by Various
"Oh, these are all approved titles," Blucher said. "But you know how it is, people get carried away."
Gunther remembered the public book burnings in Berlin, after the Führer's rise to power. "Anything you'd recommend?"
"Have you tried Mein Kampf ? It sells like plum cakes at a church fundraiser."
"I read it," Gunther said.
"Which part?"
"Chapters One and Two, and most of Chapter Three, I think," Gunther said, and Blucher laughed, shortly and abruptly. The laugh made him cough. He drank water, daintily, from a glass perched on his desk, then dabbed at his lips with a handkerchief.
"Yes," he said. "It is no Sebastian Bruce Heftromane, I'll admit as much. You are visiting London?"
"Yes."
"It is a pleasant time of year."
Gunther stared at him.
The man shrugged. "Perhaps you can visit the countryside?" he suggested. "Yorkshire, I am told, is very nice."
"You have not been?"
"I would go, but who'd mind the shop?" the man said.
"Frau Blucher?" Gunther suggested. Outside, he thought he heard the neighing of a horse; but it must have been in his imagination.
"Alas, I have not been blessed with a wife," Blucher said. "Not for many years. She died, you see."
"In the war?"
"Appendicitis."
"I'm sorry."
Blucher shrugged. What can you do, he seemed to silently suggest. The silence dragged. The books lay still, heavy with ash and ink.
"I was told you'd be coming round here," Blucher said. "Gunther Sloam. You are becoming quite notorious, in some circles."
"How do you know me?"
"London is a small place. Word spreads. You were a friend of the actress, Ulla Blau."
"You knew her?"
"Her talent spoke for her. She was magnificent in Die Große Liebe. "
"It was her best picture," Gunther said.
Blucher shrugged again. "It was schmaltz, but you knew that already."
Gunther looked at him with new suspicion. The man laughed. He took off his glasses and polished them with the handkerchief. When he put them back on, his small, shrewd eyes assessed Gunther. "I am not a Jew," he said. "If that is what you were thinking."
"Where are you from, Herr Blucher?"
"A small town in Austria. Not unlike our illustrious leader," Blucher said. "I came out here in 1947, shortly after the war. I have always admired the English writers. Who knows, some of them may even still be alive." He stretched his arms to encompass his shop. "As you can see, I prospered."
Gunther said, "I need to buy a gun."
"It is quite illegal, Herr Sloam."
"A man has a right to defend himself."
"Why not ask your friends at the Gestapo?"
Did everyone in London know his business? Gunther tapped his fingers on the cover of a book. The smell of burnt paper disinclined him from wanting to light a cigarette.
"Did you know her?" he said.
"Ulla?" the man's eyes misted over. "She was a beautiful woman," he said.
"Do you know who killed her?"
Blucher looked at him mildly. "I thought you did."
"That is a lie!"
Blucher sighed. He pushed back his chair with great deliberation, and stood up, panting. He pressed a hidden button, and a hidden drawer popped open in his desk. He brought out an object wrapped in cloth and unwrapped it. It was a Luger, perfectly clean. It was the sort of gun Gunther had used in the war. The sort of gun that only a day earlier took care of Ulla Blau.
"Will this do?" Blucher said.
"I want to know who killed her."
"Forget Ulla Blau," the bookseller said, with infinite sadness. "Finding her killer won't bring her back. Go home, Gunther Sloam. There is nothing for you here but death."
"You know something, I think," Gunther said. He took the gun and examined it. "I would need bullets," he said.
"Of course."
Blucher brought out a clip of ammunition from the same drawer and handed it to Gunther. "The fee is fifty Reichsmarks."
"Where did you get this gun?"
"A gun," Blucher said, sadly. "Are we short of guns, Herr Sloam? Of those we have an overabundance. It is not guns but medicines we need. But how do you heal a broken soul?"
Gunther loaded the gun. He gave the bookseller the money. The man made it disappear.
"I'll tell you a joke," Blucher said. "One day Hitler visited a lunatic asylum. When he came in, all the patients raised the arms and cried, ' Heil Hitler!' Suddenly, Hitler saw one man whose arm wasn't raised. 'What is the meaning of this? Why don't you salute like the rest?' he demanded. The man said: 'My Führer, I'm an orderly, not a madman!'"
He gave Gunther an expectant look, then shrugged in resignation.
"Where did Ulla get her drugs?" Gunther said.
"Who knows," Blucher said. "I try not to ask questions that might get me killed. You'd do well to do the same."
"What do you wish to tell me, Herr Blucher?" Gunther said. He sensed that underneath the bookseller's placid exterior there was a current of rage.
"Did you love her?" Blucher said. Gunther looked away. He was embarrassed by the naked look in the man's eyes. Blucher was hurting .
"Once. Yes."
"She was radiant. So alive. She understood that a man cannot live by violence alone. There must be joy. There must be light, and music. Without her, London will be unbearable."
"Tell me what you know," Gunther said. He felt a pulse of excitement. "Tell me. Was it the dwarf?"
"The dwarf!"
The bookseller made his way ponderously around the desk. "I should not be talking with you," he said. "You are putting us both in danger." He looked like he was trying to reach a difficult decision. "Wait here," he said, at last. He waddled away toward a small door. "I'll make us a cup of coffee."
Gunther stood, waiting. He tucked the gun into the small of his back, under his shirt. He browsed the shelves. Hitler's Mein Sieg, the book he wrote after the victory. Books on natural history, in English, with hand-painted plates depicting vibrantly colored birds. It occurred to Gunther that he had not heard birdsong since he arrived.
The silence grew oppressive. The dust tickled his nostrils and made him want to sneeze. The books stared at him in mute accusation. It wasn't me, he wanted to say. I was just following orders . The seconds lengthened.
" Herr Blucher?"
There was no reply. Gunther let the moment lapse. He fingered the spine of an ancient volume on moths. It was loused with worm tracks. The dust tickled his throat. The gun felt heavy in the small of his back. He went to the door and knocked, softly.
" Herr Blucher?"
Still there was no reply and Gunther, with a sense of mounting dread, pushed the door open. He was afraid of what he would find.
Beyond, there was nothing but a small kitchenette. Gunther heaved a sigh of relief. Blucher was sitting in a folding chair by the sink. A kettle began to shriek on the open-top stove. Blucher was smiling faintly. His hands were folded quite naturalistically in his lap. He evidently fell asleep, and slept so soundly, even the mounting cry of the kettle would not wake him.
"Wake up, Blucher," Gunther said. "Blucher, wake up."
Later, in my office, he could not explain why he acted the way he did. Why he paced that small kitchenette, entreating Blucher to wake up, Blucher to stand, Blucher to speak to him. When all the while, of course, he was perfectly aware of the smell of gunpowder, of the smell of blood, as familiar and as intimate as a comrade on the Eastern Front; and of the small, neat hole drilled in Blucher's forehead. He was aware of all that, and yet as in a dream he spoke to Blucher; he told him of Ulla, of time spent in a high attic room, of stolen kisses in Unter den Linden, of the whistle of a train taking soldiers to battle. That whistle, long ago, seemed to him now to intertwine with the hissing kettle. It brought with it instantaneous memories long kept at bay: of Ulla's sweat-slicked body in the moonlight, of the
feral call of air-raid sirens, of the march of booted feet, of jubilant voices crying out "The Horst Wessel Song." He thought of the Führer's voice on the wireless, of crumpled bedsheets and her voice, thick with sleep, saying, "Please, don't go."
It was those last words that he carried with him on the way to the east; those words that kept him company amidst the snow and the blood. "Please, don't go." But when he returned, a different man under a different sky, she was long gone. Sometimes, under the blanket of the cold Russian night, he looked up at the stars and imagined he could see her.
At last, Gunther removed the kettle from the stove. He turned off the gas. He took one last look at Blucher's corpse. A second door, he saw, led out of the kitchenette. He pushed it open and stepped outside, into an alleyway running at the back of the bookshop. He looked left and right but saw no one, and he slipped away. My men, who were only watching the front of the shop, lost him then.
6
When Sloam failed to reappear, my men finally entered Blucher's. They found the proprietor slumped in his chair with the bullet hole between his eyes, and Gunther gone. Then they called me with the bad news.
I did not mind Gunther on the loose. After all, I had set him free myself. I had telephoned Blucher earlier that morning, and advised him that Sloam might well pay him a visit later in the day. I also told Blucher he could sell Sloam a gun. A man with a gun, sooner or later, makes his presence felt.
What I had not expected, however, was for Blucher to be so stupid as to commit suicide by gunmen.
For a time, I considered that Gunther might be the killer. His whereabouts were unknown. He was armed, and potentially dangerous. But I had sent him to rattle a nests of wasps. That the wasps stung back, I supposed, was only to be expected.
Blucher must have been killed to keep him quiet. That fact stared me in the face, and the fact that the lying scum Austrian piece of shit had held out on me.
If there was one thing you could say about Hanns Blucher, it was that the man was a professional liar. His story for Gunther was good. Parts of it were even—almost—true. He was born Erich Dittman, in Gratz, Austria, the son of a shoemaker and a seamstress, the middle child of five. His criminal career began early. He was a good little pickpocket, graduated to burglary and robbery by the age of sixteen, and after a time in prison settled on the more tranquil profession of fencing stolen goods. When war came, he escaped to France; then, when France fell, to Luxembourg. By then he had changed his identity twice. When the war ended, Hermann Blucher was a well-established rare-books dealer in Luxembourg City. He had avoided the deportations and the camps, and he thought his papers were good.
They were; almost.
How he got out of Luxembourg alive I never quite learned. He reappeared in London and was ensconced in his premises on the Charing Cross Road as though he'd always been there. In truth, he had taken the lease on an empty shop at No. 84, formerly owned by a Jew named Marks.
He called himself Blucher. He was as enmeshed in criminal enterprise as ever. And he was still a Jew.
When I first marched into his shop and he saw me, he knew it was over. He did that little shrug he always did. By rights I should have had him tortured and disposed of. But he was more useful to me alive.
Only now he was dead, like Blau.
Someone was tying up loose ends.
* * *
Gunther walked through the city that day haunted by the shadow of deaths. Usually the ghosts did not bother him overmuch; he had made his peace with the atrocities of war. What he had done, he had only done to survive. In a post-war screenplay, never produced ( Das große �bel, c. 1948), the love interest dies in the arms of the hero, a veteran of Normandy on a quest to avenge the death of his sister at the hands of blackmarket speculators. As she lies dying, she kisses him, one last time, with lips stained red with blood, and tells him he was not a bad man for the things he did. He was just an imperfect man in an imperfect world, trying to do the right thing.
She dies. The hero embraces her. Her blood soaks into his shirt. The hero walks away, into the shadows.
When he sent the script in to Tobis, he was told quite categorically not to waste his time. Demand was for domestic comedies, lighthearted affairs, adventure. "Write another Western," Rolf Hansen told him over coffee, before he got up and left him with the check. "There's always demand for that sort of thing. Oh, and Gunther?"
"Yes?"
"There is no black market in Germany. You should know better by now. Heil Hitler."
No, Gunther thought, walking through city streets slick with defeat, bounded by empty buildings like skulls, where the dead whispered through the gaping eye sockets of broken windows. There was no crime in this new Reich, no prostitution unless one counted that of the soul, no murder but that carried out by the state.
It was a land of hard-working, virtuous, and prosperous people. A dream come true.
Already they were bringing civilization even to Britain. Viennese pastries and public concerts of Wagner and Bruckner, Reinheitsgebot beer, shining gymnasiums where the soldiers of tomorrow could be taught, new factories in the north where the goods needed for the empire could be cheaply and efficiently manufactured. And no more Jews, but for a few desperate survivors like Blucher, living out their last days like rats in the shadows.
He was not usually this bleak, you understand. All of this just brought back the bad memories. When we got him later, he was done, he said.
"It's just something about this godforsaken island," he told me. "The cold and the damp and the bloody futility of it all, Everly. It starts to seep into your soul after a while."
"I'm afraid we did not present London's best side to you on your visit," I said, and he snorted.
"Oh, but I think you did," he said. "Don't worry, I won't be coming back."
Like I said, it wasn't much of a time for tourism.
Gunther retraced his steps. He tried to ensure he wasn't being followed. He wrapped himself tight in his good cashmere coat. He went back to the Lyric. A different bartender tended bar. The same indistinguishable faces drank in the corners. No one spoke German or, at any rate, no one was answering his questions.
He did not see the Luxembourgian, Klaus Pirelli, and he left.
Then he went back to the start. The house on Dean Street stood with its door closed and red lights burning behind the windows. He banged on the door but no one was answering and he did not see the old woman, Mrs. White. There was a new watcher across the street: not one of mine. He sidled up to Gunther as Gunther turned to leave. It was dark by then.
"You are looking for a girl?"
"I am looking," Gunther said. "For a dwarf."
The other man shrugged. "I see it is true what they say about you Germans. You have peculiar tastes. But each to their own, as my old nan always said."
Gunther stared at him. He had the urge to do violence. The man was too thin, his teeth too crooked, his coat too shabby, his hair too coarse. Gunther took out the gun and grabbed the man hard by the lapels and shoved him against the wall and put the gun in his face. The man looked at him placidly.
"Do you know a man called Klaus Pirelli?"
"What's it to you, friend?" the man said.
"I could shoot you right now."
"You could indeed, Fritz."
Gunther slapped him across the face with the gun, hard. The man's head shot back and slammed against the wall. He crumpled to the ground. Gunther put the gun to his forehead. "Tell me where I can find him."
The man moved his jaw, grimaced, and spat out blood. "Everyone's tough with a gun in their hand," he said. "Why don't you try asking nicely, or buying me a drink."
"I don't understand you English," Gunther said, frustrated. He pulled away from the man. He felt ashamed. The man got up slowly to his feet. Gunther took out cigarettes and offered one to the man, who took it. Gunther lit them up.
The man took a deep drag on his cigarette and exhaled a stream of smoke. "If you're not looking for a girl," he
said, reasonably, "why are you hanging about outside a whorehouse?"
"I came here for a girl," Gunther said shortly. "She died."
"I'm sorry."
"I almost believe you," Gunther said, and the man laughed.
"I can take you somewhere where there are other girls. It's best to let go of the dead, friend, or soon you become one yourself."
"You're a philosopher as well as a pimp?"
"I'm neither, friend. Just a man doing what he has to do to survive."
"Do you know where I can find this man, Pirelli?"
The man considered. "I can't tell you where he is," he said at last, "but I can tell you where he'd be."
"Where is that?"
"Somewhere where there is drink, and music, and girls."
"And you know all these places, I assume?"
"What can I say, I have a thirst for knowledge."
Gunther laughed. He stuck his hand out. "Gunther Sloam," he said.
The other man looked at the offered hand. Finally he took it. "You can call me Janson."
"One name's as good as the next," Gunther said amicably.
7
There began a night in which perception began to fracture like a mirror for Gunther. The city was a nightmarish maze of dark streets in which faceless gunmen haunted every corner. He thought about dead girls and dead Jews, and wondered who would be the next to die.
They started at the Albert, a cavernous pub where ancient families feuded with each other over pints of watery beer; continued to the Admiral's Arms, where everyone looked like a vampire; and settled for a time at the Dog and Duck over glasses of potent, home-made sherry.
"When the occupation is completed there I will go to America," Janson said. "I have a great admiration for the Americans, for all that they lost their war."
"What will you do?" Gunther said.
"I would become a writer for their pulps."
"It's a living," Gunther allowed. "Not a very profitable one, though."
"I write quickly and I have what it requires most," Janson said.
"And what's that?" Gunther said.