City of Shadows (38 page)

Of course it’s her fucking fault, he thought. The woman’s a carrier infecting anyone she comes in contact with. She’s Typhoid Mary.

Instead he said, “Anyway, she’s been safe enough these last nine years—so have you, and you’ll oblige me by keeping it like that and staying out of it. Just get on with whatever you’re doing.”

He was making her as furious as he was. “If you don’t want my help, why the hell are you here?”

“I told you. To find out if you knew why Potrovskov went to Munich.”

“Well, I don’t.”

He shrugged. “In which case I’ll drink my coffee and be on my way.”

“By all means.”

“You do something to me.” Natalya’s door was thrown open, and a man came out. Six foot two in high heels with the build of a coal heaver, scarlet lips, platinum hair, and a smart, short-skirted two-piece dress in pink velvet. “Oh,” he said, then fluttered his lashes. “Ooh-
er.
”

“Inspector, this is Marlene Leicester,” Esther said. “Marlene, this is Inspector Schmidt of the Berlin police.”

“So this is the famous Schmidt, is it?” Marlene said. He put out a manicured hand. “How do you
do,
darling. And little me off to work, what a shame.
Well . . .
” He looked from Esther to Schmidt and back again. “I sense
atmosphere,
so I’ll leave you two alone. But
you,
my dear inspector, can inspect me anytime.” He pranced off, taking most of the ghosts with him.

Esther said tenderly, “She’s not always like that. She just tends to show off when she meets new people.”

Schmidt felt anger seeping away like bad weather, leaving a laun
dered blue sky under which he could have slept for a week. A homo
sexual transvestite, bless her. That’s all right, then. He tried to show interest. “How did you acquire her?”

“She does an act at the Pink Parasol—it was one of Nick’s clubs in the
old days. Her landlord turned her out. I was glad of her company and her rent. Funnily enough, Frau Schinkel adores Marlene. It’s me she can’t stand. Give her a transvestite Aryan over a heterosexual Jew any day. And Marlene’s aristocratic, an English milord’s son, German mother. Went to Eton, everything. She was just born into the wrong body. Berlin’s been heaven for her.” She squinted at him. “She manages to shock most people.”

“Not me,” he said sleepily.

“I know. Why not?”

He roused himself. “Oh, Hanover and Düsseldorf. Murderers who were freaks of nature, mental mutants. When you’ve been wading through atrocity for nine years, you’re grateful for every human quirk that doesn’t involve killing somebody.” He yawned. “Anyway, in the Haarmann case kids died because their parents didn’t like to admit that their son was homosexual.”

He thought, Marlene’s all right by me. I love her. “I’d better be go
ing,” he said.

And if he hadn’t looked so damn tired, she’d have let him. She was still angry; he’d got what clues she could give him—it was all he’d come for. But apparently the meal had done him in; with his legs stretched out and his head resting against the back of her most comfortable chair, his eyes kept narrowing and then opening as he tried to remain awake.

She lunged to take the coffee cup from his hand before it dropped.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Where are you staying?”

“I don’t know. I only got in from Düsseldorf today.”

She clicked her tongue at the inefficiency. “There’s Marlene’s room. She won’t be back until the morning.” She told herself she’d have done as much for a dog.

She pointed him in the right direction and went off to find a pair of Nick’s pajamas that were still in a drawer somewhere, but by the time she got back with them, he’d fallen onto Marlene’s bed and was asleep.

Strange, strange man, she thought. One minute I was something the cat threw up, and the next I wasn’t.

Nine years, she thought. She stood looking down at him for a mo
ment, replaying their conversation in her head. Good God, she thought, that’s why.

You stayed away for nine years in case what happened to your wife happened to me. She turned off his light and went to bed but not to sleep, listening to the rattle of the late-night trams in Bismarckstrasse. In Schmidt’s dream Solomonova fell downstairs, her limbs flailing and

breaking while Peter Kurten stood in the shadows on the landing above. The door opened. “Are you all right?” “Shit,” he said. “Yes. I’m sorry, I get these nightmares.” She said, “There isn’t much time, is there?” “Time for what?” “For us.” She came to him, and it turned out he wasn’t as tired as he’d thought

he was.

She watched him
wake up. It was a pleasure. He looked better. And

so he should, she thought. It had been an invigorating night. “Good morning.” “Good morning.” She said, “In view of the circumstances, calling you ‘Inspector’

seems somewhat formal. What’s your first name?” “Siegfried,” he said. “My parents believed in joy through victory. Boy, did they get that wrong.”

His eyes took in Marlene’s befrilled bedroom. Pink was not just the motif, it was the only color: walls, curtains, ruched valance, cup
boards, bedclothes, bed, the tasseled tester above it—all ranging the pink spectrum from light blush to damn nearly mauve. “Good God,” he said.

“Marlene likes pink,” she said.
“I thought I was waking up in someone’s entrails.”
To get it out of the way, she said, “I never loved Nick; you ought to

know that. I was fond of him, and he was kind to me. I owed him a lot.

In a way he was my best friend.” “I didn’t love my wife enough,” he said. “She deserved better.” “We never love anyone enough.” He reached for her. “We’re going to change that.”

She would have stayed in bed forever, but he was worried that Mar
lene would return and find them in it. “How very bourgeois of you,” she said, reluctantly clambering out.

“Where I come from it’s called respectable.”

He helped her strip the bed and put on clean sheets, and then she made him breakfast—another omelette.

It was luxury to see him in her surroundings. She sat at the table in the kitchen, her chin in her hands, watching him eat and look around at its modernity, its only color the green-and-yellow chinaware. He pointed at a potbellied machine rumbling away in a corner. “What’s that?”

“A washer-dryer,” she said. “It’s doing your shirt and pants so you can go to work. Pink’s not your color.” He was wearing one of Marlene’s negligees. Actually, she thought he looked wonderful in it.

“My old mother had to make do with a boiler and a mangle.”

“Good for your old mother,” she said.

“Seems funny to ask,” he said, “but what do you do?”

“Well, I’m not a kept woman, haven’t been for nine years—not that I ever was, really. All this is the fruit of my own labors. So’s the flat—I bought it.”

She conducted him into the living room. “My showcase,” she said. She’d framed some of her best studies in metal, putting a full-length shot of Marlene the transvestite against one of Marlene the film star. Apart from Potrovskov there were black-hatted men emerging from the Moabit synagogue, a landscape, a shot of the futuristic Karstadt de
partment store in Neuköln.

“You’re a photographer.”

“Your powers of detection amaze me, Inspector,” she said. “Have you heard of Cicatrice?”

“No.”

“It’s me. French for ‘scar.’ It’s my professional name. I’m highly thought of in artistic circles.”

He shook his head in wonder. “What started you on that?”

“Nick. He gave me my first camera. A Leica, thirty-five-millimeter.” It had been Parsifal finding the Holy Grail, Wellington meeting Blucher. “I left his employment and his bed when Natalya died and began earning my own living. I didn’t want to be involved after that.”

“Was it hard going?” That had been 1923. All Germany had nearly died in 1923.

“Hard.” She’d started with happy-snaps, shivering in the Tiergarten while she took photographs of tourists and developed them by night in a primitive darkroom she set up in Anna’s old bedroom.

Then, merely because it made a terrific picture, she’d photographed some street children using packets of currency to build a playhouse. She’d taken it to an American news agency in Fischerstrasse, which had sent it to
Collier’s
magazine in New York, which had paid her for it.

“After that I just recorded Berlin life—wheelbarrows filled with bank
notes, the breadlines, Wandervogel kids without shoes, prostitutes, Einstein—”

“Einstein?”

“Through the synagogue. He’d just had his breakdown and was tak
ing things easy on the lake at Caputh. It made my name.”

“I didn’t know he’d had a breakdown.”

“Lovely man,” she said. “I like people who have breakdowns.”

She amazed him. While he dressed, he kept coming into the living room to watch her tidy the place up. Cicatrice, he thought. It was typi
cal of her to make a virtue of her scars. In the night he’d found that her upper body was pitted with old wounds. “Who the hell did this to you?” he’d asked.

“Pogrom,” she said. “Not worth talking about. Don’t let them put you off.”

They hadn’t.

“Tut, tut,” she’d said. “There’s a name for men who are excited by disfigured women.”

“It’s ‘lover,’ ” he’d told her, and it was true. For him the flaws high
lighted the beauty and mystery of the rest of her; she made other women look dull.

He wasn’t going to be much use at work today; when they hadn’t been making love, they’d been talking.

“Was it awful?” she’d asked. “Haarmann and then Kurten? I read about them.”

“If you want an authority on how flesh gets torn apart and how to tell the mothers it’s been torn and wait to find the next one and tell that
mother, send in a request. I’m setting up a department in it.” He had

memories that were beyond discussion.

She said gently, “But you caught them in the end.”

“They caught themselves. And you know what? They were glad. I saw the relief in their eyes; they were tired of it.”

Heaven would have consisted in neither of them having to go to work, but through the euphoria came the drum of duty.

As she buttoned him into his shirt, he said, “Did you ever get Anna to say where she came from?”

“No.”

“Franziska Schanskowska,” he said, musing. “Christ, there’s got to be some record of where she was born. I’ve got to go back to her beginnings.”

“We,” she said. “
We’ve
got to go back to her beginnings.”

“No.” He was suddenly furious with her. “He killed my wife because I was meddling. I’m not having it happen to you. Jesus
Christ,
don’t be stupid. In fact, I want you to move out of here.”

“I’ll do no such thing,” she said. “He’s forgotten about me. He can’t possibly know that we’ve been to bed together—you said yourself, he’s not superhuman.” She said more gently, “I’ve got my darkroom here. This is my business address. I’m damned if he drives me out.”

He supposed he didn’t have the right after just one night to insist, but she frightened him. “We’ll see,” he said.

After a while she said, “Nick couldn’t find out, but I was thinking
.. . .
”

“Thinking what?”

“The agency that dealt with the adoption of Anna’s baby. They might know—if you could use your clout to discover which one it was. Might have been German, might have been Polish.”

“I’ll find it.” He kissed her, picked up his coat, and moved toward the door. “Just don’t talk to any strange men.”

“I’ve got two of them living here,” she said. “At least ...I suppose there will be two.” She gave a marked cough. “I’m a busy career woman. I just need to know—are you coming back?”

“I am. Get something nice for dinner.” He half closed the door and opened it again. “Not omelettes.” And went out.

“Oh, thank you,” she said.

18

Going along
the third-floor corridor toward his office, Schmidt was waylaid by Eisenmenger. Literally waylaid; Eisenmenger had been waiting for him. “I expect you want to buy me a drink on my retirement,” he said.

He took Schmidt by the arm, and they went on, not downstairs to the hall but toward the door leading to the fire escape that in turn led to the police parking lot.

That a man of Eisenmenger’s dignity and bulk should lurk, let alone use a fire escape, indicated that something was up.

A hut was up, for one thing—new since Schmidt’s day—at the entrance to the parking lot. Men were working on it and a barrier. “Note that,” Eisenmenger muttered as they walked around it.

“What we want is a beer cellar of dubious reputation. Noisy if possible,” Eisenmenger said. It was like accompanying a cartoon conspirator who had a bomb peeping from his cloak.