Cesare Page 2

  I wasn’t spying on her for my own silly pleasure. Die Blutige Rose was a danger to us all. She had to be stopped. But the Brownshirts appeared in her wake. Hitler climbed right out of the blood in the Kanal. The Spartakusbund had rebellious sailors who sang love songs while they occupied the royal stables, but not Einsatzgruppen, who create killing fields wherever they go. I should have joined those sailors, kissed their hands and feet.

  There was no blood in the water now, nothing blutig at all. And then I saw some creature bobbing in the Kanal, a woman, yes, but not with Rosa’s dark brown hair. This creature was a blonde with broad shoulders. Was she practicing for some phantom Olympiad? Her strokes were perfect as she bit into the water. She was wearing goggles, I think—my winter mermaid.

  “Hänschen,” I said, “do you see the Mädl in the water?”

  “No, Herr Admiral.”

  “But I insist. You must talk to her.… She’s a Jewish mermaid, hiding from Herr Himmler.”

  Poor Hänschen started to cry. “There are no Jewish mermaids, Admiral.”

  I did not want him to cry. It irritated me.

  “Ah, you’re right,” I said. “My mind is playing tricks. Jewesses are verboten in the Landwehrkanal.”

  Hans was a magician. Suddenly he had a blanket in his arms. He unfurled it like a cape and let the blanket wind around my shoulders. I could have been a pensioner out on a stroll, or a madman with his keeper. We were all madmen at the Abwehr. We had to be. How else could we have survived the Führer’s fiery wind day after day?

  Lisalein

  1

  HE HADN’T ALWAYS SLEPT IN A COFFIN, hadn’t always been Cesare. Erik was born in Berlin the same year Rosa Luxemburg was thrown into the Landwehrkanal like some fat mermaid, a mermaid who couldn’t swim. His mother was a member of the Bavarian aristocracy who had fallen in love with a postman, Magnus Holdermann. The postman died when Erik was two, and his mother disappeared into Scheunenviertel, Berlin’s Jewish slum. Erik grew up among the Osten Jews in their pointy hats and long cloaks. His playground had been the back alleys of Scheunenviertel. And then his mother died of tuberculosis a little after Erik’s ninth birthday. It was 1928, and he roamed the streets like a wolf. It was the Jewish whores of Scheunenviertel who left their stations to feed him kuchen and coffee with hot milk. Erik was their spotter. He signaled whenever a policeman approached the Prenzlauer Allee, with its lane of cheap hotels. He lived at one of these hotels, the Kaiser’s Hat, with its neon sign that hissed all night and blinked into Erik’s eyes.

  But the whores held their own council and decided Prenzlauer Allee wasn’t the right place for their own little wolf. They sent him to the Jewish orphanage on the Rosenstrasse and subsidized his stay. He didn’t live in any barracks. He had his own room, his own bed, his own pencil case.

  Three years passed.

  He wasn’t apprenticed to some carpenter or sent to a trade school where he had to stitch leather aprons with a long needle. He attended the Jewish Gymnasium near Rosenthaler Platz. There wasn’t much talk of religion at the Jewish Gymnasium. It was a German school that celebrated Mozart and Mendelssohn, Goethe and Heine, and every sort of foreign literature. Erik wasn’t frightened to speak up in class.

  “I do not understand Herr Hemingway. His men are all wounded and too sick to fall in love. It is like amerikanische jazz—much bumping of the body and a little music.”

  The professor laughed and stroked his walrus mustache.

  “Herr Holdermann, if you want to learn American, you must put your mind to baseball.”

  The professor removed a baseball almanac from his desk, closed his eyes, and repeated the names of players as if he were reciting the profoundest poetry: Baby Doll Jacobson, Jimmy Outlaw, Shoeless Joe Jackson …

  The baseballer, Herr Shoeless Joe, was an orphan, like Erik. He went from team to team, from the Cleveland Browns to the Chikago Black Stockings, but with his own Wunderwaffe, the Black Betsy, a bat that never split and could knock a ball out of the baseball park and into the cattle yards of Chikago. Herr Joe was declared a baseball Krimineller because he took groschen from gamblers and let the other team win the famous World Series of 1919. He became a wanderer, had to disguise himself with a false beard if he wanted to play for teams in the lesser baseball leagues. Herr Joe was still playing somewhere, in Alabama or the Tennessee.

  Erik kept a memorial candle for Herr Joe near his bed. It was called a Yahrzeit candle, and Jews lit it once a year to remember the dead. But he did not think it unethical to light a Yahrzeit candle for Shoeless Joe, a living dead man, the zombie of baseball.

  Erik also had to worry about his own fate at the orphanage. A bitter famine clung to the city. There was panic and unrest in the streets of Scheunenviertel. Berlin was a Red town, but that didn’t stop the Brownshirts from coming into Scheunenviertel and pulling on the beards of old men. The Red Front had terrific battles with the Brownshirts. Professors at the orphanage predicted that Berlin would soon be run by gangsters of the Right and the Left.

  The famine had come to Erik’s orphanage. There was much less strudel and liverwurst. The whores at the Kaiser’s Hat could no longer subsidize him. They couldn’t even subsidize themselves. Overseers at the orphanage began to resign. Jewish children were turned away. Rosenstrasse couldn’t feed another orphan, couldn’t pay for its fuel. And then the orphanage found a savior in Baron Wilfrid von Hecht, Berlin’s foremost philanthropist. The baron owned department stores and investment banks, manufactured chairs and table lamps. He’d been the first Jewish cavalry captain in the Great War and liked to wear his Iron Cross. He had the finest villa in the Grunewald, but he didn’t forget the orphans of Sheunenviertel. Coal trucks returned to the Rosenstrasse. Strudel arrived from the bakery on Alexanderplatz. And the baron himself had come to the orphanage.

  He was no taller than a twelve-year-old boy. He had wide nostrils and a broad nose. His eyebrows resembled an unruly forest. He wore a frock coat with a velvet collar and spats that glistened in the orphanage’s weak light. The frock coat couldn’t erase the slight hump on his back. The orphans stood in line to greet their benefactor, the tallest boys towering over him. He gave each orphan a Montblanc fountain pen to encourage all of them in such hard times. It was a Meisterstück—Masterpiece—with a gold nib and midnight black barrel, the exact pen that Greta Garbo used to scratch her initials in someone’s souvenir book. And the baron had each orphan’s name inscribed in silver on his very own pen. It was the gift of a lifetime.

  The Direktor could have run Rosenstrasse for a year on the hard currency that such Montblanc Masterpieces could fetch. But his orphans were shrewder than he was. They grasped the baron’s motives. He needed something outlandish in such difficult times. The Direktor was a compassionate accountant who lived with loaves of bread. But Herr Baron Wilfrid had to find the imprint of everything he touched.

  He proceeded from boy to boy with each pen in its own velvet sack. He had studied every name and profile beforehand. And when he presented a boy with a pen, he could talk about the boy’s dead parents and the district in Berlin where he was born. He had an assistant who helped him with the velvet sacks. It was his daughter, Lisa von Hecht, who was fifteen and seemed very bored. She was a head taller than the baron in her velvet shoes. She scowled at the boys, and Erik was frightened to look into her eyes. He had never seen a girl who could create such a storm and still be so beautiful. She had clipped blond hair like the ticket-takers on the tram, but none of them had azure eyes that softened the angrier she got. She was much more spectacular than a fountain pen.

  “Vati,” she said, stifling a yawn, “how much longer must I remain with your children? I have tennis class this afternoon with a divine boy who has dueling scars.”

  The baron began to groan. “Lisa, Lisalein, you’re spoiling the presentation. I will bring you another boy with dueling scars.”

  She pouted, and the long crease at both sides of her mouth made her twice as adorable. She clutched the baron’s
list of orphans and read Erik’s name aloud. Lisa was nearsighted and had a terrible squint. But she wouldn’t wear spectacles on her nose.

  “Ah,” the baron said, “Erik Holdermann. But your mother’s maiden name is Albrecht, Heidi Albrecht.… Isn’t she the brother of my good friend Heinrich Percyval Albrecht?”

  “I believe so, Herr Baron.”

  “But this is astonishing!” said the baron, growing very agitated. “Lisalein, make him give us back the pen. The boy is an impostor.”

  Erik wouldn’t cry in front of the baron and his beautiful daughter, even though the baron’s accusation bit him to pieces. But it was Lisa who saw the dread and indignation in his eyes.

  “Father, you must question the boy.”

  “I will not.”

  “Then I will.”

  And she scrutinized Erik with the full force of her myopia.

  “Junge, why are you here?”

  “I am not certain, Fräulein. My mother died three years ago and I was brought to Rosenstrasse. It has a much better reputation than the other Berlin orphanages.”

  “But your uncle is alive. Heinz Albrecht. I have visited him many times. Why are you not with him?”

  “He would not have me, Fräulein, because my mother married a postman, and Uncle Heinrich said it was a stain on the family—a blotch.”

  “Blotch,” the baron repeated, the word hovering on his tongue. He took out a silk handkerchief, which was as long as a man’s shirt, and started to sniffle.

  Lisa had to reprimand him. “Vati, behave yourself. You are embarrassing me in front of all the boys.”

  “I can’t help it,” he said. “I remember now. The Rotten Sister—he spoke of Heidi several times. But I did not know there was a little boy.… Erik, you must forgive my rude language.

  Come with me.”

  “But where are we going, Vati?”

  “To the Adlon. That is our Percyval’s hotel. I spoke to him yesterday. He has some business in Berlin.”

  “But you cannot steal the boy from Rosenstrasse.”

  “Why not?” said the baron. “I am his benefactor. And I can do with him whatever I wish.”

  Erik couldn’t understand the ferocious turmoil of the baron and his Lisalein. They propelled him out onto the Rosenstrasse like one of their own toys; a limousine was waiting, a black Mercedes with a sunroof. Children from all over Sheunenviertel surrounded the car, which had a chauffeur in a uniform that drowned in silver and gold. The chauffeur stood with one of his polished boots on the running board. He was the most insolent man Erik had ever seen. He looked at Lisalein with such lechery that even the boy blushed. His name was Karl-Oskar, and the baron had to slap his boot off the running board before the chauffeur would budge.

  “Will I be driving you, Herr Baron?”

  “Of course not,” the baron growled. “Get in the back.”

  Karl-Oskar ruffled his nose. “With the little orphan?”

  “Dummkopf, he is the nephew of one of the most distinguished men in Bavaria. Be grateful that I have not yet asked you to shine his shoes.”

  “Then I would leave your employ, Herr Baron. And you will never find another chauffeur who is as cultivated as I am.”

  “You are mistaken, Karl. Berlin is cluttered with unemployed lawyers and tax accountants. I could also replace you with a Lithuanian prince.”

  Karl-Oskar smirked. “There aren’t many princes in Lithuania, Herr Baron, only Jews such as yourself and Lisalein.”

  “Do not mention my daughter, Karl. And if you keep ogling her, I will have the pleasure of plucking out your eyes. Get into the car—and be quick!”

  The chauffeur retired to the rear of the Mercedes, while the baron, Lisa, and Erik sat up front. The baron had to plop himself onto two cushions, or his eyes wouldn’t have been level with the windshield. There was plenty of room for the boy to have his own seat, but the baron insisted that Erik sit on Lisa’s lap. The boy turned crimson.

  “Herr Baron, I am the man. Shouldn’t Lisalein sit on my lap?”

  “No,” said the baron. “You are my guest.”

  And so they bumped their way out of the Rosenstrasse, the baron driving in random jerks, and Erik couldn’t even concentrate on the little shops and alleys he loved—the shoemaker at the corner of Neue Friedrichstrasse, the candy stalls in the courtyard nearby, the little store that sold model airplanes and tanks. It wasn’t the baron’s peculiar driving habits that bothered him. It was the fantastic engine of Lisa’s body engulfing him with its heat and aromas. He began to shiver all at once, and Lisa wrapped her arms around him as if she were calming a dazed turtle, not a little man with his own desires.

  They left the crooked alleys of Scheunenviertel and bumped onto Unter den Linden with its wide carriageway that was meant for a baron’s limousine or the cavalcade of a king. The Jewish shopkeepers had told him about their Kaiser, who could be seen half an age ago riding with his honor guard along that line of trees. “Kid,” the shopkeepers had said, “Unter den Linden is the nearest we’ll ever get to heaven.”

  The Brandenburg Gate was a stone mirage at the very edge of Unter den Linden, but he couldn’t enjoy a vista that was like a wicked dream while he rocked on Lisa’s lap. The baron’s Mercedes jolted to a halt in front of a sandstone castle with a mansard roof. It was the Adlon, where millionaires kept their mistresses in ten-room suites.

  A doorman in derby and ducktail coat arrived out of nowhere, dusted off the baron and bowed to Lisa and the boy, who had begun to brood now that he’d had to climb off Lisa’s lap. Then the baron and his little cortege, including Karl-Oskar, walked under a canopy and entered the Adlon, a wonderland the likes of which Erik had never seen. It had the mystifying light of a cathedral, but with carpets and red chairs, pillars with red veins. The baron could not take a step without a member of the staff saluting him and blinding himself to the hump on his back.

  “Herr Baron, would you like your usual suite? It will only take a minute. We’ll move out the admiral who has booked your rooms.”

  “No, no,” the baron had to insist. “Leave the poor admiral alone. I’m not staying, Fredi. It’s just a visit. Please tell Herr Albrecht to come downstairs. Say it’s urgent.”

  The baron didn’t even have to tread across a lobby that was larger than a Fussball field, filled with every sort of seeker—impoverished aristocrats, courtesan countesses, and bankrupt financiers who wanted some favor from the richest man in Berlin and would have loved to be caught chatting with him. But the baron was shown to a private salon hidden by a wall of mirrors. He stepped through the wall with Lisa, Erik, and Karl and disappeared from the turbulence of the lobby.

  But then a very tall man in a silk dressing gown strode through the same wall—Heinrich Percyval Albrecht, a gentleman farmer with his own estate a hundred miles north of Munich. His family had held the land for five hundred years. He had been a member of the Kaiser’s honor guard, had protected Wilhelm II all through the war, but had decided not to go into exile with him. Heinrich wasn’t suited for exile. He hunted, shut his eyes to the intrigue around him, and waited for the monarchy to be restored.

  He was irritated and didn’t even say hello to Lisalein, who visited his estates twice a year and was like a goddaughter. He grimaced at the boy.

  “Baron, what is the meaning of this? I don’t like mysteries or intrusions. You could have sent your card up to my suite, or rung me from the front desk. I don’t care to traipse around in my robe. Come down immediately. I didn’t even have time to dress.”

  “Ah,” said the baron. “Heinzi, I know you too well. You would have kept us waiting for hours if I hadn’t resorted to a trick. But don’t you recognize the boy? I found him at the Jewish orphanage. He’s your own kin.”

  Heinrich Percyval drank his lager and came to Berlin twice a year, met with his bankers and a few friends, and couldn’t forget that Berlin had almost become a Red republic—the rabble would have killed Kaiser Wilhelm had the Reds seized power. He wasn’t in the
mood to barter over the baron’s boy.

  “Wilfrid, have you come to blackmail me? I’ve fallen behind on our little loan. But I will pay you the next time.”

  The baron’s face was very raw. “Damn you and your Junker ways. I’m not talking money or merchandise. Heinzi, you cannot disappear behind the Adlon’s wonderful walls. And you cannot abandon this boy. Gott, he has your sister’s face.”

  “I have no sister,” said the Bavarian Junker.

  And the baron began to cry into a handkerchief that was longer than a man’s shirt. “Heinzi, you have no heart.”

  It was Lisa who continued her father’s attack. “Come, Vati. We’ll adopt the boy ourselves. He will live with us in the Grunewald. I will become his aunt.”

  Heinz Albrecht pursed his narrow lips, until he looked like a man with no mouth.

  “Wilfrid, I could duel with you all day, but I cannot win against your daughter.… I capitulate.”

  “Then you agree that the little Herr Holdermann is your nephew?”

  “I agree to nothing. I will take him off your hands and have my solicitor look into the matter. Meanwhile, he can stay with me.”

  “But he is not your cattle,” said Lisalein, her eyes ablaze in the hotel’s curtained salon. “You must afford him some rights.”

  “Lisa, be still,” said the baron. “We’ve gotten this far with Heinz. He wouldn’t deny his own flesh and blood.”

  “Vati, don’t gamble your life on that but we have to allow the lion to get used to the cub that was thrown into his lap.”

  She stood on her toes to kiss the tall farmer—“Good-bye, Onkel”—and then she emerged from the deep shadows of the salon to touch Erik’s crown, as if to anoint him.

  “You must not shame us, little man. My father has vouched for you. You will have to obey your new uncle.”

  He could not see much of her in the shadows. But the scent of her hair weakened his knees. Her blondness was like a visceral ghost in the salon.