The Seventh Gate

by Richard Zimler

  Tonio gets into the habit of taking my brother and me out to lunch on Sunday afternoon whenever he is on leave. I’m certain that the first time he invites us out is to make up for his telling me that Hansi had to be sacrificed, but he soon discovers that he enjoys showing me off to other army men. It’s flattering that he considers me pretty enough to give him cachet, and it’s exciting to be kissed in public, but it’s also a troubling reminder of what I cannot do with Isaac. Often, I think I must be a mad-as-a-hatter young woman to be able to give myself to two such different men.

  Once, while Hansi, Tonio, and I are having dessert at a café in the Tiergarten, Tonio shocks me by asking if I see a lot of Isaac and Vera, whom he calls “that tall ugly woman.”

  “Hardly ever,” I say. “Only when I bump into one of them in our building.”

  He looks at me skeptically, then at Hansi, who is too busy devouring his chocolate mousse to give anything away. A close call, I think at the time. But when I’m alone in bed that night, I realize that Tonio must have been testing how I’d react; if he really wanted the truth, all he’d have to do is ask my brother when I’m not around. Or have me followed by a friend. Which means that either he doesn’t want to know or already does. Maybe he’s just trying to scare me.

  I invite Isaac out with me to the movies one Saturday in late April, mostly because it irritates me that Tonio has the advantage of being able to have a public relationship with me. Hansi comes too. Papa is spending the afternoon with Greta. God bless the day he walked into his office and found that mutant parrot waiting for him, because I can nearly always come and go as I please now.

  Isaac and I have never been out as a couple before. He warns me we mustn’t even brush against each other. While he’s buying tickets I overhear a young woman tell her husband how nice it is that “that old man” takes his grandchildren to the movies. “Thanks, Gramps,” I say when he returns to us, and I stand on my toes to give him a peck on his cheek.

  I adore provoking Isaac. It’s a game that means I am loved. And now that he knows how the game works, he makes his exaggerated silent movie faces. My very own Lon Chaney.

  The movie we see is Captain Blood. Not my choice, but it seems that Isaac and my brother would both like to be pirates, and Errol Flynn is dashing with his shoulder-length hair, so I agree. Isaac is sure all those luscious locks are real, but Hansi disagrees. I vote with my brother because he wants me to. Isaac fakes being disgusted with us both, and I reach for his hand about the time Errol is made into a slave. We conceal our locked fingers beneath Isaac’s beret. And just before the credits, I kiss him full on the lips. Not quite public lovemaking, but a good start.

  Greta calls to invite me to her apartment a few weeks later, and she instructs me not to tell Papa, which makes me think I should leave a trail of breadcrumbs in case she traps me in her oven. “A secret meeting just for us girls,” Greta laughs in her breathy way, as though her lungs were made out of wind. An early sign of emphysema? I can hope…

  Her sitting room has a black marble floor that’s so slick that I skate over to the high-backed leather sofa where she’s asked me to sit, my hands out and waving for balance. “Great floor,” I tell her. “You could sell tickets.”

  “Your father warned me you were amusing,” she replies with a wink of her bright, blue-shaded eyes, and she gives a little, sputtering laugh. Her lips shine like wet red peppers and maybe she doesn’t want to spoil the glossy effect by stretching them into a full smile. Or maybe she’s one of those people who talks about emotions but doesn’t actually feel them. No matter, she’s got on a low-cut blue gown—with tufts of black-dyed ermine at the shoulders—that makes her look slinky and glamorous, and a bit goofy, all qualities much more in demand than authenticity. It occurs to me that we could have fun together if she weren’t my father’s lover. We could act out entire plays and she’d never even be aware we were performing.

  Two stuffed chamois-heads are staring into nowhere-land over a white-marble fireplace that looks too polished and perfect to have ever been used. Crossed swords and halberds hang on the far wall, and a polar bear rug—its toothy mouth wide open—is splayed at my feet. Are Hansi and I next in line to provide decoration? “Who’s the hunter?” I ask, just in case.

  “My ex-husband. He shot at anything that moved. And a few things that didn’t.”

  “He should join the Gestapo.”

  “He prefers making lots of money.”

  She hands me my sherry. A new experience, and I associate the rest of our conversation with the syrupy sweetness coating my tongue. “There are your new brocade curtains,” I say, pointing.

  “Yes, you like them?”

  “Who wouldn’t?” That’s Isaac speaking from inside me, though I refrain from adding a Yiddish accent.

  Two gilded mirrors, each the size of a barn door, frame the entranceway that I’ve just come through. I catch a glimpse of an awkward girl who plays the clown too often and who might just prefer to be Greta than herself.

  “Guess which one’s the real thing,” she challenges me.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Only one of them is a real Regency antique. Guess which one.”

  The left mirror has a crack down the middle. To be contrary, I say, “The right one.”

  “Exactly! Which proves you and I both know that most people are easily fooled. I put the crack in the left one on purpose—made it myself with a hammer. Ping! You know,” she says, putting her hands on hips in a defiant way, “it gives me pleasure to see how naïve people are. Does that make me evil?”

  “No, I’d say that makes you just about average for Germany these days.”

  “You are clever, aren’t you! Just as well then that I won’t try to fool you.” She sits opposite me on the arm of a big armchair, looking at me admiringly. Then she takes a silver cigarette case from the tea table beside her, leans forward, and offers me one. We smoke together, like sisters in a drawing-room comedy, though I’m still no good at it.

  “I bet you’re wondering why I asked you here,” she says. She gives her head a little shake as if she’s being mischievous.

  What film have I seen her in? Maybe it was Dinner at Eight. “I guess I have been wondering a bit,” I reply.

  “I just don’t want you to be angry at me. And neither does your father.”

  “I’m not angry at anyone.” I smile because how else could she possibly believe that?

  “Sophie, my goodness, what a time we’ve all had of late,” she says, sighing.

  By now, I don’t believe a word she says. Not that I don’t find her charming. And I can see what Papa likes about her. What widower wouldn’t want a slinky divorcée with a real Regency mirror to fuck him for the Fatherland after two decades of unhappy marriage?

  “How can I help you?” I ask.

  “It’s like this,” she says, and she stands up and smooths down the gossamer silk over her hips. “I’d be no good with children. I think you sense that about me, right?” She gives me a knowing look.

  “I think so.”

  “So I invited you here to tell you that although your father would like to move in with me at some point … not now you understand … sometime later … and to take in Hansi as well, I just couldn’t do that. It wouldn’t work. So what I wanted to know…” She kneels down beside me and looks up at me very seriously. Good staging, at the very least. “Has your father talked to you about any of this? I mean, about him moving in with me?”

  “No.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Not a word.”

  She puts her hand over her heart. Almost believable. “That’s a relief,” she says. “I was worried that he was too eager. He can be an eager beaver. But I guess I don’t need to tell you that.”

  “Yes, an eager beaver, that’s Papa,” I agree, but I don’t know what she’s talking about.

  She sits back on her perch, her legs crossed. “So, what I wanted to know is whether you’d support me. I mean, you really don
’t seem to mind taking care of your brother.”

  She says that as if watching over Hansi is tantamount to mining sulfur. “I love my brother,” I reply.

  “So it wouldn’t be much of a hardship if you did it for a few more years.”

  “No.”

  She pats my leg as if we’re now chums. “Oh, I’m so glad,” she beams, and she really does seem relieved.

  “That’s it?” I ask. I feel like a patient who’s just had her head X-rayed, but without knowing exactly why.

  “Of course, silly,” she assures me, smiling demurely. “And now,” she says cheerfully, “I can show you the rest of the apartment.”

  A tour of her palace is my reward. I suppose I should be glad she doesn’t toss me dog biscuits. After I’ve seen the three big bedrooms, in which there are enough stuffed animals to populate all the Edgar Allan Poe nightmares I might ever have, she leads me to the front door, where she takes my shoulder. I fear she’ll kiss me, but she doesn’t. “I think it best if I don’t invite you back,” she says, smiling. “We’ll be friends from afar.”

  We shake hands. And before I know it, I’m standing outside her closed door wondering what just happened.

  Isaac says, “Do I look like I’m any good at figuring out young women?” when I ask him what Greta might have really wanted from me. But when Vera, K-H, Marianne, and Werner come for Sabbath dinner I get an answer that makes good sense.

  Vera is helping me by chopping onions and Hansi is looking at picture books with the others in the living room, the monkey-head cane that Rolf gave him across his lap. Papa and Greta are dining with friends at a trendy beer hall where big-shot Nazis like to be seen. More and more, I get the feeling that Greta is a key part of Papa’s ambition to be seen as a winner. By now, he and I have reached an unspoken agreement: we will put no impediments in each other’s way. Not that we talk about that or anything else these days. Our relationship is built on distant grudges. Hansi provides the only bridge between us.

  I make Vera laugh by telling her everything about my visit with Greta. Then she volunteers to decipher it all for me. “Everything that woman said is the opposite of what it usually means,” she tells me. “Good is bad, yes is no, right is left…”

  “So what were her intentions?” I ask.

  “First of all, Greta didn’t want to tell you anything. She wanted you totell her something. But in such a way that you didn’t know you were telling it to her.”

  “And what did I tell her?”

  “That your father hadn’t yet broached the subject of his moving in with her. If I’m right, she’s the eager beaver! She wants him with her and he’s probably said no. You must have disappointed her. And she most assuredly does not want to be friends from afar. As for that mirror trick…” She rolls her eyes and tosses me an onion, which I catch in both hands. “That was to gain your confidence through flattery. Whichever mirror you picked would have been the antique.”

  “How can you figure all this out so easily?” I question. I toss her back the onion.

  “I behave the same way as Greta sometimes.” She shows me a pleased-with-herself face. “Don’t tell me you’re too stupid to have noticed that!”

  Rolf calls several days later. “Dr Stangl has been found in the Rummelsburger See,” he tells me, triumph in his voice.

  “Did he have any swastikas painted in blue on his face?” I ask.

  “Sophele, he had no face. He was all just rotted flesh.”

  “How did you find out?”

  “The police called me in for more questioning. They’re convinced that Heidi’s murder and Stangl’s are no coincidence. And they think I’m the connection. But someone else killed them.”

  I assure Rolf that I believe him, but after I hang up I think about Mrs Stangl telling me that he would visit her husband all the time. Then I hear again the urgency in Rolf’s voice, and just like that I can see what I’ve failed up until now to notice below the glass.

  I take the stairs two at a time to Isaac’s apartment, but he isn’t home from work yet, so I let myself in and scribble a note. He calls an hour later, and I go right up since Papa isn’t home yet.

  Isaac has tossed his work shirt onto his bed and is putting on his favorite, moth-eaten pullover when I explain about Dr Stangl. Except that I lie about where he was found, saying it was in the Jungfernsee, which is west of Berlin, thirty miles from where he was actually dumped. I want to see if that location shocks Isaac. After all, if he is somehow involved in Stangl’s death then he already knows where the body was left and should at least show some surprise.

  “Well, I suppose it’s as good a place as any to leave a body that you don’t want to be found too quickly,” he tells me matter-of-factly, which makes me take a deep breath of relief. He’s kneeling at the time, looking through his pile of clothing in the corner—which I’m not allowed to touch. When he finally finds the fraying old pair of woolen pants he likes to wear in the evenings, he says, “There you are!” Stepping into them, leaning on my shoulder for balance, he gazes around the floor. “Have you seen my slippers?”

  “They smelled like week-old bratwurst. I threw them out.”

  “You didn’t!”

  I squat down and take them out from under the bed, where he kicks them nearly every morning. Isaac takes them and kisses my forehead. “Thank you, Sophele.”

  “Someone pretending to be Rolf called Stangl,” I say, “and got him to leave the house.”

  “You already told me that theory, but I don’t think he’d go all the way to the Jungfernsee for Rolf. And if Heidi and Stangl were murdered by the same person, it doesn’t make much sense that the killer would leave them so far away from each other.” He stares off into his thoughts. “Unless he wanted to give the impression that there was nothing linking their deaths. I better call Vera. She’ll want to know.”

  He starts out of the bedroom, but I cut him off. “I’ll call her,” I tell him.

  “Why?” His furry eyebrows join together in puzzlement.

  “Because I’m the one who heard from Rolf.” He looks at me as if I require a great deal of patience, which may be true, so I take the pipe out of his mouth and press my lips to his.

  Vera is surprised to hear Stangl was found in the Jungfernsee. “Who’d waste their time going all that way just to dump that son-of-a-bitch?” she tells me.

  “So if you’d killed him, where would you have left him?” I ask, testing her reactions. And giving her the chance to confess she was involved in his death—if, of course, that’s the truth.

  “The nearest garbage. Or maybe I’d have boiled him for glue.” After a pause, she adds, “I didn’t do it, you know—kill Stangl, I mean.”

  “I didn’t accuse you.”

  “But you’ve long suspected I might have killed Heidi. And for all I know, you might suspect me of Georg’s murder, too. And now you’re wondering about Stangl. I can hear it in your voice. But I didn’t commit any of the murders.”

  “Why should I believe you? You’ve got quite a temper.”

  “Wouldn’t you have a temper if you had my face?”

  “Maybe. But is the fact that Heidi and Stangl knew each other and were killed only a short time apart, and that both of their bodies were left in lakes … Is all that just coincidental or is Rolf lying? I can easily imagine he murdered Stangl to avenge Heidi. In fact…”

  “There are other possibilities,” Vera interrupts. “Maybe Stangl was working with Georg and whoever else was betraying us. And maybe…”

  “You said was.”

  “What?”

  “You said, ‘whoever else was betraying us.’ But someone must still be working against you from inside The Ring. Unless you know for sure he’s dead. Is that why you said was?”

  “All right, is! Christ, Sophie, what a bulldog you are! Now, if you’ll let me continue … When Heidi discovered the identity of the bastard from The Ring who was working with Stangl, the good doctor killed her and dumped her where no one would fin
d her for quite some time. Then Stangl himself became a liability, because the police might have discovered he murdered Heidi, and he could have revealed to them who was giving him orders. Whoever was pulling his strings wouldn’t like that. If you ask me, Georg and Stangl might only be the tip of the iceberg … a lot of Nazis might have been working against us.”

  “Why would they be so interested in The Ring?”

  “Maybe because we’ve been having some success with the foreign press and they hate the bad publicity. Or maybe our discussing the possibility of an embargo at the English and French embassies scared them more than we ever realized. How the hell should I know? Ask them!”

  “I think that Rolf was the traitor,” I tell her.

  “Rolf? I don’t buy it. I asked him to help me and he agreed.”

  “You fell into a trap. All the time you trusted him, he was betraying you … Rolf and Heidi both. Maybe they were just like Greta and enjoyed fooling people. Rolf might even have followed me that time I went to see Julia. Maybe he was the one who called the Gestapo to go to Tieckstraße.”

  Which would mean that Tonio wasn’t guilty of betraying me on that occasion, I think, hoping it’s true. “Anyway,” I conclude, “it’s my bet that Rolf and Heidi were being pressured to report on The Ring’s activities.”

  “Who was pressuring them?”

  “Dr Stangl. He must have been ordered by one of his superiors to get information on you and your friends. Mrs Stangl told me that Rolf went to visit him all the time, at all hours. And not at his office, but at home. Vera, I think he was giving Stangl damning information about you on a regular basis.”

  “But why would Rolf agree to tell him anything? He’s been my friend for many years, and there’s no one he respects more than Isaac.”