'What's admirable in degradation?'
'It's a matter of motives, _nicht water?_ Killing people was widely advertised as highly admirable during the war.'
She sipped her coffee for some time in silence. 'Well, Mister Englishman, sympathy's not something I enjoy every day, I assure you. I don't suppose it makes much difference if I tell you they're red azo-sulphonamide dyes.'
That was interesting. I was familiar enough with sulphonamide, but I had never heard of its use for killing bacteria. 'They don't work like ordinary disinfectants,' she said. 'They're not like carbolic or formalin. Professor Domagk injects them into infected mice.'
'Do the mice live or die?'
'Die. Have you got a cigarette?'
'I don't smoke.'
As she felt in her handbag for a packet of cigarettes, she produced a folded sheet of paper. 'Have that, if you like. The mice don't always die. There was a lot of excitement in the lab just before Christmas. One of the dyes which Dr Mietzsch and Dr Klarer sent up to be tested was very successful. That chit will tell you all you want. Don't let anyone see it. I should never have taken it.'
She lit a cigarette. We talked for some time about the coming election, German politics, Lloyd George. She rose, and thrust into the stove a piece of jagged wood from a pile apparently scrounged from fences or dilapidated buildings. I had a moment to open the paper and observe a printed list of different bacteria down one side, scrawled writing down the other. 'I was intending to sell it,' Magda said frankly, 'but I should never meet anyone who might be interested. The American will be back,' she added, reaching for her coat.
Magda turned out the gas. As we left I could see the two children again, eyeing us from the stairs and whispering excitedly over our parade of wickedness. We walked arm and arm to the street corner. The snow had stopped. 'You are a chemist, mein Herr?' I nodded. She made a circular gesture round her face. 'You have the look of an English lord.' I laughed. 'Where do you live? In London?'
'Yes, in a big house in Harley Street. You've heard of that?' She shook her head. 'You travel to Wuppertal every day?'
'On the train. It makes a hole in my pocket.'
'Couldn't you find a job nearer home?'
'Is that a joke?'
'Perhaps you're right, and life will get better under Hitler.'
'That's what people are saying. Some don't care for him, of course, the Jews and the profiteers. But Hitler means business, you can tell that from the way he speaks. He's the only one up there in Berlin with the welfare of the ordinary people at heart. What do you suppose Schleicher and Papen and the rest are interested in? Lining their own pockets. Look at that disgraceful Osthilfe affair.'
'What about the Communists?'
'Oh, the Communists! They take their orders from Moscow. Hitler will soon put paid to them, thank God. They frighten the life out of me.'
She threw her half-finished cigarette into the gutter as we reached the main road. Jeff was in the Cord just round the corner. 'Hey, do you know what?' He opened the driver's door. 'I just got through to Berlin. The Reichstag's gone up in smoke. The whole town's out in the streets looking at it. It started around nine this evening, the sky's as red as dawn and they're expecting the dome to fall in any minute.'
I translated the news to Magda. 'A pity the deputies weren't all inside,' she said.
We dropped her at the Sphinx, Jeff not bothering to switch off the engine. She hurried inside to find another customer. As she waved from the doorway with its camels and palm trees, I raised my right arm and called jokingly, 'Heil Hitler'. She returned a smile, the first I had seen from her. I never encountered this early supporter of Hitler again. But she was a Slav, and doubtless ended with a red line ruled through her name in a concentration camp.
7
The Red Crown brewery was in Barmen, the opposite end of Wuppertal to the I G Farben works. It was a much smaller but equally hybrid collection of wood and red brick, exhaling the same black smoke from its tall chimneys. The brewing was done in a tall narrow building with Gothic windows and turrets, like a self-confident chapel in South Wales. It had been there since the 1870s, breathing its spicy smell over the area like a genial benediction.
My cupboard-like laboratory was on the top floor of the administration block, over the office which Jeff Beckerman shared with Herr Fritsch, the manager in the butterfly collar. When I arrived at eight-thirty the morning after our jaunt to Cologne, I was surprised to find Jeff in the lab already. He was smoking a Chesterfield and holding a bottle I recognized as a famous brand of London gin.
'Hey, that Reichstag fire's sure started something,' he greeted me excitedly. 'I've just been on to our agent in Berlin. They've got the man who set it alight. He's a Dutchman, called van der Lubbe or something-a Communist, well known to the police. That's raised hell, naturally. The Storm Troopers are out everywhere, rounding up the Communists and shouting the State's in danger. There's a rumour that the police have already got Torgler.' He was the leader of the Communist party in the Reichstag. 'They reckon to lay their hands on the other ringleaders before the day's out.'
I unwound my Trinity scarf. 'So, the Communists have obliged Herr Hitler as the Jesuits obliged King James.' Jeff looked puzzled. 'The Gunpowder Plot-Guy Fawkes,' I explained. 'It needs a genius for mismanagement, starting out to blow up the seat of authority and ending up being burnt annually in effigy.'
'It won't be effigies of the Communists going up in smoke. Hitler's been waiting his chance to rub them out ever since he took over. My God, how Germany fascinates me! Like I was fascinated by a nigger's corpse they fished out of the Hudson one day when I was a kid. It was bloated, looking like it might explode any minute, with slugs crawling out of it.' As he spoke, Jeff was swilling out a laboratory beaker under the tap of my square sink. 'I want you to try this gin.'
'It's too early.'
'Only a sip. Take it neat.' He handed me the beaker.
'God, how foul!' I spat the mouthful into the sink. 'It tastes like petrol.'
Jeff was amused. 'Maybe it is. I got it off one of your countrymen. It looks like the genuine article, OK? I guess a lot of people in the States would have paid good money for it. That's the racket. They reckon only one bottle of smuggled gin in a hundred is real.'
Times were hard for bootleggers, like everyone else. Jeff's father had bought the Red Crown Brewery in May 1931, and a fair share of the brew went by dray to Rotterdam and Hamburg then Toronto or Tampico, bribery greasing a path for it across the frontiers. A bottle of Red Crown in New York must have cost more than a bottle of good claret in Wuppertal, but Americans relished a wholesome German beer. It amuses me in America today seeing imported Red Crown advertised in the colour supplements as indicating the educated taste of its drinkers.
'You know my old man's permitted to handle alcohol by the United States Government, because he runs a chemical plant,' Jeff continued, while I rubbed my smarting lips with a handkerchief. 'A lot of it's on the level, he sells his products dirt cheap just to keep the Federal permits going. Of course, the Government puts all sorts of crap in the alcohol to make it undrinkable. You've heard of "boiling"?' I shook my head. 'You redistill the industrial alcohol, but it doesn't always work out. I want you to find a way of redistilling what's in this gin bottle, so we can get ninety per cent pure alcohol from it.'
'You've a delicate consideration for the health of your customers.'
'Oh, bull!' He laughed. 'We make better gin, we charge double price. I can pick up these bottles and forged labels anywhere.'
I objected. I told him I wasn't a bootlegger. There was always the chance of blindness or death from drinking impure alcohol, a possibility I did not want on my conscience. Jeff coloured, his thick bar of eyebrow drawn into a scowl. I always felt nervous of courting his anger. But he unexpectedly gave a nod and said, 'You're right, I guess. I pay you. Hitler pays the S.A. But it's no excuse for them giving him value for his money.' He stared at the deceptive bottle in his hand, ending from the doorway, 'Anyway, it's a sure bet they're going to repeal the Eighteenth Amendment, Roosevelt's saying it's a cause of the Depression.'