Cesare

by Jerome Charyn

  He saw a curious angel float above the carpets on the central staircase in a stunning white robe. It was only a trick of light. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem had come downstairs with his Arab bodyguards. He signaled to Erik, and the two of them sat in red chairs under the vaulted marble ceiling.

  “I am mindful of Baron von Hecht. He donated millions of marks to the poor of Jerusalem. I might be able to help you smuggle the baron and his daughter out of Berlin.”

  The Mufti’s men had captured an ambulance and parked it outside the hotel.

  “Excellency, if those bloodhounds at the SS ever find out …”

  The Mufti laughed. His beard had gone gray; his mustache was all mottled, and his dark eyes were pierced with tiny bullets of light. He was a wanderer with a price on his head. He’d defied the Engländers, and now the Germans kept him in a golden cage. But he wasn’t their magnificent myna bird.

  “Herr Cesare, if they bury me in the Tiergarten, all of Arabia will revolt. And the Führer will be furious.… No, they’ll let me have one Jewish baron. But I would like to see the Germans and the Engländers out of the way.”

  Erik found the ambulance, put on the white orderly’s coat and cap that the Mufti’s agents had left for him beside the steering wheel, and drove across the river Spree and the ragged roofs of Wedding in the midst of a sudden storm of trolley cars. The streets were strewn with broken glass and the debris of battered buildings. He left the ambulance right on Iranische Strasse and marched through the main entrance in his hospital hat, knowing that the SS commandos in their field car couldn’t be far behind. Cows still lived on the lawn. Nurses and wounded soldiers from the Wehrmacht hospital on the grounds tended to the garden; the Gestapo jail was still embroiled in barbed wire. But the Jewish Hospital of Wedding could have come out of a fairy tale, not a torn Berlin; the Mosquitoes had left all seven pavilions untouched, except for a few missing tiles on the roofs.

  Erik climbed up the stairs of the main pavilion to the baron’s “hotel,” which had no chains on the doors. The Extrastation was like an added wing of the Adlon. Frau Hedda had permitted the baron to borrow one of her Empire mirrors and Louis Quatorze chairs. The baron was in bed, smoking a Roth-Händle and wearing silk pajamas. The nurse beside him had a yellow star sewn on her blouse. Erik couldn’t have mistaken her blond hair.

  He was puzzled by her different movements and emanations, had always been. She was Mata Hari one day, and Rosa Luxemburg the next. He could never really find Lisa. No sooner did he catch the baron’s daughter than she metamorphosed into something else. She seemed the mistress of her own fierce ballet, and he was always excluded, always locked out. She danced with Fanni at the White Mouse and defied the whole German apparatus, grabbing Jewish children away from the SS. And now she wore the costume of a nurse.

  “Sister Lisa,” he said. She turned toward him with a savage swiftness and a snarl that puffed out her eyes and made her look like a she-wolf. He lost his footing under her attack. Stumbling, he had to hold on to the baron’s bed.

  She growled at him. “Why are you here with your funny hat?”

  “I have an ambulance downstairs. We have to leave the hospital right away.”

  “And where did you get your ambulance?” she asked with that same snarl.

  “The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem gave it to me—he admires the baron.”

  Lisa leered at him just like a she-wolf. “Admires him enough to send us all into Hell.”

  “What does it matter? Hell won’t keep me from saving you and the baron from destruction.”

  “And who would dare destroy us?” the baron asked, his chest ruffling under his silk pajamas. “I have a letter signed by the chief of all the Sammellager. We’re safe.”

  “Baron, the Leibstandarte are minutes away. They won’t even bother arresting you. They mean to burn you alive.”

  The she-wolf went to scratch his face, but Erik clutched both her wrists.

  “It’s a lie,” she said.

  Erik shivered under his white coat.

  “Couldn’t you have told me about Spartakus? What do I care that you were all a bunch of Reds? We were both moving submariners, saving Jews.”

  “Idiot,” she said, “why do you think I asked Emil to invite you to dinner? To reminisce with my little lost protégé? Vati may be sentimental, but I am not. It was to groom you, Captain—groom you for your own death.”

  His knees were shaking. It was her rancor that terrified him. He let go of her wrists.

  “Half the men you murdered, Herr Magician—in Majorca, Paris, Madrid—half of them were Jews.”

  “Yes, from some forgotten Red Brigade. But most of them I never touched. I had the Abwehr behind me. I paid them to disappear. They’re sitting out the war on some Greek island.”

  “It’s still assassination,” she said. “You tore them away from us. Vati, throw him out.”

  “I can’t,” the baron said. “It’s not in my constitution.”

  “Then I’ll leave you here with him.”

  “Frau Valentiner,” Erik said, his eyes aiming like an ax between her shoulder blades, not to harm Lisalein, but to hook her to him before she disappeared again into another mask. “Then our times together were only an Aktion?”

  She roared at Erik, and her shoulders began to heave. “Darling, how did you ever survive so long? Haven’t you noticed? I cannot bear the smell of a man.”

  But when Lisa saw the sadness on his face, she seemed to soften. She kissed him, sucked at his mouth as if to uproot him from the baron’s little hotel, and even caressed his hospital hat.

  “Don’t worry, darling. I’ll take the back stairs. Your commandos will never find me.”

  And she shoved through the Extrastation’s inner and outer doors, engulfed by the crippling perfume of her own flesh.

  “Captain,” the baron said, “she’s in love with you; I would bet my life on it. Or half in love. With Lisa, it comes to the same thing. She was always full of mischief.”

  Erik looked out the baron’s window and caught the commandos trampling across the garden. The cows stared at them and started to bellow and moan.

  “Baron, I wish we had more time to chat … but the Death’s-Heads are in the garden.”

  The baron was defiant until he heard the lowing of the cows. That mournful noise diminished him. He tumbled into Erik’s arms. He wanted to raid his own closet at the Extrastation and wear his best satin coat and alligator shoes, but the magician swooped him out of bed in his slippers and silk pajamas and hoisted him onto his back, so that the baron felt like some kind of lighthouse with human eyes.

  Erik had to find a route to the ambulance, but he wondered now if the ambulance itself was a time bomb that the Mufti had set into motion. Nein, he muttered to himself. The ambulance wasn’t a booby trap. The Mufti had to fight not to become a Nazi toy. His suite at the Adlon had become a miniature radio station. He gave interviews against the Engländers that were beamed across Arabia. He posed with Hitler at the Chancellery. He visited munitions factories, had even gone onto the roof of IG Farben and sat in the cradle of an ack-ack gun. Erik had seen him in the Illustrirte, with a quizzical look on his face, as if he mocked his role as performing monkey, but was still defiant in his very performance.

  Erik couldn’t play hide-and-seek with commandos on the hospital stairs. So he went down into the basement, with the baron riding on his back. One winding staircase brought him into that tunnel land, lit with tiny red bulbs. Chairs and sofas and hospital beds were strewn about, since the basement also served as a bunker. He thought of Herr Herman Melville, and wondered if he was inside the belly of the White Whale, or a monstrous caterpillar, because the tunnel had its own striations, its own limbs, and Erik was confused after five minutes, but then he stumbled upon a wooden sign that read SCHWESTERNHEIM, with an arrow that pointed along a particular limb. It was darker than the rest, and this tunnel belched a bluish smoke that started to burn Erik’s nose.

  It also had a low ceiling,
and the baron had to duck his head so as not to bang into the iron cages that housed the red lights. He hadn’t had such adventure since he was a little boy, playing on his father’s grounds in the Grunewald. He grew up surrounded by barons. His father had served two Kaisers, with a hump on his back, had financed the Kaisers’ wars and was given his own black charger, which he would ride in the Grunewald like a member of the cavalry.

  His father had died before he was fifty, his heart exploding against the narrowing walls of his chest. And young Wilfrid inherited his father’s vast holdings and the hump on his back. But that didn’t prevent him from becoming an officer in the Kaiser’s cavalry. He had two pillows stitched to his saddle, and his sword was tied to his right hand with thick leather thongs. But Lt. Wilfrid von Hecht never led a single charge during the Great War; there were few charges to lead against tanks and an army living in enormous holes in the ground. He was useless without his horse. But he still wandered in that no-man’s-land with a pistol and the same sword, and he did earn an Iron Cross Second Class, but he loved his horse more than his own men.

  None of his accomplishments—the banks, the department stores in Berlin—could ever make his heart race. It was only the toy horse he rode in the Grunewald, or that saddle he had in the horse patrol, with its seat as high as a castle, that could ever satisfy him … until now. Riding on the magician’s back was like having his hobbyhorse and his high saddle. And it was better than a forest or a battlefield. Nothing was ever so dark or severe as this tunnel, with its whorish red lamps. And then half his joy was gone, and the wind went out of his chest as he saw the flickering shadows. Commandos had stolen up behind him and his hobbyhorse with their powerful flashlights. He heard them shout “Scheisse” in the dark as they banged into the tunnel’s winding walls.

  “Herr Cesare,” he said, “we will never outrun such an army. You must abandon me. Please. I have no wind left. Run for your life.”

  “Baron, you are my life. You sent me to the Jewish Gymnasium.”

  “And gave you to Uncle Heinrich, fool that I am. Heinrich sentenced you to his barn.”

  “But I loved the animals, Herr Baron. Their bodies were like furnaces in the winter—did you ever sleep near a cow? But I cannot run and talk.”

  So Erik ran silently in that labyrinthine limb of the tunnel. And most of the baron’s joy came back … until he thought of Lisalein. The baron had married an opera singer who had the quivering nostrils and broad shoulders of a Valkyrie. And she gave him a strapping blond daughter without the familial trademark—that hump of the von Hechts. He didn’t want much more from his Valkyrie. He’d never been in love. He rewarded the opera singer with her own castle on the Rhine, her own opera house, and had her sign away all her rights to Lisalein. It was a monstrous act. He raised Lisalein in the Grunewald with a houseful of servants who waited on her every whim. But he couldn’t wipe out that Valkyrie of a wife. Soon Lisa’s shoulders were broader than his. Her nostrils flared. Her whispers were twice as resonant as his own shouts. She was willful, stubborn, and violent with the servants. No school or summer camp could govern Lisa. He sent her to Switzerland. Lisa’s Swiss boarding school sent her back. He hired tutors, the finest young women and men, and Lisa seduced them all. She went off for a month with a former nanny, a woman uglier than a frog. At sixteen, Lisa wanted to resurrect Rosa Luxemburg, while the baron did everything in his power to destroy the Reds, who would have made of Berlin one vast commune.

  Lisa married a Nazi, Josef Valentiner, who had managed the baron’s empire even while he was a boy. She brought Reds into their villa on Herman-Göring-Strasse as house servants. She ran her own network two doors away from the gauleiter of Berlin. Herr Goebbels never knew that one of his nearest neighbors was Spartakus.

  She wouldn’t flee Germany, wouldn’t go into exile. And the baron wouldn’t leave without her. He’d financed entire boatloads of German Jews, but these boats wandered the ocean without a country that would have them. The baron bribed more and more officials, flung his reichsmarks wherever he could, but Berlin had become a tightening knot. Josef Valentiner grew suspicious of servants who sneered at him; he sacked one after the other, and Lisa had to move her Red Brigade into the Schwesternheim. It wasn’t so difficult. All she had to do was wear a yellow star and pretend to be a nurse. She seduced the headmistress and slept with some of the sisters.

  Yet it wasn’t all about seduction and the baron’s marks. In spite of their ambiguity as Jewish nurses in Nazi Berlin, and their own fear of the Gestapo and the SS, who could strip them of their licenses and hurl them onto a transport truck, these sisters still wanted to help. And so the Extrastation had become the ganglia and nerve center of Spartakus. The baron’s own accountants kept track of all the submariners. His banks had been seized by the Reich, but some of the managers remained loyal to him and guarded his cash boxes. It was Lisa who put them all at risk. She decided to counterattack, to have her own lightning war against the Death’s-Heads and their factory raid. The baron had to buy a transport truck and hire actors to play commandos with white gloves. And now the Death’s-Heads were right behind him in the tunnel. But he could no longer see the flicker of their flashlights on the walls.

  “Herr Cesare,” he said, “we have arrived.”

  The baron slid off Erik’s back. His hump was much more apparent in silk pajamas. He groped along the wall and found a tiny knob. It was the only protuberance of a door that couldn’t be seen in the tunnel’s dim red light. He rattled the knob.

  “Lisa, it’s me and the magician—let us in.”

  But he had to turn the knob himself. And Erik could see Lisalein huddled in some kind of closet. She looked at Erik with all the loneliness of a wounded animal.

  And then the tunnel was bathed in light; Erik was blinded for a moment, with terrible spots in his eyes. But soon he could see the commandos crouching with their flashlights and machine pistols. And Colonel Joachim appeared in his plum-colored coat, with dust on his service cap, his face covered in grime. He was clutching a machine pistol, but he didn’t point it at Erik.

  “Herr Magician, I’m so happy you led us to the blond bitch.”

  Erik moved toward that elfin door, tried to seal in Lisalein, when Joachim hit him with the pistol butt. And a strange image flashed in front of Erik’s eyes—he’d gone to paradise. But this paradise was a bordello with marble pillars and nurses who wore nothing but garter belts. They had no clients but themselves. They prowled under the pillars, in their garter belts, with magnificent strides. Erik wanted to watch them forever. But Joachim hit him again, and he hurtled into some kind of sleep.

  Blue Moon

  19

  HE WOKE IN THE BARON’S OWN BED, wearing a hospital gown with a yellow star over his heart. He looked at himself in Frau Hedda’s gilded mirror. He had a bandage over one eye and purple marks on his chin. He was Cesare the somnambulist, a haunted dreamer and magician. A nurse hovered over him, wearing her own yellow star.

  “Schwester, you must help me into my clothes. I have to find Lisalein and Baron von Hecht.”

  She turned away from him, and he discovered a tall man with a dueling scar on his right cheek. It was Commander Stolz, head of Aktion. Stolz was the real sorcerer; Cesare only had to play himself.

  “Helmut,” he said, sitting up, with the bandage over his eye. A sharp pain shot across his spine, and he had to lie down again. “I have to rescue Frau Valentiner. Joachim must be holding her and the baron in his favorite Gestapo cellar. We’ll mount a raid on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. We won’t need more than two Aktion commandos.”

  “A brilliant strategy,” said the commander. “We’ll start a war between the Death’s-Heads and the Abwehr. They’ll drown us in our own Kanal.”

  “Then I’ll do it myself. But you’ll have to wrap me in bandages, or I’ll never be able to leave this hotel.”

  “It’s too late, damn you. Joachim didn’t take them to Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. He shot them in the forest at Sachsenhausen, burnt th
eir bodies, and buried their bones in a communal grave. There are no relics—nothing. You won’t be able to tell their bones from any of the others.”

  “Joachim wouldn’t dare,” said Erik, beginning to sob, his own tears blinding him. “He’s holding them somewhere. They’ll stand in chains before the People’s Court, wait in the executioner’s shed, and walk to the guillotine. But we’ll be there first.”

  “Mensch, they’re kaput.”

  The commander took some items out of a little sack—shreds of the baron’s silk pajamas and a crop of long blond hair, braided with a rubber band.

  “They tore off the baron’s pajamas … and Joachim cut her hair with his own razor before he shot her.”

  “I’ll kill him.”

  “Erik, he did it as a favor to Frau Valentiner. He swore on his life that he would give you her hair. She braided it herself, in front of their machine pistols, smiling half the time.”

  “He conspired with her. I’ll kill him.”

  And then a voice shot from behind Stolz’s back.

  “Männe, you’ll do nothing but sit in bed.”

  It was Uncle Willi in his admiral’s uniform, but without his dachshunds. There were blotches on his face, but his blue eyes shone like bullets. He’d had to bargain half the night with the Death’s-Heads. They wanted to drink Erik’s blood. It was the Grand Mufti who rescued Erik, not the Abwehr. The Mufti went to Himmler, said that Herr Cesare was the best bodyguard he’d ever had in Berlin, and that he would not sing Nazi songs on the radio again if they harmed him. But even that wasn’t enough. The admiral had to swear that he was sending Cesare across the Atlantic, into America’s bloodstream, and that the Abwehr would soon be able to broadcast near the needle on top of the Empire State Building.

  “Männe, it’s all been arranged. The Death’s-Heads are throwing a farewell party at the Adlon, in one of the grand salons. They’re glad to get rid of you.”

  “Alte, you have it wrong. I’ll get rid of them.”

  “Silence,” said the admiral. “I forbid you to speak. We have to live with their Schweinerei. We have no other choice. Do you think I don’t mourn Lisa and the baron? I took her sailing when she was a little girl. She was much more of a mariner than my own daughters. She wasn’t even frightened of the sharks. She fed them from the footropes, tiny pieces of cake. I swear to you, those sinister creatures fell in love with Lisa. They followed her with their pink eyes.…”