The Butchers of Berlin

by Chris Petit

  Stoffel said his story made sense, up to the point where Keleman got lost in the fog.

  ‘I’m not saying you didn’t roll around in shit, son, but why would anyone want to kill a fucking accountant?’

  46

  Lore didn’t come back that night. Stella Kübler, flicking through a magazine in the common room, cheerfully said she hadn’t seen her.

  ‘It happens quite a lot in the early stages. They wander off, usually only for a few days, then come back with their heads straight. One or two jump, but I wouldn’t say yours was one of those.’

  Sybil walked out. Stella caught up with her in the corridor, grabbed her arm, spun her round and kissed her on the lips.

  ‘I made your little friend so hot and wet she was sobbing for it. She said you need to be more adventurous.’

  Sybil slapped her. Stella put her hand up to the red mark on her cheek and laughed.

  ‘Darling, so jealous. Don’t be so possessive.’

  Sybil got through the next day by working herself to distraction, using newspapers in cafés to make a list of cinemas and going to speak to the managers, with a story about wanting to contact her brother-in-law who was working as a projectionist. In the big cinemas she found staff were fairly permanent; the waiter had said Grigor was part time.

  She trawled suburbs, visiting rundown picture houses. One venue was reduced to a bomb site and she thought it was just her luck if he had worked there.

  At night she concentrated on the city centre. Some late-night joints were free for troops. The flea-pits showed more or less anything. There were newsreel theatres and a couple that ran only cartoons. The picture palaces and the dives all smelled the same, of stale smoke and dirty bodies.

  She walked miles. She knew she wasn’t even close. It wouldn’t have been beyond the waiter to have made it up.

  Lore didn’t return that night either.

  Stella came to Sybil’s room with a contrite face. ‘Sorry, darling, I am such a bitch. Don’t believe anything I say.’

  She was so insincere Sybil decided she was only there to churn up more doubt.

  ‘Take my hand and say you forgive me.’

  When Sybil cried Stella insisted on holding her. Sybil weakened in spite of herself, thinking any embrace was better than none, her mind in utter confusion.

  ‘She’ll come back. I am so sorry. Are we friends again? Kiss me like we are sisters and I will say goodnight.’

  Sybil couldn’t bring herself to and saw the blazing hatred in Stella’s eyes.

  The next morning Gersten talked of the war against the forgers and how good Stella Kübler was and how delighted he would be if Sybil became half as accomplished, which was when Sybil realised he never meant to let her go.

  ‘Mikki Hellman’s gone. Schönhaus can’t last much longer. These are all names familiar to you.’

  They had all been part of the same student scene.

  ‘There’s even a Chinese forger. He must be the last Chink in Berlin, so if you see him . . .’

  Gersten laughed. The few Chinese restaurants left were run by Germans. Everyone said the one in Schmargendorf served dog.

  ‘How’s your friend adjusting?’

  ‘She’ll be fine,’ said Sybil, saying nothing of Lore’s vanishing. He probably knew already from the Kübler woman, who would have boasted of her conquest, true or not.

  ‘And Grigor?’

  She hoped one more day would be sufficient.

  Life became a series of bets with herself. A train passing overhead when she crossed under the S-Bahn was a sign everything would be all right. The next corner reached in fewer steps than she had guessed meant Lore would be back safe that night. Her fingers ached from keeping them crossed. And all the time pictures like film flickers bombarded her head, showing Lore writhing with the Kübler woman.

  Alternately she had the clearest visions of Lore falling to earth. She saw Lore drowned, throwing herself in front of a hurtling train, and broken on the ground after jumping from a high building.

  She returned to Alwynd’s to see if she had been back. Alwynd was his usual beady self. Unusually, there was no female companion around.

  No, he hadn’t seen Lore. He had been wondering.

  ‘I haven’t seen you in days. Are you still staying here?’

  He said she looked tired and they could always go and lie down.

  ‘I don’t have any classes until this afternoon. It will relax you.’ Sybil ignored him. ‘I promise not to mention your Jewishness to anyone.’

  She couldn’t tell if this was a threat or more drollery. She said she had to go when what she really wanted was to be held, and left at that.

  In desperation, she called Franz, who sounded surprised. She told him she was at her wits’ end and badly needed to reach Grigor. She listened to his long silence before she said she was desperate to know how to find out if Lore was still alive.

  Franz said it was easier to check if she were dead. He spoke in a tough way, as if even the idea of a single death was sentimental. He suggested she try the hearse drivers.

  The hearse driver she spoke to had picked up no one of Lore’s description but he couldn’t speak for the others.

  Sybil asked, ‘Do you know Grigor? He used to be one of the drivers.’

  There had been a lot of changes. The man looked like he couldn’t care less about her plight.

  ‘If you see him, tell him I am looking for him.’

  She might as well put a message in a bottle and chuck it in the river.

  The driver decided to be helpful after all and produced a tatty exercise book which listed those they had fetched. Twelve dead were down for the last two days.

  Sybil read down the entries, written in several hands.

  Couple, middle-aged, presumed Veronal poisoning, Frankfurter Allee.

  Female, approx. 40, drowned Gross Glienicke See.

  Male, 50s, jumped Damaschkestrasse.

  Female, 30s, slit wrists, Steglitzer Damm.

  Male, 40s, gassed, head in oven. Orber Strasse.

  Mother and child, approx. 30 and 5 or 6, Veronal poisoning, Alt Moabit.

  Child, approx. 15, natural causes [?], Reinickendorfer Strasse.

  Couple, 70s, Veronal, Brunnenstrasse.

  Female, 50s, drowned, Halensee.

  That night she avoided Stella and lay in her room, hoping by sheer willpower she could conjure Lore back. No one came, except Gersten, standing in her doorway, watching as she pretended to be asleep.

  The following morning a mist hung in the air. She was shutting the gate to the garden when a ghostly figure approached.

  It had to be chance, was her first thought; then she realised he must be looking for her too. He looked older, with deep lines down the side of his face, but had lost none of his aura. The easy way he moved on the balls of his feet was like a big cat, alert and self-contained in a way Franz could only dream of. Sybil wondered if Franz had done her the favour after all.

  But if he knew where she lived he would also know what that meant.

  ‘Sybil,’ he said.

  47

  Schlegel wandered drunk, from bar to bar, taking too many pills, as if he could hallucinate reality away.

  As long as Keleman’s body was missing there was no case.

  He had gone back with Stoffel’s crew, minus Stoffel, to the slaughterhouse. Baumgarten professed ignorance of everything. Schlegel stumbled around to little purpose. He remembered to return the boiler suit. He knew he had lost his hat but couldn’t think where. He confiscated the slaughterhouse stun gun, suspecting it was a waste of time because if it had been used on Keleman it would have been steam-cleaned so no trace was left.

  Schlegel did his best to persuade himself that Keleman had made himself scarce after all. There was no sign of Morgen. He forgot to send the stun gun on to forensics. His thinking was all over the shop.

  He spent a long time nursing a drink in a bar, developing a theory of parallel memory. He had always thought of the p
ast as something to be moved on from, the way something chucked from a speeding boat receded and became absorbed. He had imagined the ditch shootings would grow similarly distant. Most of the time he didn’t think about them; it belonged to a time known as then that had nothing to do with now. But since Morgen’s disappearance he started to accept the past as an adjacent space, like a room into which one could step.

  He was in a bar in Mitte, probably talking to himself. Then he was wandering around Alexanderplatz, thinking about Lampe and his dark fantasy world, which was maybe preferable to the state of denial the rest of them lived in. He supposed he was going through a crack-up brought on by a combination of catharsis and disgust. Enough was enough; one more drink then go home and dry out, before dedicating himself properly, to what? Was there any point in trying to track down Grigor, who would be crushed by the machine sooner or later? They all would. Even if a fraction of what Keleman had been saying was true, Schlegel couldn’t see how he could begin to make a dent in it.

  He spotted a couple of underground Jews. He was getting good at picking them out. He tried talking to them. They didn’t want to. He supposed they were worried his being drunk would attract attention. Then he didn’t know what was going on because two men were addressing him and it seemed to be his turn to be the U-boat. They were asking for his papers. That was easy enough. He stayed them with a raised finger and reached in his jacket, except his papers weren’t there. He patted other pockets in desperation. When he said he was a policemen they laughed in his face, punched him in the stomach and made him show his cock.

  ‘Come on, Jew boy, under arrest.’

  48

  Sybil sat in the cinema. It was in a bad part of town, much given over to foreign workers’ barracks. The cinema showed cheap fodder for sex-starved troops, featuring sturdy, prancing, scantily dressed women. Sybil presumed it was a relic from more permissive times. From what she could tell, everyone else in the cinema was male. Much furtive rustling went on. The place was a free-for-all. She even spotted some noisy boys presumably there for a dare. The only empty seats were all down the front because they were too close to the screen. Sybil had no one on either side and was fairly sure the man two seats away was pleasuring himself under his greatcoat.

  She had told Gersten about Grigor, hoping he would intervene.

  She was flattered in spite of herself that Grigor had remembered her name, until he said she worked for the other side now.

  Gersten asked what she had said to that.

  ‘I told him I was looking to get out.’

  ‘Good. What was his response?’

  ‘He asked if I was another of your traps. I swore I wasn’t and he said, “You know what happened to the others who were sent.” ’

  ‘Did he mention me by name?’

  ‘He just said Gestapo.’

  ‘But he admitted to killing them, so I am right. You have done well. I expect you can’t tell if you are the spider or the fly.’

  Gersten unnerved her. Grigor unnerved her. Her response to Grigor unnerved her too. She didn’t know if what she was saying was just words or she believed them. Would she throw in her lot with him? What choice she had from what she could see amounted to deciding who between Grigor and Gersten she would elect to kill her. Compared to the artistry of Gersten, who would hide his true face until the last moments, Grigor came over as primitive and unpredictable. His gaze so unsettled her that she considered him quite capable of flaying someone. She could imagine him doing it to the Kübler woman and experienced a perverse thrill. She had heard that beyond extremes of pain lay unsuspected hinterlands that were not unpleasant and even pleasurable.

  Grigor had named a cinema, a dive, he said, under railway arches that ran late-night sessions. She wouldn’t find it listed in any of the papers, he added, as though he knew what she had been up to. He gave her a time and told her to sit down at the front, as far to the left facing the screen as she could.

  She had asked Gersten to intervene, but he only said it was too early.

  ‘I want to know more now you are close enough to smell him. I need evidence that he is the flayer.’

  She had looked in vain for Schlegel and left a string of desperate messages, hoping he might materialise and afford some protection.

  The film was terrible. It was old and scratched, with chunks missing, because of the censor or projectionists hacking bits out for private enjoyment. She tried hard to follow it, in an effort to blot out everything else. Time seemed to be accelerating. Events of only a few days past – that first gut-churning glimpse of Lore as Gersten’s captive – seemed half a lifetime ago. The man two seats away had his cock out, his hand a blur as he worked away, spine arched, head tilted back over the edge of the seat, and groaning like a dying man. The boys sniggered and pointed. On the screen two buxom flaxen-haired maidens in bathing costumes threw a beach ball at each other.

  Something prodded her in the back. Before she had time to be surprised a voice whispered, ‘Follow me.’

  The auditorium was almost pitch-black because the screen had gone to a night scene. Sybil had to feel her way down the aisle, vaguely aware of the shape of Grigor’s long army surplus coat ahead of her. He took her out not by the front, as she was expecting, but through the fire exit, which took them into a back yard, and from there up an outside staircase to a gantry where the projection booth was housed in a wooden hut. The projector ground away unattended.

  Grigor turned and slapped her so fast that Sybil had no time to protect herself. She fell in a heap, her head ringing, seeing stars. She supposed this was the start of what he did. The strange hiccoughing must be her, she decided, a sound unlike anything her body had ever produced before.

  Grigor wanted to know who the white-haired young man was he had seen hanging around outside the back of her lodgings.

  She was about to deny everything but Grigor’s murderous tone made her say, ‘He’s police. He’s harmless.’

  He bent down, too fast for her again, and picked her up by the front of her coat so she was lifted off the ground, feet dangling. His strength was evident in the way he held her one-handed. In the other was a knife whose sharp point he stuck into the soft skin under her jaw.

  ‘Why is he following you?’

  ‘Because he is looking for you.’

  The knife pierced her skin. Her whining sounded despicable. Snot ran down her face. Her bladder was about to burst. Rain fell outside, a sudden, sharp squall. There was no shame in losing control. She was tired of trying to hold it all together.

  The room went suddenly bright, followed by slow handclapping and wolf whistles. For a moment Sybil thought the audience must be watching them on a stage, but Grigor had missed his reel change. The projector had run out of film.

  He worked fast and professionally as though a few seconds ago had never happened. Sybil considered running but her legs were like feathers. No one had ever hit her that hard before. All her scrambled brain could think was Grigor would be led as much by his cock as the masturbating man downstairs.

  Grigor might toy with her for a while but he would kill her unless she could offer something. She’d heard of double agents, people who worked for opposite sides at the same time. She supposed that was what she was about to become, pretending to work for both men in the desperate hope that she could play off one against the other.

  Grigor appeared embarrassed by his earlier violence. Sybil took her chance, asking if he had a cigarette. Grigor said it was forbidden in the booth. Sybil laughed at that, thinking he mustn’t see her fear. She scoffed at being told she couldn’t smoke.

  She didn’t want the cigarette but took it anyway. She made it clear she expected him to light it for her, and sucked greedily at the flame.

  ‘So we have an interesting situation,’ she said as coolly as she could manage, wriggling for the slightest chance of survival.

  ‘Let’s say I deliver the Kübler bitch to you, so we can take care of her the same way as the others.’

&n
bsp; She now considered him easily capable of flaying Kübler alive, and experienced the same spurt of nasty pleasure as before.

  ‘The white-haired one is harmless. He’s only interested in you because of some forgeries. He’s easily taken care of.’

  The knife was in Grigor’s hand again, pressed against her belly. The other one lay splayed on her breast. The threat was still there but not as strong. Sybil sighed inwardly. She would have to fuck him in the end, however hard she tried to string him along.

  ‘I have nothing clever to say. You want the Kübler woman or you don’t. I am going now. As for meeting again, I could name a place and turn up with Gersten, so what do we do?’

  ‘You come here, to this booth, any time after dark. Bring anyone and there’s enough flammable materials to blow the roof off the cinema.’

  Sybil saw herself out, climbed downstairs and paused in the alleyway to spew up the contents of her stomach. The cobblestones were slick from the rain she had listened to drumming on the booth while thinking she might not be alive to hear it stop.

  Gersten came on what Schlegel reckoned was the third day.

  He was alone and said, ‘You look awful.’

  ‘What took you so long?’

  Schlegel was in a cell on his own, not much bigger than a tomb, that felt deep underground. He had a wooden bunk, one grimy blanket and a bucket. He slept curled in a ball, sweating from withdrawal, so exhausted he didn’t care about his plight or that no one came. The thin gruel always delivered while he slept was stone cold when it came to eating and scarcely alleviated his hunger. The last thing he remembered were sausages at Stoffel’s party.

  Gersten looked suave, wearing the whipcord coat, his hair silky, freshly washed.

  ‘You needed the rest to judge by the state of you.’

  He took them via a series of complicated tunnels to a huge vaulted space like a crypt, full of stainless-steel containers.

  ‘It’s a morgue. In case you are still having trouble thinking.’

  He slid open a drawer and Schlegel was presented with the sight of flayed meat.