2
I
WENT STRAIGHT INTO THE BAR, ordered a large schnapps, and hurried it down like it was the middle of January.
The Excelsior was full of cops, but the only one I recognized was the house detective, Rolf Kuhnast. Before the purge of 1933, Kuhnast had been with the Potsdam political police and might reasonably have expected to join the Gestapo except for two things: One was that it had been Kuhnast who had led the team detailed to arrest SA leader Count Helldorf in April 1932, following Hindenburg’s orders to forestall a possible Nazi coup. The other was that Helldorf was now the police president of Potsdam.
“Hey,” I said.
“Bernie Gunther. What brings the Adlon Hotel’s house detective into the Excelsior?” he asked.
“I always forget that this is a hotel. I came in to buy a train ticket.”
“You’re a funny guy, Bernie. Always were.”
“I’d be laughing myself but for all these cops. What’s going on here? I know the Excelsior’s the Gestapo’s favorite watering hole, but usually they don’t make it quite so obvious. There are guys with foreheads in here who look like they just walked out of the Neander Valley. On their knuckles.”
“We got ourselves a VIP,” explained Kuhnast. “Someone from the American Olympic Committee is staying here.”
“I thought the Kaiserhof was the official Olympic hotel.”
“It is. But this was a last-minute thing, and the Kaiserhof couldn’t put him up.”
“Then I guess the Adlon must have been full as well.”
“Take a flick at me,” said Kuhnast. “Be my guest. Those oxtails from the Gestapo have been flicking my ears all day. So some shit-smart fellow from the great Adlon Hotel coming around to straighten my tie for me is all I need.”
“I’m not taking a flick at you, Rolf. Honest. Here, why don’t you let me buy you a drink?”
“I’m surprised that you can afford it, Bernie.”
“I don’t mind getting it free. A house bull’s not doing his job unless he’s got something on the barman. Drop by the Adlon sometime and I’ll show you how philanthropic our hotel barman can be when he’s been caught with his hand in the till.”
“Otto? I don’t believe it.”
“You don’t have to, Rolf. But Frau Adlon will, and she’s not as understanding as me.” I ordered another. “Come on, have a drink. After what just happened to me, I need something to tighten my bowels.”
“What happened?”
“Never you mind. Let’s just say that beer won’t fix it.”
I tossed the schnapps after the other one.
Kuhnast shook his head. “I’d like to, Bernie. But Herr Elschner won’t like it if I’m not around to stop these Nazi bastards from stealing the ashtrays.”
These apparently indiscreet words were guided by an awareness of my own republican-minded past. But he still felt the need for caution. So he walked me out of the bar, through the entrance hall, and into the Palm Court. It was easier to speak freely when no one could hear what we were saying above the Excelsior’s orchestra. These days the weather’s the only really safe thing to talk about in Germany.
“So, the Gestapo are here to protect some Ami?” I shook my head. “I thought Hitler didn’t like Amis.”
“This particular Ami is taking a tour of Berlin to decide if we’re fit to host the Olympic Games in two years’ time.”
“There are two thousand workers to the west of Charlottenburg who are under the strong impression we’re already hosting them.”
“It seems there’s a lot of Amis that want to boycott the Olympiad on the grounds of our government’s anti-Semitism. The Ami is here on a f act-finding mission to see for himself if Germany discriminates against Jews.”
“For a blindingly obvious fact-finding mission like that, I’m surprised he bothered checking into a hotel.”
Rolf Kuhnast grinned back. “From what I’ve heard, it’s a mere formality. Right now he’s up in one of our function rooms getting a list of facts put together for him by the Ministry of Propaganda.”
“Oh, those kinds of facts. Well, sure, we wouldn’t want anyone getting the wrong idea about Hitler’s Germany, now, would we? I mean, it’s not that we have anything against the Jews. But, hey, there’s a new chosen people in town.”
It was hard to see why an American might be prepared to ignore the new regime’s anti-Jewish measures. Especially when there were so many egregious examples of it all over the city. Only a blind man could have failed to notice the grossly offensive cartoons on the front pages of the more rabidly Nazi newspapers, the David stars painted on the windows of Jewish-owned stores, and the German Only signs in the public parks—to say nothing of the real fear that was in the eyes of every Jew in the Fatherland.
“Brundage—that’s the Ami’s name—”
“He sounds German.”
“He doesn’t even speak German,” said Kuhnast. “So as long as he doesn’t actually meet any English-speaking Jews, things should work out just fine.”
I glanced around the Palm Court.
“Is there any danger that he could do that?”
“I’d be surprised if there’s a Jew within a hundred meters of this place, given who’s coming here to meet him.”
“Not the Leader.”
“No, his dark shadow.”
“The Deputy Leader’s coming to the Excelsior? I hope you cleaned the toilets.”
Suddenly the orchestra stopped what it was playing and struck up with the German national anthem, and hotel guests jumped to their feet to point their right arm toward the entrance hall. And I had no choice but to join in.
Surrounded by storm troopers and Gestapo, Rudolf Hess marched into the hotel wearing the uniform of an SA man. His face was as square as a doormat but somehow less welcoming. He was medium in height; slim with dark, wavy hair; a Transylvanian brow; werewolf eyes; and a razor-thin mouth. Returning our patriotic salutes perfunctorily, he then bounded up the stairs of the hotel two at a time. With his eager air he reminded me of an Alsatian dog let off the leash by his Austrian master to lick the hand of the man from the American Olympic Committee.
As it happened, there was a hand I had to go and lick myself. A hand that belonged to a man in the Gestapo.
3
A
S ONE OF THE HOUSE DETECTIVES at the Adlon, I was expected to keep thugs and murderers out of the hotel. But that could be difficult when the thugs and murderers were Nazi Party officials. Some of them, such as Wilhelm Frick, the minister of the interior, had even served a prison sentence. The ministry was on Unter den Linden, right around the corner from the Adlon; and Frick, a real Bavarian square head with a wart on his face and a girlfriend who happened to be the wife of some prominent Nazi architect, was in and out of the hotel a lot. Probably the girl, too.
Equally difficult for a hotel detective was the high turnover of staff, with honest, hardworking personnel who happened to be Jewish making way for people who turned out to be much less honest and hardworking but who were at least apparently more German.
Mostly I kept my nose out of these matters, but when the Adlon’s female house detective decided to leave Berlin for good, I felt obliged to try and help her.
Frieda Bamberger was more than an old friend. From time to time we were lovers of convenience, which is a nice way of saying that we liked going to bed with each other, but that this was as far as it went, since she had a semi-detached husband who lived in Hamburg. Frieda was a former Olympic fencer, but she was also a Jew, and for this reason she had been expelled from the Berlin Fencing Club in November 1933. A similar fate had befallen nearly every Jew in Germany who was a member of a gymnasium or sporting association. To be a Jew in the summer of 1934 was like some cautionary tale by the Brothers Grimm in which two abandoned children find themselves lost in a forest full of hungry wolves.
It wasn’t that Frieda believed the situation in Hamburg would be any better than in Berlin, but she hoped the discrimination she now suffered might be easier to bear with the help of her Gentile husband.
“Look here,” I told her. “I know someone in the Jewish Department of the Gestapo. A cop I used to know at the Alex. I recommended him for a promotion once, so he owes me a favor. I’ll go and speak to him and see what’s to be done.”
“You can’t change what I am, Bernie,” she said.
“Maybe not. But I might be able to change what someone else says you are.”
At that time I was living on Schlesische Strasse, in the east of the city. And on the day of my appointment with the Gestapo I’d caught the U-Bahn west to Hallesches Tor and walked north up Wilhelmstrasse. Which was how I’d run into that spot of trouble with the policeman in front of the Kaiser Hotel. From the temporary sanctuary of the Excelsior it was only a few steps to Gestapo House at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8—a building that looked less like the headquarters of the new Germany’s secret state police and more like an elegant, Wilhelmine hotel, an effect enhanced by the proximity of the old Hotel Prinz Albrecht, which now accommodated the administrative leadership of the SS. There were few people who walked up Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse unless they really had to. Especially when they had just assaulted a policeman. Perhaps for that reason I figured it was the last place anyone would think of looking for me.
With its marble balustrades, high vaulted ceilings, and a stair as wide as a railway track, Gestapo House was more like a museum than a building owned by the secret police; or perhaps like a monastery—just as long as the order of monks was one that wore black and enjoyed hurting people in order to make them confess their sins. I entered the building and approached a uniformed and not unattractive girl on the front desk, who walked me up a stair and around a corner to Department II.
Catching sight of my old acquaintance, I smiled and waved simultaneously, and a couple of women from the nearby typing pool fixed me with a look of amused surprise, as if my smile and my wave were ridiculously out of place. And of course they were. The Gestapo hadn’t existed for more than eighteen months, but it already enjoyed a fearsome reputation, and this was why I was nervous and why I was smiling and waving at Otto Schuchardt in the first place. He didn’t wave back. He didn’t smile, either. Schuchardt had never been the life and soul of the party exactly, but I was pretty sure I’d heard him laugh when we were both cops at the Alex. Then again, maybe he’d only been laughing because I was his superior, and as we now shook hands I was already telling myself I’d made a mistake and that the tough young cop I remembered was now made of the same stuff as the balustrades and the staircase outside the department door. It was like shaking hands with a deep-frozen undertaker.
Schuchardt was handsome, if you consider men with white-blond hair and pale blue eyes handsome. As a blond-haired, blue-eyed man myself, I thought he looked like a much-improved, more efficient Nazi version of me: a man-god instead of a poor Fritz with a Jewish girlfriend. Then again, I never much wanted to be a god or even to enter heaven, not when all the bad girls like Frieda were back in Weimar Berlin.
He ushered me into his little office and closed a frosted-glass door, which left the two of us alone with a little wooden desk, a whole tank corps of gray metal filing cabinets, and a nice view of the Gestapo’s back garden, where a man was carefully tending the flower beds.
“Coffee?”
“Sure.”
Schuchardt dropped a heating element into a jug of tap water. He seemed amused to see me, which is to say his hawkish face had the look of one who had eaten several sparrows for lunch.
“Well, well,” he said. “Bernie Gunther. It’s been two years, hasn’t it?”
“Must be.”
“Arthur Nebe is here, of course. He’s the assistant commissioner. And I daresay there are many others you’d recognize. Personally, I could never understand why you left KRIPO.”
“I thought it best to leave before I was pushed.”
“You’re quite wrong about that, I think. The Party much prefers pure criminalists such as yourself to a bunch of March violets who have climbed on the Party’s bandwagon for ulterior motives.” His razor-sharp nose wrinkled with displeasure. “And of course there are still a few in KRIPO who have never joined the Party. Indeed, they are respected for it. Ernst Gennat, for example.”
“I daresay you’re right.” I might have mentioned all the good cops who’d been kicked out of KRIPO in the great police purge of 1933: Kopp, Klingelhöller, Rodenberg, and many others. But I wasn’t there to have a political argument. I lit a Muratti, smoked my lungs for a second, and wondered if I dared mention what had brought me to Otto Schuchardt’s desk.
“Relax, old friend,” he said and handed me a surprisingly tasty cup of coffee. “It was you who helped me to get out of uniform and into KRIPO. I don’t forget my friends.”
“I’m glad to hear it.”
“Somehow I don’t get the feeling you’re here to denounce someone. No, I don’t see you as the type ever to do that. So what is it that I can do for you?”
“I have a friend who is a Jew,” I said. “She’s a good German. She even represented Germany at the Paris Olympiad. She’s not religious. And she’s married to a Gentile. She wants to leave Berlin. I’m hoping I can persuade her to change her mind. I wondered if there might be a way in which her Jewishness might be forgotten, or perhaps ignored. I mean, you hear of these things happening sometimes.”
“Really?”
“Well, yes, I think so.”
“I wouldn’t repeat that hearsay if I were you. No matter how true it might be. Tell me, how Jewish is your friend?”
“Like I said, in the Olympiad of—”
“No, I mean by blood. You see, that’s what really counts these days. Blood. Your friend could look like Leni Riefenstahl and be married to Julius Streicher, and none of that would matter a damn if she was of Jewish blood.”
“Her parents are both Jewish.”
“Then there’s nothing I can do to help. What’s more, my advice to you is to forget about trying to help her. You say she’s planning to leave Berlin?”