Second Violin (3 page)

Not that he knew it but Schuster would almost have his way. It would be Hummel who watched the shop burn.

The following week Schuster wrote, ‘Forget the shop, Joe. Leave Leopoldstadt. Leave Vienna. Leave Austria. How long can it be safe for any Jew?’

The day before the German annexation the local Austrian SA had rampaged carelessly down the street of tailors, smashed Hirschel’s windows and beaten up Beckermann’s grandson, who was
unfortunate enough or stupid enough to be out in the street at the time. Most people had more sense. Had the SA been less than careless they could have taken out every window in the street and
looted what they wished. No one would have stopped them, but the rampage had its own momentum and, once it had gathered speed, roared on from one target to the next, glancing off whatever was in
the way. Hummel and Beckermann’s grandson helped Hirschel board up his window.

‘Is there any point?’ Hirschel had said. ‘They’ll be back.’

But a week had passed, a week in which many Jews had been robbed of all they possessed, some Jews had fled the city and some Jews had taken their own lives, but the mob had not returned.

At first light on the morning of the 19th, a German infantryman banged on the doors all along the street with his rifle butt.

Bemmelmann was first to answer.

‘You want a suit?’ he said blearily.

‘Don’t get comical with me grandad! How many people live here?’

‘Just me and my wife.’

‘Then get a bucket and a scrubbing brush and follow me.’

Then he came up to Hummel, shadowed in the doorway of his shop. Hummel had not been able to sleep and was already dressed in his best black suit.

‘Going somewhere, were we?’

Hummel said, ‘It’s the Sabbath.’

‘No – it’s just another Saturday. Get a bucket, follow me!’

By the time he got back from the scullery every tailor in the street was standing with a bucket of water in his hand. Old men, and most of them were; not-so-young men, and Hummel was most
certainly the youngest at thirty-one; men in their best suits, pressed and pristine; men in their working suits, waistcoats shiny with pinheads, smeared with chalk; men with their trousers hastily
pulled on, and their nightshirts tucked into the waistband.

The German lined them up like soldiers on parade. He strutted up and down in mock-inspection, smirking and grinning and then laughing irrepressibly.

‘What a shower, what a fuckin’ shower. The long and the short and the tall. The fat, the ugly and the kike! Left turn!’

Most of the older men had seen service in one war or another and knew how to drill. Beckermann had even pinned his 1914–18 campaign medals to his coat as though trying to make a point.
Those that knew turned methodically. Those that didn’t bumped into one another, dropped buckets, spilt water and reduced the German to hysterics. Well, Hummel thought, at least he’s
laughing. Not punching, not kicking. Laughing.

He led them to the end of the street, to a five-point crossroads, where the side streets met the main thoroughfare, Wilhelminastrasse. In the middle of the star was a long-parched water
fountain, topped by a statue of a long-forgotten eighteenth-century burgomaster. Someone had painted a toothbrush moustache on the statue – it was unfortunate that the burgomaster had been
represented in the first place with his right arm upraised – and around the base in red paint were the words ‘Hitler has a dinky dick!’

‘Right, you Jew-boys. Start scrubbin’!’

They scrubbed.

When they had finished the message was still more than faintly visible. Gloss paint did not scrub so well. And they’d none of them been able to reach the moustache.

The tailors stood up, their knees wet, their trousers soggy.

‘We can scrub no more off,’ Hummel said as politely as he could.

‘Who said anything about any more scrubbin’?’ said the German.

He took a dozen paces back and raised his rifle. Bemmelmann sagged against Hummel’s chest in a dead faint. Hummel heard the gentle hiss as Beckermann pissed himself. Heard Hirschel
muttering a prayer.

But the rifle carried on upwards, drawing a bead on the statue’s head, then the crack as it fired and chips of stone showered down on Hummel. The second crack and the stone head split open
and two chunks of rock heavy enough to stove in a man’s skull bounced off the cobbles behind him and rolled away.

‘Right,’ said the German. ‘Pick your feet up Jew-boys. And follow me.’

Hummel roused Bemmelmann.

‘Where am I?’ the old man said.

‘In hell,’ Hummel replied.

Hummel had no difficulty seeing himself and his neighbours as Vienna saw them from the early-morning doors and windows, in the eyes of women shaking tablecloths and in the eyes
of unshaven men still munching on their breakfast roll, clutching their first cup of coffee. A raggle-taggle bunch of damp and dusty Jewish tailors led by a bantam-cock of a soldier, strutting
while they straggled – a recognisably barmy army. Every so often the German would try to kick a little higher, but, clearly, the goose step was not as easy as it looked and needed more
practice than the man had given it, and was all but impossible whilst turning around every couple of minutes to urge on his charges. It might have been better to herd them like pigs or cattle, but
Hummel could see the thrill of leadership in the way the man stuck out his chest and kicked out his legs. He’d probably never led anything in his life before. He shouted, they shuffled. Down
to the river, across the Aspern Bridge, along Franz Josef’s Kai and into the ancient heart of Vienna.

The German yelled ‘Halt’.

Hummel was wondering why he could not just yell ‘stop’ – as though there was any particular military relevance to a word like ‘halt’ – when he realised where
they were. Outside the Ruprechtskirche. Probably the oldest church in the city – some said it had stood twelve hundred years already. It was a small church. A simple, almost plain exterior.
Not a touch of grandiosity in its conception or its accretions. What desecration now? Of course, the final desecration would be if this idiot, this tinpot Boney at the front, were to marshal them
inside. Hummel had never been in this or any other Christian church.

A crowd had their backs to them. The German parted a way with his rifle and Hummel found himself on his knees once more, his bucket and brush set down before him, facing a large bright blue
letter ‘H’. Beckermann plumped down next to him, the bucket obscuring the letter. Hummel looked to his left wanting, for reasons that were inaccessible to him, to know what word he was
obliterating now. The man next to him was hunched over, scrubbing vigorously, the letter already half-erased. Hummel knew him. He could not see his face, but he knew him. He looked at the blue
wide-pinstripe of the man’s back, and he knew the suit. He had made it himself not two months ago for a young violinist named Turli Cantor.

Cantor did not turn. Hummel dunked the brush, gazed outward at the mob and bent his head to scrub. They had an audience – a crowd of onlookers who seemed to Hummel to be neither gloating
nor commiserating. He had heard that the mobs could be as vicious as the SA, jeering and kicking as rabbis were dragged from their homes to clean public lavatories. This lot showed no inclination.
They were watching with the casual half-attention of a crowd watching a street entertainer who they found just distracting enough to pause for, but who would be off the minute the hat was passed.
So that was what they were? Street entertainment. The Famous Scrubbing Jews of Vienna. Roll up, roll up and watch the kikes on their knees on the steps of a Christian church. He looked again. They
were blank, expressionless faces. Perhaps they had no more wish to be there than he had himself. The troops standing between the Jews and the mob weren’t ordinary soldiers like the one who
had led him here. They were black-uniformed, jackbooted German SS.

Hummel was making good progress with his ‘H’ when he felt a change in the mood of the mob. He risked an upward glance. The SS were all standing stiffly upright – perhaps this
was what was meant by ‘at attention’? – and the crowd had parted to let through an officer in black and silver.

From his left he heard Cantor whisper, ‘My God. Wolfgang Stahl!’

For the first time his eyes met Cantor’s. ‘I have known Wolf all my life,’ Cantor said, his voice beginning to rise above a whisper, ‘Surely he will save us?’

Cantor stood, clumsily, one foot all but slipping from under him on the wet stone flag and uttered the single syllable, ‘Wolf.’

An SS trooper shot him through the forehead.

The crowd scattered, screaming. This was not what they had paid to see. Hummel rose – afterwards he assigned the word ‘instinctively’ to his action – only to feel the
pressure of a hand on his shoulder, forcing him back down, and the sound of the German soldier’s voice saying, ‘Don’t be a fool. You can’t help him. You can only get
yourself killed. You and all your mates.’

Hummel saw a boot push Cantor’s body over, saw the black hole between Cantor’s eyes, saw the click of the heels as the same boot came together with its mate and saluted the officer.
Then he twisted his head slightly, enough to make the German tighten his grip, and saw the black leather of the officer’s gloves drawn tight across his knuckles. Then one hand rose –
the salute returned. The man turned and all Hummel saw was his retreating back and the movement of SS troopers across the steps, and then a voice was shouting ‘Show’s over’, and
someone he could not see at all was dragging Cantor’s body away.

They scrubbed until the graffiti was washed away. They scrubbed until the blood was washed away.

Slouching home Hummel asked Hirschel what the word had been.

‘Schuschnigg,’ Hirschel replied. ‘And it may be the only memorial our chancellor ever gets.’

Death notwithstanding, it felt a little like a kindergarten outing. The German saw them all the way back to Krugstrasse. It was a curiously paternal attention. He’d even
slowed the pace of the march to the weary shuffle of old tailors wholly unaccustomed to walking four or five miles in the course of a day. When Beckermann had dropped his bucket and declared that
he could not go on – ‘Shoot me now. It would be a blessing’ – the German had picked up the bucket and urged him on with ‘Don’t make me waste my bullets,
Grandad.’ Now, he stood in the alley as Hummel unlatched his door, waiting.

‘Yes,’ said Hummel. ‘There was something else?’

‘Too bleedin’ right there is. I saved your life today. You damn near got yourself shot.’

‘You are surely not standing there waiting for me to say “thank you”?’

‘I ain’t waitin’ for nothin’.’

And he turned and walked off, and Hummel could not help the feeling that the slouch of his shoulders, the bantam-strut of morning long since worn out, was partly of his own making, that his
ingratitude had caused it. But he could not find it in him to feel blame.

The next day Bemmelmann called early to tell him that Hirschel had slit his own throat in the night.

‘Kings and Tyrants come and go, Rothschilds go on forever.’ If that is not the motto of the Rothschild family, it should be. An empty Rothschild palace –
empty of Rothschilds that is, a few dark spaces on the walls where paintings had been removed, but otherwise full of Rothschild furniture, Rothschild crockery, Rothschild opulence – had been
seized by the Germans for the exclusive use of the SS.

By the time Stahl got there, his comrades-in-arms had achieved a remarkable semblance of normality, of continuity. White-jacketed waiters served black-uniformed officers, silver platters and
soft shoes, scarcely raising their voices above a whisper, aiming for that servile pretence of invisibility, while the SS roared and guffawed and preened – plain as jackdaws, vain as
peacocks, all twinkling buttons and buffed leather. But for the unseemly loudness of the members, it struck Stahl as being less the Munich bierkeller that had spawned these vultures than a bad
parody of some London club. The sort of thing he’d read about in the works of P.G. Wodehouse.

‘I’m going back to Berlin in the morning. I have seen enough,’ he told Schellenberg.

‘No matter–we have everything under control. You must try this lemon torte. It’s simply delicious. Matches the Earl Grey like peaches to cream.’

‘Really.’

‘The apricot’s good too. Except, of course, the apricots can hardly be fresh at this time of year. You know, the Viennese make exceedingly good cakes.’

‘Then perhaps it would be a good idea to keep the patissier out of the camps until after the apricots fruit in August?’

Schellenberg paused mid-bite, swallowed with a slow, saurian gulp of the throat and said, ‘Do you really think he might be Jewish?’

‘I was joking, Walter.’

Schellenberg laughed, a soft little schoolboy giggle. Tucked into his tart again.

That was the problem with Nazis, Stahl thought, no sense of humour.

20 March
Hampstead, London

It was going to be a green day. He’d no idea why. It was just the way it felt. The green of leaf unfurling, the green of sap rising. He had a fat, and as it happened
green, anthology of English verse on his desk and was trying to find the line about ‘a green thought in a green shade’ . . . but clearly it was not the first line of anything and he
couldn’t remember the name of the bugger who’d written it or even in what century he had written it. Was it Donne or some bugger like Donne?

Alex caught sight of his younger son passing the door, pulling on his jacket, a slice of toast clenched between his teeth.

‘Frederick?’

Troy took two steps back, took the toast from his mouth and said, ‘I’m due at work, Dad.’

‘Work? I don’t understand. Where is your uniform?’

‘I’m a detective now. Remember? About six weeks ago? I joined CID?’

‘Of course,’ Alex said. ‘CID. Plain clothes. No more boots.’

‘No more boots. Exactly. But I am in a tearing hurry, so if you could just . . .’