Cesare by Jerome Charyn

Author:Jerome Charyn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
Published: 2019-02-15T16:00:00+00:00

THE SAME COMMANDOS RETURNED HIM TO THE ADLON, but this time Erik sat up front while they passed around a bottle of liebfraumilch and sang “Schöner Gigolo.” The gigolos began to disappear from Berlin tearooms after the Nazis seized power. Perhaps the craze lasted a little longer at Unter den Linden, because of Frau Hedda’s own craze to dance the tango on Sunday afternoons. She took over the Beethoven Salon for herself, dressed as an Apache, and danced with perfect strangers … after Pola Negri vacated her suite and vanished from Berlin. But it astonished Erik that Leibstandarte commandos should have memorized a song about taxi dancers; he could imagine them beating up the very gigolos they serenaded in the song.

“Herr Cesare,” they said, “we will help you catch the Jew.”

Colonel Joachim had ordered these commandos to spy on him; they would sit like spiders outside the hotel.

The main hall was packed with bellboys in their buttoned uniforms and pillbox hats; the red veins in the marble pillars seemed to dance in the light. It dazzled him—he had to save Lisalein and the baron.

He saw a curious angel float above the carpets on the central staircase in a stunning white robe. It was only a trick of light. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem had come downstairs with his Arab bodyguards. He signaled to Erik, and the two of them sat in red chairs under the vaulted marble ceiling.

“I am mindful of Baron von Hecht. He donated millions of marks to the poor of Jerusalem. I might be able to help you smuggle the baron and his daughter out of Berlin.”

The Mufti’s men had captured an ambulance and parked it outside the hotel.

“Excellency, if those bloodhounds at the SS ever find out …”

The Mufti laughed. His beard had gone gray; his mustache was all mottled, and his dark eyes were pierced with tiny bullets of light. He was a wanderer with a price on his head. He’d defied the Engländers, and now the Germans kept him in a golden cage. But he wasn’t their magnificent myna bird.

“Herr Cesare, if they bury me in the Tiergarten, all of Arabia will revolt. And the Führer will be furious.… No, they’ll let me have one Jewish baron. But I would like to see the Germans and the Engländers out of the way.”

Erik found the ambulance, put on the white orderly’s coat and cap that the Mufti’s agents had left for him beside the steering wheel, and drove across the river Spree and the ragged roofs of Wedding in the midst of a sudden storm of trolley cars. The streets were strewn with broken glass and the debris of battered buildings. He left the ambulance right on Iranische Strasse and marched through the main entrance in his hospital hat, knowing that the SS commandos in their field car couldn’t be far behind. Cows still lived on the lawn. Nurses and wounded soldiers from the Wehrmacht hospital on the grounds tended to the garden; the Gestapo jail was still embroiled in barbed wire.

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