City of Shadows (40 page)

“It
was
Russia,” Esther said, absently. “We occupied it.”

“Everybody seems to have occupied it.” Schmidt had got hold of a Baedeker. “It was Belarus, then Lithuania, then Poland, Russian again,
briefly Polish again when Napoleon went through, Russian again— ‘now democratic Poland having defeated the Red Army.’ ”

“No wonder the Poles are so gloomy,” Marlene said. “Bewildered, poor darlings.” He’d been combing his wig and put it on over his bald
ing head, adjusting it and moueing at his reflection in the mirror. “Well, I’m off, little ones—a cabaret girl’s work is never done.”

“Before you go . . .” Schmidt said. He produced the photograph that had once hung on the wall of the Kreuzberg SA headquarters. Always with him, it was getting worn; he showed it to everybody. A line of men standing behind a line of boys kneeling on one knee; if he’d met any of them in the street, he could have recognized them by the shape of the head, the very earlobes. “Have you ever seen any of these faces before?”

“The men or boys?”

“The men.” Although the boys would be men by now.

“I’d like to have, sweetie.
Very
butch. But no,” Marlene handed it back. “Friends of yours?”

“Actually . . .” Schmidt found this awkward. “I wondered, if I got copies made, whether you’d show them around. And be careful. The man I want is a killer, and I think he’s more likely to be found among people you may come into contact with. He’s a friend of Ernst Röhm’s.”

“Ha-
ha.
” Marlene took the photograph again. “We’re in the Realm of Faerie, are we? Faggots? Poofs? Queens? Buggers? Queers? Or, as my Cockney friends in England used to say, Brighton piers?”

“Nazis as well,” Schmidt said.

“Even butcher.” Marlene fluttered his mascara. “Those jackboots, my dear,
so
masterful. Well, if Esther makes some copies, I’ll do my best. Does this mean little Marlene will be helping the police with their inquiries?”

“Yes.”

“
That’d
make a change.” He blew a kiss and left, swinging his handbag.

Esther was still studying the map. “It’s not on here. We need some
thing larger-scale. Still, if we go to Pinsk and inquire . . .”

“We?”

She looked up. “I’m coming, too.”

“No.” He’d have liked to take her, but Eisenmenger’s talk had made her hideously vulnerable. Political terror had enhanced personal fear, mingling the two together. The killer’s authority had gained that of his party; their private enemy had joined his individual malevolence to that of the army bearing down on them—both of them centered on Solomonova.

Tonight he’d done a ridiculous thing and doubled back before reach
ing Bismarck Allee, using his streetcraft to ensure he wasn’t being fol
lowed to her flat, knowing even as he did it that he was crediting the killer with sorcery. “We don’t know what I’m likely to stir up in Poland,” he said.

“He’s hardly likely to be in Poland, is he?” she said. “You said yourself he wasn’t ubiquitous.”

He evaded the issue for something more pressing. “Alone at last,” he said, and dragged her off to her bedroom.

Later she said, “Are you going to Poland officially? I mean, will the Polish police be helping you?”

“Good God, no. It would entail to-ing and fro-ing between the Alex and Warsaw. And as far as Berlin is concerned, the Anastasia file is closed. I’m just taking time off, that’s all, and wandering around Poland in it.”

“You speak Polish, of course,” she said.

“Ah.”

“And Russian? Because the villages where you’re going speak a di
alect that’s a combination of both. And Yiddish? You speak Yiddish?”

“No.”

“Lot of Jews in Polesie. Lots. It was part of the Pale of Settlement.” She glared at him. “You don’t even know what the Pale of Settlement was, do you?”

“No.”

“There you are, then.”

Actually, the journey
was a swine once they got to Poland; the trains lacked the comfort of German compartments, any comfort at all some
times, and they had to keep changing because of the country’s three
different railway systems. An incipient anti-Semitism showed itself every time Esther had to produce her passport, which was often, and resulted in obstruction.

At Warsaw Station, Schmidt argued with railway officials who said their papers hadn’t been stamped properly at the frontier.

“Just give them money,” Esther said.

“It’s nothing to do with that. The bastards are being racist.”

“Here.” She shoved some zlotys into his hand and held his hand out to the official. “It’s politer for a man to do it.”

“It’s bloody corruption, that’s what it is,” Schmidt said. The official was now signing papers with a flourish.

“Haven’t traveled much in the East, have you?” she asked.

“First and last damn time,” Schmidt said.

The Poles had celebrated their emergence from occupation under Germany, Austria, and Russia by making familiar place names unac
countably Polish. The onetime Brest Litovsk, which he’d heard of, was now Brzes´c´ nad Bugiem, which he hadn’t, and couldn’t have pro
nounced if he had. Station-name signs ran the length of the platform and were strangers to vowels. Distances were immense. How Napoleon’s army had crossed them on foot and then gone on to Moscow, he couldn’t think. Or why.

And she loved it: the delays, the discomfort, the waterless washbasins, the dirty lavatories without paper—she’d brought her own supply—the beautiful flourish with which they were directed to the wrong platforms, even the breath-strangling smoking compartments she went into for his sake so that he could have a cigarette.

“Stop smiling,” he said.

“I can’t help it. I’m catching happiness on the wing.”

“You’re catching attention; it’s like traveling with a three-ring circus.” Heads turned to watch her, but not because of the scar; she radiated joy. He couldn’t take his eyes off her.

Waiting for yet another train under another station sign with more consonants than was good for it, he asked her to marry him.

She said no.

“Why the hell not?”

“Lots of reasons. I can’t have children, for one thing.”

“Who says?”

“Oh, doctors,” she said vaguely.

“We can adopt. Is it because of the Jewish-faith business? I don’t mind being up to my knees in little Yids.”

She smiled. “I know you don’t. It’s just not a good time for marrying Yids. Or bringing them up, for that matter.”

He persisted, but she stopped him. “Let’s enjoy what we have while we’ve got it.”

Which made it worse. He wanted permanence. She believed that happiness was rain in the desert; you collected what you could and stored it for a long, long drought.

Disappointment made him surly. He was impatient with the train that eventually chugged into the station, as well as with the people who crowded onto it on their way to market, all of them straight out of a Brueghel painting—complete with livestock.

“We’re well into the Pale of Settlement now,” Esther said, looking out the window.

“We’re into the bloody Middle Ages. Does that pig have to be in here?”

“It’s a pleasanter traveling companion than some,” she said.

He had to do better. He reached for a cigarette, saw her look, and put it away; the pig was probably sensitive. “All right,” he said. “What
was
the Pale of Settlement?”

“It’s where Jews were allowed to live under Old Russia,” she said. “Part of it was here in Poland under Russian rule, part of it in Russia it
self. Got very crowded.” She looked out the window again. “Made it easier to carry out pogroms, I suppose, having them all together.”

“Did you live in the Pale?”

She shook her head. “We were rich. If you’re rich, you can live any
where.”

“Where did you live?”

Her eyes stayed fixed on the window. “Lots of places,” she said.

Forbidden territory, he thought. But if we’re traveling so deep into Anna/Franziska’s past, why the hell can’t we venture into yours?

It was dark before they drew into Pinsk, and they had to check in to the nearest hotel, where the elderly woman behind the reception desk
responded to the halting, room-renting Polish he’d picked up on the way with what sounded like abuse.

“Is she haggling?” The hotel foyer was lit by one bulb, and the num
ber of keys hanging on the board behind the woman suggested that she had empty rooms to spare. A gruesome crucifix had been plastered into the wall above them.

Esther was snuffling her soda-siphon laugh into his shoulder. “I don’t have a wedding ring. It’s a Roman Catholic hotel, and she doesn’t ap
prove of us. She says
all
naughty Germans and their secretaries sign in as ‘Herr and Frau Schmidt.’ ”

“You see?” he said furiously. “We’ve got to get married.”

She took over, speaking with a rapid command that produced sub
mission and a key.

“What did you say?” he asked as they went upstairs.

“I said you were the German representative of an American travel company, and that if she wanted tourist dollars, she was going to have to wake her ideas up. They’re very moral here, but they’re also very poor, and I’m afraid they’re used to being bullied.”

The next morning
Esther walked out into Pinsk alone, leaving her lover asleep. He was looking better every day, but the fatigue imposed by Hanover and Düsseldorf had gone deep, she thought. He needed all the rest he could get.

It was going to be hot; the sun was already striking strong and yellow on the stepped fronts of the churches. A typical, old-fashioned, Rus
sianized, provincial Polish town; she’d never been here before but knew it well.

The dread she’d felt at venturing back into her past had been ame
liorated by the man she’d brought with her, and it hardly hurt at all to look on the unpaved side streets, take in the smell of horse manure and garlic and an air filled with strummed music, see the men in business suits drinking tea in the cafés with men in tall astrakhan caps while women did the work.

Automatically, she turned toward the Jewish quarter. Quarter? In Polesie, Jews were 70 percent of the population, yet 150 years of Russian
occupation had left Poles and Jews distinct and uncombined. Same unpaved streets, same wooden buildings, but a different smell, this time caraway and fish. Other, sadder melodies from the cafés where men in business suits sat drinking tea with hirsute rabbis and women still did the work.

She’d dressed dowdily. In boots, a long skirt, a loose blouse, her head bound in scarves, she more or less blended in. He wouldn’t, of course; he looked like what he was, a German, or even a damned Englishman, sure that if he addressed foreigners loudly and slowly enough, they would understand him. Perhaps the most honest man she’d ever met; last night, at the reception desk, he’d been put out as much by her lie as by the proprietor’s rudeness. It was what made him a rare and excellent policeman, she supposed. She was not going to be responsible for ruin
ing a career that went deep into the bone.

But if she wouldn’t marry him, she could at least save him embar
rassment. She turned into a tiny jeweler’s shop to look at wedding rings. She took time making her selection, asking the jeweler about the marshes—there’d be as many Jewish villages in them as Aryan. “My husband and I are thinking of visiting Bagna Duze,” she said casually.

And saw his face change.

As she returned to the hotel, Schmidt was coming from the opposite direction. He’d been looking for her. She waggled the newly ringed fin
ger of her left hand at him. “We’ve got to go by boat,” she said. “And I can tell you this much—something terrible happened in Bagna Duze when Anna Franziska was a girl.”

She’d managed to
hire what appeared to be the only motorized trans
port on the great river Pripyat. It was a low-gunwaled, narrow boat, like all the others in which Pinsk’s fishermen plied their trade, but this one had an outboard engine. True, it made a noise like a lawn mower and had been manufactured in Milwaukee much earlier in the century, but Jan, their boatman, was proud of it, and Esther said they were lucky to get both it and him. “We’re going into marshland, and the roads are un
reliable for ordinary cars. This is quicker,” she said. “Unless you want to go on horseback.”

He didn’t want to go on horseback. He didn’t particularly want to go by water either, but water was what there was in thousands of square kilometers that had more or less filled in since the Ice Age—more where it had formed peaty islands, less where it was still lakes and sin
uous little rivers that snaked through tunnels of alder out of which they emerged onto yet other stretches of water with masses of birds lifting up at their approach like a lid being sucked off a boiling saucepan.