“You know what they say about Berlin in the winter, don’t you?” he said.
“What?”
“That there’re only two places to keep warm — in bed or the bath.”
“You have no bath, of course.”
“Only a bed.”
“Then that will have to do.”
He kissed her then. She was quite ready for it, both her mouth and her tongue eager and exploring. When it was over, she leaned back on the bed, supporting herself on her elbows.
“There is no hurry, is there, printer?”
“None.”
“We will finish the bottle first and you can tell me about yourself and then we will go to bed. It has been a long time since I have been to bed with a man.”
“What about your young American?”
“He is a very nice boy and, like most boys, very eager, very impatient. Were you ever like that, printer — young and impatient and eager?”
“A long time ago.”
“Tell me about it Tell me about you and what you did before the war in Berlin.”
He leaned back and put an arm around her. She shifted slightly so that her head rested on his chest. “I had my own shop,” he said, “not far from the Adlon Hotel; do you know it?”
“A very fashionable district.”
“I was a very fashionable printer. The rich liked me — the rich and the poor poets. I printed their invitations and calling cards — the rich, I mean. No one was anyone unless they had them done by me. I did the best work in Berlin, and I was very expensive. By being expensive I could afford to print the poor poets. You know the kind of thing — slim volumes on thick paper. I also did commercial work — fancy brochures, things like that; more bread-and-butter stuff. And, of course, there was the political material. I printed that too, and kept on printing it even after I was warned not to. I was what your young American friend would call a very ‘hotshot’ Social Democrat at the time. They came for me eventually, the Gestapo. They wrecked the plant. I got to watch that. Then they took me away, and finally I wound up in Belsen. And there I broadened my political horizons.”
“So you could eat.”
“So I could eat.”
“You sound as though you like to live well, printer.”
“It is a weakness.”
“I suffer from it too. Do you think you ever will again?”
“Not unless a miracle happens — one of those kinds that you say Berlin doesn’t believe in.”
She was silent for a moment. Then she turned onto her stomach and looked at him. “Twenty-five thousand dollars can buy a great many miracles, printer. Twenty-seven, actually.”
He grinned and wrapped a strand of her hair around his finger. “You have dangerous thoughts, little one.”
“So do you.”
“I’m surprised.”
“At my thoughts?”
“That you didn’t mention them sooner.”
“It could be done.”
“It would also be dangerous.”
“No more dangerous than killing a man whom you really don’t want to kill.”
He gave the strand of hair a gentle tug. “I bet you even have a plan.”
She kissed him — a quick, friendly, warm, wet kiss. “You’re right, I do. Make love to me, printer. Make love to me and then I will tell you about my plan.”
“To abscond with twenty-five thousand dollars.”
“Twenty-seven, actually.”
He grinned again. “With that much money I could afford you, couldn’t I?”
She kissed him quickly again. “That’s right, printer. You could.”
24
On the way to the black-market restaurant, Leah Oppenheimer didn’t even seem to notice the huge old roadster or the stares that it attracted. She sat silently in the passenger’s seat, a silk scarf around her head and a small, shy smile on her lips: the kind of smile, Jackson decided, that a proper young woman would wear on her very first date.
After parking the car near the restaurant, he gave a shabbily dressed middle-aged man five cigarettes to watch it. For another two cigarettes the man offered to dust the car off with a dirty rag that he produced from underneath his hat. Jackson shrugged and paid him his price.
The restaurant was called the Blue Fox Cellar, and it was located in the bowels of a building that had been erected sometime in the late eighteenth century. There was nothing left of the building now except for a pile of rubble and a new, jerry-built entrance that was about as inviting as the entrance to a New York subway.
To get to the restaurant itself they had to go down a steep flight of stairs, then along a corridor, and through another door. But before they were allowed through that, they were inspected by an eye that peered out at them from a speakeasylike peephole. Jackson thought that the eye looked beady, but he didn’t say anything.
Past the door, they found themselves in an immense, round room with stone walls and a wide stone staircase that hugged the curving wall as it descended into the dining area thirty feet below. The place was lighted by a number of kerosene lamps and what Jackson estimated to be hundreds of thick, squat candles.
At the bottom of the stairs they were met by a bowing, properly obsequious headwaiter dressed in white tie and tailcoat, who showed them to a table, took their coats, and handed them their menus. Before examining the bill of fare, Jackson looked around at the the other diners.
Most of them were Germans: prosperous, flush-faced men in their forties and fifties. Nearly all of them were accompanied by much younger women who seemed to be eating hungrily. There were also a number of middle-ranking American Army officers: majors and lieutenant colonels mostly, with a sprinkling of captains. The Americans’ women, for the most part, seemed better looking, better dressed, and not quite so hungry. On a small raised platform a four-piece string ensemble played moody waltzes. A few couples danced.
The shock that Jackson got when he examined the menu almost cost him his appetite. The prices were higher than New York’s highest, higher even than the astronomical black-market prices he had paid, in Paris during the week’s leave he had had there in ’45 just before they had flown him out to Burma. He guessed that it was going to cost him 10,000 marks to get out of the Blue Fox Cellar. Ten thousand marks was about fifty American dollars.
Leah Oppenheimer smiled shyly and asked if he would mind ordering for her. Since the menu was written in bad French and boasted caviar and champagne, he ordered both plus coq au vin, a salad, and a Moselle, which the menu claimed to be prewar. He ordered in French, and the German waiter replied in English.
Although the caviar was a bit suspicious and the champagne equally so, the chicken was good, as was the Moselle. Leah Oppenheimer ate and drank everything that was set before her. Afterward, she said that she really didn’t care for a dessert, but wouldn’t mind the coffee and brandy that Jackson proposed instead.
The brandy made her bold, or perhaps just less reserved. With her elbow on the table and her chin cupped in her hand, she gazed at Jackson and said, “You have done this many times, haven’t you?”
“Well, not exactly like this,” he said, thinking of the bill that was yet to come. “This is rather special.”
“I think you have had much experience with many women.”
Jackson could think of nothing to say to that, so he smiled and hoped that it was a noncommittal smile and not a leer.
“But you have never married.”
“No.”
“Do you think you will one day?”
“I’m beginning to wonder.”
“I think you will marry a nice American girl and settle down and live in — in Tulsa, Oklahoma.”
Jackson realized that for her Tulsa was as remote as Timbuktu. Perhaps even more so. “I think you’re a lousy fortune-teller,” he said.