“Is Max Reles another character? You do know him, don’t you?”
“Do we have to talk about him now?”
“It can wait.”
“Good. Because I can’t wait. I never could, not since I was a little girl. Ask me about him later, when the waiting is over.”
THE CEILINGS IN THE SUITES at the Adlon were just the right distance from the floor. When you lay on the bed and blew a column of cigarette smoke straight up, the crystal chandelier looked like a remote and icy mountaintop surrounded with an ermine collar of cloud. I’d never paid the ceilings much attention before. Previous erotic encounters with Frieda Bamberger had been furtive, hurried affairs, conducted with one eye on the clock and the other on the door handle, and certainly I’d never felt sufficiently relaxed to fall asleep afterward. But now that I was looking at the lofty heights of this room, I found my soul climbing up the silky walls to sit on the picture rail, like some invisible gargoyle, and then to stare down with forensic fascination on the naked aftermath of what had gone before.
Our bare limbs still entwined, Noreen and Gunther lay side by sweating side, like Eros and Psyche fallen from some other, more heavenlike ceiling-although it was hard to imagine anything much more heavenly than what had just occurred. I felt like Saint Peter taking vacant possession of a smart new basilica.
“I bet you’ve never even been in one of these beds,” said Noreen, taking the cigarette from my fingers and smoking it with the exaggerated gestures of a drunk or someone onstage. “Have you?”
“No,” I lied. “It feels strange.”
She hardly wanted to hear about my private trysts with Frieda. Certainly not as much as I wanted to hear about Max Reles.
“He doesn’t seem to like you very much,” she said after I mentioned his name again.
“Why is that? After all, I’ve been doing a swell job of hiding how much I dislike him. No, really, I despise the man, but he’s a guest of this hotel, which obliges me not to punch him down six flights of stairs and then kick him out the door. That’s what I’d like to do. And I’d do it, too, if I had another job to go to.”
“Be careful, Bernie. He’s a dangerous man.”
“That much I already know. The question is, how do you know it?”
“We met on the SS
“One night, off the coast of Ireland, I mentioned some of this to Max Reles over a game of gin rummy. He didn’t say very much. And it’s quite possible that I’m completely mistaken about this, but the very next day, this man Martin was reported missing, and it was presumed he must have fallen overboard. I believe they carried out a search, but it was for appearance’s sake, since there was no way he could have survived after several hours in the sea.
“Anyway, soon after, I formed the impression that Reles had something to do with the poor man’s disappearance. It was something he said. I can’t remember the exact words he used, but I do remember he was smiling when he said it.” Noreen shook her head. “You must think I’m crazy. I mean, this is all completely circumstantial. Which is the main reason I never mentioned this to anyone.”
“Not at all,” I said. “There’s nothing wrong with evidence that’s circumstantial. In the right circumstances, that is. What did he say?”
“He said something like, ‘It sounds very much as if your irritating little problem has been taken care of, Mrs. Charalambides.’ And then he asked me if I’d pushed him off the boat. Which he seemed to think was funny. I told him I didn’t think it was at all funny and asked him if he thought there was any chance that Mr. Martin might still be alive. To which he then replied, ‘I very much hope not.’ Well, after that, I kept away from him.”
“What exactly do you know about Max Reles?”
“Not very much. Just what he told me over cards. He said he was a businessman in that way men do when they want to give the impression that what they do isn’t very interesting. He speaks excellent German, of course. And I think some Hungarian. He told me he was on his way to Zurich, so I hardly expected to see him again. And certainly not here. I saw him again for the first time about a week ago. In the library. I had a drink with him, just to be polite. Apparently he’s been here for a while.”
“That he has.”
“You do believe me, don’t you?”
She said it in a way that made me think she might not be telling the truth. Then again, I’m just built that way. Some people like to believe in a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. I’m the type who thinks the pot of gold is being watched by four cops in a car.
“You don’t think I imagined it, do you?”
“Not at all,” I said, although I did wonder why any man would murder another for a woman who was nothing more than a partner for a game of cards. “From what you’ve told me, I think you came to a very reasonable conclusion.”
“You think I should have told the ship’s captain, don’t you? Or the police, when we got to Hamburg.”
“With no real evidence to corroborate your story, Reles would only have denied it and made you look a fool. Besides, it’s not like it would have helped the man who drowned.”
“All the same, somehow I feel responsible for what happened.” She rolled across the bed, reaching for the ashtray on the bedside table, and stabbed out the cigarette. I rolled after her and caught up only an hour or two later. It was a big bed. I started to kiss her behind, then the small of her back, and then her shoulders. I was just about to sink my fangs into her neck when I noticed the book next to the ashtray. It was the book written by Hitler.
She saw that I noticed it, and said, “I’m reading it.”
“Why?”
“It’s an important book. But reading it doesn’t make me a Nazi, any more than reading Marx makes me a communist. Although, as it happens, I do consider myself to be a communist. Does that surprise you?”
“That you think you’re a communist? No, not particularly. The best people are these days. George Bernard Shaw. Even Trotsky, I hear. I like to consider myself a Social Democrat, but since democracy no longer exists in this country, that would be naive.”
“I’m glad you’re a democrat. That it’s something that is still important to you. The fact is, I wouldn’t have slept with you if you’d been a Nazi, Gunther.”
“Like a lot of people, I might like them a bit more if it was me who was in charge and not Hitler.”
“I’m trying to get an interview with him. That’s one of the reasons I’m reading Hitler’s book. Not that I think he will agree to meet me. Most likely I’ll have to make do with seeing the sports minister. I’m meeting him tomorrow afternoon.”
“You won’t mention our friend Zak Deutsch, will you, Noreen? Or me, for that matter.”
“No, of course I won’t. Tell me something. Do you think he was murdered?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. We’ll have a much better idea after we’ve spoken to Stefan Blitz. He’s that geologist I was telling you about. I’m hoping he can shed some light on how a man can drown in salt water in the center of Berlin. You see, it’s one thing when it happens off the coast of Ireland, in the Atlantic Ocean. It’s quite another when it happens in the local canal.”
UNTIL THE SPRING OF 1934,Stefan Blitz had been a teacher of geology at Frederick William University, in Berlin. I knew him because sometimes he had helped KRIPO to identify the clay found on the shoes of murder suspects or their victims. He lived in Zehlendorf, in Berlin’s southwest, in a modern housing development called Uncle Tom’s Hut, named after a local tavern and subway shop that were themselves named after the book by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Noreen was intrigued.
“I can’t believe they called it that,” she said. “In the States, people would never have dared give it a name like that in case people thought the houses were fit only for Negroes.”
I parked the car in front of a four-story apartment building that was as big as a city block. The smooth, modern facade was very slightly curved and pockmarked with different-sized, recessed windows, none of which was on the same level. It looked like a face recovering from a dose of smallpox. There were hundreds, perhaps thousands of these Weimar-built homes in Berlin, and they were about as distinguished as packets of Persil. And yet, although they despised modernism, the Nazis had more in common with its mostly Jewish architects than they might have thought. Nazism and modernism were both products of the inhuman, and when I looked at one of those neat, standardized gray concrete buildings, it wasn’t hard to imagine a neat, standardized detachment of gray storm troopers living in one, like so many rats in a box.
It wasn’t like that inside, however-at least not inside Stefan Blitz’s apartment. In contrast to the carefully planned modernism of the exterior, his furniture was old mahogany, tattered upholstery, chipped Wilhelmine ornaments, table oilcloths, and Eiffel Towers of books, with all of the shelves given over to slices of rock.
Blitz himself was as tattered as his upholstery and, like any other Jew who was forbidden his way of making a living, he was as thin as a maquette in an artist’s garret and hardly living at all. A hospitable, kind, and generous man, he displayed character traits that made him the very opposite of the grasping bogeyman Jew so often caricatured in the Nazi press. Nevertheless, that was what he looked like: a lecher in the stews of Damascus. He offered us tea, coffee, Coca-Cola, alcohol, something to eat, a more comfortable chair, chocolates, and his last cigarettes before finally, having refused them all, we were able to come to the point of our visit.
“Is it possible that a man could drown in seawater in the center of Berlin?” I asked.
“I assume you’ve discounted the possibility of a swimming pool, otherwise you wouldn’t be here. The Admiral’s Garden baths on Alexanderplatz is a brine bath. I used to swim there myself before they stopped Jews from going there.”
“The victim is Jewish,” I said. “And so, for that reason, yes, you’re right, I think I have discounted that possibility.”
“Why, if you don’t mind my asking, is a Gentile bothering to investigate the death of a Jew in the new Germany?”
“It’s my idea,” Noreen said, and told Blitz about the Olympiad and the failed U.S. boycott and the newspaper she hoped would put that to rights, and how she herself was a Jew.
“I suppose it would be something if an American boycott were to succeed,” Blitz admitted. “Although I have my doubts. The Nazis won’t be so easy to dislodge, with or without a boycott. Now that they have power, they mean to hang on to it. The Reichstag will sink before they have another election, and, believe me, I know what I’m talking about. It was built on posts because of all the swampy
