The Eye of the Abyss - [Franz Schmidt 01]

by Marshall Browne

  Dietrich’s blond hair was slicked straight back from his broad forehead. Two thin metallic-looking strands, sharp as scissor blades, had escaped the smooth surface, suggesting a vigorous, impetuous individual. From his auditor’s perspective, Schmidt found the notion unsettling. The large muscular figure, shoulders hunched forward, had fallen into an intent study. The blue eyes stared fixedly, then blinked quickly.

  Snaps of a camera shutter, Schmidt thought. And that was close to how the Nazi was operating as he inventoried this backroom banker in this provincial bank: Snap: short, smallboned and compact. Handsome. Very. Snap: blond, very regular features, skin smooth as a woman’s, vague little moustache hardly worth the trouble. Snap: a soft man ... yet, an air of self-reliance. Something about the eyes ...

  The Nazi suddenly ceased his camera work, produced a silver cigarette case and held it aloft in thick, nicotine-stained fingers, as though displaying it to an admiring circle. Schmidt thought: this is an experience!

  ‘A word of warning, Herr Schmidt. No unpleasant surprises. Keep me informed of relevant matters at all times, please.’ He offered the auditor a cigarette. Schmidt, a very occasional smoker, took one; surprises were an anathema to him too. The Nazi clicked the case shut. ‘All right, don’t look so worried. We’ll get along fine. You’ll do your job, I’ll do mine.’

  They lit up.

  ‘I’m not worried, Herr Dietrich.’ Schmidt exhaled, spoke quietly. ‘We auditors are the serious type.’ Some impulse told him that he’d be best served by this kind of reply.

  Dietrich assessed the remark, his blue eyes hard but otherwise expressionless. Suddenly, he laughed uproariously. In another display of athleticism he hoisted himself off the desk.

  ‘You don’t have a monopoly on that. We in the Party are serious types, too. Serious and dedicated.’ His eyes slipped away. He scrutinised the plain room. More photography. It was as though he’d determined to mentally photograph the whole Wertheim province: Schmidt’s safe, hatstand, filing cabinet, the only picture: a monochrome photograph of the bank in a heavy wooden frame, taken in 1890, a study in stone - not a shred of flesh and blood.

  Dietrich frowned at the picture. Up-and-coming Party officials were developing an eye for architecture: this taste came from the Fuehrer. He switched his gaze back to the auditor ... he would get this small banker into his pocket.

  ‘All right. I’ll speak to you again soon.’

  He left abruptly, like a man going to a string of crucial appointments. Schmidt sat down. What a character! He’d observed middle-level Party functionaries in the streets, restaurants, at the cinema. Only a few had the prescribed Aryan-look; they came in all shapes and sizes, apparently from diverse backgrounds — criminal ones, according to Wagner. But Dietrich’s appearance did fit the ideal; only two jarring notes: yellowed teeth and fingers. A piece of pumice stone would work wonders with the latter, Doctor Bernstein, the dentist, with the former. However, the Nazi wouldn’t patronise a dentist named Bernstein. With his tongue, Schmidt touched the tooth which was troubling him. For him, such a visit was still possible. He speculated on the Nazi’s origins. Behind the poses he’d felt an undercurrent of experience. Perhaps the man had been amusing himself, though a sense of humour hadn’t been evident. Schmidt wondered what the G-D thought of him. He glanced at the G-D s memorandum: Dietrich was a lawyer. Did he know anything about banking, auditing?

  He’d smoked the cigarette through to the finish. It gave off an aromatic odour which he found quite pleasant. He turned back to his work. In one crowded day a new, unsubtle spirit had impregnated the bank. Were they going to be transfused with the Nazi ethos? Thus far, Wertheims had been insulated from politics by a century of tradition and conservative banking practice. It’d seen political parties come and go like the seasons — except with more racket and stink. It had ridden out the storms of the Great War, the Inflation, the Depression. And its loyal employees had been sheltered from the worst; several had served in the Great War and carried the scars, but no-one at the bank had gone hungry, or had their gas or electricity cut off during the hard years that followed. In a speech at the staff Christmas party in 1935, the G-D had referred to the bank as ‘a sound ship in any storm’. He’d likened the clients to first-class passengers, the employees to valiant crew. The metaphor had been admiringly adopted in the bank.

  At five, Fräulein Dressler entered his room. Quickly Schmidt rose to his feet. Darkness had fallen and his window reflected his lighted domain. On these nights at the edge of winter, the world outside Wertheims was obliterated. She laid a manila file stamped Confidential in large type precisely on the desk. ’Here’s the list of the accounts and bonds transferred from Berlin.’

  Schmidt thought she had more to say. Again he smelled that enticing scent. His heart was beating faster. He assembled, rejected, words, remembered the look in her eyes the morning they’d had the news about the NSDAP.

  She nodded, turned, and left. His head tilted, he reconsidered her eyes. Tonight they’d held him with a pondering melancholy. Then he thought of her face, her neck, her hands. ‘Fräulein ...?’ he’d nearly said. But it was too late; another exit, leaving him with the notion that he’d failed a test.

  ~ * ~

  4

  W

  ELL, MY DEAR Franz, back from Berlin, what do you think about it now?’

  Six pm. Their café. Wagner had been obdurately silent, eyes downcast, until he’d got a cigarette going and taken his first swallow of beer. He flicked froth from his lips. ‘Before you tell me, I’m going to tell you what I think. Listen carefully.’ He laughed softly, now deliberately lining up his colleague in his gaze. ‘A black day for the bank — for all of us. A resident Nazi! Look at the fool striding down the corridors chock-full of his rotten politics, his twisted ideals, his lousy ambition — as though after five minutes he owns the place. Simple-minded, we might think. But remember the damned iceberg. One can only take a pessimistic view of his past. Listen, old Wertheim’s not only grabbed the tiger by the tail, he’s invited it into the dining-room! That’s simple-minded.’ He grinned quickly, nervously. Involuntarily, Schmidt had twisted around to check the room.

  ‘For God’s sake, Heinrich!’ he said in a low voice. He inclined his head sharply at the room. It was filling up, getting noisy: pairs of women in tweed suits, pert hats, tête-à-tête; voluble businessmen, unwinding, resorting to cigars; no uniforms or Nazi badges, but that shouldn’t lull anyone into feeling secure. Informers were multiplying.

  ‘For God’s sake?’Wagner snapped his fingers at the waiter.

  Suddenly Schmidt felt unwell. In a flash the nightmare of the eye had returned. An iron band encircled his chest. He’d had these attacks before, although their timing was inexplicable — like asthma. Fighting to appear normal he said, ‘On such brief acquaintance ... you’ve decided an extraordinary amount ... about our new director.’ It was difficult to speak.

  Wagner raised his eyes to the heavens. He drained his glass, smacked his lips. ‘Unlike you, my auditing friend, I make decisions on the run. However, I don’t need to tell a careful fellow like you to watch out, do I? Look how your head just whipped around.’

  The pain receded, Schmidt sighed inwardly. He watched his nervy colleague scratching another match alight. He smelt the reek of tobacco from his clothes, the body odour. All day Wagner’d been dealing with banks from Paris to Prague, remitting funds, filling out myriad forms, negotiating with the Reichsbank on exchange control — skating on the foreign exchange thin ice; solving the problems of their moneyed clients whose interests crossed national boundaries. Living on adrenalin, tobacco and caffeine, as he triumphantly reported. Add beer and Mozart. In contrast, Schmidt’s world revolved around his careful audit trails.

  He said, ‘Take your own advice, Heinrich. You’re passably discreet in the bank, dangerously careless in public.’

  ‘More careful than you think. Observe the tables I select.’

  Schmidt shrugged, unimpressed.


  Wagner grinned, nursing an edgy amusement. ‘Will you join the Party? That’s what they’ll be after. If you can pass the test.’

  Schmidt was surprised; Wagner seemed to be accelerating everything. He must say more, nail down the imperative for discipline. ‘Heinrich, I understand your disquiet. But forgive me, paranoia’s hard to disguise. Therefore it’s dangerous. One way or another, bit by bit, Wertheims was going to be invaded. When we arrive at the bank it might seem we step out of our private lives, but who totally does? The quarantines never complete.’

  He’d spoken quietly, reasonably, part of his camouflage; part of his cautious character, of trying to help the deputy foreign manager survive; part of buying time to work out his position.

  Wagner brooded into his beer. ‘So, you’re not dumb on the subject. There’s a difference between that, and throwing the door wide open. One thing we’re going to have trouble with, my friend, is keeping that Nazi’s nose out of the business of our other clients.’

  ‘I know that. And the G-D will, too. There’s nothing to be done except remain calm, do our jobs.’

  ‘Good God!’ Wagner laughed sarcastically, shook his head. ‘The auditors’ institute did a good job on you, Franz. After your demise, maybe they’ll have you stuffed and mounted, put in a glass case in their meeting hall.’

  Schmidt nodded slowly, as if considering the proposition. A woman wearing a dark overcoat, which almost swept the ground, crossed an illuminated patch of pavement. Tension clung to her figure. Schmidt sat up, feeling his heart lift. Wagner followed his gaze. His piece of black humour had fizzled out like a damp cracker. They watched Fräulein Dressler disappear.

  Wagner said, ‘After today, she won’t be cracking her little jokes. She’ll be as worried as hell.’

  Schmidt looked at him sharply. Wagner mused: ‘She’s often in here. Great eater of cream cakes. That ample, seductively trembling derriere, my friend, is all due to cream cakes.’

  Schmidt pursed his lips. ‘So? Why should she be worried?’

  ‘Don’t you know? She’s half-Jewish.’

  Schmidt sat frozen, fixated on his colleague’s face. That was it! Why hadn’t he known this? Her face, features were instantly in his mind’s eye: the long, thin-bridged nose, the cast of the lips, the darkish hair, those eyes. Suddenly, her dilemma flowed into his consciousness like molten steel pouring into a mould. He felt stupid and cold, though the café was overheated. He looked up into Wagner’s curious gaze. ‘Except for old Wertheim I don’t know who in the bank knows or has guessed. I haven’t heard a whisper. Surprising isn’t it? Our venerable institution’s usually a hotbed of gossip. Of course, he thinks she’s a wonder.’

  ‘And you?’ Schmidt’s thoughts had narrowed to the specific, as if he’d isolated a suspicious transaction. ‘How do you know this, Heinrich?’

  ‘Well, that’s a story.’ He downed more beer and smacked his lips thoughtfully. ‘Two years ago I accompanied her home from the annual concert, was invited in for coffee. Things were around which made it quite plain ... In another sense, it was an interesting evening.’ The auditor waited. ‘In the bank, she has that aura ... the mysterious humorist. Out of the blue, I found out another Fräulein Dressler.’ He paused. ‘One a man could drown in.’

  Schmidt didn’t like this. Repressed women, lonely women abounded in the Reich. A legacy of the war. But Fräulein Dressler?

  ‘Listen, my dear friend, I fucked her standing up in her hall. All over in a minute — I’m not at my best on my feet.’

  Schmidt was stunned. It turned to distaste. He said, ’I don’t think you should’ve told me — or anyone — either of those facts.’

  Wagner glanced at him with amusement, ‘We’re not the source of danger.’

  But it wasn’t only danger that the auditor had in mind.

  Schmidt rode the tram out to see his mother, consumed by Wagner’s revelations. Fräulein Dressler’s particular situation had hit him hard. He contemplated the ink-blue passing streetscape, the dense aggregation of silhouetted steeples, cupolas. Asleep under varnishes of history. He could hardly believe she was one with those black-bearded men slipping through the streets with their cat-like caution. They seemed to exist on a different planet.

  In his inner-ear the roar: Sieg heil! arose, reverberated like a shockwave, as it had in September over the suburbs from the massed rallies. Tonight, in his room, had she been on the brink of appealing for help? He stared at the darkness and in his head the voracious Sieg heil-ing seemed to rise to a crescendo.

  ~ * ~

  5

  S

  EVEN PM. NUMBER 178 Friedrichstrasse. A monumental apartment building of the type erected in the 1860s for the middle-class. Entering the hall, the auditor smelt floor-wax, and was immediately mindful of the hazard: you could skid here like an out-of-control skater. Giving the lift a sceptical look, he flexed his body in his thick black overcoat, and, careful of his footing, climbed the freezing stairs to the first floor. He was admitted by Frau Bertha, sixtyish, thin, starch whispering from cuffs and collar, who took his coat and hat, and conducted him to the front room.

  Trailing in the wake of her hoarse coughing he sighed: ‘Thursday again.’ It seemed an age since he’d left in the grey dawn to catch the Berlin express.

  The mausoleum, Helga called it. The ambience, the odour of thickly-carpeted rooms dignified with mirrored and columned mahogany pieces in which a Gothic design was worked, were common in this suburb. As was the collection of family memorabilia: portraits, photographs, pieces of silver floridly engraved, ranged in places of honour unchanged since his childhood.

  His mother’s famous ancestor was represented only by a smallish marble bust in the hall. She never spoke of him by name, only as ‘the composer’, as if it were a family secret. Her connection to Johann Sebastian Bach was well known in cultural circles.

  A district of mausoleums. He was amusing himself to lighten the moment. Lives backed into corners. A flock of aged, single ladies resided here: one might surmise that the male population had been wiped out by a disease particular to their sex. The disease was the Great War, and the subsequent economic catastrophe.

  He brought these joyless thoughts into the semi-darkness of the salon. She sat in her elegant wing chair, and he leant over the tall, emaciated figure to kiss her on each cheek: usual whiff of lavender, usual quick eagle’s glance above her pince-nez. Each week at this moment he recalled half a lifetime of Thursday evenings. Here was old age held at bay, pessimism, steely single-mindedness, fastidious dressing — her clothes never seemed to wear out: she had oak chests packed with gowns, shoes, from the 1920s. Her fine grey hair rigidly braided across her head was doubtless one source of Frau Bertha’s nerves.

  ‘Always on time, Franz. What a burden these little visits are for you.’

  ‘Not at all, mother. Are you well?’

  She was. Eighty-six. Indestructible. He went to pour schnapps: two precise measures. He handed her a small glass etched with laurel leaves.

  ‘Your wife and dear Trudi are well?’

  They were. Her relationship with Helga was correct. They each tolerated the monthly family lunch. Standing, holding his drink, he prepared to break new Thursday ground. She was interested in Herr Wertheim and his dynastic bank. In joining it all those years ago, he’d made a correct move for once.

  ‘Wertheims has turned in a new direction ... ‘

  She listened, and sipped her drink, gazing down the room at shadowy portraits of the dead. When he was finished she said in her light dry tone, ‘So, you’ve been to Berlin and back today. How remarkable.’

  He was surprised at what seemed most remarkable to her. She smiled, enigmatically. ‘Herr Hitler is much admired here. Frau Webber on the second floor thinks he is wonderful, but lacks the influence of a good woman. Frau Hoffman on the third is, she says, intensely drawn to his artistic persona. I believe their feelings are quite sexual.’

  This time, Schmidt was startled. ‘What do you think of him,
mother?’

  ‘I? I know nothing of the man. Except from their talk, which I must put up with. I don’t read the newspapers, on the wireless I listen only to classical music.’

  He thought: Yes, by tradition her family abhorred politicians. An article of faith to be kept. Tonight with their talk taking a different path, should he make another attempt ...?

  ‘Mother, the Salzburg cantatas. Won’t you allow me to put the manuscripts in the bank’s vault? I’m thinking only of their historical value.’ He would have preferred to send them to a cousin in Zurich who was a musicologist, who would know what to do with them, but she’d never entertain that.

  She regarded him with her sceptical eyes, as if his mind was freely accessible to her. ‘No, my dear Franz, they’re to stay here with the family archives. Once you start a dispersal it’s the beginning of the end. No doubt you recall that disgraceful Mendelssohn farrago in 1852.’