A Dandy in Aspic

by Derek Marlowe

  “You really are rather silly,” Stein muttered, straightening his jacket. He opened the door and entered the next office.

  “Is that all you have to say?” said Eberlin approaching Stein again. “Just like that?”

  Stein stopped and sighed.

  “Herr Dancer, you are being abnormally insistent. May I suggest you leave now before I begin to make further inquiries about you. We are a very tolerant state but do not pressure us.”

  Eberlin hesitated, studied Stein’s face for a moment, then moved away.

  “If you wish to lodge a complaint, why not try your Consul? In West Berlin, that is. Unfortunately, by some oversight, there isn’t a British Consulate in the East. Good day, Herr Dancer.”

  And Eberlin left the room.

  * * *

  He sat in the train carrying him back to the center of West Berlin feeling like a master thief caught stealing apples by a farmer. It had the painful idiocy of that. In an oblique way, he had been chastised by Kuzmich, and sent away–told to be careful in future, warned of his position. And that, Eberlin knew too well, was dangerous. It soon became worse. The two opposing walls of his nightmare suddenly closed around him as if released by the same lever. For, leaving the train and returning solemnly to his hotel, he entered

  Lietzenburger-strasse and saw, double-parked outside the small Berliner-Kindl bar opposite his window, the familiar steel-blue Jensen with a dented fender. Two minutes later, he entered the room and saw Emmanuel Gatiss standing by the window, one hand clutching a half-eaten apple, the other holding the top of Caroline’s forgotten bikini. It was all Eberlin needed–this sudden concern by the British over his welfare. He closed the door slowly behind him.

  9

  Winterhilfe Whore

  Der Mensch ist frei der Vogel in Käfig; er kann sich

  innerhalb gewisser Grenzen bewegen.

  –LAVATER

  EBERLIN glanced at the cheap alarm clock on the mantelpiece and discovered that he had been sitting in silence, sitting on the bed dumbly, for almost half an hour. His body had grown stiff and one leg was almost asleep. Gatiss had said not a word since Eberlin’s return, but remained quietly, irritatingly relaxed, reading Goethe’s Young Werther in German. The situation was unbearable. What the hell was Gatiss doing here? Did they know after all? It was becoming a stupid farce. Eberlin suddenly got up, almost collapsing on one leg, and reached for the door.

  “Going out?” Gatiss said quietly, barely raising his eyes. Eberlin hesitated, then said, “I’m getting hungry.”

  “Good idea,” replied Gatiss. “Let’s ask them to send something up.”

  “I don’t think they do things like that at this hotel. It’s rather doit-yourself.”

  “Is it really?”

  Gatiss smiled and continued reading. Eberlin stood at the door for a moment, then sat back down on the bed. There was no point in avoiding the issue. If the worst had happened, he at least ought to know the odds. He lit a cigarette.

  “Fly?” he said.

  “Car,” was the answer. “Good journey?”

  “No.”

  “Why did you come then?”

  “This really is the most absurdly sentimental book. Have you read it?”

  “Yes, I have.”

  “I suppose he commits suicide in the end?”

  “Werther?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes,” replied Eberlin.

  Gatiss glanced across the room at Eberlin, then nodded and threw the book into the corner.

  “You’re an absolute failure, aren’t you?” he said, folding his arms.

  The question threw Eberlin for a moment and Gatiss smiled.

  “I mean,” he continued, “you’ve done nothing since you’ve been in Berlin, have you?”

  “Well, I–”

  “Have you found Krasnevin?”

  “No–”

  “Have you any idea where he is?”

  “No–”

  “What have you done then?”

  “It’s just not as straightforward as you think.”

  “How straightforward is it then?” said Gatiss. “Well, I didn’t have much of a lead, did I?”

  “Didn’t you?”

  “Well, to begin with–we don’t even know if he’s bloody well in Berlin.”

  “Oh he is, Eberlin. He is. You can be sure of that.”

  “You seem very confident about it.”

  “Well, I take my work seriously and never approach any aspect of it without being absolutely sure. Today, I was followed from the border, which encouraged me greatly. You may rest assured that I will find Krasnevin before the month is out. I will do it for two reasons: one, because the odds are in my favor, and two, because I hate this city and I hate all the people in it. The sooner I get out of this Auschwitz of a country the better, so the impetus is there. What was she like?”

  “Who?”

  Gatiss held up the bikini. “All right. She’s just–”

  “You’re a fool, Eberlin. Did you have to pick an English girl?”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “It’s written on the backside of this. I suppose you told her your name was Dancer.”

  “Yes.”

  “And when she bumps into you in London and calls you George before a host of puzzled intimates, you’ll wonder why you were demoted.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Was she a whore?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Look, Gatiss–who the hell asked you to burst in here? For Godsakes, it is quite obvious there is no love lost between us, so let’s avoid any vulgar bitching, shall we?”

  Throwing his head back, Gatiss suddenly burst into laughter. Eberlin stared at him, irritated for a moment, then got up and strode to the window. After a moment, Gatiss stood up and joined him and stared out at the street.

  “Tell me about the man in the shower.”

  Eberlin sat down and lit another cigarette, and gave a detailed account of the meeting with the Russian the night before, omitting his own remarks to Henderson but giving Gatiss an accurate description of the man. Gatiss listened without comment, then said:

  “Well, they know you’re here, which is interesting. But I’m surprised they would reveal themselves like that. Very amateurish. I don’t understand it. Did he say anything else?”

  “No, I’m afraid I didn’t give him much of a chance.”

  “It doesn’t matter. But it doesn’t make sense. The whole naïve approach of this man who calls himself Henderson. It’s almost as if he knew you.”

  “Why do you say that?” Eberlin said quickly.

  “Well, he obviously didn’t expect you to attack him, that’s for sure. When did you first suspect he wasn’t from us?”

  “Well, I didn’t exactly. It was a guess. I don’t know. I panicked.” Then Eberlin added suddenly: “He wasn’t from Frazer, was he?”

  “Good God, I hope not,” Gatiss laughed. “Well, that’s a relief.”

  “Where were you this morning?”

  “Oh, nowhere in particular.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I just went for a walk.”

  “Picking flowers?”

  Eberlin turned quickly toward Gatiss, was about to shout something but changed his mind. Gatiss coolly walked past him and took the Tokarev from his pocket and dropped it on the chair.

  “Get rid of that. Don’t leave it lying around.” And then:

  “I don’t like you, Eberlin. I don’t like you personally because you are weak and dishonest and pathetic and I deplore that. But more than that–I don’t like you because I don’t trust you. You’re frightened of me and that disturbs me. I want to know why. Frazer must have had some valid reason for putting you on this job, but I’m going out now to begin the work you should have finished. Don’t leave the hotel till I return. You take orders from me from now on. Understand?”

  Gatiss opened the door, went out, returned and said
, “Oh by the way, you received a call in London that your car was ready. Prentiss is driving it up. He’ll be here tomorrow probably. Guten Tag.”

  He closed the door again, leaving Eberlin standing tense and white-faced, in the pale gray light of the wretched, fading afternoon.

  * * *

  The third whore who approached him looked like Jean Harlow but was probably not. She was distinguishable by her bottle-blond hair that hung like washing around her head, and a magnificent pair of cabbage-white breasts, barely covered, which she exhibited to the world as if they were first prize in a raffle. Eberlin ignored her.

  It had taken him ten minutes of lethargic thought after Gatiss’ departure, and forty minutes of decisive action to arrive at this squalid tenement block in Kohlhaasstrasse. Above him, on the fourth floor, lay the offices (as he knew from the past) of Breysach, a minor and yet potent rival to the mercenary Gehlen organization. The building shuddered under its pressure of corrosive silence. Broken plaster hung everywhere and the floor was littered with discarded milk bottles. Eberlin had been told of the place many years ago by a stalwart bore, as the notorious but clandestine headquarters of an illegal smuggling company. It had been checked and dismissed. Three fatalities in a row on the Wall (one wretched creature having to submit to the indignity of a street dedicated to his dead name) had registered the organization as active yet harmless in the FJ files. This absurd irony was sufficient to allow Breysach to enlarge and become the second most profitable defection racket in West Berlin. Only Gehlen was superior, but with them even Faustus had a better deal.

  Eberlin lit a cigarette and attempted the second flight. “Hello, thugar,” Harlow lisped. (Camera-shutter wink.) Eberlin continued walking.

  “Buy me a drink?” she asked. (Linguaphone voice plus pout.)

  Eberlin made the question rhetorical and wondered if Greiser would still be there. He had played dominoes with him once and had lost. It was an amusing pastime.

  “I’m the betht in the houth.”

  God help the others. Eberlin turned, glared at her, muttered some veiled obscenity and moved toward the next flight.

  The girl, defeated, retired. (Plate-balancing nose.)

  By the fourth floor, Eberlin was breathing hard. He put it down to lack of exercise for convenience and walked to a corner door marked, in small faded capitals, WINTERHILFE. Nothing ever changed. He knocked twice and waited. After two minutes, more or less, the door was opened by a myopic spinster in a quandary and bun who stared blandly at him and said:

  “Ja?”

  A slight smile and a bow from Eberlin. “Guten Tag. Herr Greiser?”

  “Who?”

  “Herr Greiser? I have come to the right place I presume.”

  The woman blinked in reply and hurried back to the apron strings of her office. Undeterred, Eberlin walked to the edge of the landing and stared down into the well of the tenement, spiraling below into a darkness of mundanity. He could see the platinum-blond whore still there, talking to a co-worker and gesturing like a semaphore instructor. She really had remarkable breasts seen from this angle, and yet painfully bracketed and laced under the thin dress. Eberlin in a fit of conscious reverie imagined her in a cot, naked and plaster-white, lisping into his ear the plagiarized suadela of the hack.

  “Would you come this way please?” came a diminished-seventh voice from the door and he was led into a green and white, cell-like room filled with nothing.

  “Wait here please. Your name?”

  “Dancer. Herr Dancer, but he–”

  “Do you have an appointment?”

  “No. But I–”

  “I see.”

  “We are old friends. If you could just persuade him to appear.”

  “Herr Greiser is very busy.”

  “No doubt. But I can wait.”

  The woman glared at him with overt resentment. Then: “One moment. I will see.”

  She left via a door next to an immense filing cabinet that dominated the room like a Buddha. Eberlin walked slowly up and down, glancing out of the window briefly at a tasteless vista of slums, and lit yet a further cigarette. Finally, after five more minutes, a small blue-chinned man in a suit that obviously belonged to his tailor, entered the room and stared in abject puzzlement at his visitor. Behind him, like altar boys, hovered three other people, including the secretary, their faces aping Greiser’s expression.

  “You wanted to see me?”

  The answer had to be negative. Negative, at least, because this wasn’t Greiser. At least not the Greiser Eberlin knew. No feasible metamorphosis could resolve such an appearance. The hostile old man before him was a stranger.

  “You are Herr Greiser?” Eberlin asked, stubbing out his cigarette on the carpet.

  “That is correct. Who are you?”

  “Herr Josef Geiser?” Eberlin insisted.

  “No. My name is Oskar Greiser. What is it you want?”

  All eyes turned toward Eberlin and the room went cold. A door opened miles away, two floors down, and he heard a man laugh and a snatch of English pop music and then silence.

  “Perhaps,” he offered defensively, “Herr Josef Greiser is a relation. A … brother?”

  “There is no Josef in my family. Good day.”

  And, Mass over, Greiser scuttled back into the next room and left Eberlin alone and resentful with the secretary. He attempted a smile of apology but it died in embryo.

  “I must have made a mistake. But you must have heard of Josef Greiser?”

  “Never.”

  “But he was in this building as little as four years ago.”

  “There is no Josef Greiser here,” the woman snapped and strode to the landing door. “Please leave quietly. This is a private establishment.”

  Eberlin frowned, confused, and then reluctantly ambled to the door. He glanced at the secretary coldly and then said with all the enthusiasm of a eunuch:

  “Tell me when you’re on duty and perhaps we could make a night of it.”

  He didn’t wait for an answer. Instead he pushed past her and was on the second flight before he heard the door bang behind him and realized the full impact of the scene. Greiser, his Greiser, had left and he had no knowledge where he had gone. Times had changed and his best and, more important, most secure inlet into the East had been smashed. There was little room for frivolity.

  “Help,

  I need thomebody”

  trilled the whore on the flight below and Eberlin groaned. He hunched his shoulders and plunged down toward the ground floor

  “Not jutht anybody, Help …”

  The whore was standing in the middle of the broken staircase staring up at him with the smile of an executioner. Eberlin made no attempt to relax his speed but shouldered past her, one elbow sinking momentarily into fleshy bosom, and hurried out, deaf to the cries, into the dim deserted street. He covered two blocks before he slowed his pace, and took stock of his environment. Kohlhaasstrasse is a walk-on as far as credits in the street maps are concerned, and so rarely mentioned. Consequently, it was difficult to find a taxi in that quarter, save in the early hours when uniformed drunks and faithful husbands disgorged themselves into the loins of the numerous brothels recommended to them by no one.

  Eberlin paused halfway down the street, numbed by the experience, and regretted the absence of a coat. He tried vaguely to remember another contact, but the name–if there ever was one–did not occur. He sighed reluctantly and began to walk, hands in pockets, toward Mehringdamm, quickening his step after a hundred yards as if to shrug off his disappointment. “Hello, thugar,” he muttered to himself for no apparent reason and cursed audibly. And then, to his horror, found he was shaking like a dog.

  * * *

  ‘Eine grosses bier, bitte, und ein Korn,” he muttered to the owner of a nearby bar.

  The drinks were served and he drank them thirstily and ordered another round. And then another six rounds in succession. And then a seventh for a drunk who bored but distracted him, and whom he
found, on the eighth round, was himself. Finally, feeling as sober as a judge, Eberlin paid the bill, turned, collapsed into a door marked PULL and vomited absurdly all over the newly scrubbed easy-to-lay, black and white tiles on the beer-room floor. It was all, he thought, staring up at a print of the Rokeby Venus, such a pathetic failure. He made a dignified attempt to rise but vomited again onto the shoes of the barman and wanted to die. It was only the utter tastelessness of the decor, and that bunch of plastic roses (pink and yellow) over his head that changed his mind. Anyone, he thought before he passed out, anyone is worthy of more than that.

  * * *

  He awoke one hour later to find himself lying on the pavement and without his wallet. He lay there, feeling like death, for a full minute before he realized where he was. Around him the street was empty and alien to him. Yet, by the dismal architecture of the houses and the scattered squalor, he assumed himself to be in the same quarter as the whore-house The whorehouse! What a farce that was. And yet …

  He stood up cautiously and discovered that he was pleasantly alert, despite the acrid stink of vomit on his trousers. Twenty past eight. Or had his watch stopped? No, twenty past eight. Why did his watch always read twenty minutes past the hour? Eberlin peered around him and then, anxious to reach the hotel before Gatiss returned, set off at a steady stride in what he hoped was the direction of Schöneberg, He had barely walked a quarter of a mile when the Porsche drew up beside him.

  At first Eberlin ignored it, thinking it belonged to a resident. But when the car emphasized its presence by crawling parallel to him, he hurried faster until he was ahead of it. Before him he could see the lights of a busy street which encouraged him greatly, and the Porsche was momentarily forgotten. Then suddenly he was aware of footsteps hurrying after him, and of his name being called:

  “Herr Dancer? Herr Dancer, bitte?”

  Eberlin turned and saw a tall man, built like a boxer and yet with an almost girlishly pretty face, running toward him with a large smile and one hand raised as if in a primitive gesture of peace. Eberlin recognised him immediately as belonging to the Herr Greiser he had just met. He had hovered elegantly in the background, like a figure in Primavera, during that cryptic but brief interview two hours before.