Cesare

by Jerome Charyn

  It was only in Scheunenviertel that he had a few moments of peace. As he walked through the measured alleys of Hackescher Markt, with its glass roofs, its pink columns, its cluster of glazed tiles, he recollected the alley’s former occupants—the tradesmen, the carpenters, the Lithuanian poets’ society, the ballet school, the tiny guild of leatherworkers that made and repaired the Kaiser’s boots and hunting clothes, the bund of Jewish girls that could argue into the night about the latest German or Czech Literatur, the juggler who gave classes under his own skylight—all gone. Goebbels, the gauleiter of Berlin, hoped to replace them with loyal Nazis, but no one wanted to move into Scheunenviertel, because they might be mistaken for Jews, plucked into a Black Maria, and taken to a holding pen, even with their Party pins. Herr Goebbels knew how clever these Jewish devils were at impersonating Christians.

  So Scheunenviertel was strewn with bits of tile and stucco and colored glass. Erik lived in a red stucco apartment house that had been put up at the end of the nineteenth century. It had its own patchwork of painted tiles that looked like a canopy of stars in some lost Jewish heaven.

  He didn’t even have to bother with the rent. He hardly had any groschen in his pocket. There was always some Abwehr clerk around to pay his bills. And what bartender in all of Berlin would ever have asked Cesare to take care of the tab? But the somnambulist preferred to drink at home. He took out his flask and cursed Fanni Grünspan while he sipped cognac. Cesare fell asleep in his own coffin on the Dragonerstrasse with the flask still in his hand.

  Jewish Jazz

  15

  THE CONE-SHAPED FLARES THAT THE MOSQUITOES dropped were called “Christmas trees,” because they were suspended from parachutes that lit the sky like huge red and yellow bulbs. Children loved to follow these falling parachute flares, but mothers and air raid wardens had to drag them into the nearest shelter. The Mosquitoes, which were mostly made of wood and could fly very low, were both bombers and spotter planes. They didn’t make that grinding noise of Britain’s heavy bombers. And thus the Mosquitoes gave very little warning. Suddenly, they were there, gliding right over your head, under the flak of antiaircraft guns. Mosquitoes were almost impossible to chase from the sky. But Tilli, the gun girl on top of IG Farben, had managed her own miracle. She captured two in one night. The first Mosquito exploded in midair, and its crew fell like tattered pieces of shrapnel into the Tiergarten; the second Mosquito landed in a potato field north of Berlin; none of its “air pirates” left the plane alive.

  Tilli was on the cover of Berliner Illustrirte; she posed in an airman’s scarf and her worn leather flak jacket, sitting in the saddle of her own antiaircraft battery on Farben’s roof. She looked like Betty Grable going to war, but the Reich’s Betty Grable, in a gun girl’s peaked cap. Plucked from her anonymous life on the roof, she was suddenly as popular as a movie star. Half of Germany and the whole of Berlin had seen her picture in the Illustrirte. She was offered the chance to play herself in a Babelsberg production, but Tilli declined. She would rather shoot real Mosquitoes out of the sky than attack cardboard planes at the Babelsberg studios.

  A general, a banker, and a U-boat ace with the Ritterkreuz hanging from a ribbon around his neck offered to marry her. And that malevolent dwarf, Herr Goebbels, wanted to make her his mistress. But she was in love with the somnambulist and would be fondled by no other man. She waited for him at the Adlon, surrounded by her admirers. The bar was packed with SS colonels and Gestapo agents, who kissed her hand, with film producers and opera stars, who dreamt of Tilli naked in her saddle. Party officials might have proposed to her, but they didn’t like the Adlon and its Jewish Kultur—Chaplin had stayed there, and Pola Negri—and so they kept to the Kaiserhof Hotel. Tilli had once belonged to the League of German Maidens and had slept with many soldier boys before she met the somnambulist. But she shed all her fiancés, and was as pious as a nun in her saddle, waiting for Erik.

  He arrived in his leather coat, with that long, lugubrious face, his eyes like amber buttons that glowed in the dark. Under the spell of blackout curtains, the Adlon bar was a study in scarlet, with red tapestries on the walls, red carpets, red velvet cushions, and only a hint of light coming from the main hall. Tilli was wearing a black dress with a décolletage that could have turned generals into shivering swine. Her nipples were taut as pinpricks against the black silk. She had to prevent an SS colonel from falling at her feet. But Erik hadn’t even glanced at her, hadn’t eaten her alive with his amber buttons. She had to shove along the bar to him, weave in and out of all that company of men.

  “My little secret agent,” she said, “are you the only one who hasn’t seen me in the Illustrirte? I was thinking of you when I shot down the Mosquitoes. The Führer sends me notes. I cannot read his scrawl. Herr Himmler wants to climb into my pants. I’m everyone’s sweetheart except Cesare’s.”

  She started to cry among all her admirers. Erik was forlorn. She was lovelier than she had ever been; it wasn’t her black sheath that excited him. It was her shyness. He might have married her in another lifetime, even with her devotion to the Nazis; she had a purity in her saddle that was far from the SS and its assassination squads. She didn’t want to enslave the world, only to stop the Mosquitoes from ravaging Berlin. But he was addicted to Lisalein, and he didn’t have the heart to tell Tilli.

  “It’s your other blonde,” she muttered, “isn’t it? The little Jewess with her Nazi husband. I could report her to the police.”

  She saw the ripple in his forehead, under the trace of scarlet light.

  “Don’t worry. I wouldn’t compromise my darling’s darling. I couldn’t have you walk around with a broken heart.”

  “Tilli, what are you talking about?”

  “Frau Valentiner. She’s the brains behind the new Spartakus.”

  Spartakus was the code name of a mythical Jewish underground in Berlin. It had resurrected the Spartakusbund of 1918, but without Rosa Luxemburg. This new bund hadn’t exploded a single bomb, hadn’t shot holes into the Adlon’s walls, hadn’t harmed one German soldier. It couldn’t have finished off the two detectives from Kripo, since Erik, the Berlin Werewolf, had acted alone. It didn’t send out manifestos, or drop leaflets from the roofs. It had no signature. Spartakus was supposed to rescue Jews from the transport trucks, but not one truck had been diverted, or Erik would have been told about it at Gestapo headquarters. Did it have a secret list of submariners? Was it sheltering runaways, providing Jews with false Papiere? Did it have its own passport and visa division, like the Abwehr, its own forgers? Spartakus couldn’t have kept such a secret from Erik’s bloodhounds at the Abwehr. And wouldn’t it have bumped into the little baron, who had his own network of submariners? No, it was a fairy tale meant to soothe a frightened horde of men, women, and children who vanished day by day with their yellow stars. Ah, went the tale, Hitler had his SS, and the Jews of Berlin had Spartakus.

  “Tilli, you’ve been on your saddle too long. Spartakus doesn’t exist.”

  She wasn’t crying now. She had Erik’s attention.

  “Ask Frau Valentiner and Fräulein Fanni Grünspan. They’re the ringleaders.”

  “That’s crazy,” he said. “Fanni’s a Greifer. She snatches submariners who come out of hiding, hands them to the Gestapo.”

  “That’s her cover,” Tilli said with a wanton smile. “She sacrifices a few submariners, and saves a hundred. She went to school with your Lisalein. They both lived in the Grunewald, with all the Jewish barons.… Darling, take me to the White Mouse. I want to hear Jewish Jazz.”

  The White Mouse had been a notorious cabaret during the Weimar years, with transvestites, boy prostitutes, society women who slummed as whores, dwarfs, Jewish jugglers, and jazz musicians. The Nazis had closed it down, sending the transvestites and Jewish jugglers to a concentration camp. But the war had lent a terrible nostalgia to Berlin, a longing not for Weimar itself, but for its powerful aromas and stinks. The Party members who descended upon Berlin with the Führer had
nothing to do with the town or its ancient musk, but there was among the elite of the Wehrmacht, the Gestapo, and the SS a secret wish for the White Mouse. And so it reopened in a tiny cellar a few doors from Gestapo headquarters on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. The Gestapo considered it their own spider house, a trap that might lure submariners and other riffraff looking for Jewish Jazz.

  It had a lone clarinetist, who had once played with an orchestra at the Adlon, during the reign of afternoon tea dances, when the hotel hired gigolos—cultivated young men—to rumba with the bored society women of Berlin. This clarinetist, who had both Gypsy and Jewish blood, and was seventy years old, lived inside the Gestapo prison at the Jewish Hospital. He was waiting for his own ticket to Auschwitz. But his Gestapo handlers made a fortune letting him sneak into the White Mouse. The Gestapo could have assembled an entire band, could have recreated the aura of the tea dances and the cabarets, but that would have meant a constant deluge of customers. And so this clarinetist, who might find himself on the next transport truck, had to offer the Gestapo and the SS a whiff of the old White Mouse.

  Erik couldn’t remember his name—Isaak or Diego. He seemed in a permanent state of palsy when his hands weren’t on the keys of his clarinet. His tunes often made no sense. But they had a marvelously sad wail. He was the White Mouse.

  ERIK SAT WITH TILLI ON HIS LAP IN A FIELD CAR filled with SS officers and female Gestapo agents. The female agents were in love with Tilli but felt she was a little coarse, showing her cleavage to half the men at the Adlon. They wore daggers at their belts, like submarine commanders, and must have contemplated cutting Erik to pieces in this twilight world of a blacked-out Berlin; he’d nuzzled their sweetheart, had licked her from head to toe, but he also carried a dirk, and he might rip their throats with that cheese knife of his while all of them had one eye on Tilli. And he was enough of a magician to make sure they arrived at the White Mouse as a bundle of corpses.

  So they left Herr Cesare alone. And he looked out upon the desolate streets. Few people wandered after dark. A streetcar still ran here and there with its blue windows, like landmarks out of Hell. For some reason it was always followed by a caravan of rats. Perhaps the caravan was intoxicated by the traveling wedges of blue paint. But he could have been wrong. The field car had its own caravan.

  They were all going to the Pied Piper of Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, Berlin’s own Benny Goodman. The White Mouse had a tattered blue awning above its cellar door. There was no other sign that it was a Nazi cabaret. It did have a doorman, an SS guard with a bull’s neck, but he was crouched under the awning.

  Tilli approached him first, wearing an SS colonel’s cap tilted over one eye.

  “Permission to enter Die Weisse Maus.”

  “Jawohl, meine Prinzessin,” he said, recognizing Tilli under her hat. He also recognized Erik, who liked to come to the White Mouse when he couldn’t sleep.

  Erik climbed down six steep steps and ducked into the cabaret. He caught the usual crowd—SS officers wearing lipstick, Gestapo agents with boas wrapped around their necks, cigarette girls with their cardboard displays cupped under their breasts, sailor boys with codpieces pinned to their trousers, whores from Alexanderplatz without a tooth in their heads, the wives of Wehrmacht officers searching every corner of the cabaret for vials of morphine. All were packed into a room that wasn’t a whole lot bigger than the barbershop in the basement of the Adlon, and with a dance floor that could have fit inside a sofa. There was no space for a bandstand. The Jewish Gypsy had to climb onto a chair, which tottered while he played but never seemed to topple over. He was held up by his own raucous melody, a series of wild, irregular bleats that thrilled the regulars at the cabaret.

  That staccato wail had become Jewish Jazz, and Berliners at the White Mouse loved to lean back and listen, tapping their feet to Don Diego’s time, or dancing with whoever was near: Men danced with men, women danced with boys or movie stars, but no one dared approach the princess of IG Farben’s roof, not even the Gestapo’s female agents. Tilli was untouchable after she appeared in the Illustrirte.

  She had to pull on Erik’s sleeve. “Mein Engel,” she growled like her own clarinet, “dance with me.”

  But he wasn’t her angel or her deliverer. He was much too absorbed in Lisalein. He couldn’t believe that she was part of some Jewish underground, and certainly not with a Greifer like Fanni Grünspan. He had warned Fanni, threatened her, and still she snatched submariners who had been lured out of their lair as if by a siren’s call and were captured by this brazen blond Lorelei at the Café Kranzler or a movie palace. She would hold a pistol on her victims and lead them to the little Gestapo jail at the Jewish Hospital. The somnambulist would have to come out of his Berlin dream long enough to strangle Fanni. But he dreaded it. He knew he would see Lisa’s smile on Fanni’s face the instant he was at her throat.

  So he let Tilli entice him onto the tiny dance floor. He clasped her hands and did a version of the boogie-woogie that he had once seen in a newsreel about Harlem’s cabarets. He paddled to Don Diego’s music like a spastic bear and spun Tilli around. It was as much as she could ever want, dancing with her fiancé at the White Mouse while Berlin was about to burn.

  She knew that everyone was staring at her, and she could afford to close her eyes and move to Erik’s touch like a blind mouse. But then that Jewish wailing multiplied, and she could hear a strange murmur in the room. She opened her eyes and saw not one but two blond Mischlinge, Frau Valentiner and Fräulein Fanni. They’d come into the cabaret in identical dark cloaks, looking at no one but themselves; each helped the other unfasten her cloak and hurl it into the air. They wore black silk sheaths, with a finer cut than Tilli’s and just as much décolletage. They talked to no one, acknowledged no one, while the female Gestapo agents gawked at them like hungry children.

  The clarinetist had stopped playing; he, too, was bound to them, had become their slave. Then Frau Valentiner smiled and the clarinetist started to wail. The two Mischlinge stood still, their heels clamped to the floor while their bodies undulated under the silk sheaths. This, Tilli realized, had to be Jewish Jazz—motion without motion, wild Jewish abandonment without lifting your foot.

  She turned to look at Erik; the button eyes were gone, replaced by hot amber holes. Her fiancé was on fire. He ran out of the room, leaving her with a pair of blond witches who had broken the equilibrium of the White Mouse. It didn’t matter that she wore an airman’s scarf on the cover of the Illustrirte, that men chased her everywhere, that housewives pointed to her while they clutched their ration booklets. She was only safe in her saddle on top of IG Farben. But she could have shot every Mosquito out of the Berlin sky and still not have been able to solve the riddle of Jewish Jazz.

  Fabrikaktion and Frauenprotest

  16

  Spartakus. NOW IT MADE SENSE. He remembered the tale Fanni had told him at the Mexiko bar. Lisalein and Fanni had both been to the same summer camp on the Wannsee. Lisalein was kidnapped right out of the water by an unruly band of Reds. A ransom was delivered, and Lisalein returned with cuts and bruises on her arms and legs. Fanni hinted that the kidnapping had been staged by Lisalein herself. Why had she told him all this? Was it to mock Erik, flaunt her own secret pact with Lisa?

  Comrade Lisalein, commandant of Berlin’s Red underground. The Nazis had broken the Reds, hung them from hooks, shot multitudes of them in the forests outside Berlin, tortured them in their cellars, kicked them to death, arranged mock trials so that their commissars could be guillotined. And now the Reds had resurfaced as a Jewish underground so clandestine that it did not leave a trace. Nothing but a whisper: Spartakus.

  Erik had seen all the lists prepared by the Gestapo and their own Jewish police. He had bribed the Jupo, had gotten them to erase or juggle certain names so that he could pull submariners out of the air. And if there was a rival group, with rival submariners, how could it have flourished right under Erik’s nose?

  An SS captain was waiting for him outside the
White Mouse.

  “It’s urgent, Herr Kapitän. Come with me.”

  Gestapo headquarters was only three doors away. It was an old art school that had been turned into a dungeon, a dormitory, and a field office. Bloodred Nazi banners ran from the roof to the ground floor and decorated half the front wall. The same banners emblazoned the Adlon’s front wall but couldn’t overwhelm the hotel’s façade. Still, Herr Hitler was everywhere.

  Erik had to click his heels and give the Hitler salute again and again until he arrived at the Gestapo command center on the second floor. A new reign of terror was about to begin. The Gestapo and SS were bunched around a table. But these were no ordinary SS men. They were members of the Leibstandarte division, Hitler’s personal bodyguards—the Death’s-Heads, the elite of the elite. They wouldn’t have descended upon Gestapo headquarters for some ordinary roundup. These were birds of prey—Raubvögel.

  What Erik feared had happened, or Hitler’s birds of prey wouldn’t have hovered over Gestapo headquarters. There would be a new roundup, much more thorough than the last, when Jews were plucked out of their apartments or picked off the streets. Jews and half Jews who survived the Nazi dragnets had become slave laborers in the Third Reich; they toiled in factories, swept the streets, picked up broken glass after the bombings while they starved to death. Farben and other factories depended on this slave labor; bankers wanted these Jews in place. Air Marshal Göring relied on Jewish expertise at his own aircraft factories. Jews seemed to have a magical hand in the manufacture of ball bearings. The Wehrmacht’s Jewish tailors were the only ones who could stitch a proper uniform. Berlin thrived on this free labor force. But the Party wanted the Jews of Berlin out of the way, and it overruled the Wehrmacht and IG Farben.