“More folders,” Gunther said, looking at the stack Bernie had brought with him for the trial. “For all the bad Germans. Let’s see what they say about Herr Brandt.”
“What makes you think he’s in them?” Jake said. “What do you save when a city’s on fire? You save yourself.” “He was trying to save his wife.”
“But he didn’t,” Gunther said, then looked away, somewhere else. “Of course, sometimes it’s not possible.” He picked up his jacket and put it on, ready to go. “That last week-you weren’t here. Fires. Russians in the streets. We thought it was the end of the world.” He looked back at Jake. “But it wasn’t. Now there’s this. The reckoning.”
The courtroom had an improvised look to it, as if the Russians had set up a stage without knowing where the props went. Their de-Nazification program had run to group executions, not trials, but the greifer was a special case, so they’d taken over a room near the old police headquarters in the Alex, built a raised platform of raw wooden boards for the judges’ bench, and assigned the press haphazard rows of folding chairs that squeaked and scraped the floor as reporters leaned forward to hear. The prosecution attorneys and their Allied advisers were crammed together at one table, a lopsided stacking of cards against the defense lawyer and his one assistant, who sat by themselves at another. Along the wall, female Soviet soldiers made transcripts with steno machines, handing them to two civilian girls for translation.
The trial was in German, but the judges, three senior officers shuffling papers and trying not to look bored, evidently understood only a little, so the lawyers, also in uniform, occasionally switched to Russian, afraid to let their points drift away to the steno keys unheard. There was a heavy chair for witnesses, a Soviet flag, and not much else. It was the format of an inquisition, starker even than the rough-and-ready frontier courtrooms of Karl May, not a robe in sight. People were frisked at the door.
Renate stood behind a cagelike railing of new plywood next to the bench, facing the room, as if her expression during the testimony would be recorded as a kind of evidence. Behind her stood two soldiers with machine guns, gazing stolidly at her back. Bernie said she had changed, but she was recognizably the same-thinner, with the hollowed-out look you saw everywhere in Berlin, but still Renate. Only her dark hair was different, cropped close and turned a premature, indeterminate pale. She was dressed in a loose gray prison shift, belted, her collarbones sticking out, and the face he remembered as pretty and animated seemed rearranged-beaten, perhaps, or somehow disfigured by her life. But there were the eyes, sharp and knowing, glancing defiantly around the crowd as if she were even now looking for news items. The same way, Jake thought, she must have hunted for Jews.
She spotted him instantly, raising her eyebrows in surprise, then dropping them in bewilderment. A friend sitting at the table of her accusers. Did she think he was there to testify against her? What would he have said? A girl with a quick smile who liked to take chances, bold enough to cadge a cigarette from a Nazi on a train platform. A sharp eye, trained for snatching prey in the street. How could she have done it? But that was always the question-how could any of them have done it? He wanted suddenly to signal some absurd reassurance. I remember who you were. Not a monster, not then. How can I judge? But who could? Three Russian soldiers on a makeshift platform, whose fleshy faces seemed to ask no questions at all.
They were only minutes into the trial before Jake realized they hadn’t come to establish guilt, just the sentence. And was there any doubt? The Germans had kept records of her activity, more columns of numbers. As the prosecution read out its indictments, Jake watched her lower her head, as if she too were overwhelmed by the sweep of it, all the snatches, one by one, until finally there were enough to fill boxcars. So many. Had she known them all, or just guessed, smelling fear when it walked into one of her Cafes? Each number a face-to-face moment, real to her, not anonymous like a pilot opening the bomb bay.
The method was as Bernie had described-the sighting, the hurried call, the nod of her head to make the arrest, her colleagues bundling people into cars as she walked away. Why hadn’t she kept walking? Instead she’d gone back to the collection center, her room there its own kind of short leash, but still not a prison. Why not just keep walking away? Gunther had moved his wife fourteen times. But he had had papers and friends prepared to help. No U-boat could survive alone. Where, after all, would she have gone?
