The Year's Best Science Fiction--Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “I’ll have an Erdinger, please,” Gunther said. “And a plate of Schweinshaxe mit sauerkraut. “

  The bartender, without changing an expression, poured the beer and served it to Gunther.

  “We don’t have pork knuckle,” he said. “Or sauerkraut.”

  Gunther closed his eyes and took a sip of the beer. He already felt light-headed from the wine he had consumed earlier with the old woman.

  “Well, what do you serve?” he said.

  “Pie.”

  “What sort of pie?”

  “Pork pie.”

  “Then I shall have a pork pie, bitte.”

  The bartender nodded and kept wiping the stein. “That’d be twenty Reichsmarks,” he said.

  “Twenty!”

  The bartender looked bored. Gunther cursed under his breath but paid. The bartender made the money disappear. Gunther lit a cigarette and looked about the pub. There were only a few men sitting around, and no women. No one looked in his direction. He began to get the sense that he wasn’t welcome.

  He took another sip of his beer.

  “I am looking for Der Zwerg,” he said; announcing it into the air of the pub.

  No one moved. If anything, Gunther thought, they had become more still.

  “Pie,” the bartender said. Gunther looked down at the counter. A round, solid brick of pastry sat on a cracked plate. Gunther picked up the knife and fork. He cut through the pastry into the pink fleshy interior. He cut a slice and put it in his mouth. It was cold and rather flavourless. He chewed and swallowed.

  “Delicious,” he said.

  Someone sniggered. When Gunther turned his head a tall thin figure rose from a bench against the wall and perched itself on a stool beside him. The man had the cadaverous look of a disappointed undertaker. The smile he offered Gunther was as honest as a Vichy cheque.

  “You are new in town?” he said.

  “What’s it to you?” Gunther said.

  “Nothing, nothing.” The man rubbed his hands together as though cold. He reminded Gunther a little of that Jew actor, Peter Lorre; he had starred in Fritz Lang’s M nearly three decades earlier. “It is good to hear an honest German voice again.”

  “You are not from Germany.”

  “No. Luxembourg,” the man confessed. That explained the accent. “It is a strange country, England, is it not? They are so dour, so resentful of you Germans. Do you know, I think, deep down, they believe they should have won the war.”

  He laughed, the same sort of insincere sound a hyena makes. “Beer, bartender!” he called, jovially. “And one for my friend here. Put it on my tab.”

  “You have been here long?” Gunther asked.

  “Two years now,” the man said. “I do a little business. Import-export, mostly. You know how it is.”

  Gunther did not. The beer arrived and he sipped from it. He forced himself to finish the pie. He had eaten worse on the front.

  * * *

  “This man,” I said. “His name was Klaus?”

  Gunther was pacing my office. He looked up, surprised. “Klaus Pirelli, or so he told me,” he said. “Yes. How did you—?”

  “He has given us a full statement,” I said. “He says he drank beer with you and discussed the ongoing war in America, Leni Riefenstahl’s latest film, the new African lebensraum and the import-export business. He says you got progressively drunker and increasingly aggressive. At some point you asked, loudly, where a man could get hold of a gun in this town. You became so voluble that he had to escort you outside. He says the last he saw of you, you were staggering down Great Windmill St., in the direction of Shaftesbury Avenue, waving your arms and swearing you would, “Get that bitch.’

  Gunther stopped pacing. His mouth hung open. I almost felt sorry for him at that moment. In his comic horror he reminded me of the comedian, Alfred Hawthorne, who I had recently seen playing Bottom in a production of A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream.

  “But that is wahnsinn!” He gaped at me like a landed fish. “It is madness! I did no such thing!”

  “Can you prove it?”

  “The other drinkers! The bartender! They were all witnesses—”

  He looked at me, realisation slowly dawning.

  “You are German,” I said, sadly. “They are not.”

  “Listen, Everly, you’ve got to believe me!”

  “Just tell me what happened,” I said.

  * * *

  Gunther found the Luxembourgian trying. The man was obviously selling something, but Gunther wasn’t sure what.

  “I am looking for the dwarf,” he said again.

  “Him!” the Luxembourgian exclaimed.

  “I was told I could find him here.”

  “He is not an easy man to find, Herr Jurgen.”

  “Is that his name?” Gunther said.

  “You do not know his name, yet you seek to find him?” the Luxembourgian looked amused at that. “What is the nature of your business with the Count?”

  “A Count, is he?” Gunther said. His head really was spinning. “Well, I want to know where Ulla Blau is.” He grabbed the Luxembourgian by the lapels and shook him. “Do you know where Ulla is?” he demanded. His speech felt slurred, his tongue unresponsive. “I need to see her. She’s in a lot of trouble.”

  The Luxembourgian gently removed Gunther’s hands. “You need air, friend,” he said. “I think you’ve had too much to drink.”

  “Don’t be … ridiculous,” Gunther said. His vision swam. He was dimly aware of his new friend putting his arm around his shoulders and steering him outside. Cold air hit his face like a slap, but it did not clear his confused thoughts. He began to stagger away from the pub. As he did, he saw a pair of shapely white legs, walking past. He raised his head and tried to focus. A good-looking woman wrapped in a thick fur coat walked away from him. As she passed under a gaslight, for just a moment, she turned her head and smiled.

  “Ulla?” Gunther cried. “Ulla!”

  There was something mocking in the woman’s smile. She turned and walked away. Gunther lurched after her for a few more steps but she was long gone, and perhaps, he thought later, she had never been there at all. He tottered on his feet. Darkness opened all around him, like the entry to a sewer. He fell, hard, and lay on the ground. He closed his eyes, and dark sleep claimed him.

  * * *

  “And that is all you remember?” I said.

  “All I remember, until some uncouth men roused me up on the street, administered a series of kicks for good measure, put me in irons and dragged me to your cellars to have another go.”

  He touched his black eye and winced. “Don’t you see?” Gunther said. “I was drugged. The Luxembourgian must be in on it. He must have slipped something into my drink when I wasn’t looking.”

  The mention of drugs caught my attention, and I looked at him in a new way.

  “Besides,” he said, with a laugh. “Who the hell was I supposed to have murdered?”

  “Come with me.”

  He shrugged. This, he endeavoured to get across, was nothing to him. In that he was wrong.

  He followed me along the corridor and down the stairs. The Gestapo had made its headquarters in Somerset House. We found the stout walls and easy access to the river compelling. I took him down to the makeshift morgue.

  “What is this?” he said, and shivered. I ignored him. We proceeded to go in.

  “Sir,” Kriminalassistent West said, standing to attention.

  “What is this?” Gunther demanded. We both ignored him. I gave West the nod. He pulled one of the refrigeration units open and slid out the gurney.

  A corpse, covered in a sheet, lay on the cold metal tray.

  Gunther’s lips moved, but without sound. Perhaps he was beginning to realise the trouble he was in.

  I gave West the nod again. He removed the sheet. Underneath it lay a naked female form. Her face had been blasted apart by the bullet from a Luger semi-automatic.

  I watched Gunther closely. The
horror on his face seemed genuine enough.

  “Can you identify her?” I asked. He looked at the body mutely. His eyes took in the ruined faced, the still, cold body, her bejewelled fingers. He began to shake.

  “No, no,” he said. “It cannot be.”

  He stepped closer to the gurney. He took the dead hand in his.

  “This ring,” he said. It was a rather tawdry thing, a large chunky emerald set in copper. “I gave it to her. I remember buying it, from Kling’s on Münzstrasse. It was a token of my love, just before they shipped me to the front.”

  “Gave it to whom?” I said, gently.

  He looked at me, his eyes full of quiet despair.

  “I gave it to Ulla Blau,” he said.

  4

  The story could have ended here, but for the fact that Ulla Blau’s death, though in some part not entirely without benefit, nevertheless put me in a somewhat awkward position.

  I brought Gunther back to my office. I asked Sergeant Cole to bring us two coffees this time, and some Viennese pastries. You may wonder why I treated Gunther Sloam with such kids gloves. After all, the expedient act would have been to send him back down to the cellars for a second, more thorough work-over—to last only as long as it would take to extract a full and frank confession—then a speedy execution and burial by water. There were, as I mentioned, several reasons Somerset House was chosen for our headquarters, and easy access to the river was a not insignificant one. The corpses, sometimes, if not weighted enough, floated back up to the surface or caught in the Greenwich wharves on their way out to the sea, but that merely served to reinforce in people’s minds the long and lethal reach of the Gestapo. Sometimes we had to make sure the corpses were lightly weighted, when a particular message needed to be sent.

  Gunther wondered the same thing. I could see it in his eyes. He observed Sergeant Cole bring in the coffee and pastries with the eyes of a condemned man watching his executioner. I sat behind my desk and stirred a cube of sugar into my coffee.

  “Cream?”

  “Thank you.”

  He said that in a wondering voice. I smiled patiently and took a bite from my apfelstrudel. “They are not as good as on the continent, of course,” I said, when I had chewed and swallowed. “But we do try our best, you see.”

  “I am sure it is delicious,” he said. He didn’t look like he tasted anything.

  “I asked you, when we first met,” I said. “What your friend was doing in London. You did not enlighten me.”

  “Everly, for God’s sake…!” he began, then went stumm.

  I waited him out.

  “I don’t know,” he admitted at last. “I received this note, and I…” he buried his face in his hands. “I did not take it seriously. She said her life was in danger and I, I…”

  “You were expecting nothing more than a pleasurable reunion,” I said. He raised his face to me and his eyes flashed with anger.

  “Now look here, Everly!” he said. “I did not kill her!”

  “Do you know what Pervitin is?” I said.

  “Of course,” he said, without hesitation, but with a moue of distaste. “It is an artificial stimulant. A type of drug—what they call methamphetamines. They gave it to us during Barbarossa. It keeps you awake and gives you energy, and it lowers inhibition, which is useful in battle.”

  “It is also highly addictive.”

  “Yes,” he said. “In our case the army didn’t worry about it too much. Most of the people who took it were destined for death. I was just luckier than most.”

  “Your friend, Ulla Blau, came to London some years ago,” I said. “London at that time was a city in ruin. A large occupying force was initially needed and soldiers, as soldiers are wont to do, require entertainments.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Ulla’s theatre connections proved handy in supplying girls for the soldiers. At that time, in London, a warm body was cheaper than a loaf of bread, and easier to get. From the soldiers she could easily acquire extra supplies of Pervitin. These she sold back into the general populace. It wasn’t, strictly speaking, legal, but legality didn’t have much of a meaning in the immediate aftermath of the war.”

  “I don’t believe you,” he said.

  I shrugged. “You can believe what you’d like to believe,” I said. “But you can’t dismiss the evidence of your own eyes. Somebody plugged a round of 9 mm bullets into her pretty little face, after all.”

  “That doesn’t make her guilty!”

  “It doesn’t make her bloody innocent, either,” I said.

  He stared at me with hatred and his fingers curled into fists. He was going to go for me in a moment.

  Then realisation dawned; I could see his expression change. “You don’t think I killed her,” he said, wonderingly.

  “Look, Sloam,” I said. I was tired and the pastry was cloyingly sweet. “It doesn’t matter to me if you killed her or not. She was nothing but trouble and the world’s a better place for her not being in it. However.”

  He watched me closely. I could see he was still aching to swing at me. He wasn’t the first and he wasn’t going to be the last.

  “Either way it’s a mess. You’re a citizen of the Deutsches Reich, not just a colonial. So was Fräulein Blau, and as a former actress, her death would play for news. The last thing my superiors want is a fuss back in Berlin about a sordid murder in the colonies. Citizens of the Reich must feel they can travel safely to any part of the empire. This isn’t 1946, Sloam. England’s a peaceful place, and a faithful servant of the Führer.”

  “So where does that leave me?” he said. He wasn’t slow when he didn’t want to be.

  “What would you do in my place?” I said.

  He considered. “You’d announce her death as an unfortunate accident, and bury me somewhere out of sight with a bullet between my eyes.”

  I nodded. He wasn’t an innocent, just the wrong man in the wrong place, and for all his war experience, he still thought like a character in one of his movies. “What did you think,” I said, “that you’d come over here and rescue her?”

  “I don’t know what I thought,” he said. “And I still don’t believe she was guilty!”

  “Which of us isn’t guilty, Mr. Sloam?” I asked. “Which of us isn’t guilty?”

  He watched me. “I am not afraid to die,” he said.

  I pressed a button, and Sergeant Cole came in. Gunther tensed.

  “Cole,” I said. “Please show Mr. Sloam outside.”

  Gunther watched me with suspicion.

  “There’s a flight leaving for Berlin tonight,” I said. “I’d advise you to be on it. Remember, I had made that offer before, and I’m unlikely to make it a third time. Sergeant Cole will take you to a hotel where you can clean up and get some rest. Auf wiedersehen, Mr. Sloam. I hope, sincerely, we do not meet again.”

  The hint of a smile touched his lips then. “Goodbye, Kriminalinspektor Everly,” he said.

  But I could see he did not mean it.

  * * *

  Cole dropped him off at the Albert in Covent Garden. It was basic, but clean. Gunther collected his key and went up to his room. He showered and changed. He did not sleep.

  Of course the obstinate German did not take my advice. I had accused him of being a romantic and I wasn’t wrong. Gunther, for all his battle experience in the Wehrmacht, still insisted, deep down, to think of himself as a character in one of his own cowboy pictures. All he could think about was Ulla Blau’s ruined, once-beautiful face staring back at him from the mortuary slab. I think he believed himself untouchable. Most Germans did, after the war. There were still pockets of resistance in America, but few since we’d dropped the A-bomb on Washington D.C. The world belonged to Germany: for Gunther, that idea was as fixed as his notion of honour.

  From the hotel, Gunther went out. For a time he walked through Covent Garden, which he found a dismal sort of place. Underneath the butchers’ stalls the blood ran rancid, and the greengrocers’ of
ferings of hard, lumpy potatoes and bent carrots depressed Gunther. The market had all the festivity of a Dachau.

  He watched the people, though. Londoners moved about the market furtively, with the bent shoulders of a conquered people. They wore shabby clothes, the men in ill-fitting suits, the women in hand-me-down dresses that seemed to come from a German Red Cross charity stall. He saw few smiles. Here and there soldiers patrolled, but they were few in number, and seemed indifferent to the populace. As I had told Gunther, this England was resigned to its fate. The majority of the occupying force had moved on to other duties, in the new African territories or America. Now, only a skeleton barracks was left and, of course, the Gestapo.

  Gunther walked past the opera house, where a prominent sign advertised the soprano’s, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, appearance that night. Along Drury Lane he saw a young boy in the shadows, peaked cap covering half his face, skulking. He paused to watch as first two men, and then a woman, stopped and seemed to make a furtive purchase. When the street was clear, Gunther crossed the road and approached the boy.

  “What do you want, mister?”

  “What have you got?” Gunther said.

  The boy looked up at him in suspicion. “You’re a German!” he said, accusingly.

  Gunther shrugged.

  “You want girls?” the boy said. “My sister is very clean.”

  “I need something to keep me awake,” Gunther said. “You got some of that?”

  The boy grinned. Relieved that this was just another punter. “Sure, sure,” he said, expansively. “But it’ll cost you.”

  Gunther took out a clip of bills, and the boy’s eyes went wide and round. “Pervitin?” Gunther said.

  The boy nodded. Gunther peeled off a twenty. “Tell me where you get it from,” he said, “and there’d be another ten in it for you.”

  “Another twenty,” the boy said, immediately.

  “That’s a lot of money,” Gunther said. The boy nodded, his eyes still drawn to the cash. Gunther let him have the first note and waited.

  The boy darted glances to either side of the street. “Seven Dials, mister,” he whispered. His hand was extended for the rest of the money. “The Bricklayer’s Arms. Ask for Doyle, the Irishman. And for God’s sake, man, don’t mention me. It’s more than my job’s worth.”