“I will not fail you, Excellency. You were under the Abwehr’s protection from the moment you stepped inside this hotel. On Admiral Canaris’ behalf, I beg you to return to your suite and sit there for one hour. Please let no one into your rooms, neither a waiter nor Frau Adlon herself. I promise you. I will have an answer to your riddle.”
And Erik left the inner garden, walked under the dazzling light of the Adlon’s gold-ribbed dome, and exited the hotel with his uniform still ablaze.
Zorro
12
CESARE WENT THROUGH THE SLIDING METAL GATE, but it was like a ghost town at the Abwehr. The section chiefs were in the screening room with half their men. They were all watching whatever Hollywood production could be smuggled out of Istanbul. Erik rounded up half a dozen agents who weren’t in the screening room, and together they rummaged through the Abwehr’s little mountain of index cards and the floor plans of the Hotel Adlon; he memorized every light well, every socket, every fixture at the Adlon, every double door, every landing, and the number of steps—sixteen—from the lobby to the basement barbershop. He had files on the Adlon’s celebrated Nazi barber, Fritz, and the prominent people who sat in his chair and preferred him to every other barber in Berlin; even in wartime a chair at the Adlon was worth a fortune; among his list of clients were Adolf Hitler, Hermann Göring, and Baron von Hecht. The barber couldn’t have been a double agent; he may have loved Reichmarks, but he wouldn’t have risked his chair to become a V-Mann for the British secret service.
The Adlon itself was divided between Gestapo and Abwehr Tipper. Uncle Willi understood how important the Adlon was as a listening post; the barman belonged to him, the cashier, the captain of the desk clerks, the maids’ own female führer, and not one of them had hinted at a British hireling, an assassin in the halls. Yet Erik still believed in the Grand Mufti’s reports.
He went to Commander Stolz, who wanted to mount an Aktion in the lobby of the Adlon, flood it with Abwehr agents. “That won’t draw him out,” Erik muttered. “He’ll spot us in a second.”
“Then we’ll have to go to Uncle Willi.”
“No, it will upset Alte. He’ll brood over how he’s disappointed the Grand Mufti. Kinder, we’ll have to solve it ourselves.”
But Admiral Canaris had come out of the screening room with the little baron, Emil von Hecht, trailing behind him. The little baron followed Alte everywhere now that he was forbidden to pluck Jews from the transport trucks and form new networks of submariners; he formed them anyway, behind the admiral’s back. Canaris knew about these dealings but said nothing to Emil. The little baron was one more delinquent, like his dachshunds.
Crumbs fell from the admiral’s uniform; he had pee stains on his trouser cuffs from Kasper, his dachshund with bladder problems. He was scowling. His own Tipper must have told him that Erik had been ransacking the admiral’s prize index cards.
“Männe,” he said, “you missed your chou-chou, Tyrone Power—Emil, tell him what we were watching.”
“Crash Dive, Herr Admiral.”
“A submarine picture that knows nothing about submarines—Hollywood should have borrowed one of our ace U-boat commanders, like Joachim Fischer, who tossed his Ritterkreuz and all his ribbons into the toilet bowl at Kiel. And he wouldn’t allow the Gestapo on board his boat. But he would have taught those dunces at MGM how a man’s face begins to swell when he’s locked inside a submarine, and he could have given Tyrone Power a few lessons in crash diving.”
Emil clutched at Canaris’ rumpled sleeve. “Fischer is dead, Herr Admiral.”
“Not dead, Emil, missing at sea—and there’s another missing man, eh? An assassin whom my little Erik cannot find. But you are looking in the wrong place. You will not find him in the index cards. We’ve mapped that hotel from top to bottom. And don’t interfere with the barbershop, please, or I’ll never be able to get a shave at the Adlon again. It’s not the unknown that haunts us, Männe, but the known. You’ve already met this assassin.”
ERIK RETURNED TO THE ADLON LIKE A SOMNAMBULIST dispatched by Caligari himself. Canaris had a clarity that no field man ever had. He could lie down on his camp bed with Sabine and Kasper, or sit in a darkened room, watching Technicolor ghosts on the screen, and have a sudden illumination. The Grand Mufti had spoken to Canaris through the medium of his somnambulist. Mohammed Amin al-Husseini was a fearless man. He wasn’t looking for protection from the Abwehr. He would have stayed in Italy, under the African sun, with his own Arab Gestapo agents, if Hitler himself hadn’t needed the illusion that Amin al-Husseini was his own exalted prisoner—so he came to Berlin with his entourage, and lived in this curious palace of a hotel that had more prayer rugs and jeweled light than a mosque. And now he was giving Admiral Canaris, the one friend he had here in the West, a master of espionage and quaa’id of the most secret of secret services, the chance to redeem himself.
Erik walked out from under the maddening light of the main hall, ducked into the bar, and whispered to Günter, the barman, who was practically an Abwehr agent. Günter went from client to client, telling them all that the bar would be closed the next half hour for a private party.
One of the regulars complained. She was the wife of a submarine commander, waiting for her husband to return from the North Sea. “Günter, don’t be foolish. There is no private party.”
The barman pointed to Erik, whose eyes were raw and unruly, and the woman disappeared with the wife of another submarine commander. Only Lt. Werner Wolfe remained on his leather settee, where he always sat sipping champagne. He smiled when Günter bolted Erik and him inside the bar.
“Sounds like fun,” the lieutenant said. “I think Admiral Canaris has suddenly entered the picture.”
The somnambulist sat down on the settee. “You shouldn’t have suckered me like some fat trout, Wolfie. Berlin isn’t your private stream. How much are the Engländers paying you to finish off the Grand Mufti?”
“Does it matter? It’s not about money. And you’ll have to cooperate. If the Gestapo ever finds out that I’ve been plotting with the Abwehr to help rescue Jews from the trucks, Unce Willi will fall, and so will you. Let’s make a deal.”
Erick saw blood in front of his eyes. He had to keep from pounding the Adlon’s American Berliner into his own grave.
“Wolfie, I’ll give you two hours to flee Berlin. That’s the kindest offer you’ll ever have. You shouldn’t have used Berlin Jews as your cover. I was born in Scheunenviertel. I still live there. I don’t belong to the Engländers and I don’t belong to you.”
The lieutenant had a sudden laughing fit that sounded like the bark of a seal. Erik knew it was a diversion. He could feel a pocket pistol pressed against his cheek. It was a Sauer 6.35 mm, made in Berlin. It would have blown bits and pieces of Erik into the chandelier and splattered the mirrors with his blood.
“Congratulations, Wolfie. That’s very sporting of you. Is this the gun you would have used against the Grand Mufti?”
The barking had stopped and was replaced by a grin. “I’m not Jesse James. This gun is just for you, Cesare. I knew the admiral would figure it all out. It was a matter of time, and I wasn’t taking any chances.”
“Enlighten us before you pull the trigger. How were you going to checkmate the Mufti? Put a bomb under his pillow? Poison his lentil soup? You don’t have a plan, do you? You’ve been playing your British masters like you’ve been playing me. You’re stalling, Wolfie, hoping the Engländers will parachute into Berlin one day, land on the Adlon’s balcony, and you can run through the hotel with your pocket pistol and arrest everyone in sight, including dachshunds and the Nazi barbers downstairs.”
“Richtig,” said the lieutenant, digging the Sauer’s blue nose deeper into Erik’s cheek, until it left a sucking hole. “But you won’t live to see it.”
He’d expected Erik to beg for his life, but the somnambulist didn’t even blink.
“Go on, pull the trigger. Günter won’t mind. He’ll just wait until the Gestapo cra
shes through the door. Have you ever been to Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, Wolfie? They have a wonderful iron grip that will remove the knuckles from your hand.”
The Sauer 6.35 began to shake. Erik slapped it away and let it fall. He clutched the lieutenant by the collar, dragged him across the pale carpet, and hurled him over the Adlon’s mahogany bar, into that little wet world of floorboards that was as mysterious to him as a submarine commander’s bridge. It was wiped clean morning and night, but it was always wet with beer drippings and seltzer water from the siphons that Günter kept on a shelf behind the bar. Erik had never been here before, but he had to hide Wolfie in case Frau Adlon had to feed one of her twenty-eight dachshunds and demanded to be let in (Günter kept the dog biscuits in a special jar near the seltzer siphons).
Erik straddled the lieutenant, who lay on the wet wood, his face recast with a blue tint in the bar’s many mirrors, his hands clasped like a mendicant.
“Cesare, I had to deal with the Engländers. They would have betrayed all our submariners and sold me to the Gestapo.”
Erik took out his dirk and cut the lieutenant’s cheek. He had to leave his mark on Wolfie, not a full Z, like Zorro, just a line an inch long on the lieutenant’s cheekbone, a little deeper than a scratch.
Wolfie didn’t howl once. He was petrified. Erik took a wet towel and placed it over the wound as a kind of camouflage. Then he handed him over to Günter.
“You’ll take the lieutenant through the Rembrandt Room and out the service entrance. A delivery truck will be waiting. It’s one of ours. Ride with him to Tempelhof. An Abwehr plane will return him to Sweden.… Wolfie, if I ever see you in Berlin, even after Winston Churchill wins the war, I’ll slice you from your nose to your balls, I swear to God.”
Günter picked up the lieutenant and rushed him out of the bar, shielding the wound with that wet towel, while Erik poured himself a glass of pilsner from the Adlon’s weakened tap; he could hear a gurgling sound. He knew that the beer had been watered down—another casualty of Winston Churchill’s war. His hand was shaking. He’d never cut a man before with such cold deliberation. He could have gutted Wolfie, skinned him alive. The Abwehr had made Erik into a monster with an SS man’s silvered sleeves. No wonder Lisalein copulated with him like a wild animal and ran away into the night. What could she have found when she looked into his eyes? A zombie who couldn’t even see his own reflection in the mirror. She must have been drawn to dead men with dark eyes.
It was Berlin, with its furor to rid itself of Jews, while it remained a Jewish town even after all the roundups and the Sammellager, and the paper stars that the Gestapo put on every door where a Jew still dwelled; children who had been snatched away still haunted Scheunenviertel, rode above the rooftops like lost angels looking for a home; the steel and glass skeleton of Die Drei Krokodile seemed to rock and sway on Alexanderplatz; the Café Kranzler, which had once reigned over that magnificent crossroad at Unter den Linden and Friedrichstrasse with its Jewish clientele, was now a pretty morgue where men and women drank ersatz coffee in tin cups and had to feast on kuchen made of sawdust and paste—the Jewish fiddler was gone, the Jewish gamblers and chess players, the Jewish prostitutes who picked up customers in the café’s ice cream parlor. The Kranzler was filled with Gestapo agents in felt hats and Gestapo spies, landladies who watched out for Jewish submariners.
Gott, he was living in a morgue and a madhouse. He picked up the lieutenant’s Sauer 6.35, dismantled it, and tossed the pieces into Günter’s garbage barrel. Then he sat down again and had another glass of watered beer.
BERLIN MITTE
February 15, 1943
From the desk of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris
72-76 Tirpitz-Ufer
Berlin
Why, why did I have to see her on the street? I wasn’t in the Jewish quarter. I was several blocks from the Chancellery, on the Wilhelmstrasse, in the heart of Hitler’s Berlin. And what was she doing all alone, wearing a yellow star in front of the Führer’s own bodyguards? She couldn’t have been more than six or seven, and as blond as any Brunhilde, her hair braided in a magnificent bun.
I had my driver stop the car. Thank God I wasn’t with my little aide. Hänschen was half a Nazi, and he would have had a fit. I had to jiggle like a madman to open the door.
“Well,” I said, “climb aboard.”
She hadn’t even stopped strolling to have a look at me. But I was far more stubborn than a six-year-old girl.
“Get in!”
Ah, now I’d caught her eye. She hopped with one foot in the air. “Mutti says I shouldn’t get into cars with strangers.”
“And where is your Mutti now?”
“I have no idea. Men in long coats knocked on our door. They took her away. Nurse hid me in the closet. And then they took Nurse and kept calling out to me. ‘Come, come, little cuckoo.’ But I didn’t answer.”
She climbed into the car. “If you have kidnapped me, mein Herr, then you are also obligated to feed me, or I will report you to the police.”
I didn’t want her to see my tears. She reminded me of my Eva, with her imperious manner. But Eva wasn’t beautiful and never had blond hair. I had my driver stop at the Kranzler. I gave him my special ration book and he returned with a glass of milk and a little mountain of Black Forest cake on a silver platter.
“Fräulein, what is your name, bitte?”
She kept looking at the cake. “Veronika,” she said, and she started picking off the maraschino cherries with her gorgeous little hands. She gobbled them all in half a minute.
“Fräulein Veronika, they are not barbarians at the Kranzler. They have given us napkins and forks. And you were meant to share that cake with me—it’s a mountain!”
“I am so, so sorry, Grossvater,” she said, and she fed me a sliver of cake with one of the Kranzler’s silver forks, patted my chin with a napkin, and shared her own glass of milk.
I was in love with this little Jewess, deeply in love, and she saw the tears in my eyes.
“Don’t cry, Grossvatter. I won’t let any harm come to you.”
I wanted to knock Hitler’s teeth out, poison his dog, piss on Goebbels, shit on Göring’s carpets at Carinhall, but it was the posturings of an old man whose officers were members of the Wehrmacht and had helped murder Jews. Fräulein Veronika saw right through my fit.
“Grossvatter, you are a naughty man.”
“And why is that?”
“You have captured me in your car, and after you have finished your cake, you will chew on my arms—as your second dessert.”
“But I am stuffed,” I had to insist.
And now she started to giggle. “But if you do not eat one of my fingers, I will vanish, and you will not have such a pleasure again.”
She teased me with two hands that were as lyrical as little animals. I was powerless. I pretended to bite off her fingers, one by one. She laughed with such complete abandon, I forgot the war. But my good humor didn’t last. I imagined her on a transport truck, with other Jews.
I knocked on the glass wall between the driver and myself.
“Dragonerstrasse, bitte.”
Erik wasn’t home. I couldn’t take her to Tirpitz-Ufer. There were too many spies in my own lair. We went to the Adlon. My driver found him reconnoitering in the bar. Erik was puzzled when he saw us.
“For God’s sake,” I said, “don’t stand there and make a spectacle of yourself. Get in!”
She abandoned me and jumped on Erik’s lap. I was heartsore, sick unto death.
“Männe,” I said, “we have to hide this little girl.”
He started to scold me. I have no loyalty among my own men. They are all scoundrels, all Cesares.
“Stop panicking,” he said.
“But she’s a Jewess.”
He took out his dirk, and with delicate strokes, he removed the yellow star from her coat; not a stitch could be seen; there wasn’t the slightest wrinkle in the fabric.
“Alte, what is she now?”
<
br /> And then he ignored his own chief. I was the extra party, the outsider. She told him her name and repeated the story about the men in long coats. And suddenly he insisted that Fräulein Veronika take my hand, and we went into the Adlon like three revelers. The bar was cluttered with SS officers and Gestapo commandants. Erik introduced her as his own niece, who had gone riding with us in the Grunewald. I don’t think Erik had ever been on a horse in his life. And how dare he expose her to such danger! What if they asked her questions about the stables?
“Fräulein Veronika, how do you like to sit on a pony?” asked one of the commandants.
I searched for my pistol. I would have to shoot the entire bar.
She smiled at the commandant. “Pony is too small.”
Then I guided her to our own table.
“Erik,” I hissed, “I’ll send you back to Kiel as a subcadet.”
“Herr Admiral, if you get excited, people will come over to pay their respects, and how will I ever find a home for Veronika?”
I panicked. “Home? Will I ever see her again?”
“You’ll ruin her cover. We will find a family of Lutherans, farmers who are beholden to us. But we cannot interfere, or see her again. You must say good-bye.”
I kissed her on the forehead. She followed the line of my tears with a finger, as if my skin were tracing paper.
“Good-bye, Grossvater. And don’t be naughty.”
I didn’t want to leave, but if I sat there, every SS officer would come over to ask a favor from Admiral Canaris: Moroccan plums for a pregnant wife, or some other miracle they imagined I might accomplish for them.
And as I marched out, I realized that Erik got along with Veronika because both of them were orphans—and I was excluded from their little orphans’ club.
I went back to my car, and we rode without a destination, nothing to guide us—no wind, no black burning sun. My blood froze without that mysterious little girl, and soon my heart would pump nothing but piss water.
Cesare Page 11
