At the bottom of the stairs was a cloakroom where a girl was filing her nails or reading a magazine and sometimes she managed to do both at the same time. You could tell that she was clever. She had dark hair and plenty of it but it was tied up like a velvet curtain at the back of her head. She was thin and she was wearing a black dress and I suppose she was good-looking in an obvious sort of way, which, lacking all subtlety, is the way I usually like my women; but she wasn’t Arianne Tauber.
I waited for the girl to finish her nail or her picture caption and to notice me and that seemed to take longer than it ought to have done with the lights on.
‘This is a cloakroom, isn’t it?’
She looked up, gave me the up and down and then, with a well-manicured hand, ushered my eyes to the coats – some of them made of fur – that were hanging on the rail behind her.
‘What do those look like? Icicles?’
‘From here it looks as if I’m in the wrong line of work. You, too, if I’m not mistaken. I had the strange idea that you’re supposed to be the first line of welcome in this upmarket shell-hole.’
I took off my coat and laid it on the counter and she stared at it with distaste for a moment before dragging it away like she was planning to kill it and then handing me a ticket.
‘Is Arianne here tonight?’
‘Arianne?’
‘Arianne Tauber. That’s Tauber as in Richard Tauber, only I wouldn’t like to have him sitting on my lap.’
‘She’s not here right now.’
‘Not here as in not working or not here as in she just stepped outside for a few minutes?’
‘Who wants to know?’
‘Just tell her that Parsifal is here. That’s Parsifal as in the Holy Grail. Talking of which, I’ll be in the bar if she does show up.’
‘You and everyone else, I guess. There’s the bar and then there’s the bar, see? And if you get bored in there you can try the bar. That’s bar as in Jockey Bar.’
‘You were listening after all.’
I went into the bar. The place needed a coat of paint and a new carpet, but not as much as I needed a drink and a set of earplugs. I like music when I’m drinking. I even like jazz, sometimes, just so long as they remember where they left the melody. The band at the Jockey Bar was a three-piece trio, and while they knew all the notes of ‘Avalon’ these were in no particular order. I sat down at a table and picked up the drinks card. The prices felt like mustard gas on my eyeballs and when I’d picked myself off the floor, I ordered a beer. The waitress came back almost immediately carrying a tray on which stood a tall glass filled with gold, which was the nearest thing to the Holy Grail I’d seen since the last time I bought a forty-pfennig stamp. I tasted it and found myself smiling like an idiot. It tasted exactly like beer.
‘I must be dead.’
‘That can be arranged,’ said a voice.
‘Oh?’
‘Take a look around, Parsifal. This louse house is jumping with important Nazis. Any one of these stuffed shirts could pick up the telephone and get you a seat on tomorrow’s partisan express.’
I stood up and pulled out a chair for her. ‘I’m impressed. That you know about the partisan express.’
The partisan express was what German soldiers called the troop train that travelled between Berlin and the eastern front.
‘I’ve got a brother in the Army,’ she explained.
‘That’s hardly an exclusive club. Not any more.’
‘Nor is this place. I guess that must be why they let you in.’ Arianne Tauber smiled and sat down. ‘But you can buy me a drink, if you like.’
‘At these prices? It would be cheaper to buy you a Mercedes Benz.’
‘What would be the point? You can’t get the petrol. So a drink will do just fine.’
I waved the waitress toward me and let Arianne order a beer for herself.
‘Got any more of those Ami cigarettes?’
‘No,’ I lied. Buying her a beer felt extravagant enough without throwing caution out of the window and giving her a smoke as well.
She shrugged. ‘That’s all right. I’ve got some Luckies.’
Arianne reached for her bag, and that gave me time to have another look at her. She was wearing a plain navy-blue dress with short sleeves. Around her waist was a purple leather belt with a series of shiny black or maybe blue lozenges that were arranged like the jewels on a crown. On her shoulder was an interesting bronze brooch of the Hindu goddess Kali. Her purple leather bag was round and on a long strap and a bit like a water-carrier, and out of it she took a silver cigarette box with three bits of inlaid turquoise that were as big as thrush eggs. On the side there was a little matching compartment for a lighter but which contained a roll of banknotes, and for a moment I pictured her lighting a cigarette with a five-mark note. As a way of wasting money that was only a little less profligate than buying a girl a drink at the Jockey Bar.
