The shorter man flinched under the blow and scowled unhappily, but he called the waiter to his side, and ordered drinks. Ulla was speaking with Karla in a mixture of German and English that, by accident or intent, obscured the most interesting parts of her conversation.
"How could I know it, _na? How was it possible for me to know that he was a Spinner? Total verruckt, I tell you. At the start, he looked totally straight to me. Or, maybe, do you think that was a sign? Maybe he was a little bit too straight looking. _Na _ja, ten minutes in the room and er wollte auf der Klamotten kommen. On my best dress! I had to fight with him to save my clothes, der Sprintficker! Spritzen wollte er, all over my clothes! Gibt's ja nicht. And later, when I went to the bathroom for a little sniff of cokes, I came back to see dass er seinen Schwanz ganz tief in einer meiner Schuhe hat! Can you believe it!
In my shoe! _Nicht _zu _fassen."
"Let's face it," Karla said gently, "The crazy ones always know how to find you, Ulla."
"Ja, leider. What can I say? Crazy people love me."
"Don't listen to her, Ulla my love," Didier consoled her.
"Craziness is the basis of many a fine relationship. In fact, craziness is the basis of every fine relationship!"
"Didier," Ulla sighed, mouthing his name with a smile of exquisite sweetness, "have I told you to get fucked yet?"
"No!" he laughed, "But I forgive you for the lapse. Between us, my darling, such things are always implied, and understood."
The whisky arrived, in four small flasks, and the waiter prised the tops off two soda bottles with a brass bottle opener that hung from a chain at his belt. He let the tops bounce on the table and fall to the floor, then swished a grimy rag over the wet surface of the table, forcing us to duck and weave as the moisture spilled in all directions.
Two men approached our table from different parts of the restaurant, one to speak to Didier and the other with Modena.
Ulla used the moment to lean close to me. Under the table she pressed something into my hand-it felt like a small roll of bank notes-and her eyes pleaded with me not to draw attention to it.
As she talked to me, I slipped the notes into my pocket without looking at them.
"So have you decided how long you're going to stay?" she asked.
"I don't really know. I'm in no hurry."
"Don't you have someone waiting for you somewhere, or someone you should go to?" she asked, smiling with adroit but passionless coquetry. Seduction was a habit with her. She turned that same smile on her customers, her friends, the waiters, even on Didier, whom she openly disliked-on everyone, in fact, including her lover, Modena. In the months and years that followed, I heard a lot of people criticise Ulla, some of them cruelly, for her flirtations. I didn't agree with them. It seemed to me, as I got to know her well, that she flirted with the world because flirting was the only real kindness she ever knew or shared: it was her way of being nice, and of making sure that people-men- were nice to her. She believed that there wasn't enough niceness in the world, and she said so, in exactly those words, more than once. It wasn't deep feeling, and it wasn't deep thinking, but it was right, as far as it went, and there was no real harm in it.
And what the hell, she was a beautiful girl, and it was a very good smile.
"No," I lied. "There's no-one waiting, and no-one I should go to."
"And don't you have any, wie soll ich das sagen, any program? Any plan?"
"Not really. I'm working on a book."
During the time since the escape, I'd learned that telling people a small part of the truth-that I was a writer-provided me with a useful and flexible cover story. It was vague enough to explain extended stays or sudden departures, and the word research was comprehensive enough to account for inquiries about certain subjects, such as transport and travel and the availability of false documents, that I was sometimes forced to make. Moreover, the cover story guaranteed me a measure of privacy: the simple threat to tell people, at length, of my work in progress usually discouraged all but the most persistently curious.
