Cesare Read online

  That was the strange aura of Iranische Strasse. The hospital consisted of seven pavilions, with an immense private garden and an underground passageway that connected all the buildings. But the Reich had eaten into its territories. Three of the pavilions had been taken over by the Wehrmacht as a military hospital, a Lazarett. And the Gestapo seized the former pathology pavilion and turned it into a Sammellager, the very last collection camp for Jews in Berlin; in the basement of this pavilion was the Polizeistation, or prison ward, where Jewish “criminals” were kept, those who had dared escape from the Gestapo’s clutches and had been found again.

  Doctors wandered through the other three pavilions like ghosts without a license, the pharmacist sold narcotics on the side, black marketers had their stashes of cigarettes and stolen ration stamps, and Jewish auxiliaries helped police Iranische Strasse for their Nazi masters. The Gestapo ran their own factory in one of the wards, where Jews stitched together children’s clothes and manufactured toys; the foreman of this factory, who might be sent to Auschwitz next week, was earning a fortune meanwhile. He picked the women who sat behind the sewing machines and slaved without respite seven days a week; the Gestapo was reluctant to part with these sorceresses of the sewing needle and put them on a transport truck, while the wizards who could design a toy for children in Munich and Frankfurt were pampered and stuffed with real marmalade and the whitest bread; a miniature fire engine or a hand-carved battleship, reproduced a hundredfold, fattened the Gestapo’s pockets and delighted the manufacturers of Nuremberg who no longer had the material to make toys.

  It wasn’t all business and calculation; the doctors from the Wehrmacht Lazarett brought their wounded soldiers to the main pavilion and had them treated by specialists who had been stripped of all their titles and couldn’t even be called Herr Professor. Such wounded members of the Wehrmacht filled the corridors with crutches and bandaged limbs and would flirt with hospital sisters wearing yellow stars.

  “Schwester, you haven’t looked at the marks on my legs.”

  And so romances spread like wildfire between the Wehrmacht and nurses of Iranische Strasse. In warm weather, they would climb up to the sundeck on the roof of the main building, or stand in the corridors and kiss. But not even soldiers with Iron Crosses could protect their sweethearts from a transport truck. The Gestapo would pluck a nurse at random right off the stairs if they hadn’t been able to fill their quota of a thousand Jewish souls for the next transport. No one was safe from this sudden kidnapping; no one was immune, except perhaps those privileged Jews of the Extrastation.

  It was a secret ward hidden from the other wards in the main building, and it resembled a hotel rather than a hospital clinic. It had its own porter, like the Adlon, its own registration desk, even its own Gestapo guard; and the Schwestern who served in this hidden ward were seldom put onto a transport truck. One of the hotel’s current guests was a Rothschild waiting to be ransomed; another was the widow of a banker who had fallen into a coma and couldn’t be moved; there was also an economist who worked on the budget of Bulgaria from his bed; but the star of the Extrastation was Baron von Hecht, who had his own furniture, his own butler, and his own sitting room. His meals didn’t come from the hospital’s kitchen, but from the chef and the sommelier at the Adlon, where the baron still had his own suite. His suite here wasn’t so different, except for the Gestapo guard who smirked a lot and the Schwestern who smoked the baron’s Roth-Händle cigarettes while they messaged his legs. He missed the page boys at the Adlon in their white gloves and pale blue caps, who carried messages to the baron, whether he was in the basement barbershop or sunning himself in the Goethe Garden.

  There were no page boys in this glorified prison right under the roof. But he did have a telephone, even if the Gestapo listened to every word, and a stenographer from Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse who could decrypt all the baron’s codes. He held conferences in his sitting room, met with bankers, nursed whatever holdings he had left. The Gestapo protected the baron from blackmailers and other plunderers, and took half of what he still owned. He couldn’t even see how sallow he was in his silken robe. His blue eyes had lost their fevered light. He was languishing on Iranische Strasse.

  He had even more of a hump on his back than his nephew, Emil. His dark, unruly eyebrows had turned white. Erik wanted to hold the baron in his arms and run out of the Jewish Hospital with him, race to the end of the world.

  He had come to Iranische Strasse in the black-and-silver uniform of the SS and marched into the Extrastation without a pass from the Gestapo. The baron was confused.

  “Are you the Teufel, mein Herr, or a messenger from one of the little führers who owes me a million marks?”

  Erik took out his Montblanc Masterpiece, and the baron started to cry.

  “I know you from somewhere? Were you once my chauffeur? They’re all with the SS. Or were you ever a floor boy at Die Drei Krokodile? I know you.”

  “Baron, I’m an orphan from Scheunenviertel. You gave me this pen, with my name inscribed in silver.”

  The baron’s crying grew twice as fierce.

  “I’d rather you were the Devil—a Jewish SS man!”

  Erik had to explain that he was the nephew of Heinrich Percyval Albrecht, and that the baron and his own daughter had kidnapped him from the Jewish orphanage and condemned him to a barn in Bavaria.

  “So you’re here to punish me for having abandoned you with a Montblanc.”

  “No, Baron. You shouldn’t mind this uniform. I’m with the Abwehr. I’m going to free you from the Extrastation.”

  “Free me?” the baron said, growing agitated; his chest swelled inside his narrow little world of silk. “Are you insane? I’m the master here. I drink Hedda Adlon’s best wine. I have caviar right off the cuff.”

  “And when the Gestapo tires of you and sucks out all your money, they’ll send you to the camps with your caviar.”

  “Of course,” the baron said. “I’ll go to Theresienstadt. It’s already been arranged. I’ll sponsor a theater company and a choir. I’ll have my own suite overlooking the walls of the town.”

  Theresienstadt was a fortress town in Bohemia. The Nazis had turned it into a showcase to convince the International Red Cross that Herr Hitler was relocating Jews to luxurious settlements; Jews had even been filmed working and playing inside the fortress of Theresienstadt. It was supposed to be a haven for prominent Jewish actors, novelists, scientists, and stockbrokers. But Theresienstadt could have been created by the Abwehr itself. It was one more illusion, a fortress prison dressed up as a playground.

  “Baron, who told you about Theresienstadt?”

  “My son-in-law. He swears that Einstein would have been sent there had he not run to America.”

  Erik could no longer control himself. He clutched the baron’s lapels and swayed him like a doll until the baron’s ears turned blue.

  “Theresienstadt’s not a Jewish postcard, Baron. It’s a way station to Auschwitz. The Nazis treat it like a movie set at Babelsberg. They have their own cameramen, with miraculous images of the children’s orchestra. And after the film has been shot, the same smiling children are marched off to the camps in their new clothes.”

  “Who sent you here with such lies?” the baron rasped.

  “Your daughter—Lisalein.”

  The baron had such venom sitting under his eyebrows that Erik had to release him. But he couldn’t stop thinking of Theresienstadt and orchestras that melted away into nothingness.

  “Baron, I could carry you out of here on my back, and who would ever notice? You’re one more refugee in a hospital of refugees.”

  “Everybody would notice. I could buy and sell this hospital. I’m Baron von Hecht. Tell me, did my daughter seduce you? Husbands mean nothing to her. She’s a heartbreaker. I embarrass my little Lisa and her fashionable girlfriends. She’s ashamed of a father who has to wear the Judenstern.” And he ruffled the yellow star on his robe. “She has to find a different black knight every week to do h
er dirty work. She wears them out. But if you lay a finger on me again, I’ll have you arrested. And you can test the waters for me at Theresienstadt.”

  “There are no waters,” Erik told him. “It’s a fortress, a city of walls.”

  And there was no point in planning an Aktion. He could have had the baron commandeered to Berne in six hours and left him to bask in “neutral waters,” but the baron would only have returned to his bed on Iranische Strasse.

  This hospital had its own curious sirens—sisters in long white stockings who visited every ward and had to comfort patients who were as precarious as the sirens themselves, all of them a whisk away from transport trucks and a fortress in Bohemia, where each gesture, each breath of air, was like a cruel, relentless Aktion.

  Wolfie

  10

  IT HAD ONCE BEEN THE KAISER’S HOTEL. Wilhelm II would walk down Unter den Linden from his own dismal palace and have a pilsner in one of the Adlon’s private rooms near the chandeliers and clouded yellow marble pillars and stone fireplaces of the reception hall. He paid the Adlon a yearly stipend to house his own guests, and took his dinners with them at the hotel. But a world war and the Spartakus uprising ruined the Kaiser’s hold on the Adlon. Wilhelm fled Berlin and crossed into Holland, while mutinous sailors barricaded themselves in the Café Viktoria or behind the Brandenburger Tor and fired upon the hotel from across Pariser Platz; there were still pockmarks in the outer walls twenty-five years later; the mutinous sailors swept through the Adlon’s revolving doors wearing red armbands, announced their own workers’ paradise, stole whatever food they could find, and ran out the rear of the hotel with candelabras and damask tablecloths from the dining room.

  The Adlon had never belonged to the Reds, nor was it really a part of the Weimar Republic; ministers dined there, but they couldn’t captivate the Adlon, not the way Kaiser Wilhelm had done. It catered to visiting royalty and the business elite. Millionaires brought their mistresses; dukes stayed in the Adlon’s ducal suites. To those who cherished it, the Adlon had become the finest address in the world—Number One, Unter den Linden. Some permanent guests never even bothered to venture beyond its doors. The barreled ceiling in the lobby and the sweeping marble staircases provided an enchantment and a vista that turned mountains, lakes, and monuments mundane.

  Then Hitler arrived with his torchlight parades through the Tiergarten. He shunned the Adlon, called it “a Jewish snake pit.” The Kaiserhof had always been his hotel in Berlin; he’d taken up the entire top floor, along with his SS bodyguards. But a mystery began to prevail: There was a tunnel under the Chancellery that led right to the Adlon, and the Führer could be seen there with his bodyguards once or twice a week. Was he having a liaison with some diva who lived at the Adlon? Who would have dared ask? But he always returned from the Adlon with his mustache trimmed and his hair slightly clipped. He was visiting the barbers’ salon in the basement of the Adlon, with its little nest of Nazi barbers. He brought his own Bavarian chef into the glassed-in cage of the Adlon’s kitchen, and began to dine on soufflés and carrot concoctions in the little alcove off the Goethe Garden, while a certain barber was summoned from the basement. And the boldest of the Nazis soon abandoned the bar at the Kaiserhof and flocked to the Adlon. Field marshals sat on its plum-colored armchairs; SS officers congregated in their own corner of the bar, while the Gestapo agents, who monitored the Adlon’s phones and had planted hidden wires and microphones everywhere, were mainly curious about the filing system that the hotel had for all its guests.

  Erik wasn’t troubled by the Adlon’s new reputation as Hitler’s hotel. He would sit at one of the bar’s low tables, with submarine commanders and secret agents, and sip on a pilsner or some champagne. Sometimes the gun girls from an antiaircraft crew would join them, but there were no gun girls this afternoon with their shapely calves and soft blond swagger. Erik suddenly found himself on the same leather settee with Werner Wolfe, a merchant from a neutral country, who lived at the hotel and conducted all his business at the bar. Wolfe was a Berliner who had gone to the United States as a child and had later settled in Sweden, where he sold electrical supplies. He wasn’t much older than Erik; tall and blond, with a delicate mustache, he also worked for U.S. naval intelligence; he was some kind of strange conduit between the Germans and the Allies. He never spied at the Adlon, never served as much of a secret agent, never hid who he was. The lieutenant would often tease Erik about Conrad Veidt’s role as Cesare in Dr. Caligari.

  “Did you know that our Conrad was the handsomest transvestite on Unter den Linden before he became a big hit in the movies? He was the rage of every boy bar. The rouge he wore could be seen for miles.”

  “You couldn’t have been one of his customers, Wolfie. You were much too young.”

  “But I saw him on the Linden, saw him with my own eyes.

  He stuck out his tongue at me. It was indecent.”

  “Yes,” said Erik, “he must have been dreaming of Cesare long before he met Caligari.”

  “And how is your own Caligari?” the lieutenant asked, fingering the microphone that bulged right out of his leather seat.

  “Ah, perhaps you’ll invite us both to America one of these days, after the Wehrmacht rides into Manhattan.”

  “With the Wehrmacht in Manhattan, you won’t need me.”

  Their little duet for the Gestapo was over now. The lieutenant did have one role at the Adlon that the Nazis were unable to unmask. He helped smuggle Jews out of Germany. It had nothing to do with naval intelligence. His government wasn’t partial to Berlin Jews. And so smuggling had become a secretive sideline. He did expect a high fee, but that was for bribing border guards and corrupt officials, who were far too compromised to inform on the American Berliner at the Adlon. One false step and the lieutenant would have become an instant casualty of war. He also risked the wrath of his own government. He had become a “spotter,” a listening device, planted like a chess piece in the heart of Berlin to feel out the Nazi war machine as it gathered at Hitler’s hotel. The Gestapo didn’t care whether he passed this information on to some V-Mann stationed in Geneva. They were delighted that America’s naval intelligence had sent a Berlin Jew as their secret agent. It supported their own image of a mongrel America rampant with Jews.

  Submarine commanders saluted Wolfe and talked to him about naval strategy. Captains and majors in the SS had schnapps with him and reminisced about all the beautiful women at the Adlon. The barman fed him. He’d become the hotel’s mascot. He could have slept with half the women who strolled into the bar and bumped into him, pretending to be blind. But they stank of the Gestapo, with their ivory cigarette holders and bloodred nail polish.

  The lieutenant liked to sit alone; he had slept with one or two of the gun girls who would come down from their batteries on the roof of IG Farben to visit with him; even if they were Gestapo plants, they never pumped him for information. And he shared one of the girls with Cesare, a sergeant with her own ack-ack gun, a certain Tilli, who left bite marks on his back and complained that Erik had lost interest in her. She had Betty Grable’s million-dollar legs, and he couldn’t understand why Erik would give her up. He meant to ask, but he couldn’t afford to sit too long with an Abwehr agent.

  Their bargaining had to be brief. He couldn’t smuggle anyone from Berlin without false papers from the Abwehr’s passport and visa division. And he couldn’t supply the Abwehr with pictures of the Jewish souls he meant to save, or fool around with microdot images in a matchbox, or the Gestapo would have been all over him. And so they sculpted a primitive sign language that served as a sketchbook. But it was done in an instant, with their own lightning war; six or seven signs, when doubled, composed a complete vocabulary; a tipping of the lieutenant’s champagne glass in one direction might mean blond or brunette; male and female were another set of signs; an unexpected smile stood for tall—and Erik would have the portrait he needed for the Abwehr’s wizards.

  It didn’t matter that there wasn’t a perfe
ct match; the passport photographs would be retouched from another face, and a new creature would emerge from the Abwehr’s Night and Fog. Then the passport was smuggled out of the Fox’s Lair in a pouch that ended up in the pocket of a page boy at Hitler’s hotel; these page boys were the lieutenant’s most trusted couriers. They wore the Adlon’s pale blue cap, could enter any room with a message on a silver tray, and could even carry messages out onto the street. And thus the American Berliner had his Pony Express. He took a big chance. But the page boys weren’t marked with any evidence. There was nothing to incriminate them. The passports they carried had the authentic stamp of the Third Reich (“borrowed” by the Abwehr itself from the Interior Ministry). The stamp was as good as Nibelungen gold. And what if a page boy got greedy and threatened to squeal? There was always the specter of Cesare, the somnambulist who could walk through walls and strangle a reckless page boy while he hid in a closet or sat huddled on the throne of his toilet seat.