That was something. When she thought of all the threats outside polling stations, the Communists who had been arrested in the preceding weeks… The news moved onto the weather, and she rose from in front of the radiogramophone.
‘Aren’t you going to say hello to the birthday boy?’ Gereon grinned from his armchair. He had fetched a glass and poured from the bottle Charly had opened.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I had to listen to that.’
It was polling day in the Prussian state parliament too. The results followed the Reichstag vote, but they didn’t interest her as much. The only thing she cared about was whether the Hitler government would have parliamentary support in future, and it would.
‘At least the Nazis can’t just do whatever they want,’ Gereon said. ‘They have to govern with Papen.’
‘Papen does whatever they want.’
‘To think the man used to be a Centrist. In the same party as my father and Adenauer!’
‘At some point Papen and his gang are going to have to wake up. Or Hindenburg, at least. It’s about time he put a stop to this madness.’
‘He will, for sure.’ Gereon glanced at the wristwatch Charly had gifted him that morning. ‘Let’s say in… four hundred and thirty-seven hours and five minutes. Starting… now!’
He smiled at her. He was such a child, but at least he liked his new watch. She had saved half a year for it. ‘No offence, Gereon, but right now I don’t feel much like joking.’ Even so, she couldn’t help but smile as he danced towards her like a gigolo manqué. In the meantime the radio was playing music again, dance music from the Femina-Bar.
He took her by the hand and led her in a dance across the carpet while Kirie looked on curiously. ‘Life goes on! At some point the Nazi government will collapse, and a new one will take its place.’
‘If there’s anyone in the country still worth voting for.’
‘Personally I can do without the Communists. Moscow’s welcome to them. Do you really want to be governed by that lot? They’d have our likes up against a wall.’
‘The Nazis aren’t just striking at the Communists. Do you have even the faintest notion of what is happening in this city?’
Their little dance was over. ‘More than the faintest notion, and I’m telling you all this will blow over.’
Not for the first time she was bewildered by his naiveté. She told him what had happened little more than four hours ago, hoping it might open his eyes. He listened in silence, until the part where the uniformed cop lifted the police cordon.
‘The SA stormed Dr Weiss’s apartment?’ he asked in disbelief.
‘Yes and, God knows, he’s no Communist.’
‘What happened?’
‘Thank God they didn’t get him. They had to vent their anger on the furniture.’
‘How do you know? Were you inside?’
She shook her head and told him how she had paced up and down Uhlandstrasse with Kirie because she couldn’t go home or face spending another minute with her idle colleagues. How suddenly she’d seen a familiar face emerge from a doorway. The relief she had felt on seeing him there, unharmed and with his wife. Bernhard Weiss gestured discreetly for her to keep walking. There were still SA officers a few metres away on Steinplatz. Only when they reached Pension Teske did the Weisses finally stop. ‘Fräulein Ritter,’ Charly’s one-time boss had said, ‘tell my brother that we are safe for the time being.’
‘What about your daughter?’
‘Hilde too. Tell my brother not to worry.’
Charly shook him and his wife by the hand. ‘I wish you all the best, Sir. See that you don’t fall into the hands of the brown mob.’
Then she made towards Adolf Weiss’s apartment, a few doors further down, and redeemed her pledge.
‘Weiss only escaped,’ she concluded her report, ‘because the SA were too stupid to station a guard outside the service entrance.’ She nodded towards the radio. ‘Yet the whole hideous episode doesn’t receive so much as a mention. According to the Funkstunde, the vote passed off peacefully.’
‘Well, nothing happened,’ Gereon said, in another clumsy attempt to pacify her.
‘Nothing happened?’ she said, careful not to shout. ‘Only because Weiss escaped in time, or he might be dead by now!’
‘It’s all right,’ he said and took her in his arms. ‘I didn’t mean it like that. You’re right.’
Suddenly she was just glad he was home, and that she wasn’t alone anymore. The radio played jazz music from the Femina-Bar, as if it were an evening like any other.
36
Erwin Zientek was at his desk when Rath arrived on Monday morning.
‘Not exactly quick off the mark, are you?’
‘I had to drop off my dog. In A Division.’
‘Police dog, is it?’
‘My secretary’s looking after her. I thought she’d get in the way here.’ He hung his hat on the hook. ‘So what is it today?’
‘What do you think? We pick up where we left off. Find a free interrogation room and start grilling Communists.’
‘The election’s over,’ Rath said, sitting at the desk Zientek had assigned him. ‘Why carry on?’
‘The election might be over, but the SA are still dredging up Communists – must be a nest somewhere.’ Zientek laughed at his joke. ‘Why do you think Dr Braschwitz requested so many CID officers? Because we love you boys so much? No, it’s because there are so many of you and so few of us.’
The detective’s lack of respect was starting to grate.
‘There are more Reds in this city than you might think,’ Zientek continued. ‘Did you see how many votes they got?’ He inhaled deeply, revealing yellowed teeth as he breathed out. ‘We’re interrogating every Communist going, in the hope of finding something Dr Braschwitz and the public prosecutor can use in court against van der Lubbe, Torgler and their co-conspirators.’
‘So it is a conspiracy?’
‘You think this Dutchman was out to grill a sausage?’
What the hell had he got himself into? He’d been careful not to breathe a word of how he’d spent his Sunday to Charly. Though she moaned about the Communists just as much as she did about the Nazis, there was no way she’d condone what he was doing with Zientek.
Communist threat or not, he was starting to feel uneasy about it himself. In his long years of service he had never been part of an interrogation marathon like this. The SA had actually been fetching people from outside polling stations – before they had a chance to vote. Time and again auxiliary police officers brought in people who weren’t even on Zientek’s list.
Mind you, the Communists had lost a good million votes since November. Within weeks, the new government had gained control of the Commune, nullifying the threat of a Red putsch. Germany was as far from civil war as it had been in a long time, but equally far from a functional democracy.
Rath thought of Charly and her vanishing hopes that the Republic might be saved. She had been in a strange mood this morning as she stepped out of the car and entered headquarters, head awhirl with dark thoughts. If he hadn’t called her back in the stairwell she’d have forgotten to kiss him as they went their separate ways. Which in his case meant the Political Police, Section 1A.
‘Let’s get on,’ he said, making no effort to conceal his temper. ‘Who’s next?’
‘We’re still waiting for the list.’
It wasn’t long before it arrived. To Rath’s surprise he knew the man who brought it in.