The Informer (29 page)

“Maybe I’ll find him first,” said Armina.

“Maybe,” said Hauptmann. “A very dangerous young man, don’t you think?”

“The songs are about to begin,” said Ritter. “Let’s forget all this for now.”

Hauptmann sat down. Armina still felt the buzzing in her hand where he had touched her, and as she stared at Ritter, she picked up his champagne class. Ritter stared back, raised a brow. The members of the audience shifted in expectation, murmured, turned toward the stage, and everywhere the room was filled with the glitter of glass and diamonds, of the glint of silver and the crème-colored china on the tablecloths. Armina moved the glass, as though to throw the wine in Ritter’s face. He flinched. She went right on staring at him and then slowly put the glass back on the table.

“So,” he said. “Cheap tricks. I wouldn’t expect it of you. But listen.” He looked up at her. “Listen.”

He beckoned with his fingers, the gesture quick and insistent, as though he were pulling a trigger and didn’t care who he hit. He beckoned again, his eyes on hers, his expression so angry that he seemed almost vibrant, like the string of an instrument.

“Come closer,” he said. “Here.”

She put her head next to his lips, and for a moment she almost expected that he would bite her. His breath was tinted with the sour odor of champagne.

“Listen. Are you listening?” he said.

“Yes,” she said.

“I don’t want there to be any misunderstanding,” he said.

“I’m listening,” she said.

He put his lips closer yet and said, “Breiter was helping the Soviets and the Germans make arms in Russia. To get around the Treaty of Versailles. Now, no one, not the Russians, not us, wants that known. So it isn’t just the fact that he got killed. We don’t care about that. We care about silence. Silence.”

She pulled back, her hand touching her ear, as though she could wipe away the touch of his breath.

“And after that,” she said. “What do you want?”

Ritter turned to Hauptmann and said, “What do we want?”

Hauptmann began to crack his knuckles, the snapping coming from one finger and then the other. He went about it slowly, as though using the cracks, the splitting sound to count something. Then he laced his fingers together to see if there was anything more, another sound, another crack. Then he started again, going through his fingers to find one that would make a snap, his eyes on Armina, as though that sound were the answer he wanted to make.

“Do you hear that?” said Hauptmann.

“Yes,” she said.

“Don’t forget it,” he said.

Hauptmann turned to a woman who sat near the stage, her legs bouncing up and down with a sultry impatience in the opening where her skirt was only partially buttoned together. Then Hauptmann’s eyes swung toward Armina. His eyes were dull and seemingly without interest, but nevertheless, he still seemed mesmerized by possibilities of malice. Then he went back to looking at the woman on the other side of the room.

“And now that you’ve been warned you can do what you want and see what it gets you,” he said. “Go on. I invite you. Look into this some more. Be my guest.”

He looked toward the stage.

Armina went back across the room, trying to walk straight up, shoulders square, dignified and unintimidated. Then she sat down, slumping into her chair.

“Is there something wrong?” said Rainer.

She tried to speak, but then bit her lip. The light in the room made the women’s jewelry bright, sidereal in its glitter, and the silver chains, the diamonds seemed like points of light, like the tips of swords for dueling. The gold appeared almost liquid in its sheen. Rainer went on looking at her, but she shook her head, not No, I won’t tell you, but No, I can’t speak.

Rainer took her hand, and she pressed his fingers against it.

The singer said, “Oh, I understand what fun you’ve had. Oh, I know….” He sang a song about Berlin where he had had too much of everything, too much to drink, too much to eat, too many lovers, too many escapes,
and between each verse, he blew into a small tube connected to a gimmick, an inflatable bladder, under his flowery vest. He appeared to swell, as though the excesses were visible, right then. His chest and stomach became enormous, and the singer patted himself, as though this bloat was a matter of pride. It wasn’t easy to get this way. Oh, no. But with each passing verse he swelled that much more, and as he did, he became alarmed. Why, he seemed to say, he had lost control after all, but what could he do? This is the way he lived. The audience laughed and applauded: yes, it had been wonderful. They’d never forget it. The singer laughed, his enormous belly and chest bouncing in the light.

The singer finished his song to more applause and then let the air out of the gimmick under his clothes. Yes, he seemed to say, what a relief. The air rushed out, his belly collapsed, and he stepped offstage. The audience applauded.

Ritter and Hauptmann sat on the other side of the room, where they clapped before they turned to Armina. Ritter dipped his head, as though to say, Good night, good night. Hauptmann just stared.

Armina’s fingers touched the flag, and as she felt the glance from across the room, she took Rainer’s hand and said, “Let’s go home. I’ve had enough.”

A
T THIS HOUR
the traffic had thinned out in the street, but bicycles still went along with the motorcars and carts drawn by horses. Armina took Rainer’s arm as they went down the avenue.

A cart filled with watermelons, lettuce, tomatoes, and potatoes for the morning market came along, its horse driven by a man who sat on a small seat. Automobiles passed it. A car honked. The driver of the cart turned to see what was wrong, and his horse screamed and reared in the traces. The horse looked like a figure made out of black metal. In the headlights of the cars everything could be seen, each spoke of the wheels, the mountain of vegetables like a pile of cannonballs, and the driver holding the reins. The horse stood on two legs and twisted in the traces. The cart driver jumped up from his seat and swore, but his voice was lost in the screams of the animal and the impact of the car that hit it squarely in the ribs. The cart driver
hung in the air, suspended in the posture of holding the reins. A second car crashed into the one that had collided with the animal, the hood collapsing like a black accordion while the headlights made an almost bell-like sound as they shattered.

The horse hit the pavement with a smack, and the water from the broken radiator made a pissing sound. The driver of the cart now fell, straight down, like a man dropped from the second story of a building into the black mess, which was part animal, part machine, hysterical where it was alive, dark and losing oil where it was inanimate. Armina and Rainer stopped at the side of the mess, which leaked steam, blood, and oil.

The horse lay on its side, its eyes rolled back. The watermelons broke on the pavement, and the sanguine pulp mixed with the horse’s blood, its froth, and the ooze of oil from the car. A mist from the radiator hung over everything, machinelike in its stink but having the fragrance of the shattered fruit and the odor of manure. The horse kicked as it tried to get up, one leg waving with a floppy uselessness. The glass on the ground, so bright with spectral colors and filled with a sidereal glitter, made the street look like the heavens where a new constellation, part machine, part animal, had just appeared.

“Do you have your pistol?” said Rainer.

“Yes,” said Armina.

“Do you want me to do it?” said Rainer.

“No,” said Armina. “I guess not.”

Armina came forward, reached into her bag, and as she stepped down from the curb, trying to get around the panting animal, she slipped in the bloody oil. Rainer took her arm and helped her up, and while she looked at the slime, the oil and blood and water on her coat, he took the pistol. The warm slime seeped down to her skin, and the touch of it, the oily caress, seemed to be everything that scared and trapped her, that confined her and left her hands shaking. That warm touch was everything she wanted to get away from, as though fear had become this liquid combination of blood, oil, and dirty water.

“Oh, no,” said Armina.

“It’s a mess,” said Rainer.

“A mess,” said Armina. She pulled the warm, sticky clothes away from her skin.

“You can get cleaned up,” said Rainer.

“Oh, no,” said Armina. “No.”

“I’ll get you some new clothes,” he said.

She shook her head. The animal screamed.

“The Soviets have been helping the Germans make arms,” she said. “Now what good can come of that? They want to hush it up.”

“And?” he said. “What else?”

She put one hand against another, as though she were going to crack one of her knuckles to remind herself of the sound: that snap and breaking, that crack, like finality itself.

He stood with the pistol in his hand, his eyes on the lunging horse.

“What else?” he said.

“That sound,” she said. “That sound. Of a cracking knuckle …” She made a gesture, as though to include everything around them. “We’re not safe. You know that, don’t you?”

Rainer moved back and forth in front of the combination of harness and engine, of tires and wooden cart, glass and leather. He put the revolver against the horse’s head. Then, in the bang of the shot the horse dropped its head in an infinitely gentle way, just lying down in the street as though taking the most delicate nap, and as it rested on the pavement with a touch as soft as a sigh, Rainer kept his eyes on Armina.

“We’ve got to go,” said Rainer.

“I can’t hear,” she said. “My ears are ringing.”

“I said we’ve got to go,” said Rainer.

“Gaelle knew something about Breiter, the man in the street. So, if I look into her, I will have to look into the Soviets and making arms.” She cracked one of her knuckles. “Like that,” she said. “Just like that.”

The driver of the cart rose from the damp slag of the accident, one broken arm hanging straight down. Vapor rose from the horse and folded into the steam of the car as the radiator went on hissing. The driver squatted in the country man’s way, just sitting on his heels, and rocked back and forth, saying to the dead animal, “Oh, my darling. Oh, my little one.”

Bystanders picked up his produce, and the uniformed police, who had now arrived, tried to keep the other cars away. The cart driver reached out
with his good arm and touched the horse’s head. Then he went back to rocking, the tears streaming down his face. The driver of the car sat in the gutter, one hand to his bleeding nose, and watched the driver of the cart.

“We need an ambulance,” said Armina.

“All right, all right,” said a member of the Schutzpolice.

On the curb, on solid ground, or on ground that at least wasn’t covered with blood and oil, Rainer gave her the pistol. Then the two of them stood there. The driver of the cart said, over and over, “Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, my darling. My little one.”

Every now and then someone tried to pick up an onion or tomato that had rolled away.

“Just look,” said Armina. “Look.”

In the gutter the water, oil, and blood ran up to a drain, the petroleum making a rainbow on the surface that bent and disappeared into the depths of the sewer. She brushed at the slime, the blood and oil on her coat, but it only rubbed it in.

“I can’t get it off,” she said. “Look.” She put her head against Rainer and said, “If I could only stop crying. Why can’t I stop?”

Steam rose from the horse and from the hot water in the gutter.

“So,” she said. “Which one of us is going to leave this city first? What do we have here?”

He looked at the mass of car and horse, machine and blood.

“More of this,” he said.

“Let’s go by the avenue on the way home,” she said. “Let’s stay in the lights.”

“Sure,” he said. “Away from the shadows.”

“I just want a bath,” she said. “Then we’ll pack. Tonight.”

“Yes,” he said. “Tonight.”

“Come on,” she said. “Before the stores turn their lights out.”

I
n New York City, in the spring of 1945, Armina looked through the window at the detectives from the War Department who came down West Twelfth Street in their dark coats, heavy shoes, and with that blank expression she recognized from Berlin: suspicion hiding behind a slack, numb face. Their hats bobbed along as they approached her building. She had been reading a letter when she had pulled back the curtains, which she did often these days, and after guessing that the men were detectives, she let the curtains fall and swing back and forth. Armina went back to the letter from Rainer, who wrote from an island in the Pacific.

Armina had come to the States, after a year in England that she remembered even now as an exercise in being so cold that even the summer wasn’t enough to get rid of the chill. She had found a place to live in New York, but a job had been difficult, especially when people were still out of work. She had worked as a secretary for a German company that went out of business, and then she had worked as a waitress in a German restaurant, bringing her tips home and keeping them in a jar, which she shook from time to time, as though the sound were evidence of how precarious her position was.

It had been easier for her to come to the States, because she had been a police officer, or that is what she guessed. For Rainer, it was another matter, and he applied for admission and waited and then went around to the greenhouses and botanical gardens in England, but no one wanted him. It didn’t matter that he was a refugee, that he was violently opposed to what was happening in Berlin. He was suspect, a liability, someone who could be a spy for all anyone knew. He thought he might get a job on the river, and tried the docks, approached tugboat captains, but they were uneasy, too. Why did he want to be around the docks, where so much shipping came
and went? He waited, wrote letters to Armina. She thought of going back to England to be with him, but that made no sense as far as he was concerned. He would wait. She would have to wait, too.

Rainer arrived a couple of years later, and they lived together on West Twelfth Street, although he had trouble, too, in finding work. He taught botany at a high school in the Bronx, and then got a job on Saturdays at the Botanical Gardens on the grounds crew. He had done translation of scientific papers, tried to publish his own work on new varieties of orchids, and finally in the late 1930s when the war began, he lied about his age and joined the army. He wasn’t allowed to fight in Europe, since he was German. His letters from the Pacific were becoming rarer. It had been three months since she had last heard from him.

Armina put the letter down and thought of her work, which was the best she could get now. No one trusted her to work where munitions were manufactured, and the only job she could find was in a factory that made portable organs for chaplains, and one day, when she was stapling the leather of the foot-cranked bellows of the instrument, she wondered if
one that she had worked on would be used on an island where Rainer was stationed.

She kept to herself, mostly, although from time to time men from the War Department came to see her to ask about people she had known in Berlin. Still, she was careful these days, since one day a man had approached her in the diner where she had breakfast and asked if she would be willing to “help him out” by doing “some work,” which involved taking pictures of ships in the harbor. She had immediately called the police.

She tried to explain the lack of letters from Rainer in every conceivable way but one. A ship that was carrying the mail could have been sunk, or an airplane that was filled with sacks of letters could have been shot down. A fire could have broken out in a jungle station where the mail had been kept. The letters could have been lost on a jungle trail, soaked with rain, dropped in the Pacific when they were being loaded onto a ship. It had come to the point where this list of possibilities was a litany she went through at night, and during the day when she had a chance (such as when she was on the train coming up from the shooting range). She wished that Rainer hadn’t told her about the god who had flown away, and the rush of air, since when she went through the possibilities and still had no concrete idea of what had happened, she was left, through a process of elimination, with the one possibility she couldn’t face. Then she imagined that rush of air, that enormous presence of wings so large she could only feel diminished.

She joined a pistol club downtown, where New York City detectives took target practice. And when she went into the range and loaded that pistol, holding the bead flat in the rear sight and feeling the beating of her heart, it was as though she was trying to concentrate on one thing against the dark rush, that breeze that left her so alone as to think all she had was the throb and Bang! throb and Bang!

At the bottom of her fear and despair, she considered something else. At first, she had tried to pretend that she was far enough away from Berlin to have escaped her obligations there, but with each passing month, and as the months had turned into years, she had discovered that just the opposite was true: the distance only increased her feeling of having left something undone. And when she woke at two and three in the morning, unable to
get back to sleep, and after reading the few letters that she had, opening them carefully and handling them only by the tips of her fingers (in which she could recall the touch of his skin, or the texture of his hair) she felt the gravitation of Berlin. She got up in the middle of the night and looked at herself in the mirror, and then she walked around her small apartment, hearing the old building creak, and all of it, the sleeplessness, the sense of living in the wake of a god that flew away, the sounds of the building, left her with the desire she couldn’t quite articulate. She wanted to do anything that would let her sleep at night, to be at peace, to stop having the impulse to scratch her face or pull her hair or be someone, or so she told herself, who probably deserved to have the man she loved end up on the floor of some jungle, in that sound of insects, and beneath the orchids that were so wet and fragrant. Then she started the entire process again, going through the possibilities of why she hadn’t heard anything from Rainer and coming back to that same feeling of being incomplete. She hadn’t finished her work in Berlin, and she could feel the ghost of what remained undone.

She closed her eyes, but she saw swirling arms of light, so much like the Milky Way, the movement of them seeming slow but yet still upsetting, and when she opened her eyes, as though she had been drinking, she saw quite clearly the pulled-down stockings, the red blisters, the faces turned toward the leaves, as though giving up, dying there against the earth with a caress, a sigh of exhaustion after what they had endured. The pad of the fingers curled so gently into the dirt, and the posture of the young women, so loose against the bottom of the gullies where they had been found seemed, from Armina’s bed, in the dark, an accusation and a plea. How could she have so utterly failed them? It hadn’t been for want of trying, and yet that didn’t do her any good at all. In fact, she thought that this might even be a larger indictment, that she had tried and failed and showed herself lacking some critical item, some aspect of personality that, if she had been able to obtain it, would have saved those women in the park. At dawn, when the first pale light came in through the windows, Armina wanted to shout, to get up and break the glasses and plates in the kitchen, anything to violate the silence of the apartment, which for her seemed to be a kind of hiss of the obligations of the dead. The marks, the posture, the sad perfume left over from the previous night, the pale skin, all of it lingered as a constant,
unavoidable indictment. Armina went through each one she had found and suspected she just wasn’t good enough. Yes, she thought, the obligations of the dead. If I could just appease them, if I could somehow do the right thing, I’d be able to rest. I could sleep. Rainer would come home.

The men in the dark clothes had come up to the bottom of her steps, and then they stopped and looked in a notebook, checking the address before looking at the front door. Their expressions were now a little more blank, a little more masked, and she knew that this meant they wanted something. She held back the gauzy curtain as they climbed the steps, their leather shoes slapping on the brownstone. The super slammed a trash can lid like a shot. Her buzzer rang.

“Armina Treffen?” said one of the men. He had taken off his hat and showed his thinning hair. The other one just stood there.

“Yes,” she said.

The man showed his ID. The War Department.

“Can we come in?” said the first one.

“Of course,” she said.

Perhaps, she thought, the War Department was running short of people to notify relatives of men who had been killed in action and so people like these were left to do the job. Or maybe it was done with a telegram. That was the proper way. She put her hand to her face.