Читать книгу Berlin Game - Len Deighton - Страница 13

It was cold; damned cold: when the hell would summer come? With my hands in my pockets and my collar turned up, I walked through Soho. It was early evening but most of the shops were closed, their entrances piled high with garbage awaiting next morning’s collection. It had become a desolate place, its charm long lost behind a pox of porn shops and shabby little ‘adult’ cinemas. I welcomed the smoky warmth of Kar’s Club, and I welcomed the chance of one of the hot spiced rum drinks that were a speciality of the place no less than the chess.

Kar’s Club was not the sort of place that Tessa would have liked. It was below ground level in Gerrard Street, Soho, a basement that had provided storage space for a wine company before an incendiary bomb burned out the upper storeys in one of the heavy German air raids of April 1941. It was three large interconnecting cellars with hardboard ceilings and noisy central heating, its old brickwork painted white to reflect the lights carefully placed over each table to illuminate the chessboards.

Jan Kar was a Polish ex-serviceman who’d started his little club when, after coming out of the Army at war’s end, he realized he’d never return to his homeland again. By now he was an old man with a great mop of fine white hair and a magnificent drinker’s nose. Nowadays his son Arkady was usually behind the counter, but the members were still largely Poles with a selection of other East European émigrés.

There was no one there I recognized, except two young champions in the second room whose game had already attracted half a dozen spectators. Less serious players, like me, kept to the room where the food and drink were dispensed. It was already half full. They were mostly elderly men, with beards, dark-ringed eyes and large curly pipes. In the far corner, under the clock, two silent men in ill-fitting suits glowered at their game and at each other. They played impatiently, taking every enemy in sight, as children play draughts. I was seated in the corner positioned so that I could look up from the chessboard, my book of chess problems and my drink, to see everyone who entered as they signed the members’ book.