The Lady from Zagreb Read Online Free Page B

but I like pretty girls. That’s my worldview.

Two
    E ver since the Second Reich, Berlin’s city architects have been trying to make its citizens feel small and insignificant, and the new wing of the Reich Ministry of Propaganda and National Enlightenment was no exception. Located on Wilhelmplatz, and just a stone’s throw from the Reich Chancellery, it looked very much like the Ministry of Aviation on the corner of Leipziger Strasse. Looking at them side by side it would have been easy to imagine that the architect, Albert Speer, had managed to mix up his drawings of these two gray stone buildings, so closely did they resemble each other. Since February, Speer was the minister of Armaments and War, and I hoped he was going to make a better job of doing that than he had of being Hitler’s court architect. It’s said that Giotto could draw a perfect circle with just one turn of his hand; Speer could draw a perfectly straight line—at least he could with a ruler—and not much else. Straight lines were what he was obviously good at drawing. I used to sketch quite a good elephant, myself, but there’s not much call for that when you’re an architect. Unless the elephant is white, of course.
    I’d read in the
Volkischer Beobachter
that the Nazis didn’t much like German modernism—buildings like the technical university in Weimar, and a trade union building in Bernau. They thought modernism was un-German and cosmopolitan, whatever that meant. Actually, I think it probably meant that the Nazis didn’t feel comfortable living and working in city offices designed by Jews that were mostly made of glass, in case they suddenly had to fight off a revolution. It would have been a lot easier defending a stone building like the Ministry of Propaganda and National Enlightenment than it would have been defending the Bauhaus in Dessau. A German art historian—probably another Jew—once said that God was in the details. I like details, but for the Nazis a soldier positioned in a high window with a loaded machine gun looked like it offered more comfort than anything as capricious and unreliable as a god. From any one of the new ministry’s small, regular windows a man with an MP40 commanded a clear field of fire across the whole of Wilhelmplatz and could comfortably have held an intoxicated Berlin mob at bay for as long as our handsome new minister of Armaments and War could keep him supplied with ammunition. All the same, it was a contest I should have enjoyed watching. There’s nothing quite like a Berlin mob at play.
    Inside the ministry things were a little less rusticated and more like a sleek, modern ocean liner; everything was burred walnut, cream walls, and thick fawn carpets. In the ballroom-sized entrance hall, underneath an enormous portrait of Hitler—without which no German ministry could possibly do its work—was an outsized scalloped vase of white gardenias that perfumed the whole building and doubtless helped conceal the prevailing smell of billy goat shit that’s an inevitable corollary of national enlightenment in Nazi Germany, and which otherwise might have offended the nostrils of our glorious leader.
    “Good morning, gentlemen,” I said as I turned right through the heavy doors and entered what I assumed was the old Leopold Palace.
    Behind a solid oak reception desk they could have used as a redoubt to provide a second line of defense against a mob, a couple of silent clerks with soft collars and softer hands regarded my slow progress across their floor with a well-practiced show of indifference. But I welcomed it: the only pleasure I ever get from wearing the uniform of an SD officer is the knowledge that if I wasn’t wearing it I might have to take a lot more humiliation from the kind of stone-faced bureaucrats that run this country. Sometimes I even get the chance to hand out a little humiliation of my own. It’s a very sadistic, Berlin sort of game and one I never seem to get tired of