The Traitor's Emblem (16 page)

“Hey, Paul! You’ve got to pose for posterity!” said the man standing next to Alys.

Paul looked up. He was wearing a black tuxedo that didn’t sit at all well on his shoulders, and a bow tie that was undone and hung down over his shirt. When he spoke, his voice was thick and his words slurred.

“Hear that, girls? Put a smile on those faces.”

The two women on either side of Paul were wearing silvery party dresses and hats to match. One of them grabbed him by the chin, forced him to look at her, and planted a sloppy French kiss just as the shutter came down. The surprised recipient returned the kiss and then burst out laughing.

“See? They really put a smile on your face!” said his friend, braying with laughter.

Alys was astonished to see this, and the Kodak almost slipped from her hands. She wanted to vomit. This drunk, just another one of the kind she had despised night after night for weeks, was so far from her image of the shy coal bearer that Alys couldn’t believe it was really Paul.

And yet it was.

Through the haze of alcohol, the young man suddenly recognized her and unsteadily got to his feet.

“Alys!”

The man who was with him turned to her and raised his glass.

“You know each other?”

“I thought I knew him,” said Alys coldly.

“Superb! Then you ought to know that your friend is the most successful banker in Isartor . . . We sell more shares than any of the other banks that have been popping up lately! I’m his proud accountant . . . Come on, drink a toast with us.”

Alys felt a wave of scorn run through her body. She’d heard all about the new banks. Almost all of those set up in recent months had been established by young people, and a lot of student types came to the club every night to burn away their earnings on champagne and whores before the money lost its value completely.

“When my father told me you’d taken the money, I didn’t believe him. How wrong I was. Now I can see it’s the only thing you’re interested in,” she said, turning away.

“Alys, wait . . .” stammered the young man, embarrassed. He stumbled around the table and tried to grab her hand.

Alys turned and gave him a slap that rang out like a bell. Although Paul tried to save himself by clutching at the tablecloth, he toppled over and ended up on the floor amid a shower of broken bottles and the laughter of the three chorus girls.

“By the way,” Alys said as she walked off, “in that tuxedo you still look like a waiter.”

Paul used the chair to pull himself up, just in time to see Alys’s back disappearing into the crowd. His friend the accountant was now leading the girls to the dance floor. Suddenly an arm grabbed Paul firmly and guided him into the chair.

“Looks like you’ve rubbed her the wrong way, eh?”

The man who’d helped him seemed vaguely familiar.

“Who the hell are you?”

“I’m a friend of your father’s, Paul. Someone who right now is wondering whether you’re worthy of sharing his name.”

“What do you know about my father?”

The man pulled out a card and put it in the inside pocket of Paul’s tuxedo.

“Come see me when you’ve sobered up.”

25

Paul looked up from the card and contemplated the sign above the bookshop, still not understanding what he was doing there.

The shop was just a few steps from Marienplatz, in the tiny heart of Munich. This was where Schwabing’s butchers and hawkers gave way to watchmakers, milliners, and shops selling walking sticks. There was even a small cinema close to Keller’s establishment that was showing F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, more than a year after it had first come out. It was the afternoon, and they must have already been halfway through the second screening. Paul pictured the projectionist in his booth, changing the worn reels of film one by one. He felt sorry for him. He had slipped in to see that film—the first and only film he’d seen—in a cinema close to the boardinghouse, when the whole town had been talking about it. He hadn’t much liked the thinly veiled screen adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. For him, the true emotion of the story resided in its words and its silence, in the white that surrounded the black letters on the page. The cinematic version seemed rather too simple, like a jigsaw with only two pieces.

Paul entered the bookshop cautiously, but soon forgot his misgivings as he studied the volumes scrupulously arranged on the floor-to-ceiling bookcases and on the large tables beside the window. There was no counter in sight.

He was leafing through a first edition of Death in Venice when he heard a voice behind him.

“Thomas Mann’s not a bad choice, but I’m sure you’ve read that one already.”

Paul turned. There was Keller, smiling at him. His hair was completely white, he sported an old-fashioned goatee, and from time to time he would scratch his large ears, drawing even more attention to them. Paul felt that he knew this man, though he was unable to say how.

“Yes, I’ve read it, but in a hurry. I was lent it by someone staying in the boardinghouse where I live. Books don’t normally stay in my hands for long, however much I want to reread them.”

“Ah. But don’t reread, Paul, you’re too young, and people who reread tend to fill themselves with inadequate wisdom too quickly. For now you should read everything you can, as wide a variety as possible. Only when you get to my age will you find that rereading isn’t a waste of time.”

Paul took another good look at him. Keller was well past fifty, though his back was straight as a rod and his body was trim in an old-fashioned three-piece suit. His white hair gave him a venerable appearance, though Paul suspected that it might have been dyed. Suddenly he realized where he’d seen this man before.

“You were at Jürgen’s birthday party, four years ago.”

“You have a good memory, Paul.”

“You told me to leave as soon as I could . . . that she was waiting outside,” Paul said sadly.

“I remember you rescuing the girl with absolute clarity, right in the middle of the ballroom. In my day I had my moments too . . . and my low points, although I never made as big a mistake as the one I saw you making yesterday, Paul.”

“Don’t remind me. How the hell was I supposed to know she was there? It’s been two years since I last saw her!”

“Well, then, I think the right question here is: What the hell were you doing getting yourself as drunk as a sailor?”

Paul shuffled his feet uncomfortably. He was embarrassed to be discussing these things with a complete stranger, but at the same time he experienced a peculiar calm in the bookseller’s company.

“Anyway,” Keller went on, “I don’t want to torture you, as the bags under your eyes and your pale face tell me you’ve tortured yourself enough already.”

“You said you wanted to talk to me about my father,” Paul said anxiously.

“No, that wasn’t what I said. I said you should come and see me.”

“Then why?”

This time it was Keller’s turn to remain silent. He led Paul to the window and pointed over to the church of St. Michael, just across from the bookshop. A bronze plaque detailing the family tree of the Wittelsbach dynasty stood above the statue of the archangel who gave his name to the building. In the afternoon sun, the statue’s shadows were long and threatening.

“Look . . . three and a half centuries of splendor. And that’s just a short prologue. In 1825, Ludwig the First decided to transform our city into the new Athens. Full of light, space, and harmony in its avenues and boulevards. Now look a little lower, Paul.”

At the door to the church, beggars had gathered, lining up to receive the soup that the parish distributed at sunset. The queue had only just started to form, and already it reached farther than Paul could see from the shop window. He wasn’t surprised to spot war veterans, still in their grubby uniforms, which had been forbidden for almost five years now. Nor was he shocked by the appearance of the tramps, whose faces had been imprinted by poverty and drink. What did surprise him was seeing dozens of adult men dressed in worn suits but with their shirts perfectly ironed, all of them with no sign of an overcoat in spite of the strong wind that June evening.

The overcoat of a family man who has to go out every day to find bread for his children—that’s always one of the last things to be pawned, thought Paul, nervously moving his hands in his own coat pockets. He’d bought the coat secondhand, surprised to find such good-quality fabric for the price of an average-size cheese.

Just like the tuxedo.

“Five years after the fall of the monarchy: terror, killings in the streets, hunger, poverty. Which version of Munich do you prefer, lad?”

“The real one, I suppose.”

Keller looked at him, evidently pleased with his response. Paul noticed that his attitude had changed slightly, as though the question had been a test for something much greater still to come.

“I met Hans Reiner many years ago. I don’t remember the exact date, but I think it was around 1895, because he came into the bookshop and bought a copy of Verne’s Castle of the Carpathians, which had just come out.”

“He liked reading too?” asked Paul, unable to hide his emotion. He knew so little about the man who had given him life that any flicker of resemblance filled him with a mixture of pride and confusion, like the echo of another time. He felt a blind need to trust the bookseller, to extract from his head any trace of the father he had never been able to meet.

“He was a real bookworm! Your father and I talked for a couple of hours that first afternoon. That was a lot of time in those days, as my bookshop was full from opening to closing time—not deserted like it is now. We discovered common interests, such as poetry. Although he was very intelligent, he was rather slow with words, and he marveled at what people like Hölderlin and Rilke could do. Once he even asked me to help him with a little poem he’d written for your mother.”

“I remember her telling me about that poem,” said Paul sullenly, “though she never let me read it.”

“Perhaps it’s still in your father’s papers?” suggested the bookseller.

“Unfortunately, the few possessions we had were left in the house where we used to live. We had to leave in a hurry.”

“A pity. Anyway . . . every time he came to Munich we’d spend interesting evenings together. That was how I first came to hear of the Grand Lodge of the Rising Sun.”

“What’s that?”

The bookseller lowered his voice.

“Do you know what the Masons are, Paul?”

The young man looked at him in surprise.

“The newspapers say they’re a powerful secret sect.”

“Run by Jews who control the fate of the world?” said Keller, his voice full of irony. “I’ve heard that story many times, too, Paul. All the more so these days, when people are looking for someone to blame for all the bad things that are happening.”

“So, what’s the truth?”

“The Masons are a secret society, not a sect, made up of select men who seek enlightenment and the triumph of morality in the world.”

“By ‘select,’ do you mean ‘powerful’?”

“No. These men choose themselves. No Mason is allowed to ask a Profane to become a Mason. It’s the Profane who has to ask, just as I asked your father to grant me admission to the lodge.”

“My father was a Mason?” asked Paul, astonished.

“Wait a moment,” said Keller. He locked the shop door, flipped the sign to C
LOSED
, and then went to the back room. On his return he showed Paul an old studio photograph. It showed a young Hans Reiner, Keller, and three other people Paul didn’t recognize, all of them looking fixedly into the camera. Their rigid pose was common to pictures from the beginning of the century, when models had to remain still for at least a minute so the photo didn’t blur. One of the men was holding up a strange symbol that Paul remembered having seen years earlier in his uncle’s study: a square and compass facing one another with a big G in the middle.

“Your father was the keeper of the temple of the Grand Lodge of the Rising Sun. The keeper ensures that the door to the temple is closed before the Work can begin . . . In the language of the Profane, before beginning the ritual.”

“I thought you said it had nothing to do with religion.”

“As Masons, we believe in a supernatural being, whom we call the Great Architect of the Universe. That’s as far as the dogma goes. Each Mason venerates the Great Architect in whatever way he sees fit. In my lodge there are Jews, Catholics, and Protestants, although this isn’t talked about openly. There are two subjects that are forbidden in the lodge: religion and politics.”

“Did the lodge have anything to do with my father’s death?”

The bookseller paused for a while before answering.

“I don’t know very much about his death, except that what you’ve been told is a lie. The day I saw him for the last time, he sent a message to me and we met close to the bookshop. We talked hurriedly, in the middle of the street. He told me he was in danger and that he feared for your life and your mother’s. A fortnight later I heard a rumor that his ship had gone down in the colonies.”

Paul wondered whether he should tell Keller about his cousin Eduard’s last words, about the night his father had visited the Schroeders’ mansion, and the shot Eduard had heard, but he decided against it. He’d given the evidence a great deal of thought but couldn’t find anything conclusive to prove that his uncle had been responsible for his father’s disappearance. Deep in his heart he believed there was something to the idea, but until he was quite sure, he didn’t want to share that burden with anyone.