Philip Kerr - Field Grey

'Come in, come in.' She vacuumed me inside, closed the door and hugged me fondly. 'I don't have any marijuana,' she said, 'but I have good coffee. Or something stronger.'

'Coffee will be fine.' I followed her along a corridor and into the kitchen. 'I like what you've done with the place. You've put furniture in it. The last time I was here I think you'd sold everything. To the Amis.'

'Not everything.' Elisabeth smiled. 'I never sold that. Lots did, mind. But not me.' She set about making the coffee and then said, 'How long has it been?'

'Since I was last here? Six or seven years.'

'It seems longer. Where have you been? What were you doing?'

'None of that matters now. The past. Right now the only thing that matters is right now. Everything else is irrelevant. Or at least that's how it seems to me.'

'You really were dead, weren't you?'

'Mmm hmm.'

She made coffee and led the way into a small but comfortable sitting room. The furniture was solid but unremarkable. Outside, the copper-coloured leaves of the linden tree helped to shade the window from the bright autumn sun. I felt quite at home. As much at home as I was likely to feel anywhere.

'No sewing machine,' I observed.

"There's not much call for expensive tailoring any more,' she said. 'Not in Berlin, anyway. Not since the war. Who can afford such things? These days I run a club called The Queen. On Auguste-Viktoria Strasse. Number seventy-six. Drop by some time. Not today of course. We're closed on Sundays. Which is why I'm here.'

'Is it a Sunday? I don't know.'

'Dead and just coming back to life. That's hardly respectable. But the club is. Probably too respectable for a man like you, but that's what the customers want nowadays. No one wants the old Berlin any more. With the sex clubs and the whores.'

'No one?'

'All right. The Americans don't seem to want them. At least not officially.'

'You surprise me. In Cuba they couldn't get enough of the sex clubs. Every night there was a long line outside the most notorious club of all, The Shanghai.'

'I don't know about Cuba, but here we get some very Lutheran Americans. Well, this is Germany, after all. It's as if they think the Russians might use any sign of depravity as an excuse to invade West Berlin. They seem to want to make the Cold War as cold as possible, for everyone involved. Did you know that you can get yourself arrested for nude sunbathing in the parks?'

'At my age that's hardly a concern.' I sipped her coffee and nodded my appreciation.

Elisabeth lit a cigarette. 'So it was you. The person who sent me that money, from Cuba. I thought it must be.'

'At the time I had more than enough to spare.'

'And now?'

'I'm sorting things out.'

'You don't look like someone who's just back from the sun.'

'Like I said. At my age. I was never one for lying around in the sun.'

'Me, I love it. Whenever I can. After all, the winters we get. What sort of things are you sorting out?'

'The Berlin kind.'

'Hmm. That sounds suspicious. This used to be a city of whores. And you don't look like a whore. Now it's a city of spies. So-' She shrugged and sipped her coffee.

'I expect that's why they don't like joy-ladies and sex clubs. Because they want their spies honest. And as for nude sunbathing well, it's difficult being something you're not when you've got your clothes off.'

'I'll bear that in mind. As a matter of fact we get lots of spies in the club. American spies.'

'How can you tell?'

'They're the ones not wearing uniforms.'

She was joking, of course. But that didn't mean it wasn't true. I glanced over at a radiogram the size of a drinks cabinet from which a low murmur was emanating. 'What are we almost listening to?'

'RIAS,' she said.

'I don't know that station. I don't know any of the Berlin stations.'

'It stands for Radio in the American Sector.' She said it in English. Good English, too. 'I always listen to RIAS on a Sunday morning. To help my English. No, to improve my English.'

I pulled a face. On the coffee table was a copy of Die Neue Zeitung. 'American radio. American newspapers. Sometimes I think we lost a lot more than just a war.'

'They're not so bad. Who's paying your rent?'

'The VdH.'

'Of course. You were a prisoner yourself, weren't you?'

I nodded.

'A couple of years ago I went to one of those exhibitions put on by the VdH,' she said. 'On the POW experience. They had reconstructed a Soviet POW camp complete with a wooden watch tower and a four-metre-high barbed-wire fence.'

'Was there a gift shop?'

'No. Just a newspaper.'

'Der Heimkehrer.'

'Yes.'

'It's a rag. Among other things, the VdH leadership believes that a free people cannot renounce in principle the protection of a new German Army.'

'But you don't believe that?'

I shook my head. 'It's not that I don't think military service is a good idea. In principle.' I lit a cigarette. 'It's just that I don't trust our Western allies not to use us as cannon fodder in a new war that some lunatic Confederate American general thinks he can fight on German soil, safely. Which is to say, a long way from America. But which in reality no one can win. Not us. Not them.'

'Better Red than dead, huh?'

'I don't think the Reds want a war any more than we do. It's only the men who fought the last war, not to mention the one before that, who can really know how many human lives were wasted. And how many comrades were sacrificed needlessly. People used to talk about the phony war. Remember that? In 1939. But if you ask me, this war, this Cold War, that's the phoniest war of the lot. Something dreamed up by the intelligence people to scare us and keep us all in line.'

'There's a waiter at the club,' she said, 'who'd disagree with you. He's a former POW, too. He came home last year, still a rabid Nazi. Hates the Bolsheviks.' She smiled wryly. 'I'm none too fond of them myself, of course. Well, you remember what it was like, when the Red Army turned up in Berlin with a hard-on for German women.' She paused for a moment. 'I had a baby. Did I ever tell you that?'

'No.'

'Well, he – the baby – died, so it didn't seem important, I guess. He got influenza meningitis and the penicillin they used to treat it turned out to be fake. That was – God, February 1946. They got the men who sold the stuff, I'm happy to say. Not that it really matters. Made in France, it was. Glucose and face powder dissolved in genuine penicillin vials. Of course by the time anyone knew it was fake it was too late.' She shook her head. 'It's hard to remember what it was like back then. People would do or sell anything to make money.'

'I'm sorry.'

'Don't be, darling. It was a long time ago. Besides, even after I had it, the baby, I was never really sure I wanted it.'

'Under the circumstances, that's hardly surprising,' I said. 'You never said before.'

'Well, you had your own problems, didn't you?' She shrugged. 'And that is the real reason I never sold my body to the Amis, of course. Gang rape. It tends to take away your sexual appetite for quite a while. By the time I did start feeling inclined that way again it was too late. I was on the shelf, more or less.'

'Nonsense.'

'Too late to find a husband anyway. German men are still in rather short supply, in case you hadn't noticed. Most of the good ones were in Soviet POW camps. Or Cuba.'

'I'm sure that's not true. You're a fine-looking woman, Elisabeth.'

She took my hand and squeezed.

'Do you really think so, Bernie?'

'Of course I do.'

'Oh, there have been men, all right. I'm not completely clapped out, it's true. But it's not like it used to be. Nothing ever is of course. But… There was an American who worked for the US State Department at HICOG, in the Headquarters Compound, on Saargemiinder Strasse. But he went home to his wife and children in Wichita. And there was a guy, a sergeant, who ran Club 48 – that's the US Army's NCO club. It was him who helped me to get the job at The Queen. Before he went home, too. That was six months ago. My life.' She shrugged. 'It's not exactly Effi Briest, is it? Oh, I do okay, at the club. Pays well. The customers behave. Good tippers, I'll say that for the Amis. They like to show their appreciation. Not like the British. Worst tippers in the world. Hell, even the French tip better than the British. You wouldn't think they'd won the war, they're so tight with their money. They say that even the mousetraps are empty in the British sector. I tell you this fellow Nasser, I'm on his side. And when Uruguay beat England I think I was even more happy than I was when West Germany won the actual trophy.'