Good People by Nir Baram Read Free Book Online

interest in recent events. This is a difficult night for the German people, and we were asked to keep order in the streets. Would you believe that a Jewish criminal scratched Höfgen, our faithful policeman?’
    Other memories of Hermann surfaced: had Thomas done him a great injustice? Hermann had suffered as a boy from his failure to behave well, and at a certain stage he began making out that Thomas was some serpent-like, seductive figure, dragging him into sin. But Hermann always acknowledged that Thomas had helped him in hard times. In short, they had had good and bad days. But for years they had had nothing to do with each other…Had he said anything against Hermann that might have reached his ears? It didn’t seem so. Thomas seldom spoke ill of people. Gossip was an indulgent weakness. Slander wasn’t useful; it was likely to give listeners the residual feeling that you were unworthy of their trust. In the final reckoning, the harm outweighed the benefit.
    ‘A nice place, isn’t it?’ Hermann pointed at the building where Erika Gelber used to treat Thomas. ‘Do you still go there regularly?’
    ‘Much less in the past two years. There’s a lot of work in the office.’ Thomas looked him in the eye. He didn’t intend to show him that he had been surprised.
    ‘Does your friend, the Jewish psychoanalyst, help you?’ Hermann asked.
    ‘Much less in the past two years,’ Thomas repeated, beginning to wonder whether this might be the right time to tell Hermann that a senior official from the Foreign Office had just visited him.
    ‘Very nice, very nice,’ Hermann laughed. ‘Baumann told me that his dad went a little crazy after the war, and that the Jews treated him…All kinds of things that you don’t understand that you know, or you don’t know that you understand. Somethinglike that. Quite a deceptive business, no?’
    ‘Yes, they helped a lot of soldiers,’ Thomas said. ‘In fact I heard that they got a medal from the War Ministry.’
    ‘All this is very well, but we have a lot more to do,’ a tall Brownshirt, behind whom Höfgen was hiding, said to Hermann irritably. ‘Maybe you could chat with your bourgeois faker some other day?’ He stepped back, and now the policeman was in front of Thomas. Höfgen stared at him as if he were seeing him for the first time and was at his wit’s end.
    ‘Speaking of Jews, I’m interested in hearing your opinion about the murder in Paris,’ Hermann said calmly, raising his hand and poking his index finger right at the tall man’s face. ‘Maybe it’s time to react against the French, too?’
    ‘It’s a terrible thing, a great shame to all the Jews,’ Thomas answered. ‘And as for the French, those are matters that the Führer knows best how to handle.’
    ‘Believe me, tonight is the great shame of the Jews,’ Hermann said quietly. His dimples deepened, but cold mockery flashed in his eyes.
    An alarming certainty crept into Thomas’s mind: it was no coincidence that Hermann was speaking to him now. He had ignored him for years, but tonight, the very night for which Hermann had been born, he was choosing to devote time to Thomas.
    ‘And maybe for their friends too,’ Hermann added. ‘There are Germans for whom the laws of the Reich are merely recommendations.’ The arrogant smile, ostensibly polite, vanished, and his flaming eyes scrutinised Thomas with hatred. ‘Didn’t you say you were hurrying home?’
    Thomas looked past Hermann and focused on Höfgen, who was in distress. There was no doubt about it. The policeman’s gaze roamed over the group, as though trying to explain to Thomas that he had no other choice.
    Thomas now knew that Hermann and his gang were planning to harm him, or, even worse, had already harmed him.
    Far behind them they heard a powerful explosion. Bluish-orange flames burst out of a row of buildings. A pillar of smoke rose and was swallowed in the darkness. Everyone gaped at it as though hypnotised. Little fires burned