City of Shadows (39 page)

There were plenty of old-fashioned dives near the Platz. Schmidt chose the Wrestlers on the grounds that, even though he’d arrested its owner several times for fencing stolen goods, they’d maintained mutual respect.

Apparently they still did. “Nice to see you back, Inspector.”

“Nice to
be
back, Boxer.”

It was too early for the quartet and crooner that usually covered the denizens’ conversations, but the place was dark enough. They ordered beers—Eisenmenger added a schnapps chaser to his—and took them to a corner table.

“To your retirement,” Schmidt said. “Bit young, aren’t you?” Eisen
menger was of the ilk to have looked fifty when he was eighteen and would continue to look fifty when he was eighty.

“Dear boy,” Eisenmenger said, and Schmidt suspected he was drunk, “I am fifty-six, and I intend to become older, a happiness that may be denied me if I stay.”

“Nonsense. You’re the doyen of the political department. Nobody knows where more bodies are buried than you do.”

“Indeed. However, since I fear that the body count will rise to a level which not even I can countenance, I am going.” His enunciation was as perfect as ever, but he was definitely drunk. “I am taking myself and my wife to Tübingen, where I intend to grow orchids, reflect on the works of Marcus Aurelius, and thank God that we had no chil
dren.”

“Christ, Carl, what’s . . . Is it this fellow Diels?”

“Ah, yes, Colonel Purely-a-Courtesy-Title Diels.” Eisenmenger looked long into his beer, then drank it. “Did you see the new addition to the parking lot?”

“The hut? Yes.”

“A guardhouse. Have you used the phone since your return?”

“Once.”

“Note the double click as the operator connects you to your number. Not only is your call—and the person to whom it is made—being regis
tered, but somebody is listening to every word you say.”

“For goodness’ sake.”

Eisenmenger looked up and raised an eyebrow. “You think I fanta
size?”

“Frankly, yes.”

“What a remarkably fine establishment this is.” Eisenmenger screwed his monocle into his eye socket to look around at the fly-ridden
sausages hanging from the beams and the cauliflower ears and tattoos of the clientele. “The beer is excellent. You may get me another.”

Schmidt fetched the drinks. “I’m glad we met. I was going to ask you about Röhm’s SA in Munich—”

Eisenmenger waved a hand. “Already an anachronism, dear boy. Röhm has become too powerful and therefore, like all threats to Herr Hitler, will be dealt with. He’s a homosexual anyway, and our Adolf loathes queers. The SA will be used as auxiliary police. No, if we are trading initials, I suggest you consider the new force, Hitler’s own, the SS, the Schutzstaffel, for which happy band our own Department 1A and Major Diels serve as an instrument.”

Schmidt’s mouth, open for follow-up questions, closed.

“We are being infiltrated,” Eisenmenger said. “I consider it my duty to warn such honest men as still remain. Has your new department been allocated staff?”

“I’ve got a secretary who clicks her heels.”

“Party member,” Eisenmenger said. “She will report back on your every move to Diels with a salutation of ‘Heil Hitler.’ ”

“Report what, for God’s sake? I’m just doing my job.”

“So is Diels. His task is to prepare a new police force for a new Reich. A secret state police, the Geheime Staatspolizei, or, to use its acronym, the Gestapo.”

Schmidt looked into eyes that were suddenly as sober as his own. “Is Hitler that close to getting the chancellorship?”

“Depending on the next election, or certainly on the one after that, an Austrian housepainter will be declared chancellor of Germany. Nearly all the center parties are caving in to him; the nationalists think that if he is allowed the respectability of power, they can control him.”

For the first time, the acidity of Eisenmenger’s speech left it and he sounded merely humanly troubled. “They don’t believe him, you see. They don’t believe
in
him—none of us really do. We think him merely mad. We refuse to recognize a phenomenon the world has never seen before.” He took a deep breath, and the old tone was back. “Oh, yes, my boy, there is nothing to stop him. Diels, a farmer’s son, or someone of equal breeding, will be made minister of the interior. Almost immedi
ately a new bill will be passed, the Enabling Act.” Eisenmenger’s hand
gripped Schmidt’s. “I tell you, I’ve seen the draft. If you are acquainted with a trade unionist, liberal, Communist, beggar, homosexual, alcoholic, Jew, Jehovah’s Witness, Gypsy, anybody mentally afflicted, or any bastard just too clever, I suggest you say good-bye to them now.”

Schmidt grinned. “That’s half the population. I can’t see—”

“They’re setting up camps,” said Eisenmenger. “SS camps, SA camps, correctional camps, camps where those who stray from the Nazi path can be . . . corrected. Also killing grounds. That’s where they take the worst strayers. The ultimate correction.”

Schmidt was silenced.

“Jews especially,” Eisenmenger said. “I hope you are not on friendly terms with any of God’s Chosen?”

“As a matter of fact, I hope to marry one.”

“Unwise,” Eisenmenger said.

Schmidt was suddenly sick of the man, his snobbery, his monocle, the measured sentences, the smell of fear that emanated from him like a contagion; sick of being frightened by warnings in the moderate newspa
pers so poundingly repetitious that, merely to continue to work, he’d dulled himself to them; sick of living through crises; sick of political bro
ken reeds; sick that he hadn’t even voted in the last election because his chosen Social Democrats had proved themselves unfit to be voted for.

“There’d be civil war,” he said, and drank the last of his beer.

Eisenmenger’s fingers still gripped his hand. “And who is to provide the other side in this conflict?”

“Well, the workers, the Communists.” Fine thing, he thought, when you started looking to the Reds for a safeguard to democracy.

“The clenched fist. Of course. The hammer and sickle. The fact that they are attached to a limp wrist does not concern us.” Eisenmenger leaned forward until his sweating face was close to Schmidt’s. “They’re terrified, man. They have come up against a force even more brutal than their own. Watch the Nazis in action, see the stomping jackboots, listen to the abuse. We are witnessing something new: terror as a political ploy.”

“Well . . .” Schmidt said, fetching money from his pocket.

“There’s a killing ground, you know,” Eisenmenger said. “They take them there and shoot them.”

“Shoot who?”

“The disappearers. Awkward buggers, troublemakers. Debris to be cleared away so that our Führer’s got a nice clean space to move into. One place where SS and SA meet in unanimity, the burial ground.”

He wagged a finger. “Under the greenwood tree—lovely phrase, that.
That’s
where the bodies are buried, my son.”

“I’ve got to go,” Schmidt said.

Eisenmenger didn’t move. “Get out of the country, Inspector. There’ll be no place for honest men in the new Reich. And take your Jewess with you.”

As Schmidt paid for the beer, Eisenmenger lumbered beside him to the bar and demanded to be introduced. “Herr Boxer? Allow me to shake the hand of an honest crook.”

The last Schmidt saw of him, he was embracing the barman and ad
vising him to get out of the country.

Schmidt went back to the Alex in a temper unimproved by the clusters of men gathered around every
litfass
apparently mesmerized by scream
ing red posters with a black swastika. Hadn’t they anything better to do?

Probably, he thought, they hadn’t. Six million unemployed.

Fuck ’em; they were poisoning a morning that had begun in Arca
dia. He’d been going to phone her every hour, like a moony adolescent, just to hear the sound of her voice. Now he wanted to phone her every hour to make sure she was safe, not from Natalya’s killer but from Jew haters.
Now,
thanks to fucking Eisenmenger, he didn’t dare phone her at all—at least not from the Alex.

He was brusque with Frau Pritt. “I want the telephone number of every adoption agency in Berlin. Start with the Roman Catholics. If necessary, we’ll move on to the Polish agencies.”

She was emptying his ashtray, one of her activities to show her dis
approval of his smoking. She flapped the air a lot with her handker
chief. Schmidt had been tempted to give up cigarettes lately but had decided that to stop annoying Frau Pritt was too big a price to pay.

“It would help if I were acquainted with the circumstances, Inspec
tor,” Frau Pritt said.

“I’m thinking of having you adopted. Now, get on and do it.” He con
gratulated himself on not saying “please” and then thought, Christ, I’m getting as bad as they are.

Give the woman her due; she was efficient. By noon he had a list as long as his arm. He retired with it to the Wrestlers, commandeered its phone, and began dialing.

Esther spent
the morning in her first-floor studio in Cicerostrasse, photographing a film director who wanted a decent portrait for the pub
licity for his next movie,
The Last Testament of Dr. Mabuse
. He said it would be his final film in Germany; he was getting out.

“I’m on Hitler’s List,” he told her.

She lunched with her agent, Morry Linderer. He said he was on the List and would probably be heading for Palestine. “You ought to get out, Esther. You’d make a fortune in the States.”

“I’m not fashionable enough to be on the List.”

“A Jew’s all you gotta be,” he said.

Her afternoon was passed at the Kronprinzenpalais, talking over an exhibition of her photographs to be held in its small upper gallery in January. Dr. Justi, its director, was depressed. A new collection of mod
ern art in the main gallery had been attacked by the Nazis’ art critic, Al
fred Rosenberg, as “intellectual syphilis.”

“They’ve probably put Kandinksy and Picasso on the List,” she said, which turned out not to be funny, because Dr. Justi thought they had.

Going home, she was passed by truckloads of stormtroopers on their way to cause trouble somewhere. They were singing one of their anthems: “ ‘
Blut muss fliessen! Blut muss fliessen!
Blood must flow. Let’s smash it up, let’s smash it up, this goddamn Jewish republic!’ ”

They would not depress her, could not; today she was undepressable— she’d been waiting for somebody to notice the gap between her feet and the ground. The shadow of forthcoming death that had been gathering over her had folded itself up like an umbrella, leaving her with only one concern: what to get a policeman for dinner.

She was not a good cook. Anna had never noticed the fact; Natalya, onetime recipient of meals by the sous-chef at Czarskoe Seloe, had borne it; Marlene ate out. But a German liked his food.

After careful thought she purchased some veal, potatoes—he’d be a potato man—green beans, and a lemon.

She opened the door to him with a rolling pin in her hand.

“Bit early in our relationship for that, isn’t it?” he said.

“I’m trying to get the bloody schnitzels flat.”

“I was thinking of getting you flat first,” he said.

“Marlene’s still here, but we could go to my bedroom; she’s broad-minded.”

He wasn’t. “I’m bourgeois enough to be inhibited. Besides, you’re a screamer.”

“I am
not
a screamer.”

“Damn well are.”

“Damn well not.”

The meal was prepared with banter and eaten with exchanges of their day’s news. “
Is
there a List?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Eisenmenger would say there was, and he’s nearer to events than I am. Christ, he was chilling. Drunk, but chilling.”

“Lang said Einstein was on it. I don’t believe it. I can’t. I mean, what would be the point of getting rid of a brain like that? I don’t understand the theory of relativity, but I know it’s important; even Hitler must know that—it’s ridiculous. It’s just Nazi bluster. Germany needs its Jews.”

He’d kept his good news until last. “I’m going away tomorrow,” he said casually.

“And I thought we were getting on so well.”

“I’m going to Poland.”

She put her hands together and waggled them, like a petitioner with an answered prayer. “You found out where Anna comes from.”

“Franziska Schanskowska. Born eighteenth May, 1901, Bagna Duse, near Pinsk. Poland.”

She ran for maps.

Marlene, ready to go to work, emerged from his bedroom while they were studying them and peered over their shoulders, smelling of shaving soap and scent. “ ‘Polesie,’ ” he read. “How sweet. Minsk, Pinsk—kitty-cat names. It looks about as far as you can go without hitting Russia.”