery, a tall fat man, a tall thin one, and a small thin one. “Good God,” she said.

  “Who’s that with Göring?” Schmidt wanted to know. Whoever he was, he was a worried man.

  “That’s Dr. Justi, he’s the director here. The little one’s Alfred Rosenberg; he’s the one who thinks modern art is intellectual syphilis.”

  From his face, it was obvious that Rosenberg was applying the same judgment to modern photography and looked at it as if he might catch something. But Göring liked it. He lumbered along the walls, pointing with his dog whip, saying, “Yes, yes, yes, this is why they vote for us.”

  He had wonderful blond hair, heavy and sculptured, like his face. He stopped at the picture of the saluting urchin and gave a rich, catarrhal laugh. “Now, here is the future. We should give this one to Goebbels for his propaganda, eh, Doctor? Introduce me to this Cicatrice. I will congratulate him.”

  Dr. Justi wiped the sweat from his forehead. “Frau Cicatrice, may I introduce Herr Göring?”

  Göring lifted Esther’s hand to his lips. “Madam, I can pay you no higher compliment than to mistake your camera for that of a man’s. I should like to see you do a study of our Führer.”

  “I’d love to,” she said. She would, too, Schmidt thought; a gleam had come into her eye he’d seen in that of newspapermen and vultures.

  “Justi here has been giving me a private view of the Impressionists downstairs,” Göring said. “Also some very fine Klees and Chagalls.”

  There was a mutter from his small companion. “Jew-inspired daubs.”

  “Rosenberg here thinks modern art is not founded sufficiently on race,” Göring said smoothly. “His preference is for paintings of warriors and big women, but there is some of the new I find most ...collectible.” He grinned at the director and slapped him on the back.

  Dr. Justi sagged.

  There was an interruption from a dark Russian. “Hermann, my friend, please to come, the grand duchess Anastasia has expressed a wish to meet you.”

  They watched Göring stride off to a small figure in a corner of the room, ringed by people apparently hanging on its every word, one of them Howie Meyer. A little hand was regally extended. Göring bent to kiss it.

  “You brought her?” Schmidt asked.

  “The press viewing’s not till tomorrow. She wanted to come. She’s beginning to feel more secure.”

  And was as big a celebrity as anyone in the room, Schmidt realized; everybody was watching the encounter.

  He took Esther to the window. “I have to go. Get Howie to take you home, but don’t invite him in—he lusts after you.”

  “I know he does, bless him.”

  “Does America beckon?”

  “It will if you don’t get back from Bremen pretty quick. I’m sex-starved.”

  He went to get his coat and bumped into Göring and his entourage getting theirs.

  Hell, why not? It might smoke the bastard out.

  “I’m glad we met, Herr Göring,” he said. “Do you happen to know an officer in the SA? Christian name Reinhardt. Big fellow, fair-haired? Midthirties, I’d guess; speaks with a Polish accent?”

  It was a massive face. It turned on him slowly, like a buffalo attracted by a gnat. “And you are?”

  “Inspector Schmidt. Berlin police. Department MM.”

  “Your interest in this person?”

  “He’s a murderer.”

  “I shall make inquiries, Inspector.”

  “Thank you.”

  ...

  FROM THE WINDOW Esther watched her lover emerge into Unter den Linden and hail a cab. Watched it drive away.

  Behind her the room’s conversation hissed with sibilants. The List, the List. Not just Jews, the avant-garde itself was on it. Art had become a risk. Risk, risk. What theater would put on a Brecht play if They took over? What concert hall would include Schoenberg in its program? Or Berg? Would Klemperer be allowed to conduct? Who’d dare hang a Kirchner on their walls? The Nazi-controlled town council of Dessau had already closed down its Bauhaus. Storm troopers in Spandau had thrown Remarque’s book All Quiet on the Western Front onto a street bonfire; cinemas showing the film version were having their seats slashed. Truth was unpatriotic. The barbarian was at the gates.

  She knew that the artistic community had turned up partly out of loyalty to her, but mostly for the chance to huddle together, like travelers who’d heard the howl of wolves getting close.

  And you ask if America beckons, she thought. One word from you and I’d follow you, like Eurydice led out of the underworld by Orpheus. Because this is the underworld. Göring, that monster with taste, wants to show my depiction of a child perverted by savagery as propaganda for that same savagery.

  Yes, America beckons. And you’d be lost in it.

  How would that man of hers, that so-German best of Germans, endure the life of a refugee, always a transplant, always aware—as those who lived in it were always aware—that the earth you drew sustenance from was not your own? That you were tolerated in another person’s house like an inconvenient aunt who’d lost her money? She knew the life of a refugee, none better. It was not for him.

  In any case, he wouldn’t go until he’d caught R.G. of Munich.

  So I’ll stay in hell with you—and gladly, because you can’t live anywhere else.

  But, by God, if she could photograph Hitler, she’d show them. She knew just the angle, the right light to emphasize those eyes, like a shark’s at the moment it rolled over and opened its teeth. She’d show them truth; she’d sell it to Collier’s for America to see. Get her name on the List of Honor before they wiped it out.

  And her.

  “I LIKE HERR Göring, Esther,” Anna Anderson said over her shoulder

  from the front passenger seat as Meyer drove them home.

  “I was afraid you would.”

  “Why you say that? He had proper respect. He will help me, I think. He has great hopes for me.”

  “He said that, Esther,” Howie said. “I heard him. He actually said that.”

  Anna ignored him. Her sojourn in the United States, where not all the huge publicity she’d received had been good publicity, had added Americans to a list they now shared with pressmen. Meyer’s being both, she rarely addressed him, and when she did, she was rude.

  She said, “He liked your pictures. He told me.” She paused graciously. “I didn’t tell him you were a Jewess.”

  And I didn’t tell him you were an impostor, Esther thought. It had been a long day.

  “Here we are, ladies.” Howie switched off the engine. It was late— the guests had been reluctant to leave one another’s company. Bismarck Allee was nearly deserted.

  “Stay there,” Esther said to Anna. And to Howie, “It’s cold. Let me open the front door before she gets out.”

  Perhaps it was the light snow that had begun to fall, perhaps it was because she was tired, but she was prey to old terrors tonight. She looked up and down the street. The doorway across the road gaped at her.

  “Okay.” She hustled them both indoors. “Coming up?” she asked Howie, reluctant to face the empty flat. She wished now she hadn’t had a fire escape fitted, but the temptation to have access to the yard and make a garden out of it had been too gr
eat.

  “Sure.”

  Anna went straight into her room without saying good night. Esther made her a hot chocolate and set coffee to brew for herself and Howie. She took Anna her drink.

  “Was a nice party,” Anna said. “I tell them all how I meet Cole Porter in America but I do not like the jazz. Herr Göring said Herr Hitler doesn’t like the jazz either. He said the Führer likes Wagner. I said I like Wagner, too; we are soul mates.”

  “Good.”

  Esther went back into the living room and poured Meyer a brandy to go with his coffee. “Come on, Esther,” he said, “tell Uncle Howie. Is she or isn’t she?”

  “So that’s what you’ve come for,” she said. “Not my company, not the coffee—the lowdown on the grand duchess. I’ve told you and told you, Howie, it’s not my business. No comment.”

  “She’s news. Once she goes to court to claim the inheritance, it’ll be big news, and I want a feature ready for my great American public.”

  “You won’t get it from me,” she said. “I want nothing to do with it. Lawyers will just bleed her dry.”

  “It’s what lawyers are good at.” He leaned forward. “I’ll tell you this, kid, the Nazis are backing her.”

  She stared dismally at him. “Schmidt said something like that.. . . Oh, it’s too fantastic. I thought Göring was just being polite.”

  “Polite? Göring? No, they’ve been talking a lot about her at their feeding troughs. Looks like Hitler’s got a grand design for our grand duchess.”

  “What?”

  “They say his intuition’s telling him she’s the real Anastasia, and we all know the Führer’s intuition is infallible, don’t we? See it from his point of view: he wants to reassure the aristocracy; also, he needs the landholding vote, the farmers. Look at me, boys, I’m the only guy in Germany who can save you from Commie revolution. Words, words, words. But how about a symbol? How about picking up the remnant of the flag the nasty Bolsheviks trampled in the dust and giving it a wave? Who but our grand duchess?”