Prague Fatale

by Philip Kerr

  One of the hostesses was perhaps the last black woman in Berlin. Her name was Ella. She sat at a table playing Solitaire using a pack of cards featuring photographic portraits of our beloved Nazi leaders. I joined her and watched for a while and she said that it improved her luck so I bought her a glass of lemonade and talked out the right cards for her; and when I gave her one of my precious American cigarettes she was all smiles and offered to ride the horse for me.

  ‘For fifty pfennigs you can see my thighs. For seventy-five you can see the mouse and everything in its mouth. I’m not wearing any underwear.’

  ‘Actually I was rather hoping to see Fräulein Tauber.’

  ‘She doesn’t work here any more. Not for a long time.’

  ‘Where does she work now?’

  Ella took a lazy puff of her cigarette and remained silent.

  I pushed a note across the table. There were no pictures on it like the ones on the backs of the cards but she hardly minded about that. I let her reach for it and then put my finger on the little black eagle in the corner.

  ‘Is she at the New World?’

  ‘That dump? I should say not. She tell you that she works there?’ She laughed. ‘It means she doesn’t want to see you again, darling. So why don’t you forget her and watch me ride that pony.’

  The Negress was tapping Morse code on the other end of the bill. I let it go and watched it disappear into a brassiere as large as a barrage balloon.

  ‘So, where does she work?’

  ‘Arianne? She runs the cloakroom at the Jockey Bar. Has for a while. For a girl like Arianne, there’s plenty of money to be made at the Jockey.’

  ‘In the cloakroom?’

  ‘You can do a lot more in a cloakroom than just hang a coat, honey.’

  ‘I guess so.’

  ‘We got a cloakroom here, Fritz. It’s nice and dark in there. For five marks, I could take real care of all your valuables. In my mouth, if you wanted.’

  ‘You’d be wasting your time, Ella. The only reason they let me come back from the front was because I don’t have any valuables. Not any more.’

  ‘I’m sorry. That’s too bad. Nice-looking fellow like you.’

  Her face fell a little and, for a moment, seeing her sympathy, I felt bad about lying to her like that. She had a kind way about her.

  I changed the subject.

  ‘The Jockey,’ I said. ‘Sure I know it. It’s that place off Wittenberg Platz, on Luther Strasse. Used to be a Russian place called Yar.’

  The Negress nodded.

  ‘I’ve only ever seen it from the outside. What’s it like?’

  ‘Expensive. Full of Amis and big-shots from the Foreign Ministry. They still play American jazz there. The real stuff. I’d go myself but for one rather obvious disadvantage. Coloureds ain’t welcome.’

  I frowned. ‘The Nazis don’t like anyone except Germans. You should know that by now, gorgeous.’

  She smiled. ‘Oh, I wasn’t talking about them. It’s the Amis who don’t like coloureds in the place.’

  From the outside, the Jockey Bar certainly sounded like the old Berlin from before the war with its easy morals and vulgar charms. Others thought so too. A small crowd of jazz fans stood on the sidewalk in the dark enjoying the music but unwilling to pay the prohibitive cost of going inside. To save paying the entrance fee myself I flashed the beer-token in my raincoat – a little brass oval that said I was police. Unlike most Berlin cops I’m not fond of trying to score a free one off an honest business, but the Jockey Bar was hardly that. Five marks just to walk downstairs was little better than theft. Not that there weren’t plenty of people already down there who seemed more than willing to be robbed. Most of them were smart types, with quite a few wearing evening dress and Party buttons. They say crime doesn’t pay. Not as well as a job does at the Foreign Office or the Ministry of Propaganda. There were also plenty of Americans, as Ella had said there would be. You could recognize them by their loud ties and their even louder voices. The Jockey Bar was probably the one place in Berlin you could speak English without some fool in a uniform trying to remind you that Roosevelt was a gangster, a Negroid maniac, a warmonger in a wheelchair, and a depraved Jewish scoundrel; and the Germans who really disliked him had some even more unpleasant things to say.

  At the bottom of the stairs was a cloakroom where a girl was filing her nails or reading a magazine and sometimes she managed to do both at the same time. You could tell that she was clever. She had dark hair and plenty of it but it was tied up like a velvet curtain at the back of her head. She was thin and she was wearing a black dress and I suppose she was good-looking in an obvious sort of way, which, lacking all subtlety, is the way I usually like my women; but she wasn’t Arianne Tauber.

  I waited for the girl to finish her nail or her picture caption and to notice me and that seemed to take longer than it ought to have done with the lights on.

  ‘This is a cloakroom, isn’t it?’

  She looked up, gave me the up and down and then, with a well-manicured hand, ushered my eyes to the coats – some of them made of fur – that were hanging on the rail behind her.

  ‘What do those look like? Icicles?’

  ‘From here it looks as if I’m in the wrong line of work. You, too, if I’m not mistaken. I had the strange idea that you’re supposed to be the first line of welcome in this upmarket shell-hole.’

  I took off my coat and laid it on the counter and she stared at it with distaste for a moment before dragging it away like she was planning to kill it and then handing me a ticket.

  ‘Is Arianne here tonight?’

  ‘Arianne?’

  ‘Arianne Tauber. That’s Tauber as in Richard Tauber, only I wouldn’t like to have him sitting on my lap.’

  ‘She’s not here right now.’

  ‘Not here as in not working or not here as in she just stepped outside for a few minutes?’

  ‘Who wants to know?’

  ‘Just tell her that Parsifal is here. That’s Parsifal as in the Holy Grail. Talking of which, I’ll be in the bar if she does show up.’

  ‘You and everyone else, I guess. There’s the bar and then there’s the bar, see? And if you get bored in there you can try the bar. That’s bar as in Jockey Bar.’

  ‘You were listening after all.’

  I went into the bar. The place needed a coat of paint and a new carpet, but not as much as I needed a drink and a set of earplugs. I like music when I’m drinking. I even like jazz, sometimes, just so long as they remember where they left the melody. The band at the Jockey Bar was a three-piece trio, and while they knew all the notes of ‘Avalon’ these were in no particular order. I sat down at a table and picked up the drinks card. The prices felt like mustard gas on my eyeballs and when I’d picked myself off the floor, I ordered a beer. The waitress came back almost immediately carrying a tray on which stood a tall glass filled with gold, which was the nearest thing to the Holy Grail I’d seen since the last time I bought a forty-pfennig stamp. I tasted it and found myself smiling like an idiot. It tasted exactly like beer.

  ‘I must be dead.’

  ‘That can be arranged,’ said a voice.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Take a look around, Parsifal. This louse house is jumping with important Nazis. Any one of these stuffed shirts could pick up the telephone and get you a seat on tomorrow’s partisan express.’

  I stood up and pulled out a chair for her. ‘I’m impressed. That you know about the partisan express.’

  The partisan express was what German soldiers called the troop train that travelled between Berlin and the eastern front.

  ‘I’ve got a brother in the Army,’ she explained.

  ‘That’s hardly an exclusive club. Not any more.’

  ‘Nor is this place. I guess that must be why they let you in.’ Arianne Tauber smiled and sat down. ‘But you can buy me a drink, if you like.’

  ‘At these prices? It would be cheaper to buy you a Mercedes Benz.’

 
; ‘What would be the point? You can’t get the petrol. So a drink will do just fine.’

  I waved the waitress toward me and let Arianne order a beer for herself.

  ‘Got any more of those Ami cigarettes?’

  ‘No,’ I lied. Buying her a beer felt extravagant enough without throwing caution out of the window and giving her a smoke as well.

  She shrugged. ‘That’s all right. I’ve got some Luckies.’

  Arianne reached for her bag, and that gave me time to have another look at her. She was wearing a plain navy-blue dress with short sleeves. Around her waist was a purple leather belt with a series of shiny black or maybe blue lozenges that were arranged like the jewels on a crown. On her shoulder was an interesting bronze brooch of the Hindu goddess Kali. Her purple leather bag was round and on a long strap and a bit like a water-carrier, and out of it she took a silver cigarette box with three bits of inlaid turquoise that were as big as thrush eggs. On the side there was a little matching compartment for a lighter but which contained a roll of banknotes, and for a moment I pictured her lighting a cigarette with a five-mark note. As a way of wasting money that was only a little less profligate than buying a girl a drink at the Jockey Bar.

  When she opened the little cigarette case I took one and rolled it in my fingers for a moment and passed it under my nostrils to remind myself that it was better to have America as a friend than an enemy before poking it between my lips and dipping my head onto a match from a book off the table that was in her scented hand.

  ‘Guerlain Shalimar,’ I said and puffed my cigarette happily for a second before adding, ‘You were wearing it when I last saw you.’

  ‘A gift from an admirer. Seems like every Fritz who comes back on leave from Paris brings a girl perfume. It’s the one thing there’s no shortage of here in Berlin. I swear I could open a shop, the amount of perfume I’ve been given since the war started. Men. Why don’t they bring something useful like shoe laces, or toilet paper?’ She shook her head. ‘Cooking oil. Have you tried buying cooking oil? Forget it.’

  ‘Maybe they figure you smell better wearing the perfume.’

  She smiled. ‘You must think I’m really ungrateful.’

  ‘The next time I’m in Paris I’ll buy you some paperclips and put you to the test.’

  ‘No, really. The other night I didn’t get a chance to thank you properly, Parsifal.’

  ‘Skip it. You were in no state to be throwing me a cocktail party.’ I took hold of her chin and turned her profile toward me. ‘The eye looks fine. Maybe just a little bruised around the edges. Then again I always go simple for blue eyes.’

  For a moment she looked bashful. Then she hardened again. ‘I don’t want you being nice to me.’

  ‘That’s all right. I didn’t bring any perfume.’

  ‘Not until I’ve apologized to you. For not being honest.’

  ‘It’s a national habit.’

  She took a sip of her beer and then a kiss from her cigarette. Her hand was shaking a little.

  ‘Really. There’s nothing to apologize for.’

  ‘All the same, I would like to explain something.’

  I shrugged. ‘If you want. Take your time. There’s no one waiting for me at home.’

  She nodded and then picked out another smile to wear. This one was looking sheepish.

  ‘First of all I want you to know I’m not some joy-girl. Sometimes, when I’m in here, I’ll let a man buy me a drink. Or give me a present. Like these cigarettes. But that’s as far as it goes unless – well, we’re all human, aren’t we?’

  ‘I certainly used to believe that.’

  ‘That’s the truth, Parsifal. Anyway, being the cloakroom girl in a place like this is a good job. The Amis – even a few of the Germans – they tip well. There’s nothing much to spend it on but I figure you still have to put something away for the bad times. And I’ve got an ugly feeling that there’s plenty of those yet to come. Worse than now, I mean. My brother says so. He says—’

  Whatever her brother had said she seemed to think better of telling me about it. A lot of Berliners were forgetful like that. They would start talking, then remember a little thing called the Gestapo and just stop, mid-sentence, and stare into the distance for a minute and then say something like what she said next.

  ‘Skip it. What I was saying. It wasn’t anything important.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘What’s important is you know I’m not selling it, Parsifal.’

  ‘I understand,’ I said, hardly caring if she was selling it or not. But I was keen to hear her out, although I was still wondering why she felt obliged to explain herself at all.

  ‘I hope so.’ She picked a piece of tobacco off her tongue and her fingers came away red from her lipstick. ‘Okay. Here’s what happened that night. Household, building, contents, everything because I figure I have to tell someone and I get the feeling you might be interested. Say if you’re not and I’ll just shut up. But you were interested enough to come down here and look for me, right?’

  I nodded.

  ‘And as a matter of fact it’s in here that the story starts. It was during my break. Magda – she’s the girl you met, in the cloakroom – was behind the desk and I was in the bar. When we have our break we’re supposed to come in here and have a drink with the customers. Like you and me are doing now.’

  She tried on another smile. This one looked wry.

  ‘Some break. Frankly it’s not a break at all. The Fritzes here are generous with their drinks and their cigarettes, and usually I’m glad to get back to the cloakroom to have a rest and try to clear my head.’ She shrugged. ‘I was never much of a drinker but that kind of excuse really doesn’t work in here.’

  ‘I can imagine.’

  I glanced around and tried not to grimace. There’s something obscene about a nightclub in wartime. All of those people having a good time while our boys are away fighting Popovs, or flying sorties over England. Somehow it didn’t feel right to have a photograph of the English film star Leslie Howard on the Jockey Club wall. For a while, after the outbreak of war, the Nazis had been sensitive enough to ban all public dancing, but following our early victories that ban had been lifted and now things were going so wonderfully for the German Army that it was thought to be fine for men and women to let down their hair and throw themselves around on a dance floor. But I didn’t care for it at all. And I liked it even less when I thought about the Fridmann sisters in the apartment beneath my own.

  ‘Sometimes when I go home I can hardly walk I’m so heavy with the stuff.’

  ‘I can see I’m going to have to come here again. This must be the only bar in Berlin where the beer still tastes like beer.’

  ‘But at a price. And what a price. Anyway, I was going to tell you about this fellow called Gustav and how I came to be hanging around Nollendorfplatz in the dark the other night.’

  ‘Were you?’

  ‘Come on Parsifal, pay attention. A few nights ago when I’m in here I start talking to this Fritz. He said his name was Gustav but I have my doubts about that. He also said that he was a civil servant on Wilhelmstrasse. And that is what he looked like, I suppose. A real smooth type. Thin prick accent. Gold bird in his lapel. Silk handkerchief and spats. Oh yes, and he had this little gold cigarette holder that he brought out of a little velvet box every time he wanted a smoke. Just watching him was kind of fascinating in an irritating way. I asked him if he did that in the morning, too – I mean, if he used the little gold holder – and he said he did. Can you imagine that?’

  ‘I’ll give it a go.’ I shook my head. ‘No, I can’t. He sounds like a fish in a glass case.’

  ‘Good-looking though.’ Arianne grinned. ‘And rich. He was wearing a wristwatch and a pocket hunter and both of them were gold, just like his cufflinks and his shirt studs and his tie pin.’

  ‘Very observant of you.’

  She shrugged. ‘What can I tell you? I like men who wear gold. It encourages me. Like a red rag to
a bull. But it’s not the movement. It’s the colour. And the value, of course. Men who wear a lot of gold bits and pieces are just more generous, I suppose.’

  ‘And was he?’

  ‘Gustav? Sure. He tipped me just for lighting his cigarette. And again for sitting with him. At the end of the evening he asked me to meet him the following evening at the Romanisches Café.’

  I nodded. ‘Just down from Wittenberg Platz.’

  ‘Yes. At eight o’clock. Anyway he was late and for a while I thought he wasn’t coming at all. It was nearer eight-twenty-five when eventually he showed up. And he was sweating and nervous. Not at all the smooth-as-silk type he’d been when we were in here the previous night. We talked for a while but he wasn’t listening. And when I asked him why he seemed so out of sorts, he came to the point. He had asked me along to the café because he had a job for me. An easy job, he said, but it was going to pay me a hundred marks. A hundred. By now I was shaking my head and telling him I wasn’t on the sledge just yet, but no, he said, it wasn’t anything like that, and what did I take him for? All I had to do was wait under the station at Nolli at nine-fifteen and give an envelope to a man who would be humming a tune.’