The Hour of the Cat (11 page)

The lighter glistened in the light, until the curtain fluttered back in place. The room was dark again. In the quiet after their very first lovemaking, Erika whispered, “Will, we are each other's destiny. It's written in the stars.” He refrained from saying what he thought.
The stars have no power over us. Distant suns, useful for navigation. That's all. The rest is romantic claptrap. Superstition.
The curtains parted once again and a beam struck the lighter as before, making it shine. Like a star. The previous March, on the day of the national celebration of the annexation of Austria, at the reception in the Chancellery, the room exploded in cheers when the Führer entered. He surveyed the crowd coldly and moved deliberately toward the corner where Canaris stood. He extended his hand. “Admiral,” he said, “I have learned the greatest truth the gods can teach. My destiny is out of human hands. It is written in the stars!”

How dim and distant that constellation had once appeared, and how suddenly it flared across the heavens. Several months before Hindenburg, war hero turned dottering octogenarian, made Hitler chancellor, the commander in chief of the navy gathered his aides and reported on the meeting that the leadership of the armed forces had with President Hindenburg. “The President assured us that he would never make that rabble-rousing outlander a cabinet minister, never mind chancellor,” the commander said. “And let me tell you, gentlemen, the thudding of hands on that conference table left no doubt of where the military stands.”

On January 30, 1933, the morning of the day Hindenburg did what he said he would never do and asked Hitler to form a coalition government, Canaris surreptitiously disembarked from his post aboard the battleship
Schlesien
, which was carrying out gunnery exercises in Kiel Bay, and traveled in mufti to rendezvous at the Hotel Adlon, in Berlin, with a friend in the naval ministry who was highly sympathetic to Hitler's ambitions. “The oldtimers are hopeless,” the friend scoffed when Canaris repeated what the commander said. “They're still waiting for the Kaiser to return. The rest of us are more than willing to give Hitler a chance. God knows, he can't be worse than what we've had.” He took a cube of sugar and placed it in the middle of the table. He banged it with his spoon. “Hitler is the anvil on which the Reds will be pounded into powder.” He scooped up the pieces with the spoon and dropped them in his coffee. “And as long as he respects and serves the wishes of the armed forces, we should have no problems.” He stirred his coffee and sipped. “Just right,” he said.

In the flyleaf of the Bible his parents had given him the morning he left for the naval academy, Canaris had scribbled a note to himself.
What men wish to believe, no matter how absurd, they will allow nothing to stand in the way of their belief.
It was a student's declaration of independence, made in the heat of having read
Zarathustra,
a sneer at absurdities enshrined at the heart of all formal religions. Over time, he'd lost his taste for Nietzsche and come to value the worth of Christianity as a bulwark against anarchy and communism. Erika was a sincere believer. After their marriage, he occasionally accompanied her to church. She sang the hymns with great skill and feeling. Once at the Easter service that took place after Erika's first miscarriage, during the choral celebration, her belief in the myth of a crucified and resurrected god carried her away. Her beaming, raptured face was streaked with tears. “Heal me, My Savior,” she whispered, “heal me.”

Erika never shared his growing faith that the National Socialists represented the best hope for restoring Germany's military strength and national greatness. She had a special disdain for the rowdy street fighting spearheaded by the SA and the loose talk among the radicals about forcing a “showdown” with the Christian churches. But that night, five years before, when Hitler was sworn in as chancellor, as they stood together in the Pariser Platz and watched the immense parade of torch-bearing Brown Shirts on their way to hail Germany's new leader, her face had the same look as in church, an overpowering joy and hopefulness. For the first time, he too knew how it was possible to be so elated, so filled with hope, tears became unstoppable.

For weeks following, magazines and rotogravures were filled with photographs of the procession. Göbbels, the new Reich Minister of Propaganda, even restaged the event so it could be properly lit for filming. But neither photographs nor newsreels nor reenactments could touch the emotions in those streets, the spontaneous singing, a three-dimensional formation of light flowing like an incandescent river, the decade-and-a-half nightmare of humiliation being washed away, shock of defeat, harsh peace, reparations, coups and uprisings, devastating inflation, the decadent republic, a rage for novelties and self-indulgence followed by the cold bath of the Depression, idle men and hollow-eyed children lined up for soup, paralyzed, ineffectual politicians mouthing endless platitudes, arrogant seditious Reds promising revolution, blood running in the streets—over, at last!
Heal us, our Savior, heal us.

On a wet, late-February afternoon, his car stopped by a large crowd, Canaris watched through his windshield as throngs of wind-whipped Social Democrats left an anti-Hitler rally in the Lustgarten. A solitary policeman halted them to let the traffic pass. Canaris glimpsed them in his rear-view mirror as he pulled away. Sodden and dispirited, beaten by more than weather, beaten by history, they slouched into the winter dusk. Good riddance, he thought, to the mob that had deserted Germany and its Kaiser in their hour of greatest need, to the rabble that made a mockery of military discipline and overthrew centuries of tradition, to the democratic dreamers who cooked up the Weimar Republic and tried to win the respect of the Great Powers by playing the role of model pupil, thus ensuring their contempt.

Erika came home one afternoon shaken and pale. She and a friend had been lunching at a restaurant in the Alexanderplatz when the Brown Shirts had pulled a workingman off a tram, handcuffed him, and kicked him to death in full view of everyone. “We watched through the window. I pleaded with the maître'd to call the police. ‘Madame,' he said, ‘the Brown Shirts
are
the police.'” The incident in the Alexanderplatz was no aberration. The Brown Shirts broke into homes, flats, cafés, pulled people out of schools, theaters, factories, pushed, punched, whipped them, dragged them off to impromptu detention centers throughout the city. At the Naval Club, Canaris joined several other officers for a drink. Among them was a rigid, old Prussian who complained about the public disorder and the flouting of legal regulations by the supporters of the new government. “Well, I suppose you can't clean out a sewer without causing a stink,” Canaris said. The table of officers laughed and even the Prussian nodded in agreement.

Canaris accepted an invitation from his friend in the naval ministry to accompany him to the ceremony scheduled for the Garrison Church in Potsdam the next day. Among the last to squeeze their way in, they stood in the back, by the door that led to the choir loft. President Hindenburg and Chancellor Hitler entered together. Bedecked in full military regalia, the old Field Marshal walked with the stiff, jerky gait of a marionette. Hitler seemed visibly uncomfortable in striped pants and formal coat. They processed up the aisle, beneath the battle flags dating back to Frederick the Great's Silesian campaign, the groom of the old Germany and the bride of the new. They bowed before the altarpiece, with its martial and triumphant Christ. The audience rose in unison, unprompted, to sing the national anthem. Hitler spoke of national unity. There were no gutter theatrics. When the ceremony was almost over, the commandant left to join the naval guard of honor outside the Church. He winked at Canaris and banged his right fist into his left palm, like a hammer on an anvil. “Mark my words,” he mouthed.

In the days that followed, the commandant's prediction was not only fulfilled but exceeded. The National Socialists became both hammer and anvil. A spontaneous adventure in rampant revenge and score-settling was quickly transformed into an efficient apparatus of state power. The burning of the Reichstag, an alleged act of Communist arson, resulted in the passage of the Enabling Act. The Chancellor was granted extra-legal powers. Two days after the ceremony in the Garrison Church, the members of the Reichstag convened in the Kroll Opera House, the wet, charred odor of their former home hanging in the air, and in effect voted themselves out of existence. On Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, not far from the Reichschancellery, Hermann Göring took over the premises of the School of Applied Arts and installed the offices of the Secret State Police, the Gestapo. In Bavaria, Heinrich Himmler was made police chief. An unused munitions factory at Dachau, on the outskirts of Munich, opened as a temporary detention center and then became a permanent concentration camp under the supervision of Himmler's SS, a prototype for the other camps that were being opened. No sooner had the Reds been squelched than Hitler turned on the SA, his own Brown Shirts, cracking down on the wild men who threatened to take over the army, attack the church, and pillage the wealthy. Pretending to have only recently been made aware of SA leader Ernst Röhm's flagrant homosexuality, Hitler used it as a pretext to have Röhm summarily executed and his circle of SA comrades purged.

The reports of the successful moves against the SA gave special attention to Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler's deputy. Erika cut out a glowing profile of him from a newspaper and left it on Canaris's desk. The face in the picture was the same smooth, creaseless one he remembered from the training cruiser
Berlin
, the sharp-featured cadet with the half-hooded, almost Asiatic eyes and slender hands, who made few friends and spent most of his time practicing his fencing. Canaris rarely spoke with the cadets. But once or twice, while standing on the bridge, he had noticed Cadet Heydrich staring at him with that same watchful, haughty gaze he trained on his fencing opponents as he donned his mask and prepared to humiliate them, as he invariably did.

It wasn't until they had finished a three-month training cruise and were back on land that he got to know Heydrich better. Cadet Heydrich showed up on a Sunday morning. Canaris was in his robe and slippers. Erika was getting ready to go to church. He was taken aback by this uninvited visit at his home by so junior a subordinate. Heydrich spoke some inane pleasantries, then said, “I'm told your wife is an accomplished musician.” Canaris's surprise gave way to indignation. When had a cadet ever gone so far as to make an inquiry about an officer's wife? He was about to give this upstart a suitable tongue-lashing when he heard Erika behind him. She was dressed for church. “Wilhelm,” she said, “don't be so rude. Please, invite our young guest in!”

Heydrich stepped into the vestibule. He spoke of how he missed playing the violin and the effect music had on his soul, the peace and comfort it brought. Erika mentioned the musical ensemble to which she belonged. They played every Sunday afternoon here, in their house. “Would you be interested?” she asked. He bowed to her. “Imagine, I came to pay my respects to an officer whom I admire and whose passions for the navy I share and find that my passion for music is shared as well!”

He surprised everyone with his musical skill. His long slender fingers moved the bow with authority and virtuosity. Although it was obviously untrue, he insisted Erika was the better musician. He lauded Canaris's abilities as an officer and offered heated support to the role he'd played in crushing the Red uprising at the end of the war. Gradually, his unctuous style began to grate on Canaris.

It was Erika who called a halt to his visits. There was no formal break. When they returned from the next cruise, the Sunday performances weren't resumed. Heydrich remained cordial and solicitous. Not long after he was commissioned, Heydrich became involved in an affair of honor and was dismissed from the navy for behaving in “a reprehensible manner.”

Canaris lost touch with Heydrich until he re-emerged as a rising star in the new leadership. Captain Patzig invoked his name during this conference at the War Ministry, when he formally turned over the job of military intelligence chief to Canaris. “I have no skill for diplomacy,” Patzig said. “It's hard enough keeping track of military developments in France or Russia without being tripped up by the clumsy zealotry of these Party types.”

“Military intelligence is a difficult job under the best of circumstances,” Canaris said.

“Thanks to God and the General Staff, it's yours now.” Patzig smacked his lips as he drew on an empty pipe. “The higher-ups were mighty impressed to hear that Heydrich is an admirer of yours. What is it he sees in you?”

Annoyed by Patzig's cynical demeanor, mechanical smile, long silences interspersed with the draining noise of his vacant pipe, Canaris ignored the question.

Patzig burped and tapped his chest with his fist. “Pardon me,” he said, “I should never have cabbage for lunch.”

Canaris stood. “On taking over, I feel well disposed toward these youngsters. The more familiar we become with National Socialist ideas, the more, I'm convinced, we'll discover they are truly soldierly ideas.”

“I suppose.” Patzig shifted in his chair, leaned to the side, lifted his rear, and broke wind. “Pardon me again,” he said.

 

 

A short while after, a lieutenant from the cryptography section, a highly competent naval officer, thin and very blonde, handsome in an adolescent, almost androgynous way, reported that he'd been visited at home by the Gestapo. He requested to see Canaris.

“They asked if I knew someone named Otto Kerstein.” The lieutenant fidgeted in the chair, seemingly unable to find a comfortable position.

Canaris offered him a cigarette, which he declined. “Kerstein's a mate of yours?”