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.’
