Cesare Page 10

  It wasn’t his page boys he had to fear, not even the Gestapo, or a Spitzel in the Abwehr itself, but naval intelligence; if his own admirals ever discovered that he had spent precious hours saving Jewish souls rather than gathering information on Hitler’s madmen, they would abandon Wolfe, let him sit forever, or hire some Swede to assassinate him. But he couldn’t sit idle while ghoulish bureaucrats in the Adlon’s bar talked about the fortune they had earned selling the property of Jews thrown into the camps, or while Gestapo agents sang obscene songs about the stench of Jewish children in Scheunenviertel. He would have run howling through the hotel if he couldn’t have helped some of these children.

  He grew reckless. He had his own military uniform sent from Sweden. It hung in his closet at the Adlon; the page boys had it cleaned; the porter polished his insignias and his black regulation shoes. The hotel’s female house detectives, who were Gestapo spies, searched his quarters routinely, once or twice a week. But nothing was ever said about his uniform; it even disappeared for a few days, and suddenly was back again, in its leather bag. What could the Gestapo expect from a mongrel nation that chose a Jewish intelligence man to sit in Berlin with all his insignias in the closet?

  But the presence of that uniform kept him sane. And Wolfe couldn’t have known that the staff at the Adlon, its front line, didn’t see him as a lunatic American Berliner, but as a prince-in-waiting who might redeem them at war’s end. So it guarded the Adlon’s future prince and his uniform. And smiling all of a sudden, he sang to Erik, who was still sitting on the settee.

  “Cesare, Tilli the Toiler says you’ve dropped her for some other damsel. She’s mad as hell. Says she might shoot out the window of your suite from her perch on the Farben’s roof. Of course, I’m forever grateful. She’s fallen into my arms. I cherish her love bites.”

  But Cesare wasn’t listening. And the lieutenant understood why. He was staring at a blond apparition who’d wandered into the bar with a whole company of colonels from the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS. He’d seen that apparition before. She was wearing a backless gown of silver sequins. He could follow the apparition’s shoulder blades and the delightful bumps of her spine. He remembered now. She’d had a fight with Baron von Hecht in this very bar before the Gestapo kidnapped him and held the baron in the Sammellager on Iranische Strasse. But she hadn’t been in silver sequins. She was the baron’s only daughter, Lisalein, married to an SS colonel who once ran a department store.

  She was also a Mischling, a half Jewess with a Nazi husband. The Fürher didn’t seem to know what to do with his Mischlinge—wipe them out like cockroaches or let them live under the Nazis’ bloodred banner. His racial laws were stuck in their own Night and Fog. His Office of Racial Purity could measure Jewish noses, trace back lineage a thousand years, drag “contaminated” grandparents out of the closet, but it couldn’t seem to calculate the innocence or the guilt of a Jewish baron’s daughter who could have leapt from the League of German Maidens, whose nose and ears and sea green eyes mocked Hitler’s racial laws and lent her all the seductive mystery of the Lorelei.

  This Lorelei of Unter den Linden must have had a little too much to drink. She moved among her company of colonels with a crooked swagger and had to keep from tripping over their polished boots. It took the lieutenant another moment to recall that Lisa-Lorelei was nearsighted and could barely see what was in front of her face. But that didn’t prevent her from showing a gruff affection to her colonels. She went from one to the other, fondling ears and noses. A Wehrmacht colonel with very large ears tried to reach for her rump, but she swatted his hand away.

  “Darling,” she growled, “I’m not a piece of Fleisch. The Wehrmacht must have its own butcher shops. That’s where you’ll find your rump steak.”

  But she’d ventured too far along her line of colonels, tripped over a bar stool, and fell into Cesare’s lap. She stared into his dark eyes with the same truculence. But she wasn’t enough of an actress to mask her own deep surprise.

  “What are you doing here, Captain? Did you follow me into the Adlon? Are you spying on me for Admiral Canaris and his monsters at the Abwehr?”

  The lieutenant was even blinder than Lisa-Lorelei. He should have sensed that Erik was in love with the blond apparition, that her spectacle had pained him: Erik was about to throw her off his lap. But a berlinisch American agent who had squatted in Hitler’s hotel for two years couldn’t have survived without a touch of clairvoyance: He imagined all the carnage inside the Adlon, imagined Erik’s demise at the hands of the colonels. And so he played the buffoon. He bumped into Lisa-Lorelei, swept her off Erik’s lap, and broke her fall as she landed in the Adlon’s little sea of carpets.

  “Gnädige Frau,” he said, “can you ever forgive me?”

  She slapped his face, but she was looking at Erik, not at him; he didn’t even exist. “Werewolf,” she said, still looking at Erik. “One of these days I’ll rip out your rotten heart.”

  Then she rose off the carpets like some miraculous flying fish with silver scales and disappeared into the soft tundra at the edge of the bar.

  The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem

  11

  THE LIGHT FROM THE MAGNIFICENT DOME in the main hall left spangled lines that could cut into the Adlon’s enormous square pillars and bleach the color of their burnt yellow marble. And for a moment Erik thought how the Kaiser must have felt when he marched through the revolving doors into his cathedral for the first time. This was the Kaiser’s home, not the dusty palace ten doors away. And Wilhelm must have danced in the Adlon’s ballroom under its own spangled light, with two orchestras on silvered bandstands that had to compete for a Kaiser’s love.

  The more he could reminisce about a Kaiser he had never met, the less he had to think about Lisalein. The page boys pawed at him near the elevator bank.

  “Herr Kapitän, how can we help? Are you looking for the Frau in the silver dress? She went upstairs.”

  “Where?” he had to wheedle like a little lost boy. “To the baron’s old suite?”

  “No, mein Herr. That’s impossible. Herr Adlon could not have an idle suite on the first floor. It’s wartime. Rooms are also rationed. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem now sits in the baron’s suite. He never leaves the hotel. The Engländers call him a gangster and a pirate. But he is the Führer’s friend. He treats us well, mein Herr. He lines our jacket pockets with gold coins from Jerusalem. The coins are heavy, but we are still obliged to the Mufti and his men. It is most unusual to see Arabs in a German uniform, mein Herr. But we aren’t sure where the Frau with the Silber went. She took the stairs. She is very beautiful, no? And even more beautiful when she cries. Then her eyes begin to glow under the lamps.”

  Erik had to wonder if this page boy was the new Thomas Mann—he talked like a novelist, with all the colors of a chameleon and a novelist’s love of detail. But Erik couldn’t stop and chat about the robes and turbans the Mufti wore, or how the Mufti’s cooks compared to the Adlon’s own kitchen staff.

  Erik strode up the marble staircase, decided he would search every floor. But he didn’t have much maneuverability, even in an SS officer’s uniform. He was stopped on the stairwells by the Mufti’s own bodyguard of Arab Gestapo agents. They weren’t unkind, only distrustful, since the Engländers had put a price on the Mufti’s head and might have a hired killer in the main hall of the Adlon. But how could Erik prove he was with the secret service? Abwehr agents had no identity card, not even a proper bank account. They were the victims of the very masks they had to wear, and all their multiple legends. Few civilians had ever heard of Admiral Canaris and the Abwehr. And most members of the Wehrmacht couldn’t have said that the Fox’s Lair was on the Tirpitz embankment. It was Uncle Willi’s secret cove.

  Erik would have had to strangle every Arab Gestapo agent on every stairwell if he meant to track Lisalein to her secret cove at the Adlon, but he did find a way out of his dilemma. He happened to have a green Gestapo card in his vest pocket with his photograph and the
Gestapo’s own seal. It satisfied the Arab agents that Erik was not an Engländer and could wander wherever he wished. But his wanderings brought him nowhere. He searched the maids’ closets, went up and down the fire stairs, hoping to hear the noise of Lisa’s heels on the carpets; Erik even unlocked the bathrooms in the attic with a skeleton key, but couldn’t find a whiff of Lisa’s perfume or a trace of her silky blond hair.

  His trek had exhausted him. He decided to take a nap in the Abwehr’s suite on the third floor. It looked out upon Pariser Platz and the great green expanse of the Tiergarten; he liked to boast that he could hear the tigers prowl in their cages, but it was a lie. The tigers had been removed from the zoo, not because of the constant threat of Allied bombings, but because it had become too expensive to feed them. Berlin’s tigers didn’t have ration stamps. But no one could tell him where the tigers had gone and when they would be back.

  He opened the outer door of his room, and standing there in that dark well between the outer and inner door was Lisalein.

  “Darling,” she growled, “aren’t you going to invite me in? How long does a Mädschen have to wait for her lover in an SS uniform? It becomes you, darling. You look divine in black.”

  “Frau Valentiner, it’s the exact same uniform your husband wears.”

  “Shut up and open the door,” she said. “I didn’t come here to talk about my husband.”

  Erik unlocked the inner door and Lisa leapt past him like some rapid-fire machine while she shucked off her silver sequins and scrutinized the Empire mirrors, the Chippendale chests, and the Abwehr’s hammered bronze bed.

  “They’ve cheated you, darling. This isn’t Frau Adlon’s very best stuff. It must have all gone to the Grand Mufti. Did you know that Father met him once—in Jerusalem? He was most gracious to a Jewish baron, offered to make him an honorary consul, or close to that. Papa could have been a little pasha.… What’s taking you so long? Why haven’t you undressed?”

  “I want my uniform to glide against your naked body,” he growled like a ventriloquist in Lisa’s throaty voice. He had never been so perverse, not even with the high-priced prostitutes whom he himself handled for the Abwehr, Spiders who could trap almost any man. He slept with these Spinnen, and sometimes they brought out an incredible cruelty in Cesare, encouraged it even, relished it, but he’d never slapped a Spider, and he longed to slap Lisa again and again. He stared at the blondness between her legs, at the rise and fall of her navel, at the soft blond silk of her arms.

  “I’ll make you my Spider,” he said. “You’ll work for me. I’ll find all your clients.”

  “And how much will I be paid? It’s wartime, darling. There’s a terrible inflation.”

  “I’ll pay you nothing, not a pfennig.”

  “Ah,” she said, “that’s the kind of job I like.”

  He shook her shoulders. “No more grand entrances with the Waffen-SS.”

  “Darling, I did it for Papa. I need all the colonels and generals on my side. Someone has to get him out of that infernal hotel on Iranische Strasse. I sent you to him. What happened? He’s still there.”

  “Ask him. He wasn’t so anxious to leave. I offered to carry him out on my back. He wouldn’t go.”

  “But you were supposed to charm him, darling. You’re the magician. You turn all your enemies into dung beetles and flies. Couldn’t you have spared a minor miracle for Papa?”

  He didn’t believe her, not a word of it. She had always been able to weave a spell around him from the moment they had met. He’d become her private page with a fountain pen. He’d never understand why she and the baron hadn’t ransomed themselves and bought their way out of Germany. The Nazis had seized Die Drei Krokodile, and still the baron stayed. He’d lost his villa in the Grunewald to a German general, and the Grand Mufti now occupied his suite at the Adlon, where some barber with a Nazi pin in his lapel had fawned on him and spat behind his back. There were Party pins all over the Adlon, and yet the baron, who could have bought half the Pariser Platz, bumped into a multitude of pins like a blind man. It left a metallic taste on Erik’s tongue; it was one more legend, a mask the baron had decided to wear. And Lisalein crept right under that mask.

  He tied her arms to the bedpost with the strings from one of the Adlon’s white robes, pushed into her chest with the buttons of his uniform, but the more he tried to humiliate her, the more he humiliated himself. And his anger turned to tenderness. He kissed the marks on her breasts that his buttons had made. He didn’t even have to confess his love. She could read the turmoil in his dark eyes, the terror that love could bring.

  She couldn’t clutch his ears while her hands were tied.

  “Darling,” she said, “kill me now, before I kill you.”

  But she was also crying. And she fell asleep in Erik’s arms, with her hot breath on his shoulder.

  WHEN HE WOKE UP WITH HIS OWN YAWNING FACE in the mirror, she wasn’t there. Had she untied herself with the help of some local Houdini? He had to console himself with the Adlon’s bathroom, which was like a battleship, with its own heated towel rack and a marble tub that could have accommodated a team of polar bears. He couldn’t find his uniform, or his necktie and his shoes. He cursed and opened the inner door of his suite. The uniform hung on the doorknob from a golden hook. His clothes must have been pressed and cleaned by the Adlon’s midnight tailors, his shoes shined by the barber’s apprentice. His black tie gleamed. His shirt was crackling white. He put it on with fumbling fingers. The collar was like a silk napkin against the hairs on his neck.

  He went downstairs to the Adlon’s inner court, which had its own fountain with the luscious whish of a waterfall. This inner court and garden often served as a breakfast room, summer and winter. Most of the Adlon’s clientele had breakfast in bed, with or without their mistresses. But Erik hated to eat alone in a little world of brutal red drapes.

  And so he sat in this garden with its potted plants, the sound of water in his ears. He wasn’t the only guest this morning. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem arrived in his robes and tall white fez, surrounded by his bodyguard of Arab Gestapo agents. He was close to fifty, with a graying beard and large round ears, but he looked much younger, almost like an inquisitive boy. It was the Mufti himself who beckoned Erik to his table.

  And Erik was bewildered by the Mufti’s mysterious cuisine. What could his cooks from Jerusalem have prepared in the Adlon’s kitchen? The waiters served him shirred eggs in a gold chafing dish, a rack of rye toast, and peppermint tea. Not wanting to offend the Mufti, Erik asked for the same thing. And the two of them sat with chafing dishes and racks of toast that resembled the torture machine at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, which could squeeze a man’s knuckles until nothing was left.

  “You must give my regards to Uncle Willi. I helped him establish his outpost in Jerusalem, but he has not been so kind to me.”

  “I don’t understand, Holiness. How did the Abwehr fail you?”

  The Mufti rubbed his beard. “Holiness. I like that. But I am not Pope Pius, with his long, long nose. I am a much simpler man.”

  “Then what should I call you?”

  “Excellency will be enough—I preferred Rome. The climate suited me, and the red sky. I could dream I was still in Africa. Have you ever been to Rome, Herr Cesare?”

  “No, Excellency. I have not been granted that privilege.”

  “Then you must believe me. Rome has an African sky, red in the morning, like the stone of a succulent peach. But Herr Hitler said that he could not protect me in Rome. The British had spies everywhere and a hundred paid assassins. I was told that I wouldn’t have lasted another month. And the Führer flew me to Berlin on his private plane. I would be safe at the Adlon, he said, safe in the heart of Germany, far from Il Duce’s corrupt and incompetent secret service. Then why can’t the Abwehr, with all its agents, protect me? Why has Uncle Willi allowed an assassin inside this hotel?”

  “You must not believe every word of the Gestapo.”

  The Grand Mu
fti patted his lips with one of the Adlon’s enormous napkins. He was still smiling, but it wasn’t meant as a slight to Erik himself, since his own secret service had told him stories of the Abwehr’s magician, who could murder a man without even entering a room.

  “If I had confidence in the Gestapo, Herr Cesare, I would not be sitting here with you. There’s a mole at the Bulgarian embassy who is in touch with British intelligence. He is very loyal to my people. The mole assures me that the Engländers have penetrated the lobby of this hotel. They have an assassin inside the Adlon.”

  “Excellency, I wonder if this mole was paid by the Engländers to misinform you. They are marvels at misinformation. We’re amateurs compared to them.”

  “At first, I thought this assassin might be you,” said the Mufti, with a bit of shirred egg in his mouth. “I hope you will forgive me—one of my men was in your room all night, behind the drapes. We had to be certain that you weren’t plotting with the Jewess.”

  Erik’s mouth turned bitter and dry, and the Grand Mufti seemed to have a moment of alarm. “The baron’s daughter,” he said, “Frau Valentiner. We did not intend to pry. And we were the ones who collected your uniform and had it cleaned.” He thrust his knife and fork away. “I cannot eat such tasteless food.”

  Erik could feel his temples pound. He was no longer listening to the Adlon’s waterfall. He had to live and die according to the Abwehr’s alliances, but in another world he would have knocked off the Mufti’s tall white hat.

  “Excellency, you brought your own cook from Jerusalem. You didn’t have to eat baked eggs in a pot.”

  “Ah, but I am enough of an oddity at Berlin’s best hotel. And when I sit down to breakfast with a Berliner, I must pluck at the Adlon’s menu like a falcon in captivity. You will help us, won’t you, Herr Cesare?”

  Erik stood up and bowed to the Grand Mufti while the Mufti’s men formed a shield around him.