The Jerusalem Diamond (12 page)

On the Kurfürstendamm, the broad boulevard where he had lived with his parents, the gray stone house looked remarkably unchanged, except that in the garden one of the two ginkgo trees had been cut down and the other had become full-grown. He stood across the street for a long time and stared, almost expecting the side door to open
. Alfred! Alfred, come at once. Your father will be home at any minute.

Finally the door did open and an elderly man came out. He had a gray, bushy mustache and looked like a retired army officer. He glanced across the street sharply just as one of the cruising homosexuals sauntered up and touched Alfred's arm
. “Na?”
the youth whispered
.

“
No,” Alfred said, and went away
.

He found an apartment in a house in central Berlin, on the Wilhelmstrasse. It came with proxy parents in the landlord's flat on the first floor. Herr Doktor Bernhard Silberstein was a retired physician, white-haired and bearded, with a chronic cough and fingers yellowed from cigarettes. His wife, a fat and comfortable old woman named Annalise, made it plain that Alfred was to have dinner with them on Fridays, to welcome the Sabbath
.

“
No, I'm not religious,” he said, too embarrassed even to thank her properly
.

“
Wednesdays, then,” Frau Silberstein said, and would hear no objections. The first time he came she gave him sliced goose liver with
gribiness
(cracklings), served as an appetizer. And then the bird itself, with fruit stuffing and a browned skin that crunched in his mouth, and potato dumplings and red cabbage. Dessert was a hot apple-nut strudel with a delicate crust that made Alfred sigh
.

“
You play chess?” Herr Doktor asked
.

“
Not for a long while
.”

“
It will come back
,”
Dr. Silberstein said, giving himself the black pieces. He was very good, he began to decimate the white chessmen “Why did you come back to Germany
?”

“
I love Berlin. For years I've dreamed of returning
.”

“
People here hate the Jews,” Dr. Silberstein said softly
.

“
It's the same everywhere
.”

“
My dear young man. You knew of Walther Rathenau
?”

“
Of course, the Foreign Minister. The one they assassinated
.”

“
There used to be a Freikorps marching song
. ‘Knallt ab den Walther Rathenau,/Die Gottverfluchte Judensau.' ‘
Shoot down Walther Rathenau,/ He's a goddam dirty Jew.' You know of the Nazis, the National Socialist German Workers' Party
?”

“
No, I'm not a political person
.”

“
A tiny party. Scum. They promise to rid Germany of Jews
.”

“
How did they do in the last election
?”

“
Pitifully, only 280,000 votes in the whole country
.”

“
Well, then,” Alfred said
.

Wertheim's on the Leipzigerplatz was a department store for royalty, a stone palace of marble and crystal. Its fountains were made of tiles from the Kaiser's own ceramic works and it had eighty-three elevators, escalators and miles of pneumatic tubes. Now an architect named Eric Mendelsohn was building another elitist department store on the Leipziger Strasse, for a family of fur merchants named Herpich. Alfred studied the building. Mendelsohn had designed it to be constructed almost entirely of glass, an unheard of innovation
.

Two young men from the architect's office responded to his interest and talked enthusiastically. The project would introduce a new method of display. At night, concealed electric lights would illuminate the entire interior of Herpich's in a blaze of glory
.

An idea intrigued Alfred
.

A short distance down the street was a building that had been vacated by a shoe store. When he sought out the owner, the man asked a higher rent than it was worth
.

“
I'll pay it, if you'll make some changes
.”

The owner listened, and agreed
.

While the renovations took place, Alfred allowed his mustache to grow. Uncle Martin sent letters of introduction to manufacturers of inexpensive watches and a line of cheap gold jewelry that sold well. Instead of using them, Alfred made telephone calls to London and wrote a series of letters. He had given a great deal of thought to the kinds of things he wanted to sell, and he was precise and specific in his requests. His audaciousness captured the imagination of one of the Syndicate's executives, who was able to check on him simply by consulting the company's file of past employees. The man wrote that they couldn't supply him, but sent the names of several Middle European wholesalers and added that DeBeers was recommending to these men that they extend credit. To Alfred's great pleasure, he was able to stock the shop almost entirely by signing vouchers, enabling him to put most of his capital into décor—thick Turkish rugs and comfortable antique chairs
placed around the small glass cases that would hold the stones. Whatever interior wall space wasn't mirrored was painted an eggshell white
.

Opening night of the Herpich Department Store was a civic occasion. There were speeches by politicians, and ribbon cuttings and champagne. Men and women in evening clothes walked past the glass walls and exclaimed at the minks, the sables and the stone martens they saw inside, all bathed in brightness by the cleverly concealed lights
.

The walkers were drawn on by a giant Kliegl lamp, fully exposed in the street. It shone on a plum-colored wall, where the windows of the former shoe store had been bricked in to match the rest of the building. After the savage jungle of furs in the exposed department store, the wall was calm and comforting. It hinted at mystery and reward beyond its blankness. As the walkers approached, they saw it contained a slit like a glimpse into the afterlife; behind glass, on a pedestal covered with black velvet, was one white, unset diamond
.

The only sign was a small brass plaque by the door, engraved with a single word
.

H
AUPTMANN
.

He was careful to pay the wholesalers with the first money that came in. In the beginning, two of the suppliers tested his youth. Between them, Deitrich Brothers, an old German house, and the Koenig Company, a smaller Jewish firm, controlled the gold settings that came into Berlin. Irwin Koenig quoted what Alfred knew was a ridiculously high price, and then so did Deitrich Brothers. Without settings, he couldn't sell diamond rings. It was clear that they had fixed the price and thought he could be forced to pay
.

“
No, thank you,” he told Koenig calmly when the supplier came back. “I've decided to order elsewhere
.”

He told Deitrich Brothers the same thing
.

He spent an anxious week before Koenig came in with a reasonable bid. Alfred used the figure to get an even more favorable price from Deitrich Brothers and arranged to buy future supplies of settings in Prague, through the Voticky store. Soon he was doing enough business to hire two technicians from Amsterdam, men who had been trained in the same apprenticeship program he and Laibel had taken
.

From the start, he enjoyed making money. He bought a slate-colored
motor car, one of the first products of a merger between the Daimler and Benz companies, and went to a tailor and began to order a wardrobe. Dr. Silberstein, who owned one stained suit and read the publications of the Psychoanalytic Institute, told him he was compensating for childhood loneliness, but he found a more expensive tailor, the finest tailor on the Tauentzienstrasse. The man knew a shirtmaker, and a bootmaker who also made spats. Three times a day, a florist's messenger delivered fresh boutonnieres to the Hauptmann shop
.

The mustache came in full and ginger-colored, but he shaped it into a brush like the one worn by the man he had seen leaving his childhood home. He fancied it added five years to his appearance. Except for his skirmish with the suppliers, his age wasn't a handicap. In a business like diamonds, once you were successful it helped to be young
.

He learned to be wary of invitations, but one day Lew Ritz, an American who was a medical student at the university, asked if he would like to go to a party. He enjoyed Ritz, whose Yiddish nickname was Laibel, like Cousin Ludvik's. That night they drove to the western outskirts of the city, to a house on the bank of the Havel River. The door was opened by a maid who wore only an apron, and inside the house the women were self-consciously nude. All the men were impeccably dressed, a number of them clustered around a dancer who had come to Berlin with Josephine Baker. Black women were a novelty in Germany, but he and Ritz noticed someone else and moved toward her at the same time
.

They stopped and looked at one another, and Ritz took out a coin
.

The girl had a pretty face and crooked teeth. Her body was slim, and he was conscious of pink garter lines marring pale thighs. “No,” he said to the coin. “Do you mind, Laibel
?”

Ritz was very good-natured. He shook his head and went away
.

“
I'm Alfred
.”

She appeared ill at ease, perhaps even angry. Maybe she had wanted Lew, he thought
.

“
I'm Lilo
.”

“
What are you thinking
?”

“
That's a magnificent suit
.”

“
Not half as magnificent as yours,” he told her gravely
.

Now she was laughing
.

“
Do we have to stay at this circus
?”

“
It's a cool night. I had better get my clothes,” she said
.

Near the kiosk where Dr. Silberstein bought his Yiddish newspaper, brown-shirted young men had begun to sell an anti-Semitic weekly
, The Attack.
They called themselves Storm Troopers
, Sturmabteilung,
and they intimidated people, but their party had done very poorly in another election
.

“
Just twelve seats, “Dr. Silberstein exulted. “They've won only twelve seats in a Reichstag of more than five hundred members
.”

“
After all,” Alfred reminded him, “this is the country that made Albert Einstein a director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes
.”

“
It's also the country …” Dr. Silberstein moved one of his bishops to knock off a pawn, “ … where citizens wait outside Einstein's office at the Prussian Academy of Science, and his apartment on the Haberlandstrasse, to shout dirty things at him because he's a Jew
.”

“
Cranks
.”

Dr. Silberstein grunted. They kept Wednesday evenings as if they were sacred, and Alfred's game had improved rapidly. The first time he had beaten his landlord was an occasion; now they played like stalking tigers, no mercy asked or shown. Bernhard Silberstein was haunted by spectres. Some Dutch financiers, four brothers named Barmat, had been accused of making “gifts and contributions” to persons high in the German government. The Barmats were Jews, and Dr. Silberstein waited for repercussions
.

“
Nonsense,” Alfred said. “Aren't there Catholic criminals? And Protestant criminals
?”

“
We must be extra careful. “Dr. Silberstein hesitated. “Especially, we must guard against engaging in sharp business practices
.”

Now Alfred knew which way the, conversation was heading; Bernhard Silberstein served on the Jewish Council with Irwin Koenig, the supplier with whom Alfred had had trouble
.

“
You've gotten to know me,” he said. “Tell me. Do you think I cheated that worm
?”

“
It doesn't matter. What matters is, he says you did. Rabbi Hillel
said, ‘It is not enough to avoid evil. One must avoid the appearance of evil.
'”

Alfred sighed
.

“
Would you like to attend a meeting of the Jewish Council next Tuesday evening?” Dr. Silberstein said. “We're planning a program to celebrate the two-hundredth anniversary of Mendelssohn's birth
.”

“
Felix Mendelssohn, the composer
?”

“
No, no, Moses Mendelssohn, his grandfather, who translated the Pentateuch into German
.”

“
I can't” Alfred said. He studied the board and then made what turned out to be a vulnerable move. “I'm extremely busy, lately,” he said
.

She claimed that because it was circumcised it gave him occult powers, kept her in thrall. When it was spent she crooned to it, dubbed it her little Jewish knight, called upon it to rise and do battle. She was ten years older than he. Everyone called her Lilo but her christened name was Elsbeth Hilde-Maria Krantz and her father was a pig farmer in Westphalia. For seven years she had worked as a chambermaid and saved her virginity and almost every
pfennig,
for the dowry a girl of her class needed in order to marry. Whenever she got a day off from the inn she went home and worked with the pigs or helped slaughter, depending on the season. She had almost enough money when inflation struck. Overnight, the Reichsmarks she had so grimly put aside were worthless
.

“
My life no longer made sense,” she told him as they lay in her bed with the faint sounds of someone's phonograph coming through the floor. “Why did it have to be a choice between cleaning toilets or smelling pig swill? I decided to be an actress
”.

Now she clerked in a fabrics shop. She was on call as an extra at UFA Studios and she spoke vaguely of a movie she had been in; he thought he could guess what kind of a film
.