The Traitor Blitz

by Johannes Mario Simmel

  I could feel Irina's hand clutching mine; it was ice cold.

  "And this young woman drove off with them, too?" Irina asked, almost inaudibly.

  "Yes. Really stupid of us to have forgotten her. We're both so upset—"

  "Who was this young woman?" I asked. "Do you happen to know her name?"

  "No," said Garnot. "We don't know her name."

  "But I met Michelsen with her one day in the hall," said Kubitzky. "I greeted them and they returned my greeting, and Herr Michelsen murmured a name I couldn't understand. But then he said something else."

  "What?" cried Irina.

  "He said, 'The young lady is the fiance of the friend who is visiting me,'" Kubitzky replied.

  14

  "Please don't be mad, Herr Roland."

  I was sitting in the snack bar of the Kniefall Market, staring straight ahead—only forty-two hours before the events described above—and I was still waiting for the editorial office to call me and tell me what those goddamned women thought of my latest article. Lucie was standing in front of me, red with embarrassment. I could see she had mustered up every bit of courage she had. "I know it's no concern of mine, but—"

  "But what?" I asked Lucie.

  "Why do you drink so much in the morning?" she asked, and added hastily, "I know that's your business, only—"only—and now her voice was trembling—"I worry so much about you."

  "You worry about me?" I stared at Lucie, and suddenly I felt sorry for her. That's good, I thought. Very good. That's the first time a girl has ever said anything like that to me. The two whores, for instance, with whom I had spent the night—they weren't 166

  worried about me. They were sleeping off their hangover, and when they'd wake up, they'd turn on the radio loud and have breakfast and get themselves all dressed up. And all the others were the same. Only Lucie was worried about me! "Every time you come here, you drink and mumble to yourself, and every time you look worse and worse. What's wrong with you, Herr Roland?"

  "What should be wrong with me? I feel great!"

  "Herr Roland!"

  I drank some more whiskey, shook myself, and suddenly it seemed to me that this young girl was the only decent person in the whole wide world! This was, of course, a result of the many whiskeys I'd drunk the night before. The whiskey was also the explanation for how I w^s behaving.

  Everybody has a breaking point, with or without liquor, and when they reach it, they unburden themselves, not to those closest to them, but to any person who happens to be handy and sympathetic—a bartender, a taxi driver, a sleeping car conductor, or a young waitress in a market.

  "All right," I said. "So I don't feel great! So actually I feel awful!" And it seemed quite natural to me that I was talking like this to Lucie with the blond hair and the dark eyes, about whom I knew nothing except that she came from Brandoberndorf.

  "But why is that?" Lucie shook her head. "You earn so much money. You're famous. Everybody reads what you write—"

  "Ach!" I interrupted her with a gesture of revulsion. "What I'm writing—that's what's killing me!"

  "I don't understand." Now the girl looked startled. "If it tortures you like that, why do you write it?"

  Yes—why? A good question. The answer should have been, "Because I'm much too depraved and demoralized and guilty to write anything better." But does one say things like that? No. One says, "I used to write quite different things. Better things."

  "But what you're writing now isn't bad." Lucie's cheeks were pink again. "I read it." She knew my pseudonym, of course. "And all my friends read it. It's very interesting and so scientific. It teaches you a lot."

  "It's crap!" I said in a low voice. "It's the most colossal crap I've ever written! But you mustn't tell anyone what I just said."

  "I won't! Word of honor!" She looked terribly distressed.

  "But won't you get into trouble?" I asked her. "Should you be talking to me like this?"

  Lucie shook her head. "You're a steady customer. Besides, there's nothing to do right now."

  "Just the same." I got up, my glass in my hand, and noticed that I was slighdy drunk. "Let's talk at the bar. There we're not so conspicuous."

  I walked ahead of her with the cautious step of the drinker who knows he's had enough and has to be careful. She followed me with my bottle of Chivas. I got up on a barstool and put the glass on the counter gendy. "And what will you drink?"

  'In the morning, Herr Roland?"

  "You've got to drink something, anything, or I can't talk," I insisted stubbornly.

  "All right, then. I'll drink a glass of tomato juice."

  "With vodka. With plenty of vodka!"

  "No. No vodka, please."

  "Without vodka... OK. For all I care."

  I watched her get a jug of dark red tomato juice out of the refrigerator and fill a glass with it. "Well, at least put some pepper in it!"

  She obediently put some pepper in it from a big wooden pepper mill.

  "What was I saying?"

  "That once you'd written other things, better things." She lifted her glass, toasted me, and drank. I drank Chivas.

  "Yes. That's right. That's when I took the job with Blitz" I twisted my glass in my hand. "At the time it wasn't only the biggest but also the best German illustrated magazine. With a fine reputation. Outside Germany, too. Like Life "

  Lucie, who probably had never heard of Life, nodded.

  "All thanks to Hem."

  "To whom?"

  "To our executive editor, Paul Kramer. We call him Hem. For years he put everything into making Blitz the top-ranking illustrated magazine in Germany. In those days it was an honor to be working for Blitz. We printed short stories by Hemingway and Somerset Maugham, novels by Jan de Hartog and Remarque, novellas by Ernst Lehmann, Irwin Shaw, Truman Capote. Breakfast at Tiffany's, for instance "

  "George Peppard and Audrey Hepburn." Lucie sounded breathless. "I saw the picture. Oh, but he was handsome! Do you remember how the two looked for the cat in the rain?"

  "Yes."

  "And the song, 'Moon River/" Lucie began to hum it.

  "For God's sake, I know the song!" I said angrily, and startled the poor girl.

  "I won't say another word. Please go on." But she had distracted me. I sat there doodling in the wet circles my glass had left on the counter. Lucie was silent.

  After a while and some more Chivas, I said, "This man, Hem, taught me the meaning of the word journalism. Once I was ready for it, he gave me the most terrific assignments—historic series, series on medicine, science." I was smiling. "The one I liked best was The Bee Nation.'"

  "'The Bee Nation,'" Lucie repeated. "That must have been beautiful."

  I held out my glass. "Another whiskey, please."

  "Hen* Roland!"

  "Another whiskey!"

  "My goodness, but you can look angry. I'll get it. Right away."

  "Thanks, FrSulein Lucie. And then, the big criminal cases. They were my specialty. I did my own research, and I knew how."

  I was sure Lucie was wondering: What the hell is research? But she nodded eagerly.

  "Hem put me on every big crime case, not only in Germany—in all Europe. He sent me to Brazil. That case of the murdering nuns. I was in Rio because of it." I drank. "Yes. First there was the frantic desire to catch up with the written word, to learn, a thirst for knowledge. Then Germany began to prosper and the curiosity phase began. Big criminal cases and political scandals. Then we had the—oh, hell, let's call it the historic wave. Everybody wanted to know more about the past. What were they really like—the good old days? That resulted in our big series on kings and emperors—the Hohenzollerns, the Wittelsbachers—forty-five, sometimes fifty articles on the subject. Oh, yes!" I went on drinking, lost in the past. "And when we were really on top, came the gourmet wave. Do you remember 'It Doesn't Always Have to Be Caviar'? That fellow Simmel wrote a novel about a secret agent who was crazy about cooking, and all his recipes went into the book. We didn't publish it. Q
uick did that. But everybody got on that bandwagon, too. Pages and pages of recipes, cooking with illustrations. You can't leaf through any paper or magazine today without finding at least one or two pages of recipes."

  "That's right." Lucie laughed. "And did you write them, too?"

  "No. But right after the food wave came the housing wave. 'Hooray, We're Building Houses Again!' Those articles were by me, and all the other series—"

  I drank again and was silent, but Lucie continued to gaze at me expectantly as I looked down at my hands and went on remembering. How Gert Lester and his crew came to Blitz right after the housing series, and how that was when Blitz began to go to the dogs, thanks to Herr Lester and Herr Thomas Herford and our wonderful research department under Herr Stahlhut. What a fight Hem had had to put up for material that was halfway decent! To prevent everything from being rewritten as sob stuff, or with a war, sex, or crime slant. What scenes! And how heroic Hem had been about it! In vain. And that was why he had resigned himself to it long ago. "What the hell! You've got to produce!"

  Smut was turned out regularly to satisfy increasingly baser instincts. Shitty novels, written for the boobs in the land, sometimes by a team of as many as five authors. One man for the male dialogue, a woman for the female dialogue, a specialist for action, another for continuity and plot, another for narrative and descriptive passages, the whole thing programmed by a computer down to the smallest detail and according to the latest poll. If we happened to get hold of a really good novel, it had to be completely rewritten to meet the requirements of the Blitz computer. It was Lester who brought this rewriter-itis into the house. We lied and cheated the reader from page one to the end. But should I tell poor Lucie all this? My tired eyes were burning. I drank and didn't notice that some whiskey was running down my chin. I looked at Lucie broodingly.

  Would my life have taken a different course if I had ever loved a girl like her, really loved? Lucie was a good girl. She might have persuaded me to oppose the powers that be, to leave when things changed at Blitz. Yes, a girl like Lucie might have done that for me. A girl like her would have gone to work if for a while things hadn't worked out for me. But I had never been interested in girls like Lucie, with decency written all over their faces. Now, when it was too late, I was attracted to them. I laughed softly.

  "Why are you laughing?"

  "Nothing."

  "I don't understand you. It must have been wonderful. You 170

  must have been a happy man ... then," she said, sounding bewildered.

  "I was. And I never drank in the morning. Never!"

  "So what happened?" asked Lucie, totally confused.

  "The circulation," I said bitterly. "The goddamn* circulation! And—and the computer!" I was whispering now, like a conspirator. "That's a secret, Fr&ulein Lucie—don't tell a soul, but we have a computer over there that decides everything we write. Hem can have a coronary before he dares to print anything decent today—"

  "A computer?"

  "A computer. With good Herr Stahlhut watching over it. And the good ladies in the house watch over me. They pass on every line I write, the darlings. They're doing it right now, and that's why I'm here."

  "I know," whispered Lucie.

  I doodled letters of the alphabet into the wet rings on the dark counter as I said, "They were just different times then, and they won't come back." I lit a cigarette. My hands were trembling. "That's about the size of my troubles," I said, and laughed. "All only an excuse for drinking. You know alcoholics always need an excuse. One has a dog that died, another is unhappily in love, the next man has trouble with his children. Don't shake your head, Fraulein Lucie. I'm an alcoholic. Don't get involved with me."

  "You are unhappy," Lucie said softly, and now we were looking into each other's eyes.

  The telephone on the bar rang. It startled both of us. Lucie answered, spoke briefly, hung up, and said hesitantly, "You're to go over."

  I got up gingerly. Lucie watched me, looking miserable as I had difficulty putting on my jacket. Donnerwetter, but I was stoned! So what! I paid, only for the tomato juice and the soda—the Chivas was mine and paid for—and I gave Lucie much too large a tip, as I always did.

  "No, Herr Holland. I can't accept that much!"

  "You can," I said, and shook hands with her. "Farewell, Fraulein Lucie."

  "Aw/ Wiedersehen, Herr Roland."

  I walked out of the store, straight as a ramrod. I looked back once and saw tears in Fraulein Lucie's eyes. She was wiping them away and staring down at the letters I had written on the counter with the spilled whiskey— LUCIE —and then crossed the name

  out twice. I turned around fast and hurried out of the store. Now, I thought, the tears will really flow.

  15

  Swaying a little, my hands clenched, shoulders braced like a boxer—that's how I walked back to the publishing house. The sun shone weakly. I felt hot. Shouldn't have drunk so much on top of all that whiskey last night. God, but I felt it now! Most of all in my head, which was spinning. So what! It wasn't the first time I'd gone before editor-in-chief Lester stoned.

  I had to make a detour, because right here the subway contractors had dug into the very bowels of the earth. They had put up thick planks and railings, making it possible to cross from one side of the street to the other. People were pouring across them from every direction, pushing, shoving. In the depths below I could see hundreds of laborers, steel helmets on their heads, crawling around like ants, digging, drilling, handling what looked like endlessly long steel wiring, working on machines mounted on cranes, pile drivers, pneumatic drills.

  I stood for a moment on one of these bridges, leaned against the railing, and looked down at the future tunnel. The shaft was supported by beams, wires ran along them, powerful mixers were disgorging cement into the future tunnel wall. On a high pedestal stood a sort of drum; around it, five Italian laborers were mixing cement and were yelling—you couldn't call it singing—in unison: "Evviva la torre di Pisa, di Pisa — che pende — che pende e che mai non va giul" I grinned. I spoke Italian: "Long live the tower of Pisa, of Pisa, because it leans and leans but never falls!" It continued in a more earthy vein.

  I looked down at the laborers as if all of them were my friends. Those are good people, I thought somberly. They're doing something worthwhile. They're men. Greeks, Italians, Yugoslavs, Turks, Germans— working men! And I? I was a parasite, a piece of shit! If only I could be a laborer—somebody who did something constructive, who created something, something useful, something that mattered! 172

  "Hey, look where you're going!" yelled a passerby whom I had bumped into. I stumbled on. I didn't look down at the laborers anymore, because suddenly I felt ashamed.

  16

  "If this happens once more, do you hear? Once more—you're fired!"

  As I got out of the VIP elevator on the seventh floor, I could hear the strident voice of our editor-in-chief, so accustomed to giving orders. "Everything has its limits! I've been patient with you long enough! Nobody is irreplacable, and you aren't either!" Gert Lester, storming in his glass office.

  His top-notch head layout man, Heinrich Leidenmiiller, husband and father, occasionally pursued by dark forces, stood before him—a very thin man with big ears, wearing glasses. He kept bowing. He was pale, he hadn't shaved, and he looked wasted, as usual. Angela Flanders and Hem were also present. They were sitting to right and left of the big chrome writing desk on tubular chrome chairs.

  "In my department you're not going to behave like a whore-fucker, not in my department!"

  The bastard, I thought, and was filled with blind rage. The filthy fucking bastard! Letting loose like that in front of Angela Flanders. Knew very well that you could hear every word in this glass emporium. And Leidenmiiller said, "Yes, sir," "I know, sir," "It won't happen again, Herr Lester!" And each time a bow! Lester was making the guy look like an ass in front of the entire department. I felt hotter and hotter. I took off my jacket and walked into the office of Lest
er's private secretary without knocking. "Hello, Frau Zschenderlein," I said.

  Sophie Zschenderlein suffered from a kidney deficiency. She had to take cortisone, which her doctor prescribed in fairly large doses. The medication had given her the typical cortisone moon face and caused her to gain weight. She had become ill quite suddenly two years ago. Until then she had been a very attractive woman. She shouldn't have been working, and sometimes she

  found it very difficult to get to the office, but one had to work if one had an eleven-year-old son, was divorced, and one's husband had left the country and paid no alimony or child support. Illness and fate had made her bitter. Her whole heart now belonged to her boss. She served him with devotion. She had the feeling that here was a man who needed her, who was glad to see her, even with her distorted features. That was why Gert Lester's friends were her friends and his enemies her enemies. Like all those whose offices overlooked Kaiserstrasse, she was very nervous, suffered from headaches, was dizzy sometimes, because here, at the front of the building, the noise from the subway construction was dreadful and penetrated every office. And this had been going on for months and would continue to go on for months more.

  I had already opened the door to the holy of holies when Frau Zschenderlein jumped to her feet. "But you can't go in! Can't you see—"

  The booze. God bless the booze! I grinned at her drunkenly and was already in Lester's office. He gave me an icy look. "What a pleasure! Herr Roland. Our star attraction! To knock and wait until I say 'Come in' seems to go beyond you, eh, Herr Roland? Please sit down, Herr Roland." Now he was going to be ironic. "Let's not be formal. Make yourself at home."

  "That's just what I'm doing, Herr Lester."

  "Good, good. Just a minute, though; I still have some unfinished business here before I can devote myself to you, Herr Roland."

  The unnerving noise of the construction below penetrated Lester's office, too. I smiled at Angela Flanders—a real friendship existed between us—and nodded at Hem. He looked troubled as he ran his fingers through his unkempt gray hair, then stroked his Hemingway beard. He must have been raging inside. Flanders looked depressed, too.