Good People (4 page)

Suddenly, Hermann's gang burst into the café. Thomas greeted him with a nod, as usual, but Hermann pretended he hadn't seen him, which was how he had behaved ever since finishing school. Once Thomas had met him by chance and said hello, but Hermann only gave him a strange look, as if Thomas's voice itself had made him feel ill.

Thomas didn't understand the meaning of such behaviour. After all, they had until recently been close friends. When Hermann's father had committed suicide, leaving his wife and children penniless, Thomas had been the one who sold their property for them, and at a fantastic price. He had taken Hermann under his wing.

That was truly a miserable affair. After the war Kreizinger's World of Toys had collapsed. They had imported toys, electric gadgets from America, whimsical novelties that arrived by steamship—hardly essential things, but people loved them. The day came when Herr Kreizinger couldn't even buy a pencil from the Americans, so they sold him some merchandise on credit and hired a lawyer to sue him. The lawyer had taken everything, and Hermann's father had lain down on the railroad tracks. Thomas preferred people who jumped from the tops of towers. A moment of soaring through the air—at least one brief instant of greatness—why not get one last thing out of life?

After his father died, Hermann went hungry. Thomas was generous with him and taught him how you could get all kinds of things in Berlin for free. At least once a week, after school, they would make a circuit of a few upmarket hotels. Thomas would enter the lobby in the guise of an exiled Russian prince, for whom German luxury was a kind of insult, while Hermann, who played his faithful attendant, carried his suitcase. If the doorman asked too many questions, Thomas would put on an arrogant air and dumbfound him with a volley of Russian phrases. Hermann would then translate, in measured tones, a sequence of horrible insults and threats. Usually the doorman would retreat and bow before the young prince.

They would stroll along the corridors, ride the elevators and roam the stairs, with a single aim: to fill the suitcase with food. Sometimes they would come upon baskets of rolls or saucers of jam outside rooms, but usually they scouted for some festive event: a reception in honour of senior executives at Siemens-Schuckert, a family wedding, a party of American movie producers. On such occasions, it was easy to find crisp rolls and smoked sausages, cheeses and—on good days—beef cooked in prunes. Sometimes they dared to sit in the hotel restaurant, and Thomas would charm the waiters with the innocent look of a pampered youngster who never imagined that his father might be late for a meal, just as it never occurred to him that any delicacy might be beyond the reach of his lazy fingers. And there was that summer night,
when they drank wine in the lounge of the Adlon, listening to a Mozart divertimento, and, as though they had all the time in the world, calmly stuffed smoked salmon and herring seasoned with allspice into their paper-lined suitcase. Hermann eyed the honoured guests in their smoking jackets, whose cloth changed colour in the bright light, and said to Thomas, half in admiration, half in anger, ‘Around you, people learn how to fake it, because it's as easy as breathing for you.'

There was gratitude for you.

In any event, Hermann's gang drank and chattered in the café. Finally the old waiter shuffled over with the bill. He understood exactly what kind of task the proprietor—a coward who stayed behind the counter clutching a loaded pistol—had given him.

‘Five million five hundred marks?' one of them shouted. ‘Couldn't you at least have rounded it off, you filthy dog?'

The gang stood and cheered while two of them set fire to the bill and forced the waiter to hold the burning paper and chant the new price. The waiter shouted in pain. His veins stood out and seemed to wrap themselves around his neck like a noose. Then Hermann pushed him to the floor. ‘Not worth the candle!' he shouted.

Thomas knew that Hermann was taking a risk. Some of his friends would understand that the shove was intended to free the burning paper from the waiter's hands. In short, Hermann had shown pity, and Thomas reckoned that now he would have to display his cruelty in some new way.

Hermann stood on a chair, waved his stick. ‘Are you crazy?' he yelled. ‘We couldn't even pay the old amount, so now you want more? How can the price jump by forty per cent during the two hours we were sitting here? Can't a person even drink a beer in this damn city anymore?'

He threw his stick at the café's display window. His friends sneered. Did he really believe they would think he had intended to break the window?

‘Isn't that your friend from school?' his father said to him.

‘Yes, but for years now he's been treating me like a leper, that punk,'
Thomas answered, unable to stop looking at Hermann.

It dawned on Hermann that he had no choice. If you want to be a bully, you have to obey the rules. He stepped down heavily from the chair and looked around. The sun threw yellow light into his eyes. He blinked. His friends were standing erect, as if listening to a speech at an assembly. Their shirts were wrinkled, their peaked caps pushed forwards, their hands thrust into the buckles of their belts. Hermann turned around, picked the chair up in both hands, and looked back into the café. Thomas imagined he saw regret in his eyes. Then he bent his body and, with a mighty swing, hurled his chair at the window. The glass shattered, and the fragments showered down upon two old women who were having an evening coffee. Hermann's friends cheered and pounded him on the shoulder, while the other customers stared. A few of them probably supported his actions or at least identified with his fury.

To Thomas's astonishment, his father approved too. Animated, he started to chat with people at nearby tables. ‘They paid my salary weekly. Then I asked to be paid daily. I told them that the money I got at the end of the week wasn't worth much the following day. The foreman sent me to read my contract again. “Herr Heiselberg,” that bastard shouted at me, “do you see a clause here about a daily salary? How come workers pick on the factory? Are you a Communist or something? Does your contract say how you should compensate
us
when not a single customer in the world bothers to answer our letters? They laughed at us even in Mozambique when we suggested doing business together. The German people are on the mat being torn apart limb by limb. Our economy is waltzing to hell, and everybody thinks it's party time.'''

‘The cheek of it,' somebody shouted.

‘I'd have belted him one,' hissed a young man in a brown shirt, apparently a member of Hermann's gang.

‘The next day they fired me,' Thomas's father complained with gloomy resentment designed to inflame the small crowd even more.

Thomas stared at the floor the whole time and squeezed his father's
wrist, trying to calm him down, but his father took no notice.

‘Those rich guys have no shame,' a young woman called out, cuddling her little boy.

‘No shame,' his father roared.

In the expansive boardroom Thomas sank sweating into his regular chair, which was a bit higher than the others. The white light struck his face. He had asked for the lights to be changed several times, because lighting that imitated daylight was unbearable.

Indeed, it seemed that Frau Stein was cleverer than he had thought. Now he understood why she had turned up on the very day the news broke about Vom Rath's death. The woman was a nuisance who had haunted him since childhood. He would gladly turn her over to the mercies of Hermann and his pals—not that those good-for-nothings would know how to get the job done.

It was almost seven, and Carlson Mailer hadn't reached the office yet. Which was strange, because the meeting with Daimler-Benz had preoccupied Carlson, who was still, at least officially, the director of Milton. In fact, he and Thomas ran the company together, but Carlson, ‘the bosses' man', always had the last say. He was Thomas's age, a tall American with short hair and the jawbone of a predator. Enormous boredom lurked in his black eyes and always made Thomas want to interest him in something. More than anything, though, Thomas was outraged by the way people admired Carlson because he made them doubt their right to take up his time. Even the clients were in awe of him. Thomas had long since understood that this human dynamic—which went beyond business connections, contracts, research documents—lacked any rhyme or reason. Carlson Mailer had a special gift for seeing into people's souls and motivating them with the urge to please him, even if it contradicted all business logic. The man was admired simply because he existed, even though he hadn't had a single brilliant idea his whole life.

Unlike Carlson, Thomas was a man who advanced in leaps. About a year after he joined Milton, an exciting period began when he set up
the Department of German Consumer Psychology. The department went out and won clients, but within a year his energy had begun to drain away. He started to imagine that nothing new would ever happen again. One day followed the next and he didn't understand where the time had gone.

The summer of 1929 triggered his meteoric ascent in the company. The senior directors of Milton went to the Ibero-American Exhibition in Seville, and he was chosen to join them as the representative of the German office. Frau Tschammer, who had not been invited, was insulted and threatened to resign.

‘Frau Tschammer, I don't understand,' Thomas said. ‘When I come back, I'll tell you everything. We'll even take pictures for you. It'll be just as if you were there.'

On that fateful trip to Spain the idea that was to change his life took shape in his mind: he was standing between Jack Fiske and Carlson Mailer on the second floor of Plaza de España, the splendid building that had been constructed in honour of the exhibition. As he touched the terracotta tiles on the wall, he looked down to the ground level, where there were benches decorated with maps of Spain and its regions. A hot wave flooded his body. He closed his eyes and saw a similar plaza in his imagination, which would be the centre of the Milton Company, and they, the managers, were standing above it between the arches, while at their feet were the branches of the French, Spanish and English Consumer Departments of Psychology.

Two years passed before the German office once again settled, under the leadership of Carlson Mailer, who had replaced Jack Fiske as the director of Milton Berlin. At the right moment Thomas had laid out his great expansion plan before him, in this very room. Carlson frittered away two months pondering things, but in the end, after Thomas managed to contact Fiske, who had meanwhile returned to head office in New York, his plan got the go-ahead. A magnificent period ensued, the best in his career. Every morning, he would piece the clouds together to redraw the map of Milton Europe, and the changing skies would urge him to conquer Europe. He travelled to
Rome, Warsaw, London and Paris, familiarised himself with different societies and cultures, each of which demanded a different set of assumptions. When Carlson commented at a meeting, ‘I see that we've raised a miniature Alexander the Great in our company,' Thomas answered, determined to avoid any personal conflict, ‘Don't be afraid of challenges, my friend. We'll set up a pan-European network, which, at first glance, might seem uniform, but which will accommodate local patterns of thought wherever it is implemented.'

He met dozens of people, some of whom inspired him with exciting ideas, and all of these encounters kindled his restless ambition. He planned that by the end of 1940 there would be ten branches of Milton in Europe. At night, in trains, he envisioned a Milton Train reserved for its employees; he dreamed of an American giant who extended his hand to him, and together they soared over the Atlantic, conquering the continent in one splendid move. Then the Far East, the British Empire—Australia, India—wasn't the world grand?

Thomas looked up. A man wearing glasses entered the boardroom. He was not tall, and his thick arms were sheathed in the pressed suit of a government official, and there was a gold pin on his lapel. The man nodded to Thomas and limped lightly to the chair opposite him.

‘A ski accident in Cortina.' He pointed at his leg. ‘My poor wife broke her collarbone.'

Thomas was not interested. This was one of those petty bureaucrats making between 250 and 1000 Reichsmark a month who had filled the streets in recent years. He had probably been sent to deliver some kind of message to Carlson, who maintained close connections with all sorts of government offices.

The man sat down and looked at Thomas again, pointed at the door and said softly, ‘Close it, please.'

Obeying the order, Thomas was disturbed by a number of things: it was 7.15 p.m. Where was Carlson? Where were the Daimler-Benz people? Aside from that, he despised meetings not arranged through the ordinary channels, and for which he wasn't thoroughly prepared.
Mainly he gathered that the man sitting opposite him had no doubts about the seniority of his own position, and probably with good reason.

‘The American Milton Company and German Consumer Psychology. An elaborate name,' the man said.

‘The gentleman appears to be interested in the subject, otherwise he wouldn't have favoured us with a visit.' Thomas stretched his body, emphasising its flexibility. His anxiety had faded. In moments of uncertainty, he believed, his superiority to others would be apparent. Never give people the feeling you aren't worthy of the position you occupy, or that anything they do might surprise you. ‘It would be a privilege if the kind sir would allow me to tell him a little about our company.'

‘Georg Weller,' the man said. Thomas had the impression that this casual introduction was calculated.

‘My name is Thomas Heiselberg, and I manage the company along with Herr Mailer.'

‘Of course, of course,' he said with a hint of mockery. ‘I was so overwhelmed by Milton's impressive offices that I forgot my manners. It is my honour to work in the Foreign Office as senior adviser to Dr Karl Schnurre. By chance I was nearby, and remembered that Herr Mailer, whom I was privileged to meet recently, had invited me to visit him here.'