The City of Fading Light

by Jon Cleary

“Soon’s I get everything together—there ain’t much.”

  “Will you be sorry to go?”

  Doe shook his head. “Only that nobody here will remember me, either. Mebbe I was the best trumpet man in Berlin, but what does that mean? Bix would have laughed . . . No, he wouldn’t. He was too nice a guy for that. Jesus Christ, I wish I’d done something to be remembered by! Well, so long, pal. I hope things work out for you and your friend in that place.” He didn’t say Ravensbrueck; the lobby was becoming crowded, you didn’t know which ears were listening to you.

  “You do a piece on me, send me a clipping. Josh Wagner, General Delivery, Charleston.”

  “Josh Wagner? You?”

  “A joke, eh? Adolf’s favourite composer—” Then abruptly he was gone, seemingly borne out by the group of Americans, the rich bastards, who chose that moment to sweep out to the car waiting to take them to the station. Carmody caught a glimpse of him in their midst, a sad half-drunk man who wanted to be remembered and never would be.

  Carmody went back into the bar, where the other three were getting ready to go home to their respective beds. “I don’t have a call till noon,” said Cathleen. “I’m going to look like hell if there are any close-ups. I’ll have to get Helmut to shoot me through thick gauze. Or through a gunny-sack, as Marie Dressier used to say when they got in close on her.”

  Carmody paid the bill, wincing as he did so: World Press would think he had gone haywire. Cathleen grinned, but said nothing. Joe Begley did up his trenchcoat, Fräulein Luxemburg straightened her hat with unsteady fingers and all four of them went out into the Unter den Linden. Carmody called a taxi and put his secretary, protesting at such extravagance, into it.

  “It’s been the most wonderful night of my life,” she said tipsily and rode away in the taxi.

  “That was the most wonderful night of her life?” said Cathleen.

  “A wonderful woman,” said Begley. “You don’t appreciate her, Sean.”

  “You’re wrong there,” said Carmody. “I do appreciate her. I just wish to hell she didn’t have to stay on in this madhouse.”

  He looked up at the sky. It was still cloudless, but the air was already sultry. There were no bombers flying, none coming back from the east.

  He took Cathleen home, reminded her to set her alarm clock in time to get her out to Neubabelsberg for her noon call, went home to his own apartment and fell asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow. It was six in the evening before he woke. He got up, had a bath, then sat down to ring around the offices in the Wilhelmstrasse. Though it was Saturday there were full staffs at all the ministries; some of those who answered his calls sounded peeved but they were all polite. No, there had been no further developments; yes, the Fuehrer was still hopeful of peace. But the rally at Tannenberg scheduled for tomorrow had been called off, as had the annual Nazi Party convention at Nuremberg next week: no, they could give no reason except that the Fuehrer had ordered the cancellations. Carmody hung up, convinced that the Fuehrer was no more interested in peace than he was in the welfare of Jews.

  He went out and bought the principal newspapers. The lies were as big as ever: POLISH SOLDIERS PUSH TO EDGE OF GERMAN BORDER . . . THREE GERMAN PASSENGER PLANES SHOT AT BY POLES . . . It made him ashamed to belong to the same profession as the men who wrote those headlines.

  He walked on over to the Potsdamerplatz. The Saturday night crowds were beginning to appear, intent on a night’s enjoyment (their last? he wondered); did they seem a little more feverish than on previous Saturday nights? There was more military traffic, as much as he had seen during the week; he could only guess that on the peripheral roads the convoys were also moving. He looked up at the sky, but there was no air traffic: the bombers and fighters, he supposed, were still there on the border, ready to battle the Polish invaders.

  Fräulein Luxemburg was at the office, as he thought she would be. He didn’t chide her for her devotion to duty; that would have been cruel. She said she had been at the office since four o’clock, but hadn’t called him because she thought he needed all the sleep he could get. “Don’t come in tomorrow,” he said. “That’s an order.”

  “But I must, Herr Carmody. Anything might happen—”

  “I’ll come over first thing in the morning, just in case. If anything is going to happen, it won’t be till afternoon. War is never declared on a Sunday morning, not while church is in.” He would go to Mass tomorrow and pray for peace, though he had little faith in the Lord to guarantee it.

  At nine o’clock Cathleen rang. “I’m pooped. I don’t think I’ve ever had a worse day on the set—everyone was so jittery. Thank God we have tomorrow free. Are we still going to Herr Klatt’s?”

  “Do you want to?”

  There was a slight hesitation, then: “Yes.”

  “What about What’s-her-name?”

  “Meg Arrowsmith?”

  “No, you know who I mean.” He couldn’t be sure that his phone was not tapped, so, as Fred Doe had said, no names, no pack drill.

  She caught on at once, despite her weariness. “Oh. Yes. I still don’t know what to do. All I can think of is going up there—”

  “You can’t do that!”

  “No, I know. Do you think Herr Klatt could help?”

  He didn’t trust anyone who had influence in Party circles; but he could not continue throwing cold water on everything she suggested. “We’ll go carefully. I’ll pick you up tomorrow at noon.” He lowered his voice so that Olga Luxemburg in the outer office wouldn’t hear him: “I love you.”

  “I love you.” It was the first time she had said it in so many words and he thought it should have been set to music. But, in the land of Beethoven and Brahms, the only composer he could think of offhand was Hoagy Carmichael.

  He did a piece on the general situation, ending with “your correspondent holds his breath, as does Europe” and phoned it through to London. London, as usual, came back with a demand for hard news. “All the papers here are full of speculation. Can’t you come up with something concrete?”

  “I have a concrete brick here I’d like to throw at your head,” said Carmody and hung up. Journalists, he knew, are rarely sacked during a crisis, especially if they are the only ones on the spot.

  He rang round the government offices once more, was assured the Fuehrer was still intent on peace. He said goodnight to Fräulein Luxemburg, told her to go home and not come in till Monday morning, then went up to the British embassy, next door to the Adlon. Each time he had come here during the past weeks he had been amazed and amused at the almost languid atmosphere in the big, dignified building. Secretaries seemed to stroll from room to room with pieces of paper that might have been no more important than laundry lists; phones rang and went unanswered till someone, almost as if bored by the interruption, bothered to pick them up; tea and Fortnum and Mason biscuits were always being served, even now at l0.30 at night. Diplomacy, they were saying, was not something to get worked up about.

  Wilmington, the assistant press attaché, was in the office he shared with two typists. He was a slim, pop-eyed young man who had been to one of the minor public schools and seemed continually surprised that he should have landed such a plum post as Berlin. A pair of cricket pads and a bat stood in one corner of the office and he was staring at them when Carmody tapped on his door.

  “We were going to play the English community tomorrow.” He offered Carmody tea and a biscuit. “It’s taken me all summer to arrange the bally game, and now it’s called off.”

  “Bad luck, sport.” When it came to cricket, Carmody became very Australian. “I’ll do a piece on it. Other than that, what else is not happening?”

  Wilmington, a true Foreign Office product, had been taught that Australians had no subtlety, so he did not look for any joke in Carmody’s remark. “Very little. Happening, I mean. HE flew off to London this morning with another offer from Hitler.”

  HE was His Excellency Sir Nevile Henderson, the ambassador, who had been possibly th
e busiest man in Germany over the past couple of weeks. He was a sincere man, Carmody privately thought but never stated in his despatches, but misguided in his approaches to Hitler: it was almost as if he had faith in the Fuehrer’s promises. Cynics, perhaps, are the better diplomats.

  “So nothing will happen tomorrow? You could play cricket.”

  “It wouldn’t be cricket, old chap. Besides, half the other side has gone home. We advised all British citizens to pack up and go. I’m surprised you’re still here.”

  “I’ll go when Dr. Goebbels kicks me out.”

  Carmody left the embassy, walked up the street, crossed the Pariser Platz and went into the French embassy set back on the square north of the Brandenburg Gate. There the press attaché, a portly man with dark bags under his eyes and a contempt for all journalists except the correspondent for Le Matin, offered him Vichy water and no information at all. All in French, too, which left Carmody none the wiser. Carmody thanked him and went home to bed. If the embassies were not worried about Sunday, why should a press bureau be?

  He slept without dreaming or tossing, got up at eight, went to nine o’clock Mass. He sat in St. Ludwig’s in a back pew and looked at all the bent heads in front of him and wondered what they were praying for: peace or the realization of the Fuehrer’s dreams? He hadn’t been to confession in over a year and his soul, according to the teaching of the parish schools he had gone to, was black with sin, particularly, over the past week, with that of fornication. So he didn’t go up to the altar for communion, but watched the priest putting the Host on the tongues and wondered if he, the priest, would offer the wafer to a lapsed Catholic like Goebbels if the Reichsminister presented himself at the altar. So far the Catholic Church in Germany had produced few heroes.

  Feeling mean and sour at how the populace was allowing itself to be led into war, he went over to his office, wrote a mean and sour piece and phoned it through to London. “Christ Almighty,” said London, an atheist, “what about some hard news?”

  “I’m going over to the Chancellery now and ask Hitler to declare war tomorrow. Okay?” Anyone who had grown up amongst a team of shearers was never lost for an answer, at least to another man. There were no women shearers, so he was still feeling his way with women.

  A train of thought he was pursuing when he picked up Cathleen: “Are you seriously going to ask Klatt if he can help with your mother?”

  She had slept the sleep of the truly exhausted last night and looked better for it. She was wearing a white skirt and green silk blouse and her red hair, freshly washed, was alive with lights. Only he, acutely aware of every expression and mood in her now, saw the hint of pain still in the bright eyes. She had sparkling eyes, which the camera, as well as men, fell for: they were only quiet after she had finished making love.

  Reckless now that he was in love, or at least reckless with World Press’ expenses, he had hired another car for the day. They drove out to Schwanenwerder through the Sunday traffic; everyone, it seemed, was heading for the Grunewald. Everyone, that is, but the troops. Convoys were moving east again, for a picnic on the Polish border.

  The Klatt villa had been designed by someone from the Bauhaus who had lost his nerve: stark angles abruptly melted into curves, glass walls turned into brick halfway down, a portico had been added like a pillared postscript. It had been built for an owner who had made and lost a fortune in the Weimar republic, a man who would always be nouveau but had been riche for only a short time. Klatt, just as nouveau and even more riche, had bought it.

  As they drove up to it Cathleen glanced through the trees and saw the English-style country house on the rise next door. But before she could orient herself they were drawing up under the Klatt portico and a butler was greeting them and then escorting them through the richly furnished house and out onto a terrace that looked down sloping lawns and out on to the Wannsee. Klatt, immaculate in cream flannels, cream silk shirt and tennis shoes, came booming towards them.

  “You brought your tennis kit, Herr Carmody? Wonderful! We shall play before luncheon. Fräulein O’Dea—how delightful you look! Doesn’t she, my love?” He introduced his wife, a good-looking blonde woman wrapped up in both her husband and a tight corset; she had a slightly dazed look, as if shell-shocked from years of her husband’s booming voice. “And you know Lady Arrowsmith? And oh, our good neighbours, Herr Reichsminister and Frau Goebbels—”

  The Reichsminister and his wife had come through the trees and up the path on to the terrace. Shadowy figures remained amongst the trees; even for Sunday luncheon at the neighbours’, the bodyguards had to be present. Goebbels was in a cream flannel suit, as was his wife: Cathleen thought they looked like a vaudeville act who might break into a soft-shoe shuffle at any moment. Goebbels took off a cream doeskin glove to raise Cathleen’s hand and kiss it.

  “Fräulein O’Dea, what a pleasure. You haven’t met my wife. Magda darling, this is Fräulein Cathleen O’Dea, who is playing in our film out at Babelsberg.”

  Magda Goebbels was a handsome blonde, taller than her husband and obviously not under his thumb, gloved or otherwise. She was a wife experienced in her husband’s liking for mistresses; she looked Cathleen up and down without seemingly moving her eyes. She must have decided that Cathleen was not yet a mistress, because her smile was sudden and charming.

  “You must tell me about Hollywood—”

  Carmody was shaking hands with Goebbels. “Herr Carmody—not working today?”

  “I checked with all the ministries, Herr Reichsminister. They told me today would be a no-news day. I can see how relaxed you are, yourself.”

  “I am always relaxed, Herr Carmody, in this best of all possible worlds.” The Minister could lie to himself on occasions.

  Carmody went off with Klatt to change into his tennis kit. Some other guests, three couples in expensive dress and expensive cars, had arrived and were being greeted by Heidi Klatt and Magda Goebbels. Cathleen moved over to sit beside Meg Arrowsmith, who was lolling in a cane chair, and Goebbels joined them. He sat down, arranging the crease in his trouser-legs, took off both gloves and looked at the women with a smile that told them they were his favourites for the day.

  “Isn’t it wonderful to be able to relax on a day like this?”

  “I wonder how the poor are relaxing?” Cathleen said in a light tone, though both Goebbels and Meg looked at her as if she were about to start a debate. She saw their looks and retreated smilingly: “A rhetorical question. You must be used to those, Herr Reichsminister.”

  He nodded, returning her smile, his eyes having difficulty in focusing above her legs. Meg said, “I thought there might be a meeting of Ministers today, Joseph.”

  “Perhaps later,” said Goebbels airily and looked out at the lake, closing that line of questioning. “We should all be out boating. The summer is almost over.”

  “Is that your boat down there?” Cathleen had now got herself oriented. She could see, through the trees bordering both estates, the small house, his “fort,” where Goebbels had entertained her. Down at the dock there were two boats, the one in which he had taken her cruising and a much larger one.

  “Yes, the Baldur. The big one. You must come for an outing on it one evening before you go home to America.”

  “You’ve never asked me, Joseph,” said Meg, who had been on his bed with him but never on his boat.

  “We must remedy that,” said Goebbels and abruptly got up and moved away to talk to one of the newly arrived men.

  Meg looked after him. “The little cad. He really is an awful swine. I saw him eyeing your legs. I hope he hasn’t tried to put his hand up them.”

  Cathleen stretched out her legs. “He’d get a kick in the crotch if he tried.”

  Meg laughed hoarsely; she looked wan and listless, as if she were suffering from a hangover. Which she was, though it was a hangover brought on by more than just liquor. “I never thought of doing that. The trouble I could have saved myself! Unfortunately, men have always been one of m
y weaknesses. I let them hurt me because I could never bring myself to hurt them. Do you think that’s an English thing?”

  “I haven’t met many Englishwomen, except the ones out in Hollywood and someone once told me, David Niven, I think, that they were always trying to be more English than they ever would have been at home. But Boadicea and Queen Elizabeth were pretty hard on men, weren’t they?”

  “Ah, but that was a long time ago. Before the Victorians thinned our blood.” She sipped her white wine, looked directly at Cathleen. “I think, after all, that I like you. Do you mind?”

  “Of course not.” Cathleen was surprised at her directness. “I think I like you, too. Sean likes you.”

  “All except my politics.” She held her wine glass up in front of her face, looked over the top of it out at the lake. Small yachts floated on it like gulls with frozen wings; motor-boats cruised amongst them like gross sharks. The far shore shimmered like a dark wave ready to break and the sky was a darker blue than usual, as if the darkness of outer space was pressing down on it, “He’s a sweet man, but he’s so innocent.”

  “Not quite,” said Cathleen, and Meg, all at once on the same wavelength as her, knew she didn’t mean it in a sexual sense. “I think maybe he sees everything much clearer than us. Than me, anyway.”

  Then the clear-sighted innocent came back, dressed in white shirt and shorts, looking much more athletic than the long-trousered Klatt beside him. The muscles in his shoulders and upper arms showed under the tight shirt and Cathleen suddenly showed a possessive pride in him. She smiled at him, like Charles Atlas’ mother, whose son had metamorphosed from a 97-pound weakling into a small mountain of muscle.

  “You must all come and watch!” shouted Klatt and led the way towards the lawn court at one side of the house.

  “How do you think you’ll go?” Cathleen said to Carmody as she walked beside him.

  “Hell probably wipe the court with me. He has a coach come out three mornings a week to practise with him. He says he often played with von Cramm.”

  “Played tennis, I hope. Didn’t he get into trouble for playing with boys?”