The Butchers of Berlin

by Chris Petit

  Gersten knew he should get out but was unable to tear himself away.

  The pigs were thrashing. Sensing human presence, they charged the rails, jumping up, some squealing, others keeping up a furious grunting. The boys were the tamest thing in the room, cowed. One or two started to cry. Morgen forced Reitner to stand. Reitner hopped around. Morgen offered him the choice of stepping voluntarily into the pigs. Schlegel could never tell when the man was serious. Reitner stiffened at a sight above him, and Schlegel looked up to see Gersten disappear from the window as Reitner, the veins in his neck jutting, screamed ‘Judas!’

  The accusation echoed round the cavernous space as the next wave of bombers rumbled in.

  Morgen was already running. Schlegel followed, glancing back at the commotion around Reitner, who raised his hands as the boxer boy stepped forward, drew his fist to his shoulder and gave his hardest punch. Reitner half-fell under his broken knee. The sharp cry of pain was followed by the crack of the boy’s uppercut, driving Reitner against the fence. He reeled from the force of the blow, swaying until the boy gave a shove, flipping him back among the waiting pigs.

  One, two, three bombs. A proper appreciation of violence took time and control. No chance of that. Sybil and her friend sat on the floor clutching each other like babes in the wood. Catatonic. The friend not so pretty now, the job half-done. The plan – too late for that now; the plan had been to make a present of her to Sybil, as a sample of work in progress, before letting her watch the rest. He had never let anyone do that before, not by invitation, to see him do to her friend what he would then do to her. In fact, the friend didn’t look so bad. He had kept himself under control. No, he hadn’t. He hadn’t meant to go to her in the first place. It had been after Schlegel and the tower. He had visited with the best of intentions, the bearer of good news. Sybil had kept her end of the bargain and delivered Grigor, so he would keep his, and as an extra surprise he would put them both on the train. Their strange love was love, after all. He wasn’t narrow-minded. No, honestly, he said, seeing she didn’t believe him. She spoiled it with that little hissing noise, made with teeth and tongue, more than her look of contempt, which he could have forgiven on its own. He hadn’t meant to cut her, had meant to stop after a quick couple of signature marks. The punch spoiled it. By the time he was done there was no question of putting her on a train.

  He had said to Grigor, ‘There are some stories people are willing to tell and some they aren’t. I am interested in you telling me all the stories you don’t wish to tell.’ He couldn’t remember the name of the Jew actor who had once put his hand on his knee, who played the bug-eyed killer running around picking up kids and was reduced to screaming how drive overrode desire. Gersten wasn’t so sure. Desire was everything. He had fancied exploring these thoughts with Sybil and her friend. He badly wanted to see if he could rouse Sybil into giving a decent account of herself. The other one he didn’t care about, but Sybil he wanted to fight him, to die well. Had he really intended to let them both go? Yes, he had. Or at least he knew he would have no trouble convincing Schlegel. Some people were born to twist around your little finger.

  Footsteps on the stairs, obliterated by the crunch of another bomb. Seconds only now. No time for fond farewells. Gersten took in the room. His colleague rooted in the corner, praying a bomb wouldn’t fall on him, handkerchief across his face, stifling the hep-hep of his wet cough. Sybil and her friend pressed together, almost comic, so immobile they could have been garden statues. Perhaps he should sell novelty items after the war. The thought amused him as he shot his consumptive colleague, who gave a final cough wetter than the rest, spraying his handkerchief red. He was sorry to drag the girls apart. Sybil put up such a struggle that he was forced to kick her, hard. There was no time to explain that he was sparing her life. It was his present to her. The other one was past caring. He yanked her up and she came easily into his arms, to make a nice cushion as Morgen came blundering in. Gersten fired, off balance from the weight of the girl. The shot splintered the door frame, millimetres from Morgen’s ear; a brief, fond memory of Lazarenko’s body jitterbugging from the velocity of bullets. Gersten fired through the empty doorway to keep Morgen quiet. He dragged himself and the girl back towards the window. She was like a dead weight in his arms, hardly worth killing. He was about to discard her when Schlegel spoiled the moment by charging up the stairs, like an actor coming in off-cue, resulting in a scramble of frantic improvisation. Gersten switched to the blade, desperately sought the carotid artery with the hand he had around her throat and plunged.

  Schlegel didn’t recognise Lore, so terribly beaten, her face a horrible clown’s mask. The nose was broken, teeth smashed, eyes swollen to slits, and someone had scribbled lipstick over her face and put make-up on, turning the face a ghastly, floury white.

  Lore was like Gersten’s marionette, tottering forwards as he gave her a huge shove and she came at Schlegel, desperately trying to raise her arms, the blood spurting from the tear in her neck. They collided in a terrible embrace, then got tangled up with Morgen, who was struggling to get past them to Gersten.

  Schlegel glimpsed Gersten, who caught his eye, looking both appalled and amused by his destruction, before he turned and threw himself out of the window.

  As the smash of glass filled the room, Lore’s eyes fluttered open. It was like she was looking at something very far away.

  Schlegel automatically ran and launched himself out of the window. He fell, hoping, and seconds later landed on the angled roof of the Jewish barracks, winding himself. He had remembered right; the roof was hard under the window. He had his gun where Gersten had chucked his aside for the blade.

  He supposed Gersten had made such a mess of Lore. Having been there himself, he knew anything could go on in those deep pockets in Gersten’s building.

  He hit the ground. His shoulder was stiffening so he could hardly move his left arm. The sky was ablaze and bombs fell all around as he worked his way down the narrow gap between the barracks and the pig building. When he came to open ground there was no sign of Gersten. Schlegel retreated back along the corridor and checked the Jewish barracks, in case he was hiding there, a prospect more terrifying than confronting him in the open because Gersten was a master of confined space.

  Schlegel was still inside when he saw Gersten through the window, trapped by explosions, standing exultant. When he saw Schlegel aiming from the doorway he ran off, not even with any urgency, as if to say he doubted if Schlegel could hit him. Schlegel fired and missed, and set off in pursuit.

  One bomb dropped so close the blast left him staggering like a drunk.

  The slurry pit was a stinking blaze of phosphorous. Planes were still coming over. Schlegel suspected Gersten was picking his way through the explosions, making for the railway embankment.

  He was hit hard from behind. The force of Gersten’s charge knocked him down and the gun flew from his hand. He waited for the slash of Gersten’s blade. Instead Gersten was on top, pulling him over, straddling him, pinning his arms, making it impossible to move. The flames from the slurry pit gave his face a yellow glow. Gersten, with an eye for performance, looked around, admiring the devastation. He performed his sneaky trick with the chapstick.

  ‘Always moist lips for a killing,’ he said, relishing the absurdity, before holding the blade high to catch the light.

  ‘Face to face, I say. Don’t disappoint me.’

  Schlegel knew he had only moments. His mind was blank. Not a single thing to say. Here goes, he thought, embarrassed to resort to her at such a moment.

  ‘My mother remembers you as an actor.’

  Schlegel saw the crucial instant of bewilderment, then the flattery register, long enough for him to dig his heels in and thrust upwards. He half-toppled Gersten, tried to push him off altogether, was hauling himself up when his frozen arm gave way, and Gersten was back on top, giggling as he pressed down on Schlegel’s throat and lifted his arm high, turning to admire the blade. Holding it th
ere, he looked back and said, ‘There’s no point if there’s no glee, don’t you agree?’

  A single plane passed overhead. Bombs started to fall. It must be a stray, Schlegel thought, jettisoning its load. Gersten’s blade would do its job first. Instead the blade fell. Gersten looked down puzzled at the hole that had appeared in the arm of Lazarenko’s coat. He seemed more offended by the damage to that than the wound. Morgen called. Another shot. Gersten took it in the body, then he was rolling away and running.

  Schlegel set off after, thinking he wanted to see the last of the man as he was blown to pieces in the inferno. Gersten zigzagged ahead, lurching. Morgen was calling Schlegel back, shouting it was too dangerous. The bombs created a corridor down which Gersten ran.

  He paused to turn, inviting Schlegel to follow, then waved and ran on. The ground between them rippled like a carpet shaken. Gersten ran between walls of flame as the world raged, then the earth exploded and everything turned black and the last thing Schlegel remembered was being thrown through the air, to become the flying man, with the brief sensation that he would carry on rising, until everything below was reduced to insignificance and nothing mattered.

  57

  Spring turned to summer, a season once looked forward to now serving only as a marker for the deteriorating situation. Whispers that things could only end badly were countered by wild stories of extraordinary technological breakthroughs: a super-bomb, laser weapons, planes faster than the speed of light, secret underground factories where all these were being developed.

  Dr Joseph Goebbels, in the sanctuary of his private screening room, watched a film archive print of the 1936 Alexander Korda movie Things to Come over and over, taking meetings with screenwriters, enthusing how its epic sweep and vision could be updated and appropriated.

  ‘In the rubble of this film lies the future we will build for ourselves.’

  He watched it alone late at night, in order to recite aloud the final speech, learned phonetically. Conquest beyond conquest. This little planet. Its winds and ways. All the universe or nothing. Which shall it be?

  He told his wife, who was over her nervous collapse, how in the film in 1966 a chemical weapon dispersed from the skies, called the wandering sickness, was used by the unnamed enemy in a final desperate bid for victory.

  ‘A wandering sickness!’

  It was so German! Dr Harding and his daughter struggled to find a cure. With such little equipment, they had no chance.

  ‘We have the equipment. This wandering sickness, what propaganda we will make from that when we inflict it on our enemies!’

  His wife wanted to know what happened in the film.

  ‘Hopeless! The plague kills half humanity and extinguishes the last vestiges of central government.’

  Schlegel’s mother’s opening remark was, ‘A broken arm, two broken legs and crutches, how on earth did you manage that?’

  He couldn’t be bothered to come up with even an approximation, so told everyone he had fallen downstairs during the raid. The bullet wound in his shoulder was disguised by the broken arm.

  ‘You look lucky to be alive.’

  During two weeks in hospital she was his only visitor. Of Morgen there was no sign.

  Afterwards he sat at home and grew bored playing patience. He tried the theatre but his legs itched unbearably and with the plaster he had no way of scratching. Something as minor as that could bring on spells of panic. He adjourned to the bar early. When the others came out at the interval there was grumbling among those trying to get drinks about the space he was taking, in spite of his obvious disability. Everyone for himself now; no kindred spirit. In the bar mirror he saw the yellow suit, then Kübler, vivacious and laughing. She held his eye for a frozen moment in the reflection, then was gone.

  His stepfather held a shooting party and insisted Schlegel come for the picnic and fresh air. It was pot luck, he said. No one bothered overmuch about hunting regulations now. He preferred to bag boar because so many were invading the suburbs.

  Schlegel travelled in a van with the food while the men were out. His stepfather came in from the morning shoot in the company of a tall, stringy man with the palest blue eyes.

  ‘This is Walter Fann. You can speak English together.’

  Fann was a classic cowboy type whose level gaze made Schlegel think of the flatlands of the Midwest; eyes used to staring at distance. It seemed impolite to ask what he was doing there. He supposed some fellow travellers had stayed behind, and those married to Germans. He wondered if Fann was Lipchitz’s Yank.

  Fann had the usual American forthright manner and sales know-how. He could see Schlegel was curious about him. He had come from Switzerland, he volunteered, on an Argentinian passport, thanks to a Spanish mother.

  Schlegel thought it unlikely given the man’s Nordic looks. Sensing his scepticism, Fann said he was also travelling on a pass issued by the Vatican.

  ‘And another for the Swiss Red Cross,’ he said, laughing easily.

  Schlegel supposed him about fifty, though he looked younger and in better trim than most German men his age. He showed no interest in Schlegel or his condition.

  They ate ham and egg pie from his mother’s recipe, and drank a dry white wine. Schlegel didn’t say much. The men talked of sporting matters. He wondered about Fann and his stepfather. Before the war they could have been legitimate partners. Americans had developed numerous tax-shelter deals. Since the war these had been discontinued or reworked through neutral countries.

  Fann didn’t go back out in the afternoon, saying he had shot enough. He was reading Hemingway. For Whom the Bell Tolls. Did Schlegel know it? Schlegel wondered why Fann was not out with the guns again. Ten days ago if anyone had told him he would soon be spending his afternoon with an American he would not have believed it.

  Fann read mostly, occasionally asked inconsequential questions, such as whether Schlegel ‘had a gal’, and Schlegel wondered if the man was sounding him out after all, and whether to a specific end.

  Fann always checked that Schlegel knew what he was talking about. Henry Ford, for instance.

  ‘You know who I mean by him?’

  ‘Of course. Ford cars,’ said Schlegel politely.

  ‘Not just cars,’ emphasised Fann.

  He observed that he sometimes found Germans hard to read, so it was a relief to talk English.

  Ford still had many subsidiaries there, despite the two countries severing diplomatic relations.

  Schlegel supposed it was an American trait to spell things out.

  The real reason for Fann being there was a surprise.

  Fann said Ford wanted to make a donation from local company profits to eugenics research, which was a registered charity for tax purposes.

  ‘You and we are leaders in the field, and until the war worked closely. Henry is looking to ways to reopen that channel.’

  Henry!

  Fann then had the nerve to describe himself as a simple kind of fellow, which was why he had consulted Schlegel’s stepfather.

  ‘He recommended that eugenics may have peaked, and isn’t necessarily the best investment for its cultural return. What do you think?’

  ‘It’s odd,’ said Schlegel carefully. ‘I was involved in something the other day involving American investment where you would least expect it.’

  ‘Where was that?’ asked Fann neutrally.

  ‘Foreign export. Illegal foreign export masquerading as tinned peaches.’

  Fann changed the subject back to Hemingway and said he was an obvious kind of guy. Schlegel was sure Fann was Lipchitz’s Yank. It didn’t bear thinking about what his stepfather was up to.

  He was left to surmise whether this money – due to be invested in racial research – was sidelined into the other operation. He suspected with Fann’s introduction he was being shown something whose meaning would become clear only gradually.

  He remained technically on sick leave, even after the plaster was removed. He suspected no one knew what to
do with him. He found having to climb five flights using crutches had made him fitter. He tried not to think of Sybil. He didn’t know if she was alive and had no idea where Morgen was to ask. Nebe kept his distance. Frau Pelz unnerved him by sending a get-well card.

  Morgen resurfaced after some weeks via telegram, suggesting they meet at the Adlon for breakfast. He was late. Schlegel started without him. He ate something calling itself porridge oats that could have been put to better use as glue for advertising hoardings. The milk was watered down. The hotel, which had once prided itself on its bakery, now served a slightly superior version of the same cardboard as everyone else. No one, high or low, was spared its flatulent effects. During one of her hospital visits, his mother had been hugely amused to recount how at a recent dinner party an Argentinian diplomat had nearly caused an international incident by inadvertently releasing a huge fart during the soup course.

  It was also widely said Adolf led by example and the climax of his speeches amounted to a cacophony of farting, which was why those immediately behind on the podium always looked so grim.

  The boiled egg came with no salt. The elderly waitress had apologised that the coffee was not real and recommended the tea, which was. They were down to the last of their reserves. The tulips that decorated the room came from Holland, she said.

  ‘You have to agree, they brighten the place up.’

  Her tone was one of long sufferance, as though she had to spend all her time dealing with requests she could not satisfy.

  People still dressed for the Adlon. A lot of senior uniforms and party badges were in, foreign journalists on good expenses, and the inevitable diplomats; the rest were new money.

  In that studied enclave, a semblance of normal life remained persistent, if grave. Newspapers were scoured with intent. A vulgar, noisy quartet was frowned at. Schlegel guessed the men were on combat leave and in no mood for social niceties. One of their female companions was being groped under the table. Schlegel couldn’t decide whether they were high-class prostitutes or society girls out for a fast time.