Outside the cafe we bought a newspaper.
On the front page there was a photograph of the two Hermanns, Six and Goering, shaking hands: Goering was grinning broadly, and Six wasn’t smiling at all: it looked like the Prime Minister was going to have his way regarding the supply of raw materials for the German steel industry after all. I turned up the entertainments section.
‘How about
‘What about this one?’ she said. ‘
But nothing surprises me now. I’ve grown used to living in a world that is out of joint, as if it has been struck by an enormous earthquake so that the roads are no longer flat, nor the buildings straight.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘she’s all right.’
We walked to the cinema. The red
THE PALE CRIMINAL
To Jane
Much about your good people moves me to disgust, and it is not their evil I mean. How I wish they possessed a madness through which they could perish, like this pale criminal. Truly I wish their madness were called truth or loyalty or justice: but they possess their virtue in order to live long and in a miserable ease.
PART ONE
You tend to notice the strawberry tart in Kranzler’s cafe a lot more when your diet forbids you to have any.
Well, lately I’ve begun to feel much the same way about women. Only I’m not on a diet, so much as simply finding myself ignored by the waitress. There are so many pretty ones about too. Women, I mean, although I could as easily fuck a waitress as any other kind of female. There was one woman a couple of years ago. I was in love with her, only she disappeared. Well, that happens to a lot of people in this city. But since then it’s just been casual affairs. And now, to see me on Unter den Linden, head one way and then the other, you would think that I was watching a hypnotist’s pendulum. I don’t know, maybe it’s the heat. This summer, Berlin’s as hot as a baker’s armpit. Or maybe it’s just me, turning forty and going a bit coochie-coo near babies. Whatever the reason, my urge to procreate is nothing short of bestial, which of course women see in your eyes, and then leave you well alone.
Despite that, in the long hot summer of 1938, bestiality was callously enjoying something of an Aryan renaissance.
1
‘Just like a fucking cuckoo.’
‘What is?’
Bruno Stahlecker looked up from his newspaper.
‘Hitler, who else?’
My stomach sank as it sensed another of my partner’s profound analogies to do with the Nazis. ‘Yes, of course,’ I said firmly, hoping that my show of total comprehension would deter him from a more detailed explanation. But it was not to be.
‘No sooner has he got rid of the Austrian fledgling from the European nest than the Czechoslovakia one starts to look precarious.’ He smacked the newspaper with the back of his hand. ‘Have you seen this, Bernie? German troop movements on the border of the Sudetenland.’
‘Yes, I guessed that’s what you were talking about.’ I picked up the morning mail and, sitting down, started to sort through it. There were several cheques, which helped to take the edge off my irritation with Bruno. It was hard to believe, but clearly he’d already had a drink. Normally a couple of stops away from being monosyllabic (which I prefer being a shade taciturn myself) booze always made Bruno chattier than an Italian waiter.
‘The odd thing is that the parents don’t notice. The cuckoo keeps throwing out the other chicks, and the foster parents keep on feeding it.’
‘Maybe they hope that he’ll shut up and go away,’ I said pointedly, but Bruno’s fur was too thick for him to notice. I glanced over the contents of one of the letters and then read it again, more slowly.
‘They just don’t want to notice. What’s in the post?’
‘Hmm? Oh, some cheques.’
‘Bless the day that brings a cheque. Anything else?’
‘A letter. The anonymous kind. Someone wants me to meet him in the Reichstag at midnight.’
‘Does he say why?’
‘Claims to have information about an old case of mine. A missing person that stayed missing.’
‘Sure, I remember them like I remember dogs with tails. Very unusual. Are you going?’
I shrugged. ‘Lately I’ve been sleeping badly, so why not?’
‘You mean apart from the fact that it’s a burnt-out ruin, and it isn’t safe to go inside? Well, for one, it could be a trap. Someone might be trying to kill you.’
‘Maybe you sent it, then.’
He laughed uncomfortably. ‘Perhaps I should come with you. I could stay out of sight, but within earshot.’
‘Or gunshot?’ I shook my head. ‘If you want to kill a man you don’t ask him to the sort of place where naturally he’ll be on his guard.’ I tugged open the drawer of my desk.
To look at there wasn’t much difference between the Mauser and the Walther, but it was the Mauser that I picked up. The pitch of the grip, the general fit of the pistol made it altogether more substantial than the slightly smaller Walther, and it lacked for nothing in stopping-power. Like a fat cheque, it was a gun that always endowed me with a feeling of quiet confidencs when I slipped it into my coat pocket. I waved the gun in Bruno’s direction.
‘And whoever sent me the party invitation will know I’m carrying a lighter.’
‘Supposing there’s more than one of them?’
‘Shit, Bruno, there’s no need to paint the devil on the wall. I can see the risks, but that’s the business we’re in. Newspapermen get bulletins, soldiers get dispatches and detectives get anonymous letters. If I’d wanted sealing- wax on my mail I’d have become a damned lawyer.’
Bruno nodded, tugged a little at his eyepatch and then transferred his nerves to his pipe – the symbol of our
