Cesare Page 8

  His male dachshund, Seppel, had died, and Canaris replaced him with another wirehaired male, Kasper, but the admiral couldn’t rid himself of Seppel’s ghost. Poor Kasper peed on the carpets and wouldn’t swallow his food until the admiral relented and began to fondle him. The admiral took long naps on his camp bed and locked himself inside his office with his dachshunds, sometimes with Erik and sometimes with Emil.

  The Abwehr’s own networks discovered that the Gestapo in Munich had arrested Erik’s uncle, Heinrich Percyval Albrecht, the gentleman farmer who had no love for the Nazis; he’d insulted an SS officer in the bar at the Hotel Marienbad, where he’d gone to get away from the gloom of his own castle.

  “Männe,” the admiral said, “you must go to him and come right back.… I cannot spare you.”

  Erik couldn’t leave his uncle to rot in a Gestapo cellar; the People’s Court might ship him to Dauchau, or sentence him to sit out the war in a Wehrmacht prison. The admiral had another motive for sending Erik to Munich, and it had nothing to do with a lost uncle. Erik could become his go-between, his V-Mann, who’d carry lavish gifts to his daughter at her insane asylum in the Bavarian Alps.

  And so the V-Mann decked himself in an SS captain’s uniform, with its silvered collars and sleeves, took an overnight transport train to Munich, and was met by a local Abwehr agent, who delivered him to Gestapo headquarters near Maximilian Strasse, in a former palace that mad King Ludwig had built for one of his male companions. Ludwig had drowned almost sixty years ago, right beside the castle where his own ministers had held him captive, but Bavarians believed that his ghost could be spotted riding over Munich in a silver carriage.

  Erik was startled by the town, which seemed to reside in its own fairy tale of red roofs and pink and tan façades. It hadn’t endured a single air raid. The British hadn’t scoured Munich with their low-flying Mosquitoes, hadn’t dropped a bomb. And the town was drenched in sunlight during these first sultry days of July. It didn’t have Berlin’s constant smell of machine oil.

  Erik didn’t have to use much persuasion with the local commandant.

  “We had no idea that he was your uncle, Captain. But he was very abusive, calling us swine.”

  “I would be delighted if the People’s Court sentenced him to the guillotine. I will guillotine him myself.”

  A look of terror sprouted like some carbuncle across the commandant’s face. “Not your uncle, Herr Holdermann. What will people think of us? We aren’t blind to your accomplishments. You have destroyed countless enemies of the Reich.”

  The commandant would have lent him his own office, but Erik insisted on meeting his uncle inside the cellar. The Gestapo spent half an hour cleaning up Heinrich. Erik waited and went down into the dungeon.

  Uncle Heinrich sat in an ancient armchair in one of the interrogation rooms. There were whips hanging from the wall. Heinrich seemed scrawny in an agent’s spotless white shirt. He had bruises under his eye and tiny clots of blood on the wings of his nose. His hair had gone white. It pained Erik to look at him, not because of the bruises, but because he reminded Erik of his own mother. They had the same disturbingly blue eyes.

  The Gestapo had given Erik half a pail of beer and two gigantic schooners from the Black Boar, Munich’s most celebrated beer hall. Heinrich growled his hello.

  “I’m not impressed with you, Little Holdermann. How can we have a secret service if all its exploits are known?”

  “But they aren’t known, Onkel. We reveal what we want to reveal.”

  “Like that vile uniform you’re wearing?” said Heinrich.

  “Uniforms are misleading. Mine is a cosmetic to get you out of jail.”

  “But I didn’t ask you to come for me.”

  “And I might not have come,” said Erik. “But my admiral told me it’s bad business to have the uncle of an Abwehr officer sitting in a Gestapo cellar.”

  “Then I accept this courtesy of Admiral Canaris.… Look what’s become of you.”

  Heinrich started to cry. His shoulders heaved, and his crying came in long, relentless gasps.

  “I loved your mother,” he said.

  “If you mention my mother’s name, Onkel, I’ll strangle you in your chair, and the Gestapo will give me a medal.”

  “She was my sister,” Heinrich rasped, “my favorite little sister. “Heidi, Heidi, Heidi.”

  Erik couldn’t harm this miserable man. He poured from the pail.

  “Drink. Your throat must be dry.”

  The cellar had the foul taste of prisoners’ sweat and blood, and the two of them finished a whole schooner in four or five gulps, the foam remaining on their lips. Even the Hotel Adlon began watering its beer by 1942, but this beer came unwatered from the Black Boar’s own cellars.

  “She shouldn’t have married that damn postman with his devil’s dark looks, a postman who painted and scribbled poems.”

  “Mutti never told me that. She hardly ever talked about him. He died before I was two.”

  “What talent! A consumptive postman who painted landscapes, like Herr Hitler … can’t you understand? Or are you a devil like him? I was jealous to the point of distraction. Our own parents were dead. I wasn’t trying to keep her for myself. I would have found a husband for her, from an old Junker line. Not a postman who was little better than a vagabond … and a thief.”

  “Onkel, you’re speaking about my father. And why didn’t you help her after he died?”

  “I was a stubborn, imbecilic fool,” Heinrich said; he’d tipped the schooner so high that the beer had washed the clots of blood away from the wings of his nose. “I waited, waited for her to come back … and I resented you as much as the postman who had spawned you. When the baron brought you to me at the Adlon, I couldn’t bear to look at your face. You had the postman’s devil eyes.”

  “Then you should have left me to die in your barn, Uncle Heinrich.”

  “But I did leave you to die,” said Heinrich with a madman’s grin. “It was another Heinrich who dug through the ice and snow for a week to save you, a much younger fellow who worked in a feverish dream, with the memory of his sister’s hair in his eyes, the memory of her skin. That’s what drove me on. I was digging for Heidi, for her.”

  THE V-Mann COULD HAVE TAKEN HEINRICH out of the cellar with him, but he decided to have Heinrich held as a captive for another four days. It wasn’t deviltry. The moment Erik left, the commandant would move Uncle Heinrich upstairs, and Gestapo headquarters would become his private luxury hotel. Heinrich would heal much better on Maximilian Strasse than in his own castle.

  The V-Mann went into the Bavarian Alps to visit Uncle Willi’s elder daughter at an asylum that was a mile from Schloss Neuschwanstein, one of the castles Ludwig the Mad had built. The temperature dropped ten degrees, and Erik began to shiver as he sat next to his driver. He had a terrifying sense of vertigo in this tall forest. But when he saw Schloss Neuschwanstein on its own little mountain, his vertigo was gone. Ludwig’s castles had bankrupted Bavaria, and perhaps that was the real reason why his ministers got rid of him, and not because of the midnight bacchanalia with his bodyguards and grooms, or the pathological shyness that sometimes didn’t allow him to greet his own courtiers. He was king and castle builder. Neuschwanstein rose out of a wall of trees like some flying circus, bone white in the sun. Erik couldn’t get close to the castle, not even in his SS uniform. It had become a fortress filled with gold. Nazi bankers hid their gold in Schloss Neuschwanstein, like the wicked dwarfs of the Nibelungen.

  But Erik had other things on his mind than Nazi storage bins. He couldn’t stop thinking of his mother. She had her own blond mystery. Who paid for his clothes? She would take Erik to Die Drei Krokodile, where she splurged on him with coats, hats, school supplies, and a child’s painting set, with its own wooden case and easel. Erik could recall the colors—burnt sienna, cobalt blue. He would paint by the window, wash his brushes in turpentine, while his mother sewed.…

  The asylum that held the admiral’
s daughter was also a castle. It was run by a little band of Lutheran nurses with long noses. He couldn’t tell these Schwestern apart. They dressed in gray and had their hair swept back. He didn’t see any patients on the front lawn, nothing but a few chairs, a volleyball court, and a bridle path.

  A nurse asked him to wait for Eva Canaris on the castle’s rear porch, which had an untrammeled view of the Alps, with their crippling beauty. He’d been to Munich before on a mission to silence one of the Abwehr’s own Tipper, who was a little too free with his tongue.

  Erik had no choice. It was at the very beginning of the war, and Munich was in the midst of a murder epidemic. All the victims were men. The Abwehr found the strangler through its own elaborate file of index cards. He was a former Brownshirt who had been banished from the Party and preyed on homosexuals. Abwehr commandos buried him in the Englischer Garten, his favorite stalking ground. And then Erik lured the Tipper into the gardens and copied the strangler’s style. It was cold-blooded and cruel. And Erik had to cleanse himself. He went up into the mountains, which were cobalt blue in the summer mist, like the color Erik had squeezed out of his paint tubes when he was a child. Those blue mountains robbed Erik of his whimsical command over life and death.

  “Lord God,” Erik had mumbled, “forgive my sins. The Tipper would have given our secrets away to the Gestapo and neutralized half our index cards. Lives would have been lost, networks compromised. And we would have had to begin from scratch.”

  And here he was hypnotized by the same mountain mist.

  Eva Canaris arrived in a blue sleeveless gown, wearing mascara and a light smear of lipstick, like a whore from Scheunenviertel. She couldn’t have been more than nineteen. She was short and pudgy, with the admiral’s pale blue eyes and knob of a nose.

  Erik was laden with gifts—a bracelet from Brussels, Swiss chocolates, perfume from the conquered city of Paris, a silk scarf from Italy, and a primitive carving of a cat that the Brandenbergers had brought back from Bulgaria for Eva Carnaris, who worshipped creatures with whiskers. She opened her gifts like some precision jeweler while she sat with Erik on the porch. She had him clasp the bracelet around her neck, which was covered with beauty marks. She pondered the carved cat, tested the perfume on her own cheek, and wore the scarf like a turban, which only brutalized the plain features that she herself glanced at in her pocket mirror.

  “Captain, did Papa send you here as my suitor?”

  “I don’t think so, Fräulein Eva.”

  She licked her lips in the mirror. “Do you have a fiancée?”

  He had to lie. “Yes.”

  “Then I shouldn’t be here without a chaperone. Schwester, you must come at once. I’m with a dangerous man. He has a fiancée. And he might be unfaithful to her.”

  One of the Lutheran nurses arrived and calmed her down by holding the pocket mirror while Eva combed her hair.

  “Schwester, you may go now. I’m perfectly safe with this man.”

  The nurse left and came back with a pitcher of lemonade. Eva dismissed her again. She poured the lemonade.

  “Captain, what if we captured you? We have the means, you know. The Schwestern are members of a secret society. They like to kidnap Berliners.”

  “Fräulein Eva, it would be a delight.”

  Erik laughed to himself. He wouldn’t mind sitting for seven years on this Zauberberg. His teachers at the Jewish Gymnasium had all talked of spending seven years on their own magic mountain, away from the Brownshirts and the Bolsheviks.

  “And would you strangle all of us, Captain? I’ve been told that you are my father’s best strangler.”

  Erik wanted to shrink into his own skin. Who could have told her about the inner workings of the Fox’s Lair?

  “Captain Erik, you shouldn’t be frightened. I wouldn’t dare seduce you. I have my own fiancé. He’s serving on the eastern front with the Waffen-SS. But please don’t tell Papa. He wouldn’t approve.

  Erik couldn’t imagine a more fanciful tale. The admiral’s daughter on her Zauberberg with the Waffen-SS. But she showed him snapshots of herself and a young German officer, with the walls of Schloss Neuschwanstein in the distance. And the tale didn’t seem so fanciful. Her Hans had wandered onto the lawn of the asylum, and Eva had fed him a cup of cold water. She played chess with him, even though the nurses didn’t encourage it. He was from a family of peasants in Lower Silesia and had been sent to the Zauberberg to guard the gold of the Nibelungen dwarfs. He’d done nothing more than kiss Eva’s hand and kidnap her queen on the chessboard. But the Schwestern had informed on him to his superiors, and he was banished to the eastern front, with all its bedlam and daily massacre. Or perhaps it was Canaris who had gotten wind of Eva’s sweetheart and had Himmler pull him off the mountain.

  “Do you think my father loves me, Captain Erik?”

  “Yes, very much.”

  “Then he should not interfere in my life. I do not need French perfume and wooden cats from Bulgaria. I need my Hans.”

  He finished his lemonade and had to lie to her again, promise that he’d talk to Canaris about her sweetheart, or she wouldn’t have stopped crying. He kissed her hand, whistled for his driver, and rode down off the Zauberberg.

  Baron von Hecht

  9

  HE RETURNED TO THE DRAGONERSTRASSE in the middle of the night, longing for the sleep of the dead. Eva Canaris didn’t need informers and spies to uncover his work at the Abwehr. He had the look of an executioner, that remote, distant stare of a man who was adrift, tied to nothing but a world of secret agents. He could catch the flick of a shadow in the dim light outside his door. Was it someone from another secret service?

  Erik took out his dirk. He wasn’t in the mood to cut some enemy from ear to ear, but he couldn’t have people dogging him like that.

  “Mensch,” he said, “step out with your hands behind your neck, or you won’t make it to the morning.”

  A voice shot back at him from the shadows without the least tremor.

  “Captain, you might be doing me a favor.”

  He recognized that melodic growl and put his dirk away. He unlocked his door and let Lisalein into his flat. She was wearing a light summer cape, and before he had a chance to accustom himself to her own particular climate, she ventured forth from inside the wings of her cape and kissed Erik on the mouth with a hunger he could never have imagined. But something wasn’t right. It was a kiss close to hysteria, and it crushed Erik once he realized that she was bargaining with him, and this was the beginning of the bargain. She could have been a fellow Abwehr agent.

  The blood beat like a hammer over his eyes. His head hurt. But he moved out of Lisa’s embrace and returned with some cognac in a pair of whiskey glasses.

  She tasted the cognac and growled at him, “Hypocrite, you were dying to kiss me.”

  The hammer still beat inside his head. He had to brace himself against his mother’s armoire.

  “Is that why you invited me to dinner with Emil? To show off one of your conquests to your husband?”

  “I didn’t have to show off,” she said. “Your tongue was hanging out at the dinner table. If Josef hadn’t gone upstairs, he would have had to duel with you on our lawn.”

  She turned away from Erik and began to prowl the apartment like a pantheress, brushing against the furniture. “Since when does an orphan acquire Queen Anne sofas and chairs?”

  “These are my mother’s heirlooms, the little she had. I haven’t changed a thing. Why have you come here? What could be so urgent that you had to stand in the dark?”

  “It’s my father,” she said.

  Erik didn’t soften to Lisa, but he grew alarmed. “Has the baron been arrested?”

  “Yes—no. Who can tell in their little game of Nacht und Nebel? He’s being held at the Jewish Hospital.”

  “But can’t your husband help him?”

  “It’s Josef who had him put in the Extrastation at the Jewish Hospital. He says it’s better than any hotel, that Father will
be safe there, but I’m not so sure. He can’t make up his mind whether he loves Father or hates him. But my husband is so devious, it comes to the same thing. I thought of hiring someone to poison him, but that won’t get Father out of the Extrastation.”

  “And so you counted on your protégé. But why did you come as Mata Hari in a cape?”

  “I thought that’s what you would want,” she said.

  He tumbled into a blinding rage. His trip to Munich had unsettled him—an uncle who had denied Erik’s existence for so long and sat in a Gestapo cellar like a demented man, and a pudgy, plain-looking girl in a madhouse on a mountain, waiting for a soldier who had already been sent to his death. He would have liked to rescue Eva from her retreat, take her past the nurses with their long noses. The admiral shouldn’t have sent him on a mission to his own daughter. Even stranglers had half a heart. And he couldn’t say why, but he struck Lisa with a softened, unclenched fist. He was the one who belonged in a madhouse.

  There was blood at the edge of her mouth. She wasn’t startled. She smiled and wouldn’t wipe the blood away.

  “Liebschen, now I see what it is you like.”

  He struck her again with the same soft fist. It frightened him. He must have wanted to squeeze the life out of Lisa all this time, he realized.

  He undressed her with the murderous precision of a matador, licked the blood off her cheek, sucked in the perfume of her naked flanks. He hadn’t imagined that her hip bones would be so sharp. She had little blond hairs around her nipples. He had her lie down on his mother’s sofa like some magical mermaid, with her face dug into the cushions; he touched the delicious fluting of her back and proceeded to bite every portion of her body, leaving blue marks on her milky skin. And the very act of biting aroused him in a terrifying way. He was vanquished by Lisa all over again. He lay beside her, and his moaning was as guttural and deep as hers.

  THE JEWISH HOSPITAL OF WEDDING WAS ONCE THE BEST Krankenhaus in Berlin; doctors had come from all over Germany to practice there; patients were willing to wait months for a free bed; ministers, bankers, and industrial barons were once faithful to its clinics. There had also been a Jewish Hospital in Munich, but the Nazis shut it down and turned its little community of buildings into a barrack and police station, where Jews were flogged and beaten to death. But neither Hitler nor his SS seemed able to close the Jewish Hospital in Berlin. Its nursing school was still flooded with applicants, even after Jewish nurses had to wear yellow stars on their uniforms. The Judenstern didn’t seem to matter much. For some mysterious reason, the Reich continued to grant Jewish nurses a State certificate. Perhaps it wasn’t even a mystery. There was a terrible shortage of nurses, and the Führer must have calculated that he might have to count on nurses with a yellow star as a last resort. And so the Schwesternheim, or nurses’ residence, at Iranische Strasse continued to flourish. And Hitler’s own ministers, who could have gone to the Charité or another Berlin hospital, would sneak into the main building with its mansard roof and walls of blackened stone and visit a Jewish urologist who no longer had the right to practice in Germany.