The Second Sight, page 28
“For the sake of your reputation I’ll let you down here,” he said. “Who would believe in our innocence if you got out of such a long motorcar as this one so early in the morning, right in front of your house? Your husband might be looking down from the windows and then what? What if he became suspicious? I tremble at the thought. After all, the pen is mightier than the sword.”
He got out of the car and stood on the sidewalk with them.
Watery light filtered through a rank of linden trees planted along the street. “What a lovely neighborhood to live in,” Heydrich said. “But now that you’ve seen my house perhaps I can persuade you to come again. I hope so!”
The three black cars sped away.
5
THE APARTMENT WAS QUIET. HUBBARD WAS WRITING; PAUL HAD GONE to the park.
“I think we won’t mention this episode to Hubbard,” Lori said.
“You think it will make him angry?”
“Possibly. But it will certanly make him write about it. I think he’s written enough about Heydrich. The question is, what to do about you?”
“What about me?” Meryem said.
“That lunatic is obsessed by you. I think you should leave Germany.”
“Where would I go?”
“What does it matter? This isn’t the end of Heydrich. It’s only the beginning. You can go to Paris, or to the Id&ren Draren, or even to America.”
“Only if we all go. Sebastian will be in Paris next month.”
Each June Sebastian came to Paris and Meryem went there to join him for a month. Then she returned to the Id&ren Dr&ren for the summer.
“No,” Lori said. “Hubbard can’t be interrupted now.”
“He can write anywhere.”
Lori shook her head. “Not with these creatures in charge of Germany. I really must have a bath. Then we’ll talk again. I think you should go at once. God knows what Heydrich might do the next time. Arrest you, declare you’re a Jew, lock you in a room and keep you as a pet. He’s mad.”
“I know,” Meryem said. “But, Lori, it isn’t me he’s obsessed by. I’m just the pretext. It’s you.”
6
THEREAFTER MERYEM AND LORI WERE ARRESTED ONCE OR TWICE A week by Heydrich’s men. The pattern never varied. They would be seized in the Tiergarten at about seven o’clock in the morning, after their ride through the park. The same two secret policemen, wearing the same black fedoras and the same black leather coats, always made the arrest, showing their credentials and repeating the same words. Then came the ride across Berlin in the Mercedes, coffee and pastries in the hunting lodge with Heydrich, and the return to the city in his staff car.
They did not change their habits because it was obvious that Heydrich had the power to find them wherever they were. He knew all about their activities between arrests. Drinking coffee and munching on little frosted cakes and fruit tarts, he would say, “Did you enjoy your dinner party on Tuesday with the Hornbläser-Lottmanns? She’s quite delightful, but he’s a bit compulsive, don’t you think? All that telephoning!” Or, “It’s such a pity your son has no friends among German boys, Baronesse. They say he’s a philo-Semite, and of course that makes him stand out, especially since he has an American father and the President of the United States is a Jew. Children are so cruel—but so honest and so just!” He always called Lori “baronesse,” as if bestowing reinstated maidenhood upon her; she had given up correcting him.
These encounters took place while Hubbard was writing. Although Lori had never before kept a secret from her husband, he knew nothing about the arrests. While working, as he did every day from six in the morning until noon, Hubbard was oblivious to the world around him. By the time he emerged from his writing room the two women had returned, and the three of them had lunch together. After that Hubbard read aloud from his work in progress, and sometimes they had an outing—a drive through the Grunewald or a visit to an art gallery or a book store. Sometimes they sat in the park and talked.
On the advice of a friend in the American Embassy, the Christophers only discussed the Hitler government and the Nazi Party in the open air. “They’ve planted microphones everywhere, by golly!” their friend said. “I’d bet dollars to doughnuts your walls are full of them, considering who your friends are—or were.”
The Christophers’ noisy Bohemian dinners were a thing of the past; almost nobody came except Otto Rothchild, who still turned up once or twice a month. Most people they knew had left the country, many of them as clandestine passengers on the Mahican on one of its night sails to Denmark.
Most afternoons Hubbard and Paul played catch in the Schlossgarten. One evening they were an hour late coming home. Lori was not alarmed: father and son were not predictable—sometimes they went to the Kurfürstendamm for pastries, sometimes Hubbard took a model of the Mahican with him and he and Paul stopped to sail it in the Schlossgarten’s ornamental lake.
When the doorbell rang at six o’clock she thought it was Hubbard, who often forgot his key. But when she opened the door, Heydrich stood in the corridor holding a silver bucket containing a bottle of champagne. He wore civilian clothes, a dark suit with a silk necktie. Two SS troopers stood behind him, their arms laden with white roses, boxes tied with ribbons, and a tray covered with a linen cloth.
“I thought it would be pleasant to spend the evening together,” Heydrich said. “I’ve seen your picture in all lights, but the models in the flesh only in the morning.”
“Spend the evening together?” Lori said. “That’s completely impossible.”
“Nothing is impossible when the will is strong enough,” Heydrich replied. “We won’t be interrupted until I give the word. Have no fear. Your husband and son were arrested in the Schlossgarten about an hour ago.”
“Arrested?”
Heydrich waved a finger. He was wearing dove-gray gloves. “Their behavior was quite suspicious,” he said. “They were sailing a model boat in the lake. For all I know there were toy Jews hidden in the hold. I have just assigned a new man to the island of Rügen, where you keep your wonderful sailboat, and he is anxious to talk to someone who knows about sailing small boats on the Baltic. So am I. Can you guess why?”
“No.”
“Because I, too, have bought a house on an island in the Baltic. I’m an enthusiastic sailor, just like you. Who knows? Perhaps we’ll meet on the water. Possibly we could have a picnic, all together.”
Heydrich set the wine bucket down. His men arranged the flowers in a vase and laid out the things they had carried upstairs on trays.
“Nothing but the best,” Heydrich said. “The SS has an excellent courier service: roses from Italy, Russian caviar from the Black Sea, goose liver from Strasbourg, and the champagne is Krug ‘09. And two beautiful hats from Paris. Please try them on, ladies. I can’t wait to see you in them.”
Lori and Meryem did so. Heydrich leaned back in his Savile Row suit and admired them. “How I would like to have a picture of that!” he said. “Alas, there is no camera.” His servants passed a tray of champagne glasses and another of food.
“Go now,” Heydrich told them. “Watch the door.” He smiled at Lori. “I’m posting guards in case your husband escapes. But I don’t think he will. I think you know the new man in Rügen—Franz Stutzer. He’s very competent, one of my favorites. He came here to dinner as a boy with your husband’s pushy Russian friend, the one who calls himself Rothchild. Do you remember Franz?”
“Yes.”
“He’ll be very pleased. He was absolutely dazzled by you.”
Heydrich asked Lori to play the piano. “Sit beside her on the bench, please, Fraulein Meryem,” he said.
Meryem said, “But I don’t play.”
“I know. It’s the picture I want to see, the two of you side by side.”
“What would you like to hear?” Lori asked.
“My tastes, as you know, are simple. I prefer Strauss. Perhaps ‘The Merry Widow Waltz.’ Do you know that one, Baronesse?”
“That’s by Franz Lehár.”
“Is it really? What a lot you know about everything! And I hope you’ll teach me every bit of it.”
After listening to the piano for an hour, sometimes beating time with his champagne glass, Heydrich turned to Meryem.
“Strange as it seems, Fräulein, we have never discussed the most famous thing about you.”
“And what is that?”
“Your second sight. Such tales have we heard about your predictions! I don’t think you realize how famous you are. Everybody in Berlin thinks you’re infallible. Even the Führer has heard about you. He is, in a manner of speaking, a clairvoyant himself—albeit on a very, very high plane. Do you read palms?”
“No,” Meryem said.
“Too bad. I’ve always wanted to have my palm read, but each time I try the fortune-teller looks at it for a moment, then refuses to go on. Absolutely refuses! I can’t tell you how often this has happened. If not palms, then what is your method?”
“Cards.”
“Then we must have cards.” Smiling again, he reached into his pocket and brought out a new deck, still in cellophane. “Let’s begin at once. Is there a table?”
Meryem asked him to shuffle and cut. Heydrich divided the cards into four piles as instructed, holding a Havana cigar between the fingers of the hand that handled the cards.
“Do I ask questions?” he said.
Meryem had not yet picked up the cards. “What questions do you want to ask?”
“None. Whatever you tell me about the future I will believe absolutely.”
Meryem picked up the cards and looked at them. She was very still. “There’s nothing I can tell you,” she said.
Heydrich banged his fist on the table in mock anger. “Again! But this time I’m in a position to insist. Tell me what you see.”
“It’s not clear,” Meryem said. “Cut the cards again.”
Heydrich did so. “If you see love, tell me at once,” he said.
“I saw that before, but in the past,” Meryem said. “You once loved a person with a birthmark.”
Heydrich was staggered. “Dear God, yes!” he said. “What shape was the birthmark?”
“Like a petal.”
“Like a tear—like your tattoo! Nobody knew about that. This is positively amazing. What do you see now?”
Meryem looked at the cards spread out on the table before her. She seemed reluctant to touch them.
“You will have a kingdom of your own and rule over it,” she said.
“A kingdom! What kingdom? Where?”
“In the east,” Meryem said.
“When?”
“Soon.”
“What else?”
“That’s all I can tell you now.”
Heydrich was beaming. “No wonder the other fortune tellers wouldn’t tell me the truth,” he said. “A kingdom! Who would have believed such a thing?” He swept the cards into a pile. “I’m going to keep these,” he said, putting them back into his pocket. “No one else must use these cards.”
The two SS men came upstairs at eleven o’clock and cleared away the bottle and glasses and the other things Heydrich had brought, even the hats and the roses. “You can keep these chez moi,” he said. “We must be discreet. Next time you come to me you can put on the hats and my photographer will make pictures.”
At the door he kissed their hands one after the other. “I must say goodnight,” he said. “Duty calls. We’ll meet again quite soon— and, remember, I hope you will both come to see me in my kingdom in the east.”
Suddenly he saw something over Lori’s shoulder. A lamp was burning in Hubbard’s study and something inside caught his eye. He strode down the hallway and entered the room. Zaentz’s nude study of Lori hung over the desk. He gasped as he looked at it.
“Wunderschön!” he cried.
After he was gone, Lori went into the bathroom and vomited. When she came back to the sitting room, pale and haggard, she found Meryem sitting on the sofa with her legs drawn up beneath her. Lori opened all the windows and stood in front of one for several moments, breathing deeply. Then she sat down beside Meryem.
“What did you really see in the cards?” she asked.
“What I said—Heydrich ruling over a kingdom.”
“God knows anything is possible. But you didn’t tell him everything. I saw it in your face. What else did you see?”
“Death.”
“A war?”
“Worse than war. I don’t know what it was.”
“What else?”
“Heydrich, dying. He dies first, before the others.”
“Not soon enough.”
“No,” Meryem said. “Not soon enough. Lori, get Paul away from him.”
Lori rose to her feet and went to the open window. In the street below, Hubbard and Paul were alighting from a large black automobile.
“I wonder what he’ll want in return?” she said. “You know, Meryem, it’s very odd, but even before he was born I thought Paul was in danger. I’ve known this day would come. But how? I’m not you. How could I possibly have known?”
Hubbard’s key turned in the lock and he and Paul came into the room.
“Well, you two,” Lori said, smiling brightly. “It’s about time.”
7
AFTER PAUL WENT TO BED, HUBBARD RECOUNTED THE DETAILS OF their encounter with the secret police. “There wasn’t much to it, he said. “We were arrested by two men in leather coats in the Schlossgarten and taken to Gestapo headquarters. There the Dandy awaited us.”
The Christophers called Heydrich’s man Franz Stutzer “the Dandy” because that was what his surname meant in English and because he was always dressed entirely in black, like an actor playing Death in an arty movie—black Gestapo leather coat, black fedora, black kid gloves, black jacket, black breeches, black riding boots, black tie.
“What did he want?” Lori asked.
“It was very odd,” Hubbard replied. “I expected a lot of questions about night sails to Denmark with forbidden cargo. But all he wanted to talk about was Paul’s passport.”
“What about it?”
“He said that Paul’s American passport had no validity under German law. He kept repeating the same phrase over and over: ‘This child was born in Germany of a German mother, therefore he is a German citizen who must have German papers.’ “
“And what did you say in reply?”
“I asked him how anybody who was half American could be a German under the racial laws.”
“Oh? And what did he say to that?”
“He said that was a dangerous question because the racial laws applied to Jews. It made him wonder if there was Jewish blood on the American side.-‘That would explain a great deal,’ he said. Really, it was a comedy—the windowless room, the bright light on the desk shining in our eyes, Stutzer lurking in the shadows, the guard outside the door, the pointless questions. He kept saying the same things over and over again, as if he was killing time.”
“Maybe he was. What else did he say about Paul?”
“I told you. He only had one thing to say: His American passport is not valid in the eyes of the government of the Reich.”
Lori went to the open window and looked down into the street. Because it was very late, there was no noise at all, nothing for the ear to apprehend. Lamplight glowed through the linden trees, casting dappled shadows that created the illusion that they were living in an underwater city. Goethestrasse seemed to be empty. But was it? It was impossible to be sure.
“I think we should go out to dinner tomorrow night,” Lori said.
Because hardly anyone went there at night, they dined at the Swedischer Pavilion, in the Grunewald, with Paul and Hubbard’s friend from the American Embassy. He was another classmate of Hubbard’s—they seemed to be everywhere—and he knew Lori well. Though he was no relation, Paul called him “Uncle.” This had been the man’s idea. “Uncle What?” Paul had asked. “Just ‘Uncle,’ “ the older man said, “I’m the only one you’ve got, so there’s no need for formality.”
Hubbard repeated the story of his arrest.
“Have you done something to annoy this man Stutzer?” the American asked.
“Lori smacked him in the face a while ago in front of fifty people,” Hubbard said. “That may have upset him.”
“Did she, by George? Draw any blood?”
“A little, from the nose,” Hubbard said. He told the story—how the old drunk, a shell-shocked veteran everyone knew and tolerated, drank cream from the little pitcher that came with Stutzer’s coffee at the outdoor table, how Stutzer had swung his boot, how Lori slapped him so hard that his black hat flew off, how they had taken the victim to the hospital.
“That would be enough,” the American said. “In the eyes of American law, this man is wrong about Paul’s citizenship. The fact that he was born abroad to a foreign mother means nothing. He’s a full-fledged American citizen. If the Germans claim him too, he could be subject to German military service. And obviously there could be other inconveniences.”
Lori said, “You’re saying you couldn’t protect him?”
“It could be difficult. Even if his citizenship was undisputed, he’s subject to German law like anyone else as long as he lives in Germany no matter what his parentage may be.”
“German law?” Lori said. “What’s that? These people do whatever they like.”
“True,” the American said. “This is no country to live in if you want to go around slapping the Gestapo in the face.”
“What’s done is done,” Lori said.
“True again.” The American patted her hand. “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “I’m sailing to New York next Monday. I’d be glad to have Paul’s company.”
“I’ll cable Elliott,” Hubbard said.
The American smiled his casual smile. “Why don’t you let me do that from the Embassy?” he said. “Nosey Parker is the postmaster here. I’ll book Paul’s passage, too.”
Paul was sitting on his mother’s right. He took her hand under the table. It was almost identical to his own, with long tapered fingers and limber bones. Because Lori had been playing the piano every day since childhood, her hands were very strong. She laced her fingers into his and wove their two hands into a single fist. Her eyes smiled when she looked at him. Squeezing Paul’s hand until the skin turned white, she drew in a long shuddering breath and shook her head, as if to rid herself of a bad memory. Aboard ship, and for years afterward, Paul wondered what the memory might have been, if memory it was.
