Yes, Esther thought, here he is. And emanating less kindness than he had yesterday; he’d categorized her as a loose woman, of course. She supposed she was, but damned if she’d apologize for it to some bourgeois male in a safe job. You’ve no idea of fighting to survive, she thought. And then remembered he’d been on the Western Front. He did.
Well, she’d deliberately repelled him so that he didn’t get too close, and here he was—repelled.
From the first she skewed the story to exonerate Nick: “Prince Nikolai heard that an unknown woman was in Dalldorf Asylum and there was a possibility that she was the grand duchess Anastasia. Naturally, being a loyal White Russian, he was concerned.”
“Naturally.”
She ignored his tone. She told him about Dalldorf. She told him about Clara Peuthert and the daggers Clara had drawn on her calendar every sixth weekend. “She told me she scared the man off once, so she may be able to give you a description.”
She told him about the drive from Dalldorf to the Green Hat. “Anna said the man was following us. I thought her paranoid, but after the incident on the stairs at the Hat, Prince Nick thought it safer for us to smuggle her out to our new flat.”
Her scar tightened as she told him about Olga Ratzel’s death, but her account was toneless. “An Inspector Bolle was in charge of that case,” she said. “The fact that Olga’s death fitted in with Clara’s theory made me think, but I convinced myself that it was coincidence. Now I know it wasn’t—he thought Olga knew where we’d taken Anna.” She told him how she’d asked for Theo to protect them the following sixth weekend, but, when nothing happened, she’d decided she’d been overfanciful.
“But on Saturday he found you again,” Schmidt said.
“Yes.” She spoke almost to herself. “Yes, he’s become clever. When you think of it, he’s been hanging around Nick’s clubs. ...Somebody’s
been talking to him. Somebody . . .” Her eyes were sapphire hard now.
“I’d like to know who.”
“That’s our job, Fräulein.”
She gave a brief nod. Then do it, it said.
He said, “Fräulein Anderson insists that it’s the Cheka who’re after her. Or Prince Yusupov, of course.”
“Yes, but when she was truly frightened, she told me the man had followed her always—she used that phrase. She mentioned past encounters at a Canal and in a forest.”
“Canal?”
“Yes.” Solomonova put up the heel of her hand to rub her forehead in a gesture with which Schmidt was becoming familiar. “I’m sorry.... Prince Nikolai once mentioned it, that she’d been fished out of the Landwehr Canal—1920, I think it was. You’d have to ask him about that.”
Schmidt looked over to Willi, who made a note. “Did she give a description?”
“No.”
“You can, though, if it’s the same man who attacked you at the Hat.”
“Yes, but whether I’d know him again ...a big man.”
“Narrows it down nicely,” intoned Willi from his notebook.
Esther told them about Natalya’s ambition, her growing irritation with Anna, and the culmination of both—the scene at the Green Hat.
“She wanted Prince Nikolai to present her to the world as the grand duchess. That was what the quarrel was about. Naturally he refused.”
“Naturally.”
She ignored his tone. “Natalya was in an overwrought state after that. I suppose it made her judgment unsound when she found the note. She must have believed that Yusupov wrote it and would present her as Anastasia.”
Schmidt got up and turned his back on her to think. In the parking lot below, a couple of uniforms were trying to push a van out of a snowdrift.
He’d got it right. God, I’m good, he thought.
And she was an examining magistrate’s dream: concise, clear—and honest, as far as it went. He wondered how far it did go.
“Do you think the canteen could supply three cups of real ersatz coffee for us, Sergeant?” he said.
“I’ll inquire, sir.”
“And...cake or something.” She looked famished.
Behind Solomonova’s back, Willi rolled his eyes. Cake yet.
When he’d gone, Esther said, “Why did he kill Natalya?”
“By mistake,” he told her.
He’d worked it out. The killer’s standing under the trees of Charlottenburg at midnight. It’s dark; all streetlights are out, owing to the latest electricity cut. (Schmidt had checked.) Everybody in the area has gone to bed to save fuel. He’s waiting for the woman to whom he’d sent the message. And here she comes, on time, through the snow, an intermittent moon washing out features so that her face is a pale, indistinguishable disk under the cloche hat. In her dark coat, Natalya is the expected woman in the expected place.
She doesn’t see him. He lets her get ahead of him, then pads after her, no sound but the creak of branches under their weight of snow. She doesn’t even cry out. The knife slashing into her neck is the only warning she has that she’s about to die. Shock probably precludes even that knowledge. It doesn’t take long in any case. Seconds.
“He thought she was Anna,” he said.
“Let’s hope he still does,” she said. “I’m afraid for her.”
Schmidt sat down. “It was fraud, wasn’t it? You were going to pass off Fräulein Anderson as Anastasia and claim the Romanov fortune.”
Her mouth opened slightly in surprise. Yep, I’m good, he thought. Then her eyes met his; she almost smiled. He thought she was going to admit it. What she said was, “Fraud implies gaining money under false pretenses. There has been no money gained.”
She was right, of course. “But it was the intention.”
She said, “Does it matter now? I want you to catch the man who killed Natalya. I am here for that.”
“Does Prince Nick believe that Anna is the grand duchess?”
“You must ask him,” she said.
“Do you?”
“No.”
He sat back, relieved. “Who is she?”
“I don’t know. None of us does. She was Mrs. Unknown in Dalldorf, and according to Nick she was Mrs. Unknown in the hospital before that. Sometimes I don’t think she knows. What’s worrying is that most of the time she really believes she is Anastasia.”
“Which you helped her to do,” he said—he couldn’t leave it. “You were coaching her, you and Natalya.”
She leaned forward, her hand on the desk. “Are we going to spend time on my sins? Because if we are, we’ll be here all day. Look”—she moved farther forward—“I don’t think this has to do with grand duchesses or fraud or anything. Anna is frightened of something in her past; it’s why she’s tried to forget it. Whoever this man is, he’s come out of it to kill her.”
“It’s a possibility,” he said.
“It’s a probability. That’s why I’m here. That’s why I’m telling you all this. I’m afraid for her.”
The scar, and her indifference to it, did something extraordinary for her, just as damage to some art object threw into relief how beautiful it had once been, tarnishing and tempering her face with the reminder of what humanity did to lovely things and how they bore it.
He kept on punishing her. “So you’ve left her on her own at Bismarck Allee.”
“For God’s sake,” she said irritably, sitting back. “Of course I haven’t. Nick’s taken her to some family called von Kleist. Wealthy people, romantics, thrilled to bits to be guarding a grand duchess from the Bolsheviks.”
He saw that “romantics” was a dirty word to her. “Address?”
She gave it to him. “You see, you’ve got the means to find out who she is and catch the man, or I wouldn’t be here—”
“Bothering with me?”
She almost smiled. “Jews don’t usually have much faith in the police, but...I trust you.”
Again they were both taken aback.
But I do, Esther thought. Integrity was this man’s milieu; he swam in it
like a lone fish. She knew him. He didn’t approve of her. She didn’t approve of herself much either.
“Thank you.” Schmidt, newly enrolled buyer in the black market, felt flattered and guilty.
They began chatting. “She couldn’t actually be the grand duchess by any chance?”
“You met her,” Esther said. “What do you think?”
“I’m not conversant with royalty. As far as I’m concerned, they all come out of lunatic asylums.”
She smiled. No, she grinned. Devastatingly. Youth and amusement had been there in the past, and for a moment they broke through. Like a miracle, he thought. Like bloody snowdrops in winter.
“Until you’ve caught this man, I’d like the von Kleists to go on believing in her,” she said. “Is that possible?”
“Why?”
She shrugged. “I may be wrong. I don’t know them, but they’d probably drop her otherwise, and she’d be at risk again. She’s not an easy person to live with.” She said wistfully, “A pain in the ass, Natalya used to call her. We think she may be Polish.”
He nodded. “That’d do it.”
And she laughed.
“No cake,” Willi said, elbowing through the door with a tray.
Schmidt asked standard questions, more to give her time to drink the coffee than because she had anything else to contribute—except who she was. When he asked her where she came from, she said, “You have my details.”
“We could do with a bit more background.”
“Is it relevant?”
He supposed it wasn’t. Nor could he detain her because she wouldn’t elaborate; she didn’t have a record—in Germany at least.
“Don’t leave town,” he told her when she was going.
“I don’t intend to,” she said, and then, graciously, “I’m a Berliner now.”
ESTHER LEFT ALEXANDERPLATZ police headquarters feeling cleaner than she had for some months. Like a Roman Catholic after confession. Schmidt hadn’t exactly given her absolution, but it had been noticeable that his more penetrating questions had been kept until his sergeant had left the room.
No point in trying to save my face, Inspector; that was lost years ago. Just find Olga and Natalya’s killer. Save Anna.
Last night the apartment had seemed extra dark without Natalya’s bright, dyed-blond presence. She’d stood at the window for a long time, menaced by hopelessness, watching the street’s gathering shadows. How could one be pinpointed among so many? Especially one that knew so much about them—“I can authenticate you”—when all they knew about it was its bigness.
But on this clear blue morning, things were better. An intuitive man was on the job with fingerprint experts, all science to help him. A clever man, a nice man, a very nice man. With a picture of a pretty wife on his desk. Leave it to him.
Leave him.
Esther walked briskly; there was more cleansing to do yet—like finding a new and better way to earn a living. Natalya’s death had been a watershed. If she—if all of them—hadn’t been involved in a sleazy conspiracy, it wouldn’t have happened.
In the Tiergarten, tourists were taking pictures of one another and of Berliners passing by with currency piled in baskets and trolleys. One or two Americans were buying bags of hot chestnuts from a man with a glowing fire bucket, handing over a dollar and photographing the resultant mountain of change, laughing.
Esther dawdled to watch them. She envied them cameras that had probably cost them, in their currency, little more than they were paying for the chestnuts. Cameras were magical to her. She must get her Leica back from the pawnbroker—she’d suffered a greater pang pawning that than anything else. If she could wish any artifact back from the past, it was the beloved box Brownie her father had given her on her tenth birthday.
Don’t think about it, don’t think about it.
She lingered a while longer. One of the vacationers handed his camera to the chestnut seller, asking the man to take a picture of him and his wife.
Now, that was an idea. Maybe there was a living to be made in taking photographs of tourists.
Well, perhaps. She wasn’t ever going to be anybody’s wife—and damned if she’d be somebody’s kept woman much longer.
She stopped dawdling and set off for Nick’s house to tell him so— and ask him to get her camera back.
WILLI CAME BACK into the office after seeing Solomonova off the premises. Schmidt said, “What do you think, Sergeant?”
“Funny woman,” Willi said. “Most kikes say ‘sir.’ I reckon there was money there one time. Two-faced, I mean really. One side she’s the Queen of bloody Sheba, other side she could be Scarface Sara from Steinplatz. I reckon that kike quack of yours could have a field day with her.”
“We’re referring to that distinguished Viennese psychoanalyst Dr. Sigmund Freud, are we, Willi?”
“Yeah, him.” Willi had been introduced to the theories of Freud when Schmidt had once tried to explain something of them in connection with a case of patricide; ever since, Willi had added deviousness to the sins he attributed to the Jewish race.
“Funny woman,” Schmidt agreed.
But she’s right, he thought. That Natalya had been murdered by a random killer wandering Charlottenburg was to lean too heavily on coincidence. “I can authenticate you.” And now the death of the Olga woman would have to be investigated. There was no doubt Anna Anderson was at the center of this particular maze. Trace the trail she’d made and they’d find the man who wanted to kill her. The trick would be to find which path led to her: the grand-duchess way or via her true identity. What was her true identity?
Eisenmenger was in the canteen, examining a sausage through his monocle as if he’d found it stuck to his shoe. “Cheka, old boy? Are we talking about the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and Sabotage?”
“Is that what it stands for?” Usually he couldn’t be bothered to humor Eisenmenger; like most officers in the Political Section, the man had been recruited from upper-class Junker military intelligence—a type Schmidt had loathed in the army.
“You might say so. You might also say that it stands for cutting the guts out of anybody who doesn’t agree with it.”
“Would it have agents operating in Berlin?”
“Has agents operating everywhere, old boy.” He cut into the sausage and peered at its interior. “I hope this dog had a pedigree.”
Schmidt sat down next to him. “Suppose a Romanov was running around loose in Berlin. Would the Cheka be interested in assassinating it?”
“Depends which Romanov.”
“Somebody pretending to be one of the royal children, maybe. Escaped the massacre.”
“Grand Duchess Anastasia, for instance?” Eisenmenger inclined his chin at Schmidt in satisfaction at preempting him. “One’s heard the rumors. The Russki community is becoming exercised on the subject. Have you met her?”
“What I want to know is, if the Reds thought it was her, would they consider her a danger? Say”—he waggled his hand—“maybe that our government wanted to use her as a bargaining chip or a rallying point or some damn thing.”
“A valuable pawn in the great game of chess against Bolshevism, you mean.” Eisenmenger always sounded sarcastic, whether he meant to or not.
“Yes, that’s what I mean.”
“No.”
“You’re sure?”
“Old boy, we wouldn’t waste our time, and the Bolshies know it. They know that we know that Czarism is dead. The great people of Russia may be dying in the thousands under Communism, but they did that anyway under the czars. Dying is what they’re good at. National pastime.”
“So the Bolshies wouldn’t assassinate somebody they believed to be the grand duchess.”
“That, old boy, is what I am trying to convey. Not planning a coup, is she? Not intending to storm Moscow at the head of a Tartar army or
anything?”
Schmidt grinned. “Not as far as I know.”
“
There you are, then.”
As Schmidt got up, Eisenmenger said, “Is she the grand duchess?”
“You’re Intelligence. You tell me.” God Almighty, he thought, if even Eisenmenger was prepared to be hoodwinked, Anna Anderson has a good career ahead of her. Automatically he wrapped one of his sausages in a napkin, just in case Hannelore hadn’t had time to begin her black-market activities.
Eisenmenger watched him. “I thought that lovely wife of yours was pregnant.”
“She is.”
“Then see that the baby doesn’t come out snarling. This dog didn’t die happy.”
Back in his office, Schmidt said, “Sergeant, I want you to fetch the file on this Olga Ratzel from Inspector Bolle. Ask politely. And after that I’ve got a nice job for you, right up your alley. Go to Dalldorf and interview Clara Peuthert. Ask around, see who she’s been talking to, get a description, find out who’s been hanging around there. If they want to keep you in, don’t you let ’em.”
“Thank you kindly, boss. And where are you going?”
“Me? I’m taking a stroll down to the Landwehr Canal.”
FOR A CITY threaded with canals, Berlin had never quite come to terms with them. Rivers, yes. The rich had built beautiful houses on the river islands, lakes provided weekends of pleasure for bathers and picnickers, but architecturally the canals led a stern, almost secret life of their own along waterfronts that, with their angular and dirty warehouses, had not been integrated into the townscape.
On the Herkulesbrücke, men with time on their hands—plenty of those nowadays—leaned on its parapet watching a dredger do its stuff, water pouring off its pail as the crane lifted it. At their backs, pedestrians crossed to and from the Lützowplatz intent on other business, while below them, quietly chugging, disregarded barges supplied their city with its necessary coal, stone, lime, gravel, and clay.