Two Brothers

Katharina slipped away while Kurt continued to witter on.

‘You were out there, boys. Solid gone. Let me tell you, I know jazz and that was jazz, baby.’

Kurt was by nature a talkative man and cocaine made him insanely verbose. He spewed words. They tumbled out on top of each other in a vomit of extravagant praise. It was as if he was saying words side by side as well as end to end. It made Wolfgang sad to hear him. The best boss he ever had was becoming a jerk.

He began to usher Kurt out of the room. Had he not done so, Kurt probably would have gone on all night, oblivious to time.

‘Got to get ourselves together, Kurt,’ he said. ‘Have to play the next bracket, that’s why you pay us.’

‘Yeah!… That’s right! Get ready! For the next bracket!’ Kurt shouted as if continuing with the evening’s performance was some brilliant and incisively original idea. ‘That’s what I like to hear. And make it hot hot hot!’

As the ridiculously youthful figure stumbled away, Wenke the clarinet player snorted in contempt. Wenke was a brilliant instrumentalist but a dark and brooding man, permanently damaged by four years in the trenches. ‘Little bourgeois prick,’ he snarled. ‘We’ll have him hanging from a lamp-post one of these days, when the revolution comes. The whole pack of them make me sick. Boys in lipstick, girls with their breasts showing through their dresses. Berlin’s turning into a cesspit.’

‘Don’t you run Berlin down in front of me, Wenke,’ Tom Taylor said with a deep friendly laugh, while chugging at a quarter of Bourbon that he kept in the breast pocket of his dinner jacket. ‘I love Berlin, ’cos ya know what? Right here in this town Wolfgang’s the nigger, not me! Ain’t that the strangest thing? Back in the States I was a nigger every day of my life but not here! I finally found a city where they hate someone worse than they hate a black man and I say hallelujah to the Jews.’

‘You just let a gang of Stahlhelm find you fucking a German girl, Tom,’ Wolfgang observed, ‘and you’ll soon find out who’s the nigger.’

‘Well, they ain’t going to find me, Wolf, are they?’ Tom laughed, ‘because I ain’t about to invite no audience in to watch. Not that they wouldn’t get one hell of a lesson in humping!’ he added, taking another slug of his whisky, ‘American style, slow and easy, like la-a-azy blues.’

Wilhelm the sax player interjected, a man whose face was caked in make-up and who wore a green carnation on his lapel.

‘Well, speaking as one of Wenke’s boys in lipstick, if you ever tire of working your way through our city’s charming show girls, Tom, don’t hesitate to call me, I’d love to try a bit of schwarz myself.’

‘I surely will remember that, Fraulein.’ Tom laughed. ‘You can expect that call just as soon as hell freezes over.’

‘You’re a bunch of decadent cunts,’ Wenke grumbled.

‘Of course we are!’ Wolfgang shouted. ‘We’re jazz men! Being decadent cunts is our job description. Now come on, as the boss says, time to go ape, Daddy!’

Halfway through the second bracket Wolfgang saw Katharina slip away. Looking out from behind the dome of his trumpet he watched as she headed for the doorway with a man. A big producer from the UFA film studios whom Katharina had introduced Wolfgang to briefly the night before. A great, swaggering, sweating, arrogant middle-aged movie guy.

It was her business of course.

Certainly none of his.

No need to feel jealous.

She was just a friend.

But as Katharina and her film producer disappeared together, the man’s plump, bejewelled hand placed proprietorially upon Katharina’s slim, naked back, Wolfgang was shocked to realize just how jealous he was.

St John’s Wood London, 1956

STONE’S FLAT OVERLOOKED Regent’s Park. He could not have afforded it on his Foreign Office salary but had bought it with the proceeds of the sale of his parents’ apartment in Berlin. The home in which he had grown up, which the Nazis stole in 1942 and which had miraculously survived the Allied bombing.

A final gift from his beloved mum and dad.

As he approached the building from St John’s Wood tube, Stone wondered if Billie would still be there. She only stayed at weekends and always left on Monday morning but never at any particular time. Billie was not the sort of person to pay much attention to regular timetables.

Waiting for the lift Stone was concerned to discover that he was rather hoping she would be there. It would be nice to see her and share a cup of coffee. They might put a record on and continue her jazz education.

Stone tried to dismiss these thoughts from his mind.

He didn’t like attachments. He had avoided them since 1939. Always walking away whenever he sensed himself getting too close to a person. Especially a woman. The very fact that he liked Billie and enjoyed her company made him think that he should stop seeing her.

After all, what right had he to such simple pleasures?

He had survived.

And, anyway, he loved Dagmar. He would always love her. He’d promised her that at the Lehrter Bahnhof.

Billie was a West Indian girl Stone had met during the previous summer at a basement party in Ladbroke Grove. Stone liked to spend time in Notting Hill. He had been an outsider of one sort or another since the age of thirteen and felt great empathy with the immigrants who had recently come to live in West London.

‘Hey, we’re the Jews now,’ Billie had once joked. To which Stone had replied that she’d better hope not.

Stone also liked the music and the easy-going attitude that he found amongst Billie’s crowd. The disrespect for convention and authority. He liked the laughter, though he never laughed, and the dancing, though he never danced. He had also found that smoking marijuana was a pleasant alternative to blotting out the world with scotch as he had done on most evenings since the war.

After long days spent in the stilted dryness of Whitehall, it was a relief to while away his evenings sitting half stoned in a noisy, sweating, crowded room, listening to unfamiliar music and watching couples dancing so close that they might almost have been single creatures. It reminded him of the places his father used to talk about. The tiny late-night clubs pounding with rhythm and sweating with sex where Wolfgang Stengel had worked in the days before the whip came down. When, according to his father, Berlin had been beautiful, wild, irreverent and life- affirming.

Sitting in those little basement clubs the West Indians had established so quickly and with so little regard for the licensing laws, Stone could imagine himself close to his father. Luxuriating in the thought that apart from the colour of the dancers’ skin the scene he saw through his half-closed eyes was not so very different from that which Wolfgang had smiled out at from behind his trumpet on crazy carefree nights long ago and in another world.

Sometimes of course with one puff of smoke too many, or one extra drink, the vision changed, and Stone could not prevent paranoid nightmare fantasies dropping into his addled mind, in which the door burst open and brown-shirted imbeciles with red and black armbands flooded in, flailing about themselves with their truncheons and smashing all the delicate, beautiful young dancers to the ground in a mess of blood, teeth and splintered bone.

Billie said that if he found himself having those thoughts too often he should definitely try putting a higher percentage of tobacco into his reefers.

‘When it makes you paranoid it’s time to slow down,’ she advised.

Billie was still at home.