Pierre Frei - Berlin - A Novel

Ben helped Herr Appel to carry the cartons. Sergeant Allen locked them in the old storeroom in the cellar. There was no way of getting at them for the moment. But he couldn't let those treasures lie there untouched, or Major Baker really would end up distributing the goodies to his flock. Ben began giving the situation his undivided attention. The black-market rate for chocolate was rising.

'That villain's name is Franz!' a voice proclaimed in the big basement room of the clubhouse one afternoon. The drama group was rehearsing Schiller's The Robbers. Ben was sitting on a bench, yawning. He'd rather have a good Western any day. Heidi Rodel was holding a Reclam edition of the play. She didn't know the part of Amalia by heart yet, but she had mastered a toss of the head, not planned by the director, which sent her hair tumbling around her shoulders. It did not, however, have the desired effect. Ben's eyes were fixed not on her silky hair but on the door to the storeroom. The loot down there was very tempting.

Getting at it was the problem. The key was in the pencil tray on the office desk, and either Sergeant Allen or his deputy Corporal Kauwe, a small Hawaiian with a shining moon-face, always sat behind the desk. All through the third and fourth acts, Ben was thinking hard. But no solution occurred to him.

'The man can yet be helped,' announced Gert Schlomm, the director, probably the first to play the robber-hero, Karl Moor, in short lederhosen, as the rehearsal came to an end. The words sounded like a prophecy.

Heidi came up to the edge of the stage. 'How did I do?' She pulled her skirt up to her tanned thighs, jumped off the improvised platform, twisted her left ankle as she landed on her wedge heel in front of Ben and, with a little cry, grasped his shoulders for balance. Her body felt warm and soft, and gave off a pleasantly astringent perfume.

'You were OK.' He helped her to sit on the bench.

She rubbed her ankle. 'I must go home now. Will you take me, Gert? I can hardly walk.'

'I'm busy. Ben can take you,' said the great actor from up on the stage.

Ben looked at the seventeen-year-old's hairy thighs with distaste. What on earth, he thought scornfully, does she see in him? Aren't you in the modelmaking group?' he asked Heidi.

She was still rubbing her ankle. 'Yes, were making a doll's house for the local kindergarten, with Corporal Kauwe. Want to come along?'

'No thanks, not my thing. Could you take a little break from building your doll's house?'

'What for?'

'To make a board with hooks for keys on it. I'll have a word with the painting group, they can paint flowers and varnish the whole thing. it's for Sergeant Allen's birthday next week, it would look good in his office. We can screw it to the door as a surprise.'

'Could be done.' Heidi hobbled a step or two. 'So will you take me home?'

This was his great opportunity to be alone with her. But since it came by permission of his rival, indeed almost by command of his rival, Ben couldn't take it. 'No time,' he said briefly.

'Please yourself,' she snapped, and stopped hobbling.

Sergeant Allen thanked them for the lovely present. Corporal Kauwe grunted cheerfully and hung all the keys on the hooks, including, as Ben noted with satisfaction, the key to the cellar storeroom. The office door folded outwards. If you opened it just far enough then the inside of it, to which the board with hooks was screwed, was out of sight of anyone sitting at the desk. Ben had come up with the solution to his problem.

Now he had to find the right moment. It came when Sergeant Allen was training the baseball team in the garden and Corporal Kauwe was on the telephone in the office. Ben flung the door wide and reached quickly for the key while the Hawaiian was conversing in a guttural voice with a fellow countryman, his gaze directed on the far-away Pacific Ocean.

'Oh, sorry. I'll come back later.' Ben slammed the door and raced downstairs. There was no one in the cellar: the drama group wouldn't be rehearsing until later. He opened the storeroom, picked up a carton labelled 'Mars Bars', hid it under the stage in the main basement area, locked the storeroom door again and went up.

Corporal Kauwe was just finishing his conversation as Ben opened the office door for the second time, and slipped the key back on its hook. 'OK, what do you want?' Ben asked if he could see the latest Saturday Evening Post, thanked the corporal and went off with the magazine. He sat in the hall and leafed through it for a little while, just for the sake of appearances, before going down again.

He pulled the carton out from under the stage, heaved it up on his shoulders, and peered through the little window in the cellar door. The baseball team had finished training. Concealed by shrubs and bushes, Ben climbed the fence to the neighbouring plot of land, and then made his way through a gap in the hedge and into the street. No one took any notice of him. Everyone was carrying something somewhere these days, whether home or to barter it. Ben was going to Frau Molch's to dispose of his goods.

The cartoon was rather heavy. Two hundred and fifty Mars Bars with that dense, sweet, sticky filling were bound to weigh a lot. Most important of all, they weighed a few thousand marks. The coveted suit, that emblem of elegant masculinity and the key to the favours of the woman he adored, was coming closer. As he shifted the carton to his other shoulder, Ben was already toying with the idea of a second raid on the cellar. Life, complete with the made-to-measure clothing suitable for a man of the world, was expensive.

Frau Molch was an energetic little woman who ran a bar at the toboggan run in winter. But it was summer, and in any case, there were no drinks available to serve at the bar. She had set herself up on the black market when she exchanged her dead husband's clothes for other articles after he fell at the Front. Soon her apartment on Eschershauser Weg was a positive warehouse.

Sacks of yellow peas, cans of condensed milk built into pyramids, shoes for ladies, gentlemen and children, candles, bicycles, powdered milk, coffee beans, cigarettes, Swiss watches — there was almost nothing in the way of desirable goods that you couldn't get from Frau Molch. She was an institution in the Onkel Tom quarter. Anyone who wanted a smoked sausage and a cup of coffee more than they wanted to hang on to a wedding ring or a camera, and didn't fancy going all the way to the Potsdamer Platz, visited her instead.

Ben let the carton slide off his shoulder on to the living-room table, where it landed between a packet of biscuits and a pair of binoculars. 'Two hundred and fifty Mars Bars,' he said, in a businesslike voice. 'Three thousand Allimarks, OK?'

'Not worth more than a thousand eight hundred,' said Frau Molch.

'Ten marks each. That makes two-five,' Ben countered.

'Two thousand,' Frau Molch offered. She would sell them for three times that amount. 'Open it up.'

The carton was sealed in a makeshift way with a strip of sticky tape. Ben hadn't noticed that before. He tore back the tape and unfolded the four sides of the lid. Before them, neatly packaged in dozens, lay six hundred yellow pencils. Major Baker had used the empty carton to hold his well-meaning gift. 'To give the kids something to write with,' the chaplain had explained to Sergeant Allen with a kindly smile. The carton of Sunshine Marshmallows held erasers, and the label on the Hershey hazelnut and chocolate bars concealed stacks of virgin notepads.

Frau Molch was annoyed. 'You think you can take me for a ride?'

Ben was shattered. 'I didn't know. Honest.' He pulled himself together. Business was business. 'How about two hundred marks? People can really do with pencils, specially pretty yellow ones like these.'

'Fifty, and now clear out.'