The Informer

by Craig Nova

  THE FRIEDRICHSTRASSE TRAIN station had the aspect of an elegant factory. It was enormous, and the two sections, one for foreign travel and one for local, appeared like greenhouses. The almost infinite number of glass panels in the roof suggested order and precision, and the engineering of the place could be seen in the scale of the platforms, the thin and beautiful squares of metal that held the panes of glass, and in the bridge above the street and over the river, where the trains came and went as the locomotives trailed a gray boa of smoke.

  In the street the cabs and cars left off passengers who emerged in traveling clothes, the women smart and crisp, their men taking care of porters and assuming the attitude of knowing how things were done. The air of the place was at once transient and yet somehow constant, as though what flowed through here was a timeless, well-mannered vitality. The women seemed sultry and powerful, and their orchid-scented perfume melded with the smoke of the locomotives.

  The interior of the station with its high ceilings, its columns, was filled with the rush of passengers and their families, and in the mass of people, who moved like skaters over a marble floor that was so shiny as to seem like ice, flowers in green florist’s paper appeared as though by magic: red, yellow, and blue flowers surrounded by asparagus ferns made arrival and departure seem romantic.

  The Moth sat on one of the long benches where people waited. He had reddish, thinning hair, a florid, inflamed complexion, and green eyes. He wore baggy pants, a large sweater, and comfortable although oversize shoes. The stains on the sweater and pants and on his shirt conveyed a horrifying intimacy: his most private habits were here for anyone to see. His red face, his greenish eyes, his frumpy presence seemed to imply a familiarity with the people he spoke to, as though his appearance, in all its dowdy frankness, were a way of saying that he understood all the failings of human beings, particularly the ones people found hard to ask about. He provided a group of boys and girls, under the age of fifteen, to people who were interested in them. Why, his green eyes and impertinent smile implied, I know. I know. Maybe we can work something out. Why, here is Gretchen. What do you think?

  Armina stood in front of him. The pockets of his sweater were heavy with the things he had brought with him, a watch, a pen, a pocketbook, the bars of lavender soap he used to wash his hands once an hour. He was reading the want ads of the paper, General Merchandise, a pair of riding boots, a wedding dress (never worn), a set of hand tools, a double bed, a bedroom mirror.

  He looked up, his green-red glance at once greasy and impertinent. Armina guessed she hated him for all the obvious reasons and for one other, too. His glance said as clearly as if he spoke out loud, I know you have a secret desire. What made this so offensive was not his correctness, since she did have one or more, but the way in which he perceived her needs would somehow diminish them to the point of being shallow or mercenary. But she did have a secret desire, which she felt here in a pulse of shame. For all her toughness, for all her eating her lunch in rooms where murders had taken place, she still longed for someone who could remove that ache she felt at three in the morning when she woke, alone, and stared at the patterns on the ceiling of her bedroom.

  “So,” said the Moth as he looked up from his paper. “Inspectorate E, I guess. Morals.”

  “Inspectorate A,” she said. “Murder.”

  “Oh, it’s all the same,” he said. “Don’t you think?”

  He put down the paper and reached into the pocket of his sweater, where he had a sandwich wrapped in brown waxed paper.

  “Sit down,” he said. “You can keep me company while I eat my lunch. Blood sausage.” He unwrapped the paper. “Do you like blood sausage?”

  “Not really,” said Armina.

  “It’s an acquired taste,” he said. “Like a lot of things. Sit down.”

  The bench next to him was polished from years of sitting and had another quality, too, a film of something that Armina might have only imagined: a slime, a greasy layer that was left by his existence. Well, she wanted his cooperation. She sat down.

  “What’s your pleasure?” he said with his mouth partially full. He brushed the crumbs from his sweater with an old napkin. His tie was stained with white marks, like dried milk. “Have you noticed how hard it is to keep your clothes clean? Why, there are times when I am just too busy to keep up with it. Why, look.”

  He reached down and took a bit of lint off her skirt, on her thigh, and then held it up for her to see before dropping it on the floor. He smiled again, as though he had proved something, some similarity between them, and went back to eating, his cheeks full. There weren’t any young girls standing along the walls of the station, just the flow of passengers. Armina guessed it was still early. Men of twenty or so stood by the doorways with an impatient hunger.

  “All right,” he said. “Let’s talk.”

  “Yes,” said Armina.

  “Have you noticed the weather in Berlin in winter? It’s so gray and the sky looks like the side of a frozen fish. A frozen fish! Have you noticed?”

  “Yes,” said Armina.

  “Of course,” said the Moth. “And then, in January, that’s when men come to see me more than usual. Maybe they are thinking about springtime. What do you think?”

  He brushed his shirt again.

  “Is that what you want to talk about?” he said.

  “We’ve found some young women in the park,” she said.

  “So I’ve heard,” said the Moth. “That’s right.”

  He turned his green eyes with their inflamed lids toward her: in his false concern there was that same impertinence. What did she really want?

  “We’re interested in men who are interested in young girls,” said Armina.

  “Yes,” he said. “I see. And you came to me. Well, I’m flattered, as you can see. A poor man like me. I am touched that you think I am so moral. So correct.” He took a bite of his sandwich and chewed, brushed at his shirtfront, and then turned his smile on her and said, with his mouth still full, “And why would I want to talk to you?”

  “Excuse me?” she said.

  He swallowed.

  “And why would I want to talk to you?” he said.

  “It’s always a good thing to have a friend in Inspectorate A,” said Armina.

  “So,” he said. “You come to me as a friend. That’s sweet.” He nodded to himself. “Say it.”

  He looked up at her. She felt the insulting nature of this, since they both knew it wasn’t quite friendship that was being offered so much as the possibility of some small favor. Having her lie pleased him, and she resisted the desire to slap him.

  “Yes,” she said. “That’s right.”

  “Friendship,” he said. “Say it.”

  “Friendship,” she said.

  He looked around. A tall, blond man began to approach, and then, after the Moth lifted his fingers, the man went away.

  “And,” said Armina, “a man who is hurting girls like that might hurt one of yours.”

  “Mine?” said the Moth. “Whatever can you mean?”

  He put the last of his sandwich in the waxed paper, folded it in his napkin, and wrapped them into a bulky package that he put into his pocket.

  “But still,” he said. “I can imagine what you are saying. And I could depend on you. As a friend?”

  “I can be a good friend,” she said.

  “Umpf,” he said. His reddish glance met hers again, the insult of it an accurate estimation of how lonely she really was and perceiving it in the worst possible way.

  “I know a man,” said the Moth. “Tall. Elegant. He wears such clothes. Why you wouldn’t believe. London. Paris. Why he has ties from Hermès. You can see he is from the top drawer. A university graduate. You know, he says he is a man who only wants to do good. Good. Can you imagine in a place like this? Why, look around.”

  He smiled as he gestured toward the men who stood in the shadows.

  “Good! Why, what a perversion of meaning! What a way of using words
so you can’t tell what they mean!” said the Moth. “He has a rescue service for girls who work around here. Medicine girls. But you know what I think. I think there’s something rum about him. Let me help you, he says. There’s something rum. In my opinion,” said the Moth.

  “Yes,” said Armina. “That’s what I mean.”

  “Of course,” said the Moth. “I understand.”

  He took the bar of lavender soap out of his pocket and held it in his red hand.

  “Can you give me the name?” said Armina.

  “Oh, the name,” said the Moth. He held the lavender soap to his nose and sniffed it as gently as a flower. He looked at Armina’s legs, her shoes, her hips in her gray skirt. “You know those days in the spring we get after those hard winters? Great fluffs of clouds drag along, gray underneath. A beautiful day. And that gray, on the bottom of the clouds, on the underside, don’t you think it makes it better?”

  “What better?” said Armina.

  “Oh, everything,” he said.

  “The name,” said Armina.

  He glanced at her, sniffed the lavender soap.

  “You’ll have to excuse me,” he said. “I like to give myself a little brushup after lunch.”

  He stood up, brushed the last of the crumbs from his sweater, and looked around.

  “I’ll wait,” she said.

  “Oh, it might be a long time,” he said. “Sometimes you have to wait a long time for things. Think about the springtime.”

  “Look,” she said. She swallowed. “I meant what I said about friendship.”

  “Did you?” he said. “I thought you’d say that. Bruno Hauptmann. Bruno Hauptmann. He lives in Wilmersdorf. That’s where you can find him. Tall man. Well dressed. Beautiful hands.”

  SHE CONTACTED OTHER informers, waiters, bartenders, men and women who were involved in the cocaine and morphine trade or pornography, all of whom had a reason to be friendly with Armina, just as she spoke to men who had been arrested in compromising circumstances, such as beating a prostitute in the park. She consulted other policemen in Inspectorate A, no matter what their political bias.

  Political point of view might be a problem, as it had in other murders, and even though Ritter was taking a more thorough interest in her cases, she hoped he would leave her alone about this. The dead woman in the park was a fact that should make political visions—and the desire to make details fit political beliefs—simply vanish, or so Armina hoped. Surely, no one could use this to blame one side or another.

  The Inspectorate was evenly divided among the three political divisions in the city: the Communists, who wanted to take over; the Socialists, who were in charge and were trying to govern; and the right wing, the collection of such groups as the Steel Helmets, the Nazis, and others, all of whom wanted to take over, too. Sometimes it seemed that the Communists and the Nazis were working together, or, at least, they were both attacking the government. A Communist police officer (who, of course, was discreet about his affiliation) would blame a member of the right wing for a crime, and the opposite was true, too: the Nazis or the Steel Helmets blamed a Communist for a crime that was obviously done by someone else. The courts were the most biased: a Communist was far more likely to be convicted and to do time than a member of a right-wing group. Armina thought that these specious lies, told for political advantage, would have to confront the marks on the woman’s legs, the torn underwear, the cigarette butts, the stained underwear. These were her arguments against the errors of perception, whether cynical or so biased as to be unable to see facts clearly.

  She looked for other possibilities, although many men in Berlin had secret lives and weren’t obvious in what they were up to after dark. Even so, Armina had a list of those known to informers and the police. A banker, who waited in the park at night on a bench, staring into the dark, counting the women who passed him, as though his keeping track of money left him incapable of any other appreciation but a summation. Sometimes, though, he approached a woman and said that he needed to smell a woman’s hair, her clothes, her perfume, and, as he did this, he swore in a constant, increasingly violent way. His name was Weber.

  Armina added his name to the list, along with the man and woman, Alda and Michael Bauer, who worked as a team. They hired a woman to come to a cheap hotel room, and then Alda held her down while the man had his way—the women from the park had said these two were odd, not in what they wanted (which was pretty common) but in their attitude in how they did it. Alda Bauer had three tattoos, one on each breast and one in the middle, the two words, just below each nipple, bound to a word between them: Liebe and Hass linked to Wunsch. Love and Hate make Desire. Armina added Alda and her husband, Michael, to the list.

  A fireman by the name of Mueller liked to go to the park, and yet he never spoke to the women there but only communicated by hand signals, as though deaf, pointing at what he wanted and tugging a woman’s hair. And then there were men, Arnwolf, Kortig, Hahn, and others, who paid the women, dump girls, who hired themselves out to be beaten. These creatures stood in the light, as though their bruises were a kind of shingle they hung out, like a shoe above a cobbler.

  Armina added the names of these men, too, along with men who had been known to push their wives around, or the ones who were so intense in this that members of the Inspectorate thought that it was only a matter of time before one of them killed a wife or someone else for that matter. Armina looked over the list and broke the names down by violence and then by geographical location. They didn’t live, as she had suspected, in the worst parts of town and not the best, either, but in neighborhoods that were distinguished by how ordinary they were, all the buildings squat, relatively well maintained with flowers planted where there was a bare piece of ground.

  She went to see the first one.

  Gaelle got out of the taxi in front of her parents’ building, checked to make sure she had her rhinestone handbag, took a step toward the building door, but then turned back to the cab. It was gone. She waved at it as it went down the street, trailing a long plume of exhaust, but the driver didn’t see her. She’d have to go in.

  The metal gate of the elevator slid aside with a creak that reminded her of a stiff joint, and when she was inside, the cage moved with a whining ascent. She took out her compact and looked at her face. Her mother had given her the compact, but before she had handed it over, she had used the flesh-colored pad and the powder to touch up Gaelle’s icy cheek. “There. That’s not so bad,” she had said.

  “Oh,” said Gaelle’s mother. “Oh. Come in. Come in. I was afraid you’d never come back.”

  “I wanted to see you,” said Gaelle.

  “Is something wrong?” said her mother.

  “No,” said Gaelle. “Can I come in?”

  “Yes,” said her mother. “Your father isn’t here. He’s at the bank.”

  Her mother only looked at the unmarked side of Gaelle’s face, and this insistence on only one half left Gaelle with the sensation of her face being divided.

  “It’s so nice to see you,” said her mother. “Is it?” said Gaelle.

  “Yes,” said her mother. “You don’t know what it’s like. You can’t understand what it’s like to be a mother.”

  “What’s it like?” said Gaelle.

  “Oh,” said her mother. “It’s not like that. You can’t just say that.” She took Gaelle by the hand. “You know, I hear the silence here now that you’re gone.”

  “My life is pretty noisy,” said Gaelle.

  “Is it?” said her mother. “Well, that’s nice.”

  “I’ve missed you,” said Gaelle.

  “Well, I’ve missed you,” said her mother. “It’s a good thing your father isn’t here.”

  The living room had a blue-gray sofa with a high, curved back and lion’s claws for legs and a marble-topped table stood in front of it. The same pictures of hanging game, pheasants and rabbits, were still in their gilt frames. A faded Persian carpet was on the floor. A clock ticked in the hall, a
nd for a while they both listened to the tick, tick, tick like something dripping.

  “I’ll get some tea,” her mother said. “You remember how I brought it to you when you were sick. A surprise tea, remember? That’s what I called it.”

  Gaelle sat on the sofa and faced the pictures of dead pheasants and rabbits, the feathers bright, the fur painted with a million fine strokes. Then she touched her face. Her fingers came away with powder, just a dry, pinkish oval at the end of each tip. From the kitchen came the sounds as her mother put sugar, some buns, jam, cream in a silver pitcher on a silver tray, and the small clinks and clicks were everything that Gaelle craved: order, small domestic pleasures, the presence of smooth china. What could go wrong in a world where such things existed? She touched the scar and then looked down at her rhinestone bag.

  Her mother brought in the silver tray with the spout of the teapot trailing mist, like a minute locomotive. She poured tea into a cup with roses on it, added cream just the way Gaelle like it, and pushed it into Gaelle’s hands. For a moment they both held the cup, and Gaelle felt the pressure from the tips of her mother’s fingers, the same touch that she had used to tuck Gaelle in at night, to caress Gaelle’s face when she had had a fever, to straighten her clothes before she had gone to school.

  “So, what’s wrong?” her mother said.

  “I just thought I’d come here,” said Gaelle.

  “Home,” said her mother. “Isn’t that what you mean?”

  “I wanted to see you,” said Gaelle.

  Gaelle got up from her chair and sat next to her mother, and without thinking, she put her head into her mother’s lap.

  “Oh,” said her mother. “You haven’t done that in a long time.”

  Gaelle shook her head against her mother’s thighs.