Cesare Page 7

  “I’m Emil,” said the little baron, who barely reached the black lace bands of her apron.

  “Frau Valentiner’s cousin, who was the little führer of Die Drei Krokodile?”

  She nuzzled him, too; Emil was already smitten. And then Erik heard a thick, melodious call from inside the chalet.

  “Sissi, how many times do I have to tell you not to flirt with my guests? They’ll think I run a bordello.”

  Lisalein appeared in a gown of spun silver, clutching a goblet filled with pink champagne. She’d startled the life out of poor Erik, who’d expected to see a beautiful dragoness on this Nazi street. Marriage must have agreed with her. She’d grown an inch. She was taller than Erik as she swayed on her heels. But female dragons weren’t usually nearsighted. And Lisalein stumbled around like a half-blind girl. She was twenty-six. And he’d never seen her as a woman, only as a child bride, seven or eight years ago. She was much fleshier now, with a gorgeous rump. She squinted at Erik and gave the little baron her hand to kiss.

  “Emil darling, whom have you brought here? One of your comrades from the secret service? A gigolo who preys on married women with weak eyes.”

  “Ach, Lisa,” said Emil. “You ordered me to bring Herr Holdermann. You said your father had found him in an orphanage. He’s a captain now.”

  “Oh,” she said, shaking Erik’s hand. “Captain, how nice to see you again. You were living in a barn when I saw you last.”

  “I still live in a barn, Frau Valentiner. Scheunenviertel was once a district of barns and a great cow pasture. But how is your father?”

  “Please don’t stand at the door, Captain. We are not barbarians.… Sissi, take their coats.”

  Sissi carried the coats to a closet and then followed Lisalein and her two guests through a long, dark corridor and into a dining room that was as grandiose as a castle’s main hall. It was lit with several torches that reached right to the ceiling. There were tapestries on the walls that depicted hunting scenes: aurochs with terrible teeth devouring hunters and their horses; hunters piercing the aurochs’ eyes with javelins; other hunters bleeding to death.

  Beneath the tapestries were benches with leather seats and a rough table that belonged in a hunting lodge. Erik wondered if the paraphernalia had come from Hermann Göring, who loved to dress up as Robin Hood in leather jerkin, high boots, and a feathered hat. But the man who stood beside the table wasn’t Robin Hood. It was Lisa’s husband, Josef Valentiner, who was no longer a Nazi wunderkind. As economic führer of the conquered territories, he was responsible for milking whatever wealth there was in Holland, Belgium, and France. He was also a colonel in the SS, and he wore a black uniform with a silver Totenkopf ring. He still had a boy’s fat cheeks and fat hands and was as nearsighted as Lisa herself. He didn’t like Emil, whom he had tangled with many times at Die Drei Krokodile when he worked for Baron von Hecht.

  He poured champagne and sat down at the table with his guests.

  “Captain Erik, how is Canaris? He used to be cozy with my wife.… They conspired to bring Cousin Emil back from the dead. I was in Brussels, at the Metropole, dining with Belgian diplomats who swore that King Leopold did not have an ounce of silver or gold. I would have torn the gold from their mouths. War is a hungry animal, Captain. I will have every barrel of oil in Bessarabia before I am through with the Russians, and I will visit Leopold’s castle at Lacken and flay him alive. I do not like barons and kings—do you?”

  “I have only met one baron, Frau Valentiner’s father, and he was quite kind to me.”

  “Ja, ja,” said Valentiner, growing impatient, “but a Jewish baron doesn’t count. I am talking about meddlers like Leopold—Leopold is one of our subjects now. I would starve him to death. But how is Canaris? Is he still creating make-believe captains like yourself?”

  Valentiner smiled and turned to his wife. “Darling, didn’t you know that your Erik couldn’t even survive his training as a cadet?”

  Lisalein stood near her husband like a silver sheath, her eyes glistening under the fickle torchlight as she smiled back at him.

  “Josef, if you insult all our guests, we’ll have to move into the Tiergarten and dine with the zebras.”

  Erik closed his eyes and imagined what it would be like to have Herr Valentiner swallow his own death’s-head ring. He had dueled with much better men than a civilian colonel who picked the bones of defeated countries.

  “It wasn’t an insult, Frau Valentiner. We are magicians at the Abwehr—we produce captains and corpses.”

  “And many of your corpses come back to life,” said Valentiner. “Dr. Caligari can’t even hold on to the dead. A rogue Bulgarian diplomat in Portugal was selling our secrets. The Abwehr silenced him. But he went from the morgue to the island of Corfu, where he lives like a king on an Abwehr pension, with two mistresses and three wives.”

  Erik created his own mask of a smile. “That was the admiral’s greatest coup. The Bulgarian was one of ours. He compromised half the British agents in Lisbon with the lies he spread. And we pulled him after someone in the SS blundered into Portugal and bribed the Lisbon police to have him killed … but I’m afraid we’re boring you, Frau Valentiner, with these fairy tales of ours.”

  Valentiner brooded for a moment, his piggish eyes darting behind thick glasses, while the maid went into the kitchen and returned with a silver tray of asparagus in white wine; the asparagus stalks were arranged like pieces of art against the silver, in their own perfect design. Valentiner maneuvered with his knife and fork, but his head was whistling and he couldn’t shut up, even with bits of asparagus in his mouth.

  “It’s Heydrich who’s keeping you all afloat,” Valentiner said. “He would have squashed the Abwehr years ago if he hadn’t served as a cadet under Canaris. He’s fond of Uncle Willi, and blind to his faults.”

  Reinhard Heydrich was chief of the Gestapo and the SS, second only to Himmler himself. Known as “Hangman Heydrich,” he was the most cunning and cruel of Hitler’s apparatchiks. He was tall, blond, with a long, crooked nose and effeminate hands. His classmates had called him “Zeige,” the goat, on account of his high voice. He’d had no friends at school. He practiced fencing, played the violin, and decided on a career in the Reichsmarine. The cadets at Kiel made fun of him and his fiddler’s hands. But he happened to train on one of Canaris’ ships, and Uncle Willi, who was also shy, took a liking to him and kept the other cadets at bay. Heydrich was cashiered out of the Reichsmarine after he broke his promise to marry the daughter of a powerful industrialist. He met Himmler in ’31, was welcomed into the Gestapo, and turned the SS into the Party’s own great spy machine. He was a major in the SS before he was twenty-six. Heydrich didn’t run to Berlin, the Red Beast. He concealed himself at Party headquarters, the Brown House, a palace on Brienner Strasse in Munich. It was Heydrich who had convinced Hitler and the Party to appoint Canaris as head of the Abwehr in ’35. He came to Berlin with the Führer and followed Canaris around like an acolyte; he would move wherever Canaris moved, first to the Dollestrasse, and then to the Schlachtensee, where Heydrich and Canaris had adjacent villas. He went riding with Uncle Willi in the Tiergarten, and played duets on the violin with Canaris’ wife. But he still watched the Abwehr like a menacing hawk with a long nose. It was a curious game of hide-and-seek. Heydrich kept Uncle Willi from falling, but he maneuvered him closer and closer to that fall.

  Erik knew that his own mortality, and that of the Fox’s Lair, depended on how long the Hangman himself survived. Heydrich was reckless with his own life. He went about in an open car, standing defiant on the front seat, whether he was in Berlin or in the Low Countries, where some madman or member of the British secret service could blow his head off.

  “We owe everything to Heydrich,” Valentiner said. “His Nacht und Nebel is a stunning success. He has broken the resistance everywhere in the Reich’s new territories.”

  “And murdered thousands of innocent people with his nighttime tactics,” said Lisalein.


  “Darling, it can’t be helped. How could we police Paris without Nacht und Nebel? A German soldier wouldn’t be able to stroll Montmartre, or sit in a café without a bomb going off. Paris has become our playground. It purrs at our feet.”

  “We had Nacht und Nebel in Berlin,” Lisa said, “before German soldiers ever climbed the hills of Montmartre.”

  “Berlin? Never! Nacht und Nebel is for foreigners. The Führer would never allow it in Berlin.”

  Nacht und Nebel, Night and Fog, was a decree dreamt up by Heydrich to rid Paris and Amsterdam and Prague of saboteurs and other troublemakers without interfering with the rhythm of everyday life. Lists were made up with the help of the local Gestapo, and potential saboteurs would vanish in the middle of the night and never be heard from again. Thousands disappeared, some of them with only the merest whisper of suspicion; there were “saboteurs” with one eye or one leg, “saboteurs” who couldn’t read or write, “saboteurs” who belonged in an asylum.

  “Darling,” Valentiner persisted, “just ask your make-believe captain if the Abwehr doesn’t have its own Nacht und Nebel.”

  Erik growled under his breath. “Ah, your husband has unmasked us, Frau Valentiner. We spies couldn’t live without Night and Fog.”

  But he knew that Lisalein was right. There had been Night and Fog in Berlin long before Heydrich’s men began to depopulate Paris. And it wasn’t only Gypsies who had disappeared, with their caravans at the edge of Berlin, or transvestites and Jews, or pastors and lawyers who were a little too loud or too public in their displeasure with the Reich’s racial laws and euthanasia programs. Some were warned, some were punished, and some vanished without a clue in Nacht und Nebel before it had a name.

  Emil didn’t like the warfare at the table and decided to play the diplomat. “I’m starving,” he said. “Cousin, I cannot appease my appetite with asparagus stalks.”

  The maid had wheeled a trolley out of the kitchen filled with butter, pickles, Viennese bread, glazed carrots, a rack of lamb, and an enormous trout cooked in paper, which cost a fortune in ration stamps.

  Erik barely nibbled on his lamb; he had no appetite in this Nazi chalet next door to Goebbels’ villa. He couldn’t even say if it was because of Valentiner or Lisalein. What was she doing in this Night and Fog? Had she closed her eyes to the troglodytes around her, these Übermenschen who broke the backs of little children and planned to turn entire countries into concentration camps? But he was a fool to consider such questions. He was also a troglodyte, part of the same regime.

  “Herr Kapitän,” Valentiner said with a mouthful of glazed carrots, “did you ever see my wife dance? She does a marvelous duet with the maid—a Jewish tango. Our Sissi’s a whore. I pretend not to notice. They dance at all the forbidden clubs, where we poor Party men have to go down on our hands and knees to get in. Berlin has always been a Jewish town, and it will always be, no matter how many Sammellager we set up, or how many midnight raids we plan—we’re infested with Jews.”

  Lisa tore the paper from her trout. “Josef, you should have married some Brunhilde or another blond Valkyrie.”

  “God forbid. Our Brunhildes die on the limb. They aren’t cultivated flowers. Jewish women make the best wives, provided they have enough German blood. I didn’t marry you because of your father’s fortune—it belongs to the Reich. And what other wife would have brought such interesting men to the table? An overripe cadet and a mad dwarf who escaped his own death sentence.”

  Lisa was trembling. She stood up, reached across the table, and slapped Valentiner’s face. His jaw twitched, but he continued to eat.

  “Darling, the lamb is delicious.… Perhaps I ought to thank Sissi. She has the whore’s touch. But don’t think you can save Sissi by sneaking her into our home. She’ll end up in a Sammellager when I’m tired of looking at her tits. And after our guests leave, I’ll drag you across the floor until you’re black and blue—don’t think your cadet can save you from a beating.”

  And when Valentiner saw the fury in Erik’s eyes, he began to laugh. “Lisa, you’ve brought an assassin into the house. Look, he’s going to cut me from ear to ear with his navy knife.”

  “And bleed you like a pig,” Erik told him.

  Valentiner sniffed his own triumph. “Darling, your cadet will murder both of us in his sleep. He’s Caligari’s puppet, Cesare.”

  Erik was prepared to mount his own Aktion, when the little baron touched his knee under the table.

  “Cousin Josef,” Emil said.

  “I’m not your cousin,” Valentiner said. “You come from a family of depraved little men. I once worked for you, remember? I started as your slave at Die Drei Krokodile. You were a tyrant who seduced hysterical salesgirls. They cried on my shoulder.”

  Emil smiled like a despotic angel. “Did you ever tell Lisalein how I hired you?”

  “Dwarf, shut your mouth, or I’ll have the Gestapo return you to your room in the Black Forest.”

  “Excellent. And I’ll have them give you the room next to mine. You snake, you hypocrite. You were a little thief … and a wizard.”

  “I’m warning you, Emil.”

  “I caught the thief myself with flasks of perfume in his pockets. I could have sent him to the police barracks across the platz, had him sit in a detention cell, but I realized in a minute how smart he was. He’d made a fortune stealing from the department store and selling his contraband to the shylocks in Sheunenviertel. And what did he do with his bundle of marks? He didn’t buy silk scarves. He bought books. He lived in an attic, and his own little library had displaced him.”

  “Dwarf,” said Valentiner, “you’re signing your own death certificate.”

  “I hired him as my stooge, had him tell me all the plots of the books he had read. But he was a cannibal. He learned all my tricks as a retailer. I introduced him to Baron von Hecht. That was my big mistake. The baron was overwhelmed that one of my lowly clerks could recite whole chapters from The Magic Mountain. He took him into his own service, and within eighteen months Cousin Josef sat in my chair.”

  THE FIGHT HAD GONE OUT OF VALENTINER. He sucked on his champagne like the little thief of Die Drei Krokodile. Then he got up from the table, excused himself, and disappeared into some hidden alcove of the chalet. It was Lisa who broke through that pall of silence in his wake.

  “Captain, you must forgive my husband. He wasn’t always this way. It was my father who converted him into a Nazi. Papa and his little band of Jewish bankers thought they could tame the beast, have the Nazis drive the Communists out of Red Berlin. But Hitler took Berlin and the bankers, too. And Vati never quite recovered from the shock.”

  “But where is your father, Frau Valentiner?”

  “You must call me Lisa, Captain. You have known me long enough.”

  She got up from the table and shook Erik’s hand. The stark formality of that gesture rippled through Erik, made him feel like a little boy; he was that orphan again on the Rosenstrasse, running after Lisalein, who reigned beside the baron.

  “Lisa,” he blurted, “I still have the fountain pen your father gave me, a Montblanc Meisterstück, with my name inscribed in silver. The cadet who tried to steal it paid a pretty price. I scarred him for life.”

  But Lisa wasn’t listening. She removed her hand from Erik’s.

  “Please excuse me, Captain. Sissi will look after you. I must attend to my husband.”

  She fluttered past Erik, stooped over the little baron, kissed him on the cheek, and climbed some dark staircase. Erik shouted after her, into some invisible void.

  “You still haven’t told me about your father.”

  Nacht und Nebel

  8

  WHAT THE ABWEHR FEARED MOST FINALLY HAPPENED in May of ’42. Hangman Heydrich was ambushed in Bohemia; carried from his wrecked car to a hospital in Prague, he played the violin and lived for another week. It wasn’t absolutely clear who the assassins were. Some said it was a splinter group within the Abwehr itself that had plotted the assa
ssination as a favor to Admiral Canaris. What sort of favor could it have been? The admiral mourned Heydrich’s death, even if his underlings had conspired behind his back. Canaris was estranged from his own family. As the war darkened and bombs began to fall over Berlin, he sent his wife and younger daughter to live on a lake in Bavaria. His elder daughter, Eva, a complicated creature, had run away from school. She grew more and more morose, and Canaris had to put her in an asylum near Munich. He adored Eva, wrote her long letters, but no one at the Fox’s Lair could quite remember if he’d visited her even once.

  And so Reinhard Heydrich, the Hangman, was his lost son, the cadet who had become an intelligence man, like the admiral. The Abwehr had commandos and sabotage teams, but it never served the Party. When Hitler asked Canaris to kidnap the Pope, or poison some bothersome Dutch diplomat, the admiral procrastinated. He drew up elaborate plans that were never delivered to the Führer and his band of wolves.

  Without Heydrich, the other wolves prepared to strike. The Gestapo and the SS sat on Uncle Willi’s doorstep, waiting for him to fall, and he had to smile and deflect their most sinister moves. He could no longer afford to have Erik devote all his time to submariners in Scheunenviertel. These submariners were putting the Abwehr at great risk. Jews were disappearing from transport trucks, marching right through Sammellager searchlights, even coming back from the dead. It was as if Cesare the somnambulist had used Heydrich’s Nacht und Nebel in reverse, shielding Jews from the Germans in a fog of his own. And Canaris couldn’t sit idle while the Gestapo broke through this fog and uncovered all of Cesare’s night moves. The Abwehr was already rife with informers, Tipper who reported back to Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse; every third agent at the Fox’s Lair was probably some SS captain in disguise. Canaris trusted no one but his dachshunds and his own inner circle.