City of Shadows (51 page)

She read the inscription on the gravestone as he propped the wreath against it. “So he got the Iron Cross,” she said.

“Yes, his father’s very proud of that.”

She read the inscription: “ ‘He died for Kaiser and Fatherland.’ ”

“His father’s proud of that, too.”

For most of
January Esther was occupied at her studio in Cicero
strasse preparing for her exhibition at the Kronprinzenpalais. It was also a particularly busy month for Schmidt, and the only way he was going to be able to attend her opening party was by flying into Tem
pelhof in the evening and catching an overnight train back to Bremen later.

Since Esther could not, Howie Meyer met him at the airport with a car. Howie was wearing a dinner jacket, making Schmidt conscious that he wasn’t. “It’s an Event, pal,” Howie said reprovingly. “The Kron
prinzenpalais doesn’t give up one of its rooms to any old happy snapper. Don’t you read the art pages?”

Schmidt usually flicked through them as he turned to the sports sec
tion. “I don’t know much about her work,” he said. “I’m ashamed.”

“You should be. She’s a first-class camerawoman.
Collier’s
takes any
thing she sends, you know that?
Cicatrice
—jeepers, that’s style. My lit
tle secretary was going to paint a scar on her face the other day so’s she’d look like Esther. Save it, kid, I told her, you need mystery and cheekbones. That’s the thing about Esther—there’s all these lousy Rus
sians claiming Peter the Great’s their great-granddaddy, but don’t none of ’em have what that woman of yours has got.”

Schmidt’s focus was suddenly on Meyer, fat, funny, with the gloss that all educated Americans had. He told himself he wasn’t jealous; at least, this wasn’t the jealousy he’d felt for Potrovskov and the shameful shot of relief he’d experienced in the first moment when reading of the Russian’s death. This was envy. Meyer could offer her what he couldn’t—security, prosperity, a new life in the Land of the Free.

The brightly lit room at the Kronprinzenpalais was crowded. Smartly dressed men and women that Schmidt felt he ought to recognize were studying the pictures, wineglass in hand. Peter Lorre and the man
who’d directed
M,
Fritz Lang, were the only two he could put a name to, and they were engaged in discussion with other people.

Howie grabbed a drink and disappeared into the crowd. Schmidt grabbed another, looked for Esther, couldn’t see her, and started study
ing the photographs.

He didn’t like them too much—he wasn’t meant to; Esther’s photog
raphy hurt. Here was Berlin’s underbelly, the toppling cards of the Weimar’s paper republic. No landscapes, no studies of film stars. In
stead a barefoot toddler in a roadway raised its arm in a Hitler salute to storm troopers’ marching boots. An old woman dragged herself through the puddles of a Moabit alley, Communist flags strung like washing above her head. A long, magnificent shot over massed steel helmets and, at the far end of the ranks, outlined against swastikas, a tiny, screaming, gesticulating figure.

Somebody next to Schmidt addressed somebody else. “She’s putting the branding iron to our eyeballs again. Isn’t she marvelous?”

Peter Lorre came up and insinuated Schmidt to a quieter corner. “May I ask you something, Inspector?” The froglike little face looked shiftily worried, but it always did. “Dr. Goebbels has let me know I’m on his list. He is saying I should get out of Germany. Can he do that?”

A few months ago, Schmidt would have said no. Now he found him
self saying, “Christ, I hope not.”

“Lang thinks he will go,” the soft, breathy voice went on, almost to it
self. “Maybe I should.”

What can I say to him? Schmidt wondered. Stay, the country needs you? They couldn’t mean it; get rid of Jews and the gap would be ru
inous. It had to be merely an election ploy, an appeal to anti-Semitic panic. You couldn’t exile people because you didn’t like them; it was against the law.

The law. The great governess, upholding, upheld. For the first time, it came home to him,
really
came, like a shrieking succubus sinking its claws into his entrails, how frail she was; he saw her in the dust, her gray head kicked in by jackboots. It could happen. Was happening.

He stared down at Lorre, dumb.

The actor nodded, shook Schmidt’s hand, and turned away, bumping
into Esther. “Wonderful shots, my dear. You should be in cinema. You

have the eye.”

“Thank you,” Esther said. She faced Schmidt. “What do you think?”

He wanted to kiss her in front of them all. No, he wanted to pick her up and walk off with her, growling his ownership like a Neanderthal.

She snuffled and fluttered her eyelashes; they hadn’t been to bed to
gether for three days. “I know,” she said.

He smiled back at her. “You don’t go in for sunsets, do you?”

“It
is
a sunset,” she said. “I’m merely recording it.” Her gaze went past him to a group just coming into the gallery, a tall fat man, a tall thin one, and a small thin one. “Good God,” she said.

“Who’s that with Göring?” Schmidt wanted to know. Whoever he was, he was a worried man.

“That’s Dr. Justi, he’s the director here. The little one’s Alfred Rosen
berg; he’s the one who thinks modern art is intellectual syphilis.”

From his face, it was obvious that Rosenberg was applying the same judgment to modern photography and looked at it as if he might catch something. But Göring liked it. He lumbered along the walls, pointing with his dog whip, saying, “Yes, yes, yes, this is why they vote for us.”

He had wonderful blond hair, heavy and sculptured, like his face. He stopped at the picture of the saluting urchin and gave a rich, ca
tarrhal laugh. “Now, here is the future. We should give this one to Goebbels for his propaganda, eh, Doctor? Introduce me to this Cica
trice. I will congratulate him.”

Dr. Justi wiped the sweat from his forehead. “Frau Cicatrice, may I introduce Herr Göring?”

Göring lifted Esther’s hand to his lips. “Madam, I can pay you no higher compliment than to mistake your camera for that of a man’s. I should like to see you do a study of our Führer.”

“I’d love to,” she said. She would, too, Schmidt thought; a gleam had come into her eye he’d seen in that of newspapermen and vultures.

“Justi here has been giving me a private view of the Impressionists downstairs,” Göring said. “Also some very fine Klees and Chagalls.”

There was a mutter from his small companion. “Jew-inspired daubs.”

“Rosenberg here thinks modern art is not founded sufficiently on race,” Göring said smoothly. “His preference is for paintings of warriors and big women, but there is some of the new I find most ...col
lectible.” He grinned at the director and slapped him on the back.

Dr. Justi sagged.

There was an interruption from a dark Russian. “Hermann, my friend, please to come, the grand duchess Anastasia has expressed a wish to meet you.”

They watched Göring stride off to a small figure in a corner of the room, ringed by people apparently hanging on its every word, one of them Howie Meyer. A little hand was regally extended. Göring bent to kiss it.

“You brought
her
?” Schmidt asked.

“The press viewing’s not till tomorrow. She wanted to come. She’s beginning to feel more secure.”

And was as big a celebrity as anyone in the room, Schmidt realized; everybody was watching the encounter.

He took Esther to the window. “I have to go. Get Howie to take you home, but don’t invite him in—he lusts after you.”

“I know he does, bless him.”

“Does America beckon?”

“It will if you don’t get back from Bremen pretty quick. I’m sex-starved.”

He went to get his coat and bumped into Göring and his entourage getting theirs.

Hell, why not? It might smoke the bastard out.

“I’m glad we met, Herr Göring,” he said. “Do you happen to know an officer in the SA? Christian name Reinhardt. Big fellow, fair-haired? Midthirties, I’d guess; speaks with a Polish accent?”

It was a massive face. It turned on him slowly, like a buffalo at
tracted by a gnat. “And you are?”

“Inspector Schmidt. Berlin police. Department MM.”

“Your interest in this person?”

“He’s a murderer.”

“I shall make inquiries, Inspector.”

“Thank you.”

...

From the window
Esther watched her lover emerge into Unter den Linden and hail a cab. Watched it drive away.

Behind her the room’s conversation hissed with sibilants. The List, the List. Not just Jews, the avant-garde itself was on it. Art had be
come a risk. Risk, risk. What theater would put on a Brecht play if They took over? What concert hall would include Schoenberg in its program? Or Berg? Would Klemperer be allowed to conduct? Who’d dare hang a Kirchner on their walls? The Nazi-controlled town council of Dessau had already closed down its Bauhaus. Storm troopers in Spandau had thrown Remarque’s book
All Quiet on the Western Front
onto a street bonfire; cinemas showing the film version were having their seats slashed. Truth was unpatriotic. The barbarian was at the gates.

She knew that the artistic community had turned up partly out of loyalty to her, but mostly for the chance to huddle together, like travel
ers who’d heard the howl of wolves getting close.

And you ask if America beckons, she thought. One word from you and I’d follow you, like Eurydice led out of the underworld by Orpheus. Because this
is
the underworld. Göring, that monster with taste, wants to show my depiction of a child perverted by savagery as propaganda for that same savagery.

Yes, America beckons. And you’d be lost in it.

How would that man of hers, that so-German best of Germans, en
dure the life of a refugee, always a transplant, always aware—as those who lived in it were always aware—that the earth you drew sustenance from was not your own? That you were tolerated in another person’s house like an inconvenient aunt who’d lost her money? She knew the life of a refugee, none better. It was not for him.

In any case, he wouldn’t go until he’d caught R.G. of Munich.

So I’ll stay in hell with you—and gladly, because you can’t live any
where else.

But, by God, if she could photograph Hitler, she’d show them. She knew just the angle, the right light to emphasize those eyes, like a shark’s at the moment it rolled over and opened its teeth. She’d show
them truth; she’d sell it to
Collier’s
for America to see. Get her name on the List of Honor before they wiped it out.

And her.

“I like Herr
Göring, Esther,” Anna Anderson said over her shoulder

from the front passenger seat as Meyer drove them home.

“I was afraid you would.”

“Why you say that? He had proper respect. He will help me, I think. He has great hopes for me.”

“He said that, Esther,” Howie said. “I heard him. He actually said that.”

Anna ignored him. Her sojourn in the United States, where not all the huge publicity she’d received had been good publicity, had added Americans to a list they now shared with pressmen. Meyer’s being both, she rarely addressed him, and when she did, she was rude.

She said, “He liked your pictures. He told me.” She paused gra
ciously. “I didn’t tell him you were a Jewess.”

And I didn’t tell him you were an impostor, Esther thought. It had been a long day.

“Here we are, ladies.” Howie switched off the engine. It was late— the guests had been reluctant to leave one another’s company. Bismarck Allee was nearly deserted.

“Stay there,” Esther said to Anna. And to Howie, “It’s cold. Let me open the front door before she gets out.”

Perhaps it was the light snow that had begun to fall, perhaps it was because she was tired, but she was prey to old terrors tonight. She looked up and down the street. The doorway across the road gaped at her.

“Okay.” She hustled them both indoors. “Coming up?” she asked Howie, reluctant to face the empty flat. She wished now she hadn’t had a fire escape fitted, but the temptation to have access to the yard and make a garden out of it had been too great.

“Sure.”

Anna went straight into her room without saying good night. Esther
made her a hot chocolate and set coffee to brew for herself and Howie. She took Anna her drink.

“Was a nice party,” Anna said. “I tell them all how I meet Cole Porter in America but I do not like the jazz. Herr Göring said Herr Hitler doesn’t like the jazz either. He said the Führer likes Wagner. I said I like Wagner, too; we are soul mates.”

“Good.”