The Informer (6 page)

S
o, the contest began, with Mani on one side and Gaelle on the other: he wanted a demonstration of dedication, and Gaelle was willing to endure almost anything to obtain protection, to have someone to turn to when she needed help with Hauptmann. She looked at Mani with the smile of a long-distance runner who sees an amateur trying to get through a difficult course for the first time. After all, she had her experience from the park and the things she had done there. What could he do to her that she hadn’t already endured?

She resisted the notion that something else was going on here, and while she made a face when she considered it, and while she pushed it further away from her usual thinking, she found that she was still interested in that hope, that cheap perfume, as she called it, that someone might care about her. It was ridiculous on the face of it, on any evidence she could find, and yet it persisted for all the arguments against it. What could love do about the fact that she had become a spy and not even a good one? That is, if you thought a good spy was one who wasn’t going to end up in the river.

They began with the street theater. The stage for it was made in sections that were bolted together by members of the Red Front. Karl did most of the heavy lifting. He was six feet four inches tall and his hands were the size of baseball gloves and his face looked like a leather suitcase that had been dragged halfway around the world. His hair was thick, clipped short like a brush. His dark eyes had an expression of what seemed to be indifference but that Gaelle knew was the result of an interior life, one of hopes and desires that were fiercely denied. If a woman looked at him, he dropped his eyes, as though ashamed of his size, his hands, his roughness. He said that he didn’t mind being alone, since it was like a raincoat, a way of keeping
things from touching him. He said that he had gotten used to it, and once you are used to something, it doesn’t matter anymore. You even grow to like it. You can make something that hurts into a kind of honor.

He moved the sections of the stage, eight-by-four rectangles of two-by-fours and plywood, from the cart that had brought them from the Red Front’s storage loft to the site of the performance. He did this with an indifference to the weight of the things, as though not showing effort was part of his job, too.

Georg, who was a sheet metal worker whose hands were covered with scars that looked like fish bones, tried to lift the sections, too, but as soon as he picked one up, his arms trembled like the string of a bass instrument.

“Here,” said Karl. “Get out of the way. Let me have it.”

Gaelle’s job was to help one of the actresses, Alice Sokoff, get dressed. Alice was Gaelle’s age, and she stood with a straight posture, like classical sculpture, and her skin was as white as marble. She took it as her due that people would fuss over her, even members of the Red Front. Gaelle laid out her clothes. Polished her shoes, made sure the corset she wore was clean, checked the skirts to make sure that none was torn.

Mani came into the small tent that was used as a changing room behind the street theater. Outside, the sound of the stage being bolted together was like a house being built in a hurry.

“Alice’s clothes look nice on her, don’t you think?” said Mani. “But she needs help with her hair. Can you brush it?”

“Yes,” said Gaelle.

“In front of the mirror,” said Mani. “Stand behind her.”

“Sure,” said Gaelle.

She stood behind the actress and brushed the heavy blond hair, which in the dim tent still sparkled, like sand in the sunlight. Gaelle put her head next to Alice’s so that they could be seen side by side, in the mirror. Mani appeared behind them, and as Gaelle worked on the hair, the brush making a hush, hush and a crackle of electricity, she looked at Mani through the mirror and kept her eyes on his and winked. “I know what you want,” she seemed to say. “Can I take this? Can I compare myself to an untouched beautiful woman, can I fuss over her, as though proof that I have been so reduced? Can I do it without blinking an eye?”

“Makeup,” said Mani.

Gaelle took out the kit and put down a base and eyeliner and rouge, and while she worked she still glanced up at Mani and winked, almost smiling now: it was too easy. And when the performance was over, Mani came into the dressing room again and stood there while Gaelle applied cold cream over the perfect face, rubbed it onto Alice’s cheeks and then wiped it off to show the fresh skin underneath, so youthful and moist as to seem like the petal of a flower. She kept her eyes on Mani when she did this, too. Outside, the set was being struck, and the sound of it, the squeaking sigh of nails being withdrawn, the bumping of the sections of the stage being dragged by someone other than Karl, the busy gathering of tools and bolts and whatever else was left around, was like a band of gypsies trying to stay one jump ahead of someone they had cheated.

“You’re pretty,” said Gaelle.

“Do you think so?” said Alice.

“Oh, yes,” said Gaelle. “I’m in a position to know.”

“I guess that’s right,” said Alice.

“Here, let me help you,” said Gaelle.

Gaelle took off the stage gown, undid the corset, and ran her fingers over the lines that were left under Alice’s breasts, the nipples as pink as barely ripened raspberries. Gaelle used a damp cloth and washed Alice, keeping her eyes on Mani, then helped with Alice’s underthings, her clothes, and passed over Alice’s small, even dainty shoes.

“Alice has a future,” said Gaelle, as much to Mani as to anyone else.

“Yes,” said Mani. “So many people are washed up. At a young age.”

Gaelle put away the makeup, folded the clothes, packed them into a small black trunk that was used for costumes, and as she did she looked at Mani, as though to say, “You can trust me. You think that I am vain? That I will flinch? Why, you poor ninny. I gave that up so long ago that I can’t even remember.”

Outside, as Karl lifted the sections of the stage onto the cart and tied them down with a trucker’s knot, Gaelle smiled at Mani and said, “Well, is that it? Is there something else you want to do?”

“Maybe,” said Mani.

“And what can you do for me?” she said.

“Oh,” said Mani. “I can be around when you want me.”

But even so, they continued. Mani wrote a part for a play in which a woman has been scarred by a factory owner who then neglects her. He showed the part to Gaelle, who looked at it, aware of what he was asking: would she stand on the stage, in costume, and show her face to the crowds, the men and women drinking beer and eating a sausage, or just gawking because there was nothing better to do. She put down the pages and said, “Yes.”

Mani stood in the audience as she performed her part, quite convincingly, and afterward he said, “It has nothing to do with politics for you, does it?”

“Politics,” said Gaelle. “You want to know what I think of politics…. No. I’m asking for something else.”

“Sure,” said Mani as he looked around uneasily. “Sure.”

“I haven’t got time for politics,” said Gaelle. “That’s a luxury.”

“Sure,” said Mani. “Fine.”

“I haven’t got time,” she said. “I’ve done what you asked. Well?”

“All right,” said Mani. “I’ll stick up for you.”

But the contest wasn’t over, not yet. The next Saturday Mani asked Gaelle to come along with some members of the Red Front to look for a new site for the street theater, and Gaelle realized that the contest had just begun. Mani, Karl, Georg, and some others got on the train, all of them pale, their skin more the color of the scars on Georg’s hand, and as they sat down together, Gaelle looked at her hands, which were pale, too, and as the train started with a slow, deep whine, like a machine from the depths of possibility, she thought that she should get some sun, but when was there time to do that? So many people in Berlin liked to sunbathe, and she imagined how it would be to have the warm caress of the sun, but all she heard was the whine of the engines.

Two stops later, the young men got on the S-Bahn and looked around the car. They had their hair combed back in a military style, and they moved as though in a squad. The first one got on the train and glanced around until he saw Gaelle, over whom he lingered with a combination of curiosity and malice. What was she doing with the Red Front? Then the next one got on and did the same thing. They weren’t wearing uniforms,
just brown pants, white shirts, ties that were tucked between the middle buttons of a shirt. Gaelle tried to stare at the men on the other side of the car. Clean-looking thugs. Nazis.

“You knew you were going to run into them,” said Gaelle. “Right? Is that why you asked me along?”

Mani shrugged.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“And you’re going to lie to me, too,” she said.

“All right,” he said. “Are you up to this or not?”

He sat with his hands in the pockets of his leather jacket, which had cracks around the cuffs.

“We’re outnumbered,” said Mani. “Maybe you could be a distraction. You know, tug at one of them while we let them have it.”

Gaelle sat between Karl and Mani. She felt the scar on her face like a parasite, something that sucked her blood, and while it did that, it seemed to invite others to do the same, the men in the park, men like Hauptmann and Mani, too. Why, they thought they could get away with anything where she was concerned. Her vulnerability was one quality that attracted men to her in the park, and she used it when she could, but now she sat there, looking at the thugs on the other side of the train and then at Mani, who glanced back and seemed to say, Well, well? How far will you go? Can you take it? Even this? Will you let me use you in a fight like this?

No, she thought, no. Screw you.

She thought about going to work with a black eye and bruises, or worse.

“I thought you were with us,” Mani said.

“I thought …,” she said. She bit her lip.

“What?” he said. “What did you think?”

“I was hoping you might …,” she said. But then she stopped. No, this is going nowhere. How could she have even considered love, or being cared about?

Karl looked one way and then another, as though the thugs on the other side of the train were of no consequence to him. If they were looking for trouble, they had come to the right man. His certainty and his serenity alarmed Gaelle, too, since how could anyone be so oblivious to danger? He
didn’t smile at her or sneer or anything like that at all. Instead his glance, with that same appalling certainty, seemed to hit her like a light.

Mani kept ball bearings in the pocket of his coat, and now, when he reached inside, they made a click like the kiss of a pool ball. Karl rolled his shoulder, as though trying to get loose.

Gaelle had been told that a dog could tell if someone was scared, and she wondered if the young men on the other side of the train could tell, although she realized, as she looked at them, that it wouldn’t have made much difference.

Karl put his lips, as thick as sausages, next to her ear and said, “Pick one. Tug on his clothes. I’ll take it from there.” He nodded at a man on the other side of the train who had blond hair and very blue eyes, the color of a delphinium. “Him. I’ll be waiting for you.”

The S-Bahn went along the Spree, which curved through the city behind the Reichstag, the Berliner Dom, the museums, and the Lustgarten, too. A proper woman in a silk dress and furs got up and went to the door between this car and the next and pulled it open. She went through and let it slam shut behind her, without looking back.

“There’s a smart one,” said Georg.

Karl watched her go and said, “Yes. That’s a good idea. If you don’t like trouble.”

The train stopped at the Zoologischer Garten station.

“This isn’t like dressing a beautiful young woman. That’s just vanity, you know, standing up to that kind of thing when I ask you. Or letting the crowd get a look at you.”

“You’d be surprised,” said Gaelle.

Mani shrugged.

“I thought I’d see how serious you were,” he said.

“What I’ve done doesn’t count for anything? You’ve used me and then we end up like this?”

“Just pull on one of their arms,” said Mani.

“That one,” said Karl.

The young men in brown pants on the other side of the car sat straight up, all watching her, or so it seemed. It was as though they were thinking
the same thing, and for all she knew, they were. The one on the end, with the eyes as bright as a delphinium, kept staring at her. She felt the atmosphere in the car press in on her. Then she thought of the creeps she had handled in the park. That had been all right, and she had been plenty scared then, too. Then she thought of the parasitic aspect of the scar that invited all the worst from those people who looked for a flaw or a weakness to exploit.

The young men on the other side of the train stood up. Mani raised an eyebrow, and then Karl, Georg, and the others stood up, toe to toe with the men in brown pants. Gaelle stood up, too. Mani reached into his pocket for a ball bearing and made a click when one of them knocked against another. Karl lifted his large hand, and held it in a fist at the side of his chest. One of the young men looked along the line from Karl to Georg and then to Gaelle.

“What a mug,” he said. “Did you bring her along to scare us?”

“What did you say?” said Karl.

A man in a blue suit, a woman in a green dress, a boy in short pants, a young girl with a hat that had a large glass stick pin in it moved away, and as they went, they were careful not to look at the men in the white shirts or the members of the Red Front.

“You heard me,” said the same young man.

Mixed in with the muffled sound of someone being hit in the chest there was another, harder crack. Gaelle had thought this kind of fighting would be more like boxing, but instead the men shoved at one another and hit out sloppily, like struggling through brush. Karl pushed her aside. She stepped back. Three or four ended up on the floor of the train while the others stood around and kicked when they had a chance. The entire mass looked like a horse with fifteen pairs of legs that had gotten loose on the train, although it had different shoes on its feet. That same man, the one with the blue eyes, glanced in her direction.