In the distance the schloss was a domed confectionary of spun sugar. The white covering on the expanse of its lawns rose here and there in perfect simulation of some statue beneath. Local flatfeet were gathered around something halfway up an avenue of trees where trampled snow
suggested they’d been clog dancing.
“Willi, tell those morons to stand still.”
Willi strode toward the uniforms, bellowing, “Freeze, you varmints.” Willi marched like a soldier but got his vocabulary from cowboy films.
And the plaintive, “We are freezing, Sergeant.” But the damage was done—footprints all over the damn place.
They’d dug the snow off most of her. One of the uniforms said, “Don’t reckon she was buried, sir, not deliberate like. Killer cut her throat and left her, and she got covered natural. Arnie, that’s the gardener here, he just saw a mound where there shouldn’t have been. No sign she’d been dug in like.”
“When was that?”
“This morning, early. She could have been here two days, judging from the snow over her. Weather was too bad for Arnie to do his rounds yesterday.”
“Dinter, is it?”
“Yes, sir.” Dinter’s round face was happy at the recognition. “Worked with you on that business in Wedding, sir.”
“I remember. That’s intelligent guessing, Dinter.” No need, in that case, to get exercised about the murderer’s footprints; there wouldn’t be any. They’d have been obliterated by the snow that had covered the body at the same time.
“Thank you, sir.” Dinter was emboldened. “And reckon we know who she is. Foreigner.” He consulted his notebook. “Terchichagova, something like that. Russian. Reported missing 0300 hours this morning. Answers the description. Fair-haired. Twenty-two years.”
She lay in a sort of snow coffin in the avenue of beeches that led eventually to the schloss. Nothing else, just her and the snow and the trees.
“Whore killing, don’t you reckon, sir?”
Very neat, apart from the stain that had leaked out of her throat. Very quiet. The silence the dead imposed was reinforced by the park’s frozen stillness and the snow-muffled rattle of traffic in the distance.
Could be a prostitute. But her skirt was long—and it was a funny place to take a customer for hanky-panky in the depth of winter.
Summertime, now, there were copulating couples as thick as dande
lions here, but in this temperature a man’d get icicles on it.
And she was tidy. Murdered prostitutes weren’t usually tidy.
He bent down and lifted the ice-stiff skirt to peek up and under. He heard Dinter excusing the action to the others. “We have to do that, see. Find out if they’ve got their knickers on.”
She had. Cami-knickers—unstained and untorn.
She lay on her front, arms straight by her sides, nose buried in the snow beneath, suggesting she’d been dead before she hit the ground. The toes of her shoes were squeezed forward, leaving the soles and heels sticking up at right angles, indicating the same thing. Schmidt thought how anonymous she looked. A tight-fitting black cloche covered her hair. The coat with its cheap fur collar gave no clue to the shape of her body apart from the fact that it was slim. She might have been a shop-window dummy that somebody had abandoned in the snow.
Not rape, then. He wondered if she’d met her attacker face-to-face or whether the bastard had waited in the trees to cut the throat of any woman who passed by. Unlikely. Only an optimistic killer expected a victim to visit the gardens in this weather.
“Has she been moved?”
“She’s exact as we found her.”
He knelt down and laid his cheek against the snow to peer at her neck. A wide blue eye stared appallingly back at him. A strand of dyed fair hair had escaped from the cloche hat and lay across her cheek. The incision began deep on the left-hand side and petered out toward the right.
So the killer had cut her with the knife in his right hand while holding her up with his left. His retaining arm would have been saturated with her blood, most of which now formed a congealed black mass down what Schmidt could see of her front. Stains in the snow they’d shoveled off her showed where blood had spurted farther.
Yes, he’d cut her throat and let her drop and gone away, both of them disappearing—he through the falling snow, she under it.
Twenty-two years old; she wasn’t going to get any older.
Schmidt got up. “What makes you think she’s a prostitute, Dinter?”
“It’s the area for them. And look at them fingernails.”
He’d seen them, little arcs of scarlet berries curled in the snow.
“And”—Dinter lowered his voice—“that underwear, sir. Not what respectable women wear.”
Undoubtedly pink satin cami-knicks, silk stockings, and suspenders with silk roses on them wouldn’t be what Frau Dinter wore. Old Germany didn’t approve of them, or painted fingernails. Some archbishop had condemned them and short skirts as the devil’s invitation to sin. Schmidt had once shocked Hannelore by buying her a pair of camiknickers, though she’d subsequently loved them.
The woman could be a pro, except most of them saved time by not wearing knickers at all when they were working, but she could also be any one of the factory girls or secretaries now to be found in every capital in Europe.
“Where’d she live?”
Dinter went back to his notebook. “Bismarck Allee.”
“Bismarck Allee?” Not a whore’s address.
He’d have liked the knife and a handbag but decided not to dig around anymore until the police surgeon had seen her.
“On his way, boss,” Willi said. They’d worked as a team too long not to know what the other was thinking.
A policeman came up from the gate. “Sir, there’s a woman. Reported a friend missing. Says we phoned and told her to come. Wants to see the body.”
“Did you tell her to come, Dinter?”
Aware he’d exceeded his authority, Dinter was flustered. “Seeing as we needed an identification quick as we could and—”
“And they’re only foreigners.” Strange, Schmidt thought. Dinter, not an unkind man, wouldn’t consider letting a Berlin girl look at a murdered body until it had been tidied up in a mortuary, but he was prepared to inflict the sight on a non-German. “Go and tell her to wait, Willi.”
Dr. Pieck arrived, stepping high over the snow like a thin black heron. As always he was in top hat, tailcoat, and striped trousers, no overcoat, the opinion of his staff being that he was too bloodless to notice cold. A good forensics man.
“Morning, Herr Doctor. Don’t worry about footprints—nobody else has.”
“Good morning, Inspector.” Pieck put his bag down. “Now, then, young woman, what’s up with you?”
He always addressed his bodies like living patients, a habit Schmidt found unnerving. Schmidt told him what he could and left him to it; he never liked watching the insertion of the thermometer, that ultimate indignity. He went down to the gate.
Willi met him, identity papers in hand, rolling his eyes. “You know this one, boss. Remember that Russian kike with the scar last year? At the Green Hat? The one that talked like she was the kaiser’s missus? Still does.”
He’d never forgotten her.
“Bit of a coincidence, ain’t it, boss? And you like coincidences.”
He did; in crime they were usually not coincidences at all.
Schmidt took the papers and walked over to where a figure dressed much like the one lying in the snow stood by the gate. She’d been lodged in his memory as extraordinary, but even as he wondered if she still would be, his policeman’s eye marked the fact that she wore the same sort of hat, the same dark, long coat as the dead woman; another window dummy, only this time upright. Very upright.
She had her hands in her pockets, looking toward the schloss and away from the cluster of activity around the thing among the trees.
She was in profile as he approached her noiselessly across the sno
w, the late-dawn sun gilding the left side of her face like an Egyptian queen’s, and once again he thought, She’s beautiful, and then she heard him approach and turned.
“We’ve met before, Fräulein.”
She could have arranged her hat or her hair to hide some of the mess that was the other side of her face, but she hadn’t. She didn’t even care if you pitied her; you could if you liked, but why bother? What other people thought about her didn’t interest Fräulein Solomonova; what concerned her was the body in the avenue. Very blue, very intelligent, and very driven eyes stared into his. She didn’t look Jewish, but what was Jewish? Ikey Wolff had been redheaded with freckles.
There were no preliminaries. “I must know,” she said.
“Describe your friend, please.”
“My age, about as tall as me, blond, pretty.”
“Did she have a handbag with her?”
“I don’t . . . yes, it’s gone from her room.”
Schmidt looked down at the papers in his hand. Solomonova would be twenty-two in June; she looked older. “It seems likely,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
He saw her hands grip in her pockets. “I heard somebody say it was murder.”
“I’m afraid so.”
He had to catch her arm as whatever had been holding her up went out of her. He said, “We’ll do the rest of this in the car.”
He guided her through the gates and into the passenger seat of the Audi. Before he got in with her, he told Willi, “When the doctor’s finished, start looking for the weapon. And the handbag.”
“Okay, boss.”
“And see if somebody can produce a hot drink for the Fräulein.” He turned on the engine so that she could be warm.
Reaching for his tin of Manoli, he wondered if he should offer her one. These were his last; his tobacconist had run out. After this he’d be puffing leaves. It had been the Yuletide joke: Where’s the Christmas tree, Father? Sorry, my dears, I smoked it.
“Cigarette?”
She shook her head, good girl.
He lit up, giving her time, and wound down his window a crack to let the smoke out. “Now, then, Fräulein, who is she?” As he sat next to her, the Audi’s right-hand drive presented him with the scarred side of her face.
“Natalya Tchichagova, Russian. We share an apartment—29c Bismarck Allee.”
Name and number, Schmidt thought. As lucid as she’d been last time. This woman’s been interrogated before; a Russian Jew would be used to it.
“Single?”
“Yes.” Her voice was deep and her German excellent, but the slight Russian accent that was usually dramatic—in his experience most Russians could make “pass the salt” sound soulful—issued from Fräulein Solomonova’s mouth with the bleakness of the steppes.
“When did she go missing?”
The scar tightened as she tried to concentrate. “Two nights ago. She went out on Saturday night. She went out . . . eleven-thirtyish, I think. Our landlady heard her. And she didn’t come home.”
“And that was unusual? Not to come home?” “Yes.” Still concentrating, she added, “She’s never done it before.” “But you didn’t report it until the early hours of this morning, Mon
day.” “No.” She put the heel of her hand against her forehead and rubbed
it. “One always hopes there’s an explanation, a boyfriend or something.” “And was there one? A boyfriend?” “Not to my knowledge.” “So why didn’t you contact the police right away when she failed to
return the first night?” “I thought she’d come back. I called everybody I could think of—” “You have a phone in the apartment?” “Yes.” “Where did Fräulein Tchichagova work?” “She used to be an exotic dancer.” Read “stripper,” he thought. “Where?” “At the Purple Parrot.” The answers were coming mechanically now;
she was staring into a void.
He loved inconsistencies—they always led somewhere. A stripper living in bourgeois-solid Bismarck Allee? And with a telephone? He’d bet there weren’t many phones installed even in that area. And for the first time, Solomonova had referred to the dead woman in the past. She used to be an exotic dancer but wasn’t when she died.
“And you, Fräulein? Do you still work for Potrovskov?” “I am still Prince Nikolai’s secretary.” “I thought you lived in Moabit.” Hell, he thought, I remember every
thing about her. “Prince Nikolai rents the flat for us.” So that’s how she could afford Bismarck Allee. Schmidt had
checked with the Vice boys after his last encounter with Prince bloody Nikolai. A crook, with a bigger harem than a fucking sultan, they’d said. So Solomonova was his moll after all; probably the dead
woman, too.
“Anybody else live there?”
“Another friend, Anna Anderson.”
“Scandinavian?”
Pause. “Russian.”
It was a bloody harem. He was disappointed; he’d thought better of this one. She didn’t stack up as a loose woman; the scar for one thing, too respectably dressed for another, too well spoken, and Willi was right: shocked, grieving, she still had the self-possession of the upper class. On the other hand, she was wary of him—which, if she were in a racket with that shyster, she would be.
Time to use the whip. “Who killed your friend, Fräulein?”
“I don’t know,” Esther said, and heard the lie resonate in her head.
In all the shock and the grief, terror had been her first reaction—terror for Anna. Hide her, he’s found us. Before anything else, hide her. He’s out there.
She’d phoned Nick at home, waking him up. He’d had trouble grasping it. “Natalya?”
“Yes.”
“You been drinking, Esther?”
“I’ve got to go and identify her. I’m going to tell them everything, but first you’ve got to get Anna away. Take her abroad, anywhere. He was here, the man who’s been watching her. He was here on Saturday night. He killed Natalya.”
“Why? You sure it was him?”
“Yes.”
“I completely don’t know anything about this.”
“I know you don’t.”
“Murder. Holy God, it could ruin me. I can grease palms against most everything, but murder.”
“Nick.”
“Okay, okay, I’ll see to it. Listen, Esther, don’t say anything. Give me a couple of hours to get her away, and then we’ll see.”
“Just do it.”
Then she’d gone downstairs to Frau Schinkel and virtually hauled the woman up to 29c. “Something terrible has happened. I’ve got to go out. Stay here and don’t open the door to anybody unless it’s me or Prince Nick, not a crack, do you hear me?”
She’d managed to frighten Frau Schinkel. “Do we call the police?”
“They know.”
In the street, people were going to work. Shopkeepers were sweeping snow from their sidewalks. It’s Monday, she’d thought, surprised at the banality of time’s persistence. He doesn’t kill on Mondays. Then she thought, I can’t rely on it. Anna can’t rely on it.
Housewives were setting up stalls to sell their possessions on the roadside; she’d done that, a million years ago. The everydayness of things shifted her mind into a no-man’s-land between hope and awful certainty. Perhaps it isn’t her. Natalya wouldn’t go to Charlottenburg. Why would she? Natalya’s preference was to go east, toward the city, where she felt at home; Charlottenburg’s quiet gardens weren’t Nasha’s thing.
Yet at the same time, she knew it was Natalya they’d found, because it was the answer, the hideous logic of the fear that had attended her for two days, for months.
She knew when she saw the little crowd gathered at the gates to the park, had slowed because she knew. Almost strolled toward them, not wanting to know. And been slammed with confirmation, again and again, her head like a boxer’s being rocked back and forth as a woman told her, “They say it’s a foreign girl.” Somebody else: “One of them blondes from the east.” And
a policeman not letting her go and see. And the terrible little group among the trees.
Ice. Not feeling anything really; metallic lips answering questions as if somebody else pulled the lever that moved them. Sure of only one thing: Anna must be got away. Once the story was out, the delay would be extensive, the questions, the disbelief attendant on her answers, the “don’t leave town,” the reporters, photographers. Anna’d be exposed to people going in and out—and one of them a man with a knife. A man who was ubiquitous and, it seemed to Esther, with a longer arm than the police.
So now she said again to the police inspector, “I don’t know.” And thought, Tomorrow. I’ll tell you tomorrow. Then she said, “What did he do to her? She wasn’t . . . tortured?”
He wondered if that was a euphemism for rape. “Her throat was cut. It was very quick. If it’s any comfort, I don’t think he interfered with her.”
“I see,” she said.
“Did she have any money in her purse?”
“No.” He saw her lip twist. Even in Bismarck Allee, nobody had money anymore.
He said, “Why do you think she came to these gardens?” It was unlikely she’d been carried here to be killed. Either she’d walked here with her murderer or she’d come on her own.
“I don’t know.” That at least was true. Warmer now. The man beside her was thawing her with kindness. He’d put a hot drink in her hands. She turned in her seat to look at him; very ordinary, very German, hair the color of dishwater, mustache ditto, somehow familiar.
He said, “Fräulein, the last time we met was at the Green Hat when you were attacked. Do you remember?”
She nodded; she did now.
“I mistrust coincidence. You must tell me if there is a connection.”
She temporized. “What?”
The stupidity of shock, Schmidt thought. They weren’t going to get anything out of her until it had passed off.