Philip Kerr
Page 21
24 T
HEY LEFT ME ALONE for several days, which was better than a beating. Of course, this gave me plenty of time to think about Noreen and to worry that she would be worried about me. What would she think? What did anyone think when a loved one disappeared off the streets of Berlin and into a concentration camp or a police jail? The experience gave me a new understanding of what it was to be a Jew or a communist in the new Germany. But mostly I worried about myself. Did they really intend to throw me in the Havel if I refused to sign the D-11? And if I did sign it, could I trust von Helldorf not to send me to a camp straightaway? When I wasn’t worrying about myself, I reflected on how, thanks to von Helldorf, I knew something more about the death of Isaac Deutsch than I had before. I knew that his corpse was somehow connected with the corpse of Dr. Heinrich Rubusch. So was it possible that his death in a room at the Adlon Hotel had been the result of something other than natural causes? But what? I never saw a more natural-looking corpse. The two cops who had investigated the case, Rust and Brandt, had told me that the cause of death had been a cerebral aneurysm. Had they lied? And Max Reles—what was his involvement in all of this? Since my incarceration in a Potsdam police cell seemed to owe everything to a telephone call Max Reles had placed to Count von Helldorf, I had to assume that the American was somehow implicated in the deaths of both men and that this had something to do with Olympic bids and contracts. Reles had somehow been informed of my interest in Deutsch and had assumed, incorrectly, that this was connected with my recovery of the stolen Chinese lacquer box—or, more accurately, with the contents of that Chinese box. Given the involvement of the notoriously corrupt von Helldorf, it seemed I had stumbled onto a conspiracy that involved a variety of people from the GOC and the Ministry of the Interior. How else could one explain how artifacts from Berlin’s Ethnographical Museum were being given to Max Reles so that he might send them to Avery Brundage on the AOC in return for his continuing opposition to an American boycott of the Berlin games? If all of this was true, then I was in a lot more trouble than I had realized when I’d been lifted off Herman Goering Strasse by von Helldorf’s men. And by the fourth or perhaps the fifth day of my imprisonment, I was beginning to regret not taking a gamble on von Helldorf’s word and signing the D-11—especially when I recalled his reasonable tone. From my cell window I could see and hear the Havel. Between the south wall of the prison was a line of trees and beyond it the S-Bahn line to Berlin, which ran along the riverbank and across a bridge into Teltower. Sometimes the train and a steamboat traded hoots, like good-natured characters in a children’s story. Once I heard a military band playing somewhere to the west, behind Potsdam’s own Lustgarten. It rained a lot. Potsdam is green for a very good reason. On the sixth day the door finally opened for longer than it took for me to slop out and be given a meal. Leather Coat, smiling quietly, beckoned into the corridor outside my cell. “You’re free to go,” he said. “What happened to your D-11?” He shrugged. “Just like that?” I said. “Those are my orders.” I rubbed my face thoughtfully. I wasn’t quite sure what was making it itch so much: my urgent need for a razor, or suspicion at this latest turn of events. I had heard stories of people being shot “while attempting to escape.” Was this to be my fate? A bullet in the back of the head as I walked along the corridor? Sensing my hesitation, Leather Coat’s smile widened—as if he had guessed the reason for my hesitation in leaving. But he said nothing to reassure me. He looked as if he enjoyed my discomfort, as if he had just watched me eat a very hot chili pepper and was now looking forward to seeing me suffer an attack of hiccups. He lit a cigarette and stared at his fingernails for a moment. “What about my stuff?” “You’ll get it downstairs.” “That’s what I’m worried about.” I picked up my jacket and put it on. “Aw, now you’ve hurt my feelings,” he said. “You’ll grow new ones when you get back under your stone.” He jerked his head down the corridor. “Get moving, Gunther, before we change our minds.” I walked ahead of him, and it was just as well that I hadn’t eaten that morning—otherwise, it wouldn’t have been only my heart that was in my mouth. My scalp was crawling, as if I had one of the praesidium’s cockroaches in my hair. At any moment I expected to feel the cold barrel of a Luger pressed against my cranium and to hear the sound of a shot, abruptly curtailed as a hollow-point 9.5-gram round tunneled through my brain. For a second I recalled seeing a German officer in 1914 shooting a Belgian civilian suspected of leading an attack on our soldiers, and the way the bullet had left his head looking like a burst football. My legs felt like jelly, but I forced them to march me along the corridor without stopping to look around and see if Leather Coat had a pistol in his hand. At the top of the stairs, the corridor kept on going and I paused awaiting his instructions. “Downstairs,” said the voice behind me. I turned and tramped down the steps, my leather soles slapping against the stones like my heart on the walls of my chest. It felt pleasantly cool on the stairwell. A great blast of fresh air was coming up from the ground floor like a sea breeze. And arriving there at last, I saw a door open onto the central courtyard, where several more police cars and vans were parked. To my relief, Leather Coat marched ahead of me now and led the way into a little office where my coat and hat, my tie, my braces, and the contents of my pockets were returned to me. I put a cigarette into my face and lit it before following him along another corridor and into a room the size of an abattoir. The walls were covered with white bricks, and on one was a large wooden crucifix; for a moment I thought we were in some kind of chapel. We turned a corner, and I stopped in my tracks, for there, like a strange-looking table and chair, was a shiny new falling ax. Constructed of dark polished oak and dull-colored steel, the machine was about eight feet high—just a bit taller than an executioner wearing his customary top hat. For a moment it sent such a chill through my body that I actually shivered. And I had to remind myself that it was unlikely Leather Coat would have attempted to execute me by himself. The Nazis were hardly short-staffed when it came to carrying out judicial murder. “I bet this is where you bring Hitler Youth in lieu of a bedtime story,” I said. “We thought you’d like to see it.” Leather Coat uttered a dry little chuckle and stroked the wooden frame of the falling ax fondly. “Just in case you were ever tempted to come back.” “Your hospitality overwhelms me. I suppose this is what they mean when they talk about the people who’ve lost their heads to Nazism. But it might be just as well to remember the fate of almost all the French revolutionaries who were so keen on their guillotine: Danton, Desmoulins, Robespierre, Saint-Just, Couthon. They ended up going for a ride on it themselves.” He scraped the blade with the flat of his thumb and said, “As if I care what happened to a bunch of francies.” “Maybe you should.” I flicked my half-smoked cigarette at the terrible machine and followed Leather Coat through another door and into a corridor. This time I was pleased to see that it led out onto the street. “As a matter of idle curiosity, why are you releasing me? After all, I never signed your D-11. Was it the thought of having to spell ‘concentration camp’? Or was it something else? The law? Justice? Proper police procedure? I know that sounds unlikely, but I thought I’d ask anyway.” “If I was you, friend, I’d count myself lucky just to be walking out of here.” “Oh, I do. Only not as lucky as I count myself for the fact that you’re not me. That really would be depressing.” I tipped my hat to him and walked out of there. A moment later I heard the door bang behind me. It sounded a lot better than a Luger, but it still made me jump all the same. It was raining, but the rain looked good because there was only the open sky above it. I took off my hat and lifted my unshaven face into the air. The rain felt even better than it looked, and I rubbed it across my chin and hair the same way I’d washed my face with it in the trenches. Rain: it was something clean and free that fell from the sky and wasn’t going to kill you. But even while I celebrated the moment of my liberation, I felt a tug at my sleeve and turned around to find a woman standing behind me. She was wearing a long, dark dress with a high belt; a fawn-colored
raincoat; and a small, shell-like hat. “Please, sir,” she said quietly, “were you a prisoner in there, perhaps?” I rubbed my chin again. “Is it that obvious?” “Did you by chance come across another man by the name of Dettmann, Ludwig Dettmann? I’m his wife.” I shook my head. “I’m sorry, Frau Dettmann, no, I didn’t see anyone at all. But what makes you think he’s in there?” She shook her head, sadly. “I don’t. Not anymore. But when they arrested him, this is where he was taken. I’m sure of that, at least.” She shrugged. “But afterward, who knows? No one thinks to tell his family anything. He could be anywhere for all I know. But no one thinks to tell his family anything. Several times I’ve been in that police station asking for information about my Ludwig, but they won’t tell me what’s happened to him. They’ve even threatened to arrest me if I go in there again.” “Might be one way of finding out,” I said glibly. “You don’t understand. I have three children. And what’s to become of them, eh? What is to become of them if I’m arrested, too?” She shook her head. “Nobody understands. Nobody wants to understand.” I nodded. She was right, of course. I didn’t understand. No more than I understood what had persuaded von Helldorf to order my release. I walked through the Lustgarten. In front of the state castle was a bridge that led across the Havel and over an island to the Teltower Tor Station, where I caught a train back to Berlin.