by Chris Petit
Sybil sat on an upright sofa and wondered how Lore would broach the subject while Alwynd made tea in the kitchen, and talked easily between the rooms, saying only the other day he had been thinking about one of his conversations with Lore.
Sybil found the easy pleasantries grated after the tension of the last forty-eight hours. She considered Alwynd probably indiscreet and tactless. She was prepared to defer to Lore, who said Alwynd was indifferent to racial and religious distractions, apart from hating the British. His propaganda broadcasts against them made him something of a local star, otherwise he seemed studiedly indifferent to his past, the war, and whatever woman he was with. There were stories of an abandoned wife back in Ireland.
Alwynd served them awkwardly, his social skills minimal. He was still barefoot. He said to Lore, ‘I expect you’re short of a bob or two.’
‘Always, and hungry too.’
Alwynd looked aghast and said, ‘My God, there’s cake!’
He disappeared to the kitchen and returned with mismatched plates on which lay thick slices of moist, compressed fruit cake.
Lore protested that she hadn’t intended for Alwynd to feed them. Alwynd waved his hand, and said he couldn’t stand cake anyway.
Sybil had never seen anything so succulent and inviting. It would be sweet too. She almost dared not start eating for fear of cramming it in her mouth.
She looked at Alwynd in awe and asked if it had real sugar. Alwynd’s sparse German seemed to extend to understanding her.
‘Sugar or golden syrup,’ he said, amused by her reaction. ‘And dried fruit too. Wednesdays at school was a half-day and you could order a packed lunch. You used to get a slice of the same cake wrapped in greaseproof paper. It was called sudden death.’
Lore as usual had to translate for Sybil’s benefit.
Alwynd added, ‘Schoolboy humour.’
He seemed as entertained as if he were watching a show as they inspected, savoured and devoured the cake, telling each other to take it slowly, making noises of ecstatic appreciation with every mouthful, then using their fingers to wipe the last of the sticky residue off their plates.
The effusiveness of their thanks became embarrassing, until Alwynd said, ‘Drink your tea now, children,’ and Sybil appreciated he was older than he looked, perhaps forty, a man who made sport with girls half his age.
Alwynd slopped his tea into the cup’s saucer and drank from that, with an air of childish disobedience. The sight saddened Sybil. Individual flourish and such civilised values as eccentricity were beyond them now. She thought she heard the click of the front door, signalling the departure of Alwynd’s unseen guest. He caught her eye and smiled, whether shy or superior she couldn’t tell.
He got up and put on a record whose strange primal rhythms were unlike anything Sybil had heard.
‘Proper jazz,’ he said. ‘None of that anodyne rubbish with strings that passes for it here.’
He turned to Lore and said, ‘I get asked to write quite a lot, for newspapers and so forth. Rubbish, really. What a tyrant Cromwell was. How the British invented the concentration camp. Not rubbish as such, but they accept any old nonsense. You could say the Welsh are all three-legged and no one would question it. The point is the text has to be translated. The real point is it has to be written in the first place. You see, I’m thinking you could write it for me then translate it so we can bill them for the cost of writing and a translation fee. Split fifty-fifty. The girl who did my translations is no longer around.’
Another one bedded, another gone, thought Sybil, presuming Alwynd escaped unscathed from his romantic encounters.
‘Feel free to stay the night,’ he said, and Sybil saw he had known what they’d had in mind. ‘Plenty of room at the back.’
The music progressed in a crescendo towards the end.
‘That old “Black Bottom Stomp”,’ Alwynd said, looking at Sybil provocatively. He stuck his hands in the pockets of his baggy corduroys. Lore looked around happily. Sybil wasn’t sure. She had seen how Alwynd looked at her with that dangerous and attractive combination of merry glance and hard stare.
12
Schlegel made his way to headquarters for his turn as night-duty officer. The appointment was supposed to be by rota but seemed to include him a lot more than others. Stoffel almost never did it. The job only mattered in an emergency, which usually didn’t happen, leaving the desk sergeant in charge and the duty officer free to help himself to an empty cell.
He told the sergeant the shop would be open for half an hour if anyone wanted any business. Shop was the name of the storage cellars for requisitioned goods, a long narrow space that ran under the street. As a lot of Schlegel’s cases involved black-market confiscation, he was expected to sell on to colleagues at bargain prices, a standard arrangement from before his time.
The boring stuff was named for the record and put in store. The deal included a warehouse in Moabit where anything large of interest was got rid of on the quiet, with the profits going to what were known as office emergency funds. Smaller stuff – watches, jewellery and personal effects – was available at nominal rates for staff to sell at a profit. The briskest trade was in bicycles, liquor and tobacco, for which they could get four times what they paid.
Many of the night staff came down to the shop. Some shuffled in sideways, with a wink and a nudge. Others were brazen, producing their lists. The most unusual items he sold that night were a stamp album and fifty new umbrellas.
Schlegel telephoned the main Jewish administrative office in Oranienburger Strasse. He was right to think that in the present crisis they would have a night staff. A woman eventually answered, sounding elderly and frail. He heard her intake of breath at his mention of criminal police.
He said he needed someone to look up a dead man’s work record.
She said the office was closed until the morning.
‘We can either sort this out between us now or I will have to send someone over, which will be less pleasant for everyone.’
The woman agreed to do it. Just the one card, he said.
He called back and was told Metzler used to have a job with the railways.
‘Until three months ago.’
‘As what?’
He was listed as a cleaner. Schlegel asked for dates.
‘January 1941 until November 1942.’
‘And before?’
‘He was originally a teacher.’
It didn’t say where. Wasn’t there supposed to be a full record?
‘There should be. Most have two or three cards. Perhaps his are lost.’
‘And after last November where did he work?’
‘At the slaughterhouse.’
‘Excuse me?’ asked Schlegel, not sure what he was hearing.
‘At the beginning of December he was moved there.’
His skull tightened. Coincidence? Or a connection to the flayed body?
He asked whether the card gave a job description of Metzler’s last employment.
‘He is first listed as a bookkeeper. But that has been crossed out and someone has written cleaner.’
‘Whereabouts?’
‘It just says shed twenty-seven.’
Schlegel went upstairs to the room where maps of varying sizes and sorts were kept. Maps of sewers and waterworks; maps of the city’s electricity and gas grids; insurance maps, showing which buildings had firewalls; small-scale maps and large ones. The first he looked at showed mainly the railway yard, like a huge artery.
He came across an atlas-like book devoted to the district, published to coincide with the completion of the project fifty years earlier. The pages had public spaces in green, residential in ochre, the commercial zones in grey and the slaughterhouse, including the yards and railway, which took up several pages, in pink.
Scale drawings of the long halls showed how the animals were sent on precise, individual routes, into holding bays and pens and corridors leading to their respective slaughterhouses, after which they
were taken through to the adjacent cleaning and butchering sheds, to be turned into inert product in preparation for their final destination, the wholesale commercial market.
The actual slaughter rooms had individual numbered doors. The floor plan showed the separate entrances through which they were driven: 26, 27 and 28. Number 27 was the pork room.
Was that what was meant by shed twenty-seven? Was it where the old man ended up? A Jew sent to work in a pork room; someone had a nasty sense of humour.
The man’s tagged key that looked like it belonged to a locker began with a twenty-seven.
13
Schlegel worked in a small, gloomy office in Alexanderstrasse, tucked away in a wing at the back of the main building that overlooked an inner courtyard. Its lack of importance was underlined by an absence of any corridor connecting the main building to his, leaving him having to cross the yard in all weathers. A sick-looking plane tree struggled to reach the level of his window on the third floor. In the time he had been there it failed to grow and in summer barely managed to leaf. The outside wall opposite was blank. The office was horribly brown and sunless. The furniture consisted of filing cabinets and a couple of identical chipped bureau desks facing each other, with rolled lids and numerous drawers and cubbyholes. Down the corridor sat the secretary he was supposed to share with others but the desiccated Frau Pelz had taken a huge dislike to him, for reasons he could not fathom. It was impossible to get her to do anything; another addition to his list of what not to talk about to homicide: that he was reduced to doing his own typing.
That morning Schlegel signed off after an uneventful night duty, walked across the yard and went up to his office, meaning to telephone the slaughterhouse before going home, only to find a stranger sitting there. This was a shock in itself, as the room had few visitors, and more ominous because of the man’s uniform.
Schlegel thought he must have done something badly wrong to attract the attention of the SS.
The stranger asked if he was Schlegel. He said he was.
‘We have been assigned to work together.’
He looked at the man and asked if he really was meant to come there.
‘You just said you were Schlegel. What have you done to offend Frau Pelz so?’
‘I wish someone would tell me.’
‘My name is Morgen. Who’s Stoffel?’
‘Homicide.’
‘He telephoned. He wants you.’
Schlegel was disconcerted by the way Morgen sat there, looking at home. He failed to understand why an SS officer was being assigned to work with him. The man’s kitbag in the corner suggested he had come straight from the station. Schlegel wondered where before that.
‘Is this yours?’ Morgen asked, reaching down to produce Schlegel’s hat. It was like watching a conjuring trick.
‘Where did you find it?’
‘In the locker they gave me downstairs.’
Schlegel stared in astonishment. ‘How did you know it was mine?’
‘It has your name inside.’
Schlegel turned the hat awkwardly in his hands, thinking the man must have him down for a fool.
‘An English hat too,’ said Morgen.
Schlegel gave an unnecessary account of the hat, all the while thinking he couldn’t even be sure what rank Morgen was. SS insignia were notoriously hard to read, even among the SS.
Schlegel hoped the uniform was more frightening than the man. Morgen appeared neither good-looking nor otherwise, somewhere in between, with hair already thinning on top, a cleft chin, the beginnings of a jowl, round wire-framed spectacles, and a pendulous lower lip that gave him what Schlegel could only think of as a disappointed way of looking at the world. He suspected the slothful manner was deceptive.
Morgen’s ashtray was already full. Schlegel’s asthma meant he didn’t smoke. He envied smokers the way women leaned in when a light was held. He supposed Morgen about eight or nine years older, thirty-three or -four. He wondered how the man managed to smoke so much with cigarettes in such short supply.
The slither of sunlight began its daily twenty-minute crawl across the blank wall opposite.
Morgen reminded him, ‘You have a dead body waiting. Stoffel.’
Not again, he thought.
‘Dead bodies are Stoffel’s department, not ours.’
‘This one has money stuffed in its mouth.’
Schlegel could have ignored Stoffel’s request. He was technically off duty but his life seemed to have taken on the illogical air of an unpleasant dream. Morgen insisted on accompanying him.
Schlegel usually took public transport, not being eligible to use what was left of the motor pool. Morgen would have none of that and hailed a taxi. He sat filling the cab with smoke.
Schlegel asked him to open the window. Morgen obliged by lowering it a crack.
Schlegel crossed his legs and was aware of Morgen staring at his shoe. It was tied with a broken lace, long enough only to string through a couple of eyes. Laces and razor blades were among the latest shortages.
He asked where Morgen had been. Morgen returned the question, asking if Schlegel had ever been to Russia.
Schlegel said he hadn’t. He was uncomfortable lying, and presumed Morgen could tell. It seemed quite possible that Morgen had been sent to shake the place up because they were all on the take.
Morgen lit another cigarette, opened the window to throw out the butt and rewound it so the crack was even more infinitesimal.
Whatever else the man was, he was a smoking machine.
A dead man in a long overcoat lay on his back. He had been found on the floor of a large reception room in a substantial ground-floor apartment near the zoo, after local police broke into the already sealed premises, following a report of lights showing in contravention of blackout regulations.
The dead man was tall, over six foot, of sallow complexion and probably in his late thirties. From the neck down he didn’t appear much disturbed and his state of repose reminded Schlegel of the way the old man had lain. The shoes had large holes in the soles. Unlike the old man, his hat had fallen off and rolled on the parquet floor.
The only extraordinary feature was the wedge of money spilling out of the gaping mouth. Schlegel had imagined a neat roll inserted like a cork, not stuffed in anyhow, in what looked like a frenzy, leaving the dead man’s eyes appearing to protrude in disbelief.
Stoffel, a man rarely surprised, did a double take on seeing Morgen’s uniform. Two more men walked in. The younger was Gersten, the Gestapo man from the roundup. Schlegel didn’t know his companion, an elderly consumptive with bitten cheeks, who, despite walking a deferential pace behind, had the air of a sadist. Gersten grunted at Stoffel and asked if he was in charge.
They immediately began squabbling, taking up from where they had left off. Stoffel said he was dealing with a murder and had no need of Gestapo assistance.
Gersten said he was there because the apartment was Gestapo property, having been requisitioned.
Schlegel took in the room. It was large and spacious and its owners would have been rich. The walls had been stripped of their pictures, leaving faded spaces where they had hung. Empty bookshelves in glass cabinets indicated a once considerable library.
‘What’s your theory?’ Gersten asked Stoffel.
Stoffel shrugged. A couple of lowlifers had come to loot, prior to the property’s contents being sold off. With the place empty it was a safe break-in.
‘Presumably the murderer stuffed what he could in his pockets before he left.’
‘But what happened?’ asked Gersten, looking as though he thought Stoffel could try harder.
‘An argument. No honour among thieves. One ends up killing the other. The only real issue is the money.’
He asked if Gersten recognised the man, as he was dead on what was now Gestapo property. Gersten tapped the corpse with his toecap and observed the shoes didn’t match.
Stoffel announced to the room that one advantage of everyone going
hungry was dead men tended not to crap their pants.
Gersten ignored him. ‘Black market, I would say, which puts the ball in your court. You’ll find the money is counterfeit.’ He turned to Schlegel and said lightly, ‘No one can afford these days to donate good cash to a dead man’s cake hole.’
Schlegel was aware of Morgen in the background, saying nothing.
Stoffel addressed Schlegel. ‘Since you’re here, son, go through the man’s pockets.’
‘Didn’t someone do that?’
‘Waiting for you, dear,’ said Stoffel. ‘Be our guest. Bad knee, can’t bend down.’
He proffered an old biscuit tin he used to store the dead’s personal effects.
Schlegel recognised the fine line between acceptance as one of them and being the butt of their cruelty. He didn’t want to appear squeamish, while knowing he could also be seen as weak for giving in.
There was nothing in the coat. Nothing in the rim of the hat. Nothing in the jacket pockets. The jacket was double-breasted and still done up. He wondered what to do about the back trouser pockets because it would mean disturbing the body. He unbuttoned the jacket. The crotch was stained, about the size of a large coin, presumably from a small last involuntary release.
Schlegel grew aware of Morgen standing closer, and he said to Morgen rather than Stoffel that on second inspection the stain looked more like blood.
‘Then you’d better take a look,’ said Stoffel.
‘That’s the doctor’s job.’
Schlegel stood up, surprised by his decisiveness. He handed the biscuit tin to Stoffel. Stoffel grunted and signalled to the doctor who had been hovering in the doorway to carry on.
Like the rest of them, the doctor smoked. Schlegel watched ash fall and land next to the dead man’s nostril where it lay undisturbed. The doctor made a clumsy job of opening the fly.
Blaming his arthritis, he turned to Schlegel and said, ‘Do it for me, son. My fingers are too stiff.’
