Rosa (20 page)

Hoffner had lain awake for most of the night. He was a periodic insomniac, and, except for the fact that he actually enjoyed the long hours of intense thought, he might have attributed it to some sort of cosmic payback for a waking life of chosen isolation. For some reason, though, dead-of-night focus on a case always left him feeling refreshed in the morning. It was dreaming that exhausted him.

He had come to the conclusion—sometime around 4:00 a.m.—that the note from K might be the only piece of recent information that could lead him forward. Everything else seemed to be generating lateral movement: the grease had introduced the possibility of a military connection; the gloves had raised a whole series of problems—the girl’s transport, the girl herself, and the fact that Wouters was in a different country. Hoffner had considered the “second carver” theory—the smooth versus the jagged and angular strokes—but that hardly explained who the first carver might be, what with Wouters safely locked away in Sint-Walburga. And, of course, there was Luxemburg, which had brought in the Polpo and which, to Hoffner’s way of thinking, was somehow linked to the leak.

That left him with the note from K, which, on the surface, seemed equally cloudy. The small hours, however, did more than just concentrate Hoffner’s mind; they allowed his instincts to come to the fore: by the time Martha had begun to show signs of life at five-thirty, Hoffner knew with absolute certainty that the note was unrelated to everything else. He just had no notion why.

Finding out, however, would have to wait. He slipped out of bed, dressed, and grabbed a quick breakfast—yesterday’s cold potatoes and coffee—and was out the door before the rest of the house knew he had been home. At this hour, cabs were easy pickings and Hoffner was at the Alex by half past six.

Little Franz was standing over a washbasin in one of the attic alcoves when Hoffner pulled up next to him. It was now a quarter to seven, and the light had just begun to creep through the porthole window directly above them. Hoffner had ducked his way under the beams and past the three beds—two of which were still occupied—all without drawing attention. He now waited for Franz to turn off the tap.

“Up nice and early,” said Hoffner when the splashing finally stopped.

The boy nearly jumped. He stood there as water dripped down his cheeks and onto the floor. He had that same concave, pale little chest that Georgi had, but his biceps were already beginning to show genuine muscle: this was a boy who had learned to survive. Hoffner knew that any comparison with his own son was strictly of his own making. Hoffner reached over for the paper-thin towel hanging from a hook, and held it out to him.

Franz took the towel. “Yes. Good morning, Herr
Kriminal-Kommissar.
” He continued to stare at Hoffner.

“Don’t let yourself catch cold, Franz.” Immediately the boy went to work on his hair and face. “I’ve a favor to ask you.” Franz nodded from under the towel and continued with the fury that was a ten-year-old boy drying himself. “You might want to leave a little skin on your face,” said Hoffner.

Franz looked up. His hair was shooting off in all directions, but his face had that lovely pink-and-white hue. “Yes, Herr
Kriminal-Kommissar.
”

Hoffner placed the towel on its hook as Franz began to do what he could with a hairbrush. “You remember Herr Kvatsch? At the
BZ
?” The boy had tailed Kvatsch during a case last year; he had proved himself exceptionally good at getting the names of the people Kvatsch saw during the day.

Franz nodded. “The one with the teeth,” he said. “Yes, Herr
Kriminal-Kommissar.
” Franz had managed something of a part; he placed the brush by the basin.

“Good. I’m going to need you to find out who he’s been talking to.” Hoffner knew Kvatsch was lazy: the man would eventually contact his source. Hoffner only hoped it would be quicker than the last time: then, Franz had spent the better part of a week in Kvatsch’s shadows. “It’s five pfennigs a name,” said Hoffner. The boy’s eyes lit up: it had been two, the last go-round. As then, Hoffner had no reason to worry that Franz might pad the list in order to make a few extra coins; the boy took too much pride in his work. It was why Hoffner had known Franz would be at his washbasin at a quarter to seven in the morning.

Franz reached over for his shirt. He slipped his arms through and began to button it. “Today, Herr
Kriminal-Kommissar
?”

“Today.” Hoffner watched as Franz crammed his shirttail into his pants. Once again Hoffner had to remind himself that this was no ordinary ten-year-old, the boy’s gawkiness notwithstanding: no doubt Franz was already proficient with a blackjack, maybe even a knife. “One other thing,” said Hoffner. He nodded back over his shoulder to the two sleeping boys. “Which one of them do you trust?”

Franz peered past Hoffner and pointed toward the boy in the far bed. “Sascha. He’s all right.”

Hoffner turned to the sleeping boy. From this angle, he might have been his own Sascha, a few years removed. Again, it was best not to think about it. “I need him by the wire room, all day and all night, if necessary. Anything comes in for me, he’s to hold it and find me. Can he do that?” Franz nodded. “Good. Tell him I’ll telephone the switchboard at eleven to see if anything’s come in.” Hoffner waited for another nod; he then headed for the door. He was figuring that Fichte and Toby would be landing in Bruges sometime around ten if they could manage to get themselves out of bed in the next hour. Then again, Hoffner had spent his own weekend with Victor and Toby, that trip to the Tyrol, most of which he now recalled as a smoke-filled, boozy blur. Hoffner stopped and turned back to Franz. “Better make it noon.”

T
he morning commuters were long gone by the time Hoffner arrived in the South End: Lindenstrasse was virtually empty. Even so, he stood on the corner for perhaps ten minutes, gazing from his newspaper to the few passersby, none of whom seemed the least interested in Luxemburg’s building. Satisfied, Hoffner tossed the paper into a trash bin and headed for Number 2.

This time the landlady let him in without so much as a question. Breakfast was in the offing, but Hoffner politely refused and asked if anyone else had come to the flat since his own visit: the woman recalled no one.

Luxemburg’s rooms were untouched, except for a few very subtle changes: the teacup had been rinsed and returned to its shelf; several of the pictures had been straightened on the wall; and the smell of dried wood had been aired out, although the windows were once again shut tight. K, as it turned out, was more than just a secretive man; he was a neat one. Hoffner found that in keeping with the tone of the note.

The purpose for the return visit, however, was a bit more difficult to pinpoint. In fact, it took Hoffner nearly twenty minutes to find what K had sent him back for. When Hoffner did find it, he realized it was in the most obvious, and therefore least likely, place to have been searched. Sitting atop her desk—and side by side with the unread speeches—was a stack of books and papers held together by a rough piece of cord. K had been clever: the stack had been placed in such a way as to seem a part of the speeches. Hoffner now saw it otherwise. He stepped over, sat in Rosa’s chair, and began to loosen the knot.

Within half a minute he was flipping through one of her private diaries, February through May 1914. The other volumes chronicled her life in equally short and arbitrary installments: July 1911 through January 1912; November 1915 through July 1916; and an entire book devoted to August 1914. The beginning of the war had marked the end of the International; with German workers voting to fight against their French and English brothers, Luxemburg’s dream of a Universal Socialism had come crashing down. It had been the great disaster of her life—”workers of the world” choosing country over one another—and had thus inspired pages and pages of grief-stricken prose, all with the requisite hair-pulling of a Greek tragedy. Hoffner quickly moved through them.

The more startling discovery was the collection of loose letters slotted into each of the books. Hoffner estimated several hundred from a first glance-through: it was clear that they had been hastily included, the addressees and dates even more haphazard. There were more than thirty names, with dates reaching as far back as 1894, the most recent from only a few months ago. The one constant was the writer. They were all from Rosa.

How, then, thought Hoffner, had K amassed nearly two hundred of Rosa’s private letters in just over a week? The answer—and K’s identity—obviously lay with the recipients, but Hoffner knew any attempt to contact Luxemburg’s coterie would elicit only blank stares and denials: the remaining Spartacists—her band of left left-wingers—would never give up one of their own to the Kripo.

He also knew there would be nothing in the stack to tell him who K was; even so, Hoffner needed to make sure. He went to work on the names.

Of those who had received letters, only three had a
K
in either initial. The first was Karl Liebknecht, and unless he had risen from the dead, it was highly unlikely that he had been the one to show up at the Alex last week. Hoffner eliminated Liebknecht.

The second was a Konstantin Zetkin—Kostia, in the letters—a boy fifteen years her junior, the son of Luxemburg’s good friend Clara, and, from what Hoffner could make out, Rosa’s lover for a short period of time. That, however, hardly distinguished him from any number of the other correspondents: Paul Levi, her lawyer; Leo Jogiches, her mentor; and Hans Diefenbach, her doctor—who had actually married Rosa during her last stint in prison, but who had died at the Russian front before reaping the benefits—had all kept in contact with her both before and after the affairs; all, of course, except for Diefenbach, although there were a few diary entries in which Luxemburg had carried on some lively conversations with him postmortem.

What made it clear that she would never have allowed Zetkin to compile her letters was the fact that the boy simply didn’t have the smarts to do it. Zetkin was a classic
Luftmensch,
all air and no substance, and although Rosa had tried to mold him into something artistic, the journals made it clear that he had been a lost cause. Hoffner quickly recognized that Kostia Zetkin was not his K.

That left Karl Kautsky. Most of the letters were addressed to his wife, Luise, but even Hoffner had heard of the very public falling-out between Luxemburg and her onetime comrade. It was generally agreed that squabbles among socialists made for the most entertaining reading in town: vitriol and sarcasm never had quite the same shrillness elsewhere, and the newspapers knew it, even if most of their readers never understood the finer points. In fact, no one understood the finer points; they were meaningless, anyway. The comedy was in the personal swipes, and Luxemburg had given Berlin a
tour de thtre
with her dismantling of Kautsky. Suffice it to say Kautsky had not been the one to lead Hoffner to the flat.

K had left nothing in the letters that could be tied to himself; he was too clever for that. He had signed the note for a reason, but for now, his identity would have to wait.

Hoffner sat back. He noticed a decanter of brandy on a nearby shelf, and, reaching over, brought it to the desk. There was a glass among the papers, and he poured himself a drink. He imagined that K had brought him here to see the real Luxemburg—stripped of the caricature of fanaticism—and while the pages did paint a more flesh-and-blood picture, Rosa remained distant. There were moments of raw emotion, but they came across too self-consciously: pain was never simply pain—it was acute, or frantic, or unbearable—beauty never less than triumphant. There was a morality to socialism that seeped into everything. It was as if she had been unable to separate herself from the woman who shouted down to the crowds, even when writing for herself. A few lines would hint at more, but then, just as quickly, the exclamation points would return—the heightened sense of purpose—and the other Rosa would slip quietly away.

Hoffner refilled his glass and realized that the room had been cast in much the same way. During his first visit he had seen it as a place for gatherings, warmth: now that seemed contrived, as well. The pillows and photographs were placed too perfectly to be inviting. There was an earnestness to the intimacy, which made it all the more suspect.

Glass in hand, Hoffner stood and moved across to one of the bookshelves. He scanned the titles and pulled out a volume of Pushkin: maybe he would find more of her in how she read than in how she wrote? But here, too, her marginalia lived in the extremes: Pushkin was either a genius or a fool. The same held true for Marx and Korolenko, a special diatribe reserved for a collection of essays by a man named Plekhanov. No matter where, her words, like herself, were intended for display. There seemed to be no private Rosa in any of it.

Hoffner finished his drink and began to squeeze the book back into place. He was having trouble getting it in when he heard the sound of something falling behind the row. He peered in through the gap, but it was too dark. Pulling a handful of books from the shelf, he found a thin volume lying flat on its back: it was little more than a pamphlet. He placed the stack on the desk and retrieved the book.

At first he thought his eyes were playing tricks on him. It had been years since he had seen it, a standard edition of Mrike’s poetry. Not that it was so momentous a find: every first-year university student could recite a few passages from memory. But it seemed odd to find it here, in and among the weighty tomes. Then again, it really hadn’t been with them, tucked safely behind. Hoffner pulled over a chair and opened the leather cover.

The pages were almost clean—a mark here and there, or a word—but nothing like the constant commentary he had seen elsewhere. And yet it was clear from the ragged corners that Rosa had spent a good deal of time with the book. Hoffner leafed through, allowing the pages to lead him. They came to a stop on a poem called “Seclusion.” He needed to read only the first line to understand why: