The City of Fading Light

by Jon Cleary

  “You have some questions you want to ask me?”

  Lutze looked at Decker, who opened the safe of his suit and took out a thick black notebook. He was a tall thin man who looked slightly mouldy, as if summer had failed to dry him out. He had a voice to match, coated with fuzz.

  “You have been enquiring for the whereabouts of a woman named Mady Hoolahan?”

  The ten marks hadn’t gone far enough with the night clerk at the Hotel Ernst: there had been a higher bidder, or bigger threats. “Yes.”

  “What is your interest in this woman?”

  “I was asked by my New York office to see if I could find her.” He sounded convincing, at least in his own ears.

  “Would you have a copy of that request?”

  “No. It came through London, by phone.”

  Lutze chimed in, nodding his head understandingly. “Of course.”

  “Did they say why they wanted you to find her?”

  “I gather she came to Germany from America earlier this year and then just disappeared.”

  “What exactly do you mean by disappeared?” said Lutze, looking puzzled. Or doing a very good impersonation of it.

  “She left the Hotel Ernst one night with her luggage and hasn’t been seen since. I think that’s what I mean by disappeared.”

  “You haven’t told us why World Press should be interested in her,” said Decker.

  “You haven’t given me a chance to answer,” said Carmody a little testily.

  “Of course not,” said Lutze, giving absolution. “Take your time, Herr Carmody.”

  “She is the aunt by marriage of one of our stringers in Kansas City. He was concerned about her.” I’m a bloody awful liar, he thought. Fiction had never been his strong point; which made him such a good objective reporter. “It was just a personal thing, not an official agency enquiry.”

  “What is a stringer?” Lutze was puzzled again, this time by a word he had never heard before.

  Carmody himself had only just invented it, knocking together his own portmanteau: Schnurkorrespondent. “A part-time correspondent.”

  “What is this man’s name?” said Decker, pencil poised above the notebook.

  Carmody grabbed a name out of the shearing sheds back home. “Venneker, Rupert Venneker.” He hoped to God there was no Venneker in Kansas City; he hoped even more fervently there was no Gestapo stringer in that town. “I’ve never met him.”

  “Of course not,” said Lutze, again nodding understandingly. His sympathetic agreement had begun to annoy Carmody. Why wasn’t the bugger playing true to type?

  Even Decker seemed only mildly interested in the questions he was asking. “So Frau Hoolahan means nothing to you personally?”

  She did mean very much to him, since she was Cathleen’s mother: she was beginning to assume the importance of someone on whom his own happiness might depend. “I am just doing a favour for someone. Maybe you could help find her?”

  “How do you think we could do that, Herr Carmody?” said Lutze.

  “Perhaps some of your colleagues in the Secret Police have picked her up.” That was a mistake and he knew it as soon as he said it.

  “Why do you think they would have done that?”

  “I’m sure they have their reasons for everything they do, but I’ve never been able to find out why. After all you are the Secret State Police.”

  Lutze nodded again, this time approvingly. He took out a handkerchief and wiped his face, which had got pinker in the warmth of the room. The windows faced west and the afternoon sun was pushing against the glass like a physical force, threatening to crack it. Carmody felt comfortable in it, but it was proving too much for Lutze. Decker, on the other hand, looked as if he might be losing some of his mould. He was warming to his questioning.

  “You are an acquaintance of Lady Margaret Arrowsmith?”

  “As a newspaperman I’m an acquaintance of a lot of people.”

  “Of Fräulein Cathleen O’Dea, the film star?”

  “I’ve been doing a story on her, that’s all.”

  “Have you written stories on Lady Arrowsmith?”

  They had been watching him more closely than he had imagined. “No. I just like her as a person.”

  “She is a great admirer of the Fuehrer.”

  “So I understand. But we never discuss politics.”

  Lutze said, “A foreign correspondent, and you don’t discuss politics?”

  “Not with women. I think the Fuehrer would agree with me. How many women does he have in his Ministries?” The heat was too much for Lutze; the brilliantine had started to glisten in little beads, the orange jelly looked ready to run. He gave up, though reluctantly. “We must talk again some time, Herr Carmody. It has been very interesting.”

  He ran his handkerchief over his head and it came away streaked with grease. Decker, looking disappointed, put away his notebook and buttoned up the blue serge safe. Then they both put on their hats, like a vaudeville duo about to make an exit off-stage. Only for that moment did they look ludicrous, but Carmody knew he had nothing to laugh about.

  But he threw out a line: if they were going to continue watching him, he must try to gain something from them: “Will you let me know if you hear anything of Frau Hoolahan?”

  “Of course,” said Lutze. “We mustn’t forget why we came.”

  When they had gone Carmody took off his jacket and found his shirt soaked with sweat. He flopped down in his chair and looked up as Olga Luxemburg put a worried face inside the door.

  “What did they want?” Her tongue was almost in a knot with contempt.

  “Just routine.”

  “Nuts,” said Fräulein Luxemburg, who might have been vulgar if her life had been different. Carmody often wondered what had kept her a spinster with no visible male in her life, but he would never have dared ask her. “You don’t usually get hot and bothered like that.”

  “Am I hot and bothered?” Indeed he was. He got up and pushed both windows high, letting in the noise of the Potsdamerplatz. “Do you think you could send down for a nice cold beer? Two.”

  “Thank you,” she said, though he hadn’t meant the second one for her.

  She went out and he turned to his typewriter. He glanced at the tapes and clippings on his desk. Von der Schulenburg, the German ambassador to Moscow, was still seeing Foreign Minister Molotov; Hitler and Ribbentrop, the German Foreign Minister, were still down at the Berghof in Obersalzberg. Europe was coming to the boil, the most unlikely of partners looked as if they might finish up in the same pot, and New York was waiting on another two thousand words of conjecture. He began his two-fingered pecking at the keys. He wondered if, when the end of the world came, there would be final editions of newspapers on the day after.

  III

  “I tell you, mate, it’s a bugger of a way to make a living. Round and round the bloody track night after night, riding up your own arse. This week Berlin, last week Cologne, the week before that Amsterdam. Still, I tell you, mate, I’d never make this sort of money doing anything else.”

  “How do you get on with the German riders?”

  “Great, except when there are big-wigs up in the boxes. Then they all have to start proving they’re good Nazis.”

  “How do you feel about that?”

  “Don’t mean a bugger to me, mate. They get rough, me and me mate and the Yanks we get rough, too. It’s all good dirty fun.”

  He reminded Carmody of shearers he had known: tough, sinewy, his body worn to the bone by the rigours of his trade. He had the used, lived-in face that is impossible to name for age: he could have been anywhere between 25 and 45. He came from Sydney, had been on the world six-day track for ten years and sounded as if he might welcome a world war as an excuse to go home. Carmody had come down into the middle of the track to talk to him and one of the American riders, hoping to get something that would lighten the stories he had been filing for the past two weeks. The American had been just as bluntly expressive and Carmody, feel
ing pleased with what he had, wished the Australian cyclist good luck and went back up to join Cathleen.

  “It’s a hard way of making a living,” she said, watching the twelve cyclists on the track as they whirred by, the wheels beneath them flickering silver circles, all their backs bent over in matching curves like a ballet line of symmetrical hunchbacks.

  “That’s what they both told me. Like boxing.” He looked up and about him at the Sportspalast. The huge arena was packed, but he had seen it filled to denser capacity. This was where Hitler came to preach to the faithful; then the bicycle track was removed and the centre of the arena became a seething mass of acclamation for the Fuehrer. This was Berlin’s indoor equivalent of the huge outdoor stadium at Nuremberg, where Hitler wielded his magic, where Sieg Heil! became a terrifying chorus that came out of the throat of Hell and the impartial observer feared for the rest of the world. He had seen Hitler address 15,000 Nazi Party officers in this Sportspalast, with hundreds of swastika flags fluttering high above them like a storm of red, black and white clouds, and the booming shouts of the crowd another storm in the body of the huge arena and he had gone away convinced that war in Europe was inevitable, that passionate ambition such as he had seen could not be contained.

  Tonight was different; but the memory of that other night clouded his mind. Lights blazed on the track; the cyclists went round and round in their whispering pursuit of each other; the crowd murmured and chattered and occasionally shouted as some cyclist tried to make a break on the main bunch, but there was no hysterical frightening din. Yet Carmody kept waiting for the atmosphere to change, for the bike-riders to turn into charging lancers, the crowd to rise to its feet and start chanting and for that modest figure in the brown Party uniform suddenly to appear, raise an arm and turn the night into another terrifying threat.

  A hand touched him on the shoulder and he jumped, still deep in the misery of his imagination. Or was he expecting a summons from the Gestapo? He turned and almost laughed with relief when he saw Meg Arrowsmith. She had just sat down behind him. “Darling, are you a bicycle fan?”

  “No,” said Cathleen, turning round, “he’s a fan of mine.” Oh crumbs, thought Carmody, who knew nothing of women’s rivalry. He introduced them to each other and saw at once that women were not natural friends; knowing the other’s reputation, each looked at the other with a suspicious eye. They were smiling, but their eyes had the same metallic glitter as the whirring wheels out on the track. Carmody wondered what he would have made of the encounter if he had been a gossip columnist. His pen, as yet, was not sharp enough to be malicious.

  Meg introduced her escort, a young bull who knew he would be of service tonight; he kept looking at Meg as if he were already beside her, or on top of her, in bed. “Herr Krebs is with the Ministry of Sport.”

  He would be, thought Carmody.

  “I’d never have guessed it,” said Cathleen, giving the muscular young man a smile that made him wonder for the moment if he had chosen the wrong woman for the night. “You look more the Ministry of Culture type, Heir Krebs.”

  Lay off, said Carmody silently and pressed her knee. She gave him the same dazzling smile. “Don’t you think so, Sean?”

  Carmody was saved from an opinion on Herr Krebs by a spectacular spill on the track. Three cyclists at the rear of the field went down in a wild tangle of arms, legs and bikes. Attendants rushed to their aid; the crowd stood up hoping for some serious injury, then, breeding overcoming instinct, sighed with relief when they saw the three riders get groggily to their feet; excitement simmered down and the race went on as the injured riders’ partners came on to take their place. By then Krebs had his arm in Meg’s and his thoughts a couple of hours ahead.

  “Shall we ask them to have supper with us?” Cathleen whispered.

  “No,” said Carmody.

  “I’d like to know her better.”

  “I can tell you all you want to know.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  There was a sexual bantering to her voice that had never been there before, at least not with him. He was encouraged by it, but not enough to agree with her to having supper with Meg Arrowsmith. “Why are you so keen to know her better?”

  “I’d like to know what sort of woman hangs around Hitler, especially an Englishwoman.”

  “From what I hear, she’s out of favour with Hitler at the moment. She thinks he and Chamberlain should get together instead of sparring with each other.”

  “Then let’s ask them for supper.” They were still whispering, heads together like lovers. He wondered what Meg, sitting immediately behind him, was thinking.

  He sought a distraction, looked out at the track, then up at the galleries and found one: “Look, there’s Himmler! In the main box—”

  He was the man he did not want to see; the head of the SS, the Schutzstaffel, also controlled the Gestapo. Carmody had no illusions about his own importance; he was small fry, Himmler would not even know he had been interrogated by Gestapo junior officers. But he had become sensitive about whom he was with: sitting beside him was Cathleen, favoured by Goebbels, and right behind was Meg Arrowsmith, once favoured by Hitler. He was sure that the information had already been conveyed to Himmler. Even as he looked up at the box, at the Reichsfuehrer SS and his bodyguard of uniformed toughs, Himmler looked down at him through binoculars. Then the binoculars were handed back to an aide and the SS chief went back to watching the track and the circling cyclists.

  “What’s he doing here?”

  He shrugged; but he had a shrewd guess. For the past ten days, while tension had grown over the question of the Danzig Corridor, which Hitler claimed was German territory and should be returned by Poland, ministers and other top officials had been appearing at the opera, concerts and other public functions, as if to reassure the nervous Berliners, and by extension other Germans, that the current international crisis was under control. That Himmler, the ex-chicken farmer who looked like a fussy schoolmaster but who ran concentration camps instead of schools, who fostered the idea that he was an elitist mystic, should come to the bike races to suggest that everything was normal, struck him as a bad joke. Berlin was noted for its wicked wit, but Himmler was not a Berliner.

  He felt another tap on his shoulder. Meg said, “Would you and Miss O’Dea care to have supper with us at the Adlon?”

  “We’d love to,” said Cathleen before Carmody could think of an excuse to decline. “Now or later?”

  “Why not now?” said Meg. “Men on bicycles don’t excite me.”

  “Me, neither,” said Cathleen.

  Carmody and Krebs, neither of them on a bike, rose reluctantly. Carmody wanted to keep Cathleen away from Meg; Krebs wanted Meg for himself. But in the social game, women are rulers: both men followed Cathleen and Meg obediently. As he went down towards the exit Carmody looked back and up at the boxes. One of Himmler’s aides had the binoculars focused on the departing party.

  Meg had hung back to wait for him. “Did you see Himmler?”

  He fired a random arrow: “He had the glasses on you.”

  “Not me, darling. You and Miss O’Dea.”

  “No.” He shook his head emphatically. “What have you been up to?”

  But she wasn’t taken in by his fake attack. “Darling, my life is an open book to the Gestapo. What have you been up to?”

  Cathleen, with Krebs adrift beside her, was waiting for them at the bottom of the steps. “What’s been going on behind my back?”

  “I was just giving him some sisterly warning,” said Meg. “We Empire types must stick together.”

  “What empire was that?” said Cathleen.

  On a raft of splintered smiles they all floated out to find a taxi. The two men were stiff and cagey, but the two women were completely at ease, foes on common ground. Contempt had bred familiarity.

  Krebs was out of place at the Adlon; he was a beerhall diner. But he kept his mouth shut except when eating and his eyes never stopped moving; after a while they
began to remind Carmody of the spinning wheels of the six-day bike riders. For his own part Carmody, too, kept quiet, leaving the two women to provide most of the conversation. Which they did willingly.

  “Is it true you were one of Dr. Goebbels’ mistresses?” said Cathleen, plunging into the deep end again.

  Carmody, jaws locked on smoked salmon, waited for Meg to erupt. But she just smiled, a blade of white steel between her lips. “What sort of question is that to ask an English maiden?”

  “If I knew an English maiden I shouldn’t ask it,” Cathleen’s smile was a reflection of Meg’s. Carmody resumed chewing, knowing the battle was going to be deadly but civilized. Krebs’ eyes stopped swivelling for a moment; then he gave up and sank out of his depth. Carmody, the boy from the bush, all at once felt terribly sophisticated alongside him.

  “No, I wasn’t.” Meg was not a good liar; she had to avoid Carmody’s eye. “Though he tried. But I’m very un-English in some ways—I don’t like being in a queue. Do you?”

  That stung Cathleen, but she didn’t show it. She went off on another of her tangents: “Do you think there will be war?”

  “How should I know?” But doubt and worry suddenly showed: the evening was turning serious, something Meg always tried to avoid. Days were the time for serious discussion, evenings were for fun. Lately, Carmody had discovered, she had taken to avoiding people during the day.

  “From the circles you move in. You know all the men who count. Hitler, for instance.”

  Meg laughed; it sounded just a little hysterical. Krebs’ eyes came back from their tour of the dining room, focused on her: the conversation was on a level he could understand, at least for the moment. “I haven’t seen the Fuehrer in weeks.”

  “I thought you were one of his favourites?”

  “Gossip, darling. You should know what it’s like—gossip is food and drink to film people, isn’t it? Aren’t you supposed to have had countless lovers?”

  “No, that was Mae West. I always counted mine.”