The Informer

by Craig Nova

  “Well,” she said. “That was close.”

  “Naw,” said Felix. “The guy was a pushover. Like all those jackasses who just want to talk.”

  The car pulled up to Gaelle’s usual spot, and they got out. Then Gaelle looked around. Felix limped a little bit beside her as they went back to the building where she waited. Gaelle thought, I’ve got to pull myself together. Her stockings were a little soiled at the top where an earlier customer had dripped on them, and she wished she could find a way to change them. Had she really gotten away? She looked around, trying to think it over. Felix held the lighter, which hung in the dark like reassurance itself.

  “It could be plate,” said Felix. “But it looked like he had good stuff.”

  “Thanks for coming with me,” said Gaelle.

  “Sure, sure,” said Felix. “We’re a team.”

  Felix looked at the lighter.

  “Just a few more and we’re done for the night,” said Felix. “Say, you’re looking better, you know that?”

  “Am I?” said Gaelle. “Well, I guess.”

  “Sure,” said Felix. “Did that guy give you a scare?”

  “Everyone has an army,” said Gaelle. “The Reichsbanner, the Brown-shirts, the Red Front Fighters. They shoot spies.”

  “Make some money,” said Felix. “Keep it simple.”

  “That’s it?” said Gaelle. “That’s what you’ve got to say?”

  “Those guys are horny for information. Easier than sex, and pays better, too. If you don’t know anything, make it up. It’s like money that grows on moonlight. Why, I couldn’t have dreamed up something better than what we got. Armies, schemes, and enough murder to make everything seem important. A lark, see?”

  Gaelle put a hand to her hair and walked around to get her knees to stop trembling, but it lingered, and she struggled with that watery sensation, that weakness in her legs.

  “You see what I’m saying?” said Felix.

  “Yes,” she said. “I do.”

  Armina Treffen worked for Inspectorate A, the serious crimes section of the Berlin Police Department. At this hour, just after dawn, the park was a combination of green and gold, the tops of the trees covered with a film of gilt as the sun rose, and along with the colors, the place had a serenity, a moist silence matched only by the ominous trilling of birds. Armina was twenty-six years old with red hair and very white and freckled skin. Her eyes were green, almost the color of trees in the first light of dawn.

  She was concerned about Gustave Ritter, head of Inspectorate IA, the Political Section, who was taking more interest in her cases than before. Now, as she walked up the path of the Tiergarten with the crowns of the trees like green lace, she considered Ritter. He reminded her of a puff adder in the Berlin Zoo, and while the association was one of malice, she recognized something else that was common to both: the naturalness with which they were ready to strike. Ritter wouldn’t regret causing her trouble any more than the snake. How could the moon regret pulling on the oceans, or how could lightning regret setting a tree on fire?

  In the park she passed a bronze statue of a poet that was the color of blackened leather, and the poet seemed forever knowledgeable and wise, although he appeared to squint with discomfort, as though what he knew had come at an eternal price. The path had benches every fifty feet or so, and at this hour they were shiny with dew, although in the stillness of dawn the atmosphere of what happened here at night seemed to linger, the women in silky dresses, their white thighs marked by a taut garter as they lifted their skirts, the men in their dark suits, the bills offered, the snap of a clasp of a handbag. Armina passed the benches and thought that this one was just a child, maybe sixteen, dressed like a schoolgirl.

  The men in uniform, the Schutzpolice, stood at the top of a gully, their blue coats crosshatched by brush and new leaves, their buttons so much like those of a train conductor, as though this were a way station on the route to the underworld. The Schutzpolice murmured and looked around: they appeared lost and searching for a familiar landmark. Down below, in the bottom of the gully, the odor was of decayed leaves, and something else, too, a scent of flowers and the promise of spring.

  Hans Linz stood at the bottom of the gully, his hands in his pants pockets, his eyes on the shape on the ground. He was in his thirties with a beard so heavy that even after he had shaved, his chin looked blue. He was a Communist, although he was careful about letting on about it, and more than anything else, it made him seem like a librarian with a secret. His awkwardness about it wasn’t a sign of his lack of belief, but just the opposite. He cared so much as to be embarrassed.

  A week before, in the middle of a tense investigation, Armina had gone out with him, and they had ended up at her apartment. She had been tired and her guard was down, or perhaps it is better to say she wanted a little time away from her mood and from scenes like this one. She let his nicotine-stained fingers fumble at the buttons of her blouse and finally lost patience and said, “Here. Let me do it.” But as she undid the first one, she looked up at him and said, “You’re tired. I’m tired. This is a mistake.”

  Then she sat back.

  “You don’t have to be so tough,” he said. “It might be nice.”

  “I’m sorry. Let’s forget it,” she said.

  Linz picked up the glass of brandy and took a sip.

  “All right,” he said. “If that’s the way you feel about it.”

  He closed his eyes and looked down at his heavy, black shoes.

  “Let’s go into the kitchen,” she said. “Would you like a sandwich?”

  “Are you angry?” he said.

  “No,” she said. “Why would I be angry? I’m just tired. You are, too, if you’d give it half a thought.”

  “I want to ask you something,” he said.

  “All right,” she said.

  “What would it take for you to love me?” he said.

  “Oh, god,” she said. “Let’s have a snack and let it go at that.”

  In the kitchen she made him a bacon and egg sandwich and drank a brandy while he ate. At the door, when he had put on his coat, he had kissed her cheek and said, “Well, see you around.”

  Now, in the park she walked down to the swale where the girl seemed to have partially melted and collected in the bottom. The body seemed pliable, almost melded with the ground. Her blond hair was cropped short, the sheen of it remarkable in the first light, although not all of it was visible, since her coat had been thrown over the side of her face and part of her head. She was facedown, her stockings around her knees, her feet without shoes. A shockingly red bird flew from one branch to another in the trees. A cardinal, Armina thought.

  Everything here was final: the disorder of the girl’s clothes, the skirt pulled up, the moon-shaped buttocks, the torn stockings, and above everything else, the way in which she lay against the earth. Some of the men looked through the brush around the top of the gully and in the understory that grew on the sides of the land as it sloped to the bottom. The underwear was usually found in the brush. And, as at the other places, a number of cigarette stubs, smoked down to the end, had been ground out in the leaves. So, thought Armina, he had waited, whoever he was, thinking it over, listening to see if anyone was coming. And when was that? At two or three in the morning, she guessed, one could only hear the occasional footstep of someone going home after a night in the clubs and bars and the movement of a nocturnal animal, a raccoon, or a possum, or a rat that was looking for something that had been left behind. The wind made a susurrus in the trees, and perhaps, if one listened very closely, it would be possible to hear the condensed mist as it dripped from one of the scraggly trees to the ground. The young woman’s blond hair, what was visible from under the coat, looked like gold splashed on the floor of a foundry. Her skin was marked in the usual way. That, Armina guessed, was what had been done with the cigarettes.

  “They’re getting younger,” said Hans Linz.

  “This one looks about sixteen,” said Armin
a.

  “Could be younger,” said Linz. “We haven’t found her handbag. It’s around here someplace.”

  “It usually is,” said Armina.

  The Schutzpolice and the others stepped back. They had seen enough, and since this was Armina’s case, they were glad to get away. Their curiosity had been satisfied and their convictions about Berlin at night had been validated again. They looked at the collapsed figure at the bottom of the gully, now surrounded by filaments of insects in the air, and then the men turned away, everything about them saying, Here. This is yours. They shrugged and climbed the bank.

  One of the young woman’s shoes lay about five feet away from her stocking feet: fashionable, black with a low heel, good for walking in the park. Armina stood there while the others left, alone with the shoe. It was the same brand and model that she wore.

  Armina had been hired in the mid-1920s, when women—under the laws of the new constitution—had been brought into the Berlin Police Department, but where others had been content to work the “social crimes” section (those that dealt with women, children, and domestic problems), Armina had insisted in the face of hostility and constant objections on moving into the other Inspectorates—morals, theft, murder—although as an echo of that lingering hostility, she was given cases in which a woman had been killed. She had resisted the atmosphere of contempt and had demonstrated that she was as unflappable as the rest of the members of the Criminal Inspectorates: she had eaten her lunch in an apartment where the blood stained most of the floor, and she had examined the women, like this one, to see if a rape had taken place. She had lifted a buttock and exposed a wound and said to the others, “Look. You see that? That tear? It’s unmistakable.”

  “Well,” said Linz. “This one’s yours.”

  He shrugged.

  “When they’re like this, they usually are,” she said.

  She knew the underwear would be found close by with the usual pearly stain, and, of course, when Armina lifted the coat she would find a wound. The gully was shaped like a bowl, and Armina had the sense of being in a place where the gravity seemed to tug on everything, as though this place were at the bottom. The girl’s perfume had the scent of roses and carnations, and Armina was drawn downward, as though the perfume had a variety of gravity. Along with the perfume, the moldy leaves, and the lavender soap the girl used, the girl’s skin had a scent of ammonia. Sweat. Fear.

  The cigarette butts were scattered in the leaves, six altogether, already yellowed by the dew, each burned down so just a half inch was left. Small blisters were on the girl’s legs.

  “How long does it take to smoke a cigarette?” said Armina.

  Linz shook one out of his pack, put it between his full lips, and lighted it. Armina thought of his nicotine-stained fingers as he had touched her blouse: he had been tender but desperate and unsure.

  Armina considered the scene as it must have been, the girl at the bottom of the gully, the man who had done this as he smoked the cigarettes, the coal like a bit of red foil on a black sheet. Did he wait to approach the girl again? Bunching her skirt, removing her underwear? Or did he sit there and consider what he had already done? She guessed the marks on the neck came from a silk cord.

  “About two minutes,” said Linz.

  “So he was here for almost fifteen minutes,” she said.

  “If he smoked one right after another,” he said.

  “Oh,” she said. “I think he’s a chain-smoker.”

  Armina and Linz walked around the top of the gully and then spiraled slowly down to the girl. The leaves made a snakeskin pattern, the brown and light-gray shapes like ink blots. She picked up a torn ticket, a piece of cellophane, a scrap of paper—who knew what these things were. When men came back here with a woman, all kinds of things fell out of a pocket or a handbag. Linz looked more quickly and with much less interest than she did.

  She picked up a crumpled cigarette package and put it in a handkerchief. Well, maybe the man who did this would have stayed longer, but he ran out of something to smoke. She thought of him going into a tobacconist’s shop—his fingers stained pink as he pushed over a bill and picked up the new package, his nails pink, too, under their shape like a new moon.

  “About the other night,” said Linz. “I wanted to say how much I liked being with you. How good I felt.”

  “I think we’ve got other things to worry about.”

  “Of course. Of course. I just didn’t want you to be upset.”

  “How could I be upset?” she said. “It meant nothing.”

  When will I learn to be quiet? she thought. She had spoken honestly because the presence of the girl made it difficult to lie.

  “I see,” said Linz again.

  “Come on,” she said. “Let’s forget it.”

  “Sure,” he said. “Maybe we could try another time. Nothing is hopeless.”

  Armina looked down at the girl’s blond hair, the youthful fingers in the leaves like snakeskin. Then she nodded, although she wondered if she had committed herself to sleeping with him just to shut him up. Maybe the time had come to take a vow of celibacy, to sleep alone and to live with it. Clean living. Read a book at night. Less to drink. Everything else was causing too much trouble.

  The sun was behind two trees at the top of the gully, and with the sun behind them, they appeared like the legs of an enormous man, in black trousers, who observed what happened here. Birds flitted with a nervous intensity, their cries twittering and filled with alarm. The uniformed men at the top put their heads together and spoke in low voices. Armina worked her way toward them, eyes down, keeping a lookout for anything unusual, a piece of jewelry, a card or cosmetic case, anything that a human being might have dropped.

  “You know the one about the old people’s home in Berlin?” said the first Shutzpoliceman. “Mostly it is filled with women.”

  “Yeah,” said the second. “They live longer.”

  “That’s right,” said the first, “and so this man moves into the old people’s home and he puts up a sign that says ‘Stud.’”

  “No kidding,” said the second.

  “Yeah. A widow comes in and asks what his fees are. And he says, well, twenty-five marks on the floor, fifty on the chair, and a hundred on the bed. The widow takes out a hundred-mark note.”

  “‘Once on the bed?’ said the stud.”

  Armina stepped closer and looked at the men.

  “No,” she said. “Four times on the floor.”

  “How did you know?” said the first Shutzpoliceman.

  “I’m just thrifty,” she said.

  The men laughed. Armina turned down the slope and felt the tug of the girl. The girl’s fingers curled against the leaves, and when Armina picked them up, there were no wounds on them. The jacket, which had been laid over the side of the girl’s face and the top of her head, looked like a misshapen hat.

  “Putting a coat over a head is something new,” Linz said.

  “Yeah,” said Armina. “I think it means whoever did this isn’t feeling good about this one. He’s ashamed.”

  “Because they’re getting younger?” said the man.

  “Maybe,” said Armina. “Maybe she said something that set him back.”

  “What could that be?” Linz said.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Something sentimental probably. These assholes are usually sentimental.”

  The perfume was still very strong.

  “What are you going to do?” he said.

  The scrim of leaves at the top of the gully looked, in the rising sun, like the lace of green lingerie. Then Armina glanced at the cigarette stubs, already stained yellow where the moisture of dawn had brought out the nicotine.

  “I think it’s time to go to the train station,” she said.

  “Yes,” said Linz. “That’s probably a good idea. Mostly, though, that’s where the boy hookers are working.”

  “There’s someone else there,” said Armina.

  “I guess that’
s right,” said Linz. “He’s still there. As far as I know.”

  “I think it’s a good idea to see what he has to say,” said Armina.

  “What a guy,” said Linz. “You want me to go with you?”

  “No,” said Armina. “I think I’ll go alone. It’ll make it friendlier.”

  Armina walked around the gully, her shoes making a slight hush in the leaves just like the one, she thought, that this young woman made when she walked down here. The birds started singing again, their voices diminutive and sweet, oddly cheerful in the green clutter of the bushes at the top of the gully. The birds probably weren’t singing, she thought, at three or four in the morning. Then it was just the scavengers, the rats, the moisture dripping from the leaves like a muted elegy.

  “Wait,” said Linz. “Here they are.”

  He held up the girl’s underwear.

  “They were back in the bushes,” he said. “Just the same.”

  The Schutzpolice had their hands in their pockets. Soon they’d get their coffee, their jelly buns, the paper with the news of the six-day bicycle races. Armina couldn’t blame them. What else could they do after a morning like this? And yet, she was convinced that something was needed, but she hadn’t a precise idea what it was. The best thing, she supposed, was to go about her business, to try to find a way to get through the hours, and to keep her face blank, but recently she had found that this wasn’t anywhere near enough. But what was?

  “And here’s her handbag,” said Linz. “Her name was Marie Rote.”

  “All right,” said Armina.

  “I’ll take it back to the office,” said Linz. He stood there, against the brush, holding the purse. Then he shrugged. It was the usual thing.

  It was the best part of the day. The streets were damp, and in the moist sheen a verdant film appeared from the trees in the park. Horse-drawn carts brought potatoes from the farm cellars outside Berlin, the black horses shimmering in the damp streets, and their hooves made a somnolent clip clop, clip clop, as though everything were possible. The smell of the horses mixed with the exhaust of the first cars. Armina’s heels made a crisp cadence on the sidewalk, and as she went she thought, Yes, how deceptive appearances are. Why, anyone would think I was perfectly happy, on my way to work, that I had made a date with a good friend for lunch. Why, what would we have? A salad Niçoise, a little sweet for dessert, maybe a glass of champagne.