The Butchers of Berlin (3 page)

Feeling he was being watched, perhaps by the strange woman upstairs, he looked around guiltily, aware that he was blushing, which was ridiculous.

An ancient, battered van drove into the yard. A tall, dark-haired man got out. The van was nondescript and had seen better days.

‘Are you the Jewish hearse?’ Schlegel asked.

The driver asked instead, ‘Where did he get the gun?’

News spread fast along all kinds of unofficial channels.

‘Can you give me a hand with the loading?’

That the driver had no help struck Schlegel as in keeping with the disjointed day.

He supposed he must look amenable; the driver certainly wouldn’t have asked Stoffel. He bent down to take the dead man’s heels. He regretted not having his hat. It was bitterly cold.
At least it numbed the hangover. People usually stared at his hair but the driver seemed not to notice.

The corpse weighed so little, as though it barely consisted of matter at all.

Inside the vehicle looked like a converted bakery van, with shelves made of plywood. The casual way the driver closed the door afterwards made it seem the most normal thing to drive into a yard
and collect a body. Schlegel found him handsome in a sardonic way, far more self-possessed than the men upstairs, who were always on the point of flinching, as if they expected to be hit.

He thought of cadging a lift, then decided he didn’t want to ride with a dead man. As for the notebook, he had known upstairs he wouldn’t hand it over. No one was interested. Stoffel
would have snaffled the pistol.

The driver got in the van. Schlegel watched him go, thinking about the medal. Perhaps he shouldn’t keep it. Maybe it was bad luck. What had the woman said? That he would see terrible
things, enough to turn his hair white many times over.

Sybil still tasted vomit in her mouth. The fright of the shooting continued to boom in her head and she had to force herself not to run. Only she seemed to detect the strange,
almost frenzied tempo of official traffic as everyone else went about their business. Sybil saw police and military vehicles everywhere, and the removal vans they used to take people away in
waiting outside factories and tenement blocks. For months things had been quiet. A few had started to hope against hope, including Sybil, however much her mother warned they would stop at nothing
in the end.

She passed through Olivaer Platz, crossed Mommsenstrasse and went down Wilmersdorfer Strasse as it tried to snow. Everything appeared normal: trams, buses, a policeman directing traffic.
Cinemas, cafés, bars. A shoe-shine man with amputated legs, sitting on his box. A lorry with a flat tyre. A child with a penny whistle. In a shop window, a toy monkey with a drum. Pedestrian
crossings. A big store looking forlorn. A bookshop still with a Russian dictionary in the window. A young woman, not unlike herself, in a cloche hat, glanced in brief recognition. Caught in a flow
of pedestrians, Sybil crossed a busy junction, thinking she must speak to Franz. Franz worked as an orderly at the Jewish hospital. She had known him since she was at the school of design and
fashion, not far from where she was now.

Rather than use a telephone in the street, which attracted patrols, Sybil marched into the Hotel Savoy in Fasanenstrasse and took a kiosk in the lobby.

It took ages to get through to the hospital, which was impossibly busy, and so long to fetch Franz that Sybil worried her money would run out.

At last he came, breathless, asking if she was all right because it was chaos at his end, with the hospital told to provide typists, marshals, doctors and nursing staff for hastily erected
assembly camps for those arrested, and to prepare food for ten thousand.

‘Ten thousand!’ Sybil echoed.

Franz said, ‘It’s as though they mean to make a clean sweep.’

It no longer seemed possible to pretend. Such a level of arrest was unprecedented. Before a lull that had lasted several months, there had been only individual summonses for deportation, never
any mass roundups.

Sybil also urgently needed to talk about the forged papers Franz was helping her get for her friend Lore, who was in hiding.

‘Is Lore worth it?’ he asked. ‘It will be much more difficult and dangerous now.’

Sybil said yes.

‘Call me the same time tomorrow.’

Sybil stared at the replaced receiver and feared she might altogether lack the courage to leave the booth, and would sit there until drowned in the tide of her rising panic.

She composed herself enough to walk through the lobby and smile at the ancient flunky dressed in his braided livery, whose sole job was to stand by the revolving door.

On the Ku’damm her nerve faltered at the sight of a street patrol checking papers. They had stopped a dark woman with frizzy hair.

Normally she swept past patrols with her blond head held high, secure in the knowledge that she did not conform to their stereotype. But that morning her legs disobeyed her and she knew she
would soon come to a standstill, inviting arrest. Using the last of her energy, she marched into the
Konditorei
she was outside, thinking how much she wanted to share the security of its
clientele, even for a few minutes. Smart women sat content and placid, drinking tea and eating artificial-looking cake, as if without a care in the world. Sybil was bone-weary and very frightened.
Her feet ached and her chilblains burned.

She had to remember how to behave, ordering, looking around, gazing at passers-by. The white tablecloth, a pathetic attempt at luxury, was grimy. The thin tea was the usual herbal concoction.
She got up and went to the toilet and rinsed her mouth and cleaned her teeth with her finger. There was no soap.

She went back, took a copy of the wretched Party newspaper, like a good little citizen, and drank her tea. The patrol was still outside, laughing and joking now.

The paper was full of such hate and rubbish. Now they didn’t have their victories to crow about it made them hate all the more, as well as starting to feel sorry for themselves, which they
seemed to be even better at than hating. Whenever her mother predicted they would come in great numbers to take their people away Sybil had refused to listen. For a start, there was a labour
shortage, and they were told they were needed because of their jobs. Now this. It didn’t make sense.

A voice came out of nowhere. ‘Fräulein?’

Sybil jumped. She looked up at what appeared to be a pleasant, elderly gentleman, wanting to know if she had finished with the paper.

He wore a Party pin. She dreaded he would insist on sitting with her, pat her on the knee and talk about the Jewish filth being rounded up. Perhaps she should let him sleep with her, in exchange
for his protection. But he paid her no attention, accepted the paper and walked away.

The lesson was salutary. From now on she could not allow for any more approaches made unawares. Next time the voice could be saying she had better come with them.

Sybil reached the conclusion she had been dreading. She would have to join Lore and go underground. The ones that went into hiding were known as U-boats, with reason; one might as well be at the
bottom of the ocean. Many buckled from the pressure. Those with the discipline to forgo all outside contact had the best chance. That was not her, and probably not Lore.

Schlegel was coming up from the cells after searching in vain for his hat when Stoffel, standing by the main desk, collared him again and said, ‘You’ll do. We have
another body.’

‘Why me again?’

He had been looking forward to slipping off and going back to bed.

‘You’re fraud, son, I know that, but as of oh-six hundred hours this morning one slacker is requisitioned to the homicide department on my say-so.’

Schlegel knew the rest of the man’s crew were down in the cells still sleeping it off. He had just seen them, lying on their backs, snoring, oblivious.

‘Where’s your other glove, boy?’

He didn’t answer and followed Stoffel back to the car, confused because he was blushing for the second time that day. He supposed it must be to do with tired blood fighting the
hangover.

They drove east, towards the poorer districts. Streets were empty, shops and bars boarded up. Schlegel stared at the surroundings and had trouble imagining what trees with leaves looked
like.

Set on the edge of the city, bordered by the outer-ring railway, the meat district was a town in itself, a walled citadel, built fifty years before as a testament to civic
pride, now fallen on hard times. It spread as far as the eye could see, a substantial complex of squat barracks, glass halls and sheds, dwarfed by the twin towers of the ice factory.

They parked on Landsberger Allee, by the north-west entrance. On top of the gate pillars stood two large statues of the Berlin bear. A line of low buildings led down to a railway siding where
wagons stood. Weeds pushed up through the concrete.

Local cops, slaughterhouse and railway officials were waiting down below, looking green. A doctor and photographer were on their way. A cop led them to a cattle car, gestured to the ladder and
stepped back. Stoffel’s fat arse stuck out as he went up. Schlegel heard him say, ‘Take a look at this, son.’

What he saw in the corner of the carriage more resembled something found hanging in a butcher’s shop. No evidence was left of the pain inflicted, not even a head to register death’s
agony, just a flayed limbless torso, with the skin gone to reveal the muscle. What remained lay on its back, surgically treated to make it impossible to tell what sex it had been.

‘Tell me what you see,’ said Stoffel.

Dead meat was all he could think. A rack of meat.

‘You would think they were going to eat it. No mess. No blood. Control. Precision. And where are we?’

‘A slaughterhouse.’

‘And what are we standing in?’

‘A cattle car.’

The photographer arrived. They were still waiting for the doctor. Stoffel told the photographer to get on with it. The camera flashes looked like gunshots from outside the
wagon.

Stoffel said to Schlegel, ‘Here, take one of these.’

‘What is it?’

‘Grown-up pill. Make you feel better.’ Stoffel put one in his mouth. He shook another out of the cylinder for Schlegel, who couldn’t feel any worse.

‘You’re going to have to write up this one too,’ said Stoffel. ‘I’m short-staffed. It either came in on the train, which means it could have come from anywhere, and
we bury it, or it was done by one of the locals.’

Stoffel asked the assembled men who had found the body. One of the railway officials said he had checked the wagon because the door was open. Old vagrants from the last war made a habit of
sleeping there.

Stoffel whistled in the direction of the loitering civilians and demanded to know who was in charge. A tall fellow wearing a bowler hat and brown overalls wandered over in no hurry and announced
he was Baumgarten, the slaughterhouse foreman.

Stoffel asked, ‘Any of your boys been misbehaving?’

Baumgarten, an elderly, unshaven giant with a missing top front tooth and enormous hands, was slow to answer.

‘It would be Jews,’ he eventually said.

‘What Jews?’

‘Jewish butchers.’

‘Excuse me,’ said Stoffel. ‘Since when did butchering count as war effort?’

Baumgarten agreed he was as surprised as anyone when they turned up. Most of his men had been drafted into army catering.

‘Even our trainees were shipped off and the Dutch and Danish labour we were promised never showed, so we got Jews.’

Stoffel asked whether the Jewish butchers operated according to kosher practice. Baumgarten explained they didn’t do the killing, they only prepared the carcasses afterwards. He laughed
uncertainly.

‘How many of these Jews work here?’ Stoffel asked.

About a dozen, Baumgarten replied, counting on his fingers.

They even had their own foreman.

‘A dozen working here at one time with axes and knives!’ exclaimed Stoffel. ‘Whose bright idea was that?’

‘The penpushers. They wouldn’t listen.’

‘You had better go and fetch these Jewish butchers.’

‘They were taken away this morning.’

Stoffel gave a hoot of disbelief. ‘In the roundup?’

Baumgarten said he’d heard it was happening all over. The least they could have done was warn them. Now they were short again. Over two thousand personnel used to work there before the
war. Barely a hundred were left.

‘Where were the Jews taken?’ asked Stoffel.

They hadn’t been told.

‘Well, go and find out.’

The man lumbered off. Stoffel turned to Schlegel.

‘Thirteen suspects, including the foreman. Take a look around while that shirker finds out where they are, see if anything comes to mind.’

Schlegel passed through huge separate compounds, the length of three S-Bahn stops.

He was given a map by the main reception in the central building on Eldenaer Strasse, where the talk was of that morning’s arrests. The desk was staffed by three roguish old women who
flirted clumsily as a matter of course. One marked for him where she thought the Jewish dormitory was.

‘We didn’t really know anything about them until they were taken away this morning.’

The dormitory was back up the end he had come from.

Outside, he rotated the map, using the towers of the ice factory as a marker. The dirty boundary wall he remembered from his one trip there with his stepfather, a dozen years before, to see a
vet about a lame racehorse. He had been an impressionable age. The high wall didn’t prevent those passing from hearing the bellowing of animals about to be slaughtered. It was, his stepfather
laconically stated, where the animals went in and the meat came out.

The Jewish butchers’ dormitory was a temporary wooden barracks like those crammed into every bit of city wasteland to house the growing army of foreign workers. Schlegel
stepped straight into the sleeping area, with double bunks and a tiny cubicle which he supposed was for the supervisor. The building was freezing cold, without heating, and windows covered with tar
paper. The space told nothing about its inhabitants. If they had been shipped out that morning taking nothing, then they had left nothing behind. When they were there it must have been like they
had already gone.