by DBC Pierre
“Did I hear you say Brandy?”
“Yeah,” he grunts. “Life’s too fucking short to remember his whole name. Thomas Georg Philip Frederick Florian von Brandenburg Stendal Saxe fuck-knows-even-what-else. Needs a business card about a meter long. The petit prince, who never met a woman with hairs around her ass.”
Thomas returns in time for this, motioning me up. “You mean, who can tell the difference between the ass of a woman and the ass of a man.”
“Get out of here.” Werner empties the last drops of wine, and we leave him smirking at a mother and daughter nearby.
Staff nod good night as we move to the entrance. Passing a service trolley, Thomas plucks out a full bottle of Rochelt Vogelbeere and tucks it under his arm. “Herr Bauer has invited us the bill.” He smiles. “With this, to take away.”
“Of course, Herr Stendal.”
As we step outside, he stabs a key on his phone, and by the time we reach Friedrichstrasse the Mercedes is there.
“One downside of the business world,” he says with a sigh, climbing in. “You have to be civil to assholes. Shame about supper. Unusual for Bauer to show up here, normally he’s over at Borchardt. More his temperature. Took the Basque there once, bad move. The captain thought he didn’t speak German, and blamed him to his female companion for a mistake with the table. Really bad form, unbelievable.”
“Wages of sin,” I ambiguously say; in fact not even understanding it myself.
Still, Thomas looks over. “Exactly, that’s Bauer—all money, no class. Typical Berlin to bump into him, you know how it is. Twenty years since the wall, and at our level there’s still only a handful of places to go. Otherwise it’s pasta or kebabs. Or up where you’re staying, yogurt and Bionade. Amazing you survived it.”
“My luggage weighs twenty kilograms and it’s all Marius.”
Thomas nods before turning to me. “I like you, Gabriel.”
We cruise down quiet streets, finally purring up to a baby skyscraper tucked behind buildings on Stresemannstrasse.
“Solar Club,” says Thomas. “Now we’ll talk.”
We take vodka martinis to a smoking area, where king-sized leather beds line a wall overlooking the city. Couples and threesomes stretch out on two of the beds, and we take a third, where red light, smoke, and gloom give the air of an opium den. Settling in, I scan Berlin’s low skyline through the glass—and after a moment am taken in by a patch of darkness, a hole in the view quite nearby. It looks as if an entire city block has vanished into space. I point it out to Thomas.
“The Topography of Terror,” he says. “Don’t you know it?”
“Is it a park? Seems awfully dense, light doesn’t even make it in from the streets.”
“That’s Gestapo headquarters. Also the Prinz Albrecht Hotel, where the SS were based. Himmler, Heydrich, Eichmann—that was their address.”
“But wasn’t that all destroyed?” I crane to see into the void, but no light escapes at all, not even a cigarette tip. It’s an absolute deletion from Berlin’s twinkling map.
“Of course, but at the end of the war. Next minute the Russians arrived, and history moved on. The GDR didn’t know what to do with it. What do you do with the most evil address in the world? Rent office space? Put a children’s playground?”
“Wasn’t a kindergarten built over Hitler’s bunker?”
“Yeah, but that was deep underground. On top all you see is a mound of grass. This is a whole city block of ruins. Even after the wall fell nobody knew what to do with it. In fact the Berlin wall still runs down one side of it, untouched. I think it’s the only section still standing. A tradition just grew of avoiding the place. The city threw a fence around it and nature claimed it back. After sixty-five years it’s like Tarzan’s jungle in there, even has lianas growing. But underneath you’ll find foundations and rubble, and bunkers will be there, and tunnels, I guess. Still today. You can walk out of a luxury hotel, go to a jungle in the city center, and pick up a piece of Gestapo headquarters. Only in Berlin. You’ve led a sheltered life here, my friend.”
“Perhaps. Though only till now, I fear.”
The evening’s intoxicants start to mill at the foot of the next climb, which is the trek to the high nimbal veldt, there to roam wisely under stars. I decide to press it into my service lest the evening slip from our hands.
“Smuts has been moved to prison,” I say.
Thomas reclines, squinting through his martini. He idly converts “Smuts” into the German for smacking lips: “Schmatz,” he says. “Schmatz—good name for a chef. Look, the Basque knows we’re meeting tonight. Obviously the situation’s difficult. Japan’s difficult, and a little out of his territory. But he stands by Smuts. You should know that. He once told me how he found him at the Kempinski in Bruges. Did Smuts tell you? He may not have realized the impression he made.”
“He has a few stories from the Kempinski.”
“The Basque heard something on the grapevine and went there posing as a diner. Arrived late, demanding only amuse-bouches. Ten courses of amuse-bouches he ordered, and apparently Smuts poked his head from the kitchen to see who this French asshole was. But he didn’t refuse him, or send amuses from the list. Instead he took a cart of ingredients to the table, grabbed the prettiest waitress, and invented little poetries on the spot. Right there at the table. And for the last one he took a sliver of fish, pulled out his cigarette lighter, and flame-cooked it hanging from his finger. He hand-fed Didier Laxalt like a baby. Can you believe it?”
“Sounds like Smuts.”
“Yeah, listen, Didier doesn’t tell stories about every chef he meets. He captures that kind of talent, grooms it for himself. The kind that isn’t confined to the teachings of the kitchen. It’s why the Basque doesn’t look for Michelin stars, almost always disqualifies them. Because a star calls for consistency over a period of time. It’s for the married, who can do the same thing over and over. Bu t in turning a part of their talent to the question of routine, they lower their ceiling. Basque looks for the autonomous genius, the wild and free naïf—he takes a risk, naturally, that they spectacularly fail. But when they don’t, they extract from nature an experience so breathtaking that nobody can forget, or even find words to describe it. And this, I believe, is the case with our friend in Tokyo. I wanted to say it aloud so that we understand what brings us together. And so you feel reassured that he has powerful friends. Basque came from the Foreign Legion, remember. As a hard man he might laugh at a few days in jail—but he also understands brotherhood.” Thomas gives me a slap on the leg. “So relax. Take heart. Nobody will let him disappear.”
A flood of high feeling runs through me, a kind of hopeful determination. Ah, this Master Limbo. Peopled not by complainers or theorists, but by creatures of action.
Thomas empties his martini into his mouth, swirls it, swallows it, then catches my eye: “Which brings us to the crucial question.”
His face is obscured for a moment by my upended glass. But when its liquids have gone, all savored at length, along with droplets of frost that follow them down to my mouth; and when my tongue has stopped stirring, and lays still, and the glass stands back off my lip—I find his black eyes boring through me.
“I’ve guessed the obvious for myself,” he says. “But let’s recap and understand each other. Firstly Smuts cites a decadent club at Flughafen Tempelhof. Now, as you must know, there is an old cabaret among its odd enterprises—but for the purposes Smuts describes, I discount it. And as the airport will close this month, I also discount any permanent venue. Meanwhile, you and I have agreed that certain public spaces can be hired for functions—the terminal, for example, after hours. And we both know the building comprises working spaces and historical spaces, some untouched in years.” Thomas’s smile begins to flicker. “So it all comes narrowing down to a point. Something which, when the Basque called for m
y opinion, initially made me laugh.”
I feel myself pressed into a corner of the lounge.
“But after his call I thought again. I thought about the claim Smuts had made. The unbelievable claim. The frankly ridiculous claim, which was this: Smuts claimed he had several kilometers of Tempelhof Airport at his disposal.”
My pulse starts to bang.
Leaning in, almost whispering, Thomas goes on: “Then, thinking about it afterwards, I called the Basque back to say there was a single conceivable chance that this could be true. One negligible fraction of possibility. But that if it was true, it would represent the most electrifying opportunity he and I might see in our lifetimes. And if we acted fast, the most perfect timing of anything we might ever do again. So then—Gabriel Brockwell—one small question.”
My heart stops.
“Don’t name it out loud,” he whispers. “But do you have access to the complex? The only one Smuts can be speaking of?” He stares without blinking.
My tongue darts over my lips. I begin to nod as if conceiving of that very place, as if conjuring its picture to mind. “Yes,” I finally hear a voice say.
Thomas slumps back, blinking left and right. “How the hell did you do it?”
I sit quiet for a moment. “You said only one question.”
We stop perfectly still, watching each other. Then he lunges, wrestles me down, tousles my hair, punches my arm. “You star. Let’s drink.”
Whoosh. We ride the elevator down to the waiting car, where Thomas pulls out two fine cigarette cases, handing one to me: “Survival kit,” he says. He also grabs an iPod, two sets of earphones, and the bottle of Rochelt, before setting off scampering like a boy with a kite. We fly around the corner onto Anhalter Strasse till the black hole of the Topographie des Terrors draws alongside, its woods twisted and creaking, tendrils seething out to the sidewalk. Near the block’s far end, a slim no-man’s-land of tall grass pushes the jungle back off the fence, and we stop here, panting. Thomas checks the street up and down, but only his Mercedes prowls some distance behind. Our attention turns to the fence, which stands lower than shoulder height, and is flimsy considering that it quarantines a kind of hell. Thomas finds a spot where it’s also bowed, and shakes it. With a grunt he vaults the wire, and presses it down for me to scramble over.
We vanish from the modern day.
As we make for the heart of the wilderness, our contact with the city fades, dark presses in till we have to feel our way through the tangle. It’s a setting from a witches’ tale, branches writhing with filaments, roots clawing out at our feet; as if to warn us away, a wind even rises to shake the canopy overhead. Thomas shines the screen of his phone, making monstrous copses reach out, hinting of coiled snakes watching from branches and spiders as big as your head.
A fear nimbus comes from all this, but inside it I detect a core of something else, a virginal buzz that’s quite intoxicating. My mind turns to wondering what, and I realize it’s this: the place has cut intellect off from perception. We fly on instruments, because only the brain knows we’re in the heart of a capital city—the senses have no evidence to support it, if anything being swayed the other way. This inner struggle produces its own sensual voltage, a touch of what parachutists must feel. It seems the senses distrust the brain, crudely improvised as it is by nature.
In addition to this our airways were blasted open by the run. Now we vacuum up jungle mists, and the buzz is so clean that it makes me wonder if the run was part of a plan. Looking ahead, I see Thomas lighting thickets with his phone, and I weigh the odds of his being a grand wizard of nimbus. Proof frankly mounts for it, here alone with liquor at the world’s most heinous address.
“Achtung.” He points out a hole up ahead.
An opening leads underground through a wreckage of vines and rubble. We stop to adjust to the dark, and after a few moments symmetries of brick and concrete appear. It’s a glade amid foundations, enclosing a rug of fallen leaves. Somehow it invites us to sit, and we do, pulling up our collars and hugging our coats around us. I reflect how rare it is to see nature as untrained as this, in its purest cannibalism and chaos, with parasite upon parasite upon parasite; except of course in the free market. Shining the phone on his cigarette case, Thomas points out a tiny jar of cocaine, a razor blade, and some joints, or cigarettes. I pull out my case and find the same, but he stops me from opening the cocaine: in the bottom of the case lies a cellophane envelope holding a square of blotter acid. He takes the blade and slices a corner for each of us.
“Coke will keep us cold,” he says. “This is also speedy and lasts longer. We don’t need much, just enough to make a base camp.”
A base camp. Surely the words of a wizard. We chase the tabs with fruit brandy, and he lights one of the cigarettes, from which a bitter smoke pours out to mingle with ground mist. Serenity comes over us, and warmth, as we smoke. I sense that it’s heroin. I sit in Gestapo headquarters doing smack and rowanberry brandy with a nimbus wizard. How can it be? In my mind I see that a rope of history stretches here from the bistro kitchen after school. Smuts took up the rope and pulled this moment in; a moment in a life of geniuses, voluptuaries, and wild fortune.
But I sit at the end of his rope without him.
And now it’s for Thomas to pull him back.
He passes the brandy and lights a joint of hash. It dawns on me that my limbo is weaker than these men’s everyday lives. This is how reduced my spirit is by culture. Oblivion for me is just a Thursday night for Thomas. I fall back spinning onto the bed of leaves, feeling consciousness tug on its bindings. And I ask myself which is more terrifying: to lack the spirit to soar—or to have it. As a gust rustles overhead, Thomas’s eyes flicker at me like the black orbs of a crow. My mental arguments must have seeped into the air, because he then mysteriously says: “Economy in pleasure is not to my taste. Divinity is achieved through the senses—whether you abstain from sensing or indulge in it, life exists in relation to how deeply we sense.”
Nimbus flares at this. Acid starts to peak. He lies back and I catch his face in profile, see his lips resting open, the tip of his tongue poking out. It’s the default human, his body turned instrument, without pretension, without psychology at all. Intoxicants have disconnected us, we’re empty tunnels for gales to blow through. He turns to see me watching him, and we smile knowing we’ve met for real. A cage crackles over us, and all around churns with dark. At some point his phone rings. He moves it to his face, lights himself ghostly green, but I can’t tell what he says. I’m trying to dodge splinters falling from its ring, but end up hit in both eyes.
My attention turns to nature.
She has me in her boudoir, lying down. After all my nasty comments. Vengeful destiny delivered me, or Smuts’s rope, or my father’s bistro, or limbo, or Himmler. There is tonight a feeling of perfect connection to some system or another—but to which never grows clear. This is as sure a sign of nature lurking near as is the smell of shit around the devil. And sure enough, leaves and stems start to lunge at me, they jerk and twist and choke, and the earth rots to liquid beneath my head. A revelation comes—that hell isn’t hot, but heaven is: hot and liquid, while hell is cold and rotting.
Thomas passes a cigarette and I clutch it like a life buoy. But its tip burns holes in the dark, it leaves flaming blobs wherever I stop it, that don’t go away. Such is this workload of nimbus. I try to keep the cigarette still over my face, try to suck without looking. But in the process I hear voices. Gasps and giggles in the dark.
After a moment Thomas presses earphones into my head.
“Rammstein,” he simply says. “Bye-bye.”
An electroshock jolts me stiff: the crunch-crunch-crunch of massed troops on the march, “Links, two, three, four,” making the canopy rage overhead and the ground shake beneath me as they pass. Then comes a hellfire of guitars. My eyes roll back in their sockets
. I leave my body and join the air. Two women arrive, and one squats to plunge her hands into me, scattering my essential gases across the ruin. She stabs them with her tongue, and the reek of earth joins vaginal sweat and kiss-smell to baste us, suction us, squelching till our juices run sour to the ground and we die together, here to decompose with nature. Ah, this dreadnought nimbus.
My component parts will never fit snugly again.
The fitful sleep of the cold dead finally takes me, the sleep of worms, till some time later, in a different life, I’m roused by Glenn Miller.
Moonlight Sonata.
Light prickles the canopy. Imperious nature relaxes her grip, night being her manor, the better to kill and harm. Now her toadies the birds mock the souls who died before morning. A girl is here with me. I cuddle her, reaching for buttocks to wedge a hand between, someplace where softness and warmth still hide. Thomas is spread-eagled beside me with another woman slumped over him, stirring. We’re trouserless. A polka-dot panty blows from a branch in the canopy above.
Needles of sunshine flicker through it.
Thomas’s girl has thick lips. Her mascara has bled onto her cheeks. She reaches to drag a wicker case through the leaves, from which Thomas pulls intravenous serum bags with hoses. He hangs them overhead on a tree, and peach nectar flows through which makes us blink when it hits our mouths. Then an Armenian brandy appears, and like an emergency-room procedure a sequence of therapies unfolds which forces our bodies to scroll through expressions of nausea, headache, drowsiness, anxiety, lust, and hunger, at which last condition Thomas spoons cocaine for each of us, starting with the girls.
“Here,” he says, “because you are just objects to us.”
“Thank God,” snorts a girl, “or we’d have to pretend to respect you.”
Sunlight dusts this plateau of recovery. It gives the air a freshly rinsed taste. We feel like Berlin itself, woken alive after a heavy bombing. Then ginger-and-lime Lauenstein chocolate gives us hope, cigarettes awaken humor, and I finally note that my lady friend has piercing blue eyes. Life’s faculties mount a provisional government with these agents, enough to prompt canoodling until beer appears from the basket, perfectly chilled by nature. And this decisive therapy soon sends us swirling from the underworld like nymphs and satyrs, the aristocrat, the sphinx, and the lissom maidens a-swishing.