Cesare Page 4

  “Stop crying,” she said. “What a pest! You’re just like my father. You cry over the tiniest thing.”

  “But you won’t forget me?”

  She smiled and pinched his earlobes. “Darling, how could I forget a boy in a wolf’s hairy coat?”

  She pranced out of the barn in her satin cape that she furled around her shoulders like some sleeping bat. And all Erik could do was follow her footsteps with his brown eyes, dreading a future without Lisalein.

  Kiel

  3

  HE WASN’T EVEN A CADET, BUT A SUBCADET, a toady attached to the old Warrant Officers’ School in the Mühlenstrasse, where all the cadets trained, not far from the Kiel Kanal. Heinrich sold him into an elaborate form of slavery. He lived in a shack with other subcadets behind the training school. He never got near a submarine, hardly even stepped onto the seawall. He went from Heinrich’s barn to a cave near the sea.

  The cadets, with their enamel swastikas pinned to the pockets of their middy blouses, expected the subcadets to be their toads. Erik had to bring them blood sausages and beer, shine their shoes, and wash their underwear, but when the first cadet tried to kiss him, Erik broke his nose. He could have been tossed out of this lowly subcadet corps and sent back to Heinrich, but the cadets voted to keep him. They still thought to conquer the subcadet from Berlin and make him their whore. But they hadn’t counted on the Teufel inside him. Erik had fought Heinrich’s bastard sons, who were far crueler than these cadets; he’d had a training they never had. It didn’t matter how often they pummeled him or pissed in his locker. He could wield a “cheese knife” as well as any of the cadets. And he kept that dirk with him whenever he was in the shower stall, or when he was in his little cave behind the cadets’ own barrack—he slept like a wolf, always half awake, one eye open, the dirk under his pillow. And when the cadets attacked in the middle of the night, he would lunge with his dirk an inch from their eyes. They’d hiss and call him a devil-boy, but they always scattered.

  So it went on for more than a year, this game of cat and mouse, where the mouse was even fiercer than the cat-cadets. But they had other diversions, their cadet balls and their very own nightclub, Trocadero, on the Kaiserstrasse, while Erik had little else but the seawall and patches of sky when he wasn’t doing their chores.

  And on a windy night he happened to be near the seawall when a little gang of drunken louts attacked a man in civilian clothes. The boy was seventeen, and his time in Kiel had toughened him. These louts couldn’t have been cadets; they reminded him of the Red thugs who would wander through Scheunenviertel when he was a child, stealing apples and pieces of cloth from the peddlers, fondling women who had strayed onto the streets without their kerchiefs. But these weren’t Reds. They were louts from the local beer hall. And the man they were kicking had gray hair and a knob of a nose. His suit had an aristocratic cut, but it was all crumpled and slightly worn, as if he were an elegant tramp.

  The louts sneered at Erik and his uniform of a subcadet, which marked him as a kitchen slave. Their leader called him a little boy.

  “Knabe, mind your business before we break your head.”

  Erik flicked the dirk out of his sleeve and ripped a line of blood across the leader’s face. The other louts rushed at him, and Erik tore their winter coats to shreds, like a master undressing his own pupils. They had an insane energy that propelled them beyond their own fear. Erik kicked them in the shins; they fell and rose again and stumbled away from the elegant tramp.

  Erik picked up the man’s homburg and dusted it off. “Alte,” he said, even though the tramp really wasn’t that old. “What the hell are you doing near the seawall at this hour? They could have cracked your skull.”

  The tramp laughed. “But I had you to protect me, Männe, my little man. Are you a cadet at the naval college?”

  “Nein, Alte. I’m the toad who shines their shoes, a subcadet.”

  “I never heard of such a thing, a subcadet,” said the tramp.

  The boy grew irritated. “What the hell would you know?”

  That great knob of a nose began to twitch. “Männe, I was once also a cadet, and we had kitchen slaves, but not with the diabolic category of subcadet.”

  Erik scrutinized the tramp a little closer. “You must have fallen on hard times. Do you need a little pocket money? I could lend you a few marks. That’s all I have.”

  “Yes, they took my purse. What’s your name? I’ll send you a postal check.”

  “It’s a gift, Alte. I have no place to spend my money. The cadets have their Trocadero, and we have sour wine.”

  The tramp smiled to himself. “Is the Troc still open, Männe? It was a high-class whorehouse in my day. I married nine or ten of the Mädchen within its walls—for one night. The whores were given veils and everything, and there was even a minister, who was a client at the Troc. What’s your name?”

  Erik told him. He was still confused. “I would walk you to the train station, Alte, but we’re not allowed to leave the base.”

  The tramp put on his homburg and bowed to Erik. “Auf Wiedersehen.”

  And Alte disappeared into the fog that rose off the Baltic and flooded the seawall. Erik returned to his cave and wouldn’t give the tramp another thought. He didn’t expect a postal check and never received one. He went on shining the cadets’ shoes. And then two members of the Kiel patrol appeared at his bedside and shone a light in his eyes. Erik assumed he was going to be court-martialed for having roughed up several citizens of Kiel. But he suddenly remembered that he couldn’t be court-martialed. A subcadet had no real contract with the German navy, and didn’t even have the right to exist. But to his great surprise, he was escorted to the cadets’ barrack and given his own bunk.

  As a cadet, he was free to wander through Kiel. He went to the Kaiserstrasse, strolled into the Troc, which wasn’t much of a whorehouse in 1937, but a club for cadets. He danced with the Mädchen, but their lips were too red, and none of them had Lisa’s perfume. They smelled of soap. He wouldn’t even fumble with them in a dark corner behind the curtains.

  He had little taste for this town. It didn’t have its own Scheunenviertel, with courtyards full of peddlers, poets, and men in pointy hats. It was a sailors’ paradise that came alive for one little moment in June, Kieler Woche, when yacht clubs from all over the world descended upon Kiel for a week of races. Hitler’s Kriegsmarine presided over the regatta, with Kiel’s naval base as its headquarters and the Kaiser’s former yacht club as its host. Admirals strolled along the seawall, flags flying in their wake like war banners. Cadets and midshipmen served as messengers and pages, drinking schnapps with senior officers and their wives when they weren’t dancing with the most marriageable daughters of Schleswig-Holstein. These were educated girls with magnificent flanks and without the smear of lipstick. They wore white gloves and carried little spangled bags attached to their wrists. They wanted to be the wives of navy men, but when they giggled at him, he wouldn’t giggle back.

  And while he brooded in the great hall of the Reichsmarine’s own regatta, his eyes fell upon the tramp he had rescued from the seawall. The tramp was wearing an admiral’s uniform, which was very rumpled. Erik didn’t dare approach until the admiral-tramp beckoned to him.

  “Herr Admiral,” the boy said, clicking his heels. “Heil Hitler!”

  But the admiral did not return Erik’s Hitler salute. He seemed apart from the other admirals, outside the ken of Kiel Week.

  “Männe, do you remember me?”

  “Yes, Herr Admiral, we met on the seawall.”

  “And what did you call me then?”

  “Alte—but I can assure you that you are the youngest admiral here.”

  “Ah, you’ve grown into a flatterer since you’ve become a cadet. That admiral near the window with the Schmiss on his cheek is much, much younger than I.”

  Erik saw an admiral in orange epaulets, with a dueling scar under one eye; the admiral could have been Serbian or Lithuanian, God knows, but he
had the rough hands of a laborer.

  “What if I told you he’s an impostor,” said the admiral-tramp, “an impostor who has come here to harm me?”

  “Then we should arrest him on the spot, Herr Admiral.”

  “Suppose we couldn’t arrest him. Suppose it would cause a scandal. What would you do, Männe?”

  “Make sure he doesn’t harm you, Herr Admiral.”

  Erik wasn’t sure what hold this admiral-tramp had on him, but he wouldn’t hesitate. Alte’s eyes weren’t harsh and remote, like the other officers in Kiel. Such a mysterious tramp had to be crucial to the Kriegsmarine, or else a false Lithuanian admiral with a dueling scar wouldn’t have risked breaking into Kiel Week to kill him.

  “Alte, what if you are wrong about the Lithuanian?”

  “Then follow me to the Toilette and we will find out.”

  It troubled Erik and intrigued him. It was like stepping into Alice im Wunderland; suddenly he had become part of a strange book, where murderers followed admirals into toilets. The Kiel club had enormous windows, and he could catch the panoply of sails in the harbor, like sheets of a hundred colors in the pale sky. And with this admiral out of Alice, he began to feel his own place in the regatta.

  Down they went into the rabbit hole, the winding stairs that led to the basement, the admiral never once looking behind him. It had been the Kaiser’s own club, and the walls had silvered wainscoting; the banisters were embossed in gold. Erik heard footsteps behind him, but the admiral signaled that he shouldn’t turn around.

  There was a valet outside the toilet who handed both of them a towel. They went through a chrome door. The Kaiser’s old Toilette was a festival of mirrors, where Erik could view himself from every angle; he and the admiral were multiplied so many times that it was like conjuring up an army. The tiles on the floor did not have a single chip. They might have been polished with a magic stone; he had to keep from sliding.

  He heard a grunt outside the door. The Lithuanian must have knocked the valet over the head. Alte pretended to have heard nothing. He stopped in front of a urinal, undid his fly, and began to piss like a horse.

  That’s when the Lithuanian broke into the toilet clutching a kind of blackjack that telescoped into a long and thin metal club. He bowed to the admiral and the boy.

  “Congratulations, Uncle Willi. I’m so glad I caught you with your Schwanz in your hand.”

  The admiral continued to piss with great éclat, while the Lithuanian pointed to Erik.

  “What is this child in the sailor suit doing here? Is he your protector, Willi?”

  Erik couldn’t have lunged with his dirk. The Lithuanian would have cracked Alte’s skull with that sharp metal stick before the knife ever landed. Erik would never get near enough, not while the Lithuanian controlled the perimeter with the long stick. But the boy didn’t waver for a moment. He tossed his towel at the Lithuanian, who took his eyes off Erik long enough to flick at the towel like a fencing master. Erik ducked under the path of that murderous metal, dove into the Lithuanian, knocked him to the floor of immaculate tiles, and hit him between the eyes with his knuckles. The Lithuanian’s throat began to rattle.

  “Männe,” the admiral said, buttoning his fly. “That’s enough. Put him in a stall, bitte. And prop him up. When the porters find him, they will sing to themselves that one more admiral got lost in the Toilette.”

  And while Erik dragged the Lithuanian to a stall and plunked him down on the toilet seat, the admiral stood near the mirrored sink and scrubbed his fingernails with a tiny brush as if nothing untoward had ever happened.

  “Alte, who is this man, and why would he dare attack a German admiral?”

  “He’s nothing,” the admiral said, staring at his own imperfect teeth in the mirror. “A delivery boy. Tell me, Männe, what is it you want most in the world? Make one wish.”

  Wunderland

  4

  A MONTH PASSED, AND NOTHING HAPPENED. Kieler Woche was a dead dream that wouldn’t be revived until next year. The base fell asleep again, though Kiel seemed all aclutter over its submarine fleet. There were bits of noise about driving the British sea lions from the North Atlantic. But the admiral-tramp made no more appearances. Erik assumed the Old Man was lost in Wunderland. But he began to make inquiries; he discovered that this white-haired admiral did have a name, and it was Wilhelm Canaris, but the name itself was surrounded by mirrors, like the ones inside the Toilette at the Kaiser’s old yacht club. Canaris wasn’t with the Kriegsmarine. He was attached to the Wehrmacht in some mysterious way. But whoever heard of a lone admiral huddling with generals at the war ministry? And then there was talk that Canaris had a ministry all his own, but not even the base commander at Kiel knew where it was. Wunderland, Erik muttered to himself. The admiral with the white hair had his ministry inside a rabbit hole.

  But the wily illusionist couldn’t even grant Erik his wish. The boy had asked for Berlin. “Old Man,” he had said, while the Lithuanian sat in the toilet, more dead than alive, “I miss the streets of Scheunenviertel. Bring me back to Berlin.”

  And still nothing happened. He’d become a kind of royalty among his fellow cadets, a loner who had been seen talking to an admiral other admirals feared. The days dragged on. He had bad dreams about Scheunenviertel, where the streets collapsed like rotten teeth and he was caught in the maelstrom. He woke up with his own teeth chattering—a man of ice—while Kiel was in the middle of a heat wave.

  And that July, after his instructors had fêted him on his eighteenth birthday with glasses of champagne, members of the Kiel patrol entered the barrack and ordered him to pack his belongings. He was delivered to a pair of SS men who stood outside the base with their death’s-head insignias and polished black boots. He had to greet them with a Hitler salute. He couldn’t read their blond, imperturbable faces. They both carried pistols and kid gloves under their belts, and Erik had to wonder if they meant to escort him to the nearest forest and put a bullet in his head. They did stop in a tiny wood, where submarine commanders stationed at Kiel liked to hunt and fish at the end of a long tour. Erik was bewildered when the SS men passed around a bottle of liebfraumilch and asked him to cut the sausages they had kept in the glove compartment with his dirk. Was it their own unkind ritual before a kill? He was preparing to puncture their throats when they placed the empty bottle on the stump of a tree, and took some target practice. In their drunken stupor, they didn’t hit the bottle once. They started to dance and imitate the sound of a tuba. He put his dirk away.

  These SS men had a little caravan attached to their Mercedes; it contained a guillotine. Their job was to deliver the guillotine to towns in the north that didn’t have one and had to carry out a death sentence handed down by the People’s Court. And they were squiring Erik to Berlin as a favor to Uncle Willi.

  He couldn’t help but like such gruesome companions. They both had been kindergarten teachers who were swept away by the Nazi regalia—the promise of black uniforms and a thousand-year Reich. They had never heard of Rilke or Brecht and Rosa Luxemburg, but could recite tales of Hansel and Gretel for half an hour, and soon Erik began to think of them as Hansel and Gretel. They had both participated in book burnings but couldn’t recollect which books they had burnt or why. They hated whatever they had been told to hate, and dragged this guillotine of theirs from town to town.

  Hansel and Gretel were treated like visiting royalty in backwater provinces, where they would park outside the heavily guarded gate of some resurrected castle on Königstrasse or Königsallee, with bloodred Nazi banners riding up its front wall. The castle never varied—it served as a prison, a hotel, and local Gestapo headquarters. Erik would march into the main hall with Hansel and Gretel. A contingent of secretaries, SS officers, and Gestapo agents would swarm around them, excited by the delivery of a death machine and by the deliverers themselves. Erik had to mask his own rage and pretend that he, too, belonged with the guillotine. He had to take part in a banquet that often preceded the execution, and
then watch the condemned man enter the castle’s rear courtyard in a cloth hood, his hands tied behind his back, and proceed with the local pastor to this traveling guillotine, where Hansel or Gretel sat him down in its wooden cradle with a curious tenderness, whispered in his ear as they would have done to a high-strung horse, and dispatched him in the Führer’s name.

  The people of the town were often invited to the beheadings, which might even have a drummer boy to beat out the calvary of the condemned man. Erik’s knees always jerked when the blade fell. He had to smile and smile even as he grew ill. Sometimes he vomited into a handkerchief that he hid.

  He endured six beheadings on the road from Kiel to Berlin, having slept as a guest of the Gestapo in castles that were also killing grounds. The two executioners, Hansel and Gretel, had grown attached to him and insisted that he accept their last bits of sausage. They dropped him off at a nondescript gray building at the Tirpitz embankment, on the north side of the Landwehrkanal. He recalled his history lessons at the Jewish Gymnasium. Rosa Luxemburg’s body had been found floating in the Kanal in the summer of 1919, after sailors in Kiel revolted against their own admirals, and Rosa Luxemburg’s band of Spartakus radicals seized Berlin for five days and dreamt of a workers’ paradise. But the Prussian police and a ragged army of irregulars broke the rebellion, and Rosa Luxemburg ended up in the Landwehrkanal.

  A doorman in a sailor’s uniform stood in front of the building on the Tirpitz embankment. Hansel and Gretel had already abandoned him, and the boy didn’t quite know what magic formula would get him inside the building. He clicked his heels and said, “Admiral Canaris, bitte.”

  The sailor scowled at him. “Can I say who is calling?”

  “His Little Man.”

  It must have been the right formula, because suddenly the sailor shifted his tone. “Come with me, mein Herr.”

  They entered the building, which was far removed from the castles that Erik had visited with Hansel and Gretel. It had no great hall. It could have been a spider’s web with its warren of little rooms and dark passageways cluttered with admirals and generals who looked past Erik as if he had no right to exist. They followed one of the poorly lit passages until they arrived at a lone elevator cage in the middle of nowhere. They climbed to the fourth floor in this cage that rocked at every landing and seemed to scratch against some wall. The boy was terrified. He suffered a deeper vertigo than he had ever had aboard one of the training ships in the harbor at Kiel.