The Informer (8 page)

T
he living room in Armina’s apartment had a sofa, a padded chair, bookcases, pictures done in a precise, hyperrealist style, a piano and a desk. The piano had belonged to her mother, a concert pianist who had died of a disease of the nerves, a painful condition that had been made worse by morphine. Her father’s desk was here, too, in the corner, the top of it lined with pigeonholes where he had kept his papers, all of the square spaces appearing as though birds could nest in them, or, at least, they looked empty. The green blotter on the desk was still covered with ink stains. He had been a biochemist with a specialty in pain medication, and when Armina’s mother had been sick, he had tried one compound after another, the lack of effect making him even more exasperated, and near the end, he hardly slept. He had sat at this desk, where he made notes, wrote formulas, consulted his notebooks, wrote letters to colleagues. What did they know about a particular preparation of opium? Did anyone know of analgesics found in the jungles of South America?

Armina had put flowers in the room, white and pink peonies with centers that were flecked with red. Now she sat with a glass of brandy and looked at the piano. Then the desk. Then she had a sip.

Each night recently when she came home from work she had the impulse to write a letter. At first, she laughed at herself and thought, Grow up. Don’t be a fool. Don’t act like a schoolgirl. But these interior remarks and lack of empathy for herself only made her get up and pour herself another drink.

The letter was to a man she didn’t know and yet in whose existence she still believed, if only by the proof of the silence of her apartment, which seemed not just an emptiness, but also a potential that referred to a specific human being. She imagined this as one of the varieties of silence. Well, she
thought in her own self-mockery, maybe the silence is proof of something else: that I’m filling my head with nonsense.

She resisted writing the letter on the first night, and then the second, her reports, files, crime scene descriptions on the table in front of her. At least she didn’t have to hide them—there was no one to be appalled by the photographs, the descriptions of wounds, the statements of people who had found a woman in the park.

On the fourth night, she didn’t open her files. She took a pen, dipped it into her black official ink, and wrote, the metal nib on the paper a sound that barely scratched the silence in the room,

“Of course it is silly for me to want to write to you, and just putting these words on paper makes me feel my embarrassment. Still, I want to do it, if only to be clear to myself about what is happening to me. Frankly, I am not sure—not really, since I seem to be in the middle of it—but I know that I crave—is this the word?—crave your understanding. I know you are here, in this city, and yet why can’t I find you? And what do I have to offer you, as though what I feel could ever be part of a bargain? Loyalty. I am loyal. I am understanding. If you need something, I will try to get it. If you want something from me (a touch, a look, a gift, a surrender, a frank offer) I will give it. I am not easily frightened.

“And what do I want? Well, I will recognize it when I see it. I wonder if I pass you on the street, if you will recognize me—would we hesitate, glance at one another, shocked by the other’s sudden presence. Would it be frightening? Embarrassing? Would we know what to do? Or would we just pass along, too stupid and ridiculous to take advantage of the moment?”

Then she stopped, reached the pen tip for the ink, but sat that way, arm extended: this note had explained nothing and only provided justification for her contempt, a neat trick in which she used her needs as an accusation. She ripped the paper, threw it away, the pieces of it falling like blue-gray confetti into the trash can. The record she put on was one of her mother’s performances, Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 12, and as the music came into the room she had another drink. Her father’s desk sat in the corner, appearing as though he would come into the room and go to work on the desk beneath the pigeonholes.

In the morning she got up and went to work as always.

Two Greek columns supported the roof of Precinct 88 and between them a bronze door led to the dim interior. Armina walked through the marble lobby and up the stairs where the brass banister was cold. On the second floor the common room for Inspectorate A was filled with desks, the papers on them square as a geometry lesson. The walls had two tones, a dark crème up to shoulder height and a lighter one above. Milk glass globes hung from the ceiling, and everything about the place was oversize and left her with the feeling of a nightmare of being a child in which everything is too large and difficult to reach. Here the doorknobs were the size of bowling balls.

The people who worked in the precinct were evenly divided, at least as far as politics were concerned, but she was irritated with politics—the Communists were either too cynical or too stupid to see the real enemy was the thugs, the Nazis, the Steel Helmets. After all, from the Communist point of view, if another war broke out in Europe, no matter who won, Europe would be exhausted and easy pickings, that is if the Russians could stay out of it. But how would they do that? Is that the way they thought? Armina assumed it was possible. She thought of a prostitute she had interviewed in a murder investigation who had said she knew the thugs were trouble because when they slept with her it was as though they were trying to fuck her to death. No tip, either.

Ritter, the head of the Political Section, considered himself a nationalist, a patriot, although this was a nostalgia, for the time before the Great War, when the Kaiser had still been in Germany. And, along with the nostalgia, he had a contempt for the current life in the city (after all, women were holding hands in the street and wearing men’s tuxedos in the nightclubs, where they were hilarious with champagne and cocaine). Ritter was one of the few members of the Berlin Police Department who had been glad to move to the Political Section. Armina guessed he was a member of some pro-Kaiser organization, or something worse. The groups that existed for assassination and revenge killings, such as Organization Escherich, or Organization Consul. The Nazis. He spoke perfect French, was an excellent amateur musician, and he wrote poetry, which he had privately printed on excellent paper and bound in leather.

Armina’s office had a frosted glass door and one of those large knobs.
She went in and sat down while animated shadows passed on the other side of the frosted glass like those one made on a wall to amuse a child. A note on her desk from Ritter said: “Please come up to see me, will you, when you’ve got a moment? Thanks, R.”

She unfolded a map of the Tiergarten on which she had put crosses, in green ink, where the young women, like Marie Rote, had been murdered. Along the bottom she had written the date that the bodies had been found, and these dates had been put along a line, like a ruler. She added May 14, 1930. The newer dates were pushed closer together, and so the scale had the aspect of an accordion that was collapsed on one side. The new cross added to the pattern the others made, a semicircular array spreading from an entrance to the park, and if the lines were drawn from the entrance to each mark, it would be like an enormous shell, a scallop, say, that had been sketched on the map. Armina made an additional cross, a line over the top to make note of the fact that the faces were now being covered up. She added other marks to show what this one had in common with the others, the wound, the stained underwear left in the bushes.

Armina folded up the map. It was possible that some of these killings were the work of the Rings, the Berlin gangs, such as Immertreu, that fought over prostitution territory, which they were never able to hold for long, since they were either gaining or losing strength. Of course, the Rings did political killings, too, at a price. Beyond the door of her office men and women went by, their shadows sweeping across the icy glitter of the glass.

The city had a fascination with the sexual murders of young women, and cabarets had reenactments of some of the most notorious crimes, not to mention that some paintings were done of these assaults. Why, she wondered, were there so many more of them than before? Was there some impalpable quality in the air, some fascination with doing these things, as though the horrible violence of them served as a substitute for some otherwise lacking clarity? But, whatever the reason, she was left to clean up what was left, to go see the parents or boyfriend, to give the news no one ever wants to hear.

She had given this news on her first day at Inspectorate A, a few years before. A woman had been found in the park and the case had been given to her. The other members of the Inspectorate had other things to worry
about. Of course, if she failed, which was quite possible, since these cases were almost always difficult, her job and her prospects would be diminished. But her ambition wasn’t the issue here so much as the moment, which she felt as a weight, when she realized what had happened after dark in an out-of-the-way place. This sensation didn’t vanish but stayed with her like an invisible mist that she could get rid of in only one way—she didn’t know who would have more contempt for her if she failed, the men in the Inspectorate or herself: she’d have to admit that the things that she had seen, the evidence of such horrors, were beyond her, and a sense of incapacity was what she feared the most.

So, she began. She talked to the friends of the woman who had been found, interviewed those who had worked with her at a typewriter factory, talked to the merchants in the places where the woman had shopped, just as Armina made a catalogue of everything she had discovered. She did this for the next woman who was found and the one after that, all of them with the same marks, a welt on the neck from a cord, cigarette burns, small puncture wounds. The men in the Inspectorate came into her office, looked at her with the blank expression that detectives have perfected and said, as though through a mask, “What have you got on the cases in the park? Nothing? Hmmpf.”

She went home at night to her apartment or sat in a café, always with the sensation that the evidence of her incapacity or the strength of what opposed her was getting close, reducing her to a sort of accomplice, since the man in the park did his part and then she did hers, like partners of some sort.

She found that all of the women had bought lingerie at the same store, a fashionable shop that had an antiquated elegance perfectly mixed with the erotic—young women from all over the city came to shop there. Armina talked to the saleswomen, all of whom had an elegant disdain for her, as though Armina’s questions brought an air of the vulgar to a place that was calm, above the reality of what happened to women in an out-of-the-way place.

Armina’s father and mother were dead, and when she was troubled, as she was now, she went to see a friend of her father’s, a man in his fifties, an engineer, who had a house in a suburb outside of Berlin.

Michael Freelander was a fisherman, and whenever he had a chance to get away he was off to the Mohne, or a river in Spain or Austria to fish for trout. His living room was filled with a neat adornment of feathers and yarn, stored in a cabinet with small drawers like those in a post office, and when Armina came to talk to him, he tied flies, small ones with a cloud of hackle, upright wings, and a gray body, a tail as fine as a baby’s eyelashes.

“So,” he said. “You’ve got a woman’s shop and that’s it?”

“Yes,” said Armina.

“And what about the dates,” he said.

Armina read the dates from her notebook. Then she sat with the leather-bound thing in her lap.

“Are you worried about your job?” said Michael.

“I’m worried that I can’t do it,” she said. “That this is beyond me.”

Michael asked her to repeat the dates. He wrote them down and asked her to go through them again before he reached to the shelf where he kept his fishing diaries. He turned the pages, looked at a map, then went back to his notebooks. The women had been found in May and June.

“He must be a fisherman,” he said. “The hatches of mayflies come at regular times. Not far from here, in Spreeland, for instance, the peaks of various hatches correspond with these dates.”

“So,” said Armina. “This is how he gets the time? He says he is going fishing?”

“Yes,” said Michael.

“He follows a woman from the shop, finds where she lives, and then when he has an excuse, he follows her and takes her into the park.”

Michael looked in his fishing diaries, the blue ink of his entries in neat lines, the margins with drawings of mayflies—the next hatch,
Potamanthus distinctus
, was coming at the end of the month. It was a white mayfly, like an apple blossom.

“Week after next,” said Michael. “I think you’re going to find another.”

Armina finished her drink and sat while Michael tied another pattern, and as he used his gray thread, on a bobbin, as he spun some fur for a body, as he set the wings upright, she kept an eye on the certainty of his movements, the precision of his work, just like an engineer making a drawing. It was as though she were watching him make a blueprint for a fly.

At the lingerie shop Armina talked her way through the disdain of the saleswomen, and when they condescended to speak to her, she found that men occasionally were customers, too. These men looked through the displays of underthings and asked about sizes by saying that a girlfriend had the shape and was the height of one of the women who worked in the shop. Armina explained again about what she had seen in the park, and after going through the details, the saleswomen agreed to say to these men that they were interested in fishing, and that they had always wanted to catch a big, cold trout. In the next week, a man who had come in and browsed through the things on display, said that he was a fisherman and he would be happy to teach a saleswoman how to catch a trout. It was all about presentation, he said, about stalking a fish, of trying not to be seen, of being absorbed by the landscape, and, above everything else, not to frighten the fish before the moment came. He left his card with the saleswoman.