Cesare Read online

  24

  THE FORTY THIEVES WOULDN’T BURY FRÄNZE AT SEA. They kept her in the hammock. She didn’t seem to rot around their rotting clothes. But after a week the magician ventured into their quarters, wrapped Fränze in her own hammock, tied it at both ends until it resembled a cloth sarcophagus, carried her up the ladder all by himself, and pitched her into the Atlantic.

  Without Fränze, the Forty Thieves had lost control of the tub. They were frightened of Erik and took to kissing his hand. He was their little führer. Kleist was the one who sent them to their battle stations, but Erik was the real Kapitän zur See.

  “We have captured them by the tail,” Kleist said. “We should toss them overboard and let them live with the whales.”

  Erik peered at Kleist from under his blue cap. “No wonder the admirals in Berlin are wary of you. You’re a captain who likes to get rid of his crew.”

  And Erik searched the tub for traces of Franz. But Franz seemed to have vanished from this gray Leviathan. And then, during their fifth week at sea, Erik noticed a phantom crawl out of the map chest. This phantom was double-jointed and could fold himself into closets. He was terribly thin and must have been starving himself. Erik had to feed him some of the tub’s wretched rice, filled with beetles and bugs. He was pondering what damage a phantom acrobat might do, but saw right away that Franz was helpless without his sister.

  “Herr Magician, don’t kill me, please. I’ll be your slave. You can kiss me as much as you want.”

  “Shut up. We have to prepare. We’ll be landing soon.”

  They’d arrived off the coast of Maine with a listless crew and the captain’s dead reckoning. The milk cow had crept underwater into the mouth of Frenchman Bay. Kleist had to make a silent run, or the American naval base at Bar Harbor would have picked up their soundings and captured the tub. They proceeded past Ironbound Island and the Porcupines at periscope depth and approached their destination point—Crabtree Neck, a wooded peninsula that was part of the mainland.

  But Kleist couldn’t risk a landing. The weather was much too spectacular. The lighthouses along the peninsula lit the night sky like a series of flaming balls. Patrol boats would have spotted the tub’s tower in five minutes. And so the milk cow had to sit blindly at the bottom of the sea and wait for a storm to brew.

  Erik wasn’t idle. He didn’t have to memorize his call signals, since he meant to bury his Afu radio kit in the forest the first chance he had. He tried to help Franz pronounce some American lingo, but Franz had never heard of Mark Twain and Moby Dick, or Shoeless Joe Jackson and Filene’s bargain basement. He could only sit and count his dollars. He never talked of Fränze, and Erik began to wonder when Franz’s anger would break.

  But Franz was frightened of America. He didn’t want to leave the tub. His teeth chattered all the time. Erik had to calm him like a high-strung horse. He didn’t have to think of too many details. Uncle Willi had created a “legend” for him at the Abwehr. And the Abwehr’s legends didn’t stray too far into fiction. “A legend should cling to a man,” Uncle Willi loved to declare. And so Erik Holdermann of Berlin would become Eric Holder of Boston, Massachusetts, with a driver’s license, a Social Security card, a draft card, and a bankbook with the seal of the First National Bank of Boston. The cards and licenses were magnificent forgeries, dated with authentic stamps. Uncle Willi had been building this legend for years, so that Erik already had a shadow self in North America, with a bank account that was quite real.

  All Erik had to do was land on the beach at Crabtree Neck and dive right into his shadow self. This shadow would soon be his second skin. Uncle Willi had never intended him to hit the mainland as a secret agent. The admiral couldn’t save himself, but he could cure his own magician of the Third Reich.

  ERIK AND FRANZ SHED THEIR UNIFORMS and wore shirts and trousers with American labels. They had Camels and Lucky Strikes in their waterproof pockets. They had combs, shoelaces, American dollars, and American mints. And when the wind started to rip and the fog obscured that “pharaoh’s eye” of the lighthouses, the diesels started to roar, the propellers churned, and Milchkuh Number Nine broke the surface of Frenchman Bay, off Crabtree Neck. Erik and Franz stood on the weather deck in rainwear from Martha’s Vineyard.

  Some of the Forty Thieves began to sniffle in front of Erik.

  “Auf Wiedersehen, mein kleine Führer.”

  The captain whispered in Erik’s ear the moment Franz climbed into the rubber boat that would carry them to Crabtree Neck.

  “Erik, kill him as soon as we submerge. Bash in his skull with the oar. Otherwise, it will be too late.”

  But the magician wasn’t in a murderous mood. He sat with Franz in the rubber boat, with his cards and radio kit, and the two secret agents rowed into the fog. Franz was facing him, but Erik could see nothing but one nostril, which quivered all the time.

  “Herr Magician, will you let me live?”

  “Shut up. Our voices carry like gunshots in this water.”

  Franz fell back into silence, and Erik listened to the rhythmic pattern of Franz’s oars. Both blades struck the water with a startling swoosh. And then Franz’s music stopped.

  “Keep rowing,” the magician said, “or I will get rid of you. Who knows how long the fog will last? And we can’t be caught in this boat.”

  That swoosh began again. Franz was no more than three feet away in this rubber boat, yet it wasn’t only the fog that obscured Franz. The acrobat was wearing a much more diabolic mask.

  “Herr Cesare, I saw you fuck my sister.”

  The magician kept rowing. He was waiting for the suck of Franz’s oars to stop. And then he would attack with his own oar.

  “I was right there, in the engine room, in an open closet, above your ass and balls. My poor sister had lost track of me, but I could have broken your head with my own hand.”

  Erik had to keep him talking, in spite of the echo that could have carried across the water to a lighthouse, or ricocheted off the side of a patrol boat.

  “Why didn’t you when you had the chance?”

  Erik’s ears pricked at the unbroken pattern of Franz’s oars.

  “I couldn’t. I was frightened by Fränze’s face—her noises, like a crazy cow. She was never a cow with me. I couldn’t make her moan and scream.”

  And then the swooshing stopped. Erik stood up and swung the blade of his oar like a baseball bat. But he was as unlucky as Shoeless Joe. The blade struck nothing but patches of fog. The rubber boat washed onto the beach, and Franz disappeared into the forest. Erik couldn’t chase after him. There would have been too much of a racket. And sailors from the base at Bar Harbor would search the whole of Crabtree Neck. The FBI might come from Boston on a seaplane. And Erik would have disgraced Uncle Willi minutes after he arrived in America.

  No, he’d have to carry the rubber boat into the woods with his Afu, bury what had to be buried, and move on before the manhunt began. He knew that Franz would be captured. It was only a matter of time. The acrobat couldn’t hide his own frenzy, and he’d left most of his dollars in a briefcase. But Eric Holder of Boston had learned the art of invisibility. He didn’t kiss the ground like Robinson Crusoe. He couldn’t even catch sight of the trees in all that mist. He was one more captain without a country.

  He didn’t even have that illusion very long. Eric hadn’t climbed a hundred feet from the ragged shoreline when the whole of Crabtree Neck seemed to light up like some gigantic movie set that broke right through the mist; every tree was strung with lanterns, and sailors in white spats crept out from between the lanterns, rifles in their hands; they leered at him with red faces, shoved him right into the shore, until Eric stood with one foot on land and one in the sea, like some strange amphibious creature. The glare from the lanterns blinded him, burnt into his eyes. These American sailors had no mercy. Their brilliant white spats flew around him as they kicked at Eric and drubbed him with their rifle butts. A ferocious sailor nibbled on his ear.

  “Cesare, welc
ome to the United States.”

  BERLIN USA

  June 11, 1943

  From the desk of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris

  72-76 Tirpitz-Ufer

  Berlin

  Our food stores have dwindled at the Abwehr. I can no longer help beggars on the street. I’ve become the beggar. Yesterday an old man near the Kanal wanted to share his crumbs with me. I hadn’t deceived him. He saw my admiral’s uniform. And he must have thought that even admirals were starving in Berlin. I did not want to disillusion him, or disturb his dignity. So we ate together like a pair of tramps. I produced an apple from my pocket and sliced it with my dirk. “It’s delicious,” he said. We watched the barges from our perch along the embankment. Their hulls were hollowed out, and they did not have much coal to carry. They could have been skeletons on a skeleton river. Coal was as scarce as sugar, even under Berlin’s blazing sun. There would be no reserves for winter, nothing at all. Come December, we would have to feed our little stove in the Fox’s Lair with whatever debris we could find.

  My new friend wore a Party pin. It bewildered me. I wondered what rules he had broken. The Party wasn’t in the habit of creating beggars. It looked out for its own. And here was this frail old man with his offering of crumbs. He believed in Hitler, but not in all the bloodshed. The Party had given him a sinecure: It was his job to mark the front doors of Jewish families in Scheunenviertel and Wedding with yellow stars. He was paid a pretty penny, he said. He used a very fat crayon. But he ran out of doors to mark. So he began marking doors at random. The Party took away his sinecure. There was talk of expelling him, but both his sons had died in the Ukraine, and his daughter, an army nurse, had been raped by the Russians. She was discovered wandering about the battlefield. A Soviet army doctor had rescued her, a Soviet Jew. He’d risked his own life for a Nazi nurse. And it plagued this old man. He would dream about the doors he had marked. In his dreams, it was his own daughter who was always behind the doors. He could no longer sleep.

  “Herr Admiral, it is not guilt. I would have used my crayon forever if I’d had the chance. Helga is not a Jewess in my dreams. But she stands behind the doors, as mad as the moon.”

  I didn’t know what to do with this old man. I wanted to shield him, take him into the Fox’s Lair, but I couldn’t even shield myself. The Tirpitz-Ufer was overrun with Nazi apes. Soon I would have SS informers sitting in my lap. Suddenly, the old man had a mysterious smile.

  “Herr Admiral, are you also burdened with dreadful dreams?”

  Was he some mountebank planted near the Kanal? Night after night I dreamt of Erik bathing in blood. What could it mean? The Americans had taken him in. I had assurances, coded messages from my contacts. And still my Erik bathed in blood.

  I said good-bye to this strange old man and went back inside the Fox’s Lair. I couldn’t work or play with my dogs. I’d gone to Switzerland, you see. I’d met with those gangsters from the American Secret Service a fortnight ago. I sat with the gangsters in the heart of Geneva. They were all in mufti, but I wouldn’t sneak into a Swiss hotel without my uniform. The gangsters had offered me one of their own chalets, with a stunning view of the Old Town, but I insisted on the Métropole—it was the local Den of Iniquity, where all the secret agents met, much worse than Istanbul, with a spy on every street corner. But I was less visible than the gangsters were, even in my uniform. They fidgeted too much, played with their cuffs. Finally, they talked about Cesare.

  Yes, they said. He had landed in America with his brains intact. No harm had come to him. Erik had his own cottage, they said. In the countryside. And now they wanted me to kidnap Göring. They thought I could snap my fingers and stop the war. They had very precise plans. They would level Munich once Germany surrendered, level Kiel. And I would become viceroy of this wasteland. So they said. I was no more to them than some eccentric fool who did magic tricks. They were startled when I wouldn’t use the interpreter they had brought along. They didn’t know I had almost married an American girl, that I had learnt their language from American pirates in half a dozen ports.

  “Gentlemen,” I said, “I won’t be viceroy of the fuckland you intend to build on German bones and German soil. And if you harm my Cesare, I will break up all your networks in France, Turkey, Spain, and Yugoslavia. You won’t have a single spy.”

  They were in much more of a bargaining mood after that. I was Admiral Canaris, not the future viceroy. They didn’t chortle in my face. They smoked in silence, never asked about Hitler’s camps. I could have given them the blueprint of every camp. But that wasn’t on their agenda. We didn’t speak of the Jews. I was like that old man near the Kanal, drawing yellow stars on every other door in my sleep. His madness was also mine. We were all brutes, but I didn’t need lessons in morality from these American pirates with their Phi Beta Kappa keys. I’d already damned myself. Perhaps I was the viceroy of this fuckland we had all become.

  They wanted to know if Himmler or Göring was second in command.

  “There is no second in command,” I said. “Blondi is much closer to Hitler than Hermann Göring.”

  I’d confused them. They whispered among themselves, rubbed their Phi Beta Kappa keys.

  “Admiral, for God’s sake, who is Blondi?”

  “Hitler’s dog,” I said.

  They all laughed. But I still had visions of Erik bathed in blood.

  Ghosts

  25

  HE REMEMBERED HOW COLONEL JOACHIM had described America in that SS rag of his, Das Schwarze Korps. “It’s the land where Superman lives with his kike friends. It does not have one blue mountain. It has Jewish bedbugs and dung beetles.” But Eric Holder, lately of Boston and Berlin, would have liked to ask his captors the difference between a Christian beetle and a Jewish one.

  He rode across the country with a hood over his eyes. They’d tied up his hands. He could have been some trained falcon, a falcon that couldn’t fly. From time to time, a sailor sitting with him in the back of their sedan would raise the hood above his chin and allow Eric to suck on a cigarette. It wasn’t half as good as a Roth-Händle. And in spite of Eric’s own erudition, and all his scrupulous study, he couldn’t make out a word of the sailors’ slang.

  They spoke in a nervous clutter of half sentences. It was a sailor’s jazz, and he couldn’t find the lilt. So he barked at them in German.

  “Schwanz, ich bin der Teufel.”

  And they laughed at Eric, poked him in the ribs. “Don’t talk Deutsch, sonny boy. We’re Americans here.”

  He couldn’t really smoke with the rough hairs of a hood over his eyes and mouth. His captors offered him nothing but a lump of peanut brittle that they shoved under his hood. They drove for hours and hours, and they ended up at a navy brig—a hospital-prison yard that must have been near the water, since he could smell the salt in the sea.

  Finally, the bastards had taken off his hood. It was the most desolate landscape Eric had ever seen—a concrete desert with barbed wire and buildings that belonged on the moon. These buildings were as heartless as the bunkers in Berlin that housed the air raid shelters and the ack-ack batteries; they had no real windows, nothing but little glassed-in holes. And for a moment, Eric thought he saw Tilli the Toiler on the roof of a navy bunker. She smiled at him.

  He was stripped, hosed down by some maniac, and given convict’s clothes to wear: navy blue pajamas without a single pocket, sandals and no socks. He had to live in a cell that was narrower than a lion’s cage at the Berlin Zoo. He had a desk screwed into the wall, a monk’s bed, a sink, and what the sailors called “a tin can,” a stainless-steel commode that rocked and swayed every time Eric sat down on the seat.

  But he didn’t understand his status here. Was he a secret prisoner of war? His cell wasn’t locked. Eric could wander wherever he wanted, but he had nowhere to wander in this gray world. He met American admirals in the passageways. He met priests and women dressed like prostitutes. And he realized that this navy brig was a kind of Fox’s Lair, or crazy school for spie
s. Nurses would come into his cage and comb his hair. He couldn’t tell if these Schwestern were male or female. They had big biceps and big breasts—“pectorals,” the nurses called them, “pecs.” Once a nurse tiptoed into his cell in the middle of the night and whispered like a snake, “Cesare, be a good boy and give us a Kuss.”

  He tossed this nurse out of his cell. Others came back and beat him with rubber sticks. They tried to dig their tongues into Eric’s ear. He battled with them for half an hour. It was like being a subcadet in Kiel all over again. After six or seven assaults, these nurses with enormous biceps were much more careful with Eric; soon he learned their American lingo, their own jive. And he began to curse like any sailor at this hideout in Norfolk, Virginia, a town he had never seen. Was it like Kiel, with it harbor and seawall? He could no longer smell the sea from this dank tomb where he now lived.

  After he’d been there a month, he found a note on his bed. He recognized the stationery of the Abwehr, and the admiral’s own personal seal: two couched lions with a serpent in the middle. His hands shivered as he tore the envelope.

  Tirpitz-Ufer, July 1943

  Männe, I wanted to say good-bye and wish you the finest years of your life in America. You must forget me and your comrades at the Fuchsbau the minute you read this note. Please burn it, dear Erik. Eva sends her love. She says you are the nicest spy she ever met. I had to put her in another institution far from Berlin and the Russian dogs, who will one day soon be sitting in our lap. I would die if those dogs ever raped my little girl. I should have put her on the Milchkuh with you and Emil. I am sorry I could not save Emil. But I couldn’t overload the Milchkuh with Abwehr agents. I remember the day I met you on the seawall at Kiel. How ferocious you were, Männe, but still concerned with the safety of one old man being attacked by young wolves. I was frightened that you had no fear. I had to kidnap you, bring you to Berlin. You must forgive your Alte for training you as his Cesare. But I am a selfish old fool who loves you as much as my Eva and my dachshunds. Do not think ill of me, Mr. Eric Holder of the United States. I hope you have found a lovely house somewhere in the woods.