by Chris Petit
Suppressed sniggers greeted the remark. The doctor’s cheeks were a drunk’s network of broken veins.
Schlegel knelt down and undid the buttons and parted the waistband. The shirt was in the way, then the underpants. The dark stain was no larger. He separated the fly. The doctor opened his mouth in surprise. The cigarette fell out and landed on the man’s crotch.
‘For God’s sake. Get out of here,’ said Stoffel.
The doctor staggered to his feet. He didn’t look well.
‘And take your bloody cigarette!’ said Stoffel.
The doctor mumbled to Schlegel, ‘Would you? My fingers.’
Gersten’s sidekick leered. Schlegel pinched the cigarette between his thumb and forefinger and passed it to the doctor, who didn’t want it. He flicked it aside for someone to pick up. Stoffel was laughing hard as he did.
‘Give us a proper look, boy. Tell us what you see.’
Schlegel pulled the fly wider.
Gersten said in disbelief, ‘He’s got no cock!’
Stoffel found the whole thing side-splitting.
Where the man’s penis should have been was a bloody hole. A clean cut at the shaft indicated surgical precision, in contrast to the money stuffed messily into the mouth.
The doctor was about to keel over. Gersten’s eyes bulged like the dead man’s. The doctor sat down, breathing hard through his mouth. The rest of the crew stood around in varying degrees of disbelief. Only Morgen appeared unconcerned.
Schlegel found the sight not frightening as such. It didn’t involve smashed bone or enormous gouts of blood. The disturbing aspect was what these highly personal acts represented, one seemingly spontaneous, the other so calculated.
Stoffel interrupted to ask crudely, ‘Have the balls been cut off? Are we talking castration too?’
Schlegel had had enough. He stood up, failing to provide the smart answer Stoffel required. Backchat was seen as essential to the job.
Stoffel told the orderlies to remove the body. Morgen puffed away. Gersten continued to look put out. Maybe he was squeamish. Most of the men were standing protectively with their hands in trouser pockets.
Morgen said, ‘You realise the body was probably killed elsewhere and dumped here.’
‘What makes you say that?’ said Stoffel, looking not at all pleased.
‘There should be much more blood, and it would have been impossible to get such a clean cut if the man had been struggling.’
Stoffel looked unimpressed. ‘Strangled here first, I would say, and a sharp knife. What’s the point of bringing him here?’
Morgen didn’t bother to answer.
Stoffel said, ‘In that case you and your albino friend can do the door-to-door.’
Outside Stoffel asked Schlegel, with a poke of his thumb in the direction of Morgen, ‘Who the fuck is he?’
‘I’ve no idea. He turned up this morning.’
‘More to the point, who does he think he is?’
Schlegel shrugged. Stoffel leaned in confidentially. ‘Find out what he’s doing here. That’s an order. It can’t be anything good.’
Schlegel excused himself and went over to Gersten.
‘About the old man who shot himself, who telephoned us about the shooting?’
Gersten patted his pockets for his lip salve. ‘It must have been a Jewish marshal.’
‘The shooting occurred before the area was sealed. We think there was a witness.’
‘We had other things on our minds.’ It was said in a vague, confiding way.
Schlegel wasn’t sure. Gersten, for all his affected air, struck him as a man to be in full possession of the facts.
Schlegel asked if Gersten knew any more about the old man.
‘That he worked at the slaughterhouse, for instance.’
Schlegel was aware of Morgen coming over and staring as Gersten said, ‘Are you sure? That’s not what we heard.’
‘Did you know he might have been working for us?’
‘Really?’ Gersten repeated his act with the lip salve. ‘Who says?’
‘We’ve had a tip-off that he was an informer.’
Schlegel wanted to see Gersten’s reaction. Informers invariably worked for the Gestapo. Not a flicker, which left him wondering how reliable Nebe’s information was.
Morgen appeared endlessly interested in the idea of the dead body turning up in an apartment that had been sealed by the Gestapo, especially if it had been taken there after being killed.
‘Why there?’
Schlegel wanted to ask why on earth should he know.
They spoke to the local district warden, who confirmed the original complaint had been over a blackout infringement, an anonymous call. It was the sort of place where people kept to themselves and were quick to inform on any irregularity.
‘Respectable, in other words,’ said Morgen.
Schlegel couldn’t tell if Morgen was being sarcastic.
Once dignified, the area had become shabby and too deathly quiet even for such a discreet address. Few cars were parked out because no one could afford to run them.
They knocked on doors to no effect.
Either people were out or those that were in had nothing to report and were eager to disappear back inside rather than be seen to be talking to the police.
Morgen asked if Stoffel was as obtuse as he looked. Schlegel wasn’t sure how much to volunteer and answered economically. Morgen asked about Gersten. Schlegel said he’d only come across him once before.
Morgen asked why Gersten wore his hair so long.
Schlegel suspected he was going to spend a lot of his time telling Morgen that he didn’t know.
‘Why cut a man’s dick off? I’ve never come across that before.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What’s so funny?’
‘Nothing.’
‘I don’t understand why people laugh when something isn’t funny.’
They came across a forlorn message fixed to a tree. A local resident was asking for help finding her lost dog. Morgen said the woman was stupid to have a dog.
‘Expensive when there isn’t enough food to go round. I hear oysters are in from Holland, as if I can afford them. I suppose you can see cutting off a man’s dick being part of a crime of passion.’
‘It’s not our case.’
‘We’re the ones knocking on doors. It’s also a classic locked-room mystery.’
Schlegel had read his share of detective fiction. ‘It’s not. The back window was smashed. That must be how they got in.’
The remark earned him a look.
‘A man with a mind of his own.’
With Stoffel the remark would have been mocking. Again with Morgen, Schlegel couldn’t tell.
They got around to the address of the elderly woman with the missing dog, which she went on about. When they managed to ask if she had noticed anything unusual she knew immediately what they were talking about. Her beloved pet had failed to come home and she had sat up sleepless with worry. There had been noise in the garden a few doors down. She pointed to the back of the crime scene.
‘What sort of noise?’ asked Morgen, revealing a considerateness new to Schlegel.
The woman reduced her voice to a loud whisper. ‘I heard voices, not German. And they had a vehicle.’
‘Yiddish?’
‘No, not Yiddish, at least I don’t think. Yiddish sounds German.’
‘What sort of vehicle?’
‘Am I supposed to see in the dark? It was pitch-black. Big engine, small engine. They sound the same to me.’
‘My goodness, you need handling with kid gloves,’ said Morgen cheerfully. ‘Just tell us in your own words.’
The woman seemed to be enjoying herself now. She remembered seeing an unprotected light on in the house. ‘Which of course isn’t allowed.’
Something was being carried that involved a lot of grunting and swearing. She couldn’t say how many men there were. More than two, she thought. She had been to
o afraid to go and look.
‘Did you think to call the district warden?’ asked Schlegel.
The woman looked nervous, sensing the question could lead to trouble. Schlegel was sure she had reported the blackout infringement.
‘What did you think was happening?’ Morgen asked.
She was very certain in her answer. Things were being taken out of the apartment.
‘Why do that?’ Morgen asked.
She grew indignant. ‘Fine policemen you are! Rich Jews lived there. But when you go to such places for the auction preview all the decent stuff is gone. They had a piano because the daughter took lessons and you could hear her in summer when the windows were open, banging away at her scales. Tell me that’s still there.’
They left her to it.
‘What were they talking?’ Morgen asked. ‘Hungarian? Romanian?’
Plenty of outside labour came for the work and overtime, according to reciprocal agreements. Morgen thought it unlikely that the woman would have heard a language from any of the occupied territories – Poland, the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and so forth – because their workers tended to be locked up at night.
‘Norwegian? Danish? Greek?’ asked Morgen, in an apparently good mood for the first time. ‘I have a theory about the dog.’
They went back to the apartment garden and found it in the bushes, throat cut.
Morgen said, ‘Why didn’t they take it with them? You would eat a dog these days.’
Neither was inclined to return to the woman as the bearer of bad news. Schlegel saw her watching from her window.
They went back inside as it started to rain, via the back door with its broken pane. Morgen led the way.
‘If the body was brought here after being killed they would have taken him in this way.’
Schlegel had a flash of the murder room in the slaughterhouse, with its knives and strange drawing. Could the dead man have been taken there to be killed? Or somewhere like it? He had an intimation of other such places. He couldn’t get the Jewish butchers out of his head. Another neat, surgical cut. Anatomical.
Even with the apartment stripped, Schlegel could see the place would have been a beautiful home. There would be a lot of competition to become the next tenant. In a few weeks it would no doubt look as it had, with comfortable furnishings, tapestries, paintings and carpets, maybe a piano for some nice little girl of correct breeding; would she play with better timing than her predecessor, hitting each note just so?
Morgen’s voice came from down the corridor. ‘The fact of the man being left could be seen as a message for its present temporary owners, the Gestapo.’
Then money stuffed in the mouth had to be because the dead man had been paid to talk. He was an informer. Schlegel wondered about his new companion and thought how life had got a lot more complicated in the few hours since his arrival.
14
The Café Bollenmüller was a large and dowdy establishment near Friedrichstrasse, crowded with professionals and secretaries having lunch. Outside it was raining hard and the place smelled of damp clothes. Sybil and Lore turned up bedraggled, neither having an umbrella.
They took a corner seat with a street view, which was being vacated as they arrived. It was just an ordinary lunchtime Sybil told herself as she inspected the busy room. There was no sign of their man from what she could see. Newcomers tried to share with them and were disagreeable on being told the seats were taken.
They were waiting for someone, she said, smiling at Lore, like they were meeting for some normal reason.
A waitress came and stood rubbing her leg with her foot. Varicose veins, thought Sybil, whose attention to detail helped her keep her nerve. The black uniform had been washed so many times it had gone grey.
She opened the menu and found a single strand of greasy hair she supposed was the waitress’s. Everything had been crossed out until only potato soup and sausage and cabbage remained.
She told the waitress they would order when their friend came.
She kept glancing at the street, hoping to see the figure of the tall man.
Ten minutes passed. Sybil got up and did a tour of the crowded room, to check in case they had missed him. When she got back Lore was defending the table from other diners trying to take it over.
Sybil sat back down, shrugged at Lore and looked out of the window, which was when she saw.
She leaned forward and whispered, ‘Don’t turn your head. Take my hand. Act normal.’
She told her that reflected in the shop window across the street she could see the furniture van the Gestapo used.
‘Move In, Move Out with Silberstein?’ Lore asked.
It was how the Gestapo took people away, in disguised civilian vans. Sybil looked sideways again.
‘A car is drawing up in front of the van. Three men in hats and coats.’
‘Three plainclothes men in a car can only mean police,’ said Lore. She had gone very pale. ‘He must have betrayed us.’
‘He will have shown them our photographs.’
‘He must have been working for them all along.’
The three men entered the restaurant. The tallest one with long hair was clearly in charge. They surveyed the room. Sybil calculated there must be over a hundred in, which gave them a slim chance. She even considered throwing a chair through the window and making a run for it, except the plate glass looked too tough.
The one in charge remained by the door, checking those leaving. His accomplices started going round the tables, clearly knowing who they were looking for, sometimes asking for papers for the sake of inconvenience, sometimes not bothering. They were in no hurry.
Sybil said, ‘We have to split up. They will be looking for two of us.’
Was there a back exit? She couldn’t remember. She hadn’t been in years. They would probably have a man there anyway. They weren’t stupid. Was there anywhere to hide? Cloakrooms. Kitchens. If they stayed they would get caught.
It was a split-second decision.
Sybil said, ‘We leave separately. You go first.’
‘I don’t look like a secretary. They’ll stop me.’
It was true, though Sybil resented the inference.
Lore said, ‘I stay, you go.’
‘What will you do?’
Lore made a show of unconcern.
‘Hang around. Have tea. Stroll out.’
The two men were still over the other side of the room, moving among the tables. Sybil calculated maybe three or four minutes before they got to them. She said Lore should get up and go to the newspapers, which hung on wooden rods next to the coat rack.
‘Take the Völkischer Beobachter.’
‘No thanks.’
It was the Party rag Sybil had taken in the café on the morning of the roundup, for the simple reason that she was more likely to be taken for one of them.
‘Don’t take your hat off. No one will question you if you are seen reading that. It’s our only chance. We’ll see each other back at Hochmeisterplatz.’
‘Wish you luck,’ said Lore.
She offered her cheek to be kissed like old friends, then turned at the last moment and kissed Sybil briefly on the lips.
‘Till later. Wish me luck.’
Sybil stood and her nerve failed her. The man by the door looked too knowing and imposing. He made a point of talking to those leaving, a comment here and there, checking them out. Sybil went to the toilet instead, to compose herself, aware of Lore reflected in the café’s big mirror, apprehensive as she followed Sybil’s progress across the room.
Downstairs she sat on the toilet without using it, thinking she might as well give up and wait until they came for her. She pulled herself together, to set a proper example to Lore, went back out into the washroom and stuffed her hair inside her hat as much as possible, to appear less obvious to anyone using the photograph, in which she was hatless.
How transparent and scared the woman in the mirror looked.
She decided to
make a beeline for the door, and somehow bluff her way past the man. She would say she was going to see her SS lover. She could even give a name because a woman she had sewn for was married to one.
As she came back up, Lore was walking exposed towards her, on her way to the newspapers. One of the two Gestapo men started to look at her. There was no way to warn her. An insignificant little man in a shabby raincoat stood up and started to walk out, crossing Lore’s path. His exit was cut off by the second Gestapo man, who asked for his papers. Lore veered towards the newspapers as the little man panicked and tried to run. She grabbed the newspaper and quickly sat down, gesturing to Sybil that she should take advantage of the altercation. The little man was being wrestled to the floor and thumped.
Most people carried on as though nothing were happening. Some craned their necks and one or two stood to see better what was going on. The man started sobbing.
Sybil walked fast to the exit. The Gestapo man on the door was distracted and held it for her automatically. She thanked him with a brief look; another secretary on her way back from lunch. Their eyes met briefly. She saw them shift from indifference to a flicker of recognition, but the moment was broken by his colleagues shouting to him.
‘Your lucky day,’ he said in an easy way. ‘Catch you later.’
He laughed when she stood rooted to the spot and said, ‘Hurry along now.’
Sybil ran out into the rain, losing herself among the umbrellas, dazed with relief. One glimpse of the man’s sensuous mouth was enough to warn her his cruelty would be complicated.
Her adrenaline was flowing. It wouldn’t last. Doubt already chased at her heels. Had they been betrayed? It made no difference. They were no nearer to getting papers.
Iranische Strasse was four stops and a walk. Regarding Lore, Sybil reassured herself that the Gestapo hadn’t been checking everyone’s papers and the Party rag amounted to virtually a passport.
At the hospital she went to the kitchen entrance where she found Franz supervising several trucks that were backed up to the door. He said she was fortunate; he should be off duty but had been called back to organise food distribution to the holding centre in Rosenstrasse.
He said he was dog tired because they had run out of the pills they usually took to get them through.
