by Philip Kerr
“Nevertheless,” continued von Helldorf, “there may come a stage in the future when, shall we say, the security of the state is endangered, at which time anyone subject to a D-11 will be arrested and incarcerated without recourse to the judicial system.”
“Yes, I can understand how that might be useful.”
“Good, good. Which leaves us with the subject of your own D-11.”
“Perhaps if I knew the reason you feel I need to give a guarantee of my own good behavior,” I said, “then I might be more inclined to sign such a thing.”
Von Helldorf frowned and looked sternly at the three men who had brought me all the way from the Adlon. “Do you mean to tell me he hasn’t been told why he’s been brought here?”
Leather Coat shook his head. His hat was off now, and I had a clearer idea of him as a human being. He looked like a gorilla. “All I was told, sir, was that we should pick him up and bring him here immediately.”
Von Helldorf rattled the dice box irritably, as if he wished it had been Leather Coat’s skull. “It seems I have to do everything myself, Herr Gunther,” he said, and walked toward me.
While I waited for him to arrive, I rolled my eyeballs around the room, which was set up for the playboy prince of Ruritania. On one wall was a geometry set of foils and sabers. Beneath this was an oceangoing sideboard that was home to a radio as big as a tombstone and a silver tray with more bottles and decanters than the cocktail bar at the Adlon. A double-front secretaire was full of leather-bound books, and a few of them were about the laws of criminal evidence and procedure, but mostly they were classics of German literature such as Zane Grey, P. C. Wren, Booth Tarkington, and Anita Loos. Police work never looked so leisured and comfortable.
Von Helldorf drew out one of the heavy dining chairs around the table, sat down, and leaned against a carved back that had more tracery than a window in a Gothic cathedral. Then he laid his hands on the desk as if he had been about to play the piano. Either way, he had my full attention.
“As you possibly know, I’m on the German Olympic Organizing Committee,” he said. “It’s my job to ensure the security not just of all the people who will be coming to Berlin in 1936, but also of all the people who are involved in making sure everything is ready in time. There are several hundred contractors, which presents something of a logistical nightmare if what looks like an almost impossible deadline is to be met. Now, given the fact that we have less than two years to get everything up and ready, I don’t think anyone will be surprised to learn that there are times when mistakes get made or when standards have to be compromised. All the same, it’s awkward for some of these contractors when, in spite of doing their very best, they feel that they’ve become the subject of scrutiny by elements who lack the same enthusiasm for the Olympic project as everyone else. Indeed, it could be argued that some of these elements are behaving in a way that might easily be construed as unpatriotic and un-German. Do you see what I mean?”
“Yes,” I said. “By the way, General, do you mind if I smoke?”
He nodded, and I tossed one onto my lip and lit it quickly, marveling at von Helldorf’s talent for quietly spoken understatement. But I wasn’t about to mistake or underestimate him. Underneath the velvet glove was, I felt certain, a substantial fist, and even if the general wasn’t prepared to hit me with it himself, I figured there were others in that absurdly large room who lacked his well-bred scruples about using violence.
“To put it bluntly, Herr Gunther, a number of people are upset that you and your Jewish lady friend, Mrs. Charalambides, have been asking a lot of awkward questions about this dead Jewish laborer, Herr Deutsch, and the unfortunate Dr. Rubusch. Very upset indeed. I’m told you actually assaulted a gang master who supplies labor for a new S-Bahn tunnel. Is that right?”
“Yes, that’s quite correct,” I said. “I did. However, in my defense I should point out that he assaulted me first. The mark on my face was given to me by him.”
“He says this only happened because you attempted to subvert his workforce.” Von Helldorf rattled the dice in the box impatiently.
“I’m not sure that ‘subvert’ is the right description of what I did, sir.”
“How would you describe it?”
“I wanted to discover how Isaac Deutsch—that Jewish laborer you mentioned—met his death and if it was, as I had supposed, the result of his being illegally employed on the Olympic site.”
“So that Mrs. Charalambides might write about it when she gets back home to America? Is that right?”
“Yes, sir.”
Von Helldorf frowned. “You puzzle me, Herr Gunther. Don’t you want your country to put on a good show in front of the rest of the world? Are you a patriotic German or not?”
“I like to think I’m as patriotic as the next man, sir. Only it strikes me that our policy with regard to the Jews is—inconsistent.”
“And you want this exposed with what aim? So that all those Jewish workers might lose their jobs? Because they will. If Mrs. Charalambides writes about this in her American newspaper, I can guarantee it.”
“No, sir, that’s not what I want. It’s just that I don’t agree with our Jewish policy in the first place.”
“That’s neither here nor there. Most people in Germany do agree with it. Even so, that policy has to be tempered with what is practical. And the fact remains that it simply isn’t feasible to get the project finished in time without employing a few Jewish workers.”
He put it so matter-of-factly, I could hardly disagree. I shrugged. “I suppose not, sir.”
“You suppose right,” he said. “You simply can’t go around making an issue about this. It’s not realistic, Herr Gunther. And I simply can’t allow it. Which is where the D-11 comes in, I’m afraid. As a guarantee that you will put an end to this habit you’ve developed of sticking your nose in where it isn’t wanted.”
It all sounded so reasonable I was actually tempted to sign his D-11, just in order to actually be able to return home and go to bed. I had to hand it to von Helldorf. He was a smooth operator. Quite possibly he had learned more from Erik Hanussen, the clairvoyant, than merely his own lucky number and color. Perhaps he had also learned how to persuade people to do something they didn’t want to do. Such as signing a document saying that you agreed to be sent to a concentration camp. Maybe that just made von Helldorf a typical Nazi. Quite a few of them—Goebbels, Goering, and Hitler, most of all—seemed to have a flair for persuading Germans to go against their own common sense.
Reflecting that it might be a while before I got to smoke again, I took a couple of hurried puffs and then stubbed out my cigarette in a smoked-glass ashtray the same color as von Helldorf’s lying eyes. And this was just enough time for me to remember the day I’d looked in on the Reichstag fire trial and how many Nazi liars I’d seen in court; and how everyone had loudly bravo’d the biggest liar of them all, Hermann Goering. Seldom had I found being a German so unattractive as on that particular day of lies. With all of that in mind, I felt obliged to tell von Helldorf to go to hell. Except that I didn’t, of course. I was rather more polite about it. There’s bravery, after all, and then there’s downright stupidity.
“I’m sorry, General, but I can’t sign that document. It’d be like a goose writing someone a Christmas card. Besides, I happen to know that all of those poor fellows who were in Oranienburg got sent on to a concentration camp in Lichtenberg.”
The general upended the dice box onto the table in front of him and inspected the result, as if it mattered. Maybe it did, and I simply didn’t know it. Maybe if he’d thrown a couple of sixes, that might have been lucky for me—he might have let me go. As it was, he’d thrown only a one and a two. He closed his eyes and sighed.
“Take him away,” he told the man in the leather coat. “We’ll see if a night in the cells can’t change your mind, Herr Gunther.”
His men picked me up by the shoulders on my suit and sleep-walked me out of von Helldorf’s office. To my sur
prise we went up another floor.
“A room with a view, is that it?”
“All our cells have a nice view of the Havel,” said Leather Coat. “Tomorrow, if you don’t sign that paper, we’ll give you a swimming lesson off the bow of the count’s yacht.”
“That’s all right. I can swim already.”
Leather Coat laughed. “Not off the yacht, you won’t. Not after we tie you to the anchor.”
THEY PUT ME IN A CELL and locked the door. A lock on the wrong side of the door is one of the things that remind you that it’s a cell you’re in and not a hotel room. That and a few bars on the window and a stinking mattress on a damp floor. The cell had all the usual amenities, like an en-suite bucket, but it was the little things that reminded me I wasn’t staying at the Adlon. Little things like the cockroaches. Although really these were little only by the standard of the Zeppelin-sized roaches we’d encountered in the trenches. It’s said that human beings will never starve on this planet if they can learn how to eat a cockroach. But try telling that to someone who’s ever stepped on a roach or awoken in the night to find one crawling on his face.
Freud had invented a technique used in psychology called free association. Somehow I knew that if I got through this, I was forever after going to associate cockroaches with Nazis.
24
THEY LEFT ME ALONE for several days, which was better than a beating. Of course, this gave me plenty of time to think about Noreen and to worry that she would be worried about me. What would she think? What did anyone think when a loved one disappeared off the streets of Berlin and into a concentration camp or a police jail? The experience gave me a new understanding of what it was to be a Jew or a communist in the new Germany. But mostly I worried about myself. Did they really intend to throw me in the Havel if I refused to sign the D-11? And if I did sign it, could I trust von Helldorf not to send me to a camp straightaway?
When I wasn’t worrying about myself, I reflected on how, thanks to von Helldorf, I knew something more about the death of Isaac Deutsch than I had before. I knew that his corpse was somehow connected with the corpse of Dr. Heinrich Rubusch. So was it possible that his death in a room at the Adlon Hotel had been the result of something other than natural causes? But what? I never saw a more natural-looking corpse. The two cops who had investigated the case, Rust and Brandt, had told me that the cause of death had been a cerebral aneurysm. Had they lied? And Max Reles—what was his involvement in all of this?
Since my incarceration in a Potsdam police cell seemed to owe everything to a telephone call Max Reles had placed to Count von Helldorf, I had to assume that the American was somehow implicated in the deaths of both men and that this had something to do with Olympic bids and contracts. Reles had somehow been informed of my interest in Deutsch and had assumed, incorrectly, that this was connected with my recovery of the stolen Chinese lacquer box—or, more accurately, with the contents of that Chinese box. Given the involvement of the notoriously corrupt von Helldorf, it seemed I had stumbled onto a conspiracy that involved a variety of people from the GOC and the Ministry of the Interior. How else could one explain how artifacts from Berlin’s Ethnographical Museum were being given to Max Reles so that he might send them to Avery Brundage on the AOC in return for his continuing opposition to an American boycott of the Berlin games?
If all of this was true, then I was in a lot more trouble than I had realized when I’d been lifted off Herman Goering Strasse by von Helldorf’s men. And by the fourth or perhaps the fifth day of my imprisonment, I was beginning to regret not taking a gamble on von Helldorf’s word and signing the D-11—especially when I recalled his reasonable tone.
From my cell window I could see and hear the Havel. Between the south wall of the prison was a line of trees and beyond it the S-Bahn line to Berlin, which ran along the riverbank and across a bridge into Teltower. Sometimes the train and a steamboat traded hoots, like good-natured characters in a children’s story. Once I heard a military band playing somewhere to the west, behind Potsdam’s own Lustgarten. It rained a lot. Potsdam is green for a very good reason.
On the sixth day the door finally opened for longer than it took for me to slop out and be given a meal.
Leather Coat, smiling quietly, beckoned into the corridor outside my cell. “You’re free to go,” he said.
“What happened to your D-11?”
He shrugged.
“Just like that?” I said.
“Those are my orders.”
I rubbed my face thoughtfully. I wasn’t quite sure what was making it itch so much: my urgent need for a razor, or suspicion at this latest turn of events. I had heard stories of people being shot “while attempting to escape.” Was this to be my fate? A bullet in the back of the head as I walked along the corridor?
Sensing my hesitation, Leather Coat’s smile widened—as if he had guessed the reason for my hesitation in leaving. But he said nothing to reassure me. He looked as if he enjoyed my discomfort, as if he had just watched me eat a very hot chili pepper and was now looking forward to seeing me suffer an attack of hiccups. He lit a cigarette and stared at his fingernails for a moment.
“What about my stuff?”
“You’ll get it downstairs.”
“That’s what I’m worried about.” I picked up my jacket and put it on.
“Aw, now you’ve hurt my feelings,” he said.
“You’ll grow new ones when you get back under your stone.”
He jerked his head down the corridor. “Get moving, Gunther, before we change our minds.”
I walked ahead of him, and it was just as well that I hadn’t eaten that morning—otherwise, it wouldn’t have been only my heart that was in my mouth. My scalp was crawling, as if I had one of the praesidium’s cockroaches in my hair. At any moment I expected to feel the cold barrel of a Luger pressed against my cranium and to hear the sound of a shot, abruptly curtailed as a hollow-point 9.5-gram round tunneled through my brain. For a second I recalled seeing a German officer in 1914 shooting a Belgian civilian suspected of leading an attack on our soldiers, and the way the bullet had left his head looking like a burst football.
My legs felt like jelly, but I forced them to march me along the corridor without stopping to look around and see if Leather Coat had a pistol in his hand. At the top of the stairs, the corridor kept on going and I paused awaiting his instructions.
“Downstairs,” said the voice behind me.
I turned and tramped down the steps, my leather soles slapping against the stones like my heart on the walls of my chest. It felt pleasantly cool on the stairwell. A great blast of fresh air was coming up from the ground floor like a sea breeze. And arriving there at last, I saw a door open onto the central courtyard, where several more police cars and vans were parked.
To my relief, Leather Coat marched ahead of me now and led the way into a little office where my coat and hat, my tie, my braces, and the contents of my pockets were returned to me. I put a cigarette into my face and lit it before following him along another corridor and into a room the size of an abattoir. The walls were covered with white bricks, and on one was a large wooden crucifix; for a moment I thought we were in some kind of chapel. We turned a corner, and I stopped in my tracks, for there, like a strange-looking table and chair, was a shiny new falling ax. Constructed of dark polished oak and dull-colored steel, the machine was about eight feet high—just a bit taller than an executioner wearing his customary top hat. For a moment it sent such a chill through my body that I actually shivered. And I had to remind myself that it was unlikely Leather Coat would have attempted to execute me by himself. The Nazis were hardly short-staffed when it came to carrying out judicial murder.
“I bet this is where you bring Hitler Youth in lieu of a bedtime story,” I said.
“We thought you’d like to see it.” Leather Coat uttered a dry little chuckle and stroked the wooden frame of the falling ax fondly. “Just in case you were ever tempted to come back.”
�
�Your hospitality overwhelms me. I suppose this is what they mean when they talk about the people who’ve lost their heads to Nazism. But it might be just as well to remember the fate of almost all the French revolutionaries who were so keen on their guillotine: Danton, Desmoulins, Robespierre, Saint-Just, Couthon. They ended up going for a ride on it themselves.”
He scraped the blade with the flat of his thumb and said, “As if I care what happened to a bunch of francies.”
“Maybe you should.” I flicked my half-smoked cigarette at the terrible machine and followed Leather Coat through another door and into a corridor. This time I was pleased to see that it led out onto the street.
“As a matter of idle curiosity, why are you releasing me? After all, I never signed your D-11. Was it the thought of having to spell ‘concentration camp’? Or was it something else? The law? Justice? Proper police procedure? I know that sounds unlikely, but I thought I’d ask anyway.”
“If I was you, friend, I’d count myself lucky just to be walking out of here.”
“Oh, I do. Only not as lucky as I count myself for the fact that you’re not me. That really would be depressing.”
I tipped my hat to him and walked out of there. A moment later I heard the door bang behind me. It sounded a lot better than a Luger, but it still made me jump all the same. It was raining, but the rain looked good because there was only the open sky above it. I took off my hat and lifted my unshaven face into the air. The rain felt even better than it looked, and I rubbed it across my chin and hair the same way I’d washed my face with it in the trenches. Rain: it was something clean and free that fell from the sky and wasn’t going to kill you. But even while I celebrated the moment of my liberation, I felt a tug at my sleeve and turned around to find a woman standing behind me. She was wearing a long, dark dress with a high belt; a fawn-colored raincoat; and a small, shell-like hat.
