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

by Gardner Dozois

  “You are not happy to see us?”

  Pirelli put on a pained smile. “My apologies, Sturmbannführer,” he said, through gritted teeth. “I seem to have hurt my hand.”

  The S.S. officer was round and jolly. His companion was buxom and blonde.

  “Let me look at that,” he said, grabbing for Pirelli’s hand. Pirelli screamed. The Sturmbannführer laughed jovially and called the bartender for ice. “You’ll be fine in no time,” he said. He turned to Gunther and studied him, and under the jovial exterior Gunther saw cold, dark eyes.

  “Who is your friend?”

  “Gunther Sloam, Sturmbannführer,” Gunther said, stiffly.

  “Sloam, Sloam,” the S.S. man said. His companion leaned over his shoulder and eyed Gunther with interest. “Where did you serve?”

  “258th Infantry Division, sir.”

  “The heroes of Moscow!” the Sturmbannführer declared, delightedly. “Why do I know your name, Sloam?”

  “I’m sure I can’t say, sir.”

  “A drink for my friend here,” the S.S. man called. “A true hero of the Reich. So good to hear civilized German in this godforsaken place. How is Berlin?”

  “Still there, last I checked.”

  “Magnificent!” the man laughed. His belly shook. His eyes remained cold and suspicious. “You two seem to be having a bit of an argument.”

  “It’s nothing, sir. A minor disagreement.”

  “Good, good. We do not like trouble here in London, Sloam. This is a peaceful place. The natives are most obliging.” He squeezed his companion’s bottom and she squealed delightedly. Gunther averted his gaze. The girl’s eyes were colder even than the Sturmbannführer’s.

  “So I see, sir.”

  “Well, Pirelli, about that thing we discussed—”

  “I will have the shipment to you by tomorrow,” the Luxembourgian said. He was nursing a pack of ice on his broken hand and scowling.

  “First thing, Pirelli. Sloam—” he nodded, cordially, and waddled off with the girl on his arm.

  “Drugs?” Gunther said.

  “Nudie pictures,” Pirelli said. “The Sturmbannführer is a connoisseur.”

  “So I see.”

  “Give me back my gun.”

  “Why don’t we take a walk?”

  “No!”

  “What is it, Pirelli? I’m not going to kill you.”

  “Listen to me, Sloam. It’s safer here. I don’t want to die like the others.”

  “Who killed them?”

  Unexpectedly, Pirelli laughed. “No one,” he said. His whole body shook.

  “Get up. We’re going outside.”

  “You won’t dare shoot me here.”

  “Only one way to find out. Move.”

  Pirelli got up. “You’re a fool,” he said.

  “Why was Ulla killed?” Gunther said. They walked to the doors. It was cooler outside, quieter. There were few cars on the street. In the distance he could hear the clop-clop-clop of a horse and carriage. The lights of the Ferris wheel spun.

  “She was tight with the S.S.,” Pirelli said. “She supplied this place with half the whores. And then the other half too. They turned a blind eye to the drugs. First she bought from the soldiers her girls were sleeping with. Then, when that dried out, she put the pressure on me.”

  “How did she do that?”

  Pirelli shrugged. “Do you have a cigarette?”

  Gunther kept one hand in his pocket, where he held Pirelli’s gun. He offered him the cigarette case with the other. The Luxembourgian lit up and coughed. “Filthy stuff,” he said.

  “What did she have on you?”

  “She knew about Erich. We had our own racket going before she came along. Everyone in this town has a racket. But she wanted it all.”

  “You don’t sound like you liked her much.”

  “We did business. Business was good.”

  “You were bringing the drugs in from Luxembourg? Shipping them inside what, old books?”

  Pirelli smiled, tiredly. “You’re not as stupid as you look.”

  “You and Blucher were close?”

  “What the hell do you mean!”

  Gunther nodded; the pieces falling into place at last. Perhaps he’d been wrong about Ulla, he thought. Perhaps he’d been wrong all along. People changed; and she’d always had that hard, selfish core inside her, even in Berlin, during the war. He didn’t hold it against her. She was just another survivor, in the end, and you can only survive for so long.

  “Blucher didn’t know, did he?” Gunther said. “How you felt about him.”

  “He loved that bitch!”

  He opened his arms. His mouth opened, to speak, perhaps even to smile. There was a soft pop, like a bottle of champagne was opened. Pirelli fell on Gunther, his arms enfolding him in a hug. Gunther held him. When he lowered him, gently, to the ground, Pirelli’s mouth was a vomit of blood and he was no longer breathing.

  8

  They were down near the river by then. The shot could have come from anywhere. The Thames ran softly. The mud swallowed sound. Overhead clouds shaped portents of rain.

  Gunther swore. Pirelli’s cigarette was on the ground, still burning. Gunther picked it up and put it to his mouth and took a drag. He knelt beside the corpse and searched through Pirelli’s pockets. He found a bottle of Pervitin and dry swallowed a handful. The hit was almost immediate. He stood up straighter, all his senses alert. Apart from the pills he found three hundred marks, which he pocketed; the photo of an old woman in an old-fashioned dress, with her hand around a tall, thin boy; and a comb. The boy in the photo could have been Pirelli. The comb was fine-toothed and made of ivory. Gunther stuffed both back into Pirelli’s pockets and added rocks—as many as he could find. Then he rolled up his sleeves and dragged the corpse by its feet into the water.

  When the last of Pirelli’s head finally disappeared into the Thames, Gunther walked away. Something kept nagging away at him. Pirelli’s use of the past tense, he realised. As though their little operation here in London had already come to its end.

  Had it been wound down, even before Gunther arrived? Or was Ulla’s death the catalyst? And why did the Luxembourgian spike his drink at the Lyric?

  He needed to find the dwarf, he thought. The last piece of the puzzle.

  Instead he found himself a girl.

  * * *

  “She reminded me of Ulla, that was all,” he told me, later, in my office. “She was German, can you believe that? She was sending money back to her family in Munich. She said she was an actress, only times are hard.”

  “They are all actresses, Sloam,” I said. “And if you can believe that you can believe anything.”

  “She was a good girl!” he turned on me. He was a romantic to the core, even if he couldn’t admit it, not even to himself. “She was just doing what she could to make a life.”

  “She’ll be used up within a year,” I told him. “And dead in two.”

  I was being harsh on him; I wanted to provoke him.

  He only shook his head tiredly. Like I said, by then the drugs had worn off and he was dead on his feet; he was done. “She was a good trooper,” he insisted.

  “You can’t fight a war on your back.”

  “What is it about you, Everly? Did someone you loved one day suddenly abandon you?”

  “You could say that, Sloam. But then you could say a lot of things. What was her name?”

  “Anna,” he said.

  “They’re all called Anna.”

  “What do you want from me, Everly? Shoot me and be done with it.”

  “I still might,” I said. “Now answer my damn questions.”

  * * *

  Gunther met the girl walking back from the river. For a moment the light framed her face and he thought it was Ulla, and his breath caught in his throat. But her nose was different and her face worn in a way Ulla’s never was, though this girl was young.

  (“They’re all young, at the Berlin.”
r />   “You sound quite the expert, Everly. Are you sure you weren’t there?”

  “Just keep talking, Sloam.”)

  He saw that she was crying. She hurried her steps when she saw Gunther. “Herr Pirelli, have you seen him?”

  “Herr Pirelli has gone for a swim.”

  She looked up at him with dark eyes. Her makeup was smudged. “I don’t understand.”

  “I’m sorry,” Gunther said. “I was only making a joke. He had to leave. Urgent business elsewhere, he said. You look distraught.”

  “It’s nothing, really.” She tried to smile, failed.

  “Can I buy you a drink?”

  “That’s awfully kind,” the girl said. “Only I need something a little stronger first, you understand? Just to take the edge off things.”

  Gunther stuck his hand in his pocket, came back with a pill. The girl took it without a word. This time, she managed a smile.

  (“They know how to smile, Sloam, believe me. They all smile like Ulla Blau in Die Grosse Liebe.”

  “You sound bitter, Everly.”

  “You’re an incurable romantic, Sloam.”

  “You keep saying that. But it’s just basic decency.”

  “Only you slept with her.”

  “It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t like that at all.”)

  Only maybe it was, a little bit. My men were only now getting there. The girl put the Pervitin pill between her teeth. She leaned into Gunther. He kissed her, hungrily. The pill dissolved between them. Her lips were hot and her eyes fevered. He imagined himself kissing Ulla. The girl threw her head back and laughed. “Let’s go!”

  She led him at a run and he followed like a fool. My men pursued but then lost them. It took us a while to realise what had happened to Pirelli. It wasn’t that Gunther hadn’t been observed. It was just that people don’t willingly talk to the Gestapo.

  She took him up the hill, along St. Martin’s Lane where the theatres still displayed playbills from the last decade. She had a room on the third storey of a boardinghouse in Denmark Street. There was a wilted rose in a vase on the table—“From an admirer,” she said—and the bed was neatly made. Her only books were Mein Kampf and a copy of the Bible. Her only other reading were several out-of-date issues of Deutsches Kinomagazin, the latest of which had a radiant Leni Riefenstahl on the cover, posed with a camera on a tripod, against a gloriously empty African savannah.

  “Can I offer you a drink?”

  Gunther sat on the edge of the bed. The girl slipped off her shoes and her coat. Underneath it she was wearing nothing but lingerie. She moved about quite unconcerned.

  “Sure.”

  “Scotch?”

  “If you have it.”

  The girl laughed. “You’re such a gentleman,” she said. Her eyes went over his body but dawdled on his pocket; where the pills were. “I keep drinks here for, you know.”

  “Admirers.”

  “Sure.” She opened a cabinet and brought out a bottle and poured him a glass and one for herself too. They clinked glasses. Gunther’s body was on fire and his mind was elsewhere. He kept thinking she was Ulla, and he knew that he wanted her.

  There had been other girls, other rooms like these, hurried romances carried in the dark. He’d never really let himself feel, after the war. Love was just another kind of transaction, another kind of scam.

  He left the drink unfinished. He reached for her and she came willingly. Touching her lips was like completing a circuit. Electricity burned in him. “Ulla…” he said.

  The girl recoiled back. Her hand was on his naked chest. He did not remember when he’d taken off his clothes.

  “She’s dead,” she said. “She was always good to me.”

  “You’re crying,” he said, wonderingly. The girl shook her head and smiled sadly through the mist.

  “No,” she said. “I’m not.”

  Gunther touched his eyes and realised they were wet. He could not remember when he had last cried. He wondered if he should feel good for it. He felt nothing.

  The girl pushed him on the bed. He lay on his back. The ceiling was cracked, the paint peeling. The girl climbed on top of him.

  “Ulla…” he said.

  “Shh,” the girl said. “I’ll be your Ulla.”

  Gunther closed his eyes. The girl rocked above him. Gunther wondered if he’d ever loved Ulla, or if he was merely in love with the idea of being in love. After a while it didn’t matter, nothing much did, only the slow build and the urgency, the creaking of the mattress springs, the girl’s soft cries.

  * * *

  He half-awoke in the night to find the girl smoking a cigarette by the window. He saw her profile in silhouette. She reclined, nude, her long legs held up to her chest. There was a long cigarette holder between her lips. He stood up, naked also. The girl didn’t turn her head. He went to the sink and filled a glass with lukewarm water and downed it. He turned to the girl. From this angle he could see her face.

  “She made us watch her in this old movie,” the girl said. “Over and over again, to teach us how to walk and how to talk.”

  “Die Grosse Liebe?”

  The girl looked at him vaguely. “What’s that?” she said.

  “An old movie. It was very successful.”

  “This was Der blaue Mond. It was alright. She played a good-time girl in trouble with the law. There’s a detective always chasing her. It was silly.”

  “I never saw it.”

  The girl shrugged. “No, well,” she said. “Why would you.”

  “We were lovers, in Berlin.”

  “She had many lovers,” the girl said. “I think the only one she really loved was herself.”

  “Why were you looking for Pirelli, earlier?”

  “He’s always been good to me. He’s not, you know…”

  “I know.”

  “He liked to pay us for our time and then just listen to us talk.” She laughed. “Most men just want us to shut up and get on our backs. One of the S.S. men likes me to spank him. He just doesn’t want to, you know. Have a conversation about it.”

  “And Pirelli? You looked distraught.”

  “It was nothing, really. One of the other girls hasn’t been in to work for a couple of days. I thought maybe he’d seen her.”

  “Does she owe you money?”

  The girl laughed. “No, silly. She’s my friend.”

  She got up and advanced on him. The cigarette in its holder was left to smoulder by the window. “Why do you have a gun in your coat?” she said.

  “In case I get into trouble,” Gunther said.

  “You look like the kind of man who’s always in trouble.”

  “That’s just a role I play. In real life I’m a sweetheart.”

  She melted into his arms. She was good at that sort of thing. “Shut up and kiss me,” she whispered.

  So he did.

  When they parted for air some of the fire inside him had calmed. The girl reached for his coat draped on the chair and reached into the pocket and took out the pills. “Do you mind?” she said. He shook his head, mutely.

  He wondered if the line she’d used was from Ulla’s film, that the girl had memorised it. He thought it was the sort of thing he would have written himself, a throwaway line in a B-movie script on a long afternoon.

  The girl popped a pill.

  Gunther decided it didn’t really matter. He took her in his arms and lifted her and carried her to the bed and she was laughing.

  She lay there looking up at him. “I’ll be your Ulla,” she whispered.

  “No,” he said. “This time, just be yourself.”

  The night faded into torn strips of time. For a while, he slept.

  When he woke up the girl was in the corner putting her stockings on in a businesslike fashion, and sitting in the chair facing Gunther was a man with a gun in his hand.

  9

  “I thought I was gone for sure,” Gunther said. He looked at me a little sadly, I thought. “But of course i
f they’d wanted me dead, I’d have been dead before I ever woke up.”

  “And the girl?”

  “She got dressed and left. It wasn’t her fault,” he said; almost pleading. “What could she do?”

  “Did she take your money?”

  He smiled. “And the pills.”

  “You’re a sap, Gunther.”

  “Yes,” he said. “That’s what people keep telling me.”

  * * *

  There were two of them. One on the chair, facing Gunther, and the other at the door. Both had guns.

  The girl got dressed. “Are you going to hurt him?” she said. She didn’t look at Gunther once.

  “What’s it to you, girl?”

  “It’s nothing,” she said. “It’s nothing to me.”

  “Then get lost, would you?” the gunman on the door said. The girl gave him a stare, but that’s all it was. She got lost.

  “Get dressed,” the man on the chair said. Gunther sat up in bed. “I can’t,” he said. “I’m shy in front of strangers.”

  “He thinks he’s clever,” the gunman on the chair complained. The gunman by the door looked over, slowly. “Everyone’s a comedian these days,” he said.

  “He’s a regular Karl Valentin,” the other gunman said. “Come on, Sloam. Get dressed. You don’t want to be late.”

  “He’d be late for his own funeral,” the gunman by the door said, and they both laughed. Gunther didn’t. He thought it was a cheap line. He got up and got dressed and he followed them outside.

  A long black Mercedes was parked in the road. Gunther got in at the back. The gunmen sat on either side of him. A third man was driving.

  “Where are we going?”

  “To church.”

  He let it go. He didn’t have a choice. They drove through the dark city streets. Few cars passed them, going the other way. London after the war wasn’t a place where people dawdled after dark. It was warm inside the car. The men on either side of him smelled of wet wool and incense. It was a peculiar English smell. Outside the city projected like the flickering images of a black and white film. Bomb damage everywhere. He’d seen newsreels of the Luftwaffe bombing over the city, waves of bombers flying over Big Ben and St. Paul’s Cathedral, over the Thames. It was not uncommon for children to play in the ruins of a house and find an unexploded ordnance. People died of the bombs even now.