Second Violin

by John Lawton

  ‘The world will be watching.’

  Stahl heard the irony in Heydrich’s tone, but responded to the literal truth in what he said.

  ‘Exactly. We cannot harm any foreigners . . . Jews included. We haven’t kicked out the foreign press yet.’

  ‘What do you suggest?’

  ‘Put the Criminal Police on the streets. Let them be seen to intervene to stop looting. Of course . . . once a synagogue is ablaze . . .’

  ‘Quite. And the press?’

  ‘Police escort. Entirely for their own safety . . . of course.’

  ‘Of course.’

  By the time they had finished, the list of instructions and the veil of restraints that couched them covered all but one page of Nietzsche’s manuscript in unsubtle ambiguities. Heydrich lay back on the sofa, stretched out his arms and cracked the joints in his fingers. Stahl slipped the sheet music back in his briefcase.

  ‘I’ll get this to a teleprinter.’

  As Stahl opened the door, Heydrich turned his head and spoke.

  ‘Tell me . . . which side of that document do you think will really be of “historical importance”, which will go down in history and which will be your suburban monument?’

  Stahl didn’t care – all he knew was that he might just have saved a few hundred Jewish lives . . . if one cop, one kripo in a hundred, bothered to play by the rules they had set. And it was as though Heydrich had read his mind.

  ‘You know, in the end we’ll have to kill them all.’

  ‘I know,’ Stahl said, stating for the first time what had been obvious to him for ten years.

  ‘There won’t be enough bullets in the world to do the job.’

  Stahl could only guess at what the Obergruppenführer meant by this.

  § 26

  Rod Troy had finally prevailed upon his father to let him go to Vienna. After the September riots the Post’s Vienna stringer, one Stan Burkinshaw, citizen of Sheffield, had boarded a train to Paris and simply refused to go back: ‘They’re worse than the bloody Germans. It’s as though they’d got the copyright on anti-Semitism. I’d sooner be covering pigeon-racing in Sheffield.’ Alex obliged and assigned him to a local paper in his home town, where he duly reported on amateur dramatics and burgeoning steel production as well as pigeon-racing, and continued to think Sheffield more interesting than Vienna.

  His last report, and Rod had read all his reports, had been to state the risk that Vienna posed. Vienna had long since been home to most Austrian Jews – ninety per cent of them. Since 1933, numbers had swelled as German Jews had left the Reich in search of safety. It was a city ticking like a time bomb. They had, Burkinshaw wrote, leapt from frying pan to fire.

  The vacancy created as Burkinshaw leapt from frying pan to pigeon loft remained unfilled. Rod had put it to his father that he could and would fill the gap until a new man was hired. Alex had argued for three weeks but the day before Herschel Grynszpan shot vom Rath he had relented. Rod had arrived in Vienna, checked into the Meissl und Schadn hotel on Kärtnerstrasse – because Hugh Greene had told him it would be stuffed with the Nazi hierarchy – rather than his father’s recommended Imperial, to find the place buzzing with the assassination of a complete nonentity who wasn’t even dead yet.

  On the evening of the ninth – or, to continue to be precise, the small hours of the tenth – he sat in the bar, alone, quiet, eavesdropping, and heard the news that the nonentity had finally expired. He had a street map of Vienna and spread it out on the table in front of him. So far he’d reported nothing back to London. While his father might think it appropriate to talk to the new rulers of Vienna, Rod didn’t. He had walked the city centre for a couple of days, taken a tram ride out to the Prater and viewed Vienna from the wheel, got, as he told himself, a bit of a feel for the place, found it evoked no memory, dunked no cake, and was now feeling a bit stumped. Whatever was going to happen could happen anywhere. All he wanted was a bit of a clue. Where to go and who to follow. Something was going to happen. The sheer glee with which the Germans spoke of the death of Ernst vom Rath told him that. It was a godsend, the very excuse the buggers had been waiting for for just one more rampage.

  He was just thinking that perhaps he should not wait for news of any disturbance, and that he should actively go out and seek it, when he saw a waiter pointing in his direction, and a small man in a grubby macintosh and a grubby trilby, looking very different from the customary clientele of the Meissl bar, came over to him.

  ‘Herr Troy?’

  ‘Yes . . . I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure . . . ?’

  The little man opened a small leather wallet he had been clutching in the palm of his hand, held it up just long enough for Rod to read, and said, ‘Oskar Siebert, Detective-Sergeant, Vienna HQ.’

  So, the little scruff was a copper. Certainly looked like a copper.

  ‘Am I under arrest?’

  Siebert smiled, pulled out a chair uninvited and sat down.

  ‘Far from it, Herr Troy. I’m here to protect you.’

  ‘Protect me?’

  Rod could not help feeling that if the Vienna police wanted him protected they would have sent someone bigger.

  ‘Surely you have heard?’

  ‘Of course I’ve heard. I’d be a pretty poor excuse for a journalist if I hadn’t.’

  ‘We – that is the Kripo – fear there may be consequences beyond our control. Naturally you, as a reporter, will wish to see whatever happens tonight. And, as I said, I am here to . . .’

  ‘See, that I don’t see.’

  ‘As I said . . . to protect you.’

  ‘I think I get the message.’

  Siebert gave Rod a nervous little smile, picked up a book of hotel matches from the ashtray, fished around in his pockets and pulled out a crushed packet of Astas. He held it out to Rod, Rod declined and he lit up a bent cigarette and inhaled deeply. For the first time Rod noticed the deep nicotine stains on the fingers of his right hand – the hand waved the match out, wafting across his words as he did so.

  ‘Herr Troy, I am just a simple police sergeant.’ Siebert paused, lowered his voice to the not-quite-confidential-but-the-certainly-discreet, ‘We’re not all Nazis you know.’

  Was this deliberately disingenuous? Greene had told him for a fact that most of the Vienna police were Nazis.

  ‘My brother’s a police detective.’

  ‘Then perhaps we have something in common?’

  ‘I doubt that, and the purpose of me telling you is that while there might be such a thing as a simple copper – and trust me, I come from a village in the English Home Counties and they’re full of simple coppers – I don’t think there’s such a thing as a simple detective.’

  Siebert shrugged a little – the nervousness of his smile broadened into a grin.

  ‘I suppose I should be flattered. But tell me . . . it’s almost two in the morning. You have waited up in anticipation. Knowing it or not you were waiting for me and we are neither of us destined for an early night or even an early morn, so tell me . . . what are you are plans?’

  Rod knew he’d never be able to shake this bloke off. He even thought that the man might be telling the truth – that he was here to protect him, and if he was . . . why not take advantage of the fact?

  ‘I was thinking that perhaps I should be in the Jewish quarter, across the canal. I think I’ll just roll up the map and get in a cab.’

  ‘Not tonight you won’t. There’s such a thing as cabman’s instinct. I doubt you’ll find a cab on the streets tonight for love nor money. They’re all staying home. However . . . I have my car outside, or I should say I have a car, my own does not have Polizei written on each door . . . but tonight will hardly be a night when discretion pays. Shall we go?’

  Outside in the Kärtnerstrasse Siebert led the way to a big, black Opel Super Six. Rod slipped in next to him. It was old and smelly and the springs in the seat were shot, and it was deathly cold.

  ‘I found it in the car pool,’ Sieb
ert said, almost by way of apology. ‘Regret to say the heater does not work, but we’ll be fine.’

  Rod did not think they’d be fine. It was a clear starlit night. They’d probably freeze to death.

  § 27

  They crossed over the Danube Canal at the Franzens Bridge. Siebert had been right to choose a marked police car. The bridge was packed with SA men marching into Leopoldstadt by burning torchlight, all brown shirts and black boots – so many Rod began to wonder if fascism hadn’t been started by an enterprising bloke in the clothing trade to shift several million rolls of brown cloth. Faces flickering in the fractured light, half-glimpsed as though half-formed, hiding in the half-darkness. A few banged on the roof of the car – most thought better of getting in the way of the police.

  ‘It’s bigger than I thought,’ Siebert said. ‘There’ll be some dead Jews by morning.’

  Rod found his matter-of-factness alarming. But, then, coppers could be like that, and whilst he had refuted the notion that Siebert and his little brother might have a common bond in being coppers, he had seen just the same near-amoral detachment in Frederick Troy. Not a blasé acceptance that such things happen, or that they cannot be prevented, but an apartness, a degree or more of separation, a distinct lack of ‘there but for the grace of God . . .’

  Siebert swung the car into a side street only a hundred yards or so past the bridge. Pulled up outside a small, brightly lit café – Bordoni Fratelli.

  ‘We’ll be alright here. They’re open all night, and only an illiterate would think it was a Jewish-run place.’

  Rod thought it highly likely that the average Brownshirt – if anything like the ones he’d come across in Berlin – probably was close to illiterate. Instead, he said, ‘Why do we need to be anywhere off the street? That’s where the action will be.’

  Siebert pushed the glass door open and Rod followed. A man in a stiff off-white apron waved at him from behind the counter as though to a regular customer.

  ‘I mean . . . we have only to follow one of these gangs of –’

  ‘Trust me . . . you want action, you will get action.’

  Rod was troubled by the simple truth buried in the statement.

  ‘Of course I don’t want action. I just –’

  ‘You just want to be there if . . .’

  ‘If what?’

  ‘Whatever. You want to see Jews beaten up? You will. You want to see shops looted in the name of politics? You will. Cheap thuggery dressed up as moral force? You will.’

  ‘I . . . I . . .’

  ‘Giuseppe . . . an espresso and a glass of Pellegrino for me. And for my friend?’

  ‘The same. Look, I feel I’m not making myself clear.’

  Siebert had his hands cupped to his face lighting up another Asta. He waved out the match.

  ‘Now, Giuseppe here . . .’

  The proprietor looked up from his hissing coffee machine – a gentle smile beneath the comic-book moustache.

  ‘Giuseppe here, he comes from a country in which fascism sees its first priority as being to make the trains run on time. What was wrong with Italian trains under the monarchy, I have no idea. But this is what one hears about Italy. Until Abyssinia it was all one heard about Italy. Il Duce makes the trains run on time. No doubt he sees to this personally.’

  Siebert had the old Italian smiling broadly now.

  ‘We, on the other hand . . . we Austrians . . . no I shall let Austria off the hook . . . we Viennese . . . it is a Viennese affair after all . . . have other priorities. What do our fascists do? . . . they take the German disease of anti-Semitism and they nurture the virus like a beloved family pet, and, once the cage is opened by Anschluss, they let loose a beast that has teeth and claws to terrify even Germany. Don’t worry Herr Troy – tonight the gutters of Leopoldstadt will run with Jewish blood. It is what we Viennese do best, we torment and we torture Jews. All you have to do is listen for the first clap of doom. And do not let your conscience trouble you. We are both of us merely doing our job.’

  At last Rod had found out what it was that united coppers across continents. An unflagging talent for razor sarcasm.

  ‘Tell me, Herr Troy. Shall we reach a gentleman’s agreement not to despise one another, and not to despise each other’s professions? Would that be “cricket”?’

  Siebert accepted his coffee, slapped down a couple of coins on the counter and took a tentative sip. Sipped, dragged on his Asta, sipped. Blew smoke with all the self-evident pleasure of a self-confessed addict. Sip, drag, sip.

  ‘Mmmm . . . good. You should try it. Do not let it go to waste.’

  Rod picked up his cup. Drinking coffee – and he had to admit that it was the best he’d had since his last meal in Soho, sharper than the Viennese taste – seemed like an appropriate diversion. A good enough way of not answering a question he rather thought Siebert did not much expect an answer to in the first place.

  ‘Listen, you said. Listen for what?’

  A boom like thunder rattled the coffee cups and blew the door open. A poltergeist had entered the room.

  ‘That,’ said Siebert.

  § 28

  Hummel’s mother had died when he was ten in the great flu pandemic that swept Europe towards the close of the Great War. His father had been a good father, a gentle spirit who had never laid a hand on the young Hummel, but whose vocabulary was severely limited, both verbally and emotionally. He would have bought the boy anything he wanted, anything his young heart desired, but the boy had to ask for it first – Old Hummel had not the imagination to know what a child might want without asking. Hence Hummel had found the nurture he lacked at his father’s hand in books. He had been a word-child, forever with his nose in a book when other boys were out in the alley bouncing a ball off the back wall. He had, in so short a time, come to prefer the company of fictional characters to real ones. Hence, while his verbal vocabulary greatly exceeded his father’s – so much so that neighbours used to joke that the boy had ‘swallowed a dictionary’ – his emotional vocabulary was as constrained as his father’s, a world of love and pain bent double, hairpinned into restraint, straitjacketed in a tailored suit of good manners and long words and convoluted sentences. When the novels of adolescence had lost their fascination for him – he had ripped through Tolstoy and Stendhal and Balzac, but found most pleasure in the work of Theodore Fontane, if only because he was reading the author’s work in the original German – he had turned to philosophy. As a young man in his twenties he would while away long winter nights with Schopenhauer or Spinoza, subjects on which he could converse with no one.

  In November 1933, about ten months after the accession to power of Adolf Hitler, Old Hummel had died, leaving young Hummel alone in the world, in full possession of a tailor’s shop that thrived or not as the tide of tailoring ebbed or flowed, and the skills to run it. Social skills he had few, and, as Bemmelmann had remarked on his departure, young Hummel had been watched over by his neighbours, his father’s contemporaries – each one baffled by the gangling, big-eared youth.

  His father’s last words had been, ‘Joe, whatever will become of us?’ Hummel had taken this to be more a reference to the fate of Jews in general than to the tiny tribe of Hummel.

  So it was that each November, on the morning of the 10th, Hummel would go at first light to the Jewish cemetery on the far side of the Prater and sit at his father’s grave. It was a ritual that began the night before. Hummel would take his father’s best suit from the wardrobe, his father’s best brown shoes and his father’s best grey herringbone woollen overcoat. The only item that fitted remotely well were the shoes – the suit and the overcoat were far too big, and he looked, at thirty-one, as he had at eighteen, a boy masquerading as a man – a scrawny youth in the baggy clothes of a long-dead father. Dressed in mourning.

  He sat that evening, and into the small hours, cocooned in his father’s overcoat, gently rocking in his father’s rocking chair, re-reading Descartes, weighing up for the fourth or fifth t
ime that everything is mathematics and struggling to understand how Descartes could reach this conclusion and remain a deist. He had not read a newspaper of any kind for a week or more – he was no more aware that Ernst vom Rath had just died than he was aware that Ernst vom Rath had ever lived. Had he been aware he might not have ventured out when, a few hours before dawn, listening to the creaking silence of night, he had heard the biggest bang of his life. It rattled the windows, it shook dust down from the ceiling. A poltergeist had walked into the room and it appeared to have come from the direction of Leopoldstrasse.

  He slipped out of the door. The street was deserted, the curfew observed. But from the same direction came the sound of smaller explosions, and a red glare above the rooftops. He walked to the end of the street. He’d been ready to break the curfew to sneak across the park to the cemetery, what would a peek into Leopoldstrasse matter? At the sound of running feet, he pressed his back against the wall, and, invisible in the darkness of the alley, watched as three men of his own age, one in his nightshirt, ran past pursued by half a dozen Brownshirts.

  He looked down Leopoldstrasse. Several buildings were on fire. He walked on – no more running, no more shouting, jeering Brownshirts. A small crowd had gathered. He approached their backs, almost certain of what he would see. They’d been torching synagogues for weeks now. He rather thought this was the first time they’d blown one up with dynamite. And in so doing they had wrecked the houses to either side.

  He found himself standing behind an old couple in dressing gowns and carpet slippers. They wept, the man no less loudly than the woman. The air seemed full of confetti, dancing in the heat and dust like autumn leaves caught in a breeze. Hummel held out one hand and a fragment settled – it reminded him of a game he had used to play with his father at just this time of year in the park. His father would walk several paces behind him. The young Hummel would spot a crisp, brown autumn leaf swirling to earth and run ahead to catch it, cup it in his hands. His father would say, ‘Well done, Josef’ – that had been his contribution to the game.