City of Shadows (25 page)

“She wasn’t a prostitute, sir.” And what if she had been? Did that make her expendable?

“Nevertheless . . .” Ringer consulted his paper. “I see you’ve asked for house-to-house inquiries. I’ve told you before, in these hard times—”

Schmidt interrupted. “She wasn’t the intended victim, sir. And there’s Russian royalty involved.” He hadn’t made the rank of inspector by neglecting the art of manipulating his superior’s prejudices.

“Really?”

“Yes, sir.” He got Yusupov’s name and title into the story quickly, moved on to Count Chodsko and Prince Nick, weaving in the two mysterious Russian women of 29c Bismarck Allee on the way. He needed men for those house-to-house inquiries—all the alibis re
quired checking.

After a while he wondered if he could sit down. He dragged up a chair, still talking, and experienced a moment of triumph when Ringer didn’t object. I’m Scheherazade enchanting the fucking sultan, he thought.

“Fascinating, fascinating,” the sultan said when Scheherazade paused.

“Yes, sir. You see, I know what they’re up to, Prince Nick and Fräulein Anderson.”

“You do?”

“Yes, sir. It’s fraud. Any moment now she’ll be presented to the world as the long-lost daughter of the czar.”

Ringer surprised him. “Which one, Inspector? There were four grand duchesses: Olga, Tatiana, Marie, and Anastasia.”

So Ringer’s bedside reading wasn’t only police statistics; it included popular magazines; there was hardly one that hadn’t displayed the pic
ture of the four young girls in white dresses.

“Anastasia, sir. There’s money to be made. Yusupov thinks there’s a cache in England, and presumably she’d be entitled to it—if she can convince everybody she’s the czar’s surviving child.”

“You’re sure of this, Inspector?”

“Pretty sure, sir.” He started building the bricks of his argument: (a) Prince Nick’s shady reputation.

(b)

Solomonova’s reluctance to cooperate—“She’s in on it, I’m afraid, one of Prince Nick’s women. He pays her rent.”

(c)

The note itself:
“I can authenticate you.”
“It was for Anderson— the killer knew enough to think that would tempt Anderson into meet
ing him, but Tchichagova picked it up and acted on it. She was an ambitious young woman, and I think she saw her way to film stardom.”

(d)
Anderson’s fear that she would be assassinated. “She talks about

the Cheka wanting to get rid of her.” “The Cheka, eh? Nasty.” “Yes, sir.”

(e)
Czarskoe Selo. “It was the czar’s favorite palace, sir.” He’d asked Chodsko about it. “Natalya’s parents were servants there, familiar with royal procedure. Ideal for grooming somebody for the role of a grand duchess.”

(f
) Yusupov’s account of the boy claiming to be the czarevitch. “You see, sir, the White Russians were advancing on Ekaterinburg at the time the Romanovs were killed. Ekaterinburg was the place—” “Where the Reds shot the czar and his family. I know that, Inspector. Frau Ringer was very upset by it.”

Good God, there was a Frau Ringer? He’d never thought of Ringer as having a wife, especially one with susceptibilities. “Yes, well. A White Russian force was advancing on the place. Which was why the family was killed, to stop them from being rescued. And there’s a strong rumor that one of the Romanovs got away.”

He looked up from his notebook. “In my view, because of that belief, we’re going to see a spate of impostors saying they escaped the slaugh
ter and claiming to be the czarevitch or a grand duchess or some damn thing. There’s already been one. Anna Anderson will be another. Prince Nick’s got her under his thumb. She’s not very stable.”

“She wouldn’t be, would she?”

Schmidt sat up. “Beg your pardon, sir?”

“After all she’s been through, if she
is
the grand duchess,” Ringer

said. He waggled a reproving finger. “We can’t rule it out, Inspector.” Schmidt said, “I don’t think she can be, sir.”
Nobody got out of that cellar.

The finger wagged on. “They haven’t found the bodies. One at least might have survived—with the aid of a servant, perhaps, and...and helpful people sympathetic to the czar who were living nearby.”

Jesus, he wanted it to be true.

Then and only then did Schmidt fully believe in the structure he’d made from his bricks. Its cement had consisted of a good deal of intu
ition; he’d believed it but had reckoned on having trouble persuading Ringer. Now he knew his case was solid, not because Ringer had fol
lowed his reasoning but because Ringer was prepared to buy what Potrovskov would be selling.

His respect for the crook went up. Potrovskov had seen what he hadn’t—that it would be easy. It was the perfect confidence trick: peo
ple
wanted
to believe it. The age of fairy tales still spun its magic in the hearts of men, even bureaucratic old farts like the one opposite him. This fairy tale had ogres.
Red
ogres. A princess escaping from them through Siberian wastes, disappearing into the wild woods, popping up again to claim her inheritance. Hans Christian Andersen was nowhere. Schmidt wondered if, as in all good fairy tales, any of the grand duchesses had possessed a birthmark to identify her.

Potrovskov’ll tattoo one on, he thought.

He heard Ringer say, “It seems we must look deeper into Romanov history for our killer. Do you want any assistance from the Counteres
pionage Section?”

“What for?”

“Well, if it
is
the Bolsheviks who are on her trail . . .”

He does, Schmidt thought, he loves it. Communist assassins are the icing on his bloody cake. He said, “We’ll see how it goes, sir, shall we?”

“Very well, Inspector.” Ringer went on, “You may have what men I can spare. And keep me informed—this promises to be interesting.”

Dazed, Schmidt had reached the door before he remembered to turn around and salute. He’d been expecting a battle; he hadn’t even had to argue.

But if Ringer thought he was going to waste time buggering about with cloak-and-dagger crap and inquiries into Russian royalty, Ringer had another think coming.
“Nobody got out of that cellar.”
Yusupov had
said it, and Schmidt believed him; butchers weren’t in the business of allowing lambs to escape the shambles.

Anna Anderson was an impostor. Maybe—
maybe
—she was being tar
geted because she was an impostor, but it was much more likely that the killer had emerged out of the apparent no-man’s-land that was her past.

But we don’t know it,
Potrovskov had said.

About time they did.

Nick popped into
Bismarck Allee after he’d settled Anna with the von Kleists to tell Esther that it had gone well and to see if she wanted to go to bed with him.

“Not tonight, Nick.” She was too tired to tell him that she would be neither working for him nor sleeping with him again.
Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.
And this, if any, had been an evil day.

“Okay.” He never pressed her; his sea was full of amenable ladyfish.

She warned him again: “I’m telling the police everything, Nick.”

“Sure, sure. I’ve got nothing to hide.” He was restive. “You think it was Cheka did in Natalya?”

“There is no Cheka,” she said wearily. “You know that.”

“I don’t,” he said. “I completely believe in Her Imperial Highness. Completely.”

“But what?” There was something bothering him; she knew him well.

“I need insurance. Maybe we ought to find out a bit more about her.”

Schmidt went up
the stairs leading to his apartment with much use of the handrail, not because he was weary, though he was, but because Hannelore insisted on polishing the wood of each step until it shone like ice—and was as slippery. He’d tried pointing out the hazard to his and her neck and that of every visitor, but she held to the view that un
polished stairs were un-German and disgraced her.

“Sorry I’m late.” He always said it, though she never complained.

“Hard day?”

“Fairly.”

As always, the table was prepared for dinner. His slippers awaited him at the door. Artistically crumpled red paper in the fireplace did its best to simulate the flames they could no longer afford. She’d found ivy from somewhere, and it trailed with brave artistry along the mantel shelf that used to hold her pieces of Dresden.

He kissed her; invariably a pleasure, but her freshness made him re
alize that he smelled of sweat and cigarettes—and something meaty. Reminded, he brought a nasty-looking napkin out of his pocket. “Some hare stew,
madame,
and a dumpling. For
madame’s
dinner.”

She took it but stood still, smiling expectantly at him.

He sniffed. “Pork?” he said.
“Pork?”

“And potatoes,” she said.

“Good God, woman, have you been sleeping with the butcher?”

She’d stopped being appalled at jokes like that. “I didn’t have to. A consignment came in just as I reached the head of the line.”

“How long did you have to wait?”

“It doesn’t matter,” she told him. “Go and wash, and I’ll serve up.”

She was an excellent cook and had stretched the small piece of pork as far as it could go; it was also one of her tenets that the man should have the lion’s share, so he had to make sure she gave herself a decent portion. “You’re eating for two, woman.”

“I know. Siegfried, isn’t it wonderful?” To be childless was another state she regarded as un-German, a conviction she shared with, and was supported in, by almost the whole nation. Even left-wing public-health reformers were urging good German couples to start families. Magazines and newspapers were full of advice on eugenics counseling, how to raise children, on breast-feeding, potty training, preventive medicine, and the general production of improved human beings.

To Schmidt, in the first two years of their marriage during which Han
nelore had not conceived, this propaganda had been a vague irritant; to Hannelore it was a dagger in the heart. It had been gall and wormwood for her to watch the shiftless Lammers family across the road produce more and more babies on welfare.

When she’d become pregnant, she’d said, “Now I am a proper woman.”

“You were always proper woman enough for me,” he’d said, but she wouldn’t have it. The consequent miscarriage had nearly sunk her. This
time she hadn’t told anyone she was pregnant again until the three-month point had well gone by.

It had caused Schmidt to wonder at the burden this imposed on all the leftover women whose prospects of marriage and children had died on the battlefields. If you weren’t a virtuous hausfrau with a Teutonic pedigree having babies on a production-line basis, you weren’t doing your bit for the nation.

Tonight he found himself speculating on how it also isolated already-isolated women like the Jewish Solomonova who didn’t qualify under any of those categories.

Hannelore was full of news. Frau Busse in the ground-floor apart
ment had offered the youngest Busse’s baby clothes and might barter its carriage for something—they could keep it in the entrance hall. She had already unraveled a primrose-colored jersey of her own and was knitting a baby jacket from it.

“Siegfried, I am considering selling my hair. What do you think?” She had wonderful hair, ash blond and wavy; she kept it long, plaited around her head.

“How do you feel about it?”

But it was no good trying to get her to make her own decisions; she had to have his approval—he liked her hair spread about them both when they were naked in bed—so they spent time analyzing her mo
tive. Fashion? Or what a wigmaker would pay for it? She wouldn’t say, so eventually he took the initiative and told her to keep it, which pleased her.

He’d known he wanted to marry her the moment he saw her in 1916, a nervous, adolescent, honey-colored confection in Bavarian national dress sitting with her mother at a dance put on for soldiers, like him and Ikey Wolff, who were recovering in a Munich convalescent home after the Somme. He and Ikey were still trying to get used to their sur
vival from the 142 days that had claimed 650,000 German soldiers. Hannelore had appeared as a seraphim to one rising from a muddy grave. He’d said to Ikey, “That, my son, is going to be my bit of home comfort.”

He’d pursued her with ferocity for three years, against her parents’ hopes for her—they were small-time winegrowers and wanted her to
marry the local vintner’s son, not a damn Prussian without a penny to his name—holding her image in his head while up to his thighs in filth, writing her letters under bombardment, thinking of her even when he was with other women, using everything he knew to outbid his rival.

After the war he’d brought her back to a Berlin so changed even he’d barely recognized it, to find that the greatest change of all had taken place in its women—a new breed accustomed to working, managing, making decisions, who’d cast off corsets and hampering skirts along with deference, who had opinions and the vote, who smoked and swore and generally kicked over the traces of an older generation that had ex
pected its daughters to remain untouched by the war it had inflicted on them.