"Stick to buggering boys." Fuming, Erich strode down the section of drive that ran to the garage, Taurus trotting alongside. She has tasted blood, Erich thought. The worst thing that could happen to a guard dog. Would that make her too emotionally unstable for duty? If so, he would cover for her; that was what partners were for.
He opened one of the garage doors and switched on the light. The place was dank and smelled of oil. Two rows of vehicles, civilian cars and military jeeps and cycles, faced one another beneath the bare bulb. The cars that were still Konrad's responsibility, Rathenau's limousine and the Daimler, were parked on each side of Goebbels' SSK Mercedes Benz. Beside the limo hulked the Gauleiter's pride, a Minerva Landaulet imported from Belgium. Next to the Daimler an empty parking space awaited the prize Goebbels wanted: a Sears, from the American catalogue.
Erich had never touched the Daimler. Now, running a gloved hand across the smooth curve of its fender, he thought of Miriam, sheathed in black silk, singing before the floodlights. He banged his fist down. Why must she always demean him! Why did he keep pushing? He should not even be associating with her, or with Solomon--especially after tonight's episode at Ananas. Any fool could see their ties were a danger to him, and to them...more so, now that he and Hempel had declared open warfare.
He cursed himself for allowing Hempel to goad him like that. If Hempel filed charges--not that he could prove anything--things could get messy. The man's past was an open secret; his own could as easily become one. Any of his Abwehr superiors could insist he cut all ties with his impure past. Burying it could literally mean burying Miriam and the Freunds.
He shuddered.
Trading his overcoat for a flight jacket and the leather helmet he kept in one of the lockers along the east wall, he climbed onto his cycle. He kick-started it with such force that he almost toppled the machine, and raced the engine without regard for Goebbels' comfort. He roared out of the door and up the incline, waving at Krayller to open the gate.
With Taurus loping next to him, Erich wound his motorcycle through the Grünewald and past the Tiergarten. He had gone through Potsdamer Platz and was cruising up Friedrich Ebert Strasse, throttled down and coasting in neutral, by the time he acknowledged to himself he wasn't running from something as much as to something: he wanted to go home.
He slowed to a halt in front of the cigar shop. It looked dark and forlorn, and the lights of Das Ostleute Haus bathed him in blue. Snow had begun to fall. He gripped his lapels together against the cold and stared at the elongated reflections the street lamps cast as the pavement gave itself over to white. Across the street, the curb and the ragged blue-spruce hedge seemed like a line someone had drawn in the powder, daring him to cross. But he was not ready--yet.
A woman in a fur coat stepped around the corner and into the blue light. For a split second it seemed as if one of the furrier's mannequins had come alive. Then he saw the whip and the high-heeled boots so capable of trampling across a man's conscience. The fury and nervous near-exhaustion he had thought he had shed on the Ku'damm returned to suffocate him.
"Evening, soldier." The woman lifted her gaze seductively.
Taurus, panting from the run, went rigid and bared her teeth. No sound. Her affect was one of silent, mean cunning.
The woman backed away. "Some animal you've got there." Fear in her voice.
He switched off the engine but held onto the handlebars as he strained to see into the Freund-Weisser apartments.
Twirling her whip, the woman circled Taurus and stepped saucily toward Erich. "Want to be my slave? Or perhaps I should be yours? I don't mind pain if the money's right."
"How much are you willing to pay?" Erich asked in an off-hand tone, not looking at her.
"Pay?" She laughed and tried a new approach. "Don't want to be alone on Christmas Eve, do you, Sugar Plum?"
"That's exactly what I do want."
Still gripping the cycle, he stared into the darkness, imagining Miriam kissing Solomon's fingers, easing his hand down over her breast and belly to her thighs, she sliding her fingers down his chest. Damn her! Those three in the alley behind the El Dorado had gloried in whoredom, yet even in his mind's eye he could not force Miriam to compromise herself.
"What's wrong, honey? Cat got your tongue?"
She took a feather from her coat and drew it across the nape of his neck. Giggling, she slipped a hand in his coat, reaching for his crotch. He debated having her get on her knees to service him--power-prayer, he called it--but pulled away.
He wanted to wish his mother a Merry Christmas and maybe drink a schnapps with his father. He could stand the old man for that long. Except Miriam might hear him upstairs and think he had come around because of her, he thought, knowing full well that he was making excuses and that Miriam could not possibly distinguish his footsteps from those of any stranger.
"Prefer boys?" the prostitute asked.
"Bitch!"
Letting go of the cycle, Erich backhanded her as hard as he could. The machine fell with a crash. Dropping the whip, the woman put her fingers tentatively against her cheek. Erich slapped her again. Hard. As she stumbled and landed on her knees, Taurus leapt. She sank her teeth into the wrist, just above her the glove. When the whore's flesh broke against her canines, Taurus quietly hunkered down. Belly tensed and shoulder muscles rippling, she swallowed and bit deeper.
Blood ran down the whore's arm and she screamed, her face contorted with terror, her acne-scarred cheeks as death-white as
rotted carp flesh. An electric tingling rolled down Erich's spine. He stiffened. The street lamp took on the form of a lopsided moon, and a feeling that he was surrounded by greenery and gloom suffused him. He felt hot, sweaty. Then, just as abruptly, he was cold again, looking down on the whore and thinking how ludicrous women really were.
For all their power, life rendered them as helpless as men.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Berlin was alive with lights.
The New Year, the Führer had assured everyone, would ring in greater times for the New Order, and so the Reich was beribboned and pulsing with music and laughter.
Solomon waited outside Ananas for Miriam to finish her performance. Around him, couples clung to one another as they reeled along the pavement, many with half-finished bottles of champagne in hand. He tried to feel their joy, but he could not see or feel beyond their swastika armbands--their emblems of hope and the coming happiness. He kept to the shadows, estranged from the crowds yet part of them--like a man dining alone in a fine restaurant, aware of the quality food but unable to enjoy it because he had no one with whom to share the meal.
He wished Miriam would hurry. Since the Christmas Eve incident on Friedrich Ebert Strasse, he had walked her home every night rather than having her take the trolley. According to the papers, an overcoated, enormous-nosed Jew had attacked one Gisela Haas while she was out collecting money for the poor. Der Stürmer, the most viciously and openly anti-Semitic of the papers, compared her wounds to those inflicted by Peter Stumpf, the self-confessed werewolf convicted of lycanthropy in Cologne in 1598 and flayed alive on All-Hallows Eve. It was suggested that perhaps the Jew was seeking a virgin's menstrual blood for another satanic rite to be perpetrated against the Holy Child.
Such nonsense! Not that the truth was relevant; only the danger to Miriam was. The heritage of the family who owned the cigar shop was no secret, nor was hers. Audiences at Ananas knew she was Jewish. Fink, now the cabaret's manager, did what he could to defuse the jeers and shield her from the bottles that were occasionally thrown while she performed, but it was up to Solomon to keep her safe. If she walked in the streets unescorted, it was just a matter of time before something happened to her.
Miriam emerged at last, slipping furtively through the cabaret's service entrance. She held her coat close, like protective armor, and smiled at the sight of him.
"How do you always manage to look happy?" Sol bent and kissed her, wondering for the thousandth time what miracle had f
inally brought her to him.
"Shouldn't I be? The past is gone. Buried. No sense dwelling on its ugliness." She looped her arm through his.
"You have a God-given talent for optimism." The way her eyes reflected the holiday lights overhead enchanted him.
Right before Chanukah, a week before Christmas Eve, she had come to his bedroom with the ease and familiarity of a wife. Her attitude was perfect, for had she been hesitant, he might have kept his distance, and had she been too bold, he would have been overly concerned with his performance. He had consummated the sexual act only once before, with a prostitute Erich goaded him into buying. It had been a dismal failure, too ephemeral to constitute reality, and he had continued to think of himself as a virgin.
With Miriam, lovemaking was a glorious event. Like children holding hands at the ocean's edge, they laughed and splashed and leaped over waves, daring each other to go together into deeper and deeper water, and he did not even care that his parents and Recha might hear them.
Nodding and smiling at passers-by like any Gentile couple, they walked home along Leipziger Strasse, past Wertheim's. Like the KadeWe's square-block delicatessen, perhaps the world's largest, Wertheim's was for all practical purposes off-limits to Jews. The Depression had again brought scarcity to the Fatherland, so Aryans--real Germans--were to be fed and clothed first.
Thank God people still found money for tobacco, Sol thought, seeing the crowd that milled outside Die Zigarrenkiste. "Looks like Herr Weisser was right," he said. "He insisted business would be good tonight, so we should turn up the lights and stay open late. 'What good is a holiday brandy without a fine cigar.'"
Miriam laughed at his imitation of Herr Weisser. "See, you worry needlessly about leaving him to handle the shop."
Sol hugged her, slipping his hands inside her coat so he could hold her more tightly.
She was right; he worried too much. Like his father, he feared things might not be done correctly unless he did them himself. He needed to rely more not only on Miriam and Herr Weisser but also on his mother and Frau Weisser. On Papa too, perhaps. Lately there were days when Papa's melancholia--he laughed at himself for his use of the illness' archaic name, as though that romanticized it and thus lessened its reality--released its grip. At those times, Jacob was able and willing to help with small tasks. Since Christmas Eve, when Miriam came home from Ananas so distraught and Sol held her through the night as she cried, Jacob kept the curtains and window open when he rocked. He wanted, he said, to hear all the horror outside, and did not seem to mind the chill that seized the room.
Sol checked his watch as they neared the crowd. Three in the morning. "Herr Weisser has extended his midnight special. He enjoys spreading happiness on nights like this."
"I think the general idea is for the customers to do the spreading...of their money."
Sol laughed but his laughter died in the air. Grabbing Miriam's hand, he rushed forward. Something was very wrong. The crowd was static, gawking. Nobody was going inside the shop, no one coming out, and the door of the shop was open, its glass shattered.
"I don't care who they are, people ought not to be treated like that," said a hefty woman on the crowd's outskirts.
"Nonsense, Luise." The skinny man beside her was on tiptoes, straining to see. "They've been cheating people for years. Don't you listen to what the Führer says?"
The man swore at Sol as he and Miriam shoved past and entered the shop. "All his fault," someone said.
"No. He was a nice man. I liked him."
"Money-sucking Jews. We should rid Germany of the lot of them."
The inside of the shop was a shambles. Display cases lay overturned and broken on top of merchandise that would never again be salable. Herr Weisser, his face red and swollen and splotched with darkening bruises, lay amid strewn money and broken glass. His head was on his wife's lap. Leaning against the upside-down cash register, she wept and stroked his cheek.
Friedrich lifted a hand when he saw Solomon, then his head lolled and his hand fell to the floor.
"Fred offered them money. They wouldn't take it," Inge Weisser said. "They said it was tainted. Jew money. Can you believe, they called him a Jew? They beat him, kicked him. Four of them held his arms and legs and two others...two others...oh God! They dropped the cash register on him." She put her head in her hands. "It's his ribs. I think one has punctured a lung."
"A Jew they called me!" Friedrich Weisser wheezed and then caught his breath. "Me! A Jew!"
"If I had only been here," Inge Weisser told Sol. "I would have told them the truth, that they had the wrong--"
As if realizing what she was saying, and to whom, Frau Weisser covered her mouth with her hand. She is determined to blame this on us, Sol thought angrily as two burly men carrying a makeshift stretcher shouldered their way into the shop.
"I've been here before," one of them said, glancing around. "People like these never learn." He shook his head. "Waste of our time, if you ask me."
"What are we supposed to do? Leave the old man to die? He could be your father."
They knelt and eased Friedrich Weisser onto the stretcher. He whimpered. "Cover me with cheese and charge admission," he said through compressed lips.
His bitter humor made Sol wince. Weissenberg, the Weimar-Berlin healer considered by many to be a saint, had claimed he could resurrect the recent dead by applying cheese curds to a body. When cheese and corpse began to stink and the police stepped in, he ranted that his impending miracle had been circumvented by police interference.
"Anyone else hurt?" Sol asked Frau Weisser.
She shook her head. "Your mother was here when they came, but she's safe."
"Mama? Where is she!"
"At the apartment. She got away." There was a biting edge to Inge's voice. "Left my Friedrich to those animals!"
"I'll go and find her," Miriam said softly, touching Sol's arm as if to quiet his nerves.
Sol followed the stretcher out the door. Inge clung to her husband's hand.
"I'm sorry, Freddie. You said we should insist they send her away, but I wouldn't listen," she said. "That Miriam and her cabaret dancing! First we lost Erich because of her, now they came to finish what they started at the nightclub on Christmas Eve!"
"Did they mention me, Frau Weisser?" Miriam's voice was tight.
After a moment's hesitation, Inge Weisser shook her head. "Not exactly, but...but you may be sure they were after you!"
Miriam's shoulders sagged, and she looked very pale.
"Please, Frau Weisser," Sol said. "I know how upset you are, but watch what you're saying."
"I am watching! I'm watching my Friedrich here! Where were you when the Brownshirts arrived? Out on your nightly stroll!"
Sol leaned over Friedrich. "I'll find a way to get in touch with Erich--"
"No!" Herr Weisser's voice was amazingly strong. "I don't want to see him." He stopped and closed his eyes before he went on. "He did not come. Not even for Christmas...or for his birthday."
Sol patted the man's meaty hand. "I must check on Mama, then I'll come to the infirmary. You'll be all right."
"He'll be fine. We'll all be fine, won't we Solomon-the-Wise! Especially your papa over there!" Frau Weisser spat on the street. "My Friedrich might die, but Jacob Freund will be fine!"
Solomon looked sadly at the woman he had known most of his life, realizing he did not know her at all.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Miriam put her arms around Sol's waist and her cheek against his back. She leaned against him for a moment, warming him, then took his hand and led him to the apartment like a child.
They found his parents and sister in the library. His mother stood in the corner, body pressed against the wall as if only it stood between her and collapse. Her left cheek was badly bruised. Recha, dressed in a white pleated floor-length gown, sat with her head tilted against the rocker back, staring at the ceiling. Her father stood behind the chair, gripping its scroll tops and staring blankly out th
e window toward the store front.
"Thank God you're all right, Mama," Solomon said.
"They called me a whore, Sol. Me! A whore!" His mother twisted a blond curl around and around her finger. Her voice was soft. Toneless. She was not crying. "They said any Gentile who was in partnership with Jews certainly copulated with them. As God is my witness, I didn't deny our--Him--but I didn't argue with them either. I wanted to live, Solly. For you and Papa and Recha."
"Anti-Semitic garbage talk." Jacob's chin was stubbornly lifted, his voice stronger than Solomon had heard it in years.
"They thought I was Frau Weisser and that Friedrich was Jacob. One of them hit me, then they told me to get out." She was twisting her hair with both hands now.
"I just sat here," Jacob said. "What kind of man would do that while his wife and best friend--"
"I'll have it cut." Ella Freund pulled her curls down in front of her eyes. "And dyed. What do you think, Sol? Recha? Miri? How would I look with black hair?" She posed like a little girl pleading forgiveness for some silly infraction of family rules.
Recha rose from the rocking chair and faced her mother. "You will look beautiful, Mutti," she said quietly.
"She's right," Miriam added. Hoping her voice had not betrayed her concern, she kissed Ella Freund's cheek. The woman smiled, her face strangely calm. She had the look of a piece of fragile porcelain, as if she could shatter from the slightest touch.
Sol looked gratefully at Miriam. She could see her own fear mirrored in his face.
"I sat and rocked!" Jacob lashed out at the chair with his foot. In his near-blindness he missed and kicked again, knocking the chair on its side. Kicking at it a third time, he splintered two spindles.
Recha put her arms around him. He twisted, then allowed his body to slacken. "They'll be back," he said. "What then? Shall I sit and smile while they rape my wife and daughter and plunder my shop whenever they choose? Or should I sell them pencils so they can write their names on our souls."
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