In an attempt to lift a corner of his gloom, he listened to the conversation of the soldiers at the next table, heads together like chuckling conspirators, and then wished he hadn't. They were describing their latest sojourn with a Jewish prostitute. "Big-nosed bronco busting," one called it, trying for an American cowboy inflection. "They can't get enough of it. Not when we start poking them."
The conversation sickened Erich, though he knew he should be used to it. The Jewesses who worked the alleys had no other choice. Those who did not do it for food, did it in a desperate attempt to help rescue loved ones from work camps--begging for something as simple as a letter forwarded to the right authority. Like Miriam with me, Erich thought, annoyed with himself for making the comparison. Except Solomon really isn't incarcerated.
"I left her tied up, back there," the soldier went on. "Ready for the next one." His laughter, ringing hollow in the otherwise quiet cabaret, chilled Erich. Back there. There were prostitutes in here now? Not that there hadn't always been a working girl or two among the tables, but this was different. These were...Slaves.
Back there, beat within his brain.
They had a Jewish woman, perhaps several, tied up in the back rooms. Maybe even in Miriam's former dressing room, the one with the tawdry, half-peeled star on the door. Is that what it had stood for all these years...a Star of David?
His throat felt parched, and his heart thudded. He rose, quivering with rage, turned to face the soldiers, and saw the ratty high heels sticking up from beneath the tablecloth as a woman serviced the service man.
A pressure burrowed up his spine and hit the base of his skull. His head jerked back. "I--I'm sorr-sorry about Urs-ula," he said over his shoulder. In some part of his mind, unaffected by the lightning seizure that held him, the illogic of it all pulsed like a heavy Latin beat. Sexual union between Germans and Jews was forbidden, but rape of Jewesses and Jewish boys was condoned if not encouraged.
He stood, everything off-kilter. He watched the grins of the soldiers drain and the glazed eyes of the one receiving fellatio change from glassy to fearful.
"W-what is an arm-army without hon...without honor," Erich stammered, knowing that they would think him drunk. "J-ust l-look at you. W-what have we be-become."
In a single movement, he approached the table, bent down, and tugged at the legs of the woman underneath. She allowed herself to be drawn forth, but made no attempt to stand.
"Get out of here," Erich said softly. "And don't ever come back."
On impulse, he dug into his shirt pocket, pulled out the diamond bracelet, and dropped it onto the woman. Then, trembling, unable to catch his breath, he stumbled backward toward the door, careful not to turn his back on the young soldiers.
He yanked his cap from the hat-check girl's extended hands, and shouldered his way outside into a gloomy, overcast winter morning. Taurus gained her feet awkwardly, wagging her tail despite the pain of her dysplasia. He wanted to sag to his knees and wrap his arms around her neck but felt unworthy of her affection. Against the pole, Hawk too seemed apart from him, as though leaning away from his attention, a prize he did not deserve.
The door opened behind him. When Müller put a tentative hand on his shoulder, he did not pull away or otherwise resist the familiarity, though the corporal clearly was over the limits of military protocol. "Are you all right, Herr Major? You went white as a ghost."
Erich took a deep breath to slow his pounding heart. "I-I'm fine. Thanks for asking, Oberschütze M-Müller."
"Do you need to go back inside?"
"I'll never g-go back inside."
"Nor I." Müller held the bike while Erich unchained it. "And to think," he said, face flushed with the knowledge that he was out of line, "that I used to be proud to call myself a soldier," he finished.
"I understand. Only too well," Erich said, grateful that he had stopped stammering. He looked up at the marquee. "We need a nightclub without...without women."
"Where we can be ourselves," Müller finished, a look of finality and defeat on his face. "I think I need to walk," he said. "A long walk. Somewhere beyond the sun." He stuck his hands in his pockets and, softly whistling "Mack the Knife," walked away.
Erich lit a cheroot and dragged deeply. He knew he had to do something to slough off his anger over Ananas and his anguish about Ursula, though what he was not sure. He mounted the bike and pedaled around the corner into the early morning traffic, Taurus close beside him. Drivers, perhaps seeing his uniform, cautiously veered around him.
He steered down a side street--his old neighborhood--and the answer stared right at him. Visiting the butcher shop had always been a favorite part of his times with Taurus--a simple enough pleasure, and one that would certainly cheer him up now.
He stopped before the butcher's, chained his bicycle to a pole, and mentally commanded Taurus to "Stay." Taurus lay on the stoop, her head on the doorway threshold, eyeing the meat hanging behind the crescent-shaped counter. Half a pig, complete with snout and tail, dangled from a hook in the corner in full view of the customers because Faussan, the butcher, liked to perform his artistry as much as possible in public. His meat was, he claimed, the best in Berlin, and the show was good for business.
Good for his ego, Erich thought, standing before the counter and studying the meat beneath the fingerprint-smeared glass. He had rescued his first dog, Bull, from the alley behind the shop--rescue being the operative word, since Bull had clearly been slated for someone's dinner table...not an unusual event in the lean times following the Great War. The rescue grew more noble, and his frustration greater, with each retelling.
That had been the dog his father drowned. For Erich, father and butcher had become one. He hated them equally, and suspected that he returned to this particular shop so often to torment the owner.
Their encounter was always the same:
"Something I can get for you, Herr Major?" A tired voice, for surely the butcher knew what the answer would be.
"No dogs or cats today, no human flesh?"
"That's not funny, Herr Major." Followed by a whack of the cleaver. The man's paunch--so evident twenty years before--was gone, but the inevitable cigarette still peeked out from behind one ear. It was balanced with a pencil behind the other, announcing him to be a man of revenue. "That's not funny at all."
No Berlin butcher liked being reminded that Carl Grossman, who specialized in picking up peasant girls from the train station, or Georg Haarmann, who specialized in picking up orphan boys wandering around the station, had both been city butchers--and in more than one sense of the word. Grossman maintained he had not killed and cannibalized over two dozen women, until detectives agreed to let him confess the murders to his pet bird, which seemed not at all ill at ease sitting on his shoulder. Haarmann was mild-mannered, soft-spoken; during rape, he would tear out his victim's throat with his teeth, then boil and neatly package the result. Both men did a brisk wholesale business: Grossman in several local shops, Haarmann on the black market. After their confessions, there was, according to the papers, furtive inspections of larders and meat jars, furtive vomiting.
Today, as usual, the shop smelled of blood--the sawdust that covered the floor was clumped where droplets had fallen--but Faussan was not present.
"Your papa visiting the abattoir?" Erich asked the butcher's daughter, a pigtailed blonde with rounded shoulders who emerged from the back rooms, wiping her hands on a rag. She wore a bloodied apron and, surprisingly, a perfectly white blouse cut low across the bodice and gathered at the shoulders. Seeing him, her whole demeanor changed. The worn-out, bedraggled shop girl look vanished as with her wrist pushed back a curl from her forehead.
"Papa's at his telephone. We finally got one. I think he's called most of Berlin." She leaned over to wipe off the fingerprints, her weight against the side of the counter so that her cleavage was better exposed. She smiled when she saw Erich looking. "I'd be happy to help you, Herr Major," she offered in a sing-song, admiring his uniform, "any way
I can. He will probably be tied up--for hours."
"Sausage. Smoked." He had half a mind to run a hand down the blouse. Would she object, or merely thrust out that wonderful chest even further? "A dozen links," he added, pleased that he felt less revolted by the idea of sex than he had in a long time.
"These big ones?" she asked, pointing. "I love sausage."
What she loved, Erich knew, had little to do with him personally. What the Führer had called an honor and a duty had given young women the moral license to sleep with soldiers. Officers were, as in the butcher-shop parlance, prime. Married or not, a young blonde pregnant by an Aryan officer was lauded and pampered. Once the child surpassed infancy, the State institutions gradually relieved her of her maternal responsibilities and eased her out the door. He wondered if she were aware of that.
"I've seen you with your dog before," she said. "I've watched the little game you play with her. Looks like fun."
"It is," he said. How often had he sat on the shop stoop, letting Taurus take a sausage from his mouth, so delighted by his dog's trust in him that he had hardly noticed this enchanting creature?
He glanced toward Taurus, paternally sentimental, and felt a surge of dismay. She was slowly bellying across the sawdust, heading for the pig. "Back," he mentally commanded.
Perhaps it was the pride in his mind, perhaps the absence of the shop's owner. Whatever the reason, Taurus did not obey. She put her head down and looked up at him dolefully. When he repeated the command to back up, she rose and reluctantly moved back half a meter, until her hips were within the doorway. Then she lay down, and no number of repeated commands made her move. He knew that if he mentally scolded her harshly enough, she would obey, but she was old and almost always in pain. He let her lie.
The shop girl put a hand on his forearm. When he did not resist, she slipped around the counter with a dancer's dexterity and slid her arm through his. "I've been thinking about closing up for a while, while Papa's on the phone. You think I should?"
She was--what? Fifteen? Sixteen? Was she right now calculating the days since her last period, considering her chances...? He let the back of his hand rest against her side, then shifted to cup a fleshy buttock. She murmured throatily.
"Do you have a place?" she asked. "Or do we need to sneak upstairs?"
Why couldn't Miriam be so unsophisticated, so loving and willing? He steered himself from answering, Why not here on the sawdust and was about to say, "I have an apartment overlooking the Landwehr," when he again saw Taurus sneaking forward.
This time when she gazed up at him, she growled. Jealous.
Erich let go of the sweet, rounded buttock.
"What's going on here!"
Erich glanced toward the back rooms, expecting her father, but the voice came from a figure, a boy, really, standing in the front door, just behind Taurus. He wore a Hitler Youth uniform with the sash indicating Block Warden, which made him responsible for political correctness in the neighborhood. A pistol was holstered at his side. Erich had never heard of the Hitler Youth carrying pistols, not officially anyway, but he was happy when he did not hear about that organization at all.
"Bertel!" the boy said, as if unsure he had been heard before.
"Oh, Gregor." She clucked in disappointment and went back around the counter, working again at the fingerprints in passing.
Eyes narrowed, a hand on the pistol grip, the youth maneuvered around Erich and leaned over the counter. She backed up; he clutched her by the wrist. "I thought you said there would never be a next time."
"We were just talking, Gregor. Besides, you hardly ever come around anymore." She was pouting.
"You think it's easy being a Block Warden? We cannot put the individual above the State."
Parroting, Erich knew. Just like I used to...
He lifted up the sack of sausage, wishing he'd had time to take her before her boyfriend arrived, so he might have handed her over, wet-sex and all. Like Hempel using Goebbels' castoffs, he thought with a strange combination of delight and disgust. Sharing the seed.
The direction of his thoughts caused a disconnect from Taurus. Seizing the moment, she leapt for the pig. It was not the power-ballet leap of which she had been capable just a year ago. More a standing take-off from pain-filled legs. But it was accurate. She grabbed the pig by the forelegs and, though probably intending only to yank off a mouthful, brought it down with a twist of her powerful head.
"Stop that!" Forgetting her boyfriend, Bertel clutched at the pig's wired-together hind legs.
Taurus growled, backing away, refusing to release her grip.
For several moments, dog and shop-girl pulled in opposite directions, like the two women, it occurred to Erich, fighting over the baby in the Solomon legend. Then the Hitler Youth stepped away from the counter, legs spread and weight balanced, like a gunfighter in a cowboy film.
Erich took out a cheroot. "If you shoot, you'd better hit your girlfriend," he said calmly. "Because if you hurt the dog, I'll break both your arms. Then I'll break your legs."
The young gunman turned his attention toward Erich.
Erich lit the cheroot.
"Kill," he told Taurus matter-of-factly. "Kill the little bastard."
Taurus was scrambling across sawdust and in the air before Erich finished speaking. Her whole weight crashed into the youth, who cried out as he was knocked against the counter. Almost miraculously, the glass did not break.
The boy sat on the sawdust, mouth open, arms and legs splayed out like a rag doll, while Taurus licked his face.
"Kill him harder," Erich said, laughing with Taurus at their private joke and dragging on the cheroot.
The boy sputtered, but appeared to be afraid to move away. Taurus licked the youth's lips and all but stuck her tongue up his nose.
"Good girl." Erich bent beside her as she backed off. He could sense the fury that rippled beneath her fur at not being allowed to do real damage, feel it as she growled softly.
"Would you like her to kill you too?" he asked Bertel.
"No thank you." The words dropped like icicles from her lips, but the light in her eyes danced with amusement.
He paid for the sausages with a banknote and backed out of the door. That was twice in one morning that he had been loathe to expose his back, he thought. Suddenly he wished Hitler's war would come--almost a foregone conclusion these days. A battlefield where one could recognize the enemy might prove less dangerous than Berlin.
CHAPTER NINE
Erich mounted Hawk and rode off, thinking about the girl, Bertel, about Miriam, about the woman beneath the table at Ananas. How different the world would be without women! Not better, but less...complicated.
Müller's comment came back to him. We need a place without women. Where we can be ourselves.
With that in mind, Erich abruptly steered across traffic and headed for Friedrich Ebert Strasse. He usually avoided his home-street, especially now that his parents had returned to the apartment they had abandoned, and taken over the tobacco shop again. That thieves such as his parents could be gifted the business they had previously ransacked was indicative of the moral penury of the times. It sickened him--but whether because of the immorality or because he hated his father, he wasn't sure.
Today was Sunday, and his father had not yet opened the shop. Probably gone to Mass, now that he was wealthy; celebrating not the bread and wine, but the roast duckling and vintage sherry he and Erich's mother would later enjoy.
The idea Corporal Müller had given him overpowered Erich's scorn for everything the tobacco shop represented. He passed the place, its shades halfway down, the tall windows looking sleepy-eyed, and parked his bike next door, against the gold-plated guardrail above what was once Kaverne, Grand dame Rathenau's cabaret for the upper-crust. He looped Taurus' leash through the rail and descended the stairs. Like regressing into a past life, he thought, letting the cool, moist shadows invade him.
Shaking, he removed his lock picks, a memento from chil
dhood, from the small leather pouch at the end of his key chain. He willed the shaking to stop, and was thankful, regardless of the trembling, when he was able to open the door.
He slipped in quickly, like a boy afraid the bogey man was coming, and shut the door quietly and firmly behind him. The basement nightclub awaited him at the bottom of the metal spiral stairs, dust dancing in the light streaming through the green, sidewalk-level windows.
The place smelled old and musty. Disused. The chairs were upended on the tables, and everything was covered with dusty muslin. He assumed, for lack of specific knowledge, that the ownership of the place had reverted to the furriers, upstairs, from whom the Grand dame had purchased it, though perhaps it belonged to Miriam and she did not know it. Had Goebbels confiscated all her property, or just the Grünewald estate? It was worth looking into.
He went slowly down the steps, the metal ringing, his eyes on the empty dance floor. There he--and Solomon--had first seen her, a sylph in white tights, form-fitting tunic, swirl of pale pink niñon. Her singing once again hummed in his ears, her subsequent can-can--with his first look at her leotarded thighs--danced before his eyes. She had been fifteen or sixteen then, probably the same age as the girl today at the butcher shop, he thought with a slight shame; he and Sol two years younger. "Wenn der weisse Flieder wieder blüht," she had sung, with the voice of an angel. "When the white lilac blooms again."
Someone had stacked two sets of two tables each close to the dance floor and canopied the creation with a shawl, as though to form an archway through which dancers might pass. Kids, he thought; probably partying. He wondered if they had gotten in as he and Sol used to, with lock picks. They could not have come up through the ancient sewer that ran beneath the cabaret and the tobacco shop, because his father had welded the grate shut at the shop, and he assumed the padlock had been replaced at this end. Not that he was about to go down into the cellar to find out. The place held too many bitter memories.
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