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

by Gardner Dozois

  “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 in 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 may 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 may be the killer. His whereabouts were unknown. He was armed, and potentially dangerous. But I had sent him to rattle a nest of wasps. That the wasps bit 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 16, and after a time in prison settled on the more tranquil profession of fence in 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 Blecher 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 Übel, 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 black market 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’d sent the script in to Tobis, he was told quite categorically not to waste his time. Demand was for domestic comedies, lighthearted affair, adventure. “Write another Western,” Rolf Hansen told him over coffee, before he got up and left him with the cheque. “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 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 with the gun across the face, 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.

  “Despair.”

  Gunther shook his head and swallowed his drink. Visions of Ulla Blau’s ruined face kept rising in his mind.

  “Were you in the war?” he said.

  “Does it matter?”

  “No,” Gunther said, tiredly. “I suppose it doesn’t.”

  They rose from their seats and stepped out into the night. It had truly fallen by then, and here and there, solitary gas lamps began to wink into being, casting murky pools of yellow light around them. Janson palmed a pill and dry-swallowed. “You want some?” he said.

  Gunther said, “Sure.”

  During the war they had functioned as little more than animated corpses: kept alive by minimal food rations and handfuls of drugs. Gunther’s memories of the march on Moscow were fragmentary. They killed for the sake of killing, killed because it was the only thing left for them to do. It wasn’t glory or the Führer that kept them on that march. It was the little pills manufactured by Bayer’s; that, and simple, total desperation.

  The veneer of humanity was stripped off Gunther during the long march, during the slaughter and the occupation. He had never hated Jews, had no feelings at all for the Russians, but he was just one man; and when it came down to it, he wanted to survive.

  In this world, I think, you do what you must to live: another minute, another hour, another day.

  Sometime during that long evening they stumbled into the Berlin. It is a club situated on the embankment, next to the gardens or what used to be gardens before the war, and facing the south bank. Gunther stopped outside. The Ferris wheel rotated slowly on the opposite side of the river, softly illuminated against the night sky. Gunther was drunk. His body was on fire from the methamphetamine. The Thames snaked dark and in its depths he saw Ulla’s face rising up to him, laughing bubbles. He tottered.

  Janson said something to the doormen and they laughed.

  Money changed hands. The money was Gunther’s. They went inside. It was a large room with a stage at one end. Girls danced on the stage, naked but for the fans they held. They moved about the stage in complicated patterns. A piano played, softly. Gunther heard conversation, laughter, the clink of glasses. He saw S.S. men in uniform sitting at one table, each officer with a girl in his lap. Important locals in last year’s suits swanned about. They had bad skin and bad teeth and great big booming laughs. Gunther ordered a drink and thought he’d had enough of this town.

  It was then that he saw him.

  The Luxembourgian stepped out of the door marked Bathroom, his hands still wet. He dried them on his trousers. He wore a pinstripe suit and a pink shirt and a muted tie. His eyes darted nervously from side to side but he put on a smile as charming and shiny as a false diamond bracelet. Then he, too, saw Gunther.

  The smile hovered but stayed in place. Gunther got up. He did not dare pull out the gun. Not with the officers present. The Luxembourgian’s smile grew more assured. He passed through the throng of people like an eel until he came to Gunther.

  “Sit down.”

  “I’ve been looking for you,” Gunther said, and he matched the man’s smile with his own, cold and hard.

  “I said sit down!”

  Gunther looked down. Held in the Luxembourgian’s manicured fingers was a small Röhm .22 Derringer gun.

  Gunther sat down. Pirelli sat on a stool opposite. He trained the gun on Gunther, holding it between his legs. “Don’t bloody move, man.”

  “I wasn’t going anywhere.”

  The bartender arrived. She was a young girl bare to the waist but for dark kohl painted over her nipples. She brought the Luxembourgian a drink without being asked. He kept one hand on the gun and with the other downed his scotch and grimaced. “They know me here, you see.”

  “You’re a difficult man to find.”

  “Hardly!” The man’s eyes kept shifting. Gunther was primed, every muscle in his body singing alertly. “Listen, if this is about the other night…”

  “What do you think it’s about?”

  “You didn’t have to kill Blucher!”

  It came out almost as a shout. A couple of heads turned. Then the girls on the stage began to gyrate erotically and what attention they’d been given was gone. It was just the two of them on the bar at the Berlin. At this point, too, one of my men spotted Gunther. He did not approach but quietly went for a phone.

 
“I didn’t kill him,” Gunther said, startled.

  “Didn’t you? You come to town, start poking about, and two days later both Ulla and Erich are dead?”

  “Who’s Erich?”

  “Blucher.” Pirelli was sweating, Gunther saw. And he realised Pirelli, too, must be on Pervitin. He was wired worse than an S-mine. “That was his real name.”

  “How did you know him?”

  Pirelli was so jumpy, Gunther was worried he’d press the trigger by accident. But the man seemed almost eager to talk.

  “In Luxembourg. I helped him when his trouble got bad. Helped him get out and establish himself here.” He sneered at Gunther. “What are you going to do, rat on me to your pals in the Gestapo? They can’t touch me. I have connections. I’m a foreign national.”

  “You could try telling that to the fishes,” Gunther said, with a touch of cruelty. “When they dump you in the Thames.”

  “They wouldn’t dare!” A flash of anger or defiance in his eyes. “How do I know you didn’t kill Erich?”

  “Why did you set me up? You spiked my drink at that godawful pub.”

  “The Lyric’s decent,” Pirelli said; almost offended.

  “Why did you do it!” Gunther said.

  “Listen, friend, I’m the one holding the gun,” Pirelli said.

  “Blucher knew something. He was going to tell me. Then someone shot him.”

  “Someone, someone!” But he could see it in Pirelli’s eyes. The man was afraid of something. He kept looking everywhere but at Gunther.

  “Who are you working for?” Gunther threw at him.

  “I work for myself.”

  “A man like you? You’re just the hired help.”

  Gunther thought to needle the man. But Pirelli’s mouth curved in a mocking smile. At that moment one of the S.S. officers approached them, accompanied by a woman draped on his arm.

  “Signore Pirelli!”

  Gunther reached between them and grabbed Pirelli’s hand in a painful grip, twisting it. He yanked the gun from the Luxembourgian’s hand, hearing a bone break. Pirelli cried in pain.