"Chacun à son goût--to each his own." Brecht sipped his white beer. "Me, I come for the sequins and sex. There's no art to the shows anymore, except for Fink, and I hear he's hanging on by his fingernails." He eyed Erich's uniform suspiciously. "I suppose you're another of those who has come to write him up so he can be punished by the keepers of order."
Is that what he looked like to Brecht? A keeper of order? How laughable! His dogs...they were the real keepers of order, capable equally of killing upon demand and loving without reservation.
"Just here for the main attraction," he told Brecht.
Brecht shook his head. "Now there is wasted talent."
Erich had heard of Brecht, some poet or playwright who hung around cabarets like a pig around a corncrib. People of suchso-called occupations were worthless; as waffle-brained as Solomon, except that they had the bad taste to air their souls in public.
"In case you haven't heard, I'm not to be called a conférencier anymore," Fink went on. "The government says I'm an Ansager because that other word is too French. So many changes! Government, language, the newspaper on the bottom of my bird cage, my face if I'm not careful. Change everywhere except in my pocket! Only one thing never changes--the beauty of our very own Mimi de Rau!"
As he backed into the wings, the curtains swung open. Reclining on an ottoman and haloed in red light was "Mimi,"kohl-eyed and wearing a spangling headdress roped with fake jewels. From her ears hung brass baubles. Erich recognized them even if the rest of the audience did not. They were matching dreidels, like the ones the Freund and Weisser children had spun each Chanukah until the world went mad.
"Sei lieb zu mir," she sang, her voice sultry while her earrings told the world in her own small way that life had spun her around once too often. "Komm nicht wie ein Dieb zu mir...."
Erich could feel the crowd's pulse quicken as people responded to her version of "Mean to Me," the popular Dietrich song. "Be kind to me. Don't come like a thief to me...."
"Time was when a talent like that would have embraced the audience. Now she merely entrances them," Brecht said.
"Go to hell."
"Already have. It rang with the tramp of jackboots, so I have returned here to Limbo, where the entertainment's better. Take the lady on stage, for example. There's a Christmas treat. Voice like an angel, body waiting to be unwrapped."
Knocking over the beer, Erich grabbed Brecht's throat so fast that it appeared the playwright's cigar must shoot from his mouth. For an instant the men stared at each other, Erich with his mangled hand raised to slap the playwright, Brecht with his eyes bulging.
Brecht took the cigar from between his lips. "Meant no insult, friend." Despite its being unlit, he thumped the cigar on the ashtray as if to dislodge imaginary ash.
Erich released him. Embarrassed, he stared at the table. The man was not out of line. "Look, I'm--"
"Sorry? Don't be." Brecht rubbed his neck. "The Fatherland has too much to be sorry for already."
"Sei lieb...zu...mir.
Miriam's song, plaintive and sensual, floated to its conclusion amid a burst of applause.
She rose slowly and drifted forward, arms outstretched as though to embrace a lover. Erich looked around the audience with cynical detachment. Strange how the only time she did not stir him was when she was performing. The red stage lights were intended to make her look wanton, but the effect was both illusion and delusion, for her demeanor made it apparent she was untouchable. That knowledge seemed to enflame most spectators, yet the more the other men wanted her the less enticing he found her. It was only when he and she were alone, or when he was alone and she was alive in his fantasies, that he could not control his childhood desire of wanting her to love him. Not just screw him. Love him.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Miriam stood quietly at the microphone, waiting for the applause to die down. She had one more song to do before a big production number that did not include her. During her first two songs, she habitually took little notice of the audience, viewing them as heads of cabbages, featureless and brainless. By now, individuals began to take form. The regulars, there to pinch the bottoms of the waitresses and to drink as much as they could in as little time as possible. Goebbels' spies, probably playing with themselves in the dark under the tables. Bertolt Brecht, always at the same table, always with the same laconic expression.
She looked over at Brecht, and winked. He winked back. It was their private nightly tradition, an acknowledgment that they admired each other's work and talents.
Erich, sitting tonight at Brecht's table, turned red. So he had noticed the exchange, she thought. Good. Maybe that would finally keep him away from her. How much more overt did she have to become before he'd give up the challenge of getting her into bed?
She took hold of the microphone and faced Brecht.
"This song is my tribute to you, Bertolt." She smiled at the playwright. The orchestra began the overture from Threepenny Opera and segued neatly into Mack the Knife.
Listen to the words, Erich, she thought, and began to sing.
At the end of the song, the curtains swung shut, draping around her. When they reopened, she stepped onto the stage apron and descended the stairs that led to the floor. She had to mingle with the patrons at least once each night; part of her job. It helped when Brecht was there. She simply headed for his table and had a drink with him.
"Going to drink with your Jew-lover friend?" One of three boys seated at the table next to Brecht's took hold of her arm as she tried to walk past. His tone was friendly, conversational, but his free hand was tapping the beat of the music on a pistol lying on the table. "I'm talking about that one there. The Rittmeister." He nodded toward Erich. "C'mon, Judsche. Try some real men. It'll make you feel like a German."
Miriam looked at Erich, sensing his body tighten with coiled fury. Hadn't he once boasted to her about his Oriental fighting lessons? Said he took them and guerrilla tactics from Otto Braun himself, who had, as Li Te, fought alongside Mao throughout the Long March. Well, use what you learned, damn it!
The youth stared coldly at Erich, his hatred apparent. "You have run with the wrong dogs too long, Weisser."
"Who sent you here?" Erich's voice was deadly calm, barely audible beneath the music.
"Never mind who sent us!" another said. "We'll fuck 'The Star' after you do. Three at once! Cork all three holes at the same time!"
"Do what you want with the whores." Erich still sounded reasonable, rational. "No one touches Miss de Rau."
"Shoot the Jew-lover, Klaus," his buddy said. "Who cares who he is!"
But the boy holstered his pistol. "We've done our job. Let's go." He spat on the floor and stood up. "If you love the Fatherland," he said, "you'll stay away from this pigsty in the future...or we'll burn it down around you."
"Like you did the Reichstag?" Brecht was seemingly beyond caring what the boys might do next.
"That was the Communists."
"Jews."
"Foreigners."
Shaking, as angry as she was afraid, Miriam watched the boys go out the door, a Machiavellian chorus of avenging angels. Whatever it was that had happened to German society that February night the Hollander, van der Lubbe, torched the congressional building, she was certain it would take a cataclysm to assuage it.
"Jewmongers!" one of the boys screamed before following his friends into the street.
He flipped a wine bottle over his shoulder. The sound of smashing glass coincided with the crash of the cabaret door as it slammed shut behind him.
Stooping awkwardly in her tight dress, Miriam picked up a champagne glass and a bottle from one of the front tables. Leaning across Brecht's table, she said to Erich, "You brought them here. They came for you. The rest of us were only diversions." She filled the glass.
"They would have come anyway. I warned you."
She glanced up at the stage. Oblivious to the drama on the floor, a circle of ersatz Ziegfield girls in scarlet ostrich feathers strutted around the stage. F
orming a crescent, they opened their feathers to reveal g-strings and tasseled nipples.
"Yes, perhaps they would have come," she said, staring at Erich. "But not tonight."
Turning from him she lifted her glass as if it were a chalice.
The girls took their final bow. The music stopped. The applause quieted.
"I had a friend once," she told the audience. "Today was his birthday. I wish to sing his favorite Christmas carol."
Erich grabbed her arm. "Haven't you had enough for one night? You could be arrested for blasphemy."
"This has nothing to do with you," she said. "Erich Joachim Weisser was my friend. I'm singing this for him."
Twisting from his grasp, she raised her head. "Stille Nacht," she sang. "Heilige Nacht...."
As her voice filled the room she prayed--that someday God would replace bullets and broken glass with love.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Erich pushed money at the taxi driver and stepped out into the wind. Alois. Joachim. Names. Didn't she use a stage name? Was she so unperceptive that she didn't realize his being in the Party was as much an act as hers? Women! Not one of them worth the price of a pineapple.
He looked up at the bedroom Goebbels occupied when he was too "busy" to go home to his wife and family. Surely on Christmas Eve...
The light was on. Above the villa shone an icy star, as if to remind Erich that Adolph Hitler, the twentieth-century Messiah, had ordered him to keep an eye on the Gauleiter, who remained suspect in the Chancellor's eyes. The way Goebbels behaved, like probably sending those youths to Ananas, made it hard to believe the man was educated. It was as if the osteomyelitic inflammation of the bone marrow that had caused his foot to be deformed had also attacked his brain, wiping out any semblance of normal behavior.
Even now, the Gauleiter had probably passed out with his head between some prostitute's legs.
To hell with him, and Hitler--and women. Erich pulled his collar up against the wind and followed the path around to the dogs. Only they were worth anything. He could hear them as he approached, barking and howling at the moonless sky, as restless as he.
He shook the chain-link fence he'd had erected along the west end to separate the sloped, circular dog-runs from the rest of the grounds, and the dogs came charging. When they reached the ends of their chains, they were jerked from their feet, only to circle and charge again. Their ferocity sent a welcome chill up his spine.
"Password!" The bolt of a carbine rammed home and an overcoated helmeted soldier with the broad shoulders of a Greco-Roman wrestler hustled from the shadows; the affenpinscher yipped and ran in such circles at the end of its leash that it became entangled and had to roll over to extricate itself.
"Tannenbaum," Erich said. "And Merry Christmas, Oberschütze."
"Oh, it's you, sir." Krayller lowered the 98 from his shoulder and grinned down at his monkey terrier's antics. The dog was barely bigger than its master's hamhock-sized hand; he loved it like a father might an infant. "Merry Christmas."
Putting the rifle butt against the ground, Krayller stooped to pet the dog, which rolled over to have its belly tickled. "I'll let you in, sir."
"I thought Holten-Pflug had drawn the midnight shift."
"Well, their new baby and all--"
"You're quite the altruist, Johann."
As Erich walked through the gate, he smiled at Krayller's affection for the little dog.
"What's the meaning of all the commotion?" Hempel strode toward them, a bottle in one hand, in the other a Mann--connected to his holster by a black braid. Though he was clearly inebriated, the alcohol seemed to have tightened rather than loosened his rigidity. He did not stop walking until his nose almost touched Erich's.
"Have we disturbed the Gauleiter's...holy night?" Erich asked, not backing up.
"Don't be impudent."
Hempel raised the gun. Erich brushed it aside nonchalantly. Touching Krayller's shoulder, he sent the lance-corporal back to his post. With a flourish he probably would not have exhibited had Hempel not been present, the corporal clicked his heels together and, saluting, bellowed "Heil Hitler!" loud enough to be heard in the upstairs bedrooms if not throughout the rest of the Grünewald.
"Someday his impudence will get him shot." Hempel reholstered his gun. "The way he mollycoddles that excuse for a dog! It's unmanly." He paused, then added in a low voice, "Like a man who would rather fuck than fight for his country when she is at war."
"Like Doktor Goebbels, Herr Obersturmführer?" Erich glanced again at the bedroom light, wondering if by some quirk he would have to defend Goebbels in order to put down Hempel. "And is the nation at war?"
Hempel's smile did not waver. "I'm referring to you, Herr Rittmeister. The Fatherland will always be at war, if not from without then from within." His gaze flickered with contempt, but perhaps sensing Erich's clenched fist, he took a step back. "I mean nothing derogatory, Herr Rittmeister. It's just that we've much in common, you and the Oberschütze and I--bachelors who are married, as the best of German men should be, to ideals rather than to wives or to our mothers. I hate to see any man prostitute his possibilities. I'd as soon see Krayller dead...nothing personal against him, you understand."
"As you said," Erich glared up into his adversary's face, "our country is at risk, from within and without. You are to be commended for helping Herr Goebbels in his efforts within---" Erich pointed toward the villa. "But just as you do whatever you must, it is the duty of myself and my men, and whatever dogs we feel best belong in the unit, to keep these grounds patrolled. That is what you need to understand. As far as I'm concerned, that is all you need to understand."
He waited for Hempel to back off, but the man did not move. "Anything else we need to agree to tonight?" Erich asked.
"All we have ever asked is that you keep the dogs quiet when we are," again the smile, "in conference."
"You're speaking for Herr Goebbels?"
"I have always spoken for Herr Goebbels." Hands in pockets, Hempel walked over to the scarecrow elm, where he had an undisturbed view of the Gauleiter's window.
Always his insistence about his closeness to Goebbels, Erich thought as he strode toward the kennels. Well, bad as Goebbels was, at least he was man enough to prefer women over boys. Greeting him, the shepherds yelped with delight and tugged at their chains. He wanted to pet Achilles, but instead he unhooked and leashed up Taurus. Killi reminded him too much of Miriam and her stubborn rage. What would he have done if those youths had raped her? What could he have done?
Involuntarily he remembered an experience he had tried to bury. One Easter, while motorcycling down for field training in Bavaria, he had witnessed the aftermath of a rape--the people of a village walking past a naked woman sitting on a wagon tongue in an alley, crying. No one went to her aid; they simply averted their eyes. A Jew, obviously. And I did nothing either, he thought, just roared away, speeding deep into the Black Forest, the wind--surely it was the wind--making his eyes water.
She could have been Miriam...could have been Miriam...
That night, as he camped alone beneath the stars, those words echoed in his head like a song. He kept asking himself why he had done nothing. By morning he had neither answers nor sleep. When the sleepless nights continued during the bivouac, he requested a pass to attend the Passion Play at Oberammergau. Maybe Father Dahns had been right all along. Perhaps religion did hold answers or, if not, then at least clues to the secrets.
As Christ was nailed to the cross, an elderly woman behind him whispered, "Mein Hitler," and the response, increasingly louder, quickly serpentined through the audience.
Soon each character in the play had a German counterpart. Even Bethlehem, which the audience took to be Berlin. Mutterings and murmurs and lisped whispers hovered about him like prayers breathed by dark angels. He left after the first curtain call, when the rest of the audience rose in ovation.
Was Miriam blind to everything beyond the stage lights? Was that why she insisted on putti
ng herself in danger, like staying in that damn cabaret and singing, of all things, a Christmas carol?
"The shepherds do need a responsible leader, Herr Rittmeister," Hempel said, coming forward. "Human as well as canine. Nothing personal, you understand, but they lack proper orientation. As you do. You've run with the wrong pack too long."
Erich saw in Hempel's eyes the same haughty disdain for others he had witnessed in the youth at Ananas.
You have run with the wrong pack too long--
"You sent those animals to the club! Not Goebbels." Erich felt the rope of his gut twist tighter. They were your boys!"
"And why not? You must learn--"
Erich's fury exploded. Get him, Taurus. Tear the son of a bitch to pieces.
Taurus lunged for the lieutenant. For an instant, Erich hesitated--just long enough for Hempel to know the attack was no accident. Then he grabbed her collar and tugged her away.
The lieutenant lay on the ground, shaking. His wolfhound whined and licked his face.
Erich stared down in horror. He had allowed--instructed--Taurus to attack an officer. He should stoop and help the man. Apologize.
He could not bring himself to commit such hypocrisy. Instead, after mentally commanding Taurus to sit, he leaned over just enough to remove the Mann from Hempel's holster. The braid on the handle felt slick and soft. Looking more closely he realized it was human hair. Nauseated, he unhooked the braid and pitched it and the pistol into the hedge.
The lieutenant groaned and opened his eyes. As he sat up, he gave Erich a perverse, suave smile.
"How kind of you, Herr Rittmeister, and how crass of me. I forgot it was your birthday and did not buy you a gift. And here you are giving me such a priceless one." He fingered blood-rimmed teeth marks on the back of his hand. "I do believe you have given me incentive for doing anything I wish to you and your brood."
Fist clenched, Erich stood over him. "The hell I have."
"Something's already in the works, Herr Rittmeister. When the dogs are fully trained, I will have them." His smile broadened. "But not now. Not yet."
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