The City of Fading Light

by Jon Cleary

  “I don’t think Klatt is that sort. You watch how he’s going to impress you ladies.”

  The guests seated themselves in the small pavilion beside the court. Goebbels, who had no interest in tennis or any other sport, who felt that any energetic exercise only drew attention, no matter how indirectly, to his club foot, sat down beside Cathleen and looked bored and irritated. He would have gone home, even though it would have been rude to do so, had he not welcomed this opportunity to see Cathleen again. He felt lovesick, a feeling that made him queasy and irritated him even more. Sometimes, he thought, it is much easier to be in love only with oneself. He had tried that and succeeded, but women would keep intruding.

  Klatt’s service was like his voice, booming. He took the first game to love and Carmody could only console himself that his ignominy would soon be over. Unless the bastard wanted to play half a dozen sets, as he had threatened. Carmody, on his own service, lost the second game after he had managed to get to deuce. Klatt took the third game, but it went to deuce. Carmody began to find some form; he also began to realize that Klatt was a wound-up toy, a totally manufactured player, the product of some coach’s patience and persistence. Carmody was a natural athlete, born with a ball sense, but he played only for the exercise and the enjoyment of tennis; if anyone had suggested that he should be coached, he would have given up and taken up some other game. Klatt was flat-footed and badly co-ordinated; all his shots were correctly performed, but they looked like the actions of a mechanical man. Carmody began to run him around the court and took the next four games.

  As they crossed over he saw the look on Klatt’s face. The look told him he was being a poor guest and he would never be invited again. Heidi Klatt offered her husband a towel to wipe his streaming face, but he angrily brushed it aside and stalked down to his end of the court. Carmody stopped to take a sip from the glass of lemonade Magda Goebbels offered him. He looked at her and she was smiling approvingly at him; evidently she was no admirer of Nicky Klatt. Then Carmody looked at Cathleen and Meg and they were both discreetly shaking their heads. So much for being a show-off bastard, he thought; and went out on to the court to do his best to be a good guest.

  He lost the next three games to deuce, making a good job of covering up the fact that he allowed Klatt to win them. When the set ended Klatt came bounding to the net, hand out-thrust to his defeated opponent, all booming grace in victory.

  “Well played, old chap! It’s too hot to play another set, don’t you think? Let’s go up and shower and have luncheon.”

  Everyone looked pleased that the match was over; even Goebbels clapped politely. “I think we should give them three cheers,” said Meg. “Or would that be enough?”

  Klatt, who would have given six cheers if the figure of three had not already been set by the too-moderate English, laughed modestly, though his look told Meg this would be her last visit to the house. The group moved up into the house, with Carmody and Cathleen bringing up the rear.

  “I thought you were going to foul Herr Klatt’s nest,” she said softly.

  “He’d have broken my leg or something if I had. Crumbs, how can winning a game of tennis mean so much?”

  “You’re not his age, darling. When you’re forty-five, you’ll be busting your balls to lick the young men.”

  “You’re not only so wise about men, you have a ladylike way of putting things.”

  She put her cool arm in his sweaty one and they went into the house. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Goebbels staring at her, his face dark with—what? He was in his early forties and a cripple to boot: she shuddered at the unintended pun in her mind. She took her arm out of Carmody’s, told him to go and have his shower and crossed, almost a little hurriedly, to the Minister. She recognized the jealousy in his bony face and felt afraid.

  “You seem very close to Herr Carmody.” His voice was soft but harsh.

  “He’s just a friend. I’m very affectionate. Most actresses are, aren’t they?”

  “Not all. You haven’t been very affectionate towards me.”

  “It’s our positions, Herr Reichsminister. I was never very affectionate towards Mr. Mayer, either, at MGM.”

  “A Jew? You showed good taste.” His tongue was threatening to run away from him. He had never felt as jealous as this, at least not since the days with Lida Baarova. He felt frustrated, too, because he knew this affair would be over before it could even begin.

  The word Jew tripped her own tongue into saying, “Have you been able to find out anything about Frau Hoolahan?”

  He was sharp: “What made you say that? Is she Jewish?”

  “Hoolahan?” She laughed, an effort that almost stuck in her throat. That’s as Irish as my own name.”

  He laughed, too, though it took him a moment or two. “Of course it is. No, I have no information yet, but one of my secretaries is looking into it.”

  That, she guessed, meant nothing was being done. “Well, I’ll be grateful—”

  “I hope so.” There was no mistaking his meaning. He could no longer waste time being subtle: another week at the most and there would be no time for love affairs.

  Cathleen gave him an encouraging smile, just in case. Then Magda Goebbels, recognizing from experience an old symptom, came across to have a second look at her husband’s new actress. All three smiled at each other, a white circle of hypocrisy.

  “Talking films? My husband is absolutely besotted with films, Fräulein O’Dea. But perhaps he has told you that?”

  “He knows as much about American movies as I do.”

  Cathleen looked at the wife, a good-looking, intelligent woman who had given her husband six good-looking healthy children, and wondered what it was that drove the ugly, little Minister into so many other women’s beds. Was it revenge of some sort on women; or an attempt to prove he had as much sexual appeal as handsomer, less physically handicapped men; or was it just plain horniness, the animal urge that needed no explanation? Or, the saddest prospect of all, had they, after so many years of marriage and all those children, just grown tired of each other?

  “He knows so much,” said Magda Goebbels and made it sound less than a compliment.

  But her husband, a deft catcher of compliments, even badly-thrown ones, accepted it. “I have a good memory for everything I’ve read. And I’ve read everything.”

  “Of course you have, my darling.” She looked at Cathleen. “He comes to bed so late every night—he is always staying up to read. Still, I always know where he is.”

  Was it a warning? “I’m sure that’s a comfort.”

  Both women wiped their smiles across Goebbels’ throat. He had read everything, so he knew: man to woman can be a fair contest, sometimes; but man to two women is, as they would say out at the Hoppegarten, a two-mare race. He gave them a smile in return, but it was a poor defence.

  At lunch Cathleen sat on Klatt’s left at one end of the table; Goebbels sat on Frau Klatt’s right at the other end. Carmody found himself between Meg Arrowsmith and Magda Goebbels: stone the crows, he thought, if Mum and Dad could only see me now! The other couples had split themselves up and it was obvious they were regular diners at this table. Carmody recognized the names if not the faces of the three men: a banker and two industrialists. He looked along the table at Goebbels and decided the Minister was bored and was growing tired of hiding it. He knew that Goebbels rarely spent any social time with the rest of the Nazi hierarchy, whom he considered below his intellectual level; most of his social round was in the company of people from the arts, mostly from films and the theatre. Bankers and industrialists, it seemed, were, in Goebbels’ estimation, on a par with the dullards and buffoons of the Party. The Minister was here, Carmody decided, only because his wife had decreed it. Then he saw Goebbels looking down the table at Cathleen and he knew otherwise. And felt suddenly angry and jealous.

  “Steady on, darling,” whispered Meg, leaning forward into her vichyssoise. She pressed her knee against his. “I can feel you tre
mbling.”

  He grinned, tried to relax. “I didn’t think it was so obvious. You know what’s upset me?”

  “Of course. I’m all eyes and ears, darling.” She looked past him at Magda. “My dear Australian friend says he feels out of place here. I’m telling him he’s foolish to feel that way.”

  “Why do you feel out of place, Herr Carmody?”

  Out of the corner of his eye Carmody could see the amused glint in Meg’s eyes: you bitch, he thought. But he had learned how to think on his feet: “I’m a newspaperman, a foreign one. At a time like this most Germans are suspicious of us.”

  “Only those who write lies about us.” She was a good Propaganda Minister’s wife.

  “Oh, I’d never do that.” He was learning to be diplomatic. The shearing sheds and the country newspaper office had taught him nothing of diplomacy; nor, for that matter, had Australia as a whole. Diplomacy was for smarmy bastards like the Poms. But the civilizing process will out, since only the unintelligent know the honest joys of being uncivilized. “I write nothing but the truth.”

  “I’m sure you do,” said Magda, who hadn’t read anything he had written nor, indeed, heard of him till today. “You look truthful.”

  “Exactly!” said Meg and turned her head to scrutinize him, as if looking at him for the first time. “It’s just the word to describe him.”

  Carmody felt like kicking her.

  “I hope you won’t write anything untruthful about our food situation,” said Magda, leaning back so that the maid could take away her vichyssoise plate and replace it with the cold salmon plate.

  “What situation is that?” He must have missed something.

  “It was announced on the wireless news at midday,” said Meg. “Before you arrived. I don’t know how we’ll survive. Five hundred grams of meat a week—”

  “Seven hundred grams,” said Magda. “Don’t exaggerate, Lady Arrowsmith. I’m sure we’ll all get by without too much discomfort.”

  “Soap’s been rationed. And sugar and coffee. Another month and we’ll all be filthy as well as hungry.”

  “Nonsense,” said Magda. “We’ll survive.”

  Carmody watched both women attacking their salmon, survivors both.

  At the end of the table Klatt was complimenting Cathleen, fawning over her with all the grace of a flat-footed bull. He had never met an American film star before; was Garbo really as beautiful as she appeared on the screen? “Garbo isn’t American,” said Cathleen.

  “Of course—how stupid of me!” But one knew he really didn’t think he was stupid. “And you are Irish?”

  “Half.”

  “What is the other half?”

  Jewish. “American.”

  “What a wonderful combination! The poets and the businessmen. We don’t have that mixture here in Germany. Poets and businessmen don’t mix.”

  Denis Hoolahan’s talent for poetry hadn’t got past dirty limericks. He had known nothing of Yeats, who had never written There was a young man from Byzantium . . . But then she, too, had never read Yeats or any of the other Irish poets. She did, however, know businessmen. “You’re too flattering, Nicky. You have a way with women.” She wanted to throw up, but, for the glory of Hollywood and America, kept her stomach under control. “But I suppose you’ve been told that before.”

  “Once or twice,” he said, exaggerating. “If there is anything I can do for you—” Then he looked down the table, saw the dark eye of the Reichsminister glaring at him. He did no business with the Ministry of Propaganda, but Joseph Goebbels, and particularly Magda, could always put in a good word with the Fuehrer. He backed off, putting business before pleasure: “But then I noticed that the Minister has also fallen for your charms. I should not like to be his rival.”

  Her stomach was rising. “He has too much else on his mind to concern himself with me.”

  “True. Something is happening now.”

  The butler had come in, bent over Goebbels and whispered something to him. The Minister rose and went out of the dining room. Silence dropped for a moment on the table, but then Heidi Klatt, an experienced hostess who knew silence could spoil a luncheon party more than rotten strawberries and sour cream, picked up the ball of conversation and threw it down the table at her husband.

  “Tell them about your trip to Rome, Nicky. How you arm-wrestled Il Duce . . .”

  “And won, too,” said her husband, giving his wife a loving smile for putting the spotlight on him.

  “He’s so modest,” Meg whispered to Carmody, leaning into his left ear, “though it gives him a hernia.”

  “What did she say?” whispered Magda, leaning into his right ear.

  Carmody was saved from the truth, since he couldn’t have thought up a good enough lie, by the return of Goebbels. The little man came in, drawing on his gloves, looking self-important and at the same time relieved that he was being called away from the party.

  “I’m afraid I must go. There is a meeting of the Reichstag at the Chancellery. Please don’t let my going spoil your luncheon. No, stay, Magda.”

  He turned on his heel and went out, almost rudely; but then, of course, he was a Reichsminister and he had to be about his country’s business. It seemed to Carmody that the little man had grown several inches while pulling on his gloves and stepping out of the role of guest into that of a Minister whose presence at the Chancellery was urgently required.

  Carmody pushed back his chair. “Would you also excuse me, Herr Klatt? If there is to be a meeting, I should be there in case a statement is released.”

  Klatt looked annoyed, especially when Cathleen, too, stood up. “Must you really go? Can’t you telephone for any news? Surely you don’t have to go, Cathleen?”

  “Sean likes me to hold his hand when there’s a crisis. It’s been a marvellous day—”

  “Crisis, crisis—day after day!” Heidi Klatt had lost her good-tempered, resigned look. “Who wants the damned war, anyway?”

  Nobody said anything: she had spoiled her own luncheon party by silencing it. Carmody and Cathleen made their apologies and their exit; the Klatts let them go as if they no longer interested them. Only the butler saw them out to the rented car and as they drove away they both knew they would never be invited back.

  “Perhaps we should have stayed,” Cathleen said. “You might have got a story out of Frau Goebbels.”

  “Nobody is interested in Frau Goebbels any more. All London and New York want is hard news on whether there’s going to be war.”

  “Is there? Going to be war?”

  But he didn’t answer. He had looked in his driving mirror, seen the car pull out from the side of the road and begin to follow them as they drove out the gates of the Klatts’ estate.

  He couldn’t be sure, but the two men in the car looked like Lutze and Decker.

  II

  The lions were roaring. Not the British lion, which, in the person of its ambassador, was still running backwards and forwards trying to keep the peace; but the Berlin zoo’s lions, which sensed that feeding time was near. The zoo’s visitors crowded around the big cats’ enclosure, eager to show their children how another species besides themselves had no table manners. Babies were held up to see a lioness chewing on half a horse’s leg; older children shouted with delight as two lions fought over the butchered horse’s rump. It was all good clean fun, a nice diversion from the gloom that lay on their parents’ minds.

  “Everyone is worried,” said General Kurt von Albern. “Nobody wants war.”

  “Of course they don’t,” said Helmut. “But there won’t be any revolution if he declares war.”

  The two women, Melissa and Romy von Sonntag, said nothing; men never include women in their discussions on war. The four of them were sitting at an outdoor table in one of the zoo’s cafés; their hunger and their manners were less spectacular than the lions’ and no children were being held up to inspect them. The atmosphere amongst the four of them was awkward, mainly caused by Melissa’s unease at
her first introduction to Helmut’s father. It is not a comfortable situation when one meets an austere general for the first time and tells him that he is to be presented with his first grandchild and a bastard at that. So far Melissa herself had not broached the subject, but she knew Helmut had told Romy and Romy had told the General.

  She liked the appearance of the two older people. Romy had the sort of beauty she aspired to but doubted she would ever achieve, and Helmut’s father was slim and handsome and arrogant-looking, the sort of aristocrat she had never seen in Bradford nor in the repertory theatre, where the aristocrats of one week were the Alfred Doolittles of the next. Romy had a warmth to her that reassured her, but she doubted that she would ever find any warmth in the General. Yet, from the occasional glance that Romy gave him, there must be something there under Kurt von Albern’s cool exterior. Romy, she decided, was too intelligent and experienced to fall in love with a man who did not reciprocate. Yet she knew in her heart that intelligence had nothing to do with love.

  “You two go for a walk,” said Romy, patting the general’s hand. “Melissa and I have something to discuss. We’ll meet you over in the aquarium in half an hour. Now run along.”

  “Now run along . . . What a way to dismiss a soldier.” Kurt von Albern smiled at her, and suddenly Melissa saw the warmth in him. And wished that she could evoke the same smile in Helmut.

  Helmut looked affectionately at his father. Why can’t he love me like that? Melissa thought. Then he looked at her and for a moment she saw (or thought she saw) something in his eyes that gave her hope. He pressed her hand, stood up and walked off with his father into the crowd.

  “They are a handsome pair,” said Romy, looking after the two tall, upright men. “We are very lucky, you and I.”

  “You, perhaps. I’m not so sure about me.”

  “Why not? Helmut loves you.”

  “Does he? I’m not sure.” She was surprised that almost at once she was confiding in this stranger; but Romy von Sonntag, for all her cool elegance that, at a distance, might have been mistaken for hauteur, had a sympathy about her. “He doesn’t want to marry me.”