Metropolis Read online

  “And now, because we don’t want anyone to turn a deaf ear to your misfortune—” Brigitte burned a couple of small holes into the tunic with a cigarette and, in spite of my protests, made some stains with candle wax. “We need to ensure the pity of those who see you, Gunther. It certainly wouldn’t do to walk into the rattrap looking like you’ve just come off the parade ground.”

  After thirty minutes she pronounced herself satisfied that I was ready to go out and meet my public. So I knelt on the klutz wagon and wheeled myself eagerly to her full-length mirror, where a seismic shock awaited me. I was staring at an abbreviated, nightmarish version of myself that made me gasp out loud.

  “Holy Christ,” I said.

  The pitiful creature looking back at me was a badly damaged man who hadn’t been as lucky as me; a Gunther who, blown to pieces by an enemy mortar bomb and then salvaged by the German Army medical corps against all odds, might easily have existed in Weimar Germany’s half-Brueghel world of the blind leading the blind. The round dark glasses contrasted sharply with the creature’s pale face and bald head, so that they resembled the empty eye sockets in a human skull. A living, breathing Golgotha, I felt like Faust being shown one of my alternative futures by a rather less than accommodating Mephistopheles who cared nothing for seductively indulging me with all the pleasure and knowledge of the world. It was enough to make any man count his blessings and swear off the drink—almost.

  “Well?” she asked. “What do you think?”

  “Holy Christ,” I muttered again. “I look terrible.”

  “I’ll take that as a professional compliment.”

  “Well, yes, you can. It’s just that—I guess I never realized how very lucky I’ve been. I’m looking at the fellow in the mirror and asking myself what it must be like to wake up and be confronted with this horror every day.”

  “And what’s the answer?”

  I thought for a moment. Seeing myself like this had made me realize something important. Something profound that was probably going to affect me for the rest of my days. Thanks to Bernhard Weiss and Brigitte Mölbling, I’d achieved something useful, even if I never did manage to catch Dr. Gnadenschuss. I’d been given a genuine life lesson.

  “It’s this. That you can’t put a price on good fortune. It’s the difference between two men: One, the man in the mirror with no legs and no future other than selling Swedish matches, and the other, a stupid, able-bodied idiot of a detective who’s full of drunken self-pity instead of humble gratitude. I just got myself reminded of what a lucky break I had—to walk away from 1918 without a scratch.”

  “Well, you have to be smart to be lucky. But what you’re saying sounds like an epiphany, if you ask me.”

  I took her heavily ringed hand and kissed it with fond gratitude.

  “It’s not Archimedes but yes, why not? An epiphany. They say that when you’re drinking you have to reach rock bottom to turn your life around; I think I’ve just been shown a small preview of what rock bottom might actually look like. Thanks to you I may never drink again. Well, perhaps not as much.” I kissed her hand again.

  “If I didn’t know better I’d snatch my hand away and fetch some disinfectant. I’ve seen stray dogs that had more to recommend themselves than you do.”

  “I get that a lot.”

  “So. Are you ready?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hey, what will you do if Dr. Gnadenschuss really does try to kill you? How will you protect yourself?”

  “The usual way.” I reached into my tunic and took out a Walther automatic.

  “Good,” she said, as if it mattered to her that I was able to look out for myself. And that was good, too: that it mattered.

  She accompanied me to the front door of the theater, where she kissed the top of my shaven head.

  “You’re interesting to me now. So be careful, Gunther. There are plenty of other wicked bastards out there who can do you harm, not just Dr. Gnadenschuss.”

  I wheeled myself out the door and into the sunshine, onto the cobbled streets of Berlin, and headed across the Friedrichstrasse bridge in search of a killer.

  part three

  sexuality

  Triptych: a set of three associated artistic, literary, or musical works intended to be appreciated together.

  I WAS FOND of seeing Berlin from a great height; the view from the cathedral roof is unparalleled. But the world looks different when you’re no higher than a dog’s arse and no more significant than that to the people around you. So close to the ground I felt like a small child, one of those street urchins in summer usually seen jumping naked into the river or shouting to a friend in some poor courtyard inside another courtyard, where the sun rarely if ever shone. I didn’t know if The Threepenny Opera had any klutzes in the cast, but it probably should have done; my wagon played a squeaky little tune as it bowled lamely along that put me in mind of one of the numbers from the show. Perhaps it was because I was pretending to be a cripple, but it was only now that I noticed the theater was near the Charité hospital and on the edge of the city’s medical district, where surgical bookshops and specialist clinics were in plentiful evidence, along with orthopedic stores featuring a variety of equipment, including shiny modern wheelchairs that looked far more attractive than the contraption I was in. But from the prices I saw advertised in the shop windows, anyone who could have afforded a decent wheelchair could never have passed for a beggar.

  I launched myself across Schiffbauerdamm, dodging piles of horse shit—I’d forgotten how many delivery horses were still on the streets of Berlin—before being blasted by the horn of a tour company charabanc whose impatient driver leaned out his window and shouted at me:

  “Watch where you’re going, you dopey klutz. You’re going the right way to lose your arms as well, do you know that?”

  The travel group seated behind him stared at me and one of them even took a picture, as if I was a sight no less interesting than Old Fritz on Unter den Linden or the bronze bear in front of City Hall. I waved at them cheerily and made it onto the street corner, where I waited to cross with everyone else. I was surrounded by the shapely calves of young women who took me for a diminutive pervert spying on their stocking tops and by businessmen who assumed, not unreasonably, that I was a pickpocket and moved quickly away. They had good reason; many klutzes were thieves. No one took me for a person, least of all a person in need. But it was clear that people did take me for what I purported to be: a disabled beggar, and that was just fine. The stocking tops were fine, too. Can’t see too many of those.

  Across the Spree in Reichstagufer was a row of houses next to the railway station where I was now headed and behind these, the leafy charms of Dorotheenstrasse and the church where, at the age of nine, I’d once seen the tomb of the king’s son, Count van der Mark, who’d died at the same age, something that had made an enormous impression on me because if a nine-year-old royal prince could die, then so, I reasoned, might I. It was perhaps my first intimation of mortality and I never went near that particular church again.

  I crossed the bridge onto Friedrichstrasse, where a lethal sandwich-board man barged me aside. By the time I reached the station, I was feeling battered and my legs and feet were turning numb. I took up a position in an isolated pool of sunshine underneath the overhead rail track. I thought I’d chosen the spot well as none of the shoe shiners and news vendors were too near, the noise from the trains being as loud as it was—as loud as Fafnir the giant dragon breathing into an amplified microphone—and, Friedrichstrasse station being one of the busiest, the arrival of a train every five minutes made most types of commerce all but impossible. I was looking to get shot, not to make new friends.

  I lit a roll-up, placed my army cap on the ground in front of me, tossed a couple of coins into it for effect, and closed my eyes for a moment. Pushing myself around was harder than I’d imagined and I was already lathered with
sweat. I laid my head back against the wall and the advertising mural that was painted there: Telefunken radios: A touch of the hand and Europe plays for you. Listening to the radio seemed a safer bet than sleeping.

  Pay attention, I told myself; you’ve more to live for now you’ve decided to stop drinking. I knew it wasn’t just the sight of myself in the mirror that had helped me make this decision. It was also the sight of Brigitte Mölbling. My imagination had been drinking her in for almost twenty-four hours and I was still thirsty. And could I have imagined what she’d said as I was leaving the theater? That she found me interesting? I was certainly interested in her. And what did interesting mean, anyway? Someone with whom she could discuss the ballet or what was in Harper’s Bazaar, or someone she wanted to go to bed with?

  After a while one of the news vendors came my way, squatted down at my side, and dropped a small coin in the cap. He was a sturdy, chaff-haired man of about forty with a chin like a boxing glove. His sleeves were rolled up and I could see a tattoo on his forearm that looked like the name of a regiment.

  “My name’s Gallwitz,” he said. “Ernst Gallwitz.”

  “Helmut Zehr,” I said.

  “Listen, Helmut,” he said, “it’s none of my business where you ply your trade, friend. But where you’re sitting is where another old comrade was shot just a couple of weeks ago. Fellow named Oskar Heyde. According to the newspapers it was that Dr. Gnadenschuss who did it. You know—the spinner who’s been murdering injured veterans. Shot between the eyes he was and no one noticed. Least not for a while.”

  This was exactly why I’d picked the spot, of course; there seemed to be no reason Dr. Gnadenschuss wouldn’t kill underneath the Friedrichstrasse station bridge again. But I wasn’t about to tell this to the news vendor, whose concern would have touched me more if I hadn’t also realized I was going to have to find another place to beg. I cursed silently; the last thing I needed or wanted was someone looking out for me. It was the sort of thing Dr. Gnadenschuss might easily notice.

  “Thanks for the warning, comrade,” I said. “I heard about that bastard. As if life wasn’t already difficult enough. But I kind of figured that lightning doesn’t strike in the same place twice. That this is as safe as anywhere else in Berlin. Perhaps safer because he’s killed here before.”

  The news vendor nodded. “You may well be right about that. Anyway, I’ll keep an eye out for you.”

  “Did you know him? The man who got shot?”

  “Oskar? Yes, I knew him. Believe it or not, he was my lieutenant in the war.” The news vendor showed me his tattooed forearm. “That’s us. The 107th Infantry. We were part of the Fiftieth Reserve. We were at Passchendaele, Cambrai, and then the Marne.”

  I wondered why I hadn’t come across this man before. I was more or less certain that there had been no witness statement from a news vendor near the scene of Oskar Heyde’s murder. And I couldn’t help noticing the other tattoo on his hand: three dots, which usually meant “death to cops.”

  “What about you?” he asked. “You look like you’ve seen a bit of action yourself.”

  “Eighth Grenadiers. We were on the Somme. The best half of me is still there, probably, feeding some French worms.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “Cops got any clues as to who did it yet?” I asked, changing the subject.

  “No. They’re scratching their arses and sucking their thumbs. Just for a change. But I don’t speak to coppers, no matter what, see?” His speaking voice, a dark, gravelly tenor, added to the impression of feral animality he conveyed. “In this town, the law doesn’t care about the workingman. They’re on the side of big government and can only see out of the eye that’s on the right, if you know what I mean.”

  I sighed silently and wished I’d had a mark for every time I’d heard that horse-shit remark.

  “No descriptions of what the bastard looks like?”

  “I only know what’s in the paper. That’s my profession, after all. The killer waited for a train coming into the station, see? The noise covered the shot. Paper said it was a .25-caliber automatic that shot him, which doesn’t make much more of a pop than an air rifle. So I reckon that’s when you’ll have to keep your wits about you, friend. When there’s a train coming in.”

  I grinned. “That’s every five minutes.”

  “So you want to live forever?”

  “Not like this I don’t.”

  “Look after yourself, will you?” he said, and went back to his stand, whistling “Ain’t She Sweet”—which seemed to be on every damned radio—but not before giving me a copy of the early edition of the Morgenpost, now rendered superfluous by the recent arrival of the late edition.

  As well as wondering why we hadn’t come across Ernst Gallwitz before, I was also wondering how he knew it was a .25-caliber automatic that Dr. Gnadenschuss had used to kill Oskar Heyde. I’d persuaded the Berliner Tageblatt to leave out that particular detail from the letter they’d printed. A lucky guess, perhaps? Or something more? Apart from the three dots tattooed on his hand he didn’t look like a murderer; then again, nobody does these days, especially not the murderers; it’s one of the things that makes the job so difficult. All the same, his remarks about the Berlin police helped me decide to put him into my suspect file. After all, there was no one else in it.

  I opened the newspaper and turned the pages almost mindlessly since it was mostly filled with advertisements. A full-page ad for a clearance sale of ladies’ fur coats at Meine in East Berlin did little to persuade me I was wrong about this; buying a fur coat on one of the hottest days of the year looked every bit as crazy as staking yourself out like a goat for a man-eating tiger.

  Still cursing the news vendor, I tried to figure out where I was going to move to; the next nearest station was at the Stock Exchange, which was at least half a kilometer to the east. A fifteen-minute stroll when you were on legs, but something else when you were confined to a klutz wagon. That was clearly out of the question. But perhaps I might find a spot on Georgenstrasse, close to the all-important overhead railway line, and after a while I had marked out a place in my mind’s eye that was in front of the Trianon Theater, less than two hundred meters away. I waited a while, smoked another roll-up, and then set off.

  * * *

  —

  ON MY THIRD DAY outside the Trianon I caught a glimpse of Käthe Haack, the actress, stepping out of a shiny Maybach limousine and going up to the stage door. She signed a few autographs, smiled her famous ingénue smile, and went inside, but not before putting a silver fifty-pfennig piece in my hat, which was the most I’d had since I’d started to beg and for which I blessed her, several times, and resolved not to think badly of her or her terrible movies ever again. A little later, Haack’s much older husband, Heinrich Schroth, turned up—and gave me nothing except a look of withering contempt before going in through the same stage door. He was always playing Prussian aristocrats in movies and I think he almost believed he was one. He wore his broad-brimmed hat Bohemian-style and his coat hung on his shoulders like a cape; for a while I entertained myself with the idea that he might have been Winnetou because, at a stretch, he fit the description given by Fritz Pabst.

  The Trianon had five entrances: the main one on Georgenstrasse, and the other four on Prinz-Louis-Ferdinand-Strasse and on Prinz-Franz-Karl-Strasse. The back of the theater was a warren of alleys and small courtyards and gave onto the headquarters of the Green police, which was what the political police were called because it was their job to cover all outdoor political demonstrations, but it certainly didn’t stop them from interfering with the normal day-to-day policing of the city that was handled by the regular cops, the Schupo. From time to time, a Greenie would harass one of the many prostitutes who, at all hours of the day, brought their clients to the back alleys of the Trianon from the various bars, theaters, casinos, and revues that were located in the famous Admiralsp
alast on Friedrichstrasse. But the sheer number of pricks that were sucked around the back of the Trianon was only exceeded by the number of pricks inside the theater, although Schroth was by no means the biggest of these; Mathias Wieman and Gerhard Dammann were usually in and out of the Trianon, and so was the biggest prick of them all, the stage actor Gustaf Gründgens, who couldn’t have looked more pleased with himself if he’d been the devil incarnate. He wore a supercilious smile that persisted even after he’d flicked a half-smoked cigarette at my head. I wasn’t sure if he meant to hit me or if he intended me to smoke it, but since beggars can’t be choosers—and certainly shouldn’t look as if they can be—I picked it up and saluted him as if he’d done me a favor.

  “Thank you, sir. You’re very kind. Very kind, indeed.” I puffed the cigarette and found it was excellent Turkish tobacco. Nothing but the best for Gustaf Gründgens.

  “What’s this? Sarcasm? From a beggar?”

  “No, sir. Never. Not me. Although it seems to me that even a great actor might learn something with a beggar for a teacher.”

  “True.”

  Gründgens fixed a monocle to his eye and regarded me as he might a strange species of beetle.

  “You know who I am then.”

  “Oh yes, sir. I expect everyone knows who you are. You’re the greatest actor in Germany, sir. At least that’s what educated people say. You’re the great Emil Jannings.”

  Gründgens’s smile became a rictus and without another word he went on his way. It only takes a small triumph to make your day.

  Actors were not the only artistes I saw at the Trianon. On my fourth day playing the tethered goat I realized that a man was sketching me. He was about forty, tall, handsome, with a good head, a rather boyish haircut, and a thoughtful knot between his gloomy, gray eyes. He wore a lightweight brown suit with plus four trousers, a rose-colored shirt with a collar pin, and a stiff pink bow tie. He didn’t look like he wanted to shoot me, just to draw me. Irritated I turned my head away, hoping he might leave. Being closely observed was bad for my purpose; Dr. Gnadenschuss was hardly likely to strike while I was having my portrait done. My turning away prompted the artist to come over, first to apologize and then to offer me fifty pfennigs to resume my previous pose. He also told me his name was Otto.