“Of course. In fact, as your banker, I was banking on it. With interest.”
19
I
DROPPED NOREEN OFF at the Ministry of the Interior for her interview with von Tschammer und Osten, and drove back to the hotel and then kept on driving, west, again. Now that she was out of the way, I wanted to nose around the Olympic site at Pichelsberg on my own. The fact was I had only the one pair of gum boots; and then there was the fact that I didn’t want to draw any attention while I was doing the nosing, which was almost impossible when Noreen was on my arm. She commanded attention like a nudist playing the trombone.
Pichelsberg Racecourse was at the north end of the Grunewald. In the center of the racecourse was the stadium, laid out from a design by Otto March and opened in 1913. Encircling the course were running and cycling tracks, while to the north was a swimming pool—all built for the canceled Berlin Olympiad of 1916. In stands that could accommodate almost forty thousand people were sculptures, including a goddess of victory and a Neptune group. Except that none of them were there anymore. Nothing was. Everything—the racecourse, the stadium, and the pool—had been demolished and replaced by an enormous earthwork: a huge mass of soil had been created from the excavation of a vaguely circular pit, where I assumed the new stadium was going to be built. As assumptions go, this one seemed unlikely. The Berlin Olympics were less than two years away and nothing had been built. Indeed, a perfectly serviceable and recently constructed stadium had been knocked down to make way for the Battle of Verdun as imagined by D. W. Griffith. As I got out of the car I half expected to see the French front lines, our own line, and heavy shell bursts in the air.
For a moment I was back in uniform and feeling fairly sick with fear at the sudden recollection of that earlier dun-colored wilderness. And then the shakes were on me, as if I had just woken up from the same nightmare I always had, which was about being back there . . .
. . . carrying a box of ammunition through the mud and clay while shells were falling all around. It took me two hours to move 150 meters up to our front line. I kept throwing myself on the ground or simply falling over until I was soaked to the skin and caked with earth, like a man made of mud.
I had almost reached our redoubt when I stepped into a shell hole and found myself waist deep in mud and sinking. I shouted for help, but the noise of the barrage was too loud for anyone to hear. Struggling only seemed to make me sink more quickly, and in less than five minutes I was up to my neck and facing the horrible fate of being drowned in a small sea of brown glue. I’d seen horses stuck in the mud, and nearly always they were shot, such was the effort of pulling one out. I struggled to take hold of my pistol so that I might shoot myself in the head before being drowned, but that was hopeless, too. The mud held me tightly now. I tried to lean back so that I might “float” on the surface, but that was no use, either.
And then, just as the mud was up to my jaw, there was an enormous explosion a few meters away as a shell hit the ground and, miraculously, I was lifted right out of the morass and high into the air to land twenty meters away, winded but uninjured. Had it not been for the mud enveloping me, the shock of the blast would certainly have killed me.
That was my recurring nightmare, and I never had it without waking up, soaked with perspiration and out of breath, as if I had just sprinted across no-man’s-land. Even now, in broad daylight, I had to drop down on my haunches and take several deep breaths in an effort to pull myself together. A few spots of color in the once fertile but now devastated landscape served my mental recovery: some blue thistle at the edge of the distant tree line; red dead nettle close to where I’d left the car; some yellow-flowered tansy ragwort; a robin redbreast picking a juicy pink worm out of the ground; the empty blue sky; and finally an army of workmen and a railway line conveying a small red train of earthmoving wagons from one end of the site to the other.
“Are you all right?”
The man wore a workman’s peaked cap and a quilted jacket as voluminous as a smock. His black trousers ended several centimeters above boots doubled in size by several kilos of clay. Over a shoulder as big as Jutland rested a sledgehammer. His blond hair was almost white, and his eyes were as blue as the thistle flowers. His chin and cheekbones might have been sketched by one of those Nazi artists, like Josef Thorak.
“I’m okay.” I stood up, lit a cigarette, and waved it at the landscape. “When I saw no-man’s-land, I went off a bit like August Stramm, you know? ‘Yielding clod lulls iron off to sleep, Blood clots the patches where they oozed, Rust crumbles, flesh is slime, Sucking lusts around decay.’ ”
To my surprise, he completed the verse: “ ‘Murder on murder blinks in childish eyes.’ Yes, I know that poem. Me, I was Second Royal Württemburg, Twenty-seventh Division. You?”
“Twenty-sixth Div.”
“Then we were in the same battle.”
I nodded. “Amiens. August 1918.”
I offered him a cigarette, and he took a light from my own, trench style, not to waste a match.
“Two graduates of the university of mud,” he said. “Scholars of human evolution.”
“Ah, yes. The ascent of man.” I grinned, remembering the old saying. “When someone kills you not with a bayonet, but with a machine gun; not with a machine gun, but with a flamethrower; not with a flamethrower, but with poison gas.”
“What are you doing here, friend?”
“Just looking around.”
“Well, you’re not allowed. Not anymore. Didn’t you see the sign?”
“No,” I answered truthfully.
“We’re way behind schedule as it is. We’re already working three shifts. So we don’t have time for visitors.”
“It doesn’t look too busy here.”
“Most of the lads are on the other side of that earthwork,” he said, pointing to the west of the site. “You sure you’re not from the ministry?”
“Of the Interior? No. Why do you ask?”
“Because they’ve threatened to replace any construction companies that aren’t pulling their weight, that’s why. I thought you might be spying on us.”
“I’m no spy. Hell, I’m not even a Nazi. The truth is, I came out here to look for someone. A fellow by the name of Joey Deutsch. Maybe you know him.”
“No.”
“Maybe the site foreman’s heard of him.”
“That would be me. The name’s Blask, Heinrich Blask. Why are you looking for this fellow, anyway?”
“It’s not like he’s in trouble or anything. And I’m not about to tell him he’s won a fortune on the lottery.” I was wondering exactly what I was going to tell him, until I remembered the fight tickets in my pocket: the ones we’d bought off Gypsy Trollmann. “The fact is, I manage a couple of fighters, and I want Joey to train them. I don’t know what he’s like with a pick and a shovel, but Joey’s a pretty good trainer. One of the best. He’d be in the game right now, but for the obvious reason.”
“Which is?”
“With a name like Deutsch? He’s a kike. And kikes aren’t allowed in gyms. At least not the gyms that are open to the public. Me, I’ve got my own gym. So no one’s offended, right?”
“Maybe you don’t know, but we’re not allowed to employ non-Aryan labor here,” said Blask.
“Sure I know that. I also know that it happens. And who can blame you with the ministry breathing down your neck about getting this stadium built in time? Pretty tall order if you ask me. Listen, Heinrich, I’m not here to make trouble for you. I just want to find Joey. Maybe his nephew’s working with him. Isaac. He used to be a fighter himself.”
I took two tickets out of my pocket and showed them to the foreman. “Maybe you’d like some tickets to a fight yourself. Scholz versus Witt at the Spichernsaele. How about it, Heinrich? Can you help me here?”
“If there were kikes working on this site,” said Blask, “and I’m not saying that there are, but you would do best to speak to the hiring boss. A man called Erich Goerz. He’s not on site very much. Mostly he works out of a bar on the Schildhorn.” He took one of the tickets. “There’s a monument there.”
“The Schildhorn Column.”
“’Sright. From what I heard, if you want to work, no questions asked, that’s where you go. Every morning around six there’s a whole crowd of illegals that waits there. Jews, gyppos, you name it. Goerz turns up, decides who works and who doesn’t. Mostly on account of how they each pay him a commission. He calls the names, gives them a work tab, they report to wherever they’re needed most.” He shrugged. “They’re good workers, he finds, so what am I going to do, me with my schedule? He doesn’t tell me, and I don’t need to be told, right? I just do what the bosses order me to do.”
“Any idea what the bar’s called?”
“Albert the Bear or something.” He took the other ticket. “But let me give you some free advice, comrade. Be careful. Erich Goerz wasn’t in the Royal Württemburg, like me. His idea of comradeship owes more to Al Capone than the Prussian army. You follow me? He’s not as big as you, but he’s pretty handy with his fists. Maybe you’ll like that. You look like a fellow who can take care of himself. But Erich Goerz also carries a gun. And not where you’d expect him to carry one. It’s strapped to his ankle. If ever he stops to tie up his shoelaces, don’t hesitate. Kick him in the teeth before he shoots you.”
“Thanks for the warning, friend.” I flicked my cigarette into no-man’s-land. “You already said he’s not as big as me. Anything else you can tell me about what he looks like?”
“Let me see.” Blask dropped the sledgehammer and stroked his anvil-sized chin. “For one thing, he smokes Russian cigarettes. I think they’re Russian, anyway. Flat ones that smell like a nest of burning weasels. So when he’s in the room, you’ll know about it. Otherwise he’s a pretty regular guy, at least to look at. Aged about thirty, thirty-five, pimp mustache, bit swarthy—looks like he should be wearing a fez. Owns a new Hanomag with a Brandenburg license plate. Matter of fact, that might be where he’s from, originally. The driver’s from somewhere south of there. Wittenberg, I think. He’s a slugger, too, with a reach like the Palace Bridge, so mind you watch out for him as well.”
TO THE SOUTH OF PICHELSBERG, a high road affording pretty views but now much used by construction traffic skirted the Havel River and led to Beelitzhof and the two-kilometer peninsula of Schildhorn. Close to the riverbank were a little group of bars and ivy-covered restaurants, and a series of stone steps that rose steeply up to a group of pine trees that hid the Schildhorn monument and whatever else went on there at six o’clock in the morning. The monument was well chosen as a place for picking up illegal workers. From the road it was impossible to see anything that happened around the monument.
Albert the Bear was shaped a bit like a boot or a shoe and was of such an age that it looked as if the shoe might have an old woman who lived in it with so many children she didn’t know what to do. Outside the door was a new Hanomag with an IE license plate. It looked as if I’d arrived at the right time.
I drove on for about three or four hundred meters and parked. In the trunk of Behlert’s car was a pair of overalls. Behlert was always messing around under the hood of the W. I put on the overalls and walked back into the village, stopping only to push my hands into some damp soil to give myself a workingman’s manicure. A cold easterly wind was blowing off the river and carried a strong hint of the coming winter, not to mention a whiff of something chemical from the Hohenzollerndamm Gasworks on the edge of Wilmersdorf.
Outside the Albert, a tall man with a courtroom artist’s idea of a face was leaning on the Hanomag reading the
Zeitung
. He was smoking a Tom Thumb and probably keeping an eye on the car. As I pushed open the door, a little bell rang above my head. It didn’t seem like a good idea, but I went inside anyway.
I was greeted by a large stuffed bear. The bear’s jaws were open and its paws were in the air, and I guess a person coming through the door was supposed to feel under attack or something, but to me the bear looked as if he were conducting an ursine choir to sing “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic.” Otherwise the place was almost empty. The floor was a checkerboard of cheap linoleum. Tables with neat yellow cloths were ranged around the orange-colored walls that were a picture gallery of river scenes and characters. In the far corner, underneath a large photograph of the River Spree logjammed with Sunday canoeists, sat a man in a cloud of foul-smelling cigarette smoke. He was reading a newspaper that was spread over the whole table, and he hardly looked up as I came over and stood in front of him.
“Hey,” I said.
“Don’t make the mistake of pulling out that chair,” he murmured. “I’m not the type who likes to jaw with strangers.”
He wore a mid-green suit and a dark green shirt with a brown woolen tie. On the bench next to him were a leather coat and hat and, for no reason I could see, a substantial-looking dog lead. The flat, yellowish cigarettes he was smoking were not Russian, however; they were French.
“I understand. Are you Herr Goerz?”
“Who wants to know?”
“Stefan Blitz. I was told you were the man to speak to about getting work on the Olympic site.”
“Oh? Who told you that?”
“Fellow named Trollmann. Johann Trollmann.”
“Never heard of him. Does he work for me?”
“No, Herr Goerz. He said he heard it from a friend of his. I can’t remember his name. Trollmann and I, we used to box together.” I paused. “I say ‘used to,’ because now we can’t. Not anymore. Not now that there are rules about non-Aryans in sporting contests. Which is how I come to be looking for a job.”
“I’ve never been a sporting man myself,” said Goerz. “I was too busy earning a living.” He looked up from his newspaper. “I can see the boxer in you, maybe. But somehow I can’t see the Jew.”
“I’m a mischling. Half and half. But that doesn’t seem to make much difference to the government.”