We introduced ourselves. Mrs. Charalambides flashed him a smile that could have lit up a coal mine, and then fixed him with blue eyes a Persian cat would have envied. Trollmann kept on nodding and grinning, as if we were his oldest and dearest friends. Considering the way the world had treated him until now, perhaps we were.
“To tell the truth, I do remember you, Herr Gunther. You’re a cop. Sure, I remember now.”
“Never tell the truth to a policeman, Rukelie. That’s how you get caught. It’s true, I used to be a cop. Only not anymore. These days I’m the carpet creeper at the Adlon Hotel. It seems the Nazis don’t like republican-minded cops any more than they like Gypsy fighters.”
“Hey, you got that right, Herr Gunther. Sure, I remember you now. You came to see me fight. You was with another cop. A cop who could fight a bit, right?”
“Heinrich Grund.”
“Sure, I remember him. He used to work out at the same gym as me. Right.”
“We came to see you fight Paul Vogel, at the Sportpalast, here in Berlin.”
“Vogel, yeah. I won that fight on points. He was a tough customer, was Paul Vogel.” He looked at Mrs. Charalambides and shrugged apologetically. “Looking at me now—it’s hard to believe, ma’am, I know—but I used to win a lot of fights in those days. Now they just want to use me as a punching bag. You know, put me up in front of someone for target practice. I could beat some of these fellows, too. Only they won’t let me fight my own way.” He raised his fists and went through the motions of ducking and diving on the chair. “You know?”
She nodded and laid her hand on top of his welder’s mitt.
“You’re a pretty lady, ma’am. Isn’t she pretty, Herr Gunther?”
“Thank you, Rukelie.”
“That she is,” I said.
“I used to know a lot of pretty ladies on account of how I was a good-looking guy for a fighter. Isn’t that right, Herr Gunther?”
I nodded.
“None better.”
“On account of the fact that I used to dance around so that none of these other fellows could land a glove on me. See, boxing’s more than just hitting people. It’s about not getting hit, too. But them Nazis don’t want me to do that. They don’t like my style.” He sighed, and a tear appeared in the corner of his bovine eye. “Well, it’s all over for me now as a professional fighter, I guess. I ain’t fought since March. Six defeats in a row, I figure it’s time to hang up the gloves.”
“Why don’t you leave Germany?” she asked. “If they won’t let you fight your own way.”
Trollmann shook his head. “How could I leave? My kids live here. And my ex-wife. I couldn’t leave them behind. Besides, it takes money to set up in a new place. And I can’t earn like I used to. So I work here. And sell fight tickets. Hey, you want to buy some? I got tickets for Emil Scholz against Adolf Witt at the Spichernsaele. November sixteenth. Should be a good fight.”
She bought four. After her remarks outside the T-gym, I wasn’t sure she actually wanted to see a fight, and I imagined it was her way of kindly putting some money in Trollmann’s pocket.
“Here,” she said, handing them to me. “You look after them.”
“Do you remember fighting a fellow named Seelig?” I asked Trollmann. “Erich Seelig?”
“Sure, I remember Erich. I remember all my fights. It’s all the boxing I got now. My memories. I fought Seelig in June 1932. And lost. On points, at the Brewery. Sure, I remember Seelig. How could I forget, right? He had a pretty rough time of it himself, did Erich. Just like me. On account of the fact that he’s Jewish. The Nazis took his titles away, and his license. Last I heard, he fought Helmut Hartkopp in Hamburg and won on points. In February last year.”
“What happened to him?” She offered him a cigarette, but he shook his head.
“I dunno. But he ain’t fighting in Germany no more, that’s for a hundred percent.”
I showed Trollmann the picture of Fritz and told him the circumstances of the man’s death. “Do you think perhaps this might be Erich Seelig?”
“This ain’t Seelig,” said Trollmann. “Seelig is younger than me. And younger than this guy was, for sure. Who told you this was Seelig?”
“The Turk.”
“Solly Meyer? That explains it. The Turk is blind in one eye. Detached retina. You give him a chess set and he couldn’t tell black from white. Don’t get me wrong, the Turk is an okay guy. But he don’t see so good no more.”
The place was filling up now. Trollmann waved at a girl on the opposite side of the bar; for some reason she had pieces of silver paper in her hair. All sorts of people waved at Trollmann. Despite the best efforts of the Nazis to dehumanize him, he remained a popular man. Even the parrot on our table seemed to like Trollmann and let him smooth its gray feathered breast without trying to take a piece out of his finger.
Trollmann looked at the photograph again and nodded.
“I know this guy. And it ain’t Trollmann. How’d you figure him for a fighter anyway?”
I told him about the healed fractures on the knuckles of the dead man’s little fingers and the burn mark on his chest, and he nodded sagely.
“You’re a clever man, Herr Gunther. And you were right. This guy is a pug. Name of Isaac Deutsch. A Jewish boxer, sure. You were right about that.”
“Stop it,” said Mrs. Charalambides. “You’re going to make his head swell.” But she was writing now. The pencil was moving across the page of her notebook with the sound of an urgent whisper.
Trollmann grinned but kept on talking. “Zak was in the same workers’ sports club as me. The Sparta, back in Hannover. Poor old Zak. Somewhere at home I got me a photograph of all the fighters at the Sparta. The ones who were contenders, anyway. And Zak is standing right in front of me. Poor guy. He was a nice fellow and a pretty good fighter, with a lot of heart. We was never matched, though. I wouldn’t have liked to have fought him. Not from fear, you understand, although he was plenty tough. But because he was a real nice fellow. His uncle, Joey, used to train him, and he looked like a prospect for the Olympics until he got kicked out of the federation and the Sparta.” He sighed and shook his head again. “So poor old Zak’s dead. That’s sad.”
“So he wasn’t a professional fighter?” I said.
“What’s the difference?” asked Mrs. Charalambides.
I groaned. But patiently, like he was talking to a little girl, Trollmann explained it to her. He had a good, kind way about him. Except for the memory of seeing him fight, I might have had a hard time believing he’d ever been a professional boxer.
“Zak, he wanted a medal before he turned professional,” he said. “Might have won one, too, if he’d not been Jewish. Which makes it ironic, I suppose. If ‘ironic’ means what I think it means.”
“What do you think it means?” she asked.
“Like when there’s a difference between what is supposed to happen to a man and what actually happens to him.”
“That covers it pretty well in this case,” she agreed.
“Like the fact that Zak Deutsch couldn’t box at the Olympics for Germany because he was a Jew. But he ended up being a construction worker at Pichelsberg, helping to build the new stadium. Even though he wasn’t supposed to be working there. See, only Aryan Germans are allowed to get jobs on the Olympic construction site. That’s what I heard, anyway. And that’s what I meant about it being ironic, see? Because there are lots of Jews working at the Pichelsberg site. I was going to have to work there myself before I got this job. You see, there’s so much pressure to get the stadium finished in time that they can’t afford to turn any able-bodied man away. Be he Jew or Gentile. That’s what I heard.”
“This is beginning to make some sense,” I said.
“You’ve got a strange idea of sense, Herr Gunther.” Trollmann grinned his big, toothy grin. “Me, I think it’s crazy.”
“Me, too,” murmured Mrs. Charalambides.
“What I meant was that I’m beginning to understand a few things,” I said. “But you are right, too, Rukelie. It is crazy.” I lit a cigarette. “During the war I saw a lot of stupid things. Men getting killed for no good reason. The sheer waste of life. And quite a bit of stupidity after the war, as well. But this business with the Jews and the Gypsies is just madness. How else can you explain the inexplicable?”
“I been giving this some thought,” said Trollmann. “A lot of thought. And from what I seen in the fight game, the conclusion I come to is this: Sometimes, if you want to win a contest at all costs, it helps to hate the other guy.” He shrugged. “Roma people. Jewish people. Homos and commies. The Nazis need someone to hate, that’s all.”
“I guess you’re right,” I said. “But it makes me worry if there’s another war. I worry what will happen to all these poor bastards the Nazis don’t like.”
17
M
OST OF THE WAY BACK to the Adlon, I was thinking about what we had learned. Gypsy Trollmann had promised to mail me the Sparta Club photograph, but I didn’t doubt his identification of the dead man found floating in Mühlendamm Lock or his information about Isaac Deutsch’s having been a construction worker on the Olympic Stadium site. Say one thing, do another, that was typical of the Nazis. All the same, Pichelsberg was a long way from Mühlendamm; the opposite end of the city. And nothing I had yet learned explained how Deutsch had drowned in salt water.
“You talk too much, Gunther.”
“I was thinking, Mrs. Charalambides. What you must think of us? We seem to be the only people in the world who are actively trying to live up to everyone else’s worst impression of us.”
“Please call me Noreen. Charalambides is such a long name, even in Germany.”
“I don’t know if I can do that now that you’re my employer. Ten marks a day demands a certain amount of professional courtesy.”
“You can hardly go on calling me Mrs. Charalambides if you’re going to kiss me.”
“Am I going to kiss you?”
“This morning you mentioned something about Isaac Newton. Which certainly encourages me to think you are.”
“Oh? How’s that?”
“Newton came up with three laws to describe the relationships between two bodies. I’d say he might also have come up with a fourth if he’d ever met me and you, Gunther. You’re going to kiss me, all right. There’s absolutely no doubt about it.”
“You mean there’s algebra and stuff to prove it?”
“Pages of it. Impulse, unbalanced force, equal and opposite reaction. Between us, we’ve got almost enough equations to cover a bedsheet.”
“Then I guess there’s no point in my trying to resist the laws of planetary motion, Noreen.”
“Absolutely none at all. In fact, it would be best if you gave in to the impulse right now, in case you put the whole damned universe out of joint.”
I stopped the car, pulled on the hand brake, and leaned toward her. For a moment she turned away.
“Hermann-Goering-Strasse,” she said. “Didn’t it used to be called something else?”
“Budapester Strasse.”
“That’s better. I want to remember where it was you first kissed me. I don’t want that memory to include Hermann Goering.”
She turned toward me expectantly, and I kissed her hard. Her breath was charged with cigarettes and ice-cold liquor and lipstick and a little something special from inside her pants. She tasted better than lightly salted butter on freshly baked bread. I felt her eyelashes brush my cheeks like the wings of tiny hummingbirds, and after a minute or so she began to breathe like a medium who was trying to get in touch with the spirit world. Maybe she did at that. And, keen to possess her whole body, I pushed my left hand underneath her fur coat and let it slide awhile up and down her thigh and torso, as if I’d been trying to generate static electricity. Noreen Charalambides wasn’t the only one who knew physics. There was a thud as her handbag slid off her lap and hit the floor of the car. I opened my eyes and drew away from her mouth.
“Gravity still works, then,” I said. “The way my head feels, I was beginning to wonder. I guess Newton knew a thing or two, after all.”
“He didn’t know everything. I bet he didn’t know how to kiss a girl like that.”
“That’s because he never met a girl such as you, Noreen. If he had, he might have done something useful with his life. Like this.”
I kissed her again, only this time I put my whole back into it, like I really meant what I was doing. And maybe I did. A lot of time had passed since I’d felt this way about a woman. I glanced out of the window and, seeing the name of the street, I was reminded of what I had told myself the first time I’d talked to Noreen back in Hedda Adlon’s apartment at the hotel: that Noreen was my employer’s oldest friend, and that I was going to sleep with Hermann Goering before I ever laid a finger on her. The way things were going, it looked as if the Prussian prime minister was in for a Hermann-sized surprise.
Her tongue was in my mouth now, alongside my heart and the misgivings I kept trying to swallow. I was losing control, but mostly of my left hand, which was now under her dress and making itself familiar with her garter and the cool thigh it was stretched across. Only when the hand slipped into the secret space between her thighs did she move to arrest the wrist commanding it. I let her move my hand away and then brought my fingers up to my mouth and licked them.
“This hand. I don’t know what gets into it sometimes.”
“You’re a man, Gunther. That’s what gets into it.” She took my fingers and brushed them with her lips. “I like you kissing me. You’re a good kisser. If kissing was in the Olympics, you’d be a medal prospect. But I don’t like to be hurried. I like to be walked around the ring for a while before being mounted. And don’t even think of using the whip if you want to stay in the saddle. I’m the independent sort, Gunther. When I run it’ll be because my eyes are open and because I want to. And I won’t be wearing any blinkers if and when we reach the wire. I might not be wearing anything at all.”
“Sure,” I said. “I never figured you any other way. No blinkers. Not even a tongue strap. How do you feel about me giving you an apple sometimes?”