If the Dead Rise Not (25 page)

“There’s no method in it,” he said. “I’ve been coming here for six months, and still it seems arbitrary. There are some days when he likes your face, and others when he doesn’t even meet your eye.”

“Maybe he’s just trying to spread the work around,” I said. “For the sake of fairness.”

“Fairness?” The man snorted his derision. “Fairness has absolutely nothing to do with it. One day he’ll take a hundred men. Another day he’ll take seventy-five. It’s a kind of fascism, I think. Goerz reminding us all of the power he wields.”

Shorter than me by a head, the man was red-haired and sharply featured, with a face like a heavily rusted hatchet. He wore a thick pea jacket and a worker’s cap, and around his neck was tied a bright green handkerchief that matched the color of the eyes behind his wire-framed glasses. Jutting out of his coat pocket was a book by Dostoevsky, and it was almost as if this young and studious-looking Jew had emerged, fully formed, from a space between the pages: neurotic, poor, undernourished, desperate. His name was Solomon Feigenbaum, which, to my mostly Aryan ears, was about as Jewish as a ghetto full of tailors.

“Anyway, if it’s your first time, you almost always get picked,” said Feigenbaum. “Goerz likes to give the new man a day, so that they get the taste.”

“That’s a relief.”

“If you say so. Only you don’t look like you’re in desperate need of work. Matter of fact, you don’t even look Jewish.”

“That’s what my mother said to my father. I always figured that’s why she married him. It takes more than a hooked nose and a yarmulke to make a Jew, friend. What about Helene Mayer?”

“Who’s she?”

“A Jewish fencer on the German Olympic team in 1932. Looks like Hitler’s wet dream. She’s got more blond hair than the floor in a Swedish barbershop. And what about Leni Riefenstahl? Surely you’ve heard the rumors.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Not at all. Her mother was a Polish Jew.”

Feigenbaum seemed vaguely amused by that.

“Listen,” I said. “I haven’t worked in weeks. A friend of mine told me about this
Plage.
As a matter of fact, I thought I’d see him here.” As if hoping to see Isaac Deutsch, I looked around the crowd of men standing near the monument, and shook my head with disappointment.

“Did your friend tell you about the work?”

“Only that it’s no questions asked.”

“That all?”

“What else is there?”

“Like they use Jewish labor for work that maybe so-called German workers don’t want to do because it’s dangerous. On account of how they’re cutting corners on safety so they can finish the stadium on time. Did your friend tell you that?”

“Are you trying to put me off?”

“I’m just telling you how it is. It seems to me that if your friend was really your friend, he might have mentioned that much. That you’ve got to be a bit desperate maybe to take some of the risks they expect you to take. It’s not like anyone’s gonna give you a hard hat, my friend. A rock falls on your head or you get buried in a cave-in, there isn’t going to be anyone looking surprised or grief-stricken. There’s no social welfare for illegally employed Jews. Maybe not even a headstone. Understand?”

“I understand that maybe you’re trying to put me off. Increase your own chances of getting work.”

“What I’m trying to say is we look after each other, see? If we don’t, nobody else will. When we go down the pit, we’re like the three musketeers.”

“The pit? I thought we were on the stadium site.”

“That’s up top, for German workers. Nothing to it. Most of us here are working on the tunnel for a new S-Bahn that’s going to run from the stadium all the way to Königgratzer Strasse. If you work today, you’ll find out what it’s like to be a mole.” He glanced up at the still-dark sky. “We go down in the dark, we work in the dark, and we come up in the dark.”

“You’re right, my friend didn’t tell me any of this,” I said. “You would think he’d have mentioned it. Then again, it’s been a while since I’ve seen him. Or his uncle. Hey, maybe you know them. Isaac and Joey Deutsch?”

“I don’t know them,” said Feigenbaum, but behind his glasses, his eyes had narrowed and were studying me carefully, as if maybe he had heard of them, after all. I didn’t spend ten years at the Alex without getting an itch for when a man is lying. He pulled on his earlobe a couple of times and then glanced away, nervously. That was the clincher.

“But you must,” I said firmly. “Isaac used to be a boxer. He was a real prospect until the Nazis excluded Jews from the fights and took away his license. Joey was his trainer. Surely you know them?”

“I tell you I don’t know them.” Feigenbaum spoke firmly.

I shrugged and lit a cigarette. “If you say so. I mean, it’s nothing to me.” I puffed the cigarette to let him get a whiff of it. I could tell he was desperate for a smoke, even though he still had the one I’d given him behind his ear. “I guess all that talk about the three musketeers and looking out for each other was just that. Talk.”

“What do you mean?” His nostrils flared in front of the tobacco smoke and he licked his lips.

“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing at all.” I took another drag and dried his face with it. “Here. Finish it. You know you want one.”

Feigenbaum took the cigarette from my fingers and went to work on it as if I’d offered him an opium pipe. Some people are just like that with a nail: they make you think that maybe there’s something really harmful about a little thing like a cigarette. It’s a little unnerving to watch an addiction at work like that sometimes.

I looked the other way, smiling nonchalantly. “Story of my life, I guess. I don’t mean anything at all. Maybe none of us do, right? One minute we’re here, and the next we’re gone.” I glanced at my wrist and then remembered I’d deliberately left my wristwatch back at the hotel. “Bloody wristwatch. I keep forgetting I pawned it. Where is this fellow Goerz, anyway? Shouldn’t he be here by now?”

“He’ll be here when he’s here,” said Feigenbaum, and then, still smoking my cigarette, he walked away.

Erich Goerz arrived a few minutes after that. He was accompanied by his tall driver and another, muscular-looking man. Goerz was smoking the same pungent French cigarettes and, under a gray gabardine coat, wearing the same green suit. A hat sat on the back of his head like a felt halo, and in his hand was the lead for the same invisible dog. Immediately after he appeared, men started to crowd around him as if he’d been about to deliver the Sermon on the Mount, and his two disciples extended their thick arms to prevent Goerz from being jostled. I pushed a bit closer myself, keen to seem like I was as needful of work as anyone else.

“Stand back, you kike bastards, I can see you,” snarled Goerz. “What do you think this is, a beauty parade? Stand back, I said. I get pushed over like last week, and none of you yids will work today, got that? Right. Listen to me, you kikes. I need just ten gangs today. Ten gangs. A hundred men, hear? You. Where’s that money you owe me? I told you not to show your face back here until you can pay me.”

“How can I pay you if I can’t work?” said a plaintive voice.

“You should have thought of that before,” said Goerz. “I don’t know how. Sell your whore of a sister or something. What do I care?”

The two disciples grabbed the man and pushed him out of Goerz’s line of sight.

“You.” Goerz was speaking to someone else now. “How much did you get for those copper pipes?”

The man he’d spoken to mumbled something back.

“Give,” Goerz snarled, and snatched some notes out of the man’s hand.

With all this business concluded at last, he started to choose men for the work gangs, and as each gang was filled, the men left unpicked began to look more and more desperate, which only seemed to delight Goerz. He was like some capricious schoolboy selecting classmates for an important game of football. As the last gang came to be filled, one man said, “I’ll give you an extra two for my shift.”

“I’ll kick in three,” the man next to him said, and was promptly rewarded with one of the tickets a disciple handed to those lucky men whom Goerz had identified as those who would work that day.

“One day left,” he said, grinning broadly. “Who wants it?”

Feigenbaum pushed his way to the front of the large crowd of men still encircling Goerz. “Please, Herr Goerz,” he said. “Give me a break. It’s been a week since I had a day. I need a day real bad. I’ve got three kids.”

“That’s the trouble with you Jews. You’re like rabbits. No wonder people hate your guts.”

Goerz looked at me. “You. Boxer.” He snatched the last ticket from the hand of his disciple and then thrust it at me. “Here’s a job.”

I felt bad, but I took the ticket all the same, avoiding Feigenbaum’s eye as I followed the rest of the men who’d been picked back down the steps to the riverbank. There were about thirty or forty steps, and they were as steep as Jacob’s ladder, which was, perhaps, the intention of the Prussian emperor William IV, whose romantic ideas of chivalry had brought that peculiar monument into being. I was almost two-thirds of the way down the steps when I caught sight of the truck that was waiting to drive Erich Goerz’s illegal workforce to the site. At the same time I heard some footsteps closing behind me. This was no angel, it was Goerz. He took a swing at me with a cosh, which missed, and like Jacob, I was obliged to wrestle with him for a moment before I lost my footing and fell down the remainder of the steps and hit my head on the stone wall.

I felt as if I had been lying on a concert-sized harp while someone had struck it hard with a sledgehammer. Every part of me seemed to vibrate wildly. For a moment I lay there, staring up at the early-morning sky with the certain knowledge that, unlike Hitler, God has a sense of humor. It was in the Psalms, after all. He who sits in the heavens shall laugh. How else was I to explain the fact that in order to claim for himself the shift given to me, Feigenbaum, a Jew, had almost certainly informed the anti-Semitic Goerz that I had been asking questions about Isaac and Joey Deutsch? He who sits in the heavens was laughing, all right. That was enough to make me split my sides. I closed my eyes in prayer to ask Him if there was something He had against Germans, but the answer was all too obvious, and opening my eyes again, I found there was no perceptible difference between having them open and having them closed, except that my eyelids now seemed like the heaviest thing in the world. So heavy, they felt like they were made of stone. Perhaps the stone over a deep, dark, cold tomb. The kind of stone that even Jacob’s angel could not have wrestled away. Forever and ever. Amen.

 

 

H
EDDA ADLON ALWAYS SAID that for her to run a truly great hotel, the guests needed to be asleep for sixteen hours a day; during the other eight they should be resting quietly in the bar. That sounded just fine with me. I wanted to sleep for a long time, and preferably in Noreen’s bed. I might have done, too, except for the fact that she was trying to put out her cigarette in the small of my back. That’s what it felt like, anyway. I tried to shift away, and then something struck me hard across the head and shoulders. I opened my eyes to discover that I was sitting on a wooden floor, covered with sawdust and tied with my back to a freestanding faience stove—one of those ceramic heaters shaped like a public drinking fountain that sits in the corner of many a German living room, like some senile relation in a rocking chair. Since I was seldom ever home, the stove in my own living room was seldom lit and was therefore seldom ever warm, but even through my jacket this one felt hotter than the smokestack on a busy steam tug. I arched my back trying to minimize the point of contact with the hot ceramic and succeeded only in burning my hands; hearing my cry of pain, Erich Goerz once again set about lashing me with the dog lead. At least now I knew why he carried it. No doubt he saw himself as a sort of overseer, like that Egyptian slave driver murdered by Moses in Exodus. I wouldn’t have minded murdering Goerz myself.

When he stopped beating me, I looked up and saw that he had my identity card in his hands, and cursed myself for not leaving it back at the hotel in the pocket of my suit. Standing a few feet behind him were Goerz’s tall, cadaverous-looking driver and the square-sized man from the monument. He had a face like an unfinished piece of marble sculpture.

“Bernhard Gunther,” said Goerz. “It says here you’re a hotel employee but that you used to be a cop. What’s a hotel employee doing around here, asking questions about Isaac Deutsch?”

“Untie me and I’ll tell you.”

“Tell me and then I’ll untie you. Maybe.”

I saw no reason not to tell him the truth. No reason at all. Torture will do that to you sometimes. “One of the guests at the hotel is an American reporter,” I said. “She’s writing a newspaper article about Jews in German sports. And Isaac Deutsch in particular. She wants to bring about a U.S. boycott of the Olympiad. And she’s paying me to help her do the research.”

I grimaced and tried to ignore the heat in my back, which was a little like trying to ignore a minor imp in hell, armed with a hot pitchfork and my name on his day’s work sheet.

“That’s bullshit,” said Goerz. “It’s bullshit, because I read the newspapers, which is how I happen to know that the American Olympic Committee already voted against a boycott.” He raised the dog lead and started to beat me again.

“She’s a Jew,” I yelled through the blows. “She thinks that if she writes the truth about what’s happening in this country, to people like Isaac Deutsch, then the Amis will have to change their minds. Deutsch is the focus of her piece. How he got kicked out of his local boxing association and how he ended up working here. And how there was an accident. I don’t know what happened exactly. He drowned, didn’t he? In the S-Bahn tunnel, was it? And then someone dumped him in the canal on the other side of the city.”

Goerz stopped beating me. He looked out of breath. He swept his hair out of his eyes, straightened his tie, swung the leash around his neck, and then hung on it with both hands. “And how did you find out about him?”