The Dark Arena

by Mario Puzo

  One qf the two men started to unlock the handcuffs. He held his forefinger under the boy's nose, the gesture almost fatherly, and said, “No dumb tricks, eh?” The boy nodded his head.

  “Leave them on,” Wolf said sharply. The detective stepped back.

  Wolf walked close to the boy and shoved the blond head up with his hand. “Did you know this soap was for German children?”

  The boy let his head fall and didn't answer.

  “You worked here, you were trusted … You'll never work for the Americans again. However, if you'll sign a papa” admitting what you've done, we will not prosecute. Do you agree to that?’

  The boy nodded his head.

  “Ingeborg,” Wolf called. The German typist came in. Wolf nodded to the two men. “Take him in there to the other office; the girl knows what to do.” He turned to Eddie and Mosca. “Too easy,” and smiled his friendly smile. “But it saves everybody a lot of trouble and the kid will get his six months.”

  Mosca, not really caring, said, “Hell, you promised to let him off.”

  Wolf shrugged. “Right, but the German cops get him for making a black market The chief of police in Bremen is an old friend of mine, and we co-operate.”

  “Justice at work,” Eddie murmured. “So what if the kid stole some soap; give him a break.”

  Wolf said briskly, “Caft't do it; they'd steal us blind.” He put on his cap. “Well, Fve got a busy night ahead of me. Have to make a full-scale search on all the kitchen workers before they leave the base. There's something.”

  He grinned at them. “We get a woman cop from Bremen to search die female workers and she comes out with a big pair of rubber gloves and a bar of GI soap. You should see where those women hide a stick of butter. Phew.” He spit “I hope I never get that hungry.”

  When Wolf had left, Gordon Middleton stood up and said in his deep, laconic voice, “The colonel likes him.” He smiled at Mosca, good-naturedly, as if it were something that amused him and which he did not resent Before he left the office he said to Eddie, “I think I'll catch an early bus home,” and to Mosca, simply and in a friendly tone, “See you around, Walter.”

  It was the end of the working day. Through the windows Mosca could see the German laborers massing at the exit gate, waiting to be searched and checked by the military police before they could leave the air base. Eddie went to the window and stood beside him.

  “I guess you want to get to town and look for your girl,” Eddie said and smiled, a smile almost womanly in its sweetness, in the hesitancy of the delicately cut mouth. “That's the reason I took all the trouble to fix a job here when you wrote. I figured it had to be the girl. Right?”

  “I don't know,” Mosca said. “Partly, I guess.”

  “Do you want to fix up about your billet in town first and then look her up? Or go see her now?”

  “Let's fix up the billet first,” Mosca said.

  Eddie laughed outright “If you go now you'll catch her home. By the time the billet is arranged you won't get to her until at least eight. Maybe shell be out by then.” He watched Mosca carefully when he said this.

  “My tough luck,” Mosca said.

  They each picked up a suitcase and went out of the building to where Eddie had parked his jeep. Before Eddie started the motor he turned to Mosca and said, “You won't ask, but Til tell you anyway. I've never seen her around the officer or enlisted-men clubs or with any GIs. I've never even seen her.” After a pause he added slyly, “And I didn't think you'd want me to look her up.”

  four

  As they passed through the Neustadt, then over the bridge into Bremen proper, Mosca saw his first remembered landmark. It was a church steeple and tower, the body like a face eaten away by disease, a slim thread of stone and plaster holding the spire toward the sky. Then they were going by the massive police presidio, the white scars of the explosion still showing on its dark-green walls. They traveled on the Schwachhauser Heer Strasse to the other side of Bremen, in what had once been the fashionable suburbs, the houses almost untouched and now used as billets and homes for the occupation forces.

  Mosca was thinking about the man beside him. Eddie Cassin wasn't a romantic guy. As far as Mosca knew he was the opposite. He remembered when they had been GIs, Eddie had found in the city a very young, very developed Belgian girl, pretty as a Dresden doll. He had established her in a small, windowless room in the billet and thrown a party. The girl had serviced the thirty-odd GIs in the billet, not leaving the room for three days. The men played cards in the anteroom, a kitchen, waiting their turn. The girl was so pretty and good-natured that the men had pampered her as husbands pamper pregnant wives. They scrounged eggs, bacon, and ham and took turns preparing her breakfast tray. They brought packages of food from the mess hall for her lunch and supper. She laughed and joked as she sat up naked in bed to eat from the tray. There was always someone in her room at any hour of the day and she seemed to have a real affection for everyone. She was difficult about only one thing. Eddie Cassin had to visit her once a day for at least an hour. She always called him Daddy.

  “She was just too pretty to keep to myself.’ Eddie had said. But Mosca always remembered a note of mean satisfaction in his voice.

  They turned from the Kurftirsten Allee into the Metzer Strasse and drove in late-afternoon shade cast by the long rows of wide and leafy trees. Eddie parked in front of a four-story, new-looking brick building that had a small lawn. “This is it,” he said, “the best bachelor billet for Americans in Bremen.”

  The summer sun dyed the brick a dark red, and the street fell into deep shadows. Mosca took both suitcases and the gym bag, and Eddie Cassin went before him up the walk They were met at the door by the German housekeeper.

  “This is Frau Meyer,” Eddid Cassin said and put his arm around her waist. Frau Meyer was a woman of nearly forty, an almost platinum blonde. She had a superb figure molded by years of service as swimming teacher in the Bunddeutscher Maedel. Her face had a friendly but dissipated look accentuated by large, very white buck teeth.

  Mosca nodded and she said, “I'm very pleased to see you, Mr. Mosca. Eddie has told me so much about you,”

  They went up the stairs to the third floor, and Frau Meyer unlocked the door to one of the rooms and gave the key to Mosca. It was a very large room. In the corner was a narrow bed and in another corner a huge, white, painted wardrobe. Two large windows let in the dying sun and the first beginnings of the long summer twilight. The rest of the room was bare.

  Mosca put the two suitcases on the floor and Eddie sat on the bed. Eddie said to Frau Meyer, “Call Yergen.”

  Frau Meyer said, ‘Til get the sheets and blankets, too.” They could hear her going up the stairs.

  “It doesn't look so good,” Mosca said.

  Eddie Cassin smiled. “We have a magician in the house. This guy Yergen. Hell fix everything.” And while they waited, Eddie told Mosca about the billet Frau Meyer was a good housekeeper, saw to it there was always hot water, that the eight maids were thorough in their cleaning, and (by special arrangement with Frau Meyer) the laundry perfectly done. She lived herself in two comfortably furnished rooms in the attic. “I spend most of my time up there,” Eddie went on, “but I think she screws Yergen on the side. My room is on the floor below this one so we can't keep a real close check on one another, thank God.”

  Mosca, becoming more and more impatient as the twilight deepened, listened to Eddie go on about the billet as if he owned it. Yergen was indispensable, Eddie said, to the Americans billeted in the Metzer Strasse. He could fix the house water pump so that even people on the top floor could take baths. He made up boxes for the chinaware Americans sent home, and packed so skillfully that the grateful relatives in America never complained of breakage. They made a good team, Yergen and Frau Meyer. Only Eddie knew that during the day they would carefully loot the rooms. From one it would be a pair of shorts, another a pair of socks, here a few towels or some handkerchiefs. The Americans were careless and
kept no close check on their possessions. From the room of those extraordinarily careless it would be a pack or half-filled pack of cigarettes. All this was done with discretion. The maids who cleaned the rooms were kept honest by strict discipline.

  “For Christ sake,” Mosca said, “you know I want to get out of hero. Get those krauts on the ball.”

  Eddie went to the door and yelled, “Hey, Meyer, snap it up.” And then to Mosca, “She probably knocked off a quickie with Yergen. She loves it” They could hear her coming down the stairs.

  She came in with an armful of bedclothing and behind her came Yergen. In his hand was a hammer and in his mouth some nails. He was a short, slender German of vigorous middle age, dressed in overalls and an American Army khaki shirt. There was an air of quiet competence and dignity about him that would have inspired trust and confidence if it had not been for the bunched and wrinkled skin beneath his eyes which gave him an air of shrewd cunning.

  He shook hands with Eddie Cassin and then extended to Mosca the same greeting. Mosca shook hands to be polite. The occupation was getting real friendly, he thought

  “I am the Jack-of-all-trades here,” Yergen said. He brought out the phrase with a stilted relish. “Times you want anything fixed just call on me.”

  “I'll need a bigger bed,” Mosca said, “some furniture, a radio, some other stuff I'll think of later.”

  Yergen unbuttoned the pocket of his khaki shirt and took out a pencil. “Of course,” he said briskly, “they furnish these rooms very badly. Regulations. But I have helped other of your comrades. A small or large radio?”

  “How much?” Mosca asked.

  “Five to ten cartons.”

  “Money,” Mosca said. “I have no cigarettes.”

  “American dollars or scrip?”

  “Money orders.”

  “I tell you,” Yergen said slowly, “I think you need here a radio, some table lamps, four or five chairs, a couch, and a large bed. I get you all these thinp, we talk about the price later. If you have no cigarettes now, I can wait. I'm a businessman; I know when to give credit. And besides you are a friend of Mr. Cassin.”

  “That's fine,” Mosca said. He stripped to the waist and opened the blue gym bag for a soap and towel.

  “And if you want someone to do your laundry, please let me know. I'll give the order to the maid.” Frau Meyer smiled at him. She liked his long torso with its white ornamental scar that she guessed ran to his groin,

  “What does it cost?” Mosca asked. He had opened a suitcase and was laying out a fresh change of clothing.

  “Oh, please, no payment. Give me a few bars of chocolate a week, and I'll see to it that the maids are happy.”

  “Okay, okay,” Mosca said impatiently. And then to Yergen, “See if you can get that stuff in here tomorrow.”

  After the two Germans left, Eddie Cassin shook his head sadly in mock reproof. “Times have changed, Walter,” he said. “The occupation has entered into a new phase. We treat people like Frau Meyer and Yergen with respect, shake their hands and always, always, give them a cigarette to smoke when we talk business to them. They can do us favors, Walter.”

  “Screw ‘em,” Mosca said. “Where's the washroom?”

  Eddie Cassin led him down the hall. The bathroom was an enormous one, with three sinks, the biggest bathtub Mosca had ever seen, and a toilet bowl Reside which stood a small table littered with magazines and Stateside newspapers.

  “Real class,” Mosca said. He began to wash and Eddie sat on the toilet bowl to keep him company.

  “You going to move your girl friend in here?” Eddie asked.

  “If I find her and she wants to come back,” Mosca said.

  “You going out to see her tonight?”

  Mosca wiped himself dry and fixed a blade in the razor. “Yeah,” he said and glanced at the partly open window. The last light of evening was melting away. “I'll try it tonight.”

  Eddie got up and went to the door. “If it doesn't click, come up to Frau Meyer's rooms when you get back and have a drink.” He gave Mosca a pat. “If everything works out, then I'll see you tomorrow morning at the air base.” He went out and down the hall.

  Alone, Mosca felt an overpowering urge not to finish shaving, to go back to his room and go to bed, or go up to Frau Meyer's and spend the evening drinking with Eddie.

  He felt a strange reluctance to leave this building to go and find Hella, thinking of her name again now, consciously, but he made himself finish shaving and then he combed his hair. He walked over to the bathroom window and opened it wide; the side street was nearly empty. But down along the ruins he saw a woman in black, a dark mass in the failing light, pulling out the grass that grew here and there in the rubble. She had a great armful of it. And nearer to him, almost underneath his window, he saw a family of four, a man, his wife, and two small boys, building a wall that was as yet no more than a foot high. The boys carried from a small handcart the broken bricks they had salvaged from the rubbled city, and the man and woman hacked and scraped until the bricks fitted into the wall. The skeleton of the house framed them and etched them into Mosca's mind. The last light of the day vanished, and the whole street and the people were now just dark masses moving through a deeper and more massive darkness. Mosca went back to his room.

  He took a bottle out of his suitcase and had a long drink. He was careful about dressing, thinking, It's the first time she'll see me without my uniform. He put on a light gray suit and a white open shirt. He left everything as it was in the room—the suitcases open but unpacked, the soiled clothing on the floor, the shaving kit thrown carelessly on the bed. He had one last long drink, then ran downstairs and went out into the warm and heavy summer night.

  He caught a streetcar, and the ticket taker asked for a cigarette, spotting him for an American immediately. Mosca gave it to him and then kept a watchful eye on each streetcar going by in the opposite direction, thinking that perhaps she had already left her room to go someplace for the evening. Every so often he became tense and nervous, thinking he had seen her, that the back or profile of some girl looked like hers, but he could never be sure.

  When he left the trolley and walked down the remembered street, he wasn't sure of the house and had to check the list of names that was posted on the door of each building. He made only one mistake, for the second list he read did have her name. He knocked, waited a few minutes, and knocked again.

  The door opened, and in the dim light of the hallway he recognized the old woman who owned the house. Her gray hair neatly pinned around her head, the old black dress, the threadbare shawl, all gave her the universal look of sorrow of aged women everywhere.

  “Yes,” she asked, “what is it?”

  “Is Fraulein Hella at home?” Mosca was surprised at the ease and fluency of his German.

  The old woman did not recognize him or realize that he was not a German. “Please come in,” she said, and he followed her down the dimly lit hall to the room. The old woman knocked and said, “Fraulein Hella, you have a visitor, a man.”

  Finally he heard her real voice, quietly, but on a note of surprise. “A man?” and then, “Wait one moment, please.” Mosca opened the door and went into the room.

  She was sitting with her back to him, hastily pushing clips into her just washed hair. On the table beside her stood a gray loaf of bread. Against the wall was a narrow bed, a night table beside it.

  As he watched, Hella finished pinning the hair around her head and snatched up the loaf and slice of bread to take them to the wardrobe. Then she turned; her eyes met Mosca standing by the door.

  Mosca saw the white, bone-ridged, almost skeletal face, the body even more fragile than he had remembered it. Her hands emptied as the gray bread fell to the wooden, buckled floor. Her face showed no surprise, and for a moment he thought the look was one of annoyance and slight displeasure. Then the face dissolved into a mask of sorrow and grief. He walked over to her, and her face seemed to crumple and fold, the tears following
the many creases down to where his hand held the pointed chin. She let her head fall and pressed it against his shoulder.

  “Let me see you,” Mosca said, “let me look at you.” He tried to lift her face, but she kept it against him. “It's all right,” he said, “I wanted to surprise you.” She kept sobbing, and all he could do was'wait, looking around the room, the narrow bed, the old-fashioned wardrobe, and on the dresser, enlarged, framed, the photos he had given her. The light from the single table lamp was dim, a depressing, weak yellow, the walls and ceiling sagged inward from the weight of the ruins above them.

  Hella lifted her face—she was half-laughing, half-crying. “Ah, you, you,” she said. “Why didn't you write? Why didn't you let me know?”

  “I wanted to surprise you,” he said again. He kissed her gently, and lying against him, she said in a weak, incoherent voice, “When I saw you I thought you were dead or I was dreaming or crazy, I don't know, and I look so terrible, I just washed my hair.” She looked down at the shapeless, faded house dress and then lifted her face to him again.

  He saw now the dark circles under her eyes, as if the pigment from the rest of her face had been drained and held there to stain the skin almost black. The hair under his hand was lifeless, still wet, her body against him hard and angular.

  She smiled and he saw the gap along the side of her mouth. He caressed her cheek and asked, “And this?”

  Hella looked embarrassed. “The baby,” she said. “I lost two teeth.” She smiled at him, asked like a child, “Do I look very ugly?”

  Mosca shook his head slowly. “No,” he said, “no.” And then remembering. “What about the baby, did you get rid of it?”

  “No,” Hella said, “it was born too soon; it only lived a few hours. I just left the hospital a month ago.”

  And then, because she knew his disbelief, his lack of faith, she went to the dresser and pulled out a bundle of papers tied together with old string. She leafed through it and gave him four official documents.

  “Read them,” she said, not hurt or angry, knowing that in the world and time in which they lived, she had to give proof, that there was no absolute trust.