“Are you interested in history, Commissar?”
“One thing I’ve learned is that if our history were a little less interesting, then we might be a lot better off. Now, what about that box?”
“Oh, dear,” he said. “How am I going to explain this without making it sound suspicious?”
“Don’t try to finesse it,” I told him. “Just tell it like it is. Just tell the truth.”
“I always endeavor to do that,” he said pompously.
“Sure you do,” I said, toughening on him now. “Look, stop wasting my time, Herr Doctor, have you got the box or not?”
“Please don’t rush me.”
“Naturally, I’ve got all day to waste on this case.”
“It’s a little complicated, you see.”
“Take my word for it, the truth is rarely complicated.”
I sat down in an armchair. He hadn’t asked me to. But that didn’t matter now. I wasn’t selling anything. And I wasn’t buying anything while I was still standing on my size large. I took out a notebook and tapped a pencil on my tongue. Taking notes of a conversation always puts people on their heels.
“Well, you see the museum falls under the control of the Ministry of the Interior. And while the collections remained at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, the minister, Herr Frick, happened upon them and decided that a few of the objects might serve a more useful purpose as diplomatic gifts. Do you understand what I mean by that, Commissar Trettin?”
I smiled. “I think so, sir. It’s kind of like bribery. Only it’s legal.”
“I can assure you it’s perfectly normal practice in all foreign relations. The wheels of diplomacy often have to be oiled. Or so I’m told.”
“By Herr Frick.”
“No. Not by him. By one of his people. Herr Breitmeyer. Arno Breitmeyer.”
“Mmm-hmm.” I took note of the name.
“Naturally I’ll be speaking to him, as well,” I said. “But let me try to straighten this pretzel. Herr Breitmeyer removed an item from the Fischer collections—”
“Yes, yes. Adolph Fischer. A great collector of Asian artifacts. Now dead.”
“Namely one Chinese box. And gave it to a foreigner?”
“Not just one object. I believe there were several.”
“You believe.” I paused for more effect. “Am I right in thinking that all of this happened without your knowledge or approval?”
“That is correct. You see, it was thought at the ministry that the collections left at the original museum were not wanted for exhibition.” Stock colored with embarrassment. “That while being of great historical significance . . .”
I stifled a yawn.
“That, perhaps, they were unsuitable within the meaning of the Aryan paragraph. You see, Adolph Fischer was a Jew. The ministry had formed the impression that, under these circumstances, the true origins of the collection made it impossible to exhibit. That it was—in their words, not mine—‘racially tainted.’ ”
I nodded, as if all this sounded perfectly reasonable. “And when they did all this, they neglected to tell you, is that right?”
Stock nodded unhappily.
“Someone at the ministry didn’t think you sufficiently important to keep you informed about this,” I said, rubbing it in a little. “Which is why, when you found the object missing from the collection, you assumed it had been stolen, and reported it immediately.”
“That’s it,” he said with some relief.
“Do you happen to know the name of the person to whom Herr Breitmeyer gave the Ming box?”
“No. You would have to ask him that question.”
“I will, of course. Thank you, Doctor, you have been most helpful.”
“Do I take it the matter is now closed?”
“As far as your own involvement is concerned, yes, sir, you can.”
Stock’s relief turned to euphoria, or at least as near to euphoria as someone so dry was ever going to get.
“Now, then,” I said, “about that taxicab back into the city.”
8
I TOLD THE TAXI DRIVER to drop me at the Ministry of the Interior on Unter den Linden. Next to the Greek embassy, it was a dull, dirty gray building just around the corner from the Adlon. It was crying out for some climbing ivy.
I went inside and, at the desk in the cavernous main entrance hall, handed my business card to one of the clerks on duty. He had one of those startled animal faces that makes you think God has a wicked sense of humor.
“I wonder if you can help me,” I said unctuously. “The Adlon Hotel wishes to invite Herr Breitmeyer—that’s Arno Breitmeyer—to a gala reception in a couple of weeks. And we should like to know the correct way to address him and to which department we should send the invitation.”
“I wish I was going to a gala reception at the Adlon,” the clerk admitted, and consulted a thick leather-bound department list on the desk in front of him.
“To be honest, they can be rather stiff affairs. I don’t particularly like champagne. Give me beer and sausage any day.”
The clerk smiled ruefully as if he were not quite convinced, and found the name he was looking for. “Here we are. Arno Breitmeyer. He’s an SS-Standartenführer. That’s a colonel to you and me. He’s also the deputy Reich sports leader.”
“Is he, now? Then I expect that’s why they want to invite him. If he’s merely the deputy, then perhaps we should invite his boss as well. Who would that be, do you think?”
“Hans von Tschammer und Osten.”
“Yes, of course.”
I’d heard the name and seen it in the newspapers. At the time I’d thought it typical of the Nazis that they should have appointed an SA thug from Saxony to be Germany’s sporting leader. A man who had helped beat to death a thirteen-year-old Jewish boy. I guess it was the fact that the boy had been murdered in a Dessau gym that had really bolstered von Tschammer und Osten’s sporting credentials.
“Thank you. You’ve been most helpful.”
“Must be nice working at the Adlon.”
“You might think that. But the only thing that stops it from being exactly like hell are the locks on the bedroom doors.”
It was one of the many maxims I’d heard from Hedda Adlon, the owner’s wife. I liked her a lot. We shared a sense of humor, although I think she had more of it than I did. Hedda Adlon had more of everything than I did.
Back in the hotel, I called Otto Trettin and told him some of what I’d discovered at the museum.
“So this fellow Reles,” said Otto. “The hotel guest. It looks as if he might have been in possession of the box quite legitimately.”
“That all depends on your notion of legitimacy.”
“In which case this little stenographer, the one who went back to Danzig—”
“Ilse Szrajbman.”
“Maybe she did steal the box, after all.”
“Maybe. But she’ll have had a good reason.”
“Like that, is it?”
“No. But I know the girl, Otto. And I’ve met Max Reles.”
“So what are you saying?”
“I’d like to find out more before you go charging off to Danzig.”
“I’d like to pay less tax and make more love, but it’s not going to happen. What’s it to you if I go to Danzig?”
“We both know that if you go you’ll have to make an arrest to justify your expenses, Otto.”
“It’s true, the Deutsches Haus hotel in Danzig is quite expensive.”
“So why not telephone the local KRIPO first? See if you can get someone local to go and see her. If she really does have the box, then perhaps he can persuade her to return it.”
“What’s in it for me?”
“I don’t know. Nothing, probably. But she’s a Jew. And we both know what’s going to happen to her if she’s arrested. They’ll send her to one of their concentration camps. Or they’ll put her in that Gestapo prison, near Tempelhof. Columbia Haus. She doesn’t deserve that. She’s just a kid, O
tto.”
“You’re turning soft, you know that, don’t you?”
I thought of Dora Bauer and how I had helped her get off the sledge. “I suppose I am.”
“I was looking forward to some sea air.”
“Drop by the hotel sometime, and I’ll have the chef fix you a nice plate of Bismarck herrings. I swear, you’ll think you were on Rügen Island.”
“All right, Bernie. But you owe me.”
“Sure I do. And, believe me, I’m glad about that. I’m not sure our friendship could take the strain if it was you who owed me. Call me when you hear something.”
MOST OF THE TIME THE ADLON ran like a big state Mercedes—a Swabian colossus with handcrafted coachwork, hand-stitched leather, and six outsized Continental AGs. I can’t claim that any of this was attributable to me, but I took my duties—which were largely routine—seriously enough. I had a maxim of my own: Running a good hotel is about predicting the future, and then preventing it from happening. So every day I would look over the hotel register, just in case there were any names that leaped out at me as likely to cause trouble. There never were. Unless you count King Prajadhipok and his request that the chef prepare him a dish of ants and grasshoppers; or the actor Emil Jannings and his predilection for loudly spanking the bare bottoms of young actresses with a hairbrush.
The events diary was a different story, however. Corporate hospitality given at the Adlon was frequently lavish, often alcoholic, and sometimes things got a bit out of hand. On that particular day there were two groups of businessmen that were booked in. Representatives of the German Labor Front were meeting all day in the Beethoven Room; and, in the evening—by a coincidence that was not lost on me after my visit to the Ministry of the Interior—the members of the German Olympic Organizing Committee, including Hans von Tschammer und Osten and SS colonel Breitmeyer, were to convene for drinks and dinner in the Raphael Room.
Of the two, I was expecting trouble only from DAF—the Labor Front, which was the Nazi organization that had taken over Germany’s trade-union movement. This was led by Dr. Robert Ley, a former chemist who was given to bouts of heavy drinking and womanizing, especially when the taxpayer was picking up the bill. Prostitutes were frequently invited into the Adlon as the guests of Labor Front regional leaders, and the sight and sound of heavy men making love to whores in the lavatories was not uncommon. Their light brown tunics and red armbands made them easy to spot, which made me think that Nazi officials and pheasants had something in common. You didn’t have to know anything about them personally to want to shoot one.
As things turned out, Ley didn’t show, and the DAF delegates behaved themselves more or less impeccably, with only one of them being sick on the carpet. I ought to have been pleased by that, I suppose. As a hotel worker I was a member of the Labor Front myself. I wasn’t exactly sure what I got for my fifty pfennigs a week, but it was impossible to get any kind of job in Germany without being a member. I was looking forward to the day when I could parade proudly at Nuremburg with a brightly polished shovel over my shoulder and, in front of the Leader, dedicate myself and my hotel work to the concept of labor, if not the reality. No doubt the Adlon’s other house detective, Fritz Muller, felt much the same way. When he was around, it was impossible not to consider the true importance of work in German society. Or for that matter when he wasn’t around, because Muller seldom did any work himself. He had been tasked by me with keeping an eye on the Raphael Room, which looked like the easier detail, but when trouble broke out he was nowhere to be found, and it was to me that Behlert came seeking assistance.
“There’s trouble in Raphael,” he said, breathlessly.
As we swiftly walked through the hotel—no member of the staff was ever permitted to run in the Adlon—I tried to get Behlert to paint a picture of exactly who all these men were and what their meeting had been about. Some of the names on the Olympic Organizing Committee were not the sort of men you went up against without first reading the life of Metternich. But Behlert’s picture came out as poorly painted as von Menzel’s copy of a Raphael mural that had given the function room its name.
“I believe there may have been one or two members of the organizing committee who were present earlier on in the evening,” he said, mopping his brow with a napkin-sized handkerchief. Perhaps it was a napkin. “Funk from Propaganda, Conti from the Ministry of the Interior, Hans von Tschammer und Osten, the sports leader. But now it’s mostly businessmen from all over Germany. And Max Reles.”
“Reles?”
“He’s the host.”
“Well, that’s all right,” I said. “For a moment there, I thought one of them might try to give us some trouble.”
As we neared the Raphael Room we heard shouts. Then the double doors were flung open and two men stormed out. You can call me a Bolshevik if you like, but from the size of their stomachs I knew they were German businessmen. One of them had a black bow tie that had been twisted halfway around what was laughably called his neck. Above his neck was a face as red as the little paper Nazi flags that were pinned among several paper Olympic flags to an easel beside the doors. For a moment I considered asking him what had happened, but that would only have resulted in my being trampled, like a tea plantation trying to resist a rampaging bull elephant.
Behlert followed me through the doors and, as my eyes caught those of Max Reles, I heard him say something about Laurel and Hardy before his tough face opened into a smile and his thick body took on an apologetic, placating, almost diplomatic aspect that would hardly have disgraced Prince Metternich himself.
“It was all a big misunderstanding,” he said. “Wouldn’t you agree, gentlemen?”
But for the fact that his hair was messed up and there was some blood on his mouth, I might have believed him.
Reles looked around the dinner table for support. Somewhere under a cumulonimbus cloud of cigar smoke, several voices murmured wearily like a papal conclave that had neglected to pay the Sistine Chapel’s chimney sweep.
“You see?” Reles lifted his big hands in the air, as if I’d pointed a gun at him, and for some reason I got the feeling that if I had, he’d hardly have reacted differently. He’d have kept his nerve under the drill of a drunken dentist. “Storm in a teacup.” It didn’t sound right in German and, snapping his thick, stubby fingers, he added, “I mean, a storm in a water glass. Right?”
Behlert nodded eagerly. “Yes, that’s right, Herr Reles,” he said. “And may I say, your German is excellent.”
Reles looked uncharacteristically sheepish. “Well, it’s a hell of a language to speak well,” he said. “Considering it must have been invented to let trains know when it’s time to leave a station.”
Behlert smiled unctuously.
“All the same,” I said, picking one of several broken wineglasses off the tablecloth, “it does look like there was a storm. A Bohemian one, I think. This stuff is fifty pfennigs a time.”
“Naturally I’ll pay for any breakages.” Reles pointed at me and grinned at his complacent-looking guests. “Can you believe this guy? He wants me to pay for the breakages.”
There’s nothing that looks as pleased with itself as a German businessman with a cigar.
“Oh, there’s no question of that, Herr Reles,” Behlert said, and looked at me critically as if I had mud on my shoes, or something worse. “Gunther. If Herr Reles says it was an accident, then there’s no need to take this any further.”
“He didn’t say it was an accident. He said it was a misunderstanding. Which is how a mistake often falls just short of being a crime.”
“Is that out of this week’s Berlin Police Gazette?” Reles found a cigar and lit up.
“Maybe it ought to be. Then again, if it was, I might still be a Berlin policeman.”
“But you’re not. You’re working here in this hotel, in which I am a guest. And, I might add, a big-spending guest. Herr Behlert, tell the sommelier to bring us six bottles of your finest champagne.”
Aroun
d the table there was a loud murmur of approval. But none of them wanted to meet my eye. Just a lot of well-fed and -watered faces intent on getting back to the trough. A Rembrandt group portrait with everyone looking the other way: The Syndics of the Clothmakers Guild. It was then that I saw him, seated at the far end of the room, like Mephisto waiting patiently for a quiet word with Faust. Like the others, he was wearing a tuxedo and, but for his satirically grotesque saddlebag of a face, and the fact that he was cleaning his fingernails with a switch-blade, he looked almost respectable. Like the wolf dressed up as Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother.
I never forget a face. Especially the face on a man who’d once led a group of SA to carry out a gun attack against the members of a workers’ social club who were holding a dance party at the Eden Palace in Charlottenburg. Four dead, including a friend from my old school. Probably there were other killings for which he was responsible, but it was that one, on November 23, 1930, that I particularly recalled. And then I had his name: Gerhard Krempel. He’d served some time for that murder, at least until the Nazis got into government.
“Come to think of it, make it a dozen bottles.”
Ordinarily I might have said something to Krempel—a witty epithet, perhaps, or something worse—but Behlert wouldn’t have liked that. Punching a guest in the throat wasn’t the kind of hotel-keeping that read well in Baedeker. And, for all either of us knew, Krempel was the new minister for level playing fields and good sportsmanship. Besides, Behlert was already steering me out of the Raphael Room. That is, when he wasn’t bowing and apologizing to Max Reles.
At the Adlon, a guest is always given an apology rather than an excuse. That was another of Hedda Adlon’s maxims. But it was the first time I’d seen anyone in the hotel apologizing for interrupting a fight. Because I didn’t doubt that the man who had left earlier had been hit by Max Reles. And that he had hit Reles back. I certainly hoped that was the case. I wouldn’t have minded punching him myself.
Outside the Raphael Room, Behlert faced me irritably. “Please, Herr Gunther, I know you think you are doing your job, but do try to remember that Herr Reles occupies the Ducal suite. As such he is a very important guest.”