Nights in Berlin

by Janice Law

  “Prewar! What I wouldn’t give for a few yards of that. Do tell me where you got it! I know you have a secret source,” and so on. Back to Sigi, he complained about his feet and discussed the fortunes of Hertha Berlin, the football club, and his prospects of seeing the Nürburgring, the new auto racetrack. I found him as interesting as just about anyone I wouldn’t want to go to bed with, and I could assure Miss Fallowfield that my feminine version had a safe escort home.

  She did ask occasionally, and I got the sense that she was not just a nosey landlady but actually felt responsible for me in some way. Did that give me a good feeling? It did not. Suggesting, as it did, that I was still in a pickle and would be until Uncle Lastings’s spy circle—or whatever they were—broke cover and told me all about remilitarization and dodgy fighters.

  I wrote only some of this to Nan, whom I didn’t want to worry. I did tell her that I was certainly seeing the nightlife of Berlin. Yes, indeed. Hats and coats and furs and scarves in and out. Portly types—ex-profiteers to a man—clucked me under the chin and asked what a sweet young thing like me was doing at the Eldorado. Visitors asked if I missed England and tried to pinch my bum. Folk of all persuasions drank too much and leaned on my counter and told me their troubles, no doubt because the barmen had gotten sick of them.

  The customers shouted for their clothes and lost their tickets. Coming and going they were always in a hurry, and some of them were too mean to tip the attendant. I’d even had one or two accuse me of damaging their coats or mislaying their hats. The tourists were the worst. They’d been taken to the Eldorado with a promise of depravity, so they felt they could forget their manners and hold on to their wallets. You get the picture.

  Still, much interest. For one thing, I kept waiting for Uncle Lastings’s contact—if there was such a person. One of the barmen? One of the waiters? The manager, Herr K., who had so kindly taken me on? Or one of the hostesses, all of whom seemed as preoccupied with their feuds and quarrels and struggles for precedence as a bunch of dowagers. Who in this lot could I trust? Dare I drop a hint? I had many more questions than answers.

  But, there was some compensation for the low-level suspense and the long hours in torturous heels. A nice client would bring over a drink or compliment me on my makeup or on my frock. It turned out that Sabine wasn’t the only one with an eye for prewar fabric. And then some of the real queens were living works of art, substitutes for the paintings in the galleries that I used to enjoy and that I now had to avoid.

  Being at the Eldorado, I got so used to the drag artistes that it was sometimes a surprise to be talking to Miss Fallowfield or see women on the street and suddenly find them rather small and tame-looking. That was the Eldorado effect, where, as Belinda told me one day, life is larger than life.

  Certainly that was true in her case. In full kit with heels, she was maybe six three or six four. Add the diamond tiara (fake but well done) with the ostrich plume and she was closing in on seven feet. Unlike Sigi, I was not sure Belinda ever lived in the masculine mode. Even in the cramped lavatory, where she touched up her makeup, or back in my booth, where she sometimes took her cigarette breaks, she was always the same: large and flamboyant and feminine.

  She sang quite well, and she danced even better. Her tango was a thing of beauty, and when all six feet plus of her got going on the Charleston, believe me, she deserved the applause. She was learning English—the better to entrance the tourists—and she liked to practice on me. Vell, dolling, how are you today? she’d say, and I would help her with the elusive English W and repeat polite turns of phrase for her, because she really was courteous.

  Belinda hated swearing and vulgar talk. She was not just a lady but a lady from before the war, and her great passion was hats. Knowing I was English, one day she asked me if I had ever been to Ascot vith ze vonderful hats.

  Then I made a mistake. “Not Ascot, but other race meetings,” I said, momentarily forgetting that I was Francis Wood and not the son of a race trainer who had grown up within a stone’s throw of the Curragh.

  Belinda gave me a sly side-glance. “Really,” she said. “And hats. They have ze big hats there, too?”

  “Sometimes,” I said. “Sometimes in Ireland.”

  She winked. “Ve must talk,” she said. “About ze hats of Ireland.” Then she swanned back out to the dance floor and returned to work, leaving me nervous. Which was silly, really. I hadn’t asked to be a junior spy, and the powers that be had to expect some mistakes. Just the same, I wasn’t quite as confident as I’d been, and my uneasiness only increased when Sabine insisted on paying for the cab that night and spent most of the ride complaining about Belinda, that treacherous bitch, who seemed to have given Sabine reason to feel deep offense over the favors of a rich Argentinean. You can bet I offered no opinion one way or the other.

  Then, the next night, quite late, Belinda stopped by my counter and handed me a pack of cigarettes. “A little thank-you, dolling, for my English lessons.”

  “Thanks, but I don’t—” I started to say I didn’t smoke, that cigarettes were death on my asthma, before I caught myself. Here it was, and from the most unexpected courier! My long-awaited message from Uncle Lastings and my exit from Berlin. “Don’t need anything,” I finished. “It’s always a pleasure to talk with you. But thanks.” And with a hasty glance into the hall and toward the dance floor, I stuck the cigarettes into the front of my dress and fluffed up the lace collar to hide the bulge.

  “It’s always a pleasure to talk with you,” Belinda repeated carefully. “I can say that to any gentleman?”

  “Oh, yes. It’s very polite.” I’d been tempted once or twice to teach her something that would make a gentleman really take notice, but now I was glad I’d resisted. Under her feathers and tiara and pounds of kohl and rouge, Belinda turned out to be braver and more interesting than I’d imagined.

  So, success! My work, Nan, has turned out to be more interesting than I expected, and I am doing well. For the rest of my shift, the cigarette pack lay against my collarbone like a hot potato, and I couldn’t keep from fussing with the neck of the dress and tugging at the bodice to keep everything smooth. I had my coat on before the hour struck and legged it out of the club and into a cab before Sabine could follow. Not smart, I realized once I was in the taxi, but Sabine was always alert and nosey, and I was sure she would have sensed that I had something to hide. I decided that the next evening, I would have to use an excuse—sudden illness.

  Back at Miss Fallowfield’s apartment, I tapped lightly on her door, unsure whether I was to wake her. She replied instantly, and I found her sitting up on her bed reading but fully dressed.

  “What is it, Francis?”

  “I think it’s what you’ve been waiting for.” I handed her the cigarette pack. “A present from—”

  “No names at this point,” said Miss Fallowfield quickly. “Best for you to know and not me. Sound procedure. Everyone knows only two links in the chain. That’s what’s called a cutout.”

  “Right.” My education was proceeding apace. “The cigarettes are supposedly for helping with her English, though she knows I cannot smoke.”

  Miss Fallowfield raised her eyebrows and turned the packet over carefully. “Thank you, Francis. I will have a little look at this, and we will talk in the morning.”

  That, if nothing else, dispelled the notion that Miss Clarice Fallowfield was just another impoverished gentlewoman renting spare rooms. The next morning, I was not entirely surprised to find Mac at the breakfast table, tucking into sausage and eggs under the blue haze of Miss Fallowfield’s cigarettes.

  “Ah, the man of the hour.”

  I suspected that she was being sarcastic, but then I was congratulated so heartily that I thought I might be able to start packing my case. “The material is valuable then? And authentic?”

  “Oh, it’s from Lastings all right,” Miss Fallowfield said. “No questi
on about that. He wants money. Claims dire need, as per usual.”

  That did sound like Uncle Lastings.

  “Useful information, though,” Mac said.

  “Yes, what we have. Funds are needed to secure what he calls more and better intelligence.”

  That was the Lastings’s touch all right, but his language was quite subdued compared to his communications with the Society for a Christian Europe in which his activities were always described in the most colorful terms. Here, he was dealing with pros.

  “And are you going to pay for more?”

  Mac shrugged and looked at Miss Fallowfield. “Will Harold agree?” she asked.

  “I think so,” Mac said.

  “The money will have to go back via Francis’s contact.”

  “But surely I’m leaving! Mac can go. Anyone can go. Wasn’t that the whole point of choosing the Eldorado—that strangers are a commonplace?”

  “Simplicity,” said Miss Fallowfield, “is a cardinal virtue.”

  Mac took out a fat envelope. “For your contact.”

  “I can’t just hand that over. You don’t know how jealous and nosey and competitive the whole club is. Why, half of Berlin would know within the hour.”

  “But you’re a clever boy,” Mac said. “You’ll think of something.”

  I argued about this and said a lot of stupid things that changed nothing. Mac and Harold had my passport. The police had my name and my picture. Father Brotz’s dangerous friends had me in their sights. I sulked and ate more than my share of the sausages, while Mac drank cups of tea and Miss Fallowfield smoked as if her life depended on it. Finally I said, “Can you buy me a book of English grammar? Or an English-language phrasebook?”

  “That would do. There is a good bookstore on the Ku’damn,” Miss Fallowfield said. “But best let Mac buy it. And I will fix it nicely for you. You’ll be perfectly safe giving a language book as a little present to your contact.”

  Chapter Ten

  I set off for the Eldorado in a bad mood, even though Mac had slipped me twenty marks, enough for an hour in the Tiergarten with a boy I knew and a decent early supper. But things couldn’t have gone more smoothly. Miss Fallowfield had secreted the money cleverly toward the back of The New English Primer. “The grammar part will still be usable that way,” she remarked. And instead of wrapping paper, she added a ribbon and a bow. “So it’s obvious what it is,” she said, “but still a present.”

  Right. Belinda squealed with delight and tried out all her new phrases until we wound up laughing in the coat-check booth and were rebuked by Herr K., the manager. With that, I perked up, and once again saw the amusing side of this long-running costume party. So I really wasn’t prepared when, two nights later, Herr K. stormed up to the coat-check booth around eight and demanded to know where my friend Belinda was hiding.

  “She hasn’t come in yet, mein Herr.”

  “I don’t like it!” he said. “I don’t like it at all. If she’s late again, she gets the sack.” He stomped around and swore so that Sabine started snickering and several of the other hostesses waved their fans and fluffed their feathers and pretended to be shocked.

  “Perhaps she’s taken ill,” I said. “She was complaining of a headache last night.”

  “She’s never ill!” Herr K. almost screamed. “She’s gone off with some fool who’ll break her heart and then what use will she be? My best hostess ever, and she has the brain of a flea.”

  Naturally, he was exaggerating, but he was so upset that I kept an eye out for her. When nine o’clock came, she still had not arrived, although the club was filling up and the dance floor was crowded. It was not like Belinda to miss out on good tips, and I began to worry.

  Around ten, during a lull, I asked Martha, the pale and probably tubercular cigarette girl, if she would watch the coat-check booth for a few minutes so that I could get some air. Some nights I needed to clear my lungs after the oppressive smoke in the room. In return, Martha would give me a few coins to purchase what she called her “little pick-me-up” from the neighborhood cocaine dealer.

  I found him farther down the street than usual, young and handsome and blond with a posh manner that suggested a precipitous descent from respectable wealth to street-level drug dealing. This sort of transformation was by no means unusual in Berlin, where decently dressed old women scoured the gutters after the vegetable carts, and every other corner had its mutilated war vet.

  After we chatted for a few minutes, I pocketed Martha’s deck of snow and strolled back toward the club. I was a block away when I stopped to take a leak in an alley, figuring anywhere would be cleaner than the miserable WC Herr K. kept for the staff. But as I stepped into the shadows, something caught my eye. Bright, winking in the streetlight, and ending with a plume. I had the nasty feeling that it was Belinda’s tiara. I bent down. Yes, the ornament certainly looked like it. “Belinda?”

  No answer. I moved farther down the alley into real darkness and nearly stumbled over something large but not entirely hard. I couldn’t make myself put my hand down, and I stepped back. As my shadow moved, some light from the streetlamp ran like a shiver down a satin skirt, touched a silk stocking, and died on the tip of a patent leather shoe.

  “Belinda? Belinda!”

  I edged around, keeping the light on the body, because there was no doubt now: Someone was lying there, and I feared it was her. Alive or dead? Alive, please! I bent to touch her shoulder. Large and solid. Surely too large and solid to be dead. “Belinda!”

  Go ahead, Francis. I touched her face and found it cold. Was it really cold or just my hands? Feel her neck. The big pulse in the neck—that’s the test. So feel her neck, which meant touching her skin again, the skin that was cold—at least cool. I took a deep breath and wheezed. Just nerves, I told myself, because I had to reach down and touch her neck to find the pulse, the pulse that would be there, signaling she was all right, fine, tickety-boo, as Uncle Lastings would say. What on earth had made him select Belinda, who loved hats, who approached seven feet tall in full regalia? I thrust my hand down, searching for the artery, her pulse, her life—nothing.

  Heartbeat. She had to have a heartbeat. I put my hand down on her satin bodice and swore. My hand was wet. When I held it up to the light, I saw a deeper darkness that threatened my ridiculous clothing. “Help!” The word was a croak. “Helfen Sie mir!” Right language but still no air, no breath, no voice.

  I staggered to the street. There would have to be police. I must alert Herr K., who would summon the Kripos. Who would arrive with questions for me. A disaster, because I did not think that my papers would hold up for a murder investigation, especially not when another English visitor of my general height, age, and coloring was already wanted as an accessory in a capital case.

  No indeed. If they questioned me, the jig would be up. I didn’t need Nan to tell me that! Ergo—as my old Latin teacher used to say—ergo, no police. But to abandon Belinda in the alley was frightful. She had been a friend, a harmless friend, who loved fancy hats and polite gentlemen and lived with who knows what hopes and fantasies. I felt so sick that I threw up in the gutter and had to find a puddle to wash my hands. Under the nearest streetlight, I checked my frock for blood and mess, then caught my breath. I must return to the club, where Dolly of the hatcheck counter must be her usual vivacious self with her amusing German. Could I manage that? First, I thought yes, and then I thought no. Then I thought of efficient Prussian police and grim Prussian jails and not-to-be-imagined Prussian reformatories, and I got almost to the door when I remembered that Belinda might have been carrying some papers for Uncle Lastings.

  What if she was? What if they were found? Would there be incriminating names? I hustled back down the street, my shoes—instruments of the devil—clattering on every step and cutting into the backs of my heels. At the alley, I stopped and looked both ways. Was that the dealer with his little decks
of snow? Far down the street? Was he liable to talk to the police? I didn’t think so.

  Just the same, it took a few moments more before I could enter the alley, find Belinda’s corpse, and touch her skirt. Nothing in the pocket. Her coat next. One pocket was available. Nothing. The other was under her body. Pull it out, pull it up. Anything? No. I didn’t need to worry. She’d had nothing. She’d delivered the cash, and Uncle Lastings had taken it and turned it into dinners for some rich widow. I could go back.

  I stood up, wheezing and shaking. I remembered Belinda sashaying up to the coat-check counter and handing me the cigarette pack. She hadn’t been wearing a coat. So nothing in her coat pocket. And she hadn’t taken it from her skirt, either. Like a Victorian lady, she’d reached into her décolletage and pulled out the package.

  I felt sick again and put my hand over my mouth. But if she was carrying anything, it would be in the bodice of her dress. Which was soaked in blood. In the end, I took out my handkerchief, wrapped it around my index finger, and carefully poked at her bodice. Was that a crackle, a faint papery rustle? Papers or just the “gay deceivers” that were part of Belinda’s astonishing transformation? With great care, I lifted the edge of the dress by one armhole and fished out, yes, a pack of cigarettes.

  I stuck it into my dress, and after a cautious exit from the alley, I went straight to the Eldorado before I could lose heart. Inside, Martha was pouting—“her pick-me-up” had been delayed. Herr K. was still swearing about Belinda’s absence, and it was all I could do to keep from striking him out of grief and shame at my own cowardice. Sabine was swanning around, Queen of the Dance Floor for once, and I had a very strong urge to puke up everything I had ever eaten.

  But the café was busy. Coats were wanted immediately, others were flung on the counter to be checked. Hats came in with scarves and fancy fur wraps. I tried to think of nothing but tickets and numbers and to see nothing but collars and sleeves and bowler hats. I said nothing but Ja, mein Herr and Dankeschön, Fräulein and counted the minutes until I could put on my coat. I was so anxious to leave that I forgot the little evening reticule that held my tips. I went back behind the counter for it, a delay that landed me in a cab with Sabine, the very last person, saving a cop, that I cared to see.