Carry Me Page 25

  “Would you come around, Billy? There’s a debt of honor. I’m a bit short.”

  Con’s “debts of honor” were always gambling debts.

  “How much?”

  “My dear, I had one hundred marks on Cockpen for the derby, but April the Fifth has come in. Such a bore when the favorite takes it. Awfully slow field this year. Dear Willy let me have the go but now I find I’m forty marks short.”

  I was tempted to tell her to call my father but knew it would dishearten him to have to pluck his mother out of a nightclub. I was irritated because I relished the rare calm of the office in the evening, when I could read novels in peace.

  Ziegler was an impressive chief. Despite his American suits and soft collars, his manner was rather fierce and formal. He was hard-driving, and hated sloppy work, but he looked out for “his boys” when it came to transfers and promotions.

  Everyone in the Translation Department at IG Farben was young. My close friends were Robert Briesewitz, who’d warmed up after his initial coolness, and Ernest Mack, another member of the tribe of Walden Apache, who’d earned his doctorate in organic chemistry. Ernest and Robert loved jazz. Ernest had a fabulous collection of discs and Robert played the trumpet.

  Translations was a recognized training ground for future Prokuristen, executives. We certainly thought of ourselves as an elite. In our department everyone expected promotions and overseas postings. An IG sales office had just been opened in China, our biggest export market for dyestuffs, and we figured one or two positions at Shanghai must go to fellows from the department. The Good Earth had just been published in America and England, one of our fellows had brought a copy back from New York, and Pearl Buck’s novel was spinning a sort of Chinese magic for us. The peasant Wang Lung’s mystic feeling for the soil moved me. The irony was that he loved the soil so much it became a terrible, all-consuming lust that ruined him, broke his family, and turned his sons against him.

  We all wanted China, but there was no point putting oneself forward as a candidate. At IG Farben you were told what your next post would be; you didn’t dare ask for it.

  However, I was thinking about China a lot. What should I do if word came down from the sixth floor that I was transferred to the Shanghai bureau? Shanghai was a blank page. China meant opportunity. Salary. An expense allowance. I could write my own story there.

  But men sent to China or South America were expected to stay on those posts for years, even spend the rest of their careers overseas.

  Early in the summer Karin had spent a week at Walden while her mother was recuperating from her first cancer surgery, but I rarely got a chance to speak to her. Once or twice she’d waved from sporting roadsters with Berlin registrations, going very fast along the gravel drive.

  “Too fast!” Buck complained, concerned as always for the safety of his horses.

  I could imagine posting letters to Karin from exotic Shanghai. But what would I say in them? I hated to think of her marrying some fellow with a sports car.

  Meanwhile I had to settle up with my grandmother’s bookie. Picking up my hat, I rode the lift down and caught a tram to Frankie’s. It was raining hard, the streets were gloomy and slick. Frankfurt didn’t have much nightlife, unless you counted parades, marches, and riots, NSDAP Sturmtruppen exchanging shots with KPD gunmen, both of those brawling with uniformed squads from the Reichsbanner.

  I was soaked by the time I reached Frankie’s, in a narrow street not far from Goethe’s house, next to a musical-instrument shop. The entrance was looked after by a doorman, Brutus, supposed to be a White Russian prince. He also dealt in hashish, and wristwatches and car parts, probably stolen.

  After midnight drunken SA men sometimes gathered on the sidewalk across the street and yowled insults at patrons coming out of Frankie’s wearing “decadent” gowns and evening clothes. Since the NSDAP victory in the spring, when the party had taken the biggest percentage of votes in the Reichstag elections, Sturmtruppen had been haranguing people dressed in styles they didn’t approve of, especially anyone they imagined looked Jewish. Sometimes the Schutzpolizei intervened. Usually they didn’t.

  In Dr. Ziegler’s Translation Department we considered ourselves cosmopolitan sophisticates. Ordering a martini or manhattan at Frankie’s was as cosmopolitan and sophisticated as things got in Frankfurt. But the place was too expensive to be our regular hangout, and the SA goons lurking outside with their rubber truncheons and dog-whips targeted special abuse and threats at young fellows un-German enough to prefer handmade English shoes to jackboots, manhattan cocktails to cider in some smoky hole of Apfelweinwirtschaft.

  Frankie’s was one long narrow slot of a room with a polished mahogany bar along its length. Leather banquettes lined the wall opposite. There were also tables à deux and a small dance floor and usually a jazz band that started playing after eleven o’clock.

  Even in the blaze of German summer it was cool in Frankie’s, the atmosphere scented by ice, polished glass, liquor. Bottles and champagne buckets sparkled in the mirrors behind the bar. The air itself seemed polished. The tiny kitchen opened at midnight, and a young Siamese cook prepared the only two dishes on the menu: Frankie’s Irish stew or scrambled eggs and bacon. Eddy Morrison, the owner, was a tough customer from East Belfast who always wore a dinner jacket with satin lapels that somehow didn’t make him look any less a bruiser. He’d been shot in the neck on the Somme in 1916, and I could see the scar peeking over his stiff collar. Morrison had spent some time in New York and San Francisco before opening Charlie’s American Bar in Paris a week after Lindbergh landed in France. He once told me he’d sent a telegram offering Lindy partnership in the bar.

  “I doubt he ever was offered a better business opportunity. But not a word back. Head in the clouds, I’d say.”

  Eddy had arrived in Germany after some trouble with the Paris police. He bet heavily on the horses, and I believe my grandmother offered him tips on Walden runners. He called me Charles or Charlie, he said, because I reminded him of Lindbergh.

  I could see my grandmother seated in a banquette, playing cards with Karin Weinbrenner. I hadn’t seen Karin in months.

  While she was with her parents at Walden she’d often been less well-turned-out than you might expect of a person of her background. A button or two missing from a blouse; a front soldier’s feldgrau greatcoat thrown over her shoulders, instead of an elegant wrap. Jodhpurs instead of afternoon dresses. Such reckless dishabille certainly annoyed her mother, but she had set the style for a pack of young women, and for a while all the golden young things in Frankfurt had dressed à la Karin: belted overcoats with belts untied, blouses radically unbuttoned. Old jodhpurs with woolen jumpers and mahogany-top horse boots. Most girls had bobbed their hair, but Karin’s bob was always blunt and rough, as though cropped with a pair of fetlock shears. Her chestnut hair was so thick and lustrous that even in its wreckage it was beautiful.

  I’ve never felt at ease unless I am well dressed. All my life I’ve paid more attention to clothes than a real gentleman ought to. It’s insecurity, plainly. Uncertain social standing: my parents didn’t own the house where I was born.

  That night at Frankie’s she wore a black sheath dress with a string of pearls falling down her chest. Her neck and shoulders were white. She looked sleek, sophisticated, urbane—Very Berlin, I thought, though her hair was its usual thick, alluring tangle. I’d never been to Berlin. I had been to Paris on a business trip, however. And I was scheduled to fly to Birmingham with Dr. Ziegler in a couple of weeks: my first airplane trip. And I was pondering Shanghai. All in all, despite certain misgivings, I was pleased with myself, with what I was beginning to think of as my career, with the silk neckties I’d bought on the rue de Rivoli. I was beginning to feel quite accomplished, experienced. A man of the world. An IG man.

  You are aware that people at IG Farben did discreditable things once the directors got in bed with the NSDAP. You know they offered a significant amount of financial support to Hitler in 1933.
They expected profits from the conquest of Europe. Thousands slaved in the IG Farben plants at Auschwitz, producing synthetic rubber and fuel. You know Zyklon-B, the gas used to kill off unproductive slaves at the factories and millions more in the death camps, was originally an IG product marketed as insecticide.

  In the early thirties, I was proud to be an IG Farben man.

  “Hello, Billy.” Karin seemed older and somehow less complicated than I remembered, but even more attractive.

  “Hello, Karin.”

  I lingered by the table without sitting down, no longer feeling quite so self-assured. They were both focused on their cards.

  If I were a wristwatch, she was a magnet. Coming close to her disordered my sense of time.

  “Dear Billy,” my grandmother said, “do go and see Mr. Chopdelau.”

  The bookie Willy Chopdelau sat at his banquette with his money box and his pair of telephones. He was a Pole, muscular and young, always dressed in horsey tweeds. He was sipping a glass of milk and reading the F-Zeit. He seemed satisfied to take my check for forty marks. We spoke French.

  “What’s outside, Charlie?” he asked.

  “Raining. Buckets.”

  “Dear fellow, any SA goons?”

  “Not tonight.”

  “I like rain, Charles,” said Willy. “It makes things clean.”

  There weren’t many customers at the bar. It was still early and Frankie’s drew a late-night crowd. I ordered a glass of beer. I’d rather have had a cocktail, but cocktails were expensive.

  Karin smiled across the room at me. My grandmother was expertly shuffling the deck. It looked as though they would be playing another hand. I watched Con deal the cards briskly. As soon as the hand was played I intended to hire a taxi so we might all three ride out to Walden together. I never took taxis myself, too expensive, but my grandmother disliked trams and took taxis everywhere, whether she had funds or not, and I doubted Karin had ever taken a tram.

  The hand was played out, and Karin lost. As I approached their table my grandmother was putting money into her purse.

  “Put Constance in a cab, Billy,” Karin said. “She’s taken every last penny. Then do come back and buy me a drink. I should like to hear what you’ve been up to.”

  Drinks at Frankie’s with Karin von? Amazing. A stunning new height of sophistication had been reached.

  “Good night, my dear,” Con said, kissing Karin’s cheek. “Don’t talk to strange men.”

  “I shan’t say a word to anyone but your terribly handsome grandson.”

  My grandmother held my arm as we left the bar. “They don’t get on, she and her mother,” Con remarked.

  “They never have.”

  “Her mother’s people in Ireland were known for cold blood. I didn’t get on with my parents, either. But I married Captain Jack, and a few months later we set off for California. Didn’t tell him I was pregnant until we were off Brazil. Couldn’t bear being left behind—oh, your grandfather never liked being stuck to a place, the great thing for him was to move! Had we not met I’d have married Charlie Butler. My parents were terribly keen for me to marry poor Charlie, but I wanted my bold German sailor. Your grandfather had the vital spark! Oh, my dear, he most certainly did.”

  There was no mention of my paying off her bookie—or, rather, of her paying back her grandson.

  There were always a couple of taxis waiting outside Frankie’s, at least until the SA goons spooked the drivers away. I helped my grandmother into one.

  “Thank you, dear boy. Never bet the favorite. Not much fun. Even when you win—not much fun at all.”

  I watched her cab rattle away. The rain had stopped. Gray cobblestones glistened. No NSDAP men in sight. Going back inside the bar, I felt bold and strong. Felt the jangle of my life’s admittedly thin history trailing behind me like a string of medals. The Louisiana Seven (jazz boys from Duisburg and Köln) were warming up: discordant squeaks, throttles, the rattle of drums. I was a man of experience and substance, a man of the world, and Karin Weinbrenner was waiting for me in her buttoned-leather banquette.

  She smiled as I slid in beside her. A waiter hovered. Karin asked for another martini just like the last, and I ordered the same. In Frankfurt a martini, if you could get one, was customarily served in an old-fashioned glass, on the rocks. One-third vermouth, and no olive. But Karin preferred a few drops of vermouth per ounce of gin, stirred with ice, strained into a chilled martini glass, and served with an olive. In Berlin these were known as clear-colds.

  Rescuing my grandmother from a gambling debt, paying off her bookie—for me, this had been potentially an embarrassing situation, but Karin seemed not to notice. While we waited for our drinks she asked for a cigarette. I shook two from a pack, stuck them both in my mouth, and lit them. Another height of sophistication was reached.

  “Where do you get those?” she said.

  I was smoking Sweet Aftons. They cost a bit more than the German brands—Ecksteins, Mokris, Attikahs—and there was only one tobacconist in Frankfurt that carried them. I thought they were distinctive and made me seem less ordinary than my peers.

  “They’re Irish. I get them at Rothstein’s shop.”

  “Billy Lange, Billy Lange.” Karin smiled. “I don’t know you at all, do I? What an interesting necktie that is. Are you at university now? You’re not a fighting man, I see.”

  I reminded her I’d joined the Translation Department of IG Farben. No one on Dr. Ziegler’s flying squad wore a Schmiss. Anyone with a saber scar would be laughed out of headquarters. Krebs was the only Nazi in our office, and he had to be discreet because Dr. Ziegler certainly was no party man.

  Though there were two Jews in translation, Kracauer and Rothbart, Krebs knew he must keep his politics and racial opinions out of the office; he loathed Kracauer, who was probably responsible for the spreading of Günter’s old nickname, Ducky, around IG.

  Flying-squad esprit de corps was intense. At a period when jobs were scarce, my position in the ultra-modern firm IG Farben made me feel special. Lucky. Worldly. Smart. In our department we used as much American or English slang as we could get away with. We called Dr. Ziegler “Chief” or sometimes “Boss,” informality unimaginable in other branches or departments. We wore fedora hats with brims snapped down, like Chicago gangsters. Our crisp striped shirts were ordered from Jermyn Street, London. More than anything, we despised German shoes. Only English handmade shoes would do for us.

  I hoped all this sartorial style might disguise how out of my depth I actually felt, sitting in a banquette at Frankie’s English Bar, having drinks with Karin Weinbrenner.

  I knew what I ought to do, were China offered: get the vaccinations, purchase the tropical suits, say goodbye to the parents, and leave.

  I didn’t know if I’d actually be able leave her.

  Years before, after target shooting in the woods, she’d asked me to bury her shot-up dresses. She didn’t want her mother finding them. I’d fetched a spade and done as she asked, and there was something melancholy about it, like burying a dead bird, a robin the cat had pounced on. I’d kept one of the dresses for a while. A red dress with a bullet hole. My mother found it and looked at me strangely. She didn’t say anything but took it away, and I never laid eyes on it again.

  I gave Karin another Sweet Afton and snapped us both a light. The waiter was fetching our drinks. The bookie Willie Chopdelau was having a mild argument with a friend of my grandmother’s—Istvan, a penniless Hungarian count. The count also owed Willie money. Most of my grandmother’s friends in Frankfurt were in debt to the bookmaker, and most of them were some version of Istvan—old chancers who carried themselves like military men and liked to bet on horses.

  Karin was quiet. That was fine with me. Being in her company for the first time as an adult was enough. We didn’t need talk. Being with her always gave me some purchase on who I was myself. After the initial disturbance she caused I could always see myself more clearly.

  “This is a cozy sort
of place,” she said. “In Berlin, things are more brutal. One’s own thoughts won’t let one think. In Berlin my mind is chasing itself. How are you these days?”

  I let her know I was off to England in a few days, on a flying visit with Dr. Ziegler. And there was a possibility of Shanghai, I told her. If I was offered that post, I didn’t know what I should do.

  “Ah, Billy, my blood brother, surely China’s too far.”

  The waiter arrived with our drinks. My first clear-cold. The sharp infusion of gin was a bit breathtaking. Or maybe it was her calling me blood brother that spun my head a little.

  “Do you know what’s up on my bedroom wall, Karin?”

  “Don’t tell me you’ve become an art collector.”

  “Road maps. States of America. When I was in school I pinned them up in a sequence, east to west, and traced the route that crosses El Llano Estacado.”

  She shook out two more Sweet Aftons, put them both between her lips, lit them, and gave one to me. “When do you leave?”

  “Have you ever looked again at the Winnetou stories, Karin? They don’t bear up. They really are quite ridiculous.”

  “They worked on our dreams.”

  “One doesn’t find answers with a road map, Karin.”

  “Really?”

  “It would take money, for one thing,” I said. “And blue sky is just—blue sky. In real Texas, there are sharecroppers. Actually, peasants. They can’t get enough money for cotton they raise. Can’t afford shoes. Dress in rags. They’re starving. I read about them in the Paris Trib.”

  “We don’t have to inhabit our historical situation, Billy. You don’t have to become whatever it is they are training you to become, a Frankfurt businessman. Old Shatterhand, you recall, was working for the railroad when first he met Winnetou. He soon gave that up.”

  I’ll cross el llano if you’ll come with me.