by Robert Moss
When Heinz stabbed a finger towards the weeping man at the washbasin and said, “Take care of him,” Johnny didn’t ask what kind of care he had in mind.
“We’ll pin it on the Nazis,” Kordt announced over cognac in his room. “It won’t be the first time. You’ll be covered.”
Johnny put off thinking about whether this was true. “You’re burned,” he told Kordt. “Even if they never prove what happened, they’ll blame it on you. And those two won’t be the last ones they’ll send for you.”
Kordt considered this for a while. “I must admit your friend the barber has done a lot to convince me,” he conceded at last.
“I’ll have to report to Max tomorrow,” Johnny said. “I can only delay for a few hours. You’ve got friends in the port. Get on a boat — any boat — and leave with the first tide.”
“All right.” Kordt jumped up. He stretched out a hand and then, thinking better of it, clasped Johnny in a bear hug. “But I’ll be back. We’ll make quite a team, you and I.”
“Where will you go?”
Kordt shrugged. “Any port is home to a sailor, isn’t that so? But somewhere warm, I think. Maybe I’ll call on Trotsky. He might be able to explain what insanity spawns people like Barber Hirsch.”
9
All foreign legions have the same motto: March or Die, Marschier oder Krapier. The man who asks questions is lost. Johnny had done more than question. He had saved a life that had been claimed by the party. If his role were discovered, he would face the same fate that had been dictated for Kordt. Yet he boarded his train back to Berlin — and Max Fabrikant — without the slightest hesitation. Because of Sigrid, but not only because of her. Whatever he had done, whatever retribution might lie in store for him, he still belonged to the party. For the whole of his adult life it had been his church, his profession, his family. It was his compass. He had no direction, no purpose, without it.
In Berlin things were both better and worse than he expected. He did not have to face an immediate inquisition over Kordt’s escape, because Max had left the capital on one of his mysterious errands. When Max reappeared a few days later, he seemed oddly unconcerned about the whole affair. He asked a few perfunctory questions and seemed content to accept Johnny’s answers at face value. It was difficult to understand why Max was so indifferent to a case that had been a consuming obsession earlier that week. Perhaps, lacking evidence of Johnny’s part in the escape, he was laying a trap. Perhaps he had larger matters on his mind.
Johnny’s own mission in Germany had become impossible. He was supposed to build a fighting underground, but his local chief, Willi Leov, refused to supply him with guns or money. Young activists — the kind who had rallied to Kordt — complained that their orders were always the same: to wait. Instead of trying to mobilize the working class against Hitler, the party instructed Communist railroad workers to join with the Nazis in a strike designed to discredit the Social Democrat union bosses. The strike fizzled out after a few days, leaving a yawning chasm between the Communists and the rest of the anti-Hitler movement. Any militant who presumed to criticize these policies was reminded that he could not see “the big picture” — only Stalin knew what it was — and threatened with expulsion.
By the end of January 1933, Johnny had concluded that if the Communists had set out to install Hitler in power, they could hardly have done a better job.
“Grandmother is dead!”
In the early hours of January 30 the phrase was flashed across the country, and convoys of Brownshirts from Hamburg and Dresden, Munich and Leipzig, joined the march on Berlin. Count Helldorff, the leader of the storm troops in Berlin, rushed in and out of the Kaiserhof issuing orders. Goering waddled about in his gorgeous sky-blue uniform, his wide-cut trousers flapping like wings.
“Grandmother is dead” was the prearranged Nazi code for the seizure of power. But Hitler did not have to take power by force. He was handed it on a silver salver by the archintriguers around the president. At 11:10 A.M., Hindenburg named the man he had once reviled as “the Bohemian corporal” Chancellor of Germany. Twenty thousand storm troops turned out to ensure that nobody had second thoughts. They set the proper Wagnerian mood with a night of flaming torches.
Johnny listened to the thud of their jackboots as they marched up the Wilhelmstrasse, past the Reich Chancellery, where Hitler, flushed in triumph, took the salute. Anonymous in the crowd, borne along by its tide, he saw the torches licking at the columns of the Brandenburg Gate.
“Everything will be different!” a woman shrilled. She was pleasingly plump with a clear open face, the model German housewife.
Within twenty-four hours the phrase was blazoned in neon lights across the grand facade of the Gloria Palast, the flagship of the UFA cinema chain: EVERYTHING WILL BE DIFFERENT-ADOLF HITLER.
Johnny reeled home that night with the sinking sensation that all of Kordt’s fears had taken flesh. He had a bottle with him. Sigrid said nothing when he proceeded to pour glass after glass, but he could read something beyond reproach in her eyes. Her father had used the same crutch until it had become his supporting limb. At the thought, he felt revulsion for himself but drank long after Sigrid had gone to bed, until the bottle was empty.
When he lurched into the bedroom, she lay with her eyes closed, pretending to be asleep. He rolled onto the bed and started fumbling with the straps of her nightgown.
“Stop,” she said calmly, quietly, sadly. “You’ll tear it.” ‘She sat up and eased the garment over her head.
In the light from the street lamp across the road, her body was ivory, lovingly, exquisitely hewn.
But what followed was squalid.
He thrust himself on her, reeking of booze and stale sweat, his breathing harsh and constricted. His desire ebbed away as soon as he entered her. Soon he was panting apologies.
“It won’t happen again,” he promised. His tongue felt thick and furry.
“Nothing’s the way it used to be,” she murmured, running her hand through his hair. “Oh, Johnny. What’s to become of us?”
“We’ll survive.” He swallowed. “We’re going to survive.”
She pursed her lips and said, “Is that all?”
The survival instinct was not highly developed in Karl Liebknecht House, the headquarters of the German Communist Party. The following day, Johnny received orders to prepare for an armed insurrection in Berlin. It would be timed to coincide with a general strike. The instructions came from Willi Leov, his nominal boss — the same man who had refused him the guns and the money he had demanded to prepare an effective underground army.
“You’ll be sending men to their deaths,” Johnny protested. “We have two thousand trained fighters in Berlin. Only half that number are armed. And the general strike will never take place.”
Willi Leov glowered at him over his spectacles. “Are you refusing a party order?”
“I’m telling you how things are.” He looked with con-tempt at Leov’s red, puffy face. It was criminal, he thought, that parasites like this sat back and gave orders while Heinz was on the run from OGPU killers.
“You’re sailing close to the wind, let me tell you.”
“I’ll do what you say,” he said, in order to get out of the room.
He did nothing of the kind. When the general strike was called, the fighting cells under his command stayed at home. He had no intention of delivering them up to an act of blood sacrifice.
The German people did not respond to the party’s belated call. The general strike stirred hardly a ripple. Rank-and-file trade unionists were not disposed to risk their necks for the party now. Who could blame them? Johnny asked himself.
Sigrid came home on her bicycle and announced, “They stormed the Bülowplatz.” She described the scene of hundreds of grey-uniformed police and booted storm troopers attacking party headquarters. “They caught a man who was trying to destroy party documents,” she reported. “The idiot was throwing the pieces out the window. They threw him out afte
r them. I saw the Nazis carrying out whole cabinets of files.”
The fools, Johnny thought. They must have known this was coming on the day Hitler took power, even if they were blind before. Couldn’t they even salvage the party records?
“The fight isn’t over,” he promised Sigrid. But he expressed more confidence than he felt. The party had failed. To build a true resistance to Hitler, he would have to find an alternative — even if it meant fighting Stalin, too. But when he tried to work out the next step, his mind veered away.
It was hard, in any event, to plan for the future when everything revolved around surviving the next twenty-four hours. Soon terror reigned in Berlin. All over the city suspected Communists were dragged from their beds in predawn raids. Presses were wrecked, offices gutted. Some of those arrested informed on their friends and their families in the hope of saving their skins. Others, out of fear or disgust, volunteered their services to the new regime. The Gestapo’s net widened.
Johnny and Sigrid abandoned the Neukölln apartment — it was known to too many night callers whose fate was unknown — and lived like vagrants, dossing down in dank, airless rooms in the “rental barracks” of Moabit and Wedding. When they left their places of hiding, often in the late mornings, after working through the night, their partings were tender. They never knew whether that day’s farewell would be the last.
He wanted to tell her about Heinz and the larger doubts that wracked him. In the precious few hours they spent together, he did not have the heart. Her courage, her confidence — in defiance of everything — was immense. How could he deprive her of that, when all he could offer were questions without answers?
The whiplash of winter was in the air as he trudged back to Moabit, his chin buried in a wool muffler. The jail over to his left was a landmark, a great Victorian pile whose barred windows were dressed up with wrought iron as if they were trying to stop burglars from breaking in rather than prisoners from getting out. He crossed the street to dodge a troop of beery SA men, out looking for girls to squeeze or Jews to beat up. Between the street lamps, the darkness was almost impenetrable.
He turned into a quieter street and sensed, rather than saw, a shadow move with him. He ducked up the first alley and pressed himself flat against the wall, waiting and listening, his hand searching for the butt of his Mauser. To begin with, he could hear only the scream of police sirens and, closer, a warm-blooded scream — hard to say if it was a woman or a cat.
There.
It was a light, scurrying sound.
A rat poked its snout out of a mound of garbage and scuttled across his foot. He stayed motionless, listening. There.
A shadow flitted across the mouth of the alley. A man was coming after him, a slight figure in workman’s clothes, advancing almost noiselessly on crepe-soled shoes. Perhaps he was only a common pickpocket. Johnny willed himself invisible.
The stranger let out a low whistle — a signal to confederates? But he was almost abreast of Johnny before he spotted his quarry. He jumped, but Johnny was faster and heavier. He got hold of his pursuer’s arm and screwed it up behind his back until the man yelped in pain.
“What do you want?” Johnny let him see the gun. “Alfred, it’s me—”
Johnny was startled to hear himself addressed by a work name he had used in Hamburg. The fellow could be a police spy after all.
“Don’t you recognize me?” the stranger pleaded. Johnny hauled him back into the light. The face was narrow, almost vulpine.
Johnny remembered the young tough on the stairs at the Bunte Kuh. Heinz Kordt’s bodyguard.
“It’s Karl, isn’t it?”
The boy nodded and Johnny let him go.
“What are you doing here?”
“Party orders, what would you expect? We’re screwed, wherever we are.”
“Why did you follow me?”
“I saw you at the station. I’ve got some stuff for you.”
“What stuff?”
“From Heinz.” The boy pulled up his sweater and brought out two small packages he had tucked under his belt. “He made me promise to bring these to you if anything happened to him.”
“If anything happened—” An icy hand closed over Johnny’s heart. “What is it? What have you heard?”
Karl stood there mute, holding out the brown paper parcels. One of them had the shape and heft of a book.
Johnny reached out and gripped the boy’s wrists instead of the packages.
“Please. You have to tell me. He’s my friend, too.”
“You know someone called Max, don’t you? You ought to ask him.”
They were moving in a macabre dance, Johnny following as Karl backed away towards the street.
“Tell me.”
Johnny squeezed tighter. Karl looked at his hands as if they didn’t belong to him.
“I’m cold,” the boy said. “And I haven’t eaten all day.”
“We can go to my place.”
“Not there.” Karl shivered and glanced furtively at the street. The boy was running scared.
They went to Miller’s. It hadn’t been raided yet, even though it was popular with factory militants in the area. The bar had been shut for several hours, but Miller could always produce a drink and a sandwich for an old comrade. Karl wolfed down everything that was put before him, cramming the food into his mouth with both hands. Miller set an open bottle of wine on the table and said, “I’m turning in. Lock up after you.”
Johnny watched Karl guzzle some of the wine and said, “I’m waiting.”
“It’s like this.” Karl wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Heinz got away from Hamburg, all right, on a tub bound for Rotterdam. But there was trouble at the other end. The police nearly nabbed him on the docks. I guess that’s when Max’s people got on to him, though I can’t say for sure. Anyway, Heinz stowed away on a French cargo boat, the Antoinette. It was bound for Algiers. Heinz figured he’d be able to find a berth on another ship and get to South America. He hid under a lifeboat. But they caught him out. The captain was a real son of a bitch. He locked Heinz up in a cabin and said he’d have him deported to Germany once they got to Algiers.”
“How do you know all this?” Johnny interrupted.
“One of the seamen from the Antoinette.”
“Go on.”
“Max beat him to Algiers.”
“Max? There’s some mistake.” But even as he spoke, Johnny recalled Max’s sudden disappearance after his trip to Hamburg and his curious loss of interest in the topic of Heinz Kordt.
“Listen, the name I heard was Max,” Karl insisted. “If you don’t want to hear the rest of it, that’s fine by me.”
Johnny picked at details, hoping the boy’s story would fall apart before he reached its conclusion. Not knowing exactly where it would lead, he was already besieged by a creeping horror, colder than the night outside. Colder than any night there had ever been.
“How could Max have beaten the Antoinette into port?”
Karl shrugged. “Maybe he took a faster boat. Maybe the French tub had to stop for repairs. Maybe he found a plane. What the hell does it matter?”
Johnny reached for the wine, but his hand was shaking. His glass tipped over, and a pool of red spread across the bare wooden table.
Karl stared at it balefully and went on, “When the Antoinette came in, Max was waiting on the dock. He’d hired a gang of layabouts and armed them with axes and sledgehammers. They muscled their way straight up the gangplank. Only a few of the sailors put up any fight. Once he found out he wasn’t being hijacked, the captain was only too pleased to show them where Heinz was being held. They didn’t wait for someone to fetch the key. They broke down the door right away.”
Karl paused. His eyes were damp. His lips barely moved, and Johnny had to strain to make out every word as he said, “From what I was told, Max finished the job himself. With a sledgehammer. Myself, I’ve only seen a sledgehammer used on wood or cement. I don’t reckon a man’s skull woul
d hold up for very long.”
Johnny sat without speaking for a long time. The spilled wine, unattended, had spread to the edge of the table. The drops made a plopping sound as they hit the linoleum.
Karl’s brittle mask of cynicism had cracked. His shoulders were heaving, and he turned his face away to hide the tears.
After a while, he asked, “Why did they do it?”
Johnny felt numb. “It’s a time of madness,” he whispered.
“He was the best man we had.”
“I know.”
Heinz and one other, he amplified this inside his head. The one who had murdered him.
Karl’s expression was a mixture of disgust and disappointment. He looked at Johnny the way a child might look at a clockwork toy with a broken spring.
“I’m off,” he announced, scraping back his chair.
“Where will you go?”
“It’s all the same,” Karl said, his mask again in place. “We’re screwed wherever we are.”
The boy’s parting shot, Johnny understood later, was the demotic version of the line Heinz Kordt had inscribed on the first page of his diary. The diary was inside the larger of the two packages Karl had brought from Hamburg. It had been recorded in an old ship’s logbook. The cover was mottled and warped, and some of the pages had been torn out in haste or anger, leaving jagged rows of paper teeth. Kordt wrote in an oversized, awkward script, like a schoolboy. Johnny leafed through the later sections. The diary was the chronicle of a mind being pushed over the edge, a prolonged howl of rage and pain. “What is the difference between communism under Stalin and national socialism in Germany?” one passage read. “Answer: only that Stalin has yet to settle ‘the Jewish problem.’ Once he does that, he will be indistinguishable from Hitler.”
Johnny turned back to the epigraph. It was a phrase from Levine: “We Communists are all dead men on leave.”