Prague Fatale (11 page)

I nodded.

‘And as a matter of fact it’s in here that the story starts. It was during my break. Magda – she’s the girl you met, in
the cloakroom – was behind the desk and I was in the bar. When we have our break we’re supposed to come in here and have a drink with the customers. Like you and me are doing now.’

She tried on another smile. This one looked wry.

‘Some break. Frankly it’s not a break at all. The Fritzes here are generous with their drinks and their cigarettes, and usually I’m glad to get back to the cloakroom to have a rest and try to clear my head.’ She shrugged. ‘I was never much of a drinker but that kind of excuse really doesn’t work in here.’

‘I can imagine.’

I glanced around and tried not to grimace. There’s something obscene about a nightclub in wartime. All of those people having a good time while our boys are away fighting Popovs, or flying sorties over England. Somehow it didn’t feel right to have a photograph of the English film star Leslie Howard on the Jockey Club wall. For a while, after the outbreak of war, the Nazis had been sensitive enough to ban all public dancing, but following our early victories that ban had been lifted and now things were going so wonderfully for the German Army that it was thought to be fine for men and women to let down their hair and throw themselves around on a dance floor. But I didn’t care for it at all. And I liked it even less when I thought about the Fridmann sisters in the apartment beneath my own.

‘Sometimes when I go home I can hardly walk I’m so heavy with the stuff.’

‘I can see I’m going to have to come here again. This must be the only bar in Berlin where the beer still tastes like beer.’

‘But at a price. And what a price. Anyway, I was going to tell you about this fellow called Gustav and how I came to
be hanging around Nollendorfplatz in the dark the other night.’

‘Were you?’

‘Come on Parsifal, pay attention. A few nights ago when I’m in here I start talking to this Fritz. He said his name was Gustav but I have my doubts about that. He also said that he was a civil servant on Wilhelmstrasse. And that is what he looked like, I suppose. A real smooth type. Thin prick accent. Gold bird in his lapel. Silk handkerchief and spats. Oh yes, and he had this little gold cigarette holder that he brought out of a little velvet box every time he wanted a smoke. Just watching him was kind of fascinating in an irritating way. I asked him if he did that in the morning, too – I mean, if he used the little gold holder – and he said he did. Can you imagine that?’

‘I’ll give it a go.’ I shook my head. ‘No, I can’t. He sounds like a fish in a glass case.’

‘Good-looking though.’ Arianne grinned. ‘And rich. He was wearing a wristwatch and a pocket hunter and both of them were gold, just like his cufflinks and his shirt studs and his tie pin.’

‘Very observant of you.’

She shrugged. ‘What can I tell you? I like men who wear gold. It encourages me. Like a red rag to a bull. But it’s not the movement. It’s the colour. And the value, of course. Men who wear a lot of gold bits and pieces are just more generous, I suppose.’

‘And was he?’

‘Gustav? Sure. He tipped me just for lighting his cigarette. And again for sitting with him. At the end of the evening he asked me to meet him the following evening at the Romanisches Café.’

I nodded. ‘Just down from Wittenberg Platz.’

‘Yes. At eight o’clock. Anyway he was late and for a while I thought he wasn’t coming at all. It was nearer eight-twenty-five when eventually he showed up. And he was sweating and nervous. Not at all the smooth-as-silk type he’d been when we were in here the previous night. We talked for a while but he wasn’t listening. And when I asked him why he seemed so out of sorts, he came to the point. He had asked me along to the café because he had a job for me. An easy job, he said, but it was going to pay me a hundred marks. A hundred. By now I was shaking my head and telling him I wasn’t on the sledge just yet, but no, he said, it wasn’t anything like that, and what did I take him for? All I had to do was wait under the station at Nolli at nine-fifteen and give an envelope to a man who would be humming a tune.’

‘That’s nice. What was the tune?’

‘“Don’t say Goodbye, only say Adieu”.’

‘Zarah Leander. I like that one.’

‘He even hummed it for me to make sure I knew it. I had to ask the man for a light and then his name and if he said it was Paul I was to give him the envelope and walk away. Well, I could tell there was something peculiar about all this, so I asked him what was in the envelope and he said it was best I didn’t know, which didn’t make me feel any better about doing it. But then he put five pictures of Albrecht Dürer on the table and assured me that it would be the easiest hundred marks I’d ever earned. Especially in the blackout. Anyway I agreed. A hundred marks is a hundred marks.’

‘Mmm-hmm.’

‘So I rode the S-Bahn one stop east to Nolli and waited under the station just like Gustav had told me to do. I was
early. And I was scared, but the five Alberts felt good inside my stocking top. I had time to think. Too much time, perhaps, because I got greedy. That’s a bad habit of mine.’

‘You and the Austrian corporal.’

‘I kept on thinking that if I had been given a hundred from Gustav for showing up with an envelope then I might make at least another ten or twenty from Paul for handing it over. And when eventually he turned up that’s what I suggested. But Paul didn’t like that and started to get rough with me. He searched my coat pockets for the envelope. And my bag. He even searched my underwear. Took my hundred marks. And that’s when you showed up, Parsifal. You see he wasn’t trying to rape me. He was only trying to find his damned envelope.’

‘Where was it? The envelope?’

‘I didn’t have it on me when I tried to brolly him. Well, that would have been foolish. I’d already hidden it in some bushes near the taxi rank.’

‘That was clever.’

‘I thought so, too. Right up until the moment he punched me.’

‘Where is it now?’

‘The envelope? When I went back the next day to look for it, the envelope was gone.’

‘Hmm.’

She shrugged. ‘Now I really don’t know what to do. I’m scared to go to the cops and tell them. Naturally I’m worried about what was in that envelope. I’m worried that I’ve landed myself in the middle of something dangerous.’ She closed her eyes. ‘It seemed so easy when we were in the Romanisches Café. Just hand it over in the blackout and walk away. If only I’d done that.’

‘This Gustav. Have you seen him in here since?’

‘No.’

‘Does anyone else know him?’

‘No. It turns out that Magda thought his name was Josef, and that’s all she remembers. Am I in trouble, Parsifal?’

‘You might be. If you went to the police and told them about this, yes, I think you would be.’

‘So you don’t think I should tell them.’

‘With a story like yours, Arianne, the police – the real police – are the least of your worries. There’s the Gestapo to consider.’

She sighed. ‘I thought as much.’

‘Have you told your story to anyone else?’

‘God, no.’

‘Then don’t. It simply never happened. You never met anyone called Gustav or Josef in this place. And no one ever asked you to be a cut-out for them at the S-Bahn on Nollendorf Platz.’

‘A cut-out?’

‘That’s what you call it when someone wants to give something to someone else without actually meeting them. But that’s all right, too, because there was no something. No envelope. You don’t even have a hundred marks to show for it, right?’

She nodded.

I sipped the beer and wondered how it and the cigarette could taste so good and how much truth there was in what Arianne Tauber had told me. It was just about possible that Franz Koci had taken a hundred marks out of her underwear, although he’d been carrying only half as much when the cops had found him in Kleist Park. Of course, they could easily have helped themselves to half his cash. And it was
just about possible that some Foreign Office type who had an envelope for a Three Kings agent might have been spooked off a meeting and subcontracted the job to a money-hungry girl from the Jockey Bar. Stranger things had happened.

‘But I have a question for you, angel. Why are you telling me all this?’

‘In case you didn’t know, Parsifal’s not exactly a common name around here.’ She bit her thumbnail. ‘Look, in spite of what I told you, about getting all that perfume, I’m not the most popular girl around town. There are a lot of people who don’t like me very much.’

‘Sounds like we have a lot in common, angel.’

She let that one go. She was too busy talking about herself. That was good, too. To me she looked like a more interesting subject than I was.

‘Oh, sure, I’m attractive to look at. I know that. And there are a lot of men who want me to give them what men usually want women to give them but, beyond a cigarette and a drink and a tip, and maybe the odd present or two, I don’t want anything from anyone. You should know that about me. Maybe you’ve worked that out already. You seem bright enough. But what I’m trying to say is that I don’t have many friends and certainly none that are possessed of what you might call wisdom and maturity. Otto – Otto Schulze – the Fritz who runs this place, I couldn’t tell him. I can’t tell him anything. He’d tell the Gestapo, for sure. Otto likes to keep in with the Gestapo. I’m almost certain he pays them off with information: Magda, too, I think. And you’ve met Frau Lippert. So there’s no one else, see? My mother is old and lives in Dresden. My brother is on active service. But frankly he wouldn’t know what to say or do. He’s my younger brother and he looks to me for advice. But
you, Parsifal. You strike me as the type who always knows what to say or do. So, if you’re interested, there’s a part-time job going as my special counsel. It doesn’t pay very much but maybe you can think of me as someone who is in your debt.’

‘Suddenly I feel every one of my forty-three years,’ I said.

‘That’s not so old. Not these days. Just look around, Parsifal. Where are the young men? There aren’t any. Not in Berlin. I can’t remember the last time I spoke to someone less than thirty. Anyone my age is on active service or in a concentration camp. Youth is no longer wasted on the young because it’s wasted on the war instead.’ She winced. ‘Forget I said that. I shouldn’t have said that. They’re fighting for their country, aren’t they?’

‘They’re fighting for someone else’s country,’ I said. ‘That’s the problem.’

Arianne looked sly for a moment, as if she’d outsmarted me in a game of cards. ‘It’s not healthy putting your head under a falling axe, Parsifal. You could get into trouble.’

‘I don’t mind a little trouble, when it looks like you, angel.’

‘That’s what you say now. But you haven’t seen me throwing crockery.’

‘Volatile, huh?’

‘Like my boiling point was on the moon.’

‘Smart, too. I’m not sure I’m qualified to be your special counsel, Fräulein Tauber. I don’t know the boiling point on the moon from my own shoe-size.’

She glanced down at my feet. ‘I’ll bet you’re a forty-six, right?’

‘Mmm-hmm.’

‘Then, for a lot of liquids with higher vapour pressures, the boiling point and your shoe-size are probably the same.’

‘If that’s true then I’m impressed.’

‘Before the war I was a chemistry student.’

‘Why did you stop?’

‘Lack of money. Lack of opportunity. The Nazis like educated women almost as little as they like educated Jews. They prefer us to stay home polishing the hearth and stirring the pot.’

‘Not me.’

She tugged my wrist toward her and checked the time on my watch. ‘I have to go back to the cloakroom in a minute.’

‘I could wait but I might need to telephone the Reichs-bank to arrange a loan.’

‘It might be worth it, Parsifal. I finish at two. You could walk me home if you like. Better still you could drive me, if you have a car.’

‘I have a car. I just don’t have any petrol. And I’ll gladly walk you home. But I don’t think Frau Lippert would approve, do you?’

‘I said you could walk me home, not up the stairs. But if ever you did walk me up the stairs it’s actually none of her business. And she knows that, too. The other night, she was just mouthing off. If I hadn’t had that sock on the jaw I might have told her to shut up and mind her own business and she would have done. Up to a point. There’s nothing in our agreement that says I can’t have gentlemen friends in my room for a little quiet conversation. It’s hard to hear everything you say in a place like this. You need to speak up. I’m a little deaf.’

‘Now you tell me.’

‘That’s because last year I was near Kottbusser Strasse when a tame Tommy went off.’

A tame Tommy was what Berliners called an unexploded bomb.

‘It blew me through the air. Fortunately I landed in some bushes that broke my fall. But, for a few glorious moments, I thought I was dead.’