Читать книгу Creep Around the Corner - Douglas Atwill - Страница 7

I’ll trade you for your candy,

some gorgeous merchandise,

My camera, it’s a dandy,

six by nine, just your size.

You want my porcelain figure? Black Market . . .

–Marlene Dietrich

CORPORAL MURGON CAUGHT up with me for his guideline lecture on life at Schloss Issel, as Sergeant-Major Tetley had requested. He came over to my table at the Bierstube Langenscheidt, across the street from the schloss, while I was waiting for Follum.

The corporal was slight and dark. He sat down without being asked and looked both ways at the other stube customers before he started to speak.

“Sergeant-Major asked me to get you up to speed. About Schloss Issel.”

“Thanks, corporal, but I’ve already been here a couple of weeks now. Mostly I figured things out for myself.”

But the corporal would not be stopped. “Don’t come here very often to the Bierstube Langenscheidt, the higher-ups notice if a new enlisted man drinks too much. Don’t miss the morning formation, and stay under the radar when it comes to leave requests. They watch men who take took much time off.”

I said, “I’m looking forward to my leave time. Paris, maybe, or London.”

“I would stick around here. Foreign travel is suspect.”

“Callard goes to France a lot, he told me.”

“I would especially avoid Callard, if I were you. He used to work with us in the Counterespionage, but high command transferred him over to Historical Section. We can’t have any questionables in Counterespionage, you know.”

I said, “I’m assigned to the Historical Section, too.”

“Oh, well.”

“Now, exactly what’s wrong with Callard?”

It was obvious that Murgon relished passing along gossip and I could not help thinking of him as a fishmonger’s wife, sleeves rolled to the elbows, trafficking poisonous stories as she wrapped the glassy-eyed purchase in newspaper. We new arrivals were the only ears that would listen, I was sure.

He said, “Callard is smart, I’ll give him that. Phi Beta Kappa from Idaho, Master’s Thesis almost done when he enlisted rather than being drafted. He can type faster than anybody else with no mistakes.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad.”

“There’s talk that he’s a fairy. Nothing definite, but all the signs are there. Goes to the ballet and the opera, drinks late at night down in the Polish Quarter.”

“All major crimes, I can see.”

“If you’re not going to take me seriously, I won’t continue.”

“Sorry, Murgon, but I go to concerts and the opera, too.”

“Well, you’re different from Callard, I can tell. He even makes a point to dress like the Germans, so he won’t be picked out as an American. There is definitely something wrong with that.”

“So a season ticket to the ballet and civilian clothes are damning evidence for Callard?”

“You’ll see. Just wait.”

Follum came to join us, but before he could say a word, I took the opportunity to leave Murgon and his tittle-tattle. “Eric, let’s go over to the club. I said I would meet Callard. Thanks for everything, Murgon.”

He glared at me as we left. As we crossed the street, Follum said, “I don’t like him much, that Murgon.”

“Creepy guy.”

A few nights later, I walked down to Callard’s room at the far end of the third floor. He had showered for the evening, dressed in slim black trousers and a black silk shirt. There was a towel around his neck, protecting his shirt while he patted a gooey substance around his eyes. A glass ampoule broken into halves stood beside the plate of goo on his footlocker.

“Belgian Elixir, Bradford. My friend Omer, the Brussels pianist at the TubeBar, smuggled a few ampoules into my pocket the other night. No mere soldier could afford them. I will, in time, give him favors in return. After five minutes on your face, he said, the elixir erases every sign of a crows-foot and those horrid marionette-mouth lines. I’ll be a teen-ager again.”

“Callard, you already look like a teen-ager, if a slightly wasted one.”

“I know, but it pays to make sure on a night like tonight. The magic lasts until midnight, though, so fast work is required. I wish you could see what will happen, but I can’t take you with me tonight.”

“You don’t look old.”

“Tonight, I definitely won’t. Every eye on my entrance to the Krakow Klub, where I pause for a moment to let the cold night air swirl about me, heads turning as snow eddies into the room. Then, cruel workers’ hands reach to touch me as I pass by their rough tables, all the men engorged with desire and, at last, walking ever so slowly, giving savor to every eye, I reach my chair at the regulars’ table, the Stammtisch, in the very middle of the Corps de Ballet. The whole table of handsome Polish regulars, the very heart of the ballet, stands with light applause, companionable hugs all around. Darling, how young you look. Herr Callard, so thin and hungry. Guten Abend, Liebchen. Sweaty bodies, joy beyond belief.”

“All this from a Belgian goo?”

“Don’t be snippy. You can come next time.”

“I’m not sure I want to come.”

“You do in your heart.”

“It scares me a bit, your night world.”

“You’ll be my young apprentice, watching my every move. With the maestro, there will be no danger.”

“We’ll see, Callard.”

He wiped away the excess ointment to reveal a startled look on his face, as if someone had clapped together a pair of pot lids behind his back. The Belgian astringent was working, but perhaps concocted with too heavy a hand.

As he walked away down the hall with his curious, almost sideways walk, he looked back over his shoulder and adjusted his black jacket and long scarf. The black beret finished his look, decidedly un-American and non-military. Four hours of bliss, then I turn into a sewer rat, he said; he dipped ever so slightly and rounded the corner.

The men of the Polish quarter were in for a surprise tonight. Or not.

The next day at lunch, Callard had recovered enough for conversation and he motioned for Follum and me to sit with him. Most of the other enlisted men shunned Callard’s table because of his gamey talk and tainted reputation. Murgon was the source of his bad standing, I was sure.

“I had the most amazing offer at the Krakow Klub last night,” he said.

Follum said, “Are you sure we want to hear?”

“Nothing salacious, Follum. There was this old woman at the Stammtisch, a Nazi widow, who reached across the table. She grabbed my hand in both of hers and said that I resembled her son, Manfred, dead at Stalingrad. So young, so sad.” He put his own hand to the side of his face, now relaxed from the rigors of Belgium.

I said, “So the elixir was already paying dividends.”

“She was most pleasant, smiling, talking to her companions about the resemblance.”

I asked, “So what was her offer?”

“Don’t rush me. I could understand a little of what she said to her friends as they all nodded their heads, but then she switched to English. Spoke it well. She asked me if I had an auto. All young men needed an automobile now, for their sweeties on the other side of town.”

“She offered you her car?”

“No, it was her son’s Mercedes. A nineteen thirty-seven four-door sedan with ‘Wasserford’ bud-vases. She bought it for him on his nineteenth birthday, pulling in favors owed his father, a high-ranking bureaucrat. Now it sits in her garage, nobody using it. Father and son both dead.”

“Is a Wasserford vase really Waterford vase?”

“I think so. She mentioned the bud-vases several times, Englischerkristal für die blumen, she said. Sehr schön.”

She’s going to give the Mercedes to you?”

“She will sell it to me, a very cheap price for her son. For Stalingrad. It does her no good there in the garage, gives her the bad memories every week when she starts the engine, to make sure it still runs.”

“How much?”

“A thousand Deutsch Marks. I immediately said yes, a thousand thanks, Frau Mueller.”

“That’s two hundred fifty dollars. Do you have that?”

“No, of course not, but I have an idea.” He put his finger to his lips and looked sideways.

Callard’s scheme was to sell cigarettes on the Black Market. We all knew that there was an active exchange in the village nights of Bad Issel. A carton of cigarettes, for which we paid one dollar at the PX, brought ten dollars down in the village. That was forty Deutsch Marks. We only needed to sell ten cartons, he said.

Follum said, “But that’s only four hundred marks.”

Callard answered, “I have a little tucked away from another enterprise.”

I said, “I don’t want to be involved in the Black Market, Callard. And I speak for Follum, too. It’s highly illegal and too risky. A life sentence in the stockade.”

“No problem, my betters taught me how to disappear into walls when needed, to blend with the night, to creep around the corner. I’ll do all the undercover work. Just buy me your monthly allotment of four cartons each. I’ll use two from my allotment, and, there we have it, four hundred marks plus my stash makes a thousand.”

Weeks ago Follum and I had talked about how it would be to have a car, to be able to drive away from Bad Issel on weekends, but an enlisted man could not make a dent in such a purchase. My pay was sixty dollars a month, Follum’s fifty-five. Here was the possibility of partial ownership, just for giving up the cigarettes that neither of us smoked.

I said, “Callard, we’ll do it for full half-ownership, a quarter for Follum and a quarter for me.”

“Where did you learn to bargain, Bradford? So harshly with such a dear friend? Very unlike what I know of other gentle West Texans.”

I knew that now was the time to press our advantage. “Half the time we get to use the car without you. Fair?”

He considered for a few seconds, then said, “Fair.”

We bought our month’s quota of cigarettes the next weekend and gave them to Callard. He reported back later about his dealings in Bad Issel. He asked around the village fountain before taking any cigarettes down there. An old man told him that the market was designed to confuse the authorities, to make a trail the polizei cannot follow.

A potential seller went into the Issel Stube and ordered a glass of beer, asking if the accordionist could play the third verse of Lilli Marlene. This signaled that there were three cartons for sale. The fifth verse would mean five cartons. The waitress would be shocked and say it was forbidden to play that song, but she would ask. If the market was in operation that night, she said yes when she returned with the beer, Alles ist gut. Of course, the accordionist would not really play it.

Then, after a spell, the seller walked outside and across to the village fountain where a woman with a cane sat waiting. Without breaking stride, he must deposit his cartons, wrapped in brown paper, into the shoulder-bag that she briefly opened. The seller continued on quickly away in the opposite direction from the woman, who hobbled off with her fat satchel safely under one arm. This led the seller to the church door, deep-set and in the shadows, where a man or perhaps another woman paid him thirty marks. They parted without conversing. If other people loitered around the fountain, there would be no market. If there was a full moon, there would be no market.

Callard said, “It took me four trips up and down the hill, but here it all is.” He had a stack of mark notes, our contribution and his own. Follum went with Callard on Sunday to buy the Mercedes from the widow in case his mechanic’s expertise might be needed to get it going again. By late afternoon, they pulled into the usually vacant slot marked “Enlisted Parking” in the forecourt of Schloss Issel. They had detoured by the Bad Issel cemetery to snip the last of autumn’s roses, now fragrant in the bud-vases. We drove triumphantly around Bad Issel, turning on and off the headlights in full daylight, running the windshield wipers on dry glass and lightly honking the horn.

He said, “I told Frau Mueller that the vases would always have roses for Stalingrad. Tonight I will drive to the Krakow Klub. All my dear Polskis will come out to the curb and admire. I’ll have my absolute pick.”

I said, “Don’t forget, half the time is for Follum and me.”

“Such a waste. The pride of Stuttgart could be yours with a single honk.”

“Drive carefully, Callard. We want our half back, undented.”