Children of Wrath (39 page)

Von Hessler let Erich drop into the bed and with his bleeding hand reached for Willi’s Luger, all the intoxicated madness gone as he aimed at point-blank range.

Willi tried to reason with him. “Give yourself up. They’re sure to be more lenient with you than you were with those kids. Anyway, your Tower’s gone, von Hessler.”

“You’ve no idea what you’ve done, Kraus. Set the development of the human race back a thousand—”

A shrill cry from behind spun von Hessler’s head. From the gathering smoke Fritz landed like an incoming shell, knocking the doctor down with a blow to his jaw.

Willi, too anxious to be amazed, ran to Erich and scooped him up with an unbelievable rush of relief, especially once he felt the gentle breathing in his arms.

“Help with the kids,” he gasped, suddenly swept into the most astonishing whirlwind of faces and motion. Kai. The Red Apaches. Gunther. Security cops. Everyone was swarming in. Von Hessler was being handcuffed and led away. Children lifted from beds.

On the winding staircase down, Willi burst into tears as he clutched Erich to his chest, only half hearing Fritz proclaim Kai to be the hero of the rescue, that he’d noticed Willi’s strange mood earlier and had his Red Apaches trail him, alerting Fritz when Willi had come up here alone. Willi could barely take it in. He only knew that his son was safe. And that upstairs many more boys remained in peril.

Once Erich was down, Willi raced back up again, shouting at everyone to hurry, desperately searching boy after boy as they were carried away. Where the hell was Heinz? The whole room was a pall of smoke now, flames rushing along the ceiling. Willi gulped down as much air as he could, then plunged back into the room.

It was almost impossible to see. The top of his head felt as if it were about to ignite. But in the last still-occupied bed he found the kid he’d practically raised as a third son and frantically unplugged the narcotizing tubes, then grabbed him up, limp as a doll. What joy as he ran down the stairs with him, picturing the gratitude in the Winkelmanns’ faces when they saw their Heinzie safe. Wouldn’t they be ashamed then of the way they’d treated Willi and his family.

Finally, there was no more going inside. Even the fire department was evacuating. On the street, ambulance crews were packing up kids from officers’ arms and speeding off to hospitals, while crowds gathered behind barricades watching the fiery spectacle. As he raced off in one of the ambulances, wedged between Erich and Heinz, Willi looked out the window and saw the entire top of the water tower had exploded into a flaming torch, forever consuming the terrible legacy of Dr. von Hessler.

For the first time in a long time, he began to breathe easier.

Thirty-three

Terraced on a hillside in the city’s oldest park, the Fountain of Fairy Tales was Berlin’s grand monument to childhood. Four levels of cascading pools surrounded by neo-baroque arcades composed an enchanting world filled with travertine statues from the Brothers Grimm—Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood—a civic shrine to youth and fantasy. It had opened with great fanfare not long before the war. Willi clearly remembered visting it for the first time with his sister, Greta. He was eighteen, already done with his university entrance exams, but not yet knowing the results—an unsettling void along life’s path, although nothing compared to what was to come. He and Greta spent hours dawdling, examining statues, dipping fingers into pools, flooding with memories of their father reading to them, Mother’s cakes, long walks in the Tiergarten.

Now, watching his children’s faces, Willi was yanked not to the past but into the sun-filled present. No words could describe the happiness he felt seeing his sons side by side again, laughter bursting from their throats as they played with the squirting frog statues. Von Hessler had at least been right about one thing: Erich recollected nothing of his kidnapping. An ice cream truck pulling over. Some hands reaching out. Then waking up in bed exhausted. It remained to be seen what long-term effects might yet manifest. But after a month, to all appearances, he’d bounced back with remarkable alacrity. If only Willi could say the same for himself.

It was a warm October Sunday. Next to one another on a bench near the splashing fountain, he and Vicki were unconcerned, as they would not have been a month prior, whether they’d be a few minutes late to Grandpa’s birthday party or if the boys might mess up their trousers playing. The ordeal they’d endured had left each with sharpened awareness of the fragility of life, and they sat next to each other breathing rhythmically in the autumn sunshine. Only Willi’s celebrity interrupted.

“Inspector Kraus, aren’t you? How marvelous! Won’t you pose for a photo with my wife and me?”

With von Hessler behind bars and the rest of the case made public, Willi’d become the most famous detective in Germany. His face appeared in newsreels not only in Europe but America. The
Berliner Illustrierte
had done a cover story on him. More than one big-shot producer had contacted him about starring in a film, the very idea of which struck him as ludicrous; he’d probably put the audience to sleep. On the other hand, if they wanted Conrad Veidt to star …

After all, Willi gave himself credit, he’d done some good work on this case. Plus he’d come out with a promotion and a damned good assistant to boot, so it had a happy ending. The central gap of course was the Shepherdess. She had never been found. No confirmed sightings, no traces of her remains identified after the fire. But then neither had the remains of any of the boys on the top floor that night, trapped in their glass cages, been identified. The whole tower had collapsed in fiery hell. There’d been countless alleged sightings of the now-infamous redhead: in Frankfurt, in Leipzig, lunching on Potsdamer Platz. But with an old ID photo of hers in as many newspapers as Willi’s, even if she’d survived her descent down that smoke-filled staircase, Willi was confident the last of the Köhlers would never dare show her face in Germany again.

The case of
Der Kinderfresser
was over. Thank God.

Not that he deserved all the credit.

A day or two after his son returned, Willi’d wandered across Alexanderplatz to where the statue of Berolina had already been removed. Kai and his Red Apaches were still there, hanging around the empty pedestal, laughing and singing to a guitar one of them had somehow procured. Willi’d pulled the kid aside and thanked him from the bottom of his heart.

“Oh, come now, Inspektor.” Kai was not only surprised but touched. “You helped me. I helped you.” The corner of his pink lip trembled. “That’s the way it should be, no?”

Since assuming “chiefdom,” the boy appeared to have grown not only in confidence but in size, an inch or two at least, Willi thought, his shoulders broader, his face fuller. He still wore the makeup, but not as much as before. And for some reason it looked less like a mask now than a mark of distinction.

“What you did took courage, Kai. If it wasn’t for you, I’d be dead. So would my son. And many other boys too.”

“I know what it’s like to be scared, is all.” Kai made sure none of the other kids were listening. “I recognized it in your eyes. You don’t think clear when you’re too frightened. So I figured best keep an eye out on you, that’s all.”

“You’re going to make a great leader.” Willi reached in his pocket. “And I don’t think your bravery should go unrecognized.”

Digging out a small velvet box, he handed it to Kai. During the war he’d earned numerous decorations, not just an Iron Cross, but also a Golden Merit from the State of Prussia. Encircled with twenty-four-karat laurel leaves and embossed with the coat of arms of the House of Hohenzollern, it was quite a little work of art, something he’d always intended to pass on to his sons. Kai had earned it.

“You’re giving this to me?” Ribbons of mascara fluttered from his eyes.

“As a badge of honor.” Willi’d saluted with a quick click of the heels. “But if times ever warrant, Kai,” he added from the side of his mouth as he pinned it onto the chief’s chest, “it’d fetch quite a stack in some markets, if you catch my meaning.”

*   *   *

Children’s laughter mixed with the spashing of the Fairy Tale Fountain. On the sunny park bench, however, grateful as he was, Willi felt far from happy. A silent chasm still yawned between Vicki and him. And it hurt like hell.

Much as she said she didn’t, he knew she couldn’t quit blaming herself for what had happened, for having napped while Heinz and Erich ran off. Nor could she quit blaming the Winkelmanns for having put the boys in a situation they felt they had to escape. Most of all, though, she blamed Willi–for bringing it upon them. And he couldn’t bear her distance much longer. He yearned for even a touch.

“Okay, let’s go.” She clapped, watching the boys jump from the fountain.

They were so excited to be leaving after lunch for a week’s holiday with their aunt and grandparents, they practically ran the rest of the way. Willi hoped once they were gone, he and Vicki would reconcile.

At the Café am Teich overlooking the Swan Pond, it was warm enough that the Gottmans were having Max’s fifty-fourth birthday on the Rose Terrace. Red flowers still opened here and there, despite autumn leaves tumbling from the sky. Everyone appeared in buoyant spirits. Max especially.

“They sing about Paris in springtime, boys.” He threw an arm around his grandsons. “But wait till you see it in autumn!”

“Love your new suit, Vic,” her sister, Ava, said, feeling it with her fingers.

Willi could see how happy Vicki was wrapped in the bosom of her family, and not for the first time he envied her a little. Just the other day he’d gone to visit his own parents’ graves at the big Jewish cemetery in Weissensee. Wandering down the aisles of black marble mausoleums with their gold-leaf lettering and Jugendstil mosaics, he thought about what an accomplishment it must have felt like for them to purchase even the tiniest plots there, knowing they’d wind up in the same final resting place as philosphers and poets and department-store magnates.

“What’ll we do the minute we get there?” Bette Gottman repeated Stefan’s question. “Laugh aloud, child, as the Parisians do. Then we’ll have a nice long visit with your great-aunt, my mother’s sister, whom you met once but I’m sure don’t remember.”

“Mother.” Ava put down her fork. “He was six months old.”

“Afterwards we’ll go to Galeries Lafayette and get you some new outfits. You can’t go about Paris in German clothes; they always look out-of-date.”

Vicki’s mother could never get enough of Paris, Willi knew, but this time her excitement felt a little too urgent. She could barely conceal a desire to escape Berlin, even for a week, which one could hardly blame her for. The tension here refused to subside, even for an hour.

“Did you listen Monday night?” Ava, near the end of the meal, finally brought up. “Have you ever heard anything so grotesque?” She looked at them all.

She was referring of course to the live broadcast of the Reichstag opening session, when all the new Nazi delegates had showed up in jackboots and uniforms and disrupted everything with catcalls, giving credence to their declaration that they had not come to prop up what was collapsing, but to topple it. The legislative body now was at a total standstill, reduced to trench warfare.

“Must we, darling?” her mother begged, reaching to rearrange her daughter’s scarf.

But Ava seemed unwilling to abandon current events. “I’m so proud of Thomas Mann, at least.” She brushed away her mother’s hand.

Before a meeting of the Prussian Academy, Germany’s most prominent writer had cried out for democrats to lay aside their differences and unite against the Nazi threat. Even stormtroopers who’d infiltrated the hall hadn’t been able stop him, although it did require police protection. Still, the reactionary tide was undoubtedly having an effect on Berlin’s cultural life. When stink bombs caused hysteria at the premiere of
All Quiet on the Western Front,
the authorities, rather than standing firm, reversed an earlier decision and decreed the film “harmful to public morale,” banning all futher showings.

“It’s all because of the collapse.” Max folded his napkin over and over. “People aren’t thinking rationally.”

“Even at the university,” Ava concurred, “intelligent minds have deduced something ‘mystical’ about the Nazis.”

The speed of their political ascendancy was indeed remarkable. The Social Democats had fought for decades for a first block of Reichstag seats. The Nazis had won a quarter of the floor in one election. People said such a triumph could not be explained by ordinary means. That it had the feel of the miraculous. Of destiny.

Willi’s cousin Kurt called it a neurotic defense on a nationwide scale and was openly depressed about it. He diagnosed Germans as having an inferiority complex that caused them to overcompensate, deluding themselves with a sense of superiority and feeling outrage when reality didn’t coincide with their inflated egos. Precisely the sort of neurosis, he said, that made shouldering responsibility for their own misfortunes impossible and required a scapegoat on which ills could be expiated.

There was no doubt who that would be.

True, in their second day in office the Nazi delegates quit catcalling and got down to business, introducing a series of anti-Semitic legislation that impressed even old-time anti-Semites. The goal: complete elimination of Jewish “influence” over Germany—in all professions, in all levels of government, education, civil service. Police included. As small a chance of a measure such as the Aryan Law had of passing, Kurt feared if the economic situation didn’t stabilize, the position of Germany’s six hundred thousand Jews might grow serious.

Willi’d faced a lot more anti-Semitism in his life than Kurt, a psychiatrist in a practically all-Jewish institute. But even if Kurt’s analysis sounded extreme, Willi had a lot of respect for his psychological insight. He’d been dead-on with
Der Kinderfresser.
As sensitive as Willi was to issues of family security just now, he had to consider what might happen if they did ever have to leave the country. Where would they go? Join his sister in Palestine? The British had just curtailed Jewish immigration there. And last year, so many Jews had been hacked to death during the Arab riots.