by A. B. Decker
“The barman was expecting payment for the drinks he’d just served them, and they were faking amazement at his chutzpah. Suggested he should be paying them for drinking such ‘piss’. And they greeted my intervention with some comment like ‘if it’s good beer you want, you’d better try somewhere else’.
“And as I was still trying to process the ugliness of it all, one of the thugs threw himself over the bar, grabbed the barman round the neck and dragged him to the floor. What then followed took place under cover of the bar, so the visual impact was thankfully lost on me. But the crunch of boot against bone and the lifeless silence of the victim with every savage kick made up for anything I might have otherwise missed. You know, that thug was enjoying himself so much that he began to laugh and chuckle at his footwork and the lump of senseless flesh he was creating at his feet. It was not until his euphoric frenzy had taken him to the point of exhaustion, and he had to lean on the bar for support, that he eventually stopped. Draped over the bar, he smiled, looked down at the floor, and spat out the mouthful of phlegm generated by what was probably the only kind of exercise he knew. ‘Filthy Jew’ he scowled, then left. The other brownshirts followed, looking well pleased with the entertainment. One of them muttered something to the effect that I could help myself now if I was really so keen on the beer.
“And do you know what I did? Nothing. Just stood there and did nothing. One of the other customers ran over behind the bar as soon as they’d gone. And I did nothing – until my dumb inertia was wrenched apart by a deafening crash that made me duck for cover. Suddenly we were all pinned to the floor in terror as all the tables around us were showered with splinters of glass. The mindless animals had taken it into their boneheads to leave a visiting card. They hurled bricks and bottles from the street outside through every pane of glass in the building. When the cacophony of breaking glass eventually subsided, the hush that fell on that house was deafening. I’ve never known a silence like it. And I hear it to this day.”
Achim’s eyes moistened with the memory of that night. And Frank had nothing of value to offer in the way of sympathy or commiseration.
“Ever since then, I’ve given up what you would probably call gainful employment and devoted my energy to a more meaningful life. Away from all that dumb inertia. I had to do something, Frank. And it was your letter that eventually gave me the idea.”
“So this is where Silverstone comes in?” Frank asked.
“I was told that a lot of counterpropaganda is being produced down here on some of the friendlier Swiss printing presses. And I thought that might be something for me. I could even put my graphic talents to use designing posters. And as I say, some people I know gave me Silverstone’s name.”
“Well, if that little book he showed me on how to win at chess in three easy moves is an example of his propaganda, I think you’re barking up the wrong tree.”
Achim hesitated, and shed the trace of a smile as he pondered his friend’s words.
“That’s just for a dummy run, Frank.” He poured another brandy for each of them. “And this is where you come in. I remembered you saying that you would be going to visit your mother soon. So it seemed like the perfect opportunity. You see, we need someone to test the run to Cologne. We’re slowly exhausting all the courier options. A lot of the stuff doesn’t reach its destination. Much of it is delivered haphazardly, thrown almost at random onto trains that pass through by night from Italy. And we thought a brazen daylight run would not only stand a good chance of success. It could also get the stuff delivered straight to its target.”
“So you want me to play courier for you?” Frank asked.
“No, I want you to do a dummy run. We just need to know if it’s viable. And since you’re going to visit your mother anyway, you seem the obvious choice.”
“Can I remind you, Achim, that it was you who suggested I visit my mother in the first place?”
“But you are going to, aren’t you?” his friend asked. There was an audible uncertainty in his voice. For a moment he seemed to lose his composure.
“I’m not sure,” Frank replied.
“Look, why don’t you stay for dinner. Gertrude would love to talk more with you. And we can discuss the detail in a more convivial atmosphere.”
Without warning, Achim got up and left the room. Frank listened to the fading rhythm of his footsteps down through the stairwell. When he returned a few minutes later, Gertrude was with him. She seemed genuinely pleased to see Frank again. Nonetheless, the entire choreography of the way she welcomed him and invited him to dine with them made him suspect that this, like the whole meeting, had been well rehearsed beforehand. The suspicion chafed at his efforts to appear calm and composed. In reality, Achim’s whole manner had ruffled him. But at least Silverstone had gone, so that was one irritation less to contend with.
As the evening progressed, and they sat over the modest fare that Gertrude was able to provide for them, Frank’s unease sank little by little into the sea of nostalgia that inevitably flooded their conversation. Gertrude remained conspicuously in the background the whole time, and Frank found himself thinking once again how she had changed from the vivacious and carefree person he had known. She devoted most of her attention to the two baby boys, even long after they were tucked up in bed. The earnestness with which she took her role as a mother surprised Frank. It seemed to exclude every other aspect of life, and he wondered whether she was unusual in this respect. He had no yardstick. She was the only woman among his contemporaries who had chosen to go forth and multiply. Everyone else he knew had found the patriotic calls to breed for the fatherland too repugnant. To this extent, then, she was certainly unusual within his limited circle. But in the broader population, she was probably excruciatingly normal. With the benefit of hindsight, it now seemed almost as if her carefree nature had been an ill-fitting mask that she had struggled to keep on in order to conceal the real and painfully conventional ambitions for her life. It made him wonder whether this made her a poor match for his old friend after all – and whether maybe he regretted it. Or was she perhaps just what Achim needed?
At all events, Frank was happy to let her retreat into the shadows of their conversation, as he and his old friend wandered through the history of the days and nights they had shared in Berlin – down the avenues of their friendship to a time when that city breathed the kind of excitement which made you hungry for the next day. From lively cabarets to some of the most exciting playhouses in Europe.
He recalled the time they attended the premiere of The Threepenny Opera. It was late one summer evening, and Achim had already got wind from some of his theatre friends that this was going to be something special. So they were already full of boyish expectation as they headed off to the theatre, calling on the way at their favourite Hungarian restaurant Zur Csarda – the best goulash he had ever tasted, evoking shades of the puszta and the flavour of gypsy music. The atmosphere that evening was as merry as he had ever remembered it. Many of the guests, like them, were plainly on their way to the theatre.
As Frank and Achim quaffed their second bottle of Tokay and let their merry abandon run loose like dogs off the leash, they failed to notice that the other theatregoers had long since left. When eventually they felt compelled by the emptiness of the second bottle to settle up and head off to the theatre, the fact that they were late arriving for the performance was a triviality. More important was the mood. And this was as much imbued with the late-August merriment of a city humming with excitement as it was with the Tokay. It was a city of gaiety and bright new ideas. A city for falling in love, not for timekeeping.
So primed were they by this mood, and so captivated by the cabaret atmosphere as soon as they got into the theatre, that they barely noticed they had missed half the play. They arrived just before the duet between Lucy Brown and Polly Peachum. And Frank fell instantly for Roma Bahn’s Polly. He found the sexual jealousy of women always such a fascinating and intensely arousing spectacle, and this duet a
ccommodated all his deepest fantasies. He could not help feeling a certain envy for Macheath.
It was a feeling he recalled with particular irritation now because, with the benefit of hindsight, he reminded Frank in many ways of Willi Breitner. It was an association he preferred to suppress so as not to burst the bubble of his nostalgia too soon. But he could not suppress the nagging question that this reminder brought to the surface: who the hell was Lola?
Achim did not betray a hint of recognition when Frank mentioned this name.
But the way he derided what he called Frank’s superficial enjoyment of the play with such exaggeration, dismissing him as a licentious romantic, gave Frank the impression he knew exactly who Lola was and was simply trying to change the subject. He and Gertrude exchanged smiles that suggested a private joke at Frank’s expense.
Frank let the question lie and pointed out that he had not been alone in his enjoyment of the performance, that the theatre had fairly bubbled with entertainment that evening and that it was probably the biggest stage success they had ever witnessed in Germany – or were ever likely to witness there again.
“That just goes to prove my point,” said Achim. “Germany is now dead to culture. And no one wants to visit the theatre only to be reminded of just how dead it is.”
This return to the darker reaches of their shared memory brought them back to the real reason for his being there. Achim was not slow to pick up the thread. He tilted the bottle towards Frank and refilled his glass.
“Achim, your methods are both crude and unnecessary.”
His old friend seemed to weigh each one of those words with painstaking scrutiny, frowning sceptically as he put the last one on the balance and repeated it with the questioning care of an archaeologist as he pieced together a priceless vase not believing he had all the fragments.
“Unnecessary? Does mean you might help us?”
Frank signalled his agreement with the merest hint of a nod as he sipped from the glass and muttered something under his breath to the effect that this was surely what friends were for. Frank was aware that his assent was demonstratively weak in conviction – almost as if born of the sheepishness of knowing that it could be construed as a step over the fence into the realms of commitment. So, perhaps by way of insurance cover, he reiterated Achim’s insistence that this would only be a test run, and that he would not be carrying any incriminating material with him through Germany.
Achim’s enthusiastic endorsement of this condition set the seal on the contract.
“Here,” he said, pulling a hip flask out of his back pocket, pouring the remains of the Mirabelle brandy bottle into it and handing it to Frank. “This will give you some company on your trip.”
Frank took the bottle and slid it into the inside pocket of his coat, as Achim opened another bottle. And they spent the rest of the evening lubricating their taste for nostalgia with a little more of his friend’s elixir.
But after Gertrude politely departed for bed and left them to become hopelessly lost in their nostalgia for the pulsating young arteries of a city that had long since ceased to exist, nagging questions continued to chip away at the back of Frank’s mind. He could still not completely bury his more recent, painful memories of the last few days. And the shock on his friend’s face when he interrupted their reminiscences was plain to see.
“So what was in that rucksack you gave to Silverstone?” Frank asked.
“What?” Achim was taken aback, his lips unable to form another word while his eyes darted from side to side, as if speedreading through all the implications of the question. “Have you been following me?”
“Breitner said you’re in what he called the art business. What did he mean by that?”
“Breitner?” The scampering movement of Achim’s eyes betrayed the deep disquiet of a quarry at bay. “Did he elaborate?”
“He also wondered what you’d done with Lola.”
Achim cast a nervous glance in his friend’s direction. Sipped anxiously from his glass. And said nothing.
Frank simply watched. The furtiveness irritated him, and he was enjoying the obvious discomfort of his friend as Achim struggled to retain not only his composure, but presumably also a deeper secret. Yet Achim remained evasive.
“Silverstone has a position at the Bank for International Settlements. He has a lot of interesting connections. Can put you in touch with the right people,” he said. It was all he was prepared to offer by way of explanation. And it did nothing to allay Frank’s suspicions.
“You do realise what a Nazi-friendly organisation that is?” he asked. “One of the founding members was awarded the Golden Badge of the NSDAP only last month. He’s also great buddies with another keen enabler of the Nazis: the Governor of the Bank of England no less. And they both sit on the board.”
Frank paused to let his words sink in.
“Do you think it’s just possible that the right people Silverstone knows could be entirely the wrong people?”
Achim cast a worried look at Frank. But said nothing.
It was plain to Frank that his friend had no inkling of the hornet’s nest in which Silverstone plied whatever trade it was he pretended to be engaged in.
Chapter 12
Uncomfortably at ease with his rash agreement to go along with Achim’s plans, Frank took his imprudence back to the hotel room with him. Like a ticket he had been given for a concert that held no interest for him, it lay crumpled and forgotten in a pocket of his tipsy tired mind. The lubricated nostalgia they had enjoyed together still had him too firmly in its warm embrace. And the effects of the rapture were slow to wear off. But once they did, the implications of his agreement to attend that fast-approaching ‘concert’ began to seep through. He shivered at the chilling thought of his folly.
For the first time in years, he felt a profound need to talk to someone about the fundaments of his life. To the only person he was interested in talking to right then.
As he stood in the dark stairwell that led up to Patricia’s flat, he sensed a growing apprehension. And when eventually he knocked on her door, disappointment instantly rose from his stomach in a sour mix that smacked of heartburn. Furtive noises escaped from behind the door. But the door itself failed to open for a length of time which, in his impatience, seemed far too long for any comfortable explanation.
Frank began to wish he had not come. And he was about to turn back down the stairs, when suddenly a narrow chink of light appeared in the doorway to be instantly blotted out by the tantalising nuance of her figure. His appearance at her door failed to elicit the welcome he had been hoping for. Indeed, her soft gasp at the sight of him struggled to avoid betraying a slight irritation.
“What do you want?” she asked. “It’s far too risky for you to be seen coming here.”
With these words, she pulled him in through the door by his sleeve. Beside the stove, where he remembered warming his hands not so long ago, there stood a young man he had not seen before. On the table beside the gramophone, in place of the record he had bought for Patricia, lay a camera with the name Exakta inscribed on its brow. Frank recognised it as one of Germany’s hottest-selling cameras. And the three red roses in the vase had been replaced now by a single rose.
With his tousled ginger hair, lean figure and a pale, hungry expression in his eyes, this stranger did not give the impression he might have anything to do with Breitner.
“Frank, this is Léandre. Léandre, Frank.”
They shook hands, but said nothing. Léandre cast a questioning eye at Patricia.
“You can trust him,” she said.
Although Léandre gave a sickly impression – pale and unshaven, tired red eyes, shabby clothes – he carried himself with a self-assurance that bordered on arrogance. It quickly dispelled any feelings of charity or sympathy that may have been lurking in Frank’s mind. He was wondering why she had been so slow to open the door – it was hard to imagine that she might have been enjoying any kind of intimacy with such a p
icture of ill-health. Yet perhaps it was precisely the knowledge of intimacy that imbued the sickly looking stranger with such overweening confidence. Frank was not sorry when Léandre picked up the camera and announced that he would have to be going. But he was surprised to find this Exakta belonged to the shabbily dressed Léandre. How could he even afford a camera at all? Frank asked himself. And he wondered whether it might have been a gift from Patricia.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Léandre added. The words came with an emphasis that Frank felt was intended for him. And he saw his worst suspicions confirmed when Patricia gently kissed him and bade him “Take care” as he left.
With the delicate frame of her body, she pushed the door to and turned back towards Frank. A pensive smile played between her exquisite eyes and the conflict zone of her inviting lips. It was hard for Frank to judge whether the smile was meant for the just departed or for him the uninvited. For the time being, he preferred not to know.
“Who was that?” he asked.
“I told you. His name’s Léandre. I’ve known him since primary school in Avranches. He’s a very dear friend.”
Those last three words dug a deep trench through the pit of his stomach. He clammed up to stem the pain. And they sat watching each other, not saying a word, for some minutes. The pensive smile still lingered tantalisingly on her lips. But in her eyes it had given way to a disquieting expression that he could not identify.
“Why should he feel the need to trust me?” he asked at last.
For an answer she offered him some soup that was keeping warm on the stove and a glass of wine. Frank accepted, but he felt ill at ease, a sense of having been let down by the brief passage of time. When they had lunched together what seemed like just a short while ago, he had the impression that confidences had been shared – however small. Now it appeared that he was back at square one and having to work all the harder. But in the short time they had known each other, he had already come to realise that appearances can be deceptive when fashioned by the unpredictability of this beautiful sphinx.