City of Shadows (33 page)

He said, “You can’t make rules for killers. As somebody once said, ‘Everyone is dragged on by his own pleasures.’ ”

“Virgil,” she said. “Virgil said it.”

“He did.” Schmidt got up, because if he didn’t go now, he never would. “He also said,
‘Latet anguis in herba,’
and I don’t want it sinking its fangs into you, too, so leave the detecting to me, all right?”

She looked up at him. “It isn’t domestic,” she said. “It isn’t. It’s some
thing else.”

She scared him. He grabbed her by the elbow and hauled her to her feet. “Home,” he said. “And stay there. Promise me.”

“I can look after myself.”

Deliberately, he looked at her cheek. “You’ve done a fine job of it so far. Promise me.”

She pulled away. “Catch him,” she said. And strode off.

He stood looking after her, wondering what gave her the right to dress in old clothes and still walk as if she owned the damn park. She thought she was steel; the heavier the beating, the stronger it became. In fact, he thought, you’re as vulnerable as hell, and I don’t know what to do about it.

Esther circled the
park, mourning for Anna and the lost baby. I’d have taken it, she thought. I’d have brought it up for you and been grateful to do it. Motherhood—the one estate I crave and won’t ever have.

But at least she’d been spared the agony of losing a child, which Anna had not. No wonder she went mad, Esther thought. No wonder she went into that canal.

She tried inhabiting the cold space of Anna’s past life and wondered at the strength it must have taken to emerge from it as intact as she had.
Tough as old boots,
Nick said, his voice rasping like the rooks’ that were wheeling around the park’s elms—and about as sympathetic. Na
talya had thought the same.

Unfair,
Esther protested, she’s had too much to bear. But Nick’s words had come unbidden and couldn’t be unsaid. And they were true. Anna hadn’t grieved for her lost baby; she’d grieved only for Anna.

Perhaps it’s the same, Esther thought. How do we, the childless, know what is necessary to survive this worst thing?

She heard someone shouting at her and looked around to see a woman gesturing at a sign that said
keep off the grass
. The lawn she’d been treading on was still covered in snow, but Germans liked their

signs obeyed. She wandered back to the path, past other signs:
keep dogs on leash. do not pick the flowers. take your rubbish home.

And yet ...she began reliving life with Anna, trying to remember one word, one expression that had dwelled on the pain of a lost baby, a tear, an aching glance at children playing in the street. When Frau Schinkel’s grandchildren visited, Anna had merely complained of the noise they made on the stairs—and not as someone who couldn’t bear a reminder of young voices at play.

You don’t like children, Esther thought. You like dogs.

That didn’t mean Anna hadn’t had a child, but it did suggest that she’d been prepared to abort it or have it adopted.

I’m being unkind, Esther told herself. But Anna-as-she-was persisted in asserting herself against the sentimental pictures from one of the mothers-for-Germany magazines.

It changes things, Schmidt had said.

Don’t think about him, don’t think about him. Damn him, he may be right in every possible way for a man to be right, but he’s wrong about this.

If Anna had been compliant in the disposal of the child, why should its father go to such lengths—
such
lengths—to kill her?

Esther had been so preoccupied she had to look around to get her bearings and found she’d reached Dolls’ Alley, the name Berliners gave to the avenue of statues with which Kaiser Wilhelm had insisted on en
hancing the park. Up ahead was the sprouting column of
Victory
cele
brating the former Prussian habit of winning wars. Berliners found it ridiculous and called it “Victory Asparagus.”

Esther stared up at the kaiser. I don’t think the baby comes into this, she told him. Schmidt’s got it wrong.

Suddenly she was decided. “And so did you,” she snapped at the kaiser before directing her steps back the way she’d come, to Lützow
strasse and the Elizabeth Hospital.

It took time
to win Fräulein Schechter’s trust and the secrets of the almoner’s office, but at the end of the week, Esther Solomonova walked into Police HQ at Alexanderplatz and asked to see Inspector Schmidt.

“Not here, Fräulein,” a duty officer told her.
“I have information for him. When will he be back?”
“Better leave a message.”
He gave her paper and a pen. She wrote
“I know Anna’s real name.”

She signed it
“Solomonova.”
She said, “You’ll see he gets it, please. It’s to

do with the murder at Charlottenburg.” “Inspector Bolle’s handling the case now.” She stared at him. “Is Inspector Schmidt ill?” “His wife’s been killed.”

16

It looked like
an accident.

Accident, Schmidt thought mildly when he emerged out of the U-bahn on his way home and heard the ambulance go by with the bell on its roof ringing.

“Christ, an accident,” as he turned the corner of his street and saw that the ambulance had stopped in the region of his building.

He began to run, dodging pedestrians coming the other way. One of them blocked him for a moment, and as he teetered, then dodged again, a voice addressing someone else said, “Your pun
ishment,
mein Herr.
”

A crowd had gathered outside the front door.

A weeping Frau Busse tried to interpose her body between him and the open hallway. “No, Herr Schmidt, don’t go in. Siegfried, don’t. There’s been an accident.”

When he pushed her aside, the ambulance men attempted to stop him from seeing the body. “An accident,” they said. “She fell downstairs. Wait for the doctor.”

He pulled off the sheet they’d covered her with. There was no point in calling a doctor. The fall had flipped her beautiful hair to
one side so that it spread itself almost neatly against the hallway’s tiles. Her head was crooked at the angle made by a broken neck, like a dead bird’s.

Around her, and strewn on the stairs leading up, were groceries—the two brown paper bags she’d been carrying them in had split and re
leased their contents—tins, packets, bottles. Sugar was still trickling from its burst packet. A piece of raw rabbit stuck obscenely out of its newspaper wrapping.

She’d been to see Willi’s wife again. Schmidt didn’t think it then, but later he blamed and cursed himself over and over at having sent her to connive in the petty corruption that had helped to kill her. If both her hands had been free, she could have clutched at the banister.

His first reaction was rage that she’d always insisted on polishing and buffing the stairs. As he picked her body up and nursed it, he yelled at it, “I told you, how many times did I tell you? They were bloody lethal.”

Weeping, Frau Busse persuaded him to put her down at last. “You did, you did. But she was such a good housewife, such a good house
wife.”

After the inquest—accidental death—he took her coffin by train back to Bavaria so that she could be buried in the church where they’d got married.

He was stone up to the interment, but the image of the little curled fetus in her womb that was going under the ground with her broke him, and he bawled until the mountains echoed back the noise he made.

Willi Ritte met him at the station when he returned, and offered to take him back home to Frau Ritte and the children. “You don’t want to be alone for a bit,” he said.

“Thanks, Willi, but I’ve got to face it sometime.”

Willi was right, though. The apartment was intolerable. The unfin
ished baby jacket she’d been knitting from the wool of her sweater was on top of the needlework bag by her chair. Her cookbook was open at a recipe for “Rabbit in Morel Sauce” that she’d been going to make for him from her ill-gotten gains.

Frau Busse came in to ask him if he’d like to join her and the family for a meal. He thanked her but said he’d be going out and probably wouldn’t be back for a few days.

He went to Ikey Wolff ’s parents’ house in Wilmersdorf. They’d leaned on him when Ikey died; he leaned on them now.

Joe Wolff spent three days a week at his private dentist’s practice; the rest of the time he provided free dentistry for the poor. Minna gave her services to a Jewish ex-servicemen’s charity. She usually had trou
ble persuading Aryans that Jews had fought in the war. “I tell them Ikey got the Iron Cross. I tell them there was as many Jews fighting for Ger
many as goys,” she said.

“Pro rata the population,” Joe interrupted.

“You and your rata, but it’s true, eh, Siegfried? Even in Herr Hitler’s regiment there were Jews.”

“Ikey was a regiment all by himself,” Schmidt said.

They coped with grief for their son through hard work. “Not that it stops,” Minna Wolff said.

“You learn to live with it,” Joe said.

“You lock it up,” said Minna. “Keep it in a room in your head.”

“Comes out rampaging, of course, knocks you down,” said Joe. “But yes, you learn to live with it.”

Schmidt stayed with them for a week, but in the end he had to leave; they were talking about a different grief. His own was poisoned with guilt. Maybe at the moment Hannelore had been struggling up the stairs with her shopping, he had been thinking of Solomonova. The un
ease that had followed him on this case—not from any specific cause, just a heightened awareness of the quickness with which people could be erased—had been centered on a foreigner he hardly knew. He’d at
tributed vulnerability to the wrong woman.

All the times when he could have gone home to his wife but had stayed to work in his office returned to haunt him. He’d ripped Han
nelore out of her natural environment, dumped her in a strange city, and then neglected her.

His defense that she’d seemed happy enough was overridden by stray words picked up from a stranger’s conversation as he’d passed:
Your punishment,
mein Herr. Apt, they wrote themselves on every wall as at Belshazzar’s Feast like a judgment. He hadn’t loved her enough, and a ruthless Jehovah of the Old Testament had snatched her and the baby away from him. In the extreme moment, he had bumped into God
coming the other way, speaking through His instrument:
Your punish
ment,
mein Herr.

Crumpling under the judgment, other times defying it, he found the Wolffs’ stoical acceptance of an ultimate justice to be intolerable. He thanked them, assured them he loved them, and left.

He asked for and was granted one of the police flats near Alexander
platz, then went back to his old apartment to arrange the move.

He arrived at the same time as the furniture van that was to take the Busses to their new home. Despite the inconvenience to her, Lotte Busse insisted on making him coffee and sat him down on a packing case to be entertained by her sister-in-law, catching up on Schmidt’s news and imparting her own while she popped in and out of the room, directing the movers. The children were at school.

Maria Busse had her brother’s obsessive stare and, in Schmidt’s opinion, though not in that of Hannelore, who’d been fond of her, had always shown a simplistic and unhealthy devotion to religion. Her wide eyes regarded him out of the wimple of a novice nun at the Convent of the Holy Trinity down the road.

“Herr Schmidt, I have not had an opportunity of condoling with you. May the Lord and His mother help you through this time of trial.”

He could tell from the look of her that she was building up a head of steam. He got up, but the nun’s voice pursued him, telling him—
him
— of Hannelore’s virtues.

“. . . so strong in her faith, so gentle in her life. ...You must take comfort. ...She died certain in the love of God. ...Even her last words were a blessing. ...We grieve, but we must not be jealous that she has joined the holy saints in paradise
.. . .
”

If she mentions the baby, I’ll knock her down.

Frau Busse came in with the coffee. Schmidt began saying he had to go, then stopped. “Her last words?”

“To the man who carried her shopping.”

Schmidt looked from the wimpled face to Frau Busse’s. “What man?”

“I didn’t hear it, Siegfried,” Frau Busse said. “Maria was visiting on another dispensation, weren’t you, Maria? Sitting by the door to the hall, and she heard dear Hanne come in.”

Sister Maria nodded. “And she said, ‘God bless you, that would be so kind.’ ”

“Why? Who’d she say it to?”

“Well, it must have been to the man who carried her shopping, Siegfried,” Frau Busse said. “Little Pieter was playing in the street, and he said she came back from shopping with a man who was carrying the bags for her.”