City of Shadows (35 page)
Authors: Ariana Franklin
Yes, Esther thought, it’s the words that stay with you. Wherever, whenever it had been done and whoever had done it, Anna had been raped; she was talking to someone who knew. Anna had transposed things that had happened to her with things she thought had hap
pened to Anastasia. Like two different parasites, the experiences had twined themselves into her mind and fused; they could not be sepa
rated without tearing it apart.
“What happened to the baby?”
Anna shrugged. “Somebody adopt it. I don’t think of it.”
“You signed the papers with the name Franziska Schanskowska.”
Anna shrugged again. “Any name.”
“No, that was yours. You’re Franziska. You’re Polish. The man wants to kill Franziska Schanskowska from Poland. Why?”
Latet anguis in herba,
Schmidt had said. The snake hidden in the grass. “For God’s sake, Anna, let’s find him and scotch him.”
“I am Imperial Highness the Grand Duchess Anastasia,” Anna said. She looked ill.
“Don’t. Don’t do this. Not to me, not to yourself. You’re condemning yourself to a lie. Your life will be artificial and... oh, static, not getting anywhere. You’ll always be drifting around the edges with gullible posers. And for what? That throne has gone, thank God. It was built on bones. Every jewel, every bit of gold, every Fabergé egg—how could they look at them and not think of the misery each bloody thing had caused a people in their care? Beautiful ladies scattered coins as they drove by in their troikas, and starving children fought each other to pick them up. I saw them. Is that the inheritance you want? It’s gone to the dust where it belonged. Leave it.”
There was a tap on the door, and an anxious footman looked in. She realized she’d been shouting.
“Is all well, your Imperial Highness?”
“Yes,”
Esther said. “Get out.”
He went, leaving the door ajar; the baron would be here in a minute. “Anna,
please,
” Esther begged.
“I am Anastasia.”
Defeated, Esther looked around the stifling room. “I suppose it’s bet
ter than Dalldorf,” she said quietly.
“Yes,” Anna said. “It is.”
They looked at each other, and for a moment Esther saw something that, however misplaced, was nevertheless courage. Whoever this woman before her was, she had made a choice while she was still able to make one, and nothing would shift her from it.
“I’m so sorry, little one,” Esther said. “I’m sorry.”
She put out her hands to take Anna’s, but the Pekingese snapped at her, making Anna smile. “You see, Esther. I have guard at last. Nobody will touch me again.”
“Be safe, darling,” Esther said.
“Who’s his mummy’s little Chinese dragon? Who breathes fire on nasty Cheka and burns them up? Yes he does, little treasure, yes he does.”
Esther left her.
Ringer was calling
him “my dear inspector” in the tone people used when they said “nice doggy.”
“Under the circumstances, my dear inspector, you may wish to ac
cept the appointment.”
“What appointment?”
“Hanover.” Sighing, Ringer began again. “The Hanover force has ap
pealed to us for help in a particularly difficult case of unsolved multiple killings. And under the circumstances . . .”
“Hanover?” He was afflicted by a lassitude that made him almost deaf; the memory of Natalya’s corpse lying in the snow was overlaid by that of another body, in a hallway, its fair hair spread out on the tiles.
Sometimes they fused together and became one image; sometimes he was worried by seeing only Natalya’s, as if his mind wouldn’t give credit to Hannelore’s.
“My dear inspector, we would of course miss you, but the transfer seems preferable to losing you from the force altogether.”
Force? Altogether? “Are you kicking me out?” he asked.
Ringer’s mustache rose as he took a deep breath. “There is no ques
tion of that, but ...if you do not wish to go to Hanover, then perhaps, in your present condition, another division here would be more suit
able. Records, perhaps.”
“Records?”
Ringer’d got his attention now; the bastard wanted to put him in with paper filers and pencil fucking pushers. He sat up. “What’s happening to the Tchichagova case?”
“It is being put on file as unsolved. Should more evidence come to light . . .” Ringer uplifted a finger. “But as far as you are concerned, it is closed, do you understand?”
Either he shut up about it or he became a filing clerk. Or he went to fucking Hanover. No, it was more basic than that. Either Hannelore and their baby rotted in the grave, unavenged, or he allowed himself to rot while still living on their behalf. Bolle had done his best; there was no proof that she’d been pushed downstairs, none that would stand up in court. Willi said there wasn’t, and he believed Willi. He, Schmidt, could go on beating his head against that closed door for the rest of his life, losing his job and his sanity, or he could go to Hanover.
He said, “Suppose more evidence turns up?”
“My dear inspector, you will be told immediately. Of course.”
He remained an active detective or he turned into one of the madmen to be seen shambling through the streets muttering their obsessions.
“I’ll go to Hanover,” he said. “But don’t think the case is closed. One of these days, I’m coming back.”
Esther tried to
contact Schmidt again but was transferred to Inspec
tor Bolle, whose interest in her was little warmer than Baron von Kleist’s—or in Franziska Schanskowska, for that matter. He was loyal to his colleague, but it was obvious that in Bolle’s mind the connection
made by Inspector Schmidt between the death of Natalya Tchichigova and the unstable Anna Anderson was so much hogwash. Natalya’s killing was a straightforward case of murder by a person unknown, something to be expected when unwary women ventured into a lonely area late at night. When Esther asked after Schmidt, she was told that he had been transferred to another city.
Crossing Alexanderplatz, Esther cast a last look back at the great red building that was police headquarters. He’d gone from there, poor man. Retired into grief and another life in another city, fencing her out.
They’d been strange, those procedural and devastating minutes the two of them had shared, as if minds had met, as if, in the bare land
scape of a killing field, they’d been aware of a secret tunnel to some
where beautiful, they’d heard the flute of panpipes from the age-old forest.
Nitwit, she told herself, you were his suspect and then his witness, and that’s all you were. The magic was on your side, only yours. He didn’t even approve of you—you made sure of that.
But it had been magic to her, the first touch of warmth, the first moisture on the shard of ice that had kept her frozen for so long. Whether the thaw that was sending tears down her cheeks as she walked away from Alexanderplatz came from gratitude or chagrin that she’d ever met him, she wasn’t sure.
Either way he’d awakened a part of her that had been dead, and if the recirculating blood hurt, it was at least a reminder that she had a life and must find a better way to live it.
ART
TWO
17
A visit from
Prince Nick was a rare event nowadays.
Esther offered him a cocktail and watched him prowl the apart
ment with the resentment of a man whose butler had bought the winning lottery ticket on his wages.
“Doing well,” he said.
“Yes.”
“You owe it all to me, you know.”
“So you tell me.”
“I gave you that damn camera.”
“We are referring to the Leica I had to pawn when you left me
and Anna and Natalya to starve, are we?” “Got it back, didn’t you?” “No thanks to you.” He’d cut her off without a pfennig when
she’d told him she’d be neither sleeping with nor working for him again. He hadn’t minded no longer having droit du seigneur, but the loss of a confidential secretary who spoke as many languages as Esther did had been a blow he’d made her suffer for.
Now, however, occasionally he turned up at 29c for advice, consola
tion, or praise—things that his succession of wives had run out of.
She wondered what it was this time.
She watched him studying a portrait of himself that she’d taken some years before, all sleek hair, hooded eyes, and cigarette holder.
“Good-looking fellow, that,” he said. He still was, but the portrait, as with the man, was typical of an earlier time. To be fashionable now, he should have adopted tweeds and a pipe.
Like all speculators and black marketeers, he’d been hard hit when Germany had finally regained control of its economy and stabi
lized its currency. “Are they trying to ruin me?” he’d wailed at the time.
“Yes,” Esther had told him, “that’s exactly what they’re trying to do.”
He’d never got over it. The amusement tax had hit his nightclubs; so had a proliferation of casinos and cabarets that took away his trade to Berlin’s newer West End. To compete, he’d lowered even his standards. It was said that there were clubs one admitted going to and others one didn’t. The Green Hat, Esther was afraid, now fell mainly into the cat
egory of those one didn’t.
She wondered why she was still fond of him.
“How’s Anna?” he asked.
“She’s not enjoying America as much as she thought she would.”
“Damn good. That bitch has been a complete serpent’s tooth to me.”
Every mention of Anna in the newspapers—and hardly a week passed when she didn’t pop up in the world’s press somewhere—was gall and wormwood to him. “Not a word, not a fucking word. Not so much as a ‘Thank you, dear Prince Nick, without you I’d still be in a fucking straitjacket.’ Is that honor? I ask you, Esther, is that how Ro
manovs reward loyalty? No wonder the fucking peasants revolted.”
The press had discovered Anna without him. Harriet von Rathlef, one of Anna’s many supporters, had published a series of articles pro
claiming her as the lost Anastasia. Peter Gilliard, the grand duchesses’ former tutor, brought out a book declaring that she was a fake.
In 1928, with the death of the dowager empress, the czar’s mother, things had heated up—an inheritance was at stake—and twelve of the surviving members of the imperial family had made a declaration that
Anna Anderson was not, definitely
not,
Anastasia Nikolaievna, daugh
ter of the last czar of Russia.
On the other hand, the son and daughter of Dr. Botkin, the physi
cian who had died with the Romanovs in the House of Special Pur
pose, were equally convinced that she was—and they had known Anastasia well as a child.
It seemed that half the world’s population believed Anna to be the grand duchess and the other half didn’t. What Esther found curious was that Anna was a celebrity in both camps; if possible, those who be
lieved she was an impostor were as avid to know about her as those who proclaimed her to be the grand duchess. More books had been written about her—for and against. A film was in the offing. Dress shops sold frocks in “Anastasia blue.” For a while there’d been a run on Anastasia-brand cigarettes.
Nick, ignoring the fact that Natalya’s murder had panicked him into handing Anna over to the von Kleists, became a Rumpelstiltskin, stomping with rage at a woman spinning gold out of the straw with which he’d provided her. Esther tried pointing out that Anna wasn’t making money; she was being kept in the style her patrons felt a grand duchess deserved, but she wasn’t accumulating wealth, and if the sup
porters drifted away when the ballyhoo faded, she’d be as penniless as when Nick had found her.
“Let’s hope for that,” Nick said. “
I
sure as hell won’t be picking her out of any more loony bins. And how come that assassin ain’t taken a potshot at her? She’s been public enough.”
It was a question that had concerned Esther a lot; with Anna appear
ing in so many spotlights, it seemed impossible that the killer wouldn’t seize his opportunity. But either he
hadn’t
seen it or he’d passed it up; there had been no attempt on Anna’s life. It had taken a long time for Esther to puzzle it out. After all, Anna was still the person she always had been and therefore presumably still the object of the killer’s hatred.
“Do you know what I think?” she said. “She must know something from their mutual past, something that would harm the swine if it be
came public. Perhaps he murdered his wife, and only she knows where the body’s buried.”
“Or she abandoned the poor bastard after he’d given her everything.”
“The point is,” Esther said, “that if she tells the world what it is, she has to reveal that her past isn’t Anastasia’s. He knows now she won’t do that; she’s too famous; she can’t give him away without giving herself away. He’s safe.”
“Or maybe he’s just bored with chasing the bitch. Like I am. Or maybe he
was
Cheka, and they got bored too.”
“Or maybe he’s dead,” Esther said. “Anyway, she doesn’t seem as frightened as she was.”
“How’d you know? I thought she’d dropped you, too. She become pro-Jewish all of a sudden?”
“Not exactly.”
For a long time after their meeting in 1923, when Esther had chal
lenged Anna with the name Franziska Schanskowska, the only intelli
gence she’d gained of her was through the newspapers. Until one day she’d answered a knock on the door of 29c to have Fräulein Anderson push past her and head in the direction of her old room. “I don’t stay with stupid barons no longer.”
Whether the von Kleists had got fed up with her or she with them, it was difficult to know. Anna said she was tired of being questioned about her history and presented with strangers she was asked to iden
tify. “ ‘Who this, Your Highness? Who that? Remember we meet at Winter Palace in 1908? Remember your mama visit me in the hospital in 1916?’ Always on show, always questions. I don’t do it anymore.”
Anna scorned publicity. It was at least one trait she shared with the late czar and his family, who had fought to safeguard their privacy away from public occasions. She refused interviews and threw tantrums when they were forced on her or when enterprising reporters infiltrated wherever she was staying.
Esther thought it admirable. But those who’d taken Anna up in the hope that some of her fame would reflect on them found it a disap
pointment, which, allied with her erratic behavior, eventually caused a parting of the ways.
She left 29c a second time as abruptly as she’d come, this time at the behest of Duke George of Leuchtenberg, another believer, who’d installed her in his castle near Munich. That relationship, too, had petered out, and over the years Anna had been passed from hand to aristocratic
hand like a baton as the previous recipient dropped exhausted. At which point Anna always returned to 29c Bismarck Allee.
Jewish or not, Esther realized she was about the only constant in Anna’s life.
When, in 1928, America had beckoned and Anna set sail on the
Berengaria
for New York and the glare of popping flashbulbs, her hosts hadn’t been the only ones to be relieved. Esther hoped, for Anna’s sake, that she would make her home there.
Everybody else seemed to have forgotten Olga’s and Natalya’s mur
ders. The police certainly had, and so had most of their friends. The flowers Esther put on their graves every year in the Russian cemetery were not joined by anybody else’s.
Nick, she’d been sure, had forgotten, so he startled her now by sud
denly asking, “Remember that police inspector? What was his name? Schmidt?”
“Yes.” She remembered him.
“What did he say about Natalya’s killer?”
“He said he thought he was a member of the SA.”
“Sturmabteilung ...Why do the Germans stretch words like that? Didn’t he say anything else?”
“ ‘One of Röhm’s lot,’ that’s all he said.” She could remember exactly. Every word.
“A queer, then.” He raised his eyebrows at her surprise. “Esth-
er.
Everybody knows about Ernst Röhm. Ladies are completely
not
his cup of tea. He could get through bum-boys like ...I tell you, just one of his visits to the Pink Parasol put up my profits for a week.” Nick sighed. “He ain’t been to Berlin lately. Not now the Nazis are gone respectable, I bet Herr Hitler’s keeping poor old Ernst on a leash.”
“Oh?” she said. “And when did the Nazis become respectable?”
“Don’t you go Jewish on me. Some of my best customers are Nazis.”
“What do you want, Nick?”
He held out his glass, and she refilled it from the shaker. “I dropped in for a chat, that’s all. Old days, old friends.”
“What do you
want
?”
He eyed her over the glass’s wide rim. “That Schmidt ...When he was talking about the killer, did he mention Munich?”
“No, he ...Oh, God, Nick, is that where he comes from? Do you know anything?”
“Esther, Esther. If I had the goods on the bastard, wouldn’t I take it to the police?”
“That’d be the day,” she said. “Is it, Nick? Is Munich where he lives?”
“How would I know? We ain’t sending each other postcards.”
“Nick.”
“It’s just something Vassily said the other day—you remember Vas
sily? My sommelier? Well, he just brought the killer to mind, that’s all. Esther, I swear on the saints.”
“You don’t believe in the saints. You believe in money.”
And you’re short of it, she thought. News of the imminent sale of the Green Hat had reached her. There were other signs: His hair was the uniform black that comes out of a self-inflicted bottle. One of the larger diamond rings was missing from his finger. His eyes were tired.
“Nick, if you were in trouble, you would tell me.”
“Sure, sure. Who else? It’s just a cash-flow problem, nothing. You know me, I got plans. I’m expecting to make a killing any day. Prince Nick will ride again.”
He stayed a while longer, talking of other things, mainly his third wife, “a complete disappointment.” His farewell, so like him, was a flurry, a glance at his watch, another appointment. “See you, kid.”
Three days later she heard he was dead.
“What the hell
was he doing in Munich?” Schmidt wanted to know.
Since his return to Berlin, most of his sentences had begun with “What the hell . . . ?” What the hell happened to ...? Why the hell did they ...? It had become what-the-hell city: everything bigger, faster, more crowded. Trees had gone—which, to judge from the pulp re
quired to print the city’s enormous number of newspapers and maga
zines, wasn’t surprising. New estates had arisen. Department stores were seven stories high and proudly declared Jewish names. Alexander
platz had been refurbished but was no prettier. There was a new West End—ditto. A massive broadcasting center had sprung up; so had a ra
dio tower that might have been spawned by Eiffel.
It was election time—it was always election time this summer—and every
litfass
in the streets carried posters that blamed the other parties for a sliding economy given its push by the Wall Street crash.
At first glance the Depression that Schmidt had seen turn industrial Düsseldorf into a ghost town was leaving Berlin unaffected. It ap
peared prosperous, but he knew that waiting behind the façade—in Moabit, Wedding, Kreuzberg, the docks—were the dreary lines of un
employed, the soup kitchens—and their faithful companions, Nazis and Communists.
When he got off the train, he’d been taken for a tourist and touted to ride on an open-topped bus to see the sights of “the biggest city in the world.”
“I thought that was New York,” he’d said.
“Biggest in population,” he was told, “but Berlin’s biggest in size. Do you know, sir, a sprightly pedestrian walking ten hours a day would take five days to circumambulate the two hundred thirty kilometers of Berlin’s municipal boundary?”
“Poor bugger,” Schmidt said.
His visits over the last nine years had been mostly confined to police headquarters, and much of the development had passed him by. Now that he was back for good, it seemed he’d have to learn Berlin all over again.
