'Yes. Poor-quality carbon rubber. You can't even recap tyres like that, can't burn them or recycle them. Trabi tyres. The investigators think Tommy fell asleep and lost control. Fatal one-man, one-car accidents are always the most difficult to reconstruct. Unless it was a two-car accident and a larger vehicle came from behind and smashed the Trabi into the ramp. If Tommy had any family or any enemies, the investigation would still be open.'
'It's closed?'
'Germany has so many road accidents, terrible accidents on the autobahn, we can't investigate them all. If you want to kill a German, do it on the road.'
'Were there any flash marks in the car, any sign of arson?'
'No.'
Peter raced in reverse, and with no more than a tap of the brake snapped the car around so that it followed its nose. Arkady remembered that he had flown jets. In Texas, where there was less to hit.
'When Tommy was burning you shouted that you saw a fire like that before. Who?'
'A racketeer.' Arkady corrected himself. 'A banker named Rudik Rosen. He burned up in an Audi. Audis burn well, too. After Rudy died he got a fax from the machine that we saw at the station.'
'The sender thought he was alive?'
'Yes.'
'What kind of car fire was it? Electrical? Collision?'
'Different from this. It was arson. A bomb.'
'Different? I have another question. Before this Rosen died, were you in his car with him?'
'Yes.'
'Why is that the first thing I completely believe? Renko, you're still lying about everything else. There's more than Benz involved. Who else? Remember, there's a plane leaving for Moscow tomorrow. You could still be on it.'
'Tommy and I were looking for something.'
'What?'
'A red Bronco.'
Ahead, rear lights lined the shoulder of the road. On the turnout were the taller outlines of off-the-road vehicles. Peter swerved up among them and coasted to a stop. Figures jumped out of the way, arms shielding their eyes. From the dashboard he took torches for Arkady and himself. When they got out, they were accosted by men angry about the intrusion into turnout privacy. Peter straight-armed one and snarled convincingly enough at another to send him backpedalling between fenders. There seemed to be two sides of Peter Schiller, Arkady thought: the Aryan ideal and the werewolf – nothing in between.
Peter worked through the women waiting for customers while Arkady moved along vehicles that had pulled back to the far side of the turnout to consummate business. Since he didn't know what a Bronco looked like, he had to read the name on each vehicle. Wasn't a bronco a bucking horse? No, that wasn't the sound. It was more like the beating of a damp drum or, in the shells of the vehicles, the mating of turtles.
There were no red Broncos, but Peter returned from the other side of the turnout to say that one had just left with a driver named Tima. He didn't seem discouraged. Maybe he drove a little faster getting back on to the motorway.
Arkady imagined the night trailing behind them like a scarf. The rest of Munich lived quietly to a schedule, ate its muesli, hiked to work, paid for sex. Peter moved as if he lived at a higher r.p.m.
'I think when you were in the Trabi waiting for Tommy, somebody saw you. Then poor Tommy started home and someone followed him. It wasn't an accident. It was murder, but they thought they were killing you.'
'You want to drive around until someone tries to kill us?'
'To clear my head. Are you following someone from Moscow? Or has someone followed you?'
'At this point I'd follow anything. I'd pick out one star and aim at that.'
'Like my grandfather?'
'Maybe your grandfather is connected and maybe he's not. I honestly don't know.'
'Have you ever met Benz?'
'No.'
'Have you talked to anyone who's met Benz?'
'Tommy. Slow down,' Arkady said. Walking on the shoulder of the road was a girl in a red leather jacket and boots, and as they went by he saw that she had black hair and a round Uzbek face. 'Stop!'
She was angry and not in the mood for a lift. Her German was a dialect of Russian.
'That Arschloch threw me out of my car. I'll kill him.'
'What did your car look like?' Arkady asked.
She stamped her boot. ' Scheisse, everything I have is in there.'
'Maybe we can find it.'
'Pictures and personal letters.'
'We'll look for it. What kind is it?'
She looked off towards the dark and reconsidered. Uzbekistan is a long way off, Arkady thought. Her legs looked thin and cold. She said, 'Never mind. I'll take care of it myself.'
Peter said, 'If someone stole your car, you should report it to the police.'
She studied him and the BMW, with its extra aerial and spotlight. 'No.'
'What's Tima short for?' Arkady asked.
'Fatima.' Immediately she added, 'I never said my name was Tima.'
'Did he take the car two nights ago?'
She crossed her arms. 'Have you been watching me?'
'Do you come from Samarkand or Tashkent?'
'Tashkent. How do you know so much? I'm not talking to you.'
'How long ago tonight did he take the car?'
She set her face and started walking again, wobbling on her heels. Uzbeks had once been the Golden Horde of Tamerlane that had swept from Mongolia to Moscow. This was the end, stumbling on the autobahn.
They drove into the Red Square car park and cruised through. There was no red Bronco. A contingent of business-men were trooping loudly from vans into the sex club.
'Slumming,' Peter said. 'The Stuttgart set. They'll only touch the beer here and then they'll go home and fuck their wives silly.' He shot a little gravel at them as he swung by.
Back on the road, Peter was calmer, as if he had reached some internal decision. Arkady relaxed, too, more in tune with the speed.
The city spread as they approached, not like wildfire, more like a battlefield of moths.
A red Bronco sat in front of Benz's flat. The windows were dark. They drove by twice, parked on the next block and returned on foot.
Peter stayed in the shadow of a tree while Arkady walked up the steps and pushed the button to the flat. No voice came over the intercom. No window lit upstairs.
Peter joined him. 'He's gone.'
'The car is here.'
'Maybe he went for a walk.'
'A midnight walk?'
Peter said, 'He's an Ossie, how many cars can he have? Renko, let's act like detectives and see what we can find.'
He gave Arkady a torch, led him to the Bronco and opened the tweezers of a combination knife. The chrome on the front bumper was untouched, but its rubber guard sparkled in the torch's beam. Peter squatted and teased from the rubber what looked like threads of glass.
'One reason it's almost impossible to reprocess a Trabi is that the fibreglass body breaks up into such sharp splinters.' He dropped pieces into a paper envelope. 'Dead or alive, a Trabi is very difficult to handle.'
Peter radioed in the Bronco's number-plate. While they waited for an answer he shook pieces from the envelope into the ashtray, then turned the flame of his lighter directly on the threads. They lit like yellow kindling; strings of black ash rose on brown smoke, and a familiar, noxious aroma filled the car.
'Pure Trabi.' Peter blew out the flame. 'Proving nothing. There's not enough left of Tommy's Trabi to match to this, but even a lawyer would have to say the Bronco hit something.'
The radio spoke rapid German. Peter wrote on a pad 'Fantasy Tours' and the address of Boris Benz.
Arkady said, 'Ask how many cars are registered in Fantasy's name.'
Peter asked, then wrote on the pad the number '18'. Also, 'Pathfinders, Navahos, Cherokees, Troopers, Rovers'.
He put the phone back in its sleeve. 'You said you never met Benz.'
'I said that Tommy had met Benz.'
'You said that you and Tommy were on the motorway because you were looking for Benz.
You went to the sex club first.'
'Tommy saw him there a year ago.'
'Who was the connection? How did they meet?'
Arkady had succeeded in keeping Max's name from Peter because Max was only one step away from Irina. It would be a bitter outcome, he thought, if he came all this way just to drag her into Peter's investigation.
Peter said, 'Why would they meet? Tommy wanted to talk to Benz about the war?'
'I'm sure Tommy told him about it. He was interviewing people for a book about the war. He was obsessed with it. His flat is a museum of the war.'
'I was there.'
'What did you think?'
Peter's eyes looked energized, as if they had picked up electricity from the radio. From his jacket he produced a key. 'I think we should visit this museum again.'
Swastikas stretched across two walls. The Wehrmacht map covered a third. On the shelves were Tommy's collection of gas masks, tin Panzers, a hub cap from Hitler's touring car, assorted ammunition, Goebbels's reinforced shoe. A clock in the shape of an eagle said twelve.
Peter said, 'I was here earlier. In and out. Normally we don't search the flats of traffic victims.'
On the table where the birthday cake for the Berlin Wall had melted, a typewriter was set up with notes, paper and filing cards. Peter wandered about, focusing field glasses, trying on an armband and an SS cap, like an actor let loose in a prop room. He lifted a helmet, the one Tommy had worn at the party.
'Alas, poor Jürgen, I knew him well.'
He laid down the helmet and picked up a dental mould. 'Hitler's teeth,' Arkady said.
Peter opened the mould. 'Sieg heil!'
The short hairs on Arkady's neck rose.
'Do you know why we lost the war?' Peter asked.
'Why did you lose the war?'
'It was explained to me by an old man. We were hiking in the Alps. We were on a high meadow surrounded by wild flowers when we stopped to eat. The subject of the war came up. He said the Nazis had committed "excesses", but the real reason Germany lost the war was because of sabotage. There were workers in the munitions factory who deliberately degraded the gunpowder in the shells to make our weapons ineffective. Otherwise we would have been able to hold out for an honourable peace. He described the grandfathers and boys fighting in the ruins of Berlin, stabbed in the back by those saboteurs. It was years later when I learned that those saboteurs were Russians and Jews, slave labour being starved to death while they worked. I remembered the flowers, the wonderful view, the tears in his eyes.'
He put the mould down, joined Arkady at the table and flipped through the filing cards, notes and pages. 'What are you looking for?' Arkady asked.
'Answers.'
They searched the drawers of the desk and night table, folders that were stuffed in cabinets, address books discovered under the bed. Finally, next to the phone in the kitchen, numbers without names were pencilled on the wall. Peter gave a laugh of dark amusement, nailed one number with his finger and dialled the phone.
Considering the hour, the other end answered quickly. Peter said, 'Grandfather, I'm coming over with my friend Renko.'
The older Schiller padded around in a silk dressing gown and velvet slippers. His living room was covered in Oriental carpets. His lamps had shades of stained glass.
'I was awake anyway. The middle of the night is the best time to read.'
The banker seemed to make a firm distinction between work and personal life. Bookshelves accommodated not tomes on banking regulations but art books that ran from Turkish rugs to Japanese ceramics. Objets d'art – a Greek bronze of a dolphin, Mexican skulls of sugar and jade, a Chinese alabaster dog – sat under spotlights arranged by someone who had taken great care to display eclectic pieces of modest size but unusual quality. A dark ikon of a madonna was in the traditional place, high in a corner that would have been the 'beautiful corner' of a pre-Revolutionary peasant house. Its thick wood was split and the madonna's face was shrouded by smoke, which made her eyes seem all the more luminous.
Schiller poured tea into a gilded cup. He wore a brace under his dressing gown, Arkady realized, and leaned stiffly, marble from the waist up.
'I'm sorry, I don't have any jam. I remember that Russians love their tea with jam.'
Peter paced back and forth.
'Walk,' his grandfather told him. 'It's good for the rug.' He turned to Arkady. 'When he was a boy, Peter would march a kilometre on that carpet, back and forth. He always had too much energy. He can't help it.'
'Why did the American have your number?' Peter asked.
'His book, his moronic book. He's the sort who lurks in graveyards and thinks he has a career. He kept pestering me, but I refused to be interviewed by him. I suspect he gave my name to Benz.'
'The bank was not involved?' Arkady asked.
Schiller allowed himself the thinnest suggestion of a smile. 'Bayern-Franconia would no more invest in the Soviet Union than in the far side of the moon. Benz approached me personally.'
Peter said, 'Benz is a pimp. He runs a string of prostitutes on the autobahn. What would he approach you about?'
'Real estate.'
'It was business?' Arkady asked.
Schiller sipped his tea. The cup was porcelain with a gilded rim. 'Before the war, we had our own bank in Berlin. We're not Bavarian.' He cast a concerned eye on his grandson. 'That's Peter's problem; he's not bred to be a drunken lout. Anyway, the family lived in Potsdam, outside the city. We also had a summer home on the coast. I've described them to Peter many times. Beautiful places. We lost them all. Bank and houses, everything ended up in the Soviet sector and then in the Democratic Republic of Germany. We lost them first to the Russians and then to the East Germans.'
Arkady said, 'With reunification I thought private property was being returned.'
'Oh, yes. The former East Germany is haunted now by Jewish ghosts. But we weren't helped because the new law excepted properties confiscated from '45 to '49, which was when we lost ours. Or so I thought until Benz appeared at my door.'
'What did he say?' Arkady asked.
'He represented himself as some sort of estate agent. He informed me that there was some question about exactly when the Potsdam house had been seized. When the Russians were in charge, many estates simply stood empty for years. Records had been lost or burned. Benz said he might be able to provide me with the proper documentation to help my claim.' Schiller turned stiffly in his chair. 'It was for you, too, Peter. He said he might be able to help us with the farm and the summer house, too. They could all be ours again.'
'For how much?' Peter asked.
'No money. Information.'
'Bank information?'
Schiller was offended. 'Personal history.' The banker shook off his slippers. His feet were mottled blue, with yellowed nails. Two toes were missing. 'Frostbite. I should live in Spain. Peter, you know where the brandy is. I feel a chill.'
Arkady asked, 'What did you do on the Eastern Front?'
Schiller cleared his throat. 'I was with a special detachment.'
'How special?'
'I understand what you're saying. Other special detachments rounded up Jews. I did nothing like that. My detachment gathered art. My father wanted to keep me out of the front line, so he got me attached to a group of SS who followed the advance. I was a boy, younger than either of you. He told me that I could protect art. He was right: without us, thousands of paintings, pieces of jewellery and irreplaceable books would have been spirited into knapsacks, been burned, melted down or completely disappeared. We were literally rescuing culture. The lists were already drawn up. Goering wrote one list, Goebbels another. We had teams of carpenters, packers, our own trains. The Wehrmacht had orders to keep the tracks open just to send our cargo back. It was an enormously busy autumn. When winter came we stalled outside Moscow, and that was the war right there, though we didn't know it.'
With brandy, the tea was better. The banker shifted in his chair. It occurred to Arkady that
for the older man every movement involved pain.
'This is what Tommy wanted to ask you about?' Arkady asked.
'Some of the same questions,' Schiller said.
Peter said, 'You told me you were captured outside Moscow and spent three years in a camp. You said you surrendered when your rifles froze.'
'My feet froze. To tell the truth, when I was captured I was hiding in a goods wagon. The SS men were shot on the spot. I would have been shot, too, if the Russians hadn't opened some cases and found ikons inside. There was some interrogation, which was not delicate. I agreed to make lists of what we'd taken. Then the whole war went in reverse. I was never in camp, not for a day. I travelled with the Red Army, first searching for what the SS had shipped. Then, as we moved further west, I acted as an advisor to special troops from the Soviet Ministry of Culture, helping to locate and send German works of art to Moscow. Stalin made a list, Beria made a list. We sent back even more because we found what the SS had taken from different countries – the Koenigs drawings from Holland, Poznan paintings from Poland. We stripped the Dresden Museum, the Prussian Royal Library, museum collections from Aachen, Weimar, Magdeburg.'
'In other words, you collaborated,' Peter said.
'I served history. I survived. I was hardly the only one. When the Russians arrived in Berlin, where do you think they went? While the city burned, while Hitler was still alive, they were in the museums. Rubens, Rembrandts, the gold of Troy disappeared, treasures that have never been seen again.'
'Were you there?' Arkady asked.
'No, I was still in Magdeburg. When we were done there, the Russians gave me a vodka. We'd been together for three years. I even wore a Red Army coat at that point. They took the coat off, marched me a few steps to an alley, shot me in the back and left me for dead. See, Peter, personal history.'
'What was Benz most interested in?' Arkady asked.
'Nothing in particular.' Schiller reconsidered. 'Actually, I had the feeling he was checking his list against mine. At heart he was a crude man, a real barracks bastard. In the end, all we talked about was how to build crates. The SS enlisted carpenters from the Berlin firm of Knauer, the most expert art transporters of the time. I drew him diagrams. He was more interested in nails and woods and documentation than in art.'
Red Square Page 28
