Pavel & I

by Dan Vyleta

  ‘Boyd’s dead,’ Pavel told Doug, his hand around the glass.

  Doug wasn’t surprised. ‘Heard it on the grapevine,’ he said. ‘The Russians, they say. NKVD hatchet job. You look rough, Jay-Pee.’

  Pavel had often wondered what it was about a war that made soldiers avoid one another’s name. Something about the uniform seemed to suggest it.

  ‘I had some kidney trouble. Listen, I’m looking for one of his girls.’

  ‘A hooker?’

  ‘Yes, and a little bit more than that. Name’s Belle.’

  ‘That’s French, right?’

  ‘I don’t think it’s her real name.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’

  Doug shrugged his shoulders and pulled out a leather-bound notepad that served as his address book. He leafed through its loose pages, stopping on occasion to take a drag at his cigarette. Eventually he found what he was looking for and scribbled a number on a scrap of paper.

  ‘Best call Franzi. She used to work for Boyd. Nice girl. Big thighs.’

  ‘She has a phone?’

  Doug nodded yes. ‘Boyd arranged it. He spoilt them rotten, his girls.’ He lifted a heavy black telephone from behind the bar and stood it on the counter. ‘Go ahead if you like.’

  Pavel thanked him, then ran a finger through the dial. He let it ring a dozen times, hung up, and tried again. When she finally picked up, her voice sounded tired and hostile.

  ‘Is this Franzi?’ he asked in German, and introduced himself. ‘My name’s Jean Pavel Richter. I’m a friend of Boyd White’s.’

  ‘Boyd’s dead. What do you want? He owe you money or something?’

  ‘Do you mind if I come over? I need to talk to you.’

  ‘Talk, sugar?’

  ‘I’m willing to pay for it. I’ve got two packs of cigarettes here for you. More if I get what I need. Five minutes, that’s all it’s going to take.’

  ‘Five minutes? That’s all it ever takes.’

  She gave him an address further east in the American sector, and reminded him to bring the smokes. ‘If you change your mind about talking,’ she said, ‘make sure you bring some rubbers, too.’

  Pavel thought about taking the bus but ended up walking, placing one foot before the other, oblivious to the cold. His body hurt, the lungs and the kidneys, but his mind had slipped into a strange reverie, was caught up in the joy of being alive, conscious of it, too, an animal thawing that had started during yesterday’s lunch of ham and potatoes, and continued now, as yet fragile and inarticulate, but welling up in him, inexorable like a burp. Of the many people who were milling about in the street, he was the only one who was smiling.

  Franzi lived in a house a half of which had been destroyed in one of the bomb raids. Some of the rubble had been cleared, and now the house stood in a gap-toothed block, cut precisely in two. If one stood a little to the side of it, one had a perfect view into the shell of half a living room, half a bathroom, and a few yards of corridor. Even the toilet in the bathroom looked like it had cracked right down its middle. In the muddy field next to it, snow had collected in soot-coloured drifts.

  Pavel ran an eye over the doorbells and learned that Franzi rented the ground-floor flat. Its windows were covered by net curtains. She had hung some Christmas decorations from the curtain rail, but these were barely visible through the frost that clung to the glass. He rang the bell and Franzi opened the door for him immediately.

  ‘Come in,’ she said gruffly. ‘It’s freezing outside.’ She did not move to take his coat, and in fact it was too cold to take it off.

  Franzi was thirty going on forty, her hair dyed a henna-red and no money for make-up. A short woman with a big rump and, yes, generous thighs. These were wrapped in thick woollen tights and peeked out between her morning gown’s careless gape. Puffy skin, especially around the eyes, booze on her breath and her curls still lopsided from the way she’d slept on them. Pavel shook her hand and followed her into the living room. There was a shabby divan and a table full of drinking things. The apartment stank from lack of airing.

  ‘Have a seat.’

  He sat down on the edge of a chair as she wrapped herself into a blanket upon the divan. ‘There’s no electricity for coffee,’ she warned, and he passed over the first of the packs of cigarettes that he had promised.

  ‘I’m looking for a woman called Belle. One of Boyd’s other girls. He told me they were close.’

  ‘Belle, huh? Guess they were. He hung around her like some puppy dog. Thought her something special, God knows why. A society girl, you know, ever such a nice accent. Airs and fucking graces. Let me tell you one thing, though: a whore’s a whore. Am I right or am I right?’

  ‘Do you know where she is?’

  ‘Haven’t seen her in a while. Four, five days, maybe a week. Some of the girls went home for Christmas, or tried to, the trains are a mess. Maybe she did, too. I know where Boyd put her up if that’s any help.’

  ‘Please.’ Pavel passed over a second pack of cigarettes, and exchanged it for a hastily scribbled address.

  ‘Second or third floor, I think, overlooking the main road. Chances are she’s holed up there, crying crocodile tears.’

  ‘You don’t think she cared for him?’

  ‘Jesus Christ and Mary. He was her pimp, and a real sleazebag, too, when he put his mind to it.’

  She looked him up and down real funny, and Pavel realized he must have betrayed displeasure about her comments.

  ‘Sorry, sugar, speakin’ ill of the dead.’ She made the sign of the cross, kissing her fingers lightly when she was finished. The gesture smelled of convent school.

  ‘He wasn’t all bad, never slapped us around much, you know. You two were close?’

  He nodded yes.

  ‘The army, right? Boyd wouldn’t shut up about it. Made it sound like he took France all by himself. Special unit and all.’ She eyed him shrewdly. ‘He save your life or something?’

  ‘Nothing like that. We sat in foxholes. Swapped jokes, shared tins of corned beef. Fired bullets across muddy fields.’

  She cackled, her mouth ugly like a wound. ‘Sounds real romantic.’ He glared at her sullenly.

  ‘Sore spot, is it? Brings back bad memories, I guess. Go on, spill yer guts. We girls are used to it.’

  ‘The war’s over,’ he whispered, and she wrinkled her lips like she’d tasted something sour.

  ‘Suit yourself, sugar,’ she said derisively, and got up to show him the door. ‘You got a third pack for me, like you promised?’

  Pavel held it out and clasped her hand for a moment as she took the pack. ‘I’m sorry,’ he told her earnestly, looking to reach the woman inside the tramp.

  ‘Whatever for?’ she asked him gruffly. ‘You got whatever you came for, and I, well, I got my smokes.’

  She closed the door in his face and he stood there for a moment longer, wishing the boy were there to tell him that the woman was talking sense. Then Pavel turned on his heel and made for the address she had given him. He never saw the one-eyed man who followed him at a discreet distance, hands buried in his pockets and his scarf hitched high enough to reach all the way up to his patch.

  The boy refused to come in until she had looked into all of her apartment’s rooms and proven to him that the Colonel wasn’t hiding anywhere. Then he asked her to go down and look in on Pavel’s flat. The door was locked and nobody answered her knocking.

  ‘You see,’ she told him, ‘we are quite safe.’

  The boy bit his lip and sat down uneasily on one of her sofas, his eyes on the door and his ears cocked for Fosko’s agile tread. Sonia ignored him and got the monkey some water and food. It had shat itself again, and there was no way of cleaning its fur. She let it off its leash and watched it climb the living-room cupboard, rattling the cut glass and china on the way up.

  She started to fix Anders and herself some bread and cold cuts, but the boy stopped her and demanded to see the coat. Wordlessly, she led him over to her wardrobe and pulled ou
t a camel-coloured duffel coat.

  ‘I think that will probably do best.’

  He tried it on. It gaped at the shoulders and the sleeves were much too long, but it wrapped him up warm all the way down to his ankles. She led him over to the mirror to see what he made of it, but he wouldn’t raise his eyes and look at himself.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said sullenly. She couldn’t decide whether it was the voice of insolence, or of fear.

  ‘Take it off,’ she ordered. ‘I will shorten the sleeves for you.’

  She had just cut several inches off the first of the coat-sleeves when the telephone rang. It ran through the boy like a current, and drew a scream from the monkey on top of its perch. Sonia picked up, the cloth scissors still in one hand, and listened to the Colonel’s voice.

  ‘Sonia, my little dove, I’m looking for the boy. The street Arab that follows Pavel Richter around. Do you know whether he is home?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Be a darling and go down and check. I’ll stay on the line.’

  Sonia put the phone down on the table and motioned for Anders to stay mum. She walked over to the door, opened and closed it, stood still for two or three minutes, her feet growing cold from lack of movement. Then she re-opened the door, closed it yet again, and walked back to the phone, her heels clicking on the wooden floor with every step.

  ‘Richter’s door’s locked and nobody answers. What do you want with the boy?’

  ‘Oh, he and I, we had ourselves a little talk this morning, and there’s something I forgot to ask. Shouldn’t have let him go, but you know how it is. Early mornings, and the brow creased with worries. We all make mistakes.’

  ‘Yes. When are you coming back here?’

  ‘That depends on how things develop, my darling. Did you know Pavel was out looking for Boyd White’s sweet little belle?’

  ‘No, I didn’t. He just said he had things to do.’

  ‘Well, he is. Don’t think he will find her, but I’m having an eye kept on him just in case. Perhaps it would be a good idea for you to spend the night with him. Find out what he knows.’

  She didn’t respond.

  ‘Do you think,’ he asked sweetly, ‘that this could be arranged?’

  ‘Of course. Whatever you want.’

  ‘That’s my darling. I knew I could count on you.’ Sonia heard him blow her a kiss down the phone line and quickly hung up. When she looked up, the boy was watching her intently.

  ‘You can’t have the coat,’ she told him abruptly. ‘He would recognize it and know you’d been with me.’

  She turned to fetch some gold earrings from the bedroom. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘Use these to get yourself a new coat. And stay away from here. Pavel’s being watched.’

  The boy nodded calmly and weighed the jewellery in his grubby fist. His eyes seemed old to her, his monkey face wrinkled.

  ‘Eat something in the kitchen before you go, and warm yourself before the oven,’ she instructed him. ‘And one more thing: if the Colonel finds out you’ve got my earrings, I’ll tell him that you must have stolen them.’

  She turned her back on him then, sat down at the piano, and started playing scales. Sonia did not stop until she heard the door close behind him.

  The apartment was near Potsdamer Platz, close to the centre of the city where three of the sectors ran together into a point. The building dated from around the turn of the century, like so much of Berlin’s housing; five tall storeys organized around a communal courtyard. Pavel scanned the windows but it was impossible to see anything through the all-pervasive frost. He tried the front door and found it open. Before he disappeared inside, he turned around once, not knowing himself why, other than there was a faint feeling of illicitness about his snooping. He did not know what he was looking for, and hence saw nothing, just street-hawkers, going about their business, and a one-eyed man in a good coat tying his laces by the side of the road. Pavel closed the door behind himself and ran his eyes across the names on the postboxes. There were none he recognized. He had forgotten to ask Franzi about Belle’s last name. Chances were she didn’t know it. He shrugged and began to climb the stairs.

  The soldier gave it away. Actually, he was a policeman, wearing the insignia of the Soviet-controlled police force upon collar and sleeve. He sat on a chair on the fourth-floor landing, not looking up as Pavel walked first towards, then past him. He was smoking, and the floor around his feet was dotted with literally hundreds of cigarette butts. He – and no doubt some colleagues – must have been sitting out there for days. Pavel tried to judge which door he was interested in and realized it was one floor down, visible for the sentry if he craned his neck a little over the staircase railing. Pavel tarried a while on the top-floor landing, pretending he was ringing a bell up there, then gave a sigh of frustration – far too theatrical no doubt – and walked back towards the policeman.

  ‘Good day,’ he said in German. ‘Long, lonely vigil, is it?’

  The man merely nodded his head.

  ‘You must be freezing out here. No time for a coffee?’

  The policeman shrugged noncommittally.

  ‘You don’t speak German, do you?’ Pavel smiled, and the man answered him by blowing smoke up into his face and waving him on with his chin.

  ‘Now what’s so important that they would put a Soviet goon in a police jacket on the door?’

  He raised his hand in farewell, and continued on down the stairs, examining the door with his eyes as he passed it. Its frame looked a little cracked to him, like someone had shouldered their way in not so long ago. With any luck it was no longer possible to lock the apartment. Back on the ground floor, he let the house door slam shut, took off his shoes and then snuck back up, soft socks upon the icy floor. He took position a full flight beneath the soldier, and listened to his smoking. All he required was a minute’s inattention. Surely it was only a matter of time.

  He waited an hour or more and nothing much happened. The soldier’s smoking stank up the whole staircase, and every ten minutes Pavel could hear the flare of his match. An old woman passed him, carrying a Bavarian cuckoo clock and a large bag of cabbages. She looked at him standing in his socks upon his unlaced boots, his teeth clamped shut to keep them from chattering. He put a finger to his lips and pointed another upward, towards the sentry. ‘Please,’ he mouthed, from between frost-numbed lips.

  ‘Boys will be boys,’ she muttered, and moved past him. Her back was so bent it was as though her face grew out of her chest. The soldier above did not stir. The granny greeted him curtly while she unlocked the door right next to his chair.

  Pavel waited another quarter-hour, stiff with the cold, and was about to give up when he heard a door open and the old woman’s voice, addressing the sentry. ‘Excuse me,’ she said, ‘I could use a strong man for a second.’ And then, in bad, staccato Russian: ‘Help old mother boy she short and you just sit there like furniture ready for fireplace shame on you.’

  It got him his break. Pavel heard the soldier mumble something and follow granny into her flat. Flushing with gratitude, he leapt off his boots, gathered them in one hand and ran up the half-dozen stairs to the door with the broken frame. His luck held: it was unlocked, or rather, the lock was broken, just as he had hoped. Once inside, he closed the door gently behind himself and sat on the floor rubbing life back into his frozen feet.

  The apartment had been searched. Tossed, they said in novels. Pavel walked through the debris that covered the floor, past overturned drawers and broken photo frames whose contents had been removed. The cushions of the living-room sofa had been split end to end, and a cheap tea set lay shattered next to the dining table. In the bedroom, he found a lady’s wardrobe, gutted. Its door hung crooked on its hinges and evening gowns littered the floor: stoles, blouses, underwear. Pavel stooped to pick up a pair of red silk panties and once again was conscious of the shame of snooping. He had no idea what he was looking for. It surprised him a little that the clothes had not been ‘confiscated’. The
y were of good quality and could have bought many a pleasure on the black market.

  Tired, Pavel sat down upon the four-poster bed and sank deep into the well-worn mattress. Upon the comforter, the crust of dried blood. The stain was not much bigger than the palm of his hand. Pavel ran a finger over it, morbidly curious as to how it would feel. The blood was icy under his numb fingertip, as was the comforter itself. There was something about the winter’s cold that obscured all difference. He sniffed at the pillow but smelled nothing. A single dark hair traversed the pillow case, too long to be a man’s. Next to the bed frame lay a few condoms, unused. There was no way of telling which of these things constituted a clue.

  Pavel stood up again, unsure what to do. Wishing to be diligent in his search, he looked for papers: documents, a sheaf of letters, a diary. Predictably, he found none. If they had ever existed they had been taken by those who had come before him. In the bathroom, a collection of soaps and cosmetics had been dumped in the sink, and someone had scratched the Russian word kurva into the mirror’s glass. Pavel closed his eyes and tried to imagine how the apartment had looked before it was ransacked; tried to picture a prostitute’s life, her days carved up between the attentions of her customers and those of her pimp. He imagined the shame of the first tearful weeks of this existence, soon to be displaced by a fierce sort of pride; a manic delight in her own depravity that made men cower and fawn over her, whom they despised. It was no surprise to him that Boyd had fallen for a woman such as this, loved her perhaps, even as he rented out her flesh. Pavel pictured him bringing home chocolates and a bottle of champagne; smearing toffee across her pouty lips as he fed her with unwashed fingers. It made him angry with the dead man, and he opened his eyes.