Child of the Light (6 page)

Since Erich hated talking about his seizures, Sol decided to keep his latest theory about the voice to himself--at least for now. "You didn't go down by yourself," he said.

"Yes, I did." Erich looked at him and relented. "No. I didn't go down. But we're going down there tonight. I've decided."

Sol got up and walked over to his window. Two workmen were erecting an awning above the entrance into what had been the furrier's basement and was now about to become a cabaret. From where he stood, he could not see the steps leading down; the awning looked like it was at street level.

Once down those steps and through the door, there was a circular flight of metal stairs. After the basement--the cabaret--came a low-ceilinged sub-basement, on the same level as the cellar beneath the tobacco shop. And beneath both shops...the sewer.

"Forget it," Sol said. "We're not going down there."

"You're afraid." Erich joined him at the window.

"Am not!" Sol knew he didn't sound convincing. Even if it had been Erich's voice playing tricks on him, they boys had promised on their honor never to play in sewers again--and their fathers had welded the tobacco shop's grate down just in case. "Our papas will kill us if they catch us. The watchman could see us--"

"The construction-crew watchman won't be there tonight." Erich's eyes shone expectantly. "I saw him earlier this afternoon outside a Schultheiss. He was holding a quart of Pilsner and bragging to some girl about how his crew is so ahead of schedule he's been assigned to another project."

"I still don't think..."

"Tell you what." Erich sounded as if he'd just had an idea,
 
but judging from the look on his face, Sol suspected his friend had worked out the answers to all of Sol's possible objectives ahead of time. "Bet your pewter soldiers against my bike there's no woman in the sewer."

Erich's voice had that
it's no use arguing about this one
tone to it that Solomon knew only too well.

"You might as well hand over the soldiers right now. Voices come attached to bodies. If there ever was a real woman in the sewer, Papa would've found her."

Erich's face darkened in anger and Sol guessed his friend was thinking about Bull. Neither of them were sure what Herr Weisser had done with the puppy; he had refused to talk to them about it. But Erich knew. Or so he said.

"I have to hear her...the woman...or you lose." Erich dangled the lock-pick pouch in front of Solomon's face.

"That's dumb! Your bike against my soldiers? Dumb!"

Erich grinned and pushed a hand through his sandy hair. "I only bet on sure things. The voice was all in your mind. The trouble with you is, you read too much."

Sol watched the sparrows pecking at cracks in the sidewalk.
 
They were not nearly as bad as the pigeons everyone hated--Berlin's second-worst enemy, the city council called them. What perversity kept him feeding the sparrows, he did not know. Habit, maybe. He had been taking them bags of crumbs since Recha was a baby. There were times, he thought, when he wished they would repay him by flying overhead and decorating his friend's hair. That would cure Erich of some of his arrogance!

The cabaret's awning slapped and heaved in the breeze. Startled, the sparrows took wing. The black, red, and gold striped canvas billowed like a flag honoring the Republic; beneath it, newly installed hand and guard rails--painted the hue of ripe bananas--shone in the weak afternoon light. A door veneered with sculpted ceramics had replaced the mass of rusted iron and enormous locks and bolts that had formerly marked the entrance. It led into a basement likewise transformed, for the furriers had moved all their inventory--wardrobe crates, odorous with mothballs and filled with coats of leopard, mink, and seal--from there to the building's upper two levels.

During the past month, he and Erich had watched the nightclub take shape. Sol enjoyed listening to the sawing and hammering, and he liked the smell of the new lumber. Leather-aproned carpenters and chalk-faced plasterers scuttled up and down the steps. He and Erich snickered at the effeminate gray-haired decorator in purple plus-fours who stood on the sidewalk, frenetically waving his arms whenever things seemed to be going wrong. Any day now, according to Solomon's mother, trucks would arrive with furniture--God should only grant her such elegant things as she had heard were coming, she said.

The door of the tobacco shop opened and Sol's father stepped out.

Jacob Freund was a thin, bespectacled man whose neck, constricted in his high starched collar, made him look rather like a rooster. He shielded his eyes from the sun and gestured to Sol to come outside.

"See. Even your papa thinks you should get some fresh air," Erich said, coming up behind Sol. "Let's go outside. You can study after supper. There will be plenty of time before we meet to go down there."

"I haven't agreed to go, yet," Sol said, though by now he knew--and so did Erich--that it was as good as done.

"Well, boys--it seems as if it's actually going to happen." Jacob put a hand lightly on each of the boys' shoulders as they joined him on the sidewalk outside the shop. He smiled, and the crows' feet around his eyes deepened.

"Do you really think the nightclub will help the furriers all that much, Herr Freund?" Erich asked.

"It's bound to."

All of Berlin's businesses had been hurt by the rising inflation that had seized the city following the war, especially luxury shops like Das Ostleute Haus. Frau Rathenau's offer to buy their basement and sub-basement had been a double blessing. Not only would the money help keep the furrier shop afloat, Sol's father explained, but the kinds of people who would frequent the cabaret were also those who could afford life's other amenities.

"It will help the whole street." There was a soberly thankful tone to Jacob's voice. "Our business is sure to boom, not to mention that the cabaret will afford us the opportunity to meet and mingle with people such as the Rathenaus and their peers." He looked seriously at Erich and then at Solomon. "People whose decisions spell the future not only of Berlin but of the entire Fatherland--"

The pounding of a hammer interrupted him as a workman, standing on a ladder at the bottom of the basement stairs, unceremoniously nailed up a rectangular, mahogany-stained plaque above the door. The edges of the plaque were trimmed with a delicate gilt band, and the graceful lettering stood out black and bold:

KAVERNE

The sign gave Solomon a sense of satisfaction. He was proud of his neighborhood. Most of the store owners had moved to the more residential areas; he was glad his family had not--especially now. A cabaret, right here on his street! Papa said most of Berlin's nightclubs had sprung up after the war, when the Kaiser's
Tanzverbot
--the anti-dancing edict--was lifted. They were clustered along Leipziger Strasse, near the Kaiserhof Hotel and the Prussian State Theater. Many of them were known for the decadence of their patrons, whose outrageous behavior made for meaty reading in the weekend papers.

Frau Rathenau's purchase of the furrier's basement had made the newspapers, too. A columnist for
Der Weltspiegel,
Berlin's most widely read Sunday entertainment insert, had quoted her as saying that she had deliberately chosen to open her nightclub away from the riffraff. Kaverne was, she had said, part of her "...crusade to bring respectability to Berlin's entertainment industry." The columnist had suggested that the real purpose of the cabaret was to showcase the talents of her granddaughter--Foreign Minister Walter Rathenau's niece, Miriam, who had recently returned from America.

"I'll be back, boys. Don't go away...I have something to show you." Jacob released the boys and went back into his shop.

"If we don't go down tonight, we may never get there," Erich said as soon as Sol's father was out of earshot. "If you're too scared, I'll go alone. Once the cabaret opens, there's no way we'll get in."

"I told you, I'm scared of getting caught, not of going down there," Sol said, gesturing emphatically.

"I'll bet there's a woman's body behind one of the walls at the end of the sewer," Erich said, as if trying to goad him into agreeing. "Maybe someone sealed her up back there, like the guy in that Poe story Herr Schoenfelder made us read."

In one of their many discussions about the subject, the boys had decided the sewer had probably once been a dungeon and that there were all kinds of bones shored up behind the wall. The idea of finding them might thrill his friend, Sol thought, but it was not his idea of a good time. "I still don't think--"

"If you're worried about the bet, forget it," Erich said. As if signaling for silence, he held up his crushed hand. "Tonight. We'll meet at--"
 
He pulled up his sweater sleeve and checked his watch. "Midnight," he said, obviously carried away by his own sense of melodrama.

If only one of their papas had sealed off that sub-basement, Sol thought again, feeling less sure of his theory that the voice he had heard was Erich's. Something awful could be waiting for them down in that brick bowel.

"I--" Sol clamped his lips shut as the bell over the door of the tobacco shop jangled and his father re-emerged, waving a card embossed with calligraphy.

"You see?" His father ran a thin, long-nailed finger along the lettering as if to prove the invitation were indeed a reality, then placed it carefully in the breast pocket of his three-piece suit.
 
"Already our foot is in the door. Oma Rathenau has invited all of us, the Freunds and the Weissers, to a private dinner party in celebration of the cabaret's opening. Good thing she is not as stingy as her husband was. He would never have invited us!"

Though Sol had never met the Rathenau family, he had seen them occasionally at synagogue--not Walther, who did not deny he was a Jew but never went to
shul
--but Mathilde, Walther's mother, his father, Emil, and his younger sister. He knew that Emil, who'd died when Sol was little, had built an empire after using a small loan to buy the German rights to the Edison invention; everyone knew that.

"Mathilde Rathenau is the grand dame of the Allgemeine Elektrizitats Gesellschaft--the General Electric Company combine," Jacob Freund said. "She will insist on preserving the integrity of the Rathenau name. You watch. There will be only genteel people at her nightclub." He patted his pocket with pride. "Two weeks from tonight we shall dine with the cream of Berlin."

"I dine with the cream of Berlin every evening," Ella Freund said, coming out of the shop. "Now why don't you take care of the customers, Jacob, while I put supper on the table. You're welcome to join us, Erich."

The boy shook his head and mumbled his thanks. "Have to go. See you later, Sol."

"Later, he will be at his studies," Sol's mother said. "Why don't you two take a walk or something. Wake him up, Erich. He has a lot to do before bedtime. Have you practiced your cello?"

"Not yet, Mama."

"You had better not neglect your music." She turned to Jacob. "Have you told him?"

"Told me what, Mama?"

"To express our thanks to Mathilde Rathenau, Recha will dance and you will play your cello at the opening of the cabaret."

"But I'm not good enough to play for those people--"

"We do not ask you to be a genius--simply that you show you are a cultured young man."

Cultured, schmultured, Sol thought, a sick feeling settling in his stomach. Was it not enough that he loved music? Did he have to be forced to make a fool of himself in front of--what was it his father had called them, "...
the cream of Berlin"?

Erich decided he did not have to leave quite yet, so the boys continued watching the construction. At the first sign of dusk, the workers started packing up their tools.

"Now," Sol said, making a decision. "We go down now or forget it."

"Are you crazy? It's light enough for them to see us!"

"They're used to us. If we wander in like we're just curious, they'll probably ignore us."

"You really mean it, don't you?" Erich looked dumbfounded.
 
"Listen, you don't have to punish
me
just because your parents want you to make an idiot of yourself with your cello."

"Never mind about the cello. Do you want to do it--or not?" Sol enjoyed the shift in power. Suddenly he, and not Erich, was in command.

Sol was right. Nobody noticed them as they wandered into the half-finished cabaret and down into the sub-basement.

"Over here." Erich knelt beside the padlocked drain.

"Well, open it." With a little luck, Sol thought, the padlock will be too rusty to budge and we won't have to go into the sewer.

However, it took Erich no time at all to pry the lock open. The grate was as heavy as the one in the tobacco shop, but Erich opened it easily.

"I'll go first," Sol said, deciding he might as well go all the way with his playing the leader. Besides, he was a lot taller than Erich; the drop would be shorter for him and he could help his friend down.

The sewer smelled damp and fetid. Hardly any light filtered down, but Erich's pocket, which always seemed to hold an endless array of surprises, yielded a candle.

"See, I told you." Erich lit the candle and held it up to extend the circle of light. "There's nothing here."