Фолькер Кучер: Goldstein

Alex heard a male voice close by. ‘Look at that mess. Let’s hope they haven’t escaped.’

‘They’re still in the building somewhere,’ said another. ‘I can feel it.’

The cops had discovered the display cabinets, distracting them for a moment. She took a deep breath before stretching an arm towards the button.

The door slid open with a soft pling. Not soft enough.

‘Stop, police!’ someone shouted. ‘Put your hands in the air and show yourselves!’

Alex pulled Benny into the open lift and pressed one of the top buttons. At least she knew how these things worked, thanks to Wertheim. The cops were already coming around the corner, shouting something like ‘stay where you are’, when the door finally closed and the lift began its ascent.

Thank God!

First things first, get onto a higher floor, distance themselves from their pursuers. It would take time for the police to get another lift down to the ground floor. She looked at Benny. At last they could talk again.

‘Shit,’ he said. ‘What are the pigs doing here?’

‘Maybe we set off an alarm.’

‘More likely they were expecting us. Waiting to catch us red-handed.’

‘They’ll have to find us first.’

‘True,’ Benny grinned. ‘I always knew you were a dab hand at escaping, Alex, but where did you learn how to use a lift?’

‘There was a lift boy at Wertheim who had the hots for me.’

He nudged her in the side and laughed, even though it hadn’t been a joke. She had almost paid for that episode with the job she had lost half a year later anyway.

The lift came to a halt and the doors opened. ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, we have reached the fifth floor,’ she said.

‘Shouldn’t we go up one?’

‘Yes, but via the stairs. Then the pigs will start looking on the wrong floor.’

Benny nodded. ‘It’s best we split up. You go up one, I’ll go down one.’

‘Split up?’

‘We don’t know how many there are. To have any chance, we need to separate.’

He sounded like a general before battle. If the situation hadn’t been so serious, she would have laughed.

‘Fine,’ she said. ‘And then what?’

‘No idea. Get out of here somehow. There must be a few options in a place like this.’

‘OK. When shall we meet?’

‘Not till we’re outside. The Märchenbrunnen. At the top of every hour.’

‘Good luck, then,’ she said. ‘See you on the outside.’ She looked at him for a final time before running upstairs to the sixth floor. Their footsteps sounded further and further apart.

At the top of the stairs she paused in front of the lift door. It was only a matter of time before the night watchman switched on the sixth floor lights but, for now, it was still dark. For the first time that evening she made use of her torch, shining a light on the numbered displays above the doors. The lift on the far right was already on the way up, now passing the second floor. They were on the move. No time to lose.

Alex burst onto the shop floor in search of another escape route or, at the very least, a place to hide. Her torch beam passed over red-white floor tiles and empty glass counters: the KaDeWe snack bar, heart of the new grocery section. She crossed the floor, moving past shelves full of jam jars until, suddenly, there was nowhere else to go. She looked for an opening in the whitewashed plywood wall whose flimsiness was disguised by rows of shelves. Finally, behind a sales counter, she found an inconspicuous little door with a simple ward lock that was easy to open. She slipped inside and found a stack of planks. The place looked like a building site. She crossed the room and found a door behind which was a staircase leading upwards.

She didn’t know which way to turn, only that she couldn’t fall into the hands of her pursuers. That had been her number one rule since living on the streets: never let the cops get you! For half a year she had been scared stiff they might pick her up and hold her responsible for Beckmann’s death. Or, worse still, give her a good grilling and, in the process, discover it was her brother Karl who had shot that fucking Nazi dead; that she had just stood by and watched. Sometimes she thought it was all her fault: that she had turned her brother into a murderer, only to feel every fibre in her being protest. Because if it wasn’t for all that Red Front bullshit, Karl would never have owned a gun in the first place.

But he did own a gun, and he had fired it.

Alex switched off the torch and listened. Voices, no doubt about it, and they were growing louder. They were combing the sixth floor. Of course: they weren’t so stupid as to be deceived by the lift below. There was a flicker and then the light came on here too. Instinctively Alex eschewed the cover of the building materials and retreated inside the dark stairwell. What must the pedestrians on the street below be thinking, seeing all the floors in KaDeWe lit up just before midnight?

She put her bag over her shoulders and climbed the narrow, dark staircase, desperate to get away before the cops discovered the plywood wall and decided to look behind it.

Climbing through two attic floors she came upon a locked door that posed no problem for her skeleton key. A cold wind blew in her face. She was outside again, on a roof garden above the city. The Gedächtniskirche rose dark out of a sea of houses, and lights flashed in all colours from the urban canyons below. Traffic noise was no longer muffled by the walls of the store. The beep of a horn reminded her that life was waiting below, freedom too. How to get there? The wind was still blowing in her face, letting her know that she had ventured onto foreign terrain, and the cut on her hand was throbbing. She leaned over the parapet and looked down. The KaDeWe logo lit up the darkness, casting neon light on a steep roof with dormer windows. No chance of getting down that way. She prayed that the cops wouldn’t get it into their heads to look up here. Who would be stupid enough to escape onto the roof? Well, Alexandra Reinhold, for one, but the cops couldn’t know that.

Somehow she had to get past them, go down, right down to the bottom and out. She returned to the stairwell, closed the door behind her and stayed still for a moment, listening. Nothing. Everything was still dark. Only when she was certain that the coast was clear did she slowly descend the stairs, step by step and, having arrived below, open the door leading back into the light. The voices could no longer be heard. Had they left? There was no one by the stack of planks, but it was strange that they weren’t looking here. They had left the light on. Alex crept towards the plywood wall and peered through a narrow crack.

There was someone by the lifts. The cops didn’t even have to search the whole building, it was enough to monitor the exits.

She retreated towards the rear of the construction area. Carefully she opened one of the windows on the western side and was startled by how loud the noise suddenly was. Hopefully it wouldn’t reach the lifts. She stretched her head out into the night air, which smelled of petrol and rainclouds, and looked around. Four metres below she could see the balcony that extended around nearly the entire fifth floor of the building, and beyond it the gaping chasm of Passauer Strasse. She could hang on to the window ledge, lower herself down as far as possible and then jump. She could make it. As she was assessing the risks, she saw a figure huddled in a window recess on the balcony. Benny.

The cops had driven the poor boy outside too. He didn’t see her, simply crouched in his hiding place, keeping the door in view. Alex closed the window. How were they going to get out of here in one piece?

The cut on her hand was still throbbing. She opened a door on the south side. Again, it was dark. Only when she was certain that she couldn’t hear footsteps or voices did she switch her torch back on and enter a long corridor. An office wing, everything new, the walls smelling of fresh plaster. Slowly she made her way along the corridor, ignoring doors on both sides, before reaching a turn to the left, perhaps leading to another stairwell. She switched off her torch after noticing a faint gleam of light from a window at the end of the corridor. Outside she caught sight of a firewall, which must have looked out onto the access yard.