The Lucy Ghosts

'I understand what you're saying.'

'Hmm,' Trimmler snorted disbelievingly. 'You're English, yes?'

Adam nodded.

'European. Like me. Not like these Americans with their barbaric ways. This country is a cultural wasteland. The dollar. That's all they care about. Their dollar and what it buys for them. When I was a child, my father used to take me to concerts. I heard some of the greatest musicians in the world before the War. I have waited here for nearly fifty years. For what?'

Adam saw the waiter approaching again. 'I think we should order. Otherwise they're going to throw us out.'

'You order for me. Anything. Chicken if they have it.'

The waiter put a fresh scotch on the rocks down and took Adam's order. He asked for Chicken Cajun for Trimmler and blackened redfish, the house speciality, for himself.

Frankie wheeled himself in at that stage, caught Adam's eye and waved him over.

'Gotta message for you. From Tucker,' said Frankie. 'He said you should know that someone called Mitzer, Grob Mitzer, just died. He was in a building that got blown up. In Germany. Says not to say anything to your friend over there, unless he already knows. Just wanted to make you aware of it.'

'Okay. See you later.'

Mitzer, Adam thought as he walked back to the table, was the name mentioned during Trimmler's meeting with Goodenache. Trimmler had said they should meet him in Nordhausen. And now he was dead.

'What was it?' asked Trimmler as Adam sat down.

'Tucker. He wanted to know what time we were coming back.'

'That driver. He was at the airport to meet us.'

'He's part of Tucker's team.'

‘Everything is a game to these people.'

'If you miss Europe so much, why not go back?' There you go, he thought. In for a penny, in for a pound. 'If Germany is still your home, why stay here?'

Trimmler looked up sharply, then smiled and shook his head. 'If only life was that easy.'

'It's not the money that keeps you here. You've made yours. What is it?'

'Everything. Forty five years. That's how long I have lived here. What are you? A detective as well as a baby-sitter?'

'No, sir.' Adam could butter up with the best of them. It was like pulling a bird. No different than clinching a business deal. 'I just feel that you've achieved so much, unimaginable to the rest of us. But you did that here, in this country. And Germany has changed since you left. I can tell you that because I live in modern Europe. Nobody gets taken to concerts as kids anymore. Hell, the parents spend all their time trying to stop them going to pop concerts. We also have drugs, and high crime, and AIDS and every other problem that America's got.'

'Maybe in the West. Not in some other places.'

'Like where?'

'In Eastern Europe, even after the Russian invasion, there are still old values.'

'And poverty. And starvation. In the West we have progress.'

'Economic problems. They can be resolved. But you can never bring back the moral loss, the drop in human standards. You talk about progress. Do you know what that is to a scientist?' Trimmler downed his drink and signalled the waiter to bring another one. The drink was opening the man up. 'Let me tell you about progress. When I first left university, hardly more than a schoolboy because of the war, I was sent to the air research unit in Bremen. In 1939. We were testing for aircraft pressurisation. We wanted to see the effect high altitude flying had on people. We couldn't put rats or mice into those decompression chambers. We couldn't see what was going to happen to them, couldn't hear how they reacted. We had to use humans. First we had volunteers, from the Luftwaffe. After we'd blown a few ear drums and sent some people imbecilic after oxygen starvation, we realised we wouldn't have an Air Force left by the time we'd found a solution. So we used other volunteers. Criminals, people like that. No good people. And because of those tests, because of the risks we took, passengers now fly across the world in perfect safety, at whatever height they go to. It was our experiments that made it possible. That, my friend, is where progress comes from. From the risks of others.'

Yes, reflected Adam, and the pain of the Jews and Poles and other Eastern Europeans that Trimmler and his friends had experimented on.

'I didn't appreciate that,' he heard himself lying.

'No one ever does. They forget the hard battles you fight to win an easy life.' Trimmler reached across the table and held up one of the small plastic butter cartons. 'This is margarine, you know. In the war, that's all we could get. Not butter. But this, because it was easier to produce. We used to call it Hitler butter. You see, even here his legacy lives on.'

'Why is Eastern Europe different now?'

'Because they still have the old values. Because for forty five years they have been subjugated. Because they still remember how it was. And that's where the new Germany will come from. And the new Europe. From the old values. From the way it was.'

'And that's why you want to go back?'

'So I believed. Until I was told I was too old. I have waited all these years. For what?'

'Who told you?'

Trimmler shook his head, his face twisted in bitterness and anger. Then he suddenly stood up. 'I can't wait for this food. It's too long. I'm going.'

He stormed out of the restaurant, unsteady on his feet as Adam handed the surprised waiter a $100 dollar note and followed him.

Trimmler turned into Toulouse Street, crossed Royal and stopped on the corner of Bourbon. Adam had followed at a short distance, not wanting to further upset the scientist. Frankie, blocked off by the increasing crowds and pedestrian areas, had stayed where he was. If they wanted him they'd find him. The crowds, the night-timers, were once again on the move.

One of the hookers, a buxom blonde girl in pink satin hot pants and tight ribbed sweater, came alongside Trimmler and smiled brazenly at him; that thousand year old smile full of meaning and erotic promise. Trimmler shook his head and crossed the road, then turned and watched her from a safe distance. He saw her proposition another man, then take his arm and lead him away.

Trimmler waved Adam towards him.

'I don't want you to follow me any more,' he ordered.

'I can't do that.'

'I'm telling you to stop following me.'

'And I saying I can't.'

'I am entitled to my privacy.'

'Get my orders changed and I'll be happy to leave you alone.'

'Then keep out of my sight. You damn baby-sitter.'

Adam realised Trimmler had lost control. Whatever it was that had aggrieved him was now secondary to the hate he directed towards his watcher. Adam shrugged and moved away, melting into the crowd that had started to form as Trimmler's outburst poured out.

At a safe distance he spent the next ninety minutes watching Trimmler visit a series of bars along the strip. The scientist stuck to his staple scotch on the rocks, grew more morose as he sat in dark corners and disappeared into his own thoughts. The only times he looked up was when a single, unattached woman, nearly always a hooker, appeared near him. But he never took the initiative, always returned to the comfort of the glass in front of him.

On his sojourn between the various watering holes, he occasionally looked back to see if he could identify Adam, but the Englishman used all his experience to stay well out of sight.