Silesian Station (2008) (5 page)

'There was no address of origin, only a Wartha postmark. It's a small town - a big village really - about sixty kilometres south of Breslau. About a week ago I sent a letter to the Wartha post office, asking them to forward another letter that I'd enclosed for Rosenfeld's brother, but there was no reply. So yesterday I telephoned the post office. A man who claimed to be the postmaster said he'd never got the letter and that he'd never heard of the Rosenfelds. "Jews, I suppose" - I think those were his exact words. "They've probably gone somewhere where they're wanted."

'So I went to the Kripo office in Neukolln - not, I have to admit, in a conciliatory frame of mind. It probably wouldn't have made any difference, but I certainly rubbed the duty officer up the wrong way. After I'd explained all the circumstances, he told me that the girl had probably run off with a boyfriend, and that the German police had better things to do than scour the city for sex-mad Jewesses. I almost hit him.' Thomas clenched his fist reminiscently. 'And I've thought about reporting him to his superiors - there are still some decent men in the Kripo, after all - but it doesn't really seem like such a good idea. If I get on the wrong side of the authorities it won't be me that suffers, or at least not only me. It'll be the three hundred Jews who work here.' He paused for a moment. 'But I can't just forget about her. And I remembered that you did a piece - quite a few years ago now - on private investigators in Berlin.'

Russell grunted his agreement. 'It was after that movie
The Thin Man
came out. Berlin went from having one private detective to having fifty in a matter of months. Most of them only lasted a few weeks.'

'Can you recommend one that's still in business?'

'I don't know. If he's still in business, I mean. A man named Uwe Kuzorra. He was a Kripo detective who couldn't stomach working for the Nazis. So he quit, opened an agency in Wedding. I liked him. Knew this city inside out. But he was in his late fifties then, so he may have retired. I could find out for you.'

'If you could.' Thomas rubbed his cheeks and then clasped his hands together in front of his face. 'There were always things I hated about my country,' he said, 'but there used to be things I loved as well. Now all I feel is this endless shame. I don't know why - it's not as if I ever voted for them. But I do.'

'I'm getting to the point where all I feel is anger,' Russell said. 'And useless anger at that.'

'A fine pair we are.'

'Yes. I'll let you get back to work. I'll drive over to Wedding this afternoon, see if Kuzorra is still in business. If not, I'll try to find someone else.'

They walked back down the line of wagons and round the side of the works to the front yard. 'Give my love to Effi ,' Thomas said as Russell climbed into the front seat.

'I will.' He leaned his head out of the window. 'What's the girl's name?'

'Miriam. And I almost forgot.' He took out his wallet and removed a dog-eared photograph of two men, one woman and a girl of about fifteen. 'Rosenfeld's on the left,' Thomas said. 'The others are Miriam and her parents.'

She was a pretty girl. Dark hair and eyes, olive skin, a shy smile. Her figure would have filled out, but the face wouldn't have changed. Not that much, anyway.

Miriam Rosenfeld. A nice Jewish name, Russell thought, as he motored up Slessische Strasse towards the city centre. Miriam Sarah Rosenfeld, of course. It was almost a year since the regime had blessed all Jews with a self-defining second name - Sarah for females, Israel for males. Dumb as a dog in heat, as one of his mother's friends liked to say.

It was another hot summer day. The traffic seemed unusually sparse for noon, but then Berlin was hardly New York. The pavements were busy with pedestrians going about their business, but the faces showed little in the way of animation. Or was he imagining that, looking for depression to mirror his own? Berliners were aggressive talkers, but they could give the English a run for their money when it came to cold reserve.

A long stomach growl reminded him that he hadn't eaten that morning. Gerhardt's frankfurter stand, he decided, and abruptly changed direction, causing the driver behind to sound his horn. A new set of traffic lights outside the main post office held him up for what seemed an age. He found himself thumping the steering wheel in frustration, and then laughing at himself. What was the hurry?

The queue at Gerhardt's stretched out of the concourse beneath the Alexanderplatz Station and into Dircksen-Strasse. It moved quickly though, and Russell was soon ordering his bratwurst and kartoffelsalat from Gerhardt's brother Rolf, the sprightly septuagenarian with the drooping moustache who manned the counter.

'Haven't seen you for a while,' Rolf said, taking Russell's note and handing back some coins.

'I've been in America.'

'Lucky man,' Rolf said, passing over the food. Russell shifted down the counter to add mustard and mayonnaise, stabbed a chunk of potato with the small wooden fork and popped it in his mouth. A mouthful of steaming bratwurst followed. Paul had been right in New York. German hot dogs were better.

He walked back to the Hanomag and sat behind the wheel enjoying his meal. 'A lucky man,' he murmured to himself, and remembered Brecht's line about 'the man who laughs', who had 'simply not yet heard the terrible news.' Well, he'd heard the terrible news and he still wanted to laugh, at least once in a while. Even these clouds had a few stray fragments of silver lining hanging down. He was too old to fight, his son was too young. And Effi would be released the next day.

A drink, he decided. At the Adlon. It was time he caught up with his colleagues.

In the event, only the
Chicago Post's
Jack Slaney was there, perched on his usual barstool. He greeted Russell with a big grin. 'Beer, whisky or both?'

'Just the beer, thanks,' Russell said, sliding onto the next stool and gazing round. 'Not too busy, is it?'

'It's like this every summer. How was the States?'

'Good. Very good. My son had a whale of a time.'

'Staten Island Ferry?'

'Four times. Statue of Liberty, Central Park, Grand Central Station, Ma-cy's toy department...not to mention the World's Fair.'

'And you're one of us now.'

'News travels fast.'

'We are journalists. How's next year's election looking? Any chance that Lindbergh's going to run?'

'Doesn't look like it. The way things are going in Congress it doesn't look like he needs to. Roosevelt's chances of revising the Neutrality Bill seem to be getting worse, not better. America won't be joining a European war any time soon.'

'Pity. The sooner we get into a war, the sooner I get to go home.'

'What's been happening here?'

'Not much. Lot of grumbling in the press about you British - how the guarantee to Poland has given the Poles a free hand to persecute their poor German minority. A few incidents around Danzig but nothing serious. Calm before the storm, of course.'

'Most calms are.'

'Maybe. The German universities all closed for the summer last week. Two weeks earlier than usual, so the students can help with the harvest. They're busting a gut to get it in on time this year, and why do you think that might be? If I was a betting man - and I am - I'd put money on a new batch of Polish atrocity stories in the first two weeks of August. And then Hitler will start ranting again. A complete idiot could recognize the pattern by this time. I know they're an evil bunch of bastards, but what really gets me down is that they're such an insult to the intelligence.'

'Talking to you is always such a joy.'

'You love it. I'm the only man in Berlin who's more cynical than you are.'

'Maybe. I seem to be moving beyond cynicism, but God knows in what direction.'

'Despair comes highly recommended.'

Russell laughed. 'Like I said, a real pleasure, but I've got be off. I owe you one.'

'At least three actually. Where are you off to?'

'To see a man about a missing girl.'

Wedding had been a communist stronghold before the Nazi takeover, and it still seemed depressed by the outcome of the subsequent reckoning. A few faded hammers and sickles were visible on hard-to-reach surfaces, and billowing swastikas were less ubiquitous than usual. Uwe Kuzorra's office was on the east side of the Muller-Strasse, a hundred metres or so south of the S-bahn. Or it had been - his name was still among those listed by the door, but the detective himself had retired. 'End of last year,' a brisk young woman from the ground floor laundry told Russell. 'If you want his home address, I think they have it upstairs.'

Russell climbed the four flights to Kuzorra's former office, and found it empty. An elderly man with a monocle eventually answered his knock on the opposite door. A wooden table behind him was covered with clocks in various stages of dismantlement, chalk circles surrounding each separate inventory of pieces.

'Yes?'

'Sorry to interrupt, but I was told that you had Uwe Kuzorra's home address.'

'Yes. I do. Come in. Sit down. It may take me a while to find it.'

The room gave off a rich melange of odours - wood polish and metallic oil from the workbench, soapy steam from the laundry below, the unmistakable scent of male cat. The beast in question, a huge black tom, stared blearily back at him from his patch in the sun.

The horologist was shuffling through a pile of papers - mostly unpaid bills, if the frequent mutters of alarm and dismay were anything to go by. 'Ah, here it is,' he said at last, waving a scrap of paper at Russell. '14 Demminer Strasse, Apartment 6. Do you have a pencil?'

Russell recognized the street. He had interviewed a dog breeder there several years earlier - some dreadful piece for an American magazine on the Germans and their pets. The breeder had claimed that
Mein Kampf
inspired him in his search for pedigree perfection.

It was only a five minute drive. The apartment building was old, but seemed well cared for. A grey-haired woman opened the door - in her early 60s, Russell guessed, but still attractive. He asked if Uwe Kuzorra lived there.

'Who are you?' she asked simply.

'I interviewed him once several years ago. I'm a journalist, but that's not why I'm here...'

'You'd better come in. My husband is in the other room.'

Kuzorra was reclining in an armchair close to the open window, legs stretched out, eyes closed. A People's Radio was playing softly on the chest of drawers - Schubert, Russell guessed, but he was usually wrong. 'Uwe,' the woman said behind him, 'a visitor.'

Kuzorra opened his eyes. 'John Russell,' he said after a moment's thought. 'Still here, eh?'

'I'm surprised you remembered.'

'I was always good at names and faces. Are you chasing another story? Please sit down. Katrin will make us some coffee.'

'You've had your two coffees,' she said sternly.

'I can't let Herr Russell drink alone.'

She laughed. 'Oh, all right.'

'So what brings you to me? How did you find me? Surely that lunatic clock-maker has long since lost my address.'

'You underestimate him.'

'Perhaps. He has been mending the same dozen clocks ever since I met him. Still...'

'I need a private detective,' Russell said, 'and I thought you might be able to recommend one. It's a missing persons case - a Jewish girl. Not the sort of case that'll make anyone famous...'

'The sort of case that'll lose an investigator any police friends he still has,' Kuzorra said. 'And they're the ones you need in this job.'

'Exactly. I imagine a lot of your ex-colleagues would turn it down.'

'You're right about that. Can you give me some details?'

Russell went through what Thomas had told him, pausing only to accept an extremely good cup of coffee from Kuzorra's wife.

'Well, let's hope she hasn't run into another George Grossman,' was the detective's initial response.

'Who?'

'Before your time, I suppose. You remember the German cannibals of the 20s? There were four of them - Fritz Haarmann, Karl Denke, Peter Kurten and George Grossman.' He almost danced through the names. 'Grossmann was the Berliner. He rented a flat near the Silesian Station, just before the war. He used to meet the trains from the East, seek out innocent-looking country girls - he preferred them plump - and ask if they needed help. He told some of them that he was looking for a housekeeper, but most of the time he just offered the girls cheap lodgings while they found their feet in the big city. Once he got them back to his flat he killed them, cut them up, and ground them into sausages for the local market. He was at it for about eight years before we caught him.'

'He hasn't been released recently?'

'He hanged himself in prison.'

'That's a relief.'

'I doubt your girl has been eaten. But the first thing to do is find out if she ever reached Berlin. I've got some friends at Silesian Station - I can ask around. What day did she arrive?'

'The last day of June, whatever that was.'

'A Friday,' Frau Kuzorra said. 'I had a doctor's appointment that day. But Uwe...'

'I know, I know. I'm retired. I also get a little bored from time to time. Asking a few questions at Silesian Station is hardly going to kill me, is it? And we could do with a little extra money. That week on the coast you've been talking about.' He took her silence for acquiescence. 'My usual rates are twenty-five Reichsmarks an hour and reasonable expenses,' he told Russell.

'Fine.' Thomas could certainly afford it.

'Right then. If I go down on Friday evening there's a good chance the same crew will be working that train. Have you a picture of her?'

Russell passed it over.

'Lovely,' Kuzorra said. 'But very Jewish. Let's hope she didn't reach Berlin.' He got to his feet, wincing as he did so. 'They say old war wounds are more painful in wet weather,' he said, 'but mine always seem worst in summer. You fought in the war, didn't you?'

'In Belgium,' Russell admitted. 'The last eighteen months.'

'Well, who would have guessed we'd find a leader stupid enough to start another one?' the detective asked.