Росс Макдональд: Dark Tunnel

I REMEMBERED THAT I had come into McKinley Hall in the first place to see if there was any mail for me, and climbed the stairs to the English office on the third floor. The secretary was gone and the door was locked and I had left my keys in my apartment. I thought of using my knife on the lock as I had once or twice before, but decided it would be too much trouble. I went downstairs and out the front door, and crossed the street to the coffee-shop on the other side.

When I went in, I saw Hunter sitting by himself in a booth at the back. He raised his hand and I sat down opposite him and ordered coffee.

“Is it the right girl?” he asked.

“Yes. She’s coming here to-night.”

“You look excited.”

“I am. She’s a wonderful woman. You’ll meet her.”

“I hope so. She’s an actress, you say?”

“She was when I knew her. Apparently she studied under Schneider before he left Germany. She never mentioned him to me so far as I can remember.”

“You told me to remind you to tell me about her some time. How about now?”

“All right.” I told him about Ruth Esch and the month I spent in Munich in 1937 and how it ended.

I was twenty-three that year, and still a student. I was travelling on a fellowship and gathering material for my doctoral dissertation. After a couple of months in London, where I wore out the seat of a pair of pants in the reading room of the British Museum, I went to Munich at the beginning of November to do a month’s work there. I didn’t get as much work done as I expected to. I found better things than libraries in Munich, and worse things.

My second day in Munich I was looking for the American Express Company to change some traveller’s marks into money, when I saw a huge crowd lined up on one of the main streets. I joined the crowd to see what was up, and heard people talking in tones of delighted awe about Der Führer. Great square banners of red silk marked with black swastikas hung high above the road on wires, and gasoline torches flared on square red pillars at every corner. Along the curbs like a human fence there were lines of black-helmeted elite guards standing at attention, each second guard facing the crowd.

It looked to me as if Adolf Hitler was going to come down that street shortly, and I stayed where I was. I filled and lit a briar pipe which I had bought in London, and waited for the circus to begin.

Sudden music blared from loudspeakers on the lampposts, and the crowd’s hum died into staring silence. The music sounded like an obsolete popular song to me, but the crowd liked it and the Germans are a music-loving people. I went on puffing at my pipe.

Before six bars of music had been played, something happened to my pipe. It was whisked from my mouth and shattered on the pavement at my feet. A fat man beside me shook his jowls and growled at me in low, intense German. I gathered that he objected to the aroma of tobacco. It seemed that a lot of other people did, too, because a little circle of my German neighbors were glaring at me as balefully as hell. I felt uncomfortable and started to move out of the circle.

The fat man gave me a petulant push and I pushed him and he sat down against a woman’s legs. The woman stepped around him and I saw that her legs were beautifully made.

A man’s voice said, “Ruhe!” in a rasping whisper, and I looked up and saw the nearest elite guard stalking me with his eyes. I wanted to get away but the crowd had closed around me and the fat man was getting up panting with rage. The woman he had fallen against stepped between us and said something to him about an Auslander. Red hair flared under her black lamb hat like gasoline fire, and even in German I liked the sound of her voice.

She turned to me and I liked her face: it was calm and beautiful, with no mob-hatred in it.

“Come with me,” she said in English, and put a black-gloved hand in the crook of my arm. She said, “Bitte,” and the crowd made way for us. At the risk of breaking up the party, I went with her.

When we reached the edge of the crowd, she turned to me. “Don’t you know the Horst Wessel song? You mustn’t smoke in the presence of sublime music.”

She didn’t smile. I looked for irony in her eyes, which were green and cool as the sea, and saw it flickering deep down near the sea-floor.

“I’m afraid I didn’t realize the seriousness of my offense,” I said, trying to match her irony. “Thank you for intervening.”

“Not at all.” She smiled, so that she suddenly looked like a young girl. “I’d be jolly sorry to see anybody torn limb from limb.”

“Are you English?” I asked. She spoke English with a slight German accent, but her tone and idiom sounded English to me. English people who have lived abroad for years sometimes acquire a foreign accent.

“No. I’m German. I had an English governess. You’re an American, aren’t you?”

“Yes. But I don’t even know how you knew I was an Auslander. I was so surprised when that fat fellow knocked my pipe out of my mouth I didn’t even think of trying to explain.”

“You look like an American, and you act like one.”

“How does an American look and act?” I said, for the sake of continuing the conversation.

“Well, tall and healthy and quite – neither beautiful nor ugly.” The color on her cheek-bones deepened faintly and she laughed with some embarrassment. “And you Americans have a certain blue-eyed look. It’s not immaturity, exactly. A kind of naïveté I suppose, as if the world weren’t such a bad place after all–”

“Is it?”

She stopped smiling and looked at me. “How long have you been in Germany?”

“One day,” I said, and changed the subject: “How does an American act?”

“As if the world weren’t such a bad place after all,” she retorted. “As if a single man could cope with any difficulty, and fists were effective weapons. If an Englishman were pushed and had his pipe broken, he’d appeal to the nearest bobbie.”

“I shouldn’t have pushed him,” I said as I felt my ears turn red. “It was a childish thing to do.”

“I’m glad you pushed him,” she said, and her eyes danced like ripples in sunlight. “I felt like kicking him. He was very officious, a very kickable type.”

The music had stopped and her laughter tinkled in the silence like a bell. We were standing clear of the crowd against a building, but several people turned and frowned at us. I wondered if laughter was verboten in the Third Reich.

“We mustn’t talk,” she whispered.

Noise flooded from the loudspeakers as if somewhere a dam of sound had burst, and broke in waves over the street.

“Wagner,” the girl beside me whispered. “That means he’s coming.”

The waves of music swept the street bare of everything but sound and power, flattening the individual will like ocean combers rolling on the pavement. When the sound receded, it left a throbbing vacuum for Der Führer to fill with his presence.

A little man in a brown raincoat came down the center of the street with his peaked nose thrust out like a brown rat walking in a dry riverbed. At his right a fat stoat, bloated with the blood of stolen chickens, waddled in step with the leader, and at his left a rabbit with a twisted foot limped along. Hitler and Göring and Goebbels, triumvirate of the new order that was to be in Europe.

The crowd was humming like viols and low drums, like bees around the queen. I felt vaguely embarrassed as if I was witnessing a sexual act, and looked at the girl beside me to see how she was taking it.

She was standing on tiptoe with her chin raised to see, her breasts high and pointed under her taut black coat. Her upper lip was twitching as if there was a nerve of hate there that she couldn’t restrain, and I saw her take her lips between her teeth. Her face was pale and drawn tight over the delicate bones of her cheeks and jaw. There had been a gay and youthful beauty in her face, but now it was pinched by a bitter interior wind. Then and there I wanted to take her with me out of Germany.