by Chris Petit
‘While babes sleep vampires do their homework.’
His desk was a mess of papers, with more strewn on the floor. The ashtray was overflowing, the room a fog of smoke. His eyes were artificially bright and bleary. The magic pill made him seem worked up and excited where Schlegel felt wrung out, the day hardly begun.
‘I kept the Jewish archive up until after two. Let’s start with a possible shortlist of forgers. I came up with three. One turns out to be dead, so two. On grounds of probability, I assume we are not looking for a woman. I have settled on men under forty, given job requirements of a steady hand, nerve and stamina. I have also made up a long list for those aged between forty and fifty-five, mainly from the print trade.
‘The Jewish professional registry is not very up to date. However, a preliminary check showed three out of five of the forties to fifty-fives are gone, deported last year.
‘Of the three under forty, the dead one was called Plotkin. I list him because he committed suicide after a robbery at the printing works where he was employed. He jumped off the roof while the Gestapo was in the building.’
Or was assisted in his jump.
Morgen raised an eyebrow then hurried on. ‘The other two went to the same Jewish art school before it closed. One is Franz Liebermann. He works as an orderly at the Jewish hospital. Also an authorised driver, so he has freedom of movement. The other is Yakov Zorin, who despite his name was born here in 1918. This almost squares with what our friend the waiter told us, except Zorin isn’t called Grigor. Zorin incidentally has breeding. His mother was a Borodin, a famous Russian family that included Ashkenazi Jews. I only know this because—’
Schlegel witnessed the extraordinary sight of Morgen falling asleep in the middle of a sentence, like a man overcome by narcolepsy.
He snapped to and carried on, unawares.
‘Next there’s this,’ he said. ‘I spoke to the waiter again and did it after you went.’
It was a drawing of a man’s face. Despite its rudimentary nature Schlegel thought he looked familiar.
‘My impression of the waiter’s description of his replacement.’
‘You could have got a police artist to do it.’
‘You don’t like it?’
‘That’s not what I mean. Just that there are people to do this.’
‘He wouldn’t have turned out so late, and I wasn’t going to risk the waiter discovering his religious vocation had deserted him in the night and vanishing. It’s a passable likeness of what he described.’
‘It’s quite good actually. It’s the Jewish hearse driver. I helped him load Metzler’s body.’
He was sure. Morgen had caught his aloof, self-contained manner.
Morgen was already on the telephone to the Jewish centre in Oranienburger Strasse. He asked for the transport division. The telephone operator said they had no such thing. After Morgen explained, Schlegel heard her say, ‘Oh, you mean the hearse drivers.’
They were based at the other centre in Grosse Hamburger Strasse. Morgen asked how many drivers. The operator wasn’t sure. Morgen hung up in a hurry and stood up.
‘Come on. I don’t want to telephone and warn them.’
Morgen half-ran with Schlegel struggling to keep up.
‘I see why the army turned you down. The magic pills mean I don’t sleep and am ready for anything.’
Morgen lost his temper when they were referred on by reception to another centre in Auguststrasse next to the former Jewish girls’ school.
He shouted, ‘Don’t any of you people know where anyone is?’
The woman he was addressing flinched and Schlegel felt obliged to apologise. She said no one could keep up any more with everything happening so fast. The hearse drivers had been transferred only in the last week.
Morgen asked if she knew any of the drivers’ names. One she knew, called Fredi.
‘What about Yakov?’
The woman looked blank.
‘Grigor?’
Morgen was out of the door before she had finished shaking her head.
In Auguststrasse they flashed their badges at the gate. The hearse was parked in the yard. Morgen checked his gun and told Schlegel to do the same. The guard pointed to where the drivers waited for calls. Schlegel wondered if they should not be getting backup but Morgen marched across the yard and threw open the door to the drivers’ room. The man inside stood up, terrified, hands half in the air. He was squat and bald. Morgen subjected him to a rapid interrogation. What was his name? How many of them worked there? What were their names?
‘Come on, you can do better. You must know their names.’
The man blurted he had only been on the job a day and the other drivers worked different shifts.
‘Names?’
The man shook his head and said people didn’t have time to learn anyone’s names these days.
Morgen asked who else might know the other drivers. Was there a personnel office?
The driver didn’t have a clue. There wasn’t even a street map in his van, he said.
The main building they found run by a staff that seemed barely to know each other or what they were doing.
Morgen lost his temper again. Schlegel told him to calm down. The woman they were talking to fled in tears, saying she would try to find someone.
‘You can’t keep making them cry.’
Morgen sniggered, snapping his fingers.
The man was the limit.
The woman came back with a nervous type, competent-looking but downcast. He took them to an office where he searched a cabinet, trying to find information on the hearse drivers, always on the point of giving up.
‘Does anyone know how to do their job around here?’ Morgen asked.
‘No one showed us how anything works.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘We were in Rosenstrasse until just now. This is our first day.’
‘Where’s the old staff?’
‘Gone.’
There was no doubt what he meant.
‘What? They released you to work here?’
The man said they had spent the week in a state of suspense, presuming they would be deported. No one had said that was never the intention. They were just being held. The demonstration had been quite unnecessary.
Schlegel was slow to understand. Morgen was impatient to explain.
‘They were arrested so they could be put into the system.’
‘They already are.’
‘No, no, not like the other Jews because they are married to Germans. Experienced staff were needed to handle the administration of the roundups. Now these are done they can be packed off with the rest and untrained half-Jews inducted in their place, now there’s almost nothing left to administrate.’
The reason it had to be kept secret was for fear of alarming the former administration of its imminent redundancy.
The man said in the meantime no one had shown them how anything worked.
Morgen smacked his forehead and said how stupid he had been. He ran out and had already reached the drivers’ room as Schlegel reached the yard. The hearse was gone.
‘German efficiency!’ he shouted as Schlegel ran in.
He pointed to the duty list, showing the times and names for different shifts. He cursed the driver for not showing them.
Schlegel said the man was probably too confused to know.
There were three listed drivers. Their names meant nothing to them.
Schlegel had to pacify Morgen after he started kicking the furniture.
‘The waiter said the man’s name was Grigor. The man he described was the hearse driver I saw. The driver we spoke to has only just started. The man upstairs says everyone has been shipped off. That must mean the drivers, and Grigor too.’
They could find no Grigor on the deportation lists for that week. It meant checking every name. They were back at the Grosse Hamburger Strasse centre in the administration office, which was now looked after by one perso
n, also responsible for two other offices.
Morgen said it was like one of those liners found abandoned at sea.
They did however find Zorin, Yakov; sent the Tuesday before to Auschwitz.
‘Cross him off.’ Morgen threw up his hands. ‘Grigor, where are you?’
Schlegel picked up the telephone. Morgen asked him what he was doing. Calling the Gestapo.
‘No, no, no, it’s too soon to talk to Gersten.’
Schlegel said he wasn’t calling Gersten. He asked the Gestapo switchboard for the number of the camp in Auschwitz.
‘And the area code?’ He wrote down 2258.
He used the association’s switchboard and asked to be put through. The operator reported trouble getting a line. Schlegel told her to keep trying.
Morgen, still racing, used his extension to get the switchboard to dial Kripo headquarters. He got through straight away and asked to speak to Nebe, via his secretary, who put him straight through.
He explained the situation and Nebe spoke back for several minutes until Morgen hung up in exasperation.
‘No extradition,’ he said to Schlegel. He got up in a rush and returned five minutes later, just as Schlegel managed to get through.
Morgen came in shouting, ‘Zorin is Grigor!’
Schlegel refused to be interrupted as someone had just answered. He asked to be put through to the labour office.
Morgen called Nebe back and said the man they wanted to interview was not only the forger, he was responsible for at least two murders.
From Morgen’s thunderous expression, Schlegel guessed
Nebe was saying if the forger was out of the picture the problem was resolved.
It took Schlegel five more minutes of waiting while Morgen threw his hands in the air. The only surprise was that the woman who picked up sounded young, friendly and cheerful.
Yes, she said, she had the work register to hand.
He gave Zorin’s name.
‘That’s easy. It’ll be at the end of the index.’
She said there was no listing for Zorin.
‘He will have just arrived.’
The register was updated daily, she said, and if Zorin was a skilled worker he would have been processed straight away and signed on.
‘Threatening to rain,’ he said, on being asked what the weather was doing. He tried to picture her. ‘Do you have your workers registered by name or by profession?’
‘Both.’
‘Have you had a delivery of butchers recently?’
‘No.’ It was said with certainty.
‘How do you know?’
‘Because we are desperately short.’
‘Could they have been sent elsewhere?’
‘Lublin perhaps, but everyone knows we have been advertising for them. We have far more agriculture and farming than Lublin.’
She sounded like she wanted to pass an idle ten minutes chatting. He supposed she was a long way from home. Kiel, she said.
Schlegel presumed Zorin was the forger, had killed Abbas and the woman, then fallen victim of a relentless bureaucracy and nobody was going to bother to extract him.
They were chasing nothing.
Except where was Zorin now?
And how did that fit with him being Grigor as well?
Schlegel complained to the young woman that the system didn’t sound very efficient. She agreed and told him how a whole blast furnace had gone missing the year before.
Morgen, impatient, ended the call by depressing the receiver. He asked why he had told the woman it looked like rain when it was sunny out. Schlegel said he didn’t want her to feel she was missing anything.
‘How did you find out about Grigor?’
‘Easy,’ said Morgen. ‘The switchboard operators were the first ones today that sounded like they knew what they were doing, so I presumed they hadn’t got rid of them yet.’
The switchboard took the calls reporting all Jewish suicides. It relayed the information to the hearse drivers.
‘The drivers are known by their first names. The one called Grigor matches your description, and the waiter’s. Everyone called him Grigor, though on the actual drivers’ list he was down under his real name, Yakov. A gentleman with an eye for the ladies, she said.’
‘Except he is not where he is supposed to be, and nor are the butchers.’
32
Sybil and Lore watched from the window as Alwynd crossed Hochmeisterplatz on his way to his classes. They went to the back of the flat where Sybil posed nude. She was self-conscious because it reminded her of the demeaning business with Franz. She complained of the cold. Lore said at least it made her nipples stand up. Sybil said she didn’t want to do it, so they went back to bed. Lore told Sybil she was beautiful and held her face. She said she didn’t know what she would do without her. Afterwards they got tipsy on plum brandy of Alwynd’s they found in the kitchen.
‘And before ten in the morning too!’ said Lore.
‘Cheers!’ said Sybil, flushed from sex.
They took photographs of each other; for each other, they told themselves, though that was not the case.
When Sybil was a student some of the girls had posed as artists’ models. Lore insisted she be photographed naked too, so they would be even. She showed how to work the camera, standing with her arms round Sybil, saying all she had to do was wait for a moment she liked and press the shutter.
Afterwards they agreed they were even looking forward to the results.
Lore saw there were some frames left on the roll and said she wanted a photograph of them together. They had never appeared in the same picture.
Lore had a self-timer. Sybil stood waiting in front of the camera, trying to make herself as tall as possible, like she had as a child having her picture taken. Probably fewer than thirty photographs of her existed altogether, all lost, apart from three: one showing her as a baby in a perambulator; one as a young schoolgirl with her first satchel; and one of a student group in a café, all mugging to camera, apart from Franz trying to look cool in dark glasses.
Sybil stared into the lens and watched the camera iris open and shut. For the first they stood next to each other. In the second Sybil took Lore’s hand and in the third she impulsively reached for Lore and kissed her as hungrily as she ever had.
They both grew awkward when Lore took the finished roll and handed it to Sybil. Still feeling the effects of Alwynd’s brandy, they stood kissing for a long time in the doorway. Sybil wanted to go back to bed. Lore said later; she had to work. Lore said in a self-conscious way, ‘Sweet kisses as we part,’ and gave a salute like a matelot. Sybil was conscious of Lore watching as she left, as though wishing to retain the moment.
She wondered about not going to Schmidt’s, while perfectly aware she had little choice. She compromised and decided to go after spending an hour in the sanctuary of her little room, only to find Polish workers in the process of boarding up the house.
She tried to negotiate with the German supervisor, saying it was her home and she had come to retrieve the last of her belongings. The man showed his order sheet saying the property was condemned.
Sybil took the 51 tram as before, depressed at losing her refuge.
The track had been repaired so she didn’t have to change.
Schmidt was no more or less friendly than before. Come back in two days, he said.
That was a Sunday. Sybil took it to mean Schmidt intended to subject her to his lens. They could discuss any other business then, he said.
She ventured to ask how long it took to get papers. He said it depended, implying that the acquisition of illegal papers was like everything else and worked according to influence, position and usefulness.
Taking the initiative, Sybil said they could try some photographs now.
Schmidt had a studio across a courtyard, with proper lighting and a series of painted backdrops. She had to wait wrapped naked in a blanket for the mark of her brassiere to go. Schmidt was remote and professiona
l. A little to the left. Head up. Sybil displayed herself as naturally as she could. Only at the end did he say if she were more adventurous he could pay a lot more. Sybil knew she had been naive not agreeing a price. She had assumed it was a test and part of getting in with the man. Only the fact of Lore trusting him had stopped her walking out. Schmidt’s unthreatening manner had probably tricked a lot of women into taking their clothes off.
‘How much do you pay?’
He told her. It was a small fortune.
‘Next time. Not now.’ He had to keep the shop open in the day. ‘Think about it.’
A man tried to pick her up on the tram on the way back, sitting behind and resting on the back of the seat so he could keep up an insistent monologue. She got off and walked.
Lore had never been interested in the tedious demands of male desire. The few men she had tried it with were all sprinters or non-performers. Girls had more fun, she said, and it didn’t end with getting pregnant.
Had they been ordinary citizens they could have lived as a couple, for the simple reason that the law hadn’t got around to sending them off to a camp for loving each other, as they did men.
Outside of motherhood, women were deemed irrational and irrelevant. Their role was proscribed. Even so, she and Lore could have lived hiding in plain sight.
But had they not been persecuted they would never have met and being on the run together was preferable to a safe life alone, Sybil decided. It seemed absurd how this medieval witch hunt made a dirty secret of everything. The enemy included Alwynd, for whom they represented a prurient interest to be treated with amused but latent hostility because they fell outside his masterful gaze.
33
They were in the staff day room of the Jewish hospital, a big room with tall windows and angled sunlight, beyond which lay a bare expanse of neglected garden, its lawn full of last year’s weeds. Franz was dozing in an armchair. Seeing them standing there he knew he had been seconds too late waking up. He seemed resigned, as though he knew someone would come for him sooner or later.
‘We’re going for a drive,’ said Morgen.
Franz looked at Schlegel and clutched the arms of the chair, as if about to change his mind and make a run. Morgen pushed him back and said he had nothing to worry about.
