Philip Kerr - If the Dead Rise Not

“Yes,” I said. “By the way, General, do you mind if I smoke?”

He nodded, and I tossed one onto my lip and lit it quickly, marveling at von Helldorf’s talent for quietly spoken understatement. But I wasn’t about to mistake or underestimate him. Underneath the velvet glove was, I felt certain, a substantial fist, and even if the general wasn’t prepared to hit me with it himself, I figured there were others in that absurdly large room who lacked his well-bred scruples about using violence.

“To put it bluntly, Herr Gunther, a number of people are upset that you and your Jewish lady friend, Mrs. Charalambides, have been asking a lot of awkward questions about this dead Jewish laborer, Herr Deutsch, and the unfortunate Dr. Rubusch. Very upset indeed. I’m told you actually assaulted a gang master who supplies labor for a new S-Bahn tunnel. Is that right?”

“Yes, that’s quite correct,” I said. “I did. However, in my defense I should point out that he assaulted me first. The mark on my face was given to me by him.”

“He says this only happened because you attempted to subvert his workforce.” Von Helldorf rattled the dice in the box impatiently.

“I’m not sure that ‘subvert’ is the right description of what I did, sir.”

“How would you describe it?”

“I wanted to discover how Isaac Deutsch-that Jewish laborer you mentioned-met his death and if it was, as I had supposed, the result of his being illegally employed on the Olympic site.”

“So that Mrs. Charalambides might write about it when she gets back home to America? Is that right?”

“Yes, sir.”

Von Helldorf frowned. “You puzzle me, Herr Gunther. Don’t you want your country to put on a good show in front of the rest of the world? Are you a patriotic German or not?”

“I like to think I’m as patriotic as the next man, sir. Only it strikes me that our policy with regard to the Jews is-inconsistent.”

“And you want this exposed with what aim? So that all those Jewish workers might lose their jobs? Because they will. If Mrs. Charalambides writes about this in her American newspaper, I can guarantee it.”

“No, sir, that’s not what I want. It’s just that I don’t agree with our Jewish policy in the first place.”

“That’s neither here nor there. Most people in Germany do agree with it. Even so, that policy has to be tempered with what is practical. And the fact remains that it simply isn’t feasible to get the project finished in time without employing a few Jewish workers.”

He put it so matter-of-factly, I could hardly disagree. I shrugged. “I suppose not, sir.”

“You suppose right,” he said. “You simply can’t go around making an issue about this. It’s not realistic, Herr Gunther. And I simply can’t allow it. Which is where the D-11 comes in, I’m afraid. As a guarantee that you will put an end to this habit you’ve developed of sticking your nose in where it isn’t wanted.”

It all sounded so reasonable I was actually tempted to sign his D-11, just in order to actually be able to return home and go to bed. I had to hand it to von Helldorf. He was a smooth operator. Quite possibly he had learned more from Erik Hanussen, the clairvoyant, than merely his own lucky number and color. Perhaps he had also learned how to persuade people to do something they didn’t want to do. Such as signing a document saying that you agreed to be sent to a concentration camp. Maybe that just made von Helldorf a typical Nazi. Quite a few of them-Goebbels, Goering, and Hitler, most of all-seemed to have a flair for persuading Germans to go against their own common sense.

Reflecting that it might be a while before I got to smoke again, I took a couple of hurried puffs and then stubbed out my cigarette in a smoked-glass ashtray the same color as von Helldorf’s lying eyes. And this was just enough time for me to remember the day I’d looked in on the Reichstag fire trial and how many Nazi liars I’d seen in court; and how everyone had loudly bravo’d the biggest liar of them all, Hermann Goering. Seldom had I found being a German so unattractive as on that particular day of lies. With all of that in mind, I felt obliged to tell von Helldorf to go to hell. Except that I didn’t, of course. I was rather more polite about it. There’s bravery, after all, and then there’s downright stupidity.

“I’m sorry, General, but I can’t sign that document. It’d be like a goose writing someone a Christmas card. Besides, I happen to know that all of those poor fellows who were in Oranienburg got sent on to a concentration camp in Lichtenberg.”

The general upended the dice box onto the table in front of him and inspected the result, as if it mattered. Maybe it did, and I simply didn’t know it. Maybe if he’d thrown a couple of sixes, that might have been lucky for me-he might have let me go. As it was, he’d thrown only a one and a two. He closed his eyes and sighed.

“Take him away,” he told the man in the leather coat. “We’ll see if a night in the cells can’t change your mind, Herr Gunther.”

His men picked me up by the shoulders on my suit and sleep-walked me out of von Helldorf’s office. To my surprise we went up another floor.

“A room with a view, is that it?”

“All our cells have a nice view of the Havel,” said Leather Coat. “Tomorrow, if you don’t sign that paper, we’ll give you a swimming lesson off the bow of the count’s yacht.”

“That’s all right. I can swim already.”

Leather Coat laughed. “Not off the yacht, you won’t. Not after we tie you to the anchor.”

THEY PUT ME IN A CELL and locked the door. A lock on the wrong side of the door is one of the things that remind you that it’s a cell you’re in and not a hotel room. That and a few bars on the window and a stinking mattress on a damp floor. The cell had all the usual amenities, like an en-suite bucket, but it was the little things that reminded me I wasn’t staying at the Adlon. Little things like the cockroaches. Although really these were little only by the standard of the Zeppelin-sized roaches we’d encountered in the trenches. It’s said that human beings will never starve on this planet if they can learn how to eat a cockroach. But try telling that to someone who’s ever stepped on a roach or awoken in the night to find one crawling on his face.

Freud had invented a technique used in psychology called free association. Somehow I knew that if I got through this, I was forever after going to associate cockroaches with Nazis.

THEY LEFT ME ALONE for several days, which was better than a beating. Of course, this gave me plenty of time to think about Noreen and to worry that she would be worried about me. What would she think? What did anyone think when a loved one disappeared off the streets of Berlin and into a concentration camp or a police jail? The experience gave me a new understanding of what it was to be a Jew or a communist in the new Germany. But mostly I worried about myself. Did they really intend to throw me in the Havel if I refused to sign the D-11? And if I did sign it, could I trust von Helldorf not to send me to a camp straightaway?

When I wasn’t worrying about myself, I reflected on how, thanks to von Helldorf, I knew something more about the death of Isaac Deutsch than I had before. I knew that his corpse was somehow connected with the corpse of Dr. Heinrich Rubusch. So was it possible that his death in a room at the Adlon Hotel had been the result of something other than natural causes? But what? I never saw a more natural-looking corpse. The two cops who had investigated the case, Rust and Brandt, had told me that the cause of death had been a cerebral aneurysm. Had they lied? And Max Reles-what was his involvement in all of this?