The Sleepwalkers (22 page)

Willi recalled one of the Führer’s recent radio addresses:

The Germany of today is not the Germany of yesterday—just as little as the Germany of yesterday was the Germany of today. The German people of the present time is not the German people of the day before yesterday, but the German people of the two thousand years of German history which lie behind us.

Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!

Once a trance was in place its effects were mechanical. A subject who surrendered would obey. Regardless of the faith he or she had in the hypnotist. Or whether or not he believed.

All the hypnotist had to do was induce the trance.

“What a night you must have had, alone in that terrible cell. I bet all you’d like to do now is forget the whole thing. Make it disappear . . . like an unpleasant dream. All the worries. All the thoughts you must have had. Just dissipate . . . with one long breath. Go on. Do it, Gustave. Take a deep breath. In and out. That’s it. You’re a lucky fellow. Think of all the people in Berlin shivering in the cold. Who aren’t lucky enough to be cozy on a nice warm couch. Lucky enough to be able to relax as you are.”

Gustave smiled, nodding slightly.

His eyelids fluttered—

Then his lips twisted into a sinister smirk. “You don’t really
suppose you can hypnotize me?” His brown eyes flared mockingly. “The Great Gustave. That’s funny.”

Kurt feigned ignorance. “Herr Gustave. That is the last thing I want—for you to fall asleep on me. I only want you to relax so we can have a conversation. Inspektor.” Kurt looked at Willi. “Might I have a word with you please? Gustave, just . . . relax.”

Kurt swore in the hallway, “I’m halfway there.”

“You must be joking.”

“Did you see the way his eyes were fluttering just before his resistance flared?”

“But he was only—”

“I need time. Sit with Ruta. Have a cup of coffee. What time is it?”

“Eleven.”

“Give me an hour. One lousy hour. I’ll get him, Willi. I swear I will.”

As the clock ticked by though, Willi started going out of his mind.

Ruta was smoking cigarette after cigarette, flipping through
Berlin am Morgen
.

“
Lieber Gott—
look who’s getting married. Garbo.”

“Lucky her.” He tossed about files, pretending to be searching for something.

“Sure it is. Why, you think she’s pretty? Compared to Dietrich?”

He couldn’t stop checking the clock. It was twelve thirty. To get to the Zoo Station in midday traffic would require at least thirty-five minutes. He pictured Kathe standing there with the kids. Forty-five to be safe. That gave them less than an hour.

“Come on, Kurt,” he found himself chanting. “Come on—”

“And here’s a good one.” Ruta was blowing smoke rings. “A new movie about a giant ape that destroys New York. Something to take the grandkids to.”

He practically leapt off his seat when the door flew open.

It was Gunther, back from Central Records, his eyes aflame, his Adam’s apple jumping. “I got something, Chief!”

Willi didn’t want to hear.

“Remember you told me to check if any complaints had been filed with local precincts about unusual smells along the Havel? Well . . . guess what. There were more than a dozen in 1932. And guess where they all came from?”

Willi shot the clock a glance.

It was nearly one already. What was taking so damn long? Was Gustave’s willpower really that strong? Suppose he wouldn’t go under? Suppose he faked it.

“Where, Gunther? Where did they come from? I give up.”

“Oranienburg!” He handed Willi a file.

Inside was complaint after complaint filed to the Oranienburg police as well as several to the Prussian Ministry of Health on Konigsburger Strasse regarding a stench that engulfed portions of the riverfront when a southern wind blew. Even the mayor had filed one. On an imaginary map Willi followed the Havel south from the little town. There was the leather tannery of course. But it had gone bust the first year of the Depression. Still . . . someone might have got in there. And a mile or so farther, the brickworks. But what smell could come from that—unless it wasn’t bricks they were making? Beyond that, all there was for miles . . . were those two little islands. But he needed proof. Confirmation.

He looked again at the clock.

A quarter past one. They had to leave. If Kurt hadn’t got what they needed by now, it was just too—

The office door swung open. Kurt emerged with his coat and hat on.

“All right. Let’s go. I’ll tell you everything on the way.”

“Gunther!” Willi erupted with tension.

Ruta looked as if he’d gone mad, without her even noticing.

“Yes, sir.”

“Make sure our friend in there is comfortable,” he whispered. “Behind bars.”

“Jawohl.”

“And good work on those complaints.”

Outside, a miserable cold had settled. A Berlin fog that seeped through the pores and went straight into the bones. Starting up the BMW, Willi calculated the fastest route. It was tortuous no matter what. Only two arteries connected Berlin-Center to its western districts—and both went through hair-raising bottlenecks. Unter den Linden would be impossible at this hour, he knew. The backup at Friedrich Strasse, all the way under Brandenburg Gate and into the Tiergarten, was too nerve-racking even for a lifelong Berliner. Constant parades. Demonstrations. Nazis. Communists. He opted for Muhlendamm instead, crossing the Spree easily enough at the Gertrauden Brucke only to be caught in that stickiest of webs . . . Potsdamer Platz.

As they neared it, vehicles of every description engulfed them.

“Gustave wasn’t lying about the kidnappings,” Kurt reiterated as they ground to a halt. “He hadn’t a single memory connected with the Black Stag Inn.”

Willi cast him an incredulous look.

The King of Mystics had finally surrendered—not because his willpower had weakened, but because he was hypersensitive to hypnosis, Kurt reported. And terrified of prison.

“How could he not have known he’d sent all those people? It’s preposterous.”

“Because he hypnotized himself, Willi, repeatedly—to forget everything he did in connection with the whole affair.”

Willi shifted miserably in his seat.

“It’s true—I had to clear his mind of all posthypnotic instructions for it to come back.”

“And then . . . ?”

“And then he confessed there were thirty, perhaps forty women he’d sent to Spandau last year; he’d lost count.”

“Good God.”

“Plus a family of Hungarian dwarfs . . . special request.”

Dwarfs? Why the—Willi closed his eyes. “What about Sachsenhausen?”

“Never heard of it.”

“Scheisse!”

“All he knew was that after he found a girl they’d like, he’d phone the Black Stag to alert them. What happened after they arrived, he had no idea.”

“For God’s sake . . . what did he imagine happened to them?”

“He honestly believed, or at least allowed himself to, that they were being used as . . . sex slaves. That their ‘sentence,’ as he termed it, only lasted as long as their masters enjoyed them. Beyond that, he didn’t want to know. He had no inkling none ever returned. That any had surfaced in the Havel. No concept of any medical experiments. Nothing beyond the Black Stag. Even there . . . only voices. Never a name.”

Willi felt a dim nausea. From the upper window of a double-decker bus he noticed a young woman with green, longing eyes. For an instant he swore it was Paula. Only Paula was at Sachsenhausen. And he was back to square one again.

Vehicles bellowed as they elbowed into Potsdamer Platz. For fifty years this vortex of avenues had held the dubious distinction of being Europe’s busiest intersection. Swarms of cars, buses, and taxis squeezed around endless lines of yellow streetcars rushing past each other at alarming speeds, suicidal pedestrians madly dashing through it all.

“What made Gustave do it then, Kurt?” Willi honked at a man who seemed determined to get run over. “If he found it so loathsome he had to hypnotize himself not to remember any of it?”

Waves of people poured from the Potsdamer train station. Across the street the showy Hotel Fürstenhof beckoned with
Jugendstil
towers. Electric advertisements flashed from a dozen
directions: “Berlin Smokes Juno!” “Chlorodont—Used by Millions Daily!” Men in sandwich signs paraded the sidewalks. “Sale! Englehardt Men’s Shoes.” “Delectable! Grossmann’s Delikat Essen.”

“In a word, Willi, blackmail.”

On the left the gilded portals of the stately old Palast Hotel seemed to offer a last vestige of the stability that had been imperial Berlin. In those days, Willi knew, people understood their lives, the world around them, through an iron sense of duty to their kaiser and his state. When all that toppled, everything became a frantic rush forward, a desperate search for some new center of gravity. A terrible fear the whole bottom would drop out.

“About a year ago, some guy named Heydrich uncovered a rather unpleasant fact about his past.”

Willi became aware of mad honking behind him. A furious clanging of bells.

“Such as what, Kurt?”

A fire truck was trying to get through.

What could Heydrich have on the man that would strike such terror in him?

Willi managed to squeeze the BMW next to one of the old Schinkel gatehouses, its Greek Revival columns plastered with newspapers from a kiosk.

Commerce Bank Fails! Hitler Meets Industrialists in Cologne.

A clown on stilts was performing on the corner, surrounded by screaming children. A legless man rolled by on a little wooden cart, shaking a tin can. Two young women in silver fox kept laughing hysterically as they linked arms and tried to cross the street. A blinding advertisement overhead proclaimed, “Lux—Your Clothes Will Look Like New!”

“Gustave Spanknoebel’s not from Vienna. And he’s not Gustave Spanknoebel.”

Life in Potsdamer Platz—the center of a nation spinning out
of control—was getting like a mad carousel ride, Willi thought. Everyone barely hanging on.

“His real name’s Gershon Lapinsky. He’s from a little village in Bohemia. Comes from a long line of what they call
Wunder
rebbes. Mystics. Healers. His father sold magic amulets inscribed with Cabala symbols. He’s a Jew, Willi. A Jew. Hitler’s clairvoyant!”

Ahead, Willi’s eyes took in the stunning new office tower rising on the corner of Koniggratzer Strasse. Eight stories of horizontal glass walls curving parabolically with the traffic below. It was Erich Mendelsohn’s most spectacular achievement yet, Columbus Haus. Mendelsohn, a Jew, was reshaping the heart of Berlin. Invigorating it with optimistic futurism. No wonder the Nazis hated it. Called it Bolshevik decadence. Goebbels declared that the day they seized power, they’d turn it into a center for reeducation, to teach men like Mendelsohn what it meant to be German.

“That’s completely insane, Kurt. I don’t understand. How could a Jewish kid become Hitler’s clairvoyant?”

Willi’s cousin yanked off his glasses and began polishing them frantically. “A lot of boys fantasize about it when they’re twelve, but this one really ran off and joined a circus. Passed as a Christian ever since. Used every trick in the book to make himself a famous ‘mystic’: shills, word codes, elaborate hand signals. Confessed it all to me in tears. Years later, a big star already, he was introduced to Hitler’s buddy Hess. Nazis are quite pathological about the occult, you know. Once Hess latched onto him, they all came. Hitler hailed him as a great seer. A German visionary. Can you imagine? And little Gershon was delusional enough to think he could pull it off. Until one day, naturally, this Heydrich fellow shows up from some Nazi investigative unit, SS or something, and says he’s dug up all the dirt. If Gershon doesn’t cooperate . . . that is, if he doesn’t provide a steady flow of beautiful women free of charge, foreign-born only—he’ll be one very sorry Lapinsky.”

Past the towering Haus Vaterland, Jewish-owned, and the gargantuan three-block-long Wertheim’s main department store, Jewish-owned, traffic began to ease a bit.

The Nazis proclaimed these establishments would someday belong to “Germans.”

“If it’s any consolation”—Kurt checked his watch anxiously—“The Great Gustave also foresees a violent end for Hitler. Naturally he never told the man. But he confessed to me that the Führer’s astrological chart showed Jupiter in extreme opposition to Saturn, portending a stunning final defeat.”

Willi looked at him.

Kurt smiled nervously. “Kathe’s going to kill me if I miss this train.”

He didn’t.

Willi got him to the Zoo Station with ten minutes to spare.

They embraced on the sidewalk.

“Thank you for this, Kurt.”

“Please. You can be sure I’m going to publish a dozen papers on it, at least. I’m just sorry you didn’t find Sachsenhausen.”

“Yes. Well, me, too. But . . . maybe I got a sniff.”

“I’ll write. Tell you all about Tel Aviv.” Kurt pulled off his glasses, rubbing his reddening eyes, taking one last look around, a last deep breath of
Berliner Luft
.

“God, I’m going to miss this place.”

“Get a good suntan for me.” Willi’s throat was burning. “And . . . apologize to Kathe.”

“
Ach.
She won’t even remember once we’re out of here.” Kurt rubbed a handkerchief across his face. “Take care of yourself, Cousin. And next year”—he shook a finger as he walked away—“in Jerusalem!”

Willi got back in his BMW. Making a U-turn on Hardenburger Strasse, he felt as empty as Kurt’s apartment. Directly ahead loomed the unwieldy mass of the Kaiser Wilhelm Church,
its multiple dark spires disappearing in the mist. As he waited for the light to change, he saw a red-haired woman staring at herself in a store window. The church was reflected in the window, too, and seemed to have sprouted twice as many spires, everything doubling on itself.

So Gustave was a Jew. And couldn’t face what he’d done. He thought he could get the best of the devil. But the King of Mystics is as much a sleepwalker as the rest of us. . . .

The air seemed to shudder.