Really the Blues

by Joseph Koenig

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  German architects scouting locations for permanent Gestapo headquarters in Paris were drawn to the Second Temple Israelite near the Hotel de Ville. The massive, century-old Moorish synagogue was a remnant of an era when the promise of the European enlightenment inspired French Jews to construct houses of worship that rivaled their Christian counterparts in grandeur and elegance. The congregation had disbanded under the occupation, its members dispersed throughout the capital or else relocated to the unoccupied zone, those who hadn’t fled Europe altogether. One of the prime organs of Nazi power wasn’t a natural fit for a Jewish showcase; the interior would have to be scraped down to the bare walls. The ark, the pews, torah scrolls, and eternal light were at a trash dump when laborers gutting the interior were halted by a directive from Berlin calling for the entire structure to be demolished and rebuilt from the ground up.

  The wrecking ball was no match for the thick walls. The synagogue had been constructed of Jerusalem stone by Italian masons whose work was meant to endure at least as long as the monuments of antiquity. The project would be delayed months by the time crews chiseled down to the bedrock. For the building to be destroyed in a timely manner, it would have to be blown up.

  The impending explosion was a continuing story in Paris-Soir, which played it as a festive occasion. Citizens starved for entertainment crowded the area to observe the preliminaries. Among them were some who helped themselves to the pickaxes, shovels, crowbars, and other implements strewn over the site. The work was slowed further until the demolition firm posted watchmen to keep trespassers at bay.

  In the hours before the structure was due to come down, the night watchman noticed a small truck idling under an unlit street lamp across the street. In the gloom it was impossible to see who was behind the wheel. After stopping there for half an hour, the truck moved away. Ninety minutes later, it was back.

  Three figures all in black scurried out. Keeping to the shadows, they approached a steel shed where dynamite was stored. A blinding flash that set the watchman’s heart racing wasn’t followed by an explosion. An oxyacetylene torch was being used to cut the locks. It was a reckless act, inviting catastrophe, and he welcomed the excuse to quit his post in search of a phone. The truck was still there when he returned. He started toward the shed with the idea that the gang was inside and he would cage them, and then he stopped. For what he was being paid, it was insanity to risk his neck. What was keeping the damn flics?

  The truck doors opened, catching him by surprise as the threesome made another run at the shed. A car from the Sûreté rattled down the block. He ran to intercept it, waving his arms, pointing it toward the curb. The driver cut the lights and officers took up positions around the shed.

  The metallic walls, blast-proof and soundproof, contained what noise was being made. Then the watchman picked out the threesome slump-shouldered and moving slowly. Twenty meters from the truck, they were spotlighted in the glare of headlamps. An officer shouted “Don’t move.”

  They surrendered to the light, turned into the face of it like black sunflowers. A couple of flics were almost on them when a gun went off. The officer half a step ahead of the other clutched at his throat. A second shot dropped him. The watchman noticed canvas sacks bulging in two of the gang’s fists as they stood under the protection of the shooter, who was in the lead, slightly apart from them. The other flics held fire while the caravan to the truck resumed.

  The police car wheeled away from the curb, and as it swerved around the fallen officer the watchman heard two bullets strike. Sweet steam shrieking from the radiator sprayed the air. The vehicle plowed into the shooter, scooping him onto the hood and delivering him to the truck, where he tumbled off. Another gang member lost his satchel sprinting for the sidewalk. The car jumped the curb and pinned him against the side of the building, then backed away from the body glued to the bricks.

  The car put down a trail of rubber behind a fugitive running flat-footed down the middle of the street, the bumper practically grazing the runner’s heels when the engine seized. The driver was on the running board with his gun out before the car rolled to a stop, but was unable to get off a shot. He kicked the door shut, cracking the window glass. The runner didn’t look back.

  Of the three men lying in the street, only the flic seemed to be alive. Blood bubbled in a 10-centime-size hole above his Adam’s apple. The watchman knelt beside him and held his hand till the last bubble burst. Then he went to see about the others.

  The man beside the truck didn’t look like anyone he expected to find stealing dynamite from a construction site, clean-cut with an intelligent face that was rather handsome. War and the occupation had created dislocation at every level of French society. Sober-minded individuals routinely acted out of character to keep afloat. All of this was in the back of his mind as he went to check the body crushed against the wall. The briefest glance, and he started back to the truck. It was better not to look closely.

  A wool blanket was draped over the passenger’s seat. Underneath it was a pyramid of satchels. He unzipped the one on top, let his flashlight play over sticks of dynamite, coiled fuse, and a detonator. The flics pulled him away as he opened another. The pyramid wobbled and would have crashed onto the floor if he hadn’t smothered it in the blanket and nudged it back into place. He was a hero tonight for the second time, but neither officer commended him. He had acted well while they made a hash of things. There was a chance they would lose their jobs.

  “What about the other one?” he asked.

  “There were only two,” one officer said. “I was chasing shadows.”

  “I definitely saw a third.”

  “You are in error.”

  “Not at all.”

  “Think hard. You are making a mistake in believing that we didn’t get them all.”

  It was three in the morning, and he was exhausted and a little slow on the uptake. If there were three, and one got away, he wasn’t the same hero he’d be if there were two and they’d been foiled. The flics could be heroes now, too. Why insist on three and make trouble? Even thieves had to eat.

  Maier turned away from the window as the ground spanked the plane. The landing strip was laid out on a high meadow out of the sight of the camp he’d come to visit, twenty kilometers from Munich, the closest big city. He’d never been to this lonely part of Bavaria before, but he felt at home. All of Germany was his home, as all the world was his oyster. His and Hitler’s.

  The car waiting at the edge of the tarmacadam was one of the powerful Mercedes Benzes always at his disposal. They were excellent machines, posh yet reliable, the envy of junior officers who rarely got to see them from the inside. Maier had no appetite for luxury. His cherished places were the overlit rooms and unheated cells where he was called to do his special work. Crucial as the work was, he couldn’t say that it gave fullness to his life. Before joining the party in its earliest days while a graduate instructor in philosophy at the University of Frankfurt, already the stepfather of three small girls and with a boy of his own, he wasn’t tormented by a lack of fullness. The party had given him something he hadn’t been aware that he was missing—significance—and what could be more precious? There was nothing he wouldn’t do for Germany, but question it.

  Like the airfield and the modern highway that delivered him from there, the camp had been carved out of pastureland. Nothing grew well at these altitudes but softwoods and grass and the cattle that fed off the grass. The thin soil was expendable to the planners in Berlin who decided how much milk and cheese the country needed to produce, and enormous tracts were given over to the camp. He had underestimated its scale. He had seen only the smallest part of one section. Not far away were satellite camps of the “school for violence” that was the Dachau complex, but it was too soon for him to fit the pieces together. The gorgeous mountain landscapes, the giant imperial German eagle cast in stone above the main gate, made for a perfect picture. All that was missing was . . . nothing.
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  The commandant, SS Sturmbannführer Alex Piorkowski, invited him to his residence, where lunch was being prepared by an orderly, a former chef at a three-star Cologne hotel, but Maier declined. He had an aversion to these professional mediocrities, nothings before the war, who were living high at the public trough. He reminded Piorkowski that he wasn’t here to be entertained but to interview one of his prisoners, and time was essential. Seeing the commandant’s disappointment, he mentioned that he wasn’t hungry.

  “I will have him brought immediately,” Piorkowski said.

  “Why don’t I go to him?”

  “It’s dangerous. Typhus is rampant among the inmates, who are the dregs of Europe, and wouldn’t hesitate to kill you if they could.”

  “Can they?” Maier said.

  The Sturmbannführer wouldn’t allow an important visitor on the yard protected only by the standard escort. Maier was surrounded by a small army, which didn’t permit the candid perspectives he wanted. Thousands of men wandered about, as aimless as the herds they had displaced. Most wore striped pajamas unsuited for winter temperatures in the mountains. Two distinct kinds became apparent: hard cases with green tags on their pajamas, and their opposites tagged red. The latter, many of them, had faces showing Jewishness to be their crime, which indicated those in green to be the thieves and killers also housed at the camp. He could imagine what it was like at night when the greens feasted on the reds out of sight of the guards, or with their connivance, and what it was like in sight of Piorkowski, a shark who feasted on everyone.

  The man he wanted was in a barracks a kilometer from the administrative unit. Deep inside the camp, a notion that he was a visitor at a human zoo gave way to a feeling that he was the rare beast brought here for the edification of the men in striped pajamas gazing at him in wonder. What was more exotic than a healthy, well-fed man dressed in everyday clothes, absent the smell of death that was the distinguishing characteristic of their species? He was trying to put himself in their place—up to a point—when he spotted a familiar face.

  Familiar only as a caricature of the man in photos he’d studied, the features twisted and shrunken, made narrow by hunger and dulled by malnutrition, aged by worry, saddened, crazed, and deformed by pain in the manner of life here.

  He announced to his escort that he’d found the prisoner he wanted, so they should return wherever they could be of use.

  “We are not to leave you alone,” a lieutenant, the senior officer, said.

  “Then leave me in peace.”

  The soldiers stepped away, not far. “Professor?” Maier said. “Professor Smits?”

  The inmate concentrated on the ground. Among the pebbles and cinders Maier noticed an infinitesimal cigarette butt in the dirt. The man pounced on it, but too little was left to hold together, and it fell apart as he tried to fit it between his lips.

  “One of you,” Maier said to his escort, “give him a cigarette.”

  “It’s against the rules,” said the lieutenant.

  “Give it to me.”

  The lieutenant stood stiffly as Maier patted him down for a pack, which he placed in the inmate’s hand with a book of matches. “Now something to eat.”

  “It is also ag—”

  “My lunch is growing cold at the Sturmbannführer’s. Inform him that I will be picnicking on the yard.” Maier turned to the inmate, watched him light up and draw deep, contain the smoke greedily in his lungs before releasing it in an ecstatic sigh. “Professor,” he said.

  The inmate scarcely acknowledged him, intent on his smoke.

  “I’ve traveled a good distance for a word with you,” Maier said.

  “To free me from this hell on earth? Is that what you said?”

  “You know better.”

  “The price for my word is my freedom. If it is beyond your means, I have nothing for you.”

  “You haven’t heard what I want.”

  “A word, you said. For which you’re not prepared to pay.” He started away. “I don’t do business like that.”

  “It’s up to you,” Maier said. “But you know what Piorkowski will do when these men—” He glanced toward his escort. “When they inform him that you sent me away.”

  “In coming here, you’ve already awarded me my freedom,” Smits said. “Whether I receive it in exchange for conversation, or Piorkowski turns me over to his torturers, I’m not long for this place.”

  “My report will state that I need to talk to you again. Nothing will change for you except the calendar. Don’t be stubborn, and things will go better for you here.”

  “There is no better here.”

  “An excellent rejoinder,” Maier said. “I wouldn’t stand a chance against you in the public forum. However, Dachau is not a debating society. Words are abstract. Pain, and hunger, cold, and suffering, as you know better than I, are not. There can be better here, just as there can be worse. Better food, warmer clothes. I can ensure that you have them. I’m not Piorkowski; I have nothing against you personally.”

  “Why, then, are you one of them?”

  “Times changed. It isn’t a comment on my humanity that I adapted handily.”

  “Foolish me,” Smits said, “for believing otherwise.”

  Maier conceded the debate, but Smits wouldn’t win the argument. He squeezed the professor’s shoulder softly. Smits cringed as he increased the pressure. Well below the threshold of pain Smits looked like a beaten dog. Yes, pain, and even its promise, was real, and words were abstract, which didn’t make them cheap.

  “The information I want harms no one,” Maier said. “You are doing yourself an injustice in not letting me have it.”

  “I will decide.”

  “Certainly,” Maier said. “How can I compel you, when you have me over the proverbial barrel? Look, here is my lunch. Please, share it with me. There’s plenty for two.”

  Smits watched the lieutenant coming toward them with a tray cloaked in a linen cloth. His expression hardened, but Maier heard his stomach growl. He took the professor behind a barracks and hunkered down with him out of the wind.

  “You are from Utrecht?” Maier said. “Am I correct?”

  “Rotterdam, originally. As a teenager I was awarded a scholarship to the University of Utrecht. Things worked out well. I was offered a teaching fellowship, named an assistant professor before I was thirty, a full professor by thirty-five, and never found reason to leave. And would still be there, if I hadn’t been brought here.”

  “What are you accused of?”

  “Don’t you know?” Smits said.

  “I should point out the rules of our discussion. I supply the cigarettes. You smoke them. I supply the food. You get to eat it. I ask the questions. You provide answers. It’s an arrangement from which both of us benefit.”

  Smits revealed a measure of disgust with himself that Maier hadn’t seen before. He was about to walk away when Maier instructed the lieutenant to place the tray on the ground, and he watched, paralyzed, as the officer spread a tablecloth, anchoring one corner with a coffee pot and another with a decanter of red wine. A silver platter was placed near him, and Maier lifted the lid on a bowl of pasta in a red sauce that gave the flavors of tomatoes, and spices, and the sea. There was a loaf of bread, and butter, and a meat dish, which Maier pushed toward Smits’s side of the cloth. “Have it all. Like Hitler, I am a vegetarian. Killing animals is a crime.”

  Smits appeared as a dog of a particular breed, one of Pavlov’s, Maier thought, watching him drool.

  “My crime,” Smits said, “is membership in the Dutch communist party.”

  “Not an ordinary hack. You are the chief ideologist.”

  “It’s no secret. But I won’t divulge the names of my comrades. For the privilege of turning all of this fine food into shit, I refuse to surrender what self-respect I possess.”

  “My concern is not the party,” Maier said, “but one of your students.”

  “I won’t—”

  “There’s nothin
g either of us can do that will harm him, as he is already dead.”

  Smits tore a large chunk of bread and stuffed it in his mouth, crammed in more until he began to cough and choke. After prolonged near-starvation, too much to eat could lead to sudden death as a weakened body was overwhelmed in processing it. But Maier let him have all he wanted until he looked up as though it was time to settle the bill, and he realized he’d left his wallet at home.

  “You haven’t mentioned what your discipline was,” Maier said.

  Smits pointed to bulging cheeks that were too full to allow him to speak.

  “I’m told it was chemistry. That you are a brilliant scientist who sometimes takes on difficult experiments for the Dutch chemical industries.”

  Smits nodded. It was less compromising than speech.

  “Anton Goudsmit was your student?”

  “Anton is dead?” Smits spit food down the front of his shirt and on the tablecloth.

  “Was he special?” Maier gave him a napkin to wipe himself. “A promising chemist you took under your wing?”

  “Not at all; another of thousands of undergraduates passing through my lecture hall through the years. I’d almost forgotten him. A C student.”

  “Yet you do recall him.”

  Smits dug a fork into the spaghetti, was shoveling it into his mouth when Maier caught his hand.

  “He was a musician. It’s the only thing about him that sticks out.”

  “A pianist, wasn’t he?” Maier said. “Tell me about him.”

  “He was a prodigy at the keyboard. A genius with little understanding of how good he could be.”

  “And you would know because you are also a—?”

  “Strictly an amateur. I couldn’t hold a light to him.”

  “But also the preeminent jazz critic in the Netherlands.”

  “Some would say I was.”

  “Here you had this brilliant player in your class, whose talent only you recognized. You would have done something to nurture it.”

  “I bought him the latest records from Britain and the States, and introduced him to the biggest jazz names in Holland. He was light years ahead of them. There was nothing he could learn from them. It was rather the other way around.”