Cesare Read online

  They got out of the car, passed through a metal gate that was like the ribs of an accordion, and arrived in a new kind of Wunderland, with a maze of tiny offices on both sides of a long hall that basked in a blinding light. And this Wunderland was peopled with rabbis, Gestapo agents, local gauleiters, department-store managers, and diplomats—or at least men dressed to look like rabbis and diplomats. The sailor left him there and returned to the other side of the gate.

  Erik advanced to the far end of the hall, entered an outer office, and introduced himself to a secretary named Wera, whose own assistant was also named Wera. The two Weras knocked on a door and guided Erik into an inner office with a balcony overlooking the Landwehrkanal. The office had a camp bed, a worn sofa, a safe, and several chairs. Admiral Canaris was standing near the balcony in the same rumpled uniform, speckled with cigar ashes. Erik noticed his pale blue eyes for the first time, in the piercing light off the balcony. But it wasn’t the admiral-tramp who had startled him. It was the agent standing next to Alte. How could Erik have forgotten the man with the Schmiss under one eye, that false Lithuanian admiral from the yacht club in Kiel, who seemed to have recovered from the beating Erik had given him.

  “Alte, you shouldn’t have tricked me. I was trying to save your life in the toilet.”

  Canaris began to purr like a delighted cat. “Männe, can you ever forgive me? Meet Commander Helmut Stolz.”

  The Sheriff of Scheunenviertel

  5

  IT WAS AN ASYLUM CALLED THE ABWEHR, filled with cipher clerks, lab technicians, spies and counterspies, commandos and saboteurs. It had outstations, a Hauskapelle (or private orchestra) in every country under the sun, with its own Kapellmeister. Canaris’ deepest pleasure was to visit these outstations, whether they were in Cairo or Seville. Thus he wandered from Hauskapelle to Hauskapelle, and was seldom in Berlin, where he had a wife and two daughters tucked away in a house on Dollestrasse, with its own private garden. He took his two wirehaired dachshunds, Seppel and Sabine, wherever he went, and if he had to leave them behind, he would telephone from Cairo or Baghdad six times a day to find out if Sabine still had an eye infection or if Seppel had had a walk on the Kanal.

  Uncle Willi, as Commander Stolz called him, seemed to encourage chaos. He had little sense of order. His best agents intrigued around him. Yet he always uncovered their schemes. No one, not even Canaris, knew how the Abwehr worked. It had its own brigade, the Brandenbergers, who were soldiers and saboteurs. They were the finest military unit in Berlin and could have staged a coup d’état, locked up Hitler, Goebbels, the Gestapo, and the SS, had Uncle Willi snapped his fingers. But he wouldn’t move against Hitler and Himmler’s gang, wouldn’t arrest Herr Goebbels. He was ashamed of Hitler’s campaign against the Jews, though it was Uncle Willi himself who had suggested in 1935 that every Jew in Germany wear a Star of David as an identifying mark. He was fraught with contradictions, running to the Chancellery twice a month to meet with Herr Hitler. The little admiral had mystified half the Third Reich.

  He didn’t bother outflanking the SS as Hitler’s generals had tried to do. He knew that the SS, which was encroaching upon his territories, hid microphones in his office and listened to most of his conversations. Uncle Willi learned to live with the SS, a state unto itself, blond men in black, the Party’s own militia.

  He hadn’t brought Männe into the Abwehr to mind his dachshunds. He had Erik become the Abwehr’s liaison with the Gestapo and the SS. The boy spent several weekends a month at the SS Junkerschule in Bad Tölz, where he learned to lie and cheat and handle firearms with blond brutes, men who had never gone to Erik’s Jewish Gymnasium, whose sense of history came from Mein Kampf, who were oddly sentimental priests of the Third Reich, willing to die for their mothers, sisters, and the Fatherland. These officer candidates were all curious about the cadet from Kiel who had been kidnapped by Admiral Canaris and sent to their own training school. He did not talk of Scheunenviertel with them. And when they rasped about Rassenschand, the shame of pure-blooded Germans who had defiled their race by marrying Jewish mongrels, he nodded and pretended to listen. He realized soon enough that these SS trainees would have kissed every rabbi in Berlin had Hitler told them to do so.

  But the Gestapo wasn’t made of bumpkins and priests. Its men were much more cultivated. And when he visited Gestapo headquarters at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, he was always on his guard. The Gestapo knew right away where he lived. He had returned to Scheunenviertel, had moved into his mother’s old flat, and the commandant at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse had remarked to him, “How clever of you, Herr Holdermann. A spy in the house of the Jews.”

  The Gestapo didn’t dare spy on him; he was practically one of their own. Uncle Willi had signed a concordat with the Gestapo and the SS. They worked out a list of ten commandments. The Abwehr wouldn’t enter into domestic espionage, and the SS wouldn’t interfere with the Abwehr’s outstations in other countries. Of course, the SS was always meddling and interfering in the Abwehr’s business. But Canaris’ Tipper, his stool pigeons, were usually half a leap ahead of the Gestapo and the SS. The agents of the Tirpitz embankment were living on borrowed time. One day the Gestapo would arrive at Uncle Willi’s metal gate, eat right through it with gigantic clippers, and arrest the whole lot of them, including Canaris. But until then, they plotted and schemed, brought as many Jews as they could under their own secret veil, since the Abwehr could still keep Jews on its payroll. The admiral-tramp had reasoned to Himmler himself that an international network of spies couldn’t operate without a token number of Jews. And Himmler had left Uncle Willi alone.

  The Abwehr had tentacles everywhere. It had found each stick of furniture that the Jews of Scheunenviertel had put in storage after Erik’s mother had died. And so when Erik first appeared at his old flat on the Dragonerstrasse, it was almost exactly as he had left it. There were the same mirrors, the same carved bed, the same armoire, and Erik thought he could sniff the wonderful musk of his mother’s shoes. But not even the Abwehr could locate her dresses or shoes, her garter belts and stockings. And he hardly had a moment to contemplate his childhood.

  He was always on some mission when he wasn’t trying to please the SS or placate Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. He belonged to Commander Stolz’s Aktionen. That false Lithuanian had once been Rosa Luxemburg’s bodyguard and confidant and had taken part in the Spartakus rebellion. He was rounded up by the Prussian police after the rebellion failed and sat in Moabit prison. His “dueling scars” had come from the batons of the Prussian police. It was Uncle Willi who had rescued him in 1925. Canaris was close to naval intelligence at the time and was looking for Tipper among the Reds. Helmut Stolz once had his own theater in the workingman’s district of Wedding. The theater was called Aktion. Canaris persuaded him to reopen Aktion and put on propaganda plays. Helmut was one of the first to discover Brecht. He called himself the “Red Commandant.” He took part in brawls. He attacked Hitler’s Brownshirts. But he kept elaborate notebooks for naval intelligence. He betrayed no one. He just scribbled notes and kept track of every sailor who wandered through Wedding.

  When the Nazis seized power, Stolz melted into the countryside, and Aktion became one more deserted warehouse. But after Uncle Willi was named head of the Abwehr, he brought Helmut back from obscurity and had him resurrect Aktion within its walls. It was a theater group, but not for Red propaganda. Helmut’s Aktionen were intrigues with elaborate plots—a dozen actors among the Abwehr elite. He recruited Erik on the spot, turned him into the Abwehr’s greatest actor-spy. Anyone who threatened the Abwehr’s sanctuaries might be frightened into silence, kidnapped, or disposed of by Aktion. The Abwehr had no mandate to murder anyone, but its enemies still disappeared. And that’s how the myth of Cesare was born.

  Erik never varied his role. He played himself, though the Abwehr’s Jewish tailors might fit him with an SS officer’s uniform or a Gestapo agent’s leather overcoat. But it wasn’t much of a disguise, since the SS and the Gestapo assumed that Erik had
some sort of dual appointment with the Abwehr and Hitler’s political police. He could march into any Gestapo substation, and officers and secretaries would stand at attention. Hadn’t he gone to Prague and gotten rid of a Moldavian agent who was selling the Wehrmacht’s secret war plans to the British? He walked in and out of Czechoslovakia. But the SS never realized that this Moldavian agent was one of Uncle Willi’s best Tipper, and the Abwehr’s magicians had spirited him away to a remote island in Greece.

  He began to brood when he got back from a mission in Belgrade, where he had to rip off the clothes of Canaris’ Kappelmeister, who was selling Abwehr secrets to the Poles. It was a week after Kristallnacht—the Night of the Broken Glass—when Nazi goons all over the Fatherland destroyed the property and sanctuaries of the Jews. Erik witnessed the traces of this destruction in Scheunenviertel. The windows of Jewish shops had been shattered. The synagogue near Rosenthaler Platz had been burnt to the ground. He stood beside the ruins, remembering the gilded roof and the ornate dome and spires he had loved, and now the synagogue sat in a tiny sea of smoke and glass; the fire, he had been told, had raged for two nights, without a single fireman to save any of its relics.

  A little girl crept out from a nearby door, stared at Erik’s leather coat, began to howl, and ran back inside. He had become the sheriff of Scheunenviertel, who lived on the Dragonerstrasse, and seemed to watch over the district. The shopkeepers started to trust the man in the Gestapo coat who loved their strudel and almond bread, never spat curses at them, or sang obscene songs to their daughters. A month after Erik had come to Scheunenviertel from Kiel, Nazi hoodlums had stopped crashing through the streets. There were few Gestapo raids in the middle of the night. The commandant of the local headquarters on the Französische Strasse knew where Erik lived, and it was out of respect to him and the Abwehr that the commandant decided to “forget” the Jews near Hackescher Markt. But nothing could have stopped the fury of Kristallnacht, and the commandant had reined in none of the hoodlums, none of his own men.

  One of the district’s “gauleiters,” a printer who happened to have a shop at the very edge of Scheunenviertel, had been particularly violent during Kristallnacht, had kicked an old man to death and smashed the face of a Jewish housewife. It took Erik a week to track the printer down. He followed this gauleiter to a beer hall on the Prenzlauer Allee, in Alexanderplatz’s own little red-light district, sat over a “white” beer, and intended to murder the man once he went to piss in the toilet.

  But someone familiar sat down next to Cesare. It was his own commandant, Helmut Stolz.

  “Männe, do you want to have a second night of broken glass in Scheunenviertel? If you harm this Schwanz, all the Yids will suffer.”

  “Then what should I do, Herr Commandant? I will smolder like that beautiful lost synagogue if I let him walk out of here alive.”

  “But smoldering won’t set your hair on fire. You’ll survive, and you won’t end up in a Gestapo cellar. Leave it to us. Let him walk around for another few months. And when he disappears, it won’t be connected to Kristallnacht.”

  Erik wasn’t allowed to take part in this Aktion. A little after the new year, in the midst of a snowstorm, the gauleiter was shoved into an Abwehr ambulance parked in front of his printing shop, driven to a forest outside Berlin, and buried there. The Gestapo hardly even noticed. But Scheunenviertel must have had a Tipper of its own. In some mysterious fashion its inhabitants discovered that the gauleiter had disappeared for good. Children began to come out of their hiding places, and shopkeepers smiled at the sheriff of Scheunenviertel and begged him to taste their almond bread.

  “Herr Cesare,” they said, kissing his hands. How could they have known that he was a secret agent? They must have assumed that their savior slept in a coffin. And sometimes he did feel like a ghoul, with his own Caligari, Admiral Canaris. When he walked with the admiral on the Tirpitz embankment, a dachshund under each of the admiral’s arms, men and women did stare at them, as if they had already become an infernal couple—Canaris and his own walking nightmare, Cesare. Erik’s sunken cheeks and gloomy look must have added to the legend.

  And now that same legend had wandered through the alleys of Scheunenviertel. The ghetto had its own golem, not twisted out of clay, but a man of bone, blood, and gristle, born in Berlin. This golem had never harmed a single Jew. He often traveled about in the boots and silver sleeves of an SS captain. How wily their golem was. He mimicked their enemies, and could make a gauleiter disappear. And if their savior was a somnambulist beholden to a white-haired German admiral, what could it matter to them? The coffin Herr Cesare slept in was secreted somewhere in Sheunenviertel. And woe to any man who rocked that coffin and interfered with Cesare’s sleep.

  The Little Baron

  6

  THE ADMIRAL HAD LITTLE TIME TO PLAY CALIGARI. He was involved in a war he couldn’t avoid. He had to lend his saboteurs to the Wehrmacht. The Brandenbergers stole across the borders a few nights before the Germans invaded Poland, half their bodies painted black, cut the Polish lines of communication, dispatched border guards and border patrols, and the Wehrmacht rushed in and broke the siege of Warsaw within a month. It was the very first blitzkrieg, perfected by Hitler and his generals, with the help of Admiral Canaris. But the nightmare began once the Germans sat in Warsaw. The SS arrived in their armored cars; they had become the new commissars—it was in late September of 1939. They rounded up rabbis and priests, university professors, Gypsies, and journalists. They shot Jewish children in the streets. It was their form of recreation.

  And when Uncle Willi appeared in Warsaw, all his euphoria, his pride in the Brandenberg Brigade, was gone. He discovered a bombed-out and broken city ruled by SS assassination squads. The Gestapo fanned into Warsaw, starved half the population, and turned the other half into slaves. Uncle Willi flew back to Berlin with the chalk white face of a dead man. He withdrew into his Fuchsbau, his Fox’s Lair, that labyrinth of rooms above the Kanal, and would see no one. The old fox had run himself into the ground.

  He emerged from his lair with the same chalk white complexion. He had Seppel under one arm and Sabine under the other. He was gruff with the two Weras, when he had always been polite with them. He had his chauffeur take him to the Tiergarten. And thus he blocked out Warsaw for half an hour as he rode Motte, his splendid Arabian mare, in the woods. When he returned to the Fuchsbau, most of his sallowness was gone. His Hauskapelle in Warsaw was still functioning amid all the ruins, and he had his agents rescue as many Jews and Polish aristocrats as they could. His tailors had sewn SS uniforms for the aristocrats; Abwehr trucks drove them out of Warsaw, with a visiting choir that had come to entertain the Wehrmacht during the misery of war. But this choir couldn’t sing—it consisted of Jewish children dressed in angelic coats.

  Uncle Willi had come alive again. He smoked his little cigars while the Wehrmacht had victory after victory, with the slight inconvenience of a world war. It was Hitler who seemed like the magician, not the little admiral in his Fox’s Lair. Canaris could drape his overcoat over the telephone in his office, tap his walls for hidden microphones, and whisper to his subordinates that the Führer’s mad, insatiable hunger would cost him the war. But who would listen other than Erik, Commander Stolz, some technicians and tailors, and a few forgers? Half of Canaris’ agents, including women and men the SS had planted within the Fox’s Lair, were convinced that no one could ever stop the Wehrmacht.

  Hitler’s own generals realized that the tanks had gone too far, that the supply lines were stretched too thin, but they had inherited their Führer’s fever for war. And there were distractions in Berlin; cabarets and “boy clubs” could be found five minutes from Gestapo headquarters; Brecht was performed right under the Nazis’ noses. An SS officer appeared in Mahoganny; the gangsters in the play looked like Gestapo agents. Tickets were impossible to get; even majors in the Wehrmacht didn’t have enough pull to worm their way in. And so what if a few British Mosquitoes bombed Berlin? So far, there ha
d been little damage. Mädschen in the antiaircraft auxiliary corps who happened to sit in the raised seats of ack-ack guns might soon be sending Mosquitoes to hell. These gun girls had become the pride of Berlin. Yes, butter was rationed, and real coffee was reserved for generals. But there was another great diversion—the Jews.

  Hitler wanted to see a Berlin that was judenrein, and Herr Goebbels had decided to grant him his wish. Jews were plucked off the streets, and there was little that the sheriff of Scheunenviertel could do about it. Starting in September of ’41, all Jews in Germany had to wear a yellow star over their hearts; the star cost ten pfennigs at special shops; every Jew had to buy six, and the Jews of Berlin couldn’t be seen without a star sewn to their chests, or they would end up in a cell on Alexanderplatz. They had their own ration cards, which granted them very little to eat. They’d been thrown out of their jobs and had to live in Judenhauser, luckless apartment houses where only Jews could dwell. Jewish women had to have the name Sarah tacked onto their identity papers, and men had to use Israel as their middle name. Shopkeepers painted their own signs: JEWS NOT WELCOME HERE. Little by little, Jews were denied every scrap of Berlin life. They could only sit on park benches that were painted yellow, and then weren’t even allowed to enter the parks or movie palaces and concert halls. They were forbidden to have bicycles or radios or typewriters. They couldn’t use ordinary bomb shelters, but had to have shelters of their own, usually cellars filled with rats. They couldn’t ride on buses without a pass and their yellow stars. Jewish children were pinched in the street; shopkeepers hissed at old men in caftans. Jews had to abide by special curfews, had to be home before eight.