The Informer

by Craig Nova

  Uli Altman appeared at the door in his brown pants, his shiny shoes, although his suspenders were hanging from his waist as he worked on his tie. The scent of soap and pomade came into the room.

  “Yes?” said Uli.

  “She’s from the police,” said Gaelle’s mother.

  “I knew it would come to this,” said Uli. “She stays out all night. God knows where she goes. Why, she’s got her own apartment. How is she paying for it, that’s what I’d like to know? And you know what, she refuses to bring her friends home so we can meet them. It’s always in some dance hall or cinema or in the park or something. Six-day bicycle races. Now why would anyone want to race a bicycle for six days. What can possibly be the point of that?”

  Gaelle’s mother began to cry.

  “Look,” Uli said, as though the tears settled an issue. “I have some bad news,” Armina said. In spite of herself, even when she tried to resist it, she put her face in her hands.

  “How bad?” Uli said.

  Gaelle’s mother cried all the harder.

  “Well, what has she done?” said Uli. “She has been arrested, hasn’t she?”

  “No,” said Armina.

  “Oh god, oh god,” said Gaelle’s mother. “I tried to warn her. I thought she was all right, you know? But she was in the park. I know it.” Gaelle’s mother put her hands together. “Did she drown? Did she fall downstairs? Is that what happened?”

  “No,” said Armina. “We don’t know what happened, not yet.”

  Armina swallowed and looked around at the heavy furniture, the sofa with lion’s feet, the hanging game in the picture. What had Gaelle’s voice sounded like here?

  “Oh, no,” said Uli.

  He sat down, too, and then Armina took a chair opposite them.

  “You mean someone killed her,” said Uli.

  “Yes,” said Armina. She closed her yes. Nodded.

  Gaelle’s mother reached over for Uli’s hand, and he took hers with a surprising tenderness. In the innocence of their grief, the two of them appeared almost as they had been twenty-five years before: youthful, hesitant, courting. They sat together, holding hands, neither one saying a word. A horn honked outside and a horse drawing a cart made a muted sound.

  “Where was she?” said Uli.

  “By the river,” said Armina. “By the Spree.”

  “She always liked the river,” said Gaelle’s mother. “She used to like to stand on the bridge and watch the current go by.”

  “That was in the old days, when she was just a girl,” said Uli. “She held my hand.” He swallowed. “I can’t remember the last time I picked her up. There is a last time. You just never know it.”

  Uli shook his head. He looked around the apartment as though the things in it, the heavy curtains, the gloomy silence, were something he could hang on to but found lacking.

  “I think she was going into the park,” said Gaelle’s mother. “With men …”

  “No,” said Uli. “We don’t have to say that. What’s wrong with you? Can’t you leave me something?”

  “You’re just worried about the bank,” said Gaelle’s mother. “That’s all. What will the bank think?”

  He got up and left the room. Then they heard him moving around in the back of the apartment, opening drawers, throwing things on the floor. Gaelle’s mother sat with her head in her hands. Then Uli came back with an album of pictures: Gaelle as a young girl in a white dress, eating an ice cream at a lake in the mountains. She sat at a table and put the spoon into her mouth.

  “See,” he said. “That is the way she was. Like that! See?”

  “Please, Uli,” said Gaelle’s mother. “Please.”

  Armina felt the tug of the pictures, the innocence of them, and for a moment she just stared. Then she bit her lip.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Of course you are,” said Gaelle’s mother. “It’s not your fault.”

  “I don’t know,” said Uli. “I don’t know.”

  The two of them sat side by side, looking at the photographs, turning the sepia pages, which closed with a small, sighing whoosh of air. Armina waited. Then she said that she would be calling on them again. They nodded, without looking up, and Armina went to the door. The two of them held hands, looking at the pictures of the family. Then Gaelle’s mother started crying again, saying, “It was just a stage. Isn’t that what we thought?

  Wasn’t it?”

  Uli concentrated on a picture, his face collapsing like an accordion.

  “Yes. Yes,” he said. “That’s what we hoped.”

  Armina went down the stairs, her motion around the landings seeming to her like a mathematical illustration, a drawing of a spiral as obvious as a corkscrew, and she tried to cling to this idea, if only not to have to go on thinking, to sum up, to face that seasickness and the sense of swinging back and forth at the end of a long rope.

  Armina’s brother, Rolf, had been born deaf and he had grown up in a world of his deaf friends, who attended a special school with him. Often, Armina came home to find Rolf with five or six other children who spoke with their hands, although the atmosphere in her parents’ house changed from the cheerful intensity of his friends when he was ten and eleven to the more sullen brooding of these get-togethers when he was eighteen and nineteen Then the movement of the fingers, the gestures, were argumentative. Rolf became increasingly sullen, and as he left a room when Armina came in, he brushed by her, even bumping her, as though this abrupt contact were a continuation of his talk with his hands. Rolf had joined a rifle club, and he was an excellent shot. In fact, he had taught Armina to shoot, and when she went to the pistol range she often thought of her brother and his advice, which he had given with his hands: feel your heart, keep the bead flat in the notch, squeeze between breaths.

  He had a collection of firearms and spent hours cleaning and handling his Mannlicher-Schönauer 6.5 mm, with set triggers and a forend that ran all the way up to the muzzle. At night, he sat in his room, using an empty cartridge so he could dry fire the rifle, the click lingering in the air of the apartment like the first, innocent sound of trouble.

  Rolf and his friends had a basement in an abandoned building where they met in a club they had formed called Steel Hands. It was there that Rolf had begun putting dynamite together. No one had been able to discover where he had gotten the waxy, pale yellow sticks, and when the bomb went off, with Rolf in the basement, it made a crater ten feet deep. His friends had tried to explain to Armina’s parents, wiping their eyes and gesturing with wet fingers. Rolf had just liked the power of making the thing. He had never meant it to go off. He was playing.

  Armina stood in front of Precinct 88 and put her fingers into her hair, then looked at herself in the windows of the café next door, ran her hand over her skirt, and stood up straight. She felt that she was somehow responsible for what had happened to her brother (if she had loved him more would he have been safer, more secure?), and now as she passed back and forth, trying to get a breath of fresh air before going in, she considered the interior silence of his life, the fact of it like a fog, like something he could never shake. She considered, too, the hush of the church when she had gone there for Easter with her parents: how reassuring it had been, and how soothing to touch two people who had so completely loved her.

  The note from Ritter was in the middle of her desk, on the green blotter. He wanted to see her. Did she have a moment? He’d be in his office all afternoon. All right, she thought, why not now as any other time?

  The atmosphere of the shed clung to her like the scent of smoke, made all the worse when she thought of the disorder of Gaelle’s splayed legs on dirt.

  She climbed the stairs, where the scent of soap was as strong as always, and in the hallway outside Ritter’s office the typewriters sounded like machines of fate. She passed the doors with frosted glass and then tapped on Ritter’s door.

  “Armina,” he said. “Come in.”

  He said this without looking up, a
lthough he motioned to a chair opposite his desk. She didn’t think he had the authority to fire her, not on his own, but then he might try. She would have to stand up then and say, Fuck you. Was that the correct way of handling this? Or was there something else he could do, something a little more subtle, more difficult to describe but still easy to understand.

  “You wanted to see me?” she said.

  He looked up, his gray eyes as always, not warm, not cold, the vacuousness of their expression somehow worse than obvious viciousness and frank ill will. There was no comfort in emptiness, since it wouldn’t stop anything.

  She squared her shoulders and looked down at him.

  “Sit down,” he said.

  “I’ll stand,” she said.

  “As you please,” he said.

  The typing started again.

  “Before we get started,” he said, “I wanted to say that I am a great admirer of music. I try to get to most of the concerts in town, Brahms, Schubert, Beethoven. I’m collecting recordings, too. For instance, here is one of a Beethoven sonata. Do you recognize it?”

  He reached into his desk and took out a 78, which was in a manila envelope cut so that the label, in the middle of the record, could be seen. A red label with bright letters, like the print on a box that held the best lingerie from Paris.

  “Yes,” said Armina.

  “Your mother was a great technical performer.”

  “I’d like to think it was more than that,” said Armina.

  Ritter raised an eyebrow.

  “Well, maybe. She was precise. Lovely, really. How crisp the notes are.”

  A crank-up record player sat on a chest, and Ritter removed the record from its sleeve, put it on the felt turntable, and then wound the crank as though he were making an urgent phone call.

  “Do you have to play this?” said Armina.

  “Don’t you want to hear your mother?” said Ritter.

  “Not like this,” she said.

  “Do you have bad feelings about her?” said Ritter.

  “No,” said Armina. “I came here to talk about Gaelle.”

  “Gaelle?” said Ritter.

  “A woman with a scar,” said Armina. “She worked in the park.”

  “Oh, her,” said Ritter. “Well, this record is part of the discussion. Your mother was a fine musician, one of the best, but she misses a note. I want you to hear it.”

  “She was sick when she made this recording,” said Armina.

  “Yes, I know,” said Ritter.

  He started the record. The music was clear and ordered, the execution of it precise. Armina had the desire to close her eyes, as she did at home when she listened. Sometimes, just the first note of this piece was enough to bring tears to her eyes. Now, she stared at Ritter. The music hung in the air like perfume. She sat down in spite of herself, as though the music weighed a hundred pounds.

  “There,” said Ritter. “Right there. A pity really.”

  Armina went on staring at him.

  “I’m trying to get your attention,” he said. “You seem to be ignoring my advice.”

  “I told you,” she said. “I think they are all tied together. Hauptmann, the women in the park, Gaelle.”

  “Just sex, huh?” said Ritter.

  “Yes,” she said. “What else could there be?”

  Ritter turned to the music.

  “There,” he said. “She’s missed another note.”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “And what about Breiter?” said Armina. “You’re skittish about that, too.”

  “Don’t,” said Ritter. He shook his head. “You want to advance here, don’t you? You’ve worked so hard. Why make a mistake when you don’t have to. You’re not sick, are you?”

  “No,” she said.

  He stood up and turned off the record player.

  “I want to take a look at Hauptmann, too,” she said.

  “No, you don’t,” said Ritter. “Trust me.”

  He put his hand on her mother’s record.

  “It was such a small error,” he said.

  “She was ill,” said Armina.

  Shadows swept over the glitter of the door of his office. The typing started again. The scent of a cigar from a man lighting one in the hall came into the room.

  “You’ve been warned,” said Ritter.

  “I’m not done with this,” she said.

  “If you’re smart you are,” said Ritter.

  Armina stood up.

  “Well,” she said. “Good afternoon.”

  “Thanks for coming in to see me,” said Ritter. “I appreciate it.” Armina put her hand on the enormous knob.

  “Here,” said Ritter. “Do you want this?”

  He held out the recording. Footsteps went by outside. Armina stood straight up.

  “It was a small flaw,” he said. “But maybe it was just hiding another, larger one. Maybe it was a symptom of the flaws she carried….”

  “Don’t,” said Armina. “Don’t mention my brother.”

  “Here,” said Ritter. He held out the record. “Take it. Do the smart thing.”

  She didn’t want the record but she didn’t want him to be touching it either. He held it out. The manila sleeve was a little yellowed, and yet the passage of time had made it seem more dignified and precious, as though the aging of the paper showed how frail Armina’s connection to this part of her life really was. She reached out and took it, doing so, she hoped, with a touch, a small shove.

  “I told you what I’m going to do,” she said.

  “Well, fine,” said Ritter. “That’s a decision you had to make.”

  He turned his face down to his desk, moved some papers around, and then said with a malice so quiet that it was like a breeze, like a whiff of the first approach of winter on a wind, subtle but unmistakable, “Don’t underestimate me.”

  “That’s funny,” she said. “That’s just what I was going to tell you.”

  Armina joined the funeral for Gaelle as the members of the Ring came down the avenue, two by two, all in rented tailcoats, striped trousers, and choker collars. The men followed the four black horses whose coats were as shiny as new shoes, and behind the men came their wives and girlfriends who weren’t formal members of the Ring but nevertheless still joined in. The marchers kept a two-step cadence, which ebbed and flowed and made the women’s skirts sway. The procession was made of two layers, or so it seemed, a collection of white faces above a mass of black clothes. And finally, behind the mob, a man came with a shovel in case the horses made a mess in the street.

  The horseshoes hit the pavement with a silvery ringing, and the sound reverberated through Armina as though a blacksmith were hitting an anvil: she didn’t know why she recognized this silvery ringing, the associations of it so deeply buried as though it were a memory, but the sound left her with a sensation of some past grief combining perfectly with this one. The emptiness Gaelle left behind was like being in a room where things are obvious for the first time: how much Armina had cared, how much, in a way she found difficult to describe, she had been comforted by the scar. It had shown the possibilities of defiance, and yet, it had come to this. At least Armina could pay her respects.

  Karl was a head above the rest, his hands swaying with the same motion as the woman’s skirts. His shirt was buttoned up to the neck, and his rough coat was clean, but he seemed half awake as he kept up with the horses, the mourners, and the hearse with the glass sides. The crowd was a good one, and he knew Gaelle would have liked that, since she had always said to him that her funeral would be the saddest on earth: no one would come.

  Karl guessed the woman with the red hair was a cop, and as she came along, swaying with the cadence of the others and flinching at the ringing of the horses hooves on the cobbles, he wanted to unburden himself, to tell her what he could to help, but to do that, he’d have to say that he was there, on the street, when Breiter was killed, that he knew that last thing Breiter saw was his dog taking a crap. So how mu
ch could he say without making trouble for himself? The horses came along with the jingling of the harness, and the glass windows of the hearse showed the blue sky, the reflection of the buildings on the street like some vision from a seance, some suggestion of a passage to the underworld. Karl walked with it and thought, I’d like to get the bastards who did this to Gaelle. I really would. So, how much can I say? I was there? I know who was after her? Although, he thought, I know only some of them. There could have been others.

  Franz Nachtmann wore a black version of his usual brown suit, waistcoat included, the chain of his watch more visible. From time to time he turned to see the members of the Ring, his expression one of sweet surprise, or charmed pleasure that so many members had turned out. Then he lumbered from side to side like a man carrying a heavy trunk. At least, he thought, Gaelle had kept her funeral insurance paid up.

  Armina knew Gaelle would have liked the mysterious sheen on the horses’ coats, the dark tack of the harness, the steadfast expression of the coachman as the procession flowed through the cemetery gates like a snake going around a stump. And yet the marchers had an air of barely subdued hilarity, as though the open hole, the black clothes, the glass sides of the hearse, the trembling of the black feathers that stuck up from each of the four corners, even the man with the shovel were part of some ghastly joke that each one of them, at some point, was going to have to endure.

  At the side of the grave, men and women looked at the hole in the ground while the black box disappeared from sight. The members of the funeral reached down for the earth that was piled near the grave, took a handful, and dropped it in.

  Armina’s hands trembled as she picked up some dirt, too, and let it slip out of her fingers. In the dryness of it, she still felt a mysterious tug, as though Armina were more bound to Gaelle through this moment than she was separated from her by the tawdry things Gaelle had done.

  Karl’s shadow swept up like someone dragging a black cape over the ground. Then he dropped some dirt into the hole, too, doing so slowly and with great delicacy. The other mourners shuffled forward, stooped to get some dirt, dropped it in, wiped their hands, and moved away. Karl’s indifferent glance swept over the crowd and then stopped at Armina. Then she glanced up, too, into his face. He went right on staring at her, stepping closer, his shape blotting out the sunlight. He made a gesture to the grave and shrugged, as though this were an infinite punishment for everything he had done.