The Informer (15 page)

A
rmina hung up the phone and put her feet on the floor and lay back in bed, the sheets caressing her with a seductive warmth. How nice it would be to roll over and to go back to sleep again. What had she been dreaming? Climbing in the Alps, that was it, and even now she could smell the arctic scent of the ice sheets, the air tainted with a chill from higher up, and her fingers still felt the roughness of the climbing ropes and the weight of the ice axe. How nice it had been, even though a dream, to get away from her sense of failure. Why hadn’t she been able to be more convincing with Gaelle? And what a bad idea to have her face made up, since it only made the scar look worse, as it was disguised. Gaelle had wanted something, and yet Armina hadn’t been able to give it: a failure of spirit, of generosity, maybe even of humor. The floor was cool against her bare feet and the shadows of the room lay across the floor like a piece of gray cloth as the water dripped in the bathroom with a steady tick, tick, tick. She stood up as though she were lifting a weight.

The Inspectorate wanted her to come down to the river, to the boathouse of one of the Berlin rowing clubs where the caretaker had found something just inside the doors this morning. Right by the oar rack, is what he said when he had called the Inspectorate. By the oar rack.

There wasn’t time for a bath, and so Armina washed her face, put on her clothes, and went downstairs to the street. It was just dawn, and the sky was yellow in the east. The river wasn’t that far, really, and she’d probably feel better for a little fresh air. She told herself again that she was going to drink less, and that tonight she would have nothing. This couldn’t go on night after night.

Up ahead schoolchildren walked in two lines, their brown and blond heads bright in the early sunshine. They were a little disorderly, not jumpy,
but staggering like a line of diminutive drunks. They came two by two, their eyes a little vacuous, and some of them let their lips get wet. A girl made a soft, constant mooing. Another child rubbed his eye over and over again. The teachers with them, one in front and one at the back, seemed to be herding them. Then Armina realized they were from the special school. They came along, blinking and stumbling, not quite drooling but sniffling and breathing through their mouths, and when she was even with them, a boy with a satchel looked right at her, his glance piercing in its mystification. Then, behind her, a pigeon flew up into the first rays of sunlight, where it suddenly appeared as a bird that was covered with gilt. The boy looked at the bird, almost shaking as he saw the transformation, and then he said to Armina, his mouth wet, his eyes still insistent in their mystification,
“Ein Vogel, ein Vogel,”
a bird, a bird.

“Yes,” said Armina.

“So, so pretty,” said the boy.

Armina nodded. Yes. It was pretty.

The Spree was about sixty feet wide, confined by stone banks and crossed by many bridges. At this hour, when there was no wind, the river was placid and showed the pink and yellow sky.

The boathouse looked like a barn with two large doors on the side facing the river, and from the doors a ramp went down to the constant, indifferent hush of the water. The doors were open. The building was made of wood, and its upright planks had been painted a light blue, so that the side of the building appeared like the back of a theater where a play was set on a pleasant, clear day. Men in plainclothes and in uniform stood around a shape that was covered with a rubberized sheet just beyond the threshold of the open doors of the boathouse.

Armina’s boss, a man by the name of Weiss, was there, too. He was heavyset, had rimless glasses, and his face was round and brooding. He wore a suit with a vest, a green tie, and dark shoes. The Nazi papers had been attacking him, and Armina new that when Weiss was gone, she’d have to go with him. Linz was there, too.

Uniformed police made all this seem ceremonial as they stood around that covered shape on the boathouse floor. It was like a formal occasion, a wedding or police reception. Linz’s beard was blue and his eyes were bloodshot,
as though he were in that odd zone of no longer being drunk but not yet hungover. A woman’s leg stuck out from the rubberized tarp at his feet.

Weiss moved his eyes from the river to Armina. Even though he was in his neat clothes and his round glasses and his Homburg hat, he still conveyed a fatigue that was mixed with a sadness at the endless repetition of this moment. His eyes were old, like those of a man dug out of a glacier.

“So,” Linz said to Armina. “Hard night?”

“I’ve found the best thing for a hangover is a little brandy,” Weiss said.

She put the back of her hand to her mouth.

“Maybe,” she said. Then she reached down and pulled back the rubberized sheet. The young woman was splayed out under the boats, her skin pale verging on blue, her face against the dirt floor and her hair covered by her coat. Her presence seemed infinitely tawdry to Armina and part of an ugliness so large and originating in a stupidity so ridiculous as to defy understanding. The young woman was almost nude, aside from the coat over her head, her stockings pulled below her knees. The line on her neck was familiar, as were the red marks on her legs and buttocks and the small holes, too. For a minute, Armina was reassured by her disgust, as though, at least, she had nothing to do with this, and this distance was something she could depend on. The air, the light, the scent of the river seemed so heavy that it took effort just to stand there.

“She was here just behind the door,” said Weiss. “The caretaker found her.”

“Was she raped?” said Armina.

“I thought I’d let the doctor do that,” said Weiss.

“I’ll do it,” said Armina.

She pulled back the rubberized sheet again, reached down to her buttocks, lifted one, and glanced at the wounds. At the touch of the cool skin, the sense of being separate from this vanished, and Armina was left with the conviction that this young woman was here because of Armina’s failure. Her desire to stop this left her trembling, that cool touch of the woman’s skin lingering on the tips of her fingers. She noticed, in the soft dirt next to the young woman, that there was a curved mark, as though someone had scored the ground with a stick, or the tip of a toe.

Then she covered the woman up again and turned to Weiss.

“Yes,” she said.

Weiss shrugged.

“That’s what I thought,” he said. He took a clean handkerchief from his pocket and held it out, and she took it, wiping her hands slowly as she looked around.

“It’s too bad she’s missing so much clothing,” Armina said. “It would be nice to know if someone took a souvenir. They do that, of course.”

“We found her handbag, up there,” said Linz. “Here’s her address. She looks pretty young, doesn’t she?”

Armina stepped next to the boats where the young woman’s head lay, and pulled back the coat. The blond hair still smelled of shampoo, and the side of the face was oddly numb, slack, and the absence of expression was worse than horror, since the blankness suggested a thorough obliteration. Armina leaned over to look more closely, her face not that far from the young woman, and as she stood in the dimness of the boathouse, under the lines of light on the shells, she was left with the impulse to shake her head.

“Something wrong?” said Linz.

Armina stepped back from the shape under the rubberized material and down the boathouse ramp to the river. Now, as the sun rose, the river was covered with a million flecks of light, each one a sharp silver, all suggesting an enormous piece of glass that had shattered into an infinite number of bits. Armina wanted to sit down, to lean against the boathouse door, to find some way to stand here without her constant nausea, as though she were here and at the same time swinging back and forth at the end of a long piece of rope. The river went around the bend into the industrial clutter of Berlin. Her sense of responsibility, she realized, was something she had been trying to cover up, like makeup over a scar. The shock came not as a surprise, but with the sense of something being leeched out of her, as though she had been bleeding for a long time and was now getting weak. She put a hand to her face and stared at the facets of water. The points of light appeared artificial, remote as stars, and yet at the same time they conveyed the claustrophobia of the ordinary details that attended any hateful moment.

“This one’s yours,” said Linz.

Armina put her hand to her hair.

“Yes,” she said. “I guess it is.”

“Cases like this are a dime a dozen,” said Linz. “Same old stuff. Someone
imitating the Fisherman.” He pulled his coat a little tighter. He looked around. “Who’s going to tell her parents?” he said, gesturing to the body.

The others stood around, shifting from one foot to another, looking at the river. A barge went by and made a wave that washed up against the stones lining the river.

“It’s the investigating officer’s job,” said Linz to Armina.

Armina tuned again to the luminescent chop of the river, the silver crosses of light at the top of the small waves, and as she stared a barge went by, the bow wave of it rolling toward her in a gray, green, and silver rush.

“You’ll get over it,” Linz said. “There’s nothing to it.”

“Then why don’t you do it?” she said.

“I’ll leave it to you.”

Then he went along the river and up the stone steps that led to the avenue, his reflection like a film on the water that undulated from a passing boat. At the top of the stairs, in his dark clothes, he appeared like a man in an advertisement, at once promising something and yet not being clear about what it was. He tipped his hat to Armina and disappeared with his precise gait, as though if he walked carefully enough he could keep the hangover away for an hour more.

“Are you all right?” said Weiss.

“Yes,” she said. “No. I don’t know.”

“That happens to all of us these days,” said Weiss.

“What do you suppose they were doing, marking her like that?” said one of the uniformed officers.

“Well,” said Weiss. “They were trying to get her to talk about something. That’s one possibility. Maybe she owed them money.”

“Are there other possibilities?” said the uniformed officer.

“They were doing it for fun,” said another uniformed officer.

“No,” said Weiss. “It could have been something else.”

“What could that have been?” said the uniformed officer.

“Somebody who enjoyed his job,” said Weiss. “You know, a collector.”

The men moved around, looking one way and another. Yes, they seemed to be saying, as they looked around, that could be possible. Someone might have enjoyed his job.

“I’m going to look around,” said Armina.

“Sure,” said Weiss. “See you later.”

Armina walked upstream. The light of the rising sun covered the east side of the buildings with a film that looked like it had been painted on. At this time even the squat, enormous buildings, like the Reichstag, looked as though they had been carved from blocks of gold. Soon the sun rose and the sky turned blue, which meant that the gray stone of the buildings revealed itself again. She went along the river with its fishy, moist odor. In some places she was able to walk under the bridges and stay by the water, but at some bridges she had to climb up to the street and cross over, going among the cars and the wagons and horses. The countrified smell of horses mixed with the fishy stink of the river, and on top of that the air had the smell of burning coal.

She kept thinking about the marks. Some of them looked like they had been done with a cigarette, but others were the work of something else, a wire perhaps. The coat thrown over the face was familiar, of course, and Armina thought that the man who had done this was ashamed. Just like in the park.

She went into the Altes Museum, behind the Lustgarten. Inside, the atmosphere was dusty and damp. The statues of Roman gods stood on pedestals, all of them contradictory in their human forms, familiar and yet strangely remote, too, since the ordinary inability to know a human being had been elevated, here at least, to the difficulty in knowing a god. So, she sat there, thinking about the signs that had been left on that young woman and that torn flesh.

Armina was left with the memory of the impulse to do the right thing, which now, or so it seemed, had led to those marks, to the shape under the rubberized sheet. And where was Armina’s sense of detachment, her belief that she was remote from these things? The certainty that she was getting nowhere, just going through the motions, and that Armina had a hand in what happened settled around Armina like a fine, horrible dust, a million points of accusation, all sharp and specific. She sat there in the aroma of the stone of the old gods. Whispers came from the depths of the museum.

She started walking to the address of the girl’s parents, although she stopped in front of a store that sold men’s clothing. An animated mannequin stood behind in the window, a kind of machine-powered dummy. It was dressed in a brown suit and a green tie, with shiny brown shoes, and
it took off the hat and beckoned to the window shopper in the street. This mechanical politeness seemed friendly, but the jerkiness of the machine made Armina feel suspicious, or it made her aware of her humanity in the face of such a creature. After all, the machine never made any mistakes. It went on tipping its hat forever.

At the river she sat on a bench by the water, which had a film of oil, separated into a dirty rainbow, at once colorful and oddly subdued, as though it had leaked up from a long-submerged and tainted source. The colors seemed leached out. Her hands trembled as she put them in her lap, and the breeze that came up left her uneasy. The light seemed to fade, or to become yellow and oddly dim.

At the next bench a man and a woman, both dressed in black, reached into a paper bag and took out small handfuls of crumbs for the cooing pigeons, some of which, in the sunlight, were marked with those same tints of a dirty rainbow. The old hands sprinkled the crumbs, and the pigeons nodded their heads and pecked. And now, she thought, I am supposed to go home, to be alone, to sit there in the dark? She sat on the bench and trembled. The old man and the old woman went on feeding the pigeons, which picked at the crumbs, their heads going back and forth.