Филип Керр - Metropolis

Since the English sex tourists were only interested in visual stimulation it seemed unlikely that the Thomas Cook charabanc would be stopping outside the Cabaret of the Nameless; while being a byword for Berlin malevolence and bad taste, it was not a sex show. The cabaret involved a series of ten-minute amateur acts. All the players were poor deluded souls especially selected for their astonishing credulity and lack of talent by the sadistic conférencier , Erwin Lowinsky, who, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, managed to convince the performers that they had real talent and that there were some influential people in the audience who could give the poor wretches a head start in show business. Meanwhile, the audience — which thought itself quite sophisticated — enjoyed the cruel contemplation of one entertainment catastrophe after another. The Cabaret of the Nameless was very popular; for many a Berliner it was nothing less than a perfect evening. A cultural anthropologist seeking to understand the German character could not have done better than to go to the Cabaret of the Nameless.

I found Erich Angerstein seated near the back of a busy room behind a bottle of good champagne and accompanied by a couple of table ladies who seemed to be enjoying the show although their smiles might just as easily have been owed to the fact that he had a hand inside each of their brassieres. Seeing me, he made no attempt to remove his hands to somewhere more respectable — nothing was out of bounds among guests in the Cabaret of the Nameless — nor to introduce me to his two companions, who appeared to be twins.

‘Gunther,’ he said. ‘I’ve been wondering when you’d show up. Margit, pour Bernie a drink, there’s a good girl. You like champagne, Bernie?’

‘Not particularly.’

‘Horrible stuff. Smells of goat and tastes of cheese. Like a woman’s mouse. Women drink it because it’s expensive, which they think implies quality. But it’s a lot of gas, really.’ He jerked his head, summoning a waiter, and I asked for a glass of Mosel. ‘Where have you been anyway? Getting a haircut, I suppose.’

‘Something like that.’

‘If I were you I’d ask for my money back.’

Up onstage, a woman in a wheelchair with one arm and one leg was singing ‘Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen’. Hers was an untrained voice — a bit like Lotte Lenya’s, only there the similarity ended; the woman in the wheelchair couldn’t have hit the right note if she’d swallowed a whole canteen of tuning forks. Every so often the laughter from the audience became too bovine and she stopped, at which point Erwin Lowinsky — ‘Elow’ — would cajole her into believing she had a sweet, natural voice and that she might best ignore the audience. ‘Ah, Lucy,’ he told her, ‘these fools have had too much to drink and wouldn’t know real talent when they saw it.’ And then she would start all over again, to gusts of laughter.

‘The trouble you’ve seen,’ shouted a wag in the audience. ‘I’m just guessing, but might it involve an arm and a leg?’

The waiter came back with my Mosel. I sipped it slowly, even carefully, and then lit a cigarette.

‘Is there a reason we’re meeting in this torture chamber?’

‘In the front row. Table by the piano. Do you see the flax-haired Fritz with the cellar-mistress girlfriend? You can’t see them from here, but the girl is wearing spurs on her button-up boots.’

I looked over that way and saw a tall woman showing a good deal of snow-white thigh and quite a bit of purple garter. Beside her was a taller man wearing a coarse yellow wig. They were both in helpless fits of laughter, red-faced, tearful, slipping off the edge of their seats. The man looked like he was having an asthma attack.

‘I see him.’

‘That’s Prussian Emil. His real name is Emil Müller. Comes here regularly just before twelve after finishing work, so to speak. Last night he was in with a burglar by the name of Karl Szatmari, a Hungarian, I think. Both of them belong to a criminal ring called the Hand in Hand. I hope you’re impressed with my patience, Gunther. Sitting here and watching him for the last three or four nights has been a real test of character for me. I’ve just about chewed off my fingernails wanting to drag that bastard into an alley and beat some information out of him.’

‘In that respect at least you strike me as the kind of man who needs a regular manicure.’

‘I hope it’s been worth it. Which is why I’m going to have to insist on being there when you question Emil. I’d hate to think I’ve been coming here for no reason.’

‘We’ll speak to him tonight. After he leaves we’ll follow him outside. How long does he normally stay here?’

‘Couple of hours. I had him tailed one night. He went to the Heaven and Hell and then home to an apartment in Wedding.’

‘Please try to remember what we agreed to. We do things my way. And you’ll be helping me with a witness. Not a suspect.’

‘Sure, sure. But you try to remember this: These bastards don’t like giving out information at the best of times. Sometimes they need a little friendly persuasion.’

‘Then let’s keep it as friendly as possible. I want him talking, not bleeding. He can’t talk if he’s spitting out teeth.’

‘Whatever you say, commissioner. Always glad to help the Berlin police.’

I laughed. ‘If you mean the same way that Elow is helping poor Lucy’s singing career, then I can almost believe that.’

‘He’s a genius, isn’t he?’ said Angerstein. ‘How he can manage to persuade this one-legged no-hoper that she has a scintilla of talent is beyond me. He makes Svengali look like the Good Samaritan.’

But after my time on the street pretending to be a schnorrer , I had developed a certain sympathy for people with one leg, even the tone-deaf songbird who was at last leaving the stage in tears, followed by gales of laughter and derision. I stood up and started to applaud, as if I’d enjoyed her act.

Erich Angerstein looked at me with amusement and then pity. ‘You’re a decent man,’ he said. ‘I can see that. Says a lot about you. But the people in this audience will only think you’re being sarcastic. You know that, don’t you? There’s no room for anything genuine in this place. You probably thought that show you and Old Sparky put on in Sing Sing was the cruellest spectacle in Berlin, but you were wrong, my friend. It’s not just dreams that are broken in here; it’s souls, too.’

Finally he removed his hand from Margit’s brassiere, but only to light a cigarette. For a moment I caught the girl’s narrowed eye and knew that she wasn’t much enamoured of her host’s attentions. Or of the Cabaret of the Nameless. It wasn’t everyone in Berlin who enjoyed cruelty for cruelty’s sake or being constantly pawed.

Still looking at Margit, I said: ‘I wonder how the poor girl ended up in a wheelchair, anyway. With one leg and one arm, treated like she was shit on the cabaret carpet, pinning all her hopes on these heartless bastards.’

‘You missed the beginning of her act,’ said Margit. ‘She explained how she lost the arm in a factory accident, and the leg in hospital, as a result of losing the arm.’

Margit’s twin added: ‘She wanted to be the first one-legged actress and singer since Sarah Bernhardt.’

‘Some people have all the luck,’ said Angerstein. ‘While it seems that others have none at all. When it comes to good fortune, everyone believes they’re entitled to a fair share. And they’re not. They never were. And that’s where people like me come in.’

I sat down again. ‘Can you see all of human creation from on top of that high mountain, Siegfried?’

‘My point is this: Can you imagine how much of existence would be impossible if people didn’t believe in a certain amount of luck in the face of all evidence to the contrary? The true essence of human life is delusion. That’s what we’ve got in here. And it’s been that way ever since the first Roman soldier blew on a handful of dice. It’s simple human nature to believe your luck is going to turn.’