“One night, off the coast of Ireland, I mentioned some of this to Max Reles over a game of gin rummy. He didn’t say very much. And it’s quite possible that I’m completely mistaken about this, but the very next day, this man Martin was reported missing, and it was presumed he must have fallen overboard. I believe they carried out a search, but it was for appearance’s sake, since there was no way he could have survived after several hours in the sea.
“Anyway, soon after, I formed the impression that Reles had something to do with the poor man’s disappearance. It was something he said. I can’t remember the exact words he used, but I do remember he was smiling when he said it.” Noreen shook her head. “You must think I’m crazy. I mean, this is all completely circumstantial. Which is the main reason I never mentioned this to anyone.”
“Not at all,” I said. “There’s nothing wrong with evidence that’s circumstantial. In the right circumstances, that is. What did he say?”
“He said something like, ‘It sounds very much as if your irritating little problem has been taken care of, Mrs. Charalambides.’ And then he asked me if I’d pushed him off the boat. Which he seemed to think was funny. I told him I didn’t think it was at all funny and asked him if he thought there was any chance that Mr. Martin might still be alive. To which he then replied, ‘I very much hope not.’ Well, after that, I kept away from him.”
“What exactly do you know about Max Reles?”
“Not very much. Just what he told me over cards. He said he was a businessman in that way men do when they want to give the impression that what they do isn’t very interesting. He speaks excellent German, of course. And I think some Hungarian. He told me he was on his way to Zurich, so I hardly expected to see him again. And certainly not here. I saw him again for the first time about a week ago. In the library. I had a drink with him, just to be polite. Apparently he’s been here for a while.”
“That he has.”
“You do believe me, don’t you?”
She said it in a way that made me think she might not be telling the truth. Then again, I’m just built that way. Some people like to believe in a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. I’m the type who thinks the pot of gold is being watched by four cops in a car.
“You don’t think I imagined it, do you?”
“Not at all,” I said, although I did wonder why any man would murder another for a woman who was nothing more than a partner for a game of cards. “From what you’ve told me, I think you came to a very reasonable conclusion.”
“You think I should have told the ship’s captain, don’t you? Or the police, when we got to Hamburg.”
“With no real evidence to corroborate your story, Reles would only have denied it and made you look a fool. Besides, it’s not like it would have helped the man who drowned.”
“All the same, somehow I feel responsible for what happened.” She rolled across the bed, reaching for the ashtray on the bedside table, and stabbed out the cigarette. I rolled after her and caught up only an hour or two later. It was a big bed. I started to kiss her behind, then the small of her back, and then her shoulders. I was just about to sink my fangs into her neck when I noticed the book next to the ashtray. It was the book written by Hitler.
She saw that I noticed it, and said, “I’m reading it.”
“Why?”
“It’s an important book. But reading it doesn’t make me a Nazi, any more than reading Marx makes me a communist. Although, as it happens, I do consider myself to be a communist. Does that surprise you?”
“That you think you’re a communist? No, not particularly. The best people are these days. George Bernard Shaw. Even Trotsky, I hear. I like to consider myself a Social Democrat, but since democracy no longer exists in this country, that would be naive.”
“I’m glad you’re a democrat. That it’s something that is still important to you. The fact is, I wouldn’t have slept with you if you’d been a Nazi, Gunther.”
“Like a lot of people, I might like them a bit more if it was me who was in charge and not Hitler.”
“I’m trying to get an interview with him. That’s one of the reasons I’m reading Hitler’s book. Not that I think he will agree to meet me. Most likely I’ll have to make do with seeing the sports minister. I’m meeting him tomorrow afternoon.”
“You won’t mention our friend Zak Deutsch, will you, Noreen? Or me, for that matter.”
“No, of course I won’t. Tell me something. Do you think he was murdered?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. We’ll have a much better idea after we’ve spoken to Stefan Blitz. He’s that geologist I was telling you about. I’m hoping he can shed some light on how a man can drown in salt water in the center of Berlin. You see, it’s one thing when it happens off the coast of Ireland, in the Atlantic Ocean. It’s quite another when it happens in the local canal.”
UNTIL THE SPRING OF 1934,Stefan Blitz had been a teacher of geology at Frederick William University, in Berlin. I knew him because sometimes he had helped KRIPO to identify the clay found on the shoes of murder suspects or their victims. He lived in Zehlendorf, in Berlin’s southwest, in a modern housing development called Uncle Tom’s Hut, named after a local tavern and subway shop that were themselves named after the book by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Noreen was intrigued.
“I can’t believe they called it that,” she said. “In the States, people would never have dared give it a name like that in case people thought the houses were fit only for Negroes.”
I parked the car in front of a four-story apartment building that was as big as a city block. The smooth, modern façade was very slightly curved and pockmarked with different-sized, recessed windows, none of which was on the same level. It looked like a face recovering from a dose of smallpox. There were hundreds, perhaps thousands of these Weimar-built homes in Berlin, and they were about as distinguished as packets of Persil. And yet, although they despised modernism, the Nazis had more in common with its mostly Jewish architects than they might have thought. Nazism and modernism were both products of the inhuman, and when I looked at one of those neat, standardized gray concrete buildings, it wasn’t hard to imagine a neat, standardized detachment of gray storm troopers living in one, like so many rats in a box.
It wasn’t like that inside, however—at least not inside Stefan Blitz’s apartment. In contrast to the carefully planned modernism of the exterior, his furniture was old mahogany, tattered upholstery, chipped Wilhelmine ornaments, table oilcloths, and Eiffel Towers of books, with all of the shelves given over to slices of rock.
Blitz himself was as tattered as his upholstery and, like any other Jew who was forbidden his way of making a living, he was as thin as a maquette in an artist’s garret and hardly living at all. A hospitable, kind, and generous man, he displayed character traits that made him the very opposite of the grasping bogeyman Jew so often caricatured in the Nazi press. Nevertheless, that was what he looked like: a lecher in the stews of Damascus. He offered us tea, coffee, Coca-Cola, alcohol, something to eat, a more comfortable chair, chocolates, and his last cigarettes before finally, having refused them all, we were able to come to the point of our visit.
“Is it possible that a man could drown in seawater in the center of Berlin?” I asked.
“I assume you’ve discounted the possibility of a swimming pool, otherwise you wouldn’t be here. The Admiral’s Garden baths on Alexanderplatz is a brine bath. I used to swim there myself before they stopped Jews from going there.”
“The victim is Jewish,” I said. “And so, for that reason, yes, you’re right, I think I have discounted that possibility.”
“Why, if you don’t mind my asking, is a Gentile bothering to investigate the death of a Jew in the new Germany?”
“It’s my idea,” Noreen said, and told Blitz about the Olympiad and the failed U.S. boycott and the newspaper she hoped would put that to rights, and how she herself was a Jew.
“I suppose it would be something if an American boycott were to succeed,” Blitz admitted. “Although I have my doubts. The Nazis won’t be so easy to dislodge, with or without a boycott. Now that they have power, they mean to hang on to it. The Reichstag will sink before they have another election, and, believe me, I know what I’m talking about. It was built on posts because of all the swampy spots that exist between it and the Old Museum.”
Noreen smiled her neon smile. Her glamour seemed to warm the apartment, as if someone had lit a fire in the empty grate. She lit a cigarette from a little gold case, which she pushed toward him. He took one and slid it behind his ear like a pencil.
“Could a man drown in Berlin seawater, he asks,” said Blitz. “Two hundred sixty million years ago this whole area was an ancient sea—the Zechstein Sea. Berlin itself was founded on a series of islands that appeared in a river valley during the last Ice Age. The substrata are mostly sand. And salt. A lot of salt from the Zechstein Sea. The salt formed several islands on the land surface, and quite a few deepwater groundwater chambers all over the city and the surrounding area.”
“Seawater chambers?” asked Noreen.
“Yes, yes. In my opinion, there are some places in Berlin where men should not be digging. Such a chamber might easily be ruptured, with potentially disastrous consequences.”
“Could such a place include Pichelsberg?”
“It could happen almost anywhere in Berlin,” said Blitz. “For someone in a hurry, who didn’t carry out a proper geological survey—boreholes and that kind of thing—it would not just be the old lies that the new Germany obliged him to swallow, but a considerable quantity of salt water, also.” He smiled carefully, like a man playing a card game whose rules he was still uncertain of.
“Including Pichelsberg?” I persisted.
Blitz shrugged. “Pichelsberg? What is this interest in Pichelsberg? I’m a geologist, not a town planner, Herr Gunther.”
“Come on, Stefan, you know why I’m asking.”
“Yes, and I don’t like it. I have enough problems without adding Pichelsberg as well. Where exactly are you going with this? You mentioned a drowned man. A Jew, you said. And a newspaper article. Forgive me, but it seems to me that one dead Jew is quite enough.”
“Dr. Blitz,” said Noreen, “I promise you. Nothing you say will be attributed to you. I won’t quote you. I won’t mention Uncle Tom’s Cabin or that I even spoke to a geologist.”
Blitz removed the cigarette from behind his ear and studied it like a core of white rock. When he lit it, his satisfaction could be seen and heard. “American cigarettes. I’m so used to cheap ones I’d forgotten how good tobacco can taste.” He nodded thoughtfully. “Perhaps I should try to go to America. I’m damned sure the meaning of life in Germany doesn’t include liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Not if you’re Jewish, anyway.”
Noreen emptied her case on the table. “Please,” she said, “keep them. I have more back at the hotel.”
“If you’re sure,” he said.
She nodded, and pulled the sable coat closer to her chest.
“A good engineering company,” he said, carefully. “It would first drill, not dig. You understand? The Ice Age left behind a real mixture of substrata that would make construction here very unpredictable. Especially somewhere like Pichelsberg. Does that answer your question?”
“Is it possible that the people building the Olympic Stadium don’t know this?” she asked.
Blitz shrugged. “Who mentioned the Olympics? I know nothing about the Olympics, and I tell you I don’t want to know. We’re told it’s not for Jews, and I for one am very happy about this.” It was chilly in his apartment, but he wiped some sweat off his forehead with a ragged handkerchief. “Look, if you don’t mind, I think I’ve said enough.”
“One more question,” I said, “and then we’ll leave.”
Blitz stared momentarily at the ceiling as if calling on his maker to give him patience. His hand was trembling as he put the cigarette back between his cracked lips.
“Is there any gold in Berlin’s substrata?”
“Gold, yes, gold. But only trace amounts. Believe me, Bernie, you won’t get rich looking for gold in Berlin.” He chuckled. “At least not unless you take it from those who already have it. This is a Jew telling you, so you can take that to the bank. Even the Nazis aren’t stupid enough to look for gold in Berlin.”
We didn’t stay much longer. We both knew we’d unsettled Blitz. And in view of what he’d said, I didn’t blame him for being circumspect and nervous. The Nazis would hardly have taken kindly to what he was surely saying about the construction site at Pichelsberg. When we left, we didn’t offer him money. He wouldn’t have taken it. But when his back was turned to lead us out of the apartment, Noreen slipped a leaf under the coffeepot.
BACK IN THE CAR, Noreen let out a loud sigh and shook her head. “This town is beginning to get me down,” she said. “Tell me you don’t get used to it.”
“Not me. I’ve only just got used to the idea that we lost the war. Everyone says the Jews were to blame for that, but I always thought it was the navy’s fault. It was them who got us into it and their mutiny that forced us to quit. But for them we might have fought on, to an honorable peace.”
“You sound like you regret that.”
“Only the fact that the wrong people signed the armistice. The army should have done it instead of the politicians, which let the army off the hook rather, and which is why we’re in the state we’re in. D’you see?”
“Not really.”
“No? Well, that’s half the problem. Nobody does. Least of all us Germans. Most mornings I wake up and think I must have imagined the last two years. The last twenty-four hours most of all. What does a woman like you see in a man like me?”
She took my left hand and squeezed it. “A man like you. You make that sound as if there’s more than one. There isn’t. I know. I’ve looked. And in all kinds of places. Including the bed we slept in. Last night I was wondering how I’d feel in the morning. Well, now I know.”