photograph and gave a chesty little shrug.
'Way out of my league, I can tell you that much. Sure, I buy some small stuff.
But nothing big enough to interest the boys from the Alex. Like you, they know about me, Bernie. There's my time in the cement for a start. If I was to step badly out of line they'd have me in a K Z quicker than the drawers off a Kit-Kat showgirl.' Wheezing like a leaky old harmonium, Weizmann grinned and handed the photograph back to me.
'Amsterdam would be the best place to sell it,' he said. 'If you could get it out of Germany, that is. German customs officers are a smuggler's nightmare. Not that there aren't plenty of people in Berlin who would buy it.'
'Like who, for instance?'
'The two-tray boys one tray on top and one under the counter they might be interested. Like Peter Neumaier. He's got a nice little shop on Schlnterstrasse, specializing in antique jewellery. This might be his sort of thing. I've heard he's got plenty of flea and can pay it in whatever currency you like. Yes, I'd have thought he'd certainly be worth checking out.' He wrote the name down on a piece of paper. 'Then we have Werner Seldte. He may appear to be a bit Potsdam, but he's not above buying some hot bells.' Potsdam was a word of faint opprobrium for people who, like the antiquated pro-Royalists of that town, were smug, hypocritical and hopelessly dated in both intellectual and social ideas.
'Frankly, he's got fewer scruples than a backstreet angelmaker. His shop is on Budapester Strasse or Ebertstrasse or Hermann Goering Strasse or whatever the hell the Party calls it now.
'Then there are the dealers, the diamond merchants who buy and sell from classy offices where a browser for an engagement ring is about as popular as a pork chop in a rabbi's coat pocket. These are the sort of people who do most of their business on the gabbler.' He wrote down some more names. 'This one, Laser Oppenheimer, he's a Jew. That's just to show that I'm fair and that I've got nothing against Gentiles. Oppenheimer has an office on Joachimsthaler Strasse.
Anyway, the last I heard of him he was still in business.
'There's Gert Jeschonnek. New to Berlin. Used to be based in Munich. From what I've heard, he's the worst kind of March Violet you know, climbing on board the Party wagon and riding it to make a quick profit. He's got a very smart set of offices in that steel monstrosity on Potsdamer Platz. What's it called ?'
'Columbus Haus,' I said.
'That's it. Columbus Haus. They say that Hitler doesn't much care for modern architecture, Bernie. Do you know what that means?' Weizmann gave a little chuckle. 'It means that he and I have something in common.'
'Is there anyone else?'
'Maybe. I don't know. It's possible.'
'Who?'
'Our illustrious Prime Minister.
'Goering? Buying hot bells? Are you serious?'
'Oh yes,' he said firmly. 'That man has a passion for owning expensive things.
And he's not always as fussy as he could be regarding how he gets hold of them.
Jewels are one thing I know he has a weakness for. When I was at Friedlaender's he used to come into the shop quite often. He was poor in those days at least, too poor to buy much. But you could see he would have bought a great deal if he had been able to.'
'Jesus Christ, Weizmann,' I said. 'Can you imagine it? Me dropping in at Karinhall and saying, Excuse me, Herr Prime Minister, but you wouldn't happen to know anything about a valuable diamond necklace that some coat has clawed from a Ferdinandstrasse residence in the past few days? I trust you would have no objections to me taking a look down your wife Emmy's dress and seeing if she's got them hidden somewhere between the exhibits?'
'You'd have the devil's own job to find anything down there,' wheezed Weizmann excitedly. 'That fat sow is almost as big as he is. I'll bet she could breastfeed the entire Hitler Youth and still have milk enough left for Hermann's breakfast.' He began a fit of coughing which would have carried off another man.
I waited until it had found a lower gear, and then produced a fifty. He waved it away.
'What did I tell you?'
'Let me buy something, then.'
'What's the matter? Are you running out of crap all of a sudden?'
'No, but '
'Wait, though,' he said. 'There is something you might like to buy. A finger lifted it at a big parade on Unter den Linden.' He got up and went into the small kitchen behind the office. When he came back he was carrying a packet of Persil.
'Thanks,' I said, 'but I send my stuff to the laundry.'
'No, no, no,' he said, pushing his hand into the powder. 'I hid it in here just in case I had any unwelcome visitors. Ah, here we are.' He withdrew a small, flat, silvery object from the packet, and polished it on his lapel before laying it flat on my palm. It was an oval-shaped disc about the size of a matchbox. On one side was the ubiquitous German eagle clutching the laurel crown that encircled the swastika; and on the other were the words Secret State Police, and a serial number. At the top was a small hole by which the bearer of the badge could attach it to the inside of his jacket. It was a Gestapo warrant-disc.
'That ought to open a few doors for you, Bernie.'
'You're not joking,' I said. 'Christ, if they caught you with this '
'Yes, I know. It would save you a great deal of slip money, don't you think? So if you want it, I'll ask fifty for it.'
'Fair enough,' I said, although I wasn't sure about carrying it myself. What he said was true: it would save on bribes; but if I was caught using it I'd be on the first train to Sachsenhausen. I paid him the fifty. 'A bull without his beer-token. God, I'd like to have seen the bastard's face. That's like a horn-player without a mouthpiece.' I stood up to go.
'Thanks for the information,' I said. 'And in case you didn't know, it's summertime up on the surface.'
'Yes, I noticed that the rain was a little warmer than usual. At least a rotten summer is one thing they can't blame on the Jews.'
'Don't you believe it,' I said.
Chapter 5
There was chaos back at Alexanderplatz, where a tram had derailed. The clock in the tall, red-brick tower of St George's was striking three o'clock, reminding me that I hadn't eaten anything since a bowl of Quaker Quick Flakes ('For the Youth of the Nation') since breakfast. I went to the CafT Stock; it was close by Wertheim's Department Store, and in the shadow of the S-Bahn railway viaduct.
The CafT Stock was a modest little restaurant with an even more modest bar in the far corner. Such was the size of the eponymous proprietor's bibulous belly that there was only just room for him to squeeze behind the bar; and as I came through the door it was there that I found him standing, pouring beers and polishing glasses, while his pretty little wife waited on the tables. These tables were often taken by Kripo officers from the Alex, and this had the effect of obliging Stock to play up his commitment to National Socialism. There was a large picture of the Fuhrer on the wall, as well as a printed sign that said, 'Always give the Hitler Salute.'
Stock wasn't always that way, and before March 1933 he had been a bit of a Red.
He knew that I knew it, and it always worried him that there were others who would remember it too. So I didn't blame him for the picture and the sign.
Everyone in Germany was somebody different before March 1933. And as I'm always saying, 'Who isn't a National Socialist when there's a gun pointed at his head?'
I sat down at an empty table and surveyed the rest of the clientele. A couple of tables away were two bulls from the Queer Squad, the Department for the Suppression of Homosexuality: a bunch of what are little better than blackmailers. At a table next to them, and sitting on his own, was a young Kriminalassistent from the station at Wedersche Market, whose badly pock-marked face I remembered chiefly for his having once arrested my informer, Neumann, on suspicion of theft.
Frau Stock took my order of pig's knuckle with sauerkraut briskly and without much in the way of pleasantry. A shrewish woman, she knew and disapproved of my paying Stock for small snippets of interesting gossip about what was going on at the Alex. With so many officers coming in and out of the place, he often heard quite a lot. She moved off to the dumb-waiter and shouted my order down the shaft to the kitchen. Stock squeezed out from behind
