The Butchers of Berlin (35 page)

Schlegel asked whether Keleman was saying they both knew who was responsible but it was in their interests not to. Keleman nodded. Neither Bormann nor his paymaster, Lammers, were among those
being bribed.

Then it had to be Chancellery, said Schlegel. No one else was in a position to make such payments.

‘That’s the last we say about it. Apply for leave and make yourself scarce.’

‘It’s too late for that.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘That fancy grocer Nöthling and the ration card scandal.’

‘What about him?’

Keleman had been told if he provided evidence of his corruption the rest would take care of itself. Nöthling was on the list. He received a monthly payment to subsidise his supplies.

‘What’s your point?’

‘Nöthling has an illegal supply of pigs coming in tonight.’

‘Where?’

‘The Landsberger Allee marshalling yard.’

Where the first flayed body had been found. Again, Schlegel thought. He should have seen it coming that Keleman was bound to ask for help.

Keleman said he could still just about drive if Schlegel got a car. Schlegel thought, Stoffel’s Opel again, and sighed.

Schlegel, sobering up fast, was running on Pervitin, which Keleman was shovelling down too.

‘Been taking them for years. Dutch courage.’

A night mist reduced visibility more than usual, which, combined with Keleman’s drunk driving, made Schlegel a nervous passenger. The car’s cowled headlights showed nothing but
white.

He yawned, exhausted yet wide awake.

They parked away from the siding. Mist turned to fog. Any worse and they wouldn’t be able to see. From up ahead came the clank of shunted wagons, shouted orders, the panicky clatter of
animal hooves and occasional squeal as one fell off the unloading ramps. They passed the stationary silhouette of a parked van. Keleman pointed to Nöthling’s name, just discernible on
the side.

Schlegel groped his way forward until he reached a fence. The pigs passed beneath, barely visible. He moved on, startled by a figure coming out of the mist, who seemed not to see him.

He came to what felt like a larger area, presumably pens, where the animals’ confusion was evident, and realised he had lost Keleman.

A lorry pulled up further down the track, followed by more shouted orders. Keleman swam back into view. Schlegel suggested they investigate. Keleman nodded uncertainly as two Hitler Youths
marched past with antiquated rifles.

Taking his bearings from the train, he walked towards where he had heard the truck. The mist rolled in thicker until he could barely see his hand. Keleman was gone again.

A bolt slid on the other side of the truck he was next to. Crouching down, he could see nothing and felt his way between the wheels. A succession of handlers’ boots clumped on the wagon
floor above, then down the ramp. He heard whatever they were carrying being flung onto the lorry.

They worked in silence, as though not wishing to draw attention.

Approaching footsteps crunched on aggregate. Something was put down. Schlegel crawled forward, trying to see. He could make no sense of the blurred image that looked like an enormous white worm
or larvae, or even the remains of a snowdrift.

Whatever it was groaned and he realised the cargo must be human. The train shifted forward and stopped. Time to get out. Keleman was probably a liability wandering around on his own.

Conditions made distance impossible to judge. The scrape of a match sounded like it was being struck in Schlegel’s ear, yet when he called Keleman’s name it died in the air.

A figure loomed and ran past, leaving Schlegel with the impression of a toothless, gaping mouth, and a reek of paraffin. He was contemplating the unsettling combination of fog and Pervitin when
a man shouted. There was the noise of a scuffle. Someone called for help, followed by a report, more a dry mechanical cough than gunshot, then running footsteps.

Schlegel charged after. The footsteps stopped. Schlegel saw a yellow flash, and another. Only when the bullets sang past did he understand they were meant for him. The shooter ran off. Schlegel
chased on, the pill giving him a wild determination.

The man ahead entered a building. Schlegel followed, skidding through the doorway. The train started to move out, the engine and the grind of the wagons drowning everything. Schlegel hit his
shin against something hard and cried out. He was being reckless. He wasn’t carrying a gun. Adrenalin and panic overrode caution.

The other man seemed unbothered about making a noise now.

Schlegel reached the end of the building. A door was open. The smell said he was at the entrance of the pig shed. The pill told him he was invincible, however much the counterargument in his
head warned that jittery alertness was no substitute for stealth.

He stood in the middle of the shed, hearing only pigs. He hurried on, afraid of losing his quarry.

He came to, aware of the pungent smell of shit filling his nostrils. He was lying face down in the stuff while being pressed and prodded from above. A light was on that
hadn’t been before. He decided he must have been drinking and the hangover accounted for his head feeling split open, and the smell was some terrible practical joke perpetrated by Stoffel
after another staff binge.

He couldn’t breathe. He was aware of being walked over and something sharp nipping at him. Teeth; he was being bitten and tried calling out. He was too weak to stand. He struggled to gain
his breath. He made it to his hands and knees and found himself face to face with a pair of pale blue eyes that stared back implacably.

He understood. He had been chucked unconscious into a pen, and had he not regained his senses the pigs would have eaten him in their prosaic thorough way, simply because he was there.

Keleman was so covered in muck he was barely recognisable. Schlegel saw the man’s dead eyes, open in terror and surprise, as though the last thing he had been conscious of was the bolt of
the animal gun driving its way into his brain.

The pigs had already made a meal of him. A shoe lay discarded. His foot and his cheek had been chewed to the bone.

He dragged Keleman’s body away from the pens and left it on the concrete.

It took ages to find the night watchman, who looked at him in disbelief. Schlegel told him to call the police and get Stoffel.

He cleaned himself up as best he could in the slaughterhouse washrooms. He showered in cold water. His coat was beyond saving, the trousers too, but the rest was just salvageable. He got the
worst of the shit off his shoes using the tap. He found a workman’s boiler suit hanging on a peg and took that. He thought he had lost his hat again.

Stoffel arrived, grumbling at having been dragged out, annoyed that Schlegel had taken his car yet again and even more furious to discover it had been driven by an uninsured civilian.

‘A dead uninsured civilian,’ said Schlegel wildly.

A carload of uniformed cops turned up and muttered about flayed bodies and cannibal pigs. Keleman wasn’t where Schlegel had left him. Stoffel’s scepticism shone like a
searchlight.

‘Get this straight for me, son. You woke up to find yourself being eaten by pigs, and the other fellow was lying half-eaten after a bolt had been put through his head.’

Of his own survival all Schlegel could think was even death had washed its hands of him.

‘Then where is he now?’

‘Ask Haager who kills the animals. He once snuck up behind me with a stun gun.’

Haager lived only a street away and came to the door in his pyjamas, with his hair sticking up. He said he had been home all evening and had family to prove it.

Afterwards Stoffel said, ‘Give me one good reason why I should give you a lift home.’

Schlegel protested that a man was dead. They should be making a proper search. Stoffel sighed and asked if Schlegel was taking pills.

‘You’re staring like a madman. Psychotic episode, bad hallucination. It happens a lot. Gets harder to sleep. Gets harder to catch up, and you end up seeing all sorts of things.
Don’t deny it.’

Stoffel said his story made sense, up to the point where Keleman got lost in the fog.

‘I’m not saying you didn’t roll around in shit, son, but why would anyone want to kill a fucking accountant?’

Lore didn’t come back that night. Stella Kübler, flicking through a magazine in the common room, cheerfully said she hadn’t seen her.

‘It happens quite a lot in the early stages. They wander off, usually only for a few days, then come back with their heads straight. One or two jump, but I wouldn’t say yours was one
of those.’

Sybil walked out. Stella caught up with her in the corridor, grabbed her arm, spun her round and kissed her on the lips.

‘I made your little friend so hot and wet she was sobbing for it. She said you need to be more adventurous.’

Sybil slapped her. Stella put her hand up to the red mark on her cheek and laughed.

‘Darling, so jealous. Don’t be so possessive.’

Sybil got through the next day by working herself to distraction, using newspapers in cafés to make a list of cinemas and going to speak to the managers, with a story about wanting to
contact her brother-in-law who was working as a projectionist. In the big cinemas she found staff were fairly permanent; the waiter had said Grigor was part time.

She trawled suburbs, visiting rundown picture houses. One venue was reduced to a bomb site and she thought it was just her luck if he had worked there.

At night she concentrated on the city centre. Some late-night joints were free for troops. The flea-pits showed more or less anything. There were newsreel theatres and a couple that ran only
cartoons. The picture palaces and the dives all smelled the same, of stale smoke and dirty bodies.

She walked miles. She knew she wasn’t even close. It wouldn’t have been beyond the waiter to have made it up.

Lore didn’t return that night either.

Stella came to Sybil’s room with a contrite face. ‘Sorry, darling, I am such a bitch. Don’t believe anything I say.’

She was so insincere Sybil decided she was only there to churn up more doubt.

‘Take my hand and say you forgive me.’

When Sybil cried Stella insisted on holding her. Sybil weakened in spite of herself, thinking any embrace was better than none, her mind in utter confusion.

‘She’ll come back. I am so sorry. Are we friends again? Kiss me like we are sisters and I will say goodnight.’

Sybil couldn’t bring herself to and saw the blazing hatred in Stella’s eyes.

The next morning Gersten talked of the war against the forgers and how good Stella Kübler was and how delighted he would be if Sybil became half as accomplished, which was
when Sybil realised he never meant to let her go.

‘Mikki Hellman’s gone. Schönhaus can’t last much longer. These are all names familiar to you.’

They had all been part of the same student scene.

‘There’s even a Chinese forger. He must be the last Chink in Berlin, so if you see him . . .’

Gersten laughed. The few Chinese restaurants left were run by Germans. Everyone said the one in Schmargendorf served dog.

‘How’s your friend adjusting?’

‘She’ll be fine,’ said Sybil, saying nothing of Lore’s vanishing. He probably knew already from the Kübler woman, who would have boasted of her conquest, true or
not.

‘And Grigor?’

She hoped one more day would be sufficient.

Life became a series of bets with herself. A train passing overhead when she crossed under the S-Bahn was a sign everything would be all right. The next corner reached in fewer
steps than she had guessed meant Lore would be back safe that night. Her fingers ached from keeping them crossed. And all the time pictures like film flickers bombarded her head, showing Lore
writhing with the Kübler woman.

Alternately she had the clearest visions of Lore falling to earth. She saw Lore drowned, throwing herself in front of a hurtling train, and broken on the ground after jumping from a high
building.

She returned to Alwynd’s to see if she had been back. Alwynd was his usual beady self. Unusually, there was no female companion around.

No, he hadn’t seen Lore. He had been wondering.

‘I haven’t seen you in days. Are you still staying here?’

He said she looked tired and they could always go and lie down.

‘I don’t have any classes until this afternoon. It will relax you.’ Sybil ignored him. ‘I promise not to mention your Jewishness to anyone.’

She couldn’t tell if this was a threat or more drollery. She said she had to go when what she really wanted was to be held, and left at that.

In desperation, she called Franz, who sounded surprised. She told him she was at her wits’ end and badly needed to reach Grigor. She listened to his long silence before she said she was
desperate to know how to find out if Lore was still alive.

Franz said it was easier to check if she were dead. He spoke in a tough way, as if even the idea of a single death was sentimental. He suggested she try the hearse drivers.

The hearse driver she spoke to had picked up no one of Lore’s description but he couldn’t speak for the others.

Sybil asked, ‘Do you know Grigor? He used to be one of the drivers.’

There had been a lot of changes. The man looked like he couldn’t care less about her plight.

‘If you see him, tell him I am looking for him.’

She might as well put a message in a bottle and chuck it in the river.

The driver decided to be helpful after all and produced a tatty exercise book which listed those they had fetched. Twelve dead were down for the last two days.

Sybil read down the entries, written in several hands.