“No, sir. I can’t.”
“That’s what I thought.”
Klaus rummaged in his coat and pulled out a couple of wrinkled, dirty banknotes. He handed them guiltily to Paul.
Paul took them, doing the sums in his head.
“A portion of my monthly salary, including today. Sir, are you dismissing me?”
“I’ve been thinking about what happened yesterday . . . I don’t want any problems, you understand?”
“Of course, sir.”
“You don’t seem surprised,” said Klaus, who had deep bags under his eyes, doubtless from a sleepless night trying to decide if he should dismiss the lad or not.
Paul looked at him, wondering whether to explain the depth of the abyss into which he was being cast by the bills in his hand. He decided against it, because the coal man already knew his plight. He opted instead for irony, which was increasingly becoming his currency.
“This is the second time you’ve betrayed me, Herr Graf. Betrayal loses its charm the second time around.”
20
“You can’t do this to me!”
The baron smiled and sipped his herbal tea. He was enjoying this situation, and what was worse, he was making no attempt to pretend otherwise. For the first time he could see the possibility of getting his hands on the Jew’s money without having to marry off Jürgen.
“My dear Tannenbaum, I don’t see how I’m doing anything at all.”
“Precisely!”
“There’s no bride, is there?”
“Well, no,” Tannenbaum acknowledged reluctantly.
“So there can’t be a wedding. And since the lack of a bride,” he said, clearing his throat, “is your responsibility, it’s reasonable that you should be taking care of the costs.”
Tannenbaum shifted uneasily in his seat, searching for a response. He served himself more tea and half the sugar bowl.
“I see you take it sweet,” said the baron, arching an eyebrow. The revulsion Josef produced in him had slowly been transformed into a strange fascination as the balance of power shifted.
“Well, after all, I’m the one who’s paid for this sugar.”
The baron responded with a grimace.
“There’s no need to be rude.”
“Do you think I’m an idiot, Baron? You told me you’d use the money to set up a factory to manufacture rubber products, like the one you lost five years ago. I believed you and transferred the vast sum you asked me for. And what do I find two years later? Not only have you not set up the factory, but the money’s ended up in a portfolio of stocks to which only you have access.”
“They’re reliable stocks, Tannenbaum.”
“That may be. But I don’t trust their keeper. It wouldn’t be the first time you’d wagered your family’s future on a winning hand.”
Baron Otto von Schroeder’s face assumed a look of offense that he couldn’t bring himself to feel. Lately he had contracted gambling fever again, and had spent long nights staring at the leather folder that contained the investments he’d made with Tannenbaum’s money. Each one had an instant liquidity clause, which meant that he could convert them into wads of banknotes in little over an hour with only his signature and a stiff penalty. He didn’t try to fool himself: he knew why the clause had been included. He knew the risk he was running. He’d started drinking more and more before bed, and the previous week he’d returned to the gaming table.
Not at the Munich casino; he wasn’t that stupid. He had disguised himself in the most modest clothes he could find, and visited an establishment in the Altstadt. A cellar with sawdust on the floor and whores with more paint on them than you’d find in the Alte Pinakothek. He asked for a glass of Korn and started at a table where the opening play was just two marks. He had five hundred in his pocket, the maximum he would allow himself to squander.
The worst thing possible happened: he won.
Even with those filthy cards that stuck to one another like newlyweds on a honeymoon, even with the drunkenness brought on by home-brewed drink and the smoke that stung his eyes—even with the unpleasant smell that hung in the air of that basement—he won. Not a lot—just enough for him to leave the place without a knife in his guts. But he had won, and now he felt an itch for the game more and more frequently. “I’m afraid that on the matter of the money you’ll just have to trust my judgment, Tannenbaum.”
The industrialist gave a skeptical laugh.
“I see that I’m going to be left with no money and no wedding. Though I could always redeem that loan letter you signed for me, Baron.”
Schroeder gulped. He wouldn’t allow anyone to take away the folder in his study drawer. And not for the simple reason that the dividends were gradually paying off his debts.
No.
That folder—the act of stroking it, of imagining what he could do with the money—was the only thing that got him through the long nights.
“As I said before, there’s no need to be rude. I promised you a wedding between our families, and that’s what you’ll get. Bring me the bride, and my son will be waiting for her.
Jürgen hadn’t spoken to his mother for three days.
When the baron had gone to collect his son at the hospital a week earlier, he had listened to the young man’s profoundly biased tale. He’d been pained at what had happened—even more than when Eduard returned so badly mutilated, Jürgen thought stupidly—but he had refused to involve the police in the matter.
“We mustn’t forget that the boys were the ones who brought the penknife,” said the baron, justifying his stance.
But Jürgen knew that his father was lying, and that he was hiding a more important reason. He tried to talk to Brunhilda, but she dodged the subject again and again, confirming his suspicions that they were telling him only part of the truth. Infuriated, Jürgen shut himself away in total silence, believing that this would soften his mother.
Brunhilda suffered, but she did not give in.
Instead she counterattacked, lavishing her son with attention, bringing him endless presents, sweets, and his favorite dishes. It reached the stage when even someone as spoiled, ill-mannered, and self-centered as Jürgen began to feel suffocated, eager to get out of the house.
So when Krohn came to see Jürgen with one of his usual propositions—that he should come along to a political meeting—Jürgen gave a different reply than he normally would.
“Let’s go,” he said, grabbing his overcoat.
Krohn, who had spent years trying to get Jürgen involved in politics, and who was a member of various nationalist parties, was delighted at his friend’s decision.
“I’m sure it’ll help take your mind off things,” he said, still ashamed at what had happened in the stables a week earlier, when seven had lost to one.
Jürgen didn’t have high expectations. He was still taking sedatives for the pain his injury was causing him, and while they took the trolley toward the city center, he nervously touched the bulky bandage he would have to wear for a few more days.
And then a patch for the rest of my life, all because of that wretched pig Paul, he thought, feeling extremely sorry for himself.
To top it all, his cousin had vanished into thin air. Two of his friends had gone to spy on the stables and discovered that he no longer worked there. Jürgen suspected there would be no way of tracking Paul down in the short term, and this made his innards burn.
Lost in his hatred and self-pity, the baron’s son barely heard what Krohn was saying on their way to the Hofbräuhaus.
“He’s an extraordinary speaker. A great man. You’ll see, Jürgen.”
Nor did he pay any attention to the magnificent setting, an old beer factory built for the kings of Bavaria more than three centuries earlier, or to the frescoes on the walls. He sat next to Krohn on one of the benches in the enormous hall and sipped his beer in gloomy silence.
When the speaker Krohn had enthused about stepped up onto the stage, Jürgen thought his friend had gone craz
y. The man walked like he had a bee sting on his arse, and looked nothing like a man with something to say. He exuded everything Jürgen despised, from his haircut and his moustache to his cheap crumpled suit.
Five minutes later, Jürgen was looking around in awe. The throng that gathered in the hall, no fewer than a thousand people, stood in total silence. Lips barely parted except to whisper “Well said” or “He’s right.” The crowd’s hands did the talking, marking each of the man’s pauses with loud clapping.
Almost against his will, Jürgen began to listen. He could barely understand the subject of the speech, because he lived on the periphery of the world that surrounded him, concerned only for his own amusement. He recognized loose fragments, snippets of phrases his father dropped during breakfast as he hid behind his newspaper. Curses on the French, the English, the Russians. Complete nonsense, all of it.
Out of that confusion, however, Jürgen began to extract a simple meaning. Not from the words, which he barely understood, but from the emotion in the little man’s voice, from his exaggerated gestures, from the clenched fists at the end of each line.
There had been a terrible injustice.
Germany had been stabbed in the back.
The Jews and the Masons had held that dagger in Versailles.
Germany was lost.
The blame for poverty, for unemployment, for the bare feet of German children fell on the Jews, who controlled the government in Berlin as if it were an enormous brainless marionette.
Jürgen, who didn’t care in the slightest about the bare feet of German children, who didn’t give a damn about Versailles—who never had concern for anyone who wasn’t Jürgen von Schroeder—found himself on his feet within fifteen minutes, applauding the speaker wildly. Before the speech had ended, he told himself he’d follow this man wherever he went.
After the meeting Krohn excused himself, saying he would be right back. Jürgen fell into silence until his friend tapped him on the back. He had brought over the speaker, who was looking poor and disheveled again, his stare shifty and distrustful. But the baron’s heir could no longer see him in that light, and stepped forward to greet him. Krohn said with a smile:
“My dear Jürgen, allow me to introduce you to Adolf Hitler.”
THE ENTERED APPRENTICE
1923
In which the initiate discovers a new reality with new rules
This is the entered apprentice’s secret handshake, used so that brother Masons can identify one another as such. It involves squeezing the thumb against the top of the knuckle of the index finger of the person being greeted, who will return the action. Its secret name is BOAZ, from the column that represents the moon in Solomon’s Temple. If a Mason has any doubts about another man who is claiming to be a brother Mason, he will ask him to spell this name out. Impostors begin with the letter B, while the true initiate starts with the third letter, thus: A—B—O—Z.
21
“Good afternoon, Frau Schmidt,” said Paul. “What can I get you?”
The woman cast a quick look around her, trying to give the impression that she was considering her purchase, but the truth was that she’d set her eyes on the sack of potatoes in the hope of finding a price tag. It was useless. Fed up with having to change their prices daily, Paul had started memorizing them every morning.
“Two kilos of potatoes, please,” she said, not daring to ask how much.
Paul began to pile the tubers onto the scale. Behind the lady a couple of boys were contemplating the sweets displayed in the window, their hands firmly stuffed in their empty pockets.
“They’re sixty thousand marks a kilo!” boomed a rough voice from behind the counter.
The woman barely looked at Herr Ziegler, the owner of the grocer’s shop, but her face went red in reaction to the high price.
“I’m sorry, madam . . . I don’t have many potatoes left,” lied Paul to save her the embarrassment of having to reduce her order. That morning he had worn himself out, piling up sacks and sacks of them out the back. “A lot of our regular customers are yet to come. Would you mind if I gave you just one kilo?”
Her look of relief was so obvious that Paul had to turn away to hide his smile.
“Fine. I suppose I’ll have to make do.”
Paul took a few potatoes from the bag until the scales settled at one thousand grams. He didn’t remove the last one, a particularly large specimen, from the bag completely but kept it in his hand while he checked the weight, then replaced it as he handed the potatoes over.
The action didn’t escape the woman, whose hand shook slightly as she paid and took the bag from the counter. As they were about to leave, Herr Ziegler called her back.
“Just one moment!”
The woman turned, pale.
“Yes?”
“Your son dropped this, madam,” said the shopkeeper, holding out the smallest boy’s cap.
The woman murmured her thanks and practically ran out.
Herr Ziegler headed back behind the counter. He adjusted his little round glasses and continued to rub the cans of peas with a soft piece of cloth. The place was spotless, as Paul kept it very clean, and in those days nothing stayed in the store long enough to gather dust.
“I saw you,” said the shopkeeper without looking up.
Paul took a newspaper out from under the counter and began to leaf through it. They would have no more customers that afternoon, as it was Thursday and most people’s wages had dried up several days earlier. But the following day would be hell.
“I know, sir.”
“So, why did you pretend?”
“It had to look as if you hadn’t noticed I was giving her the potato, sir. Otherwise we’d have to give a free one to everybody.”
“That potato will be coming out of your wages,” said Ziegler, trying to sound threatening.
Paul nodded and buried himself in his reading once again. He had ceased to be afraid of the shopkeeper long ago, not only because he never went through with his threats but also because his gruff exterior was just a front. Paul smiled to himself, remembering that just a minute earlier he’d spotted Ziegler putting a fistful of sweets in the boy’s cap.
“I don’t know what the hell you find so interesting in those newspapers,” said the shopkeeper, shaking his head.
What Paul had been frantically searching for in the papers for some time now was a way of saving Herr Ziegler’s business. If he didn’t find one, the shop would be bankrupt within the fortnight.
Suddenly he stopped between two pages of the Allgemeine Zeitung. His heart somersaulted. It was right there: an idea, in a small two-column piece, almost ridiculous beside the large banner headlines announcing endless disasters and the possible collapse of the government. He could have skipped straight over it if he hadn’t been searching for that very thing.
It was crazy.
It was impossible.
But if it works . . . we’ll be rich.
It would work. Paul was sure of it. The hardest thing would be to convince Herr Ziegler. An old conservative Prussian like him would never accept such a plan, not even in Paul’s wildest dreams. Paul couldn’t even imagine how to suggest it.
So I’d better think fast, he said to himself, biting his lip.
22
It had all started with the assassination of minister Walther Rathenau, a famous Jewish industrialist. The desperation into which Germany sank between 1922 and 1923, when two generations saw their values overturned completely, had begun one morning when three students drew up alongside Rathenau’s car, peppered him with machine gun bullets, and threw a grenade at him. On June 24, 1922, the terrible seed was sewn; more than two decades later, it would result in more than fifty million dead.
Until that day, the Germans had thought that things were already going badly. But from that day onward, with the whole country transformed into a madhouse, all they wanted was to go back to the way things were before. Rathenau had been in charge of the foreign ministry. At that tu
rbulent time, when Germany was in the hands of its creditors, it was a job that was even more important than the presidency of the republic.
The day Rathenau was killed, Paul wondered whether the students had done it because he was Jewish, because he was a politician, or to try to help Germany come to terms with the disaster of Versailles. The impossible reparation the country would have to pay—until 1984!—was plunging the population into destitution, and Rathenau was the last bastion of common sense.
After his death, the country started printing money simply in order to pay their debts. Did those responsible realize that every mark they printed devalued the rest? They probably did, but what else could they have done?
In June 1922, one mark could buy you two cigarettes; two hundred and seventy-two marks equaled one U.S. dollar. By March 1923, on the same day that Paul carelessly put an extra potato in Frau Schmidt’s bag, five thousand marks were needed to buy a cigarette, and twenty thousand to go into a bank and come out with a crisp dollar bill.
Families struggled to keep up as the insanity spiraled. Each Friday, which was payday, the women would be waiting for their husbands at the factory doors. Then, all at once, they’d besiege the shops and grocery stores, they’d flood the Viktualienmarkt on Marienplatz, they’d spend the last pfennig of the salary on absolute essentials. They’d return home laden with food and try to eke it out for the rest of the week. Not a lot of business was done in Germany on the other days of the week. Pockets were empty. And on a Thursday night, a BMW production supervisor had the same purchasing power as an old tramp dragging his stumps through the mud under the bridges of the Isar.
There were many who could not bear it.
Those who were old, who lacked imagination, who took too much for granted, they were the ones who suffered the most. Their minds could not cope with all these changes, with this back-to-front world. Many committed suicide. Others wallowed in their poverty.
Others changed.