‘Yellow material.’
Ludtke nodded.
‘I might have guessed. Mind if I have one of those?’
‘Help yourself.’ He tossed the matches across the desk and watched as I fished one out and put it in the corner of my mouth. ‘I’m told they’re good for your throat.’
‘Are you worried about your health, Wilhelm?’
‘Isn’t everyone? That’s why we do what we’re told. In case we come down with a dose of the Gestapo.’
‘You mean like making sure Jews wear their yellow stars?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Oh sure, sure. And while I can see the obvious importance of a law like that, there’s still the matter of the dead Dutchman. In case you’d forgotten, he was stabbed six times.’
Ludtke shrugged. ‘If he was German it would be different, Bernie. But the Ogorzow case was a very expensive investigation for this department. We went way over budget. You’ve no idea how much it cost to catch that bastard. Undercover police officers, half the city’s rail workers interviewed, increased police presence at stations — the overtime we had to pay out was enormous. It really was a very difficult time for Kripo. To say nothing of the pressure we came under from the Propaganda Ministry. It’s hard catching anyone when the newspapers aren’t even allowed to write about a case.’
‘Geert Vranken was a rail worker,’ I said.
‘And you think the Ministry is going to be happy to learn that there’s another killer at work on the S- Bahn?’
‘This killer is different. As far as I can tell nobody raped him. And unless you count the train that drove over him, nobody tried to mutilate him either.’
‘But murder is murder, and frankly I know exactly what they’ll say. That there’s enough bad news around right now. In case you hadn’t noticed, Bernie, this city’s morale is already lower than a badger’s arse. Besides, we need those foreign workers. That’s what they’re going to tell me. The last thing we want is Germans thinking that there’s a problem with our guest workers. We had enough of that during the Ogorzow case. Everyone in Berlin was convinced that a German couldn’t possibly have murdered all those women. A lot of foreign workers were harassed and beaten up by irate Berliners who thought that one of them must have done it. You don’t want to see any more of that, do you? Christ, there are problems enough on the trains and the underground as it is. It took me almost an hour to come to work this morning.’
‘I wonder why we bother to come in at all given that the Ministry of Propaganda is now deciding what we can and what we can’t investigate. Are we really supposed to find people who look Jewish and check to see if they’re wearing the right embroidery? It’s laughable.’
‘I’m afraid that’s just how it is. Perhaps if there are any more stabbings like this one then we can devote some resources to an investigation, but for now I’d rather you left this Dutchy alone.’
‘All right, Wilhelm, if that’s the way you want it.’ I bit hard on my match. ‘But I’m beginning to understand your twenty-a-day match habit. I guess it’s easier not to scream when you’re chewing down on one of these.’
As I stood up to leave I glanced up at the picture on the wall. The Leader stared me down in triumph but, for a change, he wasn’t saying very much. If anyone needed a yellow star it was him; and sewn just over his heart, assuming he had one; an aiming spot for a firing squad.
The Berlin city map on Ludtke’s wall told me nothing either. When Bernhard Weiss, one of Ludtke’s predecessors, had been in charge of Berlin Kripo, the map had been covered with little flags marking the incidents of crime in the city. Now it was empty. There was, it seemed, no crime to speak of. Another great victory for National Socialism.
‘Oh, by the way. Shouldn’t someone tell the Vranken family back in Holland that their major breadwinner stopped a train with his face?’
‘I will speak to the State Labour Service,’ said Ludtke. ‘You can safely leave it to them.’
I sighed and rolled my head wearily on my shoulders; it felt thick and heavy, like an old medicine ball.
‘I feel reassured already.’
‘You don’t look it,’ he said. ‘What’s the matter with you, these days, Bernie? You’re a real bat in the balls, do you know that? Whenever you walk in here it’s like rain coming in at the eaves. It’s like you’ve given up.’
‘Maybe I have.’
‘Well, don’t. I’m ordering you to pull yourself together.’
I shrugged. ‘Wilhelm? If I knew how to swim I’d first untie the anvil that’s tied around my legs.’
Chapter 3
Prussia has always been an interesting place to live in, especially if you were Jewish. Even before the Nazis, Jews were singled out for special treatment by their neighbours. Back in 1881 and 1900, the synagogues in Neustettin and Konitz — and probably several other Prussian towns, too — were burnt down. Then in 1923, when there were food riots and I was a young cop in uniform, the many Jewish shops of Scheuenviertel — which is one of Berlin’s toughest neighbourhoods — were singled out for special treatment because Jews were suspected of price- gouging or hoarding, or both, it didn’t matter: Jews were Jews and not to be trusted.
Most of the city’s synagogues were destroyed of course in November 1938. At the top of Fasanenstrasse, where I owned a small apartment, a vast but ruined synagogue remained standing and looking to all the world as if the future Roman emperor Titus had just finished teaching the city of Jerusalem a lesson. It seems that not much has changed since AD 70; certainly not in Berlin, and it could only be a matter of time before we started crucifying Jews on the streets.
I never walked past this ruin without a small sense of shame. But it was quite a while before I realized there were Jews living in my own building. For a long time I was quite unaware of their presence so close to me. Lately, however, these Jews had become easily recognizable to anyone that had eyes to see. Despite what I’d said to Commissioner Ludtke, you didn’t need a yellow star or a set of callipers to measure the length of someone’s nose to know who was Jewish. Denied every amenity, subject to a nine o’clock curfew, forbidden ‘luxuries’ such as fruit, tobacco or alcohol, and allowed to do their shopping only for one hour at the end of the day, when the shops were usually empty, Jews had the most miserable of lives, and you could see that in their faces. Every time I saw one I thought of a rat, only the rat had a Kripo beer-token in his coat pocket with my name and number inscribed on it. I admired their resilience. So did many other Berliners, even some Nazis.
I thought less about hating or even killing myself whenever I considered what the Jews had to put up with. To survive as a Jew in Berlin in the autumn of 1941 was to be a person of courage and strength. Even so it was hard to see the two Fridmann sisters, who occupied the flat underneath my own, surviving for much longer. One of them, Raisa, was married, with a son, Efim, but both he and Raisa’s husband, Mikhail, arrested in 1938, were still in prison. The daughter, Sarra, escaped to France in 1934 and had not been heard of since. These two sisters — the older one was Tsilia — knew I was a policeman and were rightly wary of me. We rarely ever exchanged much more than a nod or a ‘good morning’. Besides, contact between Jews and Aryans was strictly forbidden and, since the block leader would have reported this to the Gestapo, I judged it better, for their sake, to keep my distance.
After Minsk I ought not to have been so horrified at the yellow star, but I was. Maybe this new law seemed worse to me because of what I knew awaited those Jews who were deported east, but after my conversation with Commissioner Ludtke I resolved to do something, although it was a day or two before I figured out what this might be.
My wife had been dead for twenty years, but I still had some of her dresses and sometimes, when I’d managed to overcome the shortages and have a drink or two and I was feeling sorry for myself and, more particularly, for her, I’d get one of her old garments out of the closet and press the material to my nose and mouth and inhale her memory. For a long time after she was gone that was what I called a home life. When she’d been alive we had soap, so my memories were all pleasant ones; these days things were rather less fragrant, and if you were wise you boarded the S-Bahn holding an orange stuffed with cloves, like a medieval Pope going among the common people. Especially in summer. Even the prettiest girl smelled like a stevedore in the dog days of 1941.
At first I figured on giving the two Fridmann sisters the yellow dress so that they could use it for making
