The Traitor's Emblem Read online

  Paul was one of those who changed.

  After Herr Graf dismissed him, Paul had a terrible month. He barely had time to overcome his anger at Jürgen’s attack and the revelation of Alys’s fate, or to devote more than a fleeting thought to the mystery of his father’s death. Yet again, the need for survival was so acute that he had to suppress his own emotions. But the burning pain often flared at night, populating his dreams with ghosts. He often could not sleep, and on many mornings, as he tramped through the Munich streets in shabby, snow-filled shoes, he thought about dying.

  Sometimes, when he returned to the boardinghouse with no job, he’d catch himself looking at the Isar from Ludwigsbrücke, his eyes empty. He wanted to throw himself into the icy waters, to allow the current to drag his body down to the Danube, and from there to the sea. That fantastical expanse of water, which he’d never seen, but where he’d always thought his father had met his end.

  On these occasions he had to find a reason not to climb up on the wall and jump. The image of his mother, waiting for him every night at the boardinghouse, and the certainty that she wouldn’t survive without him prevented him from extinguishing the fire in his belly once and for all. At other times it was the fire itself, and the reasons for it, that held him back.

  Until at last there was a glimmer of hope. Although it resulted through death.

  One morning a deliveryman collapsed at Paul’s feet in the middle of the road. The empty wheelbarrow he’d been pushing tipped over onto its side. The wheels were still spinning as Paul crouched down and tried to help the man up, but he couldn’t move. He gasped desperately for air, and his eyes were glassy. Another passerby approached. He was wearing dark clothes and carried a leather case.

  “Make way! I’m a doctor!”

  For a while the doctor tried to revive the fallen man, but with no success. Finally he stood up, shaking his head.

  “A heart attack or an embolism. Hard to believe, in someone so young.”

  Paul was looking at the dead man’s face. He must have been only nineteen years old, maybe less.

  Like me, thought Paul.

  “Doctor, will you take care of the body?”

  “I can’t, we have to wait for the police.”

  When the officers arrived, Paul patiently described what had happened. The doctor corroborated his report.

  “Would you mind if I took the wheelbarrow back to its owner?”

  The officer glanced at the empty wheelbarrow, then looked at Paul long and hard. He didn’t like the idea of dragging the cart back to the police station.

  “What’s your name, pal?”

  “Paul Reiner.”

  “And why should I trust you, Paul Reiner?”

  “Because I’ve got more to gain by taking this to the owner of the shop than if I try to sell these bits of badly nailed wood on the black market,” said Paul with absolute honesty.

  “Very well. Tell him to get in touch with the police station. We’ll need to know the next of kin. If he hasn’t called on us in three hours, you’ll answer to me.”

  The officer gave him a bill they’d found, the neat handwriting indicating the address of the grocer’s—on a street near the Isartor—with a list of the last things the dead boy had transported:

  ½ kilo of coffee

  3 kilos of potatoes

  1 bag of lemons

  1 can of Kruntz soup

  ¼ kilo of salt

  2 bottles of corn spirit

  When Paul arrived at the shop with the wheelbarrow and asked for the dead boy’s job, Herr Ziegler flashed him a distrustful look not unlike the one he gave Paul six months later when the young man explained his plan to save them from ruin.

  “We should transform the shop into a bank.”

  The shopkeeper dropped the jam jar he was cleaning, and it would have shattered on the floor if Paul hadn’t managed to catch it midflight.

  “What are you talking about? Have you been drinking?” he said, staring at the huge circles under the boy’s eyes.

  “No, sir,” said Paul, who had been up all night turning the plan around and around in his mind. He’d left his room at dawn and taken up position at the door of the town hall half an hour before it opened. Then he’d run from window to window collecting information about permits, taxes, and conditions. He had returned with a thick cardboard file. “I know it might seem mad, but it’s not. Right now, money has no value. Wages go up daily and we have to calculate our prices every morning.”

  “Yes, and that reminds me: this morning I had to do it all on my own,” said the shopkeeper, annoyed. “You can’t imagine how hard it was. And on a Friday! Two hours from now, the shop’s going to be heaving.”

  “I know, sir. And we have to do everything we can to get rid of all the stock today. This afternoon I’m going to talk to several of our customers, offering them merchandise in exchange for work, because the work has to be done on Monday. On Tuesday morning we’ll go through a municipal inspection, and on Wednesday we open.”

  Ziegler looked as though Paul had asked him to smear his body with jam and walk naked across Marienplatz.

  “Absolutely not. This shop has been here for seventy-three years. My great-grandfather started it, and then passed it on to my grandfather, who passed it on to my father, who eventually gave it to me.”

  Paul saw the alarm in the shopkeeper’s eyes. He knew he was one step away from being fired for insubordination and insanity. So he decided to go all in.

  “That’s a lovely story, sir. But regrettably, in a fortnight, when someone whose surname isn’t Ziegler gets hold of the shop at a creditors’ meeting, all that tradition will count for shit.”

  The shopkeeper raised an accusing finger, ready to scold Paul for his language, but then remembered the situation he was in and collapsed into a chair. His debts had been accumulating since the beginning of the crisis—debts that, unlike so many others, hadn’t simply vanished in a puff of smoke. The positive side of all the madness—for some people—was that those with mortgages with interest rates that were calculated annually had been able to settle them quickly, given the wild fluctuation of the mark. Unfortunately, those like Ziegler who had committed a share of their income, not a fixed amount in cash, could only end up losing.

  “I don’t understand, Paul. How is this going to save my business?”

  The young man brought him a glass of water, then showed him an article he had torn from the previous day’s newspaper. Paul had read it so many times that the ink had become smudged in places. “It’s an article by a university professor. He says that at a time like this, when people can’t rely on money, we have to look to the past. To the time before money. To bartering.”

  “But . . .”

  “Please, sir, give me a moment. Unfortunately no one can go around trading a bedside table or three bottles of spirits for other things, and the pawnshops are overflowing. So we have to take refuge in promises. In dividends.”

  “I don’t understand,” said the shopkeeper, who was beginning to feel dizzy.

  “Stocks, Herr Ziegler. The stock exchange will rise out of this. Stocks will replace money. And we’ll be selling them.”

  Ziegler gave in.

  Paul barely slept for the next five nights. Convincing tradesmen—carpenters, plasterers, cabinetmakers—to take products away for free this Friday in exchange for working over the weekend wasn’t difficult in the least. In fact, some were so grateful that Paul had to offer his handkerchief more than once.

  We must be in a real mess when a sturdy plumber bursts out crying when you offer him a sausage in exchange for an hour’s work, he thought. The main difficulty was the bureaucracy, but even in this respect Paul was lucky. He’d studied the guidelines and regulations the civil servants had brought to his attention until he had clauses coming out of his ears. His biggest fear was that he would come across some phrase that would dash all his hopes to the ground. After scribbling down pages and pages of notes in a little book in which he puzzle
d out the steps that needed to be taken, the requirements for the creation of Ziegler Bank had come down to two:

  1) The director had to be a German citizen aged over twenty-one.

  2) A guarantee of half a million German marks had to be deposited at the offices of the town hall.

  The first was simple: Herr Ziegler would be the director, although it was already quite clear to Paul that he should remain closed away in the office as much as possible. As for the second . . . a year earlier, half a million marks would have been an astronomical sum, a way of ensuring that only people who were solvent could start a business that relied on trust. Today, half a million marks was a joke.

  “Nobody has updated the figure!” cried Paul, leaping around the shop, startling the carpenters, who had already begun to tear the shelves off the walls.

  I wonder whether the civil servants wouldn’t prefer a couple of hams, thought Paul, amused. At least they could put them to some use.

  23

  The truck was open, and the men traveling in the back had no protection from the night air.

  Almost all of them were silent, focusing on what was about to happen. Their brown shirts barely kept out the cold, but that didn’t matter, as they would soon be on the move.

  Jürgen crouched down and started beating the metal floor of the truck with his cudgel. He’d acquired this habit on his first outing, when his comrades still regarded him with some skepticism. The Sturmabteilung, or SA—the Nazi party’s “storm troopers”—was composed of hardened ex-soldiers, people from the lowest classes who could barely read a paragraph aloud without stammering. Their first response to the appearance of this elegant young man—the son of a baron, no less!—was rejection. And when Jürgen had first used the floor of the truck as a drum, one of his companions had given him the finger.

  “Sending a telegram to the baroness, eh, boy?”

  The rest had laughed nastily.

  That night he’d felt ashamed. Tonight, however, as he began to strike the floor, all the others were quick to follow him. The rhythm was slow at first, measured, distinct, the blows perfectly synchronized. But as the truck approached its target, an inn close to the central train station, the pounding grew until it was deafening, a roar of noise that filled them all with adrenaline.

  Jürgen smiled. It hadn’t been easy to win their trust, but now he felt he had them all in the palm of his hand. When almost a year earlier he had first heard Adolf Hitler speak and insisted on a party secretary filling in his membership to the Nationalist Socialist German Workers’ Party then and there, Krohn had been delighted. But when, a few days later, Jürgen had applied to join the SA, that delight had turned to disappointment.

  “What the hell do you have in common with those brown gorillas? You’re intelligent; you could have a career in politics. And that patch on your eye . . . If you start the appropriate rumors, you could make that your calling card. We can say you lost your eye defending the Ruhr.”

  The baron’s son paid him no attention. He had joined the SA on impulse, but there was a certain subconscious logic to what he had done. He was attracted to the brutality inherent in the Nazis’ paramilitary wing, their pride as a group and the impunity for violence that this offered him. A group into which he hadn’t fitted to begin with, and where he had been the target of insults and jibes such as “Baron Cyclops” and “One-Eyed Pansy.”

  Intimidated, Jürgen had put aside the thuggish attitude he’d assumed with his school friends. These were real tough guys, and they’d have closed ranks immediately if he’d tried to gain anything by force. Instead he had won their respect bit by bit, demonstrating his lack of scruples each time they, or their enemy, had a meeting.

  A squeal of brakes drowned out the violent sound of the cudgels. The truck stopped abruptly.

  “Get out! Get out!”

  The storm troopers crowded together at the back of the truck. Then twenty pairs of black boots tramped over the wet paving stones. One of the storm troopers slipped into a puddle of dirty water, and Jürgen hastened to offer him an arm to help him up. He’d learned that gestures like this would win him points.

  The building that stood opposite them had no name, only the word TAVERN painted over the door, with a red Bavarian hat drawn alongside. It was often used as a meeting place by a division of the Communist Party, and at that very moment one such meeting was coming to an end. More than thirty people were inside, listening to a speech. On hearing the squeal of the truck’s brakes, a number of them raised their heads, but it was too late. The tavern had no back door.

  The storm troopers entered in ordered ranks, making as much noise as possible. A waiter hid behind the bar, terrified, while the first ones in seized beer glasses and plates from the tables and hurled them at the counter, the mirror above it, and the shelves of bottles.

  “What are you doing?” asked a short man, presumably the tavern’s owner.

  “We’ve come to break up an illegal meeting,” said the head of the SA platoon, stepping forward with an incongruous smile.

  “You have no authority!”

  The head of the platoon raised his cudgel and hit the man in the stomach. He fell to the ground with a groan. The leader gave him a couple more kicks before turning to his men.

  “Fall together!”

  Jürgen immediately moved to the front. He always did this, only to take a discreet step back to let someone else lead the charge—or take a bullet or blade. Firearms were now forbidden in Germany—this Germany that had had its teeth removed by the Allies—but many war veterans still had their regulation pistols or weapons they had taken from the enemy.

  Standing shoulder to shoulder in formation, the storm troopers advanced toward the back of the tavern. The Communists, scared out of their wits, began to throw anything they could get their hands on at their enemy. The man marching next to Jürgen was struck full in the face by a glass jug. He staggered, but those marching behind caught him, and another came forward to take his place in the front rank.

  “Sons of bitches! Go suck your Führer’s cock!” shouted a young man in a leather cap, picking up a bench.

  The storm troopers were less than three meters away, within easy reach of any furniture thrown at them, so Jürgen chose this moment to fake a stumble. A man came forward and joined the front.

  Just in time. Benches flew across the room, there was a groan, and the man who’d just taken Jürgen’s place slumped forward, his head split open.

  “Ready?” cried the head of the platoon. “For Hitler and Germany!”

  “Hitler and Germany!” the others cried in chorus.

  The two groups charged at each other like children playing some kind of game. Jürgen dodged a giant in mechanic’s overalls who was heading toward him, striking his knees as he passed. The mechanic tumbled, and those behind Jürgen began to beat him mercilessly.

  Jürgen continued his advance. He jumped over an upturned chair and kicked a table, which smashed against the hip of an old man wearing glasses. He fell to the floor, dragging the table with him. There were still some scribbled bits of paper in his hand, so the baron’s son deduced that this must be the speaker they had come to interrupt. He didn’t care. He didn’t even know the old man’s name.

  Jürgen went straight over to him, taking care to tread on him with both feet as he made his way toward his real target.

  The young man in the leather cap was fending off two storm troopers using one of the benches. The first of the men tried to outflank him, but the young man tipped the bench toward him and managed to get him in the neck, knocking him down. The other man lashed out with his cudgel, trying to catch the man unawares, but the young Communist ducked and managed to bury his elbow in the storm trooper’s kidney. As he doubled over, contorted with pain, the man broke the bench over his back.

  So this one knows how to fight, thought the baron’s son.

  Normally he would have left the toughest opponents for someone else to deal with, but something about this skinny yo
ung man with sunken eyes offended Jürgen.

  He looked at Jürgen defiantly.

  “Come on, then, you Nazi whore. Afraid you’ll break a nail?”

  Jürgen sucked in his breath, but he was too cunning to allow himself to be affected by the insult. He counterattacked.

  “I’m not surprised you’re so keen on the Reds, you scrawny little shit. That Karl Marx beard looks just like your mother’s backside.”

  The young man’s face lit up with rage and, hoisting up the remains of the bench, he charged at Jürgen.

  Jürgen had planted himself broadside to his attacker and he waited for the attack. As the man lunged at him, Jürgen moved aside and the Communist fell to the floor, losing his cap. Jürgen hit him in the back with his cudgel three times in quick succession—not very hard, but enough to take his breath away while still allowing him to get to his knees. The young man tried to crawl away, which was exactly what Jürgen wanted. He drew back his right leg and kicked hard. The toe-capped boot struck the man’s stomach, lifting him more than half a meter off the ground. He fell back, struggling to breathe.

  With a smile, Jürgen laid into the Communist viciously. His ribs crunched under the blows, and when Jürgen stood on his arm, it snapped like a dry branch.

  Grabbing the young man by the hair, Jürgen forced him to rise.

  “Try saying what you said about the Führer now, Communist scum!”

  “Go to hell!” the boy babbled.

  “You still want to say stupid things like that?” shouted Jürgen, incredulous.

  Grabbing the boy even more tightly by the hair, he raised his cudgel and aimed it at his victim’s mouth.

  Once.

  Twice.

  Three times.

  The boy’s teeth were nothing but a handful of bloody remains on the tavern’s wooden floor, and his face was swollen. In an instant the aggression that had fed Jürgen’s muscles ceased to flow. Finally he understood why he had chosen that particular man.