“But, really, where do you imagine he is held? And are they treating him badly?”
“If you want to pursue the matter officially,” the cop said, “you’ll have to approach the central police office on the Römer. But it would be a waste of time, because they won’t know, either.”
Buck couldn’t face Herta without bringing home any news. So he caught a tram across the bridge and headed for the Schutzpolizei headquarters. He saw lorries and cars packed with SA hurtling through the streets. Shops owned by Jews had their windows smashed. There was broken glass everywhere.
At the police station, Buck asked for any information on Dietz, Solomon, a chauffeur employed by the Baron Hermann von Weinbrenner. Last seen at the Reichsbanner club, in Niederrad.
“The Jewish baron, eh?” The Wachtmeister grimaced. “Come back tomorrow.”
“But do you have him or not? Is he being held?” Buck was by no means confrontational, but he could be stubborn. “If so, what is the charge? I must inform his wife.”
“How should I know? No one tells me anything.”
“Well, isn’t it your job to know?”
“Don’t tell me my fucking job,” the policeman replied. “Anyway, what are you, English?”
“I must establish this man’s whereabouts, it’s for the sake of his wife. She’s extremely upset, as you can imagine. If you have any idea—”
“Do you know the Klinger-Oberrealschule?”
“My son was a scholar there.”
“Well, a little bird told me there’s some funny stuff going on in the basement of the Klinger-Oberrealschule. One of their ‘wild camps.’ I shouldn’t poke my nose in it, if I were you. Now get out of here, mister, and leave me in peace. I’ve had a hell of a bloody day, I’ll tell you that!”
Stunned, feeling as though he were all of a sudden living in a strange city, my father went into a café on the Römer and ordered a cup of coffee, most unusual for him. He disliked spending money in cafés.
The afternoon papers screamed about a Communist conspiracy, a network of arsonists under orders to burn down the structures of civilized life in Germany. There was a telephone at the back of the café, and Buck rang me at the office, the only time I can remember either of my parents doing so.
“The Wachtmeister said something about goings-on at your old school. In the basement. A wild camp—have you any idea what that means?”
“No.”
“Ah so, Billy, this is fools’ business. Do you think Dietz can be in serious trouble? Can he be mixed up in this putsch?”
By then most people had swallowed the line that the Reichstag fire had been set by Communists as part of a putsch. The crazy Dutchman who’d been arrested was certifiably a Communist. Dr. Goebbels, the propaganda chief, was playing the story perfectly.
“Ought I go up there, to your old school? What do you think? Should I send off a telegram to the baron?”
Had my father ever before asked me for advice? I don’t believe he had.
We both still were under the impression that Hermann, Freiherr von Weinbrenner, commanded influence in Frankfurt. Hadn’t the university granted him the title of Ehrensenator, “honorary senator,” on his sixtieth birthday? Hadn’t the city of Frankfurt given him a silver plaque and named him Ehrenbürgerwürde, “honored citizen”? As far as I knew he still had his seat on IG Farben’s supervisory board of directors. When he wasn’t attending horse races in Belgium or yearling sales in England, he spent a lot of time going over architectural plans for the art museum Lady Maire wanted to build. The main house was crowded to overflowing with altarpieces from Italy and the Low Countries, Palmesels from all over Germany, calvaires from Brittany, devotional statuary from every corner of Christendom, cases of chalices and Mass hardware in beaten gold. There were cases stacked with priestly chasubles of Flemish cloth that somehow had survived the centuries. Lady Maire was determined to build a museum on the Walden grounds to properly house and display her collection. As she got weaker from cancer and the regime grew stronger, she only grew more passionate about this.
The baron hated the notion of a museum sprouting up at Walden and attracting visitors. So did my father. They didn’t want their horses disturbed. And they didn’t want to give up any of the stables or a single hectare of hay meadow. If there was to be a museum, the site would have to be carved out of the Walden woods. But cutting down trees was a complex matter in Germany, requiring applications to be submitted to municipal, regional, and state authorities, supplemented by negotiations with contradictory bureaucrats. Lady Maire’s museum project wasn’t moving forward quickly. My mother complained bitterly about this—they were denying a very ill woman her most cherished dream. But the delay was probably fine with the baron and with my father.
“I could send a telegram to England, but I don’t know what he could do,” Buck mused. “Weinbrenner has troubles of his own these days.”
There was a pause while he lit a cigarette. When he spoke again, he sounded weary.
“Honestly, Billy, I’m worried. I don’t like the sound of this wild camp. The longer they hold our fellow, the worse it will be for him.”
Another pause. I wondered if our connection had been dropped. Or had we been disconnected by the office switchboard? Was someone listening in?
“Dad? Still there?”
“Right here. Only thinking. I would describe the woman, his wife, Herta, as getting near the hysterical stage when I left.”
“I don’t really have time to talk now, Dad.”
“Of course, she’s a Sorb. They’re emotional. But he’s Jewish, as well as a Reichsbanner. If they’re holding him…do you hear me, Billy? If they are holding him—brownshirts, I mean—I don’t suppose they’ll be treating him with…with kid gloves. Oh no. Au contraire.”
The quaver in his voice—that couldn’t be blamed on the connection. Suddenly I remembered him—saw him—sitting alone on that London park bench on a winter day, just after his release from Ally Pally, while we were waiting be deported. Sitting alone and staring at nothing.
“Billy, what do you think I should do?”
Don’t call me at work, I thought. For three years I’d enjoyed the righteous pleasure of a salary. By then—I have statement slips from the Pensionskasse and could double-check, but don’t need to—I was earning one hundred seventy marks per week, more than double what I’d started at. I never knew what salary my father earned at Walden, but I doubt it was as much, though he also had a share of race winnings.
Even after what they’d done to Dr. Ziegler, even with Ducky Krebs throwing his weight around at the office, I was still proud to be an IG Farben man, as dismaying as that may sound. I wasn’t about to pin an NSDAP badge to my lapel, but I wasn’t going to rock the boat, either. And here was my worried father wishing to discuss a socialist chauffeur’s disappearance over a telephone connection that could be eavesdropped upon at any time by switchboard girls, by Dr. Winnacker, by Dr. Schiller, by my colleagues wearing lapel badges. All my instincts screamed, Here is a nest of trouble. Stay away. Here is a poison cup. Here is a threat possibly fatal to everything you have ever wanted in your life.
I was aware that in the preceding forty-eight hours, all over Frankfurt and possibly all over Germany, dozens—perhaps hundreds—of leftists had been rounded up into impromptu Konzentrationslager, the wild camps the policeman had referred to. On the radio they were calling it Schutzhaft, “protective custody.”
Solomon was a Reichsbanner, a loudmouth, and a Jew employed by the Jewish traitor baron. Any one of those was enough to make him a target for the auxiliary police turned loose in our fair city. I’d seen their trucks speeding down narrow streets in the medieval center, ignoring traffic laws, and I wanted to tell Buck to take the tram back across the river, go home, close the Walden gates behind him, and forget what he’d heard or hadn’t heard, seen or hadn’t seen.
Then I had a brainstorm. It wasn’t the time to be emotional or irrational. The Solomonic problem had to be dealt
with crisply and efficiently, in executive style. In other words, by passing it along to someone else.
“What we must do,” I said, “is contact Kaufman. Let Kaufman deal with it. Herr Kaufman’s a lawyer and can make inquiries through the proper channels. Stay away from Klinger School, Dad. Let’s not go looking for trouble.”
“But I’m not far off. I could walk there in ten minutes.”
“I’m going to ring Herr Kaufman. Go home, Dad.”
“Kaufman is, likewise, a Jew,” my father remarked. “What’s going to happen to him if he goes up there?”
“He’s a lawyer. An officer of the courts. They won’t trifle with him.”
“Well, I can’t go home without some news. Can’t face that wailing woman.”
“I’m going to telephone Herr Kaufman right now.”
“I believe I’m going to walk up there and—”
“No! Definitely not! Go home!”
I hung up and glanced around to see who had been listening. The other fellows seemed absorbed by their work but probably had caught every word. At least four others in our office apart from the absent Krebs were sporting NSDAP lapel pins. My father and I had been speaking English, but this was the Translation Department. Everyone within earshot knew the language perfectly.
They kept their heads down. No one met my eyes.
My generation knew the smart thing was to stay away from other people’s trouble. But my father, in his mild way, could be relentless. I thought he’d probably head for the Klinger-Oberrealschule despite my advice.
I rang Kaufman. It was a violation of protocol to use an office phone for personal business, and I figured Dr. Winnacker would give me his cold version of hell if he found out, but there wasn’t time to go to the tobacco shop across the street.
Frau Fleck, the lawyer’s indomitable secretary, demanded to know exactly why I was calling. She’d never liked me, and she had no intention of putting me through to the great man.
I let her know I was calling from IG Farben headquarters and insisted on speaking directly to Kaufman about a matter of urgent personal importance to the Baron von Weinbrenner, a supervisory director of the company. Her default German subservience kicked in. Kaufman came on the line.
“All right, my dear Billy, what mess has our Karin gone and gotten herself into now?”
It startled me, his assumption that I was calling on Karin’s behalf. His doing so gave me a little thrill of pleasure, but quickly I explained that Solomon had been taken into custody, probably by a band of SA, and probably was being held in the basement at the Klinger-Oberrealschule.
“You can’t be serious! A high school! A basement!”
I explained that my father was on his way to the school to make inquiries.
“Your father shouldn’t interfere.” Kaufman sounded annoyed. “He has absolutely no standing in the matter. He won’t get anywhere and may be exposing himself and the baron to unforeseen consequences. In short, he is putting his nose where it doesn’t belong. The authorities are under no obligation to tell him anything.”
We were speaking German. Kaufman’s English was limited. I had never cared for him. When I worked in his office I found him fussy and overcritical. He preened himself on his familiarity with the constitution of the German republic, by then the deadest of dead letters. Like the baron, he had been a front soldier, in his case in the artillery of the Grand Ducal Hessian (Twenty-fifth) Division. He also kept his Eisenkreuz in a leather box on his desk. And just like Eddy Morrison, the proprietor of Frankie’s English Bar, Kaufman had been wounded in the neck during the Battle of the Somme. The visible portion of his scar looked like a claw mark.
“Perhaps you can make inquiries,” I suggested.
“You ask me to go up there?” he said.
Silence.
I had not really grasped the significance of what I was asking, which was that he, a well-to-do, powerful, respected Frankfurt lawyer—but a Jew—poke a stick into a nest of vipers. I had always thought of Kaufman as a thoroughly establishment figure, a friend of Lord Mayor Landmann, whom I’d met in his office. Someone even the SA would treat with wariness. Deference, even. What did Herr Kaufman have to worry about?
Buck, on the other hand, with his English clothes and the very slight English intonation that lingered in his German when he was tired—my father was vulnerable. My father could be a target once again.
“Well,” Kaufman said, “I could telephone one or two Schupos whom I know, but I doubt they would appreciate such a call. This whole business of protective custody—the law is very unclear. There’s certainly no doubt the Reds were planning a conflagration.”
“I doubt Solomon was planning anything except getting drunk.”
He chuckled. “Always been a loudmouth, that fellow. I have no idea why the baron keeps him on. But for Weinbrenner’s sake I suppose I shall have to go myself and reconnoiter the situation.”
Now I was beginning to have second thoughts. “It’s SA who is holding him, you know, not regular police—”
“Of course it is, they’ve been turned loose by their masters, the swine.”
“I don’t want anything happening to my father.”
“Very foolish of him to get involved.” He paused, then started speaking in a different tone, formal and succinct, the same tone I’d heard him use when dictating correspondence to Heidi, buxom Heidi who married the pig farmer.
“I am going to pay a visit to the Klinger-Oberrealschule. I’m informing you as a matter of record, do you understand? If you do not hear from me within a few hours, say by fifteen Uhr, go directly to the Schutzpolizei offices in the Römer. Insist on seeing Oberleutnant Schwamborn. Do you hear that? Oberleutnant Hermann Schwamborn. Inform him that Lawyer Kaufman, whom he well knows, has paid a visit to the Klinger-Oberrealschule and has not been heard from. They have a good deal of respect for me, these Schupos. Understand?”
“Yes.”
“Your father has more courage than sense, do you know that?”
He hung up.
Shame, that was what I felt. I had asked of Kaufman what I was afraid to do myself. And it was my bloody alma mater they’d dragged Solomon to.
I’d followed my instinct to stay clear of trouble. Like any rat, after sniffing a threat, I had slipped into the nearest available hole.
I was hating more and more the loudmouth of a chauffeur for forcing this confrontation with my own cowardliness. And I resented these two oldsters, my father and the Jewish lawyer, for their damn courage.
Me, the bodyguard. Quelle blague.
For the next hour, I tried to work but was unable to concentrate. I kept getting up and pacing around like a sick dog. The report on my desk, a detailed analysis of the pulp and paper industry of Quebec, our largest North American market for bleaching chemicals (chlorine and caustic soda), had come to me in inadequate, practically incomprehensible English. Paragraphs swam before my eyes. I was expected to summarize them in a few paragraphs of flawless German.
I could tell that Kaufman, despite his bluff manner, was aware that auxiliary policemen were a dangerous unknown. Imagining my father in their clutches gradually became unbearable. Grabbing my hat and overcoat, walking fast, I approached Dr. Winnacker’s office. I didn’t wish to make eye contact with the other fellows. I trusted my two pals, Ernst Mack and Robert Briesewitz, but no one else.
Dr. Winnacker’s door was shut, of course. I ignored the pretty secretary, Fräulein Reppe. She was still looking rather shattered—she had worshipped Dr. Ziegler. I wondered how long she, as a Jew, would last at IG. Ducky Krebs had always treated her respectfully. Perhaps that counted for something, perhaps a lot.
I rapped on our new chief’s door. Very unusual behavior—at IG Farben, subordinates didn’t disturb the chief; it was always the other way around. Fräulein Reppe, mouth agape, was too startled to say anything.
“Yes, what is it?” came from within.
As I entered he had his feet up on his desk. Dr. Winnacker was
a heavy man, big boned, with broad shoulders. He looked tired. All we knew about him was that he had lived in Buenos Aires and helped organize Anilinas Alemanas, IG Farben’s Argentine subsidiary. There had already been gossip that his wife was an Argentine Jew.
He was a stylish dresser, Dr. Winnacker. In the middle of winter he was wearing two-toned shoes. Later he told me that he had his suits made by a famous old firm of English tailors in Buenos Aires.
“You have some trouble,” he said calmly.
He, or Fräulein Reppe, must have listened in on the telephone conversation with my father. I started to speak, but Winnacker held up his hand.
“I really don’t need to hear about it, but if you have personal matters to attend to, you may go. There’s nothing on your desk that’s pressing, is there? Go. We’ll see you tomorrow. We’ll have a talk. I want to get to know each of my men. Ich wünsche Ihnen viel Glück.”
I stepped into a paternoster cubicle and rode it down to the lobby. Those cubicles were just big enough for one person: you stepped in alone and stepped out alone; you rode in perfect silence.
The paternoster lifts were like my career at IG Farben: silent, narrow, and self-enclosed. Riding up—or down—in my own private space.
Outside it was gray and cold. Scattered lines of rain mixed with snow pattered very quickly, like cats’ feet, then swept away on gusts of wind. Leaving headquarters and looking back I always was a little intimidated by our building’s size. It was like sailing near an ocean liner in a small sailboat or a skiff. Awe and primal fear. If the big ship foundered, the small one would be sucked down, too.
I caught a tram. Somewhere near the Eschenheimer Tower I jumped down and started walking. It was raining hard by then, cold crisp rain.
I was a few blocks from my alma mater when I saw them coming without at first being able to identify what the disturbance was about: a parade, a march? A squad of stormtroopers, military rifles slung on shoulders, was walking down the middle of the road. They weren’t marching; they were sauntering. As they came near I saw they had a prisoner. The stormtroopers were smiling and joking with one another and the prisoner was stumbling to keep up, and I saw to my horror this was Herr Kaufman. Around his neck hung a placard ICH WERDE MICH NIE MEHR BEI DER POLIZEI BESCHWEREN.
Carry Me Page 28
