“You can’t do that.”
Schmidt strode into the office. “Hold the door, Willi.”
He heard the youth’s voice go high. “He can’t do that.”
And Willi’s: “Oh, yes he can, sonny.”
Schmidt partly closed the door so that it and Willi’s bulk concealed him from outside but enabled him to go quickly to his sergeant’s help if necessary. The office was military in its neatness. An iron table served as a desk. A chair. Army-surplus filing cabinets—all locked. The only books on display were large diaries on a shelf.
A framed picture of Adolf Hitler hung on the wall, looking so like the fishmonger whose stall Hannelore had patronized in the good old days that Schmidt mentally added a large cod to it. Below it were other photographs showing tiered rows of youths and bearing inscriptions: “SA Boxing team. Berlin. May 1921.” “SA Jujitsu team. Berlin. August 1922.” “SA Rifle team. Berlin. December 1922.” In one, the largest, a line of uniformed men stood behind some squatting boys, all sternly facing the camera—nobody smiled in these photos—taken recently, apparently, at “Sports Conference. Berlin. 1923.” A collection of silver cups and trophies on a shelf declared the teams’ successes in various championships.
The only female contribution to all this male achievement was contained in an untidy, much less structured photograph, but when Schmidt looked at it closely, he saw that its subjects, who’d been caught in midcaper, were not women but boys with straw wigs for hair and balloons stuck down the bodices of their dresses. A high old time was being had by all, and none more than the figure of an older man dressed in hunting clothes, flourishing a horse whip over two grinning “girls” kneeling before him, their hands held out in a mock plea for mercy.
Even less healthy was a large cardboard box in one corner with “Erasers!” written on its label. Smith pulled back its flaps; it was full of brass knuckles and rubber truncheons. Storm-trooper humor, he thought.
On the desk, usually the place for a family picture, was a framed black-and-white photo showing two men, both in a uniform Schmidt didn’t recognize but presumed to be brown. One, smaller and fatter than the other, had had to raise his arm to put it around his comrade’s shoulders. Both had adopted a pose for the camera that suggested either arrogance or defiance. Across the bottom of the photo was a large scrawl: “Revolverschnauze, herzlichst, Mollenkönig.”
He wondered at the affection existing between two men who knew each other as Revolver Muzzle and King of the Beer Barrels, but switched his attention to the more interesting diaries and took down the one most up to date.
The entries were neat and restrained. Today’s read “Meet E.R. at An-halter Station 3:00 P.M. Sports display 4:30 P.M. Rally Viktoria P. Dinner with K.”
E.R.? Ernst Röhm? Big day for the SA. He and Willi seemed to have intruded on preparations for a celebration of the Bavarian leader. God, he hoped so.
Activity had resumed in the gym hall. He heard the run and thump of takeoffs and landings over the vaulting horse and Willi calling advice to one of the boxers: “Keep your guard up, son. Watch his left.”
Good old Willi, always made friends.
A young voice sneered, “What do you know about boxing, old man?”
“Me? I taught Manny Finkelstein everything he knows.”
“He is not a boxer.”
“Not a boxer? He’s middleweight champion!”
“He is not a boxer. He is a Jew.”
Schmidt turned back the pages of the diary. What had these likely fellows been doing this last weekend when Natalya was murdered?
Nothing on the Sunday, apparently. The page was empty. But the previous one was headed “January Instruction Conference” and suggested that the Berlin SA had been paid a visit by representatives of its counterpart from other cities. Herr Revolver Muzzle (if it was he) had reminded himself of the arrangements he’d have to make for them. “Book the Tabagie,” he’d written. “Accommodation and transport for T.S. (Hamburg), W.H. (Stuttgart), B.L. (Leipzig), R.G. (Munich), A.V. (Frankfurt),
J.M. (Kiel), R.F. (Vienna), P.J. (Potsdam)”—the list was long.
God Almighty, how far did this bloody organization spread? And screw you, Revolver Muzzle, for using initials. Out of caution, perhaps— some of these men probably had police records.
Schmidt looked around at the other diaries. He took down the one for 1922. When was it Prince Nick had fetched Anna Anderson from Dalldorf Asylum? July. The bastard he was after had been in Berlin in July 1922.
He flipped over pages. And there it was: “July Instruction Conference.”
This time fewer men had come—the right-wing paramilitaries were only just getting themselves organized in ’22; these would be representatives of various Freikorps—but A.V. had turned up from Frankfurt, accompanied by a G.N. Munich had sent R.G. again, this time with E.R. himself. Men with initials differing from those in ’23 had come from Leipzig and Hamburg. Vienna had sent R.F. once more, Stuttgart had sent W.H. Kiel hadn’t sent anybody. P.J. had come again from Potsdam.
Schmidt licked his thumb and forefinger to turn more pages. I’m pinning you down, you fucker. “September Instruction Conference,” “October Instruction Conference.”
Regular meetings. There was a lot to arrange when you were undermining a government, and, despite the fact that the headquarters were in Munich, it was more convenient for the bastards to meet each other in Berlin, the transport center of Germany.
Regularly.
His hands shaking, Schmidt turned back to the diary’s beginning and then forward, counting. Every sixth weekend. They met every sixth weekend.
Schmidt straightened his back and expelled a long breath. The Wisdom of Solomonova. She’d been right: the killer lived somewhere else and traveled to Berlin every sixth weekend.
And he was right: the bastard was an SA man.
Names, that’s what he needed, not initials. Maybe Revolver Muzzle had put them somewhere else. He reached for the 1921 book but was disappointed; there’d been no conferences until November 1921, and none of the entries had any relevance he could see, except to indicate that Revolver Muzzle had split his time between Berlin and whatever Freikorps he then belonged to in order to beat up people, with trips to fellow Freikorps in Munich to help beat up people there.
There was no diary for 1920, when, if his assumption was correct, the first attempt on Anna Anderson’s life had been made at the Landwehr Canal. Which, now he came to think of it, ran not far away from this very gymnasium.
You’re here. You’re in these pages. You’ve been in this room.
With the two relevant diaries open in front of him on the table, he got out his pencil and notebook and copied down the initials mentioned under all the conference headings, writing fast—Revolver Muzzle could return with E.R. at any moment.
When he’d finished, he crossed out the initials that hadn’t turned up on up the pertinent dates. What was he left with?
W.H. ofStuttgart, R.G. of Munich, A.V. of Frankfurt, R.F. of Vienna. P.J. of Potsdam.
Shit. He imagined himself contacting the police forces of five cities and asking them if a particular storm trooper was on their books. Sorry, old boy, I only know his initials. They’d love him.
Well, what did he know about Natalya’s murderer? A big man. Aryan. Probably ex-army. And, since he was being sent to Berlin to represent his city’s storm troopers, someone high up in the SA hierarchy.
Like smoke issuing forth from the uncorked top of a genie’s bottle, a figure was forming, shadowy, still insubstantial, but gaining the form of as weird a killer as he’d ever come across, a man who was too busy to come to Berlin and commit murder other than when, conveniently, he was sent—presumably with all expenses paid.
No other time off? Unable to plead the excuse of a grandmother’s funeral in order to come and arrange Anna’s?
Unless . . . unless, he had to come to Berlin on these conferences but the capital was dangerous for him because Anna was in it, would see him
and give him away. Was that it? When you come to Berlin, you’re vulnerable? Why, in a city that now encompassed—what? four million people?—are you likely to bump into her?
Schmidt held his pencil like a drumstick and beat it on the table in a tattoo that Hannelore would have recognized as echoing her husband’s thinking at its most agitated.
Was there any reason Anna and the killer should come face-to-face in Berlin? Likely to make coinciding visits at his mother-in-law’s? Belonged to the same club?
That’s not it. Wrong track, Schmidt. No-no-no-no-nononono. The tattoo increased speed.
The two men in the photograph taunted him, as if they knew. Did they know? Would they stand for murder? Yes, in a way they did; the very existence of their organization was based on violence. Hitler’s most recent speech, as reported in the papers, had said that the only revolution he wanted was racial, that Marxism could be counteracted only by the brutality of execution. Didn’t his followers swagger through the streets on marches designed to spread fear? Weren’t their rallies a celebration of malevolence?
And then Schmidt knew why Natalya’s killer was afraid when he was in Berlin.
You’re on display, you bastard. You have to strut in front of the public, march, speak from a rostrum, have your photograph taken with the other fascist luminaries, appear on newsreels at rallies. The man was in the open, his face bared—it had to be. He couldn’t act like a shrinking violet; publicity was the SA’s oxygen.
And it was terrible for him. All the time he was aware that Anna might see him—in a newspaper, at the cinema in a newsreel. She could be standing in the crowd watching as he marched by.
And she could say, Ecce homo. “Here is the man.”
She hadn’t. Probably hadn’t even seen him. But perhaps the man couldn’t depend on her silence. Here is the man . . . who did what? What did Anna know that was so awful she mustn’t be allowed to reveal it? What crime so ugly that even Hitler and his storm troopers would cast out the perpetrator—that, presumably, being the killer’s fear, because if he belonged to the SA, he wouldn’t go in terror of the police. Rape? Murder? In the SA those were practically conditions of membership. What accusation could Anna bring against the man who wanted to kill her?
The drumming of Schmidt’s pencil stopped at the sound of an engine outside in the alley that ran alongside the gymnasium. A motorcar was a rarity in this area of Kreuzberg—when he and Willi had parked, theirs had been the only one on the street.
Schmidt looked at his watch. It was 3:15 P.M. This would be Revolver Muzzle, back from Anhalter station, having collected E.R.
He put his notebook and pencil in his pocket and replaced the diaries on their shelf, took a quick look around, knowing he’d left something undone. There it was—the photograph on the wall of the 1923 Sports conference, a big gathering. With luck, he might have a picture of Natalya’s killer. He took it off its hook, frame and all. The gap it left on the wall glared at him, and he stuffed the picture under his arm inside his coat. It wasn’t that he had no right to take it—he was the bloody police investigating a murder, wasn’t he?—but he wanted to leave this place alive.
He walked out of the office and joined Willi, shutting the door behind him, as two men entered the gymnasium.
They were the couple in the photograph on the desk. The tall one was handsomer and more elegant than he’d appeared in the picture, but it was the shorter of the two who held the eye. Plump, bordering on fat, his brown uniform stretched tight over bosoms and belly, his gait a travesty of a march that waggled his shoulders from side to side, he had a pit where the lower half of one side of his nose should have been— and he was smiling.
“HEIL RÖHM!” The gym shook with the greeting as half a hundred right arms went up.
“Heil Berlin Sports Club.” It was a grin now, roguish, and some of the boys laughed.
Then, as one man, they turned to look at the two policemen, and Schmidt knew he and Willi were as close to danger as they’d been on the Western Front. The boys had lacked a leader until this moment; now they had one. This little man carried a charge that crackled around the hall. The place was as electrified as if he’d turned on a switch. Schmidt could hear a boy next to him panting. Maenads, he thought. Bacchus here has only to give the word, and they’ll tear Willi and me apart.
Young Lieutenant Alvens was gabbling to the taller man, but it was Röhm who held up his hand to calm him and came forward. He clicked his heels. “And what do the Berlin police want with our little sports club? Have any of our boys been naughty, eh?” He was playing to the
gallery.
“And you are?”
“Captain Eric Röhm of the Sportsabteilung. Who are you?”
“Inspector Schmidt. This is Sergeant Ritte.” To Schmidt’s annoyance he heard Willi click his heels. “We are investigating the murder of a woman, Natalya Tchichagova, killed in Charlottenburg Park on Saturday last. In connection with that murder, I wish to interview a member of ”—hell, why should he pander to the pretense that this was a sports organization? it was a training ground for killers—“your storm troopers who was in Berlin at that time. Possibly he came from out of town.” He fetched out his notebook. “You will please give me the names relating to these initials and locations.” He read them out.
“The bastard’s been at my diary.” It was the taller man, pushing forward.
Röhm held him back. He took his cap off, revealing wavy black hair parted in the middle like a grocer’s. “We must help the police, Dietrich. We are a law-abiding organization.”
“Then you will supply me with the information I want,” Schmidt said.
“Certainly,” Röhm said. His pudgy hand took the notebook and he half turned so that his audience could hear him. “W.H. of Stuttgart— that would be Wilhelm Hagen, wouldn’t it, Dietrich? You know him better than I do. Reinhardt Gunther is the R.G. of Munich. A.V. of Frankfurt? That’s Albert Vali. And R.F. of Vienna is Rolf Freischütz.”
Willi was writing it down.
“There.” Röhm handed back the notebook. The youths were laughing openly. “Most respectable men, Inspector. Examples to us all.”
“I see.”
“Do you?” Röhm moved closer.
Schmidt looked back at the bright brown eyes that were gazing into his, perkily, like a robin’s. “The man I want is big,” he said. “A military man, and he was in Berlin for your organization’s conferences—cer-tainly one of them this weekend, again in July 1922, and, most probably with a Freikorps, in February 1920.”
He watched the intensity of Röhm’s stare dissolve for a second. You know him now, he thought. He said, “He slit the throat of a young woman three nights ago and tortured another woman to death before that, and I’m going to get him. I want you to believe it.”
“What were they?” Röhm said. “Whores?”
“No, they weren’t.”
Suddenly Röhm was so close to him that Schmidt could smell his breath, which had whisky on it, and the lavender-scented pomade on his hair. “You were a soldier in the war, of course?” As if to have been anything else was unsound.
“Yes.” He wished he weren’t standing so militarily stiff, but he had to keep the photo pinned tightly under his arm.
“And you?” Röhm asked of Willi.
Willi clicked his heels again. “Yes, sir. Machine Gun Company, Infantry Regiment Number 156. Sir.”
Röhm nodded and turned back to Schmidt, speaking as one veteran to another. “They betrayed us, didn’t they?”
“We lost.”
“We didn’t lose. They stabbed us in the back.” It was a shriek that sent a spray of spit onto Schmidt’s chin. “The Reds and the Jews and the pencil pushers at our rear—they crumbled, they gave in because they were women. Women!”
He stepped back. Schmidt wiped his chin.
Röhm went on more quietly, “You should not be investigating us, Inspector. You should be joining us.” His arm jerked out toward the watching youths. “See her
e the new warrior elite. Here are the ones who will give Germany back her pride, and if it takes brutality to do it, then they are ready. The masses need wholesome fear. They want it. They thirst for a leader that will frighten them into following him to glory. What are a couple of tarts to that?” He raised his arm, his voice crescendoing. “We are the real German revolution, and this time we will not be betrayed by noncombatants. We will march over them to the triumph of the Fatherland. Who are you to question the action of heroes?”
The gym erupted in ecstasy. A couple of boys hand-flipped joyfully over the vaulting horse. Fists punched into the air. Some voices screamed “Hitler!” others “Heil Röhm!” and a few “Get them!”
Willi nudged Schmidt. “Move.” They edged toward the door as the yelling began to synchronize: “Heil! Get them! Heil! Get them! Get them! Get them!”
One of the doors to the street had been left open. Young Alvens tried to stop them when they got to it, but Willi took him up by one arm and swung him away. They scrambled into the car and locked the doors, the windows darkening as bodies landed on top of it, hammering.
Grinding his gears, Willi drove blind for some yards until the two boys across the windshield saw the sense in dropping off it. Schmidt turned and glimpsed them rolling in the dust of the road. Others were still chasing.
“Don’t stop, Willi.”
“Fucking not going to,” Willi said, swinging the car around a bend.
Eventually he pulled to a stop, turned off the engine, wiped the palms of his hands down his coat, reached into his pocket, brought out a tin of cigarettes, and offered one to Schmidt. “They’re Manoli.”
“Luxury.” Schmidt took one and noticed that his hand was shaking.
“We’ll have to close that place down, boss. Have a few of those boys up in court. Teach ’em a bit of respect.”
Schmidt nodded vaguely. It wouldn’t make any difference. What had animated those young men was a disease; you couldn’t close down a disease. In any case, the only injury had been to his and Willi’s pride, and he’d learned all he could.