The One from the Other

NINETEEN

One of the nurses was from Berlin. Her name was Nadine. We got along just fine. She’d lived on Güntzelstrasse, in Wilmersdorf, which was very close to where I had once lived, on Trautenaustrasse. We had been practically neighbors. She had worked at the Charité Hospital, which is where she had been raped by twenty-two Ivans in the summer of 1945. After that she lost her enthusiasm for the city and moved to Munich. She had a rather refined, almost noble face, a high-set neck, big shoulders, and a long, strong back and correctly formed legs. She was built like an Oldenburg mare. She was calm, with a pleasant temper, and, for some reason, she liked me. After a while I liked her, too. It was Nadine who got a message to little Faxon Stuber, the export cabdriver, asking him to visit me in hospital.

“My God, Gunther,” he said. “You look like last week’s sauerkraut.”

“I know. I should be in hospital. But what can you do? A man has to earn a living, right?”

“I couldn’t agree more. And that’s why I’m here, I hope.”

Without further ado I directed him to the closet where my clothes were hanging and the wallet in the inside pocket and the ten red ladies that were waiting there.

“Find them?”

“Red ladies. My favorite kind of gal.”

“There are ten of them and they’re yours.”

“I don’t kill people,” he said.

“I’ve seen the way you drive and it’s only a matter of time, my boy.”

“But assume you’ve got my attention.”

I told him what I wanted to do. He had to sit close to my bed to hear what I was saying because my voice was sometimes very faint. I sounded like a frog in the Flying Dutchman’s throat.

“Let me get this straight,” he said. “As well as the other, I wheel you out, drive you to where you want to go, and drive you back here. Right?”

“It’ll be visiting time so no one will even know that I’m gone,” I told him. “Plus, we’ll be wearing builder’s overalls. I’ll just slip them over my pajamas. Builders are invisible in this city. What’s the matter? You look like a cat creeping around the milk.”

“If it tastes funny it’s because I don’t see you going out of here in anything other than a wooden box, Gunther. You’re a sick man. I’ve seen stronger-looking crane-flies. You wouldn’t make it as far as the car park.”

“I already thought of that,” I said and showed him a little bottle of red liquid I had been hiding under the bedclothes. “Methamphetamine. I stole it.”

“And you think this will put you back on your feet?”

“Long enough to do what I need to do,” I said. “They used to give it to Luftwaffe pilots during the war. When they were exhausted. They were flying and they didn’t even need a plane.”

“All right,” he said, folding away the red ladies. “But if you wander off or tip over don’t expect me to handle the porterage. Sick or not you’re still a big man, Gunther. Josef Manger couldn’t pick you up. Not if his Olympic gold medal depended on it. And another thing. From what I’ve heard, that ox-blood is apt to make a man gabby. But I don’t want to know, see? Whatever it is that you’re hatching, I don’t want to know. And the minute you tell me, I’ll feel free to brush you off. Clear?”

“As clear as a half bottle of Otto,” I said.

Stuber grinned. “It’s all right,” he said. “I didn’t forget.” He took a half liter of Fürst Bismarck out of his pocket and slipped it under my pillow. “Just don’t drink too much of that stuff. Grain schnapps and an armful of ox-blood might not mix too well. I don’t want you throwing up in my taxi like some stinking Popov.”

“You don’t have to worry about me, Faxon.”

“I’m not worried about you. If I look like I’m worried about you it’s because I’m worried about me. It doesn’t look like it, but there’s a big difference, see?”

“Sure, I understand. It’s what the shrinks call a gestalt.”

“Yeah, well, you’d know more about that than me, Gunther. From what I’ve heard so far, you probably want your head examined.”

“We all do, Faxon, my boy. We all do. Haven’t you heard of collective guilt? You’re as bad as Joseph Goebbels, and me, I’m just as bad as Reinhard Heydrich.”

“Reinhard who?”

I smiled. It was true, Heydrich had been dead for more than seven years. But it was just a little disconcerting to discover Stuber had never heard of him. Maybe he was younger than I had supposed.

Either that or I was a lot older than I felt. Which hardly seemed possible.