by Philip Kerr
“Only that it’s no questions asked.”
“That all?”
“What else is there?”
“Like they use Jewish labor for work that maybe so-called German workers don’t want to do because it’s dangerous. On account of how they’re cutting corners on safety so they can finish the stadium on time. Did your friend tell you that?”
“Are you trying to put me off?”
“I’m just telling you how it is. It seems to me that if your friend was really your friend, he might have mentioned that much. That you’ve got to be a bit desperate maybe to take some of the risks they expect you to take. It’s not like anyone’s gonna give you a hard hat, my friend. A rock falls on your head or you get buried in a cave-in, there isn’t going to be anyone looking surprised or grief-stricken. There’s no social welfare for illegally employed Jews. Maybe not even a headstone. Understand?”
“I understand that maybe you’re trying to put me off. Increase your own chances of getting work.”
“What I’m trying to say is we look after each other, see? If we don’t, nobody else will. When we go down the pit, we’re like the three musketeers.”
“The pit? I thought we were on the stadium site.”
“That’s up top, for German workers. Nothing to it. Most of us here are working on the tunnel for a new S-Bahn that’s going to run from the stadium all the way to Königgratzer Strasse. If you work today, you’ll find out what it’s like to be a mole.” He glanced up at the still-dark sky. “We go down in the dark, we work in the dark, and we come up in the dark.”
“You’re right, my friend didn’t tell me any of this,” I said. “You would think he’d have mentioned it. Then again, it’s been a while since I’ve seen him. Or his uncle. Hey, maybe you know them. Isaac and Joey Deutsch?”
“I don’t know them,” said Feigenbaum, but behind his glasses, his eyes had narrowed and were studying me carefully, as if maybe he had heard of them, after all. I didn’t spend ten years at the Alex without getting an itch for when a man is lying. He pulled on his earlobe a couple of times and then glanced away, nervously. That was the clincher.
“But you must,” I said firmly. “Isaac used to be a boxer. He was a real prospect until the Nazis excluded Jews from the fights and took away his license. Joey was his trainer. Surely you know them?”
“I tell you I don’t know them.” Feigenbaum spoke firmly.
I shrugged and lit a cigarette. “If you say so. I mean, it’s nothing to me.” I puffed the cigarette to let him get a whiff of it. I could tell he was desperate for a smoke, even though he still had the one I’d given him behind his ear. “I guess all that talk about the three musketeers and looking out for each other was just that. Talk.”
“What do you mean?” His nostrils flared in front of the tobacco smoke and he licked his lips.
“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing at all.” I took another drag and dried his face with it. “Here. Finish it. You know you want one.”
Feigenbaum took the cigarette from my fingers and went to work on it as if I’d offered him an opium pipe. Some people are just like that with a nail: they make you think that maybe there’s something really harmful about a little thing like a cigarette. It’s a little unnerving to watch an addiction at work like that sometimes.
I looked the other way, smiling nonchalantly. “Story of my life, I guess. I don’t mean anything at all. Maybe none of us do, right? One minute we’re here, and the next we’re gone.” I glanced at my wrist and then remembered I’d deliberately left my wristwatch back at the hotel. “Bloody wristwatch. I keep forgetting I pawned it. Where is this fellow Goerz, anyway? Shouldn’t he be here by now?”
“He’ll be here when he’s here,” said Feigenbaum, and then, still smoking my cigarette, he walked away.
Erich Goerz arrived a few minutes after that. He was accompanied by his tall driver and another, muscular-looking man. Goerz was smoking the same pungent French cigarettes and, under a gray gabardine coat, wearing the same green suit. A hat sat on the back of his head like a felt halo, and in his hand was the lead for the same invisible dog. Immediately after he appeared, men started to crowd around him as if he’d been about to deliver the Sermon on the Mount, and his two disciples extended their thick arms to prevent Goerz from being jostled. I pushed a bit closer myself, keen to seem like I was as needful of work as anyone else.
“Stand back, you kike bastards, I can see you,” snarled Goerz. “What do you think this is, a beauty parade? Stand back, I said. I get pushed over like last week, and none of you yids will work today, got that? Right. Listen to me, you kikes. I need just ten gangs today. Ten gangs. A hundred men, hear? You. Where’s that money you owe me? I told you not to show your face back here until you can pay me.”
“How can I pay you if I can’t work?” said a plaintive voice.
“You should have thought of that before,” said Goerz. “I don’t know how. Sell your whore of a sister or something. What do I care?”
The two disciples grabbed the man and pushed him out of Goerz’s line of sight.
“You.” Goerz was speaking to someone else now. “How much did you get for those copper pipes?”
The man he’d spoken to mumbled something back.
“Give,” Goerz snarled, and snatched some notes out of the man’s hand.
With all this business concluded at last, he started to choose men for the work gangs, and as each gang was filled, the men left unpicked began to look more and more desperate, which only seemed to delight Goerz. He was like some capricious schoolboy selecting classmates for an important game of football. As the last gang came to be filled, one man said, “I’ll give you an extra two for my shift.”
“I’ll kick in three,” the man next to him said, and was promptly rewarded with one of the tickets a disciple handed to those lucky men whom Goerz had identified as those who would work that day.
“One day left,” he said, grinning broadly. “Who wants it?”
Feigenbaum pushed his way to the front of the large crowd of men still encircling Goerz. “Please, Herr Goerz,” he said. “Give me a break. It’s been a week since I had a day. I need a day real bad. I’ve got three kids.”
“That’s the trouble with you Jews. You’re like rabbits. No wonder people hate your guts.”
Goerz looked at me. “You. Boxer.” He snatched the last ticket from the hand of his disciple and then thrust it at me. “Here’s a job.”
I felt bad, but I took the ticket all the same, avoiding Feigenbaum’s eye as I followed the rest of the men who’d been picked back down the steps to the riverbank. There were about thirty or forty steps, and they were as steep as Jacob’s ladder, which was, perhaps, the intention of the Prussian emperor William IV, whose romantic ideas of chivalry had brought that peculiar monument into being. I was almost two-thirds of the way down the steps when I caught sight of the truck that was waiting to drive Erich Goerz’s illegal workforce to the site. At the same time I heard some footsteps closing behind me. This was no angel, it was Goerz. He took a swing at me with a cosh, which missed, and like Jacob, I was obliged to wrestle with him for a moment before I lost my footing and fell down the remainder of the steps and hit my head on the stone wall.
I felt as if I had been lying on a concert-sized harp while someone had struck it hard with a sledgehammer. Every part of me seemed to vibrate wildly. For a moment I lay there, staring up at the early-morning sky with the certain knowledge that, unlike Hitler, God has a sense of humor. It was in the Psalms, after all. He who sits in the heavens shall laugh. How else was I to explain the fact that in order to claim for himself the shift given to me, Feigenbaum, a Jew, had almost certainly informed the anti-Semitic Goerz that I had been asking questions about Isaac and Joey Deutsch? He who sits in the heavens was laughing, all right. That was enough to make me split my sides. I closed my eyes in prayer to ask Him if there was something He had against Germans, but the answer was all too obvious, and opening my eyes again, I found t
here was no perceptible difference between having them open and having them closed, except that my eyelids now seemed like the heaviest thing in the world. So heavy, they felt like they were made of stone. Perhaps the stone over a deep, dark, cold tomb. The kind of stone that even Jacob’s angel could not have wrestled away. Forever and ever. Amen.
21
HEDDA ADLON ALWAYS SAID that for her to run a truly great hotel, the guests needed to be asleep for sixteen hours a day; during the other eight they should be resting quietly in the bar. That sounded just fine with me. I wanted to sleep for a long time, and preferably in Noreen’s bed. I might have done, too, except for the fact that she was trying to put out her cigarette in the small of my back. That’s what it felt like, anyway. I tried to shift away, and then something struck me hard across the head and shoulders. I opened my eyes to discover that I was sitting on a wooden floor, covered with sawdust and tied with my back to a freestanding faience stove—one of those ceramic heaters shaped like a public drinking fountain that sits in the corner of many a German living room, like some senile relation in a rocking chair. Since I was seldom ever home, the stove in my own living room was seldom lit and was therefore seldom ever warm, but even through my jacket this one felt hotter than the smokestack on a busy steam tug. I arched my back trying to minimize the point of contact with the hot ceramic and succeeded only in burning my hands; hearing my cry of pain, Erich Goerz once again set about lashing me with the dog lead. At least now I knew why he carried it. No doubt he saw himself as a sort of overseer, like that Egyptian slave driver murdered by Moses in Exodus. I wouldn’t have minded murdering Goerz myself.
When he stopped beating me, I looked up and saw that he had my identity card in his hands, and cursed myself for not leaving it back at the hotel in the pocket of my suit. Standing a few feet behind him were Goerz’s tall, cadaverous-looking driver and the square-sized man from the monument. He had a face like an unfinished piece of marble sculpture.
“Bernhard Gunther,” said Goerz. “It says here you’re a hotel employee but that you used to be a cop. What’s a hotel employee doing around here, asking questions about Isaac Deutsch?”
“Untie me and I’ll tell you.”
“Tell me and then I’ll untie you. Maybe.”
I saw no reason not to tell him the truth. No reason at all. Torture will do that to you sometimes. “One of the guests at the hotel is an American reporter,” I said. “She’s writing a newspaper article about Jews in German sports. And Isaac Deutsch in particular. She wants to bring about a U.S. boycott of the Olympiad. And she’s paying me to help her do the research.”
I grimaced and tried to ignore the heat in my back, which was a little like trying to ignore a minor imp in hell, armed with a hot pitchfork and my name on his day’s work sheet.
“That’s bullshit,” said Goerz. “It’s bullshit, because I read the newspapers, which is how I happen to know that the American Olympic Committee already voted against a boycott.” He raised the dog lead and started to beat me again.
“She’s a Jew,” I yelled through the blows. “She thinks that if she writes the truth about what’s happening in this country, to people like Isaac Deutsch, then the Amis will have to change their minds. Deutsch is the focus of her piece. How he got kicked out of his local boxing association and how he ended up working here. And how there was an accident. I don’t know what happened exactly. He drowned, didn’t he? In the S-Bahn tunnel, was it? And then someone dumped him in the canal on the other side of the city.”
Goerz stopped beating me. He looked out of breath. He swept his hair out of his eyes, straightened his tie, swung the leash around his neck, and then hung on it with both hands. “And how did you find out about him?”
“An ex-colleague, a bull at the Alex, showed me the body in the morgue and gave me the file. That’s all. I used to work Homicide, see? They’d run out of ideas on who the guy might be and figured I might offer a new perspective.”
Goerz looked at his driver and laughed. “Shall I tell you what I think?” he said. “I think you used to be a cop. And I think you still are. A secret cop. Gestapo. I’ve never seen anyone who looked less like a hotel employee than you do, my friend. I’ll bet that’s just a cover story so you can go around spying on people. And more important, on us.”
“It’s the truth, I tell you. Look, I know you didn’t kill Deutsch. It was an accident. That much was clear from the autopsy. You see, he couldn’t have drowned in the canal, because his lungs were full of seawater. That’s what made the polenta suspicious in the first place.”
“There was an autopsy?” It was the square-looking man—the living sculpture—who spoke. “You mean they cut him open?”
“Of course there was an autopsy, you dumb schmuck. That’s the law. Where do you think this is? The Belgian Congo? When a body’s found, a body has to be investigated. Surgically and circumstantially.”
“But when they finished with him, they’d have given him a proper burial, right?”
I groaned with pain and shook my head. “Burials are for Otto Normals,” I said. “Not unidentified bodies. There’ s been no identification. Not formally. No one claimed him, see? I’m only investigating it because the Ami woman wanted to find out about the guy. The polenta doesn’t know shit about him. As far as I know, the body went to the Charité Hospital. To the anatomy class. The kids with the forceps and the lancets got to play with him.”
“You mean medical students?”
“I don’t mean students of political economy, you stupid bastard. Of course medical students.”
I was beginning to see that this was a sensitive subject to the man with the jaw that looked as if it had been cut from a piece of marble. But with my tongue loosened from the pain I was feeling from the heat of the stove, I kept on talking regardless. “By now they’ll have sliced him open and used his dick to make an oxtail soup. His skull’s probably an ashtray on some student’s desk. What do you care, Hermann? You’re the people who dumped the poor bastard in the canal like a pail of restaurant garbage.”
The square-looking man with the marble chin shook his head grimly. “I thought at least he’d get a decent burial.”
“I told you, decent burials are for citizens. Not floaters. It seems to me that the only person who’s tried to treat Isaac Deutsch with any respect is my client.” I tried to twist away from the stove, but it was no good. I was beginning to feel like Jan Hus.
“Your client.” Erich Goerz’s voice was full of contempt, like some grand inquisitor. He started to beat me again. The dog lead whistled through the air like a flail. I felt like a dusty rug at the Adlon. “You’re going. To tell us. Exactly. Who the hell. You are . . .”
“That’s enough,” said the square-looking man with the marble chin.
I didn’t see what happened next. I was too busy pressing my chin into my chest and closing my eyes, trying to ride out the pain of the beating. All I know is that suddenly the beating stopped and Goerz hit the floor in front of me with blood pouring from the side of his mouth. I looked up just in time to see Marble Jaw neatly sidestep a big haymaker from Goerz’s driver before lifting him off his toes with a fist that came flying up from the basement like an express elevator. The driver went down like a tower of wooden blocks, which was as satisfying to me as if I had toppled him myself.
Marble Jaw took a breath and then started to untie me.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“For what?”
“For what I said about your nephew, Isaac.” I pulled the ropes away and wrestled my back clear of the stove. “I’m right, aren’t I? You are Isaac’s uncle Joey?”
He nodded and helped me to stand. “The back of your coat’s scorched through,” he said. “I can’t see what your back looks like, but it can’t be too bad. Otherwise we could probably smell it.”
“There’s a comforting thought. By the way, thanks. For helping me.” I put my arm around his huge shoulder and straightened painfully.
“He�
�s had that coming for a long time,” said Joey.
“I’m afraid all of what I said was true. But I’m sorry you had to hear about it like that.”
Joey Deutsch shook his head. “I suspected as much,” he said. “Goerz told me different, of course, but in my guts I suppose I knew different. I wanted to believe him, for Isaac’s sake. I guess I had to hear it from someone else for it sink in.”
Erich Goerz rolled slowly onto his stomach and groaned.
“That’s quite an uppercut you’ve got on you, Joey,” I said.
“Come on. I’ll get you home.” He hesitated. “Can you stand by yourself?”
“Yes.”
Joey bent down over the unconscious driver and retrieved a set of car keys from the man’s waistcoat pocket. “We’ll take Erich’s car,” he said. “Just in case these two bastards come after us.”
Goerz groaned again and contracted, slowly, into a fetal position. For a brief second I thought he might be having some sort of convulsion until I remembered what Blask, the site foreman, had told me about the gun strapped to Goerz’s ankle. Only it wasn’t strapped to his ankle anymore. It was in his hand.
“Look out!” I yelled, and kicked Goerz in the head. I’d meant to kick his hand, but as I raised my foot I lost control and fell onto the floor again.
The pistol fired harmlessly, breaking a windowpane.
I crawled over to Goerz to look at him. I hardly wanted another man’s death on my conscience. He was unconscious, but fortunately for me, and more especially him, Erich Goerz was still breathing. I retrieved my ID card from the floor, where he had tossed it angrily a few minutes earlier, and picked up the pistol. It was a Bayard semiautomatic 6.35-millimeter.
“French cigarettes, French gun,” I said. “Makes sense, I suppose.” I made the gun safe and pointed it at the door. “Anyone else out there, do you think?” I asked Joey.
“You mean, like him? No, it was just these two, the three truck drivers, and, I’m sorry to say, me. After Isaac got killed, they took me on the payroll. As extra muscle, they said, but I guess it was just as much about ensuring that I kept my mouth shut.”