The Dark Arena (17 page)

“We have to do something, Wolfgang,” the father said, “our supplies are very low. Very, very low.”

Wolf sighed. He wondered what the old bastard had done with all that stuff. They both knew damn well it hadn't been eaten. A regiment couldn't have done such damage. As always when the old man had outgeneraled him he thought grimly,
Wait until Ursula and me get back to the States. I'll teach them both a lesson.
The old man would expect packages. Balls he'd get. Wolf nodded his head as if he had been thinking over the problem.

“All right,” he said. They went back to the bedroom and he gave the father five cartons of cigarettes. “These are the last I can give for a few months,” Wolf said warningly. “I have a very big deal ready.”

“Don't worry,” the father said, “this will last a long time. My daughter and I get along as sparingly as we can, you know that, Wolfgang.” Wolf nodded his head reassuringly, and also in admiration of the man's nerve, thinking,
The old robber will make his fortune out of me yet

Before he left the room, Wolf took the heavy Walther pistol from his bureau drawer and slipped it into the jacket of his coat. This always captured the father's attention, made him more respectful, and this also pleased Wolf.

As they left the room together the older man threw his arm in a confidential, fatherly way around Wolfs shoulders. “Next week I am getting a great supply of brown and gray gabardine. I'll have some beautifcil suits made for you, as a present. And if any of your friends wish to buy I will give them a special price, as a favor to you.”

Wolf nodded gravely. As he went out the door Ursula called out, “Be careful.” He left the basement and walked up a few steps to the street. Then he strode briskly in the direction of the Rathskellar. It was only, fifteen minutes away, he would be in plenty of time. As he walked he marveled over the father. A load of gabardine.
His
gabardine really. And then he was supposed to sell it without commission. He'd fix that. He'd make himself a little something. He'd give Mosca, Cassin, and Gordon a good break, maybe even the Jew, but still earn a little something. But he should be able to sell a lot of it. At a nice cut for himself. Well, that was chicken feed, but every bit helped.

In the Rathskellar, the great underground restaurant that before the war had been one of Germany's finest, he found Eddie Cassin and Mosca at a table by the giant wine casks. These huge barrels reaching to the ceiling formed a shadow over the two men, cutting them off from the rest of the olive-drab officers and the few women who spotted the vast, cavernous room. A string orchestra played quietly, the lights were dim, and small white-clothed tables stretched out as far as the eye could see; then clustered in white eddies like foam; in alcoves and small private dining-rooms.

“Wolf, the living cigarette tree,” Eddie Cassin shouted.

His voice rose above the music and rose to the almost invisible ceiling high above them and became lost there. No one paid any attention. He leaned over the table and whispered, “What you two hustlers got planned tonight?”

Wolf sat down. “Just making a little trip around town. See if we can pick up any bargains. Stop using your butts for gash, and ITl make you a few pennies.” Though he joked, Wolf was worried. He could see Mosca was nearly as drunk as Eddie and he was surprised. He had never seen Mosca drunk before. He wondered if he should cancel the whole deal for this night. But it was all set up, this was the first night they would hit the big black-market wheels, they might even get a lead on who had the dough. Wolf ordered a drink, watching Mosca to see if he would be okay.

Mosca noticed this and smiled. “I'll be all right, a coupla minutes fresh air. I'll be okay.” He tried to enunciate carefully but the words slurred together. Wolf shook his head with an impatient disgust he could not hide.

Eddie shook his head in drunken mimicry. “The trouble with you, Wolf, is you think you're clever. You wanna be a millionaire. Wolf, you'll never make it. Never in a million years. One, you got no brains, just a little cunning. Two, you haven't got real guts. You can slap kraut prisoners around but that's all. That's all, that's all.”

“How can you stand this gash hound?” Wolf asked Mosca, his voice deliberately quiet, insulting. “He's had so many dames sitting on his head, his brain's gone soft.”

Eddie jumped up angrily and shouted, “You lousy butt hustler—” Mosca pulled him down to the chair. Some of the people at the other tables turned around. “Take it easy, Eddie, he's only kidding. You, too, Wolf. He's drunk. When he's drunk he hates everybody. And besides, his wife wrote him she's leaving England with the kid and coming here, and he can't stand giving up all his dames.” Eddie turned on Mosca with drunken reproachfulness and said, “That's not so, Walter, I really gave her some raw deals.” He shook his head dolefully.

Mosca, to cheer him up, said, “Tell Wolf about your gorilla.”

Wolf drank his whisky down, and some of his good humor returned. He grinned at Eddie Cassin.

Eddie said solemnly, almost reverently, “I'm screwing a gorilla.” He waited for Wolf's reaction.

“I'm not surprised.’ Wolf said and laughed with Mosca. “What's the deal?”

“I'm screwing a real honest-to-God gorilla,” Eddie insisted.

Wolf looked questioningly at Mosca. “It's a dame,” Mosca said, “he claims she looks just like a gorilla, she's that homely.”

Eddie looked down at the table and then turned earnestly to Mosca. “I got a confession to make, Walter, she's really a gorilla, I was ashamed to admit it. But she's a real gorilla. I lied to you. She lives right near the air base and she works for Military Government. She's an interpreter.” He smiled at them, and Wolf, his spirits completely restored, laughed so heartily that the people at the near-by tables turned around again.’

“How about bringing her around and giving us a break?” Wolf asked jokingly.

Eddie shuddered. “Christ, I never go out in the street with her even. I sneak into the house when it's dark.”

“It's time for us to leave, Walter,” Wolf said briskly; “this is the big night and itV going to be a long one.”

Mosca leaned over Eddie and asked, “You all right? Can you get home okay?” Eddie mumbled that he was and as they walked to the door they could hear him shouting to the waiter for another drink.

Wolf waited for Mosca to get ahead of him, noticing the unsteady walk. Going up the steps he could not help saying, “You picked a hell of a night to get stewed.”

The cold winter air sliced through MoscaV cheekbones, freezing the red pulp of his gums and palate, flesh already raw from too much alcohol and cigarettes. He lit a cigarette to warm his mouth and throat and thought,
Screw you, Wolf,
and thought, I'll
this son of a bitch makes another crack Til rap him or walk away.
He could feel the cold working through his coat and below it, freezing his knees and thighs, feeling his whole torso itch with the
beginning chill as if it were glazed with frost, and he felt nausea as the frozen air hit the souring whisky in his belly, sending it spinning up to his brain. He wanted to vomit but knotted his stomach muscles, held it down, not wanting Wolf to see him so. Knowing that Wolf was right, it was a hell of a night to get stewed. But for the first time he'd had a quarrel with Hella, not the kind of an argument that made you mad or resentful but one in which neither could understand the other. Just depressing and sad.

The street Wolf and Mosca followed led down a hill from the Rathskellar, past the area of light shed by the Red Cross Club, the music from it trailing after them like a ghost through the ruins. Past the Police Building with its searchlight that imprisoned the jeeps in a white blinding pool of light cut from the surrounding darkness, and then descending the hill, steep as a well, they left the heart of the city and became part of the black night, and though they must have walked for some time it seemed almost a moment to Mosca before Wolf had knocked on a door, and they were inside some place, out of the cold.

In the room there was a large table, four chairs around it These were the only pieces of furniture. Against the walls were stacks of merchandise over which brown Army blankets had been hastily thrown. There were no windows, and the room was hazy with smoke.

Mosca could hear Wolf saying something, introducing him to the little almost dwarflike German before him, and though the closeness of the room brought the nausea back he made an effort to listen, bring everything into focus.

“You know what he is interested in,” Wolf was saying. “Money, only money. American scrip.”

The German shook his head. “I have asked, I have asked all around. No one has the amount you say. That I know. I can buy a few hundred dollars, but that is the most possible.”

Mosca broke in, enunciating slowly what he had been taught to say. “I am interested in selling a great quantity at one time. Five thousand cartons minimum.”

The little German looked at him with respect and awe and his voice was filled with envious greed. “Five thousand
cartons, OH OH OH.” He thought of it dreamily and then said with a brisk, businesslike air, “However, I will keep an eye out, have no fear. A drink before you go? Freidl,” he called. A woman opened an inner door and peered out. “Schnapps,” the German shouted as if he were calling a dog's name, bringing it to heel. The woman disappeared and reappeared a few minutes later with a thin, white bottle and three small water glasses. Behind her came a small boy and girl, golden-haired but with dirty, red-splotched faces.

Wolf crouched on his haunches. “Ah, what beautiful children,” he exclaimed. From his briefcase he took four bars of chocolate and extended a pair to each.

The father stepped between them and reaching out took the chocolate into his own hands. “No,” he said, “it is too late for them to eat candy.” He went to one of the foot lockers resting against the wall and when he turned to face them his hands were empty. “Tomorrow, my children,” he said. The boy and girl turned away sullenly. As Wolf and Mosca lifted their drinks the woman said something sharply in a dialect they could not understand. The man gave her a warning and threatening look. “Tomorrow, I have said. Tomorrow.”

Mosca and Wolf left, and in the dark street, lit only by a single yellow windowpane they could hear the shrill voices of man and wife, voices raised in menacing anger, fear, and hate.

The white, homemade potato schnapps, almost as strong and raw as alcohol, warmed Mosca but added to the blackness of the winter night. He was unsteady and stumbled often. Finally Wolf stopped and held his arm and asked in a concerned voice, “You wanta call it off for tonight, Walter, and go home?” Mosca shook his head at Wolfs pasty-white face, luminous and cold as death in the darkness before him. They started to walk again. Wolf slightly ahead, Mosca following, straining against the cold wind and the physical nausea in his body. He thought of how Hella had said the same words to him that afternoon.

She had been wearing one of the dresses he had given her for the Christmas just past. Ann Middleton had let
him use her clothing card at the Army store. Hella had watched him take the little Hungarian pistol from the wardrobe and slip it into the pocket of his short coat. Then she asked him quietly, “Don't you want to go home?”

He knew what she meant. The marriage ban against Germans had beat lifted a few days before Christmas and now more than a month later he had done nothing about putting in his papers for permission to marry. And she knew that this was because once they were married they would have to leave Germany and go back to the States. And he answered, “No, I can't right now, I have six months to go on my job contract.’

She had been hesitant, almost fearful, and when she came to kiss him good-by, as she always did when he left her, even for a few hours, she said, “Why don't you read the letters from your family? Why don't you answer them with more than a little note?”

Against his own body he could feel the slight swelling of her rounded stomach and filling breasts. “We have to leave here sometime,” she said. And he knew that this was true. But he couldn't tell her why he couldn't go home now. That he had no real feeling for his mother or Alf, and reading their letters would be like hearing their voices crying out That the sight of the ruined city pleased him, the gaping wounds left in streets by destroyed buildings, the ragged and torn sky line as if a great, jagged ax had chopped off the top of the city's skull. That when he was home the solid, unending, wall-like streets, unmarred, secure, had made him angry, uneasy.

“We have time,” he said. “After the baby comes in June, we'll get the papers and marry.”

Hella stood away from him. “I'm not worried about that But you shouldn't treat your family so, you should at least read their letters.”

He had flared up at her and said, “Look, don't keep trying to make me do things I don't want to do.”

And she had kissed him and said, “Be careful tonight,” and he knew she would wait up for him though he had told her not to.

He could hear Wolfs voice say, “Here we are,” and see
the white face before him. There was a high stoop and they were standing in a pool of light formed by a naked bulb fastened into the face of the house. Its yellow light weakly stained the fabric of night. Mosca climbed the steps warily, holding fast to the iron rail.

“This guy is a long shot,” Wolf said as he rang the bell. “But I want you to know him. He's a jeweler, and if you want something for your girl, hell be a right guy.”

A window above their heads, above the naked lit bulb, was thrown open. Wolf tilted his head back and said, “Ah, Herr Furstenberg, good evening.”

“Please, just one moment, Herr Wolfgang.” TTie voice was mellow with sadness and age, and a despair that came natural to it

When the door opened a small bald-headed man, dark and with enormous black eyes, waited to greet them, and when Wolf introduced Mosca the German clicked his heels and bowed. “Please come up,” he said, and they climbed the stairs and went through a door to a large living-room with many pieces of furniture which included two large sofas, three or four stuffed chairs, and a grand piano. There was a large table in the center of the room and several smaller ones against the walls. On one of the sofas two young girls not more than sixteen were sitting, not dose to each other but with a space between them. Herr Furstenberg sat in this space.