March Violets Read online

  Not that it needs much in the way of service. There is no money in an area like this, and for most of these concerns business is about as brisk as a set of oak floorboards in a Lutheran church hall.

  It was into one of these small shops, a pawnbroker, that I went, ignoring the large Star of David daubed on the wooden shutters that protected the shop window from breakage. A bell rang as I opened and shut the door. Doubly deprived of daylight, the shop’s only source of illumination was an oil lamp hanging from the low ceiling, and the general effect was that of the inside of an old sailing ship. I browsed around, waiting for Weizmann, the proprietor, to appear from the back of the shop.

  There was an old Pickelhaube helmet, a stuffed marmot, in a glass case, that looked as if it had perished of anthrax, and an old Siemens vacuum-cleaner; there were several cases full of military medals — mostly second-class Iron Crosses like mine own, twenty odd volumes of Kohler’s Naval Calendar, full of ships long since sunk or sent to the breaker’s yard, a Blaupunkt radio, a chipped bust of Bismarck and an old Leica. I was inspecting the case of medals when a smell of tobacco, and Weizmann’s familiar cough, announced his present appearance.

  ‘You should look after yourself, Weizmann.’

  ‘And what would I do with a long life?’ The threat of Weizmann’s wheezing cough was ever present in his speech. It lay in wait to trip him like a sleeping halberdier. Sometimes he managed to catch himself; but this time he fell into a spasm of coughing that sounded hardly human at all, more like someone trying to start a car with an almost flat battery, and as usual it seemed to afford him no relief whatsoever. Nor did it require him to remove the pipe from his tobacco-pouch of a mouth.

  ‘You should try inhaling a little bit of air now and then,’ I told him. ‘Or at least something you haven’t first set on fire.’

  ‘Air,’ he said. ‘It goes straight to my head. Anyway, I’m training myself to do without it: there’s no telling when they’ll ban Jews from breathing oxygen.’ He lifted the counter. ‘Come into the back room, my friend, and tell me what service I can do for you.’ I followed him round the counter, past an empty bookcase.

  ‘Is business picking up then?’ I said. He turned to look at me. ‘What happened to all the books?’ Weizmann shook his head sadly.

  ‘Unfortunately, I had to remove them. The Nuremberg Laws -’ he said with a scornful laugh, ‘ — they forbid a Jew to sell books. Even secondhand ones.’ He turned and passed on through to the back room. ‘These days I believe in the law like I believe in Horst Wessel’s heroism.’

  ‘Horst Wessel?’ I said. ‘Never heard of him.’

  Weizmann smiled and pointed at an old Jacquard sofa with the stem of his reeking pipe. ‘Sit down, Bernie, and let me fix us a drink.’

  ‘Well, what do you know? They still let Jews drink booze. I was almost feeling sorry for you back there when you told me about those books. Things are never as bad as they seem, just as long as there’s a drink about.’

  ‘That’s the truth, my friend.’ He opened a corner cabinet, found the bottle of schnapps and poured it carefully but generously. Handing me my glass he said, ‘I’ll tell you something. If it wasn’t for all the people who drink, this country really would be in a hell of a state.’ He raised his glass. ‘Let us wish for more drunks and the frustration of an efficiently run National Socialist Germany.’

  ‘To more drunks,’ I said, watching him drink it, almost too gratefully. He had a shrewd face, with a mouth that wore a wry smile, even with the chimneystack. A large, fleshy nose separated eyes that were rather too closely set together, and supported a pair of thick, rimless glasses. The still-dark hair was brushed neatly to the right of a high forehead. Wearing his well-pressed blue pin-striped suit, Weizmann looked not unlike Ernst Lubitsch, the comic actor turned film director. He sat down at an old rolltop and turned sideways to face me.

  ‘So what can I do for you?’

  I showed him the photograph of Six’s necklace. He wheezed a little as he looked at it, and then coughed his way into a remark.

  ‘If it’s real -’ He smiled and nodded his head from side to side. ‘Is it real? Of course it’s real, or why else would you be showing me such a nice photograph. Well then, it looks like a very fine piece indeed.’

  ‘It’s been stolen,’ I said.

  ‘Bernie, with you sitting there I didn’t think it was stuck up a tree waiting for the fire service.’ He shrugged. ‘But, such a fine-looking necklace - what can I tell you about it that you don’t already know?’

  ‘Come on, Weizmann. Until you got caught thieving you were one of Friedlaender’s best jewellers.’

  ‘Ah, you put it so delicately.’

  ‘After twenty years in the business you know bells like you know your own waistcoat pocket.’

  ‘Twenty-two years,’ he said quietly, and poured us both another glass. ‘Very well. Ask your questions, Bernie, and we shall see what we shall see.’

  ‘How would someone go about getting rid of it?’

  ‘You mean some other way than just dropping it in the Landwehr Canal? For money? It would depend.’

  ‘On what?’ I said patiently.

  ‘On whether the person in possession was Jewish or Gentile.’

  ‘Come on, Weizmann,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to keep wringing the yarmulke for my benefit.’

  ‘No, seriously, Bernie. Right now the market for gems is at rock bottom. There are lots of Jews leaving Germany who, to fund their emigration, must sell the family jewels. At least, those who are lucky enough to have any to sell. And, as you might expect, they get the lowest prices. A Gentile could afford to wait for the market to become more buoyant. A Jew could not.’ Coughing in small explosive bursts, he took another, longer look at Six’s photograph and gave a chesty little shrug.

  ‘Way out of my league, I can tell you that much. Sure, I buy some small stuff. But nothing big enough to interest the boys from the Alex. Like you, they know about me, Bernie. There’s my time in the cement for a start. If I was to step badly out of line they’d have me in a KZ quicker than the drawers off a Kit-Kat showgirl.’ Wheezing like a leaky old harmonium, Weizmann grinned and handed the photograph back to me.

  ‘Amsterdam would be the best place to sell it,’ he said. ‘If you could get it out of Germany, that is. German customs officers are a smuggler’s nightmare. Not that there aren’t plenty of people in Berlin who would buy it.’

  ‘Like who, for instance?’

  ‘The two-tray boys - one tray on top and one under the counter - they might be interested. Like Peter Neumaier. He’s got a nice little shop on Schlüterstrasse, specializing in antique jewellery. This might be his sort of thing. I’ve heard he’s got plenty of flea and can pay it in whatever currency you like. Yes, I’d have thought he’d certainly be worth checking out.’ He wrote the name down on a piece of paper. ‘Then we have Werner Seldte. He may appear to be a bit Potsdam, but he’s not above buying some hot bells.’ Potsdam was a word of faint opprobrium for people who, like the antiquated pro-Royalists of that town, were smug, hypocritical and hopelessly dated in both intellectual and social ideas. ‘Frankly, he’s got fewer scruples than a backstreet angelmaker. His shop is on Budapester Strasse or Ebertstrasse or Hermann Goering Strasse or whatever the hell the Party calls it now.

  ‘Then there are the dealers, the diamond merchants who buy and sell from classy offices where a browser for an engagement ring is about as popular as a pork chop in a rabbi’s coat pocket. These are the sort of people who do most of their business on the gabbler.’ He wrote down some more names. ‘This one, Laser Oppenheimer, he’s a Jew. That’s just to show that I’m fair and that I’ve got nothing against Gentiles. Oppenheimer has an office on Joachimsthaler Strasse. Anyway, the last I heard of him he was still in business.

  ‘There’s Gert Jeschonnek. New to Berlin. Used to be based in Munich. From what I’ve heard, he’s the worst kind of March Violet - you know, climbing on board the Party wagon and riding it to make a quic
k profit. He’s got a very smart set of offices in that steel monstrosity on Potsdamer Platz. What’s it called — ?’

  ‘Columbus Haus,’ I said.

  ‘That’s it. Columbus Haus. They say that Hitler doesn’t much care for modern architecture, Bernie. Do you know what that means?’ Weizmann gave a little chuckle. ‘It means that he and I have something in common.’

  ‘Is there anyone else?’

  ‘Maybe. I don’t know. It’s possible.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Our illustrious Prime Minister.’

  ‘Goering? Buying hot bells? Are you serious?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said firmly. ‘That man has a passion for owning expensive things. And he’s not always as fussy as he could be regarding how he gets hold of them. Jewels are one thing I know he has a weakness for. When I was at Friedlaender’s he used to come into the shop quite often. He was poor in those days — at least, too poor to buy much. But you could see he would have bought a great deal if he had been able to.’

  ‘Jesus Christ, Weizmann,’ I said. ‘Can you imagine it? Me dropping in at Karinhall and saying, “Excuse me, Herr Prime Minister, but you wouldn’t happen to know anything about a valuable diamond necklace that some coat has clawed from a Ferdinandstrasse residence in the past few days? I trust you would have no objections to me taking a look down your wife Emmy’s dress and seeing if she’s got them hidden somewhere between the exhibits?”’

  ‘You’d have the devil’s own job to find anything down there,’ wheezed Weizmann excitedly. ‘That fat sow is almost as big as he is. I’ll bet she could breastfeed the entire Hitler Youth and still have milk enough left for Hermann’s breakfast.’ He began a fit of coughing which would have carried off another man. I waited until it had found a lower gear, and then produced a fifty. He waved it away.

  ‘What did I tell you?’

  ‘Let me buy something, then.’

  ‘What’s the matter? Are you running out of crap all of a sudden?’

  ‘No, but — ’

  ‘Wait, though,’ he said. ‘There is something you might like to buy. A finger lifted it at a big parade on Unter den Linden.’ He got up and went into the small kitchen behind the office. When he came back he was carrying a packet of Persil.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, ‘but I send my stuff to the laundry.’

  ‘No, no, no,’ he said, pushing his hand into the powder. ‘I hid it in here just in case I had any unwelcome visitors. Ah, here we are.’ He withdrew a small, flat, silvery object from the packet, and polished it on his lapel before laying it flat on my palm. It was an oval-shaped disc about the size of a matchbox. On one side was the ubiquitous German eagle clutching the laurel crown that encircled the swastika; and on the other were the words Secret State Police, and a serial number. At the top was a small hole by which the bearer of the badge could attach it to the inside of his jacket. It was a Gestapo warrant-disc.

  ‘That ought to open a few doors for you, Bernie.’

  ‘You’re not joking,’ I said. ‘Christ, if they caught you with this — ’

  ‘Yes, I know. It would save you a great deal of slip money, don’t you think? So if you want it, I’ll ask fifty for it.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ I said, although I wasn’t sure about carrying it myself. What he said was true: it would save on bribes; but if I was caught using it I’d be on the first train to Sachsenhausen. I paid him the fifty. ‘A bull without his beer-token. God, I’d like to have seen the bastard’s face. That’s like a horn-player without a mouthpiece.’ I stood up to go.

  ‘Thanks for the information,’ I said. ‘And in case you didn’t know, it’s summertime up on the surface.’

  ‘Yes, I noticed that the rain was a little warmer than usual. At least a rotten summer is one thing they can’t blame on the Jews.’

  ‘Don’t you believe it,’ I said.

  5

  There was chaos back at Alexanderplatz, where a tram had derailed. The clock in the tall, red-brick tower of St George’s was striking three o‘clock, reminding me that I hadn’t eaten anything since a bowl of Quaker Quick Flakes (‘For the Youth of the Nation’) since breakfast. I went to the Cafe Stock; it was close by Wertheim’s Department Store, and in the shadow of the S-Bahn railway viaduct.

  The Café Stock was a modest little restaurant with an even more modest bar in the far corner. Such was the size of the eponymous proprietor’s bibulous belly that there was only just room for him to squeeze behind the bar; and as I came through the door it was there that I found him standing, pouring beers and polishing glasses, while his pretty little wife waited on the tables. These tables were often taken by Kripo officers from the Alex, and this had the effect of obliging Stock to play up his commitment to National Socialism. There was a large picture of the Führer on the wall, as well as a printed sign that said, ‘Always give the Hitler Salute.’

  Stock wasn’t always that way, and before March 1933 he had been a bit of a Red. He knew that I knew it, and it always worried him that there were others who would remember it too. So I didn’t blame him for the picture and the sign. Everyone in Germany was somebody different before March 1933. And as I’m always saying, ‘Who isn’t a National Socialist when there’s a gun pointed at his head?’

  I sat down at an empty table and surveyed the rest of the clientele. A couple of tables away were two bulls from the Queer Squad, the Department for the Suppression of Homosexuality: a bunch of what are little better than blackmailers. At a table next to them, and sitting on his own, was a young Kriminalassistent from the station at Wedersche Market, whose badly pock-marked face I remembered chiefly for his having once arrested my informer, Neumann, on suspicion of theft.

  Frau Stock took my order of pig’s knuckle with sauerkraut briskly and without much in the way of pleasantry. A shrewish woman, she knew and disapproved of my paying Stock for small snippets of interesting gossip about what was going on at the Alex. With so many officers coming in and out of the place, he often heard quite a lot. She moved off to the dumb-waiter and shouted my order down the shaft to the kitchen. Stock squeezed out from behind his bar and ambled over. He had a copy of the Party newspaper, the Beobachter, in his fat hand.

  ‘Hallo, Bernie,’ he said. ‘Lousy weather we’re having, eh?’

  ‘Wet as a poodle, Max,’ I said. ‘I’ll have a beer when you’re ready.’

  ‘Coming right up. You want to look at the paper?’

  ‘Anything in it?’

  ‘Mr and Mrs Charles Lindbergh are in Berlin. He’s the fellow that flew across the Atlantic.’

  ‘It sounds fascinating, really it does. I suppose the great aviator will be opening a few bomber factories while he’s here. Maybe even take a test-flight in a shiny new fighter. Perhaps they want him to pilot one all the way to Spain.’

  Stock looked nervously over his shoulder and gestured for me to lower my voice. ‘Not so loud, Bernie,’ he said, twitching like a rabbit. ‘You’ll get me shot.’ Muttering unhappily, he went off to get my beer.

  I glanced at the newspaper he had left on my table. There was a small paragraph about the ‘investigation of a fire on Ferdinandstrasse, in which two people are known to have lost their lives’, which made no mention of their names, or their relation to my client, or that the police were treating it as a murder investigation. I tossed it contemptuously onto another table. There’s more real news on the back of a matchbox than there is in the Beobachter. Meanwhile, the detectives from the Queer Squad were leaving; and Stock came back with my beer. He held the glass up for my attention before placing it on the table.

  ‘A nice sergeant-major on it, like always,’ he said.

  ‘Thanks.’ I took a long drink and then wiped some of the sergeant-major off my upper lip with the back of my hand. Frau Stock collected my lunch from the dumb-waiter and brought it over. She gave her husband a look that should have burned a hole in his shirt, but he pretended not to have seen it. Then she went to clear the table that was being vacated by the pock-marked
Kriminalassistant. Stock sat down and watched me eat.

  After a while I said, ‘So what have you heard? Anything?’

  ‘A man’s body fished out of the Landwehr.’

  ‘That’s about as unusual as a fat railwayman,’ I told him. ‘The canal is the Gestapo’s toilet, you know that. It’s got so that if someone disappears in this goddamn city, it’s quicker to look for him at the lighterman’s office than police headquarters or the city morgue.’

  ‘Yes, but this one had a billiard cue - up his nose. It penetrated the bottom of his brain they reckoned.’

  I put down my knife and fork. ‘Would you mind laying off the gory details until I’ve finished my food?’ I said.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Stock. ‘Well, that’s all there is really. But they don’t normally do that sort of thing, do they, the Gestapo?’

  ‘There’s no telling what is considered normal on Prinz Albrecht Strasse. Perhaps he’d been sticking his nose in where it wasn’t wanted. They might have wanted to do something poetic.’ I wiped my mouth and laid some change on the table which Stock collected up without bothering to count it.

  ‘Funny to think that it used to be the Art School - Gestapo headquarters, I mean.’

  ‘Hilarious. I bet the poor bastards they work over up there go to sleep as happy as little snowmen at the notion.’ I stood up and went to the door. ‘Nice about the Lindberghs though.’