Philip Kerr - If the Dead Rise Not

“And I thought you had to be a Nazi to be that cynical,” she said.

I think she meant it as a joke, but it didn’t feel good hearing her say it. At the same time, I knew of course that she was right. I was a cynic. In my defense I might have told her I was an ex-cop and that being a cop is to know but one truth, which is that everything you’re told is a lie, but that wouldn’t have sounded good, either. She was right, and it was no good brushing it off with another cynical remark about how the Nazis probably put something in the water, like bromide, that made all of us Germans believe the worst about everyone. I was a cynic. Who wasn’t that lived in Germany?

Not that I could have believed anything bad about Noreen Charalambides. And I certainly didn’t want her to think anything bad about me. There wasn’t a dog muzzle handy, so I folded one lip under another to keep my mouth under control for a while, and then pushed the throttle forward. It’s one thing biting your enemies. It’s quite another when it looks like you might bite your friends. To say nothing of the woman you are falling for.

WE RETURNED THE BOAT and got back into the car. We drove east, into Berlin, along streets full of silent people who probably wanted nothing to do with one another. It had never been a particularly friendly city. Berliners are not known for their great hospitality. But now it was like the town of Hamelin after the children had left. We still had the rats, of course.

Respectable men in well-brushed felt hats and cake-box collars were scurrying home after yet another day spent trying, respectably, to ignore the uniformed and licensed louts who persisted in resting their dirty boots on the country’s best furniture. Bus conductors leaned precariously off their platforms so as to avoid any possibility of conversation with their passengers. These days nobody wanted to speak his mind. They didn’t put that in Baedeker.

At the taxi rank on the corner of Leibnizstrasse, the cabbies were putting up their checkered hoods-a sure sign that the weather was getting cooler. It wasn’t yet cold enough, however, to deter the trio of SA men bravely continuing with their vigilant boycott of a Jewish-owned jewelry store next to the synagogue on Fasanenstrasse.

Germans! Defend Yourselves! Don’t Buy from Jews! Buy Only from German Shops!

With their brown leather boots, brown leather cross belts, and brown leather faces, and lit up by the green neon of the Kurfürstendamm, the three Nazis looked prehistoric, reptilian, dangerous, like a bask of hungry crocodiles that had escaped from the aquarium in the Zoological Gardens.

I felt vaguely cold-blooded myself. Like I needed a drink.

“Are you sulking?” she asked.

“Sulking?”

“As in silent protest.”

“It’s the only kind that’s safe these days. Anyway, it’s nothing a drink can’t fix.”

“I could use a drink myself.”

“Only not at the Adlon, eh? Someone will ask me to do something if we go there.” As we neared the junction with Joachimstaler Strasse, I pointed. “There. The Cockatoo Bar.”

“Is that one of your regular haunts, Gunther?”

“No, but it’s someone else’s. Someone you should speak to for your article.”

“Oh? Who?”

“Gypsy Trollmann.”

“That’s right, I remember. The Turk said he’s the doorman at the Cockatoo, didn’t he? And he’s the one who fought Erich Seelig.”

“The Turk didn’t sound like he was one hundred percent positive that Seelig is our Fritz. So perhaps Trollmann can confirm it. When you spend time in the ring with a fellow who’s trying to hit you, you probably get to know his face pretty well.”

“Is he really a Gypsy, or is he just a Gypsy the way Solly Mayer is a Turk?”

“Unfortunately for Trollmann, he is the real thing. You see, it’s not just the Jews the Nazis don’t like. It’s Gypsies, too. And pansies. And Jehovah’s Witnesses. And communists, of course, we mustn’t forget the Reds. So far the Reds have had it toughest of all. I mean, I haven’t yet heard of anyone who’s been executed for being Jewish.”

I thought about repeating Otto Trettin’s story about the falling ax at Plötzensee and rejected the idea. Since I was already going to have to tell her about Gypsy Trollmann, I figured one sad story was all she could handle that evening. Stories certainly didn’t come any sadder than Gypsy Trollmann’s.

WE WERE EARLIER than the main crowd at the Cockatoo, and this meant that “Rukelie,” as Trollmann was known to those working at the club, hadn’t yet arrived. No one causes trouble at seven o’clock in the evening. Not even me.

Some parts of the Cockatoo were done up to look like a bar in French Polynesia, but for the most part it was velvet bucket chairs, flock wallpaper, and red lights, like any other place in Berlin. The blue-and-gold bar was said to be the longest in the city, but clearly only by those who didn’t own a measuring tape or thought that it was a long way to Tipperary. The ceiling looked as if it had been iced like a wedding cake. There were a dull cabaret, a dance floor, and a small orchestra that managed to dance around the Nazi disapproval of decadent music by playing jazz as if it had been invented not by black men, but by a church organist from Brandenburg. With nude dancing girls now strictly forbidden in all clubs, the Cockatoo’s gimmick was to have a parrot perched on every table. This only served to remind everyone of another great advantage of having dancing girls: they didn’t shit on your dinner plate. Not unless they were Anita Berber, anyway.

While I drank schnapps, Mrs. Charalambides sipped martinis like a geisha drinking tea and with as little obvious effect, and I quickly formed the impression that it wasn’t just a talent for writing she shared with her husband. The woman managed her drink the way the gods could handle their daily dose of ambrosia.

“So, tell me about Gypsy Trollmann,” she said, taking out her reporter’s notebook and pencil.

“Unlike the Turk, who’s no more Turkish than I am, Trollmann is a real Gypsy. A Sinti. That’s like a subset of Roma, only don’t ask me to explain how, because I’m not Bruno Malinowski. When we were still a republic, the papers all made quite a thing out of Trollmann being a gyppo, and because he was also good-looking, not to mention an excellent fighter, it wasn’t long before he was doing great. Promoters couldn’t get enough of the kid.” I shrugged. “I don’t suppose he’s older than about twenty-seven even now. Anyway, by the middle of last year he was ready for a shot at the German light heavyweight title, and there being no other obvious candidates, he was matched against Adolf Witt for the vacant belt, here in Berlin.

“Of course, the Nazis were hoping that Aryan superiority would win out and that Witt would beat his racially inferior opponent to a pulp. That was one of the reasons they let him fight in the first place. Not that this stopped them from trying to fix the judges, of course, only they hadn’t counted on the crowd, who were so impressed by Trollmann’s heart and completely dominant display that there was a riot when the judges gave the fight to Witt, and the authorities were obliged to declare Trollmann the winner, after all. The kid wept for joy. Unfortunately, his happiness was short-lived.

“Six days later the German Boxing Federation stripped the kid of the title and his license on the grounds that his style of hit-and-run boxing, and his ‘unmanly’ tears, made him unfit to hold the belt.”

By now her neat shorthand covered several pages of her notebook. She sipped her drink and shook her head. “They took it off him because he cried?”

“It gets worse,” I said. “This is a very German story. As you might expect, the kid gets death threats. Poison-pen letters. Shit in his mailbox. You name it. His wife and kids are intimidated. It gets so bad he makes her ask him for a divorce and change her name so that she and the kids can live in peace. Because Trollmann’s not beaten yet. He still thinks he can box his way out of trouble. Reluctantly, the German federation gives him a license to fight again on two conditions: One is that he gives up the hit-and-run style that made him such a great fighter-I mean he was fast, no one could lay a glove on him. And the other condition was that his first fight would be against a much heavier opponent, Gustav Eder.”