The Hour of the Cat

by Peter Quinn

  “I’d stay where I was, I was you.”

  The kid tried to twist his arm free. “Lemme go!” he shouted. Dunne tightened his hold. In the space of a few minutes, the cops chased away the brownshirts and brought the crowd under control. Dunne let go. The burned-down butt still hanging from his lower lip, the kid picked up his papers. “What are you, a friggin’ cop?”

  “Let’s just say I give advice to people who need it. If you were going to help your friends, forget it. Was already three against one. And if you were going to fight the cops, you’d get your ass kicked and wind up in jail. You’re still young. Plenty of time for that later on.”

  “Keep your friggin’ advice. Who asked for it?” He flicked the butt and sent it spinning in a high arc over the sidewalk and into the gutter. “People had enough of bein’ pushed around by sheenie bankers who own everythin’, includin’ the Jew-lover-in-chief in the White House. Hitler’s been the only one with balls enough to put them Christ-killin’ bloodsuckers in their place. Now it’s America’s turn. The day of reckonin’ is comin’. The Jew is gonna get his. Just wait and see.”

  “What part you gonna play?”

  “Part?”

  “Yeah. Chief bully or assistant stooge, like you are now?”

  The kid darted down the steps. “Go kiss a Jew’s ass. It’s you who’s the stooge. Bet you’ve had a lot of practice at it.”

  Not a lot, really, just that once. He meets Tommy Bellows and the others on his way home from sweeping the floor in Koening’s Butcher Shop and putting enough fresh sawdust to soak up the thick, red-black blood. They invited him to tag along to the East River to see who can throw a stone the farthest. It’s Tommy who spots two boys in yarmulkes across the street, lets out a holler, and chases after them. The pack follows, shouting and laughing. It seems at first the boys will get away, and most of the pack begin to slow down, satisfied with the fun they’ve already had. But the boys take a wrong turn, down a dead-end alley, and are instantly trapped.

  “Kneel!” Tommy yells. When they don’t, he punches one of them and the whole pack falls on them, pulls the book bags off their backs, and dumps their contents on the slime-slicked cobblestones. Tommy picks up one of the books. It’s filled with the same indecipherable characters as on the signs outside synagogues and Jewish stores. “Here, Hymie,” Tommy says to the boy he’s punched, “Sing us a Jew song.”

  “This isn’t a song book,” the boy said. “It’s a prayer book.”

  “Then pray us some Jew prayers.” Tommy laughs, and they all joined in, even the ones who don’t feel like laughing, who see in the boys’ eyes a painful, familiar fear of being outnumbered, overpowered, mocked, beaten, and humiliated. Human fears. Their own. They silently wish it would stop.

  Tommy hits the boy again and this time blood begins to spurt from his nose. He pulls off the boy’s skullcap and sticks it on his own head. “Sheenie, sheenie,” he chanted, “who’s got your beanie?” He drops the skullcap on the ground.

  The laughter rises again, then stops. A shadow appears over the alley, as though a cloud has crossed the sun. Fin is about to turn when a hand takes hold of his collar, lifts him off his feet, and hurls him against the adjacent wall. Lying stunned, left shoulder roaring with pain, face on the wet, greasy, foul-smelling pavement, Fin watches as the cluster of shoes around him backs away and flees down the alley.

  “Get up.” The bush of his father’s mustache protrudes from beneath his small, round nose. His eyes are shaded by his cap. He tells Fin to help the two boys gather their books and pick up the yarmulke. When they’re finished, he walks a pace or two ahead of Fin and doesn’t turn around until they’ve reached the corner of Drydock. Fin puts his arms over his head, sure of what’s next. But his father only talks. “There are only three types of men in this world. Bullies, their stooges, and them who refuse to be either. A bully or a stooge, Fin, is that what you want to be?”

  Fin puts his arms down. “Wasn’t my idea. Was Tommy Bellows’.”

  “So you’re Tommy’s stooge, is that what you’re telling me? Then you’re the first among us Dunnes. We never put our foot on another man’s neck or aided them who did. You’re better than that, Fin. Never let me—or yourself—down like this again.” Big Mike goes into the tenement where they live. He never speaks about it again. He doesn’t have to.

  By the time the rally ended and the people inside started leaving the casino, most of the protesters had drifted away. The Bundesführer himself, Fritz Kuhn, came out a side door surrounded by a guard of beefy brownshirts. A small crowd of news photographers started to shoot. The pop of flash bulbs brought a beamish smile to the Bundesführer’s face. He ordered his bodyguards to step aside so the photographers could get a shot of him with his arm outstretched in the Hitler salute. He entered a waiting limousine in that same position. There was no sign of Bill Huber anywhere.

  The kid Dunne had encountered earlier was among the last to leave the casino. He joined other boys in the same get-ups loitering outside. Dunne watched as they pushed and jostled one another. Loud and playful, they could have been coming from a dance. Instead, they’d been treated to two hours of Jew-baiting and race mongering, the milk of human meanness.

  Drink up, kids, it’s on the house.

  THE GENDARMENMARKT, BERLIN

  Erika left a message with Corporal Gresser informing her husband she had a severe headache and wouldn’t be able to accompany him to the special performance that evening. Canaris wasn’t surprised when he returned from putting on his dress uniform in the bathroom to find Gresser’s note on his desk. Any invitation from General Heydrich usually resulted in Erika developing a headache and being unable to attend. Heydrich invariably feigned disappointment, but since he made no effort to include Erika in his conversations and focused all his attention on her husband, he got over her absence almost instantly.

  Heydrich’s Mercedes arrived promptly at seven. His only response to Canaris’s apology for Erika’s indisposition was a slight nod. They rode in silence for several minutes. Heydrich stared ahead, betraying no emotion except for the constant torsion of his gloves, twisting and untwisting the fine kid like a poultry farmer wringing the necks of chickens. They stopped at a light. Heydrich slipped open the glass separating them from the chauffeur. “Faster,” he said.

  “Shall I use the siren, Herr General?” the chauffeur said.

  “Do what is necessary to get us there on time.” Heydrich shut the panel and sank back into the seat. The siren went off. The car moved rapidly ahead, the traffic parting to make way, the driver no longer paying attention to the traffic lights.

  “If it were up to me,” Heydrich said, “I’d do what Stalin does with his generals. I’d have Beck taken out and shot. One, two, three.” Heydrich put down his gloves and brushed his hands together, as though cleaning off some residue.

  “I doubt that would do much to help the situation.”

  “The ‘situation’?”

  Canaris turned his head away from Heydrich and watched the pedestrians stop and stare at the speeding limousine with its flags and siren, trying to guess which of the regime’s leaders was inside. “The nervousness of the commanders over war with Britain and France,” he said, “Who knows what Russia and America would do? We’ve been down this road before.”

  “Beck called a meeting of the army commanders on his own, without consulting the Führer. That’s the ‘situation,’ my friend, and the proper word to describe it is treason.”

  Heydrich retreated back into silence for the last few minutes of the ride. When they arrived at the Gendarmenmarkt, an SS orderly ran alongside to open the door, Heydrich bounded out of the car, smiling broadly, his arm half raised in a casual salute. The Schauspielhaus was draped in German and Italian flags, which announced the special salute to the fifty-fifth birthday of Benito Mussolini, the Führer’s faithful ally, a tribute inspired by the Duce’s endorsement of the Reich’s recent takeover of Austria. Dr. Göbbels, ever the stage master, had especially
chosen the Gendarmenmarkt for the occasion because of its intentional resemblance to Rome’s Piazza del Populo, a gesture to make the Italians feel at home in a city for which they expressed, often vociferously and indiscreetly, nothing but dislike.

  The celebration, occurring a week after the Duce’s official birth date, was supposed to have been attended by the Führer and Count Ciano, the Italian Foreign Minister. But when Ciano announced he was indisposed and couldn’t travel to Berlin, the Führer decided he wouldn’t be there either, which set off a cascade of cancellations among the Nazi hierarchy that left Heydrich among the top officials to attend. A trio of children dressed in the attire of peasants from the Italian Tyrol greeted Heydrich at the top of the stairs. The girl in the middle, very blonde and very shy, presented him with a bouquet. He patted her on the cheek, handed the flowers to an orderly, and proceeded down a receiving line of Italian diplomats and military officers.

  Canaris followed, shaking hands with a succession of officials and exchanging a few pleasantries in Italian. Inside, he was escorted by an SS officer to the private champagne reception for the V.I.P. guests. He stood awkwardly for a moment, looking for someone to converse with, when Dr. Max de Crinis approached with two glasses of champagne, one of which he handed to Canaris. An officer in the Sicherheitsdienst, or SD, Heydrich’s security force, Crinis was both a well-known doctor of psychiatry and neurology and a bon vivant who rarely passed up an invitation to an official function.

  On other occasions, Canaris avoided him. Tonight, he welcomed his company: Crinis’s talent for monologue—a mastery of small talk characteristic of his native Vienna—relieving him of the need to make conversation. Looking around the room, Crinis narrated a bit of gossip about almost every guest, implicating each in various acts of adultery, debauchery, and financial chicanery and making it all sound amusing rather than immoral. He was interrupted by a hubbub on the other side of the room. Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop arrived to pay his respects. Since Ribbentrop couldn’t stay for the performance, Bernado Attolico, the Italian ambassador, offered a toast to the enduring friendship of the German and Italian peoples. Ribbentrop responded with a toast to the Duce’s birthday, followed by a long-winded paean to the Führer’s leadership, in German, which left the Italian guests looking bored and indifferent.

  On his way into the performance, Canaris was stopped by an Ambassador Attolico’s aide, who conveyed the ambassador’s invitation to join him. Canaris politely declined, but Attollico came over, slipped his arm into Canaris’s, and guided him to his box. “We must talk,” he said.

  “I wouldn’t want to disturb your enjoyment of the music,” Canaris said.

  Attolico shrugged, “They play Wagner in the Duce’s honor, why? Are there no great Italian composers? Wagner gives me a headache. Better to talk than listen.”

  True to his word, as soon as the music began, Attolico began a hushed but fervently animated reiteration of everything that his boss, Count Ciano, had said to Canaris three months before, during the Führer’s visit to Rome. From across the way, in a box directly opposite, Heydrich spent much of the time staring at them through a pair of opera glasses he’d dispatched an SS adjutant to fetch for him.

  “I talked to Count Ciano tonight by telephone,” Attolico said. “He instructed me to give you his special regards. ‘The Admiral,’ in his words, ‘is a gentleman, which cannot be said of all his countrymen.’”

  At their first meeting, several years before, Canaris had been prepared to dislike Ciano, a slick charmer, blessed with olive skin and Latin good looks. Like Ribbentrop, who’d used his marriage to the daughter of a champagne-company proprietor as a lever of career advancement, Ciano was the beneficiary of an advantageous marriage, to Mussolini’s daughter. Publicly, Ciano was a second-hand version of his father-in-law, whose pugnacious gestures and scowling facial poses he slavishly imitated. In private, Canaris found Ciano a charming, intelligent conversationalist undeceived by his government’s pretensions to a revival of the Roman Empire.

  The previous May sitting in his magnificent office in the Palazzo Chigi, its three great windows facing the Piazza Colonna, Ciano had told Canaris that the Duce was disturbed by Ribbentrop’s constant refrain about “the imminent showdown with Britain and France.” The Duce didn’t want to believe that the Führer shared that desire. “Hitler is a statesman in the Duce’s eyes,” Ciano had said, “and Ribbentrop a clown.” Sotto voce, he had added that the king, who was playing host to the Germans at the Quirinale Palace, couldn’t wait until they both were gone. “He regards Ribbentrop as a cross between a head butler and a pimp, and Hitler as a sort of psycho-physiological degenerate.”

  “You’re a Latin, aren’t you?” Ciano asked.

  “Partly. My father’s family was from around Lake Como. Canarisi was the name, but that was several centuries ago.”

  “No matter.” Ciano waved his hand dismissively. “A man’s blood isn’t altered because he changes seats.” He confided that he didn’t share the Duce’s opinion of the Führer. He thought Hitler, well . . . searching for the right word, he finally chose an English one: odd. Bluster, bluff, intimidation, the annexation of weaker states and acquisition of colonies, these were all part of the game played by the great powers, and Italy had every right to participate. But to deliberately plot another war like the last, which wrecked half of Europe and set loose the forces of chaos, only a lunatic could contemplate such a thing.

  Ciano warned Canaris not to be deceived by martial displays staged for the benefit of the German visitors. It was all a masquerade. Italy lacked the economic muscle to create anything close to Germany’s military machine. The army was short of ammunition, its artillery outmoded and tanks poorly armored; the air force was small and the country’s air defenses negligible. “With a military like ours,” Ciano said, “we can safely declare war only on Peru.” The miserable state of the armed forces was matched by the people’s morale. “Except for a few fanatics, there’s absolutely no appetite for war.”

  He left his desk, which was overshadowed by a larger-than-life portrait of a helmeted and belligerent Duce, and escorted Canaris to one of the windows that looked down on the piazza. “Czechoslovakia isn’t Austria. Unless responsible men take charge, we may find ourselves drawn, in Dante’s phrase, ‘Into the everlasting darkness, into fire and into ice.’ War is like a runaway train. Once it starts, no one can know where or when it’ll stop. There must be men in Germany with sense enough to prevent it from leaving the station, no?”

  Ambassador Attolico concluded his conversation with the same metaphor Ciano had used in Rome. “This train is headed for a wreck, unless somebody stops it. Surely, there are those in the army high command who understand this.”

  Canaris said little, nodding occasionally, trying not to notice the opera glasses trained on them from the other side of the house. On the way out of the box, Crinis reappeared and accompanied Canaris to the post-performance reception on the balcony. “I could see our Italian friend had taken you prisoner, so I decided to come to the rescue. Except for the Duce, they’re all defeatists. We’d probably be better off if they joined the French and British and added a further measure of cowardice to the Allies.”

  Producing a finely tooled leather case from his pocket, Crinis extracted two maduros. He bit off the end of one, spit it over the railing, and rolled his tongue over the tightly packed tobacco. He offered the other to Canaris.

  “I don’t know if I should,” Canaris said. “It’s quite a while since I had a cigar.”

  “Go on. If war comes, these will be at a premium. Carpe diem.” Crinis lit his cigar and held out the match for Canaris. A white-gloved orderly brought them two glasses of champagne. “The thing about war is that it heightens the senses in profound ways, and pleasures we might ordinarily take for granted acquire new intensity.” As a statuesque woman in a black gown came out on the balcony, Crinis ogled her.

  “Pain and pleasure both increase in wartime.” Canaris gently puffed on th
e cigar. The taste was intense.

  “The weak feel the pain. The strong find the pleasure.” Crinis took a sip of champagne. “You’ve heard about Werner Arnheim, I suppose?”

  “Dr. Arnheim?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s my physician. I saw him last month. A routine physical. Has something happened to him?”

  “A tragic case, I’m afraid. He had a nervous collapse, or so it was thought. He was brought to me for examination at the beginning of the month. He proved to be a congenital psychotic, afflicted by periods of severe delusion and paranoia. Though he’d managed to mask it for most of his career, in the end, as always happens, it overwhelmed him. He had a daughter with the same affliction, but hers manifested itself earlier.” The woman in black passed by again, and Crinis made a polite bow.

  “I’m sorry to hear that. He seemed the nervous type but, still, a competent physician.” Canaris detected no hint that Crinis, whose gaze followed the attractive passerby, knew anything of Arnheim’s visit or allegations.

  “He’s out of his misery now. He committed suicide last evening in the institution where he was being held. He hung himself in the shower.”

  Unthinkingly, Canaris inhaled the cigar as if it were a cigarette. A rusk of hot air scorched his throat. His eyes filled with water.

  “Are you all right?” Crinis patted him on the back. “Smoking a maduro is an art, you know, to be enjoyed slowly, like lovemaking.” He held up his cigar and gazed at it admiringly. “I’ve made sure I have an adequate supply. I don’t intend to let the British navy come between me and a good smoke, the way it did in the last war.”

  Canaris gulped his champagne. He would have thrown the cigar over the balcony into the street if Crinis wasn’t standing there.