St. Urbain's Horseman (33 page)

He doubted it.

“But what are you doing in Munich?”

Jake explained.

“How on earth will you ever find him?” she asked.

“I've got to give it a try.”

The bodies are not lying scattered here and there throughout the room, but piled in a mass to the ceiling. This is explained by the fact that the gas first inundates the lower layers of air and rises but slowly to the ceiling. That forces them to trample and clamber over one another. At the bottom of the pile are the babies, children, women and aged; at the top, the strongest. Their bodies, which bear numerous scratches occasioned by the struggle which set them against one another, are often intertwined. The noses and mouths are bleeding, the faces bloated and blue
.

Jake scoured the
jazzkellers
of Schwabing and then the clubs closer to the Maximilianstrasse. From the Märzenkeller he carried on to the Schuhplattler, from there to the Lola Montes, the Moulin Rouge, the Bongo, and other cellars, until jerky accordion music reverberated in his ears, even on the black night streets. You're in Gehenna, Jake. The lowest regions. Shouldn't he raise fires? Shout at passersby? Murderers, murderers. But he continued to walk. One foot, then another. Once he bumped into a middle-aged lady wrapped in a silver fox and hastily said,
“Entschuldig mir,”
hoping she would take it for German, not Yiddish, instead of following through with his shoulder and stamping on her. Hatred was a discipline. He would have to train harder, that's all.

Nobody had ever heard of the Canadian folk singer called Jesse Hope, but the doorman at the Bongo recommended he look in at the American Way Club, formerly Hitler's Haus der Kunst. Sure, why not? When in hell, see the sights.

Explore.

On entry, Jake was confronted by the cardboard figure of a hillbilly. Pappy Burns' Tune Twisters, the poster promised, would entertain on Friday night. Heartened, Jake joined the queue before the information desk.

“Where you coming from?” the soldier ahead of him asked.

“Jerusalem,” Jake said on impulse.

“No kidding? What's the gash like there?”

“Crazy for it.”

Over the desk a poster advertised:

“Hope. Jesse Hope,” the deskman pondered the sly. “Are you from the military police?”

“No. Why?”

He tittered.

“You know him?”

“He was playing at the Bürgerbraukeller, but they ran him out a week ago.”

“Why?”

“Ask them.”

The Bürgerbraukeller, another American Army Service Club, was no more, no less, than the hall wherefrom Hitler had led his abortive march on the Bavarian parliament in 1923. In the Nazi pantheon, a shrine.

Jake arrived just before closing time, screwing his eyes up against the smoke, to see big and belligerent soldiers everywhere, slouching over tables with checkered tablecloths, comatose, listening to a hillbilly singer on the jukebox.

The manager had known Jesse Hope – yes – he had played here – it's true – but he was unwilling to discuss the matter with unauthorized personnel. Even a relative. Perhaps, if Mr. Hersh would return in the morning, the rabbi –

“
The what
?” Jake demanded, astounded.

“Captain Meltzer. He conducts services here on Saturday mornings. And he knew Jesse Hope.”

Gehenna, yes, the very lowest regions. The innermost circle. Fifteen kilometers to Dachau, no more. Bring your Rolleiflex. Yet Jake slept very well indeed at his hotel and wakened with salubrious appetite. The rolls were delicious. So was the ham, so were the eggs. The coffee, the very best. The service, impeccable. Should he eat lunch at Humplmayr's, trying their fabled goose livers? Take a stroll in the English Gardens, perhaps? Look in at the Hofbrauhaus? Jake spread the phone book on the bed and looked up “Goering.” Four entries. There were no Eichmanns, but plenty of Himmlers.

– Hello, Heinrich, what's cooking?

– Ask a foolish question. The Jews, what else?

Jake was back at the Bürgerbraukeller before ten in the morning, absolutely bewildered, unsure whether to be appalled or moved to see a sad little mouse of an army chaplain in a
talith
raise the holy scrolls aloft, before a makeshift sanctuary, in the very place where Adolph Hitler had fired his first two shots in the air. “Hear O Israel,” he sang, “the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.”

Jake and Rabbi Irwin Meltzer took coffee together at a café. The captain had once been a rabbi in Georgia. “Quite often,” he intoned in a disconcertingly high-pitched voice, “I was wakened in the middle of the night. To rush to the hospital. Accidents. We were on the main highway to Florida, you see, and so many of the collisions involved our people …”

He had not been to England yet, but he was coming.

“Ah, London. Oliver Twist. Sherlock Holmes. Liza Doolittle. Centuries of literature. The pageant flashes before my mind.”

Jake asked him about the Horseman.

“A very troubled spirit, I thought, looking for answers in the bottle, but not, mind you, without an interest in metaphysics.”

“Is that so?”

“Once he actually came to services, smirking all the while, it's true, and red-eyed drunk, and then he cornered me. You know, rabbi, he said, you're right. The Lord is our God, and the Lord is One. But do you know why, rabbi? It is because our Lord has such a tapeworm inside him, such a prodigious appetite, that he can chew up six million Jews in one meal. And if the Lord, our God, were Two. What then? Twelve million. Who had them to spare at the time? So, the Lord our God is One, because Two we couldn't afford.”

“And what,” Jake asked, “did you say to that?”

“I pointed out to him that there are mysteries within mysteries and even in blasphemy, faith can take root. It was not for me to know everything, I forewarned him, and even in God's ground crew I was no more than a rifleman.”

“Which didn't satisfy him?”

“No. It is commonly supposed, rabbi, he said, that in the camps there was no rebellion, our people went like sheep to the slaughter, but in fact survivors testify that among the Jews there was indeed rebellion of the most profound nature. Not against man. For what can be expected of other men? Venality, depravity, murder. Against God. The Holy Name. It is reported that in Auschwitz on Yom Kippur among the orthodox Jews there were those who did not fast for the first time in their lives. This much was for once denied the Lord, our God, who is One.”

The rabbi ordered more coffee.

“My good man, I said, do not question the Almighty, or He might call you up for an answer.”

“Now tell me what kind of trouble Joey ran into here.”

“Trafficking in hashish, they said, but there was no positive proof, and in fact no formal charges were brought against him. He was,
however, not very well liked. Either by our own men or the local folk. He was always bothering people, asking them questions. He was particularly interested in the affairs of the Mengele family, who have a factory not far from here, in Günzberg. In a word, he wasn't the type to let sleeping dogs lie.”

Joey, he added, had continued on to Baden-Soellingen, where he had been booked to perform on the R.C.A.F. base.

R.C.A.F. 4 Wing, at Baden-Soellingen, lay in the green and restful Schwarzwald, ringed by mountains that were rich in cool pine trees and crumbling castles, and only fifteen minutes' drive from the elegant spa of Baden-Baden. Spring, Jake had to allow, suited the province splendidly. In the foothills and valleys, the apple and pear and plum trees blossomed.

Jake talked his way past the sentry at the gate, flashing his Canadian passport and old
CBC
identification papers, saying he had come to look into the possibility of doing a TV documentary, and asking to see the
PRO
. He was directed to a sequence of concrete apartment blocks, Permanent Married Quarters, just outside the base proper. A sign in the hallway read:

Amiable, apple-cheeked F/O Jim Hanley wore a black disc around his neck, a Dosimeter, so that in the event of fallout his radiation level exposure could be measured. His companion, F/L Robert Waterman, also wore one.

“Say, I wasn't expecting you until next week.”

“You weren't?” Jake asked.

“Aren't you from the unit shooting
Freedom's Defenders?”

“That's the ticket. But, like I'm an advance man. The rest of the guys won't be out for a week or so.”

“Let's go to the mess,” Hanley said.

The school teachers attached to the base were in the midst of a cocktail party and Jake mingled with them briefly. Small-town Ontario gigglies. Lamely, Jake asked the first girl he brushed against, “Like it here?”

“The Germans are a
fantastic
people,” she replied.
“This
is the country for me.”

Jake beamed. “We have a lot to learn from them, don't you think?” Then he slid away to the bar and the serious drinkers, settling on a stool under a sign that declared
SECURITY IS ALWAYS IN SEASON
.

“Your money's no good here,” Jim Hanley bubbled. “Just tell me what brand of poison you prefer.”

An American air force major, suggesting a failed insurance agent more strongly than Steve Canyon, bore down on them, eliciting hoots. The major, clutching his stomach, pretended to totter and, after a good deal of horseplay, finally agreed to a hair of the dog that bit him.

“How goes the battle?” Hanley asked.

“Fuck.” The American major was attached to a combined
NATO
maneuver at a nearby French base. “It's a lousy war.”

“What's wrong? Is it only a paper war?”

“Naw. We got refugees and all sorts of shit. The refugees are blocking the fucking roads. By the time the real fun starts, you're dead beat. I'd rather be back out there fighting the fucking gooks.”

Their circle widened to include a tall, obdurate flying officer with an unusually thick neck and, ordering another drink, Jake regarded him with appetite.

“He's from security,” Waterman said to Jake.

“Security?” Gravely, Jake asked the flying officer if he had any real fucking security problems on the fucking base. “With the mother-fucking commies.”

“That's classified.”

Waterman explained that Jake was from the
CBC
and clapping Jake on the back, he said, “I suppose you know you can't get to look at one of the
CF
–104's – that's classified too. But if you care to park outside the gates with high-powered binoculars you can copy down the serial numbers as the planes take off and land. In fact you can easily figure out how many planes we've got here and how often they fly.”

“What about that?” Jake asked the security officer.

“No comment.”

“Want to know how to build one,” Waterman continued, “buy a copy of Model Airplane News. Hey, here comes our nuclear defense man. If the bomb falls his job is to tell everyone to fucking relax.”

Jake detached the security officer from the rest. “If it isn't classified, can you tell me what you do for entertainment out here?”

“We've got a bowling alley. Movies. There's a hockey rink –”

“Ever have a singer called Jesse Hope play here?”

“Why?”

“I ran into him in Munich a couple of weeks back.”

“A poker game?” the security man asked.

“Yeah.”

“Son-of-a-bitch ran a game here that started on Friday night and ran right into Sunday afternoon. I figure he cleared out of here with something like three thousand fucking dollars.”

Slowly, evenly, Jake replied: “Glad to hear it.”

“Lookit, fella, you're drunk.”

“Not yet. Waterman, what about another one for me?”

“Can do.”

“Jesse Hope is my cousin.”

“I wouldn't fucking brag about it.”

“But I do, see,” Jake said. “Because he's a real soldier, not a toy one. Not merely another dumb crud hanging his ass on a pension. He fought on the Ebro. Any idea where that is?”

“You tell us, buddy boy.”

“It's classified.”

“Hey, he
is
drunk.”

“You believe it.”

“It's in Spain. ‘On that arid square, that fragment nipped off from hot Africa, soldered so crudely to inventive Europe …' He also fought in Israel in forty-eight. For Jerusalem,” and leaning closer, Jake demanded, “any idea where that is?”

“You're a beaut.”

“This joker says he's a cousin of the card sharp,” the security officer announced. “Jesse Hope.”

“You know why he left Israel? I've got it right here on a postcard he sent his wife. I quote, gentlemen. When Rubashov is in prison, as they march him up and down the yard for afternoon exercise, the crazed man behind him, another old Bolshevik, repeats over and over again, ‘this could never happen in a socialist country.' Rubashov hasn't the heart to tell him they're actually in Russia. Unquote. Would you know who wrote that?”

No answer.

“Well, it wasn't Mazo de la Roche. It was Flying Officer Arty Koestler.
Chaver
Waterman, I require another drink.”

“Why don't we push on?” Hanley asked, perturbed.

“Were you in the war?” Jake asked.

The security officer nodded.

“How does it feel having the Nazis for allies now?”