Byzantium (19 page)

Later, as we lay in bed, bellies full of chicken korma from down the street, Amy’s head resting on my chest, she said, “I like you.”

Since our conversation on Wilhelmstrasse, things had been unsettled between us. “I like being with you, okay?”

“Okay,” I said. “I like being with you, too.”

A FEW DAYS LATER, Clara called. It was a Thursday and I’d spent the day teaching and had had to keep reminding myself that it was actually Thanksgiving. Clara and I hadn’t talked in two months, and after she wished me Happy Thanksgiving we didn’t say much else until she asked, “Are you flying home for Christmas?”

“I’m not sure,” I said.

“Do you want to fly back?”

I didn’t say anything.

“I need to know what to tell my parents.”

“I know,” I said.

“Well, what should I tell them?”

There was the slightest quaver in her voice. I couldn’t hear the murmur of family behind her. She must have been up in her room, sitting on her bed, the door shut. In my mind I saw her there, the lights turned off and light coming in from the street, her face pointed toward the stable of horse figurines from her girlhood. Through the deadness of my heart I felt a throb.

“Well?” she said again.

I told her, “I’m not sure,” and she hung up.

THE PHONE CALL was still troubling me when, a day later, Amy and I were sitting in bed. It was rainy and cold and we’d stayed in. Pulling closer to me, Amy told me that she and Macy were going to Rothenburg with Beth and her husband next week and she wanted me to come with them.

“Seriously?” I said.

“It’ll be fun.”

I tried to picture the five of us on a jaunt together. I couldn’t.

“No, I don’t think so,” I said, and added something about grading.

She put a leg on top of mine, rested her chin on my chest, and looked at me. She was smiling, but I didn’t know how long I had.

“Fine,” I said. “Okay. Yes.”

THE FOLLOWING FRIDAY, the day set for the trip, a beat-up red Opel honked for me at nine. Amy introduced me to Beth and then Wesley, whom I gave a shy glance. His face was red and pitted and his upper lip bore a sparse brown mustache. We’d been at war for eight years and I hadn’t yet talked to a soldier. I was assigned the passenger seat, and Amy and Beth sat together in the back, Macy buckled into her car seat directly behind me.

As Wesley guided us out of town he didn’t speak, but once we were on the highway he started talking. He drifted from the trips he and Beth had taken to Cologne and Neuschwanstein to karaoke at the Irish Pub to run-ins between his fellow soldiers and the polizei—one soldier caught flying up the autobahn, drunk, throwing beer bottles at the cars coming the other direction, another found passed out in his car, four in the morning, beneath a traffic light deep in the Wiesbaden suburbs. “Don’t fuck with the polizei,” he warned me. “They’ll fine your ass.” I waited for an opportune moment to mention my father’s combat in Vietnam. Those rare times I felt guilt over not going to war in this our decade of troubles, he was my excuse. He did that, so I didn’t have to—he’d actually said that to me once. But Wesley didn’t bring up Iraq or Afghanistan, though Amy told me he’d been to both, and at the end of each of his stories I simply smiled and laughed politely.

We arrived at Rothenburg and found the place already filled with tourists, half of them American: I spotted their SUVs in the parking lot, imported Explorers and Escalades with Frankfurt or Munich plates, the owners army officers or expat bankers. We squeezed the Opel between twin Denalis and walked in through a gate in the town wall; I pushed Macy’s empty stroller while Amy held her. At the platz a brass band played in the Christmas market and crowds swelled like tides beneath the high old buildings. We bought sausages and glühwein from a booth, then started the cycle through the tidy medieval streets. A couple of times Amy took pictures of me and Macy in front of a fountain or one of the leaning, half-timbered houses. I wasn’t sure what to do with her—I’d only seen Macy a couple of times since that day in Langgasse—and I held her awkwardly against my chest or rested my palm on her head as she squirmed next to my leg. By the third picture I began to get nervous. I said something to Amy about it and she gave me a blank look and said, “I just want some pictures.” I let it go.

“Jason would have loved this,” Wesley said, stopped in front of a shop selling souvenir knives. Jason was Amy’s ex-husband, from whom, she’d told me, she’d divorced a year ago. It was through him Amy and Beth had met, army wives at Fort Bragg. But Wesley’s eyes were red. I looked to Amy and she was teary, too, and at that I felt the bottom of my stomach sink open. Amy caught me looking and said, “Please.” I stayed quiet and we left soon after.

WHEN THE RED OPEL PULLED UP TO MY APARTMENT, Amy got out. She kissed the still-sleeping Macy on the forehead, then asked Beth, “You’re sure you don’t mind?” and Beth waved her toward me.

Once inside she told me what I’d already figured out, that Jason was dead, not divorced. He’d been killed a year ago in Afghanistan, she said. I started to say something, though I had no idea what, and she stopped me before I could.

“I needed to talk to you about all this tonight anyway. You get to stay ninety days without a visa.”

“Okay,” I said.

“My ninety days are about to run out.”

I was a little stunned. “Really?” I said.

“I’ve got ten days—I have to leave a week from Monday. But if we got married—” She broke off, glanced away.

“I’m already married,” I said.

“You could divorce.”

“That would take time.”

“Only thirty days in Michigan. I looked it up. I could go home, then come back once you were divorced.”

I felt the blood drain from my body. The newly risen ghost of Amy’s husband sat in the corner of the room. “My visa’s only good until August,” I said, to say something, even though she knew I’d been offered an extra year. Despite myself, I’d kept the university here happy. Unlike my predecessors, I had resisted throwing stacks of student essays in the toilet or claiming that people in the department were passing secret messages to me in their lectures.

“It’s not just about staying here,” she said. “I like you. I’ve been thinking about us, together.”

She seemed her prettiest then, looking up at me. She shook with a slight tremor—she was fighting hard. And the truth was, I liked her, too. But as I stood over her, the twelve years that usually disappeared when we were together returned. All I could see was her watching her old reality TV shows dubbed in German, Macy throwing a fit, and me, who liked a silent apartment filled with nothing but the noise that drifted from the street, trying to read behind a shut door.

I told her she was being ridiculous, this wasn’t what I’d wanted, and how could I trust her after today? For a moment her face remained still, but then she bolted up, hand jerked to hide her eyes, and rushed out. I stood there and watched her go.

NEARLY A MONTH LATER, the week after Christmas, I flew to London, summoned by Clara. Her sister lived in the Surrey suburbs, and Clara had flown over to visit. She asked me to come for a day, and there wasn’t a way for me to say no. I took a late flight and spent the night in a bland, business travelers’ hotel near Heathrow that Clara’s sister’s husband, still technically my brother-in-law, booked for me with his points.

In the morning I took a cab to Windsor Great Park, where I was to meet Clara beside Virginia Water. The cab driver dropped me off in a parking lot, and beyond the lot spread the park, or one corner of it. People were out, walking dogs they’d dressed in raincoats and plaid quilted capes. The trees were lifeless, their bare limbs seemingly all that kept the gray, pressing clouds from tumbling to earth.

Clara was up ahead, her back to me as she watched the swans floating in the lake. I called to her, and she turned. There was her auburn hair, spilling out of her parka’s hood, there was her dainty pointed nose, red with cold. Seeing her, I felt the last months erased, as if I’d just come up from a dream.

“Do you want anything?” I asked, nodding at the concession cart a hundred yards away.

“Tea,” she said.

I’d been nervous ever since Clara called to ask me over, and as I waited for the tea and my hot chocolate I studied the cart’s case of British snacks and tried to think through what I might do next. I had a suspicion of what was happening, but still my mind refused to work.

After I gave Clara her tea we took the path that went to the right, up the eastern branch of the lake. For a while we said nothing and watched the trotting dogs. Then, as I was testing my hot chocolate—still scalding—Clara said, “Do you plan to move back in with me next summer?”

That had been the plan once, the idea that Germany would be a cure.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve been trying not to think about it.”

There was a pause. Then, with a changed, efficient tone I’d never heard from her before, she said, “Good. That’s all I needed to hear.”

I stopped, but she kept walking. I jogged to catch up with her. “What do you mean?”

“I’m going to file for divorce.”

As we walked she kept a few inches between us. I sipped my hot chocolate. It was cooler now.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll let you know what you need to do.”

In that moment I decided the last thing I wanted was to cause her more pain, so I told her I’d agree to whatever she asked.

We passed through a part of the path lined on both sides with chain-link fence. Behind the fence workmen had left tools and some kind of tractor.

“What have you been up to, anyway?” she said.

“Fucking a war widow,” I answered. I tried to smile, like it was some kind of joke, and only when I kept walking did I notice that this time she’d stopped. I turned and saw she’d started to cry. I went to her, but she batted me away. Dog walkers passed us, shifting their eyes.

“Really?” she said. “That’s what you’re going to say?”

I tried to put my arm around her, but she backed from me. “You don’t deserve anything,” she said, and the words cut like broken glass.

I FLEW BACK TO FRANKFURT. On the plane I tried an exercise whereby I emptied my mind bit by bit. It didn’t work.

From the airport I took the S-Bahn to Wiesbaden, and as we came to the Main I looked up, as I always do for rivers. I’d taken an early flight. The Main was still and narrow, and as the train turned to cross it the morning sun shot through the windows and the river suddenly glistened. Across from me two plump girls with spiked raven hair giggled over their cell phones, indifferent, their thick thighs stretching the weave of their matching leopard-print tights, their stout pimpled faces held close together. In the aisle a Turk or Romany, accordion folded shut and slung over his shoulder, shook his knitted change purse. I closed my eyes and listened as the bridge clacked beneath us. I felt Clara’s words, Amy’s silence, wounds beneath my skin. But the winter sun shone on my face and I said to myself: I am blameless. I said: I owe no one. I said: Surely something better has been promised me.

The Moor’s Origins

The earliest record we have of the black detective Jackson Hieronymus Burke—the Moor—is an advertisement he ran in several Berlin newspapers in 1873, promising discretion and modest fees. Nothing is known of his cases from this period, but, tracing the address given in the advertisement to one of the city’s poorer quarters (Prenzlauer Berg), we believe they would have been limited to the lowest kind of work: finding stolen dogs, tracking suspected adulterers. After the advertisement, Burke drops from history until the fall of 1876, when he leaps onto the scene with a single feat of deduction.

All of Berlin had been baffled by the disappearance of the renowned theater critic Wolfgang Metzger. The police searched the sewers, dug up his mistresses’ back gardens. They questioned actors whose abilities he had maligned, impresarios whose shows he had damned. Neither the body nor evidence of foul play was found. Then, two weeks later, a letter appeared in the newspaper: Metzger had not disappeared, but had murdered his twin, a wealthy hay merchant, and replaced him. The letter, signed by Burke, described how he had uncovered the truth when he visited the twin’s villa to offer his services. He’d been directed to the stables and, finding the man there, noticed the horses shying from his touch. “With that I understood all,” he added with the confident flourish he would keep for the rest of his career. The twin’s servants might not have recognized a difference between Metzger and his brother, nor the twin’s wife, but the horses, with their keen animal sense, had betrayed the critic, who had hoped, by impersonating his brother, to avoid his debtors.

The city was shocked by this revelation and amazed by its deliverer. Everyone had the same question on their lips: who was this man, and where had he come from? Even now we can only speculate. Burke never spoke of his past, nor of how he came to detection. One rumor holds that he was born a slave on a Texas sugar plantation in the early 1840s, another that he was the son of a New Orleans freedman. References in certain archives suggest that a black detective—called, simply, El Negrito—practiced in Havana during the Civil War, but no proof connects him to Burke. We only know that Burke was American, that he was in his thirties when he arrived in Berlin, and that at the start of his career—in which he would solve over seven hundred cases and be memorialized in dozens of dime novels—he already possessed powers to rival the French masters Vidocq and Devergie.

Soon Burke’s photograph began appearing in shops, alongside etchings of the stable scene and a pamphlet, by a hack named Frisch, promising to teach its readers the detective’s secrets. He was invited to dinners, asked to salons—it was now, in the flush of his first triumph, that a columnist for the
Zeitung,
remarking on Burke’s color, gave him his nickname by declaring him their Othello, their Moor.

His Appearance

One must be wary of the newspaper and dime-novel illustrations, which often colored him darker than he was, thickened his lips, bulged his eyes. He was of middle height—five feet seven inches tall—and possessed a slight paunch, a rather large brow, and a strong nose with a rounded tip. His eyes were hazel, his skin a deep chestnut, his mouth often shaped into a slight smile that, as the kaiser famously remarked, simply said, “I know.” He never cultivated a mustache, kept his hair cropped close.

As for his dress, he wore English-cut suits of either gray or black wool, his sole ornaments three watch fobs hung from a golden chain. The fobs never changed, and any schoolchild in Wilhelm I’s Berlin could name them: the gold ship’s wheel to commemorate the Rhine Barge Mystery, the miniature shield presented to him by the Munich police in honor of his role in solving the Dubbel Murders, and the platinum-mounted bear claw given to him by the Prince von Schlieffen after he rescued Christiana, the prince’s intended, from her gypsy kidnappers. He wore them at all times—whether he was pursuing a clue in the sewers or lecturing the Reichstag on the criminal mind—perhaps as a warning of his constancy to those who would oppose him.

His Rooms, Part 1

Not long after the Case of the Murdered Twin—when he began receiving regular commissions and collecting handsome fees—Burke moved from Prenzlauer Berg to Fasanenstrasse, on the far side of the Tiergarten. He occupied the entire fourth floor of his building. Rooms upon rooms circled the courtyard, and over the years he fitted them out to his exacting specifications. There were the main living quarters, of course, and the famous sitting room where he met his clients while reclining on his settee—to heighten the flow of blood to his brain, it was said. Then there were the rooms for his collections: one for the ordered cartons of lint and hair from the chief criminals of the Continent and Britain; one filled with jars of soils from around the world, which he employed in the identification of dirts found at crime scenes; and one for weapons of every description: blackjacks and saps, trays of bullets and blades, a kris from the Dutch East Indies, even an atlatl from the polar regions. The chief of these rooms was the library. There he made his experiments, and there he kept his famous blue-morocco volumes—a vast collection of books and pamphlets, ranging from studies of African beetle carapaces to treatises on the patterns of broken glass, used in the study of clues.

His Mounting Fame

With each new case (the Mystery of the Blue Hussar, the Theft of the Archbishop of Mainz’s Diamond Miter), his fame swiftly grew. German bakers began producing the Moor’s Torte, a coffee-flavored pastry studded with “clues” (sultanas), and Moor Clubs spread across the Continent and in England—members blackened their faces and were given the details of a crime that must be solved by the end of the afternoon. Soon Burke was maintaining correspondence with other men of note (Kalb Ali Khan the philosopher-nawab of Rampur, Lord Roscomb the industrialist, Oscar Agardh the Swedish Darwin), and in 1884 he was summoned to Japan by Emperor Mutsuhito to solve the Golden Crane Murders plaguing the imperial family.

By 1881 one could open the newspaper on any given day, anywhere on the Continent and even in the United States, and read about Burke—that he had recovered a stolen painting for the State Museum or hunted the vitriol thrower Kurtz, that he had been seen having champagne with an actress at Dressel’s or sitting in Prince von Ysenburg’s box at the opera, or that he had received some new recognition from the kaiser or beaten the Prince of Wales at billiards. One famous article recorded the foods Burke ate in order to discover which aided his thinking (plums and kidneys, the reporter decided), while a number of others provided phrenological analyses of his skull, citing the enlarged organs of Comparison and Human Nature as the seat of his mental prowess.

His Nemesis

In the course of his career, Burke battled many adversaries: the confidence man Reynolds, the assassin Fiori, the archspy Countess von Perlitz. But greatest and most dangerous of all was the shadowy crime broker Heinrich Bloch.

In the fall of 1886, six-year-old Liesl von Eberbach, the daughter of the interior minister, was stolen from her home. Within a day letters began arriving at the papers bearing blood-spotted scraps of her dress. The letters asked no ransom, made no demands, but warned the girl would be killed in a week’s time. None could understand the kidnappers’ motive, nor find the faintest trace of their whereabouts—the letters bore postmarks from around the empire. Liesl’s father called in Burke to investigate, and with only a water stain and a sample of dust he determined she was being held in the aquarium by two henchmen in the pay of Henri Guillard, the French ambassador’s attaché. Liesl was rescued, the city relieved, the interior minister supremely grateful.

But Burke was not satisfied. He recognized in the plan’s design a genius far beyond Guillard’s. Its purpose, in terrorizing Liesl’s father, was to force his resignation and cause the German government to fall. Burke couldn’t question Guillard—he hid himself in the embassy, claiming immunity—but when he tried the henchmen they gave him a name, Bloch. They never met the man, they said, nor knew who he was. But it seems they had told Burke enough. The next morning they were found murdered in their cells.

In the months and years that followed, Burke devoted himself to the study of Bloch, yet he discovered little about the fiend, why he turned to crime or how he came to dominate it. The bastard son of Joachim Bloch, spice merchant, and his Javanese mistress, Heinrich Bloch was given the running of his father’s spice house at a young age and used it as a front throughout his career. Living in the Nikolaiviertel as a simple burgher, Bloch kept a perfect cover. But Burke knew that Bloch arranged the bombing of Grand Duke Alexey’s carriage during his state visit, masterminded the Reichsbank Jewel Robbery, and plotted the mine collapse at Augsburg, in which a hundred men died. It was said that Bloch controlled a network of a thousand criminals in the city; that he was a past master of the bassoon, his instrument having once belonged to the only man he’d killed with his own hands; that as soon as he’d planned and seen the execution of a thousand crimes he would retire from the spice house and return to Java and live on a boat; that he demanded souvenirs from each of his terrible schemes and kept them in pine cabinets: a golden bolt from Alexey’s carriage, the preserved finger of one of the Reichsbank’s murdered clerks, a lump of bloodstained ore from Augsburg.

For six years Burke pursued Bloch but failed to prove his guilt in any crime. Some claim that Burke could have done so, but that he took a connoisseur’s pleasure in tracing each of Bloch’s plots and allowed him his freedom to ensure there would be more. Most, though, find such a suggestion preposterous. At the end of six years, in the winter of 1892, Bloch disappeared. The spice house was boarded up. Every trace of Bloch was gone. When Burke mentioned this to the papers, he said he suspected some new villainy but could not name it.

His Rooms, Part 2

A tantalizingly brief mention in a catalog of homes of the celebrated, published in 1890 and discovered only recently, describes a room in Burke’s house holding a dozen glass curios filled with ceramic blackamoors. “Some stand nobly, others ride steeds, and yet others kneel and bear gifts,” the catalog reads. “Blackamoors of all shapes and sizes, bareheaded or in turbans and fezes.” His clients sent them, which tells us much, but what tells us more is that he kept them. For all our research, Burke himself remains a mystery, yet here we have a clue. He had a passage of Pushkin engraved on a brass tablet and mounted beneath the central curio, which the catalog gives thus: “He felt that he was for them a kind of rare beast, a peculiar alien creature, accidentally brought into a world with which he had nothing in common.” He was perhaps not as at home in Berlin as is commonly assumed, and with this passage as a lens we can see traces of a deep melancholy in Burke’s dinners alone at the Café Bauer, his solitary trips to the shore.

There were yet other rooms whose contents we do not know, entire hallways unrecorded by history. Here speculation enters. Perhaps he had a dozen bedchambers, choosing among them depending upon his temper. Sometimes, thinking of Burke’s end, we picture him roaming the halls on a long night, never finding quite the right room.

His Love

Despite the invitations to hunting parties and long weekends at castles, or the occasional notice about his being seen with an actress, Burke’s life was solitary. He explained this as a necessity of his profession, claiming in one of his more famous maxims that a detective must form few attachments. But that did not mean his heart was immune to tender feelings. Through careful study, we have discovered evidence of a great passion.

In the summer of 1885 Burke was called to Wiesbaden to investigate a spate of jewel thefts. While pretending to be on holiday—attending the spa’s gatherings, circling the room with a glass of the waters—he met an Englishwoman named Olivia Ashdown. They were soon seen strolling through the Kurhaus Kolonnade and riding the funicular up the Neroberg, arms locked, engaged in long, close conversations. Never before had Burke so doted on a female. But the other bathers disapproved. Helmut Strauss, the noted horseman and one of Burke’s acquaintances, warned him that he went too far, that all were talking of his dark hands on her white bosom.

Burke promptly broke with Olivia, but after he solved the case (an elderly waiter was the thief ) he stayed in Wiesbaden for a week. Such lingering is unprecedented; he always returned swiftly to Berlin at a case’s conclusion, yet this time he retired to a cottage above the city and sent for champagne and lobsters. Though the newspaper accounts make no mention of Olivia, it takes little effort to determine their break had merely been a ruse. When Burke finally returned to Berlin, the papers reported his surprisingly happy demeanor. With these details we have reconstructed the week he must have spent with Olivia: the long mornings in bed, the tender suppers in dishabille.

The evidence of Burke’s relationship with Olivia is scant, but it weighs heavily. Three months after Wiesbaden he was dining at Dressel’s when he received word of another rash of thefts, this time at Badenweiler. He left immediately, taking the express. Yet no record exists of the crimes at Badenweiler, nor at any of the other spa towns to which he was summoned every three months, and where he would stay for a week, lodged in seclusion outside town. He never commented on these “cases,” except to call them delightful.

His Greatest Case

How does one compare Burke’s cases, weigh the greatness of his reasoned deduction in one against that required for another?

The Wannsee Murder reportedly gave him the most fits. A body was found in an industrialist’s hunting lodge, arranged on a bier of pages torn from directories and volumes of Goethe. No one could identify the dead man, who was stripped of all his clothes. Burke took months to solve the case. The oddest is the Ware Killing, in which the murderer hired Burke to solve both crimes. Or is it the Bamberg Mystery, in which the bludgeoned duke seemed to come back to life? Then there are the cases he solved in single sittings, like the Theft of the Frankenheim Clock, the Affair of the Red Letter, the Case of the Hidden Blackmail, and his recovery of Müller’s collection of rare ferns, stolen in the light of day. Is that Burke at his most brilliant, his mind so keen he needn’t leave his study? Such cases are too numerous to count. The case that caught the most international attention was that of the Taskmaster: an underclerk in a shipping office who had organized an army of women—the daughters of Duisburg’s chief families—by sending them letters threatening them with slanders. He had ordered them to set fires for neither profit nor revenge, but for his pleasure alone.