Wolf Among Wolves (32 page)

The secretary had risen from his desk to approach them. “Take her away,” he said. “One can hardly hear oneself speak. It’s snow—when it’s worn off she’ll collapse like a wet rag.”

The policemen nodded; between them they supported the girl and took her away. Except for this assistance she was upheld only by a senseless fury which fed on anything. Even when she could no longer see Petra she still shouted abuse over her shoulder.

The secretary cast his sick tired glance (the whites of his eyes were yellow, too) on Petra, and asked in low tones: “Is it a fact? Have you walked the streets?”

Petra nodded. “Yes, a year ago. But not now.”

The secretary also nodded, wearily. He went back to his desk. But he stopped again, turned round. “Have you got a disease?” he asked.

Petra shook her head energetically. “No, never have had.”

The secretary nodded again, sat down at his desk and continued his interrupted writing. Life in the charge-room went on. Some of the arrested might have been afraid, fidgety and worried; perhaps the drunkards were tormented by visions; but outwardly everything went smoothly and well.

Until shortly after six o’clock, when the telephone announced that Oberwachtmeister Leo Gubalke was mortally injured in the stomach and would probably die before midnight. From that moment the aspect of the police station completely changed. Doors were continually banging; officers, in plain clothes or uniform, came and went. One whispered to another, a third joined in, a fourth cursed. And at half-past six Gubalke’s comrades returned, those he had wanted to help in their fight with the two gangs, the fight in which he was wounded by the only shot fired. The whispering continued. The desk was banged; a policeman stood grimly in a corner, swinging his rubber truncheon; the looks cast at the prisoners were no longer indifferent but stern.

Those, however, which were cast at Petra Ledig were of particular intensity. Everybody had been told by the secretary that she was “Leo’s last official act.” Gubalke, because he had arrested this girl, had been twenty minutes late.
Had he been punctual and turned out with the others, in closed formation, he might not have been hit by the murderer’s bullet. In fact it was certain.

The man who was in this moment suffering a painful and slow death was thinking, perhaps, of his wife and children. Possibly, in his extreme pain, he was pleased to remember that his girls at least washed themselves as he did, and that he had left behind him a part of his being, a tiny symbol of what he regarded as order. Or he may have thought, in the valley of the shadow of death, that now he would never sit in a tidy office and keep orderly records, or he remembered his allotment garden, or he wondered whether the burial club, at the present rate of devaluation, would pay out enough money for a decent funeral. The dying man might be thinking of a variety of subjects, but the chances that he was thinking of Petra Ledig, his “last official act,” were very scanty.

And yet he, dying, took possession of this case, singled it out from all the others. His colleagues saw in Petra not an ordinary girl but the reason for the dying man’s having been twenty minutes late. Gubalke’s last official act must have been important.

The tall, heavy, melancholy-looking superintendent with the sergeant major’s mustache came into the room, stood beside the secretary’s desk and asked significantly: “Is that the girl?”

“That’s the girl,” confirmed the secretary in a low voice.

“He told me that she had dealings with gamblers. Nothing else.”

“I’ve not yet examined her,” whispered the secretary. “I wanted to wait till—he came back.”

“Examine her,” said the superintendent.

“The drunken woman who made such a row recognized her. She’s walked the streets. She admitted it, but maintained that it was some time ago.”

“Yes, he was very observant. He saw everything which was not in order. I shall miss him very much.”

“We shall all miss him. He was an excellent worker and a good comrade, and not at all pushing.”

“Yes, we shall all miss him. Examine her. Remember that the only reference he made was to gamblers.”

“I’ll remember. How could I forget it? I’ll put her through it.”

Petra was led to his desk. If she had not already noticed the significant glances or realized by the way they stood round her cell that something was amiss, the manner in which the yellow secretary now spoke to her must have revealed that the atmosphere had changed and to her disadvantage. Something must have happened to make them think badly of her—could it have something to do with Wolf? This uncertainty made her timid and embarrassed. Once or
twice she referred to the kind Wachtmeister “who lives in our house,” but the blank silence with which this appeal was met by the superintendent and the secretary frightened her the more.

As long as the examination concerned herself alone, and she could stick to the truth, everything went fairly well. But when the question cropped up as to her friend’s means of subsistence, when the word “gambler” fell on her ears, then she felt cornered and confused.

Without hesitation she admitted that she had accosted men several times (“Perhaps eight or ten times, I can’t remember exactly”), had slept with them and received money for it. But she did not want to admit that Wolfgang was a gambler for money, and that this had been their main resource for some time. Since he had never made any secret of it she was not even sure whether gambling was illegal, but she preferred to be on the safe side and prevaricated. Even on this point the dying man had done her a disservice. The word “gambler” had a meaning here in the East End of Berlin quite different from what it had in the West End. A girl of doubtful character who walked the streets and had a permanent friend and also “had dealings with gamblers” could mean only one thing in the East End: she was the companion of a cardsharp, that is to say, a three-card trickster. In the eyes of the two police officers she was a girl who acted as a decoy for her friend and brought in victims to be fleeced.

In a police station in the other part of Berlin this reference to gamblers would have had a more obvious significance. The West End—everybody knew it—swarmed with gambling clubs frequented by half the Smart Set and certainly the whole of the demimonde. The police section which dealt with this evil hunted down these clubs night after night, but it was a Sisyphean labor—for every ten closed there sprang up twenty new ones. The gambling public was not prosecuted, otherwise half the population of the West End would have been imprisoned; the promoters and the croupiers only were arrested, and all money confiscated.

If Petra had explained that her friend frequented a West End gambling club, the police in the East End would have had no further interest in the matter. But she evaded their questions, affected ignorance, lied, was caught out once or twice and thereafter kept silent out of sheer bewilderment.

If the dying man had not held the threads of the case in his hands it would probably have petered out. There could not have been much in it; a girl who lied so clumsily and blushed at every lie, contradicting herself, could hardly be the decoy of an artful confidence man, or the accomplice of a dangerous criminal. But there was always the possibility that some grave but unknown matter might lie behind it all. Petra was shouted at, admonished in a fatherly
manner, warned of consequences and, when all this did not make her speak frankly, led back to her cell.

“Send her to Alexanderplatz with the seven-o’clock van,” decided the superintendent. “Draw their attention in the minutes to the importance of the case.”

The secretary whispered.

“Certainly, we can try and get hold of the fellow. But he’s sure to have bolted by this time. Anyhow, I’ll send a man to Georgenkirchstrasse at once.”

Thus, when at seven o’clock the green police van stopped outside the police station, Petra, too, was put in. It was raining. She found herself sitting next to her enemy, the Hawk, but the secretary was quite right—the cocaine had worn off and the girl was in a state of collapse. Petra had to support her during the ride or she would have fallen off her seat.

X

He turned out of Landsbergerstrasse into Gollnowstrasse. He left behind Weinstrasse on the right, Landwehrstrasse on the left. To the right again he came to Fliederstrasse, a small street with but few houses. Here on the corner stood a low schnapps bar which Pagel had never before entered.

He ordered a glass of vermouth at the counter. It cost seventy thousand marks and tasted of fusel oil. He paid and went as far as the door before remembering that he had no more cigarettes. Lucky Strikes? They had none, but they had Camels. Not bad either, thought Pagel. He lit one and ordered another vermouth.

For a while he stood at the counter shivering in his wet clothes. The fusel-oil vermouth didn’t help much, so he took a double cognac, which tasted horribly of raw spirit. But a slight warmth was kindled in his stomach and slowly spread; an artificial warmth, not bringing that quiet happiness which Petra had felt after eating the crust of bread.

Pagel stood there indolently, looking with indifference at the smelly barroom with its noisy crowd. Apathy had seized him. He was convinced that already, before he had lifted a finger to help Petra, everything had miscarried. It didn’t matter in the least that the carefully guarded money had now been broken into. Indeed, he would have preferred it to flow from him, if possible, without his having to make any effort—for what could money do? But if money couldn’t help, what did? Must there be any help? Did anything matter?

As he stood there, so he would have preferred to stand forever; each step he took brought him nearer to a decision which he did not wish to make, which he wanted to delay as long as possible. It occurred to him that he had really done nothing else the whole day long but put off that decision. First of all he must
have money, then he would go forth in grand style. Now he had the money—and he stood calmly waiting at the counter.

A young lad wearing a peaked cap down over his ear came up to him, sniffed the smoke from his cigarette and begged for one. “I’m mad on English cigarettes. Don’t be so stingy, you; at least give me your fag end.” Smiling, Wolfgang shook his head, and the face darkened. The lad turned away. Wolfgang put his hand into his pocket, extricated a cigarette, shouted “Catch” and threw it. The other caught it and nodded curtly. At once there were three or four lads round Pagel, also begging for cigarettes. Hastily he paid at the counter, noticing their eyes fixed on his thick wad of money, and as he went out he pushed aside with his shoulder a lad who tried to jostle him.

Pagel was now only three minutes’ walk from his room and this time he did not dawdle. But as he rang Madam Po’s bell he felt the stimulus which the encounter in the dram-shop had supplied dying away; boundless sadness fell on him again. It seemed to weigh him down as the dark storm clouds had done that afternoon.

In the corridor he heard Madam Po’s repulsive shuffle and her phlegmy cough, noises which somewhat dispersed the cloud of sadness, and he felt that he would punish this woman for what had happened—no matter what it was.

Cautiously the door was put on the jar, but he kicked it wide open and towered over the startled woman. “Oh, Lor’, Herr Pagel, what a fright you gave me!” she complained.

He stood silent, perhaps waiting for her to speak, for her to start to tell him what had happened. But he had obviously filled her with fear, for she didn’t utter a sound, only smoothed her apron with her hands.

Suddenly—a second ago Pagel himself hadn’t known that he would do it—his shoulder pushed aside the woman as it had done the lad in the schnapps bar, and without hesitating he went along the dark corridor toward his room.

Frau Thumann rushed up behind him. “Herr Pagel! Herr Pagel! Listen to me a second,” she whispered.

“Well?” He turned so suddenly that she was again scared.

“Lor’, what’s the matter with you, Herr Pagel? I don’t understan’ it.” She was very flustered. “It’s only that I’ve let your room. To a girlfriend of Ida’s. She’s in it now—not by ‘erself. You understand? Why are you looking at me like that? You want to frighten me. You needn’t, I’m frightened enough already. If only Willem’d come! You ain’t left anything there, and your girl having been fetched away by the coppers …”

She was under way again, was Madam Po. But Pagel listened no longer. He pushed open the door of his room—had it been locked he would have broken it open—and went in.

On the bed sat a half-naked female, prostitute, of course—on the same narrow iron bed in which he had slept that morning with Petra. A young man of no better appearance than substance was just unbuttoning his braces.

“Get out!” said Pagel to the startled pair.

Frau Thumann was lamenting in the doorway. “Herr Pagel, this is the last straw. I’ll call the police. This is my room and you not having paid I need money too. No, Lotte, don’t talk, the man’s cracked. They took his girl to the police station, and so he’s gone off his rocker.”

“Shut up!” said Pagel sharply and punched the youth in the back. “Hurry. Get out of my room! Look sharp!”

“I must really ask—” The youth made a timid show of resistance.

“I’m just in the mood,” said Pagel softly but very distinctly, “to give you a good hiding. If you and that whore are not out of my room in one minute …”

His voice failed. He was shaking from head to foot with fury. He had never for one moment intended to claim this damned filthy hole, but it would suit him admirably if this bloody counterjumper said one single word of opposition.

He did not, however. Silent and flurried, he buttoned up his braces, fumbled with his waistcoat and jacket …

At the door Madam Po was wailing. “Herr Pagel! Herr Pagel! I don’t understand you! You’re an educated man an’ we always got on so well, an’ me wanting to give a roll and a pot of coffee to your girl, only Ida wouldn’t stand for it.… Besides, everything was Ida’s fault, I’d got nothing against you. Lor’, now he sets my place on fire!”

Pagel, paying no attention to her, had been standing by the window, absent-mindedly watching the girl putting on her blouse in a great hurry. Then it occurred to him that he was no longer smoking. Lighting a cigarette, he eyed the burning match in his fingers. Beside him was the curtain, the repulsive, dingy curtain which he had always hated. He touched it with the match. The hem scorched and writhed, then burst into flame.