4 F
RIEDA’S DEPARTURE FOR HAMBURG seemed to herald an exodus of Jews from the Adlon. Max Prenn, the hotel’s chief reception clerk and a cousin of the country’s best tennis player, Daniel Prenn, announced that he was following his relative out of Germany in the wake of the latter’s expulsion from the German LTA, and said that he was going to live in England. Then Isaac somebody-or-other, one of the musicians in the hotel orchestra, went to work at the Ritz, in Paris. Finally there was the departure of Ilse Szrajbman, a stenographer who used to do typing and secretarial work for hotel guests: she went back to her hometown of Danzig, which was either a city in Poland or a free city in old Prussia, depending on how you looked at it. I preferred not to look at it, the way I tried not to look at a lot of things in the autumn of 1934. Danzig was just another reason to have one of those Treaty of Versailles arguments about the Rhineland and the Saarland and Alsace-Lorraine and our African colonies and the size of our military forces. To that extent, anyway, I was much less of a typical German than the three-quarters that were to be allowed to me in the new Germany. The hotel business leader—to give Georg Behlert, the Adlon’s manager, his proper title—took businessmen and their capacity to do business in the Adlon very seriously; and the fact that one of the hotel’s most important and highest-spending guests, an American in suite 114 named Max Reles, had come to rely on Ilse Szrajbman, meant that it was her departure, among all the Jewish departures from Adlon, that disturbed Behlert the most. “The convenience and satisfaction of the guests at the Adlon always come first,” he said in a tone that implied he thought this might be news to me. I was in his office overlooking the hotel’s Goethe Garden, from which, every day in summer, Behlert took a buttonhole. At least he did until the gardener told him that, in Berlin at least, a red carnation was a traditional sign that you were a communist and, therefore, illegal. Poor Behlert. He was no more a communist than he was a Nazi; his only ideology was the superiority of the Adlon over all other Berlin hotels, and he never wore a boutonniere again. “A desk clerk, a violinist, yes, even a house detective help the hotel to run smoothly. Yet they are also relatively anonymous, and it seems unlikely that a guest will be greatly inconvenienced by any of their departures. But Fräulein Szrajbman saw Herr Reles every day. He trusted her. It will be hard to find a replacement whose typing and shorthand are as reliable as her good character.” Behlert wasn’t a high-toned sort of man, he just looked and sounded that way. A few years younger than me—too young to have fought in the war—he wore a tailcoat, a collar as stiff as the smile on his face, spats, and a line-of-ants mustache that looked as if it had been grown especially for him by Ronald Colman. “I suppose I shall have to put an advertisement in The German Girl
,” he said. “That’s a Nazi magazine. You put an ad in there and I guarantee you’ll get yourself a Gestapo spy.” Behlert got up and closed the office door. “Please, Herr Gunther. I don’t think it’s advisable to talk like that. You could get us both into trouble. You’re speaking as if there’s something wrong with employing someone who is a National Socialist.” Behlert thought himself too refined to use a word like “Nazi.” “Don’t get me wrong,” I said. “I just love Nazis. I’ve a sneaking suspicion that ninety-nine point nine percent of Nazis are giving the other point one percent an undeservedly bad reputation.” “Please, Herr Gunther.” “I expect some of them are excellent secretaries, too. Matter of fact, I saw several just the other day when I was at Gestapo headquarters.” “You were at Gestapo headquarters?” Behlert adjusted his shirt collar to accommodate an Adam’s apple that was going up and down his neck like an elevator car. “Sure. I used to be a cop, remember? Anyway, this pal of mine runs a Gestapo department employing a whole pit of stenographers. Blond, blue-eyed, a hundred words a minute, and that’s just the confessions obtained without duress. When they start using the rack and thumbscrews, the ladies have to type even faster than that.” Acute discomfort continued to hover like a hornet in the air in front of Behlert. “You’re an unusual man, Herr Gunther,” he said, weakly. “That’s what my friend in the Gestapo said. Something like that, anyway. Look, Herr Behlert, forgive me for knowing your business better than you, but it seems to me that the last thing we want at the Adlon is someone who might scare the guests with a lot of talk about politics. Some of these people are foreigners. Quite a few are also Jews. And they’re a bit more particular about things like freedom of speech. Not to mention the freedom of Jews. Why don’t you leave it to me to find someone suitable? Someone who has no interest in politics whatsoever. Whoever we find, I’ll have to check her out anyway. Besides, I enjoy looking for girls. Even ones who can earn an honest living.” “All right. If you would.” He smiled ruefully. “What?” “What you said just now, you reminded me of something,” said Behlert. “I was remembering what it was like to speak without looking over your shoulder.” “You know what I think the problem is? That before the Nazis, there was never any free speech worth listening to.” THAT EVENING I WENT to one of the bars at Europa Haus, a geometric pavilion of glass and concrete. It had rained, and the streets were black and shiny, and the huge assemblage of modern offices—Odol, Allianz, Daimler—looked like a great passenger liner cruising across the Atlantic, with every deck lit up. A taxi dropped me near the bow end, and I went into the Café-Bar Pavilion to splice the main brace and look for a suitable crew member to replace Ilse Szrajbman. Of course, I had an ulterior motive in volunteering for such hazardous duty. It gave me something to do while I was drinking. Something better to do while I was drinking than feeling guilty about the man I had killed. Or so I hoped. His name was August Krichbaum, and most of the newspapers had reported his murder, for, it transpired, there had been a witness of sorts who had seen me deliver the fatal blow. Fortunately the witness had been leaning out of an upper-floor window of the Kaiser Hotel at the time of Krichbaum’s death and had seen only the top of my brown hat. The doorman described me as a man of about thirty with a mustache, and upon reading all of this, I might have shaved off my mustache if I had worn one. My only consolation was that Krichbaum had not left behind a wife and family. There was that and the fact that he was ex-SA and a Nazi Party member since 1929. Anyway, I had hardly meant to kill him. Not with one punch, even if it was a punch that had lowered Krichbaum’s blood pressure, slowed his heart, and then stopped it altogether. As usual, the Pavilion was full of cloche-hatted stenographers. I even spoke to a few, but there wasn’t one who struck me as having what guests of the hotel needed most in a secretary beyond the ability to type and take good shorthand. And I knew what this was, even if Georg Behlert didn’t: The girl needed to have a little bit of glamour. Just like the hotel itself. Quality and efficiency were what made the Adlon good. But glamour was what made the place famous, and why it was always full of the best people. Of course, this also made it attractive to some of the worst people. But that was where I came in and, of late, slightly more often in the evenings since Frieda had left. Because while the Nazis had closed nearly all of the sex clubs and bars that once made Berlin a byword for vice and sexual depravity, there was still a considerable number of joy girls who worked a more discreet trade in the Friedrichstadt maisons