The Butchers of Berlin (45 page)

Sybil lay on her back with Grigor on top, her eyes shut, the better to transport herself to other places while he poked away. For all his finesse, she sometimes felt like a
field being ploughed. Her body no longer seemed particularly hers any more, connected to inner feelings. She thought of it as preparing for a withdrawal that would end with her leaving; in other
words, she was getting ready to die.

She opened her eyes and saw a movement in the skylight above. No more than a bird, she thought. Then it was there again and gone. She covered her eyes with her arm and looked under it. As for
the others, Gersten seemed to have disappeared, the Kübler woman wasn’t in any of her haunts. She was cut off except for Grigor, insisting on making sad love. His behaviour swung between
threats of violence, rage and sex, which seemed only to edge him closer to despair. Seeing the pressure build in him, she supposed that was how he would reach the killing point.

In as much as she thought about it, she had always presumed murderers were murderous all the time rather than dull, ordinary people, difficult to be with, until driven to pointless destruction.
Was there any reason to murder? Even Stella Kübler? Her own desire for the woman’s obliteration was probably part of a complicated sexual jealousy and perhaps a way of channelling her
grief for Lore.

Still looking under her arm, Sybil saw first one face in the skylight then a second: two boys goggle-eyed, popping up and ducking down like pecking birds, growing bolder, nudging and sniggering
in awe.

She considered warning Grigor then decided, what if they gawped? It made the whole thing less lonely. She thought of the boys’ excitement as they ogled the stark image of their entwined
bodies, while knowing nothing about her, or her abstraction as Grigor ground on, leaving her as numb as a patient under anaesthetic.

Schlegel had his eye glued to a tiny crack in the rough, uneven planks of the attic door. He could make out Sybil with her arm over her face and Grigor’s naked buttocks
pumping.

Schlegel carefully got out his gun. Whatever he had been expecting it wasn’t this. He dithered between stealth and charge. If he barged in, Grigor might have a weapon on the floor and get
a shot off first.

The door was on a latch. He remembered there was no lock. If it squeaked he would have to take his chances.

He slipped in and took what felt like an age to close the door. He levelled his pistol, as he had been taught in weapons training, gun raised and sighted, drawing a bead on the target,
double-handed grip, right elbow out. Point and squeeze, the armoury master said. Schlegel hoped it wouldn’t come to shooting. His scores on the range were akin to being unable to hit the barn
door.

He crept forward, heel to toe, praying the boards wouldn’t creak, gambling on surprise to give him an edge.

Sybil started to turn towards him. Her arm was still over her face but she seemed to be looking under it and straight at him. He thought her about to scream. Grigor stopped thrusting and was
about to raise his head. Schlegel could not shoot for fear of hitting her. She stared for a moment before she turned back, dug her nails in Grigor’s shoulders and drove her body into his.
Schlegel blushed to his roots as he watched the object of his fantasy enacting the primal scene.

He thought she must be using Grigor to show her contempt for him. She had looked at him like he was a Peeping Tom. He wanted to leave and go quietly out. He didn’t want to see them
uncoupling, didn’t want to face her.

Sybil started to moan. Grigor paused again and tried to lift his head. She cradled it with her arm, stopping him, and Schlegel saw she was trying to help after all.

Three or four more paces. He had to get the gun to Grigor’s neck, or too much was left to chance. Sybil’s moaning turned to rhythmic groaning as Schlegel took another step. He was
about to rush, thinking he would club Grigor and stun him, when a loud yell came from above outside, followed by a clattering down the roof, a crash and scream of pain.

Schlegel’s pistol automatically went up to the source of the commotion. He saw a shape and his nervous trigger-finger fired off a round, putting a hole in the skylight.

Grigor was already on his feet, holding Sybil in front of him, both hands around her neck, lifting her off the ground. Schlegel couldn’t fire. Grigor was using her as a shield. It seemed
to take him no effort to hold her in the air at arm’s length. Sybil was in danger of being choked as she struggled to loosen his grip. Schlegel was distracted and embarrassed by Sybil’s
nakedness and Grigor’s still half-hard cock.

He traced their progress to the door with his gun, with no way to shoot. Grigor told Schlegel to throw him his clothes. Sybil thrashed for air.

Schlegel shouted for Grigor to put Sybil down. Grigor bared his teeth. Sybil started turning blue. Schlegel fired once, wide, hoping to make Grigor drop her.

An explosion came from above Schlegel’s head and a blurred shape crashed through the skylight, landed on the floor, in a shower of broken glass, and propelled itself at Grigor, who let go
of Sybil out of surprise. Schlegel fired off two shots as Sybil fell to the floor, gasping.

Grigor roared and began hopping in pain, all the while being pushed, pummelled and kicked by what Schlegel saw was a boy of no more than twelve or thirteen. He fired another shot in the air,
which stopped everything, except Sybil’s laboured breathing, which turned to screams of terror. Schlegel ordered Grigor to move from the door and lie face down in the middle of the room.
Grigor glowered, looking like he would refuse. He would shoot again, Schlegel said, and Grigor could see he meant it and the fight went out of him. The cause of Grigor’s agitation, Schlegel
saw, was that one of his shots had hit him square in the buttock.

Schlegel laboriously extricated his handcuffs while still holding on to his gun and threw them to the boy, who was caught between excitement and shock. He told him to put them on Grigor, who lay
writhing and making growling noises.

He was in the act of covering Sybil’s nakedness when he heard footsteps coming up the outside stairs. Sybil was crying, saying she wanted only to be left alone. The door opened and
Schlegel saw Frau Zwicker come to see what was going on. She stood there petrified, with a pair of nail scissors in her hand.

Schlegel turned back to attend to Sybil when he felt a fierce pain and looking down he saw Frau Zwicker had stabbed him in the leg with her tiny scissors.

Schlegel was given a tetanus shot, had his leg bandaged, and told to go home. The wound was superficial. The boy who fell off the roof had broken his leg and was in hospital.
Grigor’s bullet was extracted and he was downstairs at headquarters, in a cell next to Haager from the slaughterhouse, who had also been brought in.

Morgen had Sybil spirited away, Schlegel wasn’t sure where.

The aftermath had offered a tableau of extreme awkwardness. Grigor lay naked and cursing. Sybil retreated to a corner and dressed under a blanket. She avoided looking at Schlegel. Frau Zwicker
behaved like a woman trapped on stage and repeated over that she hadn’t meant to. The boy went off to call the cops and Morgen and didn’t come back. Schlegel told Sybil to get away
before anyone came but she refused and sat waiting.

The local police turned up, followed by Morgen, who took charge.

Schlegel, Grigor and the brat were packed off together in an ambulance, Grigor scowling malevolence, the boy whimpering and Schlegel in an unsteady state of adrenalin rush and prurient
embarrassment at the memory of Sybil naked.

Morgen appeared most amused that Schlegel had been stabbed in the leg by Frau Zwicker, in fact seemed delighted by the choreography of the entire episode, and was able to report that the
youthful voyeurs were part of a band used by Gersten for surveillance, inspired by Gersten’s own experience as a young actor in
Emil and the Detectives
. They had followed Sybil to the
cinema where Grigor worked and picked them up from there. With Gersten no longer around to report to, they had become distracted by risqué movies and sex snooping.

The boys struck Morgen as feral, uneducated and already delinquent. Soon there would be a generation of soldiers the army could make nothing of.

Frau Zwicker’s intemperate moment was attributed to a spasm of blind rage brought about by accumulative frustration, for which Schlegel was to blame, having not delivered the yellow suit
as promised, which had led to her being accused of theft by the client. Morgen looked at Schlegel owlishly and asked if any of that made sense. He was merely reporting what he had been told.
Schlegel said he would make the necessary recompense. He was too ashamed to say where the suit was now.

Morgen asked if he wished to press charges against Frau Zwicker. Schlegel said it wasn’t necessary.

‘Perhaps you would like to tell her she is free to go.’

It turned out Morgen also had her locked up downstairs. They went down together. Frau Zwicker scuttled off.

Morgen dealt with Haager next.

‘So, friend from the slaughterhouse,’ Morgen said, ‘I am not asking you to talk, only to listen.’

Haager looked puzzled.

Like a man telling a story to a child, Morgen began with how he had been out of town and just come back. Schlegel sensed the account was as much for his benefit.

‘Only for a matter of days. Everything was going according to plan until my star witness mysteriously died. It was a corruption case with a lot at stake.’

Haager asked what did any of this have to do with him.

Morgen ignored him and went on. He suspected an SS doctor of poisoning his man to stop him testifying but he had no evidence.

‘Each of us has his breaking point,’ he said, looking at Haager.

He invited the doctor to dine at the officers’ mess. Protocol made it impossible for him to refuse as it was a point of honour to accept an invitation by a fellow officer of equal rank or
higher.

‘I ordered a private dining room and the doctor turned up and went white at the sight of the dead witness on the dining table, opened up for autopsy. The contents of the man’s
stomach had been transferred to a tureen. There were also three Russian prisoners in the room. And an armed guard. It was all very formal, silver service and so on.’

The doctor was made to watch as the slops were force-fed to the three Russians, who died slow, agonising deaths, proving Morgan’s theory.

‘You see the doctor in question was lazy. He maintained he had carried out the autopsy and the man died of natural causes, but he hadn’t, and he was arrogant and careless to boot. He
failed to dispose of the body, which we found waiting for us in the morgue.

‘I told the doctor that what was now in the stomachs of the dead Russians would be extracted and fed to him, as a point of curiosity, to see if he survived being poisoned at third-hand by
the strychnine he had administered.’

Morgen said, ‘Everyone sings in the end.’

Bluffing or not, his capacity for ruthlessness was evident.

‘Now, with you, my friend,’ Morgen went on quietly, ‘I suspect my brutality will have to match behaviour familiar to you from the east. Torture is a search for the truth by
other means, eh, Haager? And Schlegel here, who is a sensitive soul, is thinking, “We are becoming like them”, to which I am bound to answer you can’t cure sickness and not risk
infection. Am I to become a brute like you? Here’s the story. Of course, you prove as tough as an ox, even after your shoulders dislocate from being strung up with your arms behind your back.
You scream in agony, and I sympathise. It’s curious how one identifies with pain. And still I ask no questions, which puzzles you to distraction and will break you in the end. Then we chuck
you in the slurry pit where your dislocated shoulders make it hard not to drown. With the fumes, you struggle to stay conscious, then decide you weren’t born to die swallowing liquid shit. So
you tell me everything.’

Haager glowered as if to say mind games would get Morgen nowhere.

‘I am going to leave you alone to think about this now. Look at your hands and ask yourself about all the things they did in Russia.’

In the corridor, Schlegel asked if the story about the poisoned Russians was true.

‘No love lost between me and Russians, and even less for those who sit at home, pretending to be soldiers, lining their pockets and claiming running a concentration camp is a frontline job
because they are fighting the internal war. Hah!’

Grigor was lying on his bunk with his hands behind his head. When he struggled to get up Morgen pushed him back.

He said he wasn’t empowered to investigate the murders, he was only interested in Metzler, Gersten, safe trains and fake money.

Grigor, as the forger, seemed in no doubt he was the star.

Schlegel found him vain and insufferable, an appropriate foil to Gersten. With both men everything had to pass through the portals of large and self-regulating egos.

Morgen said, ‘I have no wish to listen to you. Just say yes or no. Abbas told Gersten that Metzler was using forged money and Gersten was sufficiently enraged to arrange its confiscation,
disguised as robbery, and have Plotkin chucked off the roof. Metzler was about to be packed off when you stepped in and announced you were capable of producing the perfect forged note. Yes or
no?’

Grigor looked smug. ‘Yes.’

‘It only needed Metzler to point out to Gersten the advantages of such a source of untraceable money for him to become greedy and allow the smuggling to resume, now departing from the
slaughterhouse yards. Yes or no?’

‘Yes.’

‘What do you know of the accident?’

Grigor looked blank and said he was just a technician.

He radiated the superiority of the underdog. His contempt for Schlegel was clear. With Morgen he was cannier, suggesting his services might prove useful.

Morgen said, ‘I suggest half a deal. We lose you in the ordinary penal system and send you up the road to Moabit where I keep an eye on you. The condition is you have to provide yourself
with a false identity card to my satisfaction, which should be easy for a man of your skill. You probably have such a card already.’