Alone in Berlin (Penguin Modern Classics)

16

The Demise of Frau Rosenthal

On Sunday morning, Frau Rosenthal woke with a scream from deep sleep. Once again, she had had the horrible recurring nightmare: she was on the run with her Siegfried. They were hiding, and their pursuers walked right past them, even though the two were so badly hidden, she felt the men must be toying with them.

Suddenly Siegfried started running, and she set off after him. She couldn’t run as fast as he could. She cried out, ‘Not so fast, Siegfried! I can’t keep up! Don’t leave me behind!’

He lifted up off the ground, he flew. Flew at first just a few feet above the cobbles, but then higher and higher, until finally he disappeared over the rooftops. She was all alone on Greifswalder Strasse. Tears ran down her face. A big, smelly hand snuck out and covered her face, and a voice hissed in her ear, ‘Now I’ve got you at last, you Jewish bitch!’

She stared at the blackout screen in front of the window, at the daylight trickling in through the cracks. The terrors of the night faded before those of the day ahead. Another day! Once again, she had missed the judge, the only person in the world she could talk to! She had been determined to stay awake, but she had fallen asleep again. Another day alone, twelve hours, fifteen hours! Oh, she could stand no more of it! The walls of the room closing in on her, always the same face in the mirror, always counting the same bills – no, she couldn’t go on like that any more. Even the very worst couldn’t be as bad as being locked in alone, with nothing to do.

Quickly Frau Rosenthal gets dressed. Then she goes to the door. She draws the bolt, quietly opens the door, and peers out into the corridor. Everything is quiet in the apartment, and in the rest of the house. The children are not yet making their racket outside – it must be very early still. Perhaps the judge is still in his library? Then she can say good morning to him, exchange two or three sentences with him to gain the courage to withstand the unending day?

She risks it – in spite of his interdiction, she risks it. She crosses the corridor and goes into his room. She shrinks back from the brightness streaming in through the open windows, from the street, from the public life that seems to be here, along with the fresh air. But even more she shrinks back from a woman who is running a carpet sweeper back and forth over the Zwickau rug. She is a bony old woman; the kerchief tied round her head and the carpet sweeper confirm that this is his cleaning woman.

At Frau Rosenthal’s entry, the woman stops her work. She first stares at the unexpected visitor, blinking rapidly, as though not quite believing her eyes. Then she props the carpet sweeper against the table and starts flapping her arms and hands at her, while going ‘Shh! Shh!’ to her as though shooing chickens.

Frau Rosenthal, already in retreat, says pitifully, ‘Where is the judge? I must speak to him for a moment!’

The woman frowns and shakes her head violently. Then she embarks on a fresh round of hand flapping and ‘Shh! Shh!’ sounds, until Frau Rosenthal has gone back into her room. There, while the cleaning woman gently shuts the door, she collapses into the chair by the table and bursts into tears. All for nothing! Another day condemning her to lonely, senseless waiting! A lot of things are happening in the world – maybe Siegfried is dying right now or a German bomb is killing Eva – but she is condemned to sit in the dark and do nothing.

She shakes her head mutinously: she’s not going to go on like this any more. She just won’t! If she’s going to be unhappy, and persecuted, and live in fear, then at least she’ll do it in her own way. Let the door close behind her for ever; she can’t do anything to prevent it. His hospitality was well-intentioned, but it’s not for her.

When she’s standing beside her door again, she reflects. She goes back to the table and picks up the heavy gold bracelet with the sapphires. Maybe…

But the cleaning woman is no longer in the study, and the windows have been closed again. Frau Rosenthal stands in the corridor, near the front door, and waits. Then she hears the sound of crockery, and she goes towards the sound till she finds the woman in the kitchen, washing up.

She holds out the bracelet to her and says haltingly, ‘I really must speak to the judge. Take it, please take it!’

The servant has furrowed her brow at this latest disturbance. She casts a fleeting glance at the bracelet. Then she starts to shoo her away again, with those rowing motions of her arms and the ‘Ssh! Ssh!’ sounds. Put to flight, Frau Rosenthal goes back to her room. She sinks down beside the bedside table; out of the drawer she takes the sleeping pills the judge gave her.

She hasn’t taken any of them yet. Now she shakes them all out, as many as there are, twelve or fourteen, into the hollow of her hand, goes over to the washstand, and washes them all down with a glass of water… Now she will be able to speak to the judge in the evening, and learn what she must do. She lies down on the bed, fully clothed, the blanket pulled up halfway. Still lying on her back, her eyes turned up to the ceiling, she waits for sleep to come to her.

And it seems to be coming. The tormenting thoughts, the recurring visions of terror born from the fear in her brain, fade. She shuts her eyes, her limbs relax, grow heavy, she has almost found safety in sleep…

But then, on the edge of sleep, it’s as though a hand jolts her back into wakefulness. She starts, she feels such a powerful shock. Her body shudders as in a sudden cramp…

And again she’s lying on her back, staring at the ceiling, the same mill churning out the same tormenting thoughts and images. Then – gradually – it slows, her eyes fall shut, sleep is at hand. Then once again, on the threshold, the jolt, the shock, the cramp that comes over her whole body. Once again, she is expelled from peace, quiet, oblivion…

After the third or fourth time, she no longer expects sleep to come. She gets up, walks slowly, a little unsteadily, to the table, and sits down. She stares into space. She knows that the white thing in front of her is the letter to Siegfried that she began three days ago; she has only written a few lines. She sees more: she sees the banknotes, the jewels. At the back of the table is the tray with her food for today. Normally, she would throw herself at it ravenously, but now she just eyes it indifferently. She doesn’t feel like eating…

While she sits here like this, she has a dim sense that it’s the sleeping pills that have wrought this change in her: they weren’t able to put her to sleep, but they have at least taken away the desperate panic of the morning. She sits there like that, and sometimes she almost nods off in her chair, but then she jumps again. Time has passed, she doesn’t know if it’s a lot or a little, but some of this terrible day must have passed…

Then, later, she hears a footfall on the stairs. She collapses – in an instant of self-scrutiny, she tries to ascertain whether it’s even possible for her to hear sounds on the stairs from this room. But the critical minute is already over, and she merely listens tensely to the sound of the person dragging himself slowly up the steps, continually stopping, coughing lightly, and then dragging himself further along by the banister.

Now she doesn’t just hear Siegfried, she sees him, too. She sees him very clearly, as he makes his way up the still quiet staircase to their apartment. Of course they’ve abused him again, he has a couple of bandages carelessly thrown around his head, already bled through, and his face is bruised and splotchy from their blows. Siegfried is struggling to climb the stairs. His chest is whistling and wheezing, his chest hurt by their kicks. She sees Siegfried turn the corner of the staircase…

For a while she continues to sit. Most probably she has nothing on her mind, certainly not the judge and her agreement with him. She needs to get up to the apartment – what will Siegfried think if he finds it empty? – but she is so terribly tired, it’s almost impossible to lever herself up out of the chair!

Finally she’s on her feet. She takes the bunch of keys out of her handbag, reaches for the sapphire bracelet as if it were a talisman that could protect her – and slowly and uncertainly she makes her way out of the apartment. The door shuts behind her.

The judge, woken after long hesitation on the part of his cleaning woman, comes too late to keep his guest from this excursion into a too dangerous world.

He softly opens the outer door, stands for a while in the open doorway, listens above, listens below. Then, when he hears a sound, namely the swift energetic tramp of boots, he retreats into his apartment. But he doesn’t leave the peephole. If there’s a chance of saving the unhappy woman, he will open his door to her again, in spite of all the danger.

Frau Rosenthal isn’t even aware of passing anyone on her way up the stairs. She is driven by one thought, and one thought only, which is to reach the apartment and Siegfried as quickly as possible. But the Hitler Youth commander Baldur Persicke, on his way to morning roll call, stands there open-mouthed with astonishment as the woman almost brushes past him. Frau Rosenthal, that Frau Rosenthal who has been missing so many days, up and about this Sunday morning, in a dark stitched blouse and no star, a bunch of keys and a bracelet in one hand, laboriously dragging herself up the banister with the other – that’s how drunk she is! Early on Sunday morning, and already drunk out of her skull.

For an instant, Baldur stays where he is, completely dumbfounded. But when Frau Rosenthal turns the corner of the stairs, his mental powers return to him, and his mouth snaps shut. He has the feeling that the moment has come – he mustn’t make a mistake now! No, this time he will take care of the thing himself, and no one, not his father or brothers or Borkhausen, is going to foul it up for him.

Baldur waits till he is sure Frau Rosenthal has reached the Quangels’ floor, then creeps quietly back into his parents’ flat. Everyone is still asleep, and the telephone is in the hallway. He picks up the receiver and dials, then asks for a particular number. He is in luck: even though it’s Sunday, he gets put through, and to the right man. He quickly says his piece, then moves a chair over to the door, opens the door a crack, and prepares to sit and wait for half an hour or an hour, to be sure the quarry doesn’t slip away again…

At the Quangels’ only Anna is up and about, quietly pottering around the flat. In between she looks in on Otto, who is still fast asleep. He looks tired and tormented, even now, in sleep. As though something is leaving him no peace. She stands there and looks thoughtfully at the face of the man she has lived with day after day for almost thirty years. She has long since grown used to the face, the sharp birdlike profile, the thin, almost always shut mouth – it no longer frightens her, any of it. He’s the man to whom she has given virtually her whole life. Looks aren’t important…

But this morning she gets the impression that the face has become even sharper, the mouth even thinner, the furrows on either side of the nose even more deeply etched. He is worried, deeply worried, and she neglected to talk to him in time, to help him carry his load. This Sunday morning, four days after she received the news of the death of her son, Anna Quangel is once again firmly convinced not only that she has to stick it out with this man, but that her obstinacy was wrong in the first place. She ought to have known him better: he always preferred silence to speech. She always had to encourage him to speak – the man would never say anything of his own free will.

Well, today he will speak to her. He said he would, last night, on his return from work. Anna had had a bad day. When he ran off without any breakfast after she had spent hours waiting for him, and when he didn’t come home for dinner, when she realized that his shift had begun and he certainly wouldn’t come back until late, she had been in despair.

What had come over the man, ever since she let slip that unconsidered phrase? What drove him so remorselessly on? She knew him: ever since she’d said it, he’d been thinking only of how to prove to her that it was not ‘his’ Führer at all. As if she had ever seriously meant it! She should have told him she had only said it in the first rush of grief and rage. She could have said quite other things about those crooks who had senselessly robbed her of her son’s life – but that happened to be the form of words that escaped her.

But now she had said it, and now he was here and there, running all sorts of risks to prove himself right and to show her, quite concretely if possible, how wrong she had been! Perhaps he wouldn’t be back. Perhaps he had already said or done something that got the factory management or the Gestapo on his case – maybe he was already in prison! Restless as that calm man had been so early in the morning!

Anna Quangel can’t stand it, she can’t wait idly for him. She butters a couple of slices of bread, and sets off for the factory. She takes her wifely duties so seriously that even now, where every minute matters that will set her mind at rest, she doesn’t take the tram. No, she walks – saving their pennies, as he does.

From the gatekeeper at the furniture factory she learns that Foreman Quangel had come in to work as punctually as ever. She has someone take him the bread and butter he ‘forgot’, and she waits for the person to return. ‘Well, what did he say?’

‘What do you mean, what did he say? He never says anything!’

Now she can go home with her mind at rest. Nothing has happened yet, despite all the chaos this morning. And tonight she will speak to him…

He comes home. She can see from his face how tired he is.

‘Otto,’ she beseeches him, ‘I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just somehing that slipped out during my immediate reaction. Please don’t be cross any more!’

‘Me – cross with you? On account of something like that? Never!’

‘But there’s something you want to do, I can sense it! Otto, don’t do it, don’t plunge yourself into misfortune over something like that! I could never forgive myself.’

He looks at her for a moment, nearly smiling. Then he quickly lays both his hands on her shoulders. Quickly he takes them away again, as though ashamed of his spontaneous tenderness.

‘What I want to do now is sleep! Tomorrow I’ll tell you what we are going to do.’

And now it’s tomorrow, and Quangel is still asleep. But another half hour or so doesn’t matter so much now. He is here with her, he can’t do anything that would get him into trouble, he is asleep.

She turns away from his bed and does a few little chores around the house.

By now Frau Rosenthal has reached her front door, in spite of her slow progress. She is not surprised to find the door locked – she unlocks it. She pays no attention to the wild disorder of the place, nor does she spend a lot of time in the flat looking for Siegfried, or calling to him; she has already forgotten that she came upstairs to follow her husband.

Her numbness is growing, growing all the time. You couldn’t say she was asleep, but she’s not awake either. Just as she can only move her heavy limbs slowly and clumsily, so, too, her mind feels heavy and numb. Pictures come up like snowflakes and dissolve before she can see what they are. She is sitting on the sofa, her feet resting on scattered linen, looking about her slowly and muzzily. In her hand she still has the keys and the sapphire bracelet Siegfried gave her at Eva’s birth. The takings of an entire week… She smiles faintly to herself.

Then she hears the front door being carefully opened, and she knows: That’s Siegfried. Here he is. That’s why I came up here. I’ll step out to meet him.

But she remains sitting where she is, a smile spread over the whole of her grey face. She will receive him here, sitting down, as though she had never been away, had always been sitting here to welcome him.

The door opens, but instead of the expected Siegfried, there are three men in the doorway. As soon as she sees a detested brown uniform among them, she knows: This isn’t Siegfried. Siegfried won’t be here. A slight fear stirs in her, but really only very slight. Now it’s time!

Slowly the smile disappears from her face, which changes colour from grey to a greeny yellow.

The three men are directly in front of her. She hears a big, heavy man in a black cloak say, ‘Not drunk, my boy. Probably an overdose of sleeping pills. Let’s try to see what we can get out of her. Listen, are you Frau Rosenthal?’

She nods. ‘That’s right, gentlemen, Lore, or strictly speaking Sara Rosenthal. My husband’s in prison in Moabit, I have two sons in the USA, a daughter in Denmark, and another in England…’

‘And how much money have you sent them?’ Detective Inspector Rusch asks quickly.

‘Money? Why money? They all have plenty of money! Why would I send them money?’

She nods seriously. Her children are all comfortably off. They could quite easily take responsibility for their parents as well. Suddenly she remembers something she has to say to these gentlemen. ‘It’s my fault,’ she says with a clumsy tongue that feels heavier and heavier in her mouth, and starts to babble, ‘it’s all my fault. Siegfried wanted to flee Germany long ago. But I said to him, ‘Why leave all the lovely things behind, why sell the good business here for a pittance? We’ve done nothing to hurt anyone, they won’t do anything to us.’ I persuaded him, otherwise we would have been long gone!’

‘And what have you done with the money?’ the inspector asks, a little more impatiently.

‘The money?’ She tries to think. There was some left somewhere. Where did it get to? But concentrating is a strain for her, so she thinks of something else. She holds out the sapphire bracelet to the inspector. ‘There!’ she says simply. ‘There!’

Inspector Rusch casts a swift look at it, then looks round at his two companions, the alert Hitler Youth leader and his own regular number two, that fat lump Friedrich. He sees the two of them are watching him tensely. So he knocks the hand with the bracelet impatiently aside, takes the heavy woman by the shoulders, and shakes her hard. ‘Wake up, Frau Rosenthal!’ he shouts. ‘That’s an order! I’m telling you to wake up!’

He lets her go, and her head lolls against the back of the sofa, her body sags – her tongue lisps something incomprehensible. This method of bringing her round seems not to have been the right one. For a while the three men look silently at the old woman slumped on the sofa, not recovering her consciousness.

The inspector suddenly whispers very quietly, ‘Why don’t you take her back to the kitchen with you, and wake her up!’

The assistant executioner Friedrich merely nods. He picks the heavy woman up with one arm and carefully clambers with her over the obstacles on the floor.

When he reaches the door, the inspector calls after him, ‘And keep it quiet, will you! I don’t want any noise on Sunday morning in a tenement. Otherwise we’ll do it in Prinz Albrecht Strasse.^∗ I’ll be taking her back there later anyway.’

The door shuts behind them, and the inspector and Hitler Youth leader are alone.

Inspector Rusch stands by the window and looks down at the street below. ‘Quiet street, this,’ he says. ‘A real play street, eh?’

Baldur Persicke affirms that it is indeed a quiet street.

The inspector is a little nervous, but not because of the business involving Friedrich and the old Jewess in the kitchen. Pah, worse things happen every day of the week. Rusch is a lawyer manqué, who made his way into the police service. Later, he graduated to the Gestapo. He likes his work. He would have liked his work under any regime, but the brisk methods of the present lot suit him down to the ground. ‘Don’t get sentimental,’ he sometimes tells newcomers. ‘We have certain objectives. The way we get there doesn’t matter.’

No, the old Jewess doesn’t bother the inspector at all – he doesn’t have any of that sentimentality in him.

But this boy here, Hitler Youth leader Persicke, is cramping his style a bit. He doesn’t like outsiders present at any action; you never know how they’ll react. This one, admittedly, seems to be the right sort, but you really only know for sure when the job’s done.

‘Did you notice, Inspector,’ asks Baldur Persicke keenly – he tries to ignore the sounds coming from the kitchen, that’s their affair! – ‘did you notice she wasn’t wearing her Jewish star?’

‘I noticed more than that,’ the inspector says. ‘I noticed, for instance, that the woman’s shoes are clean, and it’s horrible weather outside.’

‘Yes.’ Baldur Persicke nods uncomprehendingly.

‘So someone in the building must have been keeping her hidden since Wednesday, if she really hasn’t been up to her flat for as long as you say.’

‘I’m fairly certain,’ says Baldur Persicke, a little confused by the thoughtful gaze still being levelled at him.

‘Fairly certain means nothing, my boy,’ says the inspector contemptuously. ‘There’s no such thing.’

‘I’m completely sure, then,’ says Baldur quickly. ‘I am willing to testify on oath that Frau Rosenthal has not set foot in her flat since Wednesday.’

‘All right, all right,’ says the inspector, a little dismissively. ‘You must know, of course, that by yourself you couldn’t possibly have kept the flat under observation since Wednesday. No judge would take your word on that.’

‘I have two brothers in the SS,’ says Baldur Persicke eagerly.

‘All right.’ Inspector Rusch is content. ‘It’ll all take its course. But what I wanted to say to you is that I won’t be able to have the apartment searched till tonight. Perhaps you would continue to keep the place under observation? I take it you have keys?’

Baldur Persicke assures him happily that he’ll be delighted. His eyes shine with joy. Well, now – this was the other way, didn’t he know it, all perfectly legal and above board.

‘It would be nice,’ the inspector drawls on, looking out of the window again, ‘if everything was left lying around like it is now. Of course, you’re not responsible for what’s in wardrobes and boxes, but other than that…’

Before Baldur can get out a reply, there is a high, shrill scream of terror from inside the apartment.

‘Damn!’ says the inspector, but he makes no move.

Pale, Baldur stares at him. His knees feel like jelly.

The scream is stifled right away, and now all that can be heard is Friedrich cursing.

‘What I wanted to say…’ the inspector begins again.

But his voice trails off. Suddenly there’s very loud cursing in the kitchen, footfalls, a running hither and thither. Now Friedrich is yelling at the top of his voice, ‘Will you keep still! Will you!’

Then a loud scream. Worse cursing. A door is yanked open, boots thud across the hall, and Friedrich yells into the room, ‘Well, what do you say to that, Inspector? I had just got her to the point of talking sensibly, and the bitch goes and jumps out the window on me!’

The inspector slaps him across the face. ‘You goddamned fool, I’ll have your guts for garters! Run, move!’

And he plunges out of the room, races down the stairs…

‘In the yard!’ Friedrich shouts after him. ‘She fell in the yard, not on the street! There won’t be no trouble, Inspector!’

He gets no answer. All three are running down the stairs, trying to make as little noise as possible on this quiet Sunday morning. The last of them, half a flight behind the others, is Baldur Persicke. He had the presence of mind to shut the Rosenthals’ door after him. He is still in shock, but at least there is the consolation that he has all those beautiful things in his keeping. Nothing had better get lost!

The three go running past the Quangels’ flat, past the Persickes’, past retired judge Fromm’s. Two more flights, and they’re in the courtyard.

Otto Quangel had got up and washed, and was watching his wife make breakfast in the kitchen. After breakfast they would have their conversation – so far they had only wished each other a good morning, but that was something.

Suddenly the two of them give a start. In the kitchen overhead, there’s shouting and yelling, and they listen, each looking at the other with concern. Then their kitchen window is darkened for a second, something heavy plunges past – and they hear it land with a crash in the yard. Downstairs someone yells – a man. Then deathly silence.

Otto Quangel pulls the kitchen window open, but retreats when he hears the tramp of people coming down the stairs.

‘Will you put your head out here, Anna!’ he says. ‘See if you can see anything. A woman attracts less notice.’ He takes her by the shoulder, and presses her very hard. ‘Don’t scream!’ he commands. ‘You mustn’t scream. There, now shut the window again!’

‘God, Otto!’ wheezes Frau Quangel, and stares at her husband with a white face. ‘Frau Rosenthal’s fallen out of the window. She’s lying down in the yard. Borkhausen is standing by her, and…’

‘Enough!’ he says. ‘Quiet, now. We don’t know anything. We haven’t seen or heard anything. Take the coffee into the parlour!’

And, once there, with emphasis, ‘We don’t know anything, Anna. Hardly ever saw Frau Rosenthal. And now eat! Eat, I tell you. And drink coffee! If anyone comes by, they’re not to notice anything out of ordinary!’

Judge Fromm had remained at his observation post. He had seen two civilians going up the stairs, and now three men – the Persicke boy was now with them – were charging down them. Something had happened, and now his cleaning woman was coming from the kitchen with the news that Frau Rosenthal had just fallen into the courtyard. He looked at her in consternation.

For a moment he stood there perfectly still. Then he slowly nodded his head.

‘Yes, Liese,’ he said. ‘That’s it. You can’t just want to rescue someone: they have to agree to be rescued.’ And then quickly: ‘Is the kitchen window shut?’ Liese nodded. ‘Hurry, Liese, and tidy my daughter’s room; no one must see that it’s been used. Plates out! Clothes out!’

Again, Liese nodded.

Then she asked, ‘What about the money and the jewels on the table, Judge?’

For a moment he stood there almost helplessly, looking wretched, with a perplexed smile on his face. ‘Well, Liese,’ he said. ‘That’ll be difficult. I don’t suppose any heirs will come forward. And for us it’s just a burden…’

‘Shall I put it in the bin,’ suggested Liese.

He shook his head. ‘No, they’re too smart for that, Liese,’ he said. ‘That’s their speciality, rummaging around in dirt! I’ll think of something. But in the meantime, you get on with the room. They could be here any minute!’

For now, though, they were still standing in the courtyard, with Borkhausen.

Borkhausen had got the first and the worst of the shock. He had been hanging around the courtyard from early morning, racked by his hatred of the Persickes and his lust for the lost things. He wanted to monitor events – and so he was keeping the staircase under constant supervision, the windows at the front…

Suddenly something fell very close to him, brushing past him from a great height. He was so shocked that he collapsed against the wall, and then he had to sit on the ground, because everything was going black in front of his eyes.

Then he jumped up again, because suddenly he was aware that Frau Rosenthal was lying next to him in the courtyard. God, so the old woman had thrown herself out of the window, and he knew who was to blame for it, too.

Borkhausen could see right away that the woman was dead. She had a little trickle of blood coming out of her mouth, but that barely disfigured her. On her face was an expression of such deep peace that the wretched little snoop had to look away. Then his gaze lit on her hands, and he saw that she was holding something in one of them, a piece of jewellery, something with shining stones.

Borkhausen cast a suspicious look around him. If he was to do anything, he had to do it quickly. He stooped; then, turning away from the dead woman so that he didn’t have to look her in the face, he pulled the sapphire bracelet from her grip and dropped it into his pocket. Again, he looked around suspiciously. He had a sense of the kitchen window at the Quangels’ being gently closed.

And already there they came, running across the courtyard, three men, two of whom he recognized immediately. What was important now was that he manage to behave correctly from the start.

‘Er, Inspector, Frau Rosenthal has just thrown herself out of the window,’ he said, as though reporting a perfectly ordinary event. ‘She almost landed on top of me.’

‘How do you know me?’ asked the inspector casually, while he and Friedrich bent down over the body.

‘I don’t know you at all, Inspector,’ said Borkhausen. ‘I just thought maybe that’s what you were. Because I get to do little jobs for your colleague Inspector Escherich sometimes.’

‘Is that right?’ said the inspector. ‘Well, then. Perhaps you’ll stick around a bit. You, lad,’ he turned to Persicke, ‘will you keep an eye on this fellow, and make sure he doesn’t disappear off somewhere. Friedrich, see to it that no one comes into the courtyard. Tell the driver to block the front entrance. I’ll just go upstairs to your flat and make a phone call!’

By the time Inspector Rusch returned from telephoning, the situation in the courtyard had changed a little. In all the windows of the back building there were faces, there were even a couple of people up on the roof – but some way off. The corpse had been covered with a sheet, but the sheet was a little small, and Frau Rosenthal’s legs were exposed to the knees.

Herr Borkhausen meanwhile was looking a bit yellow, and was wearing a pair of handcuffs. Watching him silently from the side of the courtyard were his wife and five children.

‘Inspector, I protest!’ Borkhausen called out plaintively. ‘I never threw the bracelet down into the cellar. Young Herr Persicke has got something against me…’

What had happened was that Friedrich, having quickly performed his allotted tasks, had then begun looking for the bracelet. Up in the kitchen, Frau Rosenthal had had it in her hand – it was over the bracelet, which she had refused to relinquish, that Friedrich had got into a heated argument with her. Distracted by this argument, he hadn’t paid as close attention as he would normally, and the woman had been able to jump out of the window. So the bracelet must still be lying in the courtyard somewhere.

When Friedrich began looking around, Borkhausen was standing by the wall. Baldur Persicke had caught sight of something flashing and heard a rattle in the coal cellar. He had gone down to look, and lo and behold, there was the bracelet!

‘I certainly didn’t throw the bracelet in there!’ Borkhausen insisted timidly. ‘It must have dropped from Frau Rosenthal into the cellar!’

‘I see!’ said Inspector Rusch. ‘You’re that sort, are you! That’s the sort of bird who’s working for my colleague. Escherich will be pleased when I enlighten him about the calibre of his occasional associates.’

But all the while the inspector was ruminating, his gaze moved back and forth, back and forth, between Borkhausen and Baldur Persicke. Then Rusch went on, ‘Well, I’m sure you won’t mind paying us a visit?’

‘Not at all, sir!’ said Borkhausen, trembling, as his face grew a few degrees paler. ‘I’m happy to come along! It’s in my interest to have this thing properly cleared up!’

‘Very good,’ said the inspector drily. And, following a swift look at Persicke, ‘Friedrich, take the handcuffs off this man. You’ll come with us without them, will you not?’

‘Of course I’ll come! Of course, gladly!’ Borkhausen eagerly assured him. ‘I’m not going to run off anywhere. And if I did – well, you’d find me easily enough, Herr Inspector!’

‘That’s right!’ Rusch said, drily once more. ‘A bird like you’s never hard to find.’ He broke off. ‘Well, there’s the ambulance, and the police. Let’s see if we can’t get the formalities over with quickly. I’ve got a lot on this morning.’

Later on, once the formalities were indeed ‘over’, Inspector Rusch and young Persicke once again climbed the stairs to the Rosenthals’ apartment. ‘Just to make sure the kitchen window’s shut!’ as the inspector said.

On the staircase young Persicke suddenly came to a stop. ‘Did you notice something, Inspector?’ he asked in a whisper.

‘I noticed various things,’ replied Inspector Rusch. ‘But what did you think about the pencil, my lad?’

‘Didn’t you notice how quiet the building is? Did you notice that here in the front building no one leaned out of the window, and in the back building they were everywhere! That’s suspicious, isn’t it? They must have noticed something, the people who live here. They just want to claim not to have noticed anything. Shouldn’t you now search those apartments, Inspector?’

‘Well, and where better to start than with the Persickes,’ replied the inspector, quietly walking on up the stairs. ‘Because as I recall none of them were looking out the window, either.’

‘They got really hammered yesterday…’

‘Listen, Sunshine,’ the inspector went on, as though he had heard nothing. ‘What I do is my affair, and what you do is yours. I don’t want any advice from you. You’re too green for me.’ He looked, quietly amused, over his shoulder at the wincing expression of the boy. ‘Boy,’ he said, ‘if I don’t conduct any house searches here, then it’s purely because they’ve had time to get rid of any evidence. Anyway, why so much fuss about a dead Jewess? I’ve got enough on my plate with the living ones.’

By now they were outside the Rosenthals’ apartment. Baldur unlocked the door. Rusch closed the kitchen window and picked up a fallen chair.

‘There!’ said Inspector Rusch, looking around. ‘Everything hunky-dory!’

He went ahead into the parlour and sat down on the sofa, in exactly the spot where he had shaken old Frau Rosenthal into a complete collapse an hour before. He stretched out leisurely and said, ‘Right now, Sunshine, and why don’t you fetch us a bottle of cognac and a couple of glasses!’

Baldur went off, came back, poured. They clinked glasses.

‘That’s better, son,’ said the inspector agreeably, and lit a cigarette. ‘And now why don’t you tell me what you and Borkhausen were doing in this apartment together?’

Seeing the indignant reaction on the face of young Persicke, he went on, a little more quickly, ‘I would think about it carefully if I were you, son! It’s not impossible I might take a young Hitler Youth leader back to Prinz Albrecht Strasse, if he got too fresh for my liking. Think about whether honesty wouldn’t be the better policy. Maybe we can keep it under wraps, so let’s hear your story.’ And, seeing Baldur hesitating, ‘I did – as you keep asking – notice a thing or two, you see. For instance, I’ve seen your bootmarks on the sheets in the corner. And that’s not from today. And how come you know there’s cognac, and exactly where to find it? What do you think Borkhausen told me in his panic? Do I need to sit here and have you tell me a string of porkies? No, as I say, you’re too green for that!’

Baldur could see that, and he confessed everything.

‘I see!’ the inspector said finally. ‘I see. Everyone does what he can. Stupid people do stupid things, and smart people often do much more stupid things. Well, son, at least you wised up in the end, and didn’t try to lie to Papa Rusch. I have regard for that. What would you like out of this lot?’

Baldur’s eyes lit up. A moment ago, he had been completely demoralized, but now things had suddenly brightened again.

‘The radio and the phonograph with the record collection, Inspector!’ he whispered greedily.

‘Very well!’ said the inspector graciously. ‘I told you I won’t be getting back here before six. Anything else?’

‘Maybe one or two suitcases full of bed linen!’ said Baldur. ‘My mother doesn’t have much.’

‘Oh, I’m so touched!’ the inspector said mockingly. ‘What a devoted son! What a little mama’s boy! Well, go on then. And no more. Everything else you’re accountable to me for! And I have a damned good memory for what’s stacked and lying around here, so don’t think you’ll pull one over on me! And as I said, in case of doubt, we just instigate a search of the Persicke place. Where I’m pretty sure we’ll turn up a radiogram and two suitcases of sheets, if not more. But no worries, son – if you play straight with me, I’ll play straight with you.’

He walked over to the door. In parting, he added, ‘And by the way, in case Borkhausen turns up here, no argy-bargy with him. I don’t like that kind of thing. Got it?’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Baldur Persicke, and with that the two parted company: it had been a most productive morning.