Child of the Light (27 page)

"I'm sorry," the girl replied. She lowered her voice. "You know how stubborn the lesser peoples can be, Fraülein."

The waitress departed for the kitchen. With a defeated sigh, the woman sat back on the white wicker chair. Glancing toward Erich, she pushed at her auburn hair, then shook her fashionable center-parting back in place. Her gaze roamed from his eyes to his ribbons and down his shirt buttons; she recrossed her legs, pointing a slim foot in his direction, her red patent-leather shoe as covert an invitation as a lighthouse beacon. "If the Gypsy is unavailable, perhaps
he
could read my tea leaves," she said in a voice just loud enough to make certain Erich heard.

Franz took her hand and pressed it to his lips. "You are a wicked creature. Such a taste for soldiers."

The taller man leaned over and quietly said something to the woman. She stiffened. When she looked back at Erich, her eyes had narrowed.

"A well-preserved forty, I'd say," Erich whispered. "They're best about that age...no games, and they work hard at it."

"Seems your SS friend has changed her mind."

"She knows what she likes." Erich settled back confidently. "She'll come around."

Other than dogs, Sol thought, the only two things that seemed to arouse his friend were conquests and contacts. The right ones. Erich's Reichsakademie studies had been but a means to an end, like his interest in mathematics and physics--derived from recognition of his excellence, not from fascination with the subjects themselves.

"Such women excite me." Erich's voice was suddenly husky. "They know everyone who's anyone, and ultimately they talk.
 
The SA Storm Troopers can keep their barrel-chested wives and simple-minded whores. I'll stick with the cream. By the time I leave here, I'll have her key and telephone number."

"Doubtless you'll use both."

"Shsh!" Erich's brows drew together and a look of concentration entered his eyes. He set down his beer and turned toward the graveled path that serpentined through the woods. "Did you hear that?"

"Hear what?"

"Them! Him! I told you he'd come."

Sol listened for the crunch of boots on gravel. He could hear nothing, but then Erich frequently sensed sounds and movement before others did. After his Freikorps unit became part of the Hitler Youth, his superior woodsman skills had earned him a two-week intensive camp in the Black Forest. He was an excellent tracker, as good and sometimes even better than the dogs he worked with so closely and loved so much; they too had senses beyond human ken.

Erich gripped Sol's wrist. "I've never seen him up close before. My God, this is a day, Solomon!"

Solomon. These days it was always "Solomon," as if Erich were deliberate distancing himself from the old days. Just as Herr Weisser had become "sir" to Erich ever since their big blow-up after Rathenau's murder. No hint of disrespect, only a coldness, as if Erich were no longer an integral part of the Weisser household or of the cigar shop, with its Jewish co-owners. Yet he insisted that he had come to hate the Hitler Youth and was bent on moving up in the Party proper precisely
for
the sake of family and friends.

There was a missing puzzle piece somewhere, Sol thought. He could feel his friend's sincerity when he said things like that. And yet--

"Can you hear him? I told you he'd come!"

Jittery as a first-day kindergartner, Erich smoothed his hair, straightened his tie, picked lint from his lapels.

Sol saw the SS man sit up even straighter than before and turn his head toward the trees. Now Sol heard voices, one resonating louder than the rest, demanding attention with the deep throaty insistence of a cello. He listened, torn between curiosity--he had never seen the Chancellor at close range like this--and the strong urge to run.

Sol watched Hitler and three paunchy Storm Troopers saunter into the open. A white terrier pranced at the Chancellor's side. While Achilles simply looked from the terrier to Hitler and lifted her brows with lazy disdain, Taurus emitted a low growl. The little dog immediately cowered behind its master's legs. Almost imperceptibly, Hitler glanced down. He shifted his gaze to the tables and looked around with the air of a man who had arrived at a popular restaurant to find his regularly reserved table taken. Then he stared over the heads of the café customers, out across the lake, as though absorbed in a vision only he could discern.

"Führer,
wir folgen Dir!"
The woman, Helga, shouted words lifted from a popular election poster: "Führer. We follow you!"

The Chancellor bowed slightly to acknowledge her adoration.

"Mitt Gottes Willen,"
Erich added softly. Rising to his feet, he clicked his heels and saluted Helga's small compact hero. "With God's will."

Hitler and his entourage lifted their arms in an answering stiff-armed salute, which induced most of the customers to shout
"Heil!"
and raise their arms in return.

The Chancellor was the last to lower his arm. Rumor had it that he took special pride in maintaining the salute for lengthy periods in front of female admirers, as if doing so proved his virility. He had apparently issued a standing challenge to any Storm Trooper who believed he could hold the salute longer than his Führer.

Grateful to the few who merely gestured in desultory fashion, Sol kept his arm lowered. Hitler looked his way. Fortunately, the Chancellor's attention was not on him, but on Erich's dogs. After looking with disgust at Achilles, Hitler fixed his gaze on Taurus.

"A beautiful dog. A fine, proud bearing. Good lineage?" He moved toward their table.

"The best, mein Führer," Erich replied. "Descended from the German grand champion."

"In animals, as in people, breeding is everything." Hitler's gaze roamed the audience. When he was sure he had their attention, he lifted his finger like a schoolmaster and said, "Genetic purity creates strength of character." As if it were being scolded, the terrier backed under the nearest table. "Your animal's name?"

"Achilles. And this--"

"I was not referring to the old one, Herr Oberleutnant."

"--is Taurus. Achilles' offspring."

Sol saw anger flare in Erich's eyes.

"Taurus!" Hitler patted Taurus on the head; she did not respond to the display of affection. "Born in May?"

"The fourteenth."

"And your name?"

"Weisser." Again Erich lifted himself into military bearing. An odd expression crossed his features. "Erich Alois Weisser. I had my name legally changed to honor your father."

The bastard doesn't miss a move, Sol thought, stunned by his friend's audacity. There was a certain appeal in Erich's lying to someone who told so many lies, but why this particular lie? Why work this hard at impressing a man he purported to despise?

What had happened to Erich's unwillingness to compromise that had caused them so much pain when they were boys?

He had finagled his way into the Reichsakademie despite his hand and come back from his training camp in the Black Forest full of tales of the people he had met there--men in counter-espionage whose mere hints about the training center in Oranienburg had been enough to convince him not to ask too many questions. He was, he had told Sol many times, thankful to be in the security division, where he could acquire power and correct abuses without inflicting pain. As for his being taken with the Nazi Party, he insisted he saw its potential for bringing Germany out of the
De
pression and, like everyone else, desperately wanted to see an end to that, as well as to
re
pression. Recently, he had managed to get a promotion and to maneuver his Abwehr canine unit into headquarters security.
I'm not guarding Goebbels, I've penned him,
he had said when the orders came through.
I intend to use him before he uses us
.

To Sol it sounded too easy; all too terribly familiar.

"Weisser." The Führer mulled the word like a fine cognac. "A good German name. A good German dog. I shall remember you."

"Maybe I was not born too late after all," Erich said, as the Chancellor patted him on the shoulder and stepped away. He looked as if he'd been touched by a god and rendered immortal.

Examining the newly appointed Chancellor as objectively as he could, Sol tried to see what it was about him that commanded such worship. He looked nothing if not ordinary in his oft-photographed, belted trench coat: a nose too large for his face; eyes, blue and clear and seemingly without guile or, more accurately, without expression at all.

A Storm Trooper pulled up a chair for Hitler and the Chancellor sat down. "You must all read Schopenhauer," he told his entourage as if continuing a lecture cut short by his emergence from the woods. "Detailed knowledge of his philosophy must be required of all Germans. My dear Schopenhauer teaches us that although all forms of life are bound together by misery and misfortune, we higher forms must struggle against, and separate ourselves from, the lower." His hands fluttered as he spoke, not with the careful theatrics with which he endowed his Reichstag-balcony speeches but, Sol thought, like the wings of an injured bird. "His books, with their affirmation of the strength and triumph of the will, kept me going"--another flutter of the hands--"no, kept me
alive,
during those terrible days in the trenches, when we dined on rats and died from typhus and influenza and were up to our knees in mud."

Again he lifted the index finger. "Yes! Everyone will read Schopenhauer."

He patted the terrier and looked at the two Brownshirts. They stood at parade rest, watching the woods as though they expected trouble from that quarter. "You may leave," he told them. He waved in the direction of the woods. "Anywhere I go in our beloved Fatherland, I'm among friends."

The men looked startled but did as they were told. At once, Hitler called over the waitress.

"Bring me apple-peel tea and the Gypsy."

She looked nervously in Helga's direction before obeying.

"I told you he would be here today to consult the Gypsy," Erich said, a little sheepishly.

"It's all so..." Sol searched for the right word. "Absurd."

"Like your voices and your visions, Solomon? Perhaps you and he should both attend the Psychoanalytic Institute. I hear Freud's old students are paying people to come for analysis."

What entitles you to be a judge of sanity, you and your dog fixation, Sol thought, glaring at his friend. Saying you feel
married
to your canine unit. Sorrowing openly over Rin Tin Tin when he died in Jean Harlow's arms. If that weren't something for Freud!
 
As for his own voices and visions, and the dybbuk he had believed in so fully, that was over...the stuff of childhood. According to his readings and to the beadle, the practical necessities of adult life had stunted his development as a mystic, forcing the dybbuk into inactivity; he preferred a less complex answer.

The waitress trundled out a serving cart, its wheels creaking across the flagstones and interrupting Sol's introspection. Lemon cakes glittery with colored sugar and edged with frosting graced a large cut-glass plate; a porcelain teapot wobbled precariously, threatening to knock down two china cups nestled on a stack of cake plates and saucers.

"The Gypsy will be out momentarily, mein Führer." The waitress placed a cup and saucer and the teapot on Hitler's table.

He took hold of her hand, looked at it, and smiled. "They told me young girls were painting swastikas on their fingernails."

The girl smiled back at him proudly.

"Find out why that Gypsy bitch is keeping me waiting." He dropped eight sugar cubes into his tea with a fine waiter's precision. "Tell her I have a good mind to--"

"A good mind to what?"

The Gypsy's voice was soft and sweet, not so much lacking in respect as filled with a surprising familiarity. She wore a simple, long black knitted dress, cut low in the front to reveal enormous breasts. Her feet were bare. The scalloped edge of a red lace shawl framed a mass of curly black hair and draped her ample shoulders, lending her broad-hipped and overweight body the voluptuous innocence of a Rubens model. She looked at Hitler with dark eyes that hinted of humor, sensuality, and a depth of understanding. Sol felt drawn to her.

"He often consults her in private," Erich whispered. "When he has a specific and immediate problem, he comes here."

"How did you know he would be here today?"

"A contact---"

"Sit!" The Chancellor pointed toward the chair beside him.

The woman glanced sidelong at the chair and, with the barest hint of disdain, took Hitler's cup.

"She doesn't seem to be treating him with reverence," Sol said.

"He makes no secret of the fact that he hates Gypsies almost as much as Jews." Erich's whisper was tense.

Apparently Hitler also found the Gypsy lacking in servility. Lifting the teapot he thrust it toward her face.
"This
is indicative of the life of Adolph Hitler. Not some little teacup." He slapped the teacup from her hands, sending it crashing to the flagstones. She knelt to pick up the shards.

"My apologies, Herr Chancellor." Her tone mocked him. "By all means, swirl the leaves in the teapot."