Prague Fatale

CHAPTER 3

Prussia has always been an interesting place to live in, especially if you were Jewish. Even before the Nazis, Jews were singled out for special treatment by their neighbours. Back in 1881 and 1900, the synagogues in Neustettin and Konitz – and probably several other Prussian towns, too – were burnt down. Then in 1923, when there were food riots and I was a young cop in uniform, the many Jewish shops of Scheuenviertel – which is one of Berlin’s toughest neighbourhoods – were singled out for special treatment because Jews were suspected of price-gouging or hoarding, or both, it didn’t matter: Jews were Jews and not to be trusted.

Most of the city’s synagogues were destroyed of course in November 1938. At the top of Fasanenstrasse, where I owned a small apartment, a vast but ruined synagogue remained standing and looking to all the world as if the future Roman emperor Titus had just finished teaching the city of Jerusalem a lesson. It seems that not much has changed since AD 70; certainly not in Berlin, and it could only be a matter of time before we started crucifying Jews on the streets.

I never walked past this ruin without a small sense of shame. But it was quite a while before I realized there were Jews living in my own building. For a long time I was quite unaware of their presence so close to me. Lately, however, these Jews had become easily recognizable to anyone that had eyes to see. Despite what I’d said to Commissioner Lüdtke, you didn’t need a yellow star or a set of callipers to measure the length of someone’s nose to know who was Jewish. Denied every amenity, subject to a nine o’clock curfew, forbidden ‘luxuries’ such as fruit, tobacco or alcohol, and allowed to do their shopping only for one hour at the end of the day, when the shops were usually empty, Jews had the most miserable of lives, and you could see that in their faces. Every time I saw one I thought of a rat, only the rat had a Kripo beer-token in his coat pocket with my name and number inscribed on it. I admired their resilience. So did many other Berliners, even some Nazis.

I thought less about hating or even killing myself whenever I considered what the Jews had to put up with. To survive as a Jew in Berlin in the autumn of 1941 was to be a person of courage and strength. Even so it was hard to see the two Fridmann sisters, who occupied the flat underneath my own, surviving for much longer. One of them, Raisa, was married, with a son, Efim, but both he and Raisa’s husband, Mikhail, arrested in 1938, were still in prison. The daughter, Sarra, escaped to France in 1934 and had not been heard of since. These two sisters – the older one was Tsilia – knew I was a policeman and were rightly wary of me. We rarely ever exchanged much more than a nod or a ‘good morning’. Besides, contact between Jews and Aryans was strictly forbidden and, since the block leader would have reported this to the Gestapo, I judged it better, for their sake, to keep my distance.

After Minsk I ought not to have been so horrified at the yellow star, but I was. Maybe this new law seemed worse to me because of what I knew awaited those Jews who were deported east, but after my conversation with Commissioner Lüdtke I resolved to do something, although it was a day or two before I figured out what this might be.

My wife had been dead for twenty years, but I still had some of her dresses and sometimes, when I’d managed to overcome the shortages and have a drink or two and I was feeling sorry for myself and, more particularly, for her, I’d get one of her old garments out of the closet and press the material to my nose and mouth and inhale her memory. For a long time after she was gone that was what I called a home life. When she’d been alive we had soap, so my memories were all pleasant ones; these days things were rather less fragrant, and if you were wise you boarded the S-Bahn holding an orange stuffed with cloves, like a medieval Pope going among the common people. Especially in summer. Even the prettiest girl smelled like a stevedore in the dog days of 1941.

At first I figured on giving the two Fridmann sisters the yellow dress so that they could use it for making yellow stars, only there was something about this I didn’t like. I suppose it made me feel complicit in the whole horrible police order. Especially since I was a policeman. So, halfway down the stairs with the yellow dress draped over my arm I went back to my flat and fetched all of the dresses that were in my closet. But even this felt inadequate and, as I handed over my wife’s remaining wardrobe to these harmless women, I quietly decided to do something more.

It isn’t exactly a page from some heroic tale as described by Winckelmann or Hölderlin, but that’s how this whole story got started: if it hadn’t been for the decision to help the Fridmann sisters I’d never have met Arianne Tauber and what happened wouldn’t have happened.

Back inside my apartment I smoked the last of my cigarettes and contemplated putting my nose in some records at the Alex, just to see if Mikhail and Efim Fridmann were still alive. Well, that was one thing I could do, but for anyone with a purple J on their ration cards it wasn’t going to help feed them. Two women who looked as thin as the Fridmann sisters were going to need something more substantial than just some information about their loved ones.

After a while I had what I thought was a good idea and fetched a German Army bread-bag from my closet. In the bread bag was a kilo of Algerian coffee beans I’d purloined in Paris and which I’d been planning to trade for some cigarettes. I left my flat and took a tram east as far as Potsdamer Station.

It was a warm evening, not yet dark. Couples were strolling arm in arm through the Tiergarten and it seemed almost impossible that two thousand kilometres to the east the German Army was surrounding Kiev and slowly tightening its stranglehold on Leningrad. I walked up to Pariser Platz. I was on my way to the Adlon Hotel to see the maître d’ with the aim of trading the coffee for some food that I could give the two sisters.

The maître d’ at the Adlon that year was Willy Thummel, a fat Sudeten German who was always busy and so light on his toes that it made me wonder how he ever got fat in the first place. With his rosy cheeks, his easy smile and his impeccable clothes he always reminded me of Herman Göring. Without a doubt both men enjoyed their food, although the Reichsmarshal had always given me the impression that he might just have eaten me, too, if he’d been hungry enough. Willy liked his food; but he liked people more.

There were no customers in the restaurant – not yet – and Willy was checking the blackout curtains when I poked my nose around the door. Like any good maître d’ he spotted me immediately and quickly came my way on invisible casters.

‘Bernie. You look troubled. Are you all right?’

‘What’s the point of complaining, Willy?’

‘I don’t know; the wheel that squeaks the loudest in Germany these days usually gets the most grease. What brings you here?’

‘A word in private, Willy.’

We went down a small flight of stairs to an office. Willy closed the door and poured two small glasses of sherry. I knew he was seldom away from the restaurant for longer than it took to inspect the china in the men’s room so I came straight to the point.

‘When I was in Paris I liberated some coffee,’ I said. ‘Real coffee, not the muck we get in Germany. Beans. Algerian beans. A whole kilo.’ I put the bread bag on Willy’s desk and let him inspect the contents.

For a moment he just closed his eyes and inhaled the aroma; then he groaned a groan that I’d seldom heard outside a bedroom.

‘You’ve certainly earned that drink. I’d forgotten what real coffee smells like.’

I hit my tonsils with the sherry.

‘A kilo, you say? That’s a hundred marks on the black market, last time I tried to get any. And since there isn’t any coffee to be had anywhere, it’s probably more. No wonder we invaded France. For coffee like this I’d crawl into Leningrad.’

‘They haven’t got any there, either.’ I let him refill my glass. The sherry was hardly the best but then nothing was, not even in the Adlon. Not any more. ‘I was thinking that you might like to treat some of your special guests.’

‘Yes, I might.’ He frowned. ‘But you can’t want money. Not for something as precious as this, Bernie. Even the devil has to drink mud with powdered milk in it these days.’

He took another noseful of the aroma and shook his head. ‘So what do you want? The Adlon is at your disposal.’

‘I don’t want that much. I just want some food.’

‘You disappoint me. There’s nothing we have in our kitchens that’s worthy of coffee like this. And don’t be fooled by what’s on the menu.’ He collected a menu off the desk and handed it to me. ‘There are two meat dishes on the menu when the kitchen can actually serve only one. But we put two on for the sake of appearances. What can you do? We have a reputation to uphold.’

‘Suppose someone asks for the dish you don’t have?’ I said.

‘Impossible.’ Willy shook his head. ‘As the first customer comes through the door we cross off the second dish. It’s Hitler’s choice. Which is to say it’s no choice at all.’

He paused.

‘You want food for this coffee? What kind of food?’

‘I want food in cans.’

‘Ah.’

‘The quality isn’t important as long as it’s edible. Canned meat, canned fruit, canned milk, canned vegetables. Whatever you can find. Enough to last for a while.’

‘You know canned goods are strictly forbidden, don’t you? That’s the law. All canned goods are for the war front. If you’re stopped on the street with canned food you’d be in serious trouble. All that precious metal. They’ll think you’re going to sell it to the RAF.’

‘I know it. But I need food that can last and this is the best place to get it.’

‘You don’t look like a man who can’t get to the shops, Bernie.’

‘It isn’t for me, Willy.’

‘I thought not. In which case it’s none of my business what you want it for. But I tell you what, Commissar, for coffee like this I am ready to commit a crime against the state. Just as long as you don’t tell anyone. Now come with me. I think we have some canned goods from before the war.’

We went along to the hotel storeroom. This was as big as the lock-up underneath the Alex but easier on the ear and the nose. The door was secured with more padlocks than the German National Bank. In there he filled my bread bag with as many cans as it could carry.

‘When these cans are gone come and get some more, if you’re still at liberty. And if you’re not then please forget you ever met me.’

‘Thanks, Willy.’

‘Now I have a small favour to ask you, Bernie. Which might even be to your advantage. There’s an American journalist staying here in the hotel. One of several, as it happens. His name is Paul Dickson and he works for the Mutual Broadcasting System. He would dearly like to visit the war front but apparently such things are forbidden. Everything is forbidden now. The only way we know what’s permitted is if we do something and manage to stay out of prison.

‘Now I know you are recently returned from the front. And you notice I don’t ask what it’s like out there. In the East. Just seeing a compass these days makes me feel sick. I don’t ask because I don’t want to know. You might even say this is why I went into the hotel business: because the outside world is of no concern to me. The guests in this hotel are my world and that’s all the world I need to know. Their happiness and satisfaction is all that I care about.

‘So, for Mr Dickson’s happiness and satisfaction I ask that you meet with him. But not here in the hotel. No, not here. It’s hardly safe to talk in the Adlon. There are several suites of rooms on the top floor that have been taken over by people from the Foreign Office. And these people are guarded by German soldiers wearing steel helmets. Can you imagine it. Soldiers, here in the Adlon. Intolerable. It’s just like 1919 all over again but without the barricades.’

‘What are workers from the Foreign Office doing here that they can’t do in the Ministry?’

‘Some of them are destined for the new Foreign Travel Office, when it’s finished. But the rest are typing. Morning, noon and night, they’re typing. Like it’s for a speech by the Mahatma.’

‘What are they typing?’

‘They’re typing up releases for the American press, most of whom are also staying here. Which means that there are Gestapo in the bar. Possibly there are even secret microphones. I don’t know for sure, but this is what I heard. Which is another source of grief for us.’

‘This Dickson fellow. Is he in the hotel right now?’

Willy thought for a moment. ‘I think so.’

‘Don’t mention my name. Just tell him that if he’s interested in a bit of “Life Poetry and Truth”, I’ll be beside the Goethe statue in the Tiergarten.’

‘I know it. Just off Herman Göring Strasse.’

‘I’ll wait fifteen minutes for him. And if he comes he should come alone. No friends. Just him and me and Goethe. I don’t want any witnesses when I speak to him. These days there are plenty of Amis who work for the Gestapo. And I’m not sure about Goethe.’

I hoisted the bread bag onto my back and walked out of the Adlon onto Pariser Platz, where it was already getting dark. One of the only good things about the blackout was that you couldn’t see the Nazi flags, but the brutal outlines of Speer’s partly constructed Foreign Travel Office were still visible in the distance against the purpling night sky, dominating the landscape west of the Brandenburg Gate. Rumour had it that Hitler’s favourite architect, Albert Speer, was using Russian POWs to help complete a building that no one other than Hitler seemed to want. Rumour also had it that there was a new network of tunnels under construction connecting government buildings on Wilhelmstrasse with secret bunkers that extended under Herman Göring Strasse as far as the Tiergarten. It was never good to pay too much attention to rumours in Berlin for the simple reason that these were usually true.

I stood by the statue of Goethe and waited. After a while I heard a 109 quite low in the sky as it headed south-east toward the airfield at Tempelhof; and then another. For anyone who’d been in Russia, it was an instantly recognizable and reassuring sound, like an enormous but friendly lion yawning in an empty cave and quite different from the noise of the much slower RAF Whitleys that occasionally ploughed through Berlin skies like tractors of death and destruction.

‘Good evening,’ said the man walking toward me. ‘I’m Paul Dickson. The American from the Adlon.’

He hardly needed the introduction. His Old Spice and Virginia tobacco came ahead of him like a motorcycle outrider with a pennant on his mudguard. Solid footsteps bespoke sturdy wing-tip shoes that could have ferried him across the Delaware. The hand that pumped mine was part of a body that still consumed nutritious food. His sweet and minty breath smelled of real toothpaste and testified to his having access to a dentist with teeth in his head who was still a decade off retirement. And while it was dark I could almost feel his tan. As we exchanged cigarettes and conversational bromides, I wondered if the real reason Berliners disliked Americans was less to do with Roosevelt and his anti-German rhetoric and more to do with their better health, their better hair, their better clothes and their altogether better lives.

‘Willy said you’ve just come back from the front,’ he said, speaking German that was also better than I had expected.

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘Care to talk about it?’

‘Talking about it is about the only means of committing suicide for which I seem to have the nerve,’ I confessed.

‘I can assure you, sir, I am nothing to do with the Gestapo. If that’s what you’re implying. I dare say that’s exactly what someone who was a Gestapo informer would tell you. But to be quite frank with you there’s nothing they have that I want. Except perhaps a good story. I’d kill for a good story.’

‘Have you killed many?’

‘Frankly, I don’t see how I could have done. As soon as they know I’m an American most Berliners seem to want to hit me. They seem to hold me personally responsible for all the ships we’ve been giving to the British.’

‘Don’t worry; Berliners have never been interested in having a navy,’ I said. ‘That kind of thing matters more in Hamburg and Bremen. In Berlin, you can count yourself lucky that Roosevelt never gave the Tommies any beer or sausage, or you’d be dead by now.’ I pointed toward Potsdamer Platz. ‘Come on. Let’s walk.’

‘Sure,’ he said and followed me south out of the park. ‘Anywhere in particular?’

‘No. But I need a few minutes to address the ball, so to speak.’

‘Golfing man, huh?’

‘I used to play a bit. Before the Nazis. But it’s never really caught on since Hitler. It’s too easy to be bad at it, which is not something Nazis can deal with.’

‘I appreciate your talking to me like this.’

‘I haven’t told you anything yet. Right now I’m still wondering how much I can tell you without feeling like – what was his name? The traitor. Benedict—?’

‘Benedict Arnold?’

‘That’s right.’

We crossed Potsdamer onto Leipziger Platz.

‘I hope we’re not headed for the Press Club,’ said Dickson. ‘I’d feel like a bit of a fool if you took me in there to tell me your story.’ He pointed at a door on the other side of the square where several official-looking cars were parked. ‘I hear all kinds of bullshit in that place.’

‘You don’t say.’

‘Doctor Froehlich, the Propaganda Ministry’s liaison officer for the American media, he is always summoning us in there for special press conferences to announce yet another decisive victory for German forces against the Red Army. Him or one of those other doctors. Brauweiler or Dietrich. The doctors of deceit, that’s what we call them.’

‘Not forgetting the biggest deceiver of them all,’ I said. ‘Doctor Goebbels.’

Dickson laughed bitterly. ‘It’s got so bad that when my own doctor says there’s nothing wrong with me I just don’t believe him.’

‘You can believe him. You’re American. Provided you don’t do anything stupid, like declare war on Russia, most of you should live for ever.’

Dickson followed me across to Wertheim’s department store. In the moonlight you could see the huge map of the Soviet Union that occupied the main window, so that any patriotic German might look at it and follow the heroic progress of our brave armed forces. It wasn’t like there was anything else in the store to put in the window. When the place had been owned and run by Jews it had been the best store in Germany. Now it was little better than a warehouse, and an empty one at that. The shop assistants spent most of their time gossiping and ignoring the spectators – you could hardly call them customers – who wandered around the store in search of merchandise that simply wasn’t there. Even the elevators weren’t working.

There was no one on the sidewalk in front of the window and it seemed as good a place as any to tell the American radio journalist the truth about our great patriotic war against the Russians and the Jews.

‘Give me another one of your cigarettes. If I’m going to cough up the whole story I want something inside me to help it along.’

He handed me an almost full pack of American cigarettes and told me to keep it. I lit one quickly and let the nicotine go and play in my brain. For a moment I felt giddy and light-headed like it was the first time I ever smoked. But that was how it should have been. It wouldn’t have been right to have told Dickson about the police battalions and resettlement and special actions and the Minsk ghetto and pits that were full of dead Jews without feeling a little sick inside.

Which is exactly what I told him.

‘And you saw all of this?’ Now it was Dickson who sounded sick inside.

‘I’m a captain in the SD,’ I said. ‘I saw it all.’

‘Jesus. It’s hard to believe.’

‘You wanted to know. I told you. That’s how it is. Worse than you could possibly imagine. When they don’t let you go somewhere it’s because they can’t boast about what they’re doing. You could have worked it out for yourself. I’d be there right now but for the fact that I’m a bit particular about who I pull the trigger on. They sent me home, in disgrace. I’m lucky they didn’t send me to a punishment battalion.’

‘You were in the SD?’ Dickson sounded just a bit nervous.

‘Correct.’

‘That’s like the Gestapo, isn’t it?’

‘Not exactly. It’s the intelligence wing of the SS. The Abwehr’s ugly little sister. Like a lot of men in the SD, I came in through a side door marked No Bloody Choice. I was a policeman at the Alex before I was in the SD. A proper policeman. The kind who started out helping old ladies across the road. Not all of us make Jews clean the street with a toothbrush, you know. I want you to know that. Me, I’m a bit like Frankenstein’s monster with the little girl at the lake. There’s a part of me that really wants to make friends and to be good.’

Dickson was quiet for a moment. ‘No one back home is going to believe this,’ he said, eventually. ‘Not that I’d ever get it past the local Press Censor. This is the trouble with radio. You have to clear your copy in advance.’

‘So leave the country. Go home and buy a typewriter. Write it up in the newspapers and tell the world.’

‘I wonder if anyone would believe me.’

‘There is that. I can hardly believe it myself and I was there. I saw it. Every night I go to bed in the hope that I’ll wake up and find that I imagined the whole thing.’

‘Perhaps if you told another American besides myself. That would make the story more believable.’

‘No. That’s your problem, not mine.’

‘Look,’ said Dickson, ‘the man you should really meet is Guido Enderis. He’s the chief of the New York Times Berlin office. I think you should tell him what you just told me.’

‘I think I’ve talked enough for one evening. Odd but it makes me feel guilty in a whole new way. Before I only felt like a murderer. Now I feel like a traitor, too.’

‘Please.’

‘You know there’s a limit to how guilty I can feel before I want to throw up or jump in front of a train.’

‘Don’t do that, Captain – whatever your name is. The whole world needs to know what’s happening on the eastern front. The only way that’s going to happen is if people like you are willing to talk about it.’

‘And then what? Do you think it’s going to make a difference? If America’s not prepared to come in to the war for the sake of the British I can’t believe they’re going to do it for the sake of Russia’s Jews.’

‘Maybe, maybe not. But you know, sometimes one thing leads to another.’

‘Yeah? Look what happened back at Munich, in 1938. One thing led to absolutely nothing at all. And your lot weren’t even at the negotiating table. They were back home, pretending it was nothing to do with the USA.’

Dickson couldn’t argue with that.

‘How can I get in contact with you, Captain?’

‘You can’t. I’ll speak to Willy and leave a message with him if I decide I’m ready to puke another fur ball.’

‘If it’s a question of money—’

‘It’s not.’

Instinctively we both glanced up as another 109 came rifling in from the north-west and I saw the moon illuminate the anxiety on Dickson’s smooth face. When the sound was just a footnote on the horizon I heard him let out a breath.

‘I can’t get used to that,’ he confessed. ‘The way these fighters fly so low. I keep expecting to see something blow up on the ground in front of me.’

‘Sometimes I wish it would. But take my word for it: a fighter tends to buzz a little louder when it decides to sting.’

‘Talking of things blowing up,’ he said. ‘The Three Kings. You hear anything? Only, the doctors of deceit have been giving us the runaround. Back in May they said they had picked up two of the leaders and that it was only a matter of time before they got their hands on the third. Since when we’ve heard nothing. We keep asking, but no one says anything, so we figure that number three must still be at liberty. Any truth in that, you think?’

‘I really can’t say.’

‘Can’t or just won’t?’ A cloud drifted across the moon like something dark over my soul.

‘C’mon, Captain. You must know something.’

‘I’m just back from the Ukraine so I’m a little behind with what’s been happening here in Berlin. But if they’d caught Melchior, I think you’d have heard all about that, don’t you? Through a megaphone.’

‘Melchior?’

‘And I thought it was just the Germans who were a godless race.’

I walked away.

‘Hey,’ said Dickson. ‘I saw that movie, Frankenstein. And I remember that scene, now. Doesn’t the monster throw the little girl in the water?’

‘Yes. Sad isn’t it?’

I strolled south, down to Bülowstrasse, where I turned west. I might have walked all the way home but I noticed there was a hole in my shoe and at Nolli I decided to get on the S-Bahn. Normally I would have taken the tram, but the thirty-three was no longer running; and since it was after nine o’clock the only taxis around were those that were called by the police for the service of the sick, the lame, the old, or travellers from railway stations with heavy bags. And senior Nazi Party members, of course. They never had a problem getting a cab home after nine.

Nolli was almost deserted, which was not uncommon in the blackout. All you could see were occasional cigarette ends moving through the darkness like fireflies, or sometimes the phosphorescent lapel badge of someone keen to avoid a collision with another pedestrian; all you could hear were the trains as they moved invisibly in and out of the art nouveau glass dome of the station overhead, or disembodied voices, snatches of passing conversations as if Berlin was one big open-air séance – a ghostly effect that was enhanced by infrequent flashes of electric light from the rail track. It was as if some modern-day Moses – and who could have blamed him? – had stretched out his strong hand toward the sky to spread a palpable darkness over the land of Germany. Surely it was time to let the Israelites leave, or at least to release them from their bondage.

I was almost on the stairs when, from under the arches, I heard the sound of a struggle. I stopped for a moment, looked around and as a cloud shifted lazily off the moon I got a son et lumière view of a man attacking a woman. She was lying on the ground trying to fight him off as, with one hand over her mouth, he fumbled under her skirt. I heard a curse, a muffled scream and then my own footsteps as they clattered down the stairs.

‘Hey, leave her alone,’ I yelled.

The man appeared to punch the woman and as he stood up to face me I heard a click and caught a glimpse of the blade that was now in his hand. If I’d been on duty I might have been carrying a firearm but I wasn’t and as the man came toward me I shrugged the bread bag containing the food cans off my shoulder and swung it hard like a medieval ball and chain as he came within range. The bag hit him on his extended arm, knocking the blade out of his hand, and he turned and fled, with me in half-hearted pursuit. The moonlight dimmed momentarily and I lost sight of him altogether. A few moments later I heard a squeal of tyres from the corner of Motz Strasse and, arriving in front of the American Church, I found a taxi with its door open and the driver staring at his front fender.

‘He just ran out in front of me,’ said the driver.

‘You hit him?’

‘I didn’t have a chance.’

‘Well he’s not here now.’

‘He ran off I think.’

‘Where did he go?’

‘Toward the cinema theatre.’

‘Stay where you are; I’m a police officer,’ I told the driver and crossed the street, but I might as well have looked inside a magician’s top hat. There was no sign of him. So I went back to the taxi.

‘Find him?’

‘No. How hard did you hit him?’

‘I wasn’t going fast, if that’s what you mean. Ten or fifteen kilometres an hour, like you’re supposed to do, see? But still, I think I gave him a good old clunk. He went right over the hood and landed on his head, like he was off some nag at the Hoppegarten.’

‘Pull into the side of the road and stay there,’ I told the driver.

‘Here,’ he said. ‘How do I know you’re a cop? Where’s your warrant disc?’

‘It’s in my office at Alex. We can go straight there if you like and you can spend the next hour or two making out a report. Or you can do what I say. The fellow you knocked down attacked a woman back there. That’s why he was running away. Because I chased him. I was thinking you might take the lady home.’

‘Yeah, all right.’

I went back to the station on Nollendorfplatz.

The girl who’d been attacked was sitting up and rubbing her chin between adjusting her clothes and looking for her handbag.

‘Are you all right?’

‘I think so. My bag. He threw it on the ground somewhere.’

I glanced around. ‘He got away. But if it’s any consolation a taxi knocked him down.’

I kept on looking for her bag but I didn’t find it. Instead I found the switchblade.

‘Here it is,’ she said. ‘I’ve found it.’

‘Are you all right?’

‘I feel a bit sick,’ she said, holding her jaw uncomfortably.

I wasn’t feeling very comfortable myself. I didn’t have my beer-token and I had a bag full of canned food that, within the limited purview of a uniformed bull, would have marked me out as a black-marketeer, for which the penalties were very severe. It was not uncommon for Schmarotzers to receive death sentences, especially if these also happened to be people who needed to be made an example of, like policemen. So I was anxious to be away from there; no more did I want to accompany her to the local police station and report the matter. Not while I was still carrying the bread bag.

‘Look, I kept the taxi waiting. Where do you live? I’ll take you home.’

‘Just off the Kurfürstendamm. Next to the Theatre Centre.’

‘Good. That’s near me.’

I helped her along to the taxi, which was where I’d left it, on the corner of Motz Strasse, and told the driver where to go. Then we drove west along Kleist Strasse with the driver telling me in exhaustive detail just what had happened and how it wasn’t his fault and that he couldn’t believe the fellow he’d collided with hadn’t been more seriously injured.

‘How do you know he wasn’t?’

‘He ran off, didn’t he? Can’t run with a broken leg. Believe me, I know. I was in the last war and I tried.’

When we got to Kurfürstendamm I helped the girl out of the car and she was promptly sick in the gutter.

‘Must be my lucky night,’ said the taxi driver.

‘You’ve got a funny idea of luck, friend.’

‘That’s the only kind that’s going these days.’ The driver leaned out of the window and slammed the door shut behind us. ‘What I mean is, she could have been sick in the cab. And that Fritz I hit. I could have killed him, see?’

‘How much?’ I asked.

‘That all depends on whether you’re going to report this.’

‘I don’t know what the lady will want to do,’ I said. ‘But if I were you I’d get going before she makes up her mind.’

‘See?’ The driver put the taxi cab in gear. ‘I was right. It is my lucky night.’

Inside the building I helped the girl upstairs, which is when I got a better look at her.

She was wearing a navy-blue linen suit with a lace-cotton blouse underneath. The blouse was torn and a stocking was hanging down over one of her shoes. These were plumcoloured like her handbag and the mark under one of her eyes from when she’d been punched. There was a strong smell of perfume on her clothes and I recognized Guerlain Shalimar. By the time we reached her door I had concluded she was about thirty years old. She had shoulder-length blond hair, a wide forehead, a broad nose, high cheekbones, and a sulky mouth. Then again, she had a lot to feel sulky about. She was about 175 centimetres tall, and against my arm felt strong and muscular: strong enough to put up a fight when she was attacked but not strong enough to walk away without help. I was glad about that. She was good-looking in a catlike way with narrow eyes and a tail that seemed to have a whole life of its own and made me want to have her on my lap for a while so that I could stroke it.

She found a door key and fumbled for the lock until I caught her hand and steered the key into the Abus and turned it for her.

‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘I’ll be all right from here, I think.’

And but for the fact that she started to sit down on the floor I might have left her there. Instead I gathered her up in my arms and swung her through the door like an exhausted bride.

Advancing into the barely furnished hall I encountered the house guard dog: a barely dressed woman of about fifty with short, bottle-blond hair and more make-up than seemed strictly necessary outside of a circus tent. Almost at once and with a voice like Baron Ochs she started to reproach the half-conscious girl I was carrying for bringing disrespect upon her house, but from the going-over the landlady’s eyebrows were giving me much of that seemed to be directed my way. I didn’t mind that. For a while it made me feel quite nostalgic for my Army days when some ugly sergeant would chew my ear off for nothing but the hell of it.

‘What kind of house do you think I’m running here, Fräulein Tauber? You should be ashamed to even think of coming back here in such a state as this, with a strange man. I’m a respectable woman. I’ve told you about this before, Fräulein Tauber. I have my rules. I have my standards. This is not to be tolerated.’

All of this told me two things. One was that the woman in my arms was Fräulein Tauber. And the other was that I was hardly through protecting her from attack.

‘Someone tried to rape her,’ I said. ‘So you can either help or you can go and put on some more make-up. The end of your nose looks like it could use some red paint.’

‘Well, really,’ the landlady gasped. ‘There’s no need to be rude. Raped, you say. Yes, of course I’ll help. Her room is along here.’

She led the way down the hall, found a key from the bunch in the pocket of her sagging dressing gown, opened a door, and, switching on the ceiling light, illuminated a neat, well-furnished room that was cosier than a cashmere-lined leather glove, and about the same size.

I laid Fräulein Tauber down on a sofa of the kind that was only comfortable if you were wearing a whalebone corset, and kneeling at her feet I started to slap some life into her hands and face.

‘When she started working at the Golden Horseshoe I told her something like this might happen,’ said the old woman.

This was one of the few remaining nightclubs in Berlin and probably the least offensive, so the chain of causation that was being suggested was hardly obvious to me; but, containing any argument because I’d already been too rough on the woman, I asked her, politely, if she could fetch a cold compress and a cup of strong tea or coffee. The tea or coffee was a long-shot, but in an emergency there’s no telling what Berlin women can come up with.

Fräulein Tauber started to come around again and I helped her to sit up. Seeing me she smiled a half-smile.

‘Are you still here?’

The smile must have been painful because she flexed her jaw and then winced.

‘Just take it easy. That was quite a left hook he handed you. I’ll say one thing for you, Fräulein Tauber, you can take a punch.’

‘Yeah? Maybe you should manage my fights. I could use a big purse. How’d you know my name, anyway, Parsifal?’

‘Your landlady. She’s fetching a cold compress and a hot drink for that eye of yours. It’s just possible that we can stop it from going blue.’

Fräulein Tauber glanced over at the door and shook her head. ‘If she’s fetching me a hot drink you must have told her I was dying.’

The landlady returned with the cold compress and handed it to me. I laid it carefully on Fräulein Tauber’s eye, took her hand and laid it on top.

‘Keep some pressure on it,’ I told her.

‘There’s tea on the way,’ said the landlady. ‘I had just enough left for a small pot.’ She shrugged and gathered her dressing gown closer to a chest that was bigger than the cushions on the sofa.

I stood up, stretched a smile onto my face and offered the landlady one of my American cigarettes.

‘Smoke?’

The old woman’s eyes lit up like she was looking at the Koh-i-noor diamond.

‘Please.’ She took one tentatively, almost as if she thought that I might snatch it away again.

‘It’s a fair exchange for a cup of tea,’ I said, lighting her cigarette. I didn’t smoke one myself. I hardly wanted either of them thinking I was Gustav Krupp.

The old woman took an ecstatic puff of her cigarette, smiled and went back into the kitchen.

‘And here was me thinking you were just Parsifal. Looks like you’ve got the touch. Healing lepers is easier than raising a smile on her face.’

‘But I get the feeling she disapproves of you, Fräulein Tauber.’

‘You make that sound almost benign. Like my old schoolmistress.’ Fräulein Tauber laughed bitterly. ‘Frau Lippert – that’s her name – she hates me. If I was Jewish she couldn’t hate me more.’

‘And what’s your name? I can’t keep calling you Fräulein Tauber.’

‘Why not? Everyone else does.’

‘The man who attacked you. Did you get a good look at him?’

‘He was about your height. Dark clothes, dark eyes, dark hair, dark complexion. In fact everything about him was dark on account of the fact that it was dark, see? If I drew you a picture he’d look exactly like your shadow.’

‘Is that all you can remember about him?’

‘Come to think of it he had nice fruity breath. Like he’d been eating Haribos.’

‘It’s not much to go on.’

‘That all depends on where you were thinking of going.’

‘The man was trying to rape you.’

‘Was he? I guess he was.’

I shrugged. ‘Maybe you should report it. I don’t know.’

‘To the police?’

‘I certainly didn’t mean the newspapers.’

‘Women in this city get attacked all the time, Parsifal. Why do you think the police would be interested in one more?’

‘He had a knife, that’s why. He might have used it on you.’

‘Listen, mister, thanks for helping me. Don’t think I’m not grateful because I am. But I don’t much like the police.’

I shrugged. ‘They’re just people.’

‘Where did you get that idea? All right, Parsifal, I’ll spell it out for you. I work at the Golden Horseshoe. And sometimes the New World, when they’re not closed for lack of beer. I make an honest living but that won’t stop the cops from thinking otherwise. I can hear their patter now. Like it was a movie. You left the Horseshoe with a man, didn’t you? He’d paid you to have sex with him. Only you took his money and tried to dodge him in the dark. Isn’t that what really happened, Fräulein Tauber? Get out of here. You’re lucky we don’t throw you in Ravensbrück for being on the sledge.’

I had to admit she had a point. Berlin cops had stopped being people when they married into the Reich Main Security Office – the RSHA – and joined a Gothic-looking family that included the Gestapo, the SS and the SD.

‘Anyway,’ she added, ‘you don’t want the police buzzing in your ears any more than me. Not with your American cigarettes and all those cans in that bag of yours. No, I should think they might ask you some very awkward questions, which you don’t look able to answer.’

‘I guess you do have a point there, at that.’

‘Especially not wearing a suit like that.’

Her visible eye was giving me the up and down.

‘What’s wrong with it?’

‘Nothing. It’s a nice suit. And that’s the point. It doesn’t look like you’ve been wearing it very much lately. Which is unusual in Berlin for a man with your accent. Which makes me think you must have been wearing something else. Most likely a uniform. That would explain the cigarettes and your quaint opinions about the police. And the tin cans, for all I know. I’ll bet you you’re in the Army. And you’ve been in Paris, if that tie is what I think it is: silk. It matches your pre-war manners, Parsifal. Manners are something else you can’t get in Berlin any more. But every German officer gets to behave like a real gentleman when he’s stationed in Paris. That’s what I’ve heard, anyway. So, you’re not a professional blackie. Just an amateur blackie, making a little money on the side while you’re home on leave. This is the only reason you’re naïvely talking about the police and reporting what happened to me this evening.’

‘You should have been a cop yourself.’ I grinned.

‘No. Not me. I like to sleep at night. But the way things are going, before very long we’re all going to be cops whether we like it or not, spying on each other, informing.’ She nodded meaningfully at the door. ‘If you know what I mean.’

I didn’t say anything as Frau Lippert came back carrying a tray with two cups of tea.

‘That’s what I mean,’ added Fräulein Tauber in case I was too dumb to understand her the first time.

‘Drink your tea,’ I said. ‘It’ll help keep that eye down.’

‘I don’t see how.’

‘This is good tea,’ I told Frau Lippert.

‘Thank you, Herr—?’

‘That is, I don’t see how it can help a blue eye.’

I nodded, appreciating the interruption: it was Fräulein Tauber’s turn to help me. It wasn’t a good idea to tell Frau Lippert my name. I could see that now. The old woman wasn’t just the house guard dog; she was also the building’s Gestapo bloodhound.

‘Caffeine,’ I said. ‘It causes the blood vessels to constrict. You want to reduce the amount of blood that can reach your eye. The more blood that seeps out of the damaged capillaries on that lovely face of yours, the bluer your eye will get. Here. Let me have a look.’

I took away the cold compress for a moment and then nodded.

‘It’s not so blue,’ I said.

‘Not when I look at you, it’s not.’

‘Mmm-hmm.’

‘You know, you sound just like a doctor, Parsifal.’

‘You can tell that from mm-hmm?’

‘Sure. Doctors say it all the time. To me, anyway.’

Frau Lippert had been out of this conversation since it started and must have felt that it lacked her own imprimatur. ‘She’s right,’ said the old woman. ‘They do.’

I kept on looking at the girl with the cold compress in her hand. ‘You’re mistaken, Fräulein. It’s not mm-hmm your doctor is saying. It’s shorter, simpler, more direct than that. It’s just Mmm.’

I drained my tea cup and placed it back on the tray. ‘Mmm, thank you.’

‘I’m glad you liked it,’ said Frau Lippert.

‘Very much.’

I grinned at her and picked my bag of canned food off the floor. It was nice to see her smile back.

‘Well, I’d better be going. I’ll look in again sometime just to see you’re all right.’

‘There’s no need, Parsifal. I’m all right now.’

‘I like to know how all my patients are doing, Fräulein. Especially the ones wearing Guerlain Shalimar.’