Cesare

by Jerome Charyn

  I kiss you on your cheek.

  Uncle Willi

  Eric couldn’t stop crying. And he wouldn’t destroy the note from Uncle Willi, which had become far more wondrous than any house in the woods. He could survive in this little gray world with his note and his pocketless pajamas. He did not need America. And then a navy captain in shoulder boards and summer whites pranced into his cell and leaned against a wall. Eric recognized the Schmiss on the captain’s cheek, but it wasn’t a dueling scar. Eric had wounded this man himself, made him bleed like a pig at the Adlon. It was the American Berliner, Werner Wolfe, who had tried to assassinate the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem for British intelligence. But he’d grown fatter in a year, had lost all his leanness; he had the ripened look of a well-fed man, and not Eric’s sunken, sallow cheeks. He started to babble in a Berliner’s raucous accent.

  Eric had to correct him. “Stop talking Deutsch. Your mother pees with her dick in her hand.”

  The navy captain started to laugh. “Cesare, you’ve been learning from my own lads.… You shouldn’t be here. It’s the admiral’s fault. Canaris couldn’t make up his mind. He kept hopping over to Switzerland to meet with us. We had lovely chats about a negotiated peace, but he wouldn’t step away from the war. I had to find a code name for him. Guess what it was?”

  “Wolfie, I don’t have that deep an imagination.”

  “Hamlet—we called him Hamlet behind his back.”

  Eric laughed bitterly to himself. Hamlet. He conjured up an image of Uncle Willi meeting with American and British spymasters, his collar wrinkled, crumbs in the crevices of his pants, and all alone without his dachshunds. What bargain could this weary gray-haired Hamlet have reached with the American sharks? Eric always knew in his gut that such brutal spymasters wouldn’t tolerate a Berlin somnambulist on their soil.

  “Wolfie, what the fuck do you want from me? Why am I a prisoner in this navy asylum? Your nurses are almost as fickle as the transvestites at the White Mouse.”

  “Ah,” said Captain Wolfe, who plucked a split of champagne from inside his tunic, uncorked it with his thumb, and found a pair of flutes in another pocket. “Prisoner, what kind of prisoner? You’re free to walk out of here. But how long would you last? With your phony cards and your phony dollars. We looked at the gelt the Abwehr gave you. It’s all counterfeit—the shittiest stuff. You would have been picked up within days. A German officer without his uniform. They’d hang you as a spy. We did you a fucking favor.”

  “Where’s Franz?”

  “Ah, that’s another story,” said Captain Wolfe, pouring the champagne. “Little Franzie is incommunicado at the moment. He’ll never survive without his sister. Shame on you. Ah, let’s have a toast.”

  “What are we celebrating?”

  “Your success … as a secret agent.”

  Eric didn’t touch the champagne.

  “It’s simple,” Wolfe said. “We’re sending you back to Germany.”

  Eric should have strangled Wolfie when he’d had the chance, finished him off inside the Adlon, had him leave Berlin as a corpse.

  “You tricked the admiral, sang him a song about America.…”

  The captain poured himself another glass. “The landscape shifted. We thought we had the Müller twins. And now all we have is you. The admiral’s a dreamer. What did he expect? It would have taken a hundred commandos just to keep you alive. And suppose you were caught? All our intel would have been compromised. The president would shut us down. And for one little admiral with pee all over his pants?”

  Eric pounced on Captain Wolfe, ripped off his shoulder boards, but Wolfe waved off the security guards, who would have clubbed Eric into the stainless-steel commode. Then he picked up the flutes and pranced out of the cell, but Eric wouldn’t let the fucker go scot-free. He grabbed the tails of Captain Wolfe’s tunic.

  “Will I be shipped back in my coffin, the better to break into Goebbels’ villa and strangle him in bed?”

  “No. That dwarf will soon be on our side.”

  Eric gave Wolfe’s tails another pull. “Then what the fuck can Cesare the somnambulist do?”

  “Be our eyes and ears. We’ll build you up into the greatest hero the Nazis ever had. We’ll invent manhunts, chases across the Rockies. You’ll have your photo in Berliner Illustrirte.”

  “I’ll agree to nothing unless I can bring the admiral out.”

  Werner started to laugh and groan. “That’s impossible. He’d never abandon his agents … and his mad daughter. You’re going back to Berlin. There’s no other option. Now get your fucking hands off my coat.”

  And he was gone, like some phantom with a pair of flutes. And Eric was suddenly stricken with an unbearable bout of loneliness. He missed the admiral, and the streets of Scheunenviertel, and the lovely sweat on Lisalein, and even Fränze’s naked ballet on board the submarine. He couldn’t seem to get her out of his mind—her silent love cries while he strangled her. She would remain attached to Eric for the rest of his life.

  He wandered into the commissary. He could have swiped anything off the shelves. But this madhouse had its own blue-and-gold scrip, and Eric preferred to pay for his candy bars and his Camels, which had at least a hint of the Roth-Händle’s flavor.

  And while navigating through the aisles of the commissary, he caught a glimpse of a ghost near the ice-cream freezer. It was Fränze, come floating out of Atlantic waters. She wasn’t naked in this madhouse. Her dark hair shone in the fluorescent light. She wore brutal red lipstick and very high heels. It was the same uniform Fränze often used when she went out on a kill. But Eric didn’t care. The sight of Fränze soothed him. Suddenly, he wasn’t in a house of strangers. He rushed toward her, but he tripped over a crate that had been left in the aisle, and nearly tumbled into a cornucopia of candy bars. He shouldn’t have taken his eyes off the ghost. Fränze was no longer by the freezer. He searched every one of the commissary’s little islands, but the ghost was gone.

  IT WASN’T FRÄNZE’S GHOST HE HAD SEEN near the freezer, but Franz in drag, dressed as his sister. That was Franz’s way of keeping her alive. Wolfie’s men had found him wandering like a madman in the woods of Maine. The nurses were all in love with Franz, who reminded them of Linda Darnell. He would strut through the halls in his high heels and then vanish for a week.

  So Eric looked everywhere for Franz. He drifted deeper into this prison and chanced upon a pavilion called Berlin USA: an enormous rat’s maze that was a replica of Berlin—with dollhouses that served as the Chancellery, the admiral’s Fuchsbau on the Landwehrkanal, the zoo with its empty cages, Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, the Adlon Hotel, and Alexanderplatz, with toy trolleys and toy men. He felt like some kind of Gulliver in the land of the small. But there was a difference between both Berlins. American flags flew in the windows, and the toy sailors on the trolleys had white spats. There were no bomb craters, no air raid wardens made of sticks, no gun girls. This couldn’t have been the battle plan of some monstrous siege; the town was already occupied with American sailors.

  Eric grew forlorn in this fake Berlin—it couldn’t conjure up Uncle Willi or the children of Sheunenviertel—it was like a Nazi town shorn of Nazis. He had no interest in exploring this asylum. He returned to his own little lion’s cage. The nurses no longer plagued him. Admirals stopped looking into his cell. He was Cesare the somnambulist, a relic from Alt-Berlin.

  Eric woke in the middle of the night and discovered Linda Darnell staring at him through thick eyelashes. He wasn’t frightened of Fränze’s ghost. The Milchkuh had been far more real to him than this madhouse. He felt a terrible pity for Franz.

  “Cesare, would you like to give me a Kuss? But you’ll have to pay with your life.”

  Franz had broken off a spoon handle and sharpened it into a dirk. Eric still wouldn’t defend himself. His only weapon was the lulling music of his voice.

  “Dreckshund, I’m all you have.”

  “Don’t talk Deutsch,” said Franz. All of a sudden, he started to
cry. He was lonely for Fränze. He’d never spent a day without his sister. Fränze made all the plans, Fränze groomed him, told him what shirt or sweater to wear. She fondled him, kissed him to sleep. He never had to say a word. She wrote all the letters, was in charge of their accounts. She doled out pocket change to him as she might have done to a little boy. Her little boy.

  Cesare was the admiral’s magician, while Fränze and Franz were circus folk. Cesare didn’t speak sentences, but snakebites. Yet Franz was more connected to Fränze’s murderer than to the cowboys in this hidden hospital.

  “Magician, let’s get married. I could be your navy wife.”

  Eric was still too forlorn to laugh. Married to Linda Darnell. He sat down on his commode, the one comfortable seat he had in this cage, and the acrobat curled up near his feet.

  Mackie Messer

  26

  WOLFIE WOKE HIM IN THE MORNING. He’d come with half a dozen nurses, who drove Franz out of the cage with their truncheons.

  “Cut it out, Cap,” Franz said. “We’re getting married.”

  The captain barked at Franz. “There are no fucking brides in my house.”

  “Wolfie, leave him alone,” Eric barked back. “Franz is my fiancée.”

  “He’s demented,” the captain said. “And you and I have business to discuss. There’s been a change of plans. We’re sending you to Bohemia.”

  “Wonderful. And what am I going to find? Hangman Heydrich’s ghost?”

  “No. Mackie Messer.”

  There was only one Mack the Knife—Bernhard Beck, the greatest cabaret star Berlin had ever had. He’d appeared in the original production of The Threepenny Opera, and when he sang “The Ballad of Mack the Knife” in 1928, half of Berlin fell into a colossal fever. Beck lived at the Adlon, had become the uncrowned prince of the Babelsberg studios … until Herr Hitler took over the Chancellery. And still Beck stayed on in Berlin, held court every morning in the Rembrandt Room. But his followers dwindled one by one. Berlin’s very last cabarets closed. And Babelsberg no longer had much interest in Jewish cabaret. Beck was an enormous roly-poly man who fluttered about with all the insouciance of an elephant on ice skates. Goebbels came to him at the Adlon with his entire entourage: the Nazis might permit him to prosper if he agreed to act in a propaganda film for the Reich. Beck refused. He was hurled out of the Adlon and into the street. But he had hundreds of fans who defied the Nazis and fed him. Smuggled out of Germany, he performed in Paris and Amsterdam, where he remained Mackie Messer. But he was captured in 1943 in one of the Dutch Gestapo’s dragnets and delivered to Theresienstadt, where Goebbels now convinced him to act in a propaganda film, The Cabaret King Comes to Bohemia. He would have been sent to Auschwitz had he refused Goebbels again. But Eric couldn’t understand why naval intelligence should have been concerned with Mack the Knife.

  “Wolfie, are you eager to have Beck perform for Herr Franklin and Frau Eleanor in the White House?”

  “That’s part of the deal. And Louis B. Mayer wants him for a musical.”

  Eric was deeply suspicious. “MGM will allow him to sing in Deutsch?”

  “They’ll dub his voice,” said Captain Wolfe.

  A rage began to build under Eric’s eyes. What was Beck without his Berliner rendering of Mack the Knife? Mayer might as well have cut out his tongue and left him to wail like a lunatic. But Wolfe must have sensed Eric’s chagrin.

  “It has nothing to do with MGM or Frau Eleanor,” he said. “It’s the beauty of it. We kidnap the king of cabaret right out of a concentration camp.”

  “And what about all the other Jewish souls? Do we leave them to rot until they’re shipped to Auschwitz?”

  “Jesus, we can’t capture a concentration camp. But we can make a lot of noise.”

  Tactics, it was all tactics with Wolfie. Sound without substance. And never the toll of human misery.

  “Lend me twenty sailors and I’ll free the whole camp.”

  “It can’t be done,” said Captain Wolfe. “And I’m not authorized to give you twenty of my boys. I have to scrape for every recruit. And hide them in an insane asylum. But you’re another story. The Abwehr spy who escapes his American captors—”

  “And Berlin USA. You like to build cities in a madhouse, don’t you?”

  “It keeps us focused, points us to the end of the game … Berlin as our prize, but not as a river of ruins. That’s what will happen if the Russkies get there first.”

  “And you want Berlin as one big cabaret, with Bernhard Beck singing ‘Mack the Knife.’ Well, leave me out of your new American empire.”

  “I can’t.… Besides, you have a special reason for visiting Theresienstadt—Lisalein.”

  Eric’s rage spilled over and he lunged at Wolfe, but his head began to spin, and he fell into the captain’s arms. The nurses fed him water. They sat him down on the commode, like some trained seal, while Wolfe stood over him.

  “Somebody tricked you, kiddo. She’s still alive.”

  “I’ll bite your fucking head off, spit your blood into my sink.”

  Wolfe handed him a photo of Lisa with white hair; there were marks on her face, and one of her eyes was much darker than the other. It was no illusion, no trick shot from the Abwehr’s archives, no double hired by naval intelligence, no Lisa look-alike. She could have been the residue of her own firestorm. But no one could have imitated that stark defiance, that wanton smile of a woman who outlasted her own auto-da-fé.

  He didn’t ask Wolfe any of the details. The captain would only have lied, or created a legend for Lisa. And Eric would have had to whirl around in some elaborate fiction, another Berlin USA.

  “Cesare,” the fat captain whispered, “will you go to Theresienstadt for us?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you bring out Mackie Messer and not start a revolution at the camp?”

  “Yes.”

  And Eric closed his eyes and fell into a dark sleep. He dreamt of Lisa with her white hair, weaving across Theresienstadt Castle in a shawl that looked like a burial gown. But she hadn’t wandered out of any coffin. And with her was Mackie Messer. They could have been man and wife. He wasn’t jealous. Beck was still a star, even among the camp guards, who collected pieces of his velvet jacket as a souvenir. But he wouldn’t sing for any living soul at this castle. He walked in silence with Lisalein.

  PARADISE

  January 3, 1944

  From the desk of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris

  72-76 Tirpitz-Ufer

  Berlin

  The Fox’s Lair has no fox. All my networks have been compromised or dismantled. Commander Stoltz, the very best battler we ever had at the Abwehr, was plucked out of my office and accused of being a Soviet spy. The Führer cannot forget that he had once been Rosa Luxemburg’s bodyguard. And who will protect him now? Not his Uncle Willi. I have my own Gestapo babysitters. Gott, they follow me into the toilet. My dachshunds are frightened of their grim faces. Poor Sabine hasn’t moved her bowels since last Sunday. But I do not allow these swine to interfere with my itinerary. I ride with them in their own car to Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. Berlin has become our necropolis, a city with mountains of rubble. The Engländers bomb day and night. Himmler is in a panic. That’s the only reason I’m still alive. He thinks I can help him broker a deal with the Allies. The SS would prefer to fight the Russians behind American tanks. But there are no American tanks in Berlin.

  I enter Gestapo headquarters with my babysitters. I’m led down-stairs to Stolz’s quarters in the dungeon. He’s a special guest. They can’t afford to knock him senseless while I’m still chief of the Abwehr.

  My babysitters come into Stolz’s cellar suite, reserved for enemies of the Reich who might still be of some use. There’s blood on Stolz’s suspenders. He smiles at me—the swine have pulled out all his teeth. They’ve broken his knuckles with their little Nazi nutcracker. But Stolz will never bend to their will. I can’t even call the Führer. I no longer exist at the Wilhelmstrasse. They see my own invisible ha
nd behind every plot against Hitler. I’m not with the plotters. I simply allow them to assemble in their own little closets.

  Stolz signals to me that he does not want any doctor to look at his hands. But we don’t have to whisper. The babysitters have little curiosity.

  I’ve brought Stolz a basket of oranges, smuggled out of Africa by the last agents on my roster. He knows I cannot help him, and he doesn’t talk about himself.

  “Uncle Willi, why the hell is Cesare in Berlin?”

  I start to groan. It is the saddest moment of my life, sadder than having my Eva sit in an asylum.

  “It wasn’t my doing. Himmler struck some monstrous deal with the American spymasters. They smuggled him across the Atlantic on a neutral freighter. Himmler let him land in Normandy like a beached whale. He gets a hero’s welcome. They swear he went on a spree, butchering FBI men like some German Goliath. It was all made up.”

  “His picture was in the Illustrirte … but how did they lure him back?”

  “Lisa,” I say. “The Americans must have told him she’s in Paradise.”

  What a diabolic name for a concentration camp. But that was how the Nazis advertised Theresienstadt—a little paradise for Jews away from Germany, with their own orchestra, their own workshops, their own Fussball field, in a fortified Bohemian town. But this paradise was mingled with filth and disease, a castle with cock-roaches on the way to Auschwitz.

  “Uncle Willi, it’s my fault. We shouldn’t have staged her death.”

  “And how else would we have gotten him onto that damn Milchkuh? He’d have followed Lisa into whatever hell she was in.”

  “And now the Dreckshunde have given him the Knight’s Cross, and he’ll strangle on the ribbon around his neck.… We must prevent him from going to Paradise.”

  “How?” I ask. “And with what?”