“You’re a Jew, then?”
Pimm was dead. It was six months since they had pulled the body from the water, a single shot to the back of the head. Several of his boys had been posted to the usual spots where things tended to float up-down by the grain mills, or along the little inlet just beyond the Oberbaum Bridge-but it had taken almost a week before one of them had spotted him.
Not that it should have come as a shock. Run with the syndicates, swim in the Spree. That was the old line, and even bosses weren’t immune. Tach and Wetzmann had been idiots back in 1916, trying to horn in on Pimm’s hold on the Turkish sugar market. What had they expected? Both had ended up bobbing against the rocks. Still, the Spree was usually reserved for ratchet-and-pick men or a sloppy garrote. Bosses usually got better.
Things had changed, though. They had changed, and the world had watched and applauded or turned away, or whatever the world does when these things happen. The new boys wanted things cleaned up-they were very keen on cleaning-and criminals were an easy target.
“Herr Hoffner?”
Kriminal-Oberkommissar Nikolai Hoffner looked back across the desk. He was finding his mind wandering these days-to Pimm, to Martha, even to Sascha-especially when the windows were so tall and the sky beyond such a nice clean gray. The office was a throwback to the Kaiser’s Berlin, a vast hall with two-story drapes held tightly among the rococo swirls of gold inlay that followed the moldings up and around. Above, someone’s idea of an Arcadian romp filled the ceiling and spilled down onto the upper reaches of the walls, although even the little cherubs seemed smart enough not to stray too far down. A portrait of Hitler hung behind the desk: best to remain out of the Fuhrer’s gaze.
Hoffner refused to look at the file on the desk. Not that he was much on reading things upside down, but he knew it was the expected response. Why give this Herr Steckler the pleasure?
Hoffner corrected him. “It’s Chief Inspector Hoffner.”
Steckler continued to scan the pages. “Yes.” He looked up. “So you’re a Jew?”
It was impressive how Steckler had waited this long to ask, the small spectacled face doing its best at indifference, though mocking it all the same. These days it was where things always began or ended: Jew, the calling card of bureaucracy. This one, however, was shaking things up, slipping the question in at the middle.
“Technically,” said Hoffner. “Yes.”
Steckler returned to the pages. “It’s a world of technicalities now, isn’t it?”
Hoffner said nothing.
“And to have it go unnoticed for over three years,” Steckler added. “Remarkable.”
The Nazis had passed the Berufsbeamtengesetz in April of 1933, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service-a clever little piece of legislation to weed out the Jews and the Communists.
Steckler continued to read. “Your mother. She was a Jewess. Ukrainian.”
“She converted,” said Hoffner. “To Lutheranism.” It might have been Methodism-Hoffner had never known which-but why burden Steckler with the details.
“But not before you were born,” said Steckler.
“No.” Hoffner was no less offhand.
“And then she converted back. In 1924. She became a Jew again.”
“She was very persistent.”
Steckler looked up. Moments of uncertainty always brought a tight smile with men like this. He went back to the file. “Probably why there was the confusion.”
“Probably.”
“She died in 1929?”
“She did.”
Steckler turned the page. “You could retire now, you know.” He seemed to be warming a bit. “Take your pension.”
“Not my full pension,” said Hoffner. It was going to be a morning of corrections.
Steckler glanced down to the bottom of the page and then closed the file. He looked up. “I’m sure we could work something out.” A chumminess seemed to be struggling to find its way through. “Only a few years left, Herr Chief Inspector. What are you-fifty-five, fifty-six?”
“Sixty-two,” said Hoffner.
“Really? Even better.” Steckler had no reason to push too hard on this one; time was on his side. “It’s a new generation, Herr Chief Inspector. New direction. New methods. Alexanderplatz isn’t the place you once knew.”
“No,” said Hoffner. “It isn’t.”
“And you’ve had such a very nice career. Impressive, even. Why muddy it now?”
It was uncanny how the Nazis always tossed everything onto everyone else’s lap: Hoffner was the one now muddying things.
“It’s been a good career, yes,” he said.
He wondered if Pimm had sat in a chair like this, commended for his estimable career marks-the takeover of the five territories, the boy and heroin trade north of the Hallesches Gate, his work in rooting out “undesirables” during the Red scare. Probably not. And probably no mention of his help in the Luxemburg and Ufa episodes, not that those were something to crow about these days. In the end, it had come down to Pimm the Jew. Pimm the crime-boss Jew. A bullet to the skull had been more than sufficient.
Hoffner reached into his jacket pocket. “But if you think we can work something out,” he said, pulling out a pack of cigarettes and matches, “I’d be happy to leave the murder and mayhem to you and your new generation, Herr Steckler.”
Steckler’s smile returned. “Undersecretary Steckler,” he corrected.
Hoffner nodded, lit up, and said, “Now-about my son.”
Berlin had never looked so red.
Hoffner gazed through the tram window and doubted whether the Nazis recognized the irony. Little Rosa Luxemburg had been dead almost twenty years and yet the streets bled-red with black, of course (who could miss the black at the center), but it was the red that flapped in the air: flags, pennants, flowers. The scarves that hung around the children’s necks were particularly fetching, as if even their little throats were soaked in it. It might have been the rain-this had been a particularly wet, cold July-but why reduce it to weather?
Irony, though, was for those on the outside, those with something still to gain, although surely this bunch had been on the fringes long enough to appreciate it just a bit. Wasn’t there an irony in their having been elected at all, in their claims to victimization by the Bolsheviks, Versailles, the Jews? Fascinating to see earnestness wash away even the most stubborn traces of the truth.
The tram stopped, and Hoffner stepped off to a nice dowsing of his trousers from a passing truck. The lettering on its side had it heading west to Doberitz. Everything was heading west these days-food, horses, prostitutes-all of it to keep the Olympic athletes happy. Most were already settled in; the last few stragglers would be setting up digs in the next day or so, with their sauna and chefs and shooting ranges and private showers. Hoffner tried to picture the genius who had seen fit to call such lush accommodations a village.
But for those who had invaded to cheer the athletes on, Berlin was determined to quell any lingering doubts. Thoughts of Olympic boycotts might be long forgotten: everyone who had threatened not to come was already here. Even so, the Jew-baiting signs that had so troubled the French and the English and, of course, the Americans (would they be bringing their Negroes?) had been pulled from shop windows, stripped from the Litfassaulen, and replaced with odes to sport and camaraderie and international friendship. Not that the Greeks had been much on mutual friendships or protecting their weak-mountainsides and babies came to mind-but they had come up with the ideal, and wasn’t that what the new Germany was all about?
It was a cloud of gentle denial-ataraxia for the modern world-that had brought this cleansing rain, and Hoffner wondered if he was the only one to feel the damp in his legs.
He turned onto Alexanderplatz and saw the giant swastika draped across the front of police headquarters. It billowed momentarily. He imagined it was waving to him, a gesture of farewell, good luck, “It was swell, Isabel, swell.” The telephone call from the ministry had no doubt preceded him. The paperwork would follow, but he was out. There was no need for the flag to be anything but gracious in victory.
The look on the sergeant’s face at the security desk confirmed it. The usual nod of deference was now an officious bob of courtesy.
“Ah, Herr Kriminal-Oberkommissar,” he said. At least the man continued to refer to him by his title. Hoffner had been one of the very few to insist on his old rank after the SS had absorbed the Kripo and the Gestapo into what was now known as the Sipo. He had never considered himself a major or a captain, or whatever rank they had tried to foist on him. Inside the Alex, “detective” would have suited him just fine, but even the Kripo had its standards. So “chief inspector” it remained, if only for a few more days.
“Herr Scharfuhrer,” Hoffner answered.
“Will you be needing help with any more boxes, Herr Kriminal-Oberkommissar?”
Hoffner had anticipated the ministry’s response. He knew the letter he had sent them a few weeks back would bring his file into play. He knew it would mark the beginning of the end-of everything. The rest was academic. Most of his office was already packed up and gone, thirty-five years neatly stacked in boxes across town in his rooms on Droysenstrasse.
“I think I can manage it, Herr Scharfuhrer,” Hoffner said. He nodded, then pushed through the oak doors and stepped out into the Alex’s vast glassed-over courtyard. The smell of ammonia, with a nice lingering of mildew, pricked at his nose as he headed for the far corner.
The rote quality of the walk to his office had taken on an unwelcome nostalgia in the last weeks: Why should he care that the once-familiar cobblestones now lay buried beneath a smooth flooring of cement? Had he really spent that much time in the subbasement morgue to mourn its dismantling? Was there anything truly lost by riding an elevator up to the third floor rather than taking the stairs? There was a sentimentality here that troubled him, and Hoffner wondered if it would be this way from now on, even beyond the Alex? Was it possible to be disgusted by a self not yet inhabited?
At least he could still take one last stroll past the offices on the floor, stop into the kitchen for a cup of bad coffee, or hear the general incompetence spilling from the desks and telephone conversations. There had been a distinct drop in the quality of police work since the politics of crime had superseded the crimes themselves. The newest officers were hacks and morons, and their brand of policing was growing ever more contagious. Why make the effort when dismissals and convictions rested on political affiliations, even for the most despicable of rapists, murderers, and thieves? At least Hoffner was on his way out. For those with five or ten years left, the Alex had become a cesspool filled with nouveau petty posturing or, worse, old-guard yearning for invisibility until their pensions came due. Either way it was an abyss.
“Nikolai.”
The voice came from the largest office on the floor. Hoffner had long given up trying to figure out how Kriminaldirektor Edmund Prager knew when someone was walking past. There was nothing for it but to pop his head through the doorway.
“Herr Gruppenfuhrer,” Hoffner said. Prager had been given no choice but to take on the new rank.
“Have a seat, Nikolai.”
Prager was pulling two glasses and a bottle from his desk drawer. Over the last few months it appeared as if the desk had been moving ever closer to the window, as if Prager might be planning a jump, albeit a gradual one.
Prager said, “I just got the call.” He poured two glasses while Hoffner sat. “So it’s finally done. I can’t say I’ll miss you.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
Prager allowed himself a half smile. “The Kripo might be filled with thugs and idiots now, but at least they do what they’re told. It’s a different sort of babysitting with them, and for another four months I can manage that.” He raised his glass and they both drank.
“And then?” said Hoffner.
“We’ve a place outside Braunschweig. My wife’s family. We’ll go there and wait for this nonsense to pass while they pay me my pension.”
Prager poured out two more and Hoffner said, “Sounds very nice.” He took his glass. “So-how many Gypsies do you have locked up out in Marzahn now? Four hundred? Five?”
Prager had the whiskey to his lips. He held it there another moment before bringing the glass down. “Just once, Nikolai, I’d like to have a drink, a chat, and then see you go. Wouldn’t that be nice?”
“You still think it’s nonsense?”
Prager drank and Hoffner asked again, “How many?”
Prager thought a moment, shook his head, and said, “What difference does it make?” He set the glass on the desk. “There’s something wrong with having just one of them out at that camp, isn’t there?”
Hoffner appreciated Prager’s decency, even if it always surfaced despite itself. Hoffner took a sip. “Good for you,” he said, and tossed back the rest.
“Yah,” said Prager. “Good for me.” He thought about pouring out two more but instead put the bottle away. “The camp can house up to a thousand,” he said. “It’s around eight hundred now. Until the games are over. Then we’ll set the Gypsies free. Happy?”
“Not that you’re keeping count.”
“You know what it’s like with these people. The SS likes its papers in triplicate. I’ve no choice.” Prager lapped at the last bit of booze in his glass and then placed it back in the drawer. “You’ll stay in Berlin, of course. Can’t imagine you anywhere else.”
“I hear there’s some nice farmland outside Braunschweig.”
“My relatives know how to use an ax, Nikolai. I’ll tell them you’re coming.”
“It’s been guns and rifles for a while, now.”
“Has it?”
Prager sat back. In twenty years peering across a desk at the man, Hoffner had never seen him strike so casual a pose.
“You and I are too old to be concerned with any of this,” Prager said. “Take your pension, join a bird or card club, learn how to make a few friends, and wait to die. I think even you can manage that.”
Hoffner pushed his glass across the desk for a refill. “But not outside Braunschweig.”
Reluctantly, Prager opened the drawer and pulled out the bottle. “It’s the walking dead in Braunschweig, Nikolai,” he said, as he poured Hoffner a half-glass and returned the bottle to the drawer. “How would you learn to make a friend?”
Hoffner smiled and then drank. “I’ve managed this long.” He set the glass down and stood.
“You should take in some of the games,” said Prager, retrieving the glass and filing it. “You like sport.”
“I prefer my chest-thumping in private.”
“Then you won’t be disappointed.” Prager closed the drawer. “It’s no uniforms at the stadium. The memo just came down. Supposedly they had a rough go of it last winter for the skiing. All those foreigners outside Munich thinking they were in a police state. Imagine that? Even the SS will be in mufti.”
Hoffner took a momentary pleasure in picturing the discomfort that would cause. “So how much of it are they having you attend?”
“It’s not all that bad,” said Prager. “The opening thing tomorrow and then some of the running events. I’m in a box next to Nebe, who’s in a box next to Heydrich. And next week I’ve been invited to give an address to a contingent of Dutch, French, and American policemen. ‘The City and the Law.’ Very exciting.”
“I’ll be sorry to miss it.”
“Yes, I’m sure you will. I’ll pass on your regrets to the Obergruppenfuhrer.”
At the door, Hoffner fought back the urge at sentimentality. Even so he heard himself say, “Be well, Edmund.”
The gesture caught Prager by surprise. He nodded uncomfortably, pulled a file from his stack, and began to read. For some reason, Hoffner nodded as well before heading off.
His office was unbearably neat. There were scuff marks along the walls where books and jars and shelves-now gone-had rested for too many years without the least disturbance. The bare desktop was an odd assortment of stained coffee rings and divots, the grain of the wood showing a neat progression from healthy brown-where the blotter had sat-to a tarlike black at the edges: it made Hoffner wonder what his lungs might be looking like. And along the floor, imprints from file books-either thrown away or shipped off to central archives-created a jigsawlike collection of misaligned rectangles. Someone would have a nice job of scrubbing those away.
There was nothing else except for a single empty crate that sat in the corner under the coatrack. It had the word “desk” scrawled on it in black ink.
Hoffner stepped over, tossed his hat onto the rack, and set the crate on his chair. He had left the drawers for last. He imagined there was some reason for it, but why bother plumbing any of that now. He pulled the keys from his pocket and unlocked the desk. Tipping over the middle drawer onto the desktop-a few dozen business cards, along with a string of pencils, spilled out to the edges-he then did the same with the side drawers, the last of them leaving several pads of paper on top. He placed the cards, pencils, and pads inside the crate and began to sift through the rest.
Most of it was completely foreign to him. There were various scrawled notes-some dating as far back as twenty years-which had somehow eluded filing and now lay crumpled in balls to be opened and tossed away: a list of streets-Munz, Oranienburger, Bulowplatz-several telephone exchanges underneath the word “Oldenburg”; the beginning of a letter to a Herr Engl, where the ink had run out; and endless names he had long forgotten. The usual assortment of Gern clips and pencil shavings fell to the desk with each new handful of paper, but it was the smell of tobacco-laced formaldehyde that was most annoying.
The only thing worthy of any real attention was the neatly rubber-banded stack of folded maps. There was no point in opening any of them: Hoffner knew exactly what each would show: a pristine view of Berlin, although probably no more recent than 1925 or 1926. He had stopped using them around then.
For twenty-five years, though, maps like these had been a mainstay in the Hoffner Approach to Detective Work. They had made him famous, albeit in rather limited circles. Young Kriminal-Assistents-now far higher up on the rungs than he-would stand at the doorway and watch as he traced his fingers along the streets and parks and canals in search of the variations. That was always the trick with Berlin. She was a city of deviation, not patterning, each district with its own temper and personality. It was always just a matter of keeping an eye out for what didn’t belong and allowing those idiosyncrasies to guide him.
These days, however, she was too sharply drawn, too meticulous, and too exquisitely certain of herself to make the subtleties of genuine crime appear in bas-relief. Those idiosyncrasies were no longer the results of human error: a miscalculation in the timing of a bread delivery truck, or the unfamiliarity with the newspapers most likely to be left on a bench after four in the afternoon (years ago, Hoffner had caught two very clever second-story men on just such slipups). Instead, the deviations were now self-constructed, printed in laws inspired by Munich and Nuremberg. They left Berlin no room for shading and made her no more impenetrable than the most insignificant little town on the distant fringes of the Reich. Why seek out differences when impurity was the only crime that mattered? Flossenburg, Berlin-to Hoffner’s way of thinking, the two might just as well have been the same place.
He tossed the maps into the crate as a head appeared around the side of his door. “No one’s going to want it, you know.”
Hoffner looked over to see Gert Henkel stepping into the office. Henkel was fortyish and rather dapper in his Hauptsturmfuhrer uniform, the double chevron and braided circle making him someone to be taken seriously, willingly or not. The insignia placed him somewhere between the old Kriminal-Kommissar and Kriminal-Oberkommissar designations-or maybe somewhere above them both; Hoffner had given up trying to follow it all. Oddly enough, for all his Nazi trappings, Henkel was a decent fellow. It was still unclear how much of the party line he swallowed: too good a cop not to see it for what it was, but too ambitious not to keep his mouth shut. Hoffner wondered how long that would last.
Henkel said with a smile, “When was the last time you cleaned the place?”
If not for the glaring shine on Henkel’s boots, Hoffner might even have called him friend. “How old are you, Henkel?”
Henkel kept his smile. “A good deal younger than you.” When Hoffner continued to wait, Henkel offered, “Forty-two.”
Hoffner nodded and went back to the crate. “Then I’d say the last cleaning was just before you set off for Gymnasium.” Hoffner tossed several more scrawled-on pads onto the pile. “You did go to Gymnasium, didn’t you, Henkel? Or are you one of those uneducated but terribly hardworking little butcher’s sons who caught the eye of some well-meaning cop and so forth?”
Henkel’s smile grew. “Never took you for an elitist, Nikolai.”
Hoffner picked up the last of the pads. “I’m not. I just like a bit of schooling. Your uniform can be rather misleading on that.”
Henkel snorted a quiet laugh and stepped farther into the office. “My God, you’re getting out just in time, aren’t you?”
“Too late to turn me in, then?”
“Not my style.” Henkel settled in one of the chairs along the wall.
Hoffner continued to flip through his pad. A photograph of Martha with Sascha at five or six years of age had somehow wedged itself into the pages. It was a dour-looking thing, mother and son both moodily sunburnt, probably taken at the beach one of those summers before Georg had come along. Still, she had been pretty.
Hoffner slid the photo back in and placed the pad in the crate. He looked over at Henkel. “Not your style? You might want to ask yourself why sometime.”
Henkel spoke easily. “That was your generation, Nikolai. It’s answers now, not questions.”
Again Hoffner bobbed a nod. “Is that meant to be clever or charming? I’m never quite sure with all these new rules.”
Henkel looked momentarily less charmed before the smile returned. “I’d never really taken you for a Jew.”
How quickly word traveled, thought Hoffner. “Neither had I,” he said. “But that’s just it. Your boys have left me no choice.”
“Early pension, and at full pay? They’re actually doing you a favor at the moment.”
“It’s not this moment that worries me.”
Henkel snorted another laugh. “Gloom and doom. I was wrong. You really are a Jew.” When Hoffner said nothing, Henkel pressed. “Oh, come on, Nikolai, don’t take it so personally. No one’s going to let an old bull cop like you get caught up in any of this.” The humane Henkel was making an appearance. “It’s just putting things in order. They make a show with a few of the more arrogant types, and then everyone settles in. Better for the Jews to live their own lives, anyway. Probably what they want themselves.” He smiled. “Now, if you happened to own a shop or, God forbid, actually had a little money, then…”
Hoffner tossed another handful of scraps into the wastebasket. “I might need to take it a bit more personally?”
“No, Nikolai, you wouldn’t.” Henkel leaned forward. “This is politics. They’re saying what they know people want to hear. So they’ve taken it a bit far. They’ll pull back. Trust me, six months from now, no one will be talking about any of this.”
Hoffner swept the remaining clips into his hand and deposited them in his pocket. “They,” he said, as he brushed the grit from his palms. “Your friends might not like hearing that from someone wearing their uniform.”
Hoffner thought he might have overstepped the line but Henkel was in too good a mood. “It’s me, Nikolai,” Henkel said, sitting back again. “I’m the one who’s getting it. I’ll probably have to bring in a fumigator, but who wouldn’t want the great Nikolai Hoffner’s office? There was quite a pool for it. Somehow I won.”
For the first time, Hoffner smiled. “Somehow,” he said. He took his hat from the rack. “Then I suppose it’s yours to enjoy.”
He started for the door, and Henkel said, “You’re forgetting your crate, Nikolai.”
Hoffner stopped and looked back. He stepped over and pulled out a pen. Scratching out the word “desk,” he wrote “trash” below it. He then pocketed the pen and moved out into the hall.
It had taken some getting used to, living among the refined. Even now, Hoffner could feel the eyes from across the street with their tidy disdain-sneering at the brown suit, brown hat, brown shoes. Brown was not a shade for the rich, at least not the brown Hoffner was sporting. Still, it was good to have a successful son. Georg’s house was large, his lawn well-kept, and his flowers always a jaunty yellow or maroon, even after too much rain: remarkable how wealth could absorb even the dullest of colors.
The one blemish on the otherwise flawless facade was a tiny streak of fresh paint on the doorjamb. Hoffner stepped up to the veranda, lowered his umbrella, and stared at the spot where the mezuzah had hung. Not that Georg had grown up with anything remotely Jewish-he had grown up with nothing-but the boy had fallen in love with a girl, and such girls demanded these things. She had even gone so far as to demand (ask, hope) that Georg might move himself up on the Judaic ledger from quarter Jew to full-fledged. Only twenty at the time, Georg had submitted without a blink, a year’s worth of preparation happily weathered to make him fit for marriage. Hoffner was now sandwiched between a dead mother and a practicing son, both of whom had returned to their roots without a single thought to the living family tree. Odd how, thus far, Hoffner was the only one to have paid for his lineage.
The mezuzah had come down after the latest spate of street beatings. Until recently, the punch-ups had always taken place in the seedier parts of town or outside synagogues. Even so, all but a few of the houses along the street were now festooned in swastika flags: national pride, they said, the German Olympic spirit on display. Those conspicuously unadorned-the Nazis had forbidden Jews from flying the Reich colors-drew stares enough. Why advertise beyond the obvious?
Hoffner pushed through the front door and into the foyer. He slid his umbrella into the stand and then opened the door to the house. Almost at once the smell of boiled chicken and potatoes wafted out to meet him.
Luckily, Georg’s Lotte was an excellent cook. Hoffner followed the smell past the sitting and dining rooms (too much velvet and suede), along the carpeted corridor (very Chinese), and into the white-white tile of the kitchen. At least here there was something of the familiar. Lotte was at the stove, standing beyond the large wooden table and leaning over a pot that seemed to be sending up smoke signals. Very quietly, Hoffner said, “Hello.”
She was known to jump. Several meals during his early days in the house had spilled to the floor with the simplest of greetings. Hoffner cleared his throat and again spoke in a calming tone. “Smells very nice.”
“I heard the door,” she said, without turning. She continued to stir. “A messenger came with another note. That makes three. It’s on the table.”
Hoffner saw the ripped-open envelope with the now-familiar Pathe Gazette rooster in the top corner. The note was stuck halfway back in.
“And?” he said, pulling out a chair and sitting.
She seemed to take comfort in the heat on her face. “They don’t feel there’s any need for alarm, at this point.” The last phrase held just the right touch of resentment. “ ‘It’s mayhem,’ ‘what Georg thrives on,’ ‘the only one who can get it on film,’ so forth and so on.” She dug through for a piece of something, scooped it up, and tossed it into the sink. “They’re doing what they always do. They’re being pricks.”
Hoffner liked this most about Lotte. In fact, he liked almost everything about her. She was lovely and fine-boned, very good to Georg, and so clever when it came to seeing things as they really were. Georg had needed a girl like this, a girl just as clever as himself. And while Georg might have had a bit more empathy for the world beyond them-Lotte was never one to suffer fools-it was only a bit. By some miracle, the world had allowed them to find each other.
It was her mouth, though, that Hoffner marveled at. There was an honesty to the way she used words like “prick” and “shit-brain.” They weren’t meant to shock, just define. Hoffner imagined it was her precision that made her so endearing.
He said, “I don’t think they’re doing it on purpose.”
“Of course they’re not doing it on purpose,” she said, stirring again. “That’s what makes them pricks. They know exactly where he is. They just don’t want to tell us.”
Hoffner nodded and asked, “Is the boy about?”
“Still,” she went on, “I imagine they’re expecting some really wonderful reels of war-torn Barcelona, bodies and red flags, rifles in the air. And all by the end of the week. Isn’t that exciting?”
Hoffner had told himself to wait until dinner to bring things up but, truth to tell, he had never been much good at waiting. He said, “I suppose I’ll just have to go and find him, then.”
“He’s up in your rooms,” she said. “Where else would he be? I think he’s got something special planned for you today.”
Hoffner waited and then said, “I wasn’t talking about the boy.”
It took her a moment to follow. When she did, she continued to ladle through the meat.
“Oh, I see,” she said. “You meant Georg. Going to Spain and bringing him back. Yes, that would be very nice of you. And some eggs while you’re out. We’re running low.”
“They’ve given me the sack at the Alex.” He waited for her to turn. “This afternoon,” he said. “It’s a few years early, but they think it’s for the best. After all, I’ve had such a nice career up until now.”
She was still holding the spoon. He noticed a glint of Georg’s empathy register in her eyes: it was nice to see it. She said, “I’m so sorry, Nikolai.”
He shook his head. “No reason. Not much police work going on at the place now, especially for a half-Jew cop.” She tried an awkward nod, and he said, “So I’ll go see this Wilson fellow tomorrow. The one who runs Georg’s office. He’s always seemed nice enough. Let him know what I’m planning to do.”
There was an uncomfortable silence before she said, “What?”
Hoffner continued easily. “I’m sure he knows where Georgi was filming last. No reason to put any of that in the notes. I’ll start there.” The spoon began to drip and Hoffner pointed. “You might want to watch that.”
Her silence turned to confusion. “You’re not being serious?” Chicken stock splattered to the tile but she ignored it. “You know, I don’t find this funny.” When he continued to stare at her, she said, “They may be pricks, Nikolai, but they’re right. He’s followed someone up into the hills. That’s what this is.” She found a dishrag and crouched down to clean up the spill. “He’ll get the footage he wants and come back down. And then he’ll come home.” There was an unexpected frailty in her need to believe what she was saying. “It’s the Spanish. Do they even have telephones?” She stood and turned on the faucet.
Hoffner watched as the dishrag now began to get the worst of it. He said, “We both know Georg’s never gone this long without a wire or a letter.” When she said nothing, he took hold of the envelope, pulled out the note, and-glancing through it-realized she had managed it almost verbatim: “mayhem,” “thrived.”
“ ‘Incomplete communications,’ ” he said, reading. “That’s a dangerous little phrase.” He waited and then added, “If you need me here, I won’t go.”
“Need you?” she said; he heard the first strains of anger in her voice. She turned off the faucet and said, “That’s not it and you know it.”
She continued to stare into the sink, and Hoffner suddenly realized how badly he had missed it. This wasn’t anger. This was fear. It was a cruel sort of stupidity that had let him think she might actually be encouraging, even excited at the prospect. All he had done was to make the danger acutely real for her.
He set the page back on the table. “No one else is going after him, Lotte. No one else wants to think they have to.” And for some inexplicable reason: “There’s probably a better story in it if they don’t.” He was too late in realizing how deeply this had cut her. Instead, he found a bit of grease on the table and began to rub his finger along the wood.
Her eyes remained on the faucet. “So you just get on a train and go to Spain, is that it?”
His fingers had become sticky. He looked for something to wipe them on. “I’ve a friend who can fly me in.”
“A friend?” she said in disbelief, turning to him. “So this has been in the works for some time.”
Hoffner let the silence settle. “Yes.”
“Of course it has,” she said. “And getting the sack from the Kripo-that just makes it easier, doesn’t it?”
“I was going anyway.”
She tossed over the dishrag. “I’m sure you were.”
“As I said, I won’t go-”
“Yes, you won’t go if I tell you I’m too weak to let you. Would that cause some real misgivings, Nikolai, a moment of genuine concern? But then I’ve never played the martyred wife with Georg, so why should I try it with you?”
At twenty-four, she already had more resilience than he would ever know in himself. And courage. It took a kind of courage for bitterness to stand up to fear. It was something he had seen only in women. Or perhaps it was what he provoked in them. Either way, it made him feel small in its presence.
He focused on the rag as he wiped off the grease. “It’s more chaos now than-” He stopped himself. Than what, he thought-killing? How much more could he possibly mangle this? He looked at her. “They haven’t drawn the battle lines. There aren’t any fronts to be held. They’re picking sides, and a man can get lost in that, no matter how noble his intentions. A man like that needs someone to come and find him.” And, perhaps trying too hard to redeem himself, he said, “If it were you, Lotte, I wouldn’t need to go at all. You’d be just fine.”
She held his gaze. It was a strained few moments before he caught the flicker of surrender in her eyes. Another moment and she pointed to the rag. “They’re still pricks,” she said.
“Yes,” he agreed, tossing it back. “They are.”
It was enough for both of them.
She turned to the pot and, with one more unexpected kindness, said, “He’ll be impossible if you don’t go up now. Just try not to get him too frantic before dinner.”
The walk across the back lawn to the carriage house was mercifully dry. Hoffner kept his head down, careful not to notice the tiny pair of eyes following him from the second-floor window. He pulled open the door, mounted the steps, and instantly heard the scurrying of Mendel’s little feet above him. At the top of the railing, Hoffner saw Elena, the boy’s nanny, who was standing behind a lamp. To a four-year-old, a woman of her size-thick in all the right places-could actually be hidden behind such things. There was a stifled giggle from the blanketed lump on the sofa.
“What a long day I’ve had,” Hoffner said. “How nice it is, finally to be alone. I’ll just stretch myself out for a nice rest.”
He tossed his hat onto a chair and began to ease himself down onto the sofa. Instantly, the boy’s hands gripped Hoffner’s shoulders with shrieks of “Not alone! Not alone! Not alone!”
Hoffner went through all the required confusion-“My goodness! Who’s that? The sofa’s alive! Help me!”-as they ran around the room, Mendel clinging tightly to his back. Finally, Hoffner pulled the boy around to the front and they both slumped back to the sofa with a smothering of kisses for Mendy’s neck and belly.
This was, with only minor variations, the routine every day, down to the last few gurgles of laughter before Hoffner finally let go. Mendel quickly leaped to the ground and raced over to the drawing table in the corner.
Elena, well practiced, now stepped out from behind her lamp and said, “We spent a good deal of time on this one, Herr Chief Inspector. A little trouble getting all the letters of your name to fit over your head, but we finally managed it.”
She was always very good with the prompting. Not yet forty, Elena might have been the perfect opportunity for a healthy father-in-law living within arm’s reach, but both of them had been smart enough not to play out that farce. Hoffner nodded, trying to catch his breath as the boy raced back to the sofa and thrust the page onto his lap.
The only thing even remotely familiar on the paper was the drawing of a silver-star badge-or at least that was how it was described. It had recently become Mendel’s signature piece and was about two-thirds the way up on a big black blob, which meant that the blob was Hoffner. A few weeks back, the boy had been given a book on cowboys from Lotte’s father, an insufferable fan of the American West. With very little encouragement, Hoffner had pointed out that a sheriff was a kind of policeman, whereupon Mendel had instantly assigned that role to him. Lotte’s father remained less than pleased.
As to the “letters” Elena had mentioned, there were various scrawled lines and curls above the blob, the nearest thing to German an upside-down A, that looked more like a capsized boat than anything else. Still, it was three little clumps of something, with the A at the end.
“ ‘Opa,’ ” said Hoffner, reading. “How wonderfully you’ve drawn it.”
The boy dug himself into Hoffner’s side as he peered at his own work. “And that’s your badge there,” he said.
“Yes, of course. I saw it at once. Thank you, Mendy. We’ll put this one up with the others.”
“Can I see it?”
This, too, was part of the ritual, the handling of the badge. Instinctively, Hoffner reached for his pocket before he realized his badge was no longer there. He might have felt a moment’s regret-his first and only for this afternoon’s events-but instead, he chose to ignore it. Even so, he had grown fond of watching the boy gaze at the thing, hold it up to his shirt, bark out orders. Pride required so little in the very young.
Hoisting himself up, Hoffner said, “I think it’s time we get you your own badge, Mendy. A deputy’s badge. What do you say to that?”
So much for not riling up the boy. The moment of primal excitement quickly gave way to an equally deep despair as Mendy was told that the promised badge was, as yet, unpurchased. Hoffner’s only recourse was to give in to the nightly plea: eating dinner with the boy, or least sitting with him while he struggled to master a fork.
Fifteen minutes later, Mendy sat on a high stool at the kitchen table-Hoffner seated by his side-as Elena put the last of the little meal together. Mendy placed his hands on the table and began to teeter himself back and forth. Instantly, Hoffner grabbed hold of the stool.
“I won’t fall,” said the boy. “I’m balancing.”
Hoffner kept his hand on the stool. “Not a good idea, Mendy.”
“But I won’t. I promise. I won’t.”
Elena set a plate of tiny chicken pieces, potatoes, and spinach in front of the boy. She then placed a glass of beer in front of Hoffner.
“Eating time, Mendy,” she said. Her tone was one that everyone in the house had learned to obey; Hoffner quickly took a sip of his beer. “If I see you balancing again,” she said, “we go to the quiet place. Understood?”
Hoffner had never visited the quiet place-a closet under the stairs-although he had heard tales of it. According to Mendy it was filled with shadows, creaking wood, and even a few monsters. Mendy, however, had learned not to mention the monsters. They had not impressed Elena.
“Is it good?” said Hoffner, as the boy speared a second piece of chicken and shoved it into his mouth. Mendy had a remarkable talent for fitting an entire plate’s worth of food inside his cheeks before starting in on the chewing. Hoffner saw the boy going in for a third, and said, “I’d work on those before taking another, don’t you think?” Hoffner bobbed a nod toward Elena, who was at the sink washing up. “You wouldn’t want to … you know.”
Mendy thought a moment, then nodded slowly as he pulled back his fork. Chewing, he said, “She likes it when I finish quickly.”
Hoffner said, “She likes it when you don’t choke.”
This seemed to make sense. Mendy nodded again and, continuing to chew, said, “Did Papi have a quiet place when he was little?”
It was always questions about Georg these days-badges, forks, trips away: did Opa go away quite so often when Papi was little? This happened to be a particularly reasonable one. The trouble was, Hoffner had never spent much time with Georg at this age-at any age, truth to tell. It made the past a place of reinvention.
“Yes,” said Hoffner, “I think he did. Right under the stairs, as a matter of fact.” There had been no stairs in the old two-bedroom flat.
Mendy swallowed and whispered, “Did it have monsters?”
Hoffner leaned in. “Not after we got rid of them.”
The boy’s eyes widened. “Really?”
Hoffner nodded quietly. “Maybe you and I can do that sometime.” Before Mendy could answer, Hoffner plucked a piece of chicken from the plate and popped it into his own mouth.
Mendy said loudly, “Opa is eating my food.” Hoffner put on a look of mock panic as Elena, without turning, said, “Opa can go to the quiet place, too, if he’s not careful.”
Mendy stabbed at a clump of spinach, studied it, and shoved it in. “If she sends you, I’ll go with you,” he whispered. “That’d be good for both of us.”
Hoffner brought his hand to the boy’s face and drew his thumb across the chewing cheek. Mendy continued unaware and drove in another piece of meat.
It was all possible here, thought Hoffner. His only hope was to find his way to dying before he learned to disappoint this one.
Hoffner’s suggestion that he have dinner out was met with little resistance. Lotte’s parents-the Herr Doktor Edelbaums-had called to say how concerned they were with Georg still out of the country: wouldn’t it be best if they all dined together, Friday night after all? They would be over in half an hour.
Together, of course, meant just the family. There was always that moment of feigned surprise from the Herr Doktor when the “lodger”-Edelbaum’s infinitely clever title for Hoffner-put in an appearance: “No murders to be solved tonight, Herr Sheriff? So you’ll be joining us?”
Frau Edelbaum was a good deal more pleasant, though without any of the tools necessary to inject some tact into the proceedings. She would smile embarrassedly, say how lovely it was to see him again, and sit quietly with her glass of Pernod while her husband-perched at the edge of Georg’s favorite chair-played trains with Mendy. Hoffner would look on from the sofa and try desperately to time the sips of his beer with any attempts to engage him. And while this was perfectly unbearable, it was Mendy’s departure for bed, and the subsequent dinner conversation, that took them over the edge. In the end, Hoffner was doing them all a favor.
He stood with Lotte in the foyer as he slipped on his coat.
She said, “They won’t be here much past ten,” smoothing off one of his shoulders. “I’ll make sure.”
“Not to worry. Gives me a chance to see a few friends.” He pulled his umbrella from the stand. “It’s not as horrible as you think.”
“Yes, it is. You detest him.”
Hoffner fought back a smile. “Tell him they let me go for being a Jew. That should cause some confusion.”
“He’s more frightened by all this than you know.”
Hoffner shook the excess water from the umbrella. “He has good reason to be.” He buttoned the last of his buttons. “I’ll be sorry to miss the chicken. You’ll save me a piece?”
“It’s already in the icebox.”
He leaned in and kissed her on both cheeks. “They won’t treat me nearly as well in Spain, you know.” He saw her wanting to find the charm in this, but it was no good. “I shouldn’t tell them about any of that,” he said. “I’d hate to have your father pretending concern for me just for your sake.” Not waiting for an answer, Hoffner opened the door and stepped out into the rain.
Rucker’s bar hadn’t changed in nearly thirty years. Any given night it was the smell of burned sausage and over-sauced noodles that wafted out to the street and made the last few meters to the door so familiar. The sounds from inside came a moment later, old voices with years of phlegm in the throat to make even pleasant conversation sound heated. Hoffner found something almost forgiving about walking into a place where he wasn’t likely to see a face younger than fifty. Even the prostitutes had the good sense not to be too young; teasing the old with what was so clearly out of reach would have been cruel. The new girls learned to steer clear quickly enough; the ripe ones came to appreciate a clientele that preferred to talk, have a few drinks or a laugh, before trundling upstairs for more sleep than sex. To an old whore, a night at Rucker’s had the feel of a little holiday. It might not be much in the purse, but it was easy and quiet and at such a nice pace.
The barman placed a glass in front of Hoffner and pulled the cork from a bottle of slivovitz.
“Let’s make it whiskey tonight,” said Hoffner.
The man recorked the bottle, reached for another, and smiled as he poured. Hoffner took his drink and scanned the tables.
Eight o’clock was still early for the usual crowd. Dinner with the wife, followed by all that endless chatter about a day spent up on the girders or underground digging new track, could keep a man home until almost half past eight. The ones without families knew it best to straggle in even later, keep the rest guessing as to where they might have gotten to in the last few hours. The smartest always had a hint of perfume on the clothes, that watered-down swill a man could buy for himself and spray onto a collar just before coming through the door. It was the surest way to get the conversation going: “What do you mean, what do you smell?” The quick sniff of the shirt, the look of surprise, the overeager laugh, and finally the confession: “Damn me if she doesn’t use the cheap stuff!” Roars of laughter after that, even if everyone knew the game. Still, why spoil a man’s last chance at pride?
Hoffner spotted Zenlo Radek sitting in the back. Two of his men were hunched over a series of plates piled high with beef, potatoes, and sausage, while Radek glanced through one of the newspapers stacked at his side. Radek might still have been somewhere in his early forties-maybe even late thirties-but his face had long ago given up on youth. It was its lack of skin, or rather the stretching of the skin across the bones, that made it so perfect for the surroundings: gaunt and pale blurred even the sharpest of eyes. Then again, it might have been his homosexuality. That aged a man, too.
Radek continued to read as Hoffner drew up.
“The streets won’t be nearly as safe now,” Radek said, flipping the page. He had unusually long thin fingers. “But I’m sure they sent you off with something nice. A cigarette case, a gold watch. Let you listen to the time slipping by. Tick, tick, tick.”
Hoffner was never surprised by what information Radek had at his disposal. “Never took you for the sentimental type.”
“Don’t confuse pity with sentiment, Nikolai.” Radek closed the paper and looked up. A taut smile curled his lips, but the eyes told Hoffner how glad Radek was to see him. “And here I thought you might not be putting in an appearance before your trip.” Hoffner looked momentarily confused, and Radek said, “Toby Mueller. He’s got a plane all gassed up out at Johannisthal. Heading off to Spain, I hear, and with you in tow. Daring stuff, Nikolai.”
Or maybe there was room for surprise. Hoffner had to remind himself that as Pimm’s onetime second-and now boss of the city’s most notorious syndicate-Radek was tapped into every conduit in Berlin. Even the Nazis came to him when they needed information. There was talk, of course, that Radek had been the one to give Pimm up to the SS-“Make it quick, painless, a single shot to the head”-but that was absurd. It might even have been insulting. Truth to tell, Radek had never wanted this. He was simply too smart, and too loyal, not to be the one to take it all on in the end.
“Running the Immertreu,” he had once joked to Hoffner, drunk. “Tell me, if I’ve been spending all this time trying to kill myself, isn’t this a much better bet than the needle ever was?”
As it turned out, Radek had proved too resilient even for heroin. It was years now since he had lost himself to the attic rooms on Frobel and Moll Strassen. The rooms were long gone-who among the war-ravaged was still alive to fill them? — but Radek had given them a good try: veins streaked that deep pumping blue, boys at the ready for whatever was asked of them, and always the empty hope that he might somehow forget he was no longer a man-images of a single grenade rolling through the French mud, skin and trench wood flying everywhere, and his trousers drenched in blood.
The medics had saved him. Of course they had saved him. Keeping death back had become such an easy thing, just as easy as teaching a man how to piss through a tube.
For now, Radek was done with death, or at least his own. Instead, he read his papers, watched his men eat, and dictated every instance of corruption in his city. And who wouldn’t call that a life?
Hoffner pulled over a chair and sat. He took a drink.
Radek said, “He won’t find it noble, you going after him, Nikolai. Georgi knows you too well.”
Hoffner set his glass on the table. “You’re giving me too much credit.”
“Am I?”
Hoffner pulled his cigarettes from his pocket. “So it’s the big ideas tonight-pity and nobility. And here I thought I’d come in just for a drink.” He bobbed a nod at the two large men who were working through their plates. “Gentlemen.”
The larger of the two, Rolf, said, “Sausage’s not so good tonight. You can have ours if you want.”
Hoffner waved over a passing waiter, ordered a plate of veal and noodles, and lit his cigarette. “You should come with me, Zenlo. Spain’s perfect for you these days. Black market and civil war. What could be better?” Across the room a woman started in at the piano.
“And deal with all that chaos?” said Radek, as he leafed through the stack. He pulled out the “BZ”. “That’s nice for a man with a truck and a cousin down at the docks. Those of us with a little more at stake have to think differently.” He found the Grand Prix results and folded back the paper. “The desperate never buy for the future, Nikolai. No market stability. Order and fear-with maybe a little strong-arming thrown in-that’s what gives you a future.” He pulled a pen from his jacket pocket. “Berlin suits me just fine right now.”
Hoffner looked over at the smaller man. “So he’s off the Freud and Jung, is he?” The man continued to sift through his plate, and Hoffner said, “Tell me, Franz, what’s he reading now?”
Franz brought a spoonful of potatoes up to his mouth. “Keynes,” he said, before shoveling it in.
This required a moment. “Really?” Hoffner said. “That’s-ambitious.” Franz chewed, and Hoffner said, “He’s getting it wrong.”
“Is he?” said Franz, swallowing. “We should all be getting it so wrong.”
Radek continued to read as he spoke. “It’s the new psychology, Nikolai. Primal urges. Consumer desires. Totted up in columns and graphs. And this time it’s all scientific. Here.” He showed Hoffner the page he was marking. “Rosemeyer and Nuvolari. Auto Union and Alfa-Romeo. Clearly the two best drivers in the world. Barcelona last month-Nuvolari one, Rosemeyer five. Nurburgring two weeks later-Rosemeyer one, Nuvolari two. A week after that in Budapest, and they’re one and two again, only this time reversed. Milan, it’s Nuvolari, and finally Rosemeyer takes the German Grand Prix last week. And on and on and on. We know there are ten other premium drivers out there every week-Chiron, Caracciola, Trossi-yet these are the two who come up with it every time.”
“I’ll make a note,” said Hoffner. “What does it have to do with economics?”
Radek ignored him. “Is it because they have the best cars? No. Half the drivers are with Alfa-Romeo. And I don’t have to tell you what it takes to handle that tank of an Auto Union thing. Sixteen cylinders. Have you seen it, Nikolai? You have to be a beast of a man just to keep the car on the road.”
“So Rosemeyer and Nuvolari are reading Keynes?”
“Shut up, Nikolai. The point is, you’d be an idiot not to put your money on one of these two. And yet, even with the odds, people don’t. Half the money every week finds its way onto Farina or Varzi or Stuck, and these are good drivers, don’t get me wrong. But the chances, if you look at the trends”-he shook his head in disbelief-“almost impossible. So you have to ask, Why do people do it?”
It took Hoffner a moment to realize that Radek was waiting for an answer. “Primal urges?” he offered.
“Exactly,” said Radek. “They buy something with no real possibility of a return because they want to believe it can have a return. And the oddsmakers tell them to believe it can have a return. ‘This week,’ they advertise, ‘Farina will do it. He has to do it. You have to want him to do it.’ And they trust this because they live in an ordered world where, if things go wrong, they can try again the next week and the next and the next. They buy a product they shouldn’t want to buy because they so desperately want it. And that, Nikolai, is economics.”
Hoffner sat with this for a few moments before reaching for his whiskey. He took a drink. “So it’s the oddsmakers who are reading Keynes?” Hoffner expected a smile but Radek said nothing.
Franz, now running his fork through the remains of his beef, said, “I wouldn’t push it on this one if I were you.”
Hoffner smiled and looked at Radek. “We’re taking this latest theory very seriously, are we?”
Radek said, “You enjoy being an idiot, don’t you?”
“Not really a question of enjoying,” said Hoffner. “I think I liked the sex theory better, though. I’ve never bet on car racing.”
“Last I checked,” said Radek, “you weren’t doing much on the sex front, either.”
Hoffner laughed to himself.
Radek set down the paper and took his glass. “You have any idea where he is?” He drank.
Hoffner lapped back the last of his whiskey. “Barcelona,” he said. “Somewhere in there.” He raised his empty glass to a waiter. “I think everything’s happening up on hilltops right about now.”
“And he’s alive?”
“He has to be, doesn’t he?”
“It’ll be hot.”
The waiter appeared and took the glass. “Yes,” said Hoffner. “It will.”
“Georgi’s good in spots like that. He always has been.”
“You’ve met him twice, Zenlo.” There was an unexpected edge to Hoffner’s voice. “You have no idea who or what he is.” It was an awkward few moments before the food miraculously arrived, and Rolf and Franz were forced to stack their plates onto the empties so as to make room. Finally Hoffner said, “He’s always liked you, though. Liked that you never tried to corrupt me.”
Radek was glad for the reprieve. “How much more corruption could you take?” When Hoffner started in on the noodles, Radek said, “You like Gershwin, Nikolai?” Hoffner focused on his plate and Radek said, “I do.”
Hoffner nodded as he chewed.
Rolf said lazily, “It’s not Gershwin.” He was working his way through a mouthful of potatoes.
“What?” said Radek.
“The piano,” said Rolf, swallowing. “It’s not Gershwin. You’re thinking of the wrong thing.” He shoveled in another forkful.
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
“No,” said Radek. “I’m not.” There was a quiet menace in his tone; Rolf, however, continued to chew. “This is”-Radek became more serious as he thought-“Crazy Girl,” he said triumphantly. “ ‘Embraceable You’ from Crazy Girl.”
“Girl Crazy,” Rolf corrected. “And, no, it’s not. This is ‘Night and Day’ from The Gay Divorce. Cole Porter.” Rolf took a drink of beer and swallowed.
Radek watched as Rolf dug back in. “I have the phonograph,” Radek said.
Rolf nodded. “Good. Then you have the phonograph of The Gay Divorce by Cole Porter.” He raised his hand to a waiter, made some indecipherable gesture with his fingers, and went back to his plate. “I’m getting the spatzle, Nikolai, if you want some.”
This, evidently, was the way an evening with Berlin’s most dangerous trio took shape: elementary economics and Tin Pan Alley.
With anyone other than Rolf or Franz, Radek would have found a reason to press things, even when he knew he was wrong. He had once told Hoffner it was good for a man to learn how to cower every now and then. This wasn’t cruelty. It was therapeutic, even better if the man recanted the truth just so as to save himself. Radek called it the psychology of order: men liked knowing where they stood; they liked even better being told where to stand. No wonder he was finding Berlin so comforting.
“Finish up,” said Radek. “We’re heading west. I’ve got a treat for you.”
Half an hour later, all four were crammed into the back of Radek’s Daimler saloon, Franz and Rolf perched precariously on the two jump seats.
“You were a fencer, weren’t you?” said Radek.
Hoffner tapped his cigarette out the window and watched as a floodlit Unter den Linden raced by. The avenue had once been famous for its dual column of trees down the center. Not now. The Nazis had insisted on building a north-south U-Bahn to impress their Olympic guests. That meant digging and destruction and the temporary loss of the trees. But not to worry. There were always plenty of flagpoles and light stanchions at the ready to take their place, row after row of perfectly aligned swastika banners fluttering in the rain.
Berlin was now nothing more than an over-rouged corpse, gaudy jewels and shiny baubles to distract from the gray, fetid skin underneath.
Hoffner said, “It’s going to smell like this for a while, isn’t it?”
The avenue was jam-packed with the city’s esteemed visitors, guzzling their beer and munching their sausages-most of them good little Germans, small-town folk, who had been arriving by the trainload for the past week. The foreign contingent-all that promised money from abroad-had proved something of a disappointment. Still, at least most of these knew how to speak the language.
Radek said, “Gives it a nice rustic feel, doesn’t it?”
They drove past the Brandenburg Gate, and the light in the car intensified. Hoffner said, “So how much have they laid out for all this?”
“Why?” said Radek. “You thinking of chipping in?”
Hoffner turned to him. “How much?”
Radek shrugged. “No idea.”
“Really.”
Radek shook his head. “I’m telling you, we had the stadium-that’s it. The electrics went to Frimmel. The Sass brothers took the village complex. They get catering on that, so they’ll be making some nice money, although they’ve had to deal with the Wehrmacht, and I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. And Grobnitz got waste disposal.”
Franz, who was staring out the window, laughed quietly to himself.
“Franz likes that Grobnitz will be up to his arms in it,” Radek said. “What Franz doesn’t realize is how much money there is in shoveling someone else’s shit.”
Hoffner said, “Refreshing to see all the syndicates working so nicely together.”
“It’s the Olympic spirit,” said Radek. “Everyone’s been asked to sacrifice.”
“And in your pocket?”
Radek smiled. “Isn’t there a little pride somewhere in there, Nikolai? Something for the German greater good?”
“Tremendous amounts,” said Hoffner. “How much?”
Radek’s smile grew as he bobbed his head from side to side, calculating. “A hundred thousand seats in the stadium … Maifeld-that’s over twenty-eight acres of open ground-the practice facilities … Maybe”-he shot a glance at Franz-“what do you say, Franz? Twelve, fifteen million?”
“Twenty-seven,” Franz said blandly, as he continued to stare out.
“Twenty-seven million?” Radek’s disbelief was matched only by his cynicism. “Really? That much? Just imagine getting a cut of that.”
“Yah,” said Hoffner. “Just imagine.”
“They want to throw away the city’s money on this, Nikolai, I’m happy to help them.” Hoffner tossed his cigarette out and Radek said, “So you didn’t think of pulling out the old saber? Helping the great German cause?”
The thought of dragging his ancient legs onto the strip forced a dismissive snort from Hoffner. “I think Fraulein Mayer rounds out the token half-Jews on the team, don’t you?”
It had been in all the papers, the girl’s “special dispensation” from the Reich’s Committee. Mayer, a former world champion now living in America-and a Jew only in name-had been made an “honorary Aryan.” It seemed demeaning, no matter which way one leaned.
“She’s not doing them any favors,” said Radek.
“Who,” said Hoffner, “the Jews or the Reich? My guess, she wins something, she’ll have to give it back anyway.”
The Reichssportfeld sits on over three hundred acres of Grunewald forest in the far west section of town. From central Berlin, it is a relatively easy trip past the Tiergarten if one makes sure not to take the truck roads out to the Halske or Siemens factory sites-unless, of course, one is desperate for a rotary engine or any number of other electrical engineering devices. If one keeps to the low roads, the first behemoth to appear on the horizon is the stadium itself. It looms at the end of the wide Olympischer Platz, stone and granite leading all the way up to the double columns of the Marathoner Gate, with the five rings pitched in between. Though ostensibly the brainchild of the March brothers-Werner and Walther-the entire complex has the feel of an Albert Speer design, the thick limestone and wide columns telltale of the Reich’s architectural wunderkind. There was a rumor that the Fuhrer, on hearing of Werner’s plans to create a modern wonder-steel, glass, and cement-said he would rather cancel the games than have them take place in “a big glass shitbox.” But that was only rumor.
Next are the Maifeld parade grounds-vast, wide, green, resplendent-surrounded by nineteen meters of elevated ground, two meters higher than the stadium itself. Originally slated to hold over 500,000 people, it manages only half that (much, again, to the Fuhrer’s dismay), but there is the hope that, with the new health incentives-and the aim at a “fitter, sleeker, trimmer” German-the grounds might actually squeeze in close to 300,000 in the not-too-distant future.
And finally there are all those squares-August Bier Platz and Kornerplatz and Hueppeplatz (absolutely vital to name one of them after the German Football League’s first president)-but the real gem is the Langemarck-Halle. It is a series of cavernous rooms built to commemorate the gallant singing student soldiers (“Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles”) who gave their lives in the early days of the war, charging in full chorus against the hordes of ravaging Belgians, who were bent on destroying the mythic German spirit. That the battle took place at Bixchote (so much harder to spell, and not really all that German-sounding) never deterred the planners from immortalizing both the place and the moment of the century’s first spilling of Aryan warrior blood. The caverns sit under the Maifeld grandstands and directly below the bell tower. Someone had suggested early on that they call it the Fuhrer Tower, but Hitler himself had vetoed that. Why overstate things?
The place was oddly quiet as the car pulled up. Hoffner noticed the requisite guards and policemen roaming about. There might have been more security elsewhere, but no one would have been stupid enough to stop Radek’s Daimler. These were his grounds; even the SS knew to leave him alone.
The car stopped and the four men stepped out onto Olympischer Platz. Somewhere off in the distance a crackling light from a welder’s torch cast shadows against a far column. Hoffner wondered if perhaps Werner March himself might be somewhere about, chiseling out the last bits and pieces. March had promised a dedication ceremony for early May. Instead, he had quietly announced the stadium’s completion about two weeks ago: AND NOT A MOMENT TOO SOON, the BZ headline had read. The editors had hoped to run a cartoon of March holding up the back of the stadium on his shoulder, a wide smile on his sweating face, but they had received a note from the Reich’s Propaganda Office advising them that such a display-“humorous as it was”-might be seen as beneath the paper’s dignity. How anything might be seen as beneath the BZ’s dignity remained open for debate.
Radek stepped around to the back of the car, pulled open the boot, and removed a bag. “The boys are going to stay here,” he said, refastening the latch, then bobbing his head toward the gate. “How’d you like to see the stadium, Nikolai?”
They walked in silence along the lamplit arcade: the place seemed to demand that kind of reverence. Flags from the competing countries hung limply from their poles. Searchlights shone high onto the stadium’s facade, arching up and over and misting into the gray of the sky.
Hoffner stared up as they passed under the gate. A few stars had managed to break through the cloud cover, but for the most part it was just swirls of black hovering above the iron rings.
Two or three guards strolled along the plaza beyond; all were careful not to notice Radek and his companion.
Hoffner said, “Do you smell that?”
“What?”
“Bad beer and piss.”
“I do,” said Radek.
“And that’s not a problem?”
“Not much they can do about it when the wind shifts.”
Hoffner was surprised at the ease of the answer. “So this happens all the time?”
“Three times a day.”
Hoffner was waiting for an answer.
“Strength Through Joy Village,” Radek finally said. “The thing’s about half a kilometer from here. It’s even got its own train station.”
“You’re joking.”
“Would I joke about that?”
They made their way between the central columns and into the stadium’s main entryway. Their footfalls began to echo.
Radek said, “It comes equipped with Strength Through Joy Beer Halls, Strength Through Joy Children’s Tents, Strength Through Joy Crappers. There might even be some Strength Through Joy Tits thrown in, but I think those girls are reserved for the pure Aryan clientele. That’s something you don’t get on the cruises.”
The Strength Through Joy recreation camps and holiday cruises had been set up by the Reich as a thank-you to the working class of Germany. The simple folk were, after all, the very spirit of the Reich. And such spirit-pungent as it was-deserved a little knockwurst and dancing on the cheap.
“Your boots are good?” said Radek. “It’s going to be wet.”
They mounted a stairway, arrived on the second level, and then moved down a short tunnel. Somewhere toward the middle of the tunnel, the stadium grounds began to come into view.
If Hoffner had hoped to find something clever or demeaning to say, he couldn’t. The place was overwrought, militaristic to a fault, self-consciously classical, larger than any other space he had ever seen, and breathtaking.
The curve of the stands pressed up and outward like the perfect ripple of a stone dropped into a still lake. The color was somewhere between the cream white of porcelain and the rough green-gray of sanded limestone. Empty, the seats looked like flawlessly laid tracks-twenty, thirty, sixty of them, circling the field in a series of infinitely rising loops. Everything was bright from the overhead lights, and yet there was no glare. Most remarkable, though, was the field itself, broad and masculine, its grass tufted and thick, glistening from the rain as if its own exertions had produced this rugged sheen. The smell, full and green, lingered, with just a taste of polished stone in the mouth. Hoffner stood in silent wonder.
“It’s even better on the grass,” said Radek, as he started down the steps. Hoffner had no choice but to follow.
Reaching the bottom of the stairs, both men stepped up onto the low wall and then jumped down to the field. Hoffner felt a slight twinge in his knee. He did what he could to ignore it as they made their way across the six lanes of cinder track and out to the infield. At the far end, the top of the bell tower loomed through the wide and solitary opening in the stadium wall. Even the sky seemed more immense here.
“That’s where he’ll be coming through tomorrow,” Radek said. “Arm up, strutting, Heil Hitler!” He flipped his hand in a mock salute. “We might even see a smile.”
“I thought you liked Berlin just now?”
“What’s not to like?”
They made it to the center of the field and Radek stopped. The silence and size of the place came together in a single rush; odd to feel dizzy without moving.
Radek set the bag down. “And despite what you’ve heard, he asks for girls.” He knelt down and opened the bag. “Young ones. You never want to know what he does with them. The girls never say a word after. It’s unpleasant, but he pays well.”
Hoffner was still finding his bearings. “I didn’t know you’d taken to pimping,” he said. “Or are the economic trends good there, too?”
Radek pulled a bottle of champagne and two glasses from the bag. “It’s one client, Nikolai. I don’t think that makes me a pimp.” He stood and handed a glass to Hoffner. “A marked man, yes, but not a pimp.”
“So he’ll kill you one day.”
Radek snorted a laugh. “He’s going to kill a great many people one day, Nikolai. At least I’m getting paid.”
Radek stepped back and let go with the cork. The echo brought a stream of guards running out onto the first-tier balcony-small, shadowy figures from this far off-and Radek shouted, “Champagne, gentlemen! No worries!”
His voice continued to echo as the men disappeared as quickly as they had come.
“Like trained dogs,” said Hoffner.
“They’re terrified,” said Radek, as he filled Hoffner’s glass. “Sabotage. They think some Russian or Jew is going to infiltrate the place, set off a bomb, ruin their fun. Truth is, there’s nothing they could do to stop it, but the SS likes to show an effort.” Radek poured his own. “No uniforms. You saw that?”
“I did.”
Radek smiled and raised his glass. “It’s all so damned ridiculous.”
Hoffner raised his as well. “And this is for…?”
Radek shook his head easily. “An end. A beginning. Whatever you’d like it to be.” He drank.
“The poet pimp,” said Hoffner. He drank as well.
“We’re going to nip that one in the bud, Nikolai. No more pimp, all right?” Radek finished off his drink and, staring into the glass, said, “You could come work for me. Now that you’re done at the Alex.”
Hoffner nearly choked as the fizz ran up into his nose. He coughed before answering. “I appreciate the joke.”
Radek poured himself a second. “It’s no joke.”
The two men stared at each other until Hoffner finally said, “Yes. Yes, it is.”
Radek needed another few moments before tossing back his drink. He then nodded. “I’m glad I waited, then. Wouldn’t have looked so good if you’d said no at Rucker’s.” He crouched down and set the bottle and glass on the grass. “Pimm said he was waiting until you were done with the Kripo to give you this stuff.” He reached into the bag. “I’m sure he had something pithy he wanted to say before handing it over. I don’t.”
Radek pulled out half a dozen canisters of film. Each had a small strip of adhesive attached to it, with a name and an initial written in fading ink. He set them on the grass.
“Jesus,” Hoffner said in a whisper. He was stunned at what he was seeing.
“Yah,” said Radek. “Turns out they never knew he had them. There’s some nice stuff of Hess and Streicher. Apparently old Julius shares the Fuhrer’s tastes.”
The films had been made in 1927 by members of the then fledgling National Socialist German Workers Party, long before they had decided to trim the party name. At the time, the films were innovative, some of the first to take a crack at synchronization of sound. They were also remarkable for having broken new ground with an unimagined kind of depravity-violent and sexual. Hoffner had spent months trying to forget them. His boy Sascha had been in one.
“I thought Pimm burned these,” said Hoffner.
“And give up this kind of leverage? He wasn’t stupid.”
“A lot of good they did him.”
Radek said nothing as he continued to stare into the bag. Finally, standing, he said, “Yah.” He looked at Hoffner. “You get in trouble, you can always ask Streicher if he wants to run an editorial in Der Sturmer on little girls, ropes, and needles. My guess is he’ll take a pass.”
They stood like this for what seemed a very long time before Radek said, “You want to take a run around it?”
Hoffner was still digesting the last few minutes. “Pardon?”
“The track, Nikolai. A lap.”
Radek was being serious; Hoffner half smiled and said, “So the films weren’t enough of a treat?”
“Standing in the middle of my legacy is the treat, Nikolai. The films are what they are. The run-that’s if you’ve always had some pathetic dream of breaking the tape. Don’t worry, I’ll cheer you on at the end, if you want.”
Hoffner laughed quietly. “And I deserve all this because…?”
“Don’t go to Spain.”
“You’ll miss me that much?”
“You’ll die there.”
Hoffner saw the concern in Radek’s eyes. It was genuine and therefore all the more unnerving. “You’re probably right,” Hoffner said.
“It’s rifles and bullets, Nikolai. Maybe even some German rifles and bullets.”
“Really?”
Radek’s gaze sharpened. “Trust me, Nikolai. Two weeks ago we had a crack squad of Wehrmacht troops training out at the Olympic Village. No one knew it, and now they’re gone. Makes you wonder where they went with all their desert gear and machine guns. Not much need for desert gear in the Rhineland, is there?” Radek waited for the silence to settle. “This isn’t some dustup, Nikolai. You haven’t heard from Georg in ten days not because he’s up on some hilltop. It’s because he’s dead. You want to tell his pretty wife and little boy that you tried, fine. But unless you’re planning on spending your time sitting in a cafe in Barcelona drinking the health of the Republic, I don’t think you come home.” Even Radek’s caring had a cruelty to it. “I got off the needles. That’s on you. I’m telling you not to go to Spain. That’s on me.”
Radek leaned over and picked up the bottle. He took a long swig as he walked off. “So is it a lap or not?” he said, gazing off into the stands.
Hoffner stood staring after him, the wide expanse beyond them suddenly small. “Wrong shoes,” he said.
Radek looked back. “Fine.” He started for the track. “Then pick up your films and let’s get out of this shithole.”
Hoffner was in a good drunk by the time he made it back to Droysenstrasse. The lights were out in the house, but Lotte had been kind enough to leave the back path lit. He wove his way through the yard, found the door to the carriage house, and hoisted himself up the stairs.
As it turned out, the lecture out at the stadium had been just the tip of the iceberg. Radek, in full political lather, had spent the last three hours taking everyone through the latest reports coming out of Spain and the Rhineland. On Spain he was a bit spotty; his sources were having trouble getting through. Imagine that? But on the rearming of the Rhineland, there he was fully informed.
“Five months and no one’s raised a finger against us.” He liked to slap his own down onto the table for emphasis. “And we went in on bicycles, for Christ’s sake. They’ll let us do whatever we want, and it’ll be the same in Spain.”
It was unclear whether this was good or bad news to Radek. He had fallen asleep before explaining. The fact that his pillow had been the chest of a very fat and very naked girl made it clear that he had no idea where or who he was at the time.
Hoffner steadied himself at the top of the stairs. He did his best with a few of his buttons before finally just pulling the shirt over his head. His shoes and trousers dropped to the floor without too much effort as he fumbled his way onto the bed. Had he been any less drunk he might have jumped at the sudden sight of Elena looking back at him.
“I hear you’re going to Spain tomorrow,” she said.
Hoffner took a moment to appreciate the very fine pair of breasts staring up at him. He nodded.
“So you might be killed,” she said. “And then we’d never have done something this stupid.”
He needed another few moments before saying, “I’m drunk.”
“Yes,” she said. “Is that going to get in the way?”
This required no thought. He shook his head.
“Good.”
She pulled back the rest of the covers and invited him in.
At 8:00 a.m. on the dot, the band of the Berlin Guards Regiment sounded Ein Grosses Wecken-a grand reveille-outside the Hotel Adlon. Luckily, Hoffner was far enough removed across town to sleep through it.
The members of the International Olympic Committee, however, were not. Given just over an hour to wash, shave, and eat-always avoid the rabbit crepes at the Adlon-they were then shuttled off to either the Berlin Cathedral or the Church of St. Hedwig (Protestants on the left, Catholics on the right) for an hour of religious observance so as to fortify themselves for the day’s events. While they prayed, thousands of children-all across the city’s recreation fields-began to perform in exhibitions of group gymnastics, obstacle races, and synchronized club twirling: the object here to show the many athletic pursuits of Berlin’s schoolchildren. Mendy, having watched the neighborhood children prepare for these displays over the last weeks, and eager himself to twist and leap and bend along with them, had been told he was too young and too Jewish to be included. Lotte decided to keep him inside for the day.
Still later, as Hoffner stirred from a remarkably deep sleep (retirement and robust late-night exertions will do that), an honor guard from the Wehrmacht, along with various uniformed Hitler Youth detachments, looked on from Unter den Linden as the Belgian delegate-a Monsieur Baillet-Latour-laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier; so nice to have all the hostilities between the two countries long forgotten, even better to see military sacrifice as the prelude to amateur sport.
By mid-morning, it was Hermann Goring-always so dapper in his sky-blue uniform-welcoming the IOC members and his Fuhrer to the Old Museum in front of the Royal Palace a few blocks down. While Hoffner shaved, thousands of SS men and ever more Hitler Youth regaled them by singing:
Hoist up our flags in the wind of the morning!
To those who are idle, let them flutter a warning!
No one was even remotely idle as the dashing Baldur von Schirach-twenty-nine and leader of the Youth-stepped to the podium and addressed the crowds with the truly inspirational words, “We, the youth of Germany, we, the youth of Adolf Hitler, greet you, the youth of the world.” Unter den Linden erupted in applause and cheering as the torchbearer finally appeared.
There was a quiet intensity along the avenue as the white-clad young man jogged slowly to the museum, lit the flame, and then jogged back across the square, where another pyre awaited him. The “flames of peace,” so Goring had promised, would burn throughout the games. No one had mentioned Berlin’s good fortune to have several libraries and bookstores in the immediate vicinity, should the flames need feeding.
Lotte was at the kitchen table reading through the Tageblatt when Hoffner finally appeared at the door. She kept her eyes on the paper. “You’ll be joining us for lunch?” she said.
He was still feeling the whiskey at the back of his throat; it was enough just to nod. He noticed Elena by the sink, washing and peeling something. Mendy was under the table with a train.
Lotte continued to read. “Yes or no?”
Hoffner managed a croaked, “Yes.”
Lotte looked up and said, “If you could fix another plate, Elena, that would be very nice.”
Elena dried her hands and moved to the stove. “Bit of a cold, Herr Chief Inspector?” she said.
“No,” he said. “Just getting old.”
“You’ve a long way to go there, Herr Chief Inspector,” she said. “Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”
Hoffner caught Lotte staring at him for a moment. Just as quickly she leaned under the table. “Lunch, Mendy.” She looked back at Hoffner. “We’re all done playing.”
It was nearly half past one before Hoffner made it to the middle of town. The crowds were already out at the stadium, the athletes due to arrive within the hour, Hitler by four. To keep them all entertained, the Olympic Committee had enlisted the services of the Berlin Philharmonic, the National Orchestra, and-how could they go on without them? — the Bayreuth Wagner Festival choir, all three en masse with soaring renditions of the Meistersinger overture, Liszt’s Les Preludes, and anything else with lots of trumpets and trombones. The stadium had yet to open its beer and wine concessions, so the louder the better.
Hoffner stepped down from the tram, crossed Kaiser-Wilhelm-Strasse, and pushed through the door at number 17.
The Berlin office of the British Pathe Gazette Company was three rooms at the top of a rather sweet if old five-floor walk-up: one secretary, four filmmakers, and all of them with the singular task of covering Germans in the news. Hoffner had stopped in twice before: the first time three years ago, to see Georg’s new digs; the second last month, when Mendy had been rushed to the hospital after falling down the stairs. The telephones at Georg’s had somehow gone out. Luckily, Hoffner had been at the Alex, only a fifteen-minute walk-or ten-minute run-depending on the traffic. Papi and Opa had arrived at the hospital to find Mendy unbroken and utterly delighted to be sporting a very long bandage on his leg. He had limped for two days after-each day a different leg-until Lotte had told him to knock it off.
Anthony Wilson was leaning out an open window behind his desk, peering off into the distance, when Hoffner stepped into the office. Hoffner shut the door, and Wilson ducked his head under his arm to see who it was.
“Hallo there, Inspector.”
Wilson was a young thirty-two, with too much enthusiasm for a man his age. He continued to peer back in this odd position before saying, “Join me?” Wilson returned to his viewing, and Hoffner had no choice but to step over, remove his hat, and inch his head out. The damp was oddly thick up here.
Wilson said, “A fellow across the way on four says that when the street’s clear, you can actually hear the music.” He was straining his ear westward. “Out at the stadium, I mean.”
Even his German sounded like public school English. Hoffner imagined all those years Wilson had spent working on the “Bosch” while his friends had been struggling through Horace and Sappho. Not much newsreel work, though, in ancient Rome and Athens.
The wind picked up, and Hoffner said, “You know that’s not really possible, Herr Wilson.”
“Oh, I know,” he said. “But they get a nice kick out of seeing the Englishman stick his head out the window. They’re placing bets on it. How long I can go. They don’t think I know about it. They’ll be wondering who you are in a minute or two.”
“So we’ll be out here that long?”
Wilson looked over, then smiled. “Fair enough.” He ducked under, and Hoffner followed. Immediately, Wilson began to smooth back what little hair he had. He was tall like Georg, but with an inordinately narrow head. “Someone on the fourth floor’s just won a bit of money.” He smiled again, motioned Hoffner to a chair, and took his own behind the desk.
Hoffner stepped over and sat. He was trying to convince himself that Wilson’s airy mood was a good sign. Then again, the man might just have been an idiot.
“Any word?” asked Hoffner.
Wilson’s face did its best with a look of seriousness: the mouth remained closed even as the jaw dropped a bit. Was it possible for the face to grow longer?
“ ‘Any word,’ ” Wilson repeated pensively. He looked across at Hoffner. “No. No word, Inspector. But I shouldn’t be too concerned.”
The English were always so good with an empty phrase. Hoffner waited and then said, “The trouble is, Herr Wilson, I am.”
There was some quick nodding from Wilson as he retreated. “Yes, yes, of course you are. I am as well. Naturally. I just mean it’s still early days. Everyone involved with POG was moved to a safe-”
“Pog?” Hoffner interrupted.
Wilson seemed surprised by the question. “POG-People’s Olympic Games?” When Hoffner said nothing, Wilson added, “Why Georg went?”
Another favorite of the English: the meaningless acronym.
Georg’s reason for going to Spain was, of course, not news to Hoffner. In fact, it had been impossible to be in Berlin over the past few months and not hear all the updates on the highly controversial, if equally pointless, Protestspiele. Barcelona for the people. Barcelona for the Games of Protest. Ludicrous.
“No,” Hoffner said. “I know why Georg went, Herr Wilson. I just didn’t know the games were called”-he hesitated-“POG.”
Wilson flipped open a cigarette box on his desk and offered one to Hoffner. “Well, technically, it’s just a few of us here at Pathe Gazette, Inspector. Makes it so much easier in wires and the like. POG this. POG that. You understand.” He lit Hoffner’s cigarette and took one for himself. “No point in using it now, though, is there? Still, as I said, everyone was moved to a safe spot once the trouble began.” He lit up.
“And where exactly do you find a safe spot in Spain these days, Herr Wilson?”
Wilson let out a stream of smoke. For an instant Hoffner thought he saw something behind the eyes: it was strangely familiar and then just as quickly gone. Wilson said, “That’s probably a very good question, Inspector.”
“And yet I shouldn’t be concerned.”
“Georg wanted to go on filming. Do you blame him? We both know he’s gotten himself out of deeper holes than this.”
“Has he?” Hoffner saw it again in the eyes. He let it pass. “And how does one lose track of a man eager to go on filming?”
“It’s a war, Inspector.” The tone was mildly sharper. “It takes time for things to settle in.”
It was a callous answer, and not in keeping with the Wilson of only moments ago. Hoffner took a long pull and said, “By the way, it’s no longer inspector. Just Herr Hoffner. My papers went through yesterday.”
“Really?” Wilson said. He leaned in and, focusing on the glass, began to curl his cigarette into the ashtray. “Good for you.”
And there it was: the eyes and the voice coming together. Hoffner was struck by how obvious it seemed.
It was the way Wilson had said it-“Good for you”-that went beyond mere congratulations. There was a relief in the voice, as if making it to the end of a career unscathed deserved a nod of admiration. As if, one day, Wilson hoped he might make it there himself.
Hoffner continued to watch as Wilson played with the ash. “Yes-it is,” he said. “I imagine you’d like to get there one day yourself.”
Wilson stayed with the cigarette. “Pardon?”
“The job. It can be rather dangerous. Nice when you survive and get the pat on the back at the end.” Hoffner watched Wilson spend too much time with the ash. Finally Hoffner said, “Which branch?”
Wilson took a moment too long before looking up. “Which branch…? I’m afraid I don’t understand.” The amiable smile was really quite a feat.
“War Office or Admiralty? Or is the British Secret Intelligence Service all under the same roof these days?” When Wilson said nothing, Hoffner added, “Thirty years, Herr Wilson. I think I know when I hear a cop.”
A car horn from the street broke through, but Wilson continued to stare. His smile became more masklike as the eyes began to sharpen: rare to see intelligence growing on a man’s face.
“Just like that,” he said. There was now a quiet certainty in the voice.
“Like what?” said Hoffner.
“Georg said you were uncanny at what you did. Hard to believe that good.” There was nothing accusatory in it. “When did he tell you?”
“Tell me what?”
Wilson crushed out his cigarette and then nodded to himself. “Fair enough.” He sat back. “We can play it that way. He’s too useful to us to care one way or the other.”
Hoffner watched the self-satisfied indifference across the desk.
Georg-an agent of British Intelligence. Hoffner was torn between a feeling of pride and terror.
“How long?” he said.
“How long what?”
“How long has Georg been with you?”
Wilson looked up. “What is it you want, Herr Inspe-” He caught himself. “Herr Hoffner?”
“He wouldn’t have told me. You know that.”
Wilson continued to stare. “No, I suppose he wouldn’t have.” He waited, then reached down to the bottom drawer. He returned with a bottle and two glasses and placed them on the desk: it seemed every office in Berlin was fitted with a set. “You really had no idea, did you?” Hoffner said nothing and Wilson poured. “Amazing how he fell into our laps. But then, everything got tossed around in ’thirty-three, didn’t it?” Wilson recorked the bottle, took his glass, and sat back.
“I’m sure it’s easy to see it that way, from a distance.”
“No, no, I know,” Wilson said blandly. “I’m sure Georg was devastated. Angry. Six years with Ufa and they throw him out.” Hoffner’s eyes remained empty. “Ufa-Tonwoche has always been a second-rate newsreel studio,” Wilson said. “Georg was too good a cameraman and director to be stuck there. He was lucky to move on.”
“So you made him your offer before they found his work too degenerate?” Hoffner took his glass. “Or was that later when you recognized his talents and his anger?” He drank.
Wilson took another cigarette from the box and lit it. “I think I’m going to continue calling you inspector, Inspector. It’ll make me feel so much better about all this.”
“Is that in some manual someplace?”
Wilson smiled as he exhaled. It was his first honest expression in the last ten minutes. “I’m sure it is.” He took another pull. “You’re expecting me to say that my father was some old beat cop, tough, hard-drinking, and this is my way of making him proud.”
“No,” Hoffner said. He finished his own cigarette and began to crush it out. “Your father was a banker-Harrow, Eton-the same places you went. The only moment of real disappointment came when you chose Oxford over Cambridge-or Cambridge over Oxford-whichever let him know you were your own man.” Hoffner let go of the cigarette. “He finds the whole newsreel business silly, but if he only knew what it was you were really doing … Closer?”
To his credit, Wilson had kept his smile. “It was Winchester, then Cambridge.”
“My mistake.” Hoffner brushed the ash from his hands. “Old beat cops don’t produce men like you, Herr Wilson. They produce the boys who go and die for your principles.”
Wilson’s eyes showed a moment of genuine regard. Both men knew it had no place here.
Hoffner said, “I’ve been thinking of taking a trip to Spain.”
“Have you? Bit dodgy there right now.”
“I’m going after him.”
“No, I don’t think you are.”
“And why is that?” Hoffner watched as Wilson took a drink. “Where was he filming, Herr Wilson?”
“The retired Kripoman decides to go and-”
“Yes,” said Hoffner. “I know. Get himself killed. I’ve been warned.”
“Oh, I don’t care if you get killed.” There was nothing malicious in the voice, not even a hint of that very brave English self-sacrifice. Wilson was simply trying to move them beyond the obvious. “I’m sure that would be tragic in some meaningless way-and isn’t that always the worst sort of tragedy-but I just don’t think you’d be much good. Do you even have Spanish or Catalan?” Hoffner said nothing, and Wilson continued. “Nothing better than seeing a nice little German in his climbing boots and short pants, sweating his way from one cafe to the next, asking about his boy gone missing: ‘Excuse me, senor, do you speak German?’ ”
“And I imagine Georg was fluent?”
Wilson gave nothing away. “Now if the boy happened to be some sad-sack Communist or socialist out to fight back the new fascists, I doubt anyone pays much attention. More troubling when the boy works for a British newsreel company-and a Jew to boot-and his daddy starts asking around. You see where I’m going with this?”
Hoffner looked at the bald pate across from him; even the shine seemed more credible now. “You really think the SS doesn’t know exactly what you are?”
“What the SS does or doesn’t know isn’t my concern. I just don’t like helping them along. And if they’re interested in Georg, so much the easier to let his sixty-year-old father lead them right to him.”
“I’m glad I inspire so much confidence.” Hoffner set his glass on the desk. “And why would the SS be so concerned with Georg?”
“The Spanish fascists haven’t a chance if they don’t get help from the outside; we both know that. And we both know where that help will be coming from. The trouble is, we’re all promising not to get involved in Spain-England, Russia, Italy, France. Even the Germans are willing to make that promise. Imagine if someone starts nosing around and finds out that the Nazis won’t be keeping their word. Especially when they’re the ones throwing the big international party out at their new stadium. Not so good for the image. Not so good for Georg.” He took a last pull and crushed out the cigarette in the ashtray.
“So what did you send Georg off to find?”
Wilson flicked something from his finger and sat back casually. “I didn’t send him off to find anything.”
Men like this were always so effortless with a lie, thought Hoffner. “I see-because of that promise you’ll all be making not to get involved.”
“We won’t be getting involved.”
“Yes, I’m sure that’s true.”
Wilson was no less glib. “We do happen to be running a news organization, Inspector. On occasion that means having to film the news. Barcelona and its Olimpiada-that was news. So Georg went.”
“And he just happened to be in the right place at the right time.”
“Whatever the reason he went, there’s nothing I can do to stop you from going after him now. I’m just hoping you understand what’s at stake.”
“Georg’s life, I think.”
“Oh, is that what you think this is about-a single life?” Wilson set his glass on the desk. “If you’re that naive you won’t make it out of the Friedrichstrasse Banhof.”
“I’m not much on trains.”
“Then he’ll be dead by the time your boat docks.”
“I’ve always found flying much more efficient.”
For the first time Wilson hesitated. It was the silence that held him.
“You have a plane,” he finally said. “That’s good. That’s very good.” He took another cigarette and lit up. “Don’t tell me how or where. Unregistered planes are a rare thing to get hold of these days.”
Wilson stared at Hoffner for another few moments and then was on his feet. He pulled a set of keys from his pocket and stepped over to the floor safe. Kneeling down, he used two of the keys to open it. He retrieved a single sheet of paper and shut the door. He set the page in front of Hoffner. There were five words written on it:
HISMA: BERNHARDT, LANGENHEIM; HANSHEN: VOLLMAN
“His last wire,” said Wilson. “Five days ago from somewhere in Barcelona. It’s impossible to say where.”
Hoffner continued to stare at the sheet. “And you’ve decided I should have this now?”
Wilson sat. “We don’t have enough people in there to send someone looking for him. You know that. Not that sending someone in would be much good. But since you’re taking that trip…”
“These are German names. I’m a German.”
Wilson was now leaning back, his eyes fixed on Hoffner. “I’ll keep that in mind. We think these are the names of contacts he made or locations. The trouble is, we need to keep a low profile. As I said, not the time for us to be digging around. Hisma and Hanshen might be names. More likely they’re not. That’s where I’d start.”
“Very generous of you.”
“Yes-it is. Of course, you don’t have to go if you don’t want.”
It was Wilson’s strongest card: giving Hoffner a way out and knowing he would never take it.
Hoffner picked up the sheet. “From the look of it, Bernhardt and Langenheim are connected to Hisma. Vollman to Hanshen.”
“I agree. So that should make it easier.”
Hoffner had no idea why Wilson thought that. Nonetheless, he folded the paper and placed it in his coat pocket.
“And when I find him?”
“You’ll bring him back.”
Hoffner saw a drop of whiskey in his glass. He picked it up and tossed it down. He stood.
He was at the door when he turned and put on his hat. “By the way, I don’t own a pair of climbing boots.”
The amiable smile returned. “How very nice for you.”
His valise was already packed and waiting by the foyer door when Hoffner got home. There was no point in checking through it; Lotte would have thought of everything. He followed the sound of her piano-playing into the sitting room.
She was working through a rough passage of something. He dropped his hat onto a chair as she continued to play.
“Long meeting,” she said.
He moved a cushion on the sofa and sat. “Yes.”
“And he was helpful?”
“Enough.”
She was making a complete mess of the left hand. She tried a few more times and then stopped. She looked over. “You told him you were going?”
Hoffner nodded. He thought she might launch into something else, but she just sat there, staring at him. Finally she said, “Good.” She stood and stepped out from behind the piano. “Do you have time for an early dinner?”
“I think so, yes.”
“Mendy wouldn’t nap.” She was crossing toward the hallway. “You might want to go up.”
As she passed, Hoffner said, “Wilson seemed very confident.”
She was inside the archway when she stopped. She turned. Her eyes told him nothing. “You don’t mind leftover chicken, do you?”
Hoffner shook his head.
“Good. We’ll have that then.” She tried a smile before moving off down the hall.
Upstairs, Mendy was at his writing table, deep into a drawing.
“I hear we lost the nap again,” Hoffner said.
Mendy continued to draw.
“Maybe you’re getting too old for that.” Hoffner stepped over and cocked his head to see what the boy was drawing: blob and badge were front and center. “Not such a bad thing to be too old for a nap.”
The pencil continued to move, and Mendy said, “Does that mean I can go?”
“Go where?”
“With you and Papi?”
Hoffner pulled over another small chair. His knees were almost to his chin as he sat. “I don’t think so, Mendy.” He expected the little face to turn, but the boy was showing some resolve. Hoffner said, “Papi always brings you something nice. I can bring you something, too.”
“I don’t want anything.”
“How do you know when you don’t know what it is?”
Mendy finished his drawing, handed it to Hoffner, took another piece of paper, and started in again.
Hoffner watched as the little hand moved, the other pressed down on the page to keep it in place. He couldn’t see the face, not that it would have helped. It was nearly half a minute before Hoffner decided to look again at the drawing he was holding. He then stood.
When he reached the door he said, “Thank you for the picture.” Mendy kept to his drawing, and Hoffner said, “I’ll see you downstairs.”
Mendy never made it to dinner. In fact, he stayed in his room even after the cab arrived. The worst of it came during the walk down the front path. There was still enough sun in the sky to catch a little face and eyes in the window, but Hoffner refused to turn.
Even so, the thought of them stayed with him for the forty-minute ride. It would have been longer had the cabbie not been clever and taken them south from the start. Anything else and they would have hit traffic heading west to the games. Luckily Johannisthal was far enough south, and far enough east, to keep it immune. Tempelhof, where all the big aeroplanes had been landing, was a zoo now. Mueller had been smart to keep himself out here.
“My tires blow on this,” said the cabbie, “and you’ll be the one paying for the spares. Understood?”
The man had been grumbling for the past ten minutes. Most of the roads around Johannisthal were little more than stomped-down grass and ruts. The modern touches-tarmac and lighting-were reserved for the airstrips: this time of night, the cab’s headlights were no match for the sudden dips and turns.
When the cabbie finally reached his limit, he pulled up about fifty meters from the old air show bandstands and reached back to open the door. They were sitting in the middle of a deserted field, the beams from the headlights spilling out like two narrow pancakes. “You’re close enough,” he said.
The big hangars were beyond another field, but Hoffner was happy enough to let the man go. He stood and watched the taillights bounce along the grass-the engine’s grind a thinning echo-before he picked up the valise and headed across the mud. The smell of sewage and sulfur seemed to follow him. By the time Hoffner stepped into the last of the hangars, his shirt was damp through to the waist.
The place reeked of gasoline, even with the doors wide open. The cement floor was a trail of brown and black puddles, with tire marks crisscrossing the entire landscape. Twelve or so aeroplanes were parked along the walls-German, French, English-most of them stripped of parts in aid of the others. Elsewhere, pieces of engine were neatly laid out on sheets, while wheels and the like rested against walls and toolboxes. As far as Hoffner could tell, there were no signs of life.
Stepping farther in, he recognized a few antiques among the four or five untouched planes: a Sopwith Snipe in nice condition; better still was the single-seater Albatros fighter, 180-hp of liquid-cooled speed. Hoffner remembered how Georg had been able to recite the specifications from memory: little wooden models dragged off to a park or set in rows along a windowsill. Hoffner even recalled helping the boy with one of them. Or two. Or not.
“You’ve lost weight.”
The voice echoed, and Hoffner tried to locate its source. He set his valise down and said, “Hello, Toby.”
“I hope that doesn’t mean you’ve stopped drinking?”
Toby Mueller appeared from behind the tail of one of the pilfered planes. Mueller was of average build, but the limp in his right leg made him seem shorter. He had lost part of the foot, along with several fingers, during the war. Neither had stopped him from flying.
Hoffner said, “You’ve quite a collection.”
“Yah,” said Mueller, as he rubbed a bit of grease off his good hand: the fingers on the other held the rag like two pincers. “Didn’t think I’d actually be seeing you.”
“Sorry to disappoint.”
They had known each other for over twenty years, Mueller the gimp World War I ace and Hoffner the cop who made sure he never got caught for smuggling. They had met on a hillside in the Tyrol, toasting Victor Konig, Hoffner’s onetime partner and Mueller’s squadron leader. Two months later they had buried Konig. It was a bond impossible to break.
“No, it’s good for me,” said Mueller. “Eight-ten hours. Bit long on my own.”
“So you were going anyway?”
Mueller’s smirk held just the right mix of disbelief and mockery. “No, Nikolai, I’m doing all this for you. Here, let me get your bag.” Mueller remained where he was and nodded over to a single-propeller biplane. “We’re taking the Arado. You can put it in the bomb hold.”
Hoffner picked up the valise and made his way over. The plane was two seats in tandem set behind the twin wings, the whole thing maybe eight meters in length, two and a half meters in height. Hoffner had expected them to be taking the beauty next to it, a red single-wing affair, with room for at least four, and who knows what else in the undercarriage. If Mueller was planning on making this a business trip, the red one looked to have far more room for merchandise.
Mueller saw where Hoffner was looking. “She’s nice, isn’t she?”
Hoffner found the latch on the Arado and shoved his valise inside.
Mueller said, “They’ve clocked her at nearly three hundred kph. And that’s not even in a dive. It’s like riding cut glass.”
Hoffner had no idea what Mueller meant but nodded anyway as he started over.
Mueller said, “She’d have us there in six hours, maybe less.”
“But she’s not yours, is she?”
“Oh, she’s mine. Had her down in Marseilles last week for some very nice fishing.”
“I’m sure the catch was good.”
“The catch is always good, Nikolai.”
Whatever Mueller was smuggling, Hoffner knew not to get involved in the details. “She’s just not for us,” he said.
Mueller’s smirk reappeared. “It’s a night flight, Nikolai. The Lockheed might be quick, but she’s not so good after dark. Trust me. The little Arado is a much better bet.”
Hoffner was rarely impressed by Mueller’s acquisitions, but this was something even for him. “How the hell did you get your hands on an American plane?”
Mueller’s smirk became a broad smile. “Well, there might have been a girl or two, and some French Air Corps mechanics involved, but I can’t really say.”
“Or,” said Zenlo Radek, who was now standing at the hangar’s entrance, “he might just have walked in here one day and found the plane waiting for him.”
Both Hoffner and Mueller looked over to see Radek in a dinner jacket and bow tie, his hair slicked back: hard to imagine the skin on his forehead looking more strained than usual, but there it was. He was carrying a small satchel.
Hoffner turned back to Mueller, and Mueller’s smile reemerged. “Well, it might have been something like that, too.” Mueller patted a few fingers on Hoffner’s shoulder and began to limp off toward the Arado. “Evening, Herr Radek.”
Radek was now making his way over. “She’s all gassed, Toby?”
Mueller nodded and ducked under the propeller. “All gassed.”
Hoffner turned again to Radek and said, “Very nice. Casino night?”
“Big party out at Goring’s.”
“And you’re bringing the girls?”
Radek drew up and held the satchel out to Hoffner. “Here.”
Hoffner hesitated before taking it. He pulled back the flap and saw two or three thick rolls of Spanish pesetas, the same in German marks and English pounds. There were perhaps ten packs of cigarettes. Tucked in at the bottom was a Luger pistol and several boxes of ammunition.
Radek said, “No idea if the peseta is still worth anything, but the marks and pounds should do you all right. I was thinking of throwing in some francs, but no one ever wants francs, do they?”
Hoffner closed the flap. “Didn’t know Toby was on the payroll.”
“He likes it that way.”
“So what’s he taking to Spain?”
“You.”
“And bringing back?”
Radek laughed quietly. “Toby thinks he deserves a holiday-gimping around Spain with a few bandages on his shit hand and leg. He thinks it’ll have all those girls eager to soothe his pain.”
From somewhere Mueller’s voice rose up. “I’ll be a regular war hero. ?Viva la Revolucion!”
“It’s a civil war, idiot!” Radek shouted back. He looked at Hoffner. “He also heard you needed a lift.”
“And you couldn’t convince him otherwise?”
“I might not have tried all that hard.”
There was a chance Hoffner might give in to the sentiment. Instead, he said, “Then I’ll try not to get myself killed.”
Twenty minutes later, Hoffner felt his stomach lurch as the plane climbed over Berlin. He peered out at the lights and saw the brightest of them off in the west. They were circling the stadium in a ring of fire, Nazi spectacle at its best. He stared at the flames, as they wavered and pitched, and imagined them washing over the city whole. He then turned his eyes to the night and did what he could to forget them.