Philip Kerr - Berlin Noir

‘What’s so special about today?’

‘I got a part in a movie.’

‘Congratulations. What’s the role?’

‘It’s an English film. Not a very big part, you understand. But there are going to be some big stars in it. I play the role of a girl at a nightclub.’

‘Well, that sounds simple enough.’

‘Isn’t it exciting?’ she squealed. ‘Me acting with Orson Welles.’

‘ The War of the Worlds fellow?’

She shrugged blankly. ‘I never saw that film.’

‘Forget it.’

‘Of course they’re not actually sure about Welles. But they think there’s a good chance they can persuade him to come to Vienna.’

‘That all sounds very familiar to me.’

‘What’s that?’

‘I didn’t even know you were an actress.’

‘You mean I didn’t tell you? Listen, that job at the Oriental is just temporary.’

‘You seem pretty good at it.’

‘Oh, I’ve always been good with numbers and money. I used to work in the local tax department.’ She leaned forward and her expression became just a little too quizzical, as if she meant to question me about my year-end business expenses. ‘I’ve been meaning to ask you,’ she said, ‘that night when you dropped all that mouse. What were you trying to prove?’

‘Prove? I’m not sure I follow you.’

‘No?’ She turned her smile up a couple of stops to shoot me a knowing, conspiratorial sort of look. ‘I see a lot of quirks, mister. I get to recognize the types. One day I’m even going to write a book about it. Like Franz Josef Gall. Ever hear of him?’

‘I can’t say that I have.’

‘He was an Austrian doctor who founded the science of phrenology. Now you’ve heard of that, haven’t you?’

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘And what can you tell from the bumps I’m wearing on my head?’

‘I can tell you’re not the kind to drop that sort of money without a good reason.’ She stretched an eyebrow of draughts-man’s quality up her smooth forehead. ‘I’ve got an idea about that too.’

‘Let’s hear it,’ I urged, and poured myself another drink. ‘Maybe you’ll make a better go of reading my mind than you did of reading my cranium.’

‘Don’t act so hard to get,’ she told me. ‘We both know you’re the kind of man that likes to make an impression.’

‘And did I? Make an impression?’

‘I’m here, aren’t I? What do you want – Tristan and Isolde?’

So that was it. She thought that I had lost the money for her benefit. To look like a big-shot.

She drained her glass, stood up and handed it back to me. ‘Pour me some more of that love potion of yours while I powder my nose.’

While she was in the bathroom I refilled the glasses with hands that were none too steady. I didn’t particularly like the woman, but I had nothing against her body: it was just fine. I had an idea that my head was going to object to this little skylark when my libido had released the controls, but at that particular moment I could do nothing more than sit back and enjoy the flight. Even so, I was unprepared for what happened next.

I heard her open the bathroom door and say something ordinary about the perfume she was wearing, but when I turned round with the drinks I saw that the perfume was all that she was wearing. Actually she had kept her shoes on, but it took my eyes a little while to work their way down past her breasts and her pubic equilateral. Except for those high-heels, Lotte Hartmann was as naked as an assassin’s blade, and probably just as treacherous.

She stood in the doorway of my bedroom, her hands hanging by her bare thighs, glowing with delight as my tongue licked my lips rather too obviously for me to have contemplated using it on anything but her. Maybe I could have given her a pompous little lecture at that. I’d seen enough naked women in my time, some of them in fair shape too. I ought to have tossed her back like a fish, but the sweat starting out on my palms, the flare of my nostrils, the lump in my throat and the dull, insistent ache in my groin told me that the machina had other ideas as to the next course of action than the deus which called it home.

Delighted with the effect she was having on me, Lotte smiled happily and took the glass from my hand.

‘I hope you don’t mind me undressing,’ she said, ‘only the gown is an expensive one and I had the strangest feeling that you were about to tear it off my back.’

‘Why should I mind? It’s not as if I haven’t finished reading the evening paper. Anyway, I like having a naked woman about the place.’ I watched the slight wobble of her behind as she walked lazily to the other side of the sitting-room where she swallowed her drink and dropped the empty glass on to the sofa.

Suddenly I wanted to see her bottom shaking like a jelly against the rut of my abdomen. She seemed to sense this and, bending forwards, took hold of the radiator like a wrestler pulling against the ring ropes in his corner. Then she stood with her feet a short way apart and stood quietly with her backside towards me, as if waiting for a thoroughly unnecessary body-search. She glanced back over her shoulder, flexed her buttocks and then faced the wall again.

I’d had more eloquent invitations, but with the blood buzzing in my ears and battering those few brain cells not yet affected by alcohol or adrenalin, I really couldn’t remember when. Probably I didn’t even care. I tore off my pyjamas and stalked after her.

I’m no longer young enough, nor quite thin enough, to share a single bed with anything other than a hangover or a cigarette. So it was perhaps a sense of surprise that woke me from an unexpectedly comfortable sleep at around six o’clock. Lotte, who might otherwise have caused me a restless night, was no longer lying in the crook of my arm and for a brief, happy moment I supposed that she must have gone home. It was then that I heard a small, stifled sob coming from the sitting-room. Reluctantly I slipped out from under the covers and into my overcoat, and went to see what was wrong.

Still naked, Lotte had made a little ball of herself on the floor by the radiator where it was warm. I squatted down beside her and asked why she was crying. A fat tear rolled down a stained cheek and hung on her top lip like a translucent wart. She licked it away and sniffed as I handed her my handkerchief.

‘What do you care?’ she said bitterly. ‘Now that you’ve had your fun.’

She had a point, but I went ahead and protested, enough to be polite. Lotte heard me out and when her vanity was satisfied she tried a crippled sort of smile that reminded me of the way an unhappy child will cheer up when you hand over 50 pfennigs or a penny-chew.

‘You’re very sweet,’ she allowed finally, and wiped her red eyes. ‘I’ll be all right now, thank you.“

‘Do you want to tell me about it?’

Lotte glanced at me out of the corner of one eye. ‘In this town? Better tell me your rates first, doctor.’ She blew her nose and then uttered a short, hollow laugh. ‘You might make a good screw doctor.’

‘You seem quite sane to me,’ I said, helping her to an armchair.

‘I wouldn’t bet on it.’

‘Is that your professional advice?’ I lit a couple of cigarettes and handed her one. She smoked it desperately, and without much apparent pleasure.

‘That’s my advice as a woman who’s mad enough to have been having an affair with a man who just slapped her round like a circus clown.’

‘König? I never saw him as the violent type.’

‘If he seems urbane that’s only the morphine he uses.’

‘He’s an addict?’

‘I don’t know if he’s an addict exactly. But whatever it was he did while he was in the SS, he needed morphine to get through the war.’