It was a big round room with small round tables around a big round dance floor. The floor was mostly given over to a mechanical horse on which the club hostesses and female customers were invited to take a musical ride and, in the process, flash a stocking-top or something more intimate. If you’d had a lot of beer it was possibly a lot of fun, but in the middle of Berlin’s drought, a quiet game of cribbage had it beat.
One of the hostesses was perhaps the last black woman in Berlin. Her name was Ella. She sat at a table playing Solitaire using a pack of cards featuring photographic portraits of our beloved Nazi leaders. I joined her and watched for a while and she said that it improved her luck so I bought her a glass of lemonade and talked out the right cards for her; and when I gave her one of my precious American cigarettes she was all smiles and offered to ride the horse for me.
‘For fifty pfennigs you can see my thighs. For seventy-five you can see the mouse and everything in its mouth. I’m not wearing any underwear.’
‘Actually I was rather hoping to see Fräulein Tauber.’
‘She doesn’t work here any more. Not for a long time.’
‘Where does she work now?’
Ella took a lazy puff of her cigarette and remained silent.
I pushed a note across the table. There were no pictures on it like the ones on the backs of the cards but she hardly minded about that. I let her reach for it and then put my finger on the little black eagle in the corner.
‘Is she at the New World?’
‘That dump? I should say not. She tell you that she works there?’ She laughed. ‘It means she doesn’t want to see you again, darling. So why don’t you forget her and watch me ride that pony.’
The Negress was tapping Morse code on the other end of the bill. I let it go and watched it disappear into a brassiere as large as a barrage balloon.
‘So, where
‘Arianne? She runs the cloakroom at the Jockey Bar. Has for a while. For a girl like Arianne, there’s plenty of money to be made at the Jockey.’
‘In the cloakroom?’
‘You can do a lot more in a cloakroom than just hang a coat, honey.’
‘I guess so.’
‘We got a cloakroom here, Fritz. It’s nice and dark in there. For five marks, I could take real care of all your valuables. In my mouth, if you wanted.’
‘You’d be wasting your time, Ella. The only reason they let me come back from the front was because I don’t have any valuables. Not any more.’
‘I’m sorry. That’s too bad. Nice-looking fellow like you.’
Her face fell a little and, for a moment, seeing her sympathy, I felt bad about lying to her like that. She had a kind way about her.
I changed the subject.
‘The Jockey,’ I said. ‘Sure I know it. It’s that place off Wittenberg Platz, on Luther Strasse. Used to be a Russian place called Yar.’
The Negress nodded.
‘I’ve only ever seen it from the outside. What’s it like?’
‘Expensive. Full of Amis and big-shots from the Foreign Ministry. They still play American jazz there. The real stuff. I’d go myself but for one rather obvious disadvantage. Coloureds ain’t welcome.’
I frowned. ‘The Nazis don’t like anyone except Germans. You should know that by now, gorgeous.’
She smiled. ‘Oh, I wasn’t talking about them. It’s the Amis who don’t like coloureds in the place.’
From the outside, the Jockey Bar certainly sounded like the old Berlin from before the war with its easy morals and vulgar charms. Others thought so too. A small crowd of jazz fans stood on the sidewalk in the dark enjoying the music but unwilling to pay the prohibitive cost of going inside. To save paying the entrance fee myself I flashed the beer-token in my raincoat – a little brass oval that said I was police. Unlike most Berlin cops I’m not fond of trying to score a free one off an honest business, but the Jockey Bar was hardly that. Five marks just to walk downstairs was little better than theft. Not that there weren’t plenty of people already down there who seemed more than willing to be robbed. Most of them were smart types, with quite a few wearing evening dress and Party buttons. They say crime doesn’t pay. Not as well as a job does at the Foreign Office or the Ministry of Propaganda. There were also plenty of Americans, as Ella had said there would be. You could recognize them by their loud ties and their even louder voices. The Jockey Bar was probably the one place in Berlin you could speak English without some fool in a uniform trying to remind you that Roosevelt was a gangster, a Negroid maniac, a warmonger in a wheelchair, and a depraved Jewish scoundrel; and the Germans who really disliked him had some even more unpleasant things to say.
