by Chris Petit
Stella appeared mortified that anyone would dare challenge her. The man frowned, embarrassed, as Sybil pointed to her bruises.
Sybil addressed the room and said, ‘You better watch out. This bit of blonde poison is a Jew, so is her friend.’
She turned and marched out.
Sybil so relished Stella’s recoil she continued to stalk her and that afternoon confronted her again, this time in Kranzler’s where she was alone.
Sybil sat down at the same table and ordered tea. Stella didn’t leave, unwilling to cause a scene, and Sybil saw what a scuttling, shifty little figure she really was.
She sat staring at Stella, saying nothing, other than she was next, which was the sort of thing girls said to each other in school, but it seemed to have the desired effect. She said Grigor was coming to flay her and enjoyed her moment as Stella fled to the toilet.
After her day out, and swearing she would never go back, Sybil returned to the bench in Treptower Park because she could see no other way of keeping Grigor within reach.
Grigor came after half an hour and made her put the bandage back on.
In her endless hours alone, Sybil spent a long time thinking about Grigor’s perceived power and her weakness, and decided she might yet gain the upper hand. She wheedled and cajoled him into using his forgery skills to prepare a death sentence for Stella in the name of the German people. She suggested using an official form from a district court. She could see such a campaign of terror appealed to him.
Sybil came to luxuriate in the possibility of revenge. It was all she had left.
Copies of the death sentence were sent by registered post to Stella at Grosse Hamburger Strasse and Gersten at Gestapo headquarters. Part of her knew this persecution made her like them, driven by irrational hatred, but she didn’t care and would not relent, however much Stella’s boasting about Lore now sounded like a shoddy fantasy.
Grigor told her Gersten had confined everyone to quarters, for fear of losing his agents. It was the only piece of information he volunteered. Sometimes in the night Sybil woke to find him on top of her, a process so impersonal it might well not be happening.
‘I could beat your pretty little face even more black and blue,’ Gersten said.
He chucked Sybil under the chin, then leaned in as if to kiss.
‘The trouble you cause. Kübler is up in arms. Was that death threat your business?’
Sybil smiled for an answer.
‘Do you know what I think? It’s a power struggle. You want to take over Stella’s role, be queen bee. And you can, with my complete backing.’
Not true, but clever of him to point it out.
‘I am your best bet. But time is running out, so make up your mind. You’re thinking: him or the other one. And can I fix that bitch too. She told me how turned on she got beating you up. As it is, you are walking the plank. Jump with Grigor or come back to me? My offer stands. Give me Grigor and my largesse knows no bounds.’
‘He fetches me from a bench in Treptower Park.’
Except that evening he didn’t.
Sybil sensed Gersten’s people lurking in bushes and behind trees, growing bored and giving up.
She supposed they waited until the park closed then all trooped out.
Left with nowhere to go herself, she followed the path of the railway to try to work out where Grigor was keeping her.
She walked until she was grabbed from behind. She knew him by his smell.
He didn’t kill her for her betrayal, as seemed inevitable, but savagely blindfolded her and dragged her back to the lockup. He cross-examined her about where she had been and so on, roughed her up, trying to force her to say.
Sybil refused and said, ‘Do what you like. I don’t care. Just get on with it.’
Grigor stopped and she realised he wasn’t going to kill her after all, because he had grown dependent on her in some sick way.
51
Morgen worked at a whirlwind pace, twice as fast as if he had still been on Pervitin. They drove out to the SS Ahnenerbe scientific research centre in Dahlem where Lampe was being held for what was quaintly called observation. Morgen explained on the way that he had fixed the trip on the quiet through his brother Theodore, who worked there.
‘We don’t really get on, though I should be more grateful, because Theo fixed my membership with the Foreign Press Club.’
Theodore Morgen turned out to be a more compact version of his brother, so much so that Schlegel couldn’t resist asking were they twins, to which they snapped in unison, certainly not. Theodore was quick to add he was the elder.
He wore a double-breasted waistcoat with mother-of-pearl buttons and smoked as much as his brother, with the same habit of switching sides with each drag. He took them to his office with a library of rare and exotic books. He told Schlegel he was employed as a Tibetan scholar but the place was like working in a mausoleum.
‘Are you the young man who loses his hat? Ever been to Tibet?’
He made it sound as commonplace as Hamburg or Kiel.
‘Your man is being brought downstairs now. It’ll be about five minutes. They’re tickled pink to have him.’
Schlegel found the brothers like a warped adult version of the Max and Moritz cartoon.
Morgen smoked by the window while his brother proceeded to lecture Schlegel.
‘I do have scholastic training, but the institution is interested only in a combination of new-age rubbish, historical fantasy, bogus science, pseudo-research and neo-paganism. The place is staffed with opportunists—’
Morgen interrupted to ask if Theo was talking about himself again.
Theo hissed at Schlegel, ‘Tell him to do something useful with his judicial powers, like sending himself to prison.’
The brothers’ rivalry was like static. God only knew what their childhood had been like, thought Schlegel.
Theo went on, ‘We have progressed from dotty scholarship and exotic field trips to conducting freezing tests to see how much cold the body can endure, using humans as guinea pigs, where revival methods include coital tests done to flatter Himmler’s belief in the magical powers of body heat, and his theory that contact between the sexes provides the transmission of a vital force from the stronger to the weaker.’
‘Does it work?’ asked Morgen.
Theo snapped, ‘See what I mean? The flippancy. No, it doesn’t. Obviously.’
‘Come on,’ said Morgen, tetchy. ‘We don’t have time to stand around all day.’
Axel Lampe was heavily sedated, to the point of drooling. Any previous talkative self was replaced by muteness. The pudding-basin haircut had gone, his skull shaved to the bone.
‘It must be pretty dim in there, Axel,’ Morgen said. ‘Let’s play a game my way. I ask the question. You don’t have to answer. Instead I hold up a finger. One finger for yes and two for no. Just nod or shake your head. First question, is Stoffel an arsehole?’
Lampe looked uninterested but eventually nodded at the single finger.
‘A yes. Next question, did you kill those people Stoffel said you did?’
Lampe stared at the single digit, looking stupid. Morgen held up two fingers and Lampe immediately nodded. A no.
‘And did you steal the money from the printers?’
Lampe hadn’t the faintest idea what they were talking about, even when they explained to the point of exhaustion.
Morgen stood up and said, ‘It’s important to remind ourselves of what the system is capable.’
They discovered the first flayed body in the cattle wagon had in fact been referred on from the city pathology department to the Jewish hospital at Iranische Strasse, on grounds of backlog and lack of staff.
The arrangement was quite common, according to Lipchitz, the Jewish pathologist they talked to. He implied most unidentified bodies ended up with him because the city department was lazy.
‘Even with a case of homicide?’ asked Morgen.
‘Someone must have made the decision the
flayed bodies were Jewish, though how he could tell I have no idea.’
Schlegel could not identify the guttural accent. Lipchitz was a careworn, elderly man, who wore pince-nez and a grubby white coat. He was grateful for Morgen’s offer of a cigarette, taken with unsteady hands. His office was like a laboratory, half-tiled and with gas jets, but so cold he wore an overcoat under his overall.
Personal curiosity had led him to conduct a proper autopsy. No one had been chasing for the report.
‘Don’t you always?’ asked Morgen. ‘Aren’t there professional standards?’
‘I can conclude what I like, for all anyone cares in this kingdom of death.’ He studied Morgen, calculating. ‘You look all right to me, so I will tell you that your lot are obsessed with paperwork that no one reads. I did both bodies, for what it’s worth.’
‘Would you say they were the work of a single hand?’
‘I would say.’
‘Based on what?’
‘For all the show of artistry, I would venture the man isn’t a very good butcher.’
‘And?’
‘The first showed signs of having been kept on ice, by the way. The other not.’
‘As in frozen?’
‘Yes, kept on ice.’
‘What’s the sense in that?’
Lipchitz shrugged. ‘What’s the sense in anything? I don’t mean to be facetious.’
The man’s skin was grey from exhaustion. Rings of tiredness under his eyes looked like bruises.
‘Was it the flaying that killed them?’ asked Morgen.
‘I can’t say. As a victim you would rather be dead first, because death can last hours, even days, in cases of being flayed alive.’
He knew of no modern examples but there were historical precedents. The Neo-Assyrian tradition was for flaying alive. The Aztecs skinned victims of human sacrifice after death.
‘Yes,’ said Morgen. ‘I have been somewhere recently where there was talk of human lampshades.’
Schlegel looked at the man. What could he mean? It was the closest Morgen had come to admitting his recent absence was another assignment.
Lipchitz had also done the autopsies on Abbas and the unidentified woman.
‘Where are the reports on those?’ asked Morgen.
Lipchitz said he had been asked to forward them to the city pathology department.
‘Though they were Jews?’
‘No rhyme or reason.’
Morgen asked for Lipchitz’s report copies. The man was organised and had them to hand. Morgen studied them and looked up, puzzled.
‘The report says the autopsies were conducted by the city department. It’s even written on their forms.’
Lipchitz said quietly, ‘That’s the way they like it.’
‘So they subcontract to you and you make it look like it was done by them.’
‘It’s about quotas and bonuses.’
‘They pad their figures with your numbers?’ asked Morgen, astonished.
‘When they can make our dead count for something.’ He smiled coldly. ‘We are more valuable to them that way.’
Morgen asked if there was a possible connection between the two types of killing.
‘Show versus obliteration. Part of the same coin. Both obviously forms of display. As polar opposites they ought to be the work of different twisted minds, but these days . . . they could be the product of a schizophrenia.’
A killer driven to extremes, thought Schlegel, both forms involving exhibition.
Lipchitz looked at what was left of his cigarette, which he had managed to keep going by letting it burn out and relighting.
‘The hour is getting late. I don’t care any longer, but do you mind if I ask if you do?’
Morgen said, ‘We wouldn’t be here if we didn’t.’
Lipchitz asked if he had been educated by Jesuits. No, said Morgen.
‘Such casuistry,’ murmured Lipchitz. ‘I was interested in the insistence on utter erasure, beyond anything that would render the flayed corpse identifiable. I’d never heard of such a thing in a so-called civilised society and with this flaying I wonder if we haven’t arrived at something where what’s done to the body is more important than the actual killing.’
‘You mean like dead meat?’ asked Schlegel.
Lipchitz looked at him properly for the first time and said yes, exactly.
‘I presume the preparation of the bodies in this manner is for symbolic reasons rather than actual consumption, but among natives in Brazil eating your enemy becomes part of a cycle of vengeance. In this cycle one consumes the enemy, and is later consumed by the enemy, dying at his hands, precisely to bring vengeance into being, and so bring about a future.’
‘What does that tell us, other than about future vengeance?’ asked Morgen, interested.
The man looked desolate. ‘You ask me? There are so many things that are in the process of being obliterated. All I can suppose is it is a reflection of the larger viciousness.’
Morgen clicked his heels and formally addressed the man. ‘My dear doctor, our appetite for the epic and the trite knows no bounds. Those in thrall – and I include myself up to a point – fooled ourselves we were being offered a narcotic sense of historical destiny, absolved of all responsibility.’
‘No,’ said Lipchitz. ‘Any Jew will tell you there is always a price to pay.’
Gersten, they discovered, was no longer available for questioning, being away on a course in Baden-Baden.
They wasted the best part of a day looking for a freezer in the slaughterhouse. They dismissed the huge ice factory as too public and conspicuous. Compared to the rest of the site, it appeared as busy as a stock exchange.
Otherwise each animal section had its own cold-storage facilities, but the freezer sections had been decommissioned. They were told this by Baumgarten, whose slow and uncomprehending manner became more questionable with each acquaintance.
With such widespread meat shortages there was no reserve to freeze, certainly not in the case of the pig section. Only one cool room remained in use, located next to the slaughterhouse, by the railway siding. Entrance was by enormous thick steel doors. Inside was a gigantic vault, cold enough to make their breath visible.
The state of supply was evident from the empty hooks and only a handful of carcasses hanging.
Morgen asked, ‘What of Nöthling’s pigs?’
‘We didn’t deal with them,’ said Baumgarten.
‘Not what I asked.’
Nöthling had brought in his own team.
As to where a frozen body might have been kept – or the existence of any temporary morgue – Baumgarten made a good show of being clueless. He emphasised the enormity of the area. Only about a quarter was currently in use.
Schlegel wondered if Baumgarten’s huge hands had been responsible for Keleman’s murder, but there was no motive or evidence, other than the man living with death every day.
Morgen asked to be shown the freezer room. The supply was switched off, as Baumgarten had said. The trenches were empty and unfrozen.
Morgen decided they should go and talk to Herr Nöthling about his pigs. Schlegel wondered if his mother still kept an account, and how toward was her use of ration cards.
Baumgarten seemed pleased by their wasted effort.
Schlegel expected them to go back to headquarters and take Stoffel’s Opel as usual. Morgen said he couldn’t be bothered.
They passed above the chambers and paths of the slaughter yards, along the seemingly endless pedestrian bridge, a windowless passageway known as the Long Sorrow that carried them over to Zentralviehhof station. There they caught the S-Bahn, skirting the south-east of the city, past Treptower Park. Another day of overcast skies, the belching smoke of factory chimneys practically indistinguishable.
What was this talk of lampshades? Schlegel asked.
Morgen stared for a long time before saying instead, ‘Maybe the bodies were frozen elsewhere.’
After Schöneberg
they had the carriage to themselves and Morgen came closest to admitting what had been preoccupying him.
‘I joined the SS Judiciary partly because it offered a swifter rate of advance than its civilian counterpart. I thought stability and order would lead us out of the mire of the twenties. But what I feared about too much power becoming invested in one man has come to pass. He has no military experience, apart from his time as a corporal runner in the war, and at the last count monopolises no fewer than seventy state functions. No wonder we are paralysed.’
Schlossstrasse was a major shopping area in the affluent suburb of Steglitz, catering for the wealthy neighbourhoods of Lichterfelde and Dahlem, a boulevard with trams and broad pavements. Substantial Wilhelmine buildings, castle-like apartments and public halls with imposing facades of rusticated stone, spoke of unassailable prosperity. It was a street down which uniformed nannies still pushed prams and leisured women met in tea rooms.
Nöthling’s store had an impressive double frontage, with his name written in enormous letters above. The old pillared entrance was flanked by two large modern picture windows, filled with an artful display of harvest baskets and produce boxes, which Schlegel suspected were empty.
Morgen asked, ‘How would you describe this place?’
‘A delicatessen, I suppose.’
‘Is that enough? I am sure Nöthling considers it an emporium and himself a purveyor of fine goods. I feel hungry just looking.’
Schlegel couldn’t remember when he had last eaten a decent meal, other than at his mother’s, and even she complained. Whatever she lacked, there was little shortage of meat, and he wondered about her supplier. Pork, beef, chicken, game. Once she had put her knife and fork down and announced, ‘This meat tastes like horse,’ to which he asked, ‘How do you know what horse tastes like?’ which shut her up.
The shop was large, clean and well-presented, presided over by female assistants, young and elderly, neat in white grocers’ coats and caps. The cashier sat in a booth of her own. Marble countertops matched the floor, and looked expensive, as did the fearsome meat slicer. Nothing had been spared to convey an atmosphere of quiet ostentation, but in keeping with the times the shelves were understocked. Homemade jam was for sale. Morgen whistled at the price.
