The Eye of the Abyss

by Marshall Browne

  They were silent, stunned by the acuteness of the problem.

  In that other world across the platz, beautifully-gowned women tossed perfect falls of hair, mimed exuberant dialogue, performed with body language as exaggerated as that of the quick-stepping waiters: a white shoulder lifted coquettishly here, a well-turned arm pointed imperiously there. Uniformed escorts danced attendance, hemmed them in with attentions. A blue haze of cigarette smoke seemed to romanticise the figures quarantined behind the distant thick glass.

  Schmidt stared at the scene, the antithesis of his own deadly rendezvous. Suddenly he was thinking along concrete lines. ‘Are you sure this Jew is reliable?’

  ‘More reliable than most men you meet today.’

  Schmidt continued his thinking, which was becoming complicated.

  The detective said, ‘Nothing’s assured. But well-known Jews have escaped this way. I’ve hopes that it might be easier for … a secretary, an unknown person, and cost less. If some money could be found, perhaps my services pledged.’

  What kind of pledge could he make? To whom? Schmidt wondered. Dressler watched his front as he’d watched all those years ago across no-man’s-land. Air whistled in his lungs, his vast gully of a throat.

  Schmidt’s thinking had reached a destination. He re-examined it carefully. Amazing! It might be done. His mind had glided into a superdangerous realm, easily as a knife into butter. Now he was thinking only of the technical problems. It was the kind of progression that Helga had feared.

  He said quietly, ‘The money can probably be obtained. Please make your arrangements with this Jew. I’ll be here tomorrow night, 6.30. I will have it.’

  In wondering silence, Dressler accepted this. He didn’t look at the pocket-sized bank auditor who, for an obscure reason, might, amazingly, provide the means to save his daughter. Erratic gifts from Providence didn’t repay analysis. A survivor’s life had taught him this.

  ‘Thank you, Herr Schmidt,’ the detective said. ‘I must return to duty. The Nazis have not eradicated ordinary crime.’ Schmidt lifted his head at the hint of irony. He saw that the detective hadn’t intended it. An even more bitter wind scythed the platz. But Dressler hadn’t finished. ‘My contact in the Gestapo said that Dietrich is behind Lilli’s downfall. Of course, we knew that. He’s been relentless in his pursuit. He submitted a damning affidavit to the court. The animal —’ his voice choked. He breathed heavily, went on ‘— has an unusual background. For six months in 1937 he was an instructor at Marienburg — one of the Nazis’ secret Order Fortresses. Prior to that, he was posted to the Reich embassy in Washington —’ The detective stopped. Even in the dark he’d caught the auditor’s reaction. ‘Herr Schmidt?’

  Schmidt was already half-frozen, but the information had driven a new icy wedge into him. He could hardly take in the proposition. Unbelievable! First von Streck, now Dietrich – connected to the Order! And this very night the Nazi’d revealed that he knew of Schmidt’s studies at the Municipal Library. It was a shadow-dance.

  An idea had come. If the detective had found out this about Dietrich … he made a decision. ‘Herr Dressler, there’s a high Nazi functionary called von Streck, described as a special plenipotentiary …’ He went on for a minute, asking the detective if he would make inquiries.

  After they’d parted, Schmidt’s mind remained focused on Dietrich and the Order. Boarding his tram shortly after seven, he still couldn’t believe the connection.

  By chance, Herr Dorf was working a late shift. Few passengers were aboard during the dinner hour. After a polite greeting the conductor swayed to the front where, hanging on two straps, head ducked forward, he mournfully watched the boarded-up shops drift past. It was rumoured that two hundred Jews were committing suicide each day in his native Vienna. The synagogue Schmidt had seen ablaze passed in the darkness. The site was to be cleared for a car park, so they said, its former worshippers co-opted for the work.

  Maria had his dinner ready and he ate it quickly, immersed in his thoughts. He complimented her on the meal; nothing had been said about the family’s changed situation, but she must be worrying. First, he had to deal with the problem of his mother’s apartment, nervy Frau Bertha still in situ.

  What stone cell, iron bars, was Lilli staring at? That came like a splinter of glass into flesh. He couldn’t picture her circumstances. He’d a good visual imagination, but like a horse baulking at a jump it failed him now. Instead, he concentrated on the plan which might save her. Travelling home, eating his dinner, drinking his coffee, it had been evolving in his head like the most complex audit program he’d ever worked on.

  He thought on it as he retired to the bathroom and began the chore which he’d been postponing. He took saline solution and a small bowl from the cabinet, and laid a thick bath towel over the handbasin. He applied pressure under his eye. The prothesis shot out and he caught it deftly. He washed it in the solution, laid it on a clean handkerchief. He poured more of the solution into an eye-cup and bathed the socket. Then he positioned it in his fingers, and reinserted it. The suction took in half his eyelashes as well; painstakingly he sorted that out. He sighed; the nerves in the socket would ache for a day or two.

  He stood in the door of Trudi’s room. A few dolls had been taken; most waited on the shelves. He’d have Maria pack a box for Dresden. All her treasures to the little one. He closed off that thinking, went to his study, shut the door and sat down at his desk.

  The Dürer engraving was behind him, but the detail was engraved in his brain. The knight was riding out stern-faced on his quest, dogged by demons. Dürer had engraved him in 1513 — two hundred years after Schmidt’s forebear had gone with the Grand Master to Marienburg. What had happened there? His father’s archives were a blank on that period of the knight’s life. He’d next turned up in 1319 at Torun – documented fact. Then the family fable took over: he’d gone into a city on the Vistula River in disguise, subverted the city’s leaders, sabotaged the defences. Fact: the Order had taken this city. The mayor and corporation had been flung from the battlements, tethered at their necks. How had that group of widows lived afterwards? The perturbation of that age had faded to silence. As would these times, one day.

  The paragraph in de Sales’ book he’d kept to think about, too occupied for its complexity. He took out the copy he’d made and scanned it. The Order had assumed a military character in 1198, and towards the end of the crusades had left Palestine forever. In 1211 the first European enterprise had begun in Hungary when they’d colonised the Transylvanian borderlands. The Hungarian king had granted the knights extensive autonomy, but when their demands became excessive had expelled them in 1225. They’d moved to Poland. A Polish duke had needed their help against the pagan Prussians. The knights had wiped out most of the native Prussian population. Bloody conquest and cruel subjugation of the eastern Baltic lands followed, a mailed heel on a wide territory of vassal states, the population treated as slaves. In 1263 the Pope had allowed the knights to become traders, relieving them of their vow of poverty. Then — the salient information – the brief chronicle of a knight of the Order, in the period 1310-1315, who’d intrigued to become a high administrator, one of a group of knights opposed to the strategy of conquest, the cruelties, the greed for treasure and power. He’d begun to plot against the Order from within, a man who kept his counsel, who’d diverted wealth, scattered assets to counteract some of the evil, weakened it immeasurably … in 1315, unmasked, tortured, and killed.

  A knight called Erik Streck.

  And now a Nazi called von Streck had appeared in the special reading room. What did it mean? A brittle thread reaching down the centuries? A meteor of fate heading earthwards through the cosmos, programmed to reach its destination at the point when his and the Nazi’s destinies were poised to move into the ascendant? He knew what Helga would think of such ideas.

  Herr Goebbels had said of the Fuehrer, ’You are like a meteor before our astonished eyes …’

  Schmidt sat perfe
ctly still. The obscure connections vibrated around him. He put the paper aside, and deliberately corrected the course of his thinking.

  He’d said to Dressler, ‘I will have it.’ Two hundred thousand. In the platz the nucleus of the plan had come like a dart of light.

  And that’s where it stood – work in progress, but already an illuminated page set out with stylised capitals, and richcoloured illustrations. And with it Wagner’s excitable face, as though the deputy foreign manager knew he was the key. A workable plan in its first phase with Wagner’s co-operation. In the second, as it stood – suicidal.

  Schmidt looked at his watch: 8.35 pm. He rang the exchange. Were they intercepting Wagner’s calls? Another risk to be run, but now he felt the steel in him; in his brain, in his heart, as though a sword, never previously unsheathed, had been drawn.

  22

  ‘WELL, WELL, MY friend. A meeting here? At this hour? What’s got into you?‘Wagner grinned slyly over the rim of his glass. ‘Is my auditing colleague peeling off as do our brave aviators, into a fearless dive!’ He studied Schmidt curiously. What was really on his mind were the events surrounding his colleague’s imbroglio with the general-director’s secretary. How in hell had he stayed out of the clutches of the Gestapo? Poor Fraulein Cream Cakes. There was no derision in the use of his private nickname for her; it came only with a sentimental feeling. A sad, sad, business.

  Schmidt winced at the beerhall noise, at his colleague’s flippancy. Though what mood was Wagner really in? And what did he really think about this summons? He glanced around the huge hall, at the riot in progress. He’d chosen this place because of its uproarious crowds.

  It was a reversal of their usual roles. The late-night beerdrinking session was Wagner’s homeground. In a moment, his attitude was going to change when he heard why he’d been called here. His unkempt hair was sprayed out, cigarette going, eyes drooping against the smoke. Despite his night-owl reputation he looked most vulnerable at night.

  Behind these observations Schmidt was ordering his thoughts. Time was short. He said, ‘Today Herr Dietrich warned me against you. Have you been opposing him by any chance?’

  Wagner stirred. ‘Aha! We haven’t crossed swords directly. You can put it down to my old political affiliations. No doubt he’s briefed himself on that through his contacts in those gangster agencies watching over your intemperate colleague. Though, I did have a run-in with Otto the other night that seemed to fascinate Herr Health and Sunshine. Otto was blind drunk. Unedifying sight.’

  ‘That’s the kind of situation you should be wary of. Dietrich’s a trained watcher. He’s watching all of us for clues to fill in the picture he’s building up. Who knows what his instructions are from Berlin.’And he knows about me and the Order, he thought. But how much? He continued, ‘He’s a man with multiple objectives.’

  Wagner shrugged. ’I agree they’re devious bastards, but you’re making that Nazi sound more interesting than he is. Franz, with your record are you really the fellow to be telling me to take care?’ He glanced at the auditor with nervy amusement.

  Schmidt ignored that. He wasn’t quite ready. He said, ‘A dose of excitement today?’

  ‘The Field-Marshal?’ Wagner struck a match and lit a cigarette. ‘The million that slippery crook banked with us doesn’t belong to him. Have you heard the story? A lunatic at the Reichsbank wrote out a cheque for a million and sent it to him. The Reichsbank’s moving heaven and earth to get it back, but he’s not letting go. Absolute thievery!’ He laughed sardonically. ‘Aided and abetted by the respected old house of Wertheim & Co.’

  Schmidt stared at his colleague. He was in touch with his auditing counterparts at the Reichsbank, but hadn’t heard a whisper about this. Wagner grinned. Everything was coming out the way he’d predicted. ‘This morning at any moment I felt Dietrich might’ve disappeared up the Field-Marshal’s arse.’ Schmidt frowned his distaste. ‘Sorry,’ Wagner chuckled.

  They were sitting side by side on a pew-like seat. Now. Decisively Schmidt turned his head, began to speak into Wagner’s ear. Calmly, he communicated Lilli’s situation, her father’s efforts, his own. Wagner’s eyes had sprung open.

  ‘I require two hundred thousand, at least.’

  Wagner drew in his breath sharply. ‘God Almighty!’ He laid down his cigarette.

  ‘Careful.’

  Wagner was shaking his head, disbelievingly Like many at Wertheims he’d been fascinated by the revelation of the Franz Schmidt—Fräulein Dressler imbroglio. He’d guessed more would be going on, but was staggered by this. He pushed his thin shoulders back against the pew. ‘No more lectures from you, Franz … two hundred thousand! What kind of wonderman is this Jew?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. I must take him at face value, accept Dressler’s judgement.’

  ‘Yes?’ Wagner stared down the barn-like hall, as though trying to penetrate a smoky battlefield.

  ‘I’ve undertaken to find the money.’ Wagner’s stare shot back to his colleague. The hubbub washed around them like surf swirling through rocks, their talk as lost as a tiny mollusc tossed about in foaming seawater. As Schmidt had calculated. ‘I need to get into the Party’s safe.’

  Beneath an iron circle impregnated with coloured electric lights crudely imitating candles, a group of middle-aged workers raucously burst into a marching song from the Great War. In rough time, they thumped their steins on the boarded table. Had Wagner heard him? From a side-room, SA men gathered in a storm centre, abruptly launched into competition with the veterans, roaring out the ‘Horst Wessel’ song.

  Oblivious to the uproar, the deputy foreign manager turned to Schmidt. ‘Herr Chief Auditor, I’ve been seriously misjudging you. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry about that.’

  Schmidt waited. Neither response was required, but he understood. He said, ‘I need your safe combination.’

  ‘You do, indeed. And my dear Franz, I remind you, one other.’

  ‘That’s not a problem.’

  Wagner remembered his beer, and took a long draught. He laughed is disbelief.

  ‘Will you do it?’

  The vehement competition between the marching song and the Nazi folk anthem had crashed to a stop. Wagner’s eyes gleamed. He leaned forward, guarded, out of character. ‘The Nazis have my number because of the Social Democratic membership. The Gestapo are watching my flat – though, I think, not tonight. Dietrich, I suspect, smells some kind of rat about me. And you propose I help thieve a large portion of the hard-won funds of the NSDAP to assist a Jewess, interesting lady though she is, flee our country! Am I a lunatic? Are you mad?’ His eyes shone with half-horrified amusement. Schmidt shrugged. Wagner was putting on one of his acts. ‘Of course I’ll do it my dear Franz. What else do I have to do with my life?’

  Schmidt relaxed his shoulders. ‘Neither of us fancies suicide. Beyond the act a plan is needed to give us cover. I’ve the glimmer of an idea on that.’ It was conceivable that he might find such a plan.

  ‘Franz, I hope you come up with something. Everywhere I look in my department I see your green-inked fingerprints. Best use gloves for this little adventure.’

  Through a corridor in the drifting tobacco smoke, Schmidt was looking straight into the eyes of Herr von Streck.

  ‘My God!’ he exclaimed softly. Suddenly his eye was stinging, the Nazi’s face blurring.

  ‘What?’ Wagner’s head had jerked around.

  ‘Don’t look now. The man across the room, in the astrakhan coat. I know him. He’s a high Nazi functionary’

  Wagner swore. ‘Not a lip-reader, I trust.’

  A large blond man was with the Nazi, and they were both staring at Schmidt. He thought rapidly: Is this a coincidence? He’d omitted von Streck from his diatribe to Wagner. Had his phone — Wagner’s — been tapped? The two Nazis were getting up, plainly coming towards them, the plenipotentiary looming broader and broader. Wagner was fumbling for cigarettes. They arrived at the bankers’ table. Schmidt stood up, and felt the
full weight of the ironical eyes. The big blond man, head and shoulders over von Streck, stood back, hard eyes switching from Schmidt to Wagner.

  ‘Well, well, Herr Schmidt! You drink beer?’ The mole stood out like a beacon on his cheek, the homburg was held lightly in his beringed, hairy fingers.

  ‘On occasion, mein herr.’

  ‘And tonight is one such.’ He looked at Wagner.

  ‘May I introduce my colleague, Herr Wagner … Herr von Streck.’

  The Nazi examined Wagner, nodded, slow and deliberate. ‘So this is Herr Wagner, deputy foreign manager.’

  Wagner bowed slightly. He’d become dead pale.

  Von Streck smiled coldly. ‘Gentlemen, have a good evening.’

  The Nazi duo, massive in their individual ways, left.

  ‘Thanks for introducing me,’ Wagner muttered, as they disappeared. ‘How in hell does he know me? And how do you know him?’

  ‘We met at the Municipal Library.’Wagner stared incredulously. ‘I don’t know how he knows you.’

  ‘I don’t like this,’ Wagner growled.

  Schmidt was silent, also disturbed. It’d been a shock. He came back on track. ‘Tomorrow evening at six, in the vault?’

  Wagner nodded, spat out a shred of tobacco, and stuck the cigarette back between his lips. Schmidt said, ‘At short notice, could you find an excuse to go to Zurich?’

  Until this point in the evening, it had seemed to Otto that the good ship Wertheim had been loafing along through a rather placid and boring sea. Now, there was tension on the bridge – as though the deck officers had observed the barometer plunge.

  This transformation had been brought about by the senior of two Ruhr industrialists who were dining at the bank, putting aside polite conversation, and in a thick Swabian accent, getting down to tintacks. Using his blunt hands, as though assembling a structure before their eyes, he’d explained the project, the assistance they sought from the bank. The man’s milk-white face moved attractively as he spoke. When he stopped, it appeared as grave as a preacher reflecting on his just-delivered sermon. Herr Wertheim, seated next to his nephew, was reminded of a Lutheran pastor he’d disliked.