Prague Fatale by Philip Kerr
‘From September 19th,’ he said, ‘all Jews in Germany and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia will be obliged to wear a yellow star inscribed with the word “Jew” on their outer garments.’
‘You mean like in the Middle Ages?’
‘Yes, like in the Middle Ages.’
‘Well, that should make them easier to spot. Great idea. Until recently I’ve found it rather hard to recognize who is a Jew and who isn’t. Of late they do look thinner and hungrier than the rest of us. But that’s about it. Frankly I’ve yet to see just one who looks anything like those stupid cartoons in Der Stürmer.’ I nodded with fake enthusiasm. ‘Yes, this will certainly prevent them from looking exactly like the rest of us.’
Lüdtke, looking uncomfortable, adjusted his well-starched cuffs and collar. He was a big man with thick dark hair neatly combed off a broad, tanned forehead. He wore a navy-blue suit and a dark tie with a knot that was as small as the Party badge in his lapel; probably it felt just as tight on his neck when it came to speaking the truth. A matching navy-blue bowler hat was positioned on the corner of his double-partner’s desk, as if it was hiding something. Perhaps it was his lunch. Or just his conscience. I wondered how the hat would look with a yellow star on the crown. Like a Keystone Kop’s helmet, I thought. Something idiotic, anyway.
‘I don’t like this any more than you,’ he said, scratching the backs of his hands nervously. I could tell he was dying for a smoke. We both were. Without cigarettes, the Alex felt like an ashtray in a no smoking lounge.
‘I’d like it a whole lot less, I think, if I was Jewish,’ I said.
‘Yes, but you know what makes it almost unforgivable?’ He opened a box of matches and bit one. ‘Right now there’s an acute shortage of material.’
‘Yellow material.’
Lüdtke nodded.
‘I might have guessed. Mind if I have one of those?’
‘Help yourself.’ He tossed the matches across the desk and watched as I fished one out and put it in the corner of my mouth. ‘I’m told they’re good for your throat.’
‘Are you worried about your health, Wilhelm?’
‘Isn’t everyone? That’s why we do what we’re told. In case we come down with a dose of the Gestapo.’
‘You mean like making sure Jews wear their yellow stars?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Oh sure, sure. And while I can see the obvious importance of a law like that, there’s still the matter of the dead Dutchman. In case you’d forgotten, he was stabbed six times.’
Lüdtke shrugged. ‘If he was German it would be different, Bernie. But the Ogorzow case was a very expensive investigation for this department. We went way over budget. You’ve no idea how much it cost to catch that bastard. Undercover police officers, half the city’s rail workers interviewed, increased police presence at stations – the overtime we had to pay out was enormous. It really was a very difficult time for Kripo. To say nothing of the pressure we came under from the Propaganda Ministry. It’s hard catching anyone when the newspapers aren’t even allowed to write about a case.’
‘Geert Vranken was a rail worker,’ I said.
‘And you think the Ministry is going to be happy to learn that there’s another killer at work on the S-Bahn?’
‘This killer is different. As far as I can tell nobody raped him. And unless you count the train that drove over him, nobody tried to mutilate him either.’
‘But murder is murder, and frankly I know exactly what they’ll say. That there’s enough bad news around right now. In case you hadn’t noticed, Bernie, this city’s morale is already lower than a badger’s arse. Besides, we need those foreign workers. That’s what they’re going to tell me. The last thing we want is Germans thinking that there’s a problem with our guest workers. We had enough of that during the Ogorzow case. Everyone in Berlin was convinced that a German couldn’t possibly have murdered all those women. A lot of foreign workers were harassed and beaten up by irate Berliners who thought that one of them must have done it. You don’t want to see any more of that, do you? Christ, there are problems enough on the trains and the underground as it is. It took me almost an hour to come to work this morning.’
‘I wonder why we bother to come in at all given that the Ministry of Propaganda is now deciding what we can and what we can’t investigate. Are we really supposed to find people who look Jewish and check to see if they’re wearing the right embroidery? It’s laughable.’
‘I’m afraid that’s just how it is. Perhaps if there are any more stabbings like this one then we can devote some resources to an investigation, but for now I’d rather you left this Dutchy alone.’
‘All right, Wilhelm, if that’s the way you want it.’ I bit hard on my match. ‘But I’m beginning to understand your twenty-a-day match habit. I guess it’s easier not to scream when you’re chewing down on one of these.’
As I stood up to leave I glanced up at the picture on the wall. The Leader stared me down in triumph but, for a change, he wasn’t saying very much. If anyone needed a yellow star it was him; and sewn just over his heart, assuming he had one; an aiming spot for a firing squad.
The Berlin city map on Lüdtke’s wall told me nothing either. When Bernhard Weiss, one of Lüdtke’s predecessors, had been in charge of Berlin Kripo, the map had been covered with little flags marking the incidents of crime in the city. Now it was empty. There was, it seemed, no crime to speak of. Another great victory for National Socialism.
‘Oh, by the way. Shouldn’t someone tell the Vranken family back in Holland that their major breadwinner stopped a train with his face?’
‘I will speak to the State Labour Service,’ said Lüdtke. ‘You can safely leave it to them.’
I sighed and rolled my head wearily on my shoulders; it felt thick and heavy, like an old medicine ball.
‘I feel reassured already.’
‘You don’t look it,’ he said. ‘What’s the matter with you, these days, Bernie? You’re a real bat in the balls, do you know that? Whenever you walk in here it’s like rain coming in at the eaves. It’s like you’ve given up.’
‘Maybe I have.’
‘Well, don’t. I’m ordering you to pull yourself together.’
I shrugged. ‘Wilhelm? If I knew how to swim I’d first untie the anvil that’s tied around my legs.’
CHAPTER 3
Prussia has always been an interesting place to live in, especially if you were Jewish. Even before the Nazis, Jews were singled out for special treatment by their neighbours. Back in 1881 and 1900, the synagogues in Neustettin and Konitz – and probably several other Prussian towns, too – were burnt down. Then in 1923, when there were food riots and I was a young cop in uniform, the many Jewish shops of Scheuenviertel – which is one of Berlin’s toughest neighbourhoods – were singled out for special treatment because Jews were suspected of price-gouging or hoarding, or both, it didn’t matter: Jews were Jews and not to be trusted.
Most of the city’s synagogues were destroyed of course in November 1938. At the top of Fasanenstrasse, where I owned a small apartment, a vast but ruined synagogue remained standing and looking to all the world as if the future Roman emperor Titus had just finished teaching the city of Jerusalem a lesson. It seems that not much has changed since AD 70; certainly not in Berlin, and it could only be a matter of time before we started crucifying Jews on the streets.
I never walked past this ruin without a small sense of shame. But it was quite a while before I realized there were Jews living in my own building. For a long time I was quite unaware of their presence so close to me. Lately, however, these Jews had become easily recognizable to anyone that had eyes to see. Despite what I’d said to Commissioner Lüdtke, you didn’t need a yellow star or a set of callipers to measure the length of someone’s nose to know who was Jewish. Denied every amenity, subject to a nine o’clock curfew, forbidden ‘luxuries’ such as fruit, tobacco or alcohol, and allowed to do their shopping only for one hour at the
I thought less about hating or even killing myself whenever I considered what the Jews had to put up with. To survive as a Jew in Berlin in the autumn of 1941 was to be a person of courage and strength. Even so it was hard to see the two Fridmann sisters, who occupied the flat underneath my own, surviving for much longer. One of them, Raisa, was married, with a son, Efim, but both he and Raisa’s husband, Mikhail, arrested in 1938, were still in prison. The daughter, Sarra, escaped to France in 1934 and had not been heard of since. These two sisters – the older one was Tsilia – knew I was a policeman and were rightly wary of me. We rarely ever exchanged much more than a nod or a ‘good morning’. Besides, contact between Jews and Aryans was strictly forbidden and, since the block leader would have reported this to the Gestapo, I judged it better, for their sake, to keep my distance.
After Minsk I ought not to have been so horrified at the yellow star, but I was. Maybe this new law seemed worse to me because of what I knew awaited those Jews who were deported east, but after my conversation with Commissioner Lüdtke I resolved to do something, although it was a day or two before I figured out what this might be.
My wife had been dead for twenty years, but I still had some of her dresses and sometimes, when I’d managed to overcome the shortages and have a drink or two and I was feeling sorry for myself and, more particularly, for her, I’d get one of her old garments out of the closet and press the material to my nose and mouth and inhale her memory. For a long time after she was gone that was what I called a home life. When she’d been alive we had soap, so my memories were all pleasant ones; these days things were rather less fragrant, and if you were wise you boarded the S-Bahn holding an orange stuffed with cloves, like a medieval Pope going among the common people. Especially in summer. Even the prettiest girl smelled like a stevedore in the dog days of 1941.
At first I figured on giving the two Fridmann sisters the yellow dress so that they could use it for making yellow stars, only there was something about this I didn’t like. I suppose it made me feel complicit in the whole horrible police order. Especially since I was a policeman. So, halfway down the stairs with the yellow dress draped over my arm I went back to my flat and fetched all of the dresses that were in my closet. But even this felt inadequate and, as I handed over my wife’s remaining wardrobe to these harmless women, I quietly decided to do something more.
It isn’t exactly a page from some heroic tale as described by Winckelmann or Hölderlin, but that’s how this whole story got started: if it hadn’t been for the decision to help the Fridmann sisters I’d never have met Arianne Tauber and what happened wouldn’t have happened.
Back inside my apartment I smoked the last of my cigarettes and contemplated putting my nose in some records at the Alex, just to see if Mikhail and Efim Fridmann were still alive. Well, that was one thing I could do, but for anyone with a purple J on their ration cards it wasn’t going to help feed them. Two women who looked as thin as the Fridmann sisters were going to need something more substantial than just some information about their loved ones.
After a while I had what I thought was a good idea and fetched a German Army bread-bag from my closet. In the bread bag was a kilo of Algerian coffee beans I’d purloined in Paris and which I’d been planning to trade for some cigarettes. I left my flat and took a tram east as far as Potsdamer Station.
It was a warm evening, not yet dark. Couples were strolling arm in arm through the Tiergarten and it seemed almost impossible that two thousand kilometres to the east the German Army was surrounding Kiev and slowly tightening its stranglehold on Leningrad. I walked up to Pariser Platz. I was on my way to the Adlon Hotel to see the maître d’ with the aim of trading the coffee for some food that I could give the two sisters.
The maître d’ at the Adlon that year was Willy Thummel, a fat Sudeten German who was always busy and so light on his toes that it made me wonder how he ever got fat in the first place. With his rosy cheeks, his easy smile and his impeccable clothes he always reminded me of Herman Göring. Without a doubt both men enjoyed their food, although the Reichsmarshal had always given me the impression that he might just have eaten me, too, if he’d been hungry enough. Willy liked his food; but he liked people more.
There were no customers in the restaurant – not yet – and Willy was checking the blackout curtains when I poked my nose around the door. Like any good maître d’ he spotted me immediately and quickly came my way on invisible casters.
‘Bernie. You look troubled. Are you all right?’
‘What’s the point of complaining, Willy?’
‘I don’t know; the wheel that squeaks the loudest in Germany these days usually gets the most grease. What brings you here?’
‘A word in private, Willy.’
We went down a small flight of stairs to an office. Willy closed the door and poured two small glasses of sherry. I knew he was seldom away from the restaurant for longer than it took to inspect the china in the men’s room so I came straight to the point.
‘When I was in Paris I liberated some coffee,’ I said. ‘Real coffee, not the muck we get in Germany. Beans. Algerian beans. A whole kilo.’ I put the bread bag on Willy’s desk and let him inspect the contents.
For a moment he just closed his eyes and inhaled the aroma; then he groaned a groan that I’d seldom heard outside a bedroom.
‘You’ve certainly earned that drink. I’d forgotten what real coffee smells like.’
I hit my tonsils with the sherry.
‘A kilo, you say? That’s a hundred marks on the black market, last time I tried to get any. And since there isn’t any coffee to be had anywhere, it’s probably more. No wonder we invaded France. For coffee like this I’d crawl into Leningrad.’
‘They haven’t got any there, either.’ I let him refill my glass. The sherry was hardly the best but then nothing was, not even in the Adlon. Not any more. ‘I was thinking that you might like to treat some of your special guests.’
‘Yes, I might.’ He frowned. ‘But you can’t want money. Not for something as precious as this, Bernie. Even the devil has to drink mud with powdered milk in it these days.’
He took another noseful of the aroma and shook his head. ‘So what do you want? The Adlon is at your disposal.’
‘I don’t want that much. I just want some food.’
‘You disappoint me. There’s nothing we have in our kitchens that’s worthy of coffee like this. And don’t be fooled by what’s on the menu.’ He collected a menu off the desk and handed it to me. ‘There are two meat dishes on the menu when the kitchen can actually serve only one. But we put two on for the sake of appearances. What can you do? We have a reputation to uphold.’
‘Suppose someone asks for the dish you don’t have?’ I said.
‘Impossible.’ Willy shook his head. ‘As the first customer comes through the door we cross off the second dish. It’s Hitler’s choice. Which is to say it’s no choice at all.’
He paused.
‘You want food for this coffee? What kind of food?’
‘I want food in cans.’
‘Ah.’
‘The quality isn’t important as long as it’s edible. Canned meat, canned fruit, canned milk, canned vegetables. Whatever you can find. Enough to last for a while.’
‘You know canned goods are strictly forbidden, don’t you? That’s the law. All canned goods are for the war front. If you’re stopped on the street with canned food you’d be in serious trouble. All that precious metal. They’ll think you’re going to sell it to the RAF.’
‘I know it. But I need food that can last and this is the best place to get it.’
‘You don’t look like a man who can’t get
‘It isn’t for me, Willy.’
‘I thought not. In which case it’s none of my business what you want it for. But I tell you what, Commissar, for coffee like this I am ready to commit a crime against the state. Just as long as you don’t tell anyone. Now come with me. I think we have some canned goods from before the war.’
We went along to the hotel storeroom. This was as big as the lock-up underneath the Alex but easier on the ear and the nose. The door was secured with more padlocks than the German National Bank. In there he filled my bread bag with as many cans as it could carry.