The One From the Other (3 page)
Read The One From the Other Online
Authors: Philip Kerr
Tags: #Mystery, #Thriller, #Suspense, #Historical
“An investigation often proves to be an expensive inconvenience,” said Flesch. “Even for a truly German business. And mistakes are sometimes made. It might be months before things returned to normal.”
I nodded, recognizing the truth in what he had said. No one turned the Gestapo down. Not without some serious consequences. My only choice was between the disastrous and the unpalatable. A very German choice. We both knew I had little alternative but to agree to what they wanted. At the same time, it left me in an awkward position, to put it mildly. After all, I already had a very strong suspicion that Franz Six was lining his pockets with Paul Begelmann’s shekels. But I had no wish to be caught up in the middle of a power struggle between the SD and the Gestapo. On the other hand, there was nothing to say that the two SD men I was accompanying to Palestine were dishonest. As a matter of course, they would surely suspect that I was a spy, and, accordingly, treat me with caution. The chances were strong that I would discover absolutely nothing. But would nothing satisfy the Gestapo? There was only one way to find out.
“All right,” I said. “But I won’t be a mouth for you people and say a lot of stuff that isn’t true. I can’t. I won’t even try. If they’re bent then I’ll tell you they’re bent and I’ll tell myself that that’s just what detectives do. Maybe I’ll lose some sleep about it and maybe I won’t. But if they are straight, that’s an end of it, see? I won’t frame someone just to give you and the other hammerheads at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse an edge. I won’t do it, not even if you and your best brass knuckles tell me I have to. You can keep your sugarloaf, too. I wouldn’t like to get a taste for it. I’ll do your dirty little job, Gerhard. But we let the cards fall where they fall. No stacked decks. Clear?”
“Clear.” Flesch stood up, buttoned his coat, and put on his hat. “Enjoy your trip, Gunther. I’ve never been to Palestine. But I’m told it’s very beautiful.”
“Maybe you should go yourself,” I said brightly. “I bet you’d love it down there. Fit right in, in no time. Everyone in Palestine has a Jewish Department.”
I left Berlin sometime during the last week of September and traveled by train through Poland to the port of Constanţa, in Romania. It was there, boarding the steamer
Romania,
that I finally met the two SD men who were also traveling to Palestine. Both were noncommissioned officers—sergeants in the SD—and both were posing as journalists working for the
Berliner Tageblatt,
a newspaper that had been Jewish-owned until 1933, when the Nazis had confiscated it.
Romania,
that I finally met the two SD men who were also traveling to Palestine. Both were noncommissioned officers—sergeants in the SD—and both were posing as journalists working for the
Berliner Tageblatt,
a newspaper that had been Jewish-owned until 1933, when the Nazis had confiscated it.
The sergeant in charge was Herbert Hagen. The other man was called Adolf Eichmann. Hagen was in his early twenties and a fresh-faced intellectual, a university graduate from an upper-class background. Eichmann was several years older and aspired to be something more than the Austrian petroleum salesman he had been before joining the Party and the SS. Both men were curious anti-Semites, being strangely fascinated with Judaism. Eichmann had the greater experience in the Jewish Department, spoke Yiddish, and spent most of the voyage reading Theodor Herzl’s book about the Jewish State, which was called
The Jewish State.
The trip had been Eichmann’s own idea and he seemed both surprised and excited that his superiors had agreed to it, having never been out of Germany and Austria before. Hagen was a more ideological Nazi who was an enthusiastic Zionist, believing, as he did, that there was “no greater enemy for the Party than the Jew”—or some such nonsense—and that “the solution of the Jewish question” could lie only in the “total de-Jewing” of Germany. I hated listening to him talk. It all sounded mad to me. Like something found in the pages of some malignant Alice in Wonderland.
The Jewish State.
The trip had been Eichmann’s own idea and he seemed both surprised and excited that his superiors had agreed to it, having never been out of Germany and Austria before. Hagen was a more ideological Nazi who was an enthusiastic Zionist, believing, as he did, that there was “no greater enemy for the Party than the Jew”—or some such nonsense—and that “the solution of the Jewish question” could lie only in the “total de-Jewing” of Germany. I hated listening to him talk. It all sounded mad to me. Like something found in the pages of some malignant Alice in Wonderland.
Both men regarded me with suspicion, as I had imagined they would, and not just because I had come from outside the SD and their peculiar department, but also because I was older than them—by almost twenty years in the case of Hagen. And jokingly they were soon referring to me as “Papi,” which I bore with good grace—at least with a better grace than Hagen, who in retaliation, and much to Eichmann’s amusement, I quickly dubbed Hiram Schwartz, after the juvenile diarist of the same name. Consequently, by the time we reached Jaffa on or about October 2, Eichmann had a greater liking for me than his younger, less experienced colleague.
Eichmann was not, however, an impressive man, and at the time, I thought he was probably the type who looked better in uniform. Indeed, I soon came to suspect that wearing a uniform had been the principal reason he had joined the SA and then the SS, for I rather doubted he would have been fit enough to have joined the regular army, if army there had been at that time. Of less than medium height, he was bow-legged and extremely thin. In his upper jaw he had two gold bridges, as well as many fillings in his long, widow’s teeth. His head was like a skull, almost exactly like the death’s head on an SS man’s cap-badge, being extremely bony with particularly hollow temples. One thing that struck me was how Jewish he looked. And it occurred to me that his antipathy for the Jews might have had something to do with this.
From the moment the
Romania
docked at Jaffa, things did not go well for the two SD men. The British must have suspected that Hagen and Eichmann were from German intelligence and, after a great deal of argument, gave them leave to come ashore for just twenty-four hours. I myself encountered no such problems, and I was quickly issued a visa allowing me to remain in Palestine for thirty days. This was ironic as I had only intended staying for four or five days at most, and caused much chagrin to Eichmann, whose plans were now in complete disarray. He railed on about this change of plan in the horse-drawn carriage that carried the three of us and our luggage from the port to the Jerusalem Hotel, on the edge of the city’s famous “German colony.”
Romania
docked at Jaffa, things did not go well for the two SD men. The British must have suspected that Hagen and Eichmann were from German intelligence and, after a great deal of argument, gave them leave to come ashore for just twenty-four hours. I myself encountered no such problems, and I was quickly issued a visa allowing me to remain in Palestine for thirty days. This was ironic as I had only intended staying for four or five days at most, and caused much chagrin to Eichmann, whose plans were now in complete disarray. He railed on about this change of plan in the horse-drawn carriage that carried the three of us and our luggage from the port to the Jerusalem Hotel, on the edge of the city’s famous “German colony.”
“Now what are we going to do?” he complained loudly. “All of our most important meetings are the day after tomorrow. By which time we’ll be back on the boat.”
I smiled to myself, enjoying his consternation. Any setback for the SD was fine by me. I was pleased if only because it relieved me of the burden of inventing some story for the Gestapo. I could hardly spy on men who had been refused visas. I even thought the Gestapo might find that amusing enough to forgive the lack of any more concrete information.
“Perhaps Papi could meet them,” said Hagen.
“Me?” I said. “Forget it, Hiram.”
“I still don’t understand how you got a visa and we didn’t,” said Eichmann.
“Because he’s helping that yid for Dr. Six, of course,” said Hagen. “The Jew probably fixed it for him.”
“Could be,” I said. “Or it could be that you boys just aren’t very good at this line of work. If you were good at it then perhaps you wouldn’t have chosen a cover story that involves you both working for a Nazi newspaper. Moreover, a Nazi newspaper that was stolen from its Jewish owners. You might have picked something a little less high profile than that, I think.” I smiled at Eichmann. “Like being a petroleum salesman, perhaps.”
Hagen got it. But Eichmann was still too upset to realize he was being teased.
“Franz Reichert,” he said. “From the German News Agency. I can telephone him in Jerusalem. I expect he will know how to get hold of Fievel Polkes. But I haven’t a clue how we’re going to get in touch with Haj Amin.” He sighed. “What are we going to do?”
I shrugged. “What would you have done now?” I asked. “Today. If you’d got your thirty-day visa after all.”
Eichmann shrugged. “I suppose we would have visited the German Freemason colony at Sarona. Gone up Mount Carmel. Looked at some Jewish farming settlements in the Jezreel Valley.”
“Then my advice is to go ahead and do exactly that,” I said. “Call Reichert. Explain the situation and then get back on the boat, tomorrow. It sails for Egypt tomorrow, right? Well, when you get there, go to the British embassy in Cairo and apply for another visa.”
“He’s right,” said Hagen. “That’s exactly what we should do.”
“We can apply again,” cried Eichmann. “Of course. We can get a visa in Cairo and then travel back here overland.”
“Just like the children of Israel,” I added.
The carriage left the narrow, dirty streets of the old town and picked up speed as we headed along a wider road, to the new town of Tel Aviv. Opposite a clock tower and several Arabian coffee-houses was the Anglo-Palestine Bank, where I was supposed to meet the manager and give him the letters of introduction from Begelmann, and from the Wassermann Bank, not to mention the camel-back trunk Begelmann had given me to take out of Germany. I had no idea what was in it, but from the weight I didn’t think it was his stamp collection. I could see no advantage in delaying my going into the bank. Not in a place like Jaffa, which seemed full of hostile-looking Arabs. (Possibly they thought we were Jews, of course. There was little liking for Jews among the local Palestinian population.) So I told the driver to stop and, with the trunk under my arm, and the letters in my pocket, I got out, leaving Eichmann and Hagen to carry on to the hotel with the rest of my luggage.
The bank manager was an Englishman named Quinton. His arms were too short for his jacket and his fair hair was so fine it was hardly there at all. He had a snub nose that was surrounded by freckles and a smile like a young bulldog. Meeting him I couldn’t help but picture Quinton’s father, paying close attention to his son’s German teacher. I suspected he would have been a good one because young Mr. Quinton spoke excellent German, with many enthusiastic inflections, as if he had been reciting Goethe’s “The Destruction of Magdeburg.”
Quinton took me into his office. There was a cricket bat on the wall and several photographs of cricket teams. A fan turned slowly on the ceiling. It was hot. Outside the office window was a fine view of the Mohammedan Cemetery and, beyond, the Mediterranean Sea. The clock on the nearby tower struck the hour, and the muezzin at the mosque on the other side of Howard Street called the faithful to prayer. I was a long way from Berlin.
He opened the envelopes with which I had been entrusted with a paper knife shaped like a little scimitar. “Is it true that Jews in Germany are not allowed to play Beethoven or Mozart?” he asked.
“They are forbidden to play music by those composers at Jewish cultural events,” I said. “But don’t ask me to justify it, Mr. Quinton. I can’t. If you ask me, the whole country has gone insane.”
“You should try living here,” he said. “Here, Jew and Arab are at each other’s throats. With us in the middle. It’s an impossible situation. The Jews hate the British for not allowing more of them to come and live in Palestine. And the Arabs hate us for allowing any Jews here at all. Right now, it’s lucky for us they hate each other more than they hate us. But one day this whole country is going to blow up in our faces, and we’ll leave and it’ll be worse than ever before. You mark my words, Herr Gunther.”
While he had been speaking, he’d been reading the letters and sorting out various sheets of paper, some of them blank but for a signature. And now he explained what he was doing:
“These are letters of accreditation,” he said. “And signature samples for some new bank accounts. One of these accounts is to be a joint account for you and Dr. Six. Is that right?”
I frowned, hardly liking the idea of sharing anything with the head of the SD’s Jewish Department. “I don’t know,” I said.
“Well, it’s from this account that you are to take the money to buy the lease on a property here in Jaffa,” he explained. “As well as your own fee and expenses. The balance will be payable to Dr. Six on presentation of a passbook that I will give to you to give to him. And his passport. Please make sure he understands that. The bank insists on the passbook holder identifying himself with a passport, if money is to be handed over. Clear?”
I nodded.
“May I see your own passport, Herr Gunther?”
I handed it over.
“The best person to help you find commercial property in Jaffa is Solomon Rabinowicz,” he said, glancing over my passport and writing down the number. “He’s a Polish Jew, but he’s quite the most resourceful fellow I think I’ve met in this infuriating country. He has an office in Montefiore Street. In Tel Aviv. That’s about half a mile from here. I’ll give you his address. Always assuming that your client won’t want premises in the Arab quarter. That would be asking for trouble.”
He handed back my passport and nodded at Mr. Begelmann’s trunk. “I take it those are your client’s valuables?” he said. “The ones he wishes to store in our vault, pending his arrival in this country.”
I nodded again.
“One of these letters contains an inventory of the property contained in that trunk,” he said. “Do you wish to check the inventory before handing it over?”
“No,” I said.
Quinton came around the desk and collected the trunk. “Christ, it’s heavy,” he said. “If you would wait here, I’ll have your own passbook prepared. May I offer you some tea? Or some lemonade, perhaps?”
“Tea,” I said. “Tea would be nice.”
My business at the bank concluded, I walked on to the hotel and found Hagen and Eichmann had already gone out. So, I had a cool bath, went to Tel Aviv, met Mr. Rabinowicz, and instructed him to find a suitable property for Paul Begelmann.
I did not see the two SD men until breakfast the next morning when, slightly the worse for wear, they came down to look for some black coffee. They had made a night of it at a club in the old town. “Too much arak,” whispered Eichmann. “It’s the local drink. A sort of aniseed-flavored grape spirit. Avoid it if you can.”
Other books
A Red Apple by Soliz, Chaundra
Night Hunter by Carol Davis Luce
Miriam's Quilt by Jennifer Beckstrand
E. W. Hornung_A J Raffles 03 by A Thief in the Night
The Desirable Duchess by Beaton, M.C.
Son of Corse (The Raven Chronicles Book 2) by KateMarie Collins
She Fell Among Thieves by Yates, Dornford
The Last Garrison (Dungeons & Dragons Novel) by Beard, Matthew
Billion Dollar Baby Bundle 2 by Simone Holloway
Parisian Promises by Cecilia Velástegui