The Wertheims, Dietrich, the other visitor, had watched the capable hands shaping elevations. The man’s firm wouldn’t normally have come within the bank’s ambit. However, he’d powerful connections in the NSDAP, and in the letter of introduction which he’d brought it was intimated that the Party’s private bankers should extend him every courtesy.
He lifted his round eyes to Herr Wertheim. ‘We’ll be buying this business for a quarter of its true value. The Finance Ministry will see to that. We’ll be acting in tune with government policy. Government contracts for the output will follow.’ He sat back, shrugged, as though such strokes of good fortune were as predictable as night following day.
Herr Wertheim smiled blandly The man’s cold-blooded detachment didn’t surprise him. Discussions at this level concerning money usually ignored questions of morality. Though Wertheims hadn’t been involved, he was perfectly familiar with the new policy, which rested on the expropriation of Jewish businesses at ludicrously undervalued prices.
‘We await the finance,’ the industrialist said, spreading his hands.
Herr Wertheim said, ‘We’ll study your proposal with great care.’
‘And very positively,’ Dietrich interposed. The letter of introduction was from SS Fuehrer Himmler.
‘Naturally,’ Otto agreed with a smile.
The general-director said with the faintest hint of steel, ‘As I said, it will have the bank’s diligent consideration.’
Alone, he stood at his window and watched the visitors depart. A black limousine drew up at the bank, a black-uniformed SS driver held open its door. The car drifted off quietly along the darkened street. The general-director gave a cold smile.
The unusual nocturnal appointment fitted the nature of the business. He’d known that, along with their profitable accounts, the acquisition of the Nazis’ business would bring the bank face-to-face with their more grotesque strategies. The sea into which the bank was heading was skeined with different currents: for example, the one that’d brought the Field-Marshal through their doors this morning.
His thinking turned to Lilli Dressler. Her arrest had shocked him, immobilised him for a brief period. Then the startling events encompassing Herr Schmidt, his mother and the fräulein, had come like a bombshell. The chief auditor had tried to get her away! Who would’ve believed it? What would be the consequences? Schmidt must be on very thin ice – though all was strangely quiet. With Dietrich lurking in the wings, Wertheim had decided not to question the auditor, and had merely written his condolences. They’d wait and see.
For the moment, a curtain had dropped on her fate. He’d been fully occupied all day, anyway, had not chosen to make inquiries. His phone tapped, the triumphant blackmailing attitude of Dietrich … but he would find a way. Perhaps the sentimental employer could request favoured treatment, an earlier release? As for Dietrich – ultimately, there’d be a way to deal with him.
Always he’d been confident in his power and influence; in the past days he’d felt it bending under a strain. It didn’t daunt him. He’d no regrets at stepping into the Nazi world. The strange new rhythms sifting in his brain had driven him in that direction. Had driven him to buy The Eye. And where would they take him next? In what direction would he steer the Wertheim? With his heart condition he didn’t have much time. He’d been rereading Nietzsche: ‘Believe me! The secret of reaping the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment from life is to live dangerously!’ Herr Wertheim thought that the great poet’s words might well sum up the way he saw Wertheims these days – and the world at large.
He’d have a glass of champagne before he left. Fraulein Dressler had loved champagne.
23
SCHMIDT SAT ON the edge of his bed trying to bring an eerie dizziness under control. For a few seconds, still entangled in his last dream, he was puzzled by Helga’s absence. Then he remembered the beerhall, and the stark fear on Wagner’s face as von Streck and his blond companion had disappeared into the night. He stared across the bedroom, now seeing only that vivid image.
After breakfast he gave Maria instructions about Trudi’s toys, and regretted the maid’s dismayed look. A good girl – Helga’d left him in capable hands. He went to the bank. Breeze from the west; acrid factory smells drifting in from the outskirts; no fog, but dark and drizzling. Through the tramcar’s blurry windows the city was impressionistic.
Watching the passing streets he felt let down from the drama of the recent days, as though things were finished. Clearly it was a deceptive sensation; the flow of danger had merely fallen back to a slower tempo, like a footballer varying his pace to confuse the defence on the point of attack. He must find time to deal with his mother’s affairs. The unpublished cantatas were the foremost concern; in today’s world, in the midst of his difficulties, what to do with them?
At the bank, he opened the post, sorted it, and sent it on its way. Yesterday, between events, he’d concentrated on bringing his work up to date. Today, feigning normality, he continued in the same vein, treading a wheel towards 6.30 pm.
Under Director Schloss’s penetrating gaze Otto had never been at ease, and this interview was no different. He resettled his ample backside in the chair, and nervously but stubbornly continued the ‘pitch’ — as Dietrich termed it – to his superior.
‘It’s worth looking at. I mean, here we have seventeen million of the Party’s funds sitting in our safe in Reich bonds earning a mere 3 per cent – or in the cash accounts earning peanuts. Why not place them in foreign currencies, invest in these bargain Jewish businesses? Make some real money. Bring in a more aggressive strategy.’
For Otto, the meeting with the Ruhr industrialists had been an eye-opener. His ambition suddenly rampant, excited by a newfound creative energy, he’d decided that if he were the agent to introduce Aryanisation business into the bank and into Party investments, rewards would follow. But he’d have to work hard. He suspected his uncle was going to be a stumbling-block.
‘More aggressive?’ Schloss tapped huge blunt fingers softly on his desk. He thought: Peanuts! God save us. After a long pause, he added: ‘Foreign currencies?’
Even Otto detected the irony, and blinked quickly. ‘Yes. I’ve no doubt the Party would instruct the Reichsbank on the approvals.’ He spoke defensively, cursing inwardly. Such a prickly bastard. Ingrained with outmoded ethics. By God! Wait till he was in charge!
‘You haven’t by any chance overlooked Wertheims’ responsibility as a member of the Reich Loan Consortium, have you? Or the chronic shortage of foreign exchange for essential purposes? Even our esteemed account-holder might baulk at the anti-patriotic proposal of retaining such for speculation. You know they imprison people these days for foreign currency transgressions?’
His sarcasm cleaved the air.
Otto said warily, ’Whatever the Party does is for the greater good of the Reich.’ He’d a minor imagination, but he’d come to equate Schloss’s eyes with the freezing Baltic which abutted the man’s wretched Rostock. He stared in fascination at the long white duelling scar – from beneath his left eye, to the corner of his mouth. Inwardly, he shuddered.
Schloss smiled, as though he’d heard something both inept and ridiculous, but from this source predictable.
‘I’m certain Herr Dietrich would be in favour.’ Otto regretted this immediately. He was finding it impossible to detect where Dietrich stood on anything.
‘I suggest to you, mein herr, that it’s not the Wertheim way – regardless of what our account-holder may, or may not think.’
‘The Wertheim way’s changing,’ the younger director muttered sullenly. God! What a struggle this was!
Schloss was silent. With the same precision that he applied to a balance sheet, he examined Otto’s flaccid face, the unsavoury bags under his eyes, the broken capillaries high on his cheeks … the Nazi Party badge. Unfortunately, here was the next general-director. Hopefully, not for many a year yet. Though God knows what was going on in the mind of his uncle. Rece
ntly the G-D seemed to be trying to walk a tightwire. It was incomprehensible. Wertheims was Schloss’s life and the big director was extremely worried about it. At last he said, ‘I can’t support any of that.’
‘May I bring it up, informally, with my uncle?’
‘By all means,’ Schloss said acidly.
Otto withdrew, relieved, but cursing under his breath in the hall. The staff said Schloss marched through these corridors as though to the beat of a drum. One day, he’d put an end to that damned parade.
Dressler was abroad on a burglary case, but as he went through the streets his mind was ranging further. The atmosphere at his station wasn’t pleasant. He was circumspect in his relations with his colleagues, who were mainly younger. Aloof, they considered it. His stolid performance, the trauma of his war experiences never articulated, set him apart. ‘Nose to the grindstone. A big dopey bear with a piece of steel in his head,’ they said suspiciously. He’d never involved himself in the politics played out in the state police; he ignored the ‘new’ variety under the shadow of the SS, which was consolidating the Reich police forces.
However, he wasn’t oblivious to the further distancing that’d been going on. This morning when he’d arrived for duty the detective signing off had been stiff and embarrassed. Of course, his problem was all over the station. But it wasn’t only that: his arrest of the two SA rapists had raised dust, as had their cracked skulls.
So what? He shrugged massively, shedding the station atmosphere, welcoming the street. A change of this nature was the least of his worries. He transferred scraps of paper from his left overcoat pocket to the right. From the in-tray to the out. He didn’t believe in deskwork, spent hardly any time at the station. Did his paperwork on the zinc bars of coffee houses.
He stopped at a phone booth, looked in his notebook, and dialled the number of the man in touch with Herr Rubinstein. Guardedly, he made his request. Call back in an hour.
Into the Jewish streets he went, swaying from side to side with his distinctive gait. The boarded-up shops reinforced the bankrupt atmosphere. With the chronic shortage of glass, would they ever look like shops again? These incidental thoughts drifted in his mind, like the mist loitering at the ends of alleys.
He entered another phone box. Herr Rubinstein would see them at 7.00 pm, but at a different address. Quite understandable. The eyes of Gestapo informers were everywhere. He knew precisely where some were. Surreptitiously, they unearthed the leads for their masters’ missions. Now, it was up to Herr Schmidt. He re-examined the street, continued on his way to the scenes of the string of overnight burglaries. He knew the identity of the perpetrator already: the modus operandi matched up with an index card in his brain.
Otto’s lustful inclinations were notorious within Wertheims – had been whispered about for a decade behind the hands of typists. Periodically, the family had removed young female staff from his reach. Generous settlements had always bought silence. To Otto’s chagrin and frustration, Fräulein Dressler had outmanoeuvred him, but her successor looked like easier pickings. A simple country girl, ripe and juicy for his attention, he’d decided on the morning of her arrival. He’d gone to the general-director’s anteroom for the express purpose of viewing her. From the door, his eyes had narrowed as they’d glazed with lust. Otto couldn’t conceal his sexual reactions. Having made his judgement on her type, he’d turned on his heel and left.
After his interview with Schloss, he came upon Fräulein Blum, statuesque but ill at ease in the unfamiliar surroundings. A corridor of the fourth floor. He was surprised to encounter her here but his brain, facile in such matters, made a quick calculation: his uncle wouldn’t come to the bank until lunchtime today. But caution was needed: the general-director’s secretary wasn’t to be compared with a typist from one of the departments. He blocked her path.
‘Heil Hitler!’ He’d adopted this salute with a calculated enthusiasm. ‘Fräulein, this is very convenient. I require assistance in locating a file in the archive. Come with me, please.’
He led the way around a corner, and opened a frosted glass door into a long room jammed with high shelving, stacked with chipped, gilt-lettered ledgers, and neat brown paper packages. Outsiders might’ve recoiled from this graveyard of financial and social history, of Wertheim & Co’s past endeavours; or, might’ve been fascinated by the potential of its secrets. Otto was oblivious to such nuances. He threaded his way to a remote corner.
Fräulein Blum, surprised, flustered, blushing, followed obediently.
‘Here we are,’ Otto said. He leaned negligently against a shelf marked 1921, and through half-closed eyes arrogantly inspected her body, causing her eyes to widen. ‘You know, fräulein, I’m a director of the bank and a member of the Party.’ He used his throaty, overbearing voice.
‘What do you wish of me, Herr Director?’
He was gratified at her quick breathing. He grinned, and his fleshy lips drew back, displaying gold-rimmed front teeth. ‘This.’ He moved his rotund body adroitly forward, forcing her into the corner. His teeth clashed against hers, his tongue forced its way into her mouth. They were exactly the same height. The transition from arrogant repose to arrogant action was seamless. His lips and tongue were working vigorously, filling her mouth. His hands dropped to roam roughly around her waist, went under her sweater, plucked blouse out from skirt. She gasped as they got to her warm flesh, then again, as his fingers slid under her brassiere, burst it off, and began kneading her breasts.
‘Fat, Munich pig!’ he hissed, quickly out of breath, dribbling saliva into her gasping mouth. His erection throbbed painfully against his trouser flies. He was overwhelmed now by his lust to penetrate; to reduce this Amazon to a suppliant, mewling victim. To make good his losses with the Dressler bitch! He ripped open his flies, spraying buttons on the floor, baring his genitals. His left hand pinioned her to the wall by one of her breasts, which overspilled his flabby fingers. He thrust his right hand under her skirt, tore down her bloomers. Expertly, two more flabby fingers found her declivity.
‘Aha! You big wet pig!’
He stiffened in shock. Her large nail-polished hand had shot out and seized his testicles in an unbreakable grip, was kneading them as fiercely as he’d worked on her breasts. Fiercer! Herr Otto’s firmament came ablaze with wheeling lights; through his every fibre, paroxysms of pain and pleasure rippled. His raucous groans filled the room. His trousers fell down. His penis was free, jagging awkwardly, uncontrolled, straining for that place. Her long, muscular legs came horizontally out from the wall, and trapped his arse.
Her hand had gripped it. ‘Oh God, fräulein!’ What’d happened to the woman?! ‘Gently!’ Her pelvis had descended on it, muscles like oscillating steel bands had taken it, were dragging it in, were going to tear it out by the roots! ‘Agony!’ he cried, fighting to withdraw, the drive to ejaculate gone. Thank God! He crashed back against the shelves, his chest heaving, his penis burning, but free of that churning, mince-meat-making vice. He was dazed, in shock, his trousers and underpants tangled around his ankles.
Fräulein Blum quickly, efficiently, was straightening her stockings, thwacking her garters into place. With a nervy gesture she pushed her blonde hair back. ‘Herr Director, you did not satisfy me,’ she said succinctly. Her lips enunciated this with an exaggerated twist. Her mouth drooped disdainfully.
Stunned, his eyes protruding, Otto looking over his shoulder watched her leave. The pain! The air froze his podgy, defeated-looking arse. His heart was bounding in his chest like a hammer. This Munich pig had thrown his directorship, his Nazi Party membership – his manhood – back in his face like a handful of chickenfeed. Otto couldn’t believe it. The Dressler bitch was responsible for this! Gingerly he felt his testicles, and groaned afresh to the Wertheim records.
24
AN HOUR TO wait; Schmidt slipped into meditation. The day had evaporated. Though he’d been half-listening for it, the sound of the bank shutting down took him unawares. Chesty coughs, footsteps, f
aded away in the corridor leaving a pregnant silence. The scene’s being set, he thought. Another ten minutes …
His thinking picked up speed. Until last night’s rendezvous with Dressler, he’d been adrift in the convoluted passage of events, reacting on impulse. Through following his conscience, following his heart, he’d moved to Lilli Dressler’s side; just doing it. But failure. Then the plan had come, out of the new necessity; a mad, dangerous plan. But a thing of concrete, putting his previous fumbling to shame. The Nazi Party’s bonds would finance her release and escape from Germany! As he’d stood with her father at the cathedral, the knight implanted in him had ridden out of the mists, and lowered his lance to the point. They’d exchanged comradely greetings. Not a fantasy. Not to him. And the knight had the humanistic character of Dürer’s, not of his ruthless ancestor of the Teutonic Order.
Sitting, waiting, immobile with his thoughts, in the deep silence of the closed bank, he realised that the hold of the Teutonic Knights on him had gone; that he’d been moving towards this moment as he understood more and more how the Order had been debased by greed and the lust for power. For twenty years, his research had been like water dripping on a rock; suddenly the rock had cracked.
Someone walked quietly along the corridor. He listened to the sound die, took up his thoughts again. It was a catharsis. But immediately it’d been outshone by what he’d realised about his father: the surgeon had arrived at the identical destination. His father had said nothing about his catharsis. He’d left Schmidt to find his way to his own. Why had it taken so long? The classic case of the auditor with his nose too close to the grindstone? So his father had given him Dürer’s knight. Left him this symbol of knightly virtue. In waiting.
The Eye of the Abyss Page 15