City of Shadows (43 page)

R.G.
ofMunich. Ryszard Galczynski of Bagna Duze.

That was it, then. Now he knew the face Hannelore had seen. The heavy features of the boy in the photograph in his pocket were those of the man third from the left in the picture of the Sturmabteilung’s sports conference, at the moment in his pack up at the hunting lodge. He had the motive, the name, and a photograph. Two photographs.

R.G.

ofMunich. The man had changed his name and probably his nationality. He’d taken German citizenship; no Pole could have pos
sessed the influence that had protected the identity of this one—but he’d kept his initials. And his nature.

What was needed now was proof. There’d be no trouble connecting

R.G.

with the murders he’d committed here in the marshes; the crimes would be on file somewhere and the Polish police probably delighted to extradite him so that he could be charged.

But I want you to pay in Germany, for Natalya, for Hannelore, and for the others you’ve dispensed with on your way. I want you in
my
dock in front of
my
judges, so the nation can see what sort of animal the fucking SA nurtures in its bosom.

And that would be more difficult. An examining magistrate was un
likely to make the imaginative leaps that Schmidt had in order to con
nect a storm trooper with the shadow in Charlottenburg. There’d been no proof at all that the man had killed Hannelore and, it seemed, very little for the murder of Potrovskov or of Olga. The witnesses who’d seen him in the streets near Charlottenburg would be unreliable nine years later—even supposing they hadn’t died in the meantime.

The only link was Anna or Franziska or the Gypsy girl or whoever the hell she was, the only one who could point the finger.

“Hello,” said a voice.

She was sitting on a bench in the Zorawskis’ garden—he hadn’t real
ized he’d reached it.

“I’ve got him,” he said. “He was here. He killed a mother and her

baby because he was having an affair with her husband.” “I know.” “How do you know?”

“The count told me.” She seemed strangely unexcited. “I want you to come for a walk with me.”

“All right.” He fell into step beside her and began to reconstruct the sequence. “He got away. It was wartime . . . chaos ...and he escaped. But we know where he went, don’t we? He went to Germany, changed his name. Christ, I don’t know how he walks on two legs; he kills like a stoat. Something stands in his way and it’s dead. He chopped down that woman and child to get them out of the way, didn’t think twice.”

He looked at Esther. “They were fair-haired, you know. I saw their picture. Even Röhm couldn’t countenance that; Hitler certainly wouldn’t. Jew killers are one thing, Aryan killers another—and the man’s a homosexual, another species Hitler’s got no time for. No won
der he wants to keep the past quiet. He’s risen through the Nazi ranks. Be a shame if his career’s spoiled by a dead woman and child in Poland. Power’s important to him; it satisfies his bloodlust—it
is
a sort of blood-lust. And he’s clever. He’s directed it. The Sturmabteilung’s a spiritual home for him. God, what a whale of a time he must’ve had—breaking limbs with impunity. He’s the Nazis’ sort of man, a monster who doesn’t care.”

They were in forest now, autumn leaves soft under their feet, but Schmidt was back in Berlin in wintertime, near the Landwehr Canal. “That’s where they met again, him and Anna, the girl from his home vil
lage, I damn well know they did. Him up from Munich for a day out smashing Communists. Her ...I don’t know what she was doing, but she’s walking along the Landwehr and comes face-to-face with a night
mare. There, right in front of her, the man who’s always terrified her. She sees him, he sees her. It blasts them both, him as well as her. She’ll tell, take away his power ...she knows. He’s got to kill her or—
Where the hell are we going?
”

“There was a village somewhere along this track. A Jewish village.”

“Have you been listening to what I said?”

“Yes,” she said. “I know. I’m glad.” She tucked herself under his arm and put her own around his waist. “He comes from here, he’s a killer, you’ve got him.”

“Well, more or less,” Schmidt said. “Could you stop a minute?”

“I love you so much,” she said. She was crying.

He put a hand under her elbow and guided her to a fallen tree. “Sit down.” He sat down beside her and fished in the pocket of her jacket for the toilet tissue she always carried on foreign journeys. “Blow,” he said.

She wiped her eyes. “But that wasn’t everything,” she said.

“What else?”

“It was Easter, you see,” she said. “Before Ryszard was declared the murderer, this was. They found the little boy’s body in the dike at Easter. Passover. They thought it was a ritual killing.”

An old, dark phrase out of history; he’d felt a brief unease when the priest had used it, but hadn’t stopped to run it down.

“Ritual killing,” she said. “It was always the same if an Aryan child was found dead. It happened in Russia . . . oh, how many times. Someone to blame and be killed in turn. The same excuse to murder Jews—they were killing Christian children or poisoning the wells, one or the other. Always. And then would come the pogrom.”

It was a warm day. The mist hiding the waterways at dawn had risen, momentarily scarlet, and dispersed into an enamel-blue sky.

She said, “They found the body, and...It was night, but immedi
ately most of the men here set out to the village where the local Jews lived. Zorawski told me. He wasn’t here at the time—he and the count
ess were in Warsaw—but I don’t think he’d have stopped it anyway.”

They were sitting so still that a quail came bustling out of the trees, then turned and went back into them. The rattle of a woodpecker came from farther in the forest.

She took a deep breath. “He said...Zorawski said, ‘It was a ghastly business, but one good thing came out of it—we got rid of the Jews.’ ”

“What did they do to them?”

“I don’t know; even the count doesn’t know. He’d have told me, be
lieve me, he’d have told me.” She turned her head to look at him. “I don’t want to go back to that house, Schmidt.”

“No.”

She stood up. “I’m going to the Jewish village. Blociska, it’s called. There’s something I want to do.”

It was a long walk and very beautiful, following the ruts in the track through shafts of sunlight, into shadow and out again, birdsong. He
thought how blithely nature had ignored killers who passed through it—a youth dragging the dead body of a child, men with torches.

The trees thinned. “This is it, I think,” she said. “Zorawski said the priest stopped them from burning it down.”

It was eerie. Blociska had been a village almost indistinguishable from Bagna Duze, but now it was dead. There were still signs above the doors of the shops in the wide, muddy main street, but the roof of one of them had fallen in. Rusted chains hung over a well. Sparrows pecked in empty hen runs. No sound apart from the singing of birds. Where the track widened out into what had been the village street, there was a huge, round, black scar made by fire.

“No need to imagine things,” he said. “That’s recent.”

She nodded and walked on, turned a corner—and there was the building that made Blociska different from Bagna Duze.

“Good God,” Schmidt said.

He’d seen synagogues in Berlin—two years ago he’d attended the fu
neral service for Minna Wolff in one—but not like this. “Chinese” was his first thought, but its successive diminishing roofs topped by a little pyramid were pitched straight, not with the curls of a pagoda. Yet it was Eastern, huge, alien, strange, exotic, and constructed entirely from wood.

It was wooden magic. It was rotting. It had a blurred look. Some of the roof shingles had slid to the ground; the Star of David held in one of the cloisterlike arches adorning the ground-floor walls was falling side
ways.

“There was one like this in Rosa’s village,” she said, “not so big, though.”

“Rosa?”

“Rosa was the one who mended me.”

She unwound one of the scarves from her head and then put it on again so that it draped. “There’s something I’ve got to do. I’m not sure how to do it, and Rosa would say I shouldn’t be doing it at all according to the Law. Women don’t play much part in the synagogue—there should be more of you, for instance, to make a minyan. But I’m going to do it anyway, for whoever died here, for his victims. You don’t need to come in. I won’t be long.”

“I think I will.”

“Well, you go in that way. I go up here. Separate entrances for men and women.” Gingerly, she began mounting the outside staircase.

“Be careful,” he called. She’d slipped as one of the steps gave way.

“Don’t worry.”

He pushed open the main door and left it open so that light could get in. The few windows were allowing only dusty shafts of sun to come through. It was even more astonishing inside than out. They hadn’t been able to afford gilding; they’d had only wood, and they’d carved it, fretted it, ornamented it, turned it, polished it, so that once it had gleamed like gold and even now leaped out, like glorious bramble bushes, to catch the soul of the beholder. The walls formed bays, and in the center of the hall stood the pulpit—no, Joe Wolff had called it the bima—an octagonal plinth with a lacelike balustrade around it.

He could smell damp and, he thought, the oil that had once burned in the hanging lamps. Some bats dangled from the cupolaed ceiling.

He heard a door scrape open in a gallery above his head, and she be
gan praying for the dead in Russian. In a low, clear monotone, the com
plex, mighty syllables echoed into an empty synagogue for the souls of men, women, and children, Aryan, Jewish, for a people that were gone and, perhaps, for the bereft and ignorant parents who had driven them away, for Natalya, for Hannelore, Potrovskov, Olga. On and on it went, until he wondered at the power of words, mere exhalations of breath, useless against cudgels and racial hatred but still so compelling that he found himself adding his own Our Father in a plea to a God he didn’t believe in, because in this place, at this time, it was appropriate.

Then there was silence, and he could hear the birds again.

When they met outside, she was brisk. “There.”

They set off toward the forest. She was still full of words, as if the prayers had loosened them. She said, “In the pogrom I lost everybody,
everybody.
They killed my mother, my father, my siblings, friends, my dog. To this day I don’t know how I got out alive—or why. I was too injured to remember. There’s a space in time I still can’t cope with. I just woke up in Rosa’s village. I get flashes of it, I hear the shots, see the bayonets slic
ing down, my head explodes. I think I hear my little brother whimper.”

She paused for a moment and went on, still brisk. “Rosa took me in and nursed me. She was the wife of the village rabbi, an ordinary woman, you’d think, rough. She had too many dead of her own to be sentimental about mine, and soon she had more because, while I was still recovering, Cossacks came riding into the village. They were being chased by a contingent of Bolsheviks. You wouldn’t think they’d stop to kill and burn, but they did.” She smiled. “Rosa said it was force of habit.”

He handed her over a fallen tree, and she resumed the long, rhyth
mic stride that helped to keep the words pumping. “She hid me along with as many as she could. When they’d gone, when we came out, there was nothing left. Her elder son had already emigrated to England; Rus
sia was in civil war, so why stay?” Her hands spread out in a very Jewish query, as Rosa’s must have done. “So she took us survivors out of Rus
sia, through Poland, into Germany. I decided to remain in Berlin. I didn’t want to go to England. When I got the job with Nick, I per
suaded him to get me papers for her and the others. They were forged, of course, but they got Rosa and the rest to England. We still keep in touch. She’s in New York now, doing well.”

He caught her arm to slow her down. She looked up at him. “So that’s it. My past. Two pogroms. Unlucky, really.”

“And you’re still standing,” he said.

“There was Rosa.”

He delved into her pocket and produced another set of toilet tissue. “Blow.” He sat her down on a log and knelt beside her.

“Oh, I don’t know, Schmidt,” she said, weeping. “It’s strange when you ought to be dead and aren’t, when you want to be. My life was somebody’s carelessness. A sort of oversight. For a long time, I didn’t know how to fill it. God was irrelevant. Rosa said that was narcissism— well, she didn’t use the word, but that’s what she meant.”

“Is it?”

“Yes. You have to have worked that out long before it happens to you, because it’s been happening always. God has to be fitted into a past of massacre. To believe in God when you’re exempt and then stop believ
ing in Him when you aren’t is not only presumptuous, it’s bad history.”