Cesare Read online

  “Your own magic, Herr Dr. Caligari.”

  I start to cry. Dr. Caligari can’t even help himself.

  “If I was such a magician, Helmut, wouldn’t I free you from Gestapo-land?”

  Suddenly, he smiles, even with the broken knuckles and the blood on his suspenders. “Alte, none of us are magicians without your Cesare.”

  He will not mention Rosa Luxemburg, though he is dying to talk about her—he is as haunted by her as I am, even if he doesn’t stand on the balcony every afternoon and wait for Luxemburg to rise again from the Landwehrkanal. I was not her lover. I only held her hand as she was riding to her own death.

  I’ll never see the commander again. Himmler will hide him somewhere well beyond my reach. And so I kiss Helmut on the cheek, and then I hop out of the dungeon, with my babysitters right behind.

  They escort me to the Adlon. How symmetrical it is that the SS should celebrate Cesare’s return in the Rembrandt Room, where they sent him off with their kiss of death. But I knew he would survive that coffin of a Milchkuh, or perhaps I’m an old fool who believes in blind faith.

  The salon is swollen with SS colonels and Gestapo commandants, together with Party hacks. These Hunde stare at me, bewildered that the Reich’s invisible admiral has dared come into their domain. The menu is different today. The banquet tables are filled with vegetarian delights in honor of Herr Hitler—potato dumplings, nuts and yellow rice, custards and egg soufflés prepared by the Führer’s three-hundred-pound Bavarian chef, since the Adlon’s own kitchen has been reduced to a kind of genteel beggary.

  The whole salon is waiting, and I cannot get close to Eric Holder of Boston, Massachusetts, who is my Erik again, with his Ritterkreuz. He is surrounded by the Leibstandarte SS. These Death’s-Heads have him in their sway. Perhaps he is angry at his Alte for having tricked him over Lisalein. He won’t acknowledge my glance, but he sees my babysitters, and doesn’t want to put me in any danger. He must sense the travesty of the whole thing, and I want to shout—Männe, go back to America!

  And then it’s too late. The Führer has arrived with his Nazi barber, Fritz, who wears his decoration from the Great War, his Iron Cross. A silence descends upon the salon. There are no sighs, no hiccoughs, no gasps of breath. This is the power Herr Hitler has—he could cut the air right out of your lungs. I have seen him snarl, with spittle flying from his tongue. I have seen him harangue his generals for an hour. But he is calm today, one hand curled inside his sleeve. Himmler has bamboozled him again, woven one of his errant songs around our gullible Führer, who believes that Erik was on the rampage, slaughtering American souls. And there is a gaiety in Hitler’s step, a kind of trick dance; for the moment, Erik can assuage all the military blunders, the mad scheme of conquering a world that is chaotic and far more cruel than the Nazis themselves, with their love of banners and parades and blond beer.

  But the Führer takes his trembling hand out of his sleeve and waves it, like the maestro of Berlin. There’s a gleam in his eyes, in spite of the dark pouches. Fritz the barber bows and touches his lips to the colored ribbons around Erik’s neck.

  And finally Erik glances at his admiral, not with anger, but with his own silent song—Alte, welcome to the asylum!

  Babelsberg on the River Ohře

  27

  IT WAS A VAST CONSPIRACY. That’s what bothered Erik the most. It was as if the Abwehr and the studios at Babelsberg had plotted to build a ghetto town that was totally picturesque—a postcard village with a central square inhabited by shadows. It had a café with somber faces, a restaurant where meals were never served. It had novelty shops without novelties, bakeries without bread. The town itself was a fortress, Castle Theresienstadt, run by the SS. Even the Wehrmacht couldn’t wander in. No general or diplomat ever stopped here on the way to Prague.

  Across the river Ohře was another castle, known as the Little Fortress; the most notorious prison in Bohemia, it was where Czech army officers, black marketeers, and resistance fighters were beaten to death by the Gestapo and the SS. But Babelsberg didn’t reach across the river. No attempt was ever made to prettify the Little Fortress—it was a house of murder, unadorned.

  But its lack of niceties didn’t trouble Erik. The Little Fortress had no return tickets. It’s where you went to die. It wasn’t touched by Paradise. It couldn’t break your heart. But the main castle on the other side of the river, with its rough red walls and battlements, was a maddening enterprise. It had been built as a fort in the northwest of Bohemia at the end of the eighteenth century. Because it couldn’t flourish in its own isolation, this red castle became a prison, then a small, unpretentious village of seven thousand souls. But in 1941, after Reinhard Heydrich was appointed Protector of Bohemia, he decided to toss out the seven thousand and turn Castle Theresienstadt into a phantasmagorical town, a paradise for German and Czech Jews, a walled ghetto where Jews themselves would volunteer to live—novelists, poets, dancers, musicians, retired millionaires. It was one more of Heydrich’s brilliant, diabolic schemes, like Nacht und Nebel. It would show the world that Hitler was magnanimous to the Jews, and that he had deigned to give them a city where they might prosper on their own.

  It was a fool’s trap. But there were many volunteers at first, and then the stories spread: Theresienstadt was a closed castle. The only means to graduate from Hitler’s Paradise was to climb aboard the cattle car to Auschwitz. Jewish conductors might have their own chorale at the castle, but then they were gassed together with their chorale. And the Nazis made a colossal blunder. They hurled several hundred Jews from Denmark into Theresienstadt in 1943. These were the only Danish Jews the SS could find. The vast majority of Jews had been hidden by the Danes themselves. But the unlucky ones, who landed in Theresienstadt, complained to their king about the appalling conditions at the castle—the bedbugs, the lice, the lack of winter clothes. The Nazis couldn’t comprehend that Danish Jews had the rights of ordinary human beings. The Danes insisted that the Red Cross come to inspect the castle.

  It threw the SS into a panic. With their sense of superiority at stake, they couldn’t contradict the Red Cross. And so they prepared for the visit. In order to end the brutal overcrowding, they sent more and more inmates to Auschwitz. They refurbished the barracks, and had the castle’s Jews live like campers, fifty in a compartment, rather than a hundred. And they found a Jewish hero, a Jewish star. They plucked Bernhard Beck out of Amsterdam with all the other Jews, coddled him a bit, brought in an entire crew from Babelsberg, and had Beck star in their own fairy tale, The Cabaret King Comes to Bohemia.

  It was a masterpiece of cunning and guile. Beck reenacted his rise from Berlin’s Jewish ghetto to Mackie Messer, and then they veered the tale in their own direction. They pretended that Bernhard was still at the Adlon in ’43, still performing Mack the Knife, and had decided to leave his adoring fans in Berlin and move to Paradise, where he falls in love with a blind Jewess and has his own wondrous cabaret.

  Goebbels took a chance and had Cabaret King shown in Berlin. There was a furor over the film; audiences flocked to it, rode right out of the rubble to watch their beloved Beck prance about and sing “The Ballad of Mack the Knife.” A tenor with the sweetest tones, he had remained their idol through all the years of Nazi rule, reminding them of the lost art of cabaret. Audiences wept the moment Mackie Messer appeared on screen, that roly-poly man, as large and round as Hitler’s own Bavarian chef. They wept after he abandoned his suite at the Adlon and traded Berlin for Bohemia. But they were in awe of this town their Führer had built for the Jews, with its own river, its own castle, its painting studios, its Fussball fields on the ramparts, its symphony hall in an attic, and its milk cows (borrowed from some pasture). Castle Theresienstadt wasn’t bombed by the Engländers, had no ashes and rubble. Mack the Knife seemed to thrive in his new home. He was surrounded by Jewish jazz musicians, and had his own cabaret in the SS clubhouse. His German guardians felt privileged to hear him sing.

  The film enriched the Reich,
and declared to the world that the Nazis could support a Jewish star. And Erik’s mission was to kidnap the Reich’s movie star from Theresienstadt. He couldn’t do it alone. The Americans had their own man within the walls. But Erik wasn’t even curious about this mastermind. He’d come to rescue Lisa, and he had to find her first.

  But he was another one of Goebbels’ propaganda pieces, no less fraudulent than Cabaret King, even if his name wasn’t lit up in half-bombed Berlin movie palaces. How could he have massacred a whole slew of Canadian Royal Mounties, or FBI men and small-town sheriffs he had never met? There couldn’t have been a mad chase across the Rockies, or a manhunt in Manhattan. The nearest he ever got to Manhattan was an unlocked cage at an espionage school in Norfolk that masked itself as an asylum. He’d seen no more of the continent than a sandbar in Maine. America had become for him an elaborate game of blindman’s bluff, with a Knight’s Cross as his reward … and five minutes with the Führer.

  He’d been gone nine months, and it might as well have been half a century. He could not recognize his Berlin. Women roamed the streets with their life’s belongings toppling out of baby carriages. The Nazi banners were now rags in the wind. His apartment on the Dragonerstrasse had been looted; it seemed as if some madman or host of starving children had sucked the paint and plaster from the walls. The furniture was gone, with his mother’s heirlooms and the paraphernalia of a secret agent. The Gestapo had stopped patrolling the streets in their black sedans; there was nothing to patrol, and no one to arrest. Even the Adlon had little of its old allure. The large windows on the ground floor had been covered with bricks to protect the hotel from shattering glass. The Adlon was like a bunker now, Berlin’s bunker hotel.

  And yet his picture had been in the Illustrirte. Children saluted him from their little forts in the rubble; old men fondled the sleeves of the SS uniform he now had to wear. The wives of generals looked at him with wild-eyed lust. They didn’t really desire him, but had bolted their own madness and hysteria onto his myth. The Führer had been no less hysterical, hopping around Erik in the Rembrandt Room, asking him whether the Royal Mounties had blue eyes.

  Erik should have plucked out the Führer’s own pale eyes, but he couldn’t. The Führer was like a bemused child with a suddenly found toy to take his mind off a winter campaign where Russian snipers dressed in white could fire at will in the brutal glare that leapt off the snow and destroy cadre after cadre in a matter of minutes. And so the Führer had danced in front of Himmler’s fabricated hero, while Erik stared at the murderers who surrounded Admiral Canaris and were slowly squeezing the life out of him. The admiral was a glorified prisoner, and had Erik tried to get near him at the Adlon, just to clasp his hand, blows would have rained down on the admiral’s head, and Erik would have been whisked away without a bite of lemon custard. The ribbons around his neck were nothing but a noose.

  He was flown to Prague; he saw no spires, no walls, not one glimpse of the city. A command car plucked him right out of the airport and onto a military road. He was caught in a dream of tanks and field cars, but it was maddening, because cows moved along the same road. There were no towns, no fields of winter corn, just ridges of snow stained with oil, like bird droppings. And then Paradise appeared, with its red walls, and it filled Erik with a curious longing, but not for an ersatz city that was a disguised killing field. Perhaps this town in Bohemia that Hitler gave the Jews was more complicated and various than the Nazis could ever have imagined.

  They stopped at a sentry box—the sentry gawked at Erik—and passed through an enormous armored gate in the red wall and onto a bumpy road. Along that road was the strangest sight Erik had ever seen. A decrepit hearse with smashed lanterns was filled with loaves of bread that wobbled like living things. But this hearse had no dray horses. It was dragged along by men who were hitched to the hearse. They had weary, skeletal faces. They wore black jackets like undertakers, with Jewish stars emblazoned over their hearts.

  This load of bread must have been a nightmare; the wheels sagged and the wagon swayed. But the men didn’t moan or complain. They were having a heated argument about Plato.

  “Plato’s shadows are not yours or mine.”

  “What are they, then?”

  “Dancers on a wall. Images of delight. Like a puppet show.”

  “I won’t listen to you, Albert. You mock the whole myth of the cave. They are the shadows we have become and will always be.”

  Erik was enthralled. He wanted to hitch himself to the same wagon. Perhaps he’d really come to Paradise. But he’d startled these philosopher–wagon men. Suddenly, they crept out of their own absorption and noticed Erik and his uniform. They released their leather straps, saluted Erik, curtsied several times, and started to tremble.

  “Please don’t punish us,” the lead wagon man whimpered. “We meant no disrespect. We would have taken another road, mein Herr, if …”

  Erik had wounded these wagon men somehow.

  “You mustn’t be frightened of me. I’m only a guest at the castle. Here, let me help you with your burden.”

  The wagon men were horrified.

  “Mein Herr, they’ll put us on the next transport if they catch us together.”

  An SS guard arrived and struck the lead wagon man with a baton.

  “Stinkjude, how dare you insult a German officer.”

  Erik knocked the baton out of the guard’s hand.

  “He didn’t insult me. They were talking about Plato, and I listened.”

  This guard gawked at Erik, as the sentry had done. He recognized the ghost warrior who had come out of America alive.

  “Herr Kapitän Holdermann, these settlers are not allowed to look at a German officer. They have no language, not—”

  “Enough,” Erik told him. He helped the wagon men hitch themselves to the hearse again and said good-bye. He’d rather talk with “settlers,” as the Jews of Paradise were called, than the contingent of guards that arrived out of nowhere. He was given a metal cup of schnapps to fortify himself against the wind that swept across the plains of Theresienstadt.

  He soon discovered that the castle wasn’t a castle at all, but resembled the Jewish Hospital of Berlin with its great outer wall and seven pavilions, though Theresienstadt’s pavilions were a deepening maze, with courtyards that went nowhere in a world of barracks, hidden spires, and walls within walls. He was led into the first pavilion and up a flight of serpentine stairs, with a sign over the landing that read SETTLERS FORBIDDEN HERE UNDER PENALTY OF DEATH. He went through an alcove and into a grand salon, where he was introduced to the castle’s commandant—it was Colonel Joachim of the SS, who had taken over Theresienstadt several months ago.

  There was a tic in the milieu of his blond mustache, like a tiny creature crawling under the skin. Erik realized in an instant that Joachim was Werner Wolfe’s own man in Paradise, and America was his escape route. Wolfie had been plotting with the SS, and Joachim must have been his liaison with Heinrich Himmler.

  “Herr Magician,” Joachim said, glancing at the Ritterkreuz, “how are you?”

  “Phone the Führer. And find out. If I’d known you were at Theresienstadt, I would have asked him for the privilege of breaking your neck.”

  Joachim cupped a hand over his mustache. He couldn’t control the tic. But he still managed to smile. “You should be more careful with a commandant. I could have you shot. Cesare, we both know why you’re here. Mackie Messer. But he’s been getting jumpy. I’m not sure he wants to leave Theresienstadt. This is the site of his biggest success. The cabaret king in Paradise. I’d like you to steal Mackie once the Red Cross comes to inspect the camp. Mackie is our jewel. He’ll perform for the Red Cross commissioners. And then you can have him.”

  The commandant seemed bewitched, and Erik didn’t understand why. All the commissioners in the world couldn’t close a concentration camp. There had to be another reason.

  “Colonel, since when are SS commandos frightened of the Red Cross?”

&nbs
p; Joachim wouldn’t even look at Erik. “It’s not the Red Cross. It’s Berlin—the Führer is obsessed with the visit. He wants to be remembered as the father of this ghost town. That’s why he tolerates a Jewish Mack the Knife. But he won’t tolerate him very long.”

  Erik wasn’t concerned about a cabaret king’s swan song in front of the Red Cross.

  “Mackie’s your problem child, not mine. Now take me to Lisalein.”

  And still there was that throbbing mustache. “She’s been sick,” he said. “The baroness isn’t allowed to see a soul.”

  “Take me to Lisalein … or I’ll have to plow through all your men.”

  The Burning Tree of Sachsenhausen

  28

  SHE WAS ON THE TOP FLOOR OF THE FIRST PAVILION, in a tiny hospital ward that must have been a kind of Extrastation for SS officers and prominent Jews at Theresienstadt. It had six or seven cots, with its own male nurse, who looked like a domesticated bulldog and was called “Little Sister”; only one of the cots was occupied—by Lisalein. She had burn marks on the side of her face and different-colored eyes. One was green and the other was shot through with blood. Her blond hair was streaked with white, like the witch of Paradise. She could have been a hundred, but then he recalled that Lisa wasn’t much older than himself. It was hard to describe his own confusion of pity, anger, and delight—anger that he hadn’t known she was still alive, and delight that his own heartbeat could have been hers—that’s how near he was to Lisalein.

  The witch of Paradise wasn’t even startled to see him.

  “Darling,” she said, as if she were continuing a conversation she’d had with him yesterday, “did you come without champagne?”

  Erik snarled at the SS guard outside the door. “Champagne, you son of a bitch. And two cups.”

  “Three,” Lisa said. “Little Sister has to have a taste of whatever I drink.… You look divine in your uniform. And it’s nice of you to bring me a present—your Ritterkreuz.”