He rolled down his window to let the smoke out. They were high up, on the edge of Viktoria Park. Down below he could see the network of railways leading to Anhalter, Potsdam, and Görlitzer stations.
It was quiet up here, and he heard a snatch of birdsong. He remembered that Mendelssohn was buried somewhere in this area of Kreuzberg.
Willi broke the silence. “Well, we got the names of some suspects, that’s one thing.”
“No we didn’t. The surnames he gave me were mythological—gods and such.”
“Was that it? I thought he gave in easy.”
“When we get back, send some uniforms to bring in Röhm and Schwerte for questioning—at gunpoint if necessary.” Wouldn’t make any difference either, he thought; Röhm wasn’t going to give anything away. But the man knew who the killer was; Schmidt had seen him know.
And he knows I’m going to find out if I have to sweat every fucking Brownshirt in Germany.
“Okay, boss,” Willi said, and added, “Pity, really.”
“What is?”
“Them kids. One of them was my neighbor’s boy. Knew him right off. Bit of a sissy, I always thought, and look at him now. They teach ’em to be manly in that outfit, that’s one thing.”
Schmidt patted his sergeant kindly on his shoulder. “Reckoned they were manly, did you, Willi?”
“Didn’t you?”
“You were better off with Yusupov.” He flicked his cigarette butt out the window. “Drive on, my son.”
BERLIN POSSESSED ONE network of information that was unavailable to both Inspector Schmidt and Prince Nick—its Jews.
Esther, leaving Bismarck Allee, turned north toward Moabit and walked through increasingly depressed and darkening streets until she reached a small wooden house next to a synagogue. All things considered, she would have preferred not to be out at night, but if she could help to find Natalya’s killer, she was damn well going to, and time was pressing.
Rabbi Smoleskin chided her for infrequent attendance at the synagogue. “We haven’t seen you in a while, Esther.”
“There’s been trouble, Rabbi.”
“Troubles are what Jews are good at—troubles and chopped liver.”
She was ushered into a passage where the only light came from the tallow taper in the rabbi’s hand. The house smelled of chicken soup. In the thousand miles she and Rosa and the children had traveled from Siberia, passed along like parcels from settlement to Jewish settlement, sometimes in houses, often in huts, that smell had been the one constant, as if they had followed its trail by sniffing, like dogs. However poor their hosts, a hen had been killed in their honor because hospitality demanded it.
From the back of the house came voices and the clatter of crockery, but she was not paying a social call, and the rabbi took her into the cramped, cold room that served as his study, which was where troubles were dealt with. Books were what it consisted of, mainly; when her host had set his taper in the grip of a holder, its small, clear light showed them piled like bricks around the flaking plaster of the walls, as if holding up the room.
That had been another constant of her and Rosa’s journey, Esther thought—always a book somewhere, even if the roof had holes in it big enough to see the stars, always a book.
When she’d told him everything, Rabbi Smoleskin pulled at his beard. “That was a sin you connived at, Esther. And seems two poor women died for it.”
“And another girl is in danger. Help me put it right, Rabbi. It’s a big hospital, the Elizabeth. There must be a Jew in it somewhere.”
Knowing her demographic statistics, she had expected Jews in Germany to be few and far between—they were, after all, less than 1 percent of its population—and she had found it extraordinary when she’d finally arrived in Berlin to find that most of its citizens considered themselves swamped by them, an effect created by the Jews’ visibility. They dominated large sections of business, the arts, the professions, owned many of the big department stores—out of all proportion to their numbers. Despite big class differences, despite quarrels between Orthodox and non-Orthodox, the Berlin synagogues were largely in touch, passing information across the great sprawl of the city. Moabit, which poor Jews left when they could, sent out its children, sometimes across the world, more often to better jobs in Berlin itself, and it knew where they were.
Frau Smoleskin was fetched in as a consultant. Hugging Esther, she asked, “How’s Rosa?” Nobody forgot Rosa. She’d stayed in Moabit less than three months after the trek, her energy still unexhausted despite piloting her children, some of her neighbors, and a wounded, shell-shocked Esther through snow and summer, checkpoints, forest, and warring armies—to become a legend.
After the destruction of her village by the Cossacks, Rosa had seen that a Russia engulfed in civil war since the going of the czar was no place for her children. It never really had been; one gifted son had already left it and was studying in England. When the survivors had crept back out of the forest to see the dead and the ruined houses, Rosa had said, “We go.” And they went. Rabbi Smoleskin had pronounced her eshet hayil, “a woman of valor.” Which, in Esther’s view, wasn’t the half of it.
“She’s left England now,” she said. “I got a letter the other day. They’ve all gone to America. She’s setting up a delicatessen business in the Bronx.”
“Let us hope President Harding is prepared,” the rabbi said, and turned to his wife. “Miriam, do we have somebody in the Elizabeth Hospital?”
Like a diplomatic posting, Esther thought.
But yes, there was. “Didn’t the Schechter girl get a job in the al-moner’s office? Bright girl, that one.” Yes, Elizabeth Schechter would help if she could. “But maybe they don’t know she’s a Jew among all those Catholics, so be tactful, Esther.”
“Tactful,” she said. “Bend with the wind, let well enough alone, consider the consequences, say ‘sir,’ don’t make waves—when’s it going to stop?”
“When Elizabeth Schechter don’t lose her job for being a Jew,” the rabbi told her sharply. “What’s set you off, girl? Better tell Joachim to see her home, Miriam. In this mood she’ll be attacking the Brownshirts.”
But Esther refused to be accompanied. The Smoleskin boy, an adolescent with earlocks and the fuzz of a beard on his chin, was in greater danger from right-wing gangs than she was.
“I don’t know what’s happening,” Miriam said on the doorstep, tucking the scarf more tightly around Esther’s face. “This used to be a good city.”
CONDUCTING INQUIRIES AROUND Prince Nick’s club took time and was a frustrating business; Nick was reluctant to give a list of his membership to the police. “My members, they’re big names, and they come here for relaxation.” When threatened with arrest for hampering a murder investigation, he gave in. He was right about the names— they were very big: ministers of the Reich, half the German aristocracy, industrialists, theater people, film stars. Willi went through them with Nick’s manager to pinpoint those of them who were also big in size, but, like the rest of the membership, these were people who traveled, often internationally, and not one of them was in Berlin on all the dates Schmidt was interested in. Often, when they attended the club, they brought guests, and as the manager pointed out, “Who can remember guests?” Certainly not the staff which, to a man and woman, swore they had not given any information to a big, military-looking man.
At the Pink Parasol, there was even more reluctance—the all-male membership wasn’t listed under names at all, only numbers—but Willi, by this time losing his temper, had crashed open its door to find “a soirée” in progress and arrested every man in the place, taking a van-load of staff and very frightened big names, some of them in pretty dresses, to Alexanderplatz to be questioned.
After a useless bout of interviewing, Schmidt let them go without charge. As one of the more open interviewees told him, “Do I talk to big men? Darling, of course I do, and I never, never ask their names.”
Damn it, he’d have to resort to tr
acking the killer along the befogged route of Anna Anderson’s past.
At the Elizabeth Hospital, where she’d been taken after her immersion in the canal, he also had to throw his Polizei weight around, first to see the superintendent, who, like the hospital itself, appeared to be busy to the point of madness, then to persuade the man (a) to find Anna’s medical notes and (b) to reveal what they contained.
“Our patients’ histories are confidential, Inspector.”
“Honorable, I’m sure, sir.” Actually, it was; nobody could have been more indigent than the Anna Anderson dragged out of the Landwehr Canal, yet her privacy was being safeguarded like that of a paying patient. Schmidt shut the door that the superintendent had left open to a bawling corridor lined with patients needing attention while their relatives shouted for it. Was all Berlin sick? “But this is a case of murder.”
“Been murdered, has she?”
“We’re concerned that she might be.”
The superintendent wasn’t curious; if it didn’t happen in his hospital, he didn’t have to cope with it. “Wouldn’t give her name, you say?”
“I understand you admitted her as Frau Unbekkant.” Nice, he thought, that they’d given her the dignity of a married woman’s title. Very German.
“Unbekkant, Unbekkant. Here we are. February 1920. What do you want to know?”
Schmidt was at a loss. “Whatever you can tell me.”
The superintendent tsked with impatience. He ran his eyes over the report. “Admitted as suffering from shock and exhaustion. Weight 110 pounds. Lacerations to the upper body, not serious. Assigned to a ‘quiet’ ward. Refused to speak. Diagnosed as suffering from melancholia. Transferred to Dalldorf six weeks later.” He looked up. “That’s it. And now if I may be allowed to get on . . .”
Schmidt pondered while the man puffed and shifted. On the off chance, he said, “ ‘Frau’ Unbekkant. Was she married, do you know?”
“Oh, that was because she’d had a child.” Tsking again, the superintendent went back to the notes. “Examination revealed she’d given birth at some time in the past.”
“But ...where’s the baby? Did it turn up? Did she say anything about it?”
The superintendent closed the file. “Apparently not. And now . . .” He hustled Schmidt out of the room and disappeared into the corri-dor’s hell.
Schmidt made his way outside to the hospital steps and lit a black-market cigarette. A child. That haunted little thing in Bismarck Allee had been a mother.
Once it would have been merely another factor in the case; today his own forthcoming parenthood made it infinitely pitiable. There was no child now. It had died or been taken away at some time in that unknown past. God Almighty, it could have gone into the canal with her, and Sergeant Hallman hadn’t seen it. A jump of despair. A baby altered everything. If Anna was Polish, she was Roman Catholic; ergo, presuming her to be unmarried, she was a single mother and a sinner. She could have been hounded into the Landwehr by precepts that belonged in the Dark Ages. Schmidt, a shaky Lutheran, had no time for popery.
Or she could have been pushed into it by the child’s father, a married man who wanted rid of her. Or anything.
He was, he realized, disappointed. The case had changed from black mystery to domestic tragedy—no less dark, but mundane in the wearying frequency with which it occurred. The killer whose reflection in Anna’s terrified eyes had assumed ogreish proportions had dwindled into a figure just as lethal but a good deal more banal.
Schmidt threw the remains of his cigarette onto the step and put it out with a vicious twist of his foot. Then, like a good German, he bent down, picked it up, and looked around for a rubbish can.
He didn’t see a rubbish can, but he saw a woman entering the gates. There were plenty of people about, but this one, dowdy as she was, he saw ringed, as if a pen had outlined her against the air.
He went toward her, put a hand under her elbow, and walked her back toward the gates. “What are you doing here, Fräulein?”
She’s going to say she’s ill, or visiting a patient, he thought. And legally I can’t stop her, except that I’m damn well going to.
What she did say—and they were out of the gates by then—was, “I should have known you’d come here.”
“You should,” he said, and kept her walking, “leave it to the police; that’s what we’re for. I presume you came to do a bit of detection. Well, don’t.” He was angry. “What the hell did you think you were going to find out?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “What did you?”
They were nearing the Tiergarten, and he steered her toward it. There was a children’s play area with swings and a bench. They sat down.
He said, “Did you know she’d had a baby?”
“Anna?”
“So they say. They examined her. At some point in the past, apparently. They don’t know what happened to it.”
“Anna,” she said. “My poor Anna.”
“It changes things.”
Her head went up. “Why?”
“It means it’s probably a domestic case.”
She left the bench and walked to the swing opposite so that she could sit on it and look at him. The way she’d wrapped her scarves around it made her face armorial, like a shield battered on one side.
“I’m hearing you right, am I?” she said. “Natalya, Olga—their murders were domestic?”
She was an uncomfortable woman. He said, “Natalya was still murdered by mistake, but the killer probably has domestic reasons to kill Fräulein Anderson. He may be the father, he may have a position to uphold, and she could ruin it. For God’s sake, I’m not saying that it excuses anything. I’m merely stating a case that would make it more understandable.”
“Really?” He’s just an ordinary male after all, Esther thought. Anna’s related to the killer, so it’s all right for him to murder her. “What else have you found out?”
She had no right to ask, and he had no compulsion to tell her, but there was a curious suspension to the moment; they might have been enclosed in a bubble that caused the surrounding snow and people and leafless trees to become indistinct.
“The killer’s probably a member of the SA,” he said, “one of Röhm’s lot.”
She dug the toes of her boots into the ground and swung slightly while she thought about it. “A Jew beater.”
“An everybody-they-don’t-like beater,” he said.
“And he’s concerned about his reputation?”
God, she was an uncomfortable woman. “He might be. For all I know, women ask him so many questions by day he goes around stabbing ’em by night.” He added, “There’s a lot to be said for it.”
She had a snuffling laugh, like a faulty soda siphon.
He said, “You can’t make rules for killers. As somebody once said, ‘Everyone is dragged on by his own pleasures.’ ”
“Virgil,” she said. “Virgil said it.”
“He did.” Schmidt got up, because if he didn’t go now, he never would. “He also said, ‘Latet anguis in herba,’ and I don’t want it sinking its fangs into you, too, so leave the detecting to me, all right?”
She looked up at him. “It isn’t domestic,” she said. “It isn’t. It’s something else.”
She scared him. He grabbed her by the elbow and hauled her to her feet. “Home,” he said. “And stay there. Promise me.”
“I can look after myself.”
Deliberately, he looked at her cheek. “You’ve done a fine job of it so far. Promise me.”
She pulled away. “Catch him,” she said. And strode off.
He stood looking after her, wondering what gave her the right to dress in old clothes and still walk as if she owned the damn park. She thought she was steel; the heavier the beating, the stronger it became. In fact, he thought, you’re as vulnerable as hell, and I don’t know what to do about it.
ESTHER CIRCLED THE park, mourning for Anna and the lost baby. I’d have taken it, she thought. I’d have b
rought it up for you and been grateful to do it. Motherhood—the one estate I crave and won’t ever have.
But at least she’d been spared the agony of losing a child, which Anna had not. No wonder she went mad, Esther thought. No wonder she went into that canal.
She tried inhabiting the cold space of Anna’s past life and wondered at the strength it must have taken to emerge from it as intact as she had. Tough as old boots, Nick said, his voice rasping like the rooks’ that were wheeling around the park’s elms—and about as sympathetic. Natalya had thought the same.
Unfair, Esther protested, she’s had too much to bear. But Nick’s words had come unbidden and couldn’t be unsaid. And they were true. Anna hadn’t grieved for her lost baby; she’d grieved only for Anna.
Perhaps it’s the same, Esther thought. How do we, the childless, know what is necessary to survive this worst thing?
She heard someone shouting at her and looked around to see a woman gesturing at a sign that said KEEP OFF THE GRASS. The lawn she’d been treading on was still covered in snow, but Germans liked their
signs obeyed. She wandered back to the path, past other signs: KEEP DOGS ON LEASH. DO NOT PICK THE FLOWERS. TAKE YOUR RUBBISH HOME.
And yet ...she began reliving life with Anna, trying to remember one word, one expression that had dwelled on the pain of a lost baby, a tear, an aching glance at children playing in the street. When Frau Schinkel’s grandchildren visited, Anna had merely complained of the noise they made on the stairs—and not as someone who couldn’t bear a reminder of young voices at play.
You don’t like children, Esther thought. You like dogs.
That didn’t mean Anna hadn’t had a child, but it did suggest that she’d been prepared to abort it or have it adopted.
I’m being unkind, Esther told herself. But Anna-as-she-was persisted in asserting herself against the sentimental pictures from one of the mothers-for-Germany magazines.
It changes things, Schmidt had said.