Very Old Bones

by William Kennedy

  “Where are we going?” I asked her.

  “It does not matter,” she said. “He follow us where we go.”

  “Who does?”

  “Meister Geld. He always look to people before he meets. We go here,” and she pointed to a café with a window full of seven-layer chocolate cakes, cream tarts, glazed Apfelkuchen, and other ambrosial wonders. She said she loved sweet food and then ordered two kinds of chocolate cake. She was rosencheeked, a characteristic in many German women that I took to be seasonal, or perhaps dietetic. Her face, with very modest makeup, was a map of sensuality, her eyes wizened with what I construed to be sexual wisdom. Her tight sweater covered only unencumbered natural uplift. Was there a reason beyond money that she became a whore?

  “Only money,” she said. “For money I used to carry a piece of carpet so when I lay down in the ruins to fuck my boys I would not tear my clothes. I made much money but later I am unhappy that I will die in disgrace. Now I want to live only old and please self, so I eat sweet cake. I hungry now. In war days I only sometimes hungry, sometimes whore. Now I always hungry, always whore. Now I live to eat.”

  I nodded and asked when Meister Geld was coming. She looked in my eye and said, “I know you do not want me, but I always pay for cake.”

  She opened her blouse and presented her naked breasts to my gaze. They were abundant and firm, underlined below by a long, jagged horizontal scar on her stomach. “Gift from lover,” she said, touching the scar. She closed her blouse and stood up.

  “I know nobody with name Meister Geld,” she said. “It is silly name.” Then she left the café.

  What was I to make of that? Conned out of two pieces of cake by a sugar whore? Was that all there was to it? I paid the check, and as I left the café, thinking about my next move, a black Mercedes pulled alongside me; and from the rear seat came a greeting.

  “Good afternoon, Lieutenant. I have your tidings from Archie Bell,” this in very good English from a man in a dark blue leather coat, and a dark suit of color and cut not unlike the suit on my back. The man was corpulent, with the red beard of a Viking warrior. I judged him to be forty.

  “Meister Geld?” I asked, and when he smiled and opened the car door I got in beside him.

  In my hierarchy of personal demons at the time of the fall, Meister Geld holds a position of eminence. He had been wounded by the weather in December, 1941, on the day the Russians stopped Hitler at Stalingrad. Forty-two degrees below zero, and his left foot froze into the similitude of marble; a frozen foot as good as a bullet in the chest. He ran barefoot in the snow to gain circulation, then stole a felt shoe from a Russian soldier who lay dead in the street, needless of the shod life. He did not steal the Russian’s right shoe but kept his own, a piece of cracked leather. His foot of marble recovered in the felt, but his right foot congealed and died inside the sodden leather. Also a hole in his glove cost him his right thumb.

  The Meister told me all this when he saw me staring at that peculiar ersatz thumb: an unlikely length of glove-covered hard rubber, tied with a finger-threading thong. And, in the shoe where the front half of his foot used to be, a piece of toe-shaped wood. Why had the Meister not understood his thumb was freezing? Why had he not stolen the Russian’s right shoe along with the left? Look to the minor devils of war for answers.

  My simple task, to change two thousand marks for dollars, was achieved in the first moments of talking, the Meister excavating from a vast interior coat pocket a leather bag thick with banknotes, and giving me the going street rate of exchange.

  “A formidable amount of marks, Lieutenant,” the Meister said. “You have been saving your pfennigs.”

  “Some belong to an associate of mine,” I said.

  “Archie Bell?”

  “No. Archie handles his own.”

  “So you not only deal in money, you are also a courier for others. And out of uniform. You have the air of the adventurer about you, Lieutenant.”

  The thought pleased me. I began to think of myself as Orson-at-large, Orson-on-the-town. Other than manipulating cards and a few black-market cigarette sales, I had done very little in life that could be construed as illegal. My moral stance on cards was that it was a survival tactic; also I gave back as much as I stole, although not always to the same citizens. I knew I was an adept, a figure of reasonable power in an unreasonable world, flush now with money, love awaiting at the other end of a taxi ride, Europe at my doorstep, needful only of a weekend or three-day pass to know the glories of civilized empire, including the empires of love, lust, beauty, and freedom (temporal for the moment, but longitude will develop; all things wait on the man who embraces the muse of freedom). And now, as I rode in the Mercedes with an underworld figure of notable dimension, I moved into a realm of possibility that included illegalities permissible to The Man Who Is, always stopping short of what might be considered serious criminality, of course. No need to venture that far into a new career.

  Meister Geld took me to a small movie theater where we stood in the back and watched a scene from a German melodrama in black and white: A woman in a kitchen backs away from a threatening man and reaches for a knife. Close on the knife, as man of menace, undeterred, comes toward her. She thrusts. Close on knife entering his stomach. He crumples. She backs away, runs out of house. Close on man, dead. He opens eyes, removes knife from his stomach, no wound visible, rises, puts knife in sink, no blood visible on it, opens cabinet, takes down whiskey, pours self a drink, drinks, looks toward door, smiles.

  The Meister grew bored and climbed the stairs to a second- floor office beside the windowed projection booth, the office similarly windowed to give access to the screen. The office was cluttered with German movie posters and photographs of naked women. The Meister hung his coat upon a hook, sat in his leather chair, and asked: “Do you like to travel, Lieutenant? May I call you Orson?”

  “Travel pleases me. Orson is my name.”

  “One may make a great deal of money by traveling, especially if one is an American officer like yourself.”

  “I’m in the mood for money,” I said.

  “From the black market?”

  “Everybody does it.”

  “The army frowns on it.”

  “But they do very little to discourage it, especially among officers. My partner in this deal is another officer.”

  “I can’t tell you how it pleases me to hear this,” said the Meister. “I sense an alliance of substance.”

  In agreeing to travel for the Meister, I perceived a change in my attitude toward myself and others. Clearly, I thought and acted faster and with more resolution than other men, knew what others would think before they thought it, knew, for instance, when I caught the Captain biting his nails, and he then guiltily hid his hands, that he was behaving like a recidivist thumbsucker, which is to say an autoeroticist. How swift the demon Orson—or is it Oreson-Whoreson?—faster by a whisker than old Freud devoid.

  As he listened, the Meister unfolded the tale of his childhood in the war, early soldierhood in the Wehrmacht, surviving the bombings of Frankfurt, aiding in their aftermath (his half a foot then only a stump), putting out fires, carrying wounded to belowground shelters. The boy into man became the peddler who could get anybody anything at a price by the time he was twenty-three. He crossed into the British, French, and Russian zones during the early occupation years with great ease and casualness, owning papers of four nations, fluent in five tongues, and with a sixth sense for survival.

  He stole an artificial leg from the hospital where he recuperated, sold the leg to an amputee for two hundred cigarettes, bartered the cigarettes for a live pig, traded the pig to a butcher who supplied the mayor of Darmstadt in exchange for the loan of a Leica and a roll of film, bided his time until he had secretly photographed an American lieutenant colonel in bed with three Fräuleins and a Doberman pinscher, blackmailed the colonel into lending him his automobile, drove to the officers’ quarters and cleaned out another colonel’s vast hoard o
f medicine, chocolate, uniforms, military insignia, and whiskey, imposed these gifts on a black marketeer known as the King of Mannheim, and earned himself the right to deal in currency for the King, which was his goal from the outset.

  The Meister carried a pistol, which was visible in the crotch of his left arm, and as he dropped references to this killing, that murder attempt, I grew wary of getting thick with his mission, which I had yet to understand. But as he unraveled the operation, I again grew comfortable, because I would be dealing with legitimate life: buying money at banks, using legitimate dollars that I could easily have come by legally. I lost my fear and entered into the brilliance of a solvent future, one in which I would crown Giselle the queen of all fortune, and where we would reign as sovereigns of a post-military life in the haut monde.

  The Meister’s method was a complex cycle of money in motion. On the street he sold marks to Americans for scrip, turned the scrip into greenbacks through a network of American army associates (like myself) by legal means, buying money orders, for instance; then sent me and others to Switzerland with the greenbacks, where we bought German marks at considerably less than their value in the American sector of Germany. Back in Frankfurt we’d take our cut, and the Meister would then sell the marks for scrip at a profit, turn the scrip into greenbacks, and off we’d go again to Switzerland on our moneycycle.

  The danger was minimal. Military personnel underwent baggage inspection at the American zone’s exit points, but I had educated luggage and also the inspection of officers was usually perfunctory for officers are honest—except the Captain, who was a grand thief in his heart, a petty thief in his skin. It was he who owned half the marks I first changed with the Meister, and it was he who saw dollar signs in his dreams after I told him of the Meister’s scheme.

  What can I say of international currency violation? Not much more than that it’s the rape of the system. The Swiss have been fucking the rest of the world with their secret vaults for generations. What the Meister and I did was to join the game.

  It would have taken me years to get rich on this arrangement, but I did finance my marriage and honeymoon, did fulfill the vision of Venice as altar and nuptial bed—Giselle and I afloat on the Grand Canal, stroked along in our gondola of desire, knowing that today is tomorrow, and tomorrow is forever, and that we will be in ecstasy, we will be rich and free, and we will manifest our own destiny forever; and not only will we never die, we will not even grow old. That’s what I told Giselle the night before we returned to Germany and I was arrested by the Military Police.

  They interrogated me for two days, then let me go but confined me to quarters, not as a total prisoner, but restricted to one room and the grounds at headquarters Kaserne, where the MPs were billeted. They escorted me to chow and kept checking to see that I hadn’t gone off. Being a married officer, I’d had my own apartment in an army housing project close to the center of the city, but I could no longer live there.

  They knew that two other officers were involved with the scam—my boss, the Captain, and Warrant Officer Archie Bell. They transferred Archie to Korea but sent the Captain to cushy London, which led me to believe that the Captain was the informer in the case. Vengeance is my estimate of his motive, since I took Giselle away from him. The police must have known he was dealing, confronted him, and he ratted. And there I was, an upstanding citizen, suddenly thrust among outcasts, thrown into an underworld role for which I had small talent and less stomach.

  Right after they checked on me I dressed and left the Kaserne, walked past the guard at the gate and took his salute, then caught a taxi to my apartment, where I changed into my German suit. Giselle was at work and I decided not to leave her a note. I’ve always quested after mystery, and as I studied myself in the mirror I realized that the Orson of the past was gone forever. I took all the cash I had in the drawer, slicked my hair with Vaseline, put on the leather coat I’d bought in emulation of Meister Geld, and stepped out into the Teutonic darkness.

  I went looking for the Meister, my first stop being his movie theater. The usher said he’d never heard of anybody named Meister Geld and I realized then that I didn’t know the man’s real name, or if he had one. The usher grew impatient and said if I wanted to go inside I’d have to buy a ticket, and I did.

  A military hanging was in process in the film. A much-decorated warrior wearing his uniform and medals ascends to the gallows, and disdains the hood that covers a hanged man’s death gasp. Hangman loops rope around his neck, man proudly strokes his medals, and hangman weeps as trapdoor springs. Close on face of hanged man: tongue out, eyes all but exploded. Hold on face as eyes return to normal, tongue recedes into mouth. View on military guards weeping as they look at hanging man. Close on hanged man, dead and smiling. His eyes suddenly open, his smile widens, and he laughs.

  I went up the stairs toward the office by the projection booth. It was as I remembered, but empty: no movie posters, no naked women, no furniture, telephone, or rug. Meister the Magnificent had made himself disappear. The usher came in behind me, said I shouldn’t be up here, and ushered me out into the night. I circled several blocks, looking for the Meister’s car, my peregrinations bringing me eventually to the only other place where I knew to look for him, the Rhineland Bar. It was busy with a mix of men and women, whores and pimps, and I sought my main connection, the sugar whore, but without success. I wanted to see her again expose her scar, the validity of which I had begun to doubt. Was it pasted on? Tattooed? Drawn? Would it run during sex, or come off on your stomach? Would you then be scarred?

  Sitting with a whore who was not as attractive as my sugar whore was a corporal from Seventh Army who had worked as a courier for the Meister. All I knew him by was Bosco, which may or may not have been his name. And when I had this thought I realized how very little I knew about any of my co-conspirators. I’d met Bosco in Switzerland, where the Meister had sent him with greenbacks—to deliver to me—for the purchase of German marks, the Meister reasoning that I was the more suave, more cosmopolitan figure to deal with bankers.

  Bosco, now in civilian clothes, looked like a character out of the funny sheets of my childhood, Wash Tubbs. He was short with glasses and wiry black curls all over his head. I found him a mix of regular-army rube and bright, wily skuldugger. We’d had drinks on two occasions and talked of the Meister, about whom Bosco was mysterious but portentous. What I took home from him was that the Meister not only dabbled in the black market, the currency conduit, and the flesh exchange, but Bosco also hinted vaguely at the more exalted intrigue of politics. And that implied politics. Was the Meister an agent? A double agent? A provocateur? A hired political killer? I couldn’t say. But that’s how the imagination went.

  I went over to Tubbs-Bosco and greeted him with a question: “Zigarette, bitte?” He smiled, proffered a Lucky Strike, and asked me to sit down beside his whore, whom I glanced at with a certain shock to the system, for she looked very like my Aunt Molly, one of the grand people of the universe. I squinted at her, disbelieving my eyes, and saw she looked not like Molly at all but really like Juliette Levinsky, a blond Jewess of great beauty who was the love of my life for a year or more, and yet this woman was not a blonde; and when I looked at her from another angle she resembled neither Molly nor Juliette. Clearly this face required further scrutiny.

  “Have you seen the Meister?” I asked Bosco.

  “Not since before the fall,” he said.

  “Which fall is that?” I asked.

  “Fall? Fall? What do you mean fall?” he asked.

  “I mean fall. It’s what you said. Whose fall? What fall are you talking about?”

  “That’s my question,” he said.

  “The Meister,” I said. “Where is he?”

  “I wish I knew the answer to that,” Bosco said.

  “When did you see him last?”

  “Last week. We had a meal together. We both had Heilbutt vom Rost, mit Toast.”

  “What do I care what you ate? Where is
he? He’s no longer at the theater.”

  “He sold the theater,” Bosco said.

  “Heilbutt vom Rost is my favorite German dish,” I said. “I had it on Good Friday, with Krauterbutter.”

  “The Captain threw you in, of course. You knew that.”

  “I suppose I did,” I said.

  “I’d have him killed, if I were you,” said Bosco.

  “That’s extreme,” I said. “Not my way. I admit I considered it, however.”

  “The Captain’s in London,” Bosco said. “Living it up at the Strand and the Ritz, dining out at the Connaught and Brown’s Hotel, shopping on Savile Row, screwing all the girls in Soho. And you call yourself a spy?”

  “I never call myself a spy,” I said.

  I looked at the whore. She looked like my third-grade teacher, who used to rub herself against the edge of the desk while lecturing us: A beautiful woman. A tall redhead with long blond hair. She was smitten with me. Followed my career all through grammar school. No one quite like her, the sweet little dolly.

  “Heilbutt vom Rost I could go for right now,” I said.

  “I can get it for you half price,” Bosco said.

  “Where’s Geld?” I asked.

  “Geld is where you find him,” Bosco said. “In the Russian zone by this time, I’d venture.”

  “You always said he was a double agent.”

  “No, I merely suggested that he was a provocateur-killer with a finger in every political honeycomb in Europe. Even his toenails are illegal. He’s a great man. He’s entitled to finger anything or anybody he pleases. You know who the greatest man in the world is?”

  “Of course,” I said. “Harry Truman. For dropping the bomb on Hiroshima. I never thought so many were undoable.”

  “And the second-greatest man in the world?”

  “The pilot who bombed Hiroshima. Think of the night sweats and headaches he’s had to put up with ever since.”

  “In my opinion,” Bosco said, “there’s only one war, with intermissions.”