“You Nazis are all the same.” He laughed again. “Hypocrites.”
“I’m not a Nazi. I’m a German. And a German is different from a Nazi. A German is a man who manages to overcome his worst prejudices. A Nazi is a man who turns them into laws.”
But he was too busy laughing to listen to what I was saying.
“It wasn’t my intention to amuse you, Emil.”
“Nevertheless, I am amused. It is rather amusing.”
I grabbed him by the braces and drew them tight in opposite directions so that I was half strangling him, and then shoved him hard up against the kitchen wall. Through the window, just north of Moabit, I could make out the shape of Plötzensee Prison, where recently Otto had seen the falling ax in action. It reminded me to be gentle with Emil Linthe. But not too gentle.
“Am I laughing?” I slapped him on one cheek and then the other. “Am I?”
“No,” he yelled irritably.
“Perhaps you think that file of yours really is lost, Emil. Perhaps I need to remind you what’s in it. You’re a known associate of the Hand in Hand, a very nasty little criminal ring. Also of Salomon Smolianoff, a Ukrainian counterfeiter who’s currently doing three years in the Dutch cement for forging British banknotes. You did three in the Punch for the same offense. Which is why you’ve developed a profitable little sideline forging documents. Of course, if they ever catch you forging currency again they’ll throw away the key. And they will, Emil. They will. I can guarantee it. Because if you don’t help me I’ll walk straight round to the Charlottenburg Police Praesidium and tell them about the printing press in your living room. What is it, a platen?”
I let him go. “I mean, I’m a fair man. I would offer to pay you, but what would be the point? You could probably print more in ten minutes than I could earn in a year.”
Emil Linthe grinned, sheepishly. “You know about printing presses?”
“Not really. But I know what one looks like when I see it.”
“Actually it’s a Kluge. Better than a platen. The Kluge is the best for running any type of job work, including die cutting, foil stamping, and embossing.” He lit a cigarette. “Look, I didn’t say I wouldn’t help you. Any friend of Otto’s, yes? I just said it was amusing, that’s all.”
“Not to me, Emil. Not to me.”
“Well, then you’re in luck. I happen to know what the hell I’m doing. Unlike most of the people Otto could have recommended. You say your maternal grandmother, surname—?”
“Adler.”
“Right. She was Jewish by birth? But was brought up as a Roman Catholic?”
“Yes.”
“In the parish of?”
“Neukölln.”
“I’ll have to fix it in the church registry and in the town hall. Neukölln’s good. A lot of officials there are old lefties and very easily corrupted. If it was more than two grandparents I probably couldn’t help you. But one is relatively straightforward, if you know what you’re doing. Which I do. But I’ll need birth certificates, death certificates, all you’ve got.”
I handed him an envelope from my coat pocket.
“It’s probably best I redo everything from scratch. All records fixed.”
“How much will it cost me?”
Linthe shook his head. “Like you said. In ten minutes I can print more than you can make in a year. So. We’ll call it a favor to you and Otto, all right?” He shook his head. “It’s no sweat. Adler easily becomes Kugler, or Ebner, or Fendler, or Kepler, or Muller, see?”
“Not Muller,” I said.
“It’s a good German name.”
“I don’t like it.”
“All right. And just to make things that little bit more plausible, we’ll turn your grandmother into your great-grandmother. Just put the Jew in you back a generation so that it becomes inconsequential. By the time I’ve finished, you’ll look more German than the Kaiser.”
“He was half English, wasn’t he? His grandmother was Queen Victoria.”
“True. But she was half German. And so was the Kaiser’s mother.” Linthe shook his head. “No one is ever one hundred percent anything. That’s what’s so stupid about this Aryan paragraph. We’re all of us a mixture. You, me, the Kaiser, Hitler. Hitler, most of all, I shouldn’t wonder. They say Hitler is one-quarter Jewish. What do you think of that?”
“Maybe he and I have something in common after all.”
For his sake I just hoped Hitler had a friend on the Jew Desk in the Gestapo, like I did.
13
H
EDDA ADLON HAD A FRIEND, TOO, but not the kind you find anywhere south of paradise. Her name was Mrs. Noreen Charalambides and, a couple of days before I was introduced to her, I had already committed her face and her backside and her calves and her bosom to a space in the flask of my Faustian memory previously reserved for Helen of Troy.
It was my job to keep an eye on the guests, and whenever I saw Mrs. Charalambides in and around the hotel, I kept all eight of them on her, waiting for her to brush against the silken thread that marked the outer limits of my darker, spidery world. Not that I would ever have tried to “fraternize” with a guest, if that was what you called it. That was what Hedda Adlon and Georg Behlert called it, but something as brotherly as fraternity was a very long way from what I wanted to do with Noreen Charalambides. Whatever you called it, the hotel took a dim view of that kind of thing. It did happen, of course, and several chambermaids were not above selling it for the right price. When Erich von Stroheim or Emil Jannings were staying at the hotel, the chief reception clerk was always careful to have them attended by a rather elderly chambermaid named Bella. Then again, Stroheim wasn’t that particular. He liked them young. But he liked them old, too.
It sounds ridiculous, and of course it is—love is ridiculous, that’s what makes it fun—but I suppose I was a little in love with Noreen Charalambides before I even met her. Like some schoolgirl with a Ross postcard of Max Hansen in her satchel. I looked at her the way I sometimes look at an SSK in the window of the Mercedes-Benz showroom on Potsdamer Platz: I don’t ever expect to drive that car, let alone own one, but a man can dream. While she was there, Mrs. Charalambides looked like the fastest and most beautiful car in the hotel.
She was tall, an impression enhanced by her choice of hat. The weather had cooled of late. She wore a gray Astrakhan shako that she may have bought in Moscow, her previous port of call, although she was in fact an American who lived in New York. An American who was on her way back home from some kind of literary or theatrical festival in Russia. Maybe she had bought the sable coat in Moscow, too. I’m sure the sable didn’t mind. Mrs. Charalambides looked better in it than any sable I’d ever seen.
Her hair, which she wore in a bun, was also sable-colored and, I imagined, every bit as nice to stroke. Nicer, probably, as it wasn’t likely to bite. All the same, I wouldn’t have minded being bitten by Noreen Charalambides. Any proximity to her pouting, cherry-red Fokker Albatross of a mouth would have been worth losing a fingertip or a piece of my ear. Vincent van Gogh wasn’t the only fellow who could make that kind of heady, romantic sacrificial gesture.
I took to hanging around in the entrance hall like a page boy in the hope of laying eyes on her. Even Hedda Adlon remarked on the similarity.
“I’m thinking of asking you to read Lorenz Adlon’s rulebook for page boys,” she joked.
“I read that. It’ll never sell. For one thing, there are too many rules. And for another, most of these page boys are too busy running errands to have the time to read anything longer than
War and Peace
.”
She laughed at that. Hedda Adlon usually liked my jokes. “It’s not that long,” she said.
“Try telling that to a page boy. Anyway, the jokes in
War and Peace
are better.”
“Have you read it?
War and Peace?
”
“I’ve started it several times, but after four years of war I usually declare an armistice and then sell the book down the river.”
“There’s someone who’d like to meet you. And it so happens she’s a writer.”
Naturally, I knew exactly whom Hedda was talking about. Writers, especially lady writers from New York, were thin on the ground at the Adlon that month. It probably had a lot to do with the fifteen-mark-a-night room rate. This was slightly cheaper if you didn’t have a bath, and a lot of writers don’t, but the last American writer who’d stayed at the Adlon had been Sinclair Lewis, and that was in 1930. The Depression hit everyone, of course. But no one gets depressed quite like a writer.
We went upstairs to the little apartment the Adlons kept in the hotel. I say “little,” but only by the standards of the large hunting estate they also kept in the countryside, away from Berlin. The apartment was nicely decorated—a fine example of late Wilhelmine wealth. The carpets were thick, the curtains heavy, the bronze hulking, the gilt abundant, and the silver solid; even the water in the carafe looked like it had extra lead in it.
Mrs. Charalambides was seated on a little birch-wood sofa with white cushions and a music-stand back. She was wearing a dark blue wraparound dress, a triple string of good pearls, diamond clip earrings, and immediately below her cleavage, a matching sapphire brooch that must have fallen off a maharajah’s best turban. She hardly looked like a writer—that is, unless she’d been a queen who’d given up her throne to write novels about the grand hotels of Europe. She spoke German well, which was fine with me since, for several minutes after shaking her gloved hand, I could hardly speak German myself and I was more or less obliged to let these two women talk across me like a Ping-Pong table.
“Mrs. Charalambides—”
“Noreen, please.”
“Is a playwright and journalist.”
“Freelance.”
“For the
Herald Tribune
.”
“In New York.”
“She’s just returned from Moscow, where one of her plays—”
“My only play, so far.”
“Was being produced by the famous Moscow Art Theater, after a very successful run on Broadway.”
“You should be my agent, Hedda.”
“Noreen and I were at school together. In America.”
“Hedda used to help me with my German. Still does.”
“Your German is perfect, Noreen. Don’t you agree, Herr Gunther?”
“Yes. Perfect.” But I was looking at Mrs. Charalambides’ legs. And her eyes. And her beautiful mouth. Now, that was what I called perfect.
“Anyway, her newspaper has asked her to write an article about the forthcoming Berlin Olympiad.”
“There’s been a lot of opposition in America to the idea of our taking part in these Olympics, given your government’s racial policies. The AOC president, Avery Brundage, was over here in Germany just a few weeks ago. On a fact-finding mission. To see if Jews are being discriminated against. And, incredibly, he reported back to the AOC that they were not. As a result of which the AOC has now voted, unanimously, to accept Germany’s invitation and to attend the Berlin Olympiad in 1936.”
“Any Olympiad that doesn’t include the United States,” said Hedda, “would be completely meaningless.”
“Exactly,” said Mrs. Charalambides. “Since the AOC president returned to the U.S., the boycott movement has collapsed. But my newspaper is puzzled. No, it’s astonished that Brundage could have arrived at the conclusions he did. The American ambassador, Mr. Dodd; the chief consul, Mr. Messersmith; and the vice consul, Mr. Geist, have all written to my government expressing their utter dismay at the president’s report. And reminding it of their own report, sent to the State Department last year, which highlighted the systematic exclusion of Jews from German sports clubs. Brundage—”
“He’s the president of the American Olympic Committee,” said Hedda, interrupting, redundantly.
“He’s a bigot,” said Mrs. Charalambides, becoming angrier. “And an anti-Semite. You’d have to be, to ignore what’s happening in this country. The many instances of open racial discrimination. The signs in the parks. In the public baths. The pogroms.”
“Pogroms?” I frowned. “Surely that’s an exaggeration. I haven’t heard of any pogroms. This is Berlin, not Odessa.”
“In July, four Jews were murdered by SS men, in Hirschberg.”
“Hirschberg?” I sneered. “That’s in Czechoslovakia. Or Poland. I forget which. It’s troll country. Not Germany.”
“It’s the Sudetenland,” said Mrs. Charalambides. “The people there are ethnic Germans.”
“Well, don’t tell Hitler,” I said. “Or he’ll want them back. Look, Mrs. Charalambides, I don’t agree with what’s happening in Germany. But is it really any worse than what’s happening in your own country? The signs in the parks? In the public baths? The lynchings? And I hear it’s not just Negroes who get strung up by white people. Mexicans and Italians also go carefully in certain parts of the United States. And I don’t recall anyone suggesting a boycott of the Los Angeles Games, in 1932.”
“You’re well informed, Herr Gunther,” she said. “And right, of course. As a matter of fact, I wrote an article about just such a lynching I saw in Georgia, in 1930. But I’m here and I’m Jewish, and my newspaper wants me to write about what’s happening in this country, and that’s what I intend to do.”
“Well, good for you,” I said. “I hope you can change the AOC’s mind. I’d like to see the Nazis take a blow to their prestige. Especially now that we’ve started spending money on it. And I’d love it, of course, if that Austrian clown got some egg on his face. But I fail to see what any of this has to do with me. I’m a hotel detective, not a press attaché.”
Hedda Adlon opened a silver cigarette box the size of a small mausoleum and pushed it toward me. There were English cigarettes on one side of the box and Turkish on the other. It looked like Gallipoli in there. I chose the winning side—at least in the Dardanelles—and let her light me. The cigarette, just like the service, was better than I was used to. I looked hopefully at the decanters on the sideboard, but Hedda Adlon didn’t drink much herself and probably thought I felt the same way about the stuff. Apart from that, she was doing a fine job of making me look nice. After all, she’d had plenty of practice doing it.