City of Women (37 page)

“So, this is a surprise,” he states. “Since you haven’t shot me on sight, am I to assume that you have discarded your shiny pistol?”

“I have it still,” she answers.

“Then I should assume you simply prefer point-blank range.”

“That depends. Do you still intend to throttle me?”

“No. I’m here on business, as you witnessed.”

“The tubby gentleman.”

“A small cog in the great machinery.”

“More diamonds stolen from Jewish coat hems?”

“No, contraband stock certificates, actually. Not really my market, you understand. I deal in stones, not paper. I’m just earning a cut of the proceeds as a go-between.”

“A bagman. How demeaning for you.”

“You didn’t leave me much choice. I couldn’t blow my nose on the money you left me. Two hundred marks. Perhaps I will throttle you, after all.”

“And who will remove the bullet from your belly after you try?”

He actually laughs at this. A thick familiar chuckle. In spite of herself, she feels her skin tingle at the sound of it. She turns her eyes to the screen, but can feel his gaze attaching itself to her, as a squadron of Stuka bombers dive murderously through the air, sirens shrieking. “There’s a boy who is stalking you,” she says.

“A what?”

“I don’t know his name. But he was one of the U-boats I was hiding. He’s been trailing
me
, apparently, hoping to find
you
. And he does not have kind intentions.”

“And who am I to him, this boy?”

“He’s under the impression that you are the responsible party in the deaths of his sisters at the hands of the Gestapo.” Her voice is detached. Almost mild. “Can that be true?”

A panzer column speeding through a burning townscape fills the cinema’s screen. Egon’s silence at the end of her question is crushing.

“I can’t forgive you, Egon,” she hears herself say.

“I haven’t asked you to. Forgiveness means nothing to me in any case. Just more words.”

“Can you tell me why?” she asks. The ground explodes on the screen, spewing whorls of dark earth.

“Why?”

“Why you
did it
?”

“You mean, why did I betray my fellow Jews to those pigs in the Grosse Hamburger Strasse? You think maybe it wasn’t just my love for the Führer and Fatherland?”

“Were you afraid? Did they threaten you? Did they threaten your family?”

“So.” He laughs again, but this time there is nothing appealing about the sound. “All that bravado, Sigrid. ‘I can’t forgive you, Egon.’ Yet you’re still trying to. Still trying to give me a way out. A moral escape route. ‘Did they threaten your family?’ the lady asks.” He shakes his head at the joke. But then a silence follows. She can feel something inside of him ebb. “I’m going to tell you the truth this time,” he says finally, with distance. “So that no one is operating under any delusions.”

Sigrid is a stone, waiting. She watches him swallow, staring into the truth before he can consider speaking it.

“Just before the war started, my wife,” he says. “My wife had begged to go to Palestine.
Begged
. She’d had a cousin, you see, who liked to style himself as a Zionist. He’d paid a fortune for a berth on a Portuguese freighter, and had been smuggled into the Mandate right under the noses of the British. But
I
thought, a
kibbutz
? Not for me. Thank you, no. I was
not interested
in eating sand for breakfast with the zealots. And, anyway, I was already working on visas, and not to some salt bed on the Dead Sea. My brother had made a contact in the American embassy. He claimed he was bouncing the wife of a legation secretary, but I never got the truth out of him. The Gestapo picked him up before I had the chance, the stupid schmuck. Maybe
they
got the truth out of him. I don’t know about that, either, because three weeks later they sent an urn full of ashes to my sister-in-law, along with an itemized bill to cover the cost of his execution.” He says this as the gray-white flashes from the screen mottle his face. “I tried to pick up where he’d left off with the visas, but it was too late. The Americans were through talking to Jews. And then the Wehrmacht stormed over the border into Poland, and the lid clamped shut on emigration.” He draws a breath and then expels it. “That was when Anna came up pregnant. She was so angry with me,” he says, as if seeing her face. “She said it was
my
doing that her baby would be born in a concentration camp. I told her she was being hysterical. I told her the Nazis were swine, but they understood the value of money. I could deal with them. And for a while I could. One year passed, and then another, and I managed. In fact, I was rather impressed with myself. We’d lost the flat in Schöneberg, but I’d found a spot down by the docks. Noisy, though not so bad, I thought. It wasn’t a dump. There was food, and coal for the stove.”

I saw your face, and I knew that I simply had to hear the sound of your voice.

“And that’s where you were living,” she asks, “when you fucked me here in the back row?”

“It was that seat over there, wasn’t it?” he says.

“You have no idea which seat it was, so please don’t try to pretend.”

He shrugs. “Maybe, maybe not. But I’m willing to bet that
you
know which seat it was.”

“Your arrogance does not promote your case,” she says, then brings him back on track. “So your wife received a letter from the jüdische Gemeinde, ordering her to report to the SS with the children? Isn’t that the next line in the story?”

“Yes.”

“And you made the arrangements to go underground. A few rooms above a warehouse in Rixdorf.”

“Yes. A few rooms above a warehouse in Rixdorf,” he repeats. “I paid plenty for it, too, but apparently the good German I was dealing with was running a side business with the Sicherheitspolizei. First the Jews paid him, and then the Sipo paid him. Anyway. They came while we were sleeping. I kicked out a window, and made it out over the rooftops, but I was the only one to escape. It probably would have been better if I had simply flung myself off one of those rooftops,” he considers. “That would have been the noble thing, wouldn’t it?”

“So there was no arrest in a café. No desperate escape from a work detail. No return to empty rooms above a warehouse. All that was a lie.”

“A man runs away, while his wife and children are ensnared? Not exactly anyone’s idea of a heroic action. But then I thought,
I could get them out
. I could work the system. What could the Stapos
really
want with a woman and her two children? I could
buy
them back. I took up a name I had used once years before, and started working. I found where they were being held, and set up a transaction with a bull named Dirkweiler from the Gross Hamburger Strasse Sammellager. It really wasn’t difficult. The Stapos are greedy old whores when it comes to what fills up their pockets. But Dirkweiler was greedier than most. He made promises, always boasting about how he could free a hundred Jews with the stroke of his pen but then always asking for more.

“And then,” he says, “came the end of February. The Sicherheitspolizei arrested more than ten thousand Jews over the course of a single morning, mostly out of the factories. It was a massive operation. Gestapo, Kriminalpolizei, even squads of Waffen-SS men, stuffing Jewish factory workers into the lorries. All the collection areas began to overflow, the Gross Hamburger Strasse included, so the decision was made to clear out some room. Three days later, Dirkweiler informed me that he had ordered my wife and children transferred to Theresienstadt in Bohemia. The ‘paradise camp,’ he called it. And there they would remain, alive and well fed, as long as I
cooperated
with his operations.” He stares dimly into the light from the screen. “That was the day I became a catcher.” A shrug. “I was good at it. In the diamond business you learn to read people’s faces, as well as the stones. I would pick out a man in a café and stare at him, until he caught my eyes, and then I would know. I became an expert at betrayal. Finally, one morning Dirkweiler calls me into his office. He was happy. I was making him look good with his bosses in the Burgstrasse office, and he wanted to show his appreciation. He’d laid his hands on a bottle of Napoleon brandy from some old Jew’s cellar, most likely. It was second rate, but he thought it was a prize, and wanted to
share
it with me. A great honor, at least in
his
eyes. An SS officer inviting a Jew to share a bottle of cognac.
Unheard of
.”

Sigrid grits her teeth. “And what did you do?”

Egon gazes at her for a moment. “I told him that I wasn’t interested in his brandy. Or his cigarettes, or wristwatches, or any of his trinkets any longer. I told him that if he wanted me to continue to make him look good with his bosses, then he’d have to do something for me.”

“For you,” Sigrid repeats.

Egon slowly breathes in, then exhales. “At first he didn’t react. Maybe he was curious about what I might want. About what a man like me might consider to be valuable, beyond the daily contraband. So I told him. I told him he’d have to bring my wife and daughters back to Berlin.”

Sigrid feels herself go still. Perfectly still. Egon’s eyes are fixed as if he’s still staring into the SS man’s face. “Suddenly, the Herr Untersturmführer didn’t look too happy any longer,” he says. “A minute later he was on his feet banging his fist and shouting about how he didn’t take orders from a fucking Yid. But it was all a front. I had already read the truth in his face.” He says this and swallows. “Maybe I had always known it.”

There’s a pause. Egon takes a long and distant breath to finish the story. “The next day I was on the train with one of the Stapo bulls. His name was Purzel. Not so bad a sort, really. I’ve certainly known worse men. In his way he was a
thoughtful
butcher. He liked to perform card tricks. Maybe he actually thought he was doing me a favor by telling me. Anna and the girls had never been sent to any sort of a ‘paradise camp.’ They’d been put on transport to a camp in Poland on the twenty-sixth of February. A place called Auschwitz. Apparently, Anna had grown hysterical when one of the girls was separated from her in the crowd at the station platform. The SS don’t like panic during a transport, of course, and have no patience for shrieking women. So a guard struck her in the head with his rifle butt, hard enough to kill her, and then tossed her body onto the train.”

He says this with an even, toneless voice, but then stares blankly for a moment. “This was the story Purzel told me. As I said, maybe he thought he was doing me a service. Maybe he thought he was being
humane
. I don’t know. He looked rather surprised when I shoved the knife blade into him. Even disappointed. In any case, that was the moment I ended my career with the Geheime Staatspolizei.”

Tears are rolling freely down Sigrid’s cheeks. She would like to touch him. She would like to feel the texture of the grief on his face. But she is afraid that if she touched his skin, she would burn her fingers. There is something of the furnace about his expression, so all she can do is wipe her eyes and say, “What about your daughters?”

“How will I ever know?” he asks the darkness into which he is staring. Then he turns his head and regards Sigrid for an instant as if regarding one of his gems.
“Come with me
,
”
he breathes.

She feels, for an instant, as if she has been hollowed out. “That’s not possible.”

“It
is
. Anything is possible. I would have thought you’d have learned that by now. Come with me.”

She shakes her head. “How?”

“How? We get on a train. Madrid is how many hours away by rail? Less than a day.”

“No. I have work here. There are people who
depend
on me.”

“
Depend on you?
For how long? How long until the Gestapo come banging on your door one night? I’ve
seen
what they do in the cellars at Grosse Hamburger Strasse. There are cellars like that all over the city. Torture is not a strong enough word for it.”

“You can’t frighten me, Egon.”

“I’m not trying to, Frau Schröder. I’m trying to save your
life
.”

She gazes at the light beading in his eyes.

“Meet me here. Tomorrow. There’s a matinee,” he tells her.

“I can’t.”

“I have a plan I’ve been working on. It’s a bit risky, but if I can pull it off, it’ll put some money in our pockets. Enough to buy you a dozen passports. All I need is that little spitter you’ve been carrying.”

“What?”

“The revolver, Sigrid.”

“What are you doing to do with it?”

“Nothing. Just hand it over.”

She hesitates. Her stomach crawling. “What if I need to shoot you later?” she asks.

“Then you can always ask for it back,” he tells her, and holds out his hand.

She shifts, finally, and passes over the shiny piece of nickel plating and watches him stuff it into his pocket. “Don’t wait for me,” she tells him. “Tomorrow. I won’t be coming.”

“We’ll see,” he replies. “A lot could happen between now and then. The world could shift on its axis, Sigrid. Mountains could spring from the seas. Pigs could fly. A woman could change her mind,” he says, and exits the seat beside her.

Outside in the street, she searches for the monkey-eared Kommissar, and spots him at the news kiosk buying a paper from an old veteran. Only this time he’s exactly the man she wants to see. It actually takes some effort to make sure she doesn’t lose him in the crowd on the U-Bahn platform. Inside the carriage, he takes a seat on the opposite side of the aisle and glowers at his newspaper. Not a good Nazi rag like the
Völkischer Beobachter
, but a spicy illustrated known for its salacious stories and its “beauty” adverts featuring undressed women. The front page features a pile of muddy skulls with the headline
RUSSIA’S GUILT
!

She stays on past her stop. Far past her stop, in fact. Past the stop for the Deutsche Opernhaus-Bismarckstrasse, past the stop for Sophie-Charlottenburg-Platz, past the stop for Kaiserdammbrücke and the circumference of the Ringbahn. At one point, as the train is pulling away from the platform at the Adolf-Hitler-Platz, the monkey-eared Kommissar stretches his neck and frowns out the window with a perplexed expression. He must wonder what sort of a ride this woman is taking him on. Finally, two stops later, it’s getting a little embarrassing. They are quite nearly the only ones left in the carriage when it heaves through the tunnel for the Reichssportfeld platform. Sigrid stands and he buries his nose in his newspaper, but when she suddenly crowds into the seat beside him, he jumps as if she’s shocked him with a bolt of electricity.