City of Shadows (47 page)

And I’ve got to go back to Bismarck Allee and tell Mrs. Noah that her dove’s killer is still free.

Nevertheless, it hadn’t been a fruitless exercise. He was throwing aside the branches hiding the killer crouching in cover; he was get
ting glimpses of the thing that had followed Natalya into Charlotten
burg Park, that had carried Hannelore’s shopping for her. Every time it sprang out to kill, it was more difficult for it to reconceal itself.

In fact, he didn’t have to tell Esther anything, because she wasn’t home when he got in. A note on the kitchen table read
“Couldn’t get you on the phone. Anna returning tomorrow on the
Deutschland.
A friend’s flying me to Hamburg to meet her. Love.”

He went back downstairs to find the patrolman whose job it was to keep an eye on number 29.

“Left in a car with a man.” The patrolman checked with his watch. “About half an hour ago.”

“A big man?”

“Biggish. On the fat side. They were laughing together.”

It wasn’t the killer; Ryszard could never have made anyone laugh. Go
ing back upstairs, Schmidt told himself he had to stop being frightened for her; she’d lived nine years without him keeping an eye on her. And if she wanted to go off with jovial fat men, why should anyone stop her?

Searching in a badly stocked refrigerator for something to eat, he found himself answering his own question.

I should. I can’t do without her.

21

The contact in
the New York Port Authority who’d cabled Howie Meyer with the tip-off that Anna Anderson was on the
Deutschland
’s passenger list had neglected to say whether she was traveling first, second, or third class.

He also appeared to have tipped off half the German press, to judge from the crowd of reporters and cameramen also waiting in the rain on the dockside, a fact that annoyed Howie. “I wanted an exclusive.”

“I don’t know why you’re bothering,” Esther told him, “or them either. She won’t talk to you. She hates the press.”

“But she’ll talk to you, kid,” Howie said. “Why d’you think I brought you along? Where the hell is she? They’re letting steerage off now.”

It was extraordinary, Esther thought. There’d been halfhearted flurries of activity by the press corps as a minor film star and an auto-racing playboy had descended the gangplank, but the per
son for whom the cameras and notebooks were patiently poised on this wet Hamburg morning was an ill-tempered, untidy, nervy little woman who didn’t want anything to do with them.

To Howie she was even important enough for him to have hired a pri
vate plane to fly them up to Hamburg in time to meet her.

A nice man, Howie Meyer, one of the slangy, cultured Americans. Esther had taken a liking to him—and he to her—when she’d provided the pictures for one of his features for
Collier’s
magazine. Even so, she wouldn’t have told him of her connection with Anna; Frau Schinkel had done that while chatting to him in the hall of number 29 one morn
ing, boasting of the famous grand duchess who’d once lived upstairs.

He’d badgered her ever since. “Is she Anastasia or isn’t she? You can tell me, kid, I’m a reporter.”

“No comment, Howie.”

“Where the hell is she?” he said now.

“Hiding on board, I expect,” Esther said.

“The hell with it. I’ll find her.” Howie shoved his umbrella into Es-ther’s hand. “Keep a lookout.” He put up his coat collar and went off.

Esther found herself looking carefully at the backs of big men in the crowd, edging around to see their faces just in case this one or that should belong to the man who had climbed the staircase of the Green Hat all those years ago.

It was the reason Esther had agreed to come when Howie’d asked her along, to make sure the killer wasn’t waiting for Anna.

For God’s sake, she’d told herself, you’re getting paranoid again.

She’d gone along anyway. It was one thing to theorize that Anna was safe from the killer, that the two of them balanced each other’s hidden identity. But for her, Anna and danger had been synonymous from the beginning. Olga had been the first who’d died for her, then Natalya, Schmidt’s wife, Nick. And now Marlene. It had reinforced the fear. And the grief. Sheltering under Howie’s umbrella, the rain fenced Es
ther around with tears for unnecessary, ubiquitous death.

“You’ve got to stop being afraid,” Schmidt had said. “He’s not a su
perman.”

Maybe not, but he was everywhere. Maybe here, among the rain-soaked welcomers, blank-faced and lethal, waiting.

She wondered if Anna was even now peering out from behind one of those portholes, as she’d peered from number 29c’s kitchen window all those years ago.

The last of the steerage passengers were coming off. She wasn’t on board. It was a mistake. She wasn’t coming. Thank you, God.

Somebody put a hand under her elbow, making her jump. “She’s gone,” Howie said.

“Gone? Where?”

“Sshh.” Howie steered her away. “Let’s have some coffee.”

They found a table in the arrivals hall’s large and dreary café. “I crossed one of the stewards’ palms with dollar bills,” Howie said. “The ship docked in the early hours, and she was taken off right away.”

“Who took her?”

“Hush, will you?” Howie looked around. “I don’t want anybody else to get this. Seems she was shanghaied over in New York. Who was it putting her up in the States—somebody called Jennings?”

“Miss Burr Jennings.”

“Annie Burr Jennings?” Howie whistled. “Daughter of the American Revolution and Standard Oil, one very rich old bird. She can sure pick ’em, your Anna.”

“More that they pick her. What happened?”

“Seems she outstayed her welcome.”

“Yes, she does that.”

“Boy, did she outstay it. The Jennings clan had her smuggled on board in charge of a Finnish nurse—a lady with muscles, my guy said. She was locked in her cabin the whole passage over, never allowed out. Five o’clock this
a.m.
she was smuggled off again, still in the charge of the muscle-bound Finn, and taken away to”—Howie consulted the back of his hand—“the Ilten Sanatorium, near Hanover. The Finn was heard to say her patient was crazy and the Jennings family’d had enough and was committing her to a German asylum where she belonged.”

“Can they do that?”

“They done it, kid.” Howie grinned. “Unusual way to get rid of a dif
ficult guest, but effective—slam her in the nuthouse.”

“It’s not funny,” Esther said. She was thinking. “Hanover ...I have a friend who knows Hanover pretty well, and he’s got authority. Find me a phone.”

Howie and the American dollar could find anything. Esther, settled in an office of the Hamburg-American Line, phoned Schmidt. “Yes, it
looks as if she’s been committed, practically kidnapped. Somewhere called the Ilten Sanatorium. Can you find out what’s happening and call me back? Oh, shut up.”

She put down the phone. “He thinks it’s funny, too.”

“Who is he?”

“A police inspector. Name of Schmidt. He was in Hanover on the Haarmann case, and then Düsseldorf—he specializes in mass killers.”

“Siegfried? Siegfried Schmidt? Whaddaya know? An old pal of mine. We watched the guillotine take Peter Kurten’s head off together.”

“For God’s sake.”

“He had to be there officially,” Howie protested, “and I had to be there because, hell, it’s big news when the biggest mass murderer in the world goes to his end hoping he’ll hear the sound of his own blood gushing from his neck. He murdered more people than anybody, and I said that was a record, and Siegfried said no, the record was held by Gilles de Rais five hundred years ago, and I said it was nice to meet an educated cop, and he said it was nice to meet an educated hack, and we exchanged hats. Good man.”

“Yes, he is,” Esther said, and paused. “I’m living with him.”

“Aw, shit, Esther.”

She smiled at him. She wouldn’t hurt him for the world, but Howie fell in love the way a speculator gambled on the stock exchange: if one company failed, there were always others.

They went to the bar, and she bought him a drink to cheer him up while they waited for Schmidt to phone back.

Haarmann, “Werewolf of
Hanover,” had not only killed his victims by biting through their windpipe in a sexual frenzy but had subsequently sold their flesh to the town’s meat peddlers. At his trial it had become apparent that several of Hanover’s citizens had probably eaten their own children—an aftermath that had caused its mental homes to be particu
larly busy and brought Schmidt into contact with most of them.

He remembered the superintendent of the Ilten Sanatorium as a man devoted to the welfare of his patients. He still was. The voice coming down the telephone line expressed outrage that one of them had
been virtually kidnapped in the United States and sent across the Atlantic to arrive at his establishment like a parcel.

“It is so irregular, these Americans. It is immoral. The poor woman . . . She has no medical records with her. I have no idea of her history, who has treated her and how—if indeed she has been treated at all.”

“What does the Finnish nurse say?” Schmidt asked.

“She has gone, just dumped her patient on us and disappeared. I have never—”

“What are you going to do with her—Fräulein Anderson?”

“We have admitted her, of course, what else? She is in a state of col
lapse. We have not had time to observe her, but I hope that time and rest—”

“I’d be obliged if you’d keep her arrival quiet, Doctor. I don’t want the press or anybody else getting in to see her.”

“Neither do I, Inspector. She will need calm, regularity, time.”

And lots of it, Schmidt hoped, putting down the phone. The longer Typhoid Anna was hors de combat, the better. He refrained from say
ing so when he rang Esther back. “She’s in good hands, and she’s going to stay there. There’s nothing more you can do. Come home.”

Bolle peered around the office door. “I’m off to SA Headquarters and have a search through their records for this Intelligence fella that young Nazi told us about. You reckon your man’s stationed in Munich, do you?”

“I think he travels back and forth. Liaison, maybe.”

“Want to come along?”

Schmidt reached for his coat, then thought better of it. “The SA guys aren’t exactly fans of mine. You’ll do better without me. But take some strong-arm boys with you. The last time Willi and I ventured into an SA nest, we had to make a run for it.”

“I’m not standing for any of their nonsense,” Bolle said stolidly. “Mine’s a lawful police inquiry.”

“So was ours.”

If he’d thought that Bolle was going to get any answers, he would have gone with him, but he didn’t—he’d made a few inquiries of his own. Captain Schwerte, Röhm’s friend and the same bastard who’d been in charge of the Kreuzberg SA nine years before, had risen to the rank of colonel and was now a power to be reckoned with in the
national storm-trooper hierarchy. The man hadn’t cooperated with the police in 1923, and, the SA being even more rampant than it had been then, he wasn’t going to cooperate now. Bolle wouldn’t get anywhere.

So Schmidt reckoned, as he followed other lines of inquiry. What he hadn’t foreseen was that Bolle would be taken off the case altogether.

“They
haven’t.
”

“They have. I got in to see this Colonel Schwerte,” Bolle said. “Told him I wanted a look at his list of military personnel. He laughed at me.”

“
Did
he, now?”

Bolle lit his pipe, blank-faced as ever, but the match in his hand shook as he applied it. “ ‘I am an officer of the law, sir,’ I told him. ‘You are required to answer my questions.’ And he laughed. He picked up the phone and asked to be put through to Department 1A. ‘I have an of
ficer here wanting to look at military records. Some case he says in
volves one of my men.’ ”

Bolle pursed his lips, and a drift of Old Lüneburg wafted into the air to join Schmidt’s cigarette smoke. “Next thing I know, the bastard’s grinning again and handing me the fucking phone, and it’s Diels on the other end, and what the hell am I doing, and return at once and report, Inspector. And I did.” Another waft of Old Lüneburg. “And I’m off the case.”

“Who’s on it, for Christ’s sake?”

Bolle shrugged. “Department 1A, I suppose. Set a Nazi to catch a Nazi.”

“Shit.” Schmidt stubbed out his cigarette. “Does Ringer know?”

“Doesn’t matter, does it? Ringer’s not running this division anymore. Department 1A is.”

Frau Pritt put her head around the door. “Major Busse wants you in his office, Inspector.”

“Which inspector?”

“Inspector Schmidt.”

Schmidt’s eyes met Bolle’s. He left him puffing his pipe and ignoring a tutting Frau Pritt as she tried to flap its smoke toward the window with her handkerchief.