The Butchers of Berlin (39 page)

He held Sybil at arm’s length and drove his fist into her solar plexus. As she lay doubled-up on the floor, Stella kicked her winded stomach. When Sybil tried assuming a foetal position
they attacked her back and kidneys, which became the focus of even more intense pain. Sybil couldn’t tell which of them was dishing it out. She suspected Stella mostly, with the occasional
sharper, harder blow from the man. And all the while the clack-clack of the table-tennis ball back and forth.

They prised her apart. Her legs were held so Stella could straddle her, pinning her down, and beat her around the head. She took off her shoe and grunted with satisfaction as she landed each
blow. Sybil refused to give the woman the pleasure of seeing her terror. Her eye started to close. Stella called her a cunt, over and over, and ordered her to look at her. Sybil refused and told
her instead that she stank of sex. This set Stella into a greater frenzy until the man had to pull her off.

Stella paused to lean down to spit in Sybil’s face, and hiss spitefully, ‘Your bitch is dead!’

After they left, Sybil lay listening to them continuing to play Around the World. No one came to help. Stella’s authority prevailed. Sybil guessed she had a spy in the room. She heard the
rustle of a page of a magazine being turned. Her head hurt unspeakably, as though her brain had been knocked loose.

With nowhere else to go, she returned to Grigor’s cinema, and sat down at the front again where it was less crowded. The same bathing-costumed young women frolicked in
the sand. Sybil supposed she passed out rather than fell asleep. She was woken by a man groping her and snapped that she had syphilis, but please carry on. The man jumped up and was gone.

She struggled to the back of the cinema and using up the last of her strength hauled herself up the outside staircase to the projection booth. She was rehearsing how to present herself to Grigor
when she was shocked to find another man in the booth, much older, and worldly enough to accept her appearance without comment.

He pointed to a chair and silently went about rewinding the reels, then dressed her wounds with alcohol, which stung, continuing to say nothing. When he was finished he told her she didn’t
need a hospital.

Sybil asked if she could stay, she had nowhere else. The man said he would have to lock her in. The cinema closed at two and reopened the next day at ten.

She suspected he knew she was there for Grigor.

The next morning Grigor came and asked why had she come back.

Because she had nowhere else.

He didn’t seem surprised by the state of her, except to ask what had happened.

Sybil said it only made her want to kill Stella more.

‘What else can I say? That it’s me that wants to be killed and would you please be quick about it?’

He took an aggressive step forward, as though she were undermining him.

‘My survival no longer matters. The person I love is gone. I wish only to get even with Kübler and deny Gersten the pleasure of killing me. After that you can do what you
want.’

Grigor kept her in a dark bare lockup garage under railway arches, with only a mattress. He came and went as he pleased. He tied her up, either before he left or when he came
back, and it seemed more to do with mind games than security. Sometimes he kept her bound while they ate and spooned food into her mouth. Sometimes he gagged her. More often he used a blindfold,
even though he left her in the dark. He told her she could scream as much as she liked. No one would hear.

On the third day he let her out to hunt Stella Kübler, first bandaging her head so she couldn’t see where he was taking her. He escorted her through the streets, guiding her with
solicitous concern, a companion to her blindness.

The first day she missed her footing, causing her to cry out. From the sound alone, crossing big streets became terrifying. At last he told her she could sit and guided her onto a bench. She
supposed they were in a park. The city noises had receded.

‘Count slowly to five hundred before taking off the bandage. Memorise where you are and return to this exact spot by five. You have eight hours. If you don’t come back I will hunt
you down.’

She loitered in the part of town where Stella operated and went to the same cafés. The Richler. The Wintergarten. Café Möhring. Stella passed through them all at least once a
day.

She found her in the Richler having tea with the man who had helped beat her up. Stella’s eyes involuntarily lit up on seeing her before showing their hatred. Sybil kept up the pretence,
like they were friends from the old days, saying they must all get together. She enjoyed watching Stella unnerved, confronted with her own method. It was how she did her catching, always using the
softest friendly approach.

Stella appeared mortified that anyone would dare challenge her. The man frowned, embarrassed, as Sybil pointed to her bruises.

Sybil addressed the room and said, ‘You better watch out. This bit of blonde poison is a Jew, so is her friend.’

She turned and marched out.

Sybil so relished Stella’s recoil she continued to stalk her and that afternoon confronted her again, this time in Kranzler’s where she was alone.

Sybil sat down at the same table and ordered tea. Stella didn’t leave, unwilling to cause a scene, and Sybil saw what a scuttling, shifty little figure she really was.

She sat staring at Stella, saying nothing, other than she was next, which was the sort of thing girls said to each other in school, but it seemed to have the desired effect. She said Grigor was
coming to flay her and enjoyed her moment as Stella fled to the toilet.

After her day out, and swearing she would never go back, Sybil returned to the bench in Treptower Park because she could see no other way of keeping Grigor within reach.

Grigor came after half an hour and made her put the bandage back on.

In her endless hours alone, Sybil spent a long time thinking about Grigor’s perceived power and her weakness, and decided she might yet gain the upper hand. She wheedled and cajoled him
into using his forgery skills to prepare a death sentence for Stella in the name of the German people. She suggested using an official form from a district court. She could see such a campaign of
terror appealed to him.

Sybil came to luxuriate in the possibility of revenge. It was all she had left.

Copies of the death sentence were sent by registered post to Stella at Grosse Hamburger Strasse and Gersten at Gestapo headquarters. Part of her knew this persecution made her like them, driven
by irrational hatred, but she didn’t care and would not relent, however much Stella’s boasting about Lore now sounded like a shoddy fantasy.

Grigor told her Gersten had confined everyone to quarters, for fear of losing his agents. It was the only piece of information he volunteered. Sometimes in the night Sybil woke to find him on
top of her, a process so impersonal it might well not be happening.

‘I could beat your pretty little face even more black and blue,’ Gersten said.

He chucked Sybil under the chin, then leaned in as if to kiss.

‘The trouble you cause. Kübler is up in arms. Was that death threat your business?’

Sybil smiled for an answer.

‘Do you know what I think? It’s a power struggle. You want to take over Stella’s role, be queen bee. And you can, with my complete backing.’

Not true, but clever of him to point it out.

‘I am your best bet. But time is running out, so make up your mind. You’re thinking: him or the other one. And can I fix that bitch too. She told me how turned on she got beating you
up. As it is, you are walking the plank. Jump with Grigor or come back to me? My offer stands. Give me Grigor and my largesse knows no bounds.’

‘He fetches me from a bench in Treptower Park.’

Except that evening he didn’t.

Sybil sensed Gersten’s people lurking in bushes and behind trees, growing bored and giving up.

She supposed they waited until the park closed then all trooped out.

Left with nowhere to go herself, she followed the path of the railway to try to work out where Grigor was keeping her.

She walked until she was grabbed from behind. She knew him by his smell.

He didn’t kill her for her betrayal, as seemed inevitable, but savagely blindfolded her and dragged her back to the lockup. He cross-examined her about where she had been and so on,
roughed her up, trying to force her to say.

Sybil refused and said, ‘Do what you like. I don’t care. Just get on with it.’

Grigor stopped and she realised he wasn’t going to kill her after all, because he had grown dependent on her in some sick way.

Morgen worked at a whirlwind pace, twice as fast as if he had still been on Pervitin. They drove out to the SS Ahnenerbe scientific research centre in Dahlem where Lampe was
being held for what was quaintly called observation. Morgen explained on the way that he had fixed the trip on the quiet through his brother Theodore, who worked there.

‘We don’t really get on, though I should be more grateful, because Theo fixed my membership with the Foreign Press Club.’

Theodore Morgen turned out to be a more compact version of his brother, so much so that Schlegel couldn’t resist asking were they twins, to which they snapped in unison, certainly not.
Theodore was quick to add he was the elder.

He wore a double-breasted waistcoat with mother-of-pearl buttons and smoked as much as his brother, with the same habit of switching sides with each drag. He took them to his office with a
library of rare and exotic books. He told Schlegel he was employed as a Tibetan scholar but the place was like working in a mausoleum.

‘Are you the young man who loses his hat? Ever been to Tibet?’

He made it sound as commonplace as Hamburg or Kiel.

‘Your man is being brought downstairs now. It’ll be about five minutes. They’re tickled pink to have him.’

Schlegel found the brothers like a warped adult version of the Max and Moritz cartoon.

Morgen smoked by the window while his brother proceeded to lecture Schlegel.

‘I do have scholastic training, but the institution is interested only in a combination of new-age rubbish, historical fantasy, bogus science, pseudo-research and neo-paganism. The place
is staffed with opportunists—’

Morgen interrupted to ask if Theo was talking about himself again.

Theo hissed at Schlegel, ‘Tell him to do something useful with his judicial powers, like sending himself to prison.’

The brothers’ rivalry was like static. God only knew what their childhood had been like, thought Schlegel.

Theo went on, ‘We have progressed from dotty scholarship and exotic field trips to conducting freezing tests to see how much cold the body can endure, using humans as guinea pigs, where
revival methods include coital tests done to flatter Himmler’s belief in the magical powers of body heat, and his theory that contact between the sexes provides the transmission of a vital
force from the stronger to the weaker.’

‘Does it work?’ asked Morgen.

Theo snapped, ‘See what I mean? The flippancy. No, it doesn’t. Obviously.’

‘Come on,’ said Morgen, tetchy. ‘We don’t have time to stand around all day.’

Axel Lampe was heavily sedated, to the point of drooling. Any previous talkative self was replaced by muteness. The pudding-basin haircut had gone, his skull shaved to the
bone.

‘It must be pretty dim in there, Axel,’ Morgen said. ‘Let’s play a game my way. I ask the question. You don’t have to answer. Instead I hold up a finger. One finger
for yes and two for no. Just nod or shake your head. First question, is Stoffel an arsehole?’

Lampe looked uninterested but eventually nodded at the single finger.

‘A yes. Next question, did you kill those people Stoffel said you did?’

Lampe stared at the single digit, looking stupid. Morgen held up two fingers and Lampe immediately nodded. A no.

‘And did you steal the money from the printers?’

Lampe hadn’t the faintest idea what they were talking about, even when they explained to the point of exhaustion.

Morgen stood up and said, ‘It’s important to remind ourselves of what the system is capable.’

They discovered the first flayed body in the cattle wagon had in fact been referred on from the city pathology department to the Jewish hospital at Iranische Strasse, on
grounds of backlog and lack of staff.

The arrangement was quite common, according to Lipchitz, the Jewish pathologist they talked to. He implied most unidentified bodies ended up with him because the city department was lazy.

‘Even with a case of homicide?’ asked Morgen.

‘Someone must have made the decision the flayed bodies were Jewish, though how he could tell I have no idea.’

Schlegel could not identify the guttural accent. Lipchitz was a careworn, elderly man, who wore pince-nez and a grubby white coat. He was grateful for Morgen’s offer of a cigarette, taken
with unsteady hands. His office was like a laboratory, half-tiled and with gas jets, but so cold he wore an overcoat under his overall.

Personal curiosity had led him to conduct a proper autopsy. No one had been chasing for the report.

‘Don’t you always?’ asked Morgen. ‘Aren’t there professional standards?’

‘I can conclude what I like, for all anyone cares in this kingdom of death.’ He studied Morgen, calculating. ‘You look all right to me, so I will tell you that your lot are
obsessed with paperwork that no one reads. I did both bodies, for what it’s worth.’

‘Would you say they were the work of a single hand?’

‘I would say.’

‘Based on what?’

‘For all the show of artistry, I would venture the man isn’t a very good butcher.’

‘And?’

‘The first showed signs of having been kept on ice, by the way. The other not.’

‘As in frozen?’

‘Yes, kept on ice.’

‘What’s the sense in that?’

Lipchitz shrugged. ‘What’s the sense in anything? I don’t mean to be facetious.’

The man’s skin was grey from exhaustion. Rings of tiredness under his eyes looked like bruises.