Cesare Page 6

  Erik went on fewer missions. He’d walk the streets at night in his black leather coat, but he could not save the Jews of his own district. They were rounded up in taxis, Black Marias, and trucks, while the Gestapo sat and yawned and did not have to scream at the Jews. The Gestapo had their own assistants, Judenpolizei, or Jupo, Jewish auxiliary policemen, ex-schoolteachers who had lost their schools and their students and were now fed by their Nazi handlers. The Jupo did not carry whips or strike children and confused old men. They helped them with their bundles and other belongings. They whispered, soothed, stroked some wizened grandmother, and didn’t even have to coerce her onto a truck. They bribed with bits of honey cake and brown rock candy. They wore mouse-colored velvet gloves and steered the Jews of Scheunenviertel into the collection camp at Erik’s old orphanage on the Rosenstrasse. Some of the Jews would be sent to the ghetto in Lodz, others to labor camps, with their suitcases; it tore at Erik to see the little Jewish girls with their dolls. He could not rescue a single one.

  He raced across Berlin from the Rosenstrasse to the Landwehrkanal and went up to the little admiral and his Fox’s Lair. But the admiral wasn’t alone. A strange little man sat in Canaris’ chair, resembling one of Rouault’s dwarfish emperors and Christ clowns. Erik’s art teacher at the Jewish Gymnasium had loved Rouault, had talked about the images of Christ in a red beard that wandered like an apparition through Rouault’s work. This little man also had a red beard. He wasn’t exactly a dwarf, but his legs didn’t touch the ground; he wore slippers instead of shoes; his soft shirt and silk tie must have been bought ages ago at Berlin’s best department store, Die Drei Krokodile (once owned by Baron von Hecht), when silk ties could still be found. He was, in fact, a nephew of the baron, a certain Emil von Hecht, who was thirty-nine years old and had lived at a sanitarium in the Black Forest until Uncle Willi whisked him away to Berlin. Emil wasn’t insane; nor was he feebleminded, but he was slow of speech. Sentences wouldn’t form. He lisped. Veins exploded on his forehead. He would scribble a note on a pad attached to his vest by a silver string, memorize the words, and chant them like some forlorn opera singer who had lost her melodic line.

  The Gestapo didn’t appreciate the peculiarities of such a male diva and convinced the doctors at the sanitarium to sterilize Emil. The game had begun. The SS would kidnap Emil and hide him in a factory that manufactured cuckoo clocks until Baron von Hecht paid their ridiculous ransom. It was a way of keeping Emil alive. But Uncle Willi knew it wouldn’t last. Other patients at the sanitarium had fallen heir to Aktion T4, Hitler’s mad scheme to rid the Reich of mental misfits, and one afternoon Emil would be led deep into the woods and shot in the neck. And so Canaris kidnapped him permanently from the SS.

  “Herr Admiral,” Erik said, “I am happy for Emil, but I must speak to you in private.”

  “Männe, we have nothing to hide. Emil is one of us. I have brought him into the Abwehr.”

  “Good, but what will we do about the Rosenstrasse? The Dreckshunde are rounding up Jews block by block. And the Jupo help them make their lists. Can’t we borrow your Brandenbergers and have them march in front of the SS and their trucks?”

  “And tomorrow the Brandenbergers will be locked out of their barracks and sent to guard Polish prisoners.”

  “But it will give me time to mount my own Aktion. We’ll send in our trucks, with our own forged documents, and empty out the Rosenstrasse.”

  “And where will you put a whole Sammellager of Jews?” Uncle Willi begged with his pale blue eyes. “You’ll get them all killed.”

  That’s when Emil von Hecht, the little baron, decided to open his mouth. He didn’t have to scratch on his pad. His cheeks puffed out perfect syllables. “They’ll die anyway, Uncle Willi.… They’ll go right from Lodz to the labor camps. And what magnificent labor! They’ll all be starved to death or gassed.”

  “Silence,” said the admiral. “You’re an agent of the Abwehr. I didn’t bring you out of the Black Forest to speculate on the Führer’s policies. There are no gas chambers at Auschwitz. There are no trucks filled with Zyklon B, no ovens that burn day and night.… They are someone’s feeble imaginings. We are spies, not philosophers and moralists. And if you utter another word about gas chambers, Emil, I’ll sell you back to the Gestapo.”

  The little baron sat with his velvet slippers dangling above a carpet that had been soiled and torn by Seppel and Sabine, while the admiral himself fell into silence. He leaned forward and put his hands over his eyes. His white hair shone in the weak light. He started to tremble.

  “Männe, I will not tolerate civil war. You will not harm one hair of the Führer’s Polizei. You will not involve our tailors in your schemes. They already have one foot on the other side of eternity. You will not use Abwehr real estate. We cannot hide Jews in our safe houses. You will draw whatever funds you need. And you must be discreet with our forgers. They have their own style. And it can easily be unmasked. So you must save only one Jew at a time.”

  Erik coughed into his fist. “Alte, they murder wholesale, and we are pathetic retailers who have to dance on the head of a pin.”

  “One Jew at a time. And no more than two in every trainload of a thousand, or they’ll catch on to you in a minute.”

  “Two in a thousand,” Erik whispered. “That’s unkind. And what team will I have? May I include Commander Stolz?”

  “And compromise us all? I will allow you one man. Emil.”

  Erik stared at the little baron with the red beard who was both a Christ and a wily cretin.

  “Gott, he’s been living in an asylum. And when the Nazis kidnapped him, he had to listen to the sound of cuckoo clocks.”

  “Männe, that sound might save your skin.”

  IT WAS A SERIES OF NIGHT MOVES. Erik had to wander into the local Gestapo headquarters, where the list of Jews was assembled, and pore over the list with the Jupo and whatever Gestapo agent or SS captain was in charge of that night’s roundup. He would smoke a Roth-Händle with the Jewish auxiliaries, offering them cigarettes out of his silvered pack. The Roth-Händles came from the Abwehr’s own stores and were worth a fortune on the black market.

  It was while smoking with the Jupo that Erik realized which ones were truly “tainted” and which ones he could trust. It was not a matter of soundings. He looked into their eyes, and sometimes he saw the mad gleam of a Jewish Gestapo agent, a convert who fed off the little power he had. Or else Erik saw the sad, conflicted eyes of a man lost in his own bewilderment. These were the Jupo he had to avoid. They were like children who might howl and run into the arms of their Nazi handlers, or jump onto a deportation truck. The others were zealots who were looking to survive. And Erik worked out business deals with them. He pretended to be a profiteer. It was like buying and selling cigarettes.

  “Mensch, this one on Oranienburger, he’s rich as Moses. His grandparents paid for half the gold on the roof of the Neue Synagogue. We’ll squeeze them dry. Ten thousand marks if we scratch him off the list.”

  “Herr Holdermann, anything can be done. We’ll swear he had a heart attack on the way to the Rosenstrasse. But we’ll have to pull another Yid off the street.”

  Erik had to harden himself to their gambits, their promiscuity with people’s lives. But he also realized that he was no less promiscuous. He’d turned the nightly roundup into a roulette wheel. He couldn’t snatch children, because they didn’t know how to play roulette. And he couldn’t separate a parent from a child, or a husband from a wife, because the rescued one might rebel and want to climb back onto the truck. He had to pick men or women who lived alone, who wouldn’t be missed. They were already half-dead in Erik’s eyes, husks who had so little connection to other humans that there was no memory in their limbs. That’s what he wanted to believe.

  He’d kill himself, fall under a moving truck, if he had to follow the admiral’s prescriptions. He’d save entire families, or no one at all. But he was far more quixotic than the families themselves, who recognized the terror
of their own existence—whole families could not be saved, but a daughter could, or a son who had been thrown out of the gymnasium.

  A father with tears in his eyes would touch Erik’s shoulder. “Take my daughter, Excellency. We will think of her and it will give us courage.”

  The daughter would cackle like a lunatic and begin to cry. “Papi, I will not hide without you. Please don’t abandon me to this hell.”

  Erik would have a tantrum while pitying her. “No, no, no! I’ll save you all from the Sammellager.”

  It was the little baron who had to take him aside. “It’s impossible. We would need an army to provide for them all. And an army leaves its own slugs, like a snail. The Gestapo will shut us down, Excellency.”

  Erik had to whisper. “Emil, why do you call me ‘Excellency’? I never even graduated from Kiel.”

  But Emil’s speech was whimsical. It came and went. He had to scribble on his pad. The sounds still wouldn’t come. He was frantic. Erik had to stroke Emil’s red beard.

  “You’re my field man, Emil. Don’t fail me now.”

  “Yes, Excellency. Our lives are in your hands.”

  Erik took the lone daughters and sons and condemned their families to the Rosenstrasse. He had to find cellars where the submariners could hide, or lodge them with couples who were themselves Abwehr subagents. It was an elaborate subterfuge, where the “U-boats” had to exist without the least commotion, with footless footsteps not even an angel could hear. But sometimes these submariners took risks. They could not bear to be cooped up and they’d wander into the streets with their false papers that wouldn’t have fooled any of the Jew-hunters, and Erik himself would have to recapture these submariners and return them to their roosts.

  It was like being the master of a band of brilliant, unruly children. He wouldn’t have succeeded without the little baron. Protected by the Abwehr, Emil could move unmolested about Berlin, clutching a briefcase full of encrypted notes. He was the go-between who behaved like the U-boats’ private counselor. They would present Emil with their own little list of needs: a chess set, a bar of rationed soap, winter underwear, a certain book. And Erik would have to supply the U-boats from the Abwehr’s own stores. The Abwehr had the largest library of forbidden books in Berlin. Erik had improved his English by reading American authors whose books had been banned in Germany. He could not have comprehended America without The Great Gatsby or Moby-Dick. His favorite American author was Herman Melville, another submariner who had spent half his life under the surface of society, who had stopped writing books by the time he was forty and wandered around in the brittle and barren landscape of his own mind, a landscape that was not unlike Berlin.

  So he assembled a little library for the submariners on his own watch. There was a certain danger, since each book carried the Abwehr’s stamp inside the front cover. But it seemed worth the risk because of the pleasure it gave Erik to be the submariners’ librarian. He felt as if he were back at school, prowling through the great Babel of books at the Jewish Gymnasium. He considered his own work at the Abwehr trivial compared to his manhunts across the pages of Moby-Dick. Hitler’s mad dominions meant nothing to Erik. He was loyal to Uncle Willi and played Cesare for him. He would have gladly murdered Herr Goebbels, the gauleiter of Berlin, who had a villa on Hermann-Göring-Strasse, at the eastern edge of the Tiergarten; the somnambulist could have strangled Goebbels in bed without harming his six little children—Hildegard, Helga, Helmut, Hedwig, Heidrun, and Holdine, whose sonorous names were like chords plucked out of a dream.

  An assault on Hermann-Göring-Strasse would have compromised Uncle Willi and destroyed the Abwehr in one blow, but it still tempted Cesare. So what if he’d have to lie down in the cradle of Hansel and Gretel’s traveling guillotine? He’d refuse to wear a hood. He’d face the Nazi banners and go to the guillotine with a look of bliss. But nowhere in his cosmology could he ever have imagined slaughtering Herr Goebbels’ six children. Ah, but he couldn’t leave this world now that he had a new friend and fellow agent. What would happen to Emil? The little baron thrived on his descent into the cellars with a satchelful of forbidden books. He was a perfect porte-parole. He could maneuver like no other dwarfish man with a red beard. He hadn’t always been locked away in a sanitarium. He had once been the heir to Baron von Hecht’s fortune at Die Drei Krokodile. He’d managed that magnificent department store on Alexanderplatz, with its walls of steel and glass. He had looked like a diplomat in his striped trousers, spats, and swallowtail coat. He terrorized the baron’s personnel. But he lusted after the salesgirls and the mannequins in the women’s fine-wear department. He made a mess of things, fell in love with a mannequin, who laughed in his face. He had her fired. But her brutish fiancé, a Brownshirt, arrived at Die Drei Krokodile with five other Brownshirts, broke into the little baron’s office, and hurled him headlong across counters of merchandise, as if Emil were a professional midget who made a living at country fairs being hurled by strongmen from Bavaria.

  The little baron’s swift decline began after this invasion of Brownshirts at Die Drei Krokodile. It was in the spring of 1934, and the Brownshirts still ruled Berlin. Emil lost the will to speak. He remained as manager, but his eyes were listless. He couldn’t remember the simplest detail. He wore the same trousers for a month. The baron had to come in his limousine from the Grunewald and have Emil removed from the glass and steel wonderland of Die Drei Krokodile. He kept Emil at his villa, fed him soup with his own hand, but he couldn’t cure the despair and humiliation of a man who had been hurled across a department store. He had Emil sent to the sanitarium in the Black Forest, which had been a refuge for the richest Jews of Berlin, where catatonic nephews and daughters and wives who had lost their minds could live in a kind of regal prison-hotel. The little baron might have remained there in perpetuity if Hitler hadn’t decided to cleanse the Reich of “degenerates and dwarfs.” He had to thank the Führer for his sudden freedom. How else could he have gone from a palatial room with bars on the window to the Abwehr?

  He began wearing striped trousers again as the submariners’ porte-parole. His speech wasn’t as slow. He did look like one of Rouault’s suffering emperors, but he suffered less. He entered the strange, fluid world of wartime Berlin.

  One freezing afternoon in ’42, he stood on his toes and tapped Erik on the shoulder with a ferocious growl.

  “Männe, we’re invited to a soiree.”

  “Who invited us, Emil? We’re much too busy with our submariners.”

  “Then we’ll have a holiday. It’s my little cousin, Frau Valentiner. She hasn’t forgotten her protégé.”

  Erik was bewildered for a moment. And then he began to shiver under his long leather coat.

  Lisalein.

  He’d been having a sort of quick romance with a gun girl whose station was the roof of the IG Farben offices across from the Hotel Adlon. He’d met her in the bar of the Adlon, where ack-ack auxiliaries had their own little roost. Her name was Tilli. He never brought her to the Dragonerstrasse. He either went to her tiny apartment near the Charlottenburger Chaussee or made love to her in the suite that the Abwehr kept at the Adlon to recruit some V-Mann (a foreigner who served as an informant and go-between). The V-Mann might have been a minor diplomat from a neutral country. He would be trapped into a liaison with one of the Abwehr’s “Spiders,” high-priced whores who were paid to catch some poor soul in the Abwehr’s own web. At first, Erik thought that Tilli herself was a Spider. But she was a patriotic gun girl. And when he pinned her arms to the bedpost at the Adlon and listened to her deafening love screams, he could luxuriate for a moment in the delicious perfume of her armpits. He dreamt of little else than to empty out the Sammellager on Rosenstrasse and to possess enough magic to have Jews melt back into Scheunenviertel, a hundred at a time.

  And now this blond witch from his own past would wreck whatever little peace he had!

  Die Drei Krokodile

  7

  HE COULD HAVE WORN HIS CAPTAIN’S U
NIFORM, with its epaulets and buttons made of pure bone. But he didn’t want to come swaggering into Lisa’s foyer as a military man. So he arrived on the Hermann-Göring-Strasse in a worsted suit that he had inherited from an Abwehr agent who died of a heart attack while on active duty. It was his “Cesare” suit, which he would wear on missions abroad. Its cuffs were slightly frayed, but he liked to think that the simple elegance of its worsted wool had brought him luck. It was an assassin’s suit.

  Emil was much more diplomatic. He’d come in spats and a swallowtail coat from his days at Die Drei Krokodile, bearing Belgian chocolates in a heart-shaped box. Erik could have found some exotic gift in the Abwehr’s stores, but he would have felt foolish with a stuffed panda in his arms.

  Lisa lived a few doors down from Herr Goebbels in a classic Nazi Alpine cottage with a gabled roof. Goebbels’ street was always guarded, but the SS men on duty recognized Erik and didn’t bother much with the little baron. A maid in blue mascara met them at the door. Erik had to blink. The maid reminded him of a notorious Jewish streetwalker named Sissi who had patrolled Alexanderplatz while he was still at the orphanage. Sissi had been kind to him, had given Erik bonbons and cigarettes, and had even allowed him to touch her breast. And if it was Sissi, he didn’t want to embarrass her, but he couldn’t help kissing her hand.

  She had a mole painted on her cheek, like Madame de Pompadour.

  “Fräulein Sissi,” he said, “do you remember me?”

  She laughed in the doorway with all her robustness, and it nearly split the seams of her white blouse. “My orphan with the big eyes,” she said, nuzzling him without shame. “You mustn’t spill my secret to Herr Valentiner. He’ll ship me to a Farben factory, and the petrochemicals will kill my complexion.… Who is your handsome friend?”