Cesare Read online

  He sat forever in his Fox’s Lair, with his dachshunds, a spymaster who had sent his saboteurs into Poland, and had unwittingly helped turn Warsaw into a vast hunting ground for the Death’s-Heads. He’d watched Colonel Joachim stand in his field car like a circus performer, on the shoulders of his men, and shoot at rabbis and high school teachers and Jewish children in the ruined streets of Warsaw. Joachim had been wearing goggles that day, like some colonel in the Afrika Korps. But it was no act of bravura or majesty. There was a horrific storm of dust and blood. The rubble seemed to rise up off the wreckage with a whisper and a will of its own; it whipped strings of blood into the faces of the SS, blinded them, until they had to look for shelter in the dusty caverns of their field cars. It only maddened Joachim, made him retreat into his goggles and find more children to shoot. It was the admiral and his band of saboteurs who broke up that relentless slaughter. He marched in front of Joachim’s telescopic sights and shooed the child away from the Death’s-Heads, and onto another pile of rubble.

  The admiral hadn’t told Erik this story, but the myth had circulated in the halls of the Abwehr. Uncle Willi was always irritable when he had to spend too much time away from his dogs. But he was here now, in the lions’ den of the Death’s-Heads. He had a pasty look about him. He was a man who lived in closets. He wouldn’t even visit Eva in her five-star asylum, though he thought about her constantly. He rode his Arabian mare in the Grunewald, slept on a military cot with his dachshunds, worried about their indigestion, and dreamt up missions against the Engländers and the Americans that would never happen. The Abwehr had come to a halt months ago. It lived within a whirlwind of activity, as deceptive as a matador’s cape. The Abwehr plotted to murder that Asiatic monster, Stalin, to poison the cigar-sucking satyr, Winston Churchill, and blow up the wheelchair of that paralytic, Franklin Roosevelt. The plots grew more and more elaborate. They were Tolstoyan in length and attention to detail. But the field agents and V-Männer in these reports existed only in the mind and imagination of the Fox’s Lair. And yet the admiral had come to the Adlon on a mission that mattered to him. He didn’t have to speak to Erik, didn’t have to hold his hand. He salaamed to Frau Hedda and talked in deadly earnest about the diet of her dachshunds. He smiled at the musicians and started to dance with the gnädige Frau, queen of the afternoon teas, who had danced with Pola Negri.

  No one had suspected the admiral’s suppleness, the lightness he had under his dour mien. Gott, he moved like a gigolo. He had mastered the strains of “Blue Moon.” Frau Hedda already had a wildness in her eyes. Her huge, buxom body seemed in a trance. But all the while the admiral was signaling to Erik, signaling without a word.

  It was no suicide mission. Männe, the admiral was saying with every beat of “Blue Moon.” You will not perish on a submarine. I am sending you to the mainland of America. But Erik couldn’t think of Atlantic crossings. He could see Saturn on the wall, being devoured by Berlin—and then Lisa lying in her own blood. He was already a clay man. And clay men were hard to kill.

  WHILE HE DANCED, THE ADMIRAL DREAMT of Rosa Luxemburg. He could still picture her bruised eyes, the blood on her fingers. He shouldn’t have been part of the conspiracy. But he had to save Berlin. The Spartakus putsch would have overwhelmed a nation already crippled by war. The Kaiser had fled to Holland. The sailors at Kiel had flown their Red flags and turned half the town into a brothel. Some of these rebel sailors had rushed through Berlin in the first days of 1919 and behaved like burglars at the Chancellery, carrying desks and typewriters on their backs. Canaris was a young officer who had joined a volunteer naval brigade to thwart these sailors and their revolution. His brigade had helped capture the Spartakus leaders, Leibknecht and Luxemburg. She was the brave one, the mad one, who went around reviling the entire officer corps. There would be no officers in the Red Rose’s new army and navy.

  He never saw Leibknecht, never saw him once. Leibknecht had been dragged into a different car. His navy escort was supposed to deliver him to Moabit prison. But Leibknecht never got to Moabit. Leibknecht was shot in the neck on the way there—the Gestapo Genickschuss. And Rosa Luxemburg sat next to Canaris in the second car. She’d already been mauled by members of the Freikorps at the Hotel Eden. She was barely alive. Canaris fed her water and wiped her brow. She clutched his hand, searched his pale blue eyes. But he couldn’t rescue her. That foolish cavalry lieutenant, Vogol, was on the running board, his waxed mustache wavering in the wind. He had a pistol in his hand, like some desperado of the Wild West. He didn’t deliver the Genickschuss. He shot Rosa in the head. But Canaris might as well have killed her. She died in his arms, as if Rosa’s executioner had also become her very last lover.

  He put a blanket over her and screamed at Vogel, who laughed. It wasn’t the murder itself, you see. Rosa would never have gotten to Moabit. It was the look of pleasure in Vogel’s eyes, his deep exultation. Canaris’ face was splattered with blood. Vogel twirled his mustache. Canaris threw him off the running board.

  He couldn’t recall if it was his idea to drop her in the Landwehrkanal. Her corpse didn’t rise for nearly six months. But every afternoon, while standing on his balcony at the Fox’s Lair, with his dachshunds in his arms, Canaris kept waiting for the Red Rose to rise again, to mock him with her broken shape, in the muddy water of the Kanal.

  She was a tiny woman, like his Eva. He could still hear her heart beat. And then the jazz musicians brought him out of his dream. Frau Hedda was in his arms, not Eva, not the Red Rose. And he looked at Cesare, his Männe, whom he’d stolen from a miserable barrack in Kiel. Alte should have left him where he’d found him, as a subcadet on the seawall.

  Blue Moon, Blue Moon. He hid in Frau Hedda’s remarkable bosom. He didn’t want Cesare to see him cry.

  THE NORTH ATLANTIC

  Fränze

  April 13, 1943

  We should have fled Berlin and run back to the circus, my brother and I. We loved the high wire. I had such confidence hanging from his arms a hundred feet above the ground. I had thought of no other man, and no other man had pursued me until Colonel Joachim, with his idiotic love proposals. “Fränze, I can always send your brother to the eastern front.”

  “And what good would that do, my little colonel?”

  I was always contemptuous of him, even as I obeyed his commands. But he liked to play rough with his Fränze, because he had come from a society of landlords and mayors, while Franz and I were the children of circus people who couldn’t bother sending us to school.

  “Well, my beauty,” he said, his hand on his chin.

  I wasn’t beautiful at all. I had the shoulders and grip of a man. My belly didn’t ripple with curves. I had no belly, and I had no curves.

  “Well, without Franz, I could have a taste of your cunt.”

  I would have torn his eyes out, but I couldn’t disappoint the Führer. The army and the navy had been a league of barons until the Führer came to Berlin. The Führer didn’t mock us—the lowly ones would replace the landlords and the barons in the new social order.

  “Give me your answer, my beauty, and be quick.”

  “Darling Joachim,” I said, blinking at him like a debutante, “you would have to fly to China on a broomstick before you’d ever taste my cunt.”

  He raged under his high collar. But there was nothing he could do. Joachim needed us.

  “Then make sure the magician gets a good whiff of you. I don’t want him coming out of the Atlantic alive.”

  “Jawohl,” I said, his little soldier again. And I marched out of the office he kept at Gestapo headquarters. He was always sneaking around from one office to the next. He was jealous of our closeness to Dr. Caligari. But we weren’t close to the admiral at all. Caligari’s agents knew we were with the Death’s-Heads. And Joachim hated Erik. Joachim wasn’t brave enough to sleep in a coffin. He liked to trample women and children, and show off his insignias. But Erik could scare people without a death’s-head pinned to his collar.

  The mag
ician would never have repeated Joachim’s idiotic love proposal. He was too polite even to look into my eyes. He taught me how to scribble words on a page, how to wander through Wilhelm Shakespeare. He’d brush my hand while we were reading, his kneecap next to mine. I would feel a jolt, like an electrical wire twisting through my bowels. And copying from Joachim, I said, “Herr Magician, would you like to taste my cunt?”

  I could tell—he was returning to his coffin, without Fränze Müller, without me. He had such a sad look. There were no more lessons, no more talk about the demons in Hamlet’s head. I loved the magician, and I wanted to crush his skull.

  He should have laughed, taken me in his arms, called me a foolish girl, and I would have forgiven him. But now there was a wall of fire between us. And I was choking on that fire. I wouldn’t stop choking until I tore his every limb. I had warned him at that ridiculous party, but he wouldn’t listen. Only an imbecile—or an Abwehr magician—would come to a party celebrating his departure from this world. Yet even now, on the eve of going to Kiel, I wanted to lie down with Erik in his coffin and have him lick me until I was dead.

  Franz and Fränze

  20

  THEY WERE PUT IN THE SAME SHACK where Erik had lived eight years ago as a subcadet, behind the old Warrant Officer’s School on the Mühlenstrasse, near the seawall. Half the city lay in ruins. The cadets’ own nightclub, Trocadero, had disappeared with much of the Kaiserstrasse. The old submarine pens and corrals couldn’t survive the nightly raids. Kiel had no celebrated gun girls like Tilli the Toiler; it had no gun girls at all. But it did have a multitude of slave laborers from Moravia and the Ukraine, who lived like troglodytes in the ruins; some slept in bomb craters, while others crawled on their knees into little holes under the seawall. Erik and Emil fed them from their own meager ration of salami. The women kissed Erik’s hand and offered to undress for him in the rubble. They were frightened of hunchbacks, but they might have undressed for Emil, too, had Erik demanded it. But he wouldn’t accept their favors. He didn’t have the slightest dream of their flesh. All he could imagine was Lisa’s own searing flesh in Sachsenhausen forest.

  He lived with other members of Milchkuh Number Nine in the same shack—a skeleton crew of forty men and Fränze—but these men wouldn’t part with their salami and pieces of lemon cake. They weren’t genuine sailors, the lords of a submarine. They had cropped skulls and wore Party pins. Some were mechanics and pipe fitters; there was even a radioman. They could have operated a tub like Milchkuh Number Nine. But they hadn’t been put there to take orders from a drunken U-boat commander with the Knight’s Cross. The Müller twins were their leader, and since Franz seldom talked, they listened only to Fränze.

  “Shitheads,” she told them, “you’ll share your salami with those starving Ukranians, or none of you will ever snore again.”

  These louts were in love with Fränze and would have leapt off the seawall for her, but they were delirious when she went into the shower with them. She was like a long silver mermaid with black hair.

  “Brothers,” she would say, “soap my back.”

  She laughed when they tried to cover their erections.

  “Jesus, this isn’t a nursery school. We’re going to live together on a tub. Why are you hiding your little cocks?”

  They grew murderous when Emil came into the showers with the magician. They couldn’t bear to look at the hump on his back. But it was Fränze who hiked across the showerheads to Emil, who put her hands on that strange carbuncle—it was like a gray mountain that sometimes moved—and soaped him from his eyebrows to his ankles while she watched Erik.

  “Cesare,” she rasped, “you’re next.”

  He smiled, knowing that he’d never leave this shack alive without Fränze. His own dirk couldn’t save him. Franz and the Forty Thieves, as he called this crew of cutthroats, would have smothered him with their pillows the minute he closed his eyes if Fränze hadn’t held the string to his existence and deflected her brother and the Forty Thieves. He understood her tactical maneuvers: She would dance around the magician until the very last day, in the middle of some orgasm that would flare up with his death—just as the milk cow arrived off the coast of Maine.

  Franz brooded while his sister soaped Erik’s ears and ground her belly into his. He didn’t break his silence—he leapt onto Erik. It was Fränze who got in the way and hissed at her twin.

  “I’ll abandon you, little brother. I’ll leave you here with these smelly men and run back to Berlin. Joachim will train you to become a zookeeper. You’ll have to wash a leopard’s balls.”

  Franz knelt in front of his sister. The anguished look on his face was unbearable to see. “I am sorry, Fränze.”

  “But you have wronged the magician. Apologize to him.”

  The muscles on his back quivered like bolts.

  “Herr Magician,” he said with a twisted smile. “I should not have attacked. My little sister is in love with you, and she regrets that we will have to feed you and the hunchback to the sharks. But it will give me a great deal of pleasure to imagine you at the bottom of the Atlantic with sharks’ blood in your eyes.”

  Fränze was startled at first; Franz had never uttered three whole sentences in his life. But she still slapped his face, and he tottered, off guard, losing his magnificent balance and landing in the muck of the shower stalls.

  “Franz,” she hissed, “that’s poison, not an apology.”

  And she strode out of the stalls, that silver mermaid with mannish shoulders, while the Forty Thieves were bereft without Fränze’s naked body, and her brother stared at Erik and Emil with murder in his eyes.

  AND SO IT WENT WHILE THE Milchkuh was being provisioned and prepared for sea; it sat in dry dock for six weeks, with a broken propeller and rotting fins. And the tub’s commander, its Kapitän zur See, didn’t appear once at Erik’s bivouac on the Mühlenstrasse. Perhaps he was frightened of his own crew and didn’t want to face such cutthroats on dry land. A ship’s captain had little purchase away from his own tub.

  Fränze mocked him mercilessly. “Where is the famous Peter Kleist, with that black-white-and-red ribbon round his neck? Gott, I’ll strangle him with it if I ever see him again.”

  “Fränze,” said one of the Forty Thieves. “You’re our Kapitän. We don’t need Kleist.”

  She wore a long coat of purple leather, with wings that could have covered half the Kiel Kanal; it must have been a gift from Colonel Joachim and the Leibstandarte commandos; she could gather five or six members of the crew in its folds. And she marched through Kiel like that, with the shore patrol saluting her, the town’s last cadets scattering in her wake, and the Moravian laborers staring at her from the dunes of broken buildings. Erik could have remained in the shed with Emil, but Franz might have doubled back with some of the Nazi crew, and he would have had to fend them off with his dirk. The Abwehr had issued him a snub-nosed automatic, but he wouldn’t carry it around with him. It sat in one of his drawers at the Dragonerstrasse. He wasn’t going to shoot off a man’s face.

  And so he clung to Fränze, who was his savior in Kiel, and would become his assassin once they were out at sea. She didn’t know how to behave in his presence. She tingled and blushed whenever he drew near; sometimes Fränze put her arm around Erik, as if they were comrades and conspirators, forgetting that her mission was to conspire against him. And if he brushed against her, she would bristle with confusion … and a curious delight.

  She’d drag him off into the cellar of a bombed-out store, hiding Emil within the wings of her coat, to save him from being trampled by the Forty Thieves.

  “Herr Magician, you could seduce me a thousand times and you’ll still have to die on board the Milchkuh. It’s been preordained.”

  He’d rub her face, not out of spite, but because he was touched by her brutal plainness, and she’d start to tremble.

  “And what if you seduced me, Fräulein Fränze?”

  She turned away from him, hugging Emil under her coat.
And her whispers grew hoarse with her own wildness. “You’re the magician, not me. And I’ve never kissed a man other than Franz.”

  He hated himself, but he had to weave an invisible cloak around Fränze, tie her to him with uncertain strings before he climbed onto the Milchkuh, or he’d never escape Franz and the Forty Thieves. He leaned against Fränze, who was exactly his height, and he brushed her cheek with his lips. Her skin had the feel of very soft leather, like the fuzz on a doe that had once strayed into his uncle’s barn during a storm. The doe had panicked, and Erik began to ease its fright, slid the blade of his hand across its flank, like a warm knife.

  “You’re a torturer,” she whispered. And then she made a noise that was like the strangled mooing of a cow. It troubled the magician, because her chaotic cry was ferocious and tender. Her body stiffened all of a sudden and the mooing stopped.

  “Franz’s coming,” she said. “He’ll kill us both … and I hate to think what he’ll do to Emil.”

  She shoved Erik out of the cellar with one great sweep and catapulted Emil from under her coat as Franz and the Forty Thieves rounded the corner of Kaiserstrasse. Franz’s dark eyes turned pink in the sunlight. He was clutching a pistol that looked like a blue toy. But he didn’t even menace the magician. He was much too distracted. Something about the cellar must have terrorized him, not its darkness, but the fact that he had lost contact with Fränze for a few moments and couldn’t seem to find her in Kiel.

  She glided up to him on the wings of her coat, kissed him on the mouth in front of the whole crew, while her hand slid behind her and grazed Erik’s kneecap. Franz was the one who broke away from the kiss, his forehead wrinkling with worry lines.