Cesare Read online

  A violent shiver snaked through the admiral’s body. He sat down and drank from Erik’s glass of water. “Männe, we will settle with Joachim, but not now. You will smile at the Death’s-Heads, dance with their wives. If you don’t, they’ll never let Emil out of Berlin. And I want to save the little baron.”

  The admiral stood up, stroked Erik’s cheek as he might have done with a child, and walked out of the room with Commander Stolz.

  THE ABWEHR’S OWN TAILORS HAD COME to the Krankenhaus with a splendid tie and shoes; they’d woven his initials into a silk shirt; his suit had been smuggled out of Shantung years ago and sat in one of the Abwehr’s closets. It was perfect for Erik’s christening, his bon voyage. The tailors stood on tiny ladders that they themselves had brought, smoothed out the wrinkles in Erik’s Shantung suit, while one of the sisters shaved him. He couldn’t bear to look at himself in the mirror; he had the complexion of clay. The Abwehr’s assassin had become a clay man.

  An Abwehr chauffeur escorted him downstairs, a seaman second class. There were craters in the garden, holes that looked like gigantic pockmarks; the cows had disappeared. The seaman second class took him to the limousine parked on Iranische Strasse and dug a red rose into his lapel.

  “It comes from one of our hothouses, Herr Kapitän. The admiral had it flown in from Spain, with his strawberries.”

  Erik almost smiled. “Uncle Willi can’t live without his strawberries.”

  “He does it for the dogs, sir. They love all that sweet pulp.”

  They rode down from Wedding. It was an afternoon in April, with a chill that swept the air. Some of the trees were still winterish, without a leaf. Others had begun to bloom, with random pink and red blossoms that reminded him of a peacock’s tail.…

  The Adlon’s page boys and wartime guests stared at the clay man, as if someone were about to knight him. Erik ached so much that he could barely march from the main hall to the Rembrandt Room, Hitler’s favorite salon. It was a world of Empire mirrors with dasmask on the walls, and chandeliers made of pure cystal. There were even faux Rembrandts planted in the salon, portraits of the painter himself in a floppy hat. But Erik dreamt of Goya’s Saturn devouring his son. He had seen that painting on his last mission to Madrid. Saturn’s black eyes were on fire. Erik clung to that image. He, too, wanted to devour—Saturn’s skinny legs could have been his own.

  There was wine and food on the center table; herring and salami that must have come out of the Leibstandarte’s special rations; there was kuchen and meat pies, pigs’ knuckles and the Adlon’s best champagne. And Erik had to wander into a sea of faces. Frau Hedda had come to welcome him with her dachshunds. There were also the same commandos who had knocked him senseless underneath the Schwesternheim, had stolen away with Lisa and the baron, shot them in the neck, set their corpses on fire, and buried them somewhere in Sachsenhausen forest. They rushed at Erik, like members of the same Fussball team, jostled him with affection.

  “Good hunting, Kapitän. Bring us back Herr Roosevelt in his wheelchair.”

  All of Berlin seemed to know about his secret mission. And he wanted nothing more than to devour these Death’s-Heads. And then their chief executioner, Joachim, spun him around. Erik winced; suddenly, the clay man had bones of brittle glass.

  “Dear Erik, you must forgive me. Would you have preferred a public trial? They did not suffer, and we had to get rid of them. I let them have their submariners. Why should my commandos care about men and women hiding in some hole? Jews were meant to grovel under the ground. But they shouldn’t have interfered with the factory raids.… Tell me that you forgive me, Herr Magician, or I might have bad dreams.”

  Erik would have to smile and smile and be like a villain, as Hamlet had done. He would have to wear his antic face, or he’d never survive this little party and summon the strength to murder Joachim and his men.

  “Forgive you,” he said, and pressed deeper into that maelstrom. He had to greet the Müller twins, Franz and Fränze, who had trained with him at the SS officers’ school, and who skirted between the Abwehr and the Death’s-Heads. They were sworn to Colonel Joachim, not to Uncle Willi. But he had gone on several missions with them; the Müller twins had even saved his life in Budapest, when two Soviet agents had nearly strangled him. They’d come from a family of acrobats, and had grown up in a caravan. Fränze could barely read or write. She’d joined the League of German Maidens but had been expelled after she broke the back of a farmer who had tried to fondle her.

  Both twins were as dark as blackbirds; Franz was slow-witted compared to his sister. He had to count on his fingers. But he was six feet tall, and as lithe as anyone Erik had ever seen. The Müller twins moved like their own little family of acrobats; they seemed to spin all the while they walked. They would have joined their uncle’s circus had there been no Hitler and no war. Fränze was much more ambitious than her brother. She had pleaded with Erik on their missions to help her with her own erratic penmanship. He was patient with Fränze, taught her as best he could to spell. She plucked off her clothes in the middle of a lesson, assuming he wanted to sleep with her. But he couldn’t summon up the least desire for her herculean body and rough, masculine face. She never forgave Erik, and neither did Franz. They were much more aloof on their next missions. But now they were assigned to the same submarine as Erik. They would be crossing the Atlantic with him as Abwehr agents. He couldn’t misread their mean little eyes. They were his Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, put there to cancel him in the middle of the voyage.

  They didn’t pretend. That’s what he liked about the Müller twins. They would warn him in advance.

  “Erik,” Fränze said, “you might get seasick. I think you should hide in the submarine base. Don’t come on board the Milchkuh.”

  The admiral wasn’t going to borrow an attack boat with torpedoes, or even a training vessel, but a Milchkuh, one of the old, haggard cows of the submarine fleet that carried no torpedoes or torpedo tubes, but one pathetic cannon, and were used as refueling boats. This milk cow would have no extra fuel, and wouldn’t rendezvous with another submarine. It would stick to the surface as much as it could. And it would be Erik’s iron coffin.

  “Fränze,” he said. “I’ve never been on board a milk cow. It will be my maiden voyage.”

  Franz said nothing; he let his sister talk. They lived together, slept in the same bed, and if the Müller twins made love, it must have been like marvelous acrobats. But Franz did start to talk. The Milchkuh must have disturbed him. Suddenly, he didn’t want to play an assassin. And Erik knew, even before the voyage, that it would be a fatal flaw. Franz might jump into the void with his eyes open.

  “Kapitän,” he said, “it’s not Uncle Willi who’s sending us to accompany you.”

  “I know,” Cesare said.

  “Then why did you volunteer for such a suicide mission?”

  “I want to see America.”

  “You are mistaken. You cannot get to America from a Milchkuh.”

  “But we shouldn’t discourage him,” Fränze said. “Our Erik is a dreamer.”

  She was the dangerous one, as supple and efficient as a dirk. Franz would be a blink behind Erik, planning out his moves. He would have to keep brother and sister apart on board the Milchkuh, wedge his way between them. First Franz, and then Fränze. He wasn’t frightened of the Müller twins. And it unsettled them to see that bravado of Cesare the somnambulist, who would welcome the Milchkuh as his coffin, since he slept in a coffin every night.

  And Erik did have an ally—the captain of the tub, Peter Kleist, the most celebrated submarine ace of the war. He sank more Allied tonnage and British corvettes than any other U-boat commander. But he fell into disgrace during the summer of ’42. He’d been declared “lost at sea” with all his crew, and then reappeared several months later, in his crumpled commander’s cap, with the ribbons of his Knight’s Cross wrapped around his neck, as if he’d stepped out of a fairy tale. He mentioned amnesia. The admirals didn’t believe
him. It was unthinkable that a captain should survive without his men. He’d walked onto a beach near Le Havre and was whisked to Berlin. The Kreigsmarine had to be careful with Kapitän Peter Kleist. The Führer himself had awarded this commander the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves, Swords, and Diamonds. No other submarine ace had such a Knight’s Cross. But the admirals assumed that the Engländers had turned him around and thrown him back to Herr Hitler. They would give him no other command, not even a Milchkuh. He sat in Berlin for six months, spent his afternoons in exile at the Adlon. Then they let him have a training ship at Kiel. But he was virtually a prisoner at the base. And now suddenly he had a new command, a milk cow to America. Kapitän Kleist hated the Nazis, hated the Death’s-Heads, hated the Hitler salute. He wouldn’t have conspired with Himmler or Colonel Joachim.

  He was a short, burly man with blond hair; he’d lost a finger at sea, and his left earlobe had been ripped off by a harpoon. When he drank too much, he fell on his face. Erik had found him like that many a time in the Adlon bar and had carried him up the main staircase to the Abwehr suite. But Kleist had his own clarity even in an alcoholic haze. He adored Moby-Dick. And they would spend half the night talking about white whales.

  He seemed glum at Erik’s party. He talked like a gangster, even though he was descended from margraves, at least on his mother’s side. He wasn’t wearing his white commander’s cap or his Ritterkreuz, on a ribbon around his neck. He was dressed in a worn leather jacket and his sea boots. He’d already gulped five glasses of champagne.

  “Scat,” he said. “The sharks have come out of the water with their medals and white gloves. I’ll go with you to Portugal. We’ll wear a disguise.… I couldn’t even pick my own first mate on this run. Colonel Joachim assembled the crew. Half of them aren’t even sailors, but his own sweethearts from the SS. Uncle Willi must be getting senile.”

  “He picked you to command the tub, didn’t he?”

  “Mensch, I haven’t been to sea in a year. I’m a nursemaid to a bunch of cadets. We crash-dive in enormous vats of water.… Where the hell is the admiral? Why hasn’t he come to your party? He’s given you a ticket to Herr Teufel.”

  Kleist’s hands were shaking. His eyes began to wander. Erik had to seize the champagne glass and sit Kleist down in one of Hedda Adlon’s chairs. And then he saw a ghost with blond hair drinking champagne with the Death’s-Heads. He couldn’t have been crazy. His Lisalein had risen out of Sachsenhausen forest to send him off on a milk cow. He would wean her from Joachim and his men, dance with her on that table of salamis.

  What did he care if her flesh wasn’t so solid? He would be tender with her charred bones. But he listened to her laugh—and it wasn’t Lisa’s throaty roar. That Greifer Fanni Grünspan was hobnobbing with her new handlers. And now Erik understood the entire script: Colonel Joachim hadn’t stumbled upon Spartakus, hadn’t been able to unmask Lisa and the baron on his own. The Greifer had given them away.

  Erik had one last mission before he said good-bye to Berlin. He would strangle Fanni here, in the Rembrandt Room, in front of all these men in their black uniforms, with their drunken red faces and silvered sleeves. And then he heard a strange tootling. The Adlon’s own little orchestra had arrived in the Rembrandt Room and set up its stand next to the piano. The Adlon had once had the best dance music in Berlin—a pair of dueling orchestras that played at all the afternoon tea dances in the Beethoven Salon or the Rembrandt Room. These dueling orchestras—the Martinets and the Bald Eagles—had become the sensation of Berlin. “Afternoon Tea at the Adlon” had been broadcast throughout the Greater Reich. But there was a tiny problem. The Martinets and the Bald Eagles both had Jewish bandleaders and Jewish musicians. The hotel held on to them as long as it could, but the Adlon couldn’t have “Jewish Jazz” a few blocks from the Chancellery. And Frau Hedda couldn’t seem to find Aryan musicians with the same heat. The broadcasts were dropped, and the afternoon teas disappeared with the dueling orchestras.

  And now Erik was confronted with musicians who looked like refugees from a labor camp. They might have been retired schoolteachers. But he looked again. They had yellow stars sewn on their dinner jackets. He wondered if they were the resurrected Eagles or Martinets. There were five of them—a base fiddler, a pianist, a trumpet, a clarinet, and a tenor sax.

  Colonel Joachim shouted at him across the salon. “Herr Magician, in your honor. Jewish Jazz. For your trip to America.”

  The Jewish jazzmen stood there like phantoms in dinner jackets. They didn’t look anyone in the eye. Joachim must have plucked them from the Sammellager or the Gestapo ward at the Jewish Hospital. They didn’t even have to rehearse. They started to play “Blue Moon.” And their soft, measured cry startled him. He’d heard nothing but tubas in the street, and the strains of marching music. Let them banish Moby-Dick, and set fire to all the books. But even as a subcadet in Kiel, abused and pissed upon, he’d lived by the sounds of Herman Hermann and his Martinets. He didn’t know anything then about tea dances or gigolos at the Adlon, only the cry of Herman’s horn and the countercry of his Martinets. And now he had five scarecrows to soften Herman Hermann’s wail with “Blue Moon.”

  No one started to dance, not even Frau Hedda, who was feeding morsels of smoked fish to her dachshunds. Erik had to steal Fräulein Fanni away from Joachim and his men.

  “Remember me?” he muttered, with one hand on the small of her back. He would play her like a counterbass, pluck music from her ribs before he broke her in half. She didn’t resist. She moved to his broken rhythm; Erik still had legs of clay. His whole body hurt.

  “Whore,” he said, “you gave Lisa up to Joachim, didn’t you? You tattled about Spartakus, led them right to the baron.”

  “Darling, did I have a choice? That bitch was crazy. She fucked me every night, in the bomb shelter. That’s why she moved to Iranische Strasse and put on a nurse’s smock—to be near me. She bit my nipples to pieces. My cunt’s still sore. She dove into me like a fisherman, with all five fingers.”

  “Shut up, or I’ll strangle you right on this floor.”

  “But I might have an orgasm, and it will ruin your party.…

  She shouldn’t have provoked the Death’s-Heads, stealing fifty Jews from them during their biggest operation in Berlin. It ruined the Fabrikaktion. I warned whoever I could. But Lisalein knew what would happen next, and still she provoked them. What could I do, darling? Joachim knows I rule the hospital. The sisters and the doctors are all afraid of the blond Lorelei. He put my mother and father on the next truck. He was going to set my face on fire.”

  “I’ll do worse than that,” Erik told her.

  “Ah, but there’s a difference. I might like whatever you did.”

  She was the blond Lorelei. He couldn’t even threaten her with his tricks. “Blue Moon” was beginning to creep into his bones. And then the music stopped. The Grand Mufti had come into the salon in his white robe, with his Arab Gestapo agents behind him. They frightened the Jewish musicians and all the Death’s-Heads, who had never seen such ferocious men, with their beetle eyes and hawkish faces.

  The Death’s-Heads clicked their heels and shot out their hands in a Hitler salute. The Grand Mufti wouldn’t acknowledge them. He stopped for no one but Frau Hedda. He smiled at her for an instant and then seized Erik by the arm.

  “Walk with me, Cesare.”

  And the Grand Mufti strode with Erik across the salon, while the wives of certain SS officers, their faces gleaming under the chandeliers, salaamed as if they were greeting a rajah in Berlin.

  “Herr Magician, how often can you rise from the dead? They mean to kill you before you ever get to Kiel. I complained to the ministry, and I slowed them down. They’ll let you board the submarine, but you won’t leave it alive. Their two best assassins will be your baby-sitters.”

  “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern … the Müller twins. I know them very well.”

  The Mufti seemed to shiver under his white robe. “I’ve used up all my capital
in Berlin. And unfortunately, Admiral Canaris has even less than I do. Himmler’s SS are picking away at the Abwehr’s feathers, and soon none of you will fly.”

  “Then I will have to fall into the sea like Icarus, Excellency.”

  “Or drown in a submarine. Cesare, these vultures dream of nothing but your grave. But perhaps we are all vultures come to celebrate your drowning. No wonder the admiral has kept away. He cannot help you, or help himself. He must be hiding in his Fox’s Lair.”

  The Grand Mufti had come to warn Erik, but wouldn’t preside at his wake. He left the salon with his bodyguards. But he’d misread the admiral, who appeared in his rumpled suit, with the little baron beside him. Emil wore some kind of military uniform that the Abwehr’s tailors must have stitched for him, borrowing from half a dozen ranks. Emil had an admiral’s ceremonial dagger and the buttons and silver piping of a sea captain. Colonel Joachim wanted to arrest Emil, but he wouldn’t ruin Erik’s party. Emil would die on the Milchkuh, with the admiral’s magician.

  Joachim clapped his hands. “This isn’t a morgue. I want my Jewish Jazz!”

  The five musicians were jolted out of their little dream. Their yellow stars swayed behind the bandstand. They went back to “Blue Moon.” There was such lament in their sounds that Erik almost began to wail with them. But he would survive his mission to America.

  The admiral himself had orchestrated this Aktion. And the admiral had not come here to mourn. He went about the salon with Emil, nibbling on salami and greeting the Death’s-Heads, clutching each one by the hand. That gesture belied his rumpled suit, his growing distance from the Führer’s ear—he no longer had monthly chats with Herr Hitler, and Goebbels had stopped calling him Caligari. His magic, it seems, was a little too close to the Jews. He could rescue rabbis in Warsaw but couldn’t kidnap Pope Pius. And Canaris’ shadow fell over Jewish Berlin.