City of Shadows (7 page)

Names buzzed past Schmidt’s ears like warning shots as he peered into the kitchen and came out again. He ignored them. Something had happened in this club, and he was going to find out what it was even if Archangel bloody Gabriel was a regular.

He toured the dance floor. He didn’t think much of the wall paintings—he wasn’t one for modern art—but he liked the bears.

From the entrance hall, Willi shouted, “Over here, Inspector!”

He was pointing toward the stairs, where one of the newel posts had hidden the woman standing silently against it.

Schmidt’s first sight of Esther Solomonova was almost immediately blocked by Potrovskov, who rushed over to her.

There was an exchange of Russian.

“What the hell happened? Can you hear me, Esther? What happened?”

“A man. He had a knife. He would have killed me—oh, Jesus, he was going to kill me. Theo ...is Theo all right?”

“Where’s Anna now? Quick, these bastards are police.”

“In your office. Asleep. I locked her in.”

“She’s not here. You hear me, Esther? You never heard of her.”

“I’d prefer it if you both spoke German, sir,” Schmidt said. “
Does
she speak German?”

“My secretary, Esther Solomonova. It was a break-in. The man got away with completely nothing.”

“Perhaps she could tell me herself, sir.”

Reluctantly, Potrovskov allowed himself to be led away by Willi. The woman’s eyes followed him.

God, she’s lovely, Schmidt thought.

Then she turned toward him, and he saw the other side of her face. The worst thing about it was that she didn’t mind if he flinched—which he didn’t; he’d seen worse in the war.

The scar ran from the outside of her left eyebrow across the cheek almost to the corner of her mouth. No neat Heidelburg dueling scar this; somebody’d taken an ax or a bayonet to her, and somebody else had cobbled the wound together and done it badly. In between the gathers made by rough sutures, the flesh had been allowed to gape. Stretched pale patches showed where the skin had struggled to grow back.

She demonstrated none of the wary expectancy that most disfigured people did when meeting someone for the first time. But she was in shock; he recognized it. Time would be moving erratically for her, some things happening fast, others extending beyond normal. She’d be very cold without realizing it. Probably incoherent.

“Frau Solomonova?”

“Fräulein,” she said—and he revised his opinion about her coherence.

He took off his jacket and put it around her shoulders. “Let’s sit down before you fall down, shall we?”

She nodded, and he held his hand under her elbow to ease her onto a step. She winced.

He sat down beside her. “Are you hurt?”

“A bit. Not badly.”

“What happened?”

“Theo,” she said. “Is Theo all right?”

So somebody cares, Schmidt thought. “He’ll need stitches, but he’ll recover. Tell me what happened.”

“There was a man. He must have got in when the club was closing and hidden behind one of the bears. When everybody’d gone, he came out
.. . .
”

Her account was lucid and cool—though her hands began shaking when she described seeing the bear spawn.

She’d called for the bouncer, she said, who turned out to have been in the lavatory. She’d shouted for nonexistent help, hoping to scare the man off by making him think the club was populated. After panicking she’d fetched a broom and gone for the man as he climbed the stairs. These stairs. He’d had a knife. The two of them had tussled, the man had thrown her down the staircase, the bouncer had come out of the lavatory. Another tussle, another glimpse of the knife, the man went off, followed by the bouncer, the crash of breaking glass . . . “And then I think I lost consciousness for a bit.”

No self-pity, he thought. She’d been through the wars before, had Fräulein Solomonova.

“Can you describe the man?”

“Big,” she said. “Tall. Not fat but . . . huge somehow. Fairish, I think. The light was bad.”

“Did he say anything?”

“No.” Her hands began to shake so badly she stuffed them between her knees. “He was silent.”

“Would you recognize him again?”

She thought about it. “I don’t know.” She turned to look at him. “How did he get out? The doors were locked.”

“Crashed through them. If it’s any consolation, he’s probably bleed
ing more than Theo.”

“Good,” she said, and tried to smile.

Schmidt got up and walked over to Potrovskov and Willi. “Sergeant, get back to headquarters—I’ll walk. Alert hospitals and doctors for a big man coming in with cuts.”

Potrovskov said, “Can I use my own phone now? We got to get that glass mended quick.”

“What you can do is get that lady a glass of brandy, or hot milk, or some bloody thing.”

“Sure, sure.” He seemed surprised. “I take her to my own doctor when you finish with her.”

“See you do.”

Schmidt went back to the woman on the stairs, going through lists in his head. Big man, he thought. With a knife. Mopey Raab? No, Mopey always stuck to a cosh. Fritz Schaffer was a knife man, but he’d never come this far west. Schmidt reminded himself that growing poverty was leading to growing crime. Desperate amateurs were getting in on the act.

But there’s something extra here, he thought. When they were talking in Russian, that bloody lounge lizard had been giving her instructions.

He sat himself down by Solomonova. “What do you think the man was after, Fräulein?”

She said, “Prince Potrovskov keeps the night’s receipts in his safe.” After a second she added, “They are considerable.”

Schmidt was sure they were. “And you were alone in the club—apart from the bouncer?”

Pause. “Yes.”

He looked at his watch. “That would be about four o’clock in the morning. Bit late to be working, isn’t it?”

“I often work late,” she said.

They heard the klaxon of an ambulance in the distance.

“You ought to be in the hospital yourself,” he said, grumbling. There was blood on one of her shoes.

And suddenly she was looking full at him, smiling, astonishing him. “I’ve had worse,” she said.

Walking back through the dawn to the Alexanderplatz, Schmidt knew he should have done more. Something had been going on in the Green Hat that wasn’t a straightforward, thwarted attack in the course of burglary. The woman had wit enough to call out and pretend there were
other men in the building to come to her aid, but that hadn’t deterred

the fucker on the staircase. He’d kept coming. Why?

I should have searched the whole bloody building.

But he couldn’t have justified it to the big guns that slimy Russian would have brought in.
Lot of important people ...all my friends.

Christ, he loathed them: important men charged with running a country,
his
country, spending its taxes,
his
taxes, on chandeliered fucking opulence and, quite probably, sin. And their people scrabbling in poverty.

The chandeliers irked him. Yesterday Hannelore had anxiously men
tioned the rising price of lightbulbs.

An even bigger mystery was what the scarred woman, the only hon
est thing in the place, was doing there. There’d been a quality to her that didn’t belong in those ersatz surroundings.

And even she hadn’t told him the truth. Not all of it. Whatever grubby secret her boss had been hiding, she’d kept it.

Fuck it, no point in puzzling about it. Or her. He had enough on his plate with another bloody report to type out when he got in.

Esther Solomonova
and Anna Anderson left the Green Hat for their new home later that day.

The move involved climbing up a ladder to the club’s skylight and a clamber over the rooftops of Potsdamer Platz, then down into an alley next to a cinema around the corner, in front of which a taxi was waiting for them.

Prince Nick had insisted on it, enjoying the drama. “I’m not having the Cheka follow her again.”

“He wasn’t the bloody Cheka.”

But Nick had decided that he was; it was more exciting, more glamorous, and it gave a boost to his decision that Anna was Anastasia.

Esther sighed. Last night Nick had accepted that the in
truder was a robber after the contents of the club’s safe; by this morning the man had become a Bolshevik state assassin. Nick changed his theories as often as he changed the flower in his buttonhole—and this one suited him.

For herself the incident was beyond explanation. The man must have been in search of money, but there had been something . . .

something
personal
about the battle on the staircase, a meeting between hunter and hunted, as if the two of them had been removed from the time and space of Potsdamer Platz and faced each other far away in a lonely forest. And he’d hated her.

She didn’t want to think about it—nor was she given much time to. Before she could accompany Anna over the rooftops, there were things to be done; she had to phone the hospital and make sure Theo was comfortable and see about hiring another bouncer to fill in for him when the club opened again on Monday. A messenger was sent to the Smoleskins in Moabit with an apologetic letter saying that she was leaving them and to collect her things. Olga, who’d turned up early to find out what was going on, was directed out into Sunday Berlin to try to obtain clothes for Anna from somewhere. Nick’s luncheon appoint
ment with last night’s inamorata had to be postponed to dinner while he made sure the new flat was ready for Esther and Anna. He also rang every influential name he could think of to ensure that he was subject to no more investigation.

At last he was satisfied. He lit a cigar. “Could have been worse, kid. We’ve kept the police out of it. Our grand duchess is still our secret.”

“Well, isn’t that good.”

None of this was passed on to Anna. She was not told that while she slept in Nick’s office, battle and near murder had taken place a few yards away. She appeared to be drugged still and was quiescent at leav
ing the club by a ladder, as if it were a normal manner of egress.

Nick loved it, making both women bend low as they emerged in case a Cheka bullet hit them as they appeared on the skyline. But when he’d got them and their suitcases to the taxi, he hesitated. “You want I should come with you?”

“No. Get back to your film star.” At that moment Esther wanted to be away from him, from everything to do with the Green Hat. The deep cut on her ankle had been treated, her bruises dabbed with arnica, but the sight of the staircase and her recollection of grappling on it with something she still thought of as inhuman was going to take a hell of a lot longer to fade.

They drove off.

...

Number 29c Bismarck
Allee was a three-bedroom top-floor apart
ment in a block of houses served by a road lined with lime trees lead
ing out of Bismarckstrasse, a good area of western Berlin, almost a suburb. There were a few dignified shops on the east side of the road— number 29 faced a bookseller’s—but the west side was solidly residen
tial, solidly lace-curtained, solidly respectable.

Frau Schinkel, the widowed landlady who lived on the ground floor of number 29 and acted as porteress, winced at Esther’s face and last name. “Prince Potrovskov did not say you were Jewish.” She was the sort of woman who believed in speaking her mind.

“Makes a difference to the rent, does it?” With her nerves still raw and her ankle painful, Esther believed in speaking hers.

“No, no.” Frau Schinkel subsided; the prince was paying good money. “But I do not usually rent to foreigners. I expect good behavior in this house.”

“So do I,” Esther told her.

As they were shown upstairs, Esther noticed that the flat beneath theirs was empty. Times being what they were, Frau Schinkel had to take what tenants she could get.

It was a nice apartment, though Frau Schinkel’s furniture, like Frau Schinkel, was on the heavy side. Nick, it appeared, had already required the landlady to make it ready for instant habitation; the bathroom was equipped, and so were the kitchen and larder—a bright new samovar stood on a surface near the sink. The sitting room was three times the size of Esther’s bed-sit in Moabit, and as a joke—she hoped it was a joke—Nick had sent his hunting prints to decorate one of its walls.

The beds were made up in the three bedrooms. Her own—there was a card to say which was hers and which Anna’s—had a plain cotton spread, whereas Anna had been accorded satin. The third bed, she was interested to see, was also made up, but it, too, was plain. It had no card.

At the far end of the sitting room, near the window overlooking a backyard, Nick had set up a small office area with a desk, a telephone, and a Dictaphone; Esther was to be no less his secretary because she
was grooming his protégée with her other hand. She picked up the Dictaphone headset, pressed the button, and listened to his high, thin voice rapping out instructions. “Tonight, Esther, if you please. Needed first thing tomorrow.”