City of Shadows Read Free

here?”
    They were going along Bismarckstrasse, bastion of Berlin re spectability.
    She didn’t bother to answer him.
    “You could,” he said. “I’m thinking of renting you an apartment.”
    Something was up; he was never generous without a reason. “Why?”
    “You’re my secretary. I can’t have a secretary living in Moabit. It’s not classy.”
    It had been classy enough so far. She suspected geese that laid golden eggs. “Good,” she said.
    For certain he wouldn’t be setting her up in a nice apartment be cause he had designs on her virtue; he’d taken that, such as it was, on the day he’d hired her. She’d thought her face would preclude her but it hadn’t.
    It had been a form of apprenticeship initiation. The chesterfield in the office was there for that purpose. So were the packets of condoms in his stationery drawer.
    She’d been so hungry. Ashamed of taking another meal from the canteen that rich Jews had set up for their suffering brethren in Moabit, she’d gone without anything but tea for two days. Even then, when she’d passed it in her search for work and seen its lines of des perate mothers and children, she’d felt guilty.
    She’d thought, What does it matter? She was soiled goods anyway. Jews waited for better times. Dully, she let him.
    He was a skilled practitioner; it was necessary to his self-esteem to leave all his women satisfied. What took her aback was that her body acted independently and responded with orgasm, as if it had become impatient with her mental numbness and was reminding itself that it was still young and needy. Memory was overwhelmed, blanked out in an eruption of voluptuousness.
    There was no pretense on either side that the encounter was any thing but physical gratification for them both, but all sensual enjoy ment had been foreign to her for so long that she was grateful for it.
    “We’ll do it again sometime,” he’d said. And indeed, when he felt it necessary to mark her as his territory and he was between mistresses, they had.
    He increased speed through western suburbs that were still loosely connected villages, where cottages and, intermittently, the walls of mansions lined the route and goats grazed the roadside grass and the poverty was agricultural, which meant that the poor at least had milk from their cow and eggs from the hens now scattering from the Audi’s wheels.
    “What’s the madwoman called?” she shouted.
    “What?”
    “The madwoman. What’s her name?”
    “She hasn’t got one.”
    “Nick?” He was making her nervous.
    “Oh, come on, Esther,” he said. “One of those Romanovs escaped from Ekaterinburg. Everybody thinks so.”
    “People will believe anything,” she said.
    “And sure as hell it was one of the princesses. All right, the Bolshies shoot the czar and the czarina, maybe even little Alexei—he’s heir to the throne, and he’s sick anyway. But those girls? You’ve seen their pic tures, all in their pretty white dresses? Like swans, every one of them. Maybe somebody’s finger faltered on the trigger when it came to put ting a bullet through those golden heads. Maybe one of them wasn’t shot, or maybe she was just wounded and they let her go.”
    “That’s firing squads all over,” Esther said. “Tenderhearted.”
    “Russian firing squad, remember that. Bolshevik bastards, but Rus sian Bolshevik bastards; they’d grown up with the image of those sweet kids in their heart, and what harm did they ever do anybody?”
    He’d actually slowed down so that she could attend to his argument better. They were into forest now, and she could smell the pines and hear birdsong.
    “Nice, polite kids they were, opened a church bazaar here and there, rolled bandages at the hospital. Was that grinding the faces of the poor? I tell you, Esther, when it came to burying the bodies and they found one of those girls was still alive, they couldn’t finish the job. They had to let her go.”
    “Sweet,” said Esther. “What