Two Brothers

Young Entrepreneurs Berlin, 1923

THE KID WHO approached Wolfgang at the bar was eighteen years old and looked younger. In one hand he held a bottle of Dom Pérignon, and in the other a solid gold cigarette case with a large diamond at its centre. The arm that held the bottle was clamped around the pencil-thin waist of a fashionably bored-looking girl with quite the severest ‘bobbed’ haircut Wolfgang had ever seen. A shining black helmet with a high straight fringe cut at an angle across her forehead, and a crimped wave at the sides that reached barely beyond her ears. An extremely striking ‘look’, both forbidding and alluring at the same time. Which was more than could be said for the young man, who at first glance struck Wolfgang as a complete pain in the ass.

‘You there! Jazz man, Mr Trumpet!’ the youth brayed. ‘I’d like a word.’

Wolfgang glanced at him but said nothing.

There were so many of them in Berlin that fruitcake summer. Kids, stupidly young and completely ridiculous, with their money, their selfconsciously loud chatter and their drunken arrogance.

Downy-cheeked boys in faultless evening dress, hair brilliantined straight back into a hard shell. Sometimes a hint of rouge on their lips, it being suddenly fashionable to look a bit queer.

And the girls, so sophisticated and world weary at all of eighteen. With their Bubikopf and Herrenschnitt hairdos, smokily made-up eyes and the newly fashionable, sheath-like, waistless dresses hanging from their bony, boyish frames.

Germany’s new kindergarten entrepreneurs, crazy alcohol-and drug-fuelled chancers. The Raffke and the Schieber — spiffs, gamblers, profiteers and thieves. Teenage wideboys in coffee bars dealing in shares, setting up private banks amongst the cakes and coffee cups. Buying up the treasured possessions of war widows for a few loaves of bread, then selling them to French soldiers in the Ruhr for foreign currency.

The youth who was approaching Wolfgang at the bar was young even by the topsy-turvy standards of the great inflation. He looked as if he had borrowed his father’s tuxedo for a school dance and got his mother to tie his tie.

‘Hello, Daddy,’ the young man said with a broad smile. ‘I’m Kurt and this divine creature is Katharina. Hey! Kurt and Katharina. Sounds like a song! Kurt and Katharina, flew in from Sardinia! Not bad. You can have that if you like. Just needs a tune. Say hello to Mr Trumpet, baby.’

The girl gave Wolfgang a cool nod, which may or may not have included the tiniest hint of a smile. Or perhaps it was a sneer. It was difficult to tell with a girl so clearly intent on remaining sultry and enigmatic.

Wolfgang wondered whether she practised such studied mystery in her dressing-room mirror when she was applying all that dark shadow to her large grey eyes and teasing the lashes to twice the length nature intended them to be. She looked a little older than Kurt, perhaps as ancient as nineteen or even twenty. At all of twenty-five, Wolfgang felt ancient.

‘Hello, Katharina,’ he said. ‘Pleased to meet you.’

‘Look but don’t touch, Mr Trumpet!’ Kurt admonished, wagging a heavily bejewelled finger. ‘This hotsy-totsy baby already found her daddy.’

Wolfgang smiled at the boy’s absurd posturing but he was secretly annoyed that his appreciation of the girl had been so obvious. Katharina herself gave Kurt a look of such endless and absolute contempt that Wolfgang could only wonder how the youth did not shrivel up into a heap of ashes inside his suit.

‘We often breeze into this particular gin mill,’ he went on, ‘me and my crowd. It’s our favourite dive. Do you want to know why?’

Wolfgang was about to remark that frankly he could live without that information. He had only stopped at the bar on his way out for a quick cigarette and a shot of whisky against the night chill, and was in no particular mood for drunken intimacies from complete strangers. Particularly teenage ones.

But there was something undeniably compelling about this young peacock, if only his immense self-satisfaction. Also, if Wolfgang was honest, he had no objection to spending a few moments longer under the cool appraisal of Katharina’s smoky gaze.

‘I imagine you’re going to tell me anyway. So put me out of my misery. Why do you come to this particular gin mill, Kurt?’

‘Well—’

‘I’m dry,’ Katharina interrupted in a lazy drawl, tapping a long, black-painted fingernail on the rim of her empty glass. Kurt, whose gushing joie de vivre was as unaffected by being ignored as it was by being derided, happily poured out the last of his champagne into Katharina’s glass and then called for another bottle.

‘Make sure it’s French, mind!’ he shouted, putting real American dollars on the bar, ‘and another malt scotch for my friend.’

As Katharina raised her glass to her lips, the wispy silk of her dress rippled against her breasts. It was as if a naked girl had walked through a cobweb.

Once more Wolfgang tried not to stare.

‘Light me,’ she said, helping herself to one of Wolfgang’s American cigarettes that were lying beside his drink. ‘I like a Lucky. They’re toasted, you know.’

Wolfgang struck a match on the sole of his shoe and held it up for her. She touched his hands as she leant forward to place the tip of her cigarette into the flame. The light flared, highlighting her fine cheekbones and casting shadows across her temples.

‘We come here,’ Kurt said finally, ‘if I might be allowed to get a word in edgeways, because of the music. And more to the point, Mr Trumpet, because of you.’

‘Thanks a lot,’ Wolfgang said, draining the double shot he’d been given in one gulp. ‘Well, I’m here each night, and all paying customers are welcome.’

‘You are very hot,’ Katharina said slowly, and for a moment she fixed her heavily lidded eyes upon his, gazing unblinkingly into them through the smoke that curled up from her purple-painted lips. ‘I like trumpet players. They know how to coordinate their mouths and fingers.’

Wolfgang actually blushed at this and Kurt roared with laughter.

‘Stop flirting, you goofy Dora!’ he shouted, slapping Katharina’s bottom. ‘I’m doing business here.’

‘Really?’ Katharina replied. ‘OK, well here’s some business for you, sonny: give me fifty American dollars now or try and find another girl as beautiful as me to make you look like a man instead of the damned little schoolboy that you are. And don’t ever slap my ass again.’

Kurt giggled foolishly. ‘Isn’t she a scream? Too too cruel. It’s what I love. I must be a masochist.’

Then to Wolfgang’s astonishment, Kurt took out a gold money clip and counted out five US ten-dollar bills, which Katharina took without a smile or even a nod of acknowledgement. Then raising her slim coltish leg on to the foot of a bar stool, she briskly pulled the hem of her dress along her thigh and slipped the money into her garter.

Her eyes flipped up and caught Wolfgang staring.

‘I’m afraid my dress doesn’t have any pockets,’ she said.

Wolfgang gulped. He needed to get home.

‘Business?’ he said quickly, trying to pretend it had been the hard currency and not Katharina’s leg he’d been looking at. ‘What business are you doing and what’s it got to do with me?’

‘You’re the fixer in this juice joint, am I right?’ Kurt enquired. ‘You book the band, do the sheets and work out the set list?’

‘Yes, they’re all my arrangements. I do it all.’

‘Well, I like what you do, Daddy. I’m starting up my own club and I want you to fix for me.’

Wolfgang tried not to laugh.

‘You? Starting up a club? Forgive me, Kurt, but how old are you?’

‘I’m eighteen.’

‘He’s seventeen,’ said Katharina.

‘I’m using the Russian calendar,’ Kurt shot back, ‘out of solidarity with the murdered Romanovs.’

Wolfgang laughed. The kid certainly had charm.

‘They shouldn’t even let you in a club, let alone buy one,’ he said.

‘They let in anyone with dollars,’ Kurt pointed out. ‘I have a lot of dollars. And francs and gold sovereigns. Anything you want. Come and join me at my table. Meet my friends, we can discuss it.’

Wolfgang looked across the crowded room towards where Kurt was nodding. Kurt’s friends looked almost as young as he was.

‘Shouldn’t you all be studying for college or something?’

‘There is nothing old people can teach us. Absolutely nothing,’ Kurt said with a weary shrug, ‘except how to crawl. How to starve. How to sit about wishing that it was still 1913 until you curl up and die. We know more already than those stupid old bastards ever knew, which is why we’re drinking French champagne and listening to hot jazz while they queue for soup or march about the streets in tin helmets looking for Jews to shoot. Come on, I want you to meet my friends.’

Perhaps it was Kurt’s money that made Wolfgang linger. Perhaps it was his girlfriend. Either way he allowed himself to be led over to the table where Kurt’s ‘crowd’ was seated and where he was greeted with enthusiastic applause.

‘This is Hans,’ Kurt said, referring to an athletic-looking young man with a thin Douglas Fairbanks moustache, which Wolfgang suspected had been beefed up with mascara. ‘One year ago he failed his final Latin exam, now he deals in automobiles.’

‘Anything from a Flivver to a Roller,’ Hans boasted, slurring his words somewhat. ‘You want it, I’ll get it. Take my card. Discount for a man who plays like you.’

Wolfgang explained that he was happy with his bicycle but took the card anyway, noticing that Hans’s pupils were mere pinpricks. There was also a girl slumped on his shoulder, dead to the world.

‘This is Dorf,’ Kurt went on, ignoring the unconscious girl and indicating a bookish-looking man with horn-rimmed spectacles sitting on the other side of her. ‘He’s in currency, his father thinks he should be studying law.’

‘He wants me to be an articled clerk when I’m twenty-one,’ Dorf said primly, ‘which is rather funny actually because, without me, my old man would starve! Mother doesn’t tell him of course.’

Kurt and Hans both laughed at this, causing the girl between them to begin to slide slowly under the table. Hans put an arm across her to arrest her progress.

‘And here’s Helmut,’ Kurt said, referring to a beautiful blond youth with piercing blue eyes that matched his cobalt blue earrings. ‘He’s what you might call—’

‘A queer pimp,’ Katharina interrupted.

‘Actually I was going to say a social consultant,’ Kurt said.

‘I prefer queer pimp,’ Helmut remarked archly, at which there was more laughter, and once more Hans’s girl had to be set up straight.

‘So now you know my friends, Mr Trumpet. They’re all big fans of yours.’

Again there was applause.

‘You haven’t said what you do?’ Wolfgang asked. ‘What’s your game, Kurt?’

‘Well, as I mentioned before, amongst other things I am a club owner,’ Kurt replied.

‘Oh? Which club do you own?’

‘I haven’t decided yet. Maybe this one, or one of the others. Perhaps all of them, we shall see.’

‘So you don’t own them yet?’

‘Details. Details. I’ll get them if I want them.’

‘How will you get them, Kurt?’ Wolfgang asked, wishing he could think of a smart way to cut this cocksure youth down to size, but uncomfortably aware that Kurt would not even notice if he did.

‘Improvise, of course! Like the good little jazz kid that I am… In fact,’ Kurt went on, clearly delighted with this image, ‘that’s what I do! I’m a jazz economist. I improvise. You borrow notes. And so do I! Banknotes! Isn’t that a scream?’

‘But where do you borrow them from?’

‘The same place you get yours! Thin air! I borrow what I need on the security of the thing I’m buying and pay off the loan next week when it’s worth a thousand times less. Anyone could do it.’

‘Why don’t they, then?’

‘Why don’t you?’

Wolfgang knew Kurt was right. He could do it. He could buy anything he wanted. Anything at all. He just had to have the guts. The sheer chutzpah to borrow enough to do it. It didn’t really even take guts, because with money depreciating so quickly debt was just an illusion.

Anyone could do it.

But it was only people like Kurt who actually did.

And the big boys of course. The industrialists who were manipulating the same situation as Kurt, except they were buying whole industries while Kurt bought only champagne and drugs.

And in the meantime everybody else was trying to work out where their next meal was coming from.

Which reminded Wolfgang he needed to get home so Frieda could go to the markets. The wages in his pocket were depreciating at the same speed as Kurt’s debt. By simply standing right there, he was getting poorer while Kurt got richer.

‘I’ll tell you what,’ Wolfgang said, draining his glass and putting it on the table, ‘you buy your club and make me an offer. If it’s a good one, then I’ll be your fixer. Meantime I really do think I should be getting home.’

Katharina was standing beside him at the table and he had felt her hand brush against his more than once. He was pretty sure that she knew it too. Hands didn’t brush against each other more than once by accident.

Which was rather exciting.

And also why he needed to get home.

Wolfgang had never been short of female admirers, girls made eyes at him all the time. He was good-looking and, more importantly, he was a jazz man and the jazz babies loved nothing better, particularly trumpet players.

Usually Wolfgang was entirely resistant. Immune to the coquettish glances of over-excited flappers on the dance floor. He was happy to look at their shaking, shimmying bottoms and swinging breasts bouncing in front of his little stage in their next-to-nothing dresses, but he was not tempted to touch. Katharina, however, was different. She had truly caught his eye, and that was dangerous, because he seemed to have caught hers.

‘I’ll be playing here tomorrow night,’ Wolfgang said to Kurt matter-of-factly, ‘you can speak to me then.’

‘If you’re playing here tomorrow night,’ Kurt said, ‘then I’ll already be your boss. So I certainly will speak to you.’

This splendid piece of bravado elicited further cheers and much table thumping from Kurt’s friends, the vibrations of which caused the unconscious girl to finally slide fully under the table.

Wolfgang shook Kurt’s hand and nodded briefly at Katharina. Her face remained as cool and impassive as ever as she nodded back, a brief, dismissive farewell.

And then, as if on impulse, she leant forward and kissed him on the mouth. For one brief moment her lips were alive against his, he felt the waxy quality of her lipstick and smelt the perfume in her hair. Then, just as abruptly, she stepped back, her face a mask once more.

‘You see!’ Kurt shouted. ‘Told you she was flirting. You’re honoured — she never kisses me goodbye.’

‘You don’t play trumpet,’ Katharina said, smiling properly for the first time.

‘Yes, well,’ Wolfgang said, trying to regain his composure. ‘Like I say, got to go. Wife and kids at home and all that.’

He said this last sentence for Katharina’s benefit. He didn’t normally talk about his domestic status at work. Too humdrum. Not very jazz.

Which was why he said it now. He wanted to make Katharina aware at once, because she had disturbed him, and in his experience nothing dampened a jazz baby’s libido quicker than mention of the wife and kids.

‘Give Frau Trumpet our love,’ Kurt said.

‘Yes, yes I will.’

He needed to get home.