The Butchers of Berlin

by Chris Petit

  The doctor was made to watch as the slops were force-fed to the three Russians, who died slow, agonising deaths, proving Morgan’s theory.

  ‘You see the doctor in question was lazy. He maintained he had carried out the autopsy and the man died of natural causes, but he hadn’t, and he was arrogant and careless to boot. He failed to dispose of the body, which we found waiting for us in the morgue.

  ‘I told the doctor that what was now in the stomachs of the dead Russians would be extracted and fed to him, as a point of curiosity, to see if he survived being poisoned at third-hand by the strychnine he had administered.’

  Morgen said, ‘Everyone sings in the end.’

  Bluffing or not, his capacity for ruthlessness was evident.

  ‘Now, with you, my friend,’ Morgen went on quietly, ‘I suspect my brutality will have to match behaviour familiar to you from the east. Torture is a search for the truth by other means, eh, Haager? And Schlegel here, who is a sensitive soul, is thinking, “We are becoming like them”, to which I am bound to answer you can’t cure sickness and not risk infection. Am I to become a brute like you? Here’s the story. Of course, you prove as tough as an ox, even after your shoulders dislocate from being strung up with your arms behind your back. You scream in agony, and I sympathise. It’s curious how one identifies with pain. And still I ask no questions, which puzzles you to distraction and will break you in the end. Then we chuck you in the slurry pit where your dislocated shoulders make it hard not to drown. With the fumes, you struggle to stay conscious, then decide you weren’t born to die swallowing liquid shit. So you tell me everything.’

  Haager glowered as if to say mind games would get Morgen nowhere.

  ‘I am going to leave you alone to think about this now. Look at your hands and ask yourself about all the things they did in Russia.’

  In the corridor, Schlegel asked if the story about the poisoned Russians was true.

  ‘No love lost between me and Russians, and even less for those who sit at home, pretending to be soldiers, lining their pockets and claiming running a concentration camp is a frontline job because they are fighting the internal war. Hah!’

  Grigor was lying on his bunk with his hands behind his head. When he struggled to get up Morgen pushed him back.

  He said he wasn’t empowered to investigate the murders, he was only interested in Metzler, Gersten, safe trains and fake money.

  Grigor, as the forger, seemed in no doubt he was the star.

  Schlegel found him vain and insufferable, an appropriate foil to Gersten. With both men everything had to pass through the portals of large and self-regulating egos.

  Morgen said, ‘I have no wish to listen to you. Just say yes or no. Abbas told Gersten that Metzler was using forged money and Gersten was sufficiently enraged to arrange its confiscation, disguised as robbery, and have Plotkin chucked off the roof. Metzler was about to be packed off when you stepped in and announced you were capable of producing the perfect forged note. Yes or no?’

  Grigor looked smug. ‘Yes.’

  ‘It only needed Metzler to point out to Gersten the advantages of such a source of untraceable money for him to become greedy and allow the smuggling to resume, now departing from the slaughterhouse yards. Yes or no?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What do you know of the accident?’

  Grigor looked blank and said he was just a technician.

  He radiated the superiority of the underdog. His contempt for Schlegel was clear. With Morgen he was cannier, suggesting his services might prove useful.

  Morgen said, ‘I suggest half a deal. We lose you in the ordinary penal system and send you up the road to Moabit where I keep an eye on you. The condition is you have to provide yourself with a false identity card to my satisfaction, which should be easy for a man of your skill. You probably have such a card already.’

  Grigor looked at them with tragic eyes and held out quivering hands.

  ‘They have been like this for a month. I can no longer work. I need to see a doctor.’

  Morgen said, ‘We’ll find you one. Tell me where your tools are and I’ll have them sent over. I am sure your second best will be good enough. Think of yourself as working for me now but get rid of the shakes because I have exacting standards.’

  Morgen had acquired a car with its own driver, the same man who had held the door for Schlegel when getting out at the bar with the green door.

  They drove the short distance to Auguststrasse and stopped outside Schlegel’s apartment. Schlegel thanked Morgen for the lift. Morgen said they weren’t finished and led the way into the dancehall and asked for the manager, Herr Valentine, who took them to his office where Schlegel saw Sybil lain on a chaise longue, passed out from exhaustion. Herr Valentine withdrew discreetly. Sybil flinched when Morgen woke her.

  He told her she was safe. Sybil appeared somewhat reassured. Her throat was bruised.

  Morgen said she could rest soon. Herr Valentine could provide a room upstairs where she would be safe.

  ‘I need you to tell us about the last night of Metzler’s life. I believe you were with him.’

  She looked aghast. ‘How do you know? I told nobody.’

  ‘Boring detective work. The aspect that puzzled me was the timing of your leaving the building just as the shooting occurred.’

  Sybil bowed her head.

  ‘You were going to meet Metzler, to escape the roundup together.’

  ‘But what about your mother?’ asked Schlegel.

  Sybil had warned her mother, who decided to take her chances and hide in the building.

  ‘Why were you trying to help Metzler?’

  He had come to her that last night. Not only had he just learned the warden was blackmailing her, he had been told he was due to be deported, and that was far from the worst of it.

  ‘Why were you being blackmailed?’ asked Morgen.

  ‘The warden knew I was having an affair with a woman.’

  At the time they only had Sundays together. Lore lived far away and, like a lot of others, they used the boiler room for their trysts.

  ‘He showed me his spy hole in the back of his apartment that let him make note of couples going in and out.’

  The warden had told Metzler out of spite, because everyone knew he had a crush.

  ‘What he didn’t know was we had known each other since I was a student. Metzler was a real artist. I was young and heartless.’ She spoke in an automatic way. ‘I didn’t realise how serious he was. We all slept around, in reaction to the urgency of the situation, living for the moment. He was older, as you know.’

  ‘What else did he tell you that night?’

  ‘Everything.’

  ‘Did he tell you about the perfect note?’

  ‘Is that what Grigor told you?’

  ‘He said it financed the second phase of the operation.’

  ‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he?’

  She confirmed Grigor sold the idea of the perfect note to Metzler, who sold it on to Gersten, who bit.

  Morgen ventured that Grigor perhaps hadn’t been as good a forger as he made out.

  Sybil said he had confessed that some tiny flaw or tremor stopped him from achieving perfection.

  ‘By the time I knew him his hands shook quite badly. Metzler said there was nothing resembling a perfect note. Well, there was in that he was using real money to pay Gersten.’

  Morgen looked astonished. ‘How? There was none left.’

  ‘Through his art. He knew a dealer who could sell in Zurich. He had collectors there, and in America, who paid well though he complained that the dealer charged a terrible fee because the transactions were illegal.’

  Sybil started to cry silently, saying it was all too painful. Morgen offered his handkerchief, which she refused, saying that’s what Gersten did.

  ‘How many words are we given to speak in a lifetime? I feel I have reached my limit. I have lost everything that ever mattered to me. Metzler was a broken man and I
promised I would never repeat what he told me.’

  Morgen looked at Schlegel for an answer. Schlegel had none. He felt shamed because if Sybil ever saw the Kübler woman again she would see her yellow suit.

  Morgen told Sybil he respected her discretion. He stood up to signal they were done. She looked at him surprised.

  Schlegel wondered if Morgen’s move was another of his manipulations.

  Sybil eventually asked, ‘Do you know what the Judas goat is?’

  Morgen said yes. It was the creature that led unsuspecting animals to the slaughterhouse, moving aside at the last moment, to let the others go to their death.

  ‘Metzler called himself the Judas goat that night.’

  ‘Because just as the perfect note was a fantasy so were the trains he thought he had arranged?’

  The warden had taunted Metzler about the futility of his efforts. On the occasion of the first departure those waiting to leave had been hidden in a decommissioned meat fridge, which was turned on accidentally. Their deaths were hushed up.

  After that accident, it became policy to repeat the process. Metzler learned that night all the subsequent escapees had been killed instead.

  ‘Who was responsible? Did he say?’ asked Morgen.

  ‘He was too distraught. He held himself responsible, however much I tried to tell him he wasn’t.’

  Schlegel thought the slaughterhouse was the perfect place to replicate the killing fields of the east.

  It still didn’t explain why bodies were being shipped in.

  Sybil had spent that last night whispering on the stairs outside Metzler’s apartment, desperate to persuade him to live. She thought she had succeeded, offering the attic as a hiding place, even for a day or two. He finally agreed, which was why, as Morgen had surmised, they had got up early, to avoid the roundup.

  As for the razored pages in the diary, Sybil said they were now hidden beneath the attic floorboards. They were sketches, made the previous summer by Metzler, of her sunbathing on the block roof where there was a hidden space between the chimneys. He had cut them out that last night and given them to her.

  Morgen said to Sybil, ‘There is a train out tomorrow or the next night. I could get you on it.’

  ‘And have happen to me what happened to the rest,’ she answered, with some of her old spark.

  Morgen conceded with a gesture of apology and said this time everyone would be safe.

  Sybil said, ‘I am not sure I want a future.’

  Herr Valentine was fetched to show Sybil to her room. They parted with no farewell. Sybil staggered under her great burden.

  Morgen asked Schlegel to step outside and said, ‘Be down here at midnight. You have work to do.’

  Morgen’s car and driver were still waiting.

  ‘Hans will fetch and watch out for you. He knows where to go. Pick up the money and pass it on. You know both parties.’

  ‘Watch out for? As in trouble?’

  ‘No trouble. Don’t fall asleep and be here at twelve.’

  Not wanting to be alone, Schlegel went back to the dancehall to get a drink and was surprised to see Sybil at a table on her own. He approached uncertainly and asked if she wanted to be alone. She pointed to a spare chair. He asked a waitress for a beer. Sybil didn’t want anything.

  Small talk was pointless. To explain his presence, he said he lived upstairs and left it at that. He drank his watery beer, wondering what was going through her head. There was a new band, worse than the last. Sybil sat with her hands folded while he tried not to think of her with Grigor. The band played a waltz. Sybil asked if he danced. Hardly ever and badly. It didn’t matter, she said, and stood up and walked onto the floor. She said Lore did the man’s steps. He took her hands. He worried about his perspiring. He concentrated on the beat, with her lost in a world of her own. He messed up his timing but was less awkward than he expected. When the music ended she broke away and went and sat back down.

  ‘Can you show me where you live?’ she asked. ‘I need to be by myself but I don’t want to be alone.’

  He noted Herr Valentine watching them leave together.

  They climbed slowly upstairs. Did she need help and should he take her arm, or would that be misinterpreted? He was as tongue-tied as any lovelorn youth.

  She looked at his apartment and said, ‘You don’t get much.’

  He agreed it was nothing to write home about. She noted Metzler’s diary on the arm of the chair. She asked if she could take a bath.

  ‘I feel unclean.’

  He thought there wouldn’t be any hot water.

  ‘It’s not as though you haven’t seen me without my clothes on,’ she remarked flatly.

  Nothing enticing was meant but the air seemed full of electricity.

  He said he could only stay until twelve because he had to work.

  ‘Please take the bed. I can sleep in the chair until then.’

  She nodded like someone who had lost the thread. He just needed to get the alarm clock in case he fell asleep, he said, knowing he was fussing too much. Alwynd would play the situation, going to bed with her as a way of obliterating the bad memory of Grigor. And so on, round in circles.

  She wandered off dazed into the bedroom and shut the door.

  Schlegel sat in a hinterland between sleeping and not sleeping, racked with desire. He heard her weeping and couldn’t decide whether to go in. He imagined getting into bed just to hold and be held, imagined the lingering smell of her body on his sheets in the next days, struggled with the impossibility of intimacy, after what she had been through. She didn’t like men anyway.

  They drove east. For all his anxiety, Schlegel had trouble not falling asleep. He imagined Sybil turning over restlessly in his bed. Once he was jolted awake by the car hitting a pothole. Hans the driver was too controlled to curse.

  Eventually they turned off down a dirt track and pulled up on what Schlegel presumed was scrub or wasteland. His impression was of no buildings nearby. He rolled down the window. Wind moved through the trees. The engine settled on its mount and from the distance came the drone of a monoplane.

  There was no traffic until a vehicle with a faltering engine turned off the main road. It was a comparatively clear night and Schlegel watched through the rear window as it pulled up. Hans nodded at Schlegel, who saw him loosen his pistol.

  Schlegel walked the exposed distance between the cars, taking care not to stumble or make any sudden move. The shape of the vehicle seemed familiar. As he approached he saw it was the Jewish hearse. The passenger door opened and a man with a strange accent told him to get in.

  The passenger seat turned out to be an upturned fruit crate.

  ‘Lipchitz. We’ve met.’

  The whole arrangement was so furtive Schlegel was surprised he hadn’t been given half of one ridiculous remark to be matched by another.

  Lipchitz reached under his seat with a grunt and produced an attaché case.

  ‘And they ask me to drive at night with my eyesight,’ he complained, handing Schlegel the case.

  ‘US green. It seems we have a fairy godmother. Don’t ask where it comes from.’

  ‘I am bound to because your people don’t have any.’

  ‘I suspect it’s dirty or the ultimate Jewish joke. I am just the messenger.’

  ‘Me too. Who gave it to you?’

  ‘The man didn’t say, and we didn’t speak, but I would bet my bottom dollar he’s a Yank.’

  ‘But they all cleared out or were packed off when the war started.’

  ‘Not an unfamiliar story. But exactly so, which makes him interesting. If you happen to find out I would be curious to know. Be careful. They shoot the messenger.’

  After Lipchitz left, Hans had trouble starting the car. He got out and fiddled under the bonnet while Schlegel sat in the back clasping the unwelcome case, picturing them stuck, with whatever plan he was part of in disarray.

  What sounded like a motorcycle at speed tore down the main road.

&
nbsp; Hans banged the bonnet shut and got back in, fastidiously wiping his hands. The engine started first time. Schlegel sat back, relieved.

  Ten minutes down the long straight road, Schlegel saw flames ahead. Hans slowed down for the the burning vehicle, stopped and got out, pistol ready, followed by Schlegel, still clutching the case. The car must have left the road and smashed into the trees. Then he saw it was the Jewish hearse. Lipchitz was trapped in the cabin, his hair a halo of flame. Hans held Schlegel back, saying the tank could explode. He levelled his gun. The single shot starred the window and snapped back the burning head.

  The man was beyond help was all Hans said.

  They drove on. Schlegel sat staring at the back of Hans’s severe head, asking himself if he had killed Lipchitz because the motorcyclist hadn’t finished the job, or was he sparing him further pain, as stated? Had the business of their car not starting been a ploy? Was someone tidying up as they went along, in which case where did that leave him?

  They went all the way to the other side of town, through empty streets, apart from an official motorcade with motorcycle outriders speeding in the other direction. Eventually Schlegel recognised the brooding shape of the Olympic Stadium. Hans circled it until they reached the high bell tower. He pulled up, turned to Schlegel and pointed to the top.

  Schlegel got out, and looked up at the thin, concrete silhouetted, stretching up.

  The entrance was guarded by two soldiers who behaved as if he was expected. Schlegel supposed the tower was an observation post. The door was open. The lift shaft stood in the middle of a large vaulted space.

  The elevator ground its way slowly up, on and on, swaying slightly. Schlegel took out his gun and hid it behind the case, which he held to his chest. He persuaded himself Lipchitz’s death was the result of an ordinary crash. He had complained about driving in the dark.

  The cage at last clanked to a halt. No guard at the top or anyone waiting.

  Several flights of exposed metal stairs carried him up to the roof. In peacetime it served as a viewing platform for tourists. He had never been up there.