Prague Fatale (4 page)

‘I wonder why we bother to come in at all given that the Ministry of Propaganda is now deciding what we can and what we can’t investigate. Are we really supposed to find people who look Jewish and check to see if they’re wearing the right embroidery? It’s laughable.’

‘I’m afraid that’s just how it is. Perhaps if there are any more stabbings like this one then we can devote some resources to an investigation, but for now I’d rather you left this Dutchy alone.’

‘All right, Wilhelm, if that’s the way you want it.’ I bit hard on my match. ‘But I’m beginning to understand your twenty-a-day match habit. I guess it’s easier not to scream when you’re chewing down on one of these.’

As I stood up to leave I glanced up at the picture on the wall. The Leader stared me down in triumph but, for a change, he wasn’t saying very much. If anyone needed a yellow star
it was him; and sewn just over his heart, assuming he had one; an aiming spot for a firing squad.

The Berlin city map on Lüdtke’s wall told me nothing either. When Bernhard Weiss, one of Lüdtke’s predecessors, had been in charge of Berlin Kripo, the map had been covered with little flags marking the incidents of crime in the city. Now it was empty. There was, it seemed, no crime to speak of. Another great victory for National Socialism.

‘Oh, by the way. Shouldn’t someone tell the Vranken family back in Holland that their major breadwinner stopped a train with his face?’

‘I will speak to the State Labour Service,’ said Lüdtke. ‘You can safely leave it to them.’

I sighed and rolled my head wearily on my shoulders; it felt thick and heavy, like an old medicine ball.

‘I feel reassured already.’

‘You don’t look it,’ he said. ‘What’s the matter with you, these days, Bernie? You’re a real bat in the balls, do you know that? Whenever you walk in here it’s like rain coming in at the eaves. It’s like you’ve given up.’

‘Maybe I have.’

‘Well, don’t. I’m ordering you to pull yourself together.’

I shrugged. ‘Wilhelm? If I knew how to swim I’d first untie the anvil that’s tied around my legs.’

Prussia has always been an interesting place to live in, especially if you were Jewish. Even before the Nazis, Jews were singled out for special treatment by their neighbours. Back in 1881 and 1900, the synagogues in Neustettin and Konitz – and probably several other Prussian towns, too – were burnt down. Then in 1923, when there were food riots and I was a young cop in uniform, the many Jewish shops of Scheuenviertel – which is one of Berlin’s toughest neighbourhoods – were singled out for special treatment because Jews were suspected of price-gouging or hoarding, or both, it didn’t matter: Jews were Jews and not to be trusted.

Most of the city’s synagogues were destroyed of course in November 1938. At the top of Fasanenstrasse, where I owned a small apartment, a vast but ruined synagogue remained standing and looking to all the world as if the future Roman emperor Titus had just finished teaching the city of Jerusalem a lesson. It seems that not much has changed since AD 70; certainly not in Berlin, and it could only be a matter of time before we started crucifying Jews on the streets.

I never walked past this ruin without a small sense of shame. But it was quite a while before I realized there were Jews living in my own building. For a long time I was quite unaware of their presence so close to me. Lately, however,
these Jews had become easily recognizable to anyone that had eyes to see. Despite what I’d said to Commissioner Lüdtke, you didn’t need a yellow star or a set of callipers to measure the length of someone’s nose to know who was Jewish. Denied every amenity, subject to a nine o’clock curfew, forbidden ‘luxuries’ such as fruit, tobacco or alcohol, and allowed to do their shopping only for one hour at the end of the day, when the shops were usually empty, Jews had the most miserable of lives, and you could see that in their faces. Every time I saw one I thought of a rat, only the rat had a Kripo beer-token in his coat pocket with my name and number inscribed on it. I admired their resilience. So did many other Berliners, even some Nazis.

I thought less about hating or even killing myself whenever I considered what the Jews had to put up with. To survive as a Jew in Berlin in the autumn of 1941 was to be a person of courage and strength. Even so it was hard to see the two Fridmann sisters, who occupied the flat underneath my own, surviving for much longer. One of them, Raisa, was married, with a son, Efim, but both he and Raisa’s husband, Mikhail, arrested in 1938, were still in prison. The daughter, Sarra, escaped to France in 1934 and had not been heard of since. These two sisters – the older one was Tsilia – knew I was a policeman and were rightly wary of me. We rarely ever exchanged much more than a nod or a ‘good morning’. Besides, contact between Jews and Aryans was strictly forbidden and, since the block leader would have reported this to the Gestapo, I judged it better, for their sake, to keep my distance.

After Minsk I ought not to have been so horrified at the yellow star, but I was. Maybe this new law seemed worse to me because of what I knew awaited those Jews who were
deported east, but after my conversation with Commissioner Lüdtke I resolved to do something, although it was a day or two before I figured out what this might be.

My wife had been dead for twenty years, but I still had some of her dresses and sometimes, when I’d managed to overcome the shortages and have a drink or two and I was feeling sorry for myself and, more particularly, for her, I’d get one of her old garments out of the closet and press the material to my nose and mouth and inhale her memory. For a long time after she was gone that was what I called a home life. When she’d been alive we had soap, so my memories were all pleasant ones; these days things were rather less fragrant, and if you were wise you boarded the S-Bahn holding an orange stuffed with cloves, like a medieval Pope going among the common people. Especially in summer. Even the prettiest girl smelled like a stevedore in the dog days of 1941.

At first I figured on giving the two Fridmann sisters the yellow dress so that they could use it for making yellow stars, only there was something about this I didn’t like. I suppose it made me feel complicit in the whole horrible police order. Especially since I was a policeman. So, halfway down the stairs with the yellow dress draped over my arm I went back to my flat and fetched all of the dresses that were in my closet. But even this felt inadequate and, as I handed over my wife’s remaining wardrobe to these harmless women, I quietly decided to do something more.

It isn’t exactly a page from some heroic tale as described by Winckelmann or Hölderlin, but that’s how this whole story got started: if it hadn’t been for the decision to help the Fridmann sisters I’d never have met Arianne Tauber and what happened wouldn’t have happened.

Back inside my apartment I smoked the last of my cigarettes
and contemplated putting my nose in some records at the Alex, just to see if Mikhail and Efim Fridmann were still alive. Well, that was one thing I could do, but for anyone with a purple J on their ration cards it wasn’t going to help feed them. Two women who looked as thin as the Fridmann sisters were going to need something more substantial than just some information about their loved ones.

After a while I had what I thought was a good idea and fetched a German Army bread-bag from my closet. In the bread bag was a kilo of Algerian coffee beans I’d purloined in Paris and which I’d been planning to trade for some cigarettes. I left my flat and took a tram east as far as Potsdamer Station.

It was a warm evening, not yet dark. Couples were strolling arm in arm through the Tiergarten and it seemed almost impossible that two thousand kilometres to the east the German Army was surrounding Kiev and slowly tightening its stranglehold on Leningrad. I walked up to Pariser Platz. I was on my way to the Adlon Hotel to see the maître d’ with the aim of trading the coffee for some food that I could give the two sisters.

The maître d’ at the Adlon that year was Willy Thummel, a fat Sudeten German who was always busy and so light on his toes that it made me wonder how he ever got fat in the first place. With his rosy cheeks, his easy smile and his impeccable clothes he always reminded me of Herman Göring. Without a doubt both men enjoyed their food, although the Reichsmarshal had always given me the impression that he might just have eaten me, too, if he’d been hungry enough. Willy liked his food; but he liked people more.

There were no customers in the restaurant – not yet – and Willy was checking the blackout curtains when I poked my
nose around the door. Like any good maître d’ he spotted me immediately and quickly came my way on invisible casters.

‘Bernie. You look troubled. Are you all right?’

‘What’s the point of complaining, Willy?’

‘I don’t know; the wheel that squeaks the loudest in Germany these days usually gets the most grease. What brings you here?’

‘A word in private, Willy.’

We went down a small flight of stairs to an office. Willy closed the door and poured two small glasses of sherry. I knew he was seldom away from the restaurant for longer than it took to inspect the china in the men’s room so I came straight to the point.

‘When I was in Paris I liberated some coffee,’ I said. ‘Real coffee, not the muck we get in Germany. Beans. Algerian beans. A whole kilo.’ I put the bread bag on Willy’s desk and let him inspect the contents.

For a moment he just closed his eyes and inhaled the aroma; then he groaned a groan that I’d seldom heard outside a bedroom.

‘You’ve certainly earned that drink. I’d forgotten what real coffee smells like.’

I hit my tonsils with the sherry.

‘A kilo, you say? That’s a hundred marks on the black market, last time I tried to get any. And since there isn’t any coffee to be had anywhere, it’s probably more. No wonder we invaded France. For coffee like this I’d crawl into Leningrad.’

‘They haven’t got any there, either.’ I let him refill my glass. The sherry was hardly the best but then nothing was, not even in the Adlon. Not any more. ‘I was thinking that you might like to treat some of your special guests.’

‘Yes, I might.’ He frowned. ‘But you can’t want money. Not
for something as precious as this, Bernie. Even the devil has to drink mud with powdered milk in it these days.’

He took another noseful of the aroma and shook his head. ‘So what do you want? The Adlon is at your disposal.’

‘I don’t want that much. I just want some food.’

‘You disappoint me. There’s nothing we have in our kitchens that’s worthy of coffee like this. And don’t be fooled by what’s on the menu.’ He collected a menu off the desk and handed it to me. ‘There are two meat dishes on the menu when the kitchen can actually serve only one. But we put two on for the sake of appearances. What can you do? We have a reputation to uphold.’

‘Suppose someone asks for the dish you don’t have?’ I said.

‘Impossible.’ Willy shook his head. ‘As the first customer comes through the door we cross off the second dish. It’s Hitler’s choice. Which is to say it’s no choice at all.’

He paused.

‘You want food for this coffee? What kind of food?’

‘I want food in cans.’

‘Ah.’

‘The quality isn’t important as long as it’s edible. Canned meat, canned fruit, canned milk, canned vegetables. Whatever you can find. Enough to last for a while.’

‘You know canned goods are strictly forbidden, don’t you? That’s the law. All canned goods are for the war front. If you’re stopped on the street with canned food you’d be in serious trouble. All that precious metal. They’ll think you’re going to sell it to the RAF.’

‘I know it. But I need food that can last and this is the best place to get it.’

‘You don’t look like a man who can’t get to the shops, Bernie.’

‘It isn’t for me, Willy.’

‘I thought not. In which case it’s none of my business what you want it for. But I tell you what, Commissar, for coffee like this I am ready to commit a crime against the state. Just as long as you don’t tell anyone. Now come with me. I think we have some canned goods from before the war.’

We went along to the hotel storeroom. This was as big as the lock-up underneath the Alex but easier on the ear and the nose. The door was secured with more padlocks than the German National Bank. In there he filled my bread bag with as many cans as it could carry.

‘When these cans are gone come and get some more, if you’re still at liberty. And if you’re not then please forget you ever met me.’

‘Thanks, Willy.’

‘Now I have a small favour to ask you, Bernie. Which might even be to your advantage. There’s an American journalist staying here in the hotel. One of several, as it happens. His name is Paul Dickson and he works for the Mutual Broadcasting System. He would dearly like to visit the war front but apparently such things are forbidden. Everything is forbidden now. The only way we know what’s permitted is if we do something and manage to stay out of prison.

‘Now I know you are recently returned from the front. And you notice I don’t ask what it’s like out there. In the East. Just seeing a compass these days makes me feel sick. I don’t ask because I don’t want to know. You might even say this is why I went into the hotel business: because the outside world is of no concern to me. The guests in this hotel are my world and that’s all the world I need to know. Their happiness and satisfaction is all that I care about.