Vienna Prelude (7 page)

Amanda bantered on furiously with the unrelenting company of hopeless skeptics. Murphy searched the faces of the pedestrians in the cold avenues below for some hint of their thoughts. He stepped forward, almost pressing his forehead on the glass as he caught sign of a young fraülein raising her arm to a passing taxi. The young woman’s shoulder-length blond hair clung in damp wisps to her finely chiseled face. She was tall and slender, aristocratic looking. Murphy found himself wishing that he was out in the rain or maybe driving the cab. This was not the type of girl he could meet at a cabaret, however. She was more the opera or symphony hall type. He squinted as the taxi splashed to a halt, and a smile of grateful relief spread across her face.

A dancer? She probably came out of the Academy of Arts on the Pariser Platz.

“Hey, Murphy!” called Timmons, clanking the gin bottle. “How can a guy get some lime around here?”

“Call room service,” Murphy replied distractedly as the woman brushed her hair back with a graceful sweep of her hand and spoke to the taxi driver through the window. “And put it on your own tab! I don’t run a restaurant!”

The woman opened the door of the automobile and slid in, revealing a nicely shaped leg. Then the door shut and she was gone. Murphy peered back toward the British Embassy as the woman’s taxi drove away, leaving behind a wake of rainwater.

“Let us know when they bring up the hearse to haul King Edward’s portrait out, will you, Murph?” Timmons stirred his drink. “That’s as close as we’re going to get to this story, I’m afraid.”

Murphy turned around just in time to see Amanda’s back as she stalked out of the room and slammed the door angrily behind her.

“She’s got no sense of humor!” grumbled Timmons.

“Yeah!” replied Johnson with a nervous laugh. “That’s why she got this assignment.”

“Yeah?” Timmons slurped his drink loudly. “So why are all the rest of us here?”

Johnson stretched out on the floor. “Exile,” he answered gloomily. “Somebody up there just don’t like us no more!”

5

Coming Home

The taxi driver grimaced and pounded his fist against the horn in irritation. The sound simply blended with the impatient blasts of a thousand other horns in the commercial district of Berlin.

Elisa Lindheim glanced at her watch, then out through the rain-streaked window of the cab. It was not yet five o’clock, but it was already dark. The bright marquees of Berlin’s great department stores reflected on the hoods and windshields of the automobiles that inched down the slick streets. On the sidewalks Christmas shoppers awkwardly clutched packages and umbrellas and vied for places on the crowded trolley cars. No one seemed to notice the Christmas decorations in the glittering shopwindows. In spite of the season, the face of Berlin was grim and cold. Elisa looked up beyond the lights to where the great red banners of the Reich clung to the dripping facades of every building. The black mark of the swastika caused her to shudder involuntarily.

Elisa had shuddered when she saw the banners the day she arrived. Berlin had changed, and her few days at home had shown her that the swastika was casting its dark shadow everywhere.

The cab lurched forward a few yards, halting inches from the bumper of a large black Mercedes. The driver beat out a rhythm on his horn again.

“It seems I might travel faster on foot,” said Elisa.

“My apologies, Fraülein. It is another of Chancellor Hitler’s building projects, you know. Down with the old Berlin, up with the new. The streets are torn up everywhere. It could be years before traffic is free again.”

“Years?” Elisa squinted out at the drizzle. “I don’t have that long, I’m afraid.” She opened her handbag. “It is only two blocks to Lindheim’s; I can walk.”

The cabdriver frowned and appraised Elisa’s finely tailored clothes and the perfect blond curls that framed her face. “Walk if you like, Fraülein”—his voice carried a warning—“but I would not walk to
that
store for Christmas shopping.”

Her blue eyes glinted angrily at his words. “Why?” she asked him, even though she already knew what his answer would be.

He shrugged. “You have been gone from Berlin a long time if you do not remember that this is a
Jewish
store. Only Jews and very foolish people shop there now,” he concluded, as if he was putting forth a perfectly logical argument.

Elisa did not reply. All of Germany was filled with such logic these days. She checked the meter and counted out the exact fare. No tip, not even a “Thank you for the information.” Elisa was sure that when the cabbie counted out the change and discovered she had not tipped him, he would curse beneath his breath and remark that she too must be a Jew. On that point he would be right, despite the fact that Elisa had inherited her mother’s “Aryan” good looks.

“I will walk,” she said curtly, opening the door to a blast of cold wet air. She slammed the door behind her and scurried between stalled vehicles to the crowded sidewalk. Opening her umbrella, she joined the jostling shoppers and breathed deeply. Voices and Christmas music mingled with the cacophony of automobile horns in the city symphony so familiar to Elisa. For a moment it was almost as if nothing had changed while she had been in Vienna. Berlin was still her home, the city of her childhood dreams and happiest hours. Beneath her umbrella, the crooked cross of Hitler’s flag seemed simply another thundercloud that would pass, taking its storm with it. She would pretend that it was Christmas in Berlin as it always had been and as it always would be.

She made her way through the throng and was relieved when she pushed open the great glass doors of Lindheim’s Department Store. Shaking the raindrops from her umbrella, she stood to the side and gazed over the crowded aisles with satisfaction. It
was
Christmas—at least in Lindheim’s. Men and women strolled along the counters. Clerks smiled and offered help. Small booths were set up to provide the famous gift-wrapping service that made even the smallest gift seem extraordinary. The sweet aroma of perfume drifted through the store, and a string quartet played the music of Mozart from a red carpeted platform beside a giant glittering Christmas tree. Marble pillars were wrapped with broad swaths of red cloth, giving them the appearance of giant candy canes.

Elisa felt a surge of pride for her father.
Ironic
, she thought,
that Christmas should seem most real here, in a Jewish store.
She smiled at the thought. Her family was devoutly Lutheran, even though her father clung proudly to his Jewish heritage. Her mother was Aryan, with a lineage pure enough to please Hitler himself.
Why then,
she wondered,
is the issue of being Jewish so all-consuming these days?

In spite of everything, Theo Lindheim had managed to carry off the image of the most carefree of all holidays for the “master race.” There were no Nazi flags flapping from the roof of his building. The only swastikas to be seen were worn on the armbands of the soldiers who crowded the aisles of Lindheim’s with everyone else.

Three years ago the sight of such soldiers would have been unthinkable. After the Great War, her father had told her that Germany had been stripped of great tracts of land and denied the right to ever rebuild its army. Elisa shook her head at the uselessness of such decrees. Only twelve years later Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist Party had burst on the scene. They had taken over the government of the Weimar Republic with only a 33 percent vote. Rearming had begun immediately, as had construction of the concentration camps for those who opposed the Nazis. The Versailles Treaty was merely a slip of paper, since France and Britain had refused to enforce it.

Decrees against the Jews of Germany had gone hand in hand with the rearming. Theo Lindheim had been spared much of the persecution others were now enduring, simply because he had been a great hero for the Fatherland during the “war to end all wars.” His trophy case contained two Iron Crosses, and he walked with a limp from a wound received as a fighter pilot in the last battle above the Argonne. Elisa was proud of him—proud that the guests around their dinner table had been among the great men of Germany. They came less and less often lately, but still no one denied that Theo Lindheim was a great German patriot, even if he was a Jew.

Elisa passed unnoticed through the shoppers and climbed the familiar stairs to the mezzanine. She could have greeted every clerk in the store, but they were all busy, and she was too preoccupied to make small talk. They would want to know about school in Vienna and what her plans were. Some even would have asked her about her romance with Thomas von Kleistmann, and that was one topic she could not face—not now.

Christmas was supposed to be a happy time, full of love and laughter and friends. Her relationship with Thomas was one thing her father’s status as war hero had not been able to save. There was a law now in Germany that the blood of a pure Aryan could not commingle with that of the defiled Jew. It was not a matter of religion, they had explained to Thomas. It did not matter that the Lindheim family were baptized Lutherans. A little water could not wash away their Jewishness. As an adjutant on the staff of Admiral Canaris, Thomas could not continue to see Elisa. He had been told this in a very polite and logical tone; there had even been some sympathy in the voice of the officer. But the law was on the books, and violation was punishable by severe prison sentences.

Elisa shook her head slightly to brush away the thought. She had denied herself the luxury of self-pity while she had studied and practiced in Vienna. The solitude of the practice cubicle had been filled with the passion of her music alone. In Austria no one ever stopped to question her heritage. She was beautiful and talented, a violinist of great potential, according to Professor Ryburg at the Academy. She had lost herself in a world of music and hard work. Letters from Thomas von Kleistmann had been burned unopened rather than returned to him at the risk of Gestapo interception. In Vienna she had not had the time to miss him.

Now, at this instant, in the familiarity of Berlin, she found herself searching the faces of the young officers in the store and hoping against her own will for a glimpse of Thomas. She almost regretted that she had come home to Berlin for a few days of shopping before the family took their December holiday in the Alps of the Austrian Tyrol. Certainly there were no terrible edicts against love in Austria. Those laws had only come with the dank rain of the swastika’s thundercloud.

Elisa drew herself up. Perhaps she would not come home again until all this had passed away, as her father and Thomas von Kleistmann believed it would. She would stay across the border and fall in love with whomever she wished. She would play the music that was now forbidden for Jewish musicians in Hitler’s Germany. The sound of Mozart followed her up the stairs—a reminder that it was against the law for her, a racial Jew, to play “German” music in public. Even in her own father’s store.

A tall, strong-jawed Wehrmacht soldier smiled and touched his hand to the brim of his cap as he passed Elisa. She lifted her chin and looked the other way, unwilling to give him the satisfaction of even a glance.

The taxi driver was wrong
, Elisa thought.
More than Jews still shop at Lindheim’s. But a great many fools come here.

Elisa was well aware, of course, that legally,
technically
, Lindheim’s was no longer a Jewish store. Theo Lindheim had the foresight to pass the control of the store on paper to a select group of his German business friends. His office still remained where it had always been on the second floor, and decisions were still relayed to him; but the names of five Aryan board members kept the store on good terms with the Nazi government. Even though it was illegal to export “Jewish capital,” Elisa had overheard her father and mother discussing the bank account in Switzerland . . . “
just in case
.”

“
In case of what?
”
Elisa had asked. Didn’t her father’s war record protect them all? Didn’t their baptism into the Lutheran church mean anything?

When the signs began appearing in shopwindows—
Juden unerwünscht (Jews unwanted)—
Elisa had ignored them. With her blond hair and fine-boned features, she was often the subject of frank stares and longing looks by the same Nazi youths in S.A. uniforms who lay in wait for the Jews outside the synagogues. And she hated them—not as a Jew, but as a German; she hated what they had done to her homeland.

Others who also hated them were systematically disappearing in midnight raids by Himmler’s Gestapo. Names like Dachau and Oranienburg were whispered in hushed tones.

Admiral Canaris, who was the head of the Abwehr, feuded frequently with Himmler over the lawless policies of the Gestapo. The result was simply that Canaris had fallen out of favor with Hitler. Perhaps it made no difference to the career of Thomas von Kleistmann that he had turned his back on her. There could be no future for him if Canaris ended up in forced retirement in Dachau, like so many other fallen leaders.

The thought gave her no pleasure. A young couple kissed on the landing, and suddenly Elisa felt angry at Thomas all over again. He had only to cross the border into Austria where she still played the bright music of Mozart on her violin! He had only to come to her there, and she would be his, no questions asked! How she had loved him once! And now what a terrible tangle her feelings of love and hatred had become!

At the top of the stairs to the right was a small crowded lunch counter. Beyond that was the office of Theo Lindheim. Elisa debated going first to her father’s office or picking up the ski clothes she had left with the tailor for alterations the day before. Putting a hand to her hot cheek, Elisa decided it would be better to see her father after she had calmed down. There had never been a time in her life that he had not been able to read a mood in her eyes. She was certain that they would now be a very pale blue, and she was not up to having him ask her what was troubling her. A session with Grynspan the tailor and a new winter wardrobe would no doubt brighten her outlook.