The Butchers of Berlin (17 page)

It was a considerable fall from grace followed by a dubious rehabilitation that made little sense, unless it involved an ulterior motive, such as everyone feared, insinuating him into the
criminal police to expose internal corruption, which would not be difficult.

On reflection the most disturbing assessment Schlegel found was a handwritten addition to the section covering his career in Lublin, which noted, ‘This officer makes a habit of getting
himself beaten up.’

Schlegel laughed before deciding he didn’t want to become a candidate for getting beaten up too. The few times it had happened he hadn’t liked it at all.

The warden’s blood, still on the corridor wall, had gone almost black. The block felt like it had remained empty. Schlegel rang the bell by the hatch. The widow
didn’t recognise him at first. As he followed her into the apartment he saw the backs of her slippers were trodden down. They slapped the floor as she walked; thick stockings still bunched
around ankles displaying deltas of broken veins. The room smelled of inadequate personal hygiene. He wasn’t offered a seat. He said he needed to know why the old man shot her husband.

‘Spare me a rookie cop. How old are you anyway?’

‘Twenty-five.’

‘You should dye it.’

She meant his hair. He wanted to say hers disqualified her from any pronouncement on the subject.

‘Ask that Todermann bitch, if you can find her. My trap’s shut on the matter.’

She crossed her arms, obviously dying to tell. Schlegel threatened to drag her down to the station. She shuddered and said she couldn’t face those photographs of the drowned in the
entrance hall. It was true. No one knew why they were there. Schlegel made a point of avoiding them too.

In the end, he had to pretend he was going to hit her. She started to cry in an entirely false way, and Schlegel saw the whole thing had been about her being able to talk up the story to her
friends afterwards.

She huffed with indignation then did as she was told, now clearly wishing to shock.

‘That lump of lard used his authority the better to position his cock. “Oh, I will have to report you . . . unless you are extra nice.” ’ She made a masturbating gesture.
‘Didn’t like to sully himself. They did it to him, it didn’t count as a race thing. Tell that to the bishop!’

Her husband and Sybil Todermann had such a relationship, of which Metzler was jealous.

Schlegel supposed he had his motive.

Would he put this in his report? It would only complicate and he didn’t fancy being assigned to two months investigating corruption among block wardens.

The woman said the reason her husband didn’t fuck them was because he didn’t want to feel their tails.

Schlegel let it pass and asked whether Sybil Todermann’s mother had been subjected to her husband’s attentions.

‘Are you kidding? That witch! I bet she cast a spell on that fool Metzler, stuck pins in her wax doll. There was that nuisance of a child that fell downstairs and broke its neck.’
She contorted her face. ‘Tell me that wasn’t her.’

He said he had heard Todermann’s mother told fortunes. The remark provoked phlegmy laughter.

‘She could no more read the cards than I can, but that didn’t stop her – “beware of the tall dark stranger” – as if sucking up to a bunch of superstitious
Party bosses was going to save her a one-way ticket.’

The old man’s door was nailed shut, not very effectively, and the Gestapo seal applied. A couple of hard kicks and it gave way.

If a gun had been safely hidden up the chimney, other things could be too.

He took off his coat, jacket, waistcoat and shirt to save them getting filthy. It was freezing cold but better that than a fortune in cleaning bills. He spent a dirty fifteen minutes feeling
around as far as he could reach. A loose brick came flying down, narrowly missing his head. He lay breathing hard, staring up into the black chimney. A second loose brick he managed to retrieve. He
scrabbled around with his fingers trying to explore the hole but his reach wasn’t long enough. It occurred to him how tall the old man must have been. Schlegel found a wooden spoon in the
kitchen and used that to poke around in the recess. Nothing. Perhaps someone else had got there first. Maybe Metzler hadn’t keep his secrets up the chimney. Where would he hide something?
Under the floorboards? Schlegel inspected the trunk again. The green pullover was gone, confirming that anything hidden up the chimney would have been taken too.

Schlegel tried to picture what he was looking for. Some sort of secret text that filled in the gaps and explained everything? He couldn’t see it. People weren’t that neat about loose
ends.

What he found was not what he had imagined. He stared at his discovery for the longest time, thinking. It wasn’t a lot but all the old temptations were there.

The bombed house was only about a five-minute walk from Alwynd’s apartment. Sybil passed it a couple of times before realising it had taken up residence in her head. It
showed there was such a thing as retribution and their persecutors might not escape unscathed.

It was easily entered in spite of the door being nailed closed and warning signs declaring the building unsafe. There was too much damage for it not to be accessible and after quickly checking
no one was around she slipped inside.

Later on, she came to think of what she found as her refuge. It was hard to reach because part of the stairs had come away and she had to find damaged floorboards to make a walkway across the
drop. The first time she crossed she was frightened by the darkness that went all the way down to the basement. Fall and she would break her neck. She wobbled in the middle of the planks, thought
about the moment of stepping off into space and hurried on.

The ceiling had crashed in on most of the first floor but at the back behind the rubble lay a perfectly preserved space that had served as someone’s reading room, with a little open
fireplace and an armchair and small table. A window overlooked the back, the garden now full of blasted masonry. The walls were lined with bookshelves, even the one with the door. It was silent and
peaceful in a way she had never encountered before. She wanted nothing more than to come every day and work her way through the books until life became normal again. They were good books too.
Classics. Books she had never got around to reading. Names she had never heard of. Poetry too. She promised to teach herself to read it. She imagined holding her own with Lore and Alwynd. At first
she was happy to sit and indulge in the luxury of undisturbed thinking. She switched the table lamp on not daring to think it might work. It did. She started to read a story about a man named
Biberkopf who haunted many of the places she knew. He had just got out of the prison in Moabit and his first meeting was with a strange rabbi. Biberkopf seemed quite mad, stir crazy perhaps, a
persecuted ox of a man, but not in the way people were now, just another loser looking for a break. It seemed he had strangled his mistress.

When she got home Lore was humming the hit tune ‘You Shall Be the Emperor of My Soul’.

Over the next few days, Sybil searched the rest of the house as much as she was able. It must have been lodgings because upstairs there were different bathrooms and kitchens
and a series of bedsits, all covered in dust. She even found some food, only carrots, just the right side of mouldy, which she took downstairs and pretended was a feast. She supposed her little
library had belonged to the landlord. The layout there was different. It seemed more a man’s space than a woman’s but she couldn’t tell. What she thought had been the bedroom was
too damaged to enter. She searched in vain for a pipe or a coat or a pair of shoes that might say. The carrots gave her as much pleasure as anything she could remember. She imagined she was a
castaway. She couldn’t remember when she had last had a game of her own. When she was ready she would share the space with Lore, although superstition played a part in not showing her. Her
growing fear was of their being taken together. Sybil had started to think her own arrest would be bearable so long as she could believe Lore was still free.

She did the obvious thing and looked for valuables and identity papers. At first she found this rooting around distasteful, then decided she should extend her search to other places in the hope
of finding a dead person’s papers. Why pay when you can get it for nothing? The observation struck her as so funny she laughed until she had a stitch, and then even more at the thought of
herself laughing alone in this strange, damaged place. After that she went downstairs and quietly carried on reading the story of Biberkopf.

Schlegel was relieved to see Morgen wearing a civilian suit. Out of uniform he looked less threatening. The suit must have been in mothballs for years. Even with his cigarette
smoke the room smelled strongly of camphor. Morgen described it as diabolical and he was not sure if he could live with it.

‘But perhaps not so inappropriate if Nebe thinks I am the devil in disguise. Isn’t that what you are all saying?’

Schlegel denied it but was a terrible liar, and Morgen told him so.

Schlegel stared at his desk top in embarrassment. Morgen seemed more amused than offended. He stubbed out his cigarette and said as though addressing a dim pupil, ‘Paranoia is the
operating principle of our system, top to bottom. It’s not a rampant paranoia, more one of stealth. It’s an extension of the leadership principle, which works on initiative and
interpretation rather than direct order and command. Are you with me so far?’

Schlegel said he hadn’t thought of it like that. A case in point was Nebe, who for all his seniority seemed as worried as the next man.

‘Like the Carter Family says, “It takes a worried man to sing a worried song”.’

Schlegel was astonished by the reference. He hadn’t thought of Morgen like that.

‘Yes, yes. Hot jazz boy!’ He laughed. ‘Not any more. One learns to move on from such dalliance. I was a fan of the method more than the product. Classical music never sounded
good on gramophones and jazz did. It was the right music for that technology. Yes, the Carter Family. Recorded in 1930 for the Victor Talking Machine Company. The story of a man imprisoned for
unknown reasons, therefore legitimate for us to discuss in terms of American paranoia.’

Schlegel suspected he was being played with and waited for the pounce. His own paranoia extended to Morgen flicking through
his
file and cackling wickedly at all the references to
ineffectiveness, backsliding and questionable decadence; the rest didn’t bear thinking about.

Morgen carried on, apparently unaware of Schlegel’s discomfort. ‘From my modest observations of human behaviour, I would say this paranoia has two main outcomes. In spite of all the
assertions of strength, the system is flawed, perhaps fatally, because the only legitimate responses are panic and inertia, masquerading as efficiency. I know we swept everything before us in the
conquests of 1940 and ’41 but it was effortless. A perverse reading could hold that mass mobilisation was really concerted inertia because the machinery did all the work and the war machine
is the perfect product of paranoia, wouldn’t you say?’

The man’s thesis had been on pacifism, Schlegel remembered.

‘Anyway,’ Morgen continued, ‘as of this January we have officially entered the new age of panic. Blame what you like, the army’s failures in the east, the alignment of
the planets . . . but with panic comes superstition.’

‘Why are you telling me this?’

‘Because I see you as the perfect representative of panic and inertia. You are a paradigm of the system. And you know it’s true, which is why you don’t take offence. You are,
Schlegel, a fascinating specimen.’

Schlegel sat there incapable of thinking, other than admiring how effectively the tables had been turned.

‘As for me,’ Morgen continued, ‘let us for the moment play Nebe’s game. You are all terrified of your corruption being exposed, and corruption is the last resort of
inertia. I could deny that I am a spy with powers of judicial enquiry – perhaps I already did, I no longer remember – but I may be lying, because lying is the cornerstone of the
edifice. This is not criticism but fact. And I would go further to say that sometimes the virtues of lying are underestimated. Of course, if I am lying now you will find yourself answering for that
shop in the cellar you run.’

Morgen waited for Schlegel to deny it. Schlegel said nothing. He had never heard such strange talk. From Morgen it didn’t sound defeatist or subversive. Schlegel wondered if it came from
some condoned higher level, dedicated to a constant re-evaluation of the entire project. Perhaps, far from being the outsider, Morgen operated at the heart of the system, in some rarefied strata,
beyond the usual strictures and propaganda control, secretly dedicated to philosophical enquiry. But if it were really the case, he wouldn’t be sitting in Schlegel’s backwater.

Morgen resumed smoking and became businesslike, moving papers around his desk.

‘That’s all for you to decide. However, I will throw this in for free. No one has asked me to investigate your little shop.’

‘Who told you about it?’

‘Stoffel, of course. He wants to get you in trouble. He doesn’t like you. He’s crafty though. He slipped it in very well. Stoffel is such a good representative of inertia that
he should be made its formal ambassador. I doubt if we will see Stoffel go through the necessary evolutionary stages to reach a state of paranoia, but I may be wrong. As for friend Stoffel, I
suggest you tell him that I am a spy because it is always good when men like that are made to sweat. And in the meantime, please note that I have just raised your paranoia levels, by giving you
confidential information in the guise of a favour that is more of a poisoned chalice.’

Morgen, pleased by his bamboozling, went back to his papers before quietly announcing, not looking up, ‘To tell the truth, I don’t know why I am here, but it is always possible
someone will ask me to make a report of the sort you are all so afraid of.’