‘I’m afraid I don’t have good news. In recent weeks, there’s been a change. A high official who had discretionary power, no longer has it.’ In a tone, polite but deadly, it had been pointed out to him by the high-ranking Nazi that she was a lawbreaker, as were Wertheims; that this made the case extremely difficult, and with Herr Dietrich’s already-documented interest – the Nazi had wasted no time – it could hardly be glossed over. Further, that policy was less fluid by the day, instance the major overnight initiative, which, the high official ventured, was going to cost the nation a packet in repairs.
A hard case, his contact had sighed. However …
Usually, Wertheim was absolutely straight with her, as though amid all the shifting sands of his affairs he needed one mind as bedrock. Today, he didn’t communicate what the Berlin functionary, finally, had suggested: that if an apartment building or a factory was available to transfer to the Party, a passport might still be feasible. Sitting there after the call, he’d thought of von Streck, with whom he’d negotiated the transfer of the Party’s business. Could that mysterious man do anything? He’d begun to reach for the phone, and then decided against it. Such an approach might be to the bank’s detriment.
He said gently, ‘Thus we can’t proceed with the Prague visit.’
On her face, in her eyes, not a hint of disappointment or emotion. It would be a relief to see something. He thought: She is enmeshed with my life. Yet, like all my old loves, a fading echo. He went on. ‘Our lives are now overshadowed, in part, by ill-conceived forces. Nonetheless they’ve the authority of the law.’ He watched her keenly. ‘My dear fräulein, I had hoped to ride out this storm. Of course a woman of your intellect has read the signs. Having taken the steps we have, it will be dangerous for you to stay at Wertheims.’
‘Yes, dangerous,’ she murmured. Her face had frozen with shock.
He paused. ‘Unfortunately, Herr Dietrich is alert to your case.’ He observed she didn’t react to this. Obviously, she knew the Nazi’s intentions. How much else was going on around him which he was missing? ‘It must be faced – and we must be the ones to choose your moment of departure. Within a few days.’ He leaned forward, his hands spread on the desk before him.
He spoke for twenty minutes more, laying out the proposition he’d devised. When she came out to her desk she was moving in a daze, but she collected herself, and began to marshal the most urgent matters to be attended to. Prague was dead; now she was going to Saxony.
14
‘HERE WE GO again,’ Wagner said tensely. ‘This time they’ve a car.’ In his pitch-black parlour, he stood back from the window peering down at the street. Behind him, still in his overcoat, Schmidt waited uncomfortably. More Wagner eccentricity. They’d come in from the street and Wagner had steered him past furniture to what seemed like the centre of a black pit, then abandoned him.
‘They?’ Schmidt inquired. He felt he’d gone totally blind.
Wagner remained absorbed in his counter-surveillance. He said, ‘I surmise it’s the SD or the Gestapo. Take your pick. Perhaps both.’Abruptly, he stepped back, drew the curtains and switched on a side-light. He added tersely, ‘Fucking gangsters.’
Schmidt blinked at the room. He said, ‘Why?’
‘Come on!’ Wagner grinned, and removed his coat. ‘Work it out for yourself, my dear. Take off your coat, I must go out and speak to the maid about supper.’ He opened an interior door and went down a dark passage towards a light.
While the maid served the meal they talked intermittently about bank matters in the shorthand of insiders. They drank burgundy, a bottle Wagner said he’d brought back from his last visit to Paris. Schmidt had never set foot outside the borders of the Reich. When the maid had cleared the table and left them with coffee, Wagner went to a cabinet and produced a bottle of schnapps. Despite their close association, Schmidt had been here only once before, long ago, and remembered the apartment for the Biedermeier pieces which Wagner had inherited. The furniture of the past, and of the future, Wagner had said then. Happier days.
‘Two glasses only of that brilliant burgundy? Even an abstemious fellow like you, Franz, will try this.’ He poured small glasses full to the brim. His hand was shaking slightly. ‘Well, have you worked it out?’ He lit a cigarette, and gustily exhaled smoke.
The auditor shook his head. ‘If there’s something to tell, say it. Don’t waste time.’
‘Aha!’ Wagner went to a record player, wound it up, and put a record on. In a moment a Mozart sonata began; a sound of heart-gripping pathos. The deputy foreign manager took up his glass, and tossed the schnapps down. ‘That makes a nice little fire inside. Listen my friend, it could be a number of things: my business missions to European capitals; my accurate, but possibly intemperate pronouncements on our so-called government; the dislike which I inspire in Herr Health and Sunshine.’ Schmidt winced. Wagner had taken to calling Dietrich this. With Schmidt, all nicknames grated. ‘But more probably, the fact that for five years until the damned thing sunk under me, I was active in the Social Democratic Party. The Nazis’ve got their dirty hands on the membership records.’
Wagner connected to the SPD! Schmidt was astonished. His mind grappled with it.Wagner had thrown out hints. More than my mouth, he’d said. Schmidt cleared his throat. ‘But that’s all in the past. Forgive me, that party’s finished, it’d be raking over dead coals.’
Wagner regarded him indulgently. ‘To the Nazis, once an opponent always an opponent. Is a defunct party absolutely defunct? Could there still be danger there? They think like that, the paranoid arseholes.’
Schmidt flinched at the obscenity. These days, a few drinks and his colleague was losing control.
Wagner grinned nervously, refilled his glass, tossed it down, still holding the bottle. He suppressed a cough. ‘Last night several hundred Jews were murdered or injured. Tens of millions of marks of damage done to their property, and to non-Jewish property. It’s a new phase. Everything’s speeding up. It’s been bad enough so far, but by God, if you’re Jewish, or out of step with the government, you’d better watch out from now on.’
Schmidt took a first sip of the suddenly-remembered schnapps. ‘I’ve been telling you this, Heinrich,’ he said quietly.
‘Yes, dear Franz, you have. But what should we do? Go on day to day simple-mindedly trying to fit the routines of our lives into what’s evil, immoral – nonsensical? Allow ourselves to be tickled on the stomach and stuffed like the miller’s daughter? Dance along in this crazy comic opera?’
Schmidt frowned. Was this what Helga was doing? No, she had its measure; there was nothing simple-minded about his wife; she was just standing cautiously aside.
Wagner laughed roughly. ‘I can see you think I trivialise it. Far from my intention. Does Greek tragedy fit better? Our Fräulein Dressler’s on stage for that, Franz.’
They were silent, and in his chair Wagner dropping his head on his chest, for a while seemed to drift away with the Mozart; then he looked up and chuckled. ‘Hear that fat bastard Otto come down on me for my smokes? That from the arch polluter of the corridors, the bank’s ace-farter! You can bet he doesn’t let it go in his own room. Is it his diet, his guts? The War Ministry should get a sample for analysis … Ha! Already a Party member!’ His head dropped again.
Despite himself, Schmidt smiled. Then grimly his thoughts regrouped; the music after those opening moments was as inconsequential to him as it’d been at the concert. Dürer’s knight, he imagined, had lived in troubled and opaque times, had negotiated them warily, with what outcome? ‘Is that an example for me – for us?’ Schmidt silently asked his slumbering colleague. Abruptly, the Nazi von Streck loomed up in his mind.
At 4.00 pm this afternoon, Herr Wertheim had called Schmidt to the first floor, and told him that the Prague mission was cancelled, no explanation — though he knew the reason. Fräulein Dressler hadn’t been at her desk. He’d returned to his room struggling with this. He’d not breathed a word to Wagner about the eve
nts unfolding around her, of his own part.
The record finished. Wagner woke up, put on a new one, his head dropped again. Unregarded, the music played on uninvolved in the changing, dangerous times, though obviously soothing to Wagner’s brain and spirit. Schmidt thought of Helga and Trudi in Dresden, probably already asleep. Was he in little Trudi’s dreams? His family life seemed a million miles away.
Wagner woke up again with a start and vigorously cranked the phonograph; he sat there, a new cigarette drooping from his lips, his face slack and meditative, his fear back in its cell in his brain. He looked slyly at his colleague: Still present. Schmidt wasn’t a social stayer; he was adept at making excuses and fading away, back to his arcane studies – Helga’d let something slip once. And what else are you up to these days, my clever, reticent friend? Has the delectable Fräulein Dressler found a champion? Franz had the guts for it; that eye business had been nothing but raw courage. He watched the auditor sip the last of his schnapps, and true to form, prepare to depart.
Schmidt said, ‘You’re not still active in politics, Heinrich?’
‘Active? Inactive? Dormant? Inert? My friend, I’m not going to tell you. But take heart, the SPD is banned, disbanded. What did you say about dead coals?’
It was not the answer Schmidt had hoped for.
Senior Detective Dressler’s giant shadow was cast on the façade of a row of houses. The street was deserted. His footfalls were silent on their thick rubber. Exception: glass crunched occasionally beneath his weight, though most of it had been swept away. Through cracks, lights glimmered here and there. The shop windows were boarded up with new lumber.
An atmosphere of dread and mourning. He’d had a good education, and had disappointed his parents when he’d joined the police. He wasn’t a literary-minded man, though some things he’d read stuck in his mind: ‘For all guilt is punished on earth.’
‘We must live in hope about that,’ he said to the darkness.
Against orders he’d been here last night seeing what he could do. Not much. The teletype from Berlin had chattered out its instructions at 6.00 pm: the police were not to intervene. At 8.00 pm, truckloads of Brownshirts had swept into the district. From a doorway, he’d watched its violation; the beating-up, dragging away of citizens, hair, beards streaming, clothing torn, eyes of dumb animals, though some with eyes more calculating. He’d heard screams, frequent explosions of shop-windows, shards of glass clanging onto the cobbles; possessions had rained down from buildings. His beat. The representative of law and order, he’d stood by, backed into the shadows, massive in his overcoat, his pistol strapped to his chest — as helpless as a baby. The only reactive force had been in his brain.
Now, he went on. It remained his beat. He still had to look these people in the eye. How could he? Moreover, how to reason it through? He wished he’d Lilli’s brains. ‘Though what’s the use of brains, these days, Dressler?’ he asked himself.
The Party had been out counting, sending excited reports to Berlin: three synagogues, twenty-two shops and businesses destroyed, 150 shops and businesses damaged, uncounted number of dwellings damaged and sacked. Two Jews killed, twenty-five seriously injured. Not a bad result for a city of four hundred thousand. Multiply that across the Reich.
He’d been of some use: a Jewish merchant draper whom he knew slightly had run out to the street screaming of a sexual assault. The detective had left his doorway, hauled himself up two long flights of stairs into an apartment. Screams of terror guided him to a bedroom where two Brownshirts, white bums pumping in unison, had two women down on a massive bed, side by side.
Dressler’s huge hands had plucked them off the frantic women like pulling weeds from the earth. The heads of the SA had cracked together. He’d thrown them down the stairs, reclaimed them at the bottom, his breath steaming out, vision blurring with the effort, handcuffed them together, propelled them, dazedly clutching their trousers, into the street. Other SA men had run up threateningly, but he’d flourished his badge and roared: ’Caught raping Jews!’ They’d shrunk back reluctantly, knowing the consequences.
As he walked on, the acrid smell of burnt material came to him. So Herr Wertheim had failed the test Lilli had set for him. Not unexpected. Steel barriers were crashing down against even the most influential. Now this alternative scheme – no less suspect. And as yet, he’d no fall-back plan. Bleakly he wondered how Herr Rubinstein had fared last night, whether he was still in a position, of a mind, to help. He’d been waiting for a call; now it might never come.
Ten pm. With an untired eye, Schmidt inspected the street. No car, no watchers. Perhaps it had become too cold. Or were Wagner’s nerves playing tricks? He stepped into bitter air. In a warm, counter-attacking wave, the single glass of schnapps rallied in him.
Wagner was up there behind that slit of light, drowsing in his fecund atmosphere of Mozart and Biedermeier, his haze of schnapps and cigarette smoke. Fervently, Schmidt hoped his colleague could find a way to modify his behaviour.
Abruptly, as though nudged by his destiny, he turned in the direction of Fräulein Dressler’s flat.
She spoke insistently through the door. ‘Go away, Herr Otto.’
‘It’s Franz Schmidt here.’
She opened the door a little on a chain, and they regarded each other. ‘I see,’ she said.
She wore a silk gown, which allowed a glimpse of deep and creamy breasts, and clung to her abundant hips. This Fräulein Dressler staggered him. Incongruously, he remembered Wagner’s description of her as a devotee of cream cakes. Her face was pale – as a white tea rose – but resolute, even defiant.
Staring at her in the gap of the door, her aura of perfect efficiency seemed cracked, like a porcelain plate. He was mesmerised. His brain had stopped functioning, then like a stalled aeroplane at the top of a loop turning its nose down, reigniting its engine, it cut back in. Suddenly it was distasteful being here on her doorstep, gazing at her like a mournful bailiff.
Last night’s passionate embrace overwhelmed him afresh. It had more immediacy than the present moment. He struggled with himself, fighting down his emotion.
‘How can I help you, Herr Schmidt?’
‘Might I come in?’
She opened the door, and stepped back into the minuscule hall. She motioned him to a chair.
‘I hope it’s not too much of a shock, Herr Schmidt, to see me minus cosmetics and glamour. But then you’re a married man.’
He hardly heard that. Help you? he was pondering. I wish to help you, but how can I?
‘Well, Herr Schmidt?’ — the general-director’s secretary back on duty. The hints of intimacy from this morning had evaporated – with the abandoned Prague mission? Did she even remember last night?
‘Herr Wertheim informed me this afternoon the Prague trip is cancelled. Herr Dietrich, that —’
‘My days at Wertheims are over?’
‘Yes.’
‘How kind of him. Nearly over. I’ll leave this week.’
He considered this. Reluctantly, she came and sat opposite him, and gave a small, dismissive shrug. ‘Herr Wertheim did his best, but the problems of people like me worsen each day.’
Schmidt would have sympathised with bitterness, but detected none. He was sitting here on the slenderest of pretexts. How ridiculous it must seem to her: a kind of meddling curiosity. What was going on was rotten and terrifically bad luck, but merely saying, thinking that was worse than useless.
Had the knight ever had such self-doubt, been a host to similar powerlessness? He said: ‘I wish to help but I don’t know what I can do.’
‘Thank you. I’ve understood that. Herr Wertheim has a new proposal.’ She considered how much to say. ‘He knows a man, an academic living a reclusive life in a remote place, who he’s persuaded to take in a secretary. He believes in this household I’d drop from sight. Until something else can be arranged.’
Silently Schmidt gazed at her. A stop-gap solution. Out of Germany, beyond the reach of th
e Third Reich was the only safe haven … This was no good. Dietrich’s interest in the case wouldn’t cease at the point when she left the bank. The dedicated Nazi, the Munich-trained lawyer, would want to see her before the courts. In prison.
It had been a long and eventful day, but Schmidt didn’t feel weary, instead more and more keyed up.
She said, ‘I’ve not decided to accept Herr Wertheim’s offer. I wish to discuss it with my father.’
He stood up. He’d come here, he realised, to discover what, if anything, was to replace the Prague initiative. At least he’d that answer.Another reason existed, he supposed with a pang of self-disgust. ‘Herr Otto …’ she’d said through the door. He had the unpleasant vision of the director and her in the corridor.
She watched him leave. There was to be no repetition of that passionate embrace. He felt he’d been dismissed from her mind as he closed the door. However, when he was gone, Fräulein Dressler remained motionless, staring at the varnished oak. A strange, well-meaning man. That serious, watchful face, his worried concern, awoke her sympathy. Did he realise the danger he might be in? It was far too late in the day to render assistance. They’d all been sleepwalking. A million troubled consciences such as his couldn’t make any difference now. She’d felt the sexual pressure upon him, brushing against her spinster’s life. It should have been merely a surprising and curious byway, yet the blood had been coursing through her last night, as it did sometimes in her solitary and intimate moments. Eligible men were few, and far between. Affairs had been rare in her life. A generation of mates killed off. Millions of German women shared her predicament. Some nights, she was desperate – less so these days.
The Eye of the Abyss Page 9
