Berlin: A Novel (44 page)

'Let's drink this next door.' She picked up her glass and went into the bedroom. When he joined her she had taken off her dress and was standing in her diaphanous lingerie.

'Enchanting.' He kissed her hand. She emptied her glass in a single draught and flung it recklessly into the flickering flames on the hearth. He kissed her shoulder, and she began to breathe heavily. That excited him, something she'd known ever since they first had sex. The rest was routine. She let him do as he liked and uttered little sobs and cries, giving the sixtyyear-old man the impression that he was an overpoweringly wonderful lover. It was all over after ten minutes.

As she was leaving he gave her a paperback with a red cover. 'Vicki Baum's latest novel. Do tell me what you think of it.' He escorted her through the snow to the high-built, chestnut-brown Mercedes. The driving seat of the old-fashioned car was exposed to the elements. The chauffeur closed the passenger door and got behind the wheel. Marlene, looking through the glass pane from the comfortable warmth of the back, saw the heavy fabric of his coat, the turned-up collar, the gloves and earmuffs under the peaked cap as they drove through the winter night to Berlin. On the way she opened the book, and a hundred-mark note fell out.

'You must be absolutely frozen. Come in with me and get warm,' she said to the chauffeur when they had reached the apartment.

'That's very kind of you, miss, but it's getting late.'

'Oh, come on.' She switched on the light. Fredie would be at some gentlemen's club or other, hunting for potential clients. He always took photographs of his supposed ex-fiancee with him. She let her Persian lamb coat drop. Fredie had hired it from the Jewish furrier on Spittelmarkt. 'Take your coat off and I'll make you a hot grog.' When she came back with the steaming glasses, he was waiting bareheaded in his grey chauffeur's uniform and shiny black leather gaiters. He was of medium height, with a friendly, round, boyish face, a dimpled chin, and carefully combed, nutbrown hair. He was twenty-eight, she learned later.

Hesitantly, he sat down and blew on the hot drink 'You're very kind. Some of your sort are really stuck-up.' He reddened. 'Sorry, didn't mean it that way.'

'Oh, nonsense!' she said, lapsing into her old Riibenstrasse accent. 'It's no secret what I do. What's your name?'

It was Franz Giese, and he came from Breslau. He grinned. 'Same as most real Berliners.'

'I really wanted to be a cinema usherette,' she said apologetically, explaining herself. 'But as so often happens ...' Giese nodded understandingly.

Keys clinked. Fredie appeared in a dinner jacket, the inevitable cigarette holder clamped between his teeth. He took in the scene at a glance. 'May I ask what this idyll is in aid of?'

'I brought him up for a moment to get warm.'

'Out.' Fredie jerked his thumb at the door. Franz Giese picked up his coat and cap in silence.

'You could have let him finish his grog,' Marlene complained.

Fredie came close to her. His face expressionless, he rammed his fist into her stomach, making her gasp for air. She writhed under the blow and collapsed into a chair, weeping soundlessly. It wasn't so much the pain - that soon died down - it was her sense of being utterly alone.

Crooking his forefinger, he raised her chin. 'I pick the guests you entertain, understand? How about the money?' She gave him the hundred-mark note from Eulenfels. He took a small notebook out of his pocket and entered the sum. 'Thirty for expenses, thirty-five for me, thirty-five for you.' He conscientiously kept accounts, although she never got to see her money. 'I'm managing it for you,' he replied when she asked about it.

'There's a Herr von Malsen coming to tea tomorrow. I hinted that you're a member of the impoverished aristocracy and very demanding. We can expect a couple of hundred.'

All she wanted was to creep away and forget it all: Fredie, the men, everything about life in the fashionable Westend that was no better than the squalor of Ri benstrasse, just less honest. A thought suddenly went through her mind - Franz Giese is different.

Fredie smiled wryly. Then he pulled her down on the couch. She had no power to resist him. She tried to think of something to put her off, but there was no holding back the orgasm. Contemptuously, Fredie walked away from her.

Herr von Malsen was a wiry man, owner of a landed estate in West Pomerania, who politely asked her to keep her stockings on. Herr Nussbaum was an asthmatic liqueurs distiller from Kopenick who wanted to be called dirty names. Dr Bernheimer was a Potsdam lawyer who liked to be called Sonja as he was being laced into a corset. She fulfilled all their little wishes, and was generously rewarded.

There was a foreigner among her clients too. She had met him over tea in the Adlon. That trick had proved its worth a couple of times before. Fredie took her into the hotel lounge, then had a pageboy call him and hurried away. Marlene liked the atmosphere. Well-dressed men and women. English voices in the background. Snatches of conversation in French. A German gentleman asking the waiter for the London Times. A Swedish woman ordering cigarettes. Two Spaniards greeting each other effusively. Really elegant and international here, she thought, looking at it through Riibenstrasse eyes.

'My brother had to leave unexpectedly on business, and I don't have any money on me,' she told the waiter, loud enough for a solitary gentleman at the next table to hear her. The gentleman was an American, and immediately offered to pay the trifling sum. Marlene smiled in embarrassment. 'How can I thank you, sir?'

'By having a drink with me.' After that he invited her to dinner and champagne in his suite. 'I'm sure you won't mind staying a little longer?' He pushed a hundred-dollar note under her glass.

She laughed. 'How did you know what I do?'

'I saw your companion disappear into one of the telephone cabins, and he was called away straight afterwards. It wasn't difficult to guess the rest - which suits me down to the ground. I'm new to Berlin, and the only woman I've met so far is the cleaning lady at my office.'

His name was Frank Saunders, and he was a correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune. 'He spoke quite good German. Which was, not least, what got me the job here. Darn interesting city, your Berlin. Especially in the present situation. Do you think this Herr Hitler will win the election?'

'Can't you ask me something easier?'

'You're not interested in politics?'

'Not a bit. You?'

'Only professionally. Privately, what I love is beautiful women and horse racing, like most of us men from Kentucky. I like to lay a few bets. How do you feel about coming to Hoppegarten with me?'

'Maybe ...'

He was thirty, and had a boxer's nose. 'Lowered my guard for a split second during the university championships at Yale. That was my reward.'

Frank Saunders was a sportsman, good figure, nice smelling. He was uninhibited in bed and put his mind to what he was doing. 'It's real fun with you,' he said appreciatively. 'I'm moving into my new apartment next week. Will you visit me?' He wrote the address down for her.

From then on they met regularly. Marlene liked the uncomplicated American. Fredie liked the flow of dollars. He even allowed her to go to the races with Saunders. She bought herself an elegant afternoon dress and an extravagant hat, and was delighted by all the beautiful people surrounding them and her good-looking companion in his grey flannels.

They played a little game which excited them both. 'That man in the bowler hat there is a client of mine too. Guess what he does to me?' And she whispered an erotic fantasy in his ear. Another time it was a bony baroness with special tastes. After her, two stylish young cavalry lieutenants. 'Just imagine what those two want me to do ...'

After the races, back in his apartment, they released their pent-up excitement. It was like a spring storm. He was the first client with whom she felt anything at all, and the first man she liked talking to afterwards.

Then there was Dr Friedhelm Noack, always clad in a black jacket, dovegrey waistcoat and striped trousers, his hair meticulously parted, wearing a silver tie. Noack was a senior civil servant in the Prussian Interior Ministry, but liked to be addressed as Major. 'So he made it all the way to paymaster in the war, but never mind, let's not dash his illusions.' Fredie always knew how to deal with people.

Dr Noack came every Thursday. He would drop into an armchair, groaning, and she would kneel in front of him and unbutton him. It was always quite hard work, but eventually he would come, and then leave looking satisfied. This would have been pure routine if she hadn't been required to service him for free, on Fredie's instructions. We don't take money from a friend of the Party,' Fredie had told her. Marlene had not the faintest idea which Party Dr Noack had befriended.

Fredie didn't beat her any more; he had understood the nature of his power over her. He fixed her appointments, and she kept them. Her bank account was growing, at least on paper. He generously allowed her more money for her parents, which she sent them by special messenger.

At around three in the morning one Sunday, Wilhelm Kuhle, unemployed, turned on the gas tap in his one-room apartment in Riibenstrasse, because Pohl and two strong assistants were going to evict him in a few hours' time. He died according to plan, but Marlene's parents and two little brothers would have liked to live a little longer. Gas fumes had passed through the cracks of the partition wall between the apartments.

The funeral was on the last Monday in January 1933. Fredie had anticipated that the newspapers would send reporters, because of all the publicity given to the tragedy, so he had Marlene dress in some old clothes he'd bought from a second-hand dealer. That way she wouldn't be conspicuous, and wouldn't have to answer any questions. On the Monday evening she wore silk stockings and pearls. Herr Eulenfels had invited her to his hunting lodge.

Franz Giese came to fetch her. He was waiting with his cap on by the door of the new Pullman limousine. His leather gaiters gleamed. Marlene shook hands. 'Hi, how's things?'

'Oh, not too bad. Can't complain.' He got behind the wheel.

She pushed the glass partition aside. 'Well, at least you're not exposed to the elements now.' He swallowed, as if he wanted to say something. Anything wrong?' she encouraged him.

'Don't know.' He started the car.

'Oh, come on. We've known each other long enough.'

'You mustn't be angry.'

'How could anyone be angry with you, Herr Giese?'

He seemed to be concentrating hard on the road ahead. Then he came out with it. 'I've got an apartment in Schoneberg. All nice and neat. Would you visit me there some time? I'll pay. Just like Herr Eulenfels.'

'But I'm extremely expensive. Can't do it under a hundred and fifty,' she said, lapsing into her old Berlin accent as she tried to put him off.

He pulled over and stopped the car. Face grave, he counted sixteen notes out of his wallet. He handed the banknotes to her in the back of the car. A hundred and fifty marks. And ten extra for the taxi. What about Sunday evening? Here's my address.' He gave her a piece of paper.

Fredie was never home before one on a Sunday. 'Comradeship evening,' he told her. Marlene had no idea what that meant.

'Sunday evening. Yes, all right.' She put the money and the piece of paper in her handbag.

At Nollendorffplatz he turned round. 'It'll take us a bit longer today. They closed off Unter den Linden and the Government area for the torchlight procession. It's for the new Reich Chancellor.'

Marlene wasn't interested in Reich Chancellors. She looked at Giese's back, the stiff white collar, the grey cloth of the chauffeur's uniform, on which the neon signs cast patches of coloured light as they passed by. She saw his face in the mirror. No different from the others after all, she thought.

After midnight she was another two hundred marks richer. She had drunk a little too much of Eulenfels's 1926 Ruinart Pere & Fils, and on the way home sang a selection from the Comedian Harmonists.

Fredie went through her handbag as usual. 'Three hundred and sixty? Did something special for Herr Eulenfels, did you?' She was too tipsy to answer.

At nine in the morning she went out to buy breakfast rolls. There was a lively discussion going on at the baker's. The man's right. He's not letting those foreigners intimidate him. You wait and see, he'll soon see off that disgraceful Treaty of Versailles.' Korff a retired teacher who lived next door, looked triumphantly around the room.

'Yes, and you just wait - Herr Hitler will soon be locking up everyone whose nose he doesn't care for, like mine,' said the man next to him, Louis Silberstein, flautist in the philharmonic. You can read all about it in his ghastly tome Mein Kampf. I'm moving to Weingartner at the Vienna Opera. Small white loaf, please.'

'He wants to send Hindenburg into well-earned retirement and bring the Kaiser back,' said the baker's wife knowledgeably. 'Well, we'll be getting the right people to lead us at last.'

'You mean those aristocratic idiots with their von and zu titles?' mocked Anita Kolbe, a sculptress who lived in Westendallee. 'Heads like wood all the way through. It comes from all those family trees.'