Winter, page 30
Now it was two o’clock in the morning and all the guests had departed. Only Pauli and Fritz remained, and they were both very drunk. Fritz reached for a bottle of good apple brandy from the crate that was far from empty. He cracked the wax from the top and used the corkscrew to open it and pour more for both of them.
All the male guests, including Pauli, had managed to find evening dress. Some – such as Peter Winter and Dr Goebbels – even had fine suits, cut to the latest fashion, with padded shoulders and wide trousers. Only Fritz came in a lounge suit, soft shirt, and coloured tie. Was it indifference, or a studied declaration of his egalitarian views? Pauli could not decide. ‘I wouldn’t have Goebbels’s job, not for anything,’ said Fritz Esser. ‘He’s been sent here on a make-or-break assignment.’
‘It looks like that,’ agreed Pauli. He offered a cigarette and Fritz took one.
‘Thanks. Yes, Strasser is getting too big for his boots – all that stuff about government ownership of everything, and alliances with the Russian proletariat – and he’s not doing so well: in Berlin the membership of the party is disappointing. On the other hand, “Dummi-dummi” Daluege is doing well: the SA is growing by leaps and bounds. No one knows the exact figures, but my guess is that the SA outnumber the party memberships. If that can happen in Berlin, it can happen everywhere. If it happens all over Germany, Hitler will be displaced by Röhm, and the brownshirts will take control.’
‘And the tail will wag the dog,’ said Pauli. Fritz had long ago thrown his lot in with Hitler and the party. If Röhm and the brownshirts gained the ascendancy, all Fritz’s calculations would come to nothing. ‘But that won’t happen,’ said Pauli.
‘Why won’t it?’ Fritz wanted to be reassured.
‘The party won’t come to power by means of a putsch. Even Hitler must realize that by now.’
‘So how?’
‘He’ll have to win votes, and that means the party will always keep control. It also means that the party will soon have to move everything to Berlin.’
‘You think so?’
‘Suppose his putsch in Munich had worked. Do you imagine that he would have been allowed to form a Nazi power base in Bavaria by means of an armed overthrow? Of course he wouldn’t – the government here in Berlin would have told the army to move against him, and they would have done so. He wouldn’t have lasted a month.’
Fritz got to his feet unsteadily and turned the gas taps. The mantle glowed greenish white. It was as if he thought the extra light would illuminate his thoughts. ‘But if the Berlin government had done nothing?’
‘The army would have moved against him anyway. And if no one had acted, the French would have used Hitler’s putsch as an excuse to occupy the whole of Bavaria, like they occupied the Rhineland.’
‘You’re probably right,’ said Fritz with a sigh. In some ways he preferred the idea of an armed overthrow. It was simpler and quicker and easier than persuading the voters, and it was much more in line with his own sort of thinking. ‘I suppose he’s sent Goebbels here because Berlin is so important.’
‘What’s he got in store for you, Fritz?’
‘One day I’ll get a top job, Pauli, and you’ll be with me.’
‘You should try to get the party to put you up as a candidate for the Reichstag.’
‘I’d like that. Think what my father would say.’ He thought about it and nodded. ‘The Führer rewards the faithful, and I’ve made myself important to him.’
‘Don’t stay away from Berlin too long, Fritz. Munich will become a backwater.’
‘We’ve known each other a long time. Right?’ His words were slurred but he was sincere enough. ‘You’re my best friend, do you know that?’ He put an arm round Pauli’s shoulder.
‘Sure, sure,’ said Pauli, although the idea was a complete surprise to him. Fritz Esser had so many friends, and the higher he rose in the party organization, the more friends he made.
‘Bastards, most of them,’ said Fritz, as if reading his friend’s mind. ‘You’re the only one who’s never asked me for a favour. Do you know that?’
‘No.’
Fritz looked at him. Pauli never tried to outshine him, never tried to take him over or push him aside. Pauli was the only man he knew who got genuine pleasure from his friends’ advancement. ‘And you need a few friends, you old bastard.’ He clapped Pauli on the back so that he almost choked on his drink. ‘Only the other day I was asked why you had intervened to stop the Guggenheimers paying their money.’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘And the party needs funds. Badly needs funds.’
‘So what did you say?’
A cough and a laugh. ‘What did I say? I said that you were protecting an informant.’
‘“Protecting an informant”. I’m glad you told me what I was doing.’
‘I learned that one from you, you cunning little swine. I learned everything I know from you.’
Pauli smiled. Fritz said, ‘What else do you know that I don’t know?’ He poured more apple brandy.
‘Get close to Captain Göring,’ said Pauli. ‘If Hitler comes to power it will be through Göring’s efforts. Göring is acceptable to the middle class. For all sorts of reasons, Göring will be the centre of power. Hitler needs Göring. All the others will be satellites.’
‘You know who was chasing the Guggenheimer business, don’t you?’
‘No,’ said Pauli, although he had a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach simply because he did guess who it was.
‘Your friend Brand. He’s just become a Sturmbannführer, under Victor Lutze, in Elberfeld. He’s going places, your old comrade Brand.’
‘I heard he was in the Ruhr SA.’
‘And he hates you, Pauli. He really hates you. What did you do to him?’
‘Nothing,’ said Pauli. ‘He’s just overendowed with hatred.’
‘Watch out for him, Pauli. If anything ever happens I’ll do what I can. You know that, don’t you?’
‘Sure, Fritz. Thanks.’
‘He’s out to get you.’ Fritz swigged the last of his apple brandy and then threw the empty glass at the wall. It was a thick, crudely made glass of the sort specially made for the hotel trade, but so violent was Fritz that it smashed into tiny fragments.
When Fritz tried to get up, he staggered and knocked his chair over. Pauli laughed. Fritz was very drunk, or he wouldn’t have been saying these things.
‘You’re not frightened, are you?’ said Fritz in his usual brutally direct way.
‘Frightened of what?’ said Pauli. He helped Fritz keep his balance, although he was equally drunk.
‘That’s right,’ said Fritz. But they both knew that Pauli was frightened. He’d miss having Fritz in the Berlin party office to protect him against the enmities and jealousy, petty spites and chronic vendettas that had become the way the Nazi Party worked. The top leadership believed that the law of the jungle provided the party with natural strength.
How would Pauli survive? Without Fritz he’d have no one to protect his back.
1929
‘There is nothing safer than a zeppelin’
There wasn’t very much upholstery remaining; that’s why the sound of the piano echoed from the dirt-encrusted gilded angels in the domed ceiling, and down through the derelict space at the back of the dress circle where once had stood a beautiful oak counter and an elaborate mirrored bar.
Once it had been a big theatre. Now it wasn’t really a theatre at all in the sense that that word is used in London, Paris, or New York. It had suffered at the hands of rioters and thieves. Back in 1920 a Freikorps had used it as their barracks, and after that the Reichswehr had stored here ammunition that the generals had wanted to hide from the Allied Armistice Commission. One of the most talented and avant-garde of the new producer-directors had leased it for a year and, when the rent was due, ripped out and sold off fixtures, fittings and floor coverings to get out of debt. So now it was a cold, draughty, uncomfortable shell. And it smelled of the cats that ran wild in the cellars. But even now, in the winter of 1929, the coldest winter in memory, people would still pay to come here if the show was good enough.
It was almost midnight; the runthrough and some last-moment auditions had finished. Almost everyone had gone home. The stage and auditorium were totally dark except for one dim electric bulb hanging very low on one side of the stage to illuminate the piano. The theatre was empty but for the piano player and the woman leaning over him to see the scrawled script and manuscript notes from which he was playing.
‘I adore it,’ said Lottie, starting to hum, following the melody her husband was playing on the piano.
‘Yes, it’s a wonderful melody.’ Peter was dressed in a dark grey lounge suit with a bowler hat perched on the back of his head. It was not the way he’d ordinarily have worn his hat, but Peter had seen one of the Americans like that, and he now sometimes imitated it.
‘And there are words, aren’t there?’ She was wearing a gigantic golden-coloured fur coat. It was too cold here to take it off.
‘You know Brecht: the words always come first, then Kurt writes the music.’ Peter sang; his voice was tuneful but soft and unsure: ‘Oh, the shark has lovely teeth, dear, and they cut you like a knife….’
‘Oh, stop. Why does he always write such stupid lyrics?’
‘He’s a poet.’
‘You all kowtow to him too much.’
‘I don’t think so. You should see him directing actors, Lottie. Silly little girls become like stars when he talks to them.’
‘I love to watch you playing piano; you are so happy.’
‘It was your idea, Lottie. I’d given up all ideas of ever playing again. But now I sometimes think I’d like to leave Father and go into show business.’ He inserted silly, skilful cadenzas into the music.
‘I hope you’re not serious, Peter darling. These people are paupers. And you’ve got a wife and daughter to look after.’
‘I know, Lottie. I wasn’t serious. If I worked in the theatre full-time, maybe I wouldn’t find it so interesting and exciting. But it’s a privilege to work with the great names: Piscator, Brecht, Kurt and all the rest of them: Reinhardt, Jannings, Peter Lorre….’He changed to play a few bars from ‘Moon of Alabama’ and made it into something foolishly grand. Then he stopped suddenly. ‘I could never have taken that job in California and left all this behind; you know that, don’t you?’
‘I know it now, but at the time I didn’t know working with Brecht mattered so much to you. You’re getting quite famous.’
‘No, I’m not getting famous, except as the piano player with a half-finger missing.’ He rearranged the pages in front of him, took off his glasses, looked up at her, and smiled. She hadn’t yet got used to seeing him in his horn-rimmed reading glasses. Peter hadn’t got used to them, either, and now he briefly rubbed the little red marks they’d left on each side of his nose. ‘They use me because I’m cheap: in fact, free.’
‘That’s not true, darling. The way you sight-read from all those scribbled notes and make a piano sound like a full band is a miracle.’
‘It’s good enough for auditions and first rehearsals, and that’s the exciting bit. Once the show is put on, I’m less interested in it.’
‘But how do you remain so good-tempered about all this communist propaganda? I remember a time when you would have walked out on songs like the ones in Mahagonny. They’re not only communist but anti-American, too.’
‘Does that annoy you?’ He was genuinely concerned, and she was touched by it.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘sometimes it does. Brecht is a pig, and his ignorance about America is phenomenal. Why does he always write about things he doesn’t know about?’
‘He’s not a politician, darling. He’s a poet. I don’t think much about the content of the songs, and I don’t think the audiences do, either. People come to be entertained. They come to escape the misery for a couple of hours of fantasy. Brecht makes “Amerika” a place for his fantasies.’
‘You’re too nice, Peter.’ She pulled the collar of the fur coat closer about her neck.
‘Being married suits me. This damned piano is already going out of tune again. Look at that….’ He tapped a dead note.
‘I love you.’
He looked up, pursed his lips to show her he loved her, too, and continued playing.
She went to get his coat, gloves and cane from the chair where he’d carefully set them. She knew he’d sit here playing the piano for another hour or so if she didn’t drag him away.
Peter Winter could easily have been playing his own piano in his own comfortable home – Lottie had bought him a fine Bechstein grand for his thirty-third birthday – but he seemed to get some special sort of pleasure from playing this neglected old instrument, just because it was on the stage in this famous old theatre. Peter would have denied it strenuously had she said so, but he was unmistakably ‘stage struck’. She’d seen it happen before. Her stepmother had wasted years dancing, desperate to get into show business. The house in California was still filled with photos of her in her stage costume. Lottie had always suspected that it was her stepmother who’d bullied her father into letting the movie people build hideous studios on their beautiful orange groves.
She put Peter’s hat level on his head and draped his overcoat across his shoulders. ‘Come along, darling, or I’ll start to think you don’t like to be at home.’
He kissed her. ‘It’s a wonderful home, and there is nowhere else I’d rather be than at home with you and little Helena. And soon your parents will be here to see what a wonderful wife and mother you are.’
‘I wish they weren’t coming on that wretched airship. I have nightmares about it.’
‘Don’t be silly, darling. There is nothing safer than a zeppelin. They’ve been flying for twenty-nine years off and on, and not one passenger has ever been hurt. You can’t say that about trains, cars, or ocean liners.’
‘What about all the people killed in the war? What about you and your injured hand?’
He frowned. ‘That was different. They weren’t passengers: they were soldiers and sailors, and there were guns firing at them. No one is going to be firing at the Graf Zeppelin.’
‘Suppose they’re ill? Mother can’t even handle a sea voyage comfortably.’
‘This flight around the world will make the Zeppelin company front-page news everywhere. Already the flight to Palestine was in the English and American newspapers; think what they’ll say about it, going completely round the world, stopping only at Tokyo, Los Angeles and Lakehurst, New Jersey.’
‘They’re not young any more, Peter.’
‘They’ll go from Los Angeles to Friedrichshafen in one week, having had a weekend in New York. It’s a miracle, Lottie. There will only be about twenty passengers; my father had the devil of a job getting two tickets for them. Most of them are reserved for important government officials or journalists.’
‘I don’t want to sound ungrateful, darling. It was a wonderful idea, and Daddy is terribly pleased about it. He says it’s made him the most celebrated man in California.’
‘Invest this five dollars with me’
The Graf Zeppelin gleamed in the sunshine. This astounding flying machine was almost one year old. The airship first took to the air in September 1928, and since then it had attracted the attention of the whole world. But none of its previous flights had been more dramatic than this one. This was the final leg of a journey that had taken the great airship fully round the world. It had sailed almost silently across a thousand miles of Russia’s wastelands, the angry Pacific Ocean, the pale American prairies, and the grey Atlantic waters. In the crowded streets of New York and Tokyo, just as in the quiet tundra and swampland, people had craned their necks and cheered the big silver fish as it floated along at a steady eighty-five miles per hour, awesome and unstoppable. Now, before dark, the airship would be back home again.
The breakfast things had been cleared away, and there was nothing to do but look down at the German countryside and work up an appetite for the lunch. The chef had been chosen from among all the Hamburg-Amerika Line’s cooks, and the wines were suited to the excellent food that came from the small but well-equipped electric kitchen.
The Graf Zeppelin cruised at fifteen hundred feet, its shadow darting across forest and farmland. It was late summer; the sky was blue and the air was clear, so that below them the trees, farm buildings, and animals looked like toys.
‘I just don’t want the flight to end,’ said Mrs Danziger as their airship crossed Germany, heading towards the Bodensee and the Zeppelin company’s base at Friedrichshafen.
Her husband chuckled. ‘Didn’t I tell you so?’ Mr Simon Danziger was a white-haired, rotund, somewhat cherubic little man in a pale-peach-coloured suit that was unmistakably Californian.
‘If anyone had told me it would be so smooth…’ The sentence tailed away, as many of her sentences and ideas did. ‘And the engines, so quiet.’
As the shiny silver airship had neared its destination, she had begun to worry about her hair. Back home she went to the hairdresser three times a week. She hated the idea of greeting her daughter and her son-in-law – and perhaps other members of his family – with her hair not properly permed by someone she could rely on.
She looked round the cabin. This room was no larger than the big reception room at their home – or what they preferred to call ‘the ranch house’ – in Ventura County. But it had accommodated twenty passengers for the whole flight. Here they’d been served their three meals a day, and this had been the only place to sit apart from the very cramped two berth cabins. Of course she’d taken the tour of the airship from stem to stern – all of them had done that, just to vary the monotony of staring down at the green-grey ocean for hour after hour. But one tour of the zeppelin was enough for her. After that she’d spent most of the time sitting here in the large cabin, talking to the other passengers or to the airship’s officers.
It had been a wonderful surprise to find that one of the passengers who joined the airship at Lakehurst, New Jersey, was the son of an old friend as well as being the uncle of Lottie’s husband: Major Glenn Rensselaer. He didn’t normally use the army rank, but it proved useful when pulling strings to get a ticket for this record-breaking flight. As he’d explained modestly, and without describing the dangers and skills of his work with the British fliers, most of his wartime service had been spent as a civilian. But in the final few months of 1918 he’d been officially gazetted to the U.S. Army so that his knowledge of the German aviation industry could be available to the Armistice Commission. Nowadays he remained on the Reserve.
