“You don’t sound sorry.”
I clenched my jaw and dropped my eyes. I wanted to throw coffee in his face. “I have a cold.”
“I can find other writers to be Peter Weill,” he said, running his fingers through his thinning hair. “It’s time you remembered that.”
He dropped his cigarette in my coffee cup and walked off, tweed jacket flaring behind him like a bird’s tail.
“That’s the best thing that could happen to that coffee,” said Paul, suddenly next to me.
I laughed and dumped it in the sink, then removed the soggy cigarette butt so it did not clog the drain.
“Does he have any other way to make a point?” Maria slid her hand possessively through Paul’s arm.
“It’s very Freudian,” Paul said, as I tossed the flaccid cigarette into the garbage and washed my hands.
“It’s all Freudian to you,” said Maria, with a snicker. “Freud is just some Jewish crackpot.”
I wondered how she reconciled her anti-Semitism with the fact that, although Paul had a Christian father, his mother was Jewish. “Maybe you’d best reread his sections on the ego,” I said.
Maria shot me a quizzical glance, and a smile flitted across Paul’s face.
“Paul!” called a voice from across the room.
“In a moment.” Paul nodded to us both and limped off. His leg had been wounded in the Great War, and it pained him more than he let on. I sometimes wished that I’d been ready for him when he was ready for me, but I had been too grieved by Walter’s death when Sarah introduced us. It had never worked out. I shook my head. All of that was years ago.
“You’d better have a good story today.” Maria broke into my reverie. “If you miss another deadline, he may find another Peter Weill.” She bared her teeth in a satisfied-looking grin.
Back at my desk I typed up a desultory analysis of the Becker trial. Not brilliant, but it would do. I straightened the typing paper and tried to read through the story again, but none of it made sense.
Paul strolled over, without Maria. “Is something wrong?”
I looked at him, calculating. He knew that Sarah had my papers. Perhaps I could tell him the truth.
Paul cocked his head to one side, waiting.
I opened my mouth to tell him everything, but changed my mind. Once I started talking to him, where would I stop? And the newsroom was no place to discuss personal secrets. “Could you read through this story?” I asked instead. “See if it makes sense.”
He took the story, but I could tell from his disappointed expression that he knew I was withholding the truth from him. He skimmed the pages.
“Not your best work,” he said, slowly. “But coherent.”
“Today, coherent will have to do.” I took the story back.
“I found a letter in your box.” He drew an envelope out of the inner breast pocket of his tweed jacket. “For Peter Weill/Hannah Vogel.”
We both hoped the letter came from Sarah, but we pretended not to care so as not to arouse any curiosity in the newsroom.
“Thank you.” I took the envelope. “I’ll open it right now. Would you like to wait and read it when I finish?”
“I’d like that,” Paul said.
I pulled a bronze letter opener from the top desk drawer and slit the envelope open. It was not Sarah’s careful handwriting, but perhaps she’d hired someone to write it for her.
My dear Fraulein Vogel,
Sincerest apologies for my beastly behavior at the courthouse.
“Oh,” I said, flustered.
Paul cleared his throat.
“It’s not from Sarah,” I said quickly.
Paul raised his eyebrows. “Is it Boris?”
I blushed. I had run into Paul and Maria while on my date with Boris on Saturday. Now the entire newsroom probably knew. “Perhaps.”
“I liked him,” Paul said. “He seemed very strong, but also charming. Exactly the kind of man you need to be seeing.”
“I do not imagine I will see him again.”
“Because?”
“I met him at the Becker trial. His daughter—”
“He’s a source?” Paul’s tone was incredulous. “You meet a man like that, and you can’t think of anything better to do with him than to use him as a source?”
“It was one hell of a story,” I said. Paul, of course, was correct.
Maria waved from across the room. Paul nodded and ambled to her.
I hurried downstairs to be alone while reading Boris’s letter. Boris’s handwriting was firm and masculine, the product of a strict teacher in his past, no doubt.
I was very emotional about the acquittal. Although I certainly did not behave as such at the time, I realize that it was not your fault. You and Trudi got along so famously at lunch, and I enjoyed our time on Saturday. Please do meet us at the Wannsee on Friday. We will be at the Potsdam Yacht Club at 13:30.
With kind regards, Boris
I folded the letter and placed it back in the envelope. How curious. Boris wanted to see me again.
I flipped to the drawing I’d sketched of him during the trial, before I’d met him. His jaw muscles stood out like ropes on his finely sculptured face. He looked like a film actor, but not so effete. Gold streaked his wavy dark hair, his jaw was firm and square, his eyes large and expressive, and his lower lip was full and sensual; kissing lips, we’d called them in school.
My heart beat faster. I wanted to see him, of course. He was the most attractive man I’d met in years. I had no idea what he wanted. But I did not think that I would go. I had to find out who killed Ernst. I could not let myself be distracted by a pair of brown eyes.
6
That night I pulled the only evening gown I owned out of my tall oak wardrobe. Ernst gave it to me after he had moved out, so that I could watch him sing without embarrassing him by wearing “some sack or other.”
Chiffon whispered against my ears as I pulled the dress over my head. I smoothed my hands over my hips, careful not to dislodge the interlocking circles of silver beads. The dress fell straight from my shoulders to right below my knees, a style all the rage in the twenties. Ernst told me that the thin flapper look was good for someone with small breasts and a small bottom like me. He harrumphed when I pointed out that my slender appearance was an economic statement, not a fashion choice.
I caressed the smooth glass beads. When I had exclaimed that the beads reminded me of chain mail, Ernst huffed that I had lost contact with my femininity. I insisted that chain mail looked beautiful, but he refused to believe that it was a compliment.
I rolled my Elbeo stockings up to my thigh and clipped them on. I smoothed the dress down again. Even I had to admit that the dress made me look younger, flirtatious, and sophisticated.
I regretted that Boris would never see me in it. He would always remember my practical shoes and my sensible brown coat. What was it about Boris? He was not the only man in the world. Yet something drew me to him. The tenderness he displayed toward his daughter was beautiful, and there were those amazing lips and eyes, but that did not explain my feelings. There had been a connection there.
Forget Boris’s lips, I told myself sternly. There are other attractive men in Berlin. Paul had quite nice lips, but I did not long to kiss them every time I was near him. I ran a comb through my straight blond hair. A bob looks the same all of the time, which is a relief.
It wasn’t as if Boris was the only man I’d ever been attracted to. I had been intimate with Walter, and a few other men since he died, in spite of what Ernst always said about me being the last nun outside of a convent in Berlin. But none of them generated heat and electric current with a single glance as Boris did. I put on powder and pink lipstick, almost ready to go.
Kommissar Lang generated strong emotions in me too. He made my heart race, but with anger and disgust. Did he suspect something? Would he take the photographs from where I had stood into Fritz? I hoped not. Fritz would identify Ernst.
Enough abo
ut men.
I took one last glance in the mirror. Ernst would have been proud.
I gathered my few coins from the sugar bowl. Drinks at the El Dorado would be expensive. I’d have to skip dinner for a week to afford it. But then I would not have to waste time cooking.
I donned my brown coat, remembering how Ernst cringed at that coat touching his dress. I pinned on my brown hat, a gift from Sarah. Practical and built to last, it matched the coat, not the dress. Ernst had never understood that I was safer on the street looking poor rather than wealthy.
Mitzi was not on the stoop when I reached the front door. I missed her. She appeared when Ernst moved in, right after our father was killed in 1923, a year after Mother’s death. I could not afford to feed Mitzi back then, but she seemed to do fine on the rats outside. Now I gave her milk every evening, and she slept on my pillow. If a mouse crept in, she caught it and left the tail and feet on the bathroom floor. We were growing old together, companionably.
I called her Mitzi, but Ernst had called her Mademoiselle Zee and claimed she embodied the spirit of a gypsy fortune-teller. For a while he made her a series of purple collars out of a pair of Mother’s old shoes. Each day she lost a collar, and each night he made a new one. He claimed that she traded them for the freedom of her kittens from the gypsies. Eventually he ran out of leather for collars and proclaimed that all of her children were free. Lucky timing all around.
I watched from the doorway before stepping onto the stoop. Automobiles cruised by with the men’s faces hidden under fedora brims behind rolled up windows. The baker’s son leaned against the side of the store, smoke curling past his narrow shoulders. I stood as tall as I could and stepped into the street. I hated being out alone at night. I’d read too many reports of rapes and murders, sat through too many trials, to believe I had any safety.
I hurried the last block from Nollendorfplatz station to El Dorado. Ernst had been proud to work in the Schöneberg borough, the area where the newly famous Marlene Dietrich was born. A safer area than my apartment, but not around the nightclubs.
When I arrived at the corner of Motz Strasse, I paused. A giant mural covered the outside wall of the club. It started with a woman in a long formal dress dancing with a man in a tuxedo and monocle. Next to them were two men in tuxedos dancing together, one with a feminine birthmark and red lips, but unmistakably male shoulders and hair. A few centimeters away, two women danced cheek-to-cheek, their backs to a ro guish man in a tuxedo dancing with another man and a laughing woman.
The mural told you that entering El Dorado was stepping through the looking glass. I remembered my first visit, not long after Ernst started working there.
“Hello, old bird,” Ernst had said, whisking me past the coat-check girl, through a thick set of velvet curtains, and into the smoky air of the club. “It’s simply divine to see you.”
Fringe on his red flapper dress swished with each step. He kept his hair short then, and he wore it in a bob with a wave, like all flappers. His lips glowed scarlet and his breasts looked bigger than mine.
“Hello, Ernst.” I took a deep breath. I’d never seen him with breasts before, but I was determined not to be shocked.
“Come meet my confidant. Oliver the bartender.” Ernst minced to the bar, holding my elbow in one red-gloved hand. “He takes such care of us, don’t you, Oliver?”
Oliver smiled from behind the bar. With his carefully trimmed black beard and well-padded frame, he looked like a panda bear. “I do my best, little one.”
“I’ll have an absinthe,” Ernst said. “And Hannah will have one too.”
I opened my mouth to protest, but he cut me off. “Don’t say you want a Berliner weisse. That’s so passé.”
I closed my mouth and glanced around the room. A dozen round tables ringed the oak dance floor. Each was set in a shallow alcove painted with a stylized scene from a Chinese opium den. Between each table hung a red curtain or a large tarnished brass gong. Every so often someone rang a gong with a bottle of Champagne, and the band stopped playing and started a different song.
“Here you go, Fraulein.” Oliver sat a glass of emerald-green liquid, a carafe of water, a slotted spoon, and a sugar cube on the bar in front of me.
I placed the sugar cube on the spoon, then set the spoon on top of the glass and dripped cold water over the sugar cube. As water dripped through the sugar, the green liquid turned cloudy white. I had tried absinthe with Walter, back when it was still legal. Absinthe had been made illegal in Germany years ago because the distilled wormwood it contained was said to cause insanity. But it was still served at El Dorado, where the clientele was obviously unconcerned about the law or sanity.
“Sip it if you’re not accustomed to it,” Oliver recommended.
I nodded to him and took a sip of the milky liquid. Just as I remembered, it tasted like licorice with an aftertaste of shoe polish and it left my mouth numb. I clenched my teeth to keep from gagging from the bitterness. Ernst drank his in one swallow, the rings he wore over his gloves clacking against the glass. “Another,” he said.
“How are you?” I asked. “Ready to come home?”
He giggled in a high-pitched affected way that I’d never heard from him before. “And give up all this?” When he gestured around the room, light sparkled on his rings.
I took another sip of absinthe. It still tasted terrible. Farther down the bar, a fat, badly shaved man in a white beaded gown winked at Ernst.
“Oh, Lola.” Ernst waved two fingers at him. “Isn’t he lovely?”
“That is not the first word that comes to mind.”
“You must try some cocaine.” Ernst whipped out Mother’s silver powder compact. “It’s divine.”
“No,” I said, losing the battle to remain unshocked. “Just, no.”
He slid the compact back into his tiny beaded purse and pouted.
“How is Herr von Reiche?” I asked.
“Around somewhere.” Ernst glanced at the stage, where a dark-skinned boy who looked twelve years old sang a jazzy dance song. “I must dash to my show.” He kissed the air near my cheek and hurried off, skirting the dance floor and vanishing through a side door.
I pushed the absinthe across the bar to Oliver. “Do you want a Berliner weisse?” he asked.
I shook my head. “I heard it’s passé.”
On the last downbeat the dark boy opened his tuxedo front to reveal decidedly female breasts. The boy, or girl, left the stage to scattered applause.
The stage went dark, and for a moment there was no music. The pianist began to play a slow love song. A dazzling spotlight pierced the darkness of the club. In the middle of the circle of light, Ernst’s pale leg stuck through the curtain, and he kicked his high heel straight toward the ceiling. He slid sinuously through the curtain and onto the stage. Every hand in the room applauded.
Ernst’s red dress glowed like embers in the spotlight. He wore so much jewelry that when he moved he flashed like a chandelier. After the applause subsided, he raised one gloved hand above his head and began to sing a throaty love song. All of the pain in the world flowed out of his body through his voice. All talking stopped. All drinking stopped. The audience sat, mesmerized.
I stared at Ernst, singing so beautifully in that red dress. I did not realize I held my breath until he stopped singing and applause washed over him like rain. He sang only two more songs, then curtsied and blew dramatic kisses to the applauding crowd before prancing off stage.
A few minutes later, he returned to the bar, fighting his way through admirers.
“And?” he asked.
“Amazing!” I remembered the times my singing teacher and I had let him take my place in my voice lessons. “Truly. Frau Witte would be proud of that voice.”
“If not the costume,” he said with an impish grin. “Now tell me everything. Is Greta still spurning Jim? How’s Mademoiselle Zee? Does she miss me?”
“The cat is inconsolable,” I lied.
Oliver placed a tr
ay of Champagne glasses in front of us. “All for you, my lovely,” he told Ernst. “I can list the name of each admirer if you would like.”
Ernst giggled. “No need. I cannot possibly keep them all straight.”
He turned back to me. “The cat is not inconsolable. But what about the love letters? And all that crazy poetry for the paper?”
“I have been promoted,” I said. “I am writing full time as Peter—”
“Hello, liebchen,” interrupted a voice behind my shoulder. Ernst’s eyes flicked to the man who spoke. He widened his eyes as if he’d been given a Christmas gift, then dropped his eyelashes like a professional coquette. His playacting skills had certainly improved.
“Rudolf,” he said. “You missed my act, you naughty boy.”
“I never miss your act.” Rudolf draped his arm over Ernst’s shoulder. “I couldn’t beat my way through the throng of admirers ogling you.”
“Try harder, darling.” Ernst pouted.
“Your wish is my command.” Rudolf slid his arm around Ernst’s waist and led him to the dance floor. They danced together, plastered so close that I feared the fringe on Ernst’s dress would rub off. Rudolf massaged Ernst’s bottom with both hands. I won, Rudolf’s eyes seemed to say to me. And you lost.
When I turned back to the bar, a Berliner weisse appeared in front of me.
“On the house,” Oliver said. “You should be able to finish it before they’re done dancing.”
I finished that beer, and another, before Ernst came back and kissed me on the cheek, his lips touching me this time. “I must dash,” he said. “Come again tomorrow.”
When he and Rudolf strolled out of the club, hand-in-hand, Oliver’s eyes followed them. Ernst turned before he left the room to wave to his many admirers and to me, sweeping his blond hair back out of his eyes with a graceful gesture so much like our mother’s that tears stung my eyes.
7
I shivered, still standing outside in front of the mural. I walked to the end scene—a man and a poodle with long lashes and a pink tutu did the foxtrot. I saluted the coquettish poodle, straightened my shoulders, and stepped through the looking glass.
A Trace of Smoke (Hannah Vogel) Page 5