by Philip Kerr
“Brundage—that’s the Ami’s name—”
“He sounds German.”
“He doesn’t even speak German,” said Kuhnast. “So as long as he doesn’t actually meet any English-speaking Jews, things should work out just fine.”
I glanced around the Palm Court.
“Is there any danger that he could do that?”
“I’d be surprised if there’s a Jew within a hundred meters of this place, given who’s coming here to meet him.”
“Not the Leader.”
“No, his dark shadow.”
“The Deputy Leader’s coming to the Excelsior? I hope you cleaned the toilets.”
Suddenly the orchestra stopped what it was playing and struck up with the German national anthem, and hotel guests jumped to their feet to point their right arm toward the entrance hall. And I had no choice but to join in.
Surrounded by storm troopers and Gestapo, Rudolf Hess marched into the hotel wearing the uniform of an SA man. His face was as square as a doormat but somehow less welcoming. He was medium in height; slim with dark, wavy hair; a Transylvanian brow; werewolf eyes; and a razor-thin mouth. Returning our patriotic salutes perfunctorily, he then bounded up the stairs of the hotel two at a time. With his eager air he reminded me of an Alsatian dog let off the leash by his Austrian master to lick the hand of the man from the American Olympic Committee.
As it happened, there was a hand I had to go and lick myself. A hand that belonged to a man in the Gestapo.
3
AS ONE OF THE HOUSE DETECTIVES at the Adlon, I was expected to keep thugs and murderers out of the hotel. But that could be difficult when the thugs and murderers were Nazi Party officials. Some of them, such as Wilhelm Frick, the minister of the interior, had even served a prison sentence. The ministry was on Unter den Linden, right around the corner from the Adlon; and Frick, a real Bavarian square head with a wart on his face and a girlfriend who happened to be the wife of some prominent Nazi architect, was in and out of the hotel a lot. Probably the girl, too.
Equally difficult for a hotel detective was the high turnover of staff, with honest, hardworking personnel who happened to be Jewish making way for people who turned out to be much less honest and hardworking but who were at least apparently more German.
Mostly I kept my nose out of these matters, but when the Adlon’s female house detective decided to leave Berlin for good, I felt obliged to try and help her.
Frieda Bamberger was more than an old friend. From time to time we were lovers of convenience, which is a nice way of saying that we liked going to bed with each other, but that this was as far as it went, since she had a semi-detached husband who lived in Hamburg. Frieda was a former Olympic fencer, but she was also a Jew, and for this reason she had been expelled from the Berlin Fencing Club in November 1933. A similar fate had befallen nearly every Jew in Germany who was a member of a gymnasium or sporting association. To be a Jew in the summer of 1934 was like some cautionary tale by the Brothers Grimm in which two abandoned children find themselves lost in a forest full of hungry wolves.
It wasn’t that Frieda believed the situation in Hamburg would be any better than in Berlin, but she hoped the discrimination she now suffered might be easier to bear with the help of her Gentile husband.
“Look here,” I told her. “I know someone in the Jewish Department of the Gestapo. A cop I used to know at the Alex. I recommended him for a promotion once, so he owes me a favor. I’ll go and speak to him and see what’s to be done.”
“You can’t change what I am, Bernie,” she said.
“Maybe not. But I might be able to change what someone else says you are.”
At that time I was living on Schlesische Strasse, in the east of the city. And on the day of my appointment with the Gestapo I’d caught the U-Bahn west to Hallesches Tor and walked north up Wilhelmstrasse. Which was how I’d run into that spot of trouble with the policeman in front of the Kaiser Hotel. From the temporary sanctuary of the Excelsior it was only a few steps to Gestapo House at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8—a building that looked less like the headquarters of the new Germany’s secret state police and more like an elegant, Wilhelmine hotel, an effect enhanced by the proximity of the old Hotel Prinz Albrecht, which now accommodated the administrative leadership of the SS. There were few people who walked up Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse unless they really had to. Especially when they had just assaulted a policeman. Perhaps for that reason I figured it was the last place anyone would think of looking for me.
With its marble balustrades, high vaulted ceilings, and a stair as wide as a railway track, Gestapo House was more like a museum than a building owned by the secret police; or perhaps like a monastery—just as long as the order of monks was one that wore black and enjoyed hurting people in order to make them confess their sins. I entered the building and approached a uniformed and not unattractive girl on the front desk, who walked me up a stair and around a corner to Department II.
Catching sight of my old acquaintance, I smiled and waved simultaneously, and a couple of women from the nearby typing pool fixed me with a look of amused surprise, as if my smile and my wave were ridiculously out of place. And of course they were. The Gestapo hadn’t existed for more than eighteen months, but it already enjoyed a fearsome reputation, and this was why I was nervous and why I was smiling and waving at Otto Schuchardt in the first place. He didn’t wave back. He didn’t smile, either. Schuchardt had never been the life and soul of the party exactly, but I was pretty sure I’d heard him laugh when we were both cops at the Alex. Then again, maybe he’d only been laughing because I was his superior, and as we now shook hands I was already telling myself I’d made a mistake and that the tough young cop I remembered was now made of the same stuff as the balustrades and the staircase outside the department door. It was like shaking hands with a deep-frozen undertaker.
Schuchardt was handsome, if you consider men with white-blond hair and pale blue eyes handsome. As a blond-haired, blue-eyed man myself, I thought he looked like a much-improved, more efficient Nazi version of me: a man-god instead of a poor Fritz with a Jewish girlfriend. Then again, I never much wanted to be a god or even to enter heaven, not when all the bad girls like Frieda were back in Weimar Berlin.
He ushered me into his little office and closed a frosted-glass door, which left the two of us alone with a little wooden desk, a whole tank corps of gray metal filing cabinets, and a nice view of the Gestapo’s back garden, where a man was carefully tending the flower beds.
“Coffee?”
“Sure.”
Schuchardt dropped a heating element into a jug of tap water. He seemed amused to see me, which is to say his hawkish face had the look of one who had eaten several sparrows for lunch.
“Well, well,” he said. “Bernie Gunther. It’s been two years, hasn’t it?”
“Must be.”
“Arthur Nebe is here, of course. He’s the assistant commissioner. And I daresay there are many others you’d recognize. Personally, I could never understand why you left KRIPO.”
“I thought it best to leave before I was pushed.”
“You’re quite wrong about that, I think. The Party much prefers pure criminalists such as yourself to a bunch of March violets who have climbed on the Party’s bandwagon for ulterior motives.” His razor-sharp nose wrinkled with displeasure. “And of course there are still a few in KRIPO who have never joined the Party. Indeed, they are respected for it. Ernst Gennat, for example.”
“I daresay you’re right.” I might have mentioned all the good cops who’d been kicked out of KRIPO in the great police purge of 1933: Kopp, Klingelhöller, Rodenberg, and many others. But I wasn’t there to have a political argument. I lit a Muratti, smoked my lungs for a second, and wondered if I dared mention what had brought me to Otto Schuchardt’s desk.
“Relax, old friend,” he said and handed me a surprisingly tasty cup of coffee. “It was you who helped me to get out of uniform and into KRIPO. I don’t forget my friends
.”
“I’m glad to hear it.”
“Somehow I don’t get the feeling you’re here to denounce someone. No, I don’t see you as the type ever to do that. So what is it that I can do for you?”
“I have a friend who is a Jew,” I said. “She’s a good German. She even represented Germany at the Paris Olympiad. She’s not religious. And she’s married to a Gentile. She wants to leave Berlin. I’m hoping I can persuade her to change her mind. I wondered if there might be a way in which her Jewishness might be forgotten, or perhaps ignored. I mean, you hear of these things happening sometimes.”
“Really?”
“Well, yes, I think so.”
“I wouldn’t repeat that hearsay if I were you. No matter how true it might be. Tell me, how Jewish is your friend?”
“Like I said, in the Olympiad of—”
“No, I mean by blood. You see, that’s what really counts these days. Blood. Your friend could look like Leni Riefenstahl and be married to Julius Streicher, and none of that would matter a damn if she was of Jewish blood.”
“Her parents are both Jewish.”
“Then there’s nothing I can do to help. What’s more, my advice to you is to forget about trying to help her. You say she’s planning to leave Berlin?”
“She thinks she might go and live in Hamburg.”
“Hamburg?” Schuchardt really was amused this time. “I don’t think living there is going to be the solution to her problem, somehow. No, my advice to her would be to leave Germany altogether.”
“You’re joking.”
“I’m afraid not, Bernie. There are some new laws being drafted that will effectively denaturalize all Jews in Germany. I shouldn’t be telling you this, but there are many old fighters who joined the Party before 1930 who believe that not enough has yet been done to solve the Jewish problem in Germany. There are some, myself included, who believe that things might get a little rough.”
“I see.”
“Sadly, you don’t. At least not yet. But I think you will. In fact, I’m certain of it. Let me explain. According to my boss, Assistant Commissioner Volk, this is how it’s going to work: A person will be classified as German only if all four of his grandparents were of German blood. A person will be officially classified as Jewish if he is descended from three or four Jewish grandparents.”
“And if that person has just one Jewish grandparent?” I asked.
“Then that person will be classified as being of mixed blood. A crossbreed.”
“And what will all of that mean, Otto? In practical terms.”
“Jews will be stripped of German citizenship and forbidden to marry or have sexual relations with pure Germans. Employment in any public capacity will be completely forbidden, and property ownership restricted. Crossbreeds will be obliged to apply to the Leader himself for reclassification or Aryanization.”
“Jesus Christ.”
Otto Schuchardt smiled. “Oh, I very much doubt that he’d be in with any sort of a chance for reclassification. Not unless you could prove his heavenly father was a German.”
I sucked the smoke from my cigarette as if it were mother’s milk, and then stubbed it out in a nipple-sized foil ashtray. There was probably a compound, jigsaw-puzzle word—assembled from odd bits of German—to describe the way I was feeling, only I hadn’t yet figured one out. But I was pretty sure it was going to involve words like “horror” and “astonishment” and “kick” and “stomach.” I didn’t know the half of it. Not yet.
“I appreciate your candor,” I said.
Once again his face took on a look of pained amusement. “No, you don’t. But I think you’re about to appreciate it.”
He opened his desk drawer and took out an oversized beige file. Pasted on the top left corner of the cover was a white label containing the name of the subject of the file and the name of the agency and department responsible for maintaining the file. The name on the file was mine.
“This is your police personnel file. All police have one. And all ex-policemen, such as yourself.” Schuchardt opened the file and removed the first page. “The index sheet. Every item added to the file is given a number on this sheet of paper. Let’s see. Yes. Item twenty-three.” He turned the pages of the file until he found another sheet of paper, and then handed it to me.
It was an anonymous letter denouncing me as someone with a Jewish grandparent. The handwriting seemed vaguely familiar, but I hardly felt up to the task of trying to guess the author’s identity in front of Otto Schuchardt. “There seems to be little point in me denying this,” I said, handing it back.
“On the contrary,” he said, “there’s every point in the world.” He struck a match, put the flame to the letter, and let it drop into the wastepaper bin. “Like I said before, I don’t forget my friends.” Then he took out his fountain pen, unscrewed the top, and wrote in the “Remarks” section of the index sheet. “No further action possible,” he said as he wrote. “All the same, it might be best if you were to try and fix this.”
“It seems a bit late now,” I said. “My grandmother has been dead for twenty years.”
“As someone of second-grade mixed race,” he said, ignoring my facetiousness, “you may well find, in the future, that certain restrictions are imposed on you. For example, if you were to try and start up a business, you could be required, under the new laws, to make a racial declaration.”
“Matter of fact, I’d been thinking of starting up as a private investigator. Assuming I can raise the money. Being the house detective at the Adlon is kind of slow after working Homicide at the Alex.”
“In which case you would be well advised to make your one Jewish grandparent disappear from the official record. Believe me, you wouldn’t be the first one to do this. There are many more crossbreeds around than you might think. In the government there are at least three that I know of.”
“It’s a crazy, mixed-up world we live in, for sure.” I took out my cigarettes, put one in my mouth, thought better of it, and returned it to the pack. “Exactly how would you go about doing something like that? Making a grandparent disappear.”
“Frankly, Bernie, I wouldn’t know. But you could do worse than speak to Otto Trettin, at the Alex.”
“Trettin? How can he help?”
“Otto is a very resourceful man. Very well connected. You know that he took over Liebermann von Sonnenberg’s department at the Alex when Erich became the new head of KRIPO.”
“Which was Counterfeiting and Forgery,” I said. “I’m beginning to understand. Yes, Otto was always a very enterprising sort of fellow.”
“You didn’t hear it from me.”
I stood up. “I was never even here.”
We shook hands. “Tell your Jewish friend what I said, Bernie. To get out now, while the going’s good. Germany’s for the Germans now.” Then he raised his right arm and added an almost rueful “Heil Hitler” that was a mixture of conviction and, perhaps, habit.
Anywhere else I might have ignored it. But not at Gestapo House. Also I was grateful to him. Not just for my own sake but for Frieda’s, too. And I didn’t want him to think me churlish. So I returned his Hitler greeting, which made twice in one day I’d had to do it. At this rate I was well on my way to becoming a thoroughgoing Nazi bastard before the week was out. Three-quarters of me, anyway.
Schuchardt walked me downstairs, where several policemen were now loitering excitedly in the hall. He stopped and spoke to one as we went to the front door.
“What’s all the commotion?” I asked when Schuchardt caught up with me again.
“A cop’s been found dead in the Kaiser Hotel,” he said.
“That’s too bad,” I said, trying to keep in check the sudden wave of nausea I was feeling. “What happened?”
“No one saw anything. But the hospital said it looks like he might have suffered some kind of blow to his stomach.”
4
FRIEDA’S DEPARTURE FOR HAMBURG seemed to herald an exodus of Jews from
the Adlon. Max Prenn, the hotel’s chief reception clerk and a cousin of the country’s best tennis player, Daniel Prenn, announced that he was following his relative out of Germany in the wake of the latter’s expulsion from the German LTA, and said that he was going to live in England. Then Isaac somebody-or-other, one of the musicians in the hotel orchestra, went to work at the Ritz, in Paris. Finally there was the departure of Ilse Szrajbman, a stenographer who used to do typing and secretarial work for hotel guests: she went back to her hometown of Danzig, which was either a city in Poland or a free city in old Prussia, depending on how you looked at it.
I preferred not to look at it, the way I tried not to look at a lot of things in the autumn of 1934. Danzig was just another reason to have one of those Treaty of Versailles arguments about the Rhineland and the Saarland and Alsace-Lorraine and our African colonies and the size of our military forces. To that extent, anyway, I was much less of a typical German than the three-quarters that were to be allowed to me in the new Germany.
The hotel business leader—to give Georg Behlert, the Adlon’s manager, his proper title—took businessmen and their capacity to do business in the Adlon very seriously; and the fact that one of the hotel’s most important and highest-spending guests, an American in suite 114 named Max Reles, had come to rely on Ilse Szrajbman, meant that it was her departure, among all the Jewish departures from Adlon, that disturbed Behlert the most.
“The convenience and satisfaction of the guests at the Adlon always come first,” he said in a tone that implied he thought this might be news to me.
I was in his office overlooking the hotel’s Goethe Garden, from which, every day in summer, Behlert took a buttonhole. At least he did until the gardener told him that, in Berlin at least, a red carnation was a traditional sign that you were a communist and, therefore, illegal. Poor Behlert. He was no more a communist than he was a Nazi; his only ideology was the superiority of the Adlon over all other Berlin hotels, and he never wore a boutonniere again.
