The Butchers of Berlin (7 page)

Sybil took off her hat and tidied her hair as best she could. There was no mirror. She stared at the lens, trying to look cheerful. Signing away her life, she thought. When it came to her turn,
Lore contrived to convey inner amusement.

The man looked like someone with too much on his mind. Could they even be sure they would see him again? They were like babes in the wood.

He said, ‘Go to the Café Bollenmüller tomorrow in the lunch hour and I will deliver the developed photographs and tell you where to go for your papers.’

On the way back Sybil thought about what they were committing themselves to. Flop houses and dives must exist, but she knew nothing about that world. She feared she might have to sell her body.
If that were the price of survival, would it be so awful? This new kind of thinking surprised her.

Lore said, ‘I have an idea.’

Nebe was back at Schlegel’s mother’s that afternoon, which was no surprise, for one of her Sunday dos. These select parties, for all their impromptu air, were
rigorously planned. Nebe came in uniform again and sat drinking mint tea, chatting to a contingent of select wives, who were allowed to be attractive but not as beautiful as Schlegel’s
mother.

This time Nebe was the master of cordial distance, raising his tea cup in acknowledgement of Schlegel. They spoke briefly, not about work, as was the form. Nebe’s talk was along the lines
of ‘How are you, dear boy?’ as if they hadn’t seen each other in months, and ‘Doesn’t your mother look wonderful?’ She did. Svelte and feral, with her perfect
figure, however much she complained of being flat-chested.

Francis Alwynd also came. The Irish poet was seen as a big social catch, being wild and mystical, with a romantic background that included republican insurrection and internment by the
British.

Schlegel hadn’t seen him in a while. He turned up with an attractive young woman.

Alwynd greeted him with a knowing smile and a mock salute. ‘It has been far too long. Fine nights we had.’

Schlegel had once been deputed to look after him because he had English when Alwynd spoke no German, other than a phonetic nonsense. They had knocked around together, listening to jazz and
getting drunk, until Schlegel decided Alwynd was more interested in his students, bedded in quick succession. The university was almost all girls, and it let Alwynd teach writers banned in Ireland.
He told Schlegel he thought he had died and gone to heaven.

He came to the party dressed as usual in a fisherman’s polo neck and corduroys. After looking around at the assembled dignitaries he announced in his usual roguish and tactless way that
these days you had to go to concentration camps to hear the best jazz.

‘Fritz Weiss plays regularly in Theresienstadt and I am reliably told the Ghetto Swingers offer an outstanding form of Nigger jazz without objection from the SS.’

Alwynd grinned and recalled long drunken nights they had spent at his apartment playing and trading jazz records, which young soldiers on leave brought from abroad.

‘One came from Amsterdam, remember?’ Alwynd reminisced in his distracted way. ‘He told us of first-class jazz clubs, with a black music scene from Surinam. Mike Hidalgo was the
musician’s name, that’s right. He had a big German following.’

They had played his records and clicked their fingers, and drunkenly argued over whether Surinam was in the Dutch East Indies or the Caribbean.

Alwynd made a point of including the young woman in his stories. The talk was just skating, Schlegel saw. The real conversation lay in the meaningful looks passing between Alwynd and the girl.
He was jealous.

Schlegel thought of the flayed body, the dead man’s medal, as he listened politely to Alwynd explain to her how they used to dine together.

‘Sometimes we went to Stockler’s and sat among the prosperous businessmen and their well-dressed wives.’

Schlegel supposed there was little for Alwynd to do except fuck and Berlin offered plenty of opportunity with its men away.

‘You used to complain about everything being slathered in mustard sauce.’

‘
Mea culpa
. Never again. Even the embassies these days are pushed to turn out a decent meal. Alas, no more. Such fine nights.’

His expression grew dreamy. He put his arm around the young woman.

‘Time for Francis to lie down. My fondest to your mother. She’s busy. We’ll slip away.’

His mother was having one of her floating afternoons. Whatever combination accounted for her heightened state, it was a fine balance. Schlegel listened to his stepfather making a date with Nebe
to attend the Arc de Triomphe. His horse had come fifth the year before.

‘We’ve never gone much for rice, on the whole,’ said one of the wives.

The voice in his head said: Pick up the gun. It makes more sense than this.

His stepfather announced he had a stallion with a terrific tool he was putting out to stud. His mother said the Hungarians were all right if you got enough drink down them.

Later she said, ‘You seem more cheerful these days.’

Schlegel could not be bothered to disagree. His diffidence so annoyed her that he made a point of it. ‘Your dress looks nice. New?’

‘Not so new.’

‘I seem to have lost my hat.’

‘Not the one from Jermyn Street?’

It had been shipped from London via Switzerland, probably picked up by his stepfather on one of his visits to Zurich. Schlegel wondered why when he couldn’t see the difference between a
hat from Jermyn Street and one by Mühlbauer.

As for ending up in the RKPA Financial Crimes Office, he dimly suspected his career had been taken care of by unspecified spheres of influence and if forced he would say his stepfather had gone
to his old pal Nebe and asked him to help out with his troubled stepson. As a teenager Schlegel had gone through what was referred to as his delinquent phase, culminating in arrest for shoplifting
in KaDeWe, which his mother considered not quite beneath her as a department store.

Prison was avoided. He was ordered to get a proper haircut and be examined by a psychiatrist. He was sent away to construct roads and learned to cope with being picked on and beaten up because
he was thought Jewish, being circumcised.

He was supposed to enlist in the cavalry after that but failed the medical.

When he told his mother he was working in financial investigations she tried not to sound disappointed. ‘I suppose you always were good at figures,’ she said, which was not true.

That afternoon, as he was leaving, a woman said to his mother, ‘I have a seamstress near Savignyplatz. I suspect she’s a Yid.’

‘Can you tell?’ his mother asked in her most offhand manner.

‘I couldn’t care either way. It’s not my job to catch them but she does lovely work and I would be sorry to lose her.’

Francis Alwynd’s visitors were a surprise, to say the least. The girl Lore had been one of his brighter students, keen on Lawrence and Joyce. She spoke good English and
professed to share his love of poetry. She remained one of the few he hadn’t had. Her sexual preference did not extend to men, which made her all the more desirable. The other young woman he
knew only enough to assess her as amenable.

He was drily amused to find them standing like a couple of waifs on his doorstep. Because he encouraged students to drop round he was used to the unexpected. To most he appeared an exceptionally
privileged figure, with his own large apartment overlooking Hochmeisterplatz.

For all his otherworldly air, Alwynd viewed his sexual liaisons as commercial transactions. Frequent food parcels from Ireland were a luxurious booty that gave him bartering power in his
conquests. He dressed the transactions with good manners and consideration. The rich English woman with the dull manufacturer husband, redeemed by his love of racing, whose guest he had just been,
called him a soft predator, offered in admiration.

Lore knew the back of Alwynd’s apartment had a servants’ room, with its own stairs. Alwynd was casual about letting people stay, for reasons of loneliness, she suspected. She also
had a hold over him because those he used were quickly discarded. He had confided to being homesick, in spite of loathing everything about the old country. He said the Germans had produced nothing
of note since the nineteenth century. The current regime accommodated him well enough as it let him teach writers banned in Ireland. His own references, he cheerfully told Lore and anyone else who
would listen, lay in pagan myth, early Christian mystics and the sexually explicit.

He was a head taller than his visitors. He stood barefoot, in a shirt hanging out and trousers. He could see the other woman had guessed he had a visitor in his bed. He was done with her for
now, which left him in the mood to entertain.

‘Well, it has been a long time. Come in. There may even be some real tea. I have supplies from home.’

Because he always spoke English, which Lore had to translate, Sybil tended not to go when Lore and Alwynd met, thinking herself a burden. There was something else. Alwynd was a tall, big-boned
man with a shock of dark hair, handsome in a brooding Celtic way, whose faraway look occasionally snapped into a gaze of blatant sexual demand.

Lore had told Sybil they should come clean with Alwynd, admit they were Jewish and ask if they could stay a few days. She suspected Alwynd had guessed anyway. In discussions on Joyce’s
Ulysses
he had repeated several times, ‘Of course, Leopold Bloom was a Jew. Yes, that’s right.’ He said it took a brave man to make a hero of a Jew in Ireland.

Furthermore, Alwynd accepted that he and Lore had poetry in common, which he considered rare, and declared he cared nothing for social convention. The man marched to the beat of his own drum,
Lore said, on top of which he was always laughing at Germans as sticklers for social observance.

Sybil sat on an upright sofa and wondered how Lore would broach the subject while Alwynd made tea in the kitchen, and talked easily between the rooms, saying only the other day he had been
thinking about one of his conversations with Lore.

Sybil found the easy pleasantries grated after the tension of the last forty-eight hours. She considered Alwynd probably indiscreet and tactless. She was prepared to defer to Lore, who said
Alwynd was indifferent to racial and religious distractions, apart from hating the British. His propaganda broadcasts against them made him something of a local star, otherwise he seemed studiedly
indifferent to his past, the war, and whatever woman he was with. There were stories of an abandoned wife back in Ireland.

Alwynd served them awkwardly, his social skills minimal. He was still barefoot. He said to Lore, ‘I expect you’re short of a bob or two.’

‘Always, and hungry too.’

Alwynd looked aghast and said, ‘My God, there’s cake!’

He disappeared to the kitchen and returned with mismatched plates on which lay thick slices of moist, compressed fruit cake.

Lore protested that she hadn’t intended for Alwynd to feed them. Alwynd waved his hand, and said he couldn’t stand cake anyway.

Sybil had never seen anything so succulent and inviting. It would be sweet too. She almost dared not start eating for fear of cramming it in her mouth.

She looked at Alwynd in awe and asked if it had real sugar. Alwynd’s sparse German seemed to extend to understanding her.

‘Sugar or golden syrup,’ he said, amused by her reaction. ‘And dried fruit too. Wednesdays at school was a half-day and you could order a packed lunch. You used to get a slice
of the same cake wrapped in greaseproof paper. It was called sudden death.’

Lore as usual had to translate for Sybil’s benefit.

Alwynd added, ‘Schoolboy humour.’

He seemed as entertained as if he were watching a show as they inspected, savoured and devoured the cake, telling each other to take it slowly, making noises of ecstatic appreciation with every
mouthful, then using their fingers to wipe the last of the sticky residue off their plates.

The effusiveness of their thanks became embarrassing, until Alwynd said, ‘Drink your tea now, children,’ and Sybil appreciated he was older than he looked, perhaps forty, a man who
made sport with girls half his age.

Alwynd slopped his tea into the cup’s saucer and drank from that, with an air of childish disobedience. The sight saddened Sybil. Individual flourish and such civilised values as
eccentricity were beyond them now. She thought she heard the click of the front door, signalling the departure of Alwynd’s unseen guest. He caught her eye and smiled, whether shy or superior
she couldn’t tell.

He got up and put on a record whose strange primal rhythms were unlike anything Sybil had heard.

‘Proper jazz,’ he said. ‘None of that anodyne rubbish with strings that passes for it here.’

He turned to Lore and said, ‘I get asked to write quite a lot, for newspapers and so forth. Rubbish, really. What a tyrant Cromwell was. How the British invented the concentration camp.
Not rubbish as such, but they accept any old nonsense. You could say the Welsh are all three-legged and no one would question it. The point is the text has to be translated. The real point is it
has to be written in the first place. You see, I’m thinking you could write it for me then translate it so we can bill them for the cost of writing and a translation fee. Split fifty-fifty.
The girl who did my translations is no longer around.’

Another one bedded, another gone, thought Sybil, presuming Alwynd escaped unscathed from his romantic encounters.

‘Feel free to stay the night,’ he said, and Sybil saw he had known what they’d had in mind. ‘Plenty of room at the back.’

The music progressed in a crescendo towards the end.

‘That old “Black Bottom Stomp”,’ Alwynd said, looking at Sybil provocatively. He stuck his hands in the pockets of his baggy corduroys. Lore looked around happily. Sybil
wasn’t sure. She had seen how Alwynd looked at her with that dangerous and attractive combination of merry glance and hard stare.

Schlegel made his way to headquarters for his turn as night-duty officer. The appointment was supposed to be by rota but seemed to include him a lot more than others. Stoffel
almost never did it. The job only mattered in an emergency, which usually didn’t happen, leaving the desk sergeant in charge and the duty officer free to help himself to an empty cell.