The Eye of the Abyss - [Franz Schmidt 01]

by Marshall Browne

  He gulped more brandy; a trickle came from the corner of his mouth.

  ‘Not tonight, my dear Otto,’ Dietrich said evenly. He’d narrowed his eyes, his handsome face had become brooding, even lustful in its own way. An interesting proposition had occurred to him — a realisation, really. It concerned Franz Schmidt. He sipped his brandy, equably regarded the other’s disappointment. He said, ’Fräulein Dressler’s no longer with us. The Gestapo are picking her up tonight.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Might already have done so, she could be under interrogation at this moment.’

  Otto sat up. Lights seemed to be spinning before his eyes. He said thickly, ‘Did I hear you right?’ Amazement was flaring in his brain, dissipating the mist of alcohol.

  ‘You did. Didn’t you know she had a Jewish mother?’

  Otto frowned heavily, trying to force his mind to take hold of this startling development. A red light was flashing in the mist. He’d known it, but had never thought it through to any kind of a conclusion. That racial stream in her, perhaps, had been the source of his sexual fantasies, of numerous sessions of masturbation. He fumbled for his glass, brooded on its emptiness, as though everything had turned inexplicable and threatening ... the Gestapo!

  ‘Never mind,’ Dietrich said. ‘In concealing that fact, in working here, she’s been breaking the law for the last three years. She’ll certainly go to prison.’

  ‘Interrogation?’ Involuntarily, Otto mouthed the word caught by his groping mind. He’d found a track in the mist. ‘I’d like to be there for that. I’d like to get my hand up that superior Jewish bitch’s cunt, make her squeal and squirm. Hear her begging ...’ His voice had risen, cracked, then become thick. Something else was on the rise; he felt it straining at his trouser flies.

  Dietrich’s wolfish teeth showed. ‘My dear Otto! Those are hardly correct sentiments? Strictly criminal sentiments ... never mind.’

  The phone on his desk jangled. He casually reached for the receiver, his sardonic look continued to hold the flushed, confused director. He listened for a few moments, not surprised by what he heard. Cunning bitch.’One minute,’ he said, and took a small notebook from his pocket, flicked it open. ‘Here are two addresses.’ He read them off. ‘Heil Hitler,’ he responded laconically and put down the phone.

  Aha! Probably not her cunning. Someone had warned her: was it complicated, stone-walling Auditor Schmidt who’d fallen into his trap? Or the fertile Herr Wertheim? Fascinating! He was going to enjoy finding out which. Perhaps it’d been both!

  He smiled patronisingly at Otto, but the young director, his hands hanging over his knees, was gazing at the carpet with his bloodshot, hangdog eyes.

  When they entered the corridor Dietrich didn’t attempt to support Otto, but, amused by the spectacle, allowed him to weave towards the lift. One by one, the lights behind the pebbled glass doors of the foreign department went out.

  Wagner appeared. He watched the two directors approach as he put on his overcoat, interested in their contrasting conditions. Attempting to pass the deputy foreign manager, Otto’s shoulder struck the wall. He cannoned off it towards Wagner who adroitly stepped aside.

  Otto came to rest against the wall. He lifted his head, and roughly focused on Wagner’s face. Through some chink, the deputy foreign manager’s contemptuous scrutiny penetrated Otto’s brain. He squinted, trying to bring the face into better focus. The corridor reeked of brandy.

  ‘I know you, Wagner,’ he said thickly. ‘I can read your damned thoughts. I see you looking at this badge.’ He fumbled for the badge on his lapel, but his nerveless fingers couldn’t find it. ‘You’d better remember ... we’re all in the same ship. If you know what’s good for you.’

  ‘A ship of fools?’ the deputy manager inquired with a succinct offhandedness.

  He turned, and walked away along the corridor. Otto peered at the departing figure, as if trying to nail it immobile against the wall with his unreliable eyes. He didn’t understand what had been said. A single idea was in his brain. ‘No-one here ... turns his back ... while a Wertheim director is talking to them,’ he shouted, seemingly chanting with difficulty from a book of etiquette. ‘D’you think ... your father can save you? Dead man, save you?’

  Wagner had gone. Otto’s voice trailed away. He was left with the empty Wertheim corridor, the usually solid but now apparently movable Wertheim wall, against which he’d lustfully pinned the aloof, fragrant Fräulein Dressler, now also departed.

  Dietrich, standing back, watched this interlude with increasing delight; it might’ve been a show put on for his entertainment and instruction.

  He stepped forward and began to steer the semi-conscious director towards his room, and its leather couch. ’Come on you dull-witted, foolish fellow. The Bavarian maidens will be safe tonight.’

  ‘Thank you, Frederick,’ Otto mumbled, ‘very good of you ... where are we off to my dear Dietrich?’

  Schmidt knocked softly on Fräulein Dressler’s door, listened, heard the soft ‘Come in’.

  She sat on the edge of the bed, fully clothed. At first he thought she was looking at the curtain-covered window. Then he realised she was contemplating the future. Like a nervous girl waiting to go to her first dance. The last image was incongruous, but in his mother’s apartment she struck him as being stripped of her character, taken out of her life. For him, more regret.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘Do you need coffee, a drink, something to eat?’

  She’d turned to him, and the contour of her chin seemed to imply trust. ’Nothing, thank you, Herr Schmidt.’

  ‘Will you sleep?’

  She glanced at him as though it hadn’t occurred to her. Her suitcases were unopened. ‘Herr Schmidt?’

  He stood in the room, the light glinting on his spectacles. The weight of matters unknown, unexplored, between them seemed to pulse in the air. Though how could she be thinking of anything but this desperate trouble?

  But he underrated her. Fräulein Dressler’s brown eyes and organised mind were considering him in a new light. Here in this stranger’s room stood a man of action. Amazingly, a different man. Yet there’d been the incident of the eye. It had been a mistake to see that as an aberration in his character. They should have known. She looked down at her hands locked in her lap.

  Schmidt found himself mute. His mother’s apartment was as silent; nothing penetrated these walls. The city had lain down and died. Four hundred thousand people dead to the world. His brain did get some relief in thinking like this. How to communicate? What to communicate?

  Suddenly the memory of them embracing in her hall came. He was aware of that scent of flowers, the smell of musk from a body which had been in haste. In the heated room, it had coalesced into a humid sensuality. Everything which he’d observed Fräulein Dressler to be: proud and dismissive, humorous and ironic, mysterious and alluring, pragmatic and sensuous, rose up in a towering wave in his head. His testicles were aching.

  This was absolute madness. And wrong! His mind reeled, yet held him on an unswerving course, and left those thoughts behind in a flash. His eye was locked with hers. Those glints of gold. The realisation transmitting between them.

  He turned and in three paces was at the door, had closed it, turned the key. Somehow their hands were together, fingers interlaced, she’d fallen back on the bed, he standing at its edge, leaning over, pinning her down. Their lips met violently, teeth jarring, the unbelievable intimacy of lips and tongue and moisture, and that habitual hint of scepticism melting away. Their mouths broke apart and he was kissing her cheeks, her eyes, her hair. The room seemed resonant with their breathing. Unbelievable pressure! He stood up, frantically threw off his coat, his braces, let his trousers fall to his ankles. Her hips were on the edge of the bed. She’d drawn up her legs, was removing underwear. He threw back her skirt, had a vision of thick white thighs above her stockings, of the darkness between, tucked up his shirt till his penis was free, fell forward on her, their hands interlacing again, felt her h
ips spread and give under him, the uplift and warmth of her stomach, found the spot, thrust once, was partially in, twice, glided in to his full extent, was rocking on her pelvis, the room filled with lubricous sounds.

  Wagner said he’d been here; Otto perhaps had been; by rumour, Herr Wertheim had - didn’t matter. One of her legs had encircled his, he was about to ejaculate - did with a spurting force which made him cry out — just as her body, her pelvis, arched up to grip him.

  He lay on her as they seemed to subside into the feather bed. Thirty seconds had passed since that first thrust. His still-hard penis was locked in her. The sensation of release spread though his body and mind. Their lips were pressed together again. Had he heard or imagined that long languorous: ‘Oh Franz!’?

  He walked home through deserted streets in a daze — not noticing that fog was accumulating, blurring the streetlamps. He couldn’t believe what had happened. Yet again! Couldn’t believe, that he’d done what he’d done. However, step by step his mind was clearing.

  Overwhelmingly came a stark horror which pulled him up: that he’d borne down on a defenceless woman at her most vulnerable. The next second, he saw this wasn’t precisely the case. She was stronger than he! What had occurred, had happened because she wished it, had been in control. Briefly in that post-orgasmic state of possession he’d thought she’d laid her character, her mystery, open to him. He saw now that she hadn’t: the enigma remained.

  He stared at the night, at the future. Images came twisting to the surface: her face, shadowed in the room at the moment of departure, a mixture of affection, something else. The ghostly faces of his family. He began to walk again.

  He’d stood in the room, somehow dressed.

  She’d said, ‘You must go.’

  ‘How can I leave you like this?’

  ‘You must. There’s no other way.’

  He’d let himself out of her room, out of his mother’s front door, half-understanding the well of her strength. Feeling empowered himself, coming out of his dream now, he went along the dark street looking towards the morning and steeling himself for the coming hard realities.

  ~ * ~

  18

  T

  HE SMALL BLACK car crawled with a clattering, misfiring motor along Frederichstrasse’s kerb, a beetle that had lost is bearings. Six thirty am. A yellowish fog blanketed the city, choking the avenues and narrower streets with swirling clouds of water vapour. The driver gazed at this murky world. His eyes were bloodshot.

  His colleague was walking the pavement, searching for number 178; each agent was invisible to the other. They kept in contact by a succession of piercing whistles. With sour, end-of-shift weariness, the driver thought if they’d been Red Indians on the hunting trail it might’ve been birdcalls. A thumping on the side panel; he braked, and peered at the blurred figure suddenly at his window.

  ‘This is it, better get a move on, we’re late,’ a disembodied voice said.

  ‘Any wonder?’ the driver grunted.

  Frau Bertha hurried through the apartment bearing a tray of hot rolls and coffee. The household had been astir for half an hour, and she knew the young woman in the guest bedroom was fully dressed, pacing the room. Her mistress, warm-gowned, already was issuing instructions with her early-morning disdain. What a start to the day!

  The doorbell clanged in the hall. Good heavens! What next? Agitatedly, Frau Bertha put down her tray on a side-table and hurried to the door.

  The tramcars had not started up because of the fog. Schmidt set out to walk from his flat to his mothers. He was aware of occasional blurry figures on the move in the fog, which almost took shape, only to decompose again. He could see a metre or two. He worried about how Herr Dressler would navigate across the city. At any rate, the trains would be delayed. He breathed lightly, trying to avoid taking in the acrid vapour.

  Last night was irradiated in his mind. A marvel. But hopeless, like a corpse on a slab. Now they’d be absorbed with arrangements, racing against time. It must be thus if they were to succeed. As surely as he’d fallen out of his character last night, with this dawn, he’d slotted back into it.

  Footsteps sounded, as if they were from an invisible twin. Ahead or behind? He stopped suddenly, so did the twin. The tapping of a blind person’s stick passed by to his left: no difference to him this morning. He went on; the twin was back. Echoes. Why was he, a man who loved his wife and daughter, engaged in these perilous events? The dripping silence for an answer.

  Black-garbed, severe-faced as priests, the two men inspected Frau Bertha. A pair of crows, she thought. She’d frozen, as if every last nerve-end had iced up. The pavement-walker held his warrant card, casually, over his heart. The official seal: the black eagle rampant, claws sunk into a swastika, glared at her. Another bird! Frau Bertha was closer to the Reich’s streetlife than her mistress. But until now, that menacing world hadn’t physically invaded the enclave which harboured No. 178.

  They stepped into the hall and the smell of leather and a whiff of foggy air came with them. Frau Bertha, grasping for normality, remembered the same odours at early departures in the households days of touring motorcars.

  ‘Tell Frau Schmidt we wish to speak to her,’ the pavement-walker said. His eyes left Frau Bertha’s face, and side-slipped to the hall furnishings, and the Great Man’s bust. He sniffed as though testing the upper-middle-class atmosphere. ’Be quick!’A Munich accent; the maid recognised it.

  In the corridor which led to the hall, a door opened and Fräulein Dressler appeared. She paused, sizing up the situation, then came forward.

  ‘I am Fräulein Dressler.’

  Both the Gestapo agents nodded, as though nebulous suspicions harboured during a long shift were confirmed. They knew nothing of her background; she was a name on a warrant. ‘You’re under arrest, fraulein,’ the walker said. ‘You’ll come with us, bringing one bag only.’ He inclined his head at her, spoke to his partner. ‘Keep her under observation.’ He turned to Frau Bertha. ‘You’ll take me to Frau Schmidt.’

  The maid led him down the passage to the salon. The driver stepped forward, and selected a hot roll from the side-table. ‘Breakfast!’ he said heartily to his colleague’s departing back.

  In her chair, Frau Schmidt waited for the denouement of the commotion. Without the buttressing of her fine clothes and jewellery she appeared as weightless as thistledown. The strict black ribbon dressing her plaited hair, the alert eyes, belied that.

  So it appeared to the unshaven man in the leather coat, who’d not removed his soft black hat. He examined this effete vision of the bourgeois, categorised it. With equal contempt, Frau Schmidt marked his manners.

  ‘By what authority do you enter my household?’ The walker sighed. Her fine-boned wrists showed from the gown. He’d snapped similar wrists like chicken-bones. As a means to an end. ‘By the authority of the Reich,’ he said in a matter-of-fact tone. He held out his identification. ‘We’ve arrested the Jewish fugitive, Dressler. How do you explain her presence here?’

  ‘Explain her presence? She is a guest.’

  ‘She is a colleague of your son’s, is she not?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Did he bring her here?’

  ‘Naturally.’ Frau Schmidt was unaccustomed to the slightest prevarication.

  His stare lifted from her face, and went around the room, taking in the rich collection. Still appraising he said, ’Then, you and your son have committed a crime. The penalty is severe. Get dressed, please.’

  Frau Schmidt did not move, continued her unblinking stare at this example of the new Germany.

  ‘Did you hear me?’

  The imperious head lifted. ‘Do you know who I am? I am the direct descendant of the most famous German in our cultural history.’

  The pronouncement, never before uttered by Frau Schmidt, except to herself, wafted in the salon. The agent’s face was empty — waiting for more information. She whispered the name, parting with it with extreme reluctance to such
a recipient. ‘Even your Herr Hitler pays my ancestor the most profound respect.’

  The man of secret orders, of subterranean cells, of the calculated dawn visitation, returned her gaze. Was she mad? Senile? Instructions for cases like this had evolved, but behind the scenes frequently lurked special influence — and purchasing power. Traps for the unwary. Now her body shook for a moment and she was staring at him fixedly. He’d be cautious. Nonetheless ...

  ‘Nonetheless, please do as I say.’

  She sat there, immutable. He waited almost a minute, by turn uncertain and impatient. She did not blink.

  ‘Frau!’

  But it was too late. Frau Schmidt had died.

  Her body remained fixed in its last position, the derisory eyes uplifted to his face.