“Herr Behlert told me what happened when you went to the Alex,” said Hedda. “About that poor Jewish man and how the police are refusing to investigate his death. Because of his race.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“Apparently you thought he might have been a boxer.”
“Mmm-hmm.” Neither of them was smoking. Not yet. Perhaps they hoped to make me light-headed. The Turkish cigarette in my mouth was strong enough, but I had the feeling I was going to need more than one to go along with whatever it was they wanted from me.
Noreen Charalambides said, “I was thinking that the dead man’s story might be the basis of an interesting article in my newspaper. In the same way I wrote about that lynching in Georgia. It occurred to me that the dead man might have been murdered by the Nazis because he was Jewish. It also occurred to me that there might be an important sports angle that could tie his story in with the Olympics. Did you know that the German Boxing Federation was the first German sports organization to exclude Jews?”
“It doesn’t surprise me. Boxing’s always been an important sport to the Nazis.”
“Oh? I didn’t know that.”
“Sure. The SA has been punching people in the face since before 1925. Those beer-hall brawlers always liked a good fight. Especially after Schmeling became world champion. Of course, when he went and lost the title to Max Baer, that didn’t exactly do the cause of Jewish boxers in Germany any favors.”
Mrs. Charalambides looked at me blankly. I guessed that her remark about the German Boxing Federation had probably emptied the spit bucket of what she knew about the sweet science.
“Max Baer is half Jewish,” I explained.
“Oh, I see. Herr Gunther, I’m sure you must have already considered the possibility that the dead man—let’s call him Fritz—that Fritz was a member of a gym or a sporting association and was expelled because he was Jewish. Who knows what happened after that?”
I hadn’t considered the possibility at all. I’d been too busy thinking about what might happen to me. But now that I did, what she said made some sense. Still, I wasn’t about to admit that. Not yet. Not while these two wanted something from me.
“I was wondering,” said Mrs. Charalambides. “I was wondering if you might care to help me find out some more about Fritz. Kind of like a private investigator. I speak pretty good German, as you can see, but I don’t know my way around this city. Berlin is a bit of a mystery to me.”
I shrugged. “If all the world is a stage, then most of Berlin is just beer and sausage.”
“And the mustard? That’s my problem. I’m afraid if I go around asking questions on my own, I’ll run into a large dollop of Gestapo and get myself kicked out of Germany.”
“There is that possibility.”
“You see, I also plan to interview someone on the German Olympic Organizing Committee. Von Tschammer und Osten, Diem, or possibly Lewald. Did you know he’s a Jew? I wouldn’t like them to find out what I’m about until it’s too late for them to stop me.” She paused. “Naturally, I’d pay you. A fee for helping me.”
I was about to remind them that I already had a job when Hedda Adlon took over the sales pitch.
“I’ll clear it with my husband and with Herr Behlert,” she said. “Herr Muller can cover for you.”
“He resigned,” I said. “But there’s a fellow in the juvenile section at the Alex who can probably use the overtime. Name of Stahlecker. I’ve been meaning to give him a call.”
“Please do.” Hedda nodded. “I’d count it as a personal favor, Herr Gunther,” she said. “I don’t want Mrs. Charalambides to come to any harm, and it seems to me that having you alongside her is the best way of ensuring her safety.”
I toyed with the idea of suggesting her safety might be better enhanced by forgetting the whole idea; but the prospect of spending time with Noreen Charalambides was not an unattractive one. I’d seen comet tails that were less attractive.
“She’s determined to do this, regardless of what you decide,” added Hedda, reading half of my mind. “So don’t waste your breath, Herr Gunther. I’ve already tried to dissuade her. But she’s always been a stubborn woman.”
Mrs. Charalambides smiled.
“You can borrow my car, of course.”
It was clear they had the whole thing worked out between them and all I had to do was go along with it. I wanted to ask about the fee, but neither of them seemed inclined to return to the subject. That’s the thing about people with money. It’s only the absence of money that ever makes it seem relevant. Like having a sable coat. The sable probably paid no attention to it until the day it wasn’t there.
“Of course. I’d be delighted to help in any way I can, Frau Adlon. If that’s what you want.”
I kept my eyes on my employer while I said this. I didn’t want Hedda thinking that my delight in her friend’s glamorous company might be anything other than rhetorical. Not when her friend was so very beautiful. Not when my own excitement at the proximity of her person seemed to me so very obvious. I felt like a porcupine in a room full of toy balloons.
Mrs. Charalambides crossed her legs, and it was like someone striking a match. To hell with the Gestapo, I thought, it’s me, Gunther, she needs protection from. It’s me who wants to strip her naked and to stand her in front of me and then think of some extra things she can do with her sweet behind than only sitting on it. Just the idea of being alone in a car with her put me in mind of a novice father confessor in a convent populated with nuns who were ex-chorus girls. Mentally I slapped myself across the mouth a couple of times and then once more to make sure I really got the message.
This woman is not for the likes of you, Gunther, I told myself. You’re not even going to dream about her. She’s a married woman and she’s your employer’s oldest friend, and you’re going to sleep with Hermann Goering before you lay a finger on her.
Of course, as Samuel Johnson reminds us, sex is usually what happens when you’re busy resurfacing the autobahn with good intentions. Perhaps it loses something in the translation. But it was true enough in my case.
14
H
EDDA ADLON’S CAR was a Mercedes SSK—the type of car I never expected ever to drive. K stood for “short,” but with its enormous fenders and six external cylinders, the white sports car looked about as short as a castle drawbridge and was just as hard to handle. Like any other car, it had four tires and a steering wheel, but there the similarity ended. Starting the supercharged seven-liter engine was like turning the prop for Manfred von Richthofen, and only the addition of twin 7.92-millimeter machine guns could have made it any louder. The car drew attention like a spotlight in a colony of stage-struck moths. Undeniably it was exhilarating to drive the car—I gained a new admiration for Hedda’s abilities behind the wheel, to say nothing of her husband’s willingness to indulge his younger wife with expensive toys—but it was of less use for private investigation work than a pantomime horse. At least a pantomime horse would have provided two people with a sort of anonymity. And I might have appreciated the intimate practicalities of bringing up the rear behind Mrs. Charalambides.
We used the car for a day and then gave it back, and thereafter borrowed Herr Behlert’s rather more discreet W.
Berlin’s wide roads were almost as busy as the sidewalks. Trams rattled up the center, their steady clockwork progress invigilated by white-sleeved traffic policemen who prevented cars and taxis from cutting in front of them like so many potbellied linesmen in a metropolitan football match. With the traffic cops’ whistles, the car Klaxons, and the bus horns, the road system was almost as noisy as a football match, too, and the way Berliners drove, you might have believed they thought someone stood a good chance of winning. Things looked calmer inside the trams: sober-suited clerks faced men in uniform like two delegations signing a peace treaty in a French siding. But the injustices of the armistice and the Depression already seemed a long way behind us. The city’s famous air was thick with the smell of gasoline and the smell of blooms from the baskets of the many flower women, not to mention a growing self-confidence. Germans were good about themselves again; at least those of us who were properly, noticeably German. Like the eagle on the Kaiser’s helmet.
“Do you ever think of yourself as Aryan?” Mrs. Charalambides asked me. “As more German than the Jews?”
I hardly wanted to tell her about my Aryan transfusion. For one thing, I hardly knew her; for another, it seemed rather a shameful thing to tell someone who, as far as I was aware, was one hundred percent Jewish. So I shrugged and said, “A German is a man who can feel enormously proud of being a German while wearing a pair of tight leather shorts. In other words, the whole idea is ridiculous. Does that answer your question?”
She smiled. “Hedda said you had to leave the police because you were a well-known Social Democrat.”
“I don’t know about well known. If I had been well known, things would be different for me now, I guess. These days you recognize a man who was a prominent Social Democrat by the arrows on his pajamas.”
“Do you miss being a policeman?”
I shook my head.
“But you were a policeman for more than ten years. Did you always want to be a policeman?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. When I was a little boy I used to play cops and robbers on the green outside our apartment building, and I wasn’t sure which I enjoyed being most: a cop or a robber. Anyway, I told my father that when I grew up I was probably going to be a cop or a robber, and he said, ‘Why not be like most cops and do both?’ ” I grinned. “He was a respectable man, but he didn’t much like the police. No one did. I wouldn’t say we lived in a tough neighborhood, but when I was growing up we still called a story with a happy ending an alibi.”
FOR SEVERAL DAYS WE DOODLED our way across a street map of Berlin with me telling her jokes and keeping her amused while we went visiting the city’s gyms and sporting clubs, and I showed around the photograph of “Fritz” from the police file Richard Bömer had left with me. It’s true Fritz wasn’t looking his best, on account of the fact that he was dead, but no one seemed to recognize him. Maybe they didn’t at that, but it was hard to tell, given their greater interest in Mrs. Charalambides. A well-dressed, beautiful woman visiting a Berlin gym wasn’t unheard of, but it was unusual. I tried to tell her that I might get more out of the men in these places if she stayed in the car, but she wasn’t having it. Mrs. Charalambides wasn’t the kind of woman you told to do anything very much.
“If I do what you say,” she said, “how am I going to get my story?”
I might have agreed with her except for the fact that it was always the same three-word story we came upon: NO JEWS ALLOWED. I felt sorry for Mrs. Charalambides seeing that kind of thing whenever we went inside a gym. She didn’t show it, but I guessed it might be upsetting for her.
The T-gym was the last place on my list. With the benefit of hindsight it ought to have been the first.
In the heart of West Berlin, just south of the Zoological Garden Station, is the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. With its many spires of differing heights, it looks more like the castle of the Swan Knight Lohengrin than any place of religious worship. Grouped around the church were cinemas, dance halls, cabarets, restaurants, smart shops, and, at the western end of the Tauentzienstrasse, sandwiched between a cheap hotel and the Kaufhaus des Westens, was the T-gym.
I parked the car, got Mrs. Charalambides out, and then turned to gaze in the KaDeWe’s shop window. “This is a pretty good department store,” I said.
“No.”
“Oh, it is. The restaurant’s good, too.”
“I mean, no, I’m not going shopping while you go in that gym.”
“How about you go in the gym and I go shopping? There’s a mark on this tie I’m wearing.”
“Then you’d hardly be doing your job. You don’t know much about women if you think I’m not coming into the gym with you.”
“Who said I know anything about women?” I shrugged. “The one thing I know for sure about women is that they walk along the street with their arms folded. Men don’t do that. Not unless they’re queer.”
“You wouldn’t be doing your job, and I wouldn’t pay you. How about that?”
“I’m glad you mentioned that, Mrs. Charalambides. How much are you paying me? We never actually agreed on a fee.”
“Tell me what you think would be fair.”
“That’s a difficult one. I’ve not had much practice at being fair. Fair’s a word I use for what’s on a barometer or perhaps to describe a maiden who’s in distress.”
“Why don’t you think of me like that and then suggest a price.”
“Because if I ever did think of you like that, then I’d have to charge you nothing at all. I don’t recall Lohengrin asking Elsa for ten marks a day.”
“Maybe he should have done. Then he might not have left her.”
“True.”
“Well, then, ten marks a day plus expenses it shall be.”
She smiled, enough to let me know that her dentist loved her, and then took my arm. She could have taken the other one to match, and I wouldn’t have objected. Not that ten marks a day had anything to do with it. Just being near enough to smell her and get the odd snapshot of her garters when she climbed out of Behlert’s car was payment enough. We turned away from the department-store window and went along to the T-gym door.
“The place is owned by an ex-boxer called the Terrible Turk. People call him the Turk for short and because they don’t want to hurt his feelings. He hurts people who hurt his feelings. I never used to come to this place very much because it was the kind of gym that was more popular with businessmen and actors than with Berlin’s rings.”
“Rings? What are they?”
“Nothing to do with the Olympics, that’s for sure. The rings are what we Berliners call the criminal fraternities that more or less used to run this city during the Weimar Republic. There were three main rings: the Big, the Free, and the Free Alliance. All of them were officially registered as benevolent societies or sports clubs. Some of them were registered as gyms, and everyone used to pay them tribute: doormen, bootblacks, prostitutes, toilet attendants, newspaper vendors, flower sellers, you name it. All of it backed up by muscle from a gym. The rings still exist, but they themselves have to pay up now to a new gang in town. A gang with more muscle than anyone. The Nazis.”