City of Shadows (26 page)

Hannelore, having been insulated from all conflict on her mountain farm, rosy with homegrown food and brought up to respect her elders, was a Sleeping Beauty in comparison; waking up to Berlin had shocked her.

It had been unfair on her, Schmidt realized—not that it occurred to her to complain that she’d been landed in a bankrupt city with a poorly paid, often absent husband.

She’d adapted to his vagaries, learned not to be repulsed by his Jew
ish friends,
probably
voted SPD in elections, as he did, put up with his swearing, his bad jokes, his sympathy for the detritus of society with whom he dealt, but she’d done so on his account, because it was a wifely thing to do; husbands were to be catered to. He was, he some
times felt, her standard issue and that she’d have adapted equally sweetly to the lifestyle of a red-kneed, red-necked Bavarian.

For his sake she tried to read translations of his loved Latin poets and had tackled Shakespeare, but literature was their dividing ground, as was music—she liked waltzes and oompah bands, he preferred Beethoven.

“Where did you get all this from?” she’d once asked, as if he’d caught some disease while in foreign parts.

“A godless radical,” he told her. Which is what Herr Müller, his ele-mentary-school teacher, had been and why, after their first five years together, Herr Müller had been dismissed by the school board. By that time, however, the two of them had caught each other’s attention, and
for a few of his mother’s hard-earned pfennigs a week, the young Schmidt had continued his education during the evenings in the garret in which Herr Müller had paced and talked and read aloud and played his gramophone and opened the gates to anarchic, terrifying, entrancing, jaw-dropping wonders of the mind and, eventually, smoked himself to death.

To get a job hadn’t occurred to Hannelore—not that he’d suggested it; she’d been brought up to be a wife and mother, job enough for any
body. In the last year, her friend and neighbor Frau Busse had tempted her into the
volkisch
movement, and she’d joined one of its women’s groups—Daughters of the Teutonic Dawn, he thought it was; the name kept changing—where like-minded females alternated jam making and sewing pot holders with pagan-looking dances around a campfire and discussions about the future of the Aryan race.

All very harmless, and if that’s what she wanted, fine—though Schmidt was uneasy with the Daughters’ stenciled newsletter in which editorials about the Aryan race seemed to take it for granted that other races, especially the Semitic, didn’t actually have a future.

What concerned him more was that she seemed to block out the re
ality that faced him every day or, rather, to think there were simple so
lutions to it. “But how are they allowed?” she would ask of the prostitutes, homosexuals, rapists, murderers, burglars, fraudsters, and general evildoers with whom he had to deal—as if a good spring clean
ing would get rid of them.

Eventually, to close the gap, he stopped talking over his cases with her and kept the discussion at dinner to matters of mutual concern.

Tonight, though, knowing she was fascinated by royalty and without mentioning names, he said, “Strange case today. I met a woman who thinks she’s the grand duchess Anastasia.”

She was gripped immediately, asked questions, fetched her scrap
book in which the familiar picture of the four girls in white dresses had been pasted. “Does she look like her?”

“She does a bit.”

“Oh, Siegfried, perhaps she is.”

He had another Ringer on his hands; the whole world was prepared to be conned. “And I’m the bloody pope,” he said.

“Siegfried.”

“What? All right, I won’t say ‘bloody pope’ to little Bocksbeutel.” They’d agreed the child was to be brought up in her religion, as a Ro
man Catholic.

“Bocksbeutel,” she said with pleasure—it was the rounded bottle into which her home region put its wine. “We’ll have to think of a proper name soon.”

“I don’t know. Bocksbeutel Schmidt—got a ring to it.”

She laughed, and he thought, What the hell have I got to complain about? She was the wife he’d dreamed about in the trenches. He was the envy of Alexanderplatz; at police get-togethers everybody loved her.
He
loved her. She loved him, and if their marriage was not the meeting of true minds that somebody—possibly Shakespeare—had talked about, it was still a happy one.

He offered to wash the dishes, but she wouldn’t have it—this was the time when husbands sat by the fire and read the paper.

When she came in, he made her put her feet across his knees so that he could massage them. “Your poor ankles are swollen.”

“It’s only from standing in the lines.”

“Only?”

Bless her, she looked exhausted; the once-rounded cheeks were showing their bones. He was swept by a caveman savagery. Christ, why should she suffer because
he
had scruples? What sort of man allowed his pregnant wife to go without when others were not? She wasn’t going to lose this baby, too. The particular little Isaac in her womb wouldn’t be laid on the sacrificial altar its father had built to the demanding de
ity of virtue. He was no Abraham—never liked the nasty old bugger.

He said, “Tomorrow I want you to go to Frau Ritte’s and tell her we’ll go in on Willi’s arrangement.”

He wasn’t even stricken by conscience. What else could he do? But he was sorry, very sorry. Weimar Germany had come to this—its police forced to join the ranks of its crooks. Fuck it,
fuck
it.

He was haunted by Latin.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

13

When Schmidt arrived
at his office in the Alexanderplatz the next morning, his wife was much on his mind.

He couldn’t look his sergeant in the eye. He said, “If it’s all right by you, Willi, Hannelore will be calling on your wife today. We’d like to come in on the arrangement.”

Willi held out his hand, Schmidt shook it, and that was that.

Willi said, “The piece from Bismarck Allee, the kike with the scar—she’s downstairs, boss, waiting to see you.”

“Let her wait.”

He gave orders for the house-to-house around Charlottenburg to be continued and a new one to be instituted in Bismarck Allee. He sent two men off to roust out of their beds those who’d been at the Green Hat on Saturday night in order to account for every minute of Prince Nick’s and Yusupov’s presences at the party. Another uniform was dispatched to find employees of the Purple Parrot and get information about Natalya. “And while you’re about it, I want the names and addresses of the men who were with Yusupov at the Green Hat and who went on with him to the Pink Parasol. They won’t want to give them—they’re probably
homosexuals—but every one of the bastards is going to be interviewed.” Schmidt had more or less eliminated Yusupov—and Potrovskov—but he was a thorough man.

He thought about Solomonova, Anderson, and Tchichagova, those three Russian witches stirring their cauldron in 29c Bismarck Allee. For all he knew of their past, they’d arrived in Berlin on broomsticks— he sent to Immigration for details of their entry papers.

Was he missing something by automatically assuming that Anderson was a fake? Perhaps he was; every other bugger was showing an open mind on the subject; maybe he should.
“There are more things in heaven and earth ...than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
Shakespeare said every frigging thing.

Finally he acknowledged that by keeping Solomonova waiting down
stairs he was cutting off his nose to spite his face; of all the people in this inquiry, she was the most likely to give him the information he needed.

You’ve gone beyond punishing people for their way of life, he told himself. What do you care who she sleeps with?

“Show her up.”

Regulations stated that witnesses and suspects be seen in the inter
view rooms, but interview rooms were on the ground level and cold, whereas his office was two floors up from the canteen and absorbed some of its rising heat.

He cleared papers off his desk so that Hannelore’s picture could stand more prominently on it, emptied his ashtray, put a chair on the opposite side to face the window, and set another one farther back for Willi.

He reached for a cigarette and remembered he didn’t have any. He’d stopped to buy some this morning, to find that a packet of Manoli cost 3,800 marks. He’d sworn at the shopkeeper and left, vowing to give up tobacco. He fought down the impulse to grub among the butts in the wastepaper basket and see if any were smokable.

“Good morning, Fräulein.” He didn’t get up.

She wore two scarves Russian peasant style, one straight across the forehead and the other around so that it framed the face. The snow-reflecting light coming through the window from the parking lot outside
was hard on her, showing every detail of the scar and emphasizing her pallor, but her eyes were more alive than they’d been yesterday, as if she’d joined the rest of the human race sufficiently to take part in it. She wasn’t nervous either, and whatever it was about her presence that activated politeness in Willi was still working; he held the door and then the chair for her.

Yes, Esther thought, here he is. And emanating less kindness than he had yesterday; he’d categorized her as a loose woman, of course. She supposed she was, but damned if she’d apologize for it to some bourgeois male in a safe job. You’ve no idea of fighting to survive, she thought. And then remembered he’d been on the Western Front. He did.

Well, she’d deliberately repelled him so that he didn’t get too close, and here he was—repelled.

From the first she skewed the story to exonerate Nick: “Prince Niko
lai heard that an unknown woman was in Dalldorf Asylum and there was a possibility that she was the grand duchess Anastasia. Naturally, being a loyal White Russian, he was concerned.”

“Naturally.”

She ignored his tone. She told him about Dalldorf. She told him about Clara Peuthert and the daggers Clara had drawn on her calendar every sixth weekend. “She told me she scared the man off once, so she may be able to give you a description.”

She told him about the drive from Dalldorf to the Green Hat. “Anna said the man was following us. I thought her paranoid, but after the in
cident on the stairs at the Hat, Prince Nick thought it safer for us to smuggle her out to our new flat.”

Her scar tightened as she told him about Olga Ratzel’s death, but her account was toneless. “An Inspector Bolle was in charge of that case,” she said. “The fact that Olga’s death fitted in with Clara’s theory made me think, but I convinced myself that it was coincidence. Now I know it wasn’t—he thought Olga knew where we’d taken Anna.” She told him how she’d asked for Theo to protect them the following sixth weekend, but, when nothing happened, she’d decided she’d been overfanciful.

“But on Saturday he found you again,” Schmidt said.

“Yes.” She spoke almost to herself. “Yes, he’s become clever. When you think of it, he’s been hanging around Nick’s clubs. ...Somebody’s

been talking to him. Somebody . . .” Her eyes were sapphire hard now.

“I’d like to know who.”

“That’s our job, Fräulein.”

She gave a brief nod. Then do it, it said.

He said, “Fräulein Anderson insists that it’s the Cheka who’re after her. Or Prince Yusupov, of course.”

“Yes, but when she was
truly
frightened, she told me the man had followed her always—she used that phrase. She mentioned past en
counters at a Canal and in a forest.”

“Canal?”

“Yes.” Solomonova put up the heel of her hand to rub her forehead in a gesture with which Schmidt was becoming familiar. “I’m sorry.... Prince Nikolai once mentioned it, that she’d been fished out of the Landwehr Canal—1920, I think it was. You’d have to ask him about that.”

Schmidt looked over to Willi, who made a note. “Did she give a de
scription?”

“No.”

“You can, though, if it’s the same man who attacked you at the Hat.”

“Yes, but whether I’d know him again ...a big man.”

“Narrows it down nicely,” intoned Willi from his notebook.

Esther told them about Natalya’s ambition, her growing irritation with Anna, and the culmination of both—the scene at the Green Hat.

“She wanted Prince Nikolai to present her to the world as the grand duchess. That was what the quarrel was about. Naturally he refused.”

“Naturally.”

She ignored his tone. “Natalya was in an overwrought state after that. I suppose it made her judgment unsound when she found the note. She must have believed that Yusupov wrote it and would present her as Anastasia.”

Schmidt got up and turned his back on her to think. In the parking lot below, a couple of uniforms were trying to push a van out of a snowdrift.

He’d got it right. God, I’m good, he thought.

And she was an examining magistrate’s dream: concise, clear—and honest, as far as it went. He wondered how far it did go.

“Do you think the canteen could supply three cups of real ersatz cof
fee for us, Sergeant?” he said.

“I’ll inquire, sir.”

“And...cake or something.” She looked famished.

Behind Solomonova’s back, Willi rolled his eyes. Cake yet.

When he’d gone, Esther said, “Why did he kill Natalya?”

“By mistake,” he told her.

He’d worked it out. The killer’s standing under the trees of Charlot
tenburg at midnight. It’s dark; all streetlights are out, owing to the lat
est electricity cut. (Schmidt had checked.) Everybody in the area has gone to bed to save fuel. He’s waiting for the woman to whom he’d sent the message. And here she comes, on time, through the snow, an inter
mittent moon washing out features so that her face is a pale, indistin
guishable disk under the cloche hat. In her dark coat, Natalya is the expected woman in the expected place.

She doesn’t see him. He lets her get ahead of him, then pads after her, no sound but the creak of branches under their weight of snow. She doesn’t even cry out. The knife slashing into her neck is the only warning she has that she’s about to die. Shock probably precludes even that knowledge. It doesn’t take long in any case. Seconds.

“He thought she was Anna,” he said.

“Let’s hope he still does,” she said. “I’m afraid for her.”

Schmidt sat down. “It was fraud, wasn’t it? You were going to pass off Fräulein Anderson as Anastasia and claim the Romanov fortune.”

Her mouth opened slightly in surprise. Yep, I’m good, he thought. Then her eyes met his; she almost smiled. He thought she was going to admit it. What she said was, “Fraud implies gaining money under false pretenses. There has been no money gained.”

She was right, of course. “But it was the intention.”

She said, “Does it matter now? I want you to catch the man who killed Natalya. I am here for that.”

“Does Prince Nick believe that Anna is the grand duchess?”

“You must ask him,” she said.

“Do
you
?”

“No.”

He sat back, relieved. “Who is she?”

“I don’t know. None of us does. She was Mrs. Unknown in Dalldorf, and according to Nick she was Mrs. Unknown in the hospital before that. Sometimes I don’t think
she
knows. What’s worrying is that most of the time she really believes she is Anastasia.”

“Which you helped her to do,” he said—he couldn’t leave it. “You were coaching her, you and Natalya.”

She leaned forward, her hand on the desk. “Are we going to spend time on my sins? Because if we are, we’ll be here all day. Look”—she moved farther forward—“I don’t think this has to do with grand duchesses or fraud or anything. Anna is frightened of something in her past; it’s why she’s tried to forget it. Whoever this man is, he’s come out of it to kill her.”

“It’s a possibility,” he said.

“It’s a probability.
That’s
why I’m here.
That’s
why I’m telling you all this. I’m afraid for her.”

The scar, and her indifference to it, did something extraordinary for her, just as damage to some art object threw into relief how beautiful it had once been, tarnishing and tempering her face with the reminder of what humanity did to lovely things and how they bore it.

He kept on punishing her. “So you’ve left her on her own at Bismarck Allee.”

“For God’s sake,” she said irritably, sitting back. “Of course I haven’t. Nick’s taken her to some family called von Kleist. Wealthy people, ro
mantics, thrilled to bits to be guarding a grand duchess from the Bol
sheviks.”

He saw that “romantics” was a dirty word to her. “Address?”

She gave it to him. “You see, you’ve got the means to find out who she is and catch the man, or I wouldn’t be here—”

“Bothering with me?”

She almost smiled. “Jews don’t usually have much faith in the police, but...I trust you.”

Again they were both taken aback.

But I do, Esther thought. Integrity was this man’s milieu; he swam in it like a lone fish. She knew him. He didn’t approve of her. She didn’t approve of herself much either.

“Thank you.” Schmidt, newly enrolled buyer in the black market, felt flattered and guilty.

They began chatting. “She couldn’t actually be the grand duchess by any chance?”

“You met her,” Esther said. “What do you think?”

“I’m not conversant with royalty. As far as I’m concerned, they all come out of lunatic asylums.”

She smiled. No, she grinned. Devastatingly. Youth and amusement had been there in the past, and for a moment they broke through. Like a miracle, he thought. Like bloody snowdrops in winter.

“Until you’ve caught this man, I’d like the von Kleists to go on be
lieving in her,” she said. “Is that possible?”

“Why?”

She shrugged. “I may be wrong. I don’t know them, but they’d prob
ably drop her otherwise, and she’d be at risk again. She’s not an easy person to live with.” She said wistfully, “A pain in the ass, Natalya used to call her. We think she may be Polish.”

He nodded. “That’d do it.”

And she laughed.

“No cake,” Willi said, elbowing through the door with a tray.

Schmidt asked standard questions, more to give her time to drink the coffee than because she had anything else to contribute—except who she was. When he asked her where she came from, she said, “You have my details.”

“We could do with a bit more background.”

“Is it relevant?”

He supposed it wasn’t. Nor could he detain her because she wouldn’t elaborate; she didn’t have a record—in Germany at least.

“Don’t leave town,” he told her when she was going.

“I don’t intend to,” she said, and then, graciously, “I’m a Berliner now.”