A Quiet Flame

In her own sweet, big-breasted, blond, and blue-eyed way, Frau Schwarz looked no less of a Nazi than her storm trooper of a husband. When she put her arm through her husband’s arm, I half expected them both to shout “Germany, awake!” and “Death to the Jews” before breaking up the furniture and then singing the “Horst Wessel Song.” Sometimes it was only these daydreaming little fantasies that made my job at all bearable. It certainly wasn’t two hundred fifty marks a month. Frau Schwarz wore a full, gathered dirndl skirt with traditional embroidery, a tight-laced-up blouse, an apron, and an expression that was a combination of fear and hostility.

Schwarz put his hand on top of the hand his wife had threaded through his ham hock of an arm, and then she put her other hand on his. But for their grim and resolute faces, they reminded me of a couple getting married.

At last they looked like they were ready to hear what they knew I was going to tell them. I’d like to say I admired their courage and that I felt sorry for them. The truth is, I didn’t, very much. The sight of Schwarz’s illegal uniform and the battalion number on his collar patch made me almost indifferent to their feelings. Assuming they had any. A very good friend of mine, POWM Emil Kuhfeld, a first sergeant with the SCHUPO, had been shot dead at the head of the detachment of riot police trying to disperse a large group of Communists in Frankfurter Allee. A Nazi commissar at Police Station 85, who had investigated the case, had managed to pin the murder on a Communist. But nearly everyone at the Alex knew he had suppressed the evidence of a witness who had seen Kuhfeld shot by an SA man with a rifle. The day after Kuhfeld’s murder, this SA man, one Walter Grabsch, was discovered dead in his Kadinerstrasse flat, having conveniently committed suicide. Kuhfeld’s funeral had been the biggest ever given to a Berlin policeman. I had helped carry the coffin. Which was how I knew that the battalion number on Schwarz’s blue collar patch was the same battalion to which Walter Grabsch had belonged.

I gave Herr and Frau Schwarz all of the hard words of grief straight from the holster. I didn’t even try to rub them in the snow first.

“We think we’ve found the body of your daughter, Anita. We believe she was murdered. Obviously I’ll have to ask you to come down to the station to identify her. Shall we say tomorrow morning, ten o’clock, at the Police Praesidium, on Alexanderplatz?”

Otto Schwarz nodded silently.

I had retailed bad news before, of course. Just the previous week I’d had to tell a mother in Moabit that her seventeen-year-old son, a schoolboy at the local Gymnasium, had been murdered by Communists who’d mistaken him for a brown shirt. “Are you sure it’s him, Commissar?” she asked me more than once during the course of my lachrymose time with her. “Are you sure there hasn’t been a mistake? Couldn’t it be someone else?”

Herr and Frau Schwarz seemed to be taking it on the chin, however.

I glanced around the apartment again. There was a little embroidery sampler in a frame above the door. It read WILLINGNESS FOR SELF-SACRIFICE and was stitched in red, with an exclamation point. I’d seen one before, and I knew the quotation was from Mein Kampf. I wasn’t surprised to see it, of course. But I was surprised that I could see no photographs of their daughter, Anita. Most people who are parents have one or two of their children around the place.

“We have the photograph you gave us, on file,” I said. “So we’re quite sure it’s her, I’m afraid. But it would save time if you could spare us some others.”

“Save time?” Otto Schwarz frowned. “I don’t understand. She’s dead, isn’t she?”

“Save time trying to catch her murderer,” I said coldly. “Someone may have seen her with him.”

“I’ll see what I can find,” Frau Schwarz said, and left the room, quite composed and less upset than if I’d told her that Hitler wouldn’t be coming to tea.

“Your wife seems to be taking it very well,” I said.

“My wife is a nurse at the Charité,” he said. “I suppose she’s used to dealing with bad news. Besides. We were sort of expecting the worst.”

“Really, sir?” I glanced at Grund, who stared balefully at me and then looked away.

“We’re very sorry for your loss, sir,” he told Schwarz. “Very sorry, indeed. Incidentally, there’s no need for both of you to come to the Praesidium tomorrow. And if tomorrow’s not convenient, we can always do it another time.”

“Thank you, Sergeant. But tomorrow will be fine.”

Grund nodded. “Best to get it over with, sir,” he said, nodding. “You’re probably right. And then you can get on with your grieving.”

“Yes. Thank you, Sergeant.”

“What was the nature of your daughter’s disability?” I asked.

“She was a spastic. It affected only the left side of her body. She had trouble walking, of course. There were also occasional seizures, spasms, and other involuntary movements. She couldn’t hear very well, either.”