The Butchers of Berlin (16 page)

Outside in the corridor, Morgen looked at Schlegel intently and asked what on earth had Nebe been on about. Schlegel could honestly answer he had no idea.

Morgen left. A man of abrupt transitions; none of the usual hello and goodbye, no formal saluting. There and not there. Schlegel enjoyed watching him go.

As the urinals in that part of the building were better appointed than the smelly toilets on his floor, Schlegel took advantage. He was going about his business when Nebe
joined him, leaving a diplomatic space. They stood in a show of attentive silence. Schlegel stared intently at his vanishing piss. It was common gossip that Nebe was inordinately proud of his cock
and his opening line in any seduction was quite simply, did they want to see it?

‘Enough to make them goggle,’ was the verdict of his mother, who regarded herself sufficiently well-bred to make a point of vulgarity. ‘But not as big as he
thinks.’

Schlegel got away first but Nebe finished quickly and joined him at the basins where he asked whether there might be a connection between the old man who had shot himself and the Jewish
butchers, through the slaughterhouse.

Schlegel said carefully that he had been asked to file a report on the old man, and as far as he understood the search for the missing Jewish butchers was a separate issue.

‘That’s your decision,’ said Nebe, sounding lightly sinister. ‘I quite understand.’

The remark was typical of the man’s mind games.

‘What do you make of Morgen?’ Nebe asked, drying his hands and doing up his jacket. Schlegel noticed he hadn’t finished up properly and there was a spot on his trousers where
he had dribbled.

He said it was too early to say. Better to volunteer nothing, he thought.

‘Has Morgen said anything?’

‘Not about why he is here. No, sir.’

‘Find out and tell me.’

How many people was he expected to spy for now? He volunteered that Morgen was not showing any signs of being there for underhand reasons. That much was true, for all the speculation. Everyone
was projecting onto Morgen, including himself. The man might be odd and mysterious but so far he had not shown his hand, if indeed he had one.

Nebe grew exasperated and asked Schlegel if he had been born yesterday.

Schlegel held the toilet door for Nebe and they went their separate ways until Nebe suddenly turned round and came back.

‘What wild theories of Gersten’s?’ he asked with restrained aggression. He appeared upset.

Schlegel carefully rehearsed his lines in his head first before reciting that Gersten had an unreliable Ukrainian translator who believed the killings had a Bolshevik connection.

‘Russian Jews or Russians
and
Jews?’

‘He’s not clear. I think it’s more to do with them having killed his people in a similar way.’

Schlegel at first avoided looking at Nebe, addressing the medals on his chest. Now he saw the man’s face was white with anger.

‘Categorically not. I will not have you going down that route. Absolutely forbidden!’

Schlegel wondered what he had said wrong.

Nebe repeated what Stoffel had told him: the hunt now was for any missing butchers.

Schlegel decided to stand up for himself. He had been given the job of finding them because no one was interested. If it was now so important then homicide should take care of its own cases,
because he did not have the necessary experience.

His remarks verged on the insubordinate, and he lacked Morgen’s indifference, but he calculated he could get away with it because Nebe deferred to his stepfather. Stoffel would give him
hell but it was only for another two weeks.

Sybil’s afternoons continued to be spent at Rosenstrasse, helping Franz, without knowing why, other than feeling safe because she had no fear of being unmasked there.
Lore anyway seemed content at Alwynd’s, writing the man’s copy and translating it so Alwynd could bill for two fees. Lore and Alwynd were always chuckling together or talking about
stuff that went over Sybil’s head. She knew Lore was safe with Alwynd and decided it was easier when she was out of the way.

She felt protected by Franz’s coping. Time to do the job, he said, and they got on with it.

Otherwise she tried to make the most of the isolated pockets of tranquillity that came her way. Sitting alone quietly sewing while Lore slept, until interrupted by the grunting of one of
Alwynd’s students being noisily fucked and a bath being run afterwards, the pipes wheezing and hammering as the ancient system tried to cope. Sybil amused herself with the thought that the
clanking and sighing was what Alwynd’s fornications would sound like by the time he was an old man. She was as usual a little shocked by the language she sometimes used to herself.

Where Sybil thought about the future and was too paralysed to do anything about it, Lore insisted their luck was holding and they should ride it. She said Alwynd was a great believer in the
drift of currents. Lore once shook Sybil and told her to appreciate what she had. They couldn’t have been more fortunate stumbling across the apartment.

They inevitably quarrelled more, which was compensated for with lingering reconciliations. Sometimes Sybil felt too stupid for Lore and feared she got on her nerves. She felt unsettled about
everything: not telling Lore about Rosenstrasse; pretending she was out searching for someone who could find them papers; not getting around to having her pin-up photos done; not making a greater
effort to look for her mother. The fate of her mother continued to nag which was perhaps only to be expected; theirs always had been a shrewish relationship. All this Sybil normally would have
taken in her stride, but she was often too exhausted to sleep.

To his surprise, as Schlegel was leaving the office he received a call from Francis Alwynd asking what he was doing. Nothing, he said.

‘Come over. We’ll have a jazz evening.’

It was the first time in as long as Schlegel could remember that anyone resembling a friend had extended an invitation.

They played jazz, got drunk and chatted about art, which Alwynd knew about.

He stood up suddenly, and said, ‘There are a couple of girls in the back. We could turn this into a party.’

Sybil heard Alwynd prowling the apartment, standing and listening outside their door. He opened it. They were in bed and the light was out. He had once said to her in his
unsubtle way that what he liked best was waking in the night with his cock hard and being able to put himself in a woman and drift off again, feeling truly safe.

Lore stirred in her sleep as Alwynd left. Sybil lay there, thinking about Lore and the give and take of their desire, which was something wholly new after the strange and unsatisfying business
of taking a man into her body. She feared Alwynd would yet find a way of insinuating himself. She listened to the world outside, with its weather and traffic, knowing that without Lore next to her
life would make no sense.

Alwynd came back pulling a face.

‘They might. Not in the mood, I suspect. One’s a lesbian. The other isn’t really, but is completely under her spell.’

Alwynd turned up the volume on the record player.

‘I was talking to one of my acquaintances at the Foreign Office who was saying that the leadership, for all its fear of decadence, is obsessed by it. Is that your view?’

Schlegel said he had no access to the leadership other than what the mass media told them and that was very controlled.

‘I will show you what I mean,’ said Alwynd.

They stared together at pale female nudes in suggestive and sinful congress with a succession of animals, especially muscular black pythons.

‘Black, no less!’ exclaimed Alwynd. ‘Hitler’s favourite, von Stuck. You’d get away with nothing like this in Ireland, however much you dressed it up in religious
metaphor.’

They were looking at a large art book of colour reproductions.

‘Here’s Paul Mathias Padua’s
Leda and the Swan
.’

The image, both suggestive and specific, showed a naked young woman lying tilted upside down on a bed with her legs apart, waiting to receive a rampant swan.

‘It caused a scandal when Hitler chose it for display in a day of German art.’

Schlegel hadn’t known.

‘It’s terrible art,’ said Alwynd. ‘Come and look at these.’

He crossed to a chest of drawers and got out two sheets wrapped in tissue.

‘Banned here now. I got these in Vienna when you could pick them up for nothing.’ Alwynd unwrapped the pictures and showed Schlegel two stark, half-undressed female studies, with
graphically displayed genitals. Schlegel stared at the parted vaginas, not at all sure what to make of the drawings. Their fluid, confident lines seemed to offer an unsettling combination of the
cold and the forensic, amounting to a clinical curiosity that transcended voyeurism, but he didn’t really understand what he was looking at, not in terms of the subject, which couldn’t
be more plain, but its interpretation. He decided they probably represented everything they had been taught to fear.

They got a lot drunker. Alwynd said it was nice to be able to get stocious once in a while in agreeable company.

‘The Germans are such relentless drinkers. The Irish too but they are more relaxed, though they probably end up the drunker. I rather miss that. The relaxation I mean. Well, time to
stagger off to bed.’

Schlegel looked at his watch. Too late for a train, he said.

Alwynd waved airily. ‘Help yourself to the sofa and in the morning we’ll have breakfast with the girls.’

Schlegel thought about the drawings Alwynd had shown him. He supposed them passionate; he could not imagine anyone displaying herself like that for him. He slept briefly and
woke up. The sofa was uncomfortable. He was about to get up and walk home when he saw Alwynd’s typewriter on the table.

He put down a blanket to muffle the noise of the machine and started to type one-fingered:

He drunkenly thought the tone caught the right balance of dull precision and dry facts. He decided to omit the military record. All he lacked was a motive for killing the warden. He was obliged
now to talk to the widow. He would do that tomorrow. After that it would be done.

He turned off the light and opened the blackout curtain and sat in the window and watched the street. The moon came out. There was still some movement, one or two cars, a few passers-by.

He thought about the other deaths, the murder room, the flayed bodies and money stuffed in a dead man’s mouth. Instinct told him to file the Metzler report as quickly as possible. The
enigmatic presence of Morgen told him he wasn’t dealing with something straightforward.

He woke after dreaming of the same dusty roads as before, standing in an empty landscape, waiting for nothing. He had a dry mouth and a hangover, which felt like someone had
shoved grit into the inside of his eyelids.

When no one appeared he left. It was still early. He was too hungover for Alwynd’s breakfast.

As he had time he decided to walk home via the tax office where two dossiers on Morgen were waiting at reception.

On the way he heard a woman at a tram stop say, ‘It’s the idea of things falling from the sky that you can do nothing about that really gets to me.’

He read Morgen’s file. The man’s age he had guessed right, nine years older than himself. He was listed as told: an investigative judge with prosecuting powers. The transfer to
military action, and his serving rank in the Waffen-SS, was noted in pencil at the end of the report. In the margin someone had written in a different hand, ‘This one won’t be coming
back,’ under which was written in ink, ‘Wrong!’ followed by details of his transfer to Financial Investigation, Criminal Police, Berlin.

An early report noted expertise in international law, and a controversy over Morgen’s chosen subject for his thesis: pacifism. That was a surprise, though Schlegel supposed the result must
not have been so subversive for it was passed for publication by the censor. More controversial was Morgen’s objection to Hitler becoming Chancellor, on the grounds that it invested too much
power in the hands of one man. The report was vague on the outcome, other than to indicate a scandal which was prevented from coming to trial by the influence of powerful friends.

‘This man needs careful watching,’ concluded the first part of the report. ‘That said, lack of compromise and principled behaviour make him a valuable asset, if used
correctly.’

Schlegel could not decide whether this meant Morgen was considered a liability or a useful tool. Whichever, several accounts followed of superiors’ mounting exasperation at his
intransigence. Despite a roving brief to investigate internal affairs in the new eastern territories, he was, as reported by Gersten and Lazarenko, accused of indiscretion and persisting after
prosecution became unrealistic. The most damning assessment had him as tenacious and possibly stupid in his inability to obey orders.

The report noted several cases closed for lack of conclusive evidence. Morgen’s downfall came after refusing to make a prosecution in a routine case of homicidal drunk driving, because he
didn’t believe the evidence, followed by detention and six months’ combat.