ARIANA FRA NKLIN
C ITY OF SHADOWS
To Frank McGuinness, in return for the picture
PROLOGUE
Berlin, February 1920
IF IGNAZ STAPEL hadn’t been so afraid of his father, he would have reported the incident and perhaps saved the lives of all the people who were to die as a consequence of it.
But Ignaz’s father thought that his son had been passing that particular February evening by singing healthy Teutonic songs at a meeting in Wilmersdorf of the Wandervogel youth club to which Ignaz belonged and of which Herr Stapel Sr. approved.
Ignaz hadn’t. He’d spent it in another part of Berlin entirely, at the house of a slightly older male friend with whom he’d indulged in an activity for which, had he known about it, Herr Stapel would have beaten his son senseless.
Since Herr Stapel had seen no reason to give the boy tram fare, Ignaz was hurrying back across the city on foot, frantically rehearsing various explanations to excuse his late return. It was nearly midnight, and Wandervogel meetings ended promptly and healthily at 2230 hours.
It was quiet and very cold; Berlin had gone to bed to keep warm. Once it would still have been busy at this time of night: cafés and beer cellars full of loud, happy, confident drinkers. But the Great War had silenced too many of them forever, and the subsequent revolution—of which Ignaz privately approved, though his father did not—had left it divided.
A bitter, poor, strike-ridden city now, and getting poorer. Only the wealthy could afford to stay up late.
Ignaz was still rehearsing his excuse as he approached the Herkulesbrücke. A young woman was ahead of him, going in the same direction. She’d already gained the bridge.
Had Ignaz considered her, which at that point he did not—women weren’t in his line—he would have put her down as one of Berlin’s factory workers either returning from or going to a late shift. She was shawled and, from the back, seemed roughly but adequately dressed against the cold, neither her gait nor heavy clothes suggesting the prostitute.
The canal, puttering and noisy in daytime, ran silent beneath her. A gas lamp on the south side of the bridge’s center sent light on turgid, icy water, intermingling with that of the blue lamp above the closed doors of the River Police station down on the towpath. The frosted, livid life preserver that hung on a stanchion nearby gaped like an astonished mouth out of the blackness.
A man, a big man, was coming over the bridge from the other direction, his boots clicking confidently on the iron of the bridgewalk. He and the woman would pass each other under the gas lamp.
There was no assignation. Ignaz, going over the event later, as he was to go over and over it for the rest of his life, could have sworn they did not intend to meet. When they neared each other, the woman swerved off the footpath so that the man could maintain his pace as he went by but, as she did so, she looked up and he looked down.
They stopped. Everything stopped. The man’s arms, which had been swinging to his walk, froze so that one stayed ahead of his body, one just behind. The woman became a hunched statue. Their intensity halted Ignaz in the shadow of the bridge’s far end. He stopped thinking about his father or excuses; there was only the couple on the bridge.
Long-lost lovers? No, there was something terrible here.
The city clocks striking midnight released them all. Ignaz thought he heard a squeak from the woman as she dodged to the other side of the bridge to run away. The man’s big head turned to watch her, like a dog following the capers of a mouse. Two strides got him to her side. He took her by the neck and the knees and lifted her in his hands. For a moment he stood under the gaslight like a strongman at a circus, holding her above his head.
Then his hands were empty and the woman was flailing down into the water, shawl and skirts flapping as if from a badly tied bundle of washing.
Ignaz stood still, trying to believe he’d seen what he had seen. He thought later that he must have cried out, certainly the woman must have screamed, must have caused a splash, but if she did, he didn’t hear her; he was looking at the man.
Who was looking at him.
Casually, his head to one side as if he were curious, the big man began walking toward him. Had he hastened toward Ignaz, shown anger, Ignaz might have run, but this interested stroll petrified the boy; he didn’t move, couldn’t.
The man padded closer. Ignaz heard his breath, smelled the feral stink.
There was a shout from below and splashing activity. The great head looked away, the heavy shoulders shrugged.
Ignaz was knocked aside, and then there was only empty space in front of him. He heard the click of running boots fading away toward Lützowplatz. Berlin reestablished itself around him, shabby and familiar.
He fell to his knees, partly from gratitude, mostly because they wouldn’t hold him up. After a minute he crawled to the bridge parapet and looked over. A man was in the water, one of his arms around the woman’s neck to keep her afloat, the other striking out toward the canal bank.
The doors of the police station opened, and men spilled out onto the towpath. One of them grabbed the life preserver from its hook.
Ignaz turned around so that his back was resting against the parapet, and retched. He’d seen one human being kill another, or certainly try to kill her. His nostrils had sniffed his own death so close he would never be the same again.
I must tell them. The thing’s loose in the city. I must tell them.
But if he told them . . .
Guilt had been Ignaz’s shadow since he’d first realized that he was not as other boys, abnormal, what his father referred to as “filth.” He lived in terror that his secret would become obvious, that the word “sodomite” would pop out on his forehead in letters of raised flesh.
If he told them, they would ask questions. Why was he crossing Herkulesbrücke at this time of night? They would guess. His sin, so apparent to him, would be clear to them. They would tell his father.
He peeped over the parapet. The inert body of the woman was being slithered onto the towpath, men were bending over her, pumping her arms.
If she was alive, she would tell them what happened. Perhaps she knew the man and would explain to them who he was, and they’d catch him. All Ignaz could declare was that he was big. And that he wore an armband.
If she was alive . . .
Knowing he was adding another sin to the burden he already carried, Ignaz crawled across the bridge on his hands and knees so that he couldn’t be seen by the men below and ran off into the darkness of his own particular hell, leaving yet another to be visited on a city that had already suffered its fair share and was to suffer much, much more.
PART ONE
Berlin, May 1, 1922
“ESTH-ER.”
“What?” She tore off her Dictaphone headset, made a mark on a notepad, and went next door to his office.
He was sitting with his chair turned to the window that looked down onto the floor of his nightclub.
It was a fine nightclub, the Green Hat, one of the largest and most exclusive in Berlin. He’d hired Kandinsky to paint the walls—“Russian scenes,” he’d told him. “I want Old Russia”—and been disappointed. “It’s blobs,” he’d said when he saw the result.
“It’s wonderful,” Esther had told him. And it was.
But his Russia hadn’t consisted of blobs, so he’d insisted on lining the walls with huge stuffed brown bears and putting ribboned kokoshniks on the heads of the cigarette girls and hiring waiters who could squat-dance. “So they know this is a piece of Old Russia,” he’d said.
“You’re not supposed to say, ‘What?’ ” he said now. “You’re supposed to say, ‘Yes, Your Highness.’ ” He was in a good mood.
“I’m busy. I’m
translating your instructions to M. Alpert.” She paused. “Are you sure you want to put them in a letter?”
“Why not?”
“Suppose the French police raid his office and find it?”
Prince Nick distrusted telephone switchboards, in case his competitors were bribing the operators to listen in, and since he spoke only Russian and German, she handled most of his foreign correspondence, which, she supposed, made her an accessory to corruption, tax evasion, not to mention fraud, all over Europe. But it was a job; she hadn’t been able to get another.
“They won’t. He’s got the gendarmerie in his pocket.” He blew out a redolent smoke ring. “And I’ve got the Polizei in mine.”
His pockets were weighed down with them. His other cabaret clubs were popular with the high-rankers because he kept them discreet; politicians, judges, police chiefs, could cavort in privacy—and did. Lists of members and their sexual preferences were kept under lock and key. There was a price, of course: they had to keep Prince Nick from prosecution—they did that, too.
The police on the beat sold him information, usually about any vagrant good-looking young men and women who’d be likely recruits for his clubs. “I want them cheap, and I want them grateful,” he used to say. He interviewed them himself. Nearly all came cheap, and most were grateful; working for Prince Nick was better than walking the streets.
In her case she’d had the choice of going on the streets or jumping into the Spree, and of the two she preferred the look of the Spree. It was the rabbi of the Moabit synagogue who’d suggested she apply to Prince Nick for work. The Jews knew of him because, for a price, he could get papers for those wanting to emigrate.
Papers—the Wandering Jew’s eternal bugbear. But if you could afford Nick’s, you could go to the U.S. embassy in the Tiergarten and get an immigration visa for America. “Go see this Prince Nick, Esther,” Rabbi Smoleskin had said. “A crook, yes, but a fair crook. And a Russian like you, so maybe he’ll give you a job.”
“With a name like Solomonova? And with my face?”
“Brains you got. Languages. A brave heart. Who cares for pretty?”
Prince Nick did; his clubs ran on pretty. He’d taken one look at her and opened his mouth to say sorry, but . . .
She hadn’t given him the chance. “I speak English, French, German, and Italian well,” she told him in Russian. “I can get by in Polish and Yiddish and Greek. I can type, I do shorthand and bookkeeping. They say you’re an international businessman—you need me.”
Most of which was true. Not the shorthand, but she could learn.
“Oh, and Latin,” she’d said, “I’m good at Latin.”
“Always handy in cabaret clubs, Latin,” he’d said, and she knew then that, if she could get him over the hurdle of her Jewishness, she’d have the job.
“How’d you get the scar?” he asked.
“Long time ago. In a pogrom.”
“A Jew, then.” In Old Russia pogroms happened to Jews.
“A Jew,” she said.
“With an expensive education?” In Old Russia pogroms happened to poor Jews.
“My father was well-off. I had a mam’zelle and a tutor.”
“What did your father do?”
“He was a banker.”
“Yeah? So how’d you get mixed up in a pogrom?”
“Are you hiring me or not?”
He hired her, which confirmed that he was no more a Russian nobleman than Rabbi Smoleskin. Prerevolution Russia had been about the only country in the world where persecution of Jews was part of the constitution, and she’d never met one of its aristocrats who wasn’t anti-Semitic.
Who he really was, where he came from, she didn’t know even now. There was a slight slant to his eyes and a beautiful olive sheen to his skin that suggested Tartar, but he professed to be Russian Orthodox and made much of the estates he’d lost to the Bolsheviks. It didn’t matter anyway; they were both frauds. And in a Germany that had lost the war, was losing the peace and its currency and, very nearly, its mind, it was only men like him who were making money.
His office had two windows, neither of them giving onto the outdoors. One looked down onto the floor of the club, two stories below, empty this morning. The other, which was small and had a sliding shutter, gave him a view of the large and illegal gaming room next door. Set into one wall was a safe like a miniature Fort Knox. Her own office, through a connecting door, was small and windowless, and she worked in it for a pittance.
He was in fine fettle today, smoking a cigar with his feet up on his desk, hair so sleek it might have been painted on, thirtyish, good-looking—and as ersatz as the sign on his door and the name on his monogrammed writing paper: PRINCE NICOLAI POTROVSKOV.
She’d told him once, “Nick, a prince of the blood doesn’t have to say he’s a prince. Just put ‘Potrovskov.’ ”
He wouldn’t. “It impresses the punters,” he said.
SHE’D BEEN ABLE to tone him down a bit. She’d stopped him wearing scent—or not so much—sent him to a dentist to get rid of the gold in his mouth, and she’d redesigned his office. When she first came, he’d been trying for the German-country-gentleman look: an antique claw-footed table desk, a massive chesterfield leather sofa, and truly awful hunting prints set in an unlikely eighteenth century on the walls. It didn’t suit him. She’d got him into chrome and hung up copies of Braque’s stage designs for Firebird.
He wouldn’t give up the chesterfield; that was for sex.
She shook her head at him—she did like him. “So what do you want?”
“Did you ever meet the grand duchesses when you were in Moscow?” He was regarding the tip of his cigar, which he did when he was plotting.
Dear God, she thought. “Who?”
“The grand duchesses. Olga, Tatiana, Marie, Anastasia. The czar’s daughters.”
“Romanovs didn’t mix with Jews,” she said.
“They did with rich Jews. Your father was rich, you told me.”
She’d have told him anything to get the job. Now she said, “The Jews were expelled from Moscow.”
“Rich Jews could live anywhere. And they were invited to St. Petersburg now and then, I know—I remember the priests yelling bloody murder about it. The czar wasn’t that much of a fool he’d expel the moneymen. Your father went to official things, all the big zhid bankers did—Sack, Baron Günsburg, Don’t tell me you don’t know what the young princesses looked like.”
Yes, she said, she knew what the princesses had looked like; their pictures had been everywhere. “They’re dead. They’re all dead.”
“Aha.” He pointed his cigar at her.
“Oh, not that old tale, Nick, please,” she said. The Russian émigrés wouldn’t let it drop; there’d been escapes from Ekaterinburg 1918; the czar had been seen walking down a street in London; little Czarevitch Alexei was alive and well in France; one or another of the grand duchesses had survived the slaughter; the whole Romanov family had been smuggled out of the cellar and put on a yacht to sail forever round the world like the Flying bloody Dutchman.
He sat up and stubbed out his cigar. “Let’s go for a drive,” he said.
“I’m busy.”
“It’s a nice day,” he said. “Get your hat on, Scarface, we’re off.”
“Where to?”
“Loony bin. See a madwoman. Hurry up.”
It was a beautiful late-July day. People strolled under the trees of the Tiergarten as if the sun had slowed down the inflation that was ruining everybody except those smart enough and unscrupulous enough, like Nick, to speculate in currency. Even those in a line waiting for food from a temporary Salvation Army shelter had raised their faces and closed their eyes like sunbathers.
Apart from the trams, Berlin was traveling on two legs or four— gasoline was scarce and expensive. His new Audi was almost the only car on the road, and he exulted over it. It had won the International Alpine Run, something about four-wheel hydraulic braking.
He slowed
down and took his right hand off the wheel to wave it. “How’d you like to live around here?”
They were going along Bismarckstrasse, bastion of Berlin respectability.
She didn’t bother to answer him.
“You could,” he said. “I’m thinking of renting you an apartment.”
Something was up; he was never generous without a reason. “Why?”
“You’re my secretary. I can’t have a secretary living in Moabit. It’s not classy.”
It had been classy enough so far. She suspected geese that laid golden eggs. “Good,” she said.
For certain he wouldn’t be setting her up in a nice apartment because he had designs on her virtue; he’d taken that, such as it was, on the day he’d hired her. She’d thought her face would preclude her but it hadn’t.
It had been a form of apprenticeship initiation. The chesterfield in the office was there for that purpose. So were the packets of condoms in his stationery drawer.
She’d been so hungry. Ashamed of taking another meal from the canteen that rich Jews had set up for their suffering brethren in Moabit, she’d gone without anything but tea for two days. Even then, when she’d passed it in her search for work and seen its lines of desperate mothers and children, she’d felt guilty.
She’d thought, What does it matter? She was soiled goods anyway. Jews waited for better times. Dully, she let him.
He was a skilled practitioner; it was necessary to his self-esteem to leave all his women satisfied. What took her aback was that her body acted independently and responded with orgasm, as if it had become impatient with her mental numbness and was reminding itself that it was still young and needy. Memory was overwhelmed, blanked out in an eruption of voluptuousness.
There was no pretense on either side that the encounter was anything but physical gratification for them both, but all sensual enjoyment had been foreign to her for so long that she was grateful for it.