Philip Kerr - If the Dead Rise Not

“I see.”

“Sadly, you don’t. At least not yet. But I think you will. In fact, I’m certain of it. Let me explain. According to my boss, Assistant Commissioner Volk, this is how it’s going to work: A person will be classified as German only if all four of his grandparents were of German blood. A person will be officially classified as Jewish if he is descended from three or four Jewish grandparents.”

“And if that person has just one Jewish grandparent?” I asked.

“Then that person will be classified as being of mixed blood. A crossbreed.”

“And what will all of that mean, Otto? In practical terms.”

“Jews will be stripped of German citizenship and forbidden to marry or have sexual relations with pure Germans. Employment in any public capacity will be completely forbidden, and property ownership restricted. Crossbreeds will be obliged to apply to the Leader himself for reclassification or Aryanization.”

“Jesus Christ.”

Otto Schuchardt smiled. “Oh, I very much doubt that he’d be in with any sort of a chance for reclassification. Not unless you could prove his heavenly father was a German.”

I sucked the smoke from my cigarette as if it were mother’s milk, and then stubbed it out in a nipple-sized foil ashtray. There was probably a compound, jigsaw-puzzle word-assembled from odd bits of German-to describe the way I was feeling, only I hadn’t yet figured one out. But I was pretty sure it was going to involve words like “horror” and “astonishment” and “kick” and “stomach.” I didn’t know the half of it. Not yet.

“I appreciate your candor,” I said.

Once again his face took on a look of pained amusement. “No, you don’t. But I think you’re about to appreciate it.”

He opened his desk drawer and took out an oversized beige file. Pasted on the top left corner of the cover was a white label containing the name of the subject of the file and the name of the agency and department responsible for maintaining the file. The name on the file was mine.

“This is your police personnel file. All police have one. And all ex-policemen, such as yourself.” Schuchardt opened the file and removed the first page. “The index sheet. Every item added to the file is given a number on this sheet of paper. Let’s see. Yes. Item twenty-three.” He turned the pages of the file until he found another sheet of paper, and then handed it to me.

It was an anonymous letter denouncing me as someone with a Jewish grandparent. The handwriting seemed vaguely familiar, but I hardly felt up to the task of trying to guess the author’s identity in front of Otto Schuchardt. “There seems to be little point in me denying this,” I said, handing it back.

“On the contrary,” he said, “there’s every point in the world.” He struck a match, put the flame to the letter, and let it drop into the wastepaper bin. “Like I said before, I don’t forget my friends.” Then he took out his fountain pen, unscrewed the top, and wrote in the “Remarks” section of the index sheet. “No further action possible,” he said as he wrote. “All the same, it might be best if you were to try and fix this.”

“It seems a bit late now,” I said. “My grandmother has been dead for twenty years.”

“As someone of second-grade mixed race,” he said, ignoring my facetiousness, “you may well find, in the future, that certain restrictions are imposed on you. For example, if you were to try and start up a business, you could be required, under the new laws, to make a racial declaration.”

“Matter of fact, I’d been thinking of starting up as a private investigator. Assuming I can raise the money. Being the house detective at the Adlon is kind of slow after working Homicide at the Alex.”

“In which case you would be well advised to make your one Jewish grandparent disappear from the official record. Believe me, you wouldn’t be the first one to do this. There are many more crossbreeds around than you might think. In the government there are at least three that I know of.”

“It’s a crazy, mixed-up world we live in, for sure.” I took out my cigarettes, put one in my mouth, thought better of it, and returned it to the pack. “Exactly how would you go about doing something like that? Making a grandparent disappear.”

“Frankly, Bernie, I wouldn’t know. But you could do worse than speak to Otto Trettin, at the Alex.”

“Trettin? How can he help?”

“Otto is a very resourceful man. Very well connected. You know that he took over Liebermann von Sonnenberg’s department at the Alex when Erich became the new head of KRIPO.”

“Which was Counterfeiting and Forgery,” I said. “I’m beginning to understand. Yes, Otto was always a very enterprising sort of fellow.”

“You didn’t hear it from me.”

I stood up. “I was never even here.”

We shook hands. “Tell your Jewish friend what I said, Bernie. To get out now, while the going’s good. Germany ’s for the Germans now.” Then he raised his right arm and added an almost rueful “Heil Hitler” that was a mixture of conviction and, perhaps, habit.

Anywhere else I might have ignored it. But not at Gestapo House. Also I was grateful to him. Not just for my own sake but for Frieda’s, too. And I didn’t want him to think me churlish. So I returned his Hitler greeting, which made twice in one day I’d had to do it. At this rate I was well on my way to becoming a thoroughgoing Nazi bastard before the week was out. Three-quarters of me, anyway.

Schuchardt walked me downstairs, where several policemen were now loitering excitedly in the hall. He stopped and spoke to one as we went to the front door.

“What’s all the commotion?” I asked when Schuchardt caught up with me again.

“A cop’s been found dead in the Kaiser Hotel,” he said.

“That’s too bad,” I said, trying to keep in check the sudden wave of nausea I was feeling. “What happened?”

“No one saw anything. But the hospital said it looks like he might have suffered some kind of blow to his stomach.”

FRIEDA’S DEPARTURE FOR HAMBURG seemed to herald an exodus of Jews from the Adlon. Max Prenn, the hotel’s chief reception clerk and a cousin of the country’s best tennis player, Daniel Prenn, announced that he was following his relative out of Germany in the wake of the latter’s expulsion from the German LTA, and said that he was going to live in England. Then Isaac somebody-or-other, one of the musicians in the hotel orchestra, went to work at the Ritz, in Paris. Finally there was the departure of Ilse Szrajbman, a stenographer who used to do typing and secretarial work for hotel guests: she went back to her hometown of Danzig, which was either a city in Poland or a free city in old Prussia, depending on how you looked at it.

I preferred not to look at it, the way I tried not to look at a lot of things in the autumn of 1934. Danzig was just another reason to have one of those Treaty of Versailles arguments about the Rhineland and the Saarland and Alsace-Lorraine and our African colonies and the size of our military forces. To that extent, anyway, I was much less of a typical German than the three-quarters that were to be allowed to me in the new Germany.

The hotel business leader-to give Georg Behlert, the Adlon’s manager, his proper title-took businessmen and their capacity to do business in the Adlon very seriously; and the fact that one of the hotel’s most important and highest-spending guests, an American in suite 114 named Max Reles, had come to rely on Ilse Szrajbman, meant that it was her departure, among all the Jewish departures from Adlon, that disturbed Behlert the most.

“The convenience and satisfaction of the guests at the Adlon always come first,” he said in a tone that implied he thought this might be news to me.