City of Shadows (31 page)

Like smoke issuing forth from the uncorked top of a genie’s bottle, a figure was forming, shadowy, still insubstantial, but gaining the form of as weird a killer as he’d ever come across, a man who was too busy to come to Berlin and commit murder other than when, conveniently, he was sent—presumably with all expenses paid.

No other time off? Unable to plead the excuse of a grandmother’s fu
neral in order to come and arrange Anna’s?

Unless . . . unless, he
had
to come to Berlin on these conferences but the capital was dangerous for him because Anna was in it, would see him and give him away. Was that it? When you come to Berlin, you’re vulnerable? Why, in a city that now encompassed—what? four million people?—are you likely to bump into
her
?

Schmidt held his pencil like a drumstick and beat it on the table in a tattoo that Hannelore would have recognized as echoing her husband’s thinking at its most agitated.

Was there any reason Anna and the killer
should
come face-to-face in Berlin? Likely to make coinciding visits at his mother-in-law’s? Be
longed to the same club?

That’s not it. Wrong track, Schmidt. No-no-no-no-nononono. The tattoo increased speed.

The two men in the photograph taunted him, as if they knew.
Did
they know? Would they stand for murder? Yes, in a way they did; the very ex
istence of their organization was based on violence. Hitler’s most recent speech, as reported in the papers, had said that the only revolution he wanted was racial, that Marxism could be counteracted only by the bru
tality of execution. Didn’t his followers swagger through the streets on marches designed to spread fear? Weren’t their rallies a celebration of malevolence?

And then Schmidt knew why Natalya’s killer was afraid when he was in Berlin.

You’re on display, you bastard. You have to strut in front of the pub
lic, march, speak from a rostrum, have your photograph taken with the other fascist luminaries, appear on newsreels at rallies. The man was in the open, his face bared—it had to be. He couldn’t act like a shrinking violet; publicity was the SA’s oxygen.

And it was terrible for him. All the time he was aware that Anna might see him—in a newspaper, at the cinema in a newsreel. She could be standing in the crowd watching as he marched by.

And she could say,
Ecce homo.
“Here is the man.”

She hadn’t. Probably hadn’t even seen him. But perhaps the man couldn’t depend on her silence.
Here is the man
. . . who did what? What did Anna know that was so awful she mustn’t be allowed to reveal it? What crime so ugly that even Hitler and his storm troopers would cast out the perpetrator—that, presumably, being the killer’s fear, because if he belonged to the SA, he wouldn’t go in terror of the police. Rape? Mur
der? In the SA those were practically conditions of membership. What accusation could Anna bring against the man who wanted to kill her?

The drumming of Schmidt’s pencil stopped at the sound of an en
gine outside in the alley that ran alongside the gymnasium. A motorcar was a rarity in this area of Kreuzberg—when he and Willi had parked, theirs had been the only one on the street.

Schmidt looked at his watch. It was 3:15
p.m.
This would be Revolver Muzzle, back from Anhalter station, having collected E.R.

He put his notebook and pencil in his pocket and replaced the di
aries on their shelf, took a quick look around, knowing he’d left some
thing undone. There it was—the photograph on the wall of the 1923 Sports conference, a big gathering. With luck, he might have a picture of Natalya’s killer. He took it off its hook, frame and all. The gap it left on the wall glared at him, and he stuffed the picture under his arm in
side his coat. It wasn’t that he had no right to take it—he was the bloody police investigating a murder, wasn’t he?—but he wanted to leave this place alive.

He walked out of the office and joined Willi, shutting the door be
hind him, as two men entered the gymnasium.

They were the couple in the photograph on the desk. The tall one was handsomer and more elegant than he’d appeared in the picture, but it was the shorter of the two who held the eye. Plump, bordering on fat, his brown uniform stretched tight over bosoms and belly, his gait a travesty of a march that waggled his shoulders from side to side, he had a pit where the lower half of one side of his nose should have been— and he was smiling.

“HEIL RÖHM!”
The gym shook with the greeting as half a hundred right arms went up.

“Heil Berlin Sports Club.” It was a grin now, roguish, and some of the boys laughed.

Then, as one man, they turned to look at the two policemen, and Schmidt knew he and Willi were as close to danger as they’d been on the Western Front. The boys had lacked a leader until this moment; now they had one. This little man carried a charge that crackled around the hall. The place was as electrified as if he’d turned on a switch. Schmidt could hear a boy next to him panting. Maenads, he thought. Bacchus here has only to give the word, and they’ll tear Willi and me apart.

Young Lieutenant Alvens was gabbling to the taller man, but it was Röhm who held up his hand to calm him and came forward. He clicked his heels. “And what do the Berlin police want with our little sports
club? Have any of our boys been naughty, eh?” He was playing to the

gallery.

“And you are?”

“Captain Eric Röhm of the Sportsabteilung. Who are you?”

“Inspector Schmidt. This is Sergeant Ritte.” To Schmidt’s annoy
ance he heard Willi click his heels. “We are investigating the murder of a woman, Natalya Tchichagova, killed in Charlottenburg Park on Sat
urday last. In connection with that murder, I wish to interview a mem
ber of ”—hell, why should he pander to the pretense that this was a sports organization? it was a training ground for killers—“your
storm troopers
who was in Berlin at that time. Possibly he came from out of town.” He fetched out his notebook. “You will please give me the names relating to these initials and locations.” He read them out.

“The bastard’s been at my diary.” It was the taller man, pushing forward.

Röhm held him back. He took his cap off, revealing wavy black hair parted in the middle like a grocer’s. “We must help the police, Dietrich. We are a law-abiding organization.”

“Then you will supply me with the information I want,” Schmidt said.

“Certainly,” Röhm said. His pudgy hand took the notebook and he half turned so that his audience could hear him. “W.H. of Stuttgart— that would be Wilhelm Hagen, wouldn’t it, Dietrich? You know him better than I do. Reinhardt Gunther is the R.G. of Munich. A.V. of Frankfurt? That’s Albert Vali. And R.F. of Vienna is Rolf Freischütz.”

Willi was writing it down.

“There.” Röhm handed back the notebook. The youths were laugh
ing openly. “Most respectable men, Inspector. Examples to us all.”

“I see.”

“Do you?” Röhm moved closer.

Schmidt looked back at the bright brown eyes that were gazing into his, perkily, like a robin’s. “The man I want is big,” he said. “A military man, and he was in Berlin for your organization’s conferences—cer-tainly one of them this weekend, again in July 1922, and, most proba
bly with a Freikorps, in February 1920.”

He watched the intensity of Röhm’s stare dissolve for a second.
You know him now,
he thought. He said, “He slit the throat of a young woman three nights ago and tortured another woman to death before that, and I’m going to get him. I want you to believe it.”

“What were they?” Röhm said. “Whores?”

“No, they weren’t.”

Suddenly Röhm was so close to him that Schmidt could smell his breath, which had whisky on it, and the lavender-scented pomade on his hair. “You were a soldier in the war, of course?” As if to have been anything else was unsound.

“Yes.” He wished he weren’t standing so militarily stiff, but he had to keep the photo pinned tightly under his arm.

“And you?” Röhm asked of Willi.

Willi clicked his heels again. “Yes, sir. Machine Gun Company, In
fantry Regiment Number 156.
Sir.
”

Röhm nodded and turned back to Schmidt, speaking as one veteran to another. “They betrayed us, didn’t they?”

“We lost.”

“We didn’t lose.
They stabbed us in the back.
” It was a shriek that sent a spray of spit onto Schmidt’s chin. “The Reds and the Jews and the pencil pushers at our rear—they crumbled, they gave in because they were women.
Women!
”

He stepped back. Schmidt wiped his chin.

Röhm went on more quietly, “You should not be investigating us, In
spector. You should be joining us.” His arm jerked out toward the watch
ing youths. “See here the new warrior elite. Here are the ones who will give Germany back her pride, and if it takes brutality to do it, then they are ready. The masses need wholesome fear. They want it. They thirst for a leader that will frighten them into following him to glory. What are a couple of tarts to that?” He raised his arm, his voice crescendoing. “We are the real German revolution, and this time we will not be be
trayed by noncombatants. We will march over them to the triumph of the Fatherland. Who are you to question the action of heroes?”

The gym erupted in ecstasy. A couple of boys hand-flipped joyfully over the vaulting horse. Fists punched into the air. Some voices screamed “Hitler!” others “Heil Röhm!” and a few “Get them!”

Willi nudged Schmidt. “Move.” They edged toward the door as the yelling began to synchronize: “Heil! Get them! Heil! Get them! Get them!
Get them!
”

One of the doors to the street had been left open. Young Alvens tried to stop them when they got to it, but Willi took him up by one arm and swung him away. They scrambled into the car and locked the doors, the windows darkening as bodies landed on top of it, hammering.

Grinding his gears, Willi drove blind for some yards until the two boys across the windshield saw the sense in dropping off it. Schmidt turned and glimpsed them rolling in the dust of the road. Others were still chasing.

“Don’t stop, Willi.”

“Fucking not going to,” Willi said, swinging the car around a bend.

Eventually he pulled to a stop, turned off the engine, wiped the palms of his hands down his coat, reached into his pocket, brought out a tin of cigarettes, and offered one to Schmidt. “They’re Manoli.”

“Luxury.” Schmidt took one and noticed that his hand was shaking.

“We’ll have to close that place down, boss. Have a few of those boys up in court. Teach ’em a bit of respect.”

Schmidt nodded vaguely. It wouldn’t make any difference. What had animated those young men was a disease; you couldn’t close down a disease. In any case, the only injury had been to his and Willi’s pride, and he’d learned all he could.

He rolled down his window to let the smoke out. They were high up, on the edge of Viktoria Park. Down below he could see the network of railways leading to Anhalter, Potsdam, and Görlitzer stations.

It was quiet up here, and he heard a snatch of birdsong. He remem
bered that Mendelssohn was buried somewhere in this area of Kreuzberg.

Willi broke the silence. “Well, we got the names of some suspects, that’s one thing.”

“No we didn’t. The surnames he gave me were mythological—gods and such.”

“Was that it? I
thought
he gave in easy.”

“When we get back, send some uniforms to bring in Röhm and Schwerte for questioning—at gunpoint if necessary.” Wouldn’t make any
difference either, he thought; Röhm wasn’t going to give anything away. But the man knew who the killer was; Schmidt had
seen
him know.

And he knows I’m going to find out if I have to sweat every fucking Brownshirt in Germany.

“Okay, boss,” Willi said, and added, “Pity, really.”

“What is?”

“Them kids. One of them was my neighbor’s boy. Knew him right off. Bit of a sissy, I always thought, and look at him now. They teach ’em to be manly in that outfit, that’s one thing.”

Schmidt patted his sergeant kindly on his shoulder. “Reckoned they were manly, did you, Willi?”

“Didn’t you?”

“You were better off with Yusupov.” He flicked his cigarette butt out the window. “Drive on, my son.”

Berlin possessed one
network of information that was unavailable to both Inspector Schmidt and Prince Nick—its Jews.

Esther, leaving Bismarck Allee, turned north toward Moabit and walked through increasingly depressed and darkening streets until she reached a small wooden house next to a synagogue. All things consid
ered, she would have preferred not to be out at night, but if she could help to find Natalya’s killer, she was damn well going to, and time was pressing.