“I got it. It’s exciting, Siegfried. Like I am a spy.”
“I love you, old friend. Do one more thing for me. Very important.”
“Anything, Siegfried, you know that.”
“Get out of the country.”
He put the phone down. “Satisfied?”
“There is no need for this elaborate nonsense,” Busse said. “I have given my word.”
“Indulge me. Shall we go?”
On the way out, Esther stooped down to kiss Anna, who’d taken herself to sit by the wireless. “Good-bye, darling. Take care of yourself.”
“Good-bye,” Anna said.
Busse waited, his gun on Schmidt, while Esther called in on Frau Schinkel and asked her to keep an eye on Anna.
They got into the car. Busse switched on its radio before Esther drove off. “And there is Herr Hitler himself, taking the salute.” The commentator might have glimpsed God. “Listen to the acclamation as the columns pass him.” The roar wasn’t just from the radio; it came through the hood of the car, a tidal wave of sound washing through the Tiergarten from Linden and the Brandenburg Gate.
Half the West End was blocked by detour signs, and they had to take a long way around to Bellevuestrasse. “Here,” Schmidt said. “Park here.”
The street was busy with people, families, all moving toward the parade, most of them carrying little paper flags with swastikas on them.
As ever, the Esplanade was crowded with the haute monde getting themselves ready for the nightclubs, its great windows showing groups of glittering people standing in groups, talking and laughing. Schmidt looked for Joe Wolff’s face but didn’t see it. He’ll be there, though, always trustworthy—like father, like son. But this is the tricky bit.
Busse was lingering in the car, staring toward the hotel; Schmidt could almost see his mind measuring times and distances. If I take them with me under arrest, can I get into the bar before the folder disappears?
No, you can’t, you bastard. And you can stop looking about for a policeman—they’re lining the procession route. Never one around when you want one.
“How do I know this isn’t a trick?” Busse asked. “Have you a code, you and your friend?”
“We’ll stay in the car until we see you wave from the window,” Schmidt said. He tried to sound casual and hoped like hell Busse didn’t see the sweat on his face. “I’ve kept my word, you keep yours. How about driving us to Tempelhof afterward? See us off the premises, as it were. Getting a cab tonight will be impossible, and the lady’s tired.”
“Very well.” Busse took the keys out of the ignition. He started to cross the road, looked back, and then went on.
Schmidt leaned forward and put his face against Esther’s. “Got the passports?”
“In my handbag.”
He began struggling with the suitcase in the restricted space of the backseat. “Did you bring another coat?”
“It’s in there.”
“Yeah, here it is. Put it over your arm. Leave the rest. I’m not carrying this bloody case to the station—too damn heavy.”
Esther’s voice was deliberately calm. “Do I gather we are not going to Tempelhof?”
“No, we’re not. They’ll be waiting for us. At this moment Busse is making the necessary phone call. He doesn’t intend to leave us alive.”
“Oh, God.” He heard the fear in her voice. So did she. She said, trying for control, “What are we going to do?”
“We’re going to watch the procession like everybody else. Ready?”
“Yes.”
“Let’s go.”
As they left the car, he tore the swastika pennant off its hood. He caught sight of Busse’s face in one of the Esplanade windows, saw it slide out of view as the man made for the exit.
“Run.” He caught her arm, and they ran toward Pariser Platz, dodging around families heading in the same direction. Crowd and noise loomed up like a turbulent sea, and they dived into it, squirming and pushing. Schmidt’s hand was pulled out of Esther’s, and for one minute he panicked; if he lost her now, it would be forever. Then he saw her struggling and had to fight to go back for her. He grabbed hold of her and dragged her along like an angry father with a recalcitrant child.
If Busse was following them, they couldn’t spot him—wouldn’t, even if he were only a few paces away; they were hemmed in toward the rear of massed chattering, cheering people, most of them staring upward at the tips of banners and eagle standards being carried by men they
couldn’t see.
“Take your coat off,” Schmidt said.
“What?” The noise of the bands and the crowd was deafening.
“Take your coat off. Put the other one on.”
She nodded and slipped one arm out of her light-colored coat, then the other, letting it fall to the ground. The people on either side didn’t notice, wouldn’t have noticed if she’d stripped naked. In the crush it was difficult to put on the new coat—it was black, Schmidt was glad to note, very different from the one Busse had seen. A man who was pressed against her complained, “Stop shoving!” without looking to see what she was doing. She took her hat off. For the first time, he noticed that she had her camera on a strap around her neck.
“Scarf,” he said.
“What?”
“Put your scarf around your face.”
They started to move in the direction of the Brandenburg Gate; it was impossible to keep in the center of the press, and in wriggling through they found themselves near the front and for a minute glimpsed the columns passing by—and were transfixed, like everybody else. The marchers came on and on, sweeping through the pillars of the great gate surmounted by Victory in her chariot, one phalanx, then another, another, as they had been all night, as they would continue, units Schmidt didn’t recognize, bands, more columns, more swastikas, as if monstrous, human-size ants were invading the city, glorious and terrible.
More terrible was the crowd watching them. “Look, Hans,” a man shouted to the child on his shoulders. “You are seeing history.” People cried, “Heil, Heil,” and stomped in time to the marchers. A divided, suffering, and humiliated city was being healed by spectacle, its pride raised high on poles, its people ready to be led by a tiny figure waving at a window.
Schmidt didn’t know it anymore.
He spotted a gap that would let them double back, but it meant going along the front of the crowd. He handed Busse’s swastika pennant to Esther. “Wave that.”
“No.”
So he waved it instead, pulling Esther behind him, running, stooped, along the space between the crowd and the police lining the route, making for the gap. He thought he glimpsed Willi Ritte and that Willi glimpsed him, but it could have been someone else.
They were nearly back where they’d started. They took a side road, aiming for Königrätzstrasse. Above them a great penumbra of light rising from the procession was diffused against the night sky, as if reflecting a burning pine forest on the march.
Esther was limping, and he put his arm around her shoulder to help her along, waving his swastika in time to the beat of “Watch on the Rhine” coming over the rooftops, hoping like hell they looked like a happy couple on their way home after a good Nazi night out.
Up ahead was Berlin’s biggest hotel, the Excelsior, opposite the An-halter, Berlin’s biggest railway station. Kings and foreign dignitaries had used both in their time, but Schmidt was aiming for a remembered greasy café in a side alley used by track workers, a place that once had served Stettin beer and possibly the best pork knuckles and sauerkraut in Berlin.
A wireless on the counter was relaying the commentary on the parade. Some men playing cards looked up as they came in, then went back to their game. The only other customer was either asleep or unconscious.
Schmidt helped Esther to a corner table and sat down opposite her. “Made my first arrest here,” he told her. “Fellow who’d beaten up his aunt for her pension.”
She tried to nod. Her eyes were close
d.
He said, “You can go to pieces now. We’ve got time to spare.”
She shook her head. “Too tired.” She said, “You know what was the worst thing? He didn’t say anything. Günsche. He never spoke a word from the time he came into the flat, not on the journey to the forest, no word. I knew he was going to kill us, but the silence . . . It was like being in the jaws of an animal. As if he were . . . just death.”
Schmidt had very nearly asked, “Who?” Günsche was the past; they were in the jaws of a bigger animal now.
“I’d thought of him as a sort of beast,” she said, “waiting in the shadows and killing us one by one, and now he’ll always be that. ...Inexplicable. Not human.”
“Yes he was,” Schmidt said. “He was a pox-ridden, nine-pfennig whore bastard.”
Her eyes went wide with surprise and relief, and she began to laugh. “I do love you, Schmidt.”
A voice from the other side of the room said, “You ordering or not? No waiter service here, you know.”
“Merely charm,” Schmidt said. He got up and crossed to the counter. Either the man he remembered behind it hadn’t aged or this was his son—same anchor tattoos on his forearms, same dirty apron, same bad temper. Schmidt had a giddying sense of déjà vu that might have been sheer, blind fatigue. He ordered beer for them both, knuckles with sauerkraut and potatoes for himself, herring and sauerkraut and potatoes for Esther. It was a long time since they’d last eaten; it would be a long time until they ate again.
The food-bespattered wireless on the counter blared out “Hail to Thee, Crowned in Victory.”
The men at the table were arguing over their cards. The drunk hadn’t moved. The café owner was relaying the order through a hatch.
Schmidt reached over and turned the wireless’s volume down low, adjusting the wavelength to a fraction above the AM band. “. ..a brown coat,” a dispatcher’s voice was saying. “The woman has a distinctive scar on her cheek and is wearing a light suede coat with a fur collar and a tight-fitting black hat. Arrest on sight. Use force if necessary.”
The café owner turned around. Schmidt flicked the knob back to the state radio band.
“Policemen,” the café owner said, and spit. “Smell ’em even when they’re off duty.”
Schmidt went back to Esther and sat down.
She’d been watching. She said, “Are they broadcasting our description?” She had a hand to her cheek.
“It’s all right,” he said. “The scarf hides it. And you’ve changed your coat.”
She said dully, “We’re not going to get away, are we?”
“Yes we are. When we’ve eaten, we’re going to walk into Anhalter and I’m going to buy us a pair of tickets for the Munich express. Nice place, Munich, Hitler country, but he won’t be expecting us. Where do you want to go? Switzerland? America? England?”
“They’ll stop us at the frontier,” she said.
“No they won’t. When we get to Munich, we’re going to buy ourselves— Have you got money with you, incidentally?”
She nodded and patted her handbag. “I’d drawn out nearly everything in my account in case Anna should want it. I’ve left her some, but tonight, when I was packing, I decided we’d need a larger amount than she would.”
“Good. Well, we’re going to buy some nice warm clothes and walking boots, and we’re going to take a nice long bus ride into the mountains, and we’re going to cross over into Austria by a track I know.”
He and Hannelore had walked it once, from the last inn in Germany over the border to the first inn in Austria, not a frontier guard in sight.
But that had been in summer, he thought.
“With every policeman in the country looking for a man accompanied by a woman with a scar on her cheek,” she said. “I’m not going to do it to you, Schmidt. We’ll go separately.”
“We go together,” he said.
She was looking toward the café window, its glass almost obliterated by advertising stickers, and he knew she was seeing beyond it to the ticket inspectors, the railway police, the wanted posters—HAVE YOU SEEN THIS COUPLE?—the hundred identity checkpoints of a new Germany.
Two steins of beer were slammed on the table, two steaming, aromatic plates shoved in front of them. She didn’t notice.
No point, he wanted to tell her. No point to life without you. He said, “Esther.” He tapped her hand to get her attention. “Mrs. Noah.”
“What?” She picked up her knife and fork.
“And still they come.” The commentator’s voice was hoarse. “The flower of Germany, marching into a glorious future.”
“About Anna.” Now that he’d got to it, he wasn’t sure what to say. “In the forest, when she was ...About the executions ...the House of
Special Purpose.”
Esther cut into a herring. “She was amazing, wasn’t she?”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, she was. How did she know?”
“Know what? This is nice herring. I didn’t realize how hungry I was.”
“Know about the House of Special Purpose. Busse was right; we were hearing what happened. She couldn’t have made that up.”
Esther sighed. “I suppose not.”
“So either she is Anastasia or somebody else got out of that cellar and told her.”
“I suppose so,” she said; her voice was very tired.
“About the bullets hitting the jewels in her bodice and making scars—has she got scars on her body like that?”
“No.”
“But you have.”
“Yes.”
“You told her.”
“Yes.” She put down her fork as if her hands needed to be free for this.
He’d known. Part of his mind not occupied with other things had known ever since the forest; it had been waiting for him. What would he feel? Now he didn’t know what he felt. Yes he did—he was angry. Not much, he was too fucking tired, but ...angry.
“And you wouldn’t tell me,” he said.
“I had to do it,” she said dully. “Hitler was taking her up. I didn’t want her trying to fool Hitler. She had to be the real thing. I thought I might be saving her life. As it turned out, she saved mine.” She put out a hand to lay it on one of his. “And then you came along and saved both of us. How did you know where we were?”
He ignored it. “Which one are you? There were six women in that cellar. You’re too young to be the maid or the czarina—or Olga. So which of them are you? Marie? Tatiana? Anastasia?”
“Anastasia,” she said.
The men were putting away the cards and calling for the bill. The drunk at the other table raised his head, said, “More beer,” and collapsed again.
After a while Schmidt asked, “Were you ever going to tell me?”
“I don’t know.” She looked at him square in the face. “Maybe, one day. But Anastasia’s dead. She died in that cellar.”
All at once she was baring her teeth like a dog. “You want to know? All right, if you want to know, Anastasia saw her mother try to make the sign of the cross as they opened fire and then drop. Just drop. She didn’t see her sisters die, any of the others, she only saw Demidova scuttling— she was scuttling, bullets everywhere and feathers and men going after her with bayonets. Then I was in a corner, my hands like this.” She put her hands over her eyes. He saw her nails digging into her forehead. “The noise ...Jemmy was barking. Demidova screaming. My chest was on fire.. . .”
She dropped her hands; her mouth was ugly with pain. “And then it was quiet. Except I heard Alexei whimper ...and then a crack from a rifle butt, and it was quiet again. Oh, God.” She was knuckling her forehead. “Oh, God.”
He gripped her hands while she fought it.
Her scarf had fallen back, and the scar was livid against whiter skin. The men at the other table were looking in their direction. She didn’t see them. She said, “Anastasia died in that cellar. What survived, how it survived . . .” She tried to smile. “Your guess is as good as mine.
”
He wasn’t angry anymore. “What survived was one hell of a woman,” he said. He leaned over and rearranged the scarf, not to hide her face but so that he could touch it.
“A different woman anyway,” she said. “Christ, I’m so tired.”
Schmidt snapped his fingers toward the counter. “Brandy,” he said.
“Brandy?” Now everybody was looking at them, the owner, the men. Even the drunk had opened his eyes.
“Schnapps, then.” God, he thought, we should have taken out an advertisement and a brass band. He made her drink.
“Telling Anna . . .” she said. “It near killed me. I’d learned not to relive it. Matter of survival.”
Yes, he thought, resurrecting that memory to give to someone else— one of the great acts of generosity.
“We are seeing the triumph of the will of one man, our leader, Adolf Hitler!” screamed the commentator.
“And the Gypsies?” he asked.
“We had to say Gypsies; it fitted in with Anna’s Franziska past. She believes it anyway. But there weren’t any Gypsies. There wasn’t anything, nothing I remember, except hurting. Until Rosa.”
“So that was true.”
“Rosa is true,” Esther said. “Except she’s unbelievable. This injured thing rolled off a cart at her feet one day, another bit of detritus from the civil war. I’d been raped, there was the great gash in my face. Sometimes I think she suspected who I was, but if she did, it made no difference to her. We’d persecuted her people, refused them education. We sent soldiers against them, encouraged pogroms.. . .”
We, he thought.
“But Rosa had seen so much death she just liked things to be alive. When the Cossacks came, she hid me as if I’d been her own. I became a Jew because of Rosa. All those adopted children we’ll have, they’re going to be Jews. For Rosa. If the Nazis catch me, I’ll shout in their faces, ‘I’m a Jew and proud of it.’ For Rosa.” She attempted another smile. “We of the House of Romanov owe her that.”