“Where he is has nothing to do with his feelings for you,” I said softly. A part of me longed to pat his back and tell him that everything would be fine, but another part of me wanted to keep some distance between us, just in case. After all, he was a Nazi. I leaned against the cold porcelain sink, waiting.
Wilhelm started to cry. “I’ve loved him since I was a kid, Hannah. That night together, he said he loved me too. But he disappeared. He never called or sent me a letter. Nothing.”
I longed to tell him that Ernst was dead.
“Can you tell me where he is? Can you tell him to come meet me?”
“No . . . I . . . You know he never listens to anyone but himself.” Wilhelm blew his nose on a simple, white cotton handkerchief, different from his red silk one. “I wanted to tell him personally, but I’ll tell you. I came to warn him.”
“Why didn’t you go to his apartment?”
“I’ve been there,” he said. “I staked it out most of the day. He never showed up there. So I decided to come here.”
“Warn him of what?”
“Rudolf,” he said, not meeting my eyes. “He’s very angry at Ernst for disappearing. He’s asking everyone where he is.”
“He asked you?”
Wilhelm squirmed. “He asked me. Last night, at the Silhouette, after the protest at Wertheim. I have to go to the Silhouette club now, because my father knows about the El Dorado. I met Francis there too, but earlier.”
I sat silently. “Did you go home with Rudolf?”
“Yes.” Wilhelm looked down at his hands. “He’s as close as I can get to Ernst right now.”
“Why did Rudolf ask you?”
“He thinks I see Ernst all the time. He thinks I’m lying about it. He said to tell Ernst that he has something they want. That they’ll kill him if he doesn’t give it to them. By Sunday.”
The day that Ernst was scheduled to meet Röhm. Röhm must know that Ernst kept his letters. Were Ernst and Rudolf about to blackmail Röhm over the letters? Would Ernst do something like that? The answer, I knew, was yes. Ernst had no trouble using people that he did not care for. If he felt they were bad people, he would get whatever he could from them. Did he think Röhm a bad person? I did. The letters seemed to indicate otherwise, though.
“What does Ernst have?” I asked, keeping my voice carefully neutral.
Wilhelm shook his head. “Rudolf wouldn’t say. But he said that if I didn’t tell Ernst to give them what they want, they might kill me too.”
I nodded, remembering my own encounter with Rudolf. “He was trying to scare you.”
“Do you think so?”
“Yes,” I lied. “Rudolf’s always doing things like that. It makes him feel important.”
Wilhelm looked so relieved that I wondered if I’d done him a favor or not. Should he be on his guard? Being on his guard would not help protect him if Röhm wanted him killed.
“He seemed so serious.” He drank the rest of his tea. “If you do see Ernst, will you give him my warning?”
“Of course.”
“And will you tell him how I feel about him?”
“He knows, Wilhelm,” I said.
“Then I guess he’ll find me when he’s ready.”
I collected our dirty cups.
“I’m sorry I frightened you at the front door,” he said.
“After Wertheim, I’m a little on edge.” The reason I was frightened had nothing to do with the protest.
“You were like a bear defending her cub.”
I sighed. “Does a mother bear wound her cub?”
“If she has to,” Wilhelm said. “She does.”
He left not long after. When I opened the envelope from Francis it contained a set of gold earrings with tiny horses on them and a letter.
“My dearest,” the letter began, not using names. Francis was more cautious than Röhm.
I am going to Kentucky! That’s right, Kentucky. Where the grass is blue so I don’t have to be. Seriously, I’ve stopped the booze and everything else. You know why? Because of you, my dearest friend. B is the real thing. He owns a farm in Kentucky and he’s taking me back with him to race. Another chance to be a jockey! And his horses are beautiful. He showed me pictures and bloodlines. A monkey could ride them to victory. And I’m going to be that monkey. Thank you for introducing us. And thank you for getting me the job at the club and teaching me to sing. I don’t know if you ever knew how slim was the edge on which I walked. But now I’m back. Back to the stables and the horses and the smell of manure that you hate so much. I’ll write you at your apartment as soon as I get out there. See you later, partner.
Cynical Francis’s letter was unsigned. Ernst had helped him, I thought proudly. Even though Francis was competition for him at the El Dorado.
When I turned the letter over, faint pencil marks caught my eye. I held them to the light. Mirror writing. Ernst and I had often practiced it when he was a boy. I held the letter to the mirror to read it more easily.
I am frightened. O says you are dead, but I don’t believe him. I delivered a package to SP for R. The next day she was dead and I don’t know what was in the package. Someone followed me there, but I got away in a taxi. Be very careful.
O for Oliver? How did he know that Ernst was dead? It seemed like only the murderer and I could know. I scanned the note again. SP for Sweetie Pie. R for Rudolf. And Francis had seen me following him. A worse thought entered my mind. What if he hadn’t seen me following him? What if someone else there saw us both?
21
Anton’s stomach growled as we stood in line to buy tickets for the tour boats at Lake Wannsee early the next morning. It was cold and foggy, and I worried that the riverbank would not be visible from the boat.
“Are you hungry?” I asked.
“A brave can go for days without food.”
“Well, I cannot,” I said with a smile. “I think they will have pretzels on the boat, perhaps even pastries.”
We bought tickets on the first boat of the day. Ernst’s police file stated that his body was spotted at 7:45 A.M. by the steward on this very boat. My stomach clenched with anxiety. I did not want to see the bank where he was hauled out of the water. But I had to. I had to stand where he died and pay my respects. He was buried now, and I had not stood at his grave.
Anton’s eyes were round as he stared at the huge ship, its flat sides rising out of the water like a house. “It’s much bigger than Trudi’s boat,” he whispered.
“I think we could put Trudi’s boat on the deck and barely notice.”
Anton eyed the wooden decking as if calculating where Trudi’s boat might fit.
“Ahoy,” said a crewman dressed in a rough black jersey and pants. He took our tickets as we climbed aboard. “It’s a light load we have this Saturday morning.”
Only a handful of passengers milled about the deck. I took Anton to the bow where we held the metal railing and peered at the muddy water of the Spree below. It was a couple of meters from the deck to the surface of the water. “Do not lean over the rail,” I told him.
I strolled back to the cabin. The steward stood behind a wooden bar serving coffee. Two rows of brass buttons ran down the front of his uniform. Their polished surfaces glittered in the yellow lamplight.
“Coffee and two pretzels,” I said. He nodded, holding my eye a second too long.
I sat in one of the tall stools bolted to the deck and sipped my coffee, watching the steward work. He kept glancing back at me. I smiled and waited for other passengers to buy their snacks and leave so I could have him all to myself.
Expensive houses slid by, a few lit windows glowing through the remains of the fog. Anton hurried in to fetch his pretzel and rushed back to the bow.
“Exciting out here on the river?” I unbuttoned my burgundy coat.
“Sometimes,” he said with a glint in his eye. “Hopefully not today.”
“Why not? Couldn’t you stand a little excitement?” I took a sip of coffee and
smiled. He was a braggart, my favorite kind of source.
“Last week we had plenty.” He puffed out his spindly chest.
“What happened?” I lowered my voice and glanced toward Anton. He stood glued to the front rail, his hair fluttering in the breeze. Probably chilled to the bone in spite of his new jacket.
“Not allowed to talk about it with the tourists.” He smiled self-importantly. “Don’t want to ruin their impression of Berlin.”
“I am no tourist,” I said. “I live in Berlin. Taking the nephew out for a ride so his parents can have a morning’s peace.” I slipped off my coat and draped it over my lap.
“Still bad for the line.” He shot a glance around the cabin, to see if any other crew members were within earshot. He clearly wanted to share his adventure with someone.
“Did you run into something? Was anyone injured?” I asked in a worried tone.
“Nothing like that.” He shook his head. “Nothing at all.”
“What then?”
He came over and wiped at my table with a rag, daring me to ask the next question.
I smiled encouragingly. “I bet it was something you did, something no one else could have done, and you’re just too modest to tell me.”
He sat on the stool next to me. “I saw a person in the water.”
“Did you help with the rescue?”
He shook his head, grandly, tragically. “I would have. But he was dead long before I spotted him.”
I gasped. “A dead man was floating down the middle of the river?”
“Not in the middle,” he said, irritated. “Anyone could have seen him there. Over on the side, caught in some bushes like.”
“You must have eagle eyes”—I looked into his watery gray eyes—“to see something like that.”
He leaned closer. “Always have had. My mum used to call me the Hawk.”
“How did he get in the water?” I took a sip of my coffee.
“Don’t know.” We stared at caramel-colored water sliding by outside the cabin window, and I worried that the story was over. “I think he was pushed in dead. Not far from here.”
“My goodness. How can you tell something like that?” I widened my eyes, hating myself for worming the information I needed out of him this way. I was no better than Boris. “Did you study medicine?”
He looked embarrassed, but pleased. “Not hardly. But I seen drowned men before. He didn’t look drowned. Wasn’t in the water long, I could tell that.”
“How?”
“The fish usually . . .” He coughed. “Experience.”
“Did you tell the police where you think he went in?”
He chuckled. “They never asked.”
“Why not?” I asked indignantly. “You probably have more idea of that than some landlubber cop.”
“I might.” He rubbed his receding chin, watching me, trying to make up his mind to tell me.
“Of course you do. A man of your experience.” I leaned forward, hanging on his every word.
“See that factory up ahead? Makes bottles.” He pointed toward a set of four smokestacks whose tops disappeared in fog. “I’m guessing he went into the water somewhere past that factory and before where we found him. Not more than a few hundred meters away.”
“Why do you think that?”
“There’s a pipe upstream of the factory draws in water. He’d a been sucked down into that pipe if he’d dropped in before there.”
“Where did you find him?”
“I’ll tell you when we get there,” he said. A young couple speaking excitedly in Italian tried to order breakfast. My gymnasium Latin told me that they wanted coffee and one of the snail-shaped pastries that looked stale, even this early in the day. The steward reluctantly stepped back behind the bar. I slipped my coat back on.
Leaving him to sort out the order, I walked to the bow and stood next to Anton. I stared at the approaching factory and shivered.
“Are you warm enough, Anton?”
“See how the boat cuts the water?” he said, eyes shining. “I saw two rats and a giant log.”
“Interesting,” I said. “Keep count for me.”
I walked back to the steward as we passed the factory. I cleared my cup from the table and handed it to him. “Are we almost there?”
“See them trees?” He pointed to a small stand of droopy willow branches touching the surface of the water. “That’s where he was. Naked as the day he was born. Long hair he had too, like a woman. We dragged him up on shore. I had to wait for the police. The ship had to go on.”
“Of course.” I marked the stand of willows with my eyes. Somewhere between there and the factory, someone had stripped my baby brother down and thrown him in the water like a sack of garbage.
“Five rats,” Anton called from the bow.
“He’s got good eyes, your nephew.” The steward washed and rinsed my cup, dried it carefully, and added it to the row of clean cups.
When the boat reached the next stop, we disembarked. We would not use the rest of our sightseeing tickets.
“I’m only up to eight rats,” Anton said. “The brave wants to find ten.”
“Next time,” I said.
I hailed a taxi and directed it to the bottle factory. The factory was closed Saturdays and the gate locked. I walked toward the river.
“What are we doing?” Anton scrambled through the mud behind me as I reached the bank.
“We are looking for signs.” I searched the wet ground in front of me for evidence of Ernst’s presence.
“Like animal spoor?”
“Anything unusual.” I thought of Ernst’s taste in clothes. “Also anything red.”
We walked along the bank, staying as close to the water as possible. I did not know what I looked for as I trudged along, circling away from the bank, staring at the ground. The recent rain had obscured any marks. Mud sucked at our shoes as we squelched along. I would find nothing here.
I walked back to the cobblestone street that ran from the bottle factory along the riverbank. Perhaps I could find something there. I scanned the ground for anything out of place.
We were not far from the willows where the steward had seen the body when Anton called out. “Mother, I found something.”
I hurried to his side, too eager to see what he found to explain again that I was not his mother.
He pried an object from between two cobblestones. Probably a bottle cap, I told myself, or part of a dead rat. That would bring his rat count for the day to nine.
“It’s a soldier,” he said. “But he’s wearing a dress.”
Resting on his muddy palm was a lead soldier, painted like a woman. Anton’s sharp eyes had found what mine could not. My hands began to sweat.
Tears blurred my eyes as I took the soldier from his hand and turned her over and over, thinking back to the day that Ernst had clothed her. The day that I had taken him away from Father for a week and created the Code of Manliness. He had carried this small soldier with him all those years, up until the moment he died with it.
“Soldiers don’t wear dresses,” Anton said.
“This one does.” I reached into my satchel and pulled out the soldier’s twin, wrapped in Ernst’s silk handkerchief. I smelled lavender orange water perfume, nearly overpowered by the smell of mud and rotting leaves in the alley. “And so does this one.”
Anton lost interest and wandered back to the alley.
I stared at the soldiers, fighting the urge to flee from the alley, to run and never look back. Halfway down the alley, Anton poked the cobblestones with a stick he’d found.
I pictured Ernst lying in this alley, bleeding to death. Had he known his killer? I wanted it to be a stranger, an accident, so that he felt only surprise in those last minutes, not betrayal. But the thought of him dying alone, or in front of a stranger who cared nothing for him, not even enough to hate him, felt bleak too.
I drew my new burgundy coat tighter around myself and gritted my teeth to keep them fr
om chattering as I walked to Anton.
“I found something,” he said, excitement in his voice. “Under the dustbin.”
This was a treasure hunt to him.
His small hands held a dagger. “It’s rusty.”
I lifted it out of his hands. The dagger had a polished wooden hilt with curves that looked like a woman wearing a long sheath dress. A nickel eagle carrying a wreath encircling a swastika perched right below the curve that looked like a woman’s bottom. Blood, not rust caked the words engraved on the blade: “Everything for Germany.” The other side had the initials W. L. I thought immediately of Wilhelm, the boy who had seen Ernst on the last night of his life. Wilhelm Lehmann.
“Why are your hands shaking?” Anton asked. “Are you cold?”
“Yes,” I said. “Very cold.”
A circle at the top of the hilt, where the face would be, if it had been a woman, contained a runic SA. A Sturm Abteilung dagger, like the one Wilhelm had said he’d lost. Thousands of men had them; certainly there must be others with the initials W. L., but Wilhelm had told me he lived near a bottle factory. How many other W. L.’s with such daggers lived near a bottle factory? And how many of them were with Ernst on the last night of his life?
“But I am warm,” Anton said. “I don’t need a jacket.”
I knelt down and looked in his clear blue eyes. “I feel cold inside,” I said. “In my heart.”
“Did the knife hurt you?” Anton reached for it.
“It’s a dagger.” I slipped it into my satchel. I did not want to answer his question.
I took his warm hand, and we walked to the edge of the river together. I hiked all of the way back to the willows where Ernst’s body had been found, thinking of Ernst climbing out of Wilhelm’s window happy and in love, probably only a few blocks from where we were walking. Did Wilhelm follow him? Perhaps they argued. Or perhaps they never made it to Wilhelm’s house. I had only the word of a Nazi boy.
“Are you scared?” Anton asked.
“I am scared, Anton.” A dead rat floated down the river. “There’s your tenth rat.”
“Nine,” he said. “Will men hurt you? That happened to Aunt Sweetie.”
A Trace of Smoke (Hannah Vogel) Page 17
