City of Shadows (17 page)

“There is,” Natalya said. “Saw him when I came in. Standing in Ull-stein’s doorway. Big man.”

Oh, God. Esther lifted the curtain. The snow was thick now, obliter
ating everything. “It’s the man who killed Olga. I’ve been trying to get hold of Theo all night, but there’s something wrong with the line. I’ve rung the police.”

“They coming?”

“I doubt it.”

“Don’t blame ’em. Did you tell ’em your six-week theory?”

“No.”

“Of course you didn’t,” Natalya said. She jerked her head toward the window. “He’s a reporter, bound to be. The press followed you, didn’t they?” She picked up Anna’s glass from the desk, went into the kitchen and filled it with the last of the vodka. She came back, grinning. “Got them interested, didn’t I?”

“Oh, the hell with it.” Esther was suddenly sick of other women and their troubles; she had enough of her own. Whoever was outside, the bastard could freeze. “I’m going to bed.”

The snow fell steadily all night, smothering the city like a soft white hand over its mouth.

Hunger woke Esther up, and she dressed to go out; sometimes on Sundays farmers brought produce from the countryside to sell in the streets. From the window she saw other shoppers with the same idea silently struggling through the snow. A perfect curve of white piled up against the bookseller’s doorway showed that no watcher had stood there for some time.

If there ever was one, she thought. Hysteria, that’s what it had been. Anna’s
and
hers. She was sorry now that she’d called the police; if they should turn up, she’d look like an even bigger fool than she’d sounded on the phone.

She was collared in the hallway by Frau Schinkel. “I won’t put up with this, Fräulein. Such a night I’ve had. Don’t answer the door. Peo
ple going in and out, letters delivered, like it was daytime. I need my sleep. My doctor insists on it.”

“What letters?”

“Letters, letters, pushed under the door. Late last night. It was on the mat. I’m not bringing it upstairs with my legs. And Fräulein Tchichagova banging the door as she goes out at midnight—it is un
bearable.”

“Natalya came in soon after half past ten, Frau Schinkel, quite a suitable hour.”

“Am I a liar? She went out again at midnight. Well, nearly it was mid
night. I looked at the time—half past eleven.”

Esther turned and ran upstairs.

Natalya’s room was empty. The man’s coat she’d worn the night be
fore was hanging from a hook by the flat’s front door. Anna’s coat was gone.

She woke Anna up. “Did Nasha tell you she was going out?” She had to pull the covers down and reassure the girl that nobody was outside before she got an answer.

“Maybe the Cheka get her.”

“Oh, stop that.”

Anna shrugged. “She has a man, maybe.”

That could be the answer; it was the most obvious one.

There was no point in ringing the Purple Parrot if it had just closed. Instead she went out foraging, but even the purchase of four large po
tatoes from a farmer’s stall in Cauerstrasse failed to lighten a worry that persisted all day.

She cleaned the flat, gave Anna her English lesson, and then was left with nothing to do but to start reading
War and Peace
for the fourth time.

Snow made a hypnotic, moving curtain outside, turning the room’s daylight a dingy yellow. She had to sit by the window to see to read and eventually became so cold she was forced to move.

At five o’clock she tried phoning the Hat to see if anyone there knew any of Natalya’s friends. No reply. At six o’clock she called again. She spoke to the hatcheck girl, Mariska, who gave her some telephone numbers. She phoned them all. Nobody had seen Natalya.

She tried Nick. He hadn’t seen her, didn’t want to. “I am completely finished with the blackmailing bitch,” he said.

“I’m worried about her, Nick. She was very strange.”

“You tell me?” He hung up.

She heard Frau Schinkel clearing snow in the backyard and went down to help her; together they set a little iron table in the center on which to put a wreath in remembrance of the young Schinkel who’d died of wounds on board the flagship
Seidlitz
during its sea battle with the British at Dogger Bank in 1915.

After that she shoveled snow off the pavement outside the front door. After that she did nothing. The tick of Frau Schinkel’s large round clock on the kitchen wall was like a cleaver chopping up the seconds— until it became the click of rifles being cocked.

Dear Christ, she thought, fighting memory, my time has stopped. Other people’s years are moving on without me. For the rest of my life, I will be trapped in a moment that has gone.

At ten o’clock she began putting on her coat.
“You don’t leave me again.” Anna began to breathe fast.
“I’ve got to find her. There’s something wrong.”
“You know where to look?”
“No.” She took off her coat.
“Dirty girl,” Anna said, grinning. “She has a man.”
“Maybe.” But there was something
.. . .
It persisted, a perpetual and

growing fear.

At three o’clock in the morning, she dialed the police. This time it was a different desk sergeant. He took down Natalya’s name and de
scription but was manifestly of Anna’s opinion.

Five hours later the phone rang. It was the police. They’d found Natalya.

“Makes a damn
change, straightforward murder,” Sergeant Willi Ritte said as they drove toward Charlottenburg that morning.

Inspector Schmidt agreed that it was. Their last three cases had been political killings, always tricky.

He told Willi to use the klaxon, more to announce a police presence than to clear other cars out of the way. Theirs was virtu
ally the only automobile on the road. No gasoline, no traffic. With tram fare into town costing anything up to ten thousand marks, people with jobs were choosing to walk to them. There was a guilty schadenfreude in being driven through those cold, la
boring streets, even if heat from the engine enhanced the smell of Willi’s feet, which hadn’t recovered from the rot they’d acquired in the war.

Early-morning faces looked tired already from the effort of getting to work through the snow, from the sheer, teeth-gritting awfulness of surviving coalless, inflation-hit days that went on and on, scything the young and the old as they passed.

Everybody thought that the economy had hit bottom in 1922. “Can’t get any worse,” they’d said.

But 1923 was proving them wrong; this city was suddenly full of gaps—the deserted corner of the street where, until last week, Schmidt always bought his
Berlin Tageblatt
from the elderly newspaper seller, the depleted numbers of children on their way to school.

Willi’s driving reflected his fury at it all. “Where’s the bloody farm
ers? That’s what I want to know. Where the hell are they?” At this time in the morning, the roads should have been filled with carts and trucks bringing food into the city.

Schmidt sighed at the forthcoming exchange. Willi knew where the farmers were; they were staying on their farms, refusing to sell their pro
duce to shops for worthless paper money or waiting until prices went even higher.

“The wife stood in line for four hours yesterday and got two eggs. And us with five kids. Know how much those eggs cost?”

“Yes.”

“Two thousand marks.”

“I know.”

“Each.”

No point in explaining that prices weren’t going up but the mark was plummeting down. Willi didn’t understand hyperinflation. Schmidt didn’t understand it himself. “We lost the war, Willi.”

“We were fucking stabbed in the back, that’s what we were.” Willi subscribed to the view that if it hadn’t been for “the enemy within”—that is, Communists and other revolutionaries—Germany would have won.

Schmidt had long decided Willi had been in another war altogether. “We lost the war, Sergeant,” he said. “We just lost it.” And the Ruhr, and all the German colonies, and the Rhine ports—everything that would make it possible to pay the reparations demanded by the victors. They were still demanding them, nevertheless. Who was it had said Germany was being squeezed until the pips squeaked? Damn right, whoever he was.

“Know who I blame, boss?”

“Yes.”

“The fucking kikes.”

He’d had to stop being angry with Willi at this or he’d have been angry with half the population, including his own wife. Willi was by no
means the worst offender; the fact that the middleweight boxer Finkelstein was a Jew didn’t stop Willi being his greatest fan and cheering him from the ringside. But in bewildering times people reverted to the simplicity of the Middle Ages. They needed someone to blame—and Jews, the old, old scapegoat, fitted the bill. They were different, they were here. Inflation? Fucking kikes. Bad harvest? Fucking kikes. It was easy.

He’d been lucky. He’d had Ikey Wolff in his regiment; a man like Ikey changed your perceptions. Wearily, he said, “It wasn’t the fucking kikes. We were on the wrong fucking side, Willi—like we are now, so shut up and look where you’re going.”

There’d been birdseed for his breakfast.

“What the hell’s this stuff?”

“It’s porridge,” Hannelore had said. “I made it out of birdseed. It was all the grocer had in his shop. It’s not too awful, is it?”

“It tastes like the birds ate it first.” Then he was sorry and ate it up; Hannelore had stood in line even for this, which wasn’t good for either her or the baby she was expecting. Her first pregnancy had ended in miscarriage.

The gaps in the soles of his shoes were going to let in snow the mo
ment he set foot in the Charlottenburg Gardens. He thanked God for his overcoat ...well, not God. He thanked Thompson, J., for that— the poor bloody British lieutenant he’d stripped it off when he found the man’s corpse lying in a shell hole at Passchendaele in 1917. A good coat, that. The maker’s name, Burberry, was sewn into the lining along with the name Thompson, J.

There were times when he felt closer to Thompson, J., than anybody else. It had been like that on the Western Front; only those fighting— German, French, or British—had known the atrocity that war was. Everyone else was a bunch of
tricoteuses
knitting around the fucking guillotine.

It was a relief to draw up outside the Charlottenburg with this straightforward murder to investigate instead of trying to make sense of it all.

In the distance the schloss was a domed confectionary of spun sugar. The white covering on the expanse of its lawns rose here and there in perfect simulation of some statue beneath. Local flatfeet were gathered
around something halfway up an avenue of trees where trampled snow

suggested they’d been clog dancing.

“Willi, tell those morons to stand still.”

Willi strode toward the uniforms, bellowing, “Freeze, you varmints.” Willi marched like a soldier but got his vocabulary from cowboy films.

And the plaintive, “We
are
freezing, Sergeant.” But the damage was done—footprints all over the damn place.

“Yes, sir.” Dinter’s round face was happy at the recognition. “Worked with you on that business in Wedding, sir.”

“I remember. That’s intelligent guessing, Dinter.” No need, in that case, to get exercised about the murderer’s footprints; there wouldn’t be any. They’d have been obliterated by the snow that had covered the body at the same time.

“Thank you, sir.” Dinter was emboldened. “And reckon we know who she is. Foreigner.” He consulted his notebook. “Terchichagova, something like that. Russian. Reported missing 0300 hours this morn
ing. Answers the description. Fair-haired. Twenty-two years.”

She lay in a sort of snow coffin in the avenue of beeches that led eventually to the schloss. Nothing else, just her and the snow and the trees.

“Whore killing, don’t you reckon, sir?”

Very neat, apart from the stain that had leaked out of her throat. Very quiet. The silence the dead imposed was reinforced by the park’s frozen stillness and the snow-muffled rattle of traffic in the distance.

Could be a prostitute. But her skirt was long—and it was a funny place to take a customer for hanky-panky in the depth of winter.

Summertime, now, there were copulating couples as thick as dande

lions here, but in this temperature a man’d get icicles on it.

And she was tidy. Murdered prostitutes weren’t usually tidy.

He bent down and lifted the ice-stiff skirt to peek up and under. He heard Dinter excusing the action to the others. “We have to do that, see. Find out if they’ve got their knickers on.”

She had. Cami-knickers—unstained and untorn.

She lay on her front, arms straight by her sides, nose buried in the snow beneath, suggesting she’d been dead before she hit the ground. The toes of her shoes were squeezed forward, leaving the soles and heels sticking up at right angles, indicating the same thing. Schmidt thought how anonymous she looked. A tight-fitting black cloche covered her hair. The coat with its cheap fur collar gave no clue to the shape of her body apart from the fact that it was slim. She might have been a shop-window dummy that somebody had abandoned in the snow.

Not rape, then. He wondered if she’d met her attacker face-to-face or whether the bastard had waited in the trees to cut the throat of any woman who passed by. Unlikely. Only an optimistic killer expected a victim to visit the gardens in this weather.

“Has she been moved?”

“She’s exact as we found her.”

He knelt down and laid his cheek against the snow to peer at her neck. A wide blue eye stared appallingly back at him. A strand of dyed fair hair had escaped from the cloche hat and lay across her cheek. The incision began deep on the left-hand side and petered out toward the right.

So the killer had cut her with the knife in his right hand while hold
ing her up with his left. His retaining arm would have been saturated with her blood, most of which now formed a congealed black mass down what Schmidt could see of her front. Stains in the snow they’d shoveled off her showed where blood had spurted farther.

Yes, he’d cut her throat and let her drop and gone away, both of them disappearing—he through the falling snow, she under it.

Twenty-two years old; she wasn’t going to get any older.

Schmidt got up. “What makes you think she’s a prostitute, Dinter?”

“It’s the area for them. And look at them fingernails.”

He’d seen them, little arcs of scarlet berries curled in the snow.

“And”—Dinter lowered his voice—“that underwear, sir. Not what respectable women wear.”

Undoubtedly pink satin cami-knicks, silk stockings, and suspenders with silk roses on them wouldn’t be what Frau Dinter wore. Old Ger
many didn’t approve of them, or painted fingernails. Some archbishop had condemned them and short skirts as the devil’s invitation to sin. Schmidt had once shocked Hannelore by buying her a pair of cami
knickers, though she’d subsequently loved them.

The woman could be a pro, except most of them saved time by not wearing knickers at all when they were working, but she could also be any one of the factory girls or secretaries now to be found in every cap
ital in Europe.

“Where’d she live?”

Dinter went back to his notebook. “Bismarck Allee.”

“Bismarck Allee?” Not a whore’s address.

He’d have liked the knife and a handbag but decided not to dig around anymore until the police surgeon had seen her.

“On his way, boss,” Willi said. They’d worked as a team too long not to know what the other was thinking.

A policeman came up from the gate. “Sir, there’s a woman. Reported a friend missing. Says we phoned and told her to come. Wants to see the body.”

“
Did
you tell her to come, Dinter?”

Aware he’d exceeded his authority, Dinter was flustered. “Seeing as we needed an identification quick as we could and—”

“And they’re only foreigners.” Strange, Schmidt thought. Dinter, not an unkind man, wouldn’t consider letting a Berlin girl look at a murdered body until it had been tidied up in a mortuary, but he was prepared to in
flict the sight on a non-German. “Go and tell her to wait, Willi.”

Dr. Pieck arrived, stepping high over the snow like a thin black heron. As always he was in top hat, tailcoat, and striped trousers, no overcoat, the opinion of his staff being that he was too bloodless to no
tice cold. A good forensics man.

“Morning, Herr Doctor. Don’t worry about footprints—nobody else has.”

“Good morning, Inspector.” Pieck put his bag down. “Now, then, young woman, what’s up with you?”

He always addressed his bodies like living patients, a habit Schmidt found unnerving. Schmidt told him what he could and left him to it; he never liked watching the insertion of the thermometer, that ultimate in
dignity. He went down to the gate.

Willi met him, identity papers in hand, rolling his eyes. “You know this one, boss. Remember that Russian kike with the scar last year? At the Green Hat? The one that talked like she was the kaiser’s missus? Still does.”

He’d never forgotten her.

“Bit of a coincidence, ain’t it, boss? And you like coincidences.”

He did; in crime they were usually not coincidences at all.

Schmidt took the papers and walked over to where a figure dressed much like the one lying in the snow stood by the gate. She’d been lodged in his memory as extraordinary, but even as he wondered if she still would be, his policeman’s eye marked the fact that she wore the same sort of hat, the same dark, long coat as the dead woman; another window dummy, only this time upright. Very upright.

She had her hands in her pockets, looking toward the schloss and away from the cluster of activity around the thing among the trees.

She was in profile as he approached her noiselessly across the snow, the late-dawn sun gilding the left side of her face like an Egyptian queen’s, and once again he thought, She’s beautiful, and then she heard him approach and turned.

“We’ve met before, Fräulein.”

She could have arranged her hat or her hair to hide some of the mess that was the other side of her face, but she hadn’t. She didn’t even care if you pitied her; you could if you liked, but why bother? What other people thought about her didn’t interest Fräulein Solomonova; what concerned her was the body in the avenue. Very blue, very intelligent, and very driven eyes stared into his. She didn’t look Jewish, but what was Jewish? Ikey Wolff had been redheaded with freckles.

There were no preliminaries. “I must know,” she said.

“Describe your friend, please.”

“My age, about as tall as me, blond, pretty.”

“Did she have a handbag with her?”

“I don’t . . . yes, it’s gone from her room.”

Schmidt looked down at the papers in his hand. Solomonova would be twenty-two in June; she looked older. “It seems likely,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

He saw her hands grip in her pockets. “I heard somebody say it was murder.”

“I’m afraid so.”

He had to catch her arm as whatever had been holding her up went out of her. He said, “We’ll do the rest of this in the car.”

He guided her through the gates and into the passenger seat of the Audi. Before he got in with her, he told Willi, “When the doctor’s fin
ished, start looking for the weapon. And the handbag.”

“Okay, boss.”

“And see if somebody can produce a hot drink for the Fräulein.” He turned on the engine so that she could be warm.

Reaching for his tin of Manoli, he wondered if he should offer her one. These were his last; his tobacconist had run out. After this he’d be puffing leaves. It had been the Yuletide joke:
Where’s the Christmas tree, Father? Sorry, my dears, I smoked it.

“Cigarette?”

She shook her head, good girl.

He lit up, giving her time, and wound down his window a crack to let the smoke out. “Now, then, Fräulein, who is she?” As he sat next to her, the Audi’s right-hand drive presented him with the scarred side of her face.

“Natalya Tchichagova, Russian. We share an apartment—29c Bis
marck Allee.”

Name and number, Schmidt thought. As lucid as she’d been last time. This woman’s been interrogated before; a Russian Jew would be used to it.

“Single?”

“Yes.” Her voice was deep and her German excellent, but the slight Russian accent that was usually dramatic—in his experience most Russians could make “pass the salt” sound soulful—issued from Fräulein Solomonova’s mouth with the bleakness of the steppes.

“When did she go missing?”

The scar tightened as she tried to concentrate. “Two nights ago. She went out on Saturday night. She went out . . . eleven-thirtyish, I think. Our landlady heard her. And she didn’t come home.”

“And that was unusual? Not to come home?”
“Yes.” Still concentrating, she added, “She’s never done it before.”
“But you didn’t report it until the early hours of this morning, Mon

day.” “No.” She put the heel of her hand against her forehead and rubbed

it. “One always hopes there’s an explanation, a boyfriend or something.” “And was there one? A boyfriend?” “Not to my knowledge.” “So why didn’t you contact the police right away when she failed to

return the first night?” “I thought she’d come back. I called everybody I could think of—” “You have a phone in the apartment?” “Yes.” “Where did Fräulein Tchichagova work?” “She used to be an exotic dancer.” Read “stripper,” he thought. “Where?” “At the Purple Parrot.” The answers were coming mechanically now;

she was staring into a void.

He loved inconsistencies—they always led somewhere. A stripper living in bourgeois-solid Bismarck Allee? And with a telephone? He’d bet there weren’t many phones installed even in that area. And for the first time, Solomonova had referred to the dead woman in the past. She
used to be
an exotic dancer but wasn’t when she died.

“And you, Fräulein? Do you still work for Potrovskov?”
“I am still Prince Nikolai’s secretary.”
“I thought you lived in Moabit.” Hell, he thought, I remember every

thing about her. “Prince Nikolai rents the flat for us.” So that’s how she could afford Bismarck Allee. Schmidt had

checked with the Vice boys after his last encounter with Prince bloody Nikolai.
A crook, with a bigger harem than a fucking sultan,
they’d said. So Solomonova was his moll after all; probably the dead

woman, too.

“Anybody else live there?”

“Another friend, Anna Anderson.”

“Scandinavian?”

Pause. “Russian.”

It
was
a bloody harem. He was disappointed; he’d thought better of this one. She didn’t stack up as a loose woman; the scar for one thing, too respectably dressed for another, too well spoken, and Willi was right: shocked, grieving, she still had the self-possession of the upper class. On the other hand, she was wary of him—which, if she were in a racket with that shyster, she would be.

Time to use the whip. “Who killed your friend, Fräulein?”

“I don’t know,” Esther said, and heard the lie resonate in her head.

In all the shock and the grief, terror had been her first reaction—terror for Anna. Hide her, he’s found us. Before anything else, hide her. He’s out there.

She’d phoned Nick at home, waking him up. He’d had trouble grasp
ing it.
“Natalya?”

“Yes.”

“You been drinking, Esther?”

“I’ve got to go and identify her. I’m going to tell them everything, but first you’ve got to get Anna away. Take her abroad, anywhere. He was here, the man who’s been watching her. He was here on Saturday night. He killed Natalya.”

“Why? You sure it was him?”

“Yes.”

“I completely don’t know anything about this.”

“I know you don’t.”