The Butchers of Berlin

by Chris Petit

  She knew somewhere, she said, when he relented.

  The condemned house near Francis Alwynd’s was still accessible, with a bit of ingenuity and from the back.

  Grigor was unappreciative of the library, which was when Sybil lost all patience.

  The rules changed. Grigor was gone more often than not, coming whenever he needed her. There was no question of leaving her tied up in such a place. The days offered some small respite. She finished the story about Franz Biberkopf.

  Grigor always failed to make her reach her climax, which offended his vanity.

  He boasted about his skills as a forger yet there was a tremor to his hands.

  Sybil got him to talk about Metzler, enticing him by telling her how she spent Metzler’s last night in his company.

  Grigor started to talk.

  Sybil repeated until it became her mantra: what you don’t possess you can’t destroy.

  The next day she went to Gersten with the intention of telling him she wanted to be followed and the rest was up to him. But he wasn’t there. They said he had gone away.

  She made what she considered a rather exquisite deal with Stella Kübler, saying where Grigor could be found if she wanted to catch him. She enjoyed the resulting confusion. Maybe Stella would act but she doubted it. She appeared unsure and withdrawn.

  In Gersten’s absence, she phoned Schlegel. He wasn’t in and she spoke to a secretary and left the address of Frau Zwicker, hoping he would work out she meant the attic.

  She told Grigor the condemned house was no longer safe. Police had been sniffing around and it was time to leave. The only place left she knew of would not be secure for long, but was better than nothing. People worked downstairs so they would have to be as quiet as church mice.

  The real reason to go there was because it brought her closer to the memory of Lore.

  It also took Grigor into her world and nearer the surface.

  They were entering the final run.

  52

  Until then Schlegel had not really considered himself part of an investigation. Rather, a series of events had resulted in dead ends. The flayed body murders were formally closed even as they went on, with he and Morgen now assigned as unofficial undertakers. Whatever the truth, it was variable. Morgen was right. The lie was the cornerstone of the edifice. Either there was no truth or it was meaningless.

  He started to consider how the puzzle of Metzler might be answered not by uncovering his motives but through Sybil, the fleeing witness.

  At another of his mother’s Sunday parties, with an apparent sense of equilibrium restored, he told her and Nebe the story of the coincidence of finding an old photograph of Metzler in a bank manager’s office of all places.

  His relationship with Nebe now ran silent and deep, with no aside that afternoon of anything passing below the surface. This latest secret disposal of bodies seemed to have initiated him into a world where things were taken care of without further reference, on personal initiative, where situations could develop which Nebe could pretend to ignore while viewing Schlegel with the same free-floating anxiety with which he regarded Morgen. In other words, Nebe would make something of Schlegel then grow suspicious of his creation.

  Later that afternoon his mother mentioned casually about seeming to remember quite a good painter named Metzler, and Schlegel, thinking it a coincidence, refused to take the clue seriously.

  ‘How were the flayed bodies selected?’ asked Morgen. ‘If we knew that we would have a clearer idea of what went on.’

  Schlegel suggested they question the Russian who had fingered Lazarenko for Gersten.

  ‘Shipped east.’

  ‘By whom?’

  ‘The paper trail starts and stops with the Department of Labour. There’s an official stamp and a clerical signature by a pen pusher with no memory of signing it because that’s all he does all day.’

  Morgen threw up his hands. Like Schlegel he thought what they were looking for wasn’t the obvious, or so obvious it was staring them in the face.

  Morgen asked, ‘What was it the Jewish pathologist said about paperwork?’

  ‘That we were obsessed with it and no one read it. Metzler may have been a painter, by the way.’

  ‘What, a house painter like Adolf?’

  ‘A picture painter.’

  ‘Like Adolf?’

  ‘Better. Even my mother has heard of him.’

  He was being unfair. His mother was more cultured than he was.

  Morgen said, ‘The record always tells, if you know where to look.’

  They spent an intense period sifting through stack rooms, archives and storage warehouses on industrial estates given over to old records. They became acquainted with the General Archive for German Jews, housed next to the synagogue on Oranienburger Strasse. They visited the Jewish picture library on Schiffbauerdamm, where Abbas had worked. There they found a small collection of photographs preserved, detailing the histories of the Jewish art school on Nürnburger Strasse and the Feige-Strassburger college of fashion and design on the Kurfürstendamm, both since closed.

  Harder to find were records of admission and graduation for both. At first they were told they were lost, until one of the more helpful archivists working in Oranienburger Strasse, where the Office of Genealogical Research kept a room, told them that just because the files were missing did not mean they were lost. She came back a few hours later, in triumph, saying she had located them as being held in the stack rooms of the Gestapo office in the same street as the Jewish hospital. Schlegel elected to go, grateful for the fresh air after hours of musty rows of files and the dry smell of paper.

  He was helped by a redhead with a beguiling smile, a sly way of looking up and full breasts beneath a tight woollen sweater. She led him down to the basement which contained a desk area and miles of shelves behind. He watched her ask for the files, thinking of the erotic combination of her white thighs surrounded by all that knowledge. He could reach out and touch her and knew she wouldn’t mind, even with others watching. She smelled a little of sweat.

  ‘Can I buy you a drink?’ he asked later.

  ‘I’m engaged.’ She didn’t sound serious about it.

  They shared the laugh. She would be easy, he thought, and nice too.

  Her arm tightened as she mimeographed the pages, casting her eyes upwards with her supplicant’s look. She smiled as she gave him the pages. An attractively crooked tooth only added to the perfection.

  Back in the office, a shroud of smoke hung in the air. Morgen was in shirtsleeves, braces loosened. He had found a blackboard and easel from somewhere, as well as chalk. His diagrams and scribbling looked like a combination of cartography and higher theory.

  ‘Paperwork returns to haunt. Everyone has a link, starting with Metzler.’

  He pointed to his hieroglyphics and talked Schlegel through them.

  ‘Metzler was a soldier and war hero, who went on to become a considerable artist. Before the last war he studied at the Berlin College of Arts and Crafts under Emil Orlik where one of his fellow students was George Grosz. Metzler’s paintings were represented in the 1937 exhibition of Degenerate Art by three works, the first filed under Revelation of the Jewish racial soul; followed by an abstract nude in the section Insult to German womanhood; and a blasted wartime landscape listed among Nature as seen by sick minds. By such a reckoning, Metzler was lucky to have hung on to his teaching post at the Jewish school of art.’

  Metzler’s former profession had been listed as a teacher, but what kind of teacher it hadn’t said.

  ‘We now know among his pupils was Yakov Zorin a.k.a. Grigor and Franz Leibermann. When it came to forging money, which seems to have been Metzler’s brainchild, he turned to his old students, who had already made a reputation providing false papers. I can’t prove it but suspect at least three of his former students, since deported, worked in this field. There’s another connection: the printer Plotkin who jumped or was pushed off the roof of the printing work
s from which Lampe and Abbas were supposed to have stolen the forged money. He and Metzler had previously published an avant-garde magazine.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘There are still books that list Metzler’s work. As Lipchitz said, no one bothers to read any more. Paperwork becomes a monument to itself. Blitzen magazine ran for two issues only, in deliberate imitation of the earlier Vorticist Blast magazine.’

  Morgen said Schlegel’s guess was as good as his. Progressive art was not something he gave any thought to.

  In more practical terms, he had found several connections like railway points between the different tracks. Of these Sybil Todermann was the most important. She knew Metzler’s former students; knew Metzler, although the precise nature of the relationship remained unclear; knew the man Metzler had shot; and she knew Gersten. And Sybil’s lover Lore had been a student of the Irishman Alwynd, who was known to, if not acquainted with, Gersten.

  Morgen turned back to the board and Metzler’s other salient point, a professional one connected to the slaughterhouse.

  ‘We presume he was known to Baumgarten. He was certainly familiar to Sepp in the steam room. He knew Gersten, of course. We move into difficult territory here.’

  Schlegel sensed where they were going. Everything collided in the end.

  Morgen hesitated. ‘I have known about your background from the beginning. Of course I read your file. I should have said when you told me about you and Gersten.’

  The man was trying to apologise and was so hopeless at it that Schlegel wished he wouldn’t.

  ‘I have no judgement to make, otherwise I would have said something sooner,’ Morgen mumbled.

  ‘Well, now I know,’ mumbled Schlegel in return.

  ‘The point is they were all there in the east at the same time. Baumgarten and the rest. Alternating between Belarus and Ukraine. The tracksuited leader of the Hitler Youth, whose name is Reitner. Sepp in the steam room. Haager who does the stunning. Even Lazarenko. The dead warden too.’

  ‘Gersten?’

  ‘Gersten above all. Summer of 1941, described as liaising with military intelligence; in fact, attached to a special anti-partisan unit that answered directly to Himmler.’

  How did he know this, Schlegel asked.

  ‘Paperwork.’

  For all the secrecy, there was endless analysis and report, prefaced by a considerable library of military theory.Theoretical experts in counter-insurgency vied to have papers adopted; the more radical the better.

  ‘The most extreme advocated rogue units posing as partisans to undertake what were called pseudo-atrocities.’

  ‘To what end?’

  ‘To justify reprisals.’

  For all the roundups and shootings, Schlegel had naively believed the field intelligence was accurate. Now Morgen seemed to be saying they had been responsible for everything. He was shocked.

  Morgen said yes, they created the situation that invited the response. ‘Rather than sitting around waiting for it to happen.’

  He knew all about it because in Lublin in 1941 he had investigated the activities of a brigade commander whose men continued to murder, rape and pillage as part of their leave activities.

  ‘I would like to be able to say it was Gersten, but unfortunately life is not that neat.’

  The commander was a convicted rapist. No one told Morgen it was a protected unit until his investigation was almost done, whereupon it was quashed. Nor had he known it consisted only of reprieved criminals who were known as the Poachers, because of the original stipulation for eligibility.

  ‘There were several such roaming gangs.’

  ‘Including Gersten’s?’

  ‘Including Gersten’s. They had carte blanche.’

  In spite of the gangs’ autonomy, considerable thought lay behind the whole enterprise. One theory Morgen had read talked of creating states of applied lawlessness, to be seen as extensions of the primordial struggle.

  ‘Are they secret papers?’

  ‘No. They were openly published in military and academic journals.’

  They were written with much appeal to and exploitation of myth. One spoke of the need for cruel hunters, like berserkers and werewolves of old. The strategy was to create a mental landscape conducive to rage, cruelty, courage, possession, punishment and alcohol, in order to create the most potent and destructive force.

  Morgen gestured in disbelief.

  ‘The surprise is how much thought went into everything, especially what lay beyond the pale.’

  ‘Did the authors believe these myths or was it a way of dressing up the extreme edges?’

  ‘I suspect the beauty was both theorists and executors came to inhabit the myth. The founding of such hunting units venturing deep into the forests of the east draws on ancient folklore, and the collective imagination – which is formed from dread – created the conditions that made such paroxysms of violence possible. Do you see where we are going with this?’

  ‘That the flayed killings might be another unofficial version of the same imagination.’

  ‘What if Gersten’s old unit is being used again in some way we don’t understand, or simply has gone rogue?’

  ‘Operating here as though it were still there.’

  ‘Gersten’s lot were known as the Butchers, by the way.’

  Upon trying to visit Gersten in Baden-Baden they were told the Gestapo ran no courses in that tranquil and picturesque spa town. Morgen understood this to mean Gersten had a level of protection. Schlegel asked what they should do now.

  Morgen said, ‘Go back to the beginning.’

  The block warden’s widow was no longer orange. From the little that showed under her neat hat, her hair was now dyed a presentable colour. She looked altogether different, the slattern wife gone, her manner reformed. When Schlegel had telephoned to say they needed another statement about her husband’s death she surprised him by volunteering to come to headquarters.

  ‘As long as I don’t have to see those terrible photographs of the drowned.’

  Schlegel said he could meet her at the back.

  He didn’t recognise her at first in her hat and brown overcoat, carrying a handbag and wearing proper shoes.

  Morgen was waiting upstairs. He addressed the woman formally, calling her Frau Schmeisser. She said she preferred now to be addressed by her unmarried name.

  ‘Frau Weiss it is then,’ said Morgen, all manners and holding the chair for her.

  Schlegel found Morgen’s manner sinisterly avuncular but the woman appeared to lap it up.

  ‘Perhaps I can start,’ Morgen prompted, ‘by asking if you are anyone’s informer.’

  The woman laughed and said, of course, it went with the job. She looked like she hadn’t enjoyed herself so much in years.

  ‘Can I ask whose?’

  ‘I am not supposed to say but I don’t think it’s terribly important.’

  ‘Let’s leave that for the moment,’ said Morgen equably. ‘Who were you informing on?’

  ‘My husband mainly.’

  The woman gave a shriek of laughter.

  ‘And who did your husband inform to?’

  ‘That flashy, long-haired cop.’

  ‘Your husband spent time in the east, did he not, with Gersten?’

  ‘He was a reservist policeman.’

  ‘Why did he leave?’

  ‘Court martial for theft.’ The woman snorted. ‘He was lucky to find work as a janitor after that.’

  Half an hour later she reviewed her statement and said, ‘That sounds right.’

  The signature was surprisingly elegant.

  She admitted she had been informing to the Austrian Commission, which was investigating Gersten, aware of his connection to her husband.

  ‘They paid quite well actually.’

  But that dried up when the Austrians moved on before anything of consequence happened.

  The meat of her statement concentrated on the night before the roundup, starting wi
th an argument overheard between her husband and Metzler.

  ‘More of a blazing row really.’

  She was in the kitchen when the voices next door became raised.

  They were quarrelling over the warden’s sexual abuse of Sybil and the warden bragged how he was going to pass her on to Gersten. The row developed a tangent when he boasted how, some nights before, he had been out all night on secret business, which he told Metzler would ‘settle the hash of your Jews’.

  The argument then turned to what was referred to as the accident and what the warden sneeringly referred to as other kinds of trains.

  It was the first they’d heard of any accident. The widow didn’t know what it meant either.

  As for other trains, from what they understood, the smuggling stopped when the Austrians came, and after that Metzler was transferred, through Gersten’s intervention, to a cushy job at the slaughterhouse goods yards.

  Morgen said to Schlegel, ‘Let’s be clear. This is no time for faint-hearted speculation. In every case reality has turned out more extreme than any speculation.’

  ‘What if Metzler transferred to his new job to replace one escape line with another?’

  Morgen smoked another cigarette. They were back upstairs.

  He finally said, ‘We have to presume Metzler was working for Gersten.’

  ‘As in using him?’

  ‘Perhaps not running rings but playing him well enough.’

  Morgen went to the blackboard. ‘Say, for argument’s sake . . .’

  He wrote: 1) Gersten was persuaded or fooled by Metzler into continuing the arrangement.

  ‘For whatever reason,’ Morgen said, chalk poised, then added: 2) Something went wrong. ‘We don’t know what.’

  He turned back to the board. Schlegel couldn’t see what he was writing until he had finished. He read: 3) What if Metzler’s transfer to the pig room was to do with whatever went wrong?

  ‘What if. Whatever.’ Morgen threw down the chalk. ‘I can tell you what I see but it doesn’t answer anything!’