by Philip Kerr
WE WERE EARLIER than the main crowd at the Cockatoo, and this meant that “Rukelie,” as Trollmann was known to those working at the club, hadn’t yet arrived. No one causes trouble at seven o’clock in the evening. Not even me.
Some parts of the Cockatoo were done up to look like a bar in French Polynesia, but for the most part it was velvet bucket chairs, flock wallpaper, and red lights, like any other place in Berlin. The blue-and-gold bar was said to be the longest in the city, but clearly only by those who didn’t own a measuring tape or thought that it was a long way to Tipperary. The ceiling looked as if it had been iced like a wedding cake. There were a dull cabaret, a dance floor, and a small orchestra that managed to dance around the Nazi disapproval of decadent music by playing jazz as if it had been invented not by black men, but by a church organist from Brandenburg. With nude dancing girls now strictly forbidden in all clubs, the Cockatoo’s gimmick was to have a parrot perched on every table. This only served to remind everyone of another great advantage of having dancing girls: they didn’t shit on your dinner plate. Not unless they were Anita Berber, anyway.
While I drank schnapps, Mrs. Charalambides sipped martinis like a geisha drinking tea and with as little obvious effect, and I quickly formed the impression that it wasn’t just a talent for writing she shared with her husband. The woman managed her drink the way the gods could handle their daily dose of ambrosia.
“So, tell me about Gypsy Trollmann,” she said, taking out her reporter’s notebook and pencil.
“Unlike the Turk, who’s no more Turkish than I am, Trollmann is a real Gypsy. A Sinti. That’s like a subset of Roma, only don’t ask me to explain how, because I’m not Bruno Malinowski. When we were still a republic, the papers all made quite a thing out of Trollmann being a gyppo, and because he was also good-looking, not to mention an excellent fighter, it wasn’t long before he was doing great. Promoters couldn’t get enough of the kid.” I shrugged. “I don’t suppose he’s older than about twenty-seven even now. Anyway, by the middle of last year he was ready for a shot at the German light heavyweight title, and there being no other obvious candidates, he was matched against Adolf Witt for the vacant belt, here in Berlin.
“Of course, the Nazis were hoping that Aryan superiority would win out and that Witt would beat his racially inferior opponent to a pulp. That was one of the reasons they let him fight in the first place. Not that this stopped them from trying to fix the judges, of course, only they hadn’t counted on the crowd, who were so impressed by Trollmann’s heart and completely dominant display that there was a riot when the judges gave the fight to Witt, and the authorities were obliged to declare Trollmann the winner, after all. The kid wept for joy. Unfortunately, his happiness was short-lived.
“Six days later the German Boxing Federation stripped the kid of the title and his license on the grounds that his style of hit-and-run boxing, and his ‘unmanly’ tears, made him unfit to hold the belt.”
By now her neat shorthand covered several pages of her notebook. She sipped her drink and shook her head. “They took it off him because he cried?”
“It gets worse,” I said. “This is a very German story. As you might expect, the kid gets death threats. Poison-pen letters. Shit in his mailbox. You name it. His wife and kids are intimidated. It gets so bad he makes her ask him for a divorce and change her name so that she and the kids can live in peace. Because Trollmann’s not beaten yet. He still thinks he can box his way out of trouble. Reluctantly, the German federation gives him a license to fight again on two conditions: One is that he gives up the hit-and-run style that made him such a great fighter—I mean he was fast, no one could lay a glove on him. And the other condition was that his first fight would be against a much heavier opponent, Gustav Eder.”
“They wanted to see the kid humiliated,” she said.
“They wanted to see the kid get killed is what,” I said. “The two meet in July 1933, at the Bock Brewery, here in Berlin. In order to send up the new racial restrictions, Trollmann turns up for the fight looking like a caricature of an Aryan man, with his body whitened with flour and his hair dyed blond.”
“Oh, Lord. You mean like some poor Negro trying to disguise himself in order to escape a lynching?”
“Kind of, I suppose. Anyway, the fight takes place, and forced to abandon the style that had made him a champion, Trollmann stands toe-to-toe with Eder and trades the heavier man punch for punch. He takes a terrible beating until, in round five, he’s battered into submission and loses the fight on a knockout. After which he’s never the same fighter again. Last I heard, he was taking monthly fights against bigger, stronger fellows and taking regular beatings just to make the payments to his wife.”
She shook her head. “It’s a modern Greek tragedy,” she said.
“If you mean that there are not many laughs in it, then you’re right. And for sure, the gods deserve a kick in the ass, or worse, for letting shit like that happen to someone.”
“From what I’ve seen so far, they’ve got their work cut out in Germany.”
“Isn’t that the point? If they’re not there for us now, then maybe they’re just not there at all.”
“I don’t believe that, Bernie,” she said. “It’s bad for a playwright to believe that man is all there is. No one wants to go to a theater to be told that. Especially now. Maybe now most of all.”
“Could be I should start going to the theater again,” I said. “Who knows, it might restore my faith in human nature. Then again, here comes Trollmann, so I’d best not build up my hopes.”
Even as I spoke, I knew that if my faith in human nature had come with a bookmaker’s ticket, then just laying eyes on Trollmann again would have had me tearing it into pieces. Gypsy Trollmann, once as handsome as any leading man, was now the caricature of a ring-damaged pug. It was like clapping eyes on Mr. Hyde immediately after a home visit from Dr. Jekyll, so grotesquely were his features coarsened by his many beatings. His nose, previously small and combative, was now the size and shape of a sandbag on a poorly built redoubt, and this seemed to have shifted his dark eyes to opposite sides of his head, like something bovine. His much-enlarged ears were entirely without contours and might have fallen onto his head from a pork butcher’s bacon slicer. His mouth now seemed impossibly wide, and when he stretched his scarred lips into a smile to reveal several missing teeth, it was like sharing a joke with King Kong’s little brother. The worst of it was his disposition, which was sunnier than a picture wall in a school kindergarten, as if he hadn’t a care in the world.
Trollmann picked up a seat as if it were a bread stick and put it down again with its back to our table.
We introduced ourselves. Mrs. Charalambides flashed him a smile that could have lit up a coal mine, and then fixed him with blue eyes a Persian cat would have envied. Trollmann kept on nodding and grinning, as if we were his oldest and dearest friends. Considering the way the world had treated him until now, perhaps we were.
“To tell the truth, I do remember you, Herr Gunther. You’re a cop. Sure, I remember now.”
“Never tell the truth to a policeman, Rukelie. That’s how you get caught. It’s true, I used to be a cop. Only not anymore. These days I’m the carpet creeper at the Adlon Hotel. It seems the Nazis don’t like republican-minded cops any more than they like Gypsy fighters.”
“Hey, you got that right, Herr Gunther. Sure, I remember you now. You came to see me fight. You was with another cop. A cop who could fight a bit, right?”
“Heinrich Grund.”
“Sure, I remember him. He used to work out at the same gym as me. Right.”
“We came to see you fight Paul Vogel, at the Sportpalast, here in Berlin.”
“Vogel, yeah. I won that fight on points. He was a tough customer, was Paul Vogel.” He looked at Mrs. Charalambides and shrugged apologetically. “Looking at me now—it’s hard to believe, ma’am, I know—but I used to win a lot of fights in those days. Now they just want to use me as a punching bag. Yo
u know, put me up in front of someone for target practice. I could beat some of these fellows, too. Only they won’t let me fight my own way.” He raised his fists and went through the motions of ducking and diving on the chair. “You know?”
She nodded and laid her hand on top of his welder’s mitt.
“You’re a pretty lady, ma’am. Isn’t she pretty, Herr Gunther?”
“Thank you, Rukelie.”
“That she is,” I said.
“I used to know a lot of pretty ladies on account of how I was a good-looking guy for a fighter. Isn’t that right, Herr Gunther?”
I nodded.
“None better.”
“On account of the fact that I used to dance around so that none of these other fellows could land a glove on me. See, boxing’s more than just hitting people. It’s about not getting hit, too. But them Nazis don’t want me to do that. They don’t like my style.” He sighed, and a tear appeared in the corner of his bovine eye. “Well, it’s all over for me now as a professional fighter, I guess. I ain’t fought since March. Six defeats in a row, I figure it’s time to hang up the gloves.”
“Why don’t you leave Germany?” she asked. “If they won’t let you fight your own way.”
Trollmann shook his head. “How could I leave? My kids live here. And my ex-wife. I couldn’t leave them behind. Besides, it takes money to set up in a new place. And I can’t earn like I used to. So I work here. And sell fight tickets. Hey, you want to buy some? I got tickets for Emil Scholz against Adolf Witt at the Spichernsaele. November sixteenth. Should be a good fight.”
She bought four. After her remarks outside the T-gym, I wasn’t sure she actually wanted to see a fight, and I imagined it was her way of kindly putting some money in Trollmann’s pocket.
“Here,” she said, handing them to me. “You look after them.”
“Do you remember fighting a fellow named Seelig?” I asked Trollmann. “Erich Seelig?”
“Sure, I remember Erich. I remember all my fights. It’s all the boxing I got now. My memories. I fought Seelig in June 1932. And lost. On points, at the Brewery. Sure, I remember Seelig. How could I forget, right? He had a pretty rough time of it himself, did Erich. Just like me. On account of the fact that he’s Jewish. The Nazis took his titles away, and his license. Last I heard, he fought Helmut Hartkopp in Hamburg and won on points. In February last year.”
“What happened to him?” She offered him a cigarette, but he shook his head.
“I dunno. But he ain’t fighting in Germany no more, that’s for a hundred percent.”
I showed Trollmann the picture of Fritz and told him the circumstances of the man’s death. “Do you think perhaps this might be Erich Seelig?”
“This ain’t Seelig,” said Trollmann. “Seelig is younger than me. And younger than this guy was, for sure. Who told you this was Seelig?”
“The Turk.”
“Solly Meyer? That explains it. The Turk is blind in one eye. Detached retina. You give him a chess set and he couldn’t tell black from white. Don’t get me wrong, the Turk is an okay guy. But he don’t see so good no more.”
The place was filling up now. Trollmann waved at a girl on the opposite side of the bar; for some reason she had pieces of silver paper in her hair. All sorts of people waved at Trollmann. Despite the best efforts of the Nazis to dehumanize him, he remained a popular man. Even the parrot on our table seemed to like Trollmann and let him smooth its gray feathered breast without trying to take a piece out of his finger.
Trollmann looked at the photograph again and nodded.
“I know this guy. And it ain’t Trollmann. How’d you figure him for a fighter anyway?”
I told him about the healed fractures on the knuckles of the dead man’s little fingers and the burn mark on his chest, and he nodded sagely.
“You’re a clever man, Herr Gunther. And you were right. This guy is a pug. Name of Isaac Deutsch. A Jewish boxer, sure. You were right about that.”
“Stop it,” said Mrs. Charalambides. “You’re going to make his head swell.” But she was writing now. The pencil was moving across the page of her notebook with the sound of an urgent whisper.
Trollmann grinned but kept on talking. “Zak was in the same workers’ sports club as me. The Sparta, back in Hannover. Poor old Zak. Somewhere at home I got me a photograph of all the fighters at the Sparta. The ones who were contenders, anyway. And Zak is standing right in front of me. Poor guy. He was a nice fellow and a pretty good fighter, with a lot of heart. We was never matched, though. I wouldn’t have liked to have fought him. Not from fear, you understand, although he was plenty tough. But because he was a real nice fellow. His uncle, Joey, used to train him, and he looked like a prospect for the Olympics until he got kicked out of the federation and the Sparta.” He sighed and shook his head again. “So poor old Zak’s dead. That’s sad.”
“So he wasn’t a professional fighter?” I said.
“What’s the difference?” asked Mrs. Charalambides.
I groaned. But patiently, like he was talking to a little girl, Trollmann explained it to her. He had a good, kind way about him. Except for the memory of seeing him fight, I might have had a hard time believing he’d ever been a professional boxer.
“Zak, he wanted a medal before he turned professional,” he said. “Might have won one, too, if he’d not been Jewish. Which makes it ironic, I suppose. If ‘ironic’ means what I think it means.”
“What do you think it means?” she asked.
“Like when there’s a difference between what is supposed to happen to a man and what actually happens to him.”
“That covers it pretty well in this case,” she agreed.
“Like the fact that Zak Deutsch couldn’t box at the Olympics for Germany because he was a Jew. But he ended up being a construction worker at Pichelsberg, helping to build the new stadium. Even though he wasn’t supposed to be working there. See, only Aryan Germans are allowed to get jobs on the Olympic construction site. That’s what I heard, anyway. And that’s what I meant about it being ironic, see? Because there are lots of Jews working at the Pichelsberg site. I was going to have to work there myself before I got this job. You see, there’s so much pressure to get the stadium finished in time that they can’t afford to turn any able-bodied man away. Be he Jew or Gentile. That’s what I heard.”
“This is beginning to make some sense,” I said.
“You’ve got a strange idea of sense, Herr Gunther.” Trollmann grinned his big, toothy grin. “Me, I think it’s crazy.”
“Me, too,” murmured Mrs. Charalambides.
“What I meant was that I’m beginning to understand a few things,” I said. “But you are right, too, Rukelie. It is crazy.” I lit a cigarette. “During the war I saw a lot of stupid things. Men getting killed for no good reason. The sheer waste of life. And quite a bit of stupidity after the war, as well. But this business with the Jews and the Gypsies is just madness. How else can you explain the inexplicable?”
“I been giving this some thought,” said Trollmann. “A lot of thought. And from what I seen in the fight game, the conclusion I come to is this: Sometimes, if you want to win a contest at all costs, it helps to hate the other guy.” He shrugged. “Roma people. Jewish people. Homos and commies. The Nazis need someone to hate, that’s all.”
“I guess you’re right,” I said. “But it makes me worry if there’s another war. I worry what will happen to all these poor bastards the Nazis don’t like.”
17
MOST OF THE WAY BACK to the Adlon, I was thinking about what we had learned. Gypsy Trollmann had promised to mail me the Sparta Club photograph, but I didn’t doubt his identification of the dead man found floating in Mühlendamm Lock or his information about Isaac Deutsch’s having been a construction worker on the Olympic Stadium site. Say one thing, do another, that was typical of the Nazis. All the same, Pichelsberg was a long way from Mühlendamm; the opposite end of the city. And nothing I had yet learned explained how D
eutsch had drowned in salt water.
“You talk too much, Gunther.”
“I was thinking, Mrs. Charalambides. What you must think of us? We seem to be the only people in the world who are actively trying to live up to everyone else’s worst impression of us.”
“Please call me Noreen. Charalambides is such a long name, even in Germany.”
“I don’t know if I can do that now that you’re my employer. Ten marks a day demands a certain amount of professional courtesy.”
“You can hardly go on calling me Mrs. Charalambides if you’re going to kiss me.”
“Am I going to kiss you?”
“This morning you mentioned something about Isaac Newton. Which certainly encourages me to think you are.”
“Oh? How’s that?”
“Newton came up with three laws to describe the relationships between two bodies. I’d say he might also have come up with a fourth if he’d ever met me and you, Gunther. You’re going to kiss me, all right. There’s absolutely no doubt about it.”
“You mean there’s algebra and stuff to prove it?”
“Pages of it. Impulse, unbalanced force, equal and opposite reaction. Between us, we’ve got almost enough equations to cover a bedsheet.”
“Then I guess there’s no point in my trying to resist the laws of planetary motion, Noreen.”
“Absolutely none at all. In fact, it would be best if you gave in to the impulse right now, in case you put the whole damned universe out of joint.”
I stopped the car, pulled on the hand brake, and leaned toward her. For a moment she turned away.
“Hermann-Goering-Strasse,” she said. “Didn’t it used to be called something else?”
“Budapester Strasse.”
“That’s better. I want to remember where it was you first kissed me. I don’t want that memory to include Hermann Goering.”
