The Sleepwalkers (12 page)

Willi couldn’t conceive of how to respond.

“Listen. This only makes what I have to ask of you simpler. I want you to get the boys out of the country, Ava. At once.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“Take them to Paris. By car. By train. I don’t care how. But go. Stay with your Aunt Hedda. Or book a hotel if you must.”

“Willi, school is still in session.”

“Never mind. You are to take them immediately. Your parents ought to go, too.”

“But . . . for how long?”

“Not long. A few weeks at most, I hope. I’ll come out and speak with you tonight.”

“You haven’t forgotten? Tonight’s Stefan’s winter festival. You promised to be there.”

“I will be. But, Ava . . . in the meantime . . . make the necessary arrangements. Please. By tomorrow afternoon—I want those boys out of Germany.”

“They’re positive dummkopfs down in Missing Persons,” Gunther complained as he arrived in Willi’s office carrying a stack of files practically as tall as he. “They can’t even put two and two together.” He dumped the small mountain on Willi’s desk. “If that’s the way the department is run, it’s no wonder people like the Nazis think the police are inept.”

Willi appreciated the frustration, if not the point of view. “What is all this, Gunther?” he mumbled, distracted. He couldn’t stop thinking of Hoffnung suddenly, and his wife. Where could they have vanished? Those SA thugs would stop at nothing. He was right to get the children out.

“The sleepwalkers! It took me a day and a half working with that nincompoop in Mutze’s office, but I finally dug up all these. Can you believe it? People have been roaming the streets of Berlin like zombies for a year now, vanishing into thin air, and these fools never think to put it all together.”

Willi and Gunther worked the rest of the day to sort through the files. By late afternoon the picture had grown not only clearer but far more frightening. In the past nine months, three different showgirls, one Greek, one Russian, and one Serbian, had all been seen “sleepwalking” the night they’d disappeared. Mila Markovitch, the Serb, had been working in nightclubs where the Great Gustave was appearing. She was seen boarding an S-Bahn train in the direction of Spandau. In addition, two female members of a Czechoslovakian track team had vanished under similar circumstances after a “Mystery Night” hosted by the Great Gustave. Although they found no connection between Gustave and two sets of female twins—one Polish, one Italian—nor an entire family of Hungarian dwarfs, all these, too, disappeared after witnesses claimed they appeared to be “going somewhere in their sleep.” Not a blond-haired, blue-eyed German was among them. And not a bit of evidence other than circumstantial that linked Gustave to their disappearances. Where the hell was he sending these people?

And why?

Sometime after four, Ruta danced in with a large envelope just arrived by messenger. “Somebody got an unmarked package,” she teased. But handing it to Willi, she noticed it was not unmarked. On the back, the return address was clearly stamped with a large black swastika.

“Don’t open it,” she stammered. “It could be a stink bomb.”

It was in a sense. The files of the late Dr. Hermann Meckel.

Ernst Roehm had followed through on one promise, at least.

Willi and Gunther pushed aside all the other stacks. Meckel’s dossier was thick, but deadly boring. An excruciatingly detailed family biography went back centuries, with a minor novel about his medical training, a synopsis of the papers he’d given, including the one Gunther had already found on bone transplantation, and even more numerous pages on the various professional associations he’d belonged to. The committees he sat on. The clinics he served. One particularly odious-sounding involvement with
something called the Institute for Racial Hygiene had been terminated six months ago, no explanation why. Willi made a note to check the dossiers of the other top orthopedists for any reference to this place. He was about to turn the page when Gunther grabbed his hand.

“Wait a second. Hold that page up to the light, Chief. Look.”

In the column following the Institute for Racial Hygiene, under “Associates,” the bright light revealed what appeared to have been a list of names blotted over in white so as to make them illegible. Willi grabbed a blank sheet of paper and tried to trace the names, but nothing came through.

“Yoskowitz,” they said simultaneously.

Willi slipped the page in an envelope. “All right. I’m off to my son’s school tonight. I’ll take this to her first. You keep working on these.”

“Right, sir. And then it’s back out to the Black Stag for me.”

“
Ach so
. Poor Gunther.”

“Not at all. I happen to be bringing along a most attractive date tonight.”

Willi raised an eyebrow. “Well, don’t get her into any trouble, Gunther. And I don’t mean the usual type.”

“Yes, sir. I know, sir. No, you don’t have to worry. She’s like me, sir. A solid republican.”

Bessie Yoskowitz had a small studio down the street in a handsome new office block called Alexander Haus, right across from Wertheim’s. As he entered, Willi could hardly ignore a noisy detachment of SA Brownshirts in front of the famous department store, holding signs with grotesque caricatures and chanting,
“Every time you buy from Jews, you harm your fellow Germans! Every time you buy from—”

Yoskowitz, a tiny-framed woman in her early sixties, gray hair meticulously pulled in a bun atop her head, with a distinct Polish/Yiddish accent left over from youth, was among Berlin’s
most accomplished paper conservators. Her skilled fingers worked on everything from Egyptian papyrus for the Pergamon to numerous police-related documents, such as what Willi now brought her.

“I see.” She looked over the page with a thick magnifying glass of the sort the jeweler had used. “Yes, of course it’s possible. I’ve got chemicals that can lift the white ink right off the black. But it’ll take time. You see the work I got piled up here?”

“Bessie—”

“I know. I know. For Kripo it’s top priority. It’s Friday already, so give me till Monday. That’s Christmas Eve. We’ll close early. Let’s say noon then, huh?”

“You’re the best.”

“Listen, Willi.” Her tiny hand stopped him from leaving. “Before you go. I hope you don’t find this impertinent. But with things as they are . . . I was wondering. By any chance . . . might you have a hint of what is really going to happen, politically I mean?”

Even on the sixth floor they could hear the echoes from the street:
“Every time you buy from Jews—”

Despite their electoral losses—or precisely because of them—the Nazis had ratcheted up their anti-Semitic campaigns, calling for boycotts against Jewish businesses, harrassing Jews in public places. One old, bearded man had been pushed to his death from a moving train. Such atrocities inevitably made front-page news and terrorized at least 1 percent of the population, which is all Germany’s Jews comprised. A mere six hundred thousand people, according to Hitler, destroying the German nation.

“You see, after all these years I’m still not a citizen. And the Hitlerites—may their name be cursed—if they ever really came to power, it’s people like me they’d go after, no?”

“I really doubt that, Bessie.” Willi patted her little hand. “I think they have more important prey.” Like me, he thought morosely.

“But if you should ever get some idea which way the wind will blow . . .”

“You’ll be the first to know. Promise.”

At the Young Judea School, tucked behind a high wall on a side street in Schoneburg, every second person that night seemed to have the same request. Greenburg the accountant. Steiner the plumber. Rosenbloom the insurance man. Stefan’s teacher. Stefan’s principal. Even Stefan’s rabbi. All approached Willi at one point or another wanting the same advice. What should we do? What? What? “Take precautions if it makes you feel more secure,” he began to answer each the same. “But I can tell you von Schleicher will do everything in his power to destroy the Nazis.” But don’t you think . . . and isn’t it possible . . . and couldn’t it be . . . and what if God forbid . . . At last he felt like crying aloud,
What do you think I am, the Great Gustave? How should I know what tomorrow will bring?

The winter festival celebrated the story of Hanukkah. The Hebrew revolt against the ancient Greeks. The miracle of the temple lamp lasting eight days instead of one. The songs. The dancing. All seemed especially warm and hopeful to the uneasy crowd of Jewish parents filling the auditorium that night, Willi included. During the performance he turned to Ava, seated next to him. The quiet expression on her face belied the nervous shifting in her chair.

Yes,
she said wordlessly, with just one glance.
It’s all arranged.

“How about your parents—do they know yet?” he whispered.

Her head shook rapidly back and forth.

The big confrontation happened later, at the Gottmans’ house in Dahlem.

“It’s not because I’m afraid the Nazis are about to seize power,” he made sure to emphasize. “I’ve become involved in a murder investigation which has taken a rather sinister turn. The people I’m after may well attempt to intimidate me by threatening my family.”

“These people, they’re Nazis?” Max Gottman seemed to have no doubt.

Willi didn’t answer.

“You really think
Mutti
and I should go, too?”

“I can arrange a police guard for the house. The business I don’t think you need to worry about.”

“And what about you?” Willi was surprised to see his mother-in-law looking at him with real fear.

“Me? I’m the last one you need to worry about,
Mutti.
”

Stefan took the news well enough. “Oh, boy, Paris for a holiday!”

But his older brother looked about with grave, sad eyes. “Why do I feel like we’ll never see this place again?”

“Nonsense.” Willi squeezed Erich’s shoulder. “I told you, it’s only until I catch these bad guys.”

He made sure though to slip Ava a small valise to take along, full of documents and family heirlooms.

The apartment was dark when he got home. He didn’t like the feeling. Paula had left a note on the table:
Went to my place for the night. Needed to take care of some things. All’s set for tomorrow—yacht sails at noon. Pick me up eleven. And don’t forget . . . look like a Nazi! Your Paula-wutzi
.

He hung up his coat and went to the bedroom. As soon as he turned on the light, he knew something was wrong. His desk. The books. They weren’t in order. Instinctively he spun around. No one was in the apartment. He checked everywhere. But at last, when he came back and sat at his desk, he knew he wasn’t being paranoid. Someone had gone through his drawers, all right. The white envelope in which he always kept a couple hundred spare marks was missing. He banged the drawer and stared at the wall as if a bullet had entered his gut. Why would she take his money when she knew he would gladly give it to her?

Down several dark hallways in the Police Presidium a set of double doors led to the mysterious Department K, where Kripo agents could procure not only identity papers but whole new wardrobes and whatever else necessary for an investigative alias. At eight a.m. Willi arrived to be transformed not into a Nazi but a wealthy factory owner from the industrial city of Essen. His dark, curly hair was fitted with a light brown wig, and his eyes shaded with a pair of tinted tortoiseshell glasses. Genuinely impressive, he thought, was the two-piece wool dinner suit with silk lapels and a silk stripe down the trouser legs. The latest from Savile Row. By the time he left at ten thirty-five, even his car had been fitted with new license plates that confirmed his identity as Siegfried Grieber, chief stockholder of Ruhr Coal and Coke.

At eleven he was waiting for Paula outside her apartment
building. People on the street were staring at him. It was not every day a BMW 320 sports coupe driven by a man in eveningwear parked on this block.

When Paula emerged, a small crowd gathered.

“Look—Paula’s become a movie star!”

She certainly was all dolled up like one. But like some swank sister from a bad B movie, Willi thought, in a tight pink evening gown with great puffed sleeves festooned with bows and a neckline that plunged God knew where. Over her shoulders she had a full-length black cape outlined in marabou.

“Getting married?” an old woman asked.

“Yes, that’s it.” Paula held out her hands like a chanteuse to her adoring fans. Willi saw she was wearing those damned black lace gloves still. “I’m off to the chapel now. Wish me luck!”

“Mein Gott,”
she exclaimed, climbing into the front seat next to him. “I hardly recognize you.” Her glassy eyes took him in, and she broke into a fit of laughter. “It’s astonishing, really. I can’t even tell you’re . . .”

“Jewish?”

“Yes.”

“Well, isn’t that the point?”

“Of course it is,
Liebling
. I’m not criticizing you.”

“The nose by the way is all mine.”

“You have a perfectly darling nose. Did I ever say otherwise? How do I look?”

He started up the engine. “Like a real Nazi beauty.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? Hey, what—not even a kiss?”

He landed his lips against hers, then shifted into gear and drove down the block, not wanting to start up with her now. But they hadn’t made it around the first corner before she realized something was wrong.

“What is it, Willi? You found out about the money, is that it?”

He didn’t say anything.

“You think I stole it, huh? Is that it? Well, you’re wrong. I
tried to call you at the office, but you’d already left. I had to buy an outfit. I couldn’t go today looking like some cheap secretary or a telephone operator. There’s going to be earls and baronesses on that yacht. You think I wasn’t going to tell you?”

Willi felt his throat tighten. “That outfit cost you three hundred marks?”

“Not exactly. A little less than a hundred. I still have the rest at home. I’ll give it to you later.”

Clenching his jaw, he shifted angrily into third, not knowing what to believe.