Philip Kerr - If the Dead Rise Not

“Stand back, you kike bastards, I can see you,” snarled Goerz. “What do you think this is, a beauty parade? Stand back, I said. I get pushed over like last week, and none of you yids will work today, got that? Right. Listen to me, you kikes. I need just ten gangs today. Ten gangs. A hundred men, hear? You. Where’s that money you owe me? I told you not to show your face back here until you can pay me.”

“How can I pay you if I can’t work?” said a plaintive voice.

“You should have thought of that before,” said Goerz. “I don’t know how. Sell your whore of a sister or something. What do I care?”

The two disciples grabbed the man and pushed him out of Goerz’s line of sight.

“You.” Goerz was speaking to someone else now. “How much did you get for those copper pipes?”

The man he’d spoken to mumbled something back.

“Give,” Goerz snarled, and snatched some notes out of the man’s hand.

With all this business concluded at last, he started to choose men for the work gangs, and as each gang was filled, the men left unpicked began to look more and more desperate, which only seemed to delight Goerz. He was like some capricious schoolboy selecting classmates for an important game of football. As the last gang came to be filled, one man said, “I’ll give you an extra two for my shift.”

“I’ll kick in three,” the man next to him said, and was promptly rewarded with one of the tickets a disciple handed to those lucky men whom Goerz had identified as those who would work that day.

“One day left,” he said, grinning broadly. “Who wants it?”

Feigenbaum pushed his way to the front of the large crowd of men still encircling Goerz. “Please, Herr Goerz,” he said. “Give me a break. It’s been a week since I had a day. I need a day real bad. I’ve got three kids.”

“That’s the trouble with you Jews. You’re like rabbits. No wonder people hate your guts.”

Goerz looked at me. “You. Boxer.” He snatched the last ticket from the hand of his disciple and then thrust it at me. “Here’s a job.”

I felt bad, but I took the ticket all the same, avoiding Feigenbaum’s eye as I followed the rest of the men who’d been picked back down the steps to the riverbank. There were about thirty or forty steps, and they were as steep as Jacob’s ladder, which was, perhaps, the intention of the Prussian emperor William IV, whose romantic ideas of chivalry had brought that peculiar monument into being. I was almost two-thirds of the way down the steps when I caught sight of the truck that was waiting to drive Erich Goerz’s illegal workforce to the site. At the same time I heard some footsteps closing behind me. This was no angel, it was Goerz. He took a swing at me with a cosh, which missed, and like Jacob, I was obliged to wrestle with him for a moment before I lost my footing and fell down the remainder of the steps and hit my head on the stone wall.

I felt as if I had been lying on a concert-sized harp while someone had struck it hard with a sledgehammer. Every part of me seemed to vibrate wildly. For a moment I lay there, staring up at the early-morning sky with the certain knowledge that, unlike Hitler, God has a sense of humor. It was in the Psalms, after all. He who sits in the heavens shall laugh. How else was I to explain the fact that in order to claim for himself the shift given to me, Feigenbaum, a Jew, had almost certainly informed the anti-Semitic Goerz that I had been asking questions about Isaac and Joey Deutsch? He who sits in the heavens was laughing, all right. That was enough to make me split my sides. I closed my eyes in prayer to ask Him if there was something He had against Germans, but the answer was all too obvious, and opening my eyes again, I found there was no perceptible difference between having them open and having them closed, except that my eyelids now seemed like the heaviest thing in the world. So heavy, they felt like they were made of stone. Perhaps the stone over a deep, dark, cold tomb. The kind of stone that even Jacob’s angel could not have wrestled away. Forever and ever. Amen.

HEDDA ADLON ALWAYS SAID that for her to run a truly great hotel, the guests needed to be asleep for sixteen hours a day; during the other eight they should be resting quietly in the bar. That sounded just fine with me. I wanted to sleep for a long time, and preferably in Noreen’s bed. I might have done, too, except for the fact that she was trying to put out her cigarette in the small of my back. That’s what it felt like, anyway. I tried to shift away, and then something struck me hard across the head and shoulders. I opened my eyes to discover that I was sitting on a wooden floor, covered with sawdust and tied with my back to a freestanding faience stove-one of those ceramic heaters shaped like a public drinking fountain that sits in the corner of many a German living room, like some senile relation in a rocking chair. Since I was seldom ever home, the stove in my own living room was seldom lit and was therefore seldom ever warm, but even through my jacket this one felt hotter than the smokestack on a busy steam tug. I arched my back trying to minimize the point of contact with the hot ceramic and succeeded only in burning my hands; hearing my cry of pain, Erich Goerz once again set about lashing me with the dog lead. At least now I knew why he carried it. No doubt he saw himself as a sort of overseer, like that Egyptian slave driver murdered by Moses in Exodus. I wouldn’t have minded murdering Goerz myself.

When he stopped beating me, I looked up and saw that he had my identity card in his hands, and cursed myself for not leaving it back at the hotel in the pocket of my suit. Standing a few feet behind him were Goerz’s tall, cadaverous-looking driver and the square-sized man from the monument. He had a face like an unfinished piece of marble sculpture.

“Bernhard Gunther,” said Goerz. “It says here you’re a hotel employee but that you used to be a cop. What’s a hotel employee doing around here, asking questions about Isaac Deutsch?”

“Untie me and I’ll tell you.”

“Tell me and then I’ll untie you. Maybe.”

I saw no reason not to tell him the truth. No reason at all. Torture will do that to you sometimes. “One of the guests at the hotel is an American reporter,” I said. “She’s writing a newspaper article about Jews in German sports. And Isaac Deutsch in particular. She wants to bring about a U.S. boycott of the Olympiad. And she’s paying me to help her do the research.”

I grimaced and tried to ignore the heat in my back, which was a little like trying to ignore a minor imp in hell, armed with a hot pitchfork and my name on his day’s work sheet.

“That’s bullshit,” said Goerz. “It’s bullshit, because I read the newspapers, which is how I happen to know that the American Olympic Committee already voted against a boycott.” He raised the dog lead and started to beat me again.

“She’s a Jew,” I yelled through the blows. “She thinks that if she writes the truth about what’s happening in this country, to people like Isaac Deutsch, then the Amis will have to change their minds. Deutsch is the focus of her piece. How he got kicked out of his local boxing association and how he ended up working here. And how there was an accident. I don’t know what happened exactly. He drowned, didn’t he? In the S-Bahn tunnel, was it? And then someone dumped him in the canal on the other side of the city.”

Goerz stopped beating me. He looked out of breath. He swept his hair out of his eyes, straightened his tie, swung the leash around his neck, and then hung on it with both hands. “And how did you find out about him?”

“An ex-colleague, a bull at the Alex, showed me the body in the morgue and gave me the file. That’s all. I used to work Homicide, see? They’d run out of ideas on who the guy might be and figured I might offer a new perspective.”