Two Brothers

Wolfgang felt ancient.

‘Hello, Katharina,’ he said. ‘Pleased to meet you.’

‘Look but don’t touch, Mr Trumpet!’ Kurt admonished, wagging a heavily bejewelled finger. ‘This hotsy-totsy baby already found her daddy.’

Wolfgang smiled at the boy’s absurd posturing but he was secretly annoyed that his appreciation of the girl had been so obvious. Katharina herself gave Kurt a look of such endless and absolute contempt that Wolfgang could only wonder how the youth did not shrivel up into a heap of ashes inside his suit.

‘We often breeze into this particular gin mill,’ he went on, ‘me and my crowd. It’s our favourite dive. Do you want to know why?’

Wolfgang was about to remark that frankly he could live without that information. He had only stopped at the bar on his way out for a quick cigarette and a shot of whisky against the night chill, and was in no particular mood for drunken intimacies from complete strangers. Particularly teenage ones.

But there was something undeniably compelling about this young peacock, if only his immense self- satisfaction. Also, if Wolfgang was honest, he had no objection to spending a few moments longer under the cool appraisal of Katharina’s smoky gaze.

‘I imagine you’re going to tell me anyway. So put me out of my misery. Why do you come to this particular gin mill, Kurt?’

‘Well—’

‘I’m dry,’ Katharina interrupted in a lazy drawl, tapping a long, black-painted fingernail on the rim of her empty glass. Kurt, whose gushing joie de vivre was as unaffected by being ignored as it was by being derided, happily poured out the last of his champagne into Katharina’s glass and then called for another bottle.

‘Make sure it’s French, mind!’ he shouted, putting real American dollars on the bar, ‘and another malt scotch for my friend.’

As Katharina raised her glass to her lips, the wispy silk of her dress rippled against her breasts. It was as if a naked girl had walked through a cobweb.

Once more Wolfgang tried not to stare.

‘Light me,’ she said, helping herself to one of Wolfgang’s American cigarettes that were lying beside his drink. ‘I like a Lucky. They’re toasted, you know.’

Wolfgang struck a match on the sole of his shoe and held it up for her. She touched his hands as she leant forward to place the tip of her cigarette into the flame. The light flared, highlighting her fine cheekbones and casting shadows across her temples.

‘We come here,’ Kurt said finally, ‘if I might be allowed to get a word in edgeways, because of the music. And more to the point, Mr Trumpet, because of you.’

‘Thanks a lot,’ Wolfgang said, draining the double shot he’d been given in one gulp. ‘Well, I’m here each night, and all paying customers are welcome.’

‘You are very hot,’ Katharina said slowly, and for a moment she fixed her heavily lidded eyes upon his, gazing unblinkingly into them through the smoke that curled up from her purple-painted lips. ‘I like trumpet players. They know how to coordinate their mouths and fingers.’

Wolfgang actually blushed at this and Kurt roared with laughter.

‘Stop flirting, you goofy Dora!’ he shouted, slapping Katharina’s bottom. ‘I’m doing business here.’

‘Really?’ Katharina replied. ‘OK, well here’s some business for you, sonny: give me fifty American dollars now or try and find another girl as beautiful as me to make you look like a man instead of the damned little schoolboy that you are. And don’t ever slap my ass again.’

Kurt giggled foolishly. ‘Isn’t she a scream? Too too cruel. It’s what I love. I must be a masochist.’

Then to Wolfgang’s astonishment, Kurt took out a gold money clip and counted out five US ten-dollar bills, which Katharina took without a smile or even a nod of acknowledgement. Then raising her slim coltish leg on to the foot of a bar stool, she briskly pulled the hem of her dress along her thigh and slipped the money into her garter.

Her eyes flipped up and caught Wolfgang staring.

‘I’m afraid my dress doesn’t have any pockets,’ she said.

Wolfgang gulped. He needed to get home.

‘Business?’ he said quickly, trying to pretend it had been the hard currency and not Katharina’s leg he’d been looking at. ‘What business are you doing and what’s it got to do with me?’

‘You’re the fixer in this juice joint, am I right?’ Kurt enquired. ‘You book the band, do the sheets and work out the set list?’

‘Yes, they’re all my arrangements. I do it all.’

‘Well, I like what you do, Daddy. I’m starting up my own club and I want you to fix for me.’

Wolfgang tried not to laugh.

‘You? Starting up a club? Forgive me, Kurt, but how old are you?’

‘I’m eighteen.’

‘He’s seventeen,’ said Katharina.

‘I’m using the Russian calendar,’ Kurt shot back, ‘out of solidarity with the murdered Romanovs.’

Wolfgang laughed. The kid certainly had charm.

‘They shouldn’t even let you in a club, let alone buy one,’ he said.

‘They let in anyone with dollars,’ Kurt pointed out. ‘I have a lot of dollars. And francs and gold sovereigns. Anything you want. Come and join me at my table. Meet my friends, we can discuss it.’

Wolfgang looked across the crowded room towards where Kurt was nodding. Kurt’s friends looked almost as young as he was.

‘Shouldn’t you all be studying for college or something?’

‘There is nothing old people can teach us. Absolutely nothing,’ Kurt said with a weary shrug, ‘except how to crawl. How to starve. How to sit about wishing that it was still 1913 until you curl up and die. We know more already than those stupid old bastards ever knew, which is why we’re drinking French champagne and listening to hot jazz while they queue for soup or march about the streets in tin helmets looking for Jews to shoot. Come on, I want you to meet my friends.’

Perhaps it was Kurt’s money that made Wolfgang linger. Perhaps it was his girlfriend. Either way he allowed himself to be led over to the table where Kurt’s ‘crowd’ was seated and where he was greeted with enthusiastic applause.

‘This is Hans,’ Kurt said, referring to an athletic-looking young man with a thin Douglas Fairbanks moustache, which Wolfgang suspected had been beefed up with mascara. ‘One year ago he failed his final Latin exam, now he deals in automobiles.’

‘Anything from a Flivver to a Roller,’ Hans boasted, slurring his words somewhat. ‘You want it, I’ll get it. Take my card. Discount for a man who plays like you.’

Wolfgang explained that he was happy with his bicycle but took the card anyway, noticing that Hans’s pupils were mere pinpricks. There was also a girl slumped on his shoulder, dead to the world.

‘This is Dorf,’ Kurt went on, ignoring the unconscious girl and indicating a bookish-looking man with horn- rimmed spectacles sitting on the other side of her. ‘He’s in currency, his father thinks he should be studying law.’

‘He wants me to be an articled clerk when I’m twenty-one,’ Dorf said primly, ‘which is rather funny actually because, without me, my old man would starve! Mother doesn’t tell him of course.’

Kurt and Hans both laughed at this, causing the girl between them to begin to slide slowly under the table. Hans put an arm across her to arrest her progress.

‘And here’s Helmut,’ Kurt said, referring to a beautiful blond youth with piercing blue eyes that matched his cobalt blue earrings. ‘He’s what you might call—’

‘A queer pimp,’ Katharina interrupted.

‘Actually I was going to say a social consultant,’ Kurt said.

‘I prefer queer pimp,’ Helmut remarked archly, at which there was more laughter, and once more Hans’s girl