Cesare

by Jerome Charyn

  The Death’s-Heads had devised the diabolic plan of capturing Jews at their workplaces and would coordinate this Fabrikaktion—factory raids and roundups. Every inch of Berlin was accounted for on the Gestapo’s roundtable. The Leibstandarte had prepared its own illustrated map. But Erik still didn’t understand why the hell he had been summoned here. The Abwehr consisted of ciphers and secret agents, not policemen.

  The Leibstandarte commandant smiled at him across the table. “Herr Kapitän, we are counting on you. We do not have our own experts on Scheunenviertel. And if the Jews escape our dragnets and try to return to their nests, we expect you to be there with our very best detail. Should these vermin resist, you have my permission to shoot them on the spot. You will have ten marksmen at your disposal. Will that be enough, Herr Cesare?”

  “More than enough,” Erik rasped, though he could barely control his panic. He had to warn the Jews before they went to work, had to hide them in the back alleys of Scheunenviertel until the Fabrikaktion was over. But how could he escape these Death’s-Heads, the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler? They recognized him as some kind of magician. But Erik couldn’t fly out of Gestapo headquarters like a bird of prey.

  He couldn’t warn the Jews. He’d have had to cut the throats of ten Leibstandarte marksmen and arrive at the factories before the Jews and the SS. But these sharpshooters couldn’t have understood the contours of Scheunenviertel. He would lead them awry, have them sink into the most desolate alleys, where they could do little harm.

  He spent half the night in the company of these men. They were all curious about the captain who slept in a coffin at the Fox’s Lair. He didn’t try to discourage their sense of him as a zombie and a magician. He passed around his own flask of schnapps. They sipped from it with suspicion, worried that Cesare’s schnapps might turn them into zombies.

  He sat with them long after sunrise. They had breakfast in the officers’ commissary. They were served by Jewish waiters and Jewish cooks who wore the yellow star. A Jewish valet appeared and began to polish their boots. They bantered with Erik, never once looking into the valet’s eyes. The kuchen at the table had come from the Gestapo’s Jewish pastry chef. The coffee was from Arabia. Erik cursed his own appetite. He should have fasted before the Fabrikaktion. But he gobbled almond cakes that had begun to disappear from Berlin. He savored the coffee, drank it with his schnapps.

  The Leibstandarte commandos left first, in their own trucks, with a handful of Gestapo agents and nurses from the Jewish Hospital to care for the old and the ill, who might be swept up in the factory raids. Then Erik left with the sharpshooters. They had their own field car, with a death’s-head banner. It was almost noon.

  The Gestapo must have killed most of the traffic to clear the lanes for Leibstandarte commandos and their trucks. Not one streetcar moved along its tracks. Shopkeepers hid behind their metal shutters. There were little fires in the rubble from the last Mosquito raid. But Erik couldn’t hear a sound except for the bump of tires along the cobbles. He arrived in the crooked lanes of Scheunenviertel within ten minutes. Erik had to lead his sharpshooters on a phantom chase. He watched them climb out of the field car with rifles as tall as a man; they did not even bother to mount their telescopic sights. They could pick off Jews in this stinking hovel with their eyes closed.

  “Herr Cesare,” said their sergeant, “shall we wait for these vermin on the roofs?”

  The slaughter would soon begin; those who had managed to dodge the raid would return to Scheunenviertel, one by one. So the sheriff of Scheunenviertel had to pluck something out of the air.

  “Spartakus,” he said, and like a miracle the sharpshooters stopped looking for Jews.

  All ten stared at Erik while they sniffed the Jewish streets.

  “Herr Cesare,” said the sergeant, “are you so clever that you can lead us to Spartakus?”

  “I’m not sure. But I might know where they have their headquarters.”

  “Nartürlich,” said the sergeant, “Jewish spiders in a Jewish den. Will we require reinforcements?”

  “For such spiders?” he said. Spartakus had no headquarters. But he led them to the Hackescher Markt. On the way, these men spotted a little Jewish girl with black hair who’d ventured out of a cellar to find her ball. They would have exploded her head like a pumpkin if Erik hadn’t intervened.

  “Fraülein,” he said, shoving her back into the cellar with her ball. “The sun is still shining. You mustn’t play in the street.”

  They passed abandoned shops and stalls, and Erik led them deeper into the labyrinth of Scheunenviertel. They entered an old building at the edge of a courtyard, went up a flight of winding wooden steps, and Erik knocked down the door of a photography studio; the photographer had died a few months ago, but no one had bothered to clear out the space; the landlord and his five sons were in the holding pen on the Rosenstrasse, and what Christian photographer was crazy enough to rent a studio in a district of Berlin that was raided every other week? The dead photographer had been a bit of a madman, and this is what had encouraged Erik. It would take the Death’s-Heads two weeks to sift through the madman’s work; Erik had known him as a boy. An older brother in Munich had supported this mad photographer, whose name was Johann. He liked to photograph snails and lines of mildew on a wall; he liked to photograph bits and pieces of Hebrew letters on a storefront, the interiors of hallways where no light ever lived, the strange beards of old women, the breasts of old men. Such were Johann’s subjects. He never sold a photograph in his life, not that Erik could recall.

  But Johann’s photos would intrigue the sharpshooters, at least for a little while. They would interpret the Hebrew letters as signs and symbols of Berlin’s Jewish underground.

  “A treasure trove,” said the sergeant, “what a bounty, Herr Cesare.”

  Erik had to violate Johann’s work in order to save some Jewish souls. And what would happen after the Leibstandarte packed all the photographs and had them cataloged by their own cipher clerks? They would discover Johann’s chaotic mind, not a plan to launch and protect submariners. And then Hitler’s elite would fall upon Cesare.

  He could have walked home to the Dragonerstrasse after the lightning raids were over. But it spooked the sheriff to stay in Scheunenviertel. He could sense Johann’s images in each cranny of the old Jewish quarter, in each veined wall. And so he crossed the Spree, marched past an air raid warden’s hut and the dead lanes of Unter den Linden with their Nazi banners and flags, and arrived at the Adlon. He didn’t wander into the bar with its red plush seats and watery beer. He was in no mood to chatter with submarine aces or gun girls. He went up to the Abwehr’s suite, which was never occupied—it seemed like Erik’s private Pension.

  His leather coat was filled with dust from Scheunenviertel; his pants stank of plaster and rotting wood. He tore off his clothes and took a bath. There was never a problem with water at the Adlon, which had its own well. It also had its own generator; the lights never died, not even during an air raid. He sat in the marble tub, under the Adlon’s mirrors and golden spigots, wishing he now had a glass of wine. He got out of the tub but couldn’t find his robe. He wrapped himself in a towel that he plucked from the heated towel rack, put on his white slippers, and tread across the carpets to his bronze bed. And there was Lisalein sitting like a cat, wearing his robe, as if she were a hausfrau from the hotel.

  “How long have you been here?” he muttered.

  “Ages, darling. I can’t even count.”

  “I’m not your darling,” he said. “You danced with that Greifer, Fanni Grünspan.”

  She laughed in that gruff voice of hers, which was almost like a growl.

  “Darling, I’m flattered that you’re so jealous. But you had your own whore, who loves to shoot down Mosquitoes. Tilli the Toiler. I watched you after every step with Fanni.”

  Erik leaned over and started to shake Lisalein, but it had no effect. Her growls came from some secret place in her throat.

  “You w
ent to summer camp with her,” he said. “She’s your own lieutenant—in Spartakus. How many trucks did you waylay during the Fabrikaktion?”

  “Idiot, I’ve been here all night. A whole battery of SS men escorted me from the White Mouse to the hotel. I wouldn’t even have a cognac with them. I was waiting here for you.”

  “Like my little wife. You’ve been a Red ever since summer camp. And why didn’t you trust me? Haven’t Emil and I been helping submariners?”

  “Submariners,” she said. “Submariners. Fanni has her own Gestapo card and her own pistol. I had to court her, darling. Did I have a choice? I pay her a queen’s ransom to help Papa.”

  “I don’t believe you. She belongs to Spartakus. She’s part of your whores’ brigade.”

  Lisalein rose out of bed, with the white wings of Erik’s robe fluttering around her, and scratched his face. The scratches went deep, but Erik didn’t howl once. He didn’t even grip her hands. She could have scratched him all over again. The pain seemed to rouse him from his slumber. He searched with his tongue but couldn’t find a lick of blood.

  He must have been born in some unholy cradle. Her violence had unleashed a tenderness in him. He touched her face. He didn’t want to tie her arms to the bed, punish her with his own passion. He reached under her robe, fondled her, his hand gliding across the surface of her skin. He started to tremble. She didn’t mock him now. Her green eyes glowed under him. He’d had to use all his cunning, all the guile of Cesare the somnambulist, to prevent the Leibstandarte from slaughtering Jews in Scheunenviertel. But his rage against the Death’s-Heads didn’t fall on Lisalein, couldn’t fuel his love. He landed in a dream once their mouths met.

  HE HAD WANTED TO WAKE WITH LISA IN HIS ARMS. He would have sat beside the bed like a pilgrim, begged her to leave Valentiner and live with him. With Lisa as his Frau, he could walk away from the war. Erik would sneak the baron out of the Extrastation at the Jewish Hospital, find Emil, the little baron, and cross into Switzerland. He would mount his own Aktion. Dr. Caligari would help him. Erik could get whatever papers he needed from the passport and visa division and a bundle of cash from the admiral’s own strongbox. He would work as a chauffeur in Basil or Zürich.

  It was like a blitzkreig in his head, his own lightning war. But Lisa was gone, the bathrobe she had worn bundled at his feet—a little Swiss mountain. He looked into the Empire mirror near his bed, ignoring its gold filigree. He had blood lines on both cheeks, marks across his face that made him look like a vampire.

  It didn’t take him long to learn about the echo of the Fabrikaktion. All he had to do was get dressed and go down to the bar, which was full of SS officers with red faces. The raid had been a roaring success. The Leibstandarte had marched into factories with their bullwhips and bayonets and rounded up Jews, while the Gestapo rode across Berlin and arrested anyone who was wearing a yellow star. The Jews were crammed into several Sammellager—an old riding stable, an abandoned Luftwaffe barracks, a shuttered nightclub called the Clou, two synagogues, an old-age home, Erik’s own orphanage on the Rosenstrasse, and the Jewish Hospital. And then the complications began; with their own thirst for order, the Nazis had decided to separate half Jews and Jews who happened to have an Aryan spouse. These special cases were locked away in Rosenstrasse and the Jewish Hospital.

  But not even Herr Hitler’s wise men and ministers could have predicted what would happen next. The wives of Jewish husbands and the mothers of Mischlinge began to congregate outside Rosenstrasse and the Jewish Hospital. And they shouted in their own orderly fashion, “Give us back our husbands and children.”

  The Nazis couldn’t use bayonets and bullwhips on these Hausfrauen, who were soon joined by the Aryan husbands of Jewish wives. There were no images of this revolt in the Berliner Illustrirte. But the crowd of protestors began to build. The SS arrived with machine guns and threatened to rip into the crowd. But they saw members of the Wehrmacht who were married to Jews. They saw movie stars, a famous acrobat from the circus, and they saw Cesare, who had joined the Frauenprotest outside the Jewish Hospital. They recognized the Abwehr’s chief magician and regarded the scratches on his face as war wounds. Their own captain bowed to him.

  “Touché, Herr Cesare. An excellent trick, attaching yourself to misguided Hausfrauen. But how long will it last?”

  “Until you send your machine gunners away,” he said.

  “And if we arrested you, Herr Cesare?”

  Erik smiled at his executioner. “Mensch, I’m with the secret service. I don’t exist.”

  The Aryan husbands and housewives gathered behind Erik and shouted, “Butchers, give us our children and go away.”

  The SS captain signaled to his men, who carried their machine guns back to their car and drove off. The housewives wanted to kiss Erik’s hand.

  His mind had begun to drift. What if he wore a yellow star, like the king of Denmark, who defied the Gestapo and saved as many Jews as he could? The Gestapo would only laugh if they discovered a yellow star on Erik’s leather coat. They’d see it as one more intrigue, one more disguise, and offer Cesare the somnambulist a glass of blond beer.

  Under the Adlon

  17

  THE Frauenprotest CONTINUED THROUGH AIR RAIDS and firestorms. The Party was petrified. No full-blooded Germans had ever sided with the Jews before. Finally, after more than a week of protests, Goebbels dismissed the machine gunners and freed all the Mischlinge and Jews with Aryan spouses.

  Most of the Sammellager were emptied out, except for the Jewish Hospital, which had become one enormous collection camp, with its Schwesternheim, its Extrastation, its Gestapo jail, where Fanni Grünspan now lived, behind a green curtain, and its clinic, where the sick were taken in the Nazis’ zeal to cure Jews before they could be killed.

  It was the last outpost of Jews in Berlin, and because three of its pavilions belonged to the Wehrmacht as a hospital of its own, the SS and the Gestapo found it hard to raid the hospital grounds. It had its own vegetable garden and sundeck, even its own cows, which provided the hospital with milk. It might even have had a submariner or two in its cellars. But the main clinic itself had become a refuge for a certain kind of submariner, treated by nurses from the Schwesternheim on the hospital’s grounds and by doctors who could no longer practice anywhere else. They kept patients out of Nazi hands as long as they could, even risked their own lives to do so. And Erik believed that the sisters themselves had to be hiding submariners. There was no other explanation. A transport truck packed with Jews from the Fabrikaktion had vanished from Berlin—fifty children. And there wasn’t a single clue.

  An alert was sent out for the fifty Jewish children and their phantom truck. The Gestapo chieftains whispered Spartakus. And Erik wondered when he himself would be caught in the dragnet, since he had led the Leibstandarte to Johann the photographer’s lair. He began seeing Johann’s photographs on the walls at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse; they were the secret pockets of Scheunenviertel itself—mildewed doors, a dead mouse, an aleph lying on its back, like the contours of some profound lament.

  But Erik knew where Scheunenviertel’s lament had gone—to Iranische Strasse and the Jewish Hospital. It had to be Spartakus’ lone warehouse and headquarters. There was no other location where the Jews of Berlin could meet. And the Schwesternheim must have been the nerve center of the Jewish underground. The Nazis hadn’t stripped Jewish nurses of their licenses, had allowed them to flourish in their own school, even though some of them had ended up on the transport trucks. The SS wandered through the hospital and all its clinics but never went near the Schwesternheim.

  Cesare followed Fanni like a hawk. He knew that the pavilions were all connected by underground passageways, which also served as a bomb shelter. Fanni could climb down to the cellar of the main pavilion and “elope” into the Schwesternheim, but she never did. She kept to her room in the Sammellager, which was fenced off from the rest of the hospital and had its own attack dogs, or she roamed Berlin in a beret and silver fox co
at, a pistol in her pocket.

  What kind of Greifer could she have been? He followed her onto streetcars with their blue windows, followed her into cafés, had kuchen at the next table, and she never spotted him. He followed her into the Sammellager itself, keeping ten paces behind her and flashing his green Gestapo identity card, always the best cover for an Abwehr man.

  Fanni was queen of this little camp. Most of the Sammellager had emptied out. There were twenty Jews, stragglers who had escaped the transport trucks for some reason, or submariners who had been caught by Fanni and hadn’t been processed yet. She ruled over them.

  He had an urge to break her neck, and then he discovered a different Fraülein Fanni. He’d forgotten that Fanni’s mother and father were inside the same Sammellager. The Nazis had stolen Herr Grünspan’s shoe store on the Alex, with all its mannequins, and all his cash. He was just another pauper in a Gestapo holding pen. Yet this Greifer didn’t play Queen Fanni with him. Her mother and father had grown half-blind, and she spent the afternoon reading Faust to them. She took all the parts—Margarete or Mephisto and the Young Witch—and when she frightened her Papa as she spat out Mephisto’s mockery of mankind, she plucked her father’s chin and cried, “Vati, it’s the Devil, not me.”

  Erik grew ashamed of spying on her. But he followed Fanni one last time … to the Adlon Hotel. She sat at the bar, and all the savagery had returned to her face. Her eyes blazed in the bar’s reddish light; her lipstick seemed to burn her own mouth. She was a Gestapo Mädschen with that pistol in her pocket. She puffed on a Roth-Händle, biting into the golden lip of her cigarette holder. And then she saw her prey. A submariner had come into the bar, a girl of seventeen or so, skittish, trying to have a whiff of freedom before she returned to some cupboard on a side street.

  The Greifer grimaced, wearing her own raw mask. She clutched her pistol and was ready to pounce, when Erik grabbed her arm.