Willi was tapping on the window. “Dr. Pieck’s finishing up, boss,” he said. “The ambulance is here. And there’s this.” He’d put gloves on and was holding up a handbag, shaking it free of snow.
“Is this your friend’s?” Schmidt asked.
At once Natalya was dead. The moment that comes, delayed but unavoidable, arrived with an imitation-crocodile handbag, her second-best because the best was pawned, slightly scuffed around the clip, held in somebody else’s official hand. Natalya joined the roll call of those who would never answer to their name again.
As he leaned over to reach for the evidence bag in the backseat, Schmidt’s arm touched Fräulein Solomonova’s shoulder. She was shaking. He took the cup out of her hand before she spilled it. “Are you up to identifying her?”
She nodded.
“We can do it later, if you’d rather.”
“Now,” she said.
They were bringing the sheeted body to the gates on an old army stretcher. He got out of the car to turn back the sheet, exposing the face but covering the throat. Dr. Pieck had closed the eyes.
She looked calm and very young, and, as always, Schmidt felt the surge of not just anger but astonishment at the effrontery and ease with which one person could erase the teeming complexity of life in another. He beckoned Solomonova, and she came over, hands in her pockets. He knew it was to stop them from trembling, but it looked casual. So did her glance down at the body.
“Yes,” she said without tone. “That is Natalya Tchichagova.”
Schmidt heard Willi shuffle; Willi liked tears at this point. Bloody kikes, Willi would be thinking.
“Take her home,” Schmidt told him. “I’ll see her later. And, Willi . . .”
“Yes, boss.”
“Look after her.”
10
HE HAD THE usual game with Dr. Pieck. “Just give me an idea, Albrecht. I won’t take it down in evidence.”
The doctor’s thin nose whiffled with enjoyment. “If pressed, I should say that someone who is right-handed, and considerably taller than our victim, cut her throat.”
“Oh-thank-you-Doctor. What with?”
“A knife.”
“And I thought it was rhubarb.” His shoes were letting the snow in. “What sort of knife?”
“On the record? I have no idea as yet. Off the record? No idea either. It might have been a trench knife. I’m not saying it was, but the cut indicates something of that curved shape. And I thought I got a whiff of cold bluing when I sniffed her neck. We’ll see what the microscope shows.”
“That’s my boy. Dinter.”
“Yes, Inspector?” Dinter stopped shoveling snow and put his hand to his lumbar region.
“It’s probably a trench knife.” Pieck knew his war wounds; he’d been an army surgeon.
“Yes, sir.” Dinter relayed the information to the other uniforms and went back to shoveling.
Schmidt returned to Dr. Pieck. “When?”
“Do you mean at what time did death occur?”
“Come on, Albrecht, I’m getting bloody cold.”
“My dear Siegfried, it is because you are cold that I am unable to venture a viable opinion as yet. The external temperature, you see, has affected the usual postmortem processes.”
“Yesterday? The day before yesterday?”
“Forty-eight hours. Possibly longer.”
“Gratis tibi maximus, Pieckus.”
The doctor bowed. “Principus placuisse vivis non ultima laus est.” It was their little joke.
Schmidt took Willi with him to the schloss and in the kitchen interviewed the caretaker, learning nothing that he didn’t know already; Arnie had seen nobody hanging about. He’d stayed indoors, out of the snow.
It was warm in the kitchen and Mrs. Arnie was offering coffee, so they took the opportunity to examine the contents of Natalya’s handbag, spreading them out on a long pine table that had become grooved with Mrs. Arnie’s scrubbing.
A cheap powder compact; a worn-down orange lipstick; a white, neatly ironed handkerchief; a knitted purse containing a thousand marks—of less value as monetary exchange than the handkerchief; a comb. Nothing of value, but all of it scrupulously clean.
And a note. There was a doubled piece of blue writing paper tucked into a pocket in the bag’s faux-silk lining.
Schmidt teased it out with gloved fingers and flipped it open.
“I can authenticate you. Come to Charlottenburg Schloss at midnight, but come alone, no prompters.” It was signed “Prince Yusupov.” No date.
He handed it to Willi.
“What’s it mean, boss?”
“I don’t know, but it brought her here on Saturday night.”
Willi said, “Yusupov, Yusupov? Only Yusupov I ever heard of was the Russki as shoved that Rasputin under the ice.”
“Only one I ever heard of as well.” God, he loved this. Some men stalked deer over the mountains; he stalked mysteries—and this was a ten-point-antlered beauty.
He took the note back from Willi. The paper was the sort sold in a million stationery shops. Writing: a careful sloping hand, light on upstrokes, heavy on downstrokes, as taught in a million schools.
“She was lured,” he said. “He was waiting for her.”
No envelope, a pity. She’d left it at home, maybe.
On the way back, he stopped beside a sweating Dinter. “Sergeant, I want you and your boys to knock on every door of every road in the vicinity and find out who was walking or driving around them on Saturday night, especially between the hours of ten and midnight.”
Was he right? He became the man he was tracking. Dinter, watching him, saw the inspector’s eyes dull and the sense go out of his face; he wondered if the man was having a mild fit.
I’m carrying my knife to the rendezvous. I’m going to kill her. I can’t wait long in the grounds—too cold—therefore I shan’t arrive too long before her. But I’m nervous that she’ll be early. Do I have a car? Too noticeable, too traceable, too loud. I’m on foot, so I’ll walk around, letting the snow camouflage me, turn me white.. . .
“Yep,” he said, briskly. “Between ten and midnight, Saturday. Concentrate on the pedestrians. All right, Dinter?”
“Yes, sir. This digging for the weapon, sir ...there’s acres.”
“I don’t know why you’re bothering. He took it home with him. If he dropped anything, we’ll have to wait for the thaw. Good man, get on with it.”
Typical bloody Geheimpolizistkommissar, Dinter thought, watching him go. Took it home with him. And us digging up half Charlottenburg for it. No thought for poor buggers in uniform and their backs. And knock on every door in the vicinity. In this weather. Typical Alexanderplatz, the creeps.
BEFORE HE DID anything else, Schmidt went back to the Alexanderplatz to have lunch. He needed to do some research. And you didn’t pass up a hot meal—not when you’d had birdseed for breakfast.
Since Willi’d taken the car, he had to walk, but he liked walking, and the feet of those going to work had cleared the pavements for him.
Thinking of his wife, he went into every food shop he saw on the way that didn’t have a line outside it, asking for whatever they had and being told that the reason there wasn’t a line outside was that they didn’t have anything.
Usually he strode the streets of Berlin like a landlord; it was his city. He boasted that, even if he were blindfolded, his nose and ears would tell him where he was—heated, rich air issuing from the hotels in the Friedrichstrasse, automobiles passing the Brandenburg Gate puffing exhaust fumes, the stink of blood and the lowing from the abattoirs of the Thaerstrasse, the milky churning of Bolle’s dairy in Moabit, green smells from the forests and the lakes, lime and coal dust from the barges chugging up the canals—but it wasn’t really true. It was always changing. This was a town that kept you on your toes. Turn your back a minute and, wallop, they’d torn something down and something else was going up in its place. No dignified sense of history here like they said the
re was in Paris or London. In Berlin history kept happening: Napoleon came and went again. Kaisers flattened elegant eighteenth-century buildings to put up monstrosities to their own glory, but the last kaiser and his war hadn’t been glorious, merely monstrous, and Berlin had revolted.
Schmidt had missed most of the revolution; on leaving the army, he’d gone down to Bavaria to get married. He’d brought his bride back to a different Berlin. The kaiser had gone, and a government that believed in liberation had come in. Buildings had disappeared, streets had altered.
He’d loved it all the more. The place where East met West, the heart of a railway and waterway system that went out to the world and brought it in. A great stew of a city. French Huguenots, Viennese Jews, Bohemian Protestants, Wends, Poles, Hungarians, Romanians, Russians—they’d all hopped into the pot to escape persecution at home, adding variety to the stock—and staying. When Napoleon occupied the city, the Huguenots had resisted his blandishments to join him. “We are Berliners,” they said. “We want to remain Berliners.”
Somebody’d once said Berlin wasn’t a city, it was a situation. And Berliners were good at coping with situations. Terrible things happened to them, but after they were over, the Berliners settled back to doing what they were good at: eating, drinking, working, and making little Berliners. Basically, for all its variation, it was a mundane city—which, a mundane man himself, was what Schmidt liked about it.
But it’s being tried too hard, he thought. Today its people were gray from fatigue under a grayer sky threatening more snow. A piano was being lowered from a third-floor window onto a cart below, watched by a little girl in tears. Middle-class housewives wrapped in shawls were setting up tables on the sidewalks to sell their possessions. Outside the Quakers’ and Salvation Army’s soup kitchens, well-dressed elderly men and women waited in line with tramps.
Tempers were as sharp as the cold. Exchanges between buyers and sellers were shouted; a couple of men tussled over a bag of coal. From the open door of a café came steam and the sound of an altercation over a cup of coffee that had been five thousand marks when it was ordered and eight thousand by the time it was drunk.
And probably, he thought as he passed, it wasn’t even real coffee. Not even acorn ersatz. Nowadays ersatz was ersatz-ersatz.
A statue of Frederick William I lacked its nameplate, as did every other statue in the Tiergarten—brass could be exchanged for potatoes. The British embassy had complained to Alexanderplatz headquarters that not even its illustrious name had been spared.
Farther along the street, a group of wing-collared businessmen were despairingly pointing out to a policeman that the roof of their office building had been stripped of lead. Burglaries and theft had doubled, street crime trebled. Violence between the Communists and the extreme right wing was an everyday event. This, in what had once been one of the most law-abiding capitals in Europe.
It’s not crime, he thought, it’s desperation. It’s what happened when the basket you carried your wages home in was worth more than the currency inside it. And what the hell was the government doing about it, apart from printing more and more paper money? The million-mark note was expected any day.
When he thought of Hannelore and the little Schmidt she carried inside her and the nourishment they should both be getting and weren’t, he wanted to kill—he just didn’t know whom.
God send us a leader who knows what he’s doing.
The Communists thought they’d found one; the usual pictures of Lenin were pasted up on walls everywhere under signs saying it was verboten to stick bills. But the posters that really caught the eye were bloodred with a huge and hinged black cross. He regretted the adoption of the swastika, that symbol of light, by the National Socialist German Workers’ Party; now it was the trademark for a bunch of gorillas whose only idea of spreading light was to make holes in the heads of those who didn’t agree with them. He didn’t like the vicious little shit who’d become their leader either. Eye-catching, though, he gave them that; the poster seemed to drag the only color in the city into itself.
Still, whatever happened, whatever government came into power, policemen like him had to be paid and fed—not much, not well, but enough. Children could become malnourished, old people die of cold, the middle class’s pensions, insurance, and savings be wiped away, but if the police didn’t survive, neither did the government.
The canteen was crowded and steamy with drying cloaks, thick with cigarette smoke. One of the liberal reforms introduced by the Weimar Republic had been to do away with the old headquarters’ segregated dining rooms that had provided varying comfort according to rank, and replace them with a vast hall in which inspectors of the Kriminal-Abteilung, like himself, even higher commissioners, were expected to eat in fraternal companionship alongside beat-pounding, uniformed Schutzmannschaft.
Nobody liked it. The place had been tiled in the public-urinal school of design; it was noisy and uncomfortable. The lower orders were constrained by the presence of officers; officers, mostly ex–military men, hated having to eat like ordinary mortals in front of their subordinates. The food was bad and getting worse.
However, at a time when Germany was starving, when a third of the population was unemployed, a third on strike, and a third having to take their pay partly in potatoes, it didn’t do to be picky.
He fought his way through the crush to the counter. “What we got today?”
An officer of the Fraud Squad nodded gloomily at a vast shape behind the counter. “She says it’s hare stew, but I just heard it bark.”
“Dumplings,” Schmidt said winningly. “Nobody makes dumplings like you, Rosa. I’ll have three.”
“You’ll have two.” Rosa was one of only five women employed at headquarters, all of them, so it was said, chosen for their ability to tear men’s arms off. “And you’ll eat them here.” She pointed her ladle at a sign saying it was verboten to carry food off the premises. Men had been taking it home to their families.
He carried his plate to a table occupied by a group of Meldewesen, the division in charge of immigrants and refugees, and insinuated his chair between two of them. “This taste as bad as it smells?”
“Worse.”
After a period of communal, reflective chewing, he said, “Otto, any Yusupovs in Berlin just now?”
“Two.” Otto Steiber knew his lists like a housewife knew her grocery cupboard. “Yusupov, Felix, and Yusupov, Irina. Prince and Princess respectively. Renting number 42 Pariser Platz. Three-week visas each.”
“So he is in Berlin. What’s he doing here?”
“Officially, he’s visiting friends.” Steiber spread out his napkin on the table and forked a piece of meat onto it. “That’s not hare. That look like hare to you?”
“No.” Schmidt did the same with his. “And unofficially?”
“Unofficially he’s here to see his lawyers. Some Yusupov jewels from his czarist days have surfaced in town. He’s claiming they’re his; the Soviet government says they belong to the proletariat.” Steiber folded up the meat in the napkin and put it in his pocket. “The courts will have to decide whether they belong to a fucking assassin or the fucking Bolsheviks—and good luck to ’em. What’s your interest?”
“His name’s come up in an inquiry. I need to see him.”
“Keep me informed. And keep your back to the wall.” Steiber crooked his left hand on his hip and flirted the fingers of his right in the air.
“One of them, is he?”
“Duckie, he invented it.”
“Otto, while we’re about it, what have you got on Prince Nick Potrovskov?”
Steiber laid down his fork. “Am I to be allowed to eat this meal in peace?”
“Do you want to?”
“Probably not. Well, then, Prince Nick ...Arrived in Berlin five years ago without a rag to his ass. Now owns three nightclubs here and another in Hamburg. We’ve got him down as an illegal dealer in foreign currency, he’s on the Vice Squad’s books as a procurer, Custom
s’ as a source of stolen passports, while the Fraud Squad’s looking hard at his tax returns, and all any of us have pinned on him is a breach of fire regulations.”
“A real prince?”
“Just some bloody jumped-up lieutenant out of the Cossack army with an eye to the main chance.”
“How does he get away with it?”
“His clubs provide spare-time activities for the rich—and that includes Reich ministers. The bastard’s got friends in high places with low tastes.”
Schmidt folded up his napkin with the saved meat and one of the dumplings in it, put it in his pocket, and went upstairs to his office to start writing his report.
Willi joined him. “You ought to see the kike’s flat in Bismarck Allee, boss. Massive. Real wages of sin, it is. And there’s me and my missus and the kids with hardly a place to park our butts.”
“Was she all right?”
“Didn’t say much. Thanked me when I made her some tea.”
Schmidt brought him up to date.
Willi rubbed his hands together. “Getting good, this. A regular Hans Christian Andersen, this is shaping up to be.”
Complete with Snow Queen, Schmidt thought. “What do you think, Sergeant?” He liked Willi’s opinions, often in order to compare his own, sometimes as entertainment. Usually the foreigner did it.
“Yusupov,” Willi said immediately. “He’s our man.”
“So he murdered Natalya, did he?”
“Yep. He’s in town. Our Natalya’s trying to sell some jewels she smuggled out of Russia but doesn’t know how. Contacts Yusupov. Little Felix says he’ll authenticate them, meet me tonight at the schloss. He says they’re mine, she says finders keepers, and—schlipp—bye-bye, Natalya.”
“Hmm. The note said, ‘I will authenticate you.’ You. A person, not jewels.”
“Slip of the pen. Bad grammar.” Willi liked his script and was running with it. “We know he’s a killer. Did he use a knife on Rasputin?”