A Good German Page 10

  The side streets were clogged with debris, so he kept to the main roads, turning left on Bulowstrasse for the long walk up to the zoo. This was a part of town he’d known well, the elevated station hulking over Nollendorfplatz, with its ring of bars. A movie marquee had slid down to the pavement nearly intact, as if the building had been whipped out from under it, like the magic trick with a tablecloth. A few people were out, one of them pushing a baby carriage filled with household goods, and Jake realized that the dazed, plodding movement he’d seen from the jeep two days ago was the new pace of the city, as careful as his own. Nobody walked quickly over rubble. Why would anyone come to Berlin? Had Tully been before? There must be traveling orders, something to check. The army ran in duplicate.

  More blocks of collapsed buildings, more groups of women in headscarves and old uniform pants, cleaning bricks. A woman in heels stepped out of one building, smartly dressed, as if she were heading up the street as usual for some shopping at KaDeWe. Instead she wobbled over some broken plaster to a waiting army car and straightened her nylons as she pulled her legs in, a different kind of excursion. And KaDeWe, in any case, was gone, ripped through by bombs and sagging into Wittenbergplatz, not even a window mannequin left. They used to meet here sometimes, by the wurst stands on the food floor, where you were likely to run into anybody, then leave separately for Jake’s flat across the square. Taking different sides so that Jake could see her through the crowd as he waited at the stoplight, watching to see that no one followed. No one did. A game to make it more exciting, getting away with something. Then up the stairs where she’d be waiting, a ring to make sure Hal was out, and inside, sometimes grabbing each other even before the door clicked shut. The flat would be gone now too, like the afternoons, a memory.

  Except it wasn’t. Jake looked across the street, shading his eyes again. A piece of the building had been knocked out, but the rest was there, with his corner flat still facing west onto the square. He took a step, elated, then stopped. What would he say? ‘I used to live here and I want to see it again’? He imagined another Frau Dzuris, looking puzzled and hoping for chocolate. A woman came to the window, opening it wider to the air, and for an instant he stopped breathing, straining to see. Why couldn’t it be? But it wasn’t Lena, wasn’t anything like

  Lena. A truck went by, blocking the view, and when it passed, the broad back was turned to the window so that he couldn’t see her face, but of course he’d know, just the movement of her arm at the window, even from across the square. He dropped his hand, feeling foolish. A friend of the landlord’s, no doubt, eager to snap up the flat when Hal finally left. Someone who wouldn’t know him, might not even believe he’d been there at all. Why should she? The past had been wiped out with the streets. But the flat was there, real, a kind of proof that everything else had happened too. If he looked long enough, maybe the rest of the square would come back with it, busy, the way it all used to be.

  He turned away and caught a glimpse of himself in a broken shard of plate glass from the store window. Nothing was the way it used to be, not even him. Would she recognize him now? He stared at the reflection. Not a stranger, but not the man she had known either. A lived-in face, older, with two deep lines bracketing his mouth. Dark hair thinning back from the temples. A face he saw every day shaving, without noticing it had changed. He imagined her looking at him, smoothing away lines with her fingers to find him. But faces didn’t come back either. They got cluttered with assignments and frantic telegrams, squint“ lines from seeing too much. They’d been kids. Only four years, and look at all the marks. His face was still there, like the flat, but scarred now too, not the one he’d had before. But the war had changed everybody. At least he was here, not dead or turned into a set of initials. POWs. DPs.

  He stopped, a tiny, nagging jolt. Initials. He took out the carbon sheets and scanned them again. That was it. He put the top sheet under, glanced over the second, then automatically shuffled for the third and stopped, empty-handed. But Jeanie had had three carbons. He squinted, trying to remember. Yes, three, like a stacked deck. He stood for another minute thinking, then put the sheets away and started up the street again toward the zoo, where small amounts of money were being made. ‹›The driver took him back to Bernie’s office, a small room in the old Luftwaffe building crammed with files and stacks of questionnaires that spilled off the couch and rose in piles on the floor, a mare’s nest of paper. How did he find anything? The desk was worse. More stacks and loose clippings, stale coffee cups, even an abandoned tie-everything, in fact, but Bernie, who was out again. Jake flipped open one of the files, a buff-colored fragebogen like one Lena might have filled out, a life on six typed pages. But this was Herr Gephardt, whose spotless record deserved, he claimed, a work permit.

  “Don’t touch anything,” said a soldier at the door. “He’ll know. Believe it or not.”

  “Any idea when he’ll be back? I keep missing him.”

  “You the guy from yesterday? He said you might be by. Try the Document Center. He’s usually there. Wasserkafersteig,” he said, breaking it into syllables.

  “Where?”

  The soldier smiled. “Mouthful, huh? If you hold on a sec, I’ll take you-I was just going myself. I can find it, I just can’t spell it.”

  They drove west past the press camp to the U-bahn station at Krumme Lanke, where a handful of soldiers and civilians huddled in a miniature version of the Reichstag market, then turned right down a quiet street. At the far end Jake could see the trees of the Grunewald. He thought of the old summer Sundays, with hikers in shorts heading out to the beaches where the Havel widened into the series of bays Berlin called lakes. Today, in the same hot sun, there were only a few people gathering fallen branches and loading them into carts. An axe chipped away at a broad stump.

  “Pathetic, isn’t it?” the soldier said. “They chop down the trees when nobody’s looking. There won’t be anything left by winter.” A winter with no coal, according to Muller.

  At the edge of the woods, they turned up a narrow street of suburban villas, one of which had been turned into a fortress with a high barbed-wire double fence, floodlights, and patrolling sentries.

  “They’re not taking any chances,” Jake said.

  “DPs camp out in the woods. Once it’s dark—”

  “What’s in there, gold?”

  “Better. For us, anyway. Party records.”

  He showed a pass at the door, then led Jake to a sign-in ledger in the entrance hall. Another guard was inspecting the briefcase of a soldier on his way out. Neither spoke. The council headquarters had had the busy shoe-clicking hum of a government office. This was quieter, the locked-in hush of a bank. One more ID check took them into a room lined with filing cabinets.

  “Christ. Fort Knox,” Jake said.

  “Bernie’ll be down in the vault,” the soldier said, smiling. “Counting the bars. This way.”

  “Where’d you get it all?” Jake said, looking at the cabinets.

  “All over. The party kept everything right to the end-membership applications, court records. Guess they never thought they’d lose. Then they couldn’t destroy them fast enough.” He spread his hand toward the cabinets as they walked. “We got the SS files too, even Himmler’s personal one. The big haul, though, that’s downstairs. Index cards. The central party registry in Munich kept duplicates of all the local cards-every single Nazi. Eight million and counting. Sent them to a paper mill in Bavaria finally, to pulp them, but before the owner could get around to it, the Seventh Army arrived. So, voila. Now we’ve got them. Here we go.” He went down a staircase to the basement. “Teitel, you here? I found your guy.”

  Bernie was bent over a broad table whose littered surface was a mirror image of the mess in his office. The room, an alcoved cellar that might once have held wine, was now walled from floor to ceiling with wooden drawers, like card catalogues in a library. When he looked up, his eyes were confused, as if he had no idea who Jake was.

  “Sor
ry to barge in like this,” Jake said. “I know you’re busy. But I need your help.”

  “Oh, Geismar. Right. You’re looking for a friend. I’m sorry, I forgot all about it.” He picked up a pen, ready to work.

  “Don’t forget to sign him out,” the driver said to Bernie, drifting back up the stairs.

  “What was the name?” ‹›“Brandt. But I need something else.” Bernie looked up, his pen still poised to write. Jake pulled out a chair.

  “A soldier was killed in Potsdam yesterday-well, killed the day before. He washed up on the conference grounds yesterday. Hear about it?”

  Bernie shook his head, waiting. ‹›“No, I guess not,” Jake said, “not down here. Anyway, I was there, so I got interested. He had some money on him, a lot, five thousand, maybe closer to ten. I thought that was interesting too, but apparently I’m the only one. MG just gave me the brush this morning-polite, but a brush. This one came with a lecture. Happens all the time. Black market’s a nickel-and-dime game, no big players. Nobody gets excited when a Russian shoots one of our men, just when they do anything else. So go away, please. Now I’m even more interested. Then I hear the body’s already been shipped back to Frankfurt. That’s a little too efficient, especially for MG. Following me so far?“

  “Who was the brush?”

  “Muller,” Jake said.

  Bernie frowned. “Fred Muller? He’s a good man. Old army.”

  “I know. So they say keep a lid on it and he keeps a lid on it. Look, I don’t blame him. He’s a time-server and he doesn’t want any trouble. He probably thinks I’m a pain in the ass.”

  “Probably.”

  “But why keep a lid on it? He promises me an exclusive and gives me a casualty report. But not all of it. There’s a sheet missing.” Jake paused. “The kind of thing the DA’s office used to pull.”

  Bernie smiled. “So why come to me?”

  “Because you were a DA. I’ve never met one yet who stopped being a DA. Something’s funny here. You can feel it in your gut.”

  Bernie looked over at him. “I don’t feel anything yet.”

  “No? Try this. Muller wants me to think it’s a GI making a few bucks on the side. Okay, not nice, but nothing special, either. But he wasn’t just a GI. PSD, that’s Public Safety Division, isn’t it?”

  “That’s what it says on the charts,” Bernie said slowly.

  “Well, that’s what it says on the casualty report too. PSD. He was one of you. Ever met a police department that couldn’t be bothered when a cop got shot? That’s one organization takes care of its own.”

  Bernie looked at him again, then reached over for his coffee cup. “We’re not exactly a police department, you know,” he said carefully. “It’s not the same.”

  “But you run the MPs, you run the local police, you’re responsible for law and order. Such as it is.”

  “I don’t run anything. You’re asking the wrong guy. I’m Special Branch. I just—”

  “Chase rats, I know. But you’re still in the department. You must know people. Anyway, you’re the only one I know. So.”

  Bernie took another sip of coffee. “Berlin PSD?” ‹›“No, he flew in from Frankfurt. Another interesting point, by the way.“

  “Then no wonder Fred sent him back. Put it in somebody else’s in-box. It’s the MG way.” He paused. “Look, I don’t have time for this, whatever it is. You want somebody over in CID. Criminal Investigation.” Jake shook his head. “CID’s army, not Military Government. Knife fights. This is being handled by Public Safety.” He took the sheets out of his pocket. “Here, see for yourself.”

  Bernie put his hand up in a stop sign. “No, I mean it. I don’t have the time.”

  “Somebody else’s in-box,” Jake said.

  Bernie put down the cup and sighed. “What are you looking for, anyway?”

  “Why nobody wants to know. The way the story’s supposed to go is the Russians loot, we just liberate a few souvenirs. I’ve told it that way myself. And Public Safety? The last place you’d expect to find a bad apple. Wrong barrel. But my guess is that he had something going, not just a couple of cartons of cigarettes, and I’ll bet it’s Muller’s guess too. The difference is, he doesn’t want to know and this time I do. So would a DA. Man’s dead.”

  Bernie ran his hand through the tight waves of his hair and stood up, as if the chair had been confining him. He moved a folder onto a pile, then walked over to another, pretending to be busy. “I’m not a DA here,” he said finally. “I’m MG too. Maybe Fred’s right, you know. The guy closed his own case. Maybe we’re all better off.”

  “Except for one thing. What if he wasn’t acting solo? A man comes to Berlin to make a deal and ends up dead. So who was he coming to see?”

  “A Russian, you said.” He moved another pile.

  “Must have been. But who set it up? He’s operating all by himself? There have to be some other apples in that barrel. Chances are, he had friends. It’s a friendly kind of business.”

  “Friends in Public Safety?” Bernie said, looking up.

  “Somewhere. That’s the way it used to work in Chicago.”

  “That’s Chicago,” Bernie said, waving his hand. ‹›“And Berlin. It’s always the same, more or less. Here’s a big city with no police and a lot of money floating around. Put out that kind of cheese and the usual mice come out. And pretty soon somebody has to organize it, to make sure he gets a little more. It’s always the same. The only question is whether Patrick Tully was one of the mice or one of the rats who took a little more.“

  “Who?”

  “Patrick Tully. The victim.” Jake handed over the sheet to Bernie. “Twenty-three. Afraid of flying. So why come to Berlin? Who was he coming to see?”

  Bernie stared at the paper, then at Jake.

  “That’s the report,” Jake said. “Half of it, anyway. Maybe the other half can tell me.”

  “I can tell you,” Bernie said evenly, his body finally still. “He was coming to see me.”

  “What?” A word to fill time, too surprised to say anything else. For a second neither of them spoke. Bernie looked again at the sheet.

  “Yesterday,” he said quietly, thinking aloud. “That’s why I canceled you. He never showed. I told Mike to keep an eye out. That’s probably who he thought you were. Why he brought you here-we’re off-limits to press.”

  “Tully was coming to see you?” Jake said, still taking it in. “Want to tell me why? ”

  “I have no idea.” He glanced up. “That isn’t a brush. I don’t know.”

  “You didn’t ask?”

  Bernie shrugged. “People come through from Frankfurt all the time. Somebody from PSD requests a meeting, what am I supposed to say? No? Half the time they’re just looking for an excuse to come to Berlin. Everybody wants to see it, but you’re supposed to have a reason for being here. So they liaise and fart around in meetings nobody has time for and then go home.”

  “With five thousand dollars.”

  “He didn’t get it from me, if that’s what you’re asking,” he said irritably. “He didn’t show, or do you want Mike to verify that?”

  “Keep your shirt on. Fm just trying to figure this out. You didn’t know him?”

  “Not from Adam. PSD out of Frankfurt, that’s all. Never worked with him on a case. I don’t even know if he was Special Branch. I suppose I could find out.” A crack in the door. Still a DA after all.

  “But what did you think he wanted? Just like that, out of the blue.”

  Bernie sat down, ruffling his hair again. “A face meeting with Frankfurt? Out of the blue? It could have been anything. Grief, usually. The last time it was Legal complaining about my methods,” he said, giving the word an edge. “They like to do that personally, bring you in line. Frankfurt thinks I’m a loose cannon. Not that I give a shit.”

  “Why a loose cannon?”

  Bernie smiled slightly. “I’ve been known to break a regulation. Once or twice.”

  “So break anot
her one,” Jake said, looking at him.

  “Because you have a gut feeling? I don’t know you from Adam either.”

  “No. But somebody comes to see you, makes a stop along the way, and gets shot. Now two of us are interested.”

  Bernie met his eyes, then looked away. “You know, I didn’t come to Germany to catch crooked soldiers.”

  Jake nodded, not saying anything, waiting for Bernie to pop up again. Instead, he stopped squirming and leaned forward, like a negotiator at the Cecilienhof, finally down to business.

  “What do you want?”

  “The other sheet. There’s nothing here.” Jake pointed at the report. “Not even ballistics. There must be someone you could ask. Quietly, just nosing around.”

  Bernie nodded.

  “Then a call to Frankfurt. Naturally you’d be curious, someone doesn’t show. So who was he, what did he want? Scuttlebutt. There should be talk all over the place now, somebody comes back in a box. Oh, did you know him? What the hell happened?”