§ CHAPTER THREE §
Berlin’s Jewish quarter, Grosser Judenhof, was one of those areas any self-respecting citizen would not want to be wandering through at night.
But then Gypsies had never been accused of being self-respecting. And it was not yet night, although the setting sun cast the narrow, building-lined street in depressing, drab shadows.
However, the Irish Traveler part of Romy considered wandering in the grimy and sooty ghetto’s shadows ádh mór -- very good luck – given that she looked much the worse for wear, after rolling on gravel, crashing into underbrush, and hiking five torturous miles on Irina Klockner’s stilts before a lorry loaded with asparagus gave a lift to Romy and her maggot of a companion.
Once again, her ankle twisted, this time on a cobblestone. “Scheiss!” Keeping up with Gunter’s killing pace was killing her.
“Your voluminous lexicon of curses indicates a brain sadly deficient in neurolinguistic ability.”
She wasn’t sure what he just said, but she knew it wasn’t complimentary. “Dingleberry!”
The electric tram churning overhead drowned out whatever his retort might have been. Not that she cared.
As if seeking to make himself disappear, he slunk his shoulders beneath his expensive but scruffed and turf-dirtied tweed jacket, turned up at its collar, and jammed his scratched hands in his jacket pockets. With his last-minute leap from the moving train, his fedora was long gone. Gone, too, was the snow white of Irina’s coat, smudged as it was here and there with dirt and grass stains.
Trying to keep abreast of Gunter, Romy trudged past a kosher market, a synagogue, and a jeweler’s shop. The familiar aroma of boiled cabbage, baked bagels, and roasted chicken tantalized her starved-hungry, rumbling stomach.
After zigzagging into a cleft between buildings, Gunter emerged from the alley to stop abruptly before a four-story-high, baroque building that might have once been stately. “This is it.”
“What is it?”
He swung open the heavy door. “My one hope for escape.”
Dodging an exiting, portly businessman, she dogged him inside. The dim vestibule smelled of dust and mustiness and apathy. “What about meself?”
Gunter shot her a look of intense displeasure and emitted a huff. “What about your poor, ailing grandfather?” Without waiting for her answer, he headed for the lift that looked like a wrought-iron birdcage.
She cringed with remorse but shot back, “If the SS troopers had anything to say about it, me grandfather is toes up by now.” She wedged inside the confining lift beside Gunter. It jerked upwards, and she gulped.
When camped with the Gypsies near Paris, she had experienced her first and only elevator ride at nine. On a cuttingly cold winter day, her grandfather had smuggled her into the Louvre – also, a first of many European museums she would explore those winters, when the need to keep warm became imperative. She had viewed a world of diverse beauty she had not known existed, until the Louvre’s museum guards had kicked them out.
After that exposure to Enlightenment, she had snuck into cinema houses across Europe, as well. Those had afforded fanciful escapes from everyday drudgery to watch newsreels and cartoons – and Westerns. She was enthralled with them. Her first Western had been Tom Mix’s romantic “Riders of the Purple Sage.”
Her lips curling in disdain, she shot Gunter a blistering look. “Forget me grandfather. What about yuir fiancée?”
“As far as the SS knows, you are Irina. Meanwhile, thanks to your moral turpitude, she is now safe. And she is not my fiancée.”
Crikey, what was ‘turpitude’? “Well, then what is Irina to ye?”
His eyes were bleak. “My half-sister.”
On the third floor, he paused before a door’s frosted pane. She nodded at its etched words. “Where are we?”
“You cannot read?” he asked, dismay evident in his refined elocution. “American Jewish Joint Distribution Center. A volunteer organization.”
He knocked on the pane and, at the “Ya?”, opened the door to a view of a mountain of cardboard boxes stamped with the Red Cross and stacked against the back wall. An assembly table and file cabinet occupied one side wall.
Behind a hand-me-down desk fronting the other wall, presided a dwarf. The desk plaque read, “Moishe Klein,” although below the name, whatever his title was, she could not decipher.
But she recognized him. She just could not remember from where. From one of the circuses that crisscrossed Europe’s map? Montmartre? Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm?
He hopped down from the chair and waddled to meet them. With large brown eyes and tufty brown hair, he had a jovial smile that made him as huggable as a carnival teddy bear. “Welcome to the Joint. How can I help?”
Gunter returned the smile. “Gunter Wagner. We are seeking the Holy Grail, of course.”
Her head snapped up towards his. Holy Grail?
“Ahhh, the Holy Grail, it is?” The dwarf nodded, as if he had the secret to a rigged carnival game. “So is the Führer,” he said genially. “If his SS Ancestral Heritage unit of archeologists and scientists doesn’t find proof of it first, we at the Center are here to lend a hand.
“And speaking of that,” the dwarf stuck up his fleshy hand, “I am Moishe Klein. It’s late. Why don’t I close up shop? We can hit one of the biergartens and discuss magic and myth and the occult.”
Within minutes, he locked the office. Once they were in the lift, he was curiously silent. As was Gunter. Dodging cars, they crossed several streets, leaving the Jewish quarter to find an empty outdoor table beneath a popular biergarten’s chestnut trees.
It wasn’t until lagers and a board of hot aromatic bread and a triangle of yellow cheese had been set before them that Moishe leaned forward, short arms crossed, and began to talk.
Like a sommelier, she inhaled the bread’s yeasty aroma. She immediately yanked a hank of hard crust from the loaf. The pillowy bread was the best food she had ever tasted. Cheeks bulging, she listened intently.
“The office walls have ears,” Moishe Klein explained. “I take it you and your companion want to immigrate immediately?”
“Not my companion,” Gunter said. “She is not a Jew. Just a gypsy.”
Just at Gypsy?! She almost gagged on the bread.
Moishe shrugged. “Jew. Gypsy. All the same in the Führer’s book.”
Gunter looked affronted but wisely kept quiet. Plainly, Moishe Klein held out the attorney’s only hope for escape.
The dwarf took a swig from his tankard. His face shapeshifting into one of those gargoyles perched on Notre Dame, he grumbled in a lowered voice. “Our contacts have word that the Nazis will soon be implementing a systematic obliteration of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals – and misfits, such as myself. They’re building gas chambers and ovens now. Hell, they even have a gas chamber on wheels in the works.” He pumped his bristly eyebrows. “‘You bring them, we’ll swing them.’ We’ll all be exterminated like termites.”
“Never underestimate the power of termites,” she mumbled, her mouth full.
Gunter groaned low, then dropped his voice and leaned forward. “Look, Polish Resistance said you could smuggle me out.”
“Us. Us out.” Romy said, shooting Gunter the Gypsy’s evil eye. “Yuir pansy arse would still be stuck on that train, afraid to jump, if it weren’t for meself.”
“Operation Texas is set up for Jews only,” Moishe told her in a voice that brooked no interference.
An accordion player had struck up a polka, and Gunter had to raise his voice. “Operation Texas?”
“An undercover project sponsored by a new Texas legislator, Lyndon Johnson,” the dwarf said. “I spent a year there, in Austin, before my papers expired. Operation Texas covertly hides selected Jews under the federal government’s National Youth Association work camps.”
“A work camp?” Gunter asked. “You understand, I am a little leery of work camps.”
So was she. Any kind of camp but a Gypsy camp.
“Set up by the Roosevelt administration. The NYA is designed to teach new trades to America’s out-of-work youth. The problem is getting us from Germany to Texas.”
“Us?” Now it was Gunter’s turn to stare.
Texas? She recalled studying plastered on one lamp post a cinema poster of a cowboy called the Duke, like her grandfather, but instead of a beret like Old Duke, this cinema star Duke wore a kind of peaked hat that stopped her just short of scoffing at its ridiculously huge size. And yet there was something powerful about that Duke’s image that had possessed her imagination.
“Rumors are rife that Nazi storm troopers are coordinating a massive attack on Jews throughout Germany the day after tomorrow,” Moishe said in a lowered voice. “Believe me, thousands are about to die.”
“Which is all the more reason I want out now,” Gunter insisted.
The gargoyle lowered his voice to a mere whisper. “I still have left immigration papers for two – with no names but signed and counter-signed. The congressman, Johnson, has had the Department of State already approve the visas beforehand. Money buys passports that take us via Mexico City to Galveston, Texas. Your papers will cost you five-thousand marks.”
“What?!” Shock shot Gunter’s brows almost into his handsome hairline. “According to Polish Resistance, cash is already supplied by wealthy benefactors to get us undercover to America and jobs and homes there.”
The little man lifted hefty shoulders. “Right now, America is rejecting Jewish refugee ships, right and left. It fears more Jewish immigrants will lengthen unemployment rolls, that Jews will become public charges and bleed away precious resources.” Moishe permitted a grin and another innocent shrug. “Thus, everyone, including Congressman Johnson, is using methods, sometimes legal and sometimes illegal to accomplish its ends. So, I ask myself, why shouldn’t I?”
“I will tell ye why not, ye miserable excuse for oxygen intake,” she heard herself saying, with not a little bit of surprise, “because I, Irina Klockner, am taking that second set of papers.”
Moishe wiped the foam off his thick lips with the back of his arm. “Ahh, but your partner has already disputed your identity. You’re not Jewish. Tough luck.”
“But I am a Gypsy, ranked up there with the Jews, at the top of the Nazi’s personae non gratae.”
The dwarf ignored her. “Last flight out of Berlin for the port of Bremen, where we ship out, is tomorrow morning at six-thirty. We enter the U.S. as residents of Mexico. Are you in, Wagner?”
“The banks are closed,” Gunter pointed out. “I don’t know where I can come up with five-thousand marks by tomorrow morning.”
“Friends?” Moishe asked. Business contacts? Family?”
“They’ve all been arrested.”
Moishe spread thickly padded hands appended to stubby arms. “Not my problem. Be here at five-thirty tomorrow morning with the marks – or don’t bother to come.”
“Charming man,” she said after she and Gunter left the biergarten, when what she was thinking what a rat of a man Moishe was. Someone she had crossed paths with somewhere, sometime, before. But where?
The scar on Gunter’s cheek ticked. Hands tucked beneath his jacket in his pants pockets, he strode off, unmindful of her.
She quickened her steps in Irina’s wobbly heels. “Where are we going?”
“I don’t know where I am going. But wherever it is, you are most definitely not going with me.”
She caught up with him and jerked on his jacket sleeve. “Ye belong to one of those gentlemen clubs? Ye know, the kind where they sit around and smoke cigars and read the daily stock quotes?”
Not breaking his stride, he eyed her askance. “No, I am not going to panhandle,” he said, as if attempting to divine her thoughts. His expression was indignant. “The gentlemen at the Hotel Adlon Kempinski would peer down their monocles at me and have the concierge toss me out.”
“They play cards, do they not – those gents?”
He halted beneath the corner street lamp and stared her down. “So, that is your point? A confidence card game? First, I would have to have a stake – you know, money. Second, I would have to win. And third – ”
“And third, ye have to look presentable. Ye are looking a little rough for the Kempinski.” She reached up and grabbed his tie and began straightening it. “And second, ye will win, because I will be helping ye cheat. And first, we pawn that expensive watch of yuirs for the stake.”
She could feel his heavy regard. “What?” she asked.
“Only that your criminal mind is amazing.”
She had the feeling – Fate whispering at her skull’s base – that was not what he had been about to say. “Not a criminal mind. Just survival skills, Gunter. I want half of yuir spoils.”
“Pardon me.” He swept a deep bow, but his tone was spiked with sarcasm. “I underestimate your resourcefulness.”
§ § §
That resourcefulness plus Gideon’s legal fame and his fluency of lip homage got a good bargain on his pawned Meisterstück, got him past Kempinski’s concierge, and got him to the gaming table in the private and lavish suite of Peter von Braun.
A great pastime for the idle rich, the white-knuckled card game of Loo was beginning to fade in popularity but was still a favorite among highborn gamblers throughout Europe. Von Braun’s uncle, a landed aristocrat, had been a Prussian baron.
Like any other game, the object was to take the most tricks. But this was unlimited Loo. A looed player who took no tricks had to toss double the amount into the current pot, meaning that player lost more than his initial wager. Fortunes were won and lost in the flick of a single card.
Before the all-night game of Loo, beginning at ten o’clock that evening, he and the exasperating girl had spent three too-short hours at the beer garden going over her tricks of the trade with a ratty deck of Bicycle playing cards that had been left, along with a cheap chess board provided by the beer hall, on one of the outdoor tables.
She had instructed him, when his turn to deal came, to call for Irish Loo, which dealt out only three cards apiece, making it easier for his unskilled fingers to palm a card. More importantly, the dealer kept control of the deck – and she taught him how to palm the crimped trump, the Jack of Clubs. Known as the Pam, it was higher even than the Ace of Spades.
Not that he could do it all that well. “Ye’re like a grasshopper on hot dirt,” she had told him back at the pebble-strewn biergarten. “Yuir fingers should palm the card smoothly. Like tracing a lover’s lip.”
That remark had got him to wondering about her. She was young. She was sharp. Winsome, if he stretched his imagination. And virginal. Gypsy and virginal certainly didn’t pair up. Yet he’d stake his last marks, which was about all he had left to his name now, that she was, indeed, as pure as Alpine snow.
“It’s all in card control,” she explained to him with an earnestness that equaled Prime Minister Chamberlain’s effort to appease Hitler with the Munich Agreement. “The pinkie and base of the thumb cradle the Pam beneath the palm – with the fingertips together so there are no spaces showing the card. Under the guise of riffling through the bridge, ye joggle the packet, so that ye crimp the Knave.”
She made it look easy enough, as time after time she dexterously but slow-motioned shuffled the deck and palmed the Jack of Clubs. But it was a matter of muscle memory and flexibility that lacked sufficient practice in such a short time for him to convert into an unchallengeable win at von Braun’s private table in his penthouse suite.
Gideon had pause to mull over exactly what it was he wanted. He was faced with an imminent choice: eventual return to his old life and impending systematic eradication of all European Jewry at the hands of the Nazis – or immigrate to the U.S. through Mexico via an undercover, uncertain, and illegal project known as Operation Texas.
Clearly, his choice was a cake walk. But what did he want?
The girl was to wait for him in the lobby below, idly perusing a newspaper to foil the house detectives. As if she could even read. At the sight of her, his eyes had lifted upward to the hotel’s high ornate ceiling. Deftly, he had removed the reversed newspaper from her clasp. “Your ignorance is abominable.”
“Yuir arrogance is no less so.” Then, her gaming smile. “May ye be lucky.”
With that reassurance, he had taken the lift to von Braun’s suite, where Gideon would either ultimately rejoice in his brilliant success or confront an SS firing squad.
Cigar smoke wreathed the room. Three other players were present – Gasquet, a Frenchman; Reinholdt, the German Assistant Minister of Finance; and the balding Heinz Auerswald, a prominent, attorney.
When Gideon’s time came to control the deck, sweat beaded his temples and upper lip and, worse, dampened his palms. As he went through the false shuffle, he could feel his damaged muscle twitch along the scar that scythed his left cheek. Everything he had left, including his own life, was in the pool.
“Worried?” Heinz asked Gideon. The lawyer was a member of the SS and in line for commissioner of Warsaw’s Jewish ghetto district.
Gideon smiled. “Trusting the hand you’re holding is as slipshod as your memory, Heinz, most certainly not.” In a court case, the two had represented opposing sides; Heinz had failed to recall legal protocol, and the case had been dismissed in favor of Gideon’s client.
“Let us get on with the game, shall we?” asked von Braun. He began divvying up the chips.
As Romy had demonstrated, Gideon gave the deck an undercut and palmed the Jack of Clubs – he hoped. He checked his cards. If any player held a flush – three cards of the same suit – or the Pam, that player won all the tricks and looed the entire table immediately. If more than one player held a flush, precedence was given to the flush with the Pam.
But Gideon held no flush, and the pot wasn’t sweet enough yet to justify playing the Pam he had palmed. With a sickening, knotting gut, he watched Heinz Auerswald swipe with a sneer a hefty portion of Gideon’s proceeds from his pawned Meisterstück.
By the fourth round, he was running out of chips.
Gasquet exchanged his hand for the ‘miss’ pile and frowned. “Merde! Mille pardons, but I must drop out.”
Next, Reinholdt tossed in his hand, as did Von Braun.
Then, Auerswald flourished his Ace-high Clubs flush.
It was now or never. The pot was barely large enough to finance Gideon’s getaway – if he cut out the girl’s portion.
He held the Six and Queen of Spades and the Ten of Diamonds. Could he pull it off? Treacherous sweat pooled at his collarbones. He loosened his tie. The sweat rivuleted down his sternum, past his clenching stomach muscles to pool at his crotch.
Without resort to all the finesse of his eloquence, he was reduced to his physical assets, of which he had few, mainly those recently acquired from the skilled tutelage of the Gypsy girl cum swindle artist.
He drained his remainder of the Regal German Rye Whiskey. With fierce focusing, he swiveled the Jack of Clubs among the cards he held and re-palmed the Ten of Diamonds. Then, he spread onto the table the cards with their Pam. Waiting for one of the other players to call him out, his heart was beating faster than Gene Krupa on the snare drum.
When no outcry ensued, he reached for the pile. “It’s been a pleasure doing business with you gentlemen.”
“Just a goddamned minute,” Auerswald said.
Gideon’s gonads shriveled to marbles. His heartbeat stuttered. His hand froze over the loot. Still, he managed to turn a guiltless smile on the balding man. “If you have a complaint, I suggest you lodge it with the Führer. Otherwise, I shall be forced to call you out.”
“And we all know how lethal you are with the rapier, Gideon,” von Braun joked in an attempt to allay the tension.
Gideon shrugged and began mounding the chips. “True, it is a given that I am not the most adroit with the weapon, but I am, nevertheless, able at times to inflict – ”
Auerswald tapped his remaining chip pile with a sausage finger. “Loo etiquette dictates that you should stay to the end of the game and give us a chance to win back our losses.”
“Alas, I was never one for etiquette, was I, Heinz?” As an appeasement, he pitched a much needed 50-mark chip in the direction of Auerswald’s mound as casually as if pitching darts and with a courtly bow made good his get away from the disgruntled players.
Now all he had to do was get away from the female aggravation waiting below. A service elevator and a shortcut through the closed-for-the-night kitchen put him on the receiving dock at the back of the Kempinski – while the girl still awaited him in the lobby.
Without his wristwatch, he could only guess the time – close to four in the morning, most likely. Still dark and cool. He had over an hour to make it to the Joint Center with time to spare.
In the dimly lit third-floor hallway outside the Center’s door, arms and ankles crossed and learning against the wall, Romy Sonnenschein waited for him.
He hid his shock. “Damn it, I was looking all over the Kempinski for you!”
She smiled forlornly. “And here I thought you had forgotten me, what with all the stress of yuir cheating at cards.”
His lids narrowed, but her usually arresting features were as bland as oatmeal. He turned his most appealing expression on her. It worked with juries, before which he pled his clients’ cases. “Listen, Romy, I only won enough at Loo to purchase the papers for myself.”
“There you are!” boomed Moishe’s voice, so unexpected, coming from such a little man. He fished a ring of keys from his woolen jacket pocket and thrust it into the door lock, at his chest level. Shoving wide the door, he stood on tiptoe to tug on the overhead light chain’s extension and waddled past both his desk and the far file cabinet toward the stacked Red Cross cartons.
On his way, he skewered Romy a quick glance. “What’s she doing here?”
“I just came to wish ye two Bon Voyage.”
Gideon groaned inwardly. She had come to plague him. To try her best to wheedle her portion of the Loo winnings from him. When he was the one who had sweated it out and put his credibility on the line.
“Let’s make it quick,” Moishe said. He extracted a Ritz Crackers box from one of the Red Cross donation cartons. “We’ll complete the paper work on the way to the airport.” From the red cardboard box, he fished a sheath of papers and passed them to Gideon. “The five-thousand marks, if you please.”
Gideon sighed, dug out his wallet, and doled out onto the desk the hard-won marks. Remaining, he still had seventy-five. He stuffed the papers into his jacket’s inside pocket, but, feeling remorse – after all, the Gypsy swindler had enabled him to win the card game – he tossed her a wad of precious fifty marks.
Her mouth curling in contempt, she thumbed through them. “Oh, swell. Fifty marks out of more than five thousand.”
Moishe flicked her a scornful glance. “Beggars can’t – ”
“ – look wealthy,” she said, stashing the fifty in her white purse, Irina’s purse. “But the likes of me will take whatever I can get.” She gave Gideon a hug that jerked at his integrity, or lack thereof. Her eyes moistened. “May ye be lucky, Gunter.”
Heading for the door, she paused and turned to blow him a kiss.
He should feel even more remorseful. Whether as Gypsy Romy Sonnenschein or Jewess Irina Klockner, she was headed not only for the door but for annihilation.
Ten minutes later, his overwhelming sense of remorse immediately vanished in the taxi cab, careening around curves on its dash to the airport. He groped into his suit jacket for the requisite paperwork to be filled out, then glanced at a frowning Moishe. “The papers, the visas – they’re gone!”