He got up from the table, his head thick with drink and the humid air. In the hall, the old man was standing in front of an open door, listening to the piano. Soft music, barely louder than the clock. When he saw Jake, he moved away, a concertgoer giving up his seat. Jake stood for a moment, trying to place the music-delicate, slightly melancholy, something nineteenth-century, like the house, a graceful world away from the abrasive dinner. When he looked through the door, he saw Bernie bent over the keys in a pool of dim light, his tight wavy hair just visible across the well of the piano. At this distance his body was foreshortened, and for a second Jake saw the boy he must have been, a diligent practicer, his mother eavesdropping down the hall. It’s something you’ll have all your life, she would have said. A nice boy, not gifted, who kept his eyes on the keys. Not yet a terrier, ready to take offense. But perhaps it was only the room, the first real Berlin room Jake had seen, with its tall stove in the corner, the piano near the window to catch the light. In the old days, there would have been cake with coffee.
Bernie kept his head down after he was finished, so that Jake was at the piano when he looked up.
“What was it?” Jake asked.
“Mendelssohn. One of the Songs Without Words”
“Beautiful.”
Bernie nodded. “Also illegal, until a few months ago. So I like playing it. Rusty, though.”
“Your audience enjoyed it,” Jake said, nodding to the hall where the old man had been.
Bernie smiled. “He’s just keeping an eye on the piano. It’s their house. They live in the basement.”
Jake took this in. “So that’s why the plate.”
“It’s all they have left. They hid it, I guess. The Russians took everything else.” He waved his hand at the room, which Jake saw now had been stripped of knickknacks, the afternoons of coffee cakes just his imagination. He looked down at the piano, covered in cigarette burns and water rings from wet glasses of vodka.
“We haven’t met. I’m Jake Geismar.” He held out his hand.
“The writer?”
“Unless there’s another one,” Jake said, pleased in spite of himself.
“You wrote the piece about Nordhausen. Camp Dora,” Bernie said. “Jacob. As in Jewish?”
Jake smiled. “No, as in the Bible. My brother got Ezra.”
Bernie shrugged. “Bernie Teitel,” he said, finally shaking Jake’s hand.
“So I heard.”
Bernie looked at him, puzzled, until Jake cocked his head toward the dining room. “Oh, that.” He looked away. “Bastard.”
“You really don’t want to join his country club, you know.”
Bernie nodded. “No. I just want to pee in his pool.” He stood up and closed the piano lid. “So what are you doing in Berlin?”
“The conference. Looking for a story, like everybody else.”
“I don’t suppose I could interest you in the program? We could use some press. Life was here. They just wanted to know how our boys were doing.”
“How are they doing?”
“Oh, fine, fine. Nobody fraternizes, so nobody gets the syph. Nobody loots. Nobody’s making a dime on the black market. Just handing out Hershey bars and keeping their noses clean. Any mother would be proud. According to Life.” He picked up his files to go.
Jake lit a cigarette and looked at him carefully through the smoke. A DA, not a boy playing Mendelssohn.
“What’s going to happen to Otto Klopfer?”
Bernie stopped. “Otto? Summary court. He’s not big enough for the Nuremberg team. Three to five, probably. Then he’ll be back driving a truck. But not for us.”
“But I thought you said-”
“We can’t prove the actual killing. No witnesses in the van. If he hadn’t sent the letter, we couldn’t prove anything. We’re sticklers for the law here. We don’t want to start an inquisition,“ he said, back in his dining room voice. ”We’d rather cut the Nazis a little slack.“
“Summary court-that’s you?”
Bernie shook his head. “We try to keep the foreign-born minorities out of court. In case they’re not-impartial. I’m just the hound. Right now I’m on the fragebogen” He touched the files. “Questionnaires,” he translated. “‘Were you a member of the party? BDM?’ Like that. They have to fill one out if they want a job, a ration card.”
“Don’t they lie?”
“Sure. But we have the party records, so we check. Wonderful people for keeping records.”
Jake stared at the bulky files, like a hundred message sticks in the rubble.
“Could you locate somebody with those?”
Bernie looked at him. “Maybe. If they’re in the American zone,” he said, a question.
“I don’t know.”
“The British files would take a while. The Russians-” He let it dangle, then said gently, “A relative?”
“Somebody I used to know.”
Bernie took out a pen and scribbled on a piece of paper. “I’ll see what I have,” he said, handing him an office number. “Come by tomorrow. I have a feeling my three o’clock will be canceled.” He left the piano, then turned back to Jake. “They’d have to be alive, you know.”
“Yes. Thanks.” He pocketed the address. “Can I buy you a drink?”
Bernie shook his head. “Have to get back to work.” He shifted the files under his arm, running late again.
