Two Brothers: A Novel

by Ben Elton

  ‘So,’ Bogart replied, ‘you think that somebody in the Stasi has communicated with you in the name of your dead sister-in-law.’

  ‘Yes. I think that’s exactly what has happened.’

  ‘Well, it’s an interesting theory,’ Bogart conceded.

  Stone looked hard at his two interrogators.

  ‘Yes, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘And the thing is, I find it difficult to credit that it never occurred to you.’

  Bogart smiled, a kind of cheerful shrug. ‘Well, we might have considered it,’ he said pleasantly.

  ‘Might have done! You damn well know it! You think the Stasi are luring me to Berlin, don’t you?’

  ‘It’s a possibility.’

  ‘It’s a bloody certainty!’

  ‘For what purpose?’ Peter Lorre enquired. ‘Since you seem to know more about them than we do.’

  ‘Same purpose as yours obviously. Dirty spying. You said you were sending me to Berlin to persuade a Stasi officer to turn traitor and work for you. I think they have exactly the same idea except the target is me. I don’t flatter myself that I’m much of a catch. I’m just a translator, but I’m in the Foreign Office and what’s more I’m attached to the East German desk. That’s got to be of interest to them.’

  For the first time Bogart left his corner and joined the party. He even reached over and helped himself to a biscuit.

  ‘You’re absolutely right, of course,’ he admitted in his soft Yorkshire burr, ‘it may very well be that you are being targeted. Which is why we must be getting along with your briefing. We don’t want to lose you to some stupid mistake on elementary protocol.’

  ‘Not so damned fast,’ Stone snapped. ‘I want to get this clear. You’re admitting that you were happy to send me into East Berlin even though you knew I was being set up for some kind of Stasi entrapment?’

  ‘We don’t know that,’ Lorre replied. ‘We don’t know anything. One never does in our game. We think you might be being set up.’

  ‘You told me you knew she was alive, you bastards!’

  ‘Perhaps we should have said that we knew somebody using her name was alive,’ Bogart conceded gently. ‘Somebody who may or may not be entitled to use it.

  ‘Either way works for us,’ he went on cheerfully, pouring Stone another cup of tea. ‘Whether we end up trying to recruit her or they end up trying to recruit you, it’s a very promising situation for HM Government.’

  Stone lit a cigarette, trying to take it all in.

  ‘So right from the start you’ve had it in mind that I might return to Britain having been recruited by the Stasi?’

  ‘That is one possible scenario,’ Lorre admitted.

  ‘Were you going to warn me?’

  ‘We find it is generally a useful policy to refrain from divulging anything that we do not absolutely have to.’

  ‘So you would have sat back and watched to see if I turned traitor? Content that you could use me either way?’

  ‘We were content to keep the various options open for as long as possible.’

  Stone smoked and sipped his tea and thought about it. ‘Well,’ he said finally, ‘at least now we understand each other a little better. So let’s get on with it, shall we? What do I need to know to be a spy?’

  ‘Oh, nothing too taxing,’ Peter Lorre said, once more adopting his vaguely patronizing tone. ‘Some addresses, a safe house if you need to run. Sources of money. Embassy codes and a bit of diplomatic law in case you have to try and claim immunity.’

  ‘I hate studying law,’ Stone said grimly.

  ‘Yes, we noticed you’ve been trying to pass your Bar exams,’ Lorre said. ‘Not happy at the Foreign Office?’

  ‘I’m not happy anywhere.’

  ‘There is just one thing, Mr Stone,’ Bogart said quietly. He had returned to his corner and was once more considering Stone with his enigmatic, faraway gaze.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘The letter that first alerted you to the possibility that Frau Stengel might still be alive.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That letter was sufficiently detailed and intimate to give you real hope. It was only when we told you that whoever wrote that letter was a Stasi agent that you began to doubt its credibility.’

  ‘That is true.’

  ‘So if Dagmar Fischer didn’t write it, who did? I can’t believe you haven’t thought about it. Who could still be alive today who had sufficiently intimate knowledge of your youthful relationship with Dagmar Fischer to be able to forge that letter?’

  Stone waited a moment before replying.

  ‘I find it is generally a useful policy,’ he said finally, ‘to refrain from divulging anything that I do not absolutely have to.’

  A Friendly Nazi

  Berlin, 1934

  WOLFGANG WAS PLAYING piano in a bar down by the river.

  It was not yet completely illegal for Jews to perform in front of non-Jews but Wolfgang did not make a point of admitting his racial status if he could avoid it. He was only playing for drinks and tips anyway and since the landlord, who was a jazz fan, didn’t ask, Wolfgang did not tell.

  He kept his dirty little secret. A secret of which he was supposed to be ashamed. And because of that, in a vague, difficult to define sort of a way, he was ashamed.

  Scarcely a year after Hitler had been handed power, something of what he had always claimed about the Jews had actually come to pass.

  He said they were different.

  And they had become different.

  He had accused them of being furtive and sneaky.

  And they had become furtive and sneaky. Covering up. Lying low. Watching the door. Hiding away. Survival rats. Constantly nervous, trying to blend in, avoiding people’s eyes, keeping out of people’s way. Attempting wherever possible to conceal the fundamental truth about themselves.

  Exactly as Goebbels and Streicher said they did.

  ‘It’s a kind of ghettoization of the soul,’ Frieda said.

  Wolfgang sat in the little bar with the smoke-blackened ceiling and played. Eyes closed, his mind transported far away by the music.

  Yes, sir! That’s my baby. No, sir, I don’t mean maybe.

  Slow and rolling, not like Lee Morse had immortalized it back in ’25, but soulful, like a blues. A faraway blues. Far away in America.

  ‘Hello, Wolfgang.’

  The voice came from behind him. It was quiet, gentle even, but it shattered his reverie just as surely as if it had been the voice of the Leader himself. Wolfgang was, after all, vermin. A rat or a cockroach, startled, terrified, looking for a skirting board to scuttle under.

  Warily he opened his eyes and glanced around. A handsome blond man in his late twenties or early thirties was standing just behind him, elegantly dressed, with a rakish pencil-thin moustache and a sardonic, knowing smile.

  And a Gold Nazi Party badge on his lapel.

  Wolfgang turned back to his piano, his fingers stumbling on the keys, clumsy with fear.

  Gold party members were real Nazis.

  Only the first hundred thousand members owned such a badge. People who’d joined when the rest of the nation were dismissing Hitler as a lunatic. These were true believers who despised the so-called Septemberlinge who had begun to flock to the swastika after Hitler’s first electoral breakthrough in September 1930.

  And this Gold Party member knew his name. And if he knew his name, he knew he was a Jew. And if he knew he was a Jew then Wolfgang was at the mercy of his slightest whim.

  ‘I’m not sure I ever heard you play piano before,’ the man said, still from behind Wolfgang’s back.

  ‘Well, you’re hearing me now, mister,’ Wolfgang replied, concentrating on his keyboard, ‘and if you’ve been listening, then a few coins or maybe a beer would be much appreciated.’

  ‘Oh absolutely. Always a pleasure to drink with an old friend. Single malt’s your tipple, if I recall. Am I right, Mr Trumpet?’

  Wolfgang remembered now. It was the use of that old nic
kname that did it. ‘Mr Trumpet’ had been Kurt’s invention but all his gang had used it.

  ‘Hello, Helmut,’ Wolfgang said, stopping playing and turning around on his stool.

  ‘Ah. That’s better,’ Helmut said with what appeared to be a genuinely friendly smile, pressing a tumbler of scotch into Wolfgang’s hand.

  It had been eleven years but, apart from the moustache, the slim, handsome, somewhat effete young man Wolfgang had known in another life had not really changed all that much.

  ‘Long time since the Joplin Club.’

  ‘Indeed. Eleven years,’ Helmut replied cheerfully.

  ‘Eleven years for you. Eternity for me.’

  ‘Ah yes,’ Helmut said with a nod but nothing more.

  Wolfgang raised his glass. ‘How about we drink to Kurt?’

  ‘Yes. Why not? To Kurt. I still miss him. I remember warning him at the time: if you can’t afford decent drugs, don’t take any. Such a shame. Mind you, perhaps it was for the best. I don’t think he’d have fared very well in our brave new Fatherland.’

  ‘Unlike you, Helmut,’ Wolfgang said, nodding at the badge on his companion’s lapel. ‘You seem to be faring all right.’

  ‘Ah yes. Bend with the wind, that’s me. And I saw the way it was blowing earlier than most. Drink up.’ Helmut ordered another round of drinks. ‘You’re still playing music, I see, and I’m very glad, I might add.’

  ‘Well, things are a little more difficult these days of course,’ Wolfgang answered warily. ‘I play when I’m allowed. This isn’t a job, you know. I do it for tips, that’s all. I’m not employed here.’

  ‘Please, Wolfgang,’ Helmut said. ‘I wear this badge because it is practical to do so. It has nothing to do with who my friends are.’

  Wolfgang sipped at his second whisky, focusing on that brief, now unfamiliar luxury rather than the demeaning fact that whatever Helmut might say, Wolfgang was still a Jew and so they were not friends. Their relationship, such as it was, existed only on sufferance. It was simply impossible to ignore the fact that socially they were polar opposites. One the master, the other the dog. And no matter what kindnesses a master might show a dog, the dog was still a dog.

  ‘And you?’ Wolfgang said finally. ‘Are you still—’

  ‘A queer pimp? Oh yes, very much so. More than ever. My brown-shirted comrades have tremendous appetites, some of them most exotic. Funny really, the more they rail against depravity the more they seem to want it. Perhaps they’re just checking that it really is as bad as they say it is. You know, for purposes of research. For how can one really know how wicked it is to batter open the arse of a penniless unemployed youth who only wanted bread and a uniform until you’ve actually done it?’

  Wolfgang tried to smile at Helmut’s levity, his newly acquired dog instincts prompting him to want to be ingratiating, despite seeing no humour in what was being discussed. ‘Well, you know what they say about power corrupting,’ he observed, gratefully accepting one of Helmut’s American Camel cigarettes. Wolfgang himself could now only afford to smoke cheap local brands, and not even as many of those as he would have liked.

  ‘Yes and absolute power corrupts absolutely,’ Helmut said, grinning, ‘which of course is what we Nazis have got, so absolute it’s positively tasteless. Hey ho. ’Twas ever thus, and in the meantime the standard-bearers of New Europe are fucking themselves senseless and there are more shivering little girls and boys working the pavements of Schöneberg and the Potsdamer Strasse than ever there were under decadent old Weimar. Ain’t life a scream?’

  ‘You said brown-shirted “comrades” a moment ago,’ Wolfgang said, looking his companion properly in the eye for the first time. ‘Are you in the SA, Helmut?’

  ‘Oh absolutely. Since 1927 in fact … almost an Alter Kämpfer, don’t you know. Not that I’ve ever been in a fight in my life, you understand. No, I went straight to the top. Pimp-in-chief to Röhm himself. Funny, don’t you think? That a man who commands three million devotedly obedient young men needs a chap like me to fix him up. I suppose it avoids small talk, although I can’t imagine dear Ernst’s small talk consists of much more than “Get your trousers off, lad, turn around and bend over”.’

  Wolfgang was most surprised at Helmut’s indiscretion. Of course everyone in Germany had heard the rumours that the SA’s all-powerful leader was a homosexual and one with a brutal and rapacious appetite, but Wolfgang could not imagine anyone being so open about it.

  ‘Funny, isn’t it?’ Helmut laughed. ‘In a way me and old Ernst are a bit like you, in so much as we’re officially blood enemies of National Socialism. The party’s terribly down on us homos, you know. There’s talk of having us sterilized, which is hilarious, don’t you think? I mean, what would be the point of sterilizing a queer? But that’s my dear party colleagues for you. Never let an inconsistency get in the way of brutality. Thick as two short planks every one of them. My dear, you won’t believe the ignorance.’

  Helmut was making no effort to lower his tone and one or two of the other drinkers in the bar were beginning to shift about, casting aggressive glances in his direction. They looked away again, however, when Helmut ostentatiously displayed the black and red badge ringed with gold that was pinned on his lapel.

  ‘Come on,’ Helmut said. ‘If you’re not officially working here, you can take the evening off, can’t you? Let me buy you dinner. There’s no one here I’m interested in anyway. Did you ever see an uglier bunch?’

  ‘Dinner? You want to eat with me?’

  ‘That’s right, a Jew and queer, eh? The SS would love that, wouldn’t they? Perhaps we can plot an assassination attempt.’

  At first Wolfgang was astonished at Helmut’s provocative behaviour, but he soon recognized that it was not so very surprising and certainly not brave. The Nazis respected nothing more than authority, and as a senior SA man close to Ernst Röhm, Helmut was invulnerable. Wolfgang decided therefore to try and relax for an hour or two and enjoy a free dinner.

  After all, he could be in no safer company in all of Berlin.

  And besides, there was something he very much wanted to ask Helmut. He raised it the moment they had sat down in a cosy little restaurant and ordered their drinks and food.

  ‘Do you ever see Katharina?’ Wolfgang asked.

  A shadow of sadness passed across Helmut’s habitually amused countenance.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘you were rather in love with her, weren’t you?’

  ‘Was it that obvious?’

  ‘Glaring, my dear. Glaring. And who can blame you? Katharina, lovely Katharina, she was such a very exquisite creature. Loveliest of them all.’

  ‘Was?’ Wolfgang asked, the shadow passing from Helmut’s face to his own.

  ‘Yes – was, I’m afraid,’ Helmut replied, staring sadly into his Martini.

  ‘Helmut. Please don’t tell me she’s dead.’

  ‘No. Not dead. Not yet. I don’t think so anyway. But she’s been very ill for years. Not a nice condition at all; sad to say, she has syphilis.’

  ‘Oh my God. Not Katharina.’

  ‘It’s quite advanced and so of course she’s rather disfigured. Such terrible luck. You know how reserved she was, never loose at all, not like most of us that year. She told me it was one mistake. A film producer. She wanted to be an actress, you recall.’

  ‘Yes, I recall.’

  Wolfgang felt such pain. Real physical pain. Katharina was his secret. The funny, wistful little might-have-been that he kept hidden in a box somewhere deep in his heart. He scarcely even looked into the box any more. He had plenty else to worry about, after all. But it was always there, a sweet memory of something beautiful that had passed him by.

  ‘I’m sorry, Wolfgang,’ Helmut said, sniffing the wine the waiter had offered him. ‘I know how much she meant to you … you didn’t ever … did you?’

  ‘No, no, we didn’t,’ Wolfgang said, ‘but not for want of desire on my part. I tried one night, when I was drunk, but she put me in my pl
ace. She didn’t sleep with married men.’

  ‘For which you should be very grateful. You may have had a lucky escape. Life is undoubtedly unfair and cruel and swinish.’

  The waiter brought the soup and they ate for a few moments in silence.

  ‘What more can I tell you?’ Helmut went on. ‘She pretty much retired from everything and went to live with her mother. I saw her about a year or two ago. The symptoms were in remission but she was very scarred.’

  ‘I should like to see her.’

  ‘I very very much doubt she would want that, Wolfgang. Besides …’

  Helmut left the sentence hanging where it was while he studied the diamond on his cigarette case. He didn’t need to say more. It was pretty obvious that the last thing any distressed girl needed was a Jew trying to befriend her.

  Wolfgang could be of no help to anyone. Not Katharina, not his family, not himself.

  ‘Best to remember her as she was, don’t you think?’ Helmut said. ‘Beautiful, captivating Katharina.’

  They ate their meal together. Sharing happier memories of the great and glorious Joplin Club, memories which for Wolfgang were destined always now to be suffused with an intolerable sadness.

  It was certainly no consolation that all the other members of Kurt’s old gang were doing very well in the newly awoken Germany. Dorf the bookish money launderer was now with Schacht at the Reichsbank.

  ‘Still juggling debt,’ Helmut laughed. ‘The only difference is that now he does it while he’s sober. And you remember Hans? Believe it or not, he’s also at exactly the same game as he was in 1923. Acquiring expensive motor cars on the cheap from those who find they have to liquidate their assets urgently.’

  Wolfgang nodded. Wondering how many of those fine cars that had pulled up outside the Kempinski hotel for the Fischers’ ‘farewell’ party a year before had since been bought short and sold long by his old friend Hans. The Fischer Mercedes probably amongst them.

  ‘And Helene, of course,’ Helmut went on. ‘You remember dear sparkling Helene? She is the star of us all, still passing out at the end of parties but now she does it in the homes of ambassadors and in ballrooms on the Wilhelmstrasse. A friend of Goering, no less. Who as we all know does love a pretty girl.’