Rosa (6 page)

“Ah,” said Hoffner, saving him the trouble: the prospect of facing dinner at home without something of a distraction beforehand was far more deflating than Fichte’s awkward brush-off. “A different kind of deviation.” The joke was lost on Fichte. “Never mind,” said Hoffner. “Another time.” He pressed a small white button by the sink, and a bell rang beyond the doors to inform the orderlies that the bodies were ready for the ice room.

“No.” Fichte was suddenly more animated. “You should come. I’d like you to come.” Still more steam. “Yes, come. Lina’s even asked about you.”

“Lina,” said Hoffner.

“A friend. A girl.”

“Oh, a girl,” said Hoffner, stating the obvious. He tossed the towel onto the counter. “Then I should definitely
not
come.”

“No, no. It’s nothing like that,” said Fichte, even more insistent. “Well, I mean it is like that, but it’ll be for a drink. One drink. We can talk about working together. You know.”

“‘Working together,’” Hoffner echoed.

“As detectives.”

“Right,” said Hoffner, more skeptically. “I can tell her what a fine partner you are, the great work you’re doing.”

“Exactly,” said Fichte. “We’ll have some fun.” He continued to gain momentum. “She’s great, my Lina. No. You have to come now. She won’t forgive me if I show up without you.”

“I see.” Hoffner stepped aside. He sat against the counter, arms crossed at his chest, as Fichte started in at the sink. “How can I deprive your Lina of my remarkable company?”

“Yes. Exactly.”

Hoffner watched as Fichte sniffed at his lathered hands. There was something reassuring about this particular fixation of his. Fichte completed his inspection and, finding nothing, rinsed off.

“So,” asked Hoffner, “how long has she been selling flowers along Friedrichstrasse?”

“About three months,” said Fichte offhandedly. He then looked over at Hoffner in complete surprise. “How did you know that?”

Hoffner smiled. “I was also once a twenty-three-year-old
Kriminal-Assistent,
Hans. Mine was called Celia.”

Fichte shook his head as he turned off the tap and picked up the towel. “No, my Lina’s a nice girl.”

For several seconds, Hoffner stared down at the floor, trying to recall his Celia. He could almost see her, the long, slim frame, the wirelike fingers, the small breasts, all of it, except for the face. He tried to find it—bad skin, pretty—but no, only a vague outline: an endless array of thieves and murderers clear as day, but no Celia. “A nice girl,” he said, still distant. He looked at Fichte. “And what makes you think mine wasn’t?”

Fichte saw the change in Hoffner’s expression. He stopped drying his hands. “.         .         .         I didn’t mean—”

Instantly, Hoffner started to laugh. “Well, you’re right. She wasn’t.” When Fichte smiled sheepishly, Hoffner pushed himself up from the counter and said, “All right, one drink, Hans. But anything to impress your Lina will cost you extra.”

T
en minutes later, after having retrieved his coat and having jotted down a few notes, Hoffner joined Fichte out on the square. The rain was misting in tiny drops of water visible only as haloes around the street lamps.

Fichte was enjoying a cigarette; he offered Hoffner a drag, but the smell of the smoke was enough to put anyone off a tasting. Fichte had a girl: he needed to save his pfennigs. Hoffner had always reasoned that the cheaper the tobacco, the greater the capital required to grease the way. From the expression on Fichte’s face each time he inhaled, few came more chaste than little Lina.

There was no reason to ask where they were heading. If Fichte was playing it well—and from the tobacco, he clearly was—he would have progressed to old Josty’s in Leipziger Strasse by now, over in the west, a step up: the café was fancy enough so that the girl would feel Fichte was showing her the proper respect, lively enough to know that respect wasn’t really what he was after. Fichte had probably asked one of the boys at headquarters where to take her, someone reliable. Hoffner felt a bit tweaked that Fichte had gone elsewhere for the advice.

“She’s quite popular, is she?” said Fichte as they continued to walk. Hoffner had no idea what Fichte was saying. “Or at least she was.”

“Was what?” said Hoffner. “Who?”

“At the lab. Luxemburg. She was popular.”

“Ah, Luxemburg. I suppose that depends on who you are.” Hoffner pulled up the collar of his coat. “You fancy yourself a Red, then?”

Fichte laughed awkwardly. “Certainly not.”

“So you’re more for the oppression of the masses. The inscrutable certainty of capitalism.”

“The what?” said Fichte.

Hoffner smiled quietly. “Yes. She was popular, Hans.”

Fichte nodded and then said cautiously, “You’re . . . 0A0;    not a Red, are you, Herr
Kriminal-Kommissar
?”

Hoffner dug his hands deeper inside his coat pockets. “And what did you have in mind?”

“Well, you know         .         .         .” Fichte had been given the go-ahead. “Blowing up buildings, marching in the streets, chaos, that sort of thing.”

“‘That sort of thing,’” Hoffner echoed. “Sounds a bit more like anarchy, don’t you think?”

“Anarchy. Socialism. Same thing.”

“I’ll leave the distinctions to you, shall I?”

Fichte hesitated. “She was a Jew,” he said with surprising certainty.

Hoffner nodded to himself. “Well, then, there you have it. The complete picture.” They ducked in behind a cart and headed across the street. Hoffner said, “You know, your anarchist wasn’t always waving her fists from balconies, Hans, but then you’re probably too young to remember that.” Hoffner hopped up onto the curb.

“Really?” said Fichte, following.

“Really.”

They continued to walk in silence until Fichte managed, “How so?”

The boy was genuinely keen on the subject. Hoffner said, “It might do you to pick up a newspaper now and then, Hans.”

Fichte nodded. “It might, Herr
Kriminal-Kommissar,
but then I’ve always got you if I don’t.”

Hoffner had never heard Fichte’s playful side: the prospect of seeing his girl was evidently working wonders. “Fair enough,” said Hoffner. “It was before the war, around the time they hanged that Hennig fellow for the Treptow murders. You remember the case?” Fichte nodded. “Frulein Luxemburg printed an article in one of her papers, something about how the average soldier was being mistreated by his officers. Not that this was any great news to anyone, but she claimed that it had gotten out of hand. Lots of press after that. A Red coming to the aid of the army’s downtrodden. Powerful stuff.”

Fichte was skeptical. “Luxemburg did that . . . 0A0;    for the soldiers?”

“She wasn’t trying to scrap the whole business, Hans—she wasn’t angling for them to disband the army or hang the culprits—she just wanted a bit of fair play.”

“Oh,” Fichte conceded.

“Naturally, the General Staff didn’t like it. They said that she’d insulted the entire breed—from the lowest scrub all the way up to General von Falkenhayn himself—so they put her on trial. Wanted to teach her a lesson, show her how easily a little Red could be crushed by the might of the Imperial Army. Except the soldiers started showing up in droves to give testimony, and all of them saying that she’d gotten it right. Something of a humiliation for the boys on top.”

“I don’t remember hearing—”

“
Reading,
Hans. It required a bit of reading. Anyway, Rosa came out of it the most popular girl in town. First the workers, then the soldiers. She had a little army behind her, this little Jewess with the funny walk. That’s why they threw her in prison when the war broke out. And why those same boys she’d helped all those years before were so eager to hunt her down once the war was over. They were officers by then. Not terribly appreciative, were they?”

Fichte waited before answering with a grin, “You’re sure you’re no Red, Herr
Kriminal-Kommissar
?”

Hoffner smiled with him. “It’s not all wild Russians and unwashed masses, Hans. There was a bit of courage in what she did—even for a socialist—and you have to respect that.”

The two walked past the darkened shops of Konigsstrasse and up alongside the walls of the Royal Palace—recent victim of its own revolutionary clash, and now forced to play the role of impotent relic. This, thought Hoffner, was to be the home of the new government. Already it seemed to be screaming out “bureaucracy!” to the socialist upstarts champing at the bit—rococo and baroque ousted by the dull gray furnishings of reform. From a certain angle, the four-block behemoth actually looked like a massive legion of filing cabinets. Maybe the social democrats knew more than they were letting on?

Wilhelmine Berlin reemerged as they crossed the Platz and started down the always-vibrant Unter den Linden. Hoffner marveled that, even in the aftermath of revolution, the avenue maintained an almost pristine elegance: trams, buses, people, were all decorously in tune with each other. Not a single tree within the dual column at its center had fallen—to battle or to firewood—although a few limbs had snapped under the push of onlookers during those first wild forays in late December. Those not lucky enough to have merited access to the upper floors of the various stores and hotels—or who had simply been daring enough to venture outside—had been forced up into the bigger branches for their vantage points. Thus had the twin line succumbed to the weight of rebellion. Still, Hoffner had to concede that, socialist or not, Berliners had known themselves well enough to leave the avenue in one piece. It was, after all, far more than just another rendering of the grand European boulevard. It was—it would always be—the city’s conduit between east and west, between the grind of labor and the gate of privilege, between his own world and the world of nobility. Revolution or not, Hoffner knew that that line could never be broken. It had made a certainty of defeat even before the first shots had been fired.

Unbreakable, however, was not the way the avenue presented itself to him tonight. Where stone and light and trees sprouted, Hoffner saw only the rising shoulder blades of the Alex and the Brandenburg Gate, the crisscrossing carvings of the well-lamped Friedrich and Spandau and Charlotten Strassen; even the elfin spire of Hedwig Church seemed now like a jagged imperfection dug out by a flawed blade. Hoffner gazed at the passing bodies, trams, automobiles, all of them caught inside the impenetrable pattern of a madman’s imagination, their movements dictated by the sudden twists and turns, and all perfectly synchronous and smooth. Variations in speed, angle, and direction faded as the avenue breathed life into the design. And within it walked Nikolai Hoffner, a willing speck in its circulation. He had allowed himself to believe that the pattern would rise up, reveal its meaning, if only he could maintain the ruse, convince it that he, too, belonged on the diameter-cut.

A child darted away from its mother; a man dropped to his knee; a tram screeched to a stop. And the pattern dissolved.

The Brandenburg Gate—once again stone—loomed above, and Hoffner heard words. Fichte was saying something. Hoffner continued to walk: he decided to let Fichte’s droning die out on its own.

As it turned out, Fichte was merely pointing out a tram and, expecting no response, had raced off to hold the door. It took another moment for Hoffner to catch on before he put some life into his legs, ran up, and jumped on. He was greeted by several muted hrumphs from the seated passengers. A flash of his badge to the conductor quieted any further commentary.

Hoffner moved to the back of the car and gazed out at the receding avenue. He tried to find the pattern again, but it was gone. Another lost opportunity, he thought. He closed his eyes and let his body sway to the tram’s motion as Fichte checked his watch.

It was another fifteen minutes before Hoffner felt a tug on his sleeve. He opened his eyes to see Fichte moving to the door, the lighted sign of Café Jostin growing nearer and nearer through the tram’s window. They had arrived in Potsdamer Platz. Two uniformed Schutzis stood at either end of the square’s traffic circle, trying to impose order. Hoffner smiled at their ineptitude: even the buses seemed to be ignoring them. He moved toward the door where Fichte was waiting impatiently. The tram came to a stop and the two hopped off.

“I didn’t know the badge gets us a free ride,” said Fichte, quickening his pace as they crossed the square.

“Only mine,” said Hoffner, aware that Fichte was too far ahead to hear him.

Hoffner let Fichte lead the way as they approached the caf’s large front windows, several long panes of glass that stretched nearly half a block. The bodies inside were packed in tightly, standing and sitting, an amorphous mass on view for the curious passerby. Pieces of conversation spilled out onto the street with each opening and closing of the door, at this hour in constant flux from the young clerks and salesgirls recently unchained from their posts at Wertheim’s and the other stores along the avenue. A slightly rougher crew—those who had left carts and other street-front enterprises—milled about around the bar. By eight o’clock it would be a different crowd altogether, a touch more sophisticated and with a few extra marks in their pockets for the second page of the menu. Until then, however, beer, not wineglasses, sat atop the marble tables; paper napkins served in place of the cloth; and those immaculately bleached white coats remained on their hooks—the long, if slightly dingy, waiters’ aprons sufficient for the early clientele.

From the eagerness in his stride, Fichte was clearly hoping to escape the changing of the guard. By then, if all had gone well, Hoffner expected him to have little Lina on his arm for a walk in the Tiergarten, her coat too thin for the cold, a needed arm around her shoulder—better yet—around her waist. Hoffner saw the evening’s performance playing out in Fichte’s eyes as his young assistant stepped over to the door.

“You go on in,” said Hoffner, still lagging behind. “I’m going to have a quick smoke.” Before Fichte could answer, Hoffner had a cigarette in his hand. “Come on, Hans. She’ll want a minute or two alone with you. You have to give her that, don’t you?” Fichte’s confusion gave way to a look of reluctant appreciation. Maybe an old detective inspector had more to offer than Fichte realized, than any of the young guns back at headquarters realized? If not, at least Hoffner was feeling himself back in the game. Or vindicated. Or not.