A Quiet Flame

Unlike Grund, I usually tried to avoid sounding righteous about Berlin’s famous sex scene. What did we expect might happen to women in a country with almost two million German men dead in the war and perhaps as many people dead again—my own wife included—from the influenza? What did we expect might happen after the Bolshevik Revolution—with the country full of Russian immigrants—and the inflation and the depression and the unemployment? What did convention and morality matter when everything else—money, work, life itself—turned out to be so utterly unreliable? But it was hard not to feel a little outraged at the trade going on around the north end of Oranienburger Strasse. It was difficult not to wish fire from the air to purge Berlin of this illicit trade in human flesh when you contemplated the life of the washed-up, stone-faced, outcast prostitutes collectively known as gravel. You wanted a woman with one leg, one eye, or a hunchback, or hideous scars, you went to the north end of Oranienburger Strasse and raked through the gravel. You found them in the shadows—standing in the doorway of the defunct Stork’s Nest, or in the old Kaufhaus arcade, or sometimes inside a club called the Blue Stocking, on the corner of Linenstrasse.

There were plenty of women we could have spoken to, but I was looking for one woman in particular—a whore named Gerda—and, not finding her on the street, I decided we should try inside the Blue Stocking.

The spanner on the door sat on a tall stool in front of the cash office. His name was Neumann and, occasionally, I used him as an informer. He’d once been a runner for the Dragonfly ring that operated out of Charlottenburg, only now he wouldn’t go anywhere near the area, having double-crossed them somehow. For a spanner, Neumann wasn’t all that tough, but he had the kind of beaten, criminal face that made people think he might not care what happened to him, which sometimes amounts to a simulacrum of toughness. Plus (I happened to know) he kept an American baseball bat behind his stool and wasn’t slow to use it.

“Commissar Gunther,” he said nervously. “What brings you to the Blue Stocking?”

“I’m looking for a garter-snapper.”

Neumann grinned a grin so carious his teeth looked more like the discarded butts of twenty cigarettes. “Aren’t they all, sir?” he said. “The fritzes who waltz in here.”

“This one is gravel,” I said.

“I wouldn’t have thought you was the type for that kind of trade.” His grin widened horribly, as he enjoyed what he hoped might be my embarrassment.

“Stop thinking I feel awkward asking about her, because I don’t,” I said. “The only thing I feel awkward about is your dentist’s feelings, Neumann. Her name is Gerda.”

The teeth disappeared behind thin, cracked lips that were all twitchy, like an angler with a hook in his mouth.

“You mean like the little girl what rescues her brother, Kay, in The Snow Queen?”

“That’s right. Only this one’s not so little. Not anymore. Plus, she’s short of an arm and a leg, not to mention a few teeth and half her liver. Now, is she here, or am I going to have to give the lads in E a call?”

E was Inspectorate E, the part of Department IV that dealt with all matters relating to morals—or more, usually, the lack of them.

“No need to be like that, Herr Gunther. Just having a bit of fun, that’s all.” He lifted a dog-trainer’s clicker off a chain on his belt and clicked it loudly, three times. “What happened to that sense of humor of yours, Commissar?”

“With each plebiscite it seems to get smaller.”

At the sound of the dog clicker, the door that led down into the club opened from the inside. At the top of a steep flight of stairs stood another spanner, only this one was wearing muscle.

Neumann chuckled. “Bloody Nazis,” he said. “I know just what you mean, Commissar. Everyone says they’ll close us all down the minute they get in.”

“I sincerely hope so,” remarked Grund.

Neumann shot him a look of quiet distaste. “Gerda’s downstairs,” he said stiffly.

“How does she get downstairs with one leg and one arm?” asked Grund.

Neumann looked at me and then at Grund, with a smile dancing on the cracked playground of his lips. “Slowly,” he said, and let out a roar of laughter that I enjoyed as much as he did.

Grund wasn’t laughing. “Think you’re a comedian, do you?” he said.

“Forget about it,” I told Grund, pushing him through the door and into the club. “You walked right into that one.”

Gerda wasn’t yet thirty, although you wouldn’t have known it. She could easily have passed for about fifty. We found her sitting in a wheelchair within spitting distance of a small stage where a zither-player and a striptease dancer were having a competition to see which of them could look more bored. By my reckoning, the striptease dancer had it won by a couple of droopy tits. On the table in front of Gerda stood a bottle of cheap schnapps, doubtless paid for by the man seated beside her, who, on closer inspection, turned out to be a woman.

“Go and plaster it,” I told the bubi.