Cave Dwellers

by Richard Grant

  Your enemies won’t be so obliging as to show up in leather coats with an Opel idling at the curb. No, he thought, this is America, regarding the dark green sedan and holding the box out in front of himself, letting the red ribbon flap in the cool breeze from the gorge, calculating his distance from the streetlamp. The car pulled abreast of him and at last he glimpsed the driver, a slight-figured man in ordinary evening clothes set off with a narrow tie. Car doors were opening—one on the passenger side, another in the rear—and there was an odd, unhurried quality to how stiffly the two men moved, as if they couldn’t ever truly relax over here, even when pretending to slouch in a murky tavern. Oskar actually felt annoyed with them for making him wait, closing on him as slowly as wrestlers, every motion calibrated, like they were working from a checklist.

  He found time in those final moments to wonder if this was, after all, how it was meant to end—if these were indeed the people for whom the treasure in the box was intended, if Oskar himself had been written off from the start. He tossed the box up high in the air, roughly in the direction of the closest man, and it seemed to float there in the penumbra of the headlamps. All eyes were on the gleaming foil, the waving ribbon, and not on Oskar as he vaulted cleanly over the opposite sidewall, vanishing in blackness.

  —

  “Clairborne!” Bull Townsend called. “You get down here right now. We need to have a little talk.” He was about to stomp upstairs—for which his son would be sorry, you can bet on that—when the boy materialized in the doorway, backlit by the hall fixture, his hair, as usual, too long. He was holding his damned flute, or piccolo, or whatever the hell it was. “Come in here, son. Take a seat.”

  The boy loped in like some wild, long-legged animal, a fawn or an antelope, that needed to be either housebroken or hung up on the wall, take your pick. Bull loved him, of course—that was what you did with children—but there was something a little abstract or theoretical about this love; it didn’t always seem to connect with the ungainly presence of Clairborne himself. About ninety-eight percent of the time, the sight of him just pissed his father off.

  “Come in, sit down,” he said, motioning to a chair, already impatient. Act like a man was what he felt like saying. Square your shoulders, look the other fellow straight in the eye.

  Clair dragged himself sullenly over the carpet with his whole upper body in a slump, dropping finally into the lozenge-shaped love seat favored by his mother on those rare evenings when she ventured downstairs. Bull gritted his teeth. The boy’s limbs fell every which way. He twiddled his piccolo like a baton. He was wearing, God alone knew why, a thick, green-and-white striped scarf—not St. Albans colors—draped twice, loosely, around his neck.

  Like that goddamn Cole Porter, Bull thought, despite having only the vaguest idea what Porter looked like and only one clue as to who he was (viz., the fellow who wrote those pornographic lyrics that got the Women’s Decency League all hot and bothered). Forcing a smile, he said, “How are you, Clairborne?” His tone was hearty, he hoped, his manner paternal. “How are things going at school?”

  The boy said nothing, only stared—his latest infuriating habit, sitting there with wide, empty eyes and his mouth clamped shut like some deaf-mute. Just watching you, waiting you out. Well, let him wait, Bull thought, till he craps in his pants. If he’s not careful, this little game will end with somebody—maybe his old man—slapping an expression onto his face. And that’d be the end of the Helen Keller act. But then he’d probably (it came to Bull in a rush of horrible clarity) just move on to the next fucking thing, which was sure to be even worse. So let’s put the kibosh on that right now.

  “Clairborne,” he said, watching the boy carefully, alert to any change in his demeanor, “I want to talk to you about your plans for the summer.”

  At first it seemed he wouldn’t deign to answer, but then he said quietly, “I have no plans, Father.”

  Bull hated that voice. Flat and world-weary, like he’d come down with the vapors or some such thing. “Now that’s where you’re wrong, son.” These words gave him considerable pleasure. “You do have plans for the summer. Yessiree—big plans.”

  There was a change now, though not exactly the one Bull had hoped for. The boy’s eyes opened a bit wider, and he seemed for the first time to take an interest in the fact of his father’s existence. Then he managed a very slight, almost secretive smile. “Do tell,” he said, dropping the monotone and speaking in the fruity voice of a Hollywood “personality.”

  This was more than Bull could take. He felt himself getting hot, his face reddening. On the whole, he was more comfortable like that. He’d built a career on anger, and it had carried him pretty far. You could say—as Toby Lugan did now and then—that Bull Townsend knew how to make anger work for him. He stared hard and silently for half a minute, maybe longer, at his only son. You could see the boy growing uncomfortable, though he made a fair show of hiding it. But in the end it was Clair who broke, of course. He would never be Bull.

  “Might one inquire,” he said, picking up the words and placing them down just so, like somebody wearing fancy gloves, “what precisely these summer plans of mine are? Also, did you actually say Yessiree?”

  Bull gave him an honest grin, letting the happiness of the moment, the triumph, just hang there, gathering force. “Tell me, Clairborne,” he said finally. “Is there anybody at that fancy school of yours that can teach you a little German? You won’t need much. Just some useful phrases like ‘Please, sir, where is the laundry room, my uniform needs washing’ or ‘Pardon me, sir, I’ve got to use the shitter, that Bavarian horse cock we had for dinner didn’t agree with me.’ Because where you’re going, son, that kind of thing ought to come in mighty handy.”

  The boy’s expression was reward enough, almost.

  FROM THE KREUZBERG TO HELL

  BERLIN: APRIL 1938

  Stav, feeling more than ever like the vampire he resembled, gazed pensively from the dark sanctuary of a stage wing at the audience packed hip to hip beyond the footlights at the Cabaret Trigilaw. The crowd swayed and throbbed like a monstrous, multiheaded jellyfish tossed by waves of blaring jazz—the permissible Nazi equivalent of jazz, containing no more than twenty percent “swing” and ten percent syncopation; it had reached maximum frenzy after midnight, then abated steadily, stuporously, in the hours since. The loud arrival around two a.m. of a party of dignitaries—what a laughably inapt term for the likes of Heydrich, head of the Security Service and a fixture of the Berlin demimonde—had only thickened the air of sinister lechery that pervaded the Trigilaw and was, indeed, its principal drawing card. People flocked here like so many carrion birds hoping for something delicious and horrible. It was Stav’s personal belief that most of the legends about the place—young women found with dresses over their heads and throats slashed in the WC, drains blocked with congealing blood—had been concocted by Glewitz himself, the owner, though one couldn’t be sure.

  This was, after all, as Stav never ceased to marvel, a city that had managed both to surrender to the direst sort of thralldom and at the same time to throw off every kind of social and moral restraint. Thus, a novel business opportunity for those with die Schnauze, the Berliners would say, “the nose,” as in something you stick where it isn’t wanted. God knew Glewitz had that.

  The Trigilaw took its name from a three-headed pagan deity in whose honor, roughly a millennium ago and not far from the current premises, a rude statue had been erected by Slavic raiders jubilant over the sacking of Marienburg, the razing of its Ottonian cathedral and the butchering of its priests. Heydrich, if he’d heard that story, could only approve. For the SS (of which his own service was an aggressively metastasizing part) had made great strides in rolling back the intervening centuries of Christianity. So give Glewitz his due: the man knew his audience.

  Stav lit a cigarette but after a couple puffs lost interest. He tossed it deeper into the shadows backstage and watched the glowing ember roll over the floorboards, settling
finally to a dull red glow like a demon’s eye. What if the place caught fire? Would even that drive the celebrants away? Or would the screaming and the licking flames and the stench of burning tempera be met with wild applause—another titillating spectacle and, when you thought about it, perfectly in keeping with the Trigilaw’s landmark status on the broad, dark Strasse running from the Kreuzberg to hell? Stav’s own act, coming up soon, after the “Grecian dancers” finished their routine of simulated (though sometimes actual) polymorphous copulation, should be a case in point.

  From the audience came raucous cheering. Scattered cries of “Noch mehr!” from gentlemen straining the seams of mustard uniforms. A lady’s high-pitched, demented laughter, which might be heard as a prolonged keening of despair. The crowd was, as they say, warmed up. It would fall to Stav to chill them down again. Freeze their blood and give them yet another reason not to think of going home so soon. Why, it’s barely three o’clock! The sun won’t be up for hours.

  One by one, sweaty limbs gleaming, smiles flashing gamely in the spotlight, the dancers filed offstage. Out front, the MC, a bald little fellow known professionally as Der Aal, made uncouth jokes about members of the audience in a sneering voice amplified by the PA to a kind of electrified, reptilian snicker. He was a man of whom you might think, Well, but of course it’s just an act—except in the Eel’s case it wasn’t. He was a sadist and a misanthrope. Where’d you find the dame, my friend—on the bargain table at Wertheim’s? Last year’s merchandise, not even a Jew could sell it! Just an act. Are the Jews still running Wertheim’s, Stav wondered. Surely all the big department stores must have been Aryanized by now. But no matter—good for a laugh.

  Now the Eel launched into the run-up to Stav’s routine, dropping his voice the better part of an octave while the pit orchestra struck up an eerie sostenuto, indebted about equally to Peter and the Wolf and to decadent atonalists like Webern, banned from the concert hall but welcome here along the infernal S-Bahn.

  “And now soon, ladies and gentlemen,” hissed the Eel, “you will meet an individual with a foot in both worlds: the Now and the Hereafter. A personage thought by many to be…something other than human. So please, honored guests, I implore you, heed my words: I make no guarantee as to your personal safety. Not while our, ah…our guest stands among us. Not while his gaze falls upon this one or that one—upon you, gnädige Frau, or you, Herr Oberst. And so I urge all individuals of a sensitive disposition, and especially women of childbearing years, to please move a prudent distance from the stage. Move now, before—my God, there’s no time, he comes, he comes! I must…you’ll forgive me…” Trailing off with a whimper, the Eel scurried offstage while the orchestra flew into a dirge of dissonant horns and screeching strings. At last the beefy percussionist, lately employed by the Philharmonic, brought down a mallet to shatter a pane of glass—flying shards glittering briefly against black curtains, stage rear, before falling harmlessly into a cloth-lined crate—and the music ceased.

  Into the stillness Stav glided soundlessly. Literally glided, on a mechanic’s trolley pulled by a rope from the opposite wing. His back was to the audience and his cape drawn tight around his neck, so when he finally stepped off the trolley and turned, throwing his arms wide, baring teeth between dark-painted lips in a face from which all blood seemed to have drained—soaking, perhaps, into the cape’s crimson lining—two members of the audience screamed, which meant that one of the screams was real. Stav smiled. It was a smile of genuine amusement, but the sorcery of stage lights and greasepaint changed it to a frightful leer.

  Stav blinked and stared, as though unaccustomed to the light. “What is this place?” Pacing, groping, shading his eyes. “To what realm have I been summoned? Which of you devils called me here? Was it you, Mein Herr? Or you—or you? What do you want from me?”

  He spoke in the dialect of his working-class childhood, as distinctive and rudely flavored as the thickest Cockney. This was something of a joke, and the audience got it—the Dark Prince himself is a native Berliner!

  Now people began shouting. Many of them had caught the act before; they knew what was expected. “How’s my old friend Gunter doing down there? Warm enough for him, is it?” “Please, sir—could you give a message to my Mutti? Tell her I forgot to wear my rubbers and now my big toe’s all red and swollen!”

  Stav affected difficulty comprehending. He narrowed his eyes, fluttered his cape, moved this way and that, as though disoriented by the cacophony of voices. Then he paused when a lone voice seemed to detach itself from the rest and to ring out in a room suddenly grown silent.

  “Where has Jakob gone? Can you tell me that? Have you seen him, where you come from? Where is Jakob, please—it’s important that I know.”

  Stav could see the speaker clearly. A young man, university age, clear-eyed and blond. Not a local, he thought. Up to the city for spring holiday, perhaps. You weren’t supposed to call it Easter anymore; it was something different now, allegedly Germanic, a rediscovered planting festival. The boy stared at him from a dozen paces back, beyond the table of VIPs, his eyes imploring, his neck craned forward, reaching hard for this foolish hope. Ignoring, or trying to, the unkind laughter around him.

  It was just an act, this was true. But what kind of act? Stav wasn’t always sure. There was a feeling he sometimes got, and was getting now—as though a secret were passing between himself and this boy, streaming like the thin yellow paper from a teletype machine—a delicate connection, take care not to rip it. Read it out slowly, one word at a time.

  “Your friend is alive,” he said. Then, more firmly, declaring it to the room: “Jakob is alive!”

  The audience was quiet now, perceiving, blearily, a change in mood.

  “But in pain,” Stav continued. “Constant—a kind of ache. The back, I think. The legs. He’s been beaten. Yet he must get up and work. And hungry, always hungry. They don’t give him enough food.”

  “Will he come back?” the boy asked. No need to shout this, just an ordinary question.

  He will not come back. Stav felt it right away, a certainty. In the end, they’ll kill him. You’ll never see Jakob again. He couldn’t bring himself to say it, but there was no need. Tears welled in the boy’s eyes.

  Then Stav felt something new. A different set of eyes, staring. A fresh summons. Look at me. He resisted for several moments, as long as he dared. At last he allowed his eyes to pass over the table immediately before the stage, there meeting the cool, passionless gaze of Reinhard Heydrich.

  “And what about me, mein böser Herr?” the tall officer said, speaking calmly but at parade-ground volume. His features were small, as though the skin had been stretched too tightly around his skull. Tonight he sported the sort of long white gloves one wears at the opera. “What message have you brought for me out of the infernal depths?”

  Stav willed himself to go blank, to feel nothing. Heydrich had come here before, was almost a regular, but this was the first time he’d taken an overt interest in the show. Ordinarily his attention was occupied by the “entertainers” employed by Glewitz (who liked the English term) to join certain preferred customers at their tables and evince an unquenchable thirst for champagne. He held his lock on Stav’s eyes for quite a while, and the audience stared too, thrilled by this unexpected sideshow. At last Heydrich broke the silence.

  “That was quite good, just now. Very convincing. How does it work, I wonder. Perhaps you’ll tell me sometime.” Smiling mirthlessly, he turned his head away. All right, if that’s how it is, then I’m done with you. One member of his party, not in uniform but in smart civilian attire, rose from the table and approached the stage, where he produced a small white rectangle, recognizably a calling card, and laid it primly by a footlight.

  Stav feigned indifference. Earthly affairs—so petty, so sordid. He swept his cape sideways, swooping with high melodrama from one wing to the other. But it was forced now; he’d been knocked off his rhythm. The crowd, too, sensed that the vital spark was mi
ssing. After ten more painful minutes, the Eel yanked him off, signaling the orchestra to strike up the exit music, something from Orff, a brownshirt favorite. Stav allowed himself one parting glance at Heydrich, who caught and returned it with a slight raising of the brow. And now, of all times, the connection came alive again.

  We’ll be seeing you, said the cold blue eyes.

  Stav looked away. Just an act, he reminded himself. And so there was no danger that the chief of the Security Service might have sensed his unspoken reply. Go fuck yourself, Nazi shit-hound.

  —

  Heydrich’s companion, the man in civilian clothes, was waiting outside the stage door, just standing in the alley reading a newspaper by the day’s first light. He wasn’t such an ominous figure; the threat lay in the fact of his being there. Stav lowered his shoulders and glanced up and down the alley. He saw no one else, no black motorcar idling on the street. But what of that? There was nowhere to run, no place in all of Germany where these men couldn’t find you. So he turned north, as always, and began walking home.

  The man fell into step beside him. Neither spoke. They emerged together into a residential street running parallel to the Oranienstrasse, where Stav turned east, the man pivoting beside him, sharp as a soldier at morning drill. He knows the route, Stav thought. Well, of course—they know everything.

  The new morning light fell like a fine powder on dirty sidewalks, placard-bearing kiosks, seedy apartment façades. Somehow the urban renaissance that had transformed Berlin into a gleaming world metropolis had not penetrated the Kreuzberg, despite its lying just south of the thriving Mitte. Stav guessed that men like this one, men of the shadows, friends of Heydrich’s, had need of a place like the Kreuzberg so they’d kept it as a sort of protected habitat—somewhere they could breathe freely, loosen their limbs, bare their fangs and take down their prey without upsetting the ladies at tea on Unter den Linden.