City of Women (28 page)

“No. No, you don’t believe in luck.”

He frowns. “There’s something I need you to do for me,” he announces, setting down the wine goblet.

“I’ve heard that before,” she observes as he removes his mohair overcoat, then unclasps a penknife. Draping his coat lining over his knee, he carefully cuts the stitching loose, and produces a velvet pouch. “There is a man in Schöneberg named Melnikov. He’s a Russian. A former tsarist, but now officially stateless. We did business together before the war. I want you to take something to him.” Opening the pouch’s string, he taps out the contents. Blue-white diamonds. They look like tiny fragments of a star in the palm of his hand. “He’s always in the market for decent stones.”

Sigrid stares at their light. “So I am to be your bagman again.”

He looks at her, waiting.

“How much are they worth?”

“Enough,” is all he says.

“I will do whatever you ask,” she answers him. “But if you expect me to make a deal with this man, I know nothing about such matters.”

“You don’t have to. Tell him that Grizmek has sent you to him. He’ll give you a good price.”

“And who is Grizmek?”

“Me.
I’m
Grizmek,” Egon answers, killing the last of his wine. “It’s the name I use for this sort of transaction.”

“And does this man Melnikov, does he know who you are,
really
?”

“Does anybody know who anyone is? Give me that handkerchief,” he tells her.

She obeys, and he opens it into a white square on the sofa next to him. She watches him set about selecting stones from the glimmer in his palm. “You’ve never said,” she breathes.

He affords her a cautious eye. “Said what?”

“Where you’re going.”

“West,” he answers, returning to his selection, holding one small stone up to inspect it in a bit of window light. “I have a contact in the Spanish diplomatic mission. A little man, with a big man’s title. For the right amount of cash, he will give me transit papers under any name I like.”

He knots the chosen stones into Wolfram’s handkerchief and offers her the small bundle, which she accepts. The diamonds feel obscenely light. Star breath.

“To Spain?” she says.

“To Madrid. From there I can make my way to Lisbon.”

She watches him return the unselected diamonds to the velvet pouch, and stick the pouch into the pocket of his trousers. “And from there?”

He lifts his eyebrows.
Anywhere
.

“What about your family? What about your wife and daughters?”

His eyes grow heavier. “I’m no good to them dead,” is all he says.

“And what about
me
?”

A breath. He combs his fingers through his hair. “What
about
you?”

“You haven’t said that you want me with you.”

“You
are
with me.”

“You know what I’m saying.”

“Do I, Frau Schröder?”

“I’m just curious how I’m fitting into your plan. Once the bedroom calisthenics are finished, that is.”

“My plan is to stay alive,” he answers. “Very simple.”

Sigrid gazes at him. “With or without me.”

“You want me to be your lover, Sigrid? I
am
your lover. You want me to make you happy? I cannot. You want me to complete you? I cannot. You want me to survive? You must help me. I can only offer you what I have. The rest is your choice.”

“Yes, I think I’ve heard that song before.”

“What do you
want
? That I proclaim
undying
love
?”

“It would be a start.”

“It would be a lie. There is no such thing. You dress me up in your husband’s
clothes
,” he burns, yanking off Kaspar’s jacket. “You want me to
play
your husband. You want devotion and fidelity and all those things that, by the way,
you
yourself don’t believe in, and you want me to
beg
you to
help me
. The poor Jew, whom you finally have in your power.”

“It is not me,” she points out numbly, “who will be leaving.”

“Makes no difference.”

“I think it does.”

“So it’s ‘Come with me, Sigrid
.
’ That’s what you’re waiting for? If I say, ‘Give up everything and risk your life,’ you would do it?”

“I’ve already given up everything. I’m already risking my life.”

“So then
come
, if you wish,” he snorts. “Why should it be
my
decision?”

“You won’t ask me?”

“I am
not responsible
,” he bursts. “And I won’t be
made
responsible. Not for
you
, not for anyone but myself. That is the way God created me, so if you have a problem with that fact, take it up with Him.”

She stares back at him for a moment. So this is the way it will go. He will slip away to Lisbon. And Sigrid will be left to rescue his wife and daughters. Isn’t God humorous. She looks at the bundle of diamonds in her hand. Then looks at her watch and says, “Take off your clothes. We have an hour.”

•   •   •

A
FTERWARD
, he goes into the WC as she redresses. When he comes out in his skivvies, buttoning his shirt closed, he asks, “What are you doing?”

She has taken out Carin’s darning kit from its basket beside the settee, and is sewing up the hem of his coat lining. “I’m preserving your secret.”

“You’re what?”

“You left your little bag of treasure unprotected in your trouser pocket, so I’m sewing it back into your coat. See how even?” she says, displaying the freshly sewn lining. “No one will ever notice.”

He looks at her with a mix of satisfaction and suspicion. “So you are a seamstress. I never knew.”

“I have a question for you,” she says suddenly, freezing her needle in mid-stitch.

“A question?”

“What are the names of your daughters?”

She waits in the silence that follows, as if balancing herself on the point of the sewing needle.

“Is this a trade, Sigrid? You carry my diamonds, I answer your questions?”

“No. I simply think about such things. Imagine what their names might be.”

“Well,” he says, lighting a bitter-smelling cigarette from Carin’s silver table lighter, “then imagine I’ve given you an answer.”

—

In the morning, Kaspar is encamped in the toilet. It makes her run late.

“Sorry. It’s the Pervatin,” he explains blankly, walking into the bedroom in his undershirt and drawers. Pervatin, the little yellow stimulant tablets dished out to front-liners by the army to keep them alert. “It plugs you up.” He retrieves his uniform breeches draped over the back of the chair and steps into them. “It’s always challenging in the field. By November, the ground in Russia is too frozen to dig a latrine, so you just have to stick your ass out into the wind and grunt. Frostbite is not uncommon.”

Sitting on the bedside, slipping on her shoes, she pauses at that image. “So why do you still take them?”

Preoccupied. Lugging his arms into his army blouse. “What?”

“You’re not in the field any longer, Kaspar. You’re at home. Why are you still taking pills?”

“You never know, Ivan could be hiding in the pantry closet or in the wardrobe, ready for an ambush. I have to stay vigilant,” he says, and then shrugs off the joke when he sees she’s not laughing. “They keep me going,” he confesses drably. Picking one from a pillbox on the dresser, he swallows it dry. “You know? Otherwise I might just keep sleeping one morning.”

Unlike Wolfram, Kaspar has not been eager to show off his wound. Even in bed, even during intercourse, he keeps his body hidden under the covers, and he never undresses in front of her. She has seen it only once really. A flash of scar tissue below the left hip, as if he had been clawed. He never complains of pain, but she can see it in his face. As he sits at the kitchen table or walks down the stairs. The minuscule hesitation before a pinch in his expression. No cane, but something in him has been no less crippled.

“So. When we married,” she hears him ask, without any particular emotion in his voice, “did you love me?”

The question stabs her. She blinks at his silent face, and then answers. “I thought I did.”

“And now? Do you love me now?”

Meeting his eyes. “I don’t know.”

Turning away, stuffing the tail of his blouse into his breeches. “Oh, come now, Sigrid. That’s not a soldier’s answer. A soldier’s answer is ‘yes, sir’ or ‘no, sir.’”

“I am not a soldier,” she says. Shoving her foot into her other shoe, she tries to escape the room, but Kaspar seizes her elbow. “Remember what I said, Sigrid? No secrets between us. Only honesty.”

She gazes into the face of the stranger inhabiting Kaspar’s body. “I feel sympathy for you. I feel grief for you. But I don’t feel love,” she says.

“Is there someone else?”

Her lips part before she answers, “Yes.”

For an instant, she is unsure what he is going to do. Strike her? Throttle her? He looks as if he is standing on a precipice, gazing downward. But then he simply releases her arm. “Now you see,” he tells her as he flops down onto the chair to yank on his boots. “That wasn’t so difficult.”

She is frozen in place. “Is that all you’re going to say?”

“What else would you have me say?”

“Are you going to divorce me?”

“Is that what you want me to do?”

“You’re not even going to ask his name?”

“You sound disappointed. It’s your business, Sigrid,” he says, and stomps his heel into his boot. “Just don’t lie to me.”

•   •   •

S
HE IS RUNNING
down the corridor. The train was delayed at the postbahnof, and now she is late. The noise of flat-heeled shoes reverberating off the linoleum, bouncing off the walls, filling her ears. She flings open the door to the stenographic room, and is met by Fräulein Kretchmar, standing like a stone monument.

“I’m sorry, Fräulein Kretchmar,” she quickly pants, but then words stick in her throat. The expression on Fräulein Kretchmar’s face is sculpted by a dismal finality.

“You are to report to Herr Esterwegen’s office, Frau Schröder.”

Sigrid feels eyes in the room stick to her, then peel away. She glances at Renate, who telegraphs her a wet blink of panic before averting her eyes back to the keys of her typewriter.

Eyes continue to follow her in the standard covert fashion as she passes through the lobby of desks that bulwark Herr Esterwegen’s private office. His secretary, an old white-headed biddy, offers her a bleak glare as she buzzes the intercom.

“Frau Schröder, Herr Esterwegen.”

Sigrid braces herself for the angry noise of a man known for his petty tirades, but all she hears over the intercom’s hash is “Send her in.”

“Come,” he calls when she knocks. The door opens and she finds Esterwegen’s pudgy red face scowling at her, chewing on the nail of his little finger, his eye popping behind the steel-rimmed spectacles. “
Sit
, Frau Schröder. There’s someone here to see you,” he instructs. But it’s not the sight of Esterwegen’s anxiety that shortens her breath.

“Herr Kriminal-Kommissar,” she declares. It’s the Gestapo man from the cinema mezzanine. The same animal fatigue is entrenched in his face. The same sleeplessness fills his eyes. He does not speak to her, however, but turns to Esterwegen instead.

“I’ll need your office, Herr Esterwegen,” he informs the man.

Esterwegen blinks stupidly. “My office?”

“It won’t be for long.”

Another blink, before he gets the message. “Of course,” he says, his scowl deepening. Standing, he thoughtlessly stuffs papers into an already bulging briefcase, then nods to the Kommissar.
“
Heil Hitler
,”
he says, showing his palm, but the Herr Kommissar does not respond. He has already blotted out Esterwegen’s existence. Shutting the door, he fishes a packet of cigarettes from his coat pocket.

“You don’t smoke,” he says.

“No,” Sigrid answers.

“I’ve heard that about you. That and a few other things.” Lighting his cigarette, he breathes out a jet of smoke. He doesn’t use Esterwegen’s chair, but rather perches on the corner of his desk, one leg hooked over. “Please, sit.”

“Sit?”

“Yes. In the chair,” the Herr Kommissar instructs.

Drawing in a breath, Sigrid smooths her skirt and inserts herself into the chair facing the desk.

“
So
. We have a problem, you and I,” he tells her.

She stares.

“It seems your young friend from the cinema has gotten herself into some very serious trouble,” he informs her.

Sigrid says nothing, swallowing back the sickly heat coming up from her belly.

“You know she’s gone missing, correct?”

“Yes,” she answers. “
Yes
, Herr Kommissar.”

“But do you know
why
?”

“
No
, Herr Kommissar.”

“Were you aware that she was trading on the black market?”

“
No
, Herr Kommissar.”

“So I can also assume you were unaware that she was also illegally sheltering criminals?”

“Criminals, Herr Kommissar? She was sleeping on a cot in a pantry closet. Where would she be hiding criminals?” Inhale, exhale.

A frown. “I understand,” he says, “your desire to protect her, Frau Schröder. It’s only to be expected of a woman such as yourself to have some maternal feelings for a wayward creature. You would not be a woman if you didn’t have such feelings. But as difficult as it may be, as
unpleasant
as it may be,” the Herr Kommissar says, leaning forward with an intimate lilt, “you must put those feelings aside.”

She stares frankly back at him. “I think you have made a mistake, Herr Kommissar.”

“Oh, no. No mistake,” he assures her, then leans over and lifts open the cover of a file folder lying on the desk blotter. Sigrid’s file from the office personnel records, she realizes. He scrutinizes it from an angle, brow furrowed. “Your husband,” he says, returning to the tone of a civil servant. “He’s been serving on the Eastern Front.”

“He was, but now he’s home. He was wounded.”

The Kommissar nods, expelling smoke. “No children,” he says.