The Sleepwalkers by Paul Grossman

replied dreamily.
    “Yes. Yes.” He kissed her up and down the neck. As he stepped into his trousers though, she sat up, pulling the blanket over her breasts.
    “Willi, you know you never told me. How did Gina die?”
    He paused before pulling up his zipper. “She drowned,” he said, grabbing his shirt. “In the Havel. Her body washed up just beneath the citadel in Spandau.”
    “Mein Gott,”
Paula stammered, clutching the blanket to her throat. “You mean . . . they threw her off that yacht?”
    “No,” he replied without thinking.
    Her green eyes flashed on his, demanding the truth. “How do you know?”
    He pictured Gina Mancuso’s deformed legs lying there in the icy water. “You’ll just have to trust me.”
    When he got back to the office, it was nearly three o’clock. He expected Ruta to be all over him like a ruffled mother hen, butfound her instead in a state more akin to apoplexy. “Willi,” she stammered, not even realizing she’d addressed him informally, something she only did at parties when they’d been drinking. “You cannot imagine who just left this office ten minutes ago.”
    “Pancho Villa,” he said, making a stab at humor.
    “Nein, nein.”
She looked at him, positively white with fear, unable even to get her cigarette to light. “A captain of the Brownshirts, Willi . . . with a message from the SA führer! Ernst Roehm invites you to dinner tonight at the Kaiserhof. Nine p.m.!”
    Willi felt his throat dry out. So, von Schleicher hadn’t been bluffing.
    “Well, Ruta, nothing to fret over a little dinner invitation.”
    One by one he’d been examining the dossiers of the top orthopedic surgeons in Germany, but so far nothing seemed to link anyone else to this case. Meckel may have been just a fall guy, but what choice was there except to go after him and try to figure out who’d laid the frame?
    “Willi. You mustn’t. You absolutely mustn’t. These people aren’t human.”
    “Yes, they are, Ruta. All too human.”
    The massive Hotel Kaiserhof on Wilhelm Platz was just down the block from the Reichs Chancellery, much older and far gloomier than the glittering Adlon, but unquestionably among the most formidable Berlin hostelries. The moment Willi entered the brass revolving doors he recalled that the upper floors had recently been rented to the Nazi Party—as their headquarters. Was it any wonder he felt cast back to his army days, penetrating enemy lines? The lobby was positively swarming with Nazis, SA Brownshirts mainly, but a whole horde of Blackshirts, too. Black being the uniform of the
Schutzstaffel
—the SS—originally Hitler’s bodyguard but more recently evolved into the Party’s intelligence-gathering unit. In its near civil war with the Communist Red Front, the Blackshirts provided the who, what, and where the Brownshirts went to battle with.
    Icy prongs stabbed his neck as he made his way into this crowd. He felt as if his nose had grown several inches and he were wearing a tall yellow dunce cap. After several steps across the red carpet though, he began to notice brown and black shirts alike stepping aside for him. Why? He couldn’t understand—until finally he got it. To face Ernst Roehm, a real soldier’s soldier, he’d pinned his Iron Cross to the upper right of chest of his jacket, a transparent tactic no doubt. But he figured he could use all the help he could get. Now the ornate medal was working the miracle of Moses, parting the sea, earning him nods, salutes even. Why not? He deserved it.
    A week before the great spring offensive of 1918 he’d led a squad of five men, including Fritz Hohenzollern, deep behind French lines to survey enemy artillery and troop positions. After more than a week sending reports back via carrier pigeon, they were discovered and found themselves trapped in a farmhouse, battling it out with a whole French company. Willi had stayed behind to cover his men while they made it back to no-man’s-land. Three days later