Cesare Read online

  22

  THEY’D GONE FROM KIEL HARBOR to the Norwegian Sea and into the North Atlantic without much of a wrinkle. There were no enemy “Q-ships,” gunboats disguised as freighters, no Lockheed Lightnings to swoop out of the sky with their forked tails, no Sunderland flying fish to strafe an unwary submarine. The captain couldn’t read his instruments, stand on the bridge, sit in his saddle, attend to the diesels, and fight the Forty Thieves. He would have to arrive off the coast of Maine by luck alone, and dead reckoning.

  But there were always alerts and alarms—a Q-ship suddenly coming out of the fog like a shark in masquerade, with its guns hidden behind a freighter’s false hull, and the captain had to crash-dive with the help of a crew that stumbled to its battle stations. Kleist had to lock all the hatches, or the tub would have drowned in a well of seawater. He had to scream instructions from his saddle, have an incompetent radioman take soundings of other “sharks” that might have been near.

  All his crash dives were performed in pantomime, as if the Milchkuh lived in a world of slow motion. It was only a matter of time before some cruiser or flying fish startled the tub and sent it to oblivion at the bottom of the sea. He couldn’t hide all day underwater and break the surface only after dark. He had to ride with the waves while the sun was still out, or he’d never leave the North Atlantic. Even with such louts, he could cruise at eleven or twelve knots.

  It wasn’t the Atlantic he feared, or the Engländers—it was Fränze. She seemed to exist in a trance, warbling at Erik while she was in the galley, or when she strode naked from stem to stern. He had to plead with the magician.

  “Mensch, will you make love to her, for God’s sake? She’ll kill us all.”

  It wouldn’t have been unnatural to Erik, or even a chore. He’d seduced the mistresses of enemy agents while he was on some Aktion for Uncle Willi. He’d slept with “swallows,” who tried to seduce him. And he still dreamt of strangling Fanni Grünspan while they rutted somewhere. But he couldn’t seem to climb into Fränze’s hammock. He wasn’t worried that Franz might split him from his ears to his navel while he was with Fränze, or that the Forty Thieves might dirk him to death. It was Fränze herself.

  He couldn’t have feigned some kind of passion with her, fooled her dark eyes. His mind was elsewhere, not on America. He couldn’t imagine the hills and pastures of Maine, or the secretive life of Shoeless Joe Jackson. He could only imagine Lisa’s burning bones in an unmarked forest grave. That’s why he seemed so lugubrious on board the milk cow. Or perhaps he was born with a funeral face.

  He couldn’t tuck Lisa’s limbs onto Fränze, pretend that Lisa was a lithe acrobat from Munich. And even if he could have accomplished such a trick, Fränze would have seen right through the magician, sensed that he was conjuring a Jewish princess from her very own heartache. And so he avoided her.

  He’d ask the captain’s permission to stand watch on the bridge. First he’d shove Emil up the ladder of the conning tower, and then he’d mount the stairs himself. That first rush of wind and air drove the stink of unwashed bodies out of his nostrils. The submarine’s stench was enough to cripple a man; the tub had become one endless toilet. He clung to the rails of the bridge while the Milchkuh rocked and rose with the waves. He held the little baron next to his heart; sailors had been known to topple off the bridge and sink into the sea. He was always startled when the captain wore his white cap on the bridge, without worrying that the wind might blow it off his head. Erik would clutch the bill of his own blue cap while he was on the bridge.

  Emil wore a sou’wester. Erik could barely see his chin.

  The sky had a molten color, could have been made of hot lead. It wasn’t a sky Erik had ever seen on land. He wasn’t much of a Kapitän zur See. He was nauseous after five minutes on the bridge. But he sucked in the salty air. He scoured the horizon with his binoculars and didn’t see a scratch. But he heard a strange squeal, and suddenly a dolphin shot out of the water and followed the lurches of the milk cow, mimicking its rise and fall. The dolphin could have been another submarine, but it was much smaller and sleeker, without the milk cow’s metal gray. It seemed to have a spout in the middle of its head, or perhaps it could spit water at an incredible rate.

  The dolphin wasn’t an albino, but Erik called it Moby Dick. It did have a white streak across its flank. Its eyes revolved like a turret, and it flicked the tub’s own debris with its tail. Erik let out a bitter laugh. The dolphin seemed more human, more playful and quick than half the men on the tub.

  “Cesare,” said Emil, clutching Erik’s thigh, “talk to the monster. It might talk back.”

  Erik danced on the roof of the conning tower, and the dolphin flew past his head. It’s an omen, he thought, an omen of America. And then the dolphin disappeared.

  “Cesare, do you think the dollars the admiral gave us are counterfeit? The Abwehr has the very best engravers. I would like to open a department store in America, bigger than Die Drei Krokodile.”

  “But we’d have to find another Alexanderplatz. And I’m not sure America has its own Alex.”

  “God forbid,” said Emil. “I wouldn’t want to go from Berlin … to Berlin.”

  “But I miss Scheunenviertel. Not the way it is now—it’s a haunted house, with the Death’s-Heads and their trucks. But before the Death’s-Heads went into the alleys and chased little children. There was a fiddlers’ society right outside my window. I woke to its sounds, and fell asleep with a fiddle in my ears. Emil, it was paradise.”

  The little baron started to sniffle, and the sentences spun out of him. “All the fiddlers are gone … and Lisalein. Lisa and the baron are gone because of me. I have a demon in my head, a red devil, like the one on the captain’s tower. I encouraged her to compete with the SS, to have her own truck, her own silver-and-black uniforms. I thought I was still in the store, that I had as many departments as Die Drei Krokodile. The Abwehr is a department store, and I stole from one department, and then another. Our tailors made the SS uniforms, and then I requisitioned a truck from one of our garages near the Kanal. I plotted behind Uncle Willi’s back. I bribed whoever I had to bribe. But I should have figured what would happen to Lisa.”

  “Stop crying,” the magician said. “The salt will get into your eyes, and they’ll sting like your own little red devil.… Spartakus had no future in Berlin. Colonel Joachim would have stumbled upon Lisa and the baron sooner or later. And you struck a blow. You snatched fifty Jews away from the Death’s-Heads in the heart of Berlin.”

  The water turned black in front of their eyes. The wind tasted of darkness. Erik couldn’t have spied a thing with his binoculars, except a kind of dread. Then he heard the dolphin whistle. And he could feel its silver streak.

  THEY’D BEEN AT SEA A MONTH. The crew was getting surly. It attacked the captain in the control room, and he shot one of the Forty Thieves in the shoulder. He had to become Jesse James on his own tub, a man of the American West. It was Fränze who stepped in, shoved the Forty Thieves out of the control room. They were more involved in her naked limbs than in a mutiny. She had sensed that these louts couldn’t run a Milchkuh on their own. They would have had to surrender to the nearest freighter.

  She took over the tub; the captain still barked orders, but he was little more than a prisoner on a very long leash. She hadn’t rationed the Milchkuh’s grub, and there was nothing to eat but rice and biscuits. All the lemons were gone. The roaches had multiplied, and Erik had to listen to their filthy shells crackle in his sleep. But sleep itself had become a miracle. He couldn’t doze more than ten minutes at a time. He had his own headquarters in the wardroom, near the captain’s red curtain. The entire tub had become infested, caught in a plague. His meager portion of rice was littered with black beetles and cockroach wings. The biscuits turned to paste in his hands. The water wasn’t sweet.

  He’d begun to hallucinate. Lisalein visited him in that shadow land between waking and dreaming. Her body wasn’t ripped with fire, wasn’t even bruised.
She wore lipstick as rich as blood. They weren’t at the Adlon, with Lisa crouching between one of the hotel’s double doors. They weren’t dancing at a Gestapo cabaret, or making love on the Dragonerstrasse, in that same apartment where Erik had lived as a boy. They were on board the milk cow, and Lisa’s naked body was covered with machine oil. It glistened under the tub’s twitching lamps. Her hair wasn’t long, with a curl over one eye, like a cabaret singer, or a Nazi vamp. It had been clipped short, like a slave laborer, and she had a hole in her neck where the Leibstandarte commandos had shot her in Sachsenhausen forest; blood had dried around that hole in the shape of a heart.

  Lisa was wearing a mechanic’s gloves. She must have been the captain of the engine room. But she seized Erik’s hand with an oily glove and led him aft to the crew’s quarters. Erik was astonished, because none of the Forty Thieves leered at him. It was an altogether different crew—sisters and patients and Gestapo guards from the Jewish Hospital on Iranische Strasse. They were lying down in their hammocks and bunks, smoking Roth-Händles, when it was forbidden to light a cigarette on board the Milchkuh. And Lisa, in her shiny cloak of machine oil, delivered Erik to her own hammock, which had silver hooks and was made of the finest satin.

  Ah, he muttered to himself, it’s just like the Extrastation at the Jewish Hospital. Satin sheets. Roth-Händles in bed. But when he climbed into the hammock with Lisa, it began to sway like a tub in a treacherous sea—the satin tore and the silver hooks shattered, and all he had in his hand was Lisa’s oily glove.

  He looked up and found Emil hanging from a hook in the wardroom. His neck had been broken, but the little baron’s knuckles weren’t even raw. He was dressed in his rain gear, as if he’d just come back from riding the waves on the captain’s bridge. There was no look of alarm in his eyes. He must have died dreaming of that silver dolphin.

  Romance

  23

  HE WAS NO LESS A PRISONER THAN KAPITÄN KLEIST, but he had to bury the little baron. So he put on his antic disposition, smiled at the Forty Thieves, who helped him carry Emil up the ladder, bundled in the captain’s own silk flag. The entire crew had assembled on the upper deck in their leather jackets, with lice in their beards. Fränze stood naked on the windswept tub, shivering in her brother’s arms. She wouldn’t gloat. It didn’t matter to her that she had masterminded Emil’s death. She must have laced Erik’s last meal with a sleeping potion. And the Forty Thieves fell upon Emil without a struggle. Otherwise, they would have had to murder the magician. Had she herself spun Emil’s ears until his neck snapped? She was mourning now.

  “We commend Emil von Hecht to the sea,” said the captain, as Erik held the little baron in his arms, folded inside the flag. “May his soul rise out of the body’s own corruption, rise out of the deep in the company of angels. Amen.”

  It was Fränze who helped Erik slide the little baron overboard in his silk coffin, which bobbed a few times and then was sucked into the waves. The Forty Thieves sniffed at the salt in the air and began to knead their caps with their thick fingers while Erik read from Revelation.

  Behold, I am coming soon, bringing my recompense, to repay every one for what he has done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.

  “Alpha and Omega,” Fränze whispered, and went down the hatch, followed by Franz and the Forty Thieves.

  “Erik,” the captain said, “you can’t fight them. You have no angels on your side. We’re two mortals on a mad submarine.”

  “But I never relied on angels,” Erik muttered, without his antic smile. “I’m an Abwehr man. But you must tell me, Herr Kapitän, why the admiral picked you to command this tub, and why Colonel Joachim even allowed you on board. He knows how much you hate the Nazis. Tell the truth. What happened to your own tub? Why did your men drown and not you?”

  “My men didn’t drown,” he said. “They’re in a prison camp in Wales. I surrendered my own tub to the Engländers.”

  Erik could barely believe such a tale. But the submarine service had always been free of Berlin and the claws of the SS. Kleist did have a couple of Nazis on board, including his first mate, but he strangled them in their sleep and stuffed each one in a torpedo tube. The rest of his crew remained loyal to the last man.

  He wasn’t looking for a cigar from Winston Churchill. He just wanted to pull his own tub out of the war. He was sick of destroying freighters and watching men drown in the sea. But the Engländers wouldn’t even put him in the same camp with his crew. He was held under house arrest at a country manor, where women paraded without their clothes and he dined on pâté and pink champagne.

  He thought he would go out of his mind. He was a submarine commander, not some little lord. A man in knickers appeared, punched Kleist in the face, and told him he could either get shot or become a spy. Other men in knickers arrived. They worked on him for three months. Then they grew tired. They had a combat team send Kleist back across the ocean and land him on a beach near Le Havre—in his white cap. The admirals in Berlin didn’t know how to treat a captain who should have been dead but was suddenly washed ashore without his crew. Kleist had become an embarrassment. But these admirals had to protect the honor of the U-bootwaffe. They couldn’t send one of their own sailors to the guillotine with a Ritterkreuz around his neck.

  “And now we’re stuck in the same pile of shit,” Erik said. “Both of us are captains without a country.”

  HE STILL HAD TO SOLVE THE COUNTRY OF THIS SUBMARINE. Franz and the Forty Thieves watched the captain’s every move, but they ignored the magician, let him wander wherever he liked. These louts didn’t even slap the dirk out of his sleeve. Franz had seen the magician walk through a wall and disarm a whole room, yet the Forty Thieves hadn’t bothered to wrap Erik up in a silk flag, like Emil.

  He was a pet, after all, Fränze’s pet, and she wanted him alive. Whatever immortality he had on the Milchkuh came from her. She hadn’t broken Emil’s neck out of anger or spite. It was her own crazy love call to Erik.

  She couldn’t entice him with her musk. She had to get his attention with a kill. She was waiting for the magician. And all he had to do was follow the lines of his own hallucination. He found her in the engine room. Her hair wasn’t cropped, like Lisa’s ghost. And Fränze didn’t glisten with machine oil. But she had smeared her mouth with red paint.

  There were no mechanics in the engine room. The twin diesels made a terrible racket, like raucous birds; the lights kept twinkling in time to the room’s constant rattle. There was only a narrow path between the engines, and that’s where Fränze stood with her slightly brutal face, her red lips on fire, her naked body like a magnificent knife.

  He didn’t try to fool her, or wear his antic mask.

  “Fräulein, if we make love, it will only be a mission, and you’ll never survive it.”

  Her brutal features began to shift in the rattling light; her face softened into a submarine flower.

  “Couldn’t you call me Liebchen? We’ve been to school together, disposed of enemy agents. And we’ve kissed.”

  “But Fränze, I deceived you with that kiss. I’m in love with someone else.”

  Her hand reached out of all that rattle and clasped his.

  “I know,” she said. “You’re in love with a corpse. Congratulations, my sweet prince.… Lie down with me. I promise not to tell Lisalein.”

  He wanted to shut his eyes and not remember the cockroaches and beetles that thrived in the hissing heat of the engine room. But he couldn’t afford to shut his eyes. Franz might have been crouching behind one of the diesels, and the Forty Thieves could have been waiting in the next compartment with their dirks.

  Fränze lay down in that cockroach country and eased Erik onto her, whispering in his ear. “Liebchen, let this be our last mission.”

  He sucked on her mouth to keep her from talking. She writhed under him and ripped off his belt. He didn’t hear the crunch of any beetles. He entered Fränze, her legs scissoring around him.
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br />   And suddenly she started to cry.

  “Am I hurting you, Fränze? Should I stop?”

  She didn’t answer. Erik was confused. How would he ever throttle her if she wasn’t in the middle of her own rapture? But when he tried to pull out of Fränze, she clutched him around the waist and squeezed him with her legs in a python’s grip. He had blood spots in his eyes. He couldn’t breathe. He was like some muddled Jack the Ripper. She meant to suffocate him, squeeze the air out of his lungs so he could begin his own death rattle.

  But then she started to purr and she gave up that python’s grip. She licked his ear until he felt a storm inside his head.

  “You mustn’t stop, sweet Erik. I have kissed no one in my life but my brother. And he is not a magician.”

  She didn’t growl, like Lisalein. Her tenderness disturbed him. He was about to sob, when he recalled that the acrobat lying under him had broken Emil’s neck. And he moved inside her with his own deadly rhythm. He made her writhe—like a magician. And when he put his hands on her windpipe, she smiled and moaned all the more. Her moans turned into a strange bark, but there was no agony in her eyes as her face turned blue.

  He didn’t have to feel the pulse in her neck. He stood up to buckle his belt, then lifted Fränze. There wasn’t one beetle or cockroach underneath. The floor was smooth as silk. He carried her out of the engine room and into the next compartment, her long arms dangling. She’d kept all her litheness. And she was lighter than he could ever have imagined for such a large-boned girl.

  He carried her into the crew’s quarters. The Forty Thieves froze in their bunks, looked at him agog. Franz could have split his back open with a single blow. But Franz couldn’t be found. And Erik placed her gently in her hammock. He had an eerie notion that Fränze might awake if he rocked the hammock once. Gott, he was waiting for her resurrection. He wanted her to lick his ear again.

  America