The Eighth Dwarf (15 page)

The Golden Rose was the only building in its block that had been spared—partially spared, anyway. It once had been a three-story building, but now the top story was completely gone. The second story was gone too, except for a bathroom, although its walls had also vanished, leaving the tub and toilet exposed. They both looked curiously naked.

Bodden entered the Golden Rose, pushing his way through the inevitable heavy curtain. Inside, several candles had been stuck here and there to help out the weak single electric bulb that hung by a long cord from the ceiling. Under it, perhaps to catch what little heat it afforded, real or imaginary, was the proprietor, leaning on the counter that served as a bar. The proprietor was a thin man with a fire-scarred face and bitter eyes. He looked up at Bodden; muttered
“Guté MOR-je”
in the Frankfurt accent, despite the fact that it was long past noon; and went back to the newspaper he had been reading. The paper was the American-controlled
Frankfurter Rundschau.
The bitter-eyed man didn't seem to like what it said.

Bodden said good morning back to the man and then waited for his eyes to adjust themselves to the gloom. There were several persons, mostly men, sitting alone at tables with glasses of thin beer before them. All still wore their hats, overcoats—and gloves, if they had them. The Golden Rose had no heat.

The young woman in the fur coat sat at a table by herself. There was nothing on the table, only her folded hands. Bodden walked back to where she sat, but before he could sit down she said, “Have you eaten?”

“Not since yesterday.”

She rose. “Come,” she said.

Bodden followed her past the proprietor and back to a curtained-off passageway. Beyond the passageway was a flight of stairs that led down to the cellar. It seemed to grow warmer as Bodden and the woman descended the stairs. Bodden also thought he could smell food. Pork, by God.

He and the woman pushed through yet another heavy curtain and entered a whitewashed room lit by two bulbs, this time, and a number of candles. A middle-aged woman stood before a large coal cookstove stirring a pot of something that bubbled. She looked around at the young woman in the fur coat; nodded in recognition, if not in welcome; and gestured with the spoon toward one of the six tables.

All the tables were empty except for one. At it sat a heavy, well-dressed man with pink jowls. Before him was a plate filled with boiled potatoes and a thick slab of pork. The man was cramming a forkful of potatoes into his mouth. He seemed to find no pleasure in his food. That one is just feeding the furnace, Bodden thought, and realized that his own mouth was watering.

The young woman chose the table that was the farthest away from the eating man.

“We will eat first,” she said.

“A fine idea, but I cannot pay.”

The woman shrugged slightly and brought a hand out of the pocket of her coat. In it were two packages of Camel cigarettes.

“One packet of these will pay for the meal,” she said, and slid them across the table to Bodden. “And a drink too, if you wish.”

“I wish very much,” Bodden said, eyeing the cigarettes.

“Smoke them, if you like,” the woman said. “There are more.”

He lit one just as the middle-aged woman approached. Her eyes were as bitter as the man's upstairs, and Bodden tried to guess whether she and the man were husband and wife or brother and sister. He decided on husband and wife. They sometimes grow to look alike, he thought, if they live together long enough and discover that they hate it

“Yes,” the middle-aged woman said, and sniffed noisily, as though she had a bad cold.

“Pay her first,” the young woman told Bodden. He handed over the unopened cigarette package.

“We'll have two plates of what the big one back there is stuffing himself with,” the young woman ordered crisply. “And buttered bread, too.”

“No butter, just bread,” the middle-aged woman said, and sniffed again.

The young woman shrugged. “Very well, then two
Schnapps.
Two large ones.”

The woman sniffed noisily for the third time, swallowed what she had sniffed, and went away. The
Schnapps
that she brought back turned out to be potato gin. Bodden took a big swallow of his, felt it burn its way down and spread warmly through his stomach.

“A drink, a cigarette, a meal on the way, and a pretty companion,” he said. “One would almost think that we were living in a civilized world.”

“If that's your idea of civilization,” the young woman said, shrugging out of her fur coat and letting it drape itself over the back of her chair.

“My needs, like my tastes, have been reduced to the basics,” Bodden said, and allowed his gaze to rest for a moment on the woman's breast, which thrust at the gray material of her dress. This one, he told himself, has been eating better than I thought.

“You can't afford me, printer,” she said, but there was no asperity in her tone.

“Ah, you know my trade.”

“But not your name.”

“Bodden.”

“Bodden,” she said. “Well, Herr Bodden, welcome to Frankfurt, or what's left of it. I am Eva. I don't think we need to shake hands. It would only draw attention.”

Bodden smiled. “You are very careful.”

“That is how I have survived; by being very careful. You were in a camp, weren't you?”

“Does it show?”

She studied him with frank curiosity. “In the eyes. They look as though they still ached. What landed you in a camp, printer—your politics?”

“My big mouth.”

“You advertised your politics, then.”

“Sometimes. And you?”

“I'm a Jew. Or rather, a half-Jew. A
Mischling.
I had friends during the war who kept both me and my politics hidden away out of sight. I would not have lasted in a camp. Tell me something; how did you?”

Bodden shrugged. “I played politics, the practical kind. I was a Social Democrat, but after they locked me up I saw that the Communists ate better than the Social Democrats and lived better, so I became a Communist.”

“Your reasons,” she said after a moment. “I like them.”

“Why?”

“They are better than mine.”

The woman brought the food then, two large platters of pork and potatoes. They both ate hungrily in silence. When he was finished, Bodden sighed, leaned back in his chair, and permitted himself the luxury of another American cigarette. He smoked and watched the young woman finish her meal. She eats like the fat one over there with the pink face, he thought. Without joy.

The woman who said her name was Eva finished her meal and arranged her knife and fork carefully on her plate. There were no napkins, so she took a small lace handkerchief from her purse and patted her lips with it.

“Now,” she said, “we will have a nice cup of coffee and a cigarette and talk about Kurt Oppenheimer.”

The middle-aged woman with the sniffles apparently had been waiting for Eva to finish her meal, for she brought two cups of coffee just as Bodden lit the young woman's cigarette.

“No milk, just sugar,” the middle-aged woman said, put the two cups down with a rattle, and went away.

Bodden leaned over his cup and inhaled deeply through his nose. “Damned if it isn't real coffee.”

Eva watched as he took his first sip. “What instructions did Berlin give you?”

“Simple ones. Too simple, probably. I'm to find him, to isolate him, and to wait.”

“For further instructions.”

“From whom?”

Bodden stared at her for a moment and then grinned. “From you.”

Eva returned his gaze for several seconds, then dropped it, picked up her cup, and gave her full attention to it.

“You seem surprised,” Bodden said. “Or maybe puzzled.”

“Perhaps both,” she said.

“There are deep thinkers in Berlin. Very deep. I no longer question their instructions. I did a couple of times and it seemed to hurt their feelings. For example, I came across at Lübeck, in the British Zone. Do you know Lübeck?”

“I was there once long ago.”

“A plesant-enough place. Well, I did not sneak across. No, I came across with a certain amount of fanfare. There was an old man in Lübeck, a printer like myself. Two days before I arrived, his leg was broken by some DP's. I was promptly given his job on the newspaper. It was not, I'm afraid, a coincidence that the old man's leg was broken. I paid a call on him once—took him some tobacco, in fact. He was a wise old sort—tremendously well read. A lot of printers are, you know. He even thought it was lucky for the paper that I happened to show up when I did. I didn't disabuse him of his notion. Then there was my landlady, Frau Schoettle. Her name was Eva too. Well, Frau Schoettle was equally interesting in her own way. She reported regularly on her roomers to a certain British captain. His name was Richards, I believe. It would seem, would it not, unwise for me to take a room at Frau Schoettle's? But those were my instructions from the deep thinkers in Berlin, the instructions which I no longer question.”

There was another silence as Eva watched Bodden take several sips of his coffee.

“Berlin wanted them to know,” she said. “The British.”

“So it would seem. But the British not only knew I had arrived, they also knew that I was coming, and, thanks to Frau Schoettle, they knew when I left. A yellow-haired man went with me—as far as Hamburg. We somehow lost each other there.”

“What are you telling me, printer?”

“I'm not sure.”

She bit her lower lip—chewed it, actually—for several seconds and said, “How much did Berlin tell you about Kurt Oppenheimer?”

“Very little. He kills people. So far, it would seem that those he killed have needed killing. He killed such people during the war; and now the war is over, he is still doing it. He kills with a certain amount of dispatch and efficiency. I did not ask, but I suppose that Berlin could make use of such a man.”

Eva looked down at her coffee, which was growing cold. “I knew him before the war.”

“Ah.”

“It begins to make sense, does it, printer?”

“A little.”

“Your instructions will come from me, if they do, not because I am well trained and cunning or even clever, but because I knew the Oppenheimers before the war. The sister and I were close friends, very close. I knew him too, of course. In fact, in '36, when he was twenty-two and I was fifteen, I had a schoolgirl's thing about him. I thought him very handsome and sophisticated. He thought I was a brat, naturally. I slept with his handkerchief under my pillow for months. I stole it from him. It had his initials on it, K.O.” She smiled then—a sad, winsome sort of smile that spoke of better days. The smile suddenly went away, so quickly that Bodden was almost convinced that it had never appeared. When it comes to smiling, he thought, I'm afraid this one is out of practice.

Looking not at Bodden but at her coffee cup, Eva said, “The sister. Her name is Leah.” She looked up then and made her voice assume a neutral, indifferent tone. “She will arrive in Frankfurt two days from now. She will stay with me. She is coming here to find her brother.”

“Ah,” Bodden said.

“It begins to make even more sense, printer, doesn't it?”

“In a complicated way.”

Eva reached for another cigarette. “There's more, which you may as well know. It will provide you with further evidence as to why Berlin chose me not for my beauty or brains, but because of my—well—convenience, I suppose. I have a lover.”

He grinned. “And I am desolate.”

“An American.”

Bodden tapped the pack of Camels. “You're right: I can't afford you.”

“A carefully chosen American.”

“Berlin's choice or yours?”

“Mine first—and then Berlin's. They approved most heartily. We have much in common, this American of mine and I. First, there is the fact that he is a Jew—an American Jew, but a Jew nonetheless. His name is Meyer. Lieutenant LaFollette Meyer. Do you speak any English?”

“A bit.”

“I call him Folly.”

Bodden smiled. “But not in public.”

“No, in bed. He calls me Sugar.” She shrugged. “He is a nice boy. Not simple, but a bit naive. His army has given him an assignment. In fact, that is how we met. His assignment is to find Kurt Oppenheimer.”

“Well, now.”

“He came to question me because I had known the Oppenheimers. It seemed too good an opportunity to pass up. So after checking with Berlin, I took him as a lover.”

“Does he talk to you about his work?”

“Incessantly. He thinks that we are to be married.”

“Sometime you must tell me what he talks about.”

“I will. But for now all you need to know is that he is no closer to Kurt Oppenheimer than you and I.”

Bodden grunted. “Then he will get no promotion soon.”

“But it is a big army, and they are not the only ones interested. So are the British, which should be no surprise to you.”

“None.”

“The British want to keep him out of Palestine,” she said.

“Ah.”

“What does ‘ah' mean?”

“Perhaps that the deep thinkers in Berlin would like to see him
in
Palestine.” He shrugged. “But that is not my concern, of course.”

“Or mine.”

They stared at each other for a very long moment—too long probably, because they recognized in each other something that would perhaps be better unrecognized. But Bodden made himself examine it, if only briefly. This one, he thought, does not have the true faith. No more than you do, printer.

“There is one more thing,” Eva said.

“My simple brain aches from what it has absorbed already.”

“Not so simple, I think. But there is this, and this is the last. I received a letter from Leah Oppenheimer. We have been corresponding by airmail through my Lieutenant's Army Post Office. It is quicker. In her most recent letter, Leah told me that she and her father have engaged two men to help her find her brother. One of them will be arriving in Frankfurt today. His name is Jackson. Minor Jackson.”