The Jewish Candidate

by David Crossland

  “But Rudi, we’re a big, important constituency,” said Hertz. “Every adult Jew in Germany will be voting for you. This is a big opportunity for you and your people!”

  “It’s ironic, but the Muslim vote is actually far more important for me, Simon. Half a million Turks usually vote for the SPD, and that no doubt includes some kebab shop owners who’ve had their businesses torched by neo-Nazis in the last few years. Surely you’d want me to mention them too?”

  He noticed Birgit suppressing a smile. She liked straight talking. Hertz didn’t. His stare betrayed his dislike for this non-Jewish Jew.

  Hertz, born in Poland, survived Auschwitz as an eight-year-old child. His parents were killed in the gas chambers. After the Soviets liberated the camp in January 1945, he and his older sister were shifted from one displaced persons centre to another. They ended up in a refugee camp near Frankfurt, in the land of the murderers, of all places. They finally made it to Palestine, but Hertz moved to Germany in 1957 to work for a merchant bank in Frankfurt. He immersed himself in Jewish life in the city’s tiny Jewish community and married a rabbi’s daughter who bore him four children. For Hertz, every Jewish baby born in Germany after the war was a triumph – living proof of Hitler’s failure to wipe out his people.

  “Rudi,” he said, leaning forward and fixing him with his watery eyes. “I’m so glad we have this chance to talk. You are such a busy man and I feel we have so much to catch up on and so little time. And you are a little evasive!” He held up his finger. “On behalf of our board, I’d like to know if you have reached a decision on our request for an adjustment in our government grant if you become chancellor?”

  “I’m afraid I haven’t,” said Gutman.

  Hertz looked pained. He sat back. “You know, Rudi,” he said. “We feel your speeches and statements lack messages to the Jewish people in Germany. There is little sense of what you will do for your people, your culture. Maybe that is understandable from a political point of view. But we also feel there’s a lack of messages in private, outside the limelight, as it were. To be frank, we feel a bit, shall, we say, ignored. Left out.”

  “What exactly do you mean by my people, Simon? We’re all Germans, aren’t we?”

  “Surely you know exactly what I mean!” Hertz insisted. “You refer to your love of your Heimat, your homeland, in your speeches. But we Jews have many homes, don’t we? Physically, culturally, spiritually!”

  Gutman stood up and walked to the window. “Look there, Simon,” he said, sweeping his hand across the vista of the Seven Hills on the far side of the Rhine, blanketed by forests shining red and gold in the autumn sun. “That’s my only homeland.” There was a hint of defiance in his voice.

  Hertz looked worried. “Rudi, surely Heimat is a bit more complicated than that for us Jews, especially in this country. We have a special duty to remind this nation of its historical obligations, don’t we? And forgive me for being blunt, but you as chancellor would have a tremendously important role to play in this regard.”

  “Simon, allow me to stop you there.” Gutman crossed his arms and leant with his back against the window sill, forcing Hertz to squint at his silhouette in the bright daylight. “I will define my role myself. And if I get elected, my responsibilities will be solely, exclusively, entirely, to the German people. Full stop.”

  Hertz wanted to speak but Gutman cut him off. “Listen, Simon! I don’t think you grasp what a sensation, what a leap forward this is. I’m not referring to my person, but to my identity. Because Jews in this country are still viewed as aliens. People still associate us with the Holocaust. To most Germans we are synagogues, Torah scrolls, bearded rabbis with payees. Your average German gentile never meets a Jew. Still, 70 years on, we embody the nation’s guilt. We are the grey men and women who sit in the front rows in the annual ritual of memorial services to the Shoah. We are the finger-waggers, the reminders. When people look at us, they don’t see us! They see the shame and the horror of their own past. We’ve got to move on from this! From this ritual of outrage. I mean, we Jews are being held hostage by the past even more than the Germans!”

  Hertz’s face went red. “Please don’t belittle what we’ve achieved, Rudi!”

  “I’m not …”

  “Let me finish, please! When the Central Council of Jews was founded in 1950, the few remaining Jews who had managed to survive, who had crept out of their hiding places or been moved here as displaced persons, they were all sitting on packed suitcases! Waiting to emigrate to Israel and America! Desperate to get out in case Germany went mad again! Now Germany has one of the fastest growing Jewish communities in the world!”

  “I am not belittling anything, Simon,” Gutman said. “But it’s not my job to represent the interests of the Jewish population. That’s your job. And you need to adapt.”

  Hertz’s jaw dropped. “Adapt? What do you mean?”

  “I mean that young Jews in this country are starting to break with the past. They want to re-invent Jewish life here, give it a positive, upbeat image. Many of them aren’t religious. And believe it or not, many don’t feel any deep affinity with Israel. They’re tired of feeling like museum exhibits in this country. They’re sick of being labelled as victims. Your organisation faces a huge task, Simon. How are you going to integrate all the Russian Jews who’ve come here in the last 20 years? How are you going to embrace all the different strands of Judaism in your vastly expanded community? What are you doing for the secular Jews who just want to preserve their culture? Big questions, Simon. And I haven’t heard many answers from the Central Council.”

  Hertz got to his feet. He was shaking with rage.

  “Well, Herr Gutman, I still don’t know how you define your own Jewish identity, and what it means to you. Maybe you don’t know yourself.”

  He grabbed his black woollen coat and his Homburg hat and nodded to Birgit as he walked to the front door. Before he opened it, he turned to Gutman. “Don’t think for a minute that things will return to normal for Jews in this country anytime soon, not even in your lifetime, Herr Gutman,” he fumed. “Just a few years ago, the first rabbi was ordained in Germany since the Holocaust, you remember? He’s your age. He walks the streets of Dresden hiding his skull cap under a baseball hat! Because he doesn’t feel safe otherwise! Is that normal? The genocide may seem a long time ago to you, but it’s in living memory! And I’m healthy! I’m going to be around for a while yet and I’m going to make damned sure that what happened to my people at the hands of this pretty nation of yours never gets forgotten.” He pointed his finger at Gutman. “Do you hear me? And when I’m gone, make no mistake that there are many Jewish children who will keep that memory alive, who will pass the story of this disaster down the generations!”

  Gutman was about to reply but Hertz opened the door and hurried down the garden path, as fast as his short legs could carry him.

  Birgit came to the door. “What the hell did you say to him?”

  “I told him what needed to be said.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Sanssouci Hotel, Berlin, Friday, August 24

  The annual press ball was the most glamorous event in Berlin’s calendar of political shindigs, and this year, with the election around the corner, attendance was compulsory for the political elite. Cabinet ministers, party leaders, regional governors, MPs, diplomats, corporate bosses, lobbyists and the cream of the nation’s journalists flocked to the Sanssouci Hotel to be seen, exchange tittle-tattle, find new jobs, clinch deals and maybe even win a car. Even Chancellor Müller, who usually shunned celebrity events, was in attendance this year, with her sour-faced husband in tow.

  Carver didn’t feel like going. He didn’t know how to explain the cut between his cheekbone and his eye. But he went, just to check the vibe surrounding Gutman. And to show anyone watching him that he wasn’t feeling intimidated. He ensconced himself at a table in the hotel lobby with some fellow hacks.

  “You heard about Colin Peterson?” said Josh Mason. “He
got himself fired from the Globe.”

  “How did he manage that?” asked Carver.

  “He told them he was in Nuremberg to cover the Gutman party conference. He’d filed a story on the speech with the Nuremberg dateline and everything. But the fucker wasn’t there, he was just ripping off wire stories as usual. When the grenade went off, the foreign editor rang Peterson, who didn’t know what had happened, of course. Then the editor heard a lot of seagulls in the background. That struck him as odd. When he pointed out that Nuremberg was hundreds of miles from the sea, Peterson confessed he was in Mallorca. So they fired him.”

  Carver laughed.

  “Peterson’s a machine,” said Mason. “Last year we were in Cologne covering the trial of that cannibal. Peterson persuaded me to give him the quotes from the judge. He told me he was writing the story for five different British papers at 150 quid each. Just made cosmetic changes to make each story look a little different.”

  “Nice work if you can get it,” said Carver.

  “Yes but that’s not all,” Mason continued. “Get this: while he was covering the trial …” – he made quotation marks with his hands when he said “covering”– “… he wrote this tear-jerking account of a reunion of Polish Auschwitz survivors – “By Colin Peterson in Warsaw” – with all the quotes and information lifted from an AP story. And he finished off a story about some baby Rhino born in Munich zoo. I took the train back to Berlin with him. On the train he whipped off 500 words about a surge in profits at VW, copied from Reuters with just a few words and paragraphs turned round.”

  Carver didn’t understand why Peterson, who looked the splitting image of legendary British screen ‘cad’ Terry Thomas minus the gap in the front teeth, hadn’t retired years ago. Surely he must be a millionaire by now.

  Brian Evans joined them, a rotund colleague who worked for the Sunday Herald. “What the fuck happened to you?” Evans asked Carver, looking at the scar on his face.

  “Cut myself shaving.”

  “Using a chainsaw, were you? That wasn’t payback for your Nazi scoop, was it?” His face darkened. “Was it?”

  Carver shook his head. “Heads up, here he comes.”

  There was a broadside of camera flashguns at the entrance as Gutman crossed the red carpet with his wife Birgit. They looked young, fresh, glamorous. Just what German politics needed. Everyone turned to watch them. When Chancellor Müller had arrived half an hour earlier, she got far less attention.

  “Germany’s First Couple in waiting,” Mason remarked. “Bet he gets elected. Anyone fancy a bet?”

  There were no takers.

  The ball was in full swing. The bureau chief of the Financial Times was downing beers in a turmoil of embarrassment and joy at winning the first prize in the tombola, a Mercedes Cabriolet. The music shifted up a few gears from the early-evening waltzes. The DJ had the dancefloor heaving with a medley of ABBA songs that even the German president, in his early 70s, couldn’t resist. He was boogying, oblivious to the pained looks of his young wife and the camera flashguns of grinning press photographers around him. The squads of close protection officers dotted around the room looked on, bored. There were more than 2,000 people in the building.

  The Bulgarian diplomat walked out of the main hall and headed to the lift. He reached room 203 and opened it with a keycard. He pulled over a chair, climbed on it, unscrewed the air vent cover and found the end of the string. He retrieved the cloth bag. He dropped the small pistol in the left pocket of his black dinner jacket and put the silencer in the right. He slipped the tool pouch and spray can in his inside breast pocket. The crackle of a walkie-talkie came through the door. He tiptoed to the spyhole and spotted two uniformed policemen passing his room. They were carrying submachine guns. One of them laughed. He waited five minutes, opened the door and walked to the emergency exit.

  It was past midnight. Rudolf Gutman was in the lobby, standing at a table deep in conversation with Heise and the two co-leaders of the Greens party, his most likely coalition partner if his Social Democrats became the strongest party.

  The staircase was empty. The diplomat raced down the steps to the basement, extracted the pouch and picked the lock of a metal door leading into the service area of the hotel. It took less than a minute. He stepped into a concrete-floored passage with plastic pipes lining the ceiling. “Excuse me!” He swung round and was confronted by a tall waiter carrying a crate of beer, ten metres down the hall. “This area is out of bounds!”

  “I’m sorry, I got lost,” the guest smiled. “I’m trying to get back to the ball.”

  “Do you have a key? How did you get in that door?”

  “Oh, it wasn’t locked!”

  It took the diplomat a split second to conclude that the waiter didn’t believe him. He pulled his gun. “Put that down and be quiet. Sit down on the floor.” The man obeyed, looking petrified. “Breathe this. You’ll be OK.” The waiter turned away from the spray can. “Breathe!” The vapour entered his air passage and worked in seconds. He slumped to the ground, thumping his head hard on the concrete floor. The guest stepped back and scanned the corridor as he waited for the gas to dissipate. He opened the door to the staircase, grabbed the waiter under the arms and hauled him out. There was a gap under the stairs. He pushed him into it and put the crate next to him. For good measure, he opened one bottle and poured some down the waiter’s shirt.

  He returned to the corridor and ran down it, reaching a staircase that led back to the lobby. He had almost got to the door when it opened. Two security officers walked in. He saw they were armed from the discreet bulges in their smart jackets. They didn’t return his smile. The door slammed shut behind them.

  “This is a restricted …” The diplomat leapt forward and smashed his fist into the first guard’s testicles. The man crumpled on the step with a low groan. His partner turned towards the door. The guest launched himself up the stairs and grabbed his foot, tearing him down the steps. He flung the man round and slammed the heel of his palm into his neck, knocking him out instantaneously. The first began to roar “Hilfe!” but before he finished the word, the attacker silenced him with a lightning punch to the temple. The men were both unconscious. He ran back down the stairs. There was a locked door around the corner. He extracted the tool pouch and picked the lock. It was a storeroom filled with crates of soft drinks. He hauled the two guards into the room one by one, struggling with the second one, an 18-stone bruiser. “Not worth your wages, boys,” he muttered, spraying their faces with the canister. He relocked the door, walked up the stairs, straightened his jacket and returned to the party.

  By half past one, Gutman was ready to leave. “Anyone seen Birgit? I’m going to take a leak and find her.” Heise’s phone began beeping. Gutman walked off to the lavatory. There was no one at the urinals. He unzipped and began to pee. A cubicle door creaked open behind him. Someone appeared in the corner of his vision and stood still. He looked around. Their eyes met. Gutman was used to being recognized and gawped at, but there was something frigid and distant in the man’s gaze. He had his hand in the pocket of his black dinner jacket. Gutman felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck. The man’s eyes shifted towards the door. Gutman heard footsteps approaching fast. Heise burst in, followed by two close protection officers. “Rudi, we’ve got a situation. A bomb’s gone off. In Cologne.”

  “What? Hold on, will you?” Gutman walked to the sink. “Islamists?” Heise shrugged.

  Before he left the lavatory, he turned around. The man was gone. “Did you see the guy in here with me when you came in?” Gutman said.

  “No.”

  “There was something odd about him.”

  Carver and his colleagues looked up. There was a commotion in the lobby. Müller was striding towards the exit with her defence minister and chief of staff in tow. She was as inscrutable as ever, but her aides looked tense. Bodyguards cleared the way and held the doors open. Car doors slammed and the convoy of black BMWs sped off.

  Gutman
was next to leave, without Birgit. Heise was with him. Carver caught a glimpse of Gutman’s face. He looked worried. A murmur went up among the guests.

  “Something’s happened,” said Carver.

  Mason’s phone rang. He returned after a couple of minutes. “Get this. Three bombs have gone off. Possibly more. In churches. During services. People killed and injured. Looks like Islamists again. This is a big one.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Berlin, Saturday, August 25

  Germany was in shock. Six people were killed and dozens hurt in nail bomb explosions in five churches in Munich, Cologne, Münster, Hanover and Erfurt. All at the same time, during evening services. Three Catholic, two Protestant. The bombs were in rucksacks that had been hidden under pews, and weren’t spotted by worshippers in the gloom. The “Revengers of Allah” symbol was found sprayed on walls in or near all the churches, and the group sent an email to news organisations threatening more attacks.

  “Germany has not heeded our warning,” the message said. “The opinion poll numbers for the Zionist Gutman continue to rise. No one is safe. Not Jews, not Christian worshippers, not commuters, and not the drinkers at the Munich Oktoberfest.”

  By the next morning it was clear that the bombings would dominate the campaign, and that Gutman had most to lose. His multiculturalism message was the last thing people wanted to hear now. Instead, there were calls for more radical racial profiling at airports, longer imprisonment without charge, CCTV cameras in every mosque and vastly increased powers to bug phones and monitor Internet usage. Thousands of police armed with submachine guns were deployed at airports and major train stations. The railway system came to a halt due to incessant bomb alerts.

  The grenade attack on Gutman and the firebombing of the Jewish bakery made people aware of the Revengers of Allah and created a sense of unease. But the simultaneous explosions of deadly bombs in churches across the country were a different dimension altogether. They showed Germany was under attack from a resourceful and well-organized group of Islamist terrorists. All the issues, the party manifestos, the debates and speeches became irrelevant overnight. The threats to mass transit systems and the world’s biggest beer festival had the potential to bring public life to a standstill.