A Trace of Smoke (Hannah Vogel) Read online

  I placed his newspaper against the wall and signed it. “I must be at the courthouse early. It is best to watch the accused come in and sit down. One learns so much.”

  He nodded. “One can determine a great deal from watching someone walk.”

  I handed him back the newspaper and walked out the front door, trying not to let the wobble in my knees betray me.

  Outside, a gust of wind tried to rip the umbrella out of my hands, but I held on, cursing and half-crying as I stumbled across cobblestones to the subway. I pushed my way down concrete stairs, against the crush of people going to work. They chattered and laughed together, gleeful in the mundane details of their lives. I wanted only to go home and be alone.

  Pictures of Ernst flashed by in my head. The most painful images were from his childhood. He’d been a wonderful child and, later, a great friend. I leaned against the wall of the subway station, face turned toward the tile, and sobbed, safely alone in the crowd. When I could stand and walk again, I did.

  Once aboard the train I collapsed on the wooden seat and drew a deep breath. I ran my fingers over the oak slats of the bench. The wood was blond, like Ernst’s hair. Across from me, their faces hidden behind twin newspapers, sat two men in black fedoras. One man read the Berliner Tageblatt, the other the Völkische Beobachter, that Nazi rag.

  2

  A burst of humid air hit my face as two teenage boys pried open the doors of the moving train. The train had entered a tunnel, and the boys were daring each other to stick their arms into the darkness, never knowing when they would draw back a bloody stump. Their parents thought they were safe in school. I closed my eyes and did not open them until I sensed the subway car had reentered the light.

  The train stopped at Kaiserhof station. I had missed my connection at Friedrichstadt. I should have climbed out and taken a bus to Moabit for the trial, but instead I rode west toward the more expensive borough of Wilmersdorf. Eventually this subway would take me to the Berlin Zoological Garden, only a few blocks from Ernst’s apartment building. I stayed on, unable to do anything else.

  When I got out at Bahnhof Zoo, I climbed the stairs like an old woman, hesitating on every step. Fewer passengers jostled me now. I wound my way through fashionable buildings, barely sparing a glance at the neo-Gothic spires of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church.

  As I wavered in front of Ernst’s apartment building, Rudolf von Reiche burst out—tall, lean, and aristocratic in a gray three-piece suit and a shirt so white it cut my eyes. He carried a cardboard box the size of a child’s schoolbag and almost knocked me off the stoop. “Ah, Hannah, Queen of the Bourgeoisie,” he said in a frosty tone, tipping his gray bowler at me.

  “Hello, Rudolf, Defiler of Children.” I leaned backward to look at him. Thirty centimeters taller than me, and he always stood too close. He never forgave me for despising him, and I never forgave him for seducing my sixteen-year-old brother out of my home and into his decadent life. Inside a week of meeting Rudolf, Ernst left school, moved out of the apartment, and started singing at the new El Dorado, a queer club on Motz Strasse. I barely saw him after that. Rudolf had turned him from a serious student into a chanteuse.

  “He’s not a child anymore,” Rudolf said. The front door swung shut behind his back. “In fact, he’s turned to defiling them himself.”

  “What are you doing here, visiting Ernst?” I knew he was not, but a lie from him might be illuminating.

  “He’s not here.” Rudolf pursed his thin lips. “You look pasty in that horrible coat, Hannah. It is the color of a paper bag. And the cut is all wrong. Are you dressing out of the dustbin?”

  “Where is he?” A cold weight lodged in my stomach.

  “Cavorting with that Nazi boy he’s seeing no doubt.” Rudolf scanned the street.

  “Nazi boy?” I stuttered.

  “Someone more his own age. A luscious youth.” Rudolf hefted the box against his narrow hip. “Someone of whom you would approve.”

  “When did you last see Ernst?” I tried to remember the date under the photograph. The body was found Saturday.

  “Friday night.” Rudolf sniffed. “Not that it concerns you. Or me, since he abandoned me for that youth.”

  “You let him leave the bar with a stranger?” I felt like a hopeless old maid as soon as the words left my mouth.

  Rudolf laughed, a sound like a horse’s whinny. He walked down the street. “Your brother does what he wants.”

  “What is in the box?” I followed him. I cast a glance over my shoulder at Ernst’s front steps, imagining him sweeping down them, admonishing Rudolf and me for arguing over him like two dogs over a bone. A delectable bone, he would add, arching his eyebrows. I bit my lip. He would never come down those stairs again.

  “The box has only trinkets I gave your brother to show my feelings. Back when he shared them.” Rudolf tossed his head like a horse without upsetting his thick gray hair. I suppressed a smile at the feminine gesture. He certainly did not do that around his rich law clients.

  “May I see these trinkets?” I hurried to keep pace with Rudolf’s long-legged stride.

  “Why?” Rudolf asked. “They do not belong to you.”

  “Nor are they yours,” I said. “If you gave them to Ernst.”

  Rudolf narrowed his eyes and stopped walking. A crowd of workmen in caps and open-necked shirts pushed by us on their way from the subway station.

  “Are you stealing them, Rudolf?”

  Rudolf sighed, and his pockmarked face sagged, caving in under the weight of his fifty years. As angry as he was, he was hurt too. “He might cast them out on the street,” he said. “If they mean nothing to him now, I should have them.”

  “Perhaps they have financial meaning?”

  “I have no need to stoop to petty thievery,” he said. “Take them. Pass them along when you see him.” He thrust the cardboard box into my hands.

  A tiny scrap of red silk stuck out from under the flap of the box, and I stroked it with my fingers. One of Ernst’s handkerchiefs. I’d taught him to sew. We’d hemmed many handkerchiefs together, always red and always, when he could afford it, silk.

  A cold wind brushed my face and I turned up the collar of my coat. I tucked the corner of red silk out of sight. “Do you know the Nazi boy’s name or address?” I asked Rudolf.

  “Certainly not.” Rudolf sniffed again.

  I wondered if he’d been sniffing cocaine in Ernst’s apartment.

  “I do not associate with that lot,” he said.

  “Your nose is bleeding.” I dug for a handkerchief in my satchel.

  Rudolf pulled a lace-edged handkerchief out of his pocket and held it to his nose. A red stain bloomed through the white linen. “Damn allergies,” he said. “I must be on my way. Inform Ernst that we have much to resolve.” He raised his hand to hail a taxi. “Make sure he knows the consequences.”

  “Which are?”

  “Very unpleasant.” Immediately a taxi stopped in front of him, as taxis must have done all of his life. He climbed in without a backward glance, and the taxi trundled off like a giant black beetle.

  My mind filled with thoughts of Ernst and the Nazi boy. I had always wanted him to date a boy nearer his own age. But not a Nazi. I was a Socialist and despised Nazis for many things, including wanting to force women back into the home—children, kitchen, and church were to be our only realms. A particularly bad set of choices for those of us who neither had nor wanted a husband or children. And I did not want to think what would happen to the Jews and Communists if the Nazis gained power. I suspected that children, kitchen, and church were far better alternatives than what the Nazis would give them.

  Still, Ernst thought those brown shirts and chocolate-colored shorts quite fetching. He’d only dated much older men. I had hoped that he would end up with a nice girl, in the end. Loving men was dangerous, and I would have shielded him from that danger if I could, or I would have had him not choose to go down that path. But I knew that he had no choice. He had b
een exactly who he was from his earliest days. Still, he could have chosen a man less predatory than Rudolf. Perhaps this boy had been an improvement for him. I stifled a sob. Too little, too late. At least he’d been alive while dating Rudolf. I rubbed my hands over my face, trying not to think of Ernst as dead.

  Would Ernst have left a good provider like Rudolf for a youth? He cared so much about his own comfort. When he betrayed Rudolf in the past (as he had often done), he’d been careful to conceal his affairs. Rudolf was a jealous and powerful man.

  The bell for the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church rang ten. I was late for the trial. If I did not go, I might lose my job, lose everything. I thought about trying to convince Ernst’s landlady to let me into his apartment, but did not think I could face his rooms after all, with his dresses and his scent.

  I plodded back toward the subway station. A sign with a white U against a dark blue background marked the entrance. Ernst called those signs empty smiles. He had preferred the confines of a taxi with a rich partner to the crush and noise of a subway car. And now he was to be buried alone, without the pomp he loved. I clutched Rudolf’s box and walked to the platform.

  Waiting for the train, I tapped the box, anxious to know what it contained, but I dared not pull anything out here. What if Rudolf had stuffed expensive jewelry in there? Or cocaine? Or a bizarre sexual instrument?

  I took the subway back toward the courthouse, staring at my reflection in the window glass while the train careened through darkness.

  I climbed endless courthouse steps and pushed open the absurdly tall doors designed to make us feel that law was a grand process and justice about more than the skill of your lawyer. The trial had started. The judge gave me a censorious look from his carved bench, a relic of richer times before the war. Any other day I would have cared, but today I returned his stare without apology.

  About one hundred spectators stuffed the courtroom, but I slipped past them and crammed myself onto the press bench, next to Philip Henker from the Berlin Börsen Courier. He nodded a greeting, his jowls drooping like a mastiff’s.

  The trial was wrapping up, so the curious were here to find out the verdict. Luckily it was less full than the Kürten trial I’d recently covered in Düsseldorf. For that one, people overflowed into the halls outside.

  I put the box on my lap and automatically got my sketchbook ready, paging through sketches of the suspected rapist I’d drawn at the beginning of the trial. Fat and round like a ball, he seemed more pathetic than sinister, but I’d tried to find a menacing angle for him. He looked like a self-indulgent old shopkeeper. Nothing worth running in the paper. I wiped sweat off my forehead with the back of my hand, careful not to smudge charcoal on myself. All of the people packed into the courtroom kept it warm and comfortable during the winter, but in summer the heat was oppressive.

  I scanned the spectators, looking for Boris and his daughter Trudi. I had met them at the courthouse last Friday, when my life still traveled on familiar tracks. The next day, Boris and I had gone out on a date. He’d given me a small but electrifying kiss after delivering me to my doorstep. Hard to believe that kiss had been only two days ago. It seemed like part of a different lifetime now.

  As if he sensed my gaze, Boris turned to look at me. His eyes narrowed, and he shot me a look of such venom that I rocked back in my seat. It was the same furious expression he’d had when the rapist was brought into the courtroom Friday.

  3

  On Friday, before I met him, I had sketched Boris in the courtroom. At first he had looked tender as he’d bent to talk to Trudi. His look had been so touching that I had turned to a blank page. I sketched broad strokes with my charcoal pencil, trying to capture the protective arc of his arm as it went around her shoulders, the tilt of his head toward her. His tailored navy-blue suit sat on him like a second skin. I guessed he worked as a banker or a lawyer. Someone used to money. Someone who expected the system to pay attention to his problems.

  I remembered how, when the suspect marched in, Boris had glared at him with such loathing I turned again to a fresh page and sketched his fury. I wondered what he would do if the suspect were acquitted. He’d looked ready to hunt him down and mete out his own justice.

  At the end of the day I had hurried out of the courthouse, anxious to get to the paper and make my deadline. I’d slipped on the wet stairs and pitched forward. A strong hand shot out and caught my elbow. My sketchbook flew out of my hands.

  “Careful,” said a concerned voice.

  “Thank you,” I said, steadying myself on an arm clad in navy blue. I gazed into Boris’s eyes for the first time. They were brown, flecked with gold. Up close he was even more handsome. I jumped back and tripped again.

  “You seem intent on hurling yourself down the stairs.” He caught me easily and pushed his beautiful lips into a slow smile. “Surely things cannot be so bad, young lady.”

  No one had called me a young lady since before the war. “Easy to say from inside such an expensive suit.” I smiled back.

  He retrieved my tattered sketchbook, open to the picture I’d drawn of him glaring at the rapist. “A masterful likeness,” he said. “Yet I am at a loss as to why you would sketch me.”

  “I do courtroom sketches,” I said to allay his suspicions. “For the newspaper.”

  “Do I look so . . .” He paused, staring at the sketch. “So hateful?”

  “I draw what I see,” I said. “But it’s understandable. . . .”

  He raised his eyebrows, and my voice trailed off.

  “Why would it be understandable?” His voice was cool and controlled.

  “Most people hate a man who commits those crimes.”

  “Not all?” He closed the sketchbook. “There are those who would not hate someone who takes a child and defiles her, hurts her, damages her on a whim?”

  His daughter climbed down the steps to us. “Is everything in order, Vati?”

  He smiled and gently touched her arm. “Of course.”

  He turned to me. “Fraulein . . .” He paused expectantly.

  “Vogel. Hannah Vogel.” I was grateful that I wrote under a pseudonym and he did not know I was also a reporter. He might be a good source, and if not, he was a very attractive man. Most men did not desire a woman who did my job: interviewing criminals, fostering connections in the criminal world, investigating crimes, and using all of that to write up stories as a man. No need for him to know that I was a reporter just yet.

  “Fraulein Vogel was just standing here when I almost knocked her off her feet. She’s quite a talented artist.” He handed me the sketchbook. “Come along,” he said to his daughter, and they started down the stairs.

  I turned to go, but my journalistic impulses triumphed over my good manners. Perhaps they knew more about the case. The best stories required the most digging. Or perhaps I fooled myself and wanted more contact with a handsome man who did not wear a wedding ring. Whatever the reason, I called to the girl. “I have a lovely drawing of you, Fraulein.”

  When she turned I leafed through my sketchbook and pulled out the drawing I’d done of her. She looked young and lost and beautiful, sitting in the courtroom next to her father. She faced the windows behind the judge, and light suffused her face. I’d drawn her large, widely spaced eyes and the luxurious long hair that she would probably cut soon. I guessed her to be fourteen, almost old enough to demand a bob.

  “I look so beautiful,” she said, in a surprised tone.

  “You are beautiful,” her father said. “It’s an amazing likeness.”

  “Please keep it,” I said.

  She took the drawing slowly from my hands. “Could we pay you something for this?”

  “No payment is required.”

  “But of course it is,” said the father. “I’m Boris Krause, and this is my daughter, Trudi. Would you care to join us for dinner?”

  He extended his hand. His palm and long fingers were warm, and I held his hand a second too long. “I would love to,” I said
.

  Boris chose a busy café half a block from the courthouse. The three of us crossed the street together, dodging a bus and a horse and buggy. I could not remember the last time I ate in a restaurant. The smells were luscious: wurst, potato salad, beer, and herring. Usually I had a roll for dinner and, if I felt wealthy, an apple or a banana. My stomach grumbled, reminding me that I had not eaten since a scanty lunch.

  In front of the restaurant a wizened organ grinder pumped away, his monkey capering at the end of a long chain. When Trudi dropped a few coins in the monkey’s cup, the organ grinder smiled his thanks without slowing his rhythm. His monkey tipped his tiny purple fez at Trudi, and she waved to him.

  We sat at an outdoor table, encircled by a simple cast-iron railing that followed the arc of the sidewalk and separated us from passers-by. A draft horse in the street chewed his way through a nosebag of oats, his docked tail twitching in a futile attempt to shoo flies.

  We ordered wurst and fried potatoes from an efficient waitress in a starched white cap. Boris and I chose Schultheiss pilsner, a little stronger than I liked, but better than mineral water with the wurst. When Trudi requested a lemonade, I noticed dark rings under her eyes. Was she one of the rapist’s victims? Their names had been withheld from the press.

  “What brought you two to the trial?” I asked.

  Trudi started, and Boris laid his hand over hers. “We came to help a friend,” he said. “And you?”

  “As I said, I work in the courthouse,” I answered, which was not a complete lie. Much of my workday was spent in the courthouse, after all. “And what do you do, Herr Krause?”

  “I am a banker for the Dresdner Bank.”

  “Steady work.”