Jack Ludlow - The Burning Sky

As he approached, walking at speed, Gretl turned to look at him and he was presented with quite a sight: her eyes were picked out in thick kohl, her cheeks caked with deep make-up and her lips a bright-red slash on her lined face. She was in the midst of a stream of German invective that told those with whom she was negotiating that the price they wanted to pay for her services was very far from sufficient. When Gretl looked like that, the customers who got into her inner sanctum paid a high price for their parsimonious temerity. It would be painful, but that was before she eased their soreness with the other skills she had honed over the years.

Sighting Jardine she smiled, exposing large, yellowing teeth, then enquired in a deep guttural voice if he had finally come for a treatment, which made the Dutchmen, for in their protested responses they established that was their nationality, look and act aggrieved. All she got was a quick peck on the cheeks, leaving Jardine with the taste of pancake on his lips as he slipped past her. The last thing he heard was Gretl reassuring her putative clients that he was only passing through.

There was no way of knowing if his tail had seen him come in to Gretl’s little cul-de-sac. If they had, she would delay them and be damned ferocious with it, but all it would take to shut her up would be the production of an identity card: no one feared the police more than those who lived and worked the Reeperbahn; if a customer complained to the Polizei , they always took their side — the reputation of the district came before right and wrong. If it was the Gestapo, that was ten times worse.

The room Gretl used was lit in red, with couchettes , a bed and various instruments of torture on the walls, manacles and harness. Behind a curtain was a door to the back alley — every establishment had them, gloomily lit by the moon and barely wide enough for two people to pass, but, like the street it served, cut off by high barriers at both ends, these locked. Once through, Jardine dropped his bag and took out his Mauser, waiting: if they were coming they would do so immediately.

After half a minute, when nothing happened, he opened the bag, well aware he had a limited amount of time, trying to assess the probable actions of those pursuing him. If he worked it right, that would allow him to get clear; getting it wrong probably meant incarceration in somewhere like Dachau, being subjected to repeated beatings and torture as the SS sought information on his Jewish contacts so he would take some of them with him as he died to avoid that.

Since they did not follow they could not have seen him disappear and thus had no idea where he was: he could be in any number of the rooms behind an empty prostitute’s window, so the only way to collar him was to shut off the Herbertstra?e at either end and that would take time — time to get to a phone and get a message to whoever was overseeing the pursuit, time to get the manpower in place — and he calculated he had up to ten minutes before such precautions could be brought in to play, a period he cut in half for safety.

Off came his trench coat and out of the bag came a sailor’s reefer jacket, a cap and a duffle bag, as well as the scarf he had taken from Lanchester and that was wrapped around his neck. The pistol was transferred, as well as a wallet containing his British passport, also the few possessions he wanted, a change of shirt and socks, his washbag and a money belt containing some US dollars, British pounds and a thick bundle of German marks, several of which he extracted before concealing the belt under his shirt. His German papers, bearing a false name, he kept handy, as well as the discharge book he had, which identified him as a Czech sailor.

The Gladstone he left by a wall in the middle of the alley so as to protect Gretl — they would question every whore in the street, and since none would admit to knowledge he had to suppose they could not finger anyone, which should lead to an impasse: not even the Gestapo could shut down the Herbertstra?e without causing a riot in the city of Hamburg. He went back through Gretl’s parlour to find her in full flow, beating on the bare buttocks of one of her Dutchmen while his three companions, bottles of very pricey beer in their hands, noisily egged her on.

Jardine didn’t stop and neither did Gretl, she was too professional, even when in passing he stuck a rolled up bundle of marks into her ample cleavage. Within seconds he was out in the crowded street, heading for the barrier, his heart in his mouth as he joined the throng and slipped between the two overlapping metal plates, to be immediately accosted by one of the unlicensed street girls. Engaging in conversation with her allowed him to assess the risks he faced, relieved that all he could see was one anxious-looking fellow in a long leather coat and fedora, less at ease given the sound of approaching sirens, added to the attention he was getting from the whores.

To disappear was easy; all he had to do was walk off with his whore. Who was going to stop a man dressed like a sailor doing that?

‘I hope you got your money’s worth from the lady of the night, old boy.’

Peter Lanchester said that as he poured Jardine a small glass of Chateau d’Yquem, the wine with which he was washing down his bread-and-butter pudding. All around them was the buzz of conversations, the Army amp; Navy Club being full of lunching officers, both serving and retired, careful of their manners under the basilisk portrait gazes of senior commanders of the past, in red coats and blue, as well as great paintings of land and sea battles in which Britannia had been triumphant.

The mere fact of Lanchester being present testified to the success of getting the Ephraims out of danger and he had been decent enough to accompany them all the way to Harwich. They were now happily ensconced in St John’s Wood, where they were to stay with their well-heeled fellow-Jewish sponsors.

‘As they say in certain of our newspapers, Peter, having paid her I made my excuses and left. It is not a good idea to get into bed with the Hamburg streetwalkers.’

‘Diseased are they?’

‘Unregulated will do and that’s before their pimps try to cosh and rob you. The window girls are not only pimp-free but are taken out of circulation if they have picked up anything untoward, which in itself is too commonplace in such a busy international port.’

‘I shall remember that if I am ever again in Hamburg. I must say your girl Gretl sounds like a real card, not that I am much taken with the idea of the treatment she metes out.’

‘I’d like to see her dealing with Goebbels — she hates the Nazis, as an awful lot of Germans do.’

‘Then why did they vote for the buggers?’ Lanchester snapped, in a rare flash of real passion.

That was said in too loud a manner and it attracted a degree of attention, especially from the older members: balding, grey-haired men with the broken-veined faces of the serious port drinker and the watery eyes of their years and endemic disapproval. They reminded Jardine of every officers’ mess he had ever been in, both at home and abroad, which always had its quota of elderly majors going nowhere, men whose sole joy in life seemed to be making existence hell for the newly commissioned subalterns, while simultaneously blocking the road to promotion for everyone else.

‘Hamburg didn’t vote for Hitler, Peter, nor did Berlin and they loathe him in the Ruhr, but when you’ve been humiliated in war, had hyperinflation twice in twenty years, suffered massive unemployment and witnessed an old dodderer like Hindenburg running the show and favouring his fellow Prussian landowners with the few coins left in the coffers, anyone who promises you security, a bit of national pride, a job and change has a certain cachet. There are, of course, no elections anymore, just the Fuhrer of the German Volk .’