“If you’re going to stay, then allow the girl to put on some clothes,” the artist suggests, but Fritz certainly doesn’t wish to interrupt.
“No, no, I won’t stay,” he insists, his gaze hanging languidly. “The last thing I’d wish is to disrupt the artistic process.”
In response, the girl draws a long, lazy breath that causes her breast to heave slowly before she expels it. “I would murder for a cigarette, Herr Landau,” she announces.
Fritz grins, but he defers to his sister. “Lavinia? May I be permitted?”
Lavinia, however, is a wall. “She can smoke when I’m finished with her,” she decrees.
“Then I should be going. I only wanted to confirm that you’ll be in Wannsee tomorrow.”
“Wannsee?”
“The Lieberman villa? The Akademie luncheon?”
“Is that really tomorrow?” Lavinia asks.
“It is. And, Sister, you must be there.”
“The only woman in the room.”
“I thought you considered that an honor.”
“I consider it a travesty. But fine. I’ll be there.”
“One o’clock,” says her brother with a smile. A smile he then raises to Lavinia’s model. “So very pleased to meet you, child. Lavinia, what did you say is this charming young woman’s name again?”
“Rosen, I said. Fräulein Rosen.”
The girl jumps in. “Angelika,” she declares.
“Of course,” Fritz agrees, still smiling. “A name for an angel.”
Afterward, when Fritz has taken his leave and Lavinia is soaking her brushes in glass jars of spirits, Angelika glares frowningly at the tarp covering the canvas. “Why can’t I see it?”
“It’s not finished, that’s why. Here,” Lavinia tells her. “Have your reward.” She lifts the copper lid of a box stained with fingerprints of paint. It’s filled with cigarettes. And when Angelika grabs one to smoke, Lavinia lights it for her with an equally paint-stained table lighter. “I wish you wouldn’t do that,” the artist tells her.
Expelling smoke. Eyes languid. “Do what?”
“Flirt with my brother.”
Angelika raises her eyebrows. “Was that what I was doing?” she asks. A question that ratchets up a sudden tension between them. It’s a certain magnetic force that has been powering their connection. An intimacy between artist and model? Or something more? Angelika does not move. She permits the tension to build, and then she breaks away. Scooping up the lazy yellow cat, she waltzes it across the room, calling it her precious treasure.
The Adlon. Berlin’s premier hotel. Let those nationalist thugs and Hitlerites pollute the dining room of the Kaiserhof if they must, the Adlon wouldn’t have them in to sweep the rugs. The Brandenburg Gate looms immensely through the windows as the liveried doorman and bellhops busy themselves with the arrivals of their guests from a stream of taxicabs rolling up to the granite curb. Only the top cut of people, of course, come to enjoy a final vestige of Kaiserliche glory that the Adlon proffers within its imperial walls. Fritz owns a garden villa in the Grunewald but keeps a suite here as a matter of course. The hanging chandeliers, the fine linen, the cathedral windows of the dining room provide the luxury that he feels comfortable with. A spot where the great and near-great sit for luncheon. A string ensemble in tailcoats plays Mozart, the Quartet in D minor, as if they are spinning threads of gold.
Angelika’s hair is plaited in a crown, ladylike, and she is dressed in what’s obviously the best dress available to a girl from the inner courtyards of the Wilhelmine Ring. Their waiter is a stiff-necked old soldier of the hotel, dressed in black cutaway and crisply pleated bib. “A brandy for the honored gentleman,” the Herr Ober announces as he serves the cognac. “And,” he adds with a certain spring to his tone, “a brandy for the gnädige Fräulein.” Even a staunch Adlon Prussian is not invulnerable to the desire she generates.
She touches Fritz’s hand as he ignites her cigarette with a gold lighter bearing a shell cameo. “What a pretty bauble,” she says.
“Alfred Dunhill,” Fritz reports.
“Is it valuable?”
He shrugs. Valuable? “Value is relative, I’ve learned.” He ignites his own cigarette screwed into a short black onyx holder. “You strike me as a person who appreciates value,” he observes. “Is that so?”
“My father runs a wholesale business in the Prenzlauer Berg. He sells buttons to garment makers. It costs him one pfennig to sell a button for two pfennigs. That’s all I understand about value, Herr Landau.” She says this and takes a sip from her snifter of cognac. “Besides, that isn’t really what you want to talk about. Is it?”
Fritz lifts his eyebrows. “Isn’t it?”
The girl shrugs but does not alter her gaze.
“You’re different now,” he observes.
“Am I really?”
“You’re better dressed. This lovely frock you’re wearing. The lovely pearl earrings.”
“Money buys things. Your sister paid me well to pose for her.”
“Nine marks an hour is what my sister pays when she uses a model,” he contradicts. “And in any case,” Fritz points out, “you’re no longer posing for my sister.”
A small smile but without pleasure. That’s all she offers.
“What happened?” he wants to know.
A shrug, inhaling smoke. “You should ask her.”
“I did,” Fritz assures her.
“And?”
“And she said it was none of my business.”
“Ha,” says Angelika.
“But she’s wrong. It is my business. She is my business, in a quite literal sense. So I’m going to ask you again, Angelika. What happened between the two of you?”
The girl takes a gulp of cognac and frowns. “She broke her promise.”
“Promise?”
“She said she would send me to Feige-Strassburger. To study fashion.”
“Did she really? Well, that’s a surprise.”
“I’m not lying.”
“I didn’t say you were. But then she changed her mind?” Fritz wonders.
“She broke her promise,” the girl repeats. “She was jealous.”
A sip of cognac. “That’s interesting to hear. Can you explain what you mean?”
The girl snorts a laugh. “Do I need to explain?” She can’t believe that she does. So all she says, with a crooked smile, is “She wanted me all to herself.”
Fritz sets down his glass and strokes the point of his Vandyke, as if to make a study of this woman in front of him. He may not be as artistically gifted as his sister, but he has a certain artistic instinct about people. He can recognize a true work of art. “What do you want?” he wonders aloud.
Angelika raises her eyebrows. “Want?”
“Yes. What does Fräulein Rosen want? From today?” Fritz asks. “From tomorrow? From life?”
“Oh. That’s simple,” she tells him. “I want freedom. Freedom to do whatever I please. Freedom to be whomever I choose. Freedom to be with whomever I choose,” she says. And then: “Your sister. She made a point of announcing that you are married.”
“I am,” he admits in an uncomplicated tone. “My wife lives in Frankfurt.”
“That’s far away for a wife.”
“She keeps her own home, and I keep mine. I send her a gift on her birthday. I believe last year it was a set of crystal sconces.”
“So this is a sport for you, then? Schtupping pretty girls who aren’t ashamed to take off their clothes for—as you reminded me—nine marks an hour.”
Fritz considers. “Is that what I’m doing, you think?” he asks. “Having sport?”
For a heavy moment, both hold the gaze of the other. Then comes an unwelcomed burst of noise from the street. A lorry roars across the Pariser Platz, bristling with hooked-cross flags and hung with a banner exhorting Berliners to “Vote List 2!” Brownshirted storm troopers bellow their narrative through megaphones. “Germany Awake! Jews Perish!” they bawl, tossing armloads of hooked-cross confetti into the wind.