The Vanishing Kind

Copyright © 2016 by Lavie Tidhar
All rights reserved.

Published as an ebook in 2018 by Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Inc., in association with the Zeno Agency LTD.

Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, July-August 2016.

Cover design © copyright 2019 Sarah Anne Langton.

ISBN 978-1-625674-13-5

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

About the Author

Other Books by Lavie Tidhar

1

DURING THE REBUILDING OF LONDON in the 1950s they had erected a large Ferris wheel on the south bank of the Thames. When it was opened, it cost 2 Reichsmarks for a ride, but it was seldom busy. London after the war wasn’t a place you went to on holiday.

Gunther Sloam came to London in the autumn, which is when I first became acquainted with him. He was neither too tall nor too short, but an unassuming man in a good suit and a worn fedora. He could have been a shopkeeper or a traveling salesman, though he was neither. Before the war he had been a screenwriter in Berlin.

He came following a woman, which is how this kind of story usually starts. She had written to him two weeks earlier, c/o the Tobis Film Syndikat in Berlin, and a friend who was still working there eventually passed him her note. It read:

My dear Gunther,

I am in London and I think I am in trouble. I fear my life is in danger. Please, if you continue to remember me fondly, come at once. I am residing at 47 Dean Street, Soho. If I am not there, ask for the dwarf.

Yours, ever,

Ulla.

The note had been smudged with a red lipstick kiss.

It was a week from the time the letter was sent, to Gunther receiving it. It was another week before he finally departed Berlin, on board a Luftwaffe transport plane carrying with it the famed soprano, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, and her entourage. She was to perform in London’s newly rebuilt Opera House. Gunther spent the short flight making notes in his pocket book, for a screenplay he was vaguely thinking to write. He was not unduly concerned about Ulla. His view of women in general, and of actresses in particular, was that they were prone to exaggeration. No doubt Ulla’s trouble would prove such as they’d always been—usually, he thought with a sigh, something to do with money. In that he was both right and wrong.

He was flattered, and glad, that she wanted to see him again. They had carried on a passionate love affair for several months, in Berlin in ’43, before Gunther was sent to the Eastern Front, and Ulla went on to star in several well-received patriotic films, the pinnacle of which was Die große Liebe, for a time the highest-grossing film in all of Germany. Gunther had watched it in the hospital camp, while recovering from the wound which, even now, made him walk with a slight, almost unnoticeable limp. He only really felt it on very cold days, and the pangs in his leg brought with them memories of the hell that was the Eastern Front. He had never known such cold.

“Don’t you see?” he said to me, much later. He was pacing my office, his hair unkempt for once, his eyes ringed black by lack of sleep. He’d lost much of his cool amused air by then. “Because we did it, we beat the Russians, and Ulla went on to star in Stalingrad, that Stemmle picture, but it was the last big film she did. I don’t know what happened after that. We lost touch, though there’d always been rumors, you see.”

He’d told me quite a lot by then but I was happy to let him talk. I knew some of the story by then and, of course, I’d known Miss Ulla Blau. We had been taking an interest in her activities for some time.

The plane landed at Northolt. There was no one there to welcome him and the soprano and her entourage were whisked away by my superior, Group Leader Pohl. I saw Gunther emerge into the terminal with that somewhat bewildered look that afflicts the visitor. He saw me and came over. “Where can a man get a taxi around here?” he said, in German.

“I’m afraid I don’t . . .” I said, in English.

His eyes, surprisingly, lit up. “You are British?” he said.

“Yes. You speak English?”

“But of course.” His accent was atrocious. “I learn to speak English in the cinema,” he explained. “Do you know the works of Alfred Hitchcock?”

“His films are prohibited nowadays,” I said, kindly. He frowned. I was not in uniform and he did not know what I was until later.

“Yes, yes,” he said. “His death was most regrettable. He was a great maker of movies. I’m sorry,” he said, “I have not introduced myself. Gunther Sloam.” He extended his hand and I shook it.

“Name’s Everly,” I said. “I was in fact on my way back into town now. Can I give you a ride?” My jeep was outside.

“That would be most kind,” he said. “I am here to see an old friend, you see. A woman. Yes, I have not seen her since the war.” he laughed, a little sadly I thought. “I am older, perhaps she is older too, no? But not in my memory, never.”

“You’re a romantic,” I said.

“I suppose,” he said, dubiously. “Yes, I suppose I am.”

“There is not much call for romantics in London,” I said. “We English have become pragmatists, since the war ended.”

He said nothing to that; perhaps he never even heard me. He sat beside me in the jeep as we went past the ruined buildings left over from the bombings, but I don’t think he saw them, either.

“Where do you need to go?” I said.

“Soho.”

“Are you sure? That is not a very good area.”

“I think I can manage, Mr. Everly,” he said. He lit a cigarette and passed one to me.

“Danke,” I said. Then again in German, “And who is this mystery lady you’re visiting, if you don’t mind my prying?”

He laughed, delighted. “Your German is flawless!” he said.

“I studied in Berlin before the war.”

“But that is wonderful,” he said.

Then he spent fifteen minutes telling me all about Fräulein Ulla Blau; her film career; their passionate affair (“But we were both so young!”); his new screenplay (“A Western, in the Karl May tradition. You know how fond the Führer is of these things”); Berlin (“Have you been back? It’s a beautiful city now, beautiful. Say what you want about Speer but the man is a gifted architect”); and so on and so on.

At one point I finally managed to interject. “And you know what your friend is doing these days?” I asked him.

He frowned. Such a thought had not entered his head. “I assumed she was acting again,” he said. “But I hadn’t really thought . . . Well, it is no matter. I shall find out soon enough.”

We were driving along the Charing Cross Road by then. The few approved bookshops stood open, their wan light spilling onto the dark pavement outside. I remembered the book purges and burnings after the invasion—after all, I led one such group myself. I did not like doing it, yet it was a necessity of the time. Gunther did not seem to pay much attention. His eyes slid over the grimy frontage of the shops. “Where are your famed picture palaces?” he said. “I have long desired to ensconce myself in the luxuries of the Regal or the Ritz.” His eyes shone with a childish enthusiasm.

“I’m afraid most were destroyed in the Blitz,” I said apologetically.

He nodded. We were in Soho then, a squalid block of half-ruined buildings where the lowlifes of London made their abode. It was a hard place to police and patrol, filled with European émigrés of dubious loyalties. But it was useful, as such places inevitably are.

Along Shaftesbury Avenue, the few theatres were doing meager trade. The big show that year was Servant of Two Masters, an Italian comedy adapted to the English stage. It was showing at the Apollo. Dean Street itself was a dark thoroughfare that never quite slept. Business was conducted in the shadows, and red lights burned invitingly behind the second-floor windows. I saw doubt enter Gunther’s eyes and I almost felt sorry for him. I had my own interest in his well-being or otherwise. My men were already stationed unobtrusively in the street.

“This is the place,” I said, stopping the jeep. He stepped out and extended his hand.

“Thank you, Everly,” he said. “You are a gentleman.”

I could see he liked that word. The Germans are a peculiar people. Having won the war, they were almost apologetic about it. I said, “If your visit does not go well, there is a transport leaving for Berlin tomorrow night. I can ensure you have a seat on it.”

His eyes changed; as though he were seeing me for the first time.

“You never said what you do,” he said.

“No,” I agreed. “Goodbye, Mr. Sloam.”

I left him there. I did not expect him to be so much trouble as he turned out to be.

2

GUNTHER STOOD OUTSIDE 47 DEAN STREET for some time. Perhaps, already, he began to have second thoughts. On receipt of her letter, he had expected little more than a fond reunion with Ulla. Perhaps he saw himself as a sort of Teutonic white knight, riding to the rescue of a helpless maiden. He never really knew Ulla, or what she was capable of, though he didn’t realize that until it was too late.

The address she had given him had been a theatre before the war. Now it was a sort of boarding house, with a hand-written sign on the door saying No Vacancies! in a barely-legible scrawl. The windows were dark. The front of house, once-grand, now looked dowdy and unkempt. Gunther looked about him and saw two shifty characters in the shadows across the road. They were smoking cigarettes and watching him. He gathered his courage and knocked loudly on the door.

There was no reply. The whole house felt silent and empty. He knocked again, louder, until at last a window overhead opened and an old woman stuck her head out and began cursing him in a mixture of English and gutter German. Almost, he wanted to take out his pen and note down some of the more inventive swearing.

“I’m looking for Ulla Blau!” he called up, when the old woman finally stopped, momentarily, for air.

The old woman spat. The spit fell down heavily and landed at Gunther’s feet.

“The whore’s not here,” the old woman said and slammed the window shut.

Now angry, Gunther began to hammer on the door again. The two observers watched him from across the street. They, too, had an interest in Fräulein Blau’s whereabouts.

At last the window opened again and the same old woman stuck her head out. “What?” she demanded crossly.

“I need to see her!”

“I told you, she’s not here!”

“Well, where is she?”

“I don’t know, and I don’t want to know!” the old woman said and slammed the window.

Gunther stood in the street. He was tired now, and hungry, and he wanted a drink. He had hoped for a fond embrace, a night spent in a comfortable bed with a bottle of good Rhine wine (which he had brought) and a willing companion to murmur sweet nothings into his ear. Instead he got this, and besides the street smelled, from uncollected garbage gathered every few paces on the broken pavement.

“Open the damn door or I’ll break it down!” he said.

Then he waited. Presently, there was a shuffling noise and then the door opened a crack and the old woman stuck her head out. “What are you, Gestapo?” she said.

“If I were the Gestapo,” Gunther said, reasonably, “you’d already be answering my questions.”

The old woman cackled. She seemed to have no fear of this strange German on her doorstep. “Do you have a drink?” she said.

Gunther brought out the bottle of wine and the old woman’s eyes widened appreciatively.

“Come in, come in!” she said. “The night is cold and full of eyes.”

Gunther followed her into the building.

The old woman’s apartment was surprisingly comfortable. A fire was burning in the fireplace and Gunther sat down wearily on a red velvet sofa which sagged underneath him. The walls were covered with old photographs and playbills. The old woman herself reminded him somewhat of an old, faded revue actress. She bustled about, fetching glasses. They were good crystal, and when she saw his enquiring look she cackled again and said, “From Marks’s, the filthy Jews. Now that was a fire sale!”

Gunther accepted the glass, his loathing for the old woman growing. He let her open the bottle, which she did deftly, then poured two glasses. The old woman drank hers rapidly and greedily, then refilled the glass. Her eyes acquired a brittle warmth.

“You have come from Germany?” she said.

“Berlin.”

“Berlin! I have often wished to visit Berlin.” She spoke a bad but serviceable German.

“It is a great city.”

“Not like this place,” the old woman said. “London is a shithole.”

Gunther silently agreed. He took a sip of his wine, mourning the loss of its planned usage. The taste brought back memories of warmer, happier times.

“I am looking for—” he began, and the old woman said, “Yes, yes. Ulla Blau. I told you, she is not here.”

At this time he was not yet unduly concerned.

“This is the address she’s given me.”

“She was here,” the old woman said. “She hires a room from me, at 30 Reichsmarks a month. I do not ask questions, Mr Sloam.”

“Has she gone away, then?” Gunther said.

“She is always coming and going, that one,” the old woman said.

“Is she still acting? In the theatre, perhaps?”

The old woman snorted a laugh, then wiped it away when she saw Gunther’s face. “Perhaps,” she said. “Yes, perhaps. What do I know?” She took a long shuddering sip of wine. “I am just an old woman,” she said.

Doubts, at this point, were finally beginning to enter Gunther’s mind. “Well, what does she do, for money?”

“I am sure I don’t know,” the old woman said huffily. Her glass was empty again and she refilled it with unsteady hands. “You should have seen this place before the war,” she said suddenly. “The theaters all alight and the public flowing on the pavements all excited and gay. The men handsome in their suits and the women pretty in their dresses. I saw Charlie Chaplin play the Hippodrome once.” Her eyes misted over. “I don’t blame you Germans,” she said. “I blame the Jews, but there are no more Jews to blame. Who can we blame now, Mr. Sloam?”

“Can I see her room?” Gunther said.

The old woman sighed. She was coming to the realisation that Gunther Sloam could be very single-minded.

“I’m sure I can’t let you do that,” she said; but he saw the speculative glint in her eye.

“I could perhaps rent it, for a while,” he offered. “I am a stranger in this town and the hour is getting late.”

His hand, which he had dipped in his pocket, returned with a handful of notes. The woman’s eyes tracked the movement of the money.

“When you put it like that . . .” she said.

Ulla Blau’s room was an almost perfect square. It had once been a dressing room of some sort, or perhaps, Gunther thought a little uncharitably, a supply closet. The old woman, whose name, he had learned, was Mrs. White, stood in the doorway watching him with her bright button eyes. She swayed, from time to time, and hummed a tune under her breath. It sounded a little like the Horst Wessel song.

There was nothing of the personal in Ulla Blau’s room. There was a bed, perfectly made up; a wardrobe and a vanity mirror; a small gas ring and a kettle; and that was about it. Gunther’s imaginings of their reunion plunged further into doubt, for this was not the romantic abode he had perhaps envisioned. There were no clues as to Ulla’s employment or whereabouts. Beyond the wall, the noise of hurried sexual congress could be clearly heard. He glanced at Mrs. White, who shrugged. Gunther began to have an idea of what the majority of the rooms were used for.

Mrs. White moved aside to let him out. The corridor was long and dark and the communal bathroom was at one end of it. Gunther was, at this point, beginning to feel concern.

“And you do not know where she is?” he demanded of Mrs. White.

The old woman shrugged. She didn’t know, or didn’t care, or didn’t care to know. Gunther dug out Ulla’s note. If I am not there, she had written, ask for the dwarf.

I shall interject, at this point, to say that this dwarf was a person of considerable interest to us. We were anxious to interview him with regards to some matters which had arisen. This dwarf went by the name of Jurgen, and was of a Swiss nationality. He had come to London six months previous and was, moreover, the scion of a wealthy Zurich banking family with connections high up within the party.

“Where can I find,” Gunther said, and then felt silly, “the dwarf?”

He said it quite light-heartedly. But Mrs. White’s reaction was the opposite. Her face turned a crimson shade and her eyes rolled in her head like those of a grand dame in a Christmas pantomime.

“Him? You ask me about him?”

Gunther was not aware of the reputation the dwarf had in certain circles. Mrs. White’s reaction took him quite by surprise.

“Where can I find him?” he said mildly.

“Do not ask me that!”

Good wine, missed plans, and bad company do not mix well. Gunther at last lost his patience.

“Listen to me, you silly old bat!” he said. He had done terrible things to survive on the Eastern Front. Now that man was before Mrs. White, and she cowered. Gunther jabbed an angry finger at the old woman’s face. “Tell me where this damned dwarf is or by God I’ll . . .”

She must have told him; he must have left. My men lost him, by accident or design, shortly after; and so the first I knew of it was the next morning, when Sergeant Cole called me and woke me from a blissful sleep, to tell me they’d arrested Gunther Sloam for murder.

3

BY THE TIME I MADE IT to HQ they’d worked Gunther over a little; mostly I think just to keep their hand in. I told them to straighten him up and bring him to my office, along with two cups of tea. When they brought him in, he had a black eye, a swollen lip, and a bad temper.

“What is the meaning of this?” he said. “I am a citizen of the Reich, you can’t treat me like this!”

“Please, Mr. Sloam, sit down. Cigarette?” I proffered the box. He hesitated then took one, and I lit him up. He took in all the smoke at once, and after that he was a little calmer.

“Say, what is the meaning of this?” I think only then my face registered with him, and he started. “You’re that chap, Everly. I don’t understand.”

He looked around him at the office. The framed photograph of the Führer stared back at him from the wall.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I should have introduced myself more fully. I am Kriminalinspektor Tom Everly, of Gestapo Department D.”

He looked at me in silence. His lips moved. He looked around the room again. When he at last spoke he was more subdued.

“Gestapo, eh?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“But you’re English!” he cried, turning on me accusingly.

“Yes?”

That stumped him. “When you said you studied in Berlin before the war—”

“It is not me who has to justify himself to you,” I said.

“How do you mean?”

“Mr. Sloam, you have been arrested for murder.”

“Murder!” His eyes were wild. “Listen, here!”

“No, you listen,” I said. “We can do this the hard way. You’ve already had a little taste of that. Or we can do this the civilized way.”

I waited and presently there was a knock on the door. Then Cole came in with the tea. He left it on my desk and departed. We’d had the routine down pat by then.

“Milk? Sugar?” I said.

Unexpectedly he smiled. “How very English,” he said. “Two sugars, please, and milk too, why not.” He sat down on the chair, hard. I passed him the tea and lit a fresh cigarette and watched him.

“You’d better tell me what happened last night,” I said.

He sighed. “I don’t know where to start,” he said, dejectedly.

Gunther left the house on Dean Street around eight o’clock in the evening. When he stood outside, the thought that came to his mind was that the house was, indisputably, one of ill repute. What Ulla was doing in such a place he did not know. He could not believe that she prostituted herself, nor understand how she came to live in such a squalid place. As I’d said to him before, he was a romantic—though that did not necessarily make him a fool.

Mrs. White had given him an address nearby. Gunther walked, not hurrying, but at a steady pace. He was well aware of the two shadows which detached themselves from the wall across the road and followed. He did not increase his speed or slow down, but his path was such that in a short amount of time he was able to shake them off. Taking a turning, he hid down a dark alleyway as the two men walked past. He could hear them arguing in low voices as he slunk in the other direction.

The night was thick with darkness. The buildings here were still half-ruined, destroyed in the Blitz, and served as hidey-holes for all kinds of illicit activities. Gunther watched himself, but wished he had a gun, a wish he was soon to fulfil. He smelled frying onions nearby and his stomach rumbled. He heard drunken laughter, soft footfalls, and a scream that was cut short. He saw four men sitting by a lit lantern playing cards. He smelled cigar smoke. He heard someone muttering and moaning in a low, never-ceasing voice.

At last he made it to the Lyric. It is a Victorian pub, and had remained undamaged during the war. Gunther, the romantic, found it charming. Opposite the pub stood the Windmill Theatre. It was the one source of bright light, and advertised nude tableaux vivants, as well as the exclusive appearance of Tran und Helle, the popular comedians, visiting London for seven nights only.

Gunther entered the pub. It was dark and dim inside, and the smell of beer, cigarette and cigar smoke hit him with their combined warmth. A small fire burned merrily in the fireplace. The atmosphere worked like a panacea on Gunther. He removed his coat and perched on the bar gratefully.

“Help you, sir?”

The bartender was bald and rotund and missing one eye, his left one. He turned a rag inside a beer stein, over and over and without much hope of making it clean.

“I’ll have an Erdinger, please,” Gunther said. “And a plate of Schweinshaxe mit Sauerkraut.”

The bartender, without changing an expression, poured the beer and served it to Gunther.

“We don’t have pork knuckle,” he said. “Or sauerkraut.”

Gunther closed his eyes and took a sip of the beer. He already felt light-headed from the wine he had consumed earlier with the old woman.

“Well, what do you serve?” he said.

“Pie.”

“What sort of pie?”

“Pork pie.”

“Then I shall have a pork pie, bitte.”

The bartender nodded and kept wiping the stein. “That’ll be twenty Reichsmarks,” he said.

“Twenty!”

The bartender looked bored. Gunther cursed under his breath but paid. The bartender made the money disappear. Gunther lit a cigarette and looked about the pub. There were only a few men sitting around, and no women. No one looked in his direction. He began to get the sense that he wasn’t welcome.

He took another sip of his beer.

“I am looking for Der Zwerg,” he said; announcing it into the air of the pub.

No one moved. If anything, Gunther thought, they had become more still.

“Pie,” the bartender said. Gunther looked down at the counter. A round, solid brick of pastry sat on a cracked plate. Gunther picked up the knife and fork. He cut through the pastry into the pink fleshy interior. He cut a slice and put it in his mouth. It was cold and rather flavorless. He chewed and swallowed.

“Delicious,” he said.

Someone sniggered. When Gunther turned his head a tall thin figure rose from a bench against the wall and perched itself on a stool beside him. The man had the cadaverous look of a disappointed undertaker. The smile he offered Gunther was as honest as a Vichy check.

“You are new in town?” he said.

“What’s it to you?” Gunther said.

“Nothing, nothing.” The man rubbed his hands together as though cold. He reminded Gunther a little of that Jew actor, Peter Lorre; he had starred in Fritz Lang’s M nearly three decades earlier. “It is good to hear an honest German voice again.”

“You are not from Germany.”

“No. Luxembourg,” the man confessed. That explained the accent. “It is a strange country, England, is it not? They are so dour, so resentful of you Germans. Do you know, I think, deep down, they believe they should have won the war.” He laughed, the same sort of insincere sound a hyena makes. “Beer, bartender!” he called jovially. “And one for my friend here. Put it on my tab.”

“You have been here long?” Gunther asked.

“Two years now,” the man said. “I do a little business. Import-export, mostly. You know how it is.”

Gunther did not. The beer arrived and he sipped from it. He forced himself to finish the pie. He had eaten worse on the Front.

“This man,” I said. “His name was Klaus?”

Gunther was pacing my office. He looked up, surprised. “Klaus Pirelli, or so he told me,” he said. “Yes. How did you—?”

“He has given us a full statement,” I said. “He says he drank beer with you and discussed the ongoing war in America, Leni Riefenstahl’s latest film, the new African Lebensraum, and the import-export business. He says you got progressively drunker and increasingly aggressive. At some point you asked, loudly, where a man could get hold of a gun in this town. You became so voluble that he had to escort you outside. He says the last he saw of you, you were staggering down Great Windmill Street in the direction of Shaftesbury Avenue, waving your arms and swearing you would, ‘Get that bitch.’”

Gunther stopped pacing. His mouth hung open. I almost felt sorry for him at that moment. In his comic horror he reminded me of the comedian, Alfred Hawthorne, who I had recently seen playing Bottom in a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

“But that is Wahnsinn!” He gaped at me like a landed fish. “It is madness! I did no such thing!”

“Can you prove it?”

“The other drinkers! The bartender! They were all witnesses—”

He looked at me then, realization slowly dawning.

“You are German,” I said, sadly. “They are not.”

“Listen, Everly, you’ve got to believe me!”

“Just tell me what happened,” I said.

Gunther found the Luxembourgian trying. The man was obviously selling something, but Gunther wasn’t sure what.

“I am looking for the dwarf,” he said again.

“Him!” the Luxembourgian exclaimed.

“I was told I could find him here.”

“He is not an easy man to find, Herr Jurgen.”

“Is that his name?” Gunther said.

“You do not know his name, yet you seek to find him?” The Luxembourgian looked amused at that. “What is the nature of your business with the count?”

“A count, is he?” Gunther said. His head really was spinning. “Well, I want to know where Ulla Blau is.” He grabbed the Luxembourgian by the lapels and shook him. “Do you know where Ulla is?” he demanded. His speech felt slurred, his tongue unresponsive. “I need to see her. She’s in a lot of trouble.”

The Luxembourgian gently removed Gunther’s hands. “You need air, friend,” he said. “I think you’ve had too much to drink.”

“Don’t be . . . ridiculous,” Gunther said. His vision swam. He was dimly aware of his new friend putting an arm around his shoulders and steering him outside. Cold air hit his face like a slap, but it did not clear his confused thoughts. He began to stagger away from the pub. As he did so, he saw a pair of shapely white legs strolling past. He raised his head and tried to focus. A good-looking woman wrapped in a thick fur coat walking away from him. As she passed under a gaslight, for just a moment, she turned her head and smiled.

“Ulla?” Gunther cried. “Ulla!”

There was something mocking in the woman’s smile. She turned and walked away. Gunther lurched after her for a few more steps but she was long gone, and perhaps, he thought later, she had never been there at all. He tottered on his feet. Darkness opened all around him like the entry to a sewer. He fell, hard, and lay on the ground. He closed his eyes, and dark sleep claimed him.

“And that is all you remember?” I said.

“All I remember, until some uncouth men roused me on the street, administered a series of kicks for good measure, put me in irons, and dragged me to your cellars to have another go.” He touched his black eye and winced. “Don’t you see?” Gunther said. “I was drugged. The Luxembourgian must be in on it. He must have slipped something into my drink when I wasn’t watching.”

The mention of drugs caught my attention and I looked at him in a new way.

“Besides,” he said with a laugh, “who the hell am I supposed to have murdered?”

“Come with me.”

He shrugged. This, he endeavored to get across, was nothing to him. In that he was wrong.

He followed me along the corridor and down the stairs. The Gestapo had made its headquarters in Somerset House. We found the stout walls and easy access to the river compelling. I took him down to the makeshift morgue.

“What is this?” he said, and shivered as we entered. I ignored him.

“Sir,” Kriminalassistent West said, standing to attention.

“What is this?” Gunther demanded. We both ignored him. I gave West the nod. He pulled one of the refrigeration units open and slid out the gurney.

A corpse, covered in a sheet, lay on the cold metal tray.

Gunther’s lips moved, but without sound. Perhaps he was beginning to realize the trouble he was in.

I gave West the nod again. He removed the sheet. Underneath it lay a naked female form. Her face had been blasted apart by a bullet from a Luger semiautomatic.

I watched Gunther closely. The horror on his face looked genuine enough.

“Can you identify her?” I said. He stared at the body mutely. His eyes took in the ruined faced, the still, cold body, her bejeweled fingers. He began to shake.

“No, no,” he said. “It cannot be.”

He stepped closer to the gurney. He took one dead hand in his.

“This ring,” he said. It was a rather tawdry thing, a chunky emerald set in copper. “I gave it to her. I remember buying it, from Kling’s on Münzstrasse. It was a token of my love, just before they shipped me to the Front.”

“Gave it to whom?” I said, gently.

He looked at me, his eyes full of quiet despair.

“I gave it to Ulla Blau,” he said.

4

THE STORY COULD HAVE ENDED HERE, but for the fact that Ulla Blau’s death, though in some part not entirely without benefit, nevertheless put me in an awkward position.

I took Gunther back to my office. I asked Sergeant Cole to bring us two coffees this time, and some Viennese pastries. You may wonder why I treated Gunther Sloam with such kids gloves. After all, the expedient act would have been to send him back down to the cellars for a second, more thorough work-over—to last only as long as necessary to extract a full and frank confession—then a speedy execution and burial by water. There were, as I mentioned, several reasons why Somerset House was chosen for our headquarters. The corpses, occasionally, if not weighted enough, floated back up to the surface or caught in the Greenwich wharves on their way out to sea, but that merely served to reinforce in people’s minds the long and lethal reach of the Gestapo. Sometimes we had to make sure the corpses were lightly weighted when a particular message needed to be sent.

Gunther wondered the same thing. I could see it in his eyes. He observed Sergeant Cole bring in the coffee and pastries with the eyes of a condemned man watching his executioner. I sat behind my desk and stirred a cube of sugar into my coffee.

“Cream?”

“Thank you.”

He said that in a wondering voice. I smiled patiently and took a bite from my Apfelstrudel. “They are not as good as on the Continent, of course,” I said, when I had chewed and swallowed. “But we do try our best, as you see.”

“I am sure it is delicious,” he said. He didn’t look like he tasted anything.

“I asked you, when we first met,” I said. “What your friend was doing in London. You did not enlighten me.”

“Everly, for God’s sake . . . !” he began, then went stumm.

I waited him out.

“I don’t know,” he admitted at last. “I received this note, and I” he buried his face in his hands. “I did not take it seriously. She said her life was in danger and I, I”

“You were expecting nothing more than a pleasurable reunion,” I said. He raised his face to me and his eyes flashed with anger.

“Now look here, Everly!” he said. “I did not kill her!”

“Do you know what Pervitin is?” I said.

“Of course,” he said, without hesitation, but with a moue of distaste. “It is an artificial stimulant. A type of drug, what they call methamphetamines. They gave it to us during Barbarossa. It keeps you awake and gives you energy, and it lowers inhibition, which is useful in battle.”

“It is also highly addictive.”

“Yes,” he said. “In our case, the army didn’t worry about it too much. Most of the people who took it were destined for death. I was just luckier than most.”

“Your friend, Ulla Blau, came to London some years ago,” I said. “London at that time was a city in ruin. A large occupying force was initially needed and soldiers, as soldiers are wont to do, require entertainments.”

“What are you saying?”

“Ulla’s theatre connections proved handy in supplying girls for the soldiers. At that time, in London, a warm body was cheaper than a loaf of bread, and easier to get. From the soldiers she could easily acquire extra supplies of Pervitin. These she sold back into the general populace. It wasn’t, strictly speaking, legal, but legality didn’t have much of a meaning in the immediate aftermath of the war.”

“I don’t believe you,” he said.

I shrugged. “You can believe what you’d like to believe,” I said “But you can’t dismiss the evidence of your own eyes. Somebody plugged a nine-millimeter bullet into her pretty little face, after all.”

“That doesn’t make her guilty!”

“It doesn’t make her bloody innocent, either,” I said.

He stared at me with hatred and his fingers curled into fists. He was going to go for me in a moment.

Then realization dawned; I could see his expression change. “You don’t think I killed her,” he said, wonderingly.

“Look, Sloam,” I said. I was tired and the pastry was cloyingly sweet. “It doesn’t matter to me if you killed her or not. She was nothing but trouble and the world’s a better place for her not being in it. However.”

He watched me closely. I could see he was still aching to swing at me. He wasn’t the first and he wasn’t going to be the last.

“Either way, it’s a mess. You’re a citizen of the Deutsches Reich, not just a colonial. So was Fräulein Blau, and as a former actress, her death would play for news. The last thing my superiors want is a fuss back in Berlin about a sordid murder in the colonies. Citizens of the Reich must feel they can travel safely to any part of the empire. This isn’t 1946, Sloam. England’s a peaceful place, and a faithful servant of the Führer.”

“So where does that leave me?” he said. He wasn’t slow when he didn’t want to be.

“What would you do in my place?” I said.

He considered. “You’d announce her death as an unfortunate accident, and bury me somewhere out of sight with a bullet between my eyes.”

I nodded. He wasn’t an innocent, just the wrong man in the wrong place, and for all his war experience, he still thought like a character in one of his movies. “What did you think,” I said, “that you’d come over here and rescue her?”

“I don’t know what I thought,” he said. “And I still don’t believe she was guilty!”

“Which of us isn’t guilty, Mr. Sloam” I said. “Which of us isn’t guilty”

He watched me. “I am not afraid to die,” he said.

I pressed a button, and Sergeant Cole came in. Gunther tensed.

“Cole,” I said “Please show Mr Sloam outside.”

Gunther watched me with suspicion.

“There’s a flight leaving for Berlin tonight,” I said. “I’d advise you to be on it. Remember, I had made that offer before, and I’m unlikely to make it a third time. Sergeant Cole will take you to a hotel where you can clean up and get some rest. Auf Wiedersehen, Mr. Sloam. I hope, sincerely, we do not meet again.”

The hint of a smile touched his lips then. “Goodbye, Kriminalinspektor Everly,” he said.

But I could see he did not mean it.

Cole dropped him off at the Albert in Covent Garden. It was basic, but clean. Gunther collected his key and went up to his room. He showered and changed. He did not sleep.

Of course the obstinate German did not take my advice. I had accused him of being a romantic and I wasn’t wrong. Gunther, for all his battle experience in the Wehrmacht, still insisted, deep down, to think of himself as a character in one of his own cowboy pictures. All he could think about was Ulla Blau’s ruined, once-beautiful face staring back at him from the mortuary slab. I think he believed himself untouchable. Most Germans did, after the war. There were still pockets of resistance in America, but few since we’d dropped the A-bomb on Washington D.C. The world belonged to Germany: for Gunther, that idea was as fixed as his notion of honor.

From the hotel, Gunther went out. For a time he walked through Covent Garden, which he found a dismal sort of place. Underneath the butchers’ stalls the blood ran rancid, and the greengrocers’ offerings of hard, lumpy potatoes and bent carrots depressed Gunther. The market had all the festivity of a Dachau.

He watched the passersby, though. Londoners moved about the market furtively, with the hunched shoulders of a conquered people. They wore shabby clothes, the men in ill-fitting suits, the women in hand-me-down dresses that appeared to have come from a German Red Cross charity stall. He saw few smiles. Here and there, soldiers patrolled, but they were few in number and looked indifferent to the populace. As I had told Gunther, this England was resigned to its fate. The majority of the occupying force had moved on to other duties, in the new African territories or America. Now, only a skeleton barracks was left and, of course, the Gestapo.

Gunther walked past the Opera House, where a prominent sign advertised the soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf’s appearance that night. Along Drury Lane he saw a young boy in the shadows, peaked cap covering half his face, skulking. He paused to watch as first two men and then a woman stopped and appeared to make a furtive purchase. When the street was clear, Gunther crossed the road and approached the boy.

“What do you want, mister?”

“What have you got?” Gunther said.

The boy looked up at him with suspicion. “You’re a German!” he said accusingly.

Gunther shrugged.

“You want girls?” the boy said. “My sister is very clean.”

“I need something to keep me awake,” Gunther said. “You got some of that?”

The boy grinned, relieved that this was just another punter. “Sure, sure,” he said expansively. “But it’ll cost you.”

Gunther took out a clip of bills and the boy’s eyes went wide and round. “Pervitin?” Gunther said.

The boy nodded. Gunther peeled off a twenty. “Tell me where you get it from,” he said, “and there’ll be another ten in it for you.”

“Another twenty,” the boy said immediately.

“That’s a lot of money,” Gunther said. The boy nodded, his eyes still drawn to the cash. Gunther let him have the first note and waited.

The boy darted glances to either side of the street. “Seven Dials, mister,” he whispered. His hand was extended for the rest of the money. “The Bricklayer’s Arms. Ask for Doyle, the Irishman. And for God’s sake, man, don’t mention me. It’s more than my job’s worth.”

Gunther gave him the other twenty and the boy ran off. At the end of the street, he paused and turned back. He stuck two fingers up at Gunther. “Nazi go home!” he shouted. Then he was gone.

Gunther resumed his walk. My men were watching him, of course. We had not been able to locate the dwarf. He usually resided at a house in Mayfair, near the Swiss ambassador’s residency. The dwarf was as good as untouchable, but Gunther didn’t know that. That suited me fine.

He walked with the same determined gait of a city dweller. Though he did not know his way, he did not appear lost. He did not stop to look at the sights. He made enquiries politely but with a certain force; and the people of London still, when they heard a German voice, were trained to reply helpfully and quickly.

Seven Dials was only a short walk away. It was a maze of narrow, twisting alleyways between Covent Garden and Soho, a cesspit of racial degradation, or so according to my superior, SS-Obergruppenführer Oswald Pohl. An efficient administrator, he was the overseer of the camps erected to deal with the Jewish question during the war. A falling out with his patron, Himmler, after the war, however (the nature of which I never quite knew) saw him exiled to Britain to supervise the local Gestapo, after the former bureau chief SS-Brigadeführer Franz Six had an unfortunate and fatal encounter with a bullet. Six was leading an Einsatzgruppe on a hunt for missing Jews in Manchester at the time.

Pohl, my current superior, took over the job with his customary efficiency but little enthusiasm. He was a keen lover of the arts and found England stifling. I also happened to know he’d been a fan of Ulla Blau.

Standing at the Seven Dials, Gunther was faced with roads leading in every direction away from him. It was as though he stood in the center of a spider bite, and the infection spread outward in wavy paths. Rundown drinking establishments faced him from each point of the compass. He saw the Bricklayer’s Arms, and two women fighting loudly over a bottle of gin at the shabby entrance. He stepped around them and entered the pub. Already he was growing sick of the sight and the smell of British pubs.

Inside it was dark, dim, and smelled of the sewers. Gunther lit a cigarette to combat the smell. He looked about him and hostile or indifferent faces stared back at him. He went to the bar and leaned across. “I am looking for Doyle, the Irishman,” he said.

“What’s it to me?” the bartender said.

Gunther put money on the counter. He did not have much but, in London, Reichsmarks seemed to go a long way. At the sight of the money there was a collective in-drawing of breath.

“I’m Doyle,” said a tall specimen.

“I’m Doyle,” said a fat, red-haired man.

“I’ll be your doll, sailor,” said a bald women with very few teeth, and leered.

Gunther waited. His stillness was born of the war. A shadow stirred by the far wall. It rose and the others faded into the background.

The man stepped close. He was a short, wiry man, in a chequered suit and a jaunty flattop hat with a red feather in the band. His knuckles were scabbed like a bareknuckle boxer’s. He jabbed a finger at Gunther’s chest.

“What do you want?” he said.

“Are you Doyle?”

“Depends who’s asking.”

“My name’s Sloam. I was a friend of Ulla Blau.”

Doyle retreated a step at the name. “Ulla is dead,” he said. His voice was softer.

“I know.”

“Heard they found her by the river,” the Irishman said. “Some maniac did her in.”

He took in Gunther’s beat-up face. Not with suspicion, Gunther thought, but as confirmation of information he already knew.

“You say you were friends?”

“Old friends,” Gunther said. Something in the Irishman’s eyes made him trust the man; he couldn’t say what it was. “We’d lost touch until recently.”

“I liked Ulla,” the Irishman said. “I don’t care what they say about her.”

“What do they say about her?” Gunther said; but of course, he thought he already knew.

“She poisoned those boys!” the bald woman said. Her savagery startled Gunther, who hadn’t noticed her creeping close. “The poor boys in Great Ormond. It’s a hospital,” she said into Gunther’s bemused face. “For children. They needed medication, pain relief.”

“Do you know what Heroin is?” Doyle said.

“Yes,” Gunther said, surprised. “It’s a medication made by Bayer.”

“You can’t get it here,” Doyle said. ‘So . . .” He shrugged.

“She cut it with rat poison,” the bald woman said, then spat. “Twenty-one children, dead, in agony.”

“Now, Martha, you don’t know that,” Doyle said. Gunther felt sick.

“She was always good to you,” Doyle said. “Who do you come to when you need your medication?”

“You and your filthy comrades,” the woman said. “We should have stood with the Allies in the war, Doyle. We shouldn’t have stayed neutral.” She spat again. “Neutral,” she said. “Isn’t that just another word for collaborator.”

Doyle slapped her. The sound, like a gunshot, filled the room. “You’re getting above yourself, Martha,” he said. The woman glared at him defiantly; then the fight went out of her.

“I need it, Doyle,” she said, whining. “I need it.”

Gunther watched. He felt sick to his stomach. He could not look away. He could not believe what the woman had said about Ulla. Doyle reached into his pocket and came back with two small pills which he tossed to the woman, like dog biscuits to a pet. She caught them eagerly. “Don’t go opening your big gob of shite, now,” Doyle said.

“I won’t, Doyle. Honest.”

“I liked Ulla, whatever they said about her,” Doyle said again, sadly. He turned back to Gunther.

“Let’s have a drink,” he said.

5

IT MAY HAVE OCCURRED TO GUNTHER at this point that all the men he’d so far encountered belonged to countries that remained neutral during the war. The Swiss, the Luxembourgians, and the Irish were rewarded for their careful noninvolvement with the status of sovereign protectorates of the Third Reich, and enjoyed a great deal of autonomy as a consequence.

“Ulla spoke of you,” Doyle said.

“She did?” Gunther said, with a mixture of pleasure and surprise.

Doyle’s smile transformed his face. “She called you the one who got away.”

They were sitting in the back room of the pub. A bottle of whiskey sat between them. Gunther only sipped at his glass. Doyle drank steadily; it didn’t seem to hamper him in any way.

“You were foolish to come see me,” Doyle said. “You are lucky to be alive.”

“Would you have killed me, then?”

“People who come to the Dials asking questions don’t always come out again.”

Gunther shrugged. “So why spare me?” he said.

“I’d heard you were in town. Heard you were picked up by the Gestapo, too.” He downed a shot and refilled the glass and grimaced. “Filthy animals,” he said.

“The Gestapo is a necessary organ of the state,” Gunther said, primly. He was still a good German. Doyle shot him a look of disgust. “Have you asked yourself why they let you walk?” he said. “By rights you should be floating past the Isle of Dogs around this time. Depending on the tide.”

Gunther shrugged. I think he had an idea. “I want to know who killed her,” he said.

“She’s dead,” Doyle said. “Let it go. This isn’t your country, or your cause. Go back to Berlin, make movies, find yourself a nice girl.”

“A nice girl? In Berlin?” Gunther said. Doyle smiled; reluctantly, it seemed.

“What did she say about me?”

“She said you were a good man, and that good men were hard to find. She was drunk when she said it, mind.”

“That does sound like Ulla.”

“Good old Ulla,” Doyle said.

“Did you kill her?” Gunther said, softly; the question hung between them like a cloud of ash. They stared at each other across the table.

Doyle broke eye contact first. He shrugged indifferently. “I had no reason to kill her,” he said. “We did business, that’s all.”

“Drugs.”

“I don’t advise you to go around asking questions,” Doyle said. “Go home. Be a good German.”

“But Heroin?” Gunther said.

“It is a powerful analgesic,” Doyle said. “We need drugs, Herr Sloam. If the Reich won’t provide, someone should.”

“I don’t believe she was involved—” Gunther began.

Doyle banged the glass on the table. “Never trust an actress,” he said. “Oh, Ulla knew what she was doing. Whores, black-market medicine—other stuff, too, I heard. Nothing to do with me. She knew. She was planning her retirement. Unfortunately, someone retired her first.”

He drank. The bottle was half-empty.

“It’s nothing to me,” he said.

Gunther said, “Where can I buy a gun?”

Everyone so far was being very helpful. It was as though London was going out of its way to be obliging to her accidental German tourist. He was as rare and unwelcome as a three pound note. So why, Gunther wondered, was he practically being given the keys to the city?

Back in the pre-war days, in ’32 or so, when he was young and carefree, and National Socialism sounded, on a good day, like a bad punch line to an off-color joke, Gunther had worked on a picture called Der Traumdetektiv for the Jewish director Max Ophüls. Gunther’s commission was to produce a surrealist piece of film noir, a sort of unreal history in which Germany, faced by her many enemies, nevertheless won the Great War. He recalled little from the finished product—which he had done quickly and for little money—but that the detective figure, whose name he could not remember, at some point entered a dusty old bookshop whose strange proprietor was played by the Hungarian actor Szőke Szakáll.

He remembered it now as he entered Blucher’s, across Charing Cross Road from W. & G. Foyle and next to a florist. The shop was low-ceilinged and dark. On a rack outside, copies of the Daily Mail were displayed. It was Britain’s sole remaining paper. Gunther picked one up and leafed through it quickly. He found it at the bottom of page five: Mystery Woman Discovered Dead. The article was only a few paragraphs long. The unknown woman was believed to be a dancer—the implication was clear—and likely took her own life. Gunther thought of Ulla Blau on the mortuary slab with her face shot clean off and fought a rise of bile. He replaced the newspaper on the stand and stepped carefully into the store. A bell rang as the door opened and poor yellow light fell down in drops. All about Gunther, books were piled up in haphazard piles. They were dusty and rust-spotted, many of them damaged by fire. Gunther smelled old smoke and cat piss.

“Can I help you?”

The man really did resemble the actor Szakáll a little. He was bespectacled and rotund, with the kind of hair that looked like a hairpiece but wasn’t. He sat behind a desk laden with books, his hands folded over his ample stomach.

“You’re Blucher?”

The man spread his arms as though to say, Who else can I be?

“You sell many books?”

“Books?” Blucher said. His myopic eyes looked at Gunther sadly. “Who today has need of books.”

“They look like they been in a fire.”

“Oh, these are all approved titles,” Blucher said. “But you know how it is, people get carried away.”

Gunther remembered the public book burnings in Berlin, after the Führer’s rise to power. “Anything you’d recommend?”

“Have you tried Mein Kampf? It sells like plum cakes at a church fundraiser.”

“I read it,” Gunther said.

“Which part?”

“Chapters One and Two, and most of Chapter Three, I think,” Gunther said, and Blucher laughed, shortly and abruptly. The laugh made him cough. He drank water, daintily, from a glass perched on his desk, then dabbed at his lips with a handkerchief.

“Yes,” he said. “It is no Sebastian Bruce Heftromane, I’ll admit as much. You are visiting London?”

“Yes.”

“It is a pleasant time of year.”

Gunther stared at him.

The man shrugged. “Perhaps you can visit the countryside?” he suggested. “Yorkshire, I am told, is very nice.”

“You have not been?”

“I would go, but who’d mind the shop?” the man said.

“Frau Blucher?” Gunther suggested. Outside, he thought he heard the neighing of a horse; but it must have been in his imagination.

“Alas, I have not been blessed with a wife,” Blucher said. “Not for many years. She died, you see.”

“In the war?”

“Appendicitis.”

“I’m sorry.”

Blucher shrugged. What can you do, he seemed to silently suggest. The silence dragged. The books lay still, heavy with ash and ink.

“I was told you’d be coming round here,” Blucher said. “Gunther Sloam. You are becoming quite notorious, in some circles.”

“How do you know me?”

“London is a small place. Word spreads. You were a friend of the actress, Ulla Blau.”

“You knew her?”

“Her talent spoke for her. She was magnificent in Die Große Liebe.”

“It was her best picture,” Gunther said.

Blucher shrugged again. “It was schmaltz, but you knew that already.”

Gunther looked at him with new suspicion. The man laughed. He took off his glasses and polished them with the handkerchief. When he put them back on his small, shrewd eyes assessed Gunther. “I am not a Jew,” he said. “If that is what you were thinking.”

“Where are you from, Herr Blucher?”

“A small town in Austria. Not unlike our illustrious leader,” Blucher said. “I came out here in 1947, shortly after the war. I have always admired the English writers. Who knows, some of them may even still be alive.” He stretched his arms to encompass his shop. “As you can see, I prospered.”

Gunther said, “I need to buy a gun.”

“It is quite illegal, Herr Sloam.”

“A man has a right to defend himself.”

“Why not ask your friends at the Gestapo?”

Did anyone in London know his business? Gunther tapped his fingers on the cover of a book. The smell of burnt paper disinclined him from wanting to light a cigarette.

“Did you know her?” he said.

“Ulla?” the man’s eyes misted over. “She was a beautiful woman,” he said.

“Do you know who killed her?”

Blucher looked at him mildly. “I thought you did.”

“That is a lie!”

Blucher sighed. He pushed back his chair with great deliberation, and stood up, panting. He pressed a hidden button, and a hidden drawer popped open in his desk. He brought out an object wrapped in cloth and unwrapped it. It was a Luger, perfectly clean. It was the sort of gun Gunther had used in the war. The sort of gun that only a day earlier took care of Ulla Blau.

“Will this do?” Blucher said.

“I want to know who killed her.”

“Forget Ulla Blau,” the bookseller said, with infinite sadness. “Finding her killer won’t bring her back. Go home, Gunther Sloam. There is nothing for you here but death.”

“You know something, I think,” Gunther said. He took the gun and examined it. “I would need bullets,” he said.

“Of course.”

Blucher brought out a clip of ammunition from the same drawer and handed it to Gunther. “The fee is fifty Reichsmarks.”

“Where did you get this gun?”

“A gun,” Blucher said, sadly. “Are we short of guns, Herr Sloam? Of those we have an overabundance. It is not guns but medicines we need. But how do you heal a broken soul?”

Gunther loaded the gun. He gave the bookseller the money. The man made it disappear.

“I’ll tell you a joke,” Blucher said. “One day Hitler visited a lunatic asylum. When he came in, all the patients raised the arms and cried, “Heil Hitler!” Suddenly, Hitler saw one man whose arm wasn’t raised. “What is the meaning of this? Why don’t you salute like the rest?” he demanded. The man said: “My Führer, I’m an orderly, not a madman!”

He gave Gunther an expectant look, then shrugged in resignation.

“Where did Ulla get her drugs?” Gunther said.

“Who knows,” Blucher said. “I try not to ask questions which might get me killed. You’d do well to do the same.”

“What do you wish to tell me, Herr Blucher?” Gunther said. He sensed that underneath the bookseller’s placid exterior there was a current of rage.

“Did you love her?” Blucher said. Gunther looked away. He was embarrassed by the naked look in the man’s eyes. Blucher was hurting.

“Once. Yes.”

“She was radiant. So alive. She understood that a man cannot live by violence alone. There must be joy. There must be light, and music. Without her, London will be unbearable.”

“Tell me what you know,” Gunther said. He felt a pulse of excitement. “Tell me. Was it the dwarf?”

“The dwarf!”

The bookseller made his way ponderously around the desk. “I should not be talking with you,” he said. “You are putting us both in danger.” He looked like he was trying to reach a difficult decision. “Wait here,” he said, at last. He waddled away towards a small door. “I’ll make us a cup of coffee.”

Gunther stood, waiting. He tucked the gun into the small of his back, under his shirt. He browsed the shelves. Hitler’s Mein Sieg, the book he wrote after the victory. Books on natural history, in English, with hand-painted plates depicting vibrantly colored birds. It occurred to Gunther that he had not heard birdsong since he arrived.

The silence grew oppressive. The dust tickled his nostrils and made him want to sneeze. The books stared at him in mute accusation. It wasn’t me, he wanted to say. I was just following orders. The seconds lengthened.

“Herr Blucher?”

There was no reply. Gunther let the moment lapse. He fingered the spine of an ancient volume on moths. It was loused with worm tracks. The dust tickled his throat. The gun felt heavy in the small of his back. He went to the door and knocked, softly.

“Herr Blucher?”

Still there was no reply and Gunther, with a sense of mounting dread, pushed the door open. He was afraid of what he would find.

Beyond, there was nothing but a small kitchenette. Gunther heaved a sigh of relief. Blucher was sitting in a folding chair by the sink. A kettle began to shriek on the open-top stove. Blucher was smiling faintly. His hands were folded quite naturalistically in his lap. He evidently fell asleep, and slept so soundly, even the mounting cry of the kettle would not wake him.

“Wake up, Blucher,” Gunther said. “Blucher, wake up.”

Later, in my office, he could not explain why he acted the way he did. Why he paced that small kitchenette, entreating Blucher to wake up, Blucher to stand, Blucher to speak to him. When all the while, of course, he was perfectly aware of the smell of gunpowder, of the smell of blood, as familiar and as intimate as a comrade on the Eastern Front; and of the small, neat hole drilled in Blucher’s forehead. He was aware of all that, and yet as in a dream he spoke to Blucher; he told him of Ulla, of time spent in a high attic room, of stolen kisses in Unter den Linden, of the whistle of a train taking soldiers to battle. That whistle, long ago, seemed to him now to intertwine with the hissing kettle. It brought with it instantaneous memories long kept at bay: of Ulla’s sweat-slicked body in the moonlight, of the feral call of air-raid sirens, of the march of booted feet, of jubilant voices crying out “The Horst Wessel Song.” He thought of the Führer’s voice on the wireless, of crumpled bedsheets and her voice, thick with sleep, saying, “Please, don’t go.”

It was those last words that he carried with him on the way to the east; those words that kept him company in amidst the snow and the blood. “Please, don’t go.” But when he returned, a different man under a different sky, she was long gone. Sometimes, under the blanket of the cold Russian night, he looked up at the stars and imagined he could see her.

At last, Gunther removed the kettle from the stove. He turned off the gas. He took one last look at Blucher’s corpse. A second door, he saw, led out of the kitchenette. He pushed it open and stepped outside, into an alleyway running at the back of the bookshop. He looked left and right but saw no one, and he slipped away. My men, who were only watching the front of the shop, lost him then.

6

WHEN SLOAM FAILED TO REAPPEAR, my men finally entered Blucher’s. They found the proprietor slumped in his chair with the bullet hole between his eyes, and Gunther gone. Then they called me with the bad news.

I did not mind Gunther on the loose. After all, I had set him free myself. I had telephoned Blucher earlier that morning, and advised him that Sloam may well pay him a visit later in the day. I also told Blucher he could sell Sloam a gun. A man with a gun, sooner or later, makes his presence felt.

What I had not expected, however, was for Blucher to be so stupid as to commit suicide by gunmen.

For a time, I considered that Gunther may be the killer. His whereabouts were unknown. He was armed, and potentially dangerous. But I had sent him to rattle a nests of wasps. That the wasps stung back, I supposed, was only to be expected.

Blucher must have been killed to keep him quiet. That fact stared me in the face, and the fact that the lying scum Austrian piece of shit had held out on me.

If there was one thing you could say about Hanns Blucher, it was that the man was a professional liar. His story for Gunther was good. Parts of it were even—almost—true. He was born Erich Dittman, in Gratz, Austria, the son of a shoemaker and a seamstress, the middle child of five. His criminal career began early. He was a good little pickpocket, graduated to burglary and robbery by the age of 16, and after a time in prison settled on the more tranquil profession of fencing stolen goods. When war came, he escaped to France; then, when France fell, to Luxembourg. By then he had changed his identity twice. When the war ended, Hermann Blucher was a well-established rare-books dealer in Luxembourg City. He had avoided the deportations and the camps, and he thought his papers were good.
They were; almost.

How he got out of Luxembourg alive I never quite learned. He reappeared in London and was ensconced in his premises on the Charing Cross Road as though he’d always been there. In truth, he had taken the lease on an empty shop at No. 84, formerly owned by a Jew named Marks.

He called himself Blucher. He was as enmeshed in criminal enterprise as ever. And he was still a Jew.

When I first marched into his shop and he saw me, he knew it was over. He did that little shrug he always did. By rights I should have had him tortured and disposed of. But he was more useful to me alive.

Only now he was dead, like Blau.

Someone was tying up loose ends.

Gunther walked through the city that day haunted by the shadow of deaths. Usually the ghosts did not bother him overmuch; he had made his peace with the atrocities of war. What he had done, he had only done to survive. In a post-war screenplay, never produced (Das große Übel, c. 1948), the love interest dies in the arms of the hero, a veteran of Normandy on a quest to avenge the death of his sister at the hands of blackmarket speculators. As she lies dying, she kisses him, one last time, with lips stained red with blood, and tells him he was not a bad man for the things he did. He was just an imperfect man in an imperfect world, trying to do the right thing.

She dies. The hero embraces her. Her blood soaks into his shirt. The hero walks away, into the shadows.

When he sent the script in to Tobis, he was told quite categorically not to waste his time. Demand was for domestic comedies, lighthearted affairs, adventure. “Write another Western,” Rolf Hansen told him over coffee, before he got up and left him with the check. “There’s always demand for that sort of thing. Oh, and Gunther?”

“Yes?”

“There is no black market in Germany. You should know better by now. Heil Hitler.”

No, Gunther thought, walking through city streets slick with defeat, bounded by empty buildings like skulls, where the dead whispered through the gaping eye sockets of broken windows. There was no crime in this new Reich, no prostitution unless one counted that of the soul, no murder but that carried out by the state.

It was a land of hard-working, virtuous, and prosperous people. A dream come true.

Already they were bringing civilization even to Britain. Viennese pastries and public concerts of Wagner and Bruckner, Reinheitsgebot beer, shining gymnasiums where the soldiers of tomorrow could be taught, new factories in the north where the goods needed for the empire could be cheaply and efficiently manufactured. And no more Jews, but for a few desperate survivors like Blucher, living out their last days like rats in the shadows.

He was not usually this bleak, you understand. All of this just brought back the bad memories. When we got him later he was done, he said.

“It’s just something about this godforsaken island,” he told me. “The cold and the damp and the bloody futility of it all, Everly. It starts to seep into your soul after a while.”

“I’m afraid we did not present London’s best side to you on your visit,” I said, and he snorted.

“Oh, I but think you did,” he said. “Don’t worry, I won’t be coming back.”

Like I said, it wasn’t much of a time for tourism.

Gunther retraced his steps. He tried to ensure he wasn’t being followed. He wrapped himself tight in his good cashmere coat. He went back to the Lyric. A different bartender tended bar. The same indistinguishable faces drank in the corners. No one spoke German or, at any rate, no one was answering his questions.

He did not see the Luxembourgian, Klaus Pirelli, and he left.

Then he went back to the start. The house on Dean Street stood with its door closed and red lights burning behind the windows. He banged on the door but no one was answering and he did not see the old woman, Mrs. White. There was a new watcher across the street: not one of mine. He sidled up to Gunther as Gunther turned to leave. It was dark by then.

“You are looking for a girl?”

“I am looking,” Gunther said. “For a dwarf.”

The other man shrugged. “I see it is true what they say about you Germans. You have peculiar tastes. But each to their own, as my old nan always said.”

Gunther stared at him. He had the urge to do violence. The man was too thin, his teeth too crooked, his coat too shabby, his hair too coarse. Gunther took out the gun and grabbed the man hard by the lapels and shoved him against the wall and put the gun in his face. The man looked at him placidly.

“Do you know a man called Klaus Pirelli?”

“What’s it to you, friend?” the man said.

“I could shoot you right now.”

“You could indeed, Fritz.”

Gunther slapped him across the face with the gun, hard. The man’s head shot back and slammed against the wall. He crumpled to the ground. Gunther put the gun to his forehead. “Tell me where I can find him.”

The man moved his jaw, grimaced, and spat out blood. “Everyone’s tough with a gun in their hand,” he said. “Why don’t you try asking nicely, or buying me a drink.”

“I don’t understand you English,” Gunther said, frustrated. He pulled away from the man. He felt ashamed. The man got up slowly to his feet. Gunther took out cigarettes and offered one to the man, who took it. Gunther lit them up.

The man took a deep drag on his cigarette and exhaled a stream of smoke. “If you’re not looking for a girl,” he said, reasonably, “why are you hanging about outside a whorehouse?”

“I came here for a girl,” Gunther said shortly. “She died.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I almost believe you,” Gunther said, and the man laughed.

“I can take you somewhere where there are other girls. It’s best to let go of the dead, friend, or soon you become one yourself.”

“You’re a philosopher as well as a pimp?”

“I’m neither, friend. Just a man doing what he has to do to survive.”

“Do you know where I can find this man, Pirelli?”

The man considered. “I can’t tell you where he is,” he said at last, “but I can tell you where he’d be.”

“Where is that?”

“Somewhere where there is drink, and music, and girls.”

“And you know all these places, I assume?”

“What can I say, I have a thirst for knowledge.”

Gunther laughed. He stuck his hand out. “Gunther Sloam,” he said.

The other man looked at the offered hand. Finally he took it. “You can call me Janson.”

“One name’s as good as the next,” Gunther said amicably.

7

THERE BEGAN A NIGHT in which perception began to fracture like a mirror for Gunther. The city was a nightmarish maze of dark streets in which faceless gunmen haunted every corner. He thought about dead girls and dead Jews, and wondered who would be the next to die.

They started at the Albert, a cavernous pub where ancient families feuded with each other over pints of watery beer; continued to the Admiral’s Arms, where everyone looked like a vampire; and settled for a time at the Dog and Duck over glasses of potent, home-made sherry.

“When the occupation is completed there I will go to America,” Janson said. “I have a great admiration for the Americans, for all that they lost their war.”

“What will you do?” Gunther said.

“I would become a writer for their pulps.”

“It’s a living,” Gunther allowed. “Not a very profitable one, though.”

“I write quickly and I have what it requires most,” Janson said.

“And what’s that?” Gunther said.

“Despair.”

Gunther shook his head and swallowed his drink. Visions of Ulla Blau’s ruined face kept rising in his mind.

“Were you in the war?” he said.

“Does it matter?”

“No,” Gunther said, tiredly. “I suppose it doesn’t.”

They rose from their seats and stepped out into the night. It had truly fallen by then, and here and there, solitary gas lamps began to wink into being, casting murky pools of yellow light around them. Janson palmed a pill and dry-swallowed. “You want some?” he said.

Gunther said, “Sure.”

During the war they had functioned as little more than animated corpses: kept alive by minimal food rations and handfuls of drugs. Gunther’s memories of the march on Moscow were fragmentary. They killed for the sake of killing, killed because it was the only thing left for them to do. It wasn’t glory or the Führer that kept them on that march. It was the little pills manufactured by Bayer’s; that, and simple, total desperation.

The veneer of humanity was stripped off Gunther during the long march, during the slaughter and the occupation. He had never hated Jews, had no feelings at all for the Russians, but he was just one man; and when it came down to it, he wanted to survive.

In this world, I think, you do what you must to live: another minute, another hour, another day.

Sometime during that long evening they stumbled into the Berlin. It is a club situated on the Embankment, next to the gardens—or what used to be gardens before the war—and facing the South Bank. Gunther stopped outside. The Ferris wheel rotated slowly on the opposite side of the river, softly illuminated against the night sky. Gunther was drunk. His body was on fire from the methamphetamine. The Thames snaked dark and in its depths he saw Ulla’s face rising up to him, laughing bubbles. He tottered.

Janson said something to the doormen and they laughed.

Money changed hands. The money was Gunther’s. They went inside. It was a large room with a stage at one end. Girls danced on the stage, naked but for the fans they held. They moved about the stage in complicated patterns. A piano played, softly. Gunther heard conversation, laughter, the clink of glasses. He saw SS men in uniform sitting at one table, each officer with a girl in his lap. Important locals in last year’s suits swanned about. They had bad skin and bad teeth and great big booming laughs. Gunther ordered a drink and thought he’d had enough of this town.

It was then that he saw him.

The Luxembourgian stepped out of the door marked Bathroom, his hands still wet. He dried them on his trousers. He wore a pin stripe suit and a pink shirt and a muted tie. His eyes darted nervously from side to side but he put on a smile as charming and shiny as a false diamond bracelet. Then he, too, saw Gunther.

The smile hovered but stayed in place. Gunther got up. He did not dare pull out the gun. Not with the officers present. The Luxembourgian’s smile grew more assured. He passed through the throng of people like an eel until he came to Gunther.

“Sit down.”

“I’ve been looking for you,” Gunther said, and he matched the man’s smile with his own, cold and hard.

“I said sit down!”

Gunther looked down. Held in the Luxembourgian’s manicured fingers was a small Röhm .22 Derringer gun.

Gunther sat down. Pirelli sat on a stool opposite. He trained the gun on Gunther, holding it between his legs. “Don’t bloody move, man.”

“I wasn’t going anywhere.”

The bartender arrived. She was a young girl bare to the waist but for dark kohl painted over her nipples. She brought the Luxembourgian a drink without being asked. He kept one hand on the gun and with the other downed his scotch and grimaced. “They know me here, you see.”

“You’re a difficult man to find.”

“Hardly!” The man’s eyes kept shifting. Gunther was primed, every muscle in his body singing alertly. “Listen, if this is about the other night—”

“What do you think it’s about?”

“You didn’t have to kill Blucher!”

It came out almost as a shout. A couple of heads turned. Then the girls on the stage began to gyrate erotically and what attention they’d been given was gone. It was just the two of them on the bar at the Berlin. At this point, too, one of my men spotted Gunther. He did not approach but quietly went for a phone.

“I didn’t kill him,” Gunther said, startled.

“Didn’t you? You come to town, start poking about, and two days later both Ulla and Erich are dead?”

“Who’s Erich?”

“Blucher.” Pirelli was sweating, Gunther saw. And he realised Pirelli, too, must be on Pervitin. He was wired worse than an S-mine. “That was his real name.”

“How did you know him?”

Pirelli was so jumpy, Gunther was worried he’d press the trigger by accident. But the man seemed almost eager to talk.

“In Luxembourg. I helped him when his trouble got bad. Helped him get out and establish himself here.” He sneered at Gunther. “What are you going to do, rat on me to your pals in the Gestapo? They can’t touch me. I have connections. I’m a foreign national.”

“You could try telling that to the fishes,” Gunther said, with a touch of cruelty. “When they dump you in the Thames.”

“They wouldn’t dare!” A flash of anger or defiance in his eyes. “How do I know you didn’t kill Erich?”

“Why did you set me up? You spiked my drink at that godawful pub.”

“The Lyric’s decent,” Pirelli said; almost offended.

“Why did you do it!” Gunther said.

“Listen, friend, I’m the one holding the gun,” Pirelli said.

“Blucher knew something. He was going to tell me. Then someone shot him.”

“Someone, someone!” But he could see it Pirelli’s eyes. The man was afraid of something. He kept looking everywhere but at Gunther.

“Who are you working for?” Gunther threw at him.

“I work for myself.”

“A man like you? You’re just the hired help.”

Gunther thought to needle the man. But Pirelli’s mouth curved in a mocking smile. At that moment one of the SS officer approached them, accompanied by a woman draped on his arm.

“Signore Pirelli!”

Gunther reached between them and grabbed Pirelli’s hand in a painful grip, twisting it. He yanked the gun from the Luxembourgian’s hand, hearing a bone break. Pirelli cried in pain.

“You are not happy to see us?”

Pirelli put on a pained smile. “My apologies, Sturmbannführer,” he said, through gritted teeth. “I seem to have hurt my hand.”

The SS officer was round and jolly. His companion was buxom and blonde.

“Let me look at that,” he said, grabbing for Pirelli’s hand. Pirelli screamed. The Sturmbannführer laughed jovially and called the bartender for ice. “You’ll be fine in no time,” he said. He turned to Gunther and studied him, and under the jovial exterior Gunther saw cold, dark eyes.

“Who is your friend?”

“Gunther Sloam, Sturmbannführer,” Gunther said stiffly.

“Sloam, Sloam,” the SS man said. His companion leaned over his shoulder and eyed Gunther with interest. “Where did you serve?”

“258th Infantry Division, sir.”

“The heroes of Moscow!” the Sturmbannführer declared delightedly. “Why do I know your name, Sloam?”

“I’m sure I can’t say, sir.”

“A drink for my friend here,” the SS man called. “A true hero of the Reich. So good to hear civilized German in this godforsaken place. How is Berlin?”

“Still there, last I checked.”

“Magnificent!” The man laughed. His belly shook. His eyes remained cold and suspicious. “You two appear to be having a bit of an argument.”

“It’s nothing, sir. A minor disagreement.”

“Good, good. We do not like trouble here in London, Sloam. This is a peaceful place. The natives are most obliging.” He squeezed his companion’s bottom and she squealed delightedly. Gunther averted his gaze. The girl’s eyes were colder even than the Sturmbannführer’s.

“So I see, sir.”

“Well, Pirelli, about that thing we discussed—”

“I will have the shipment to you by tomorrow,” the Luxembourgian said. He was nursing a pack of ice on his broken hand and scowling.

“First thing, Pirelli. Sloam–” he nodded, cordially, and waddled off with the girl on his arm.

“Drugs?” Gunther said.

“Nudie pictures,” Pirelli said. “The Sturmbannführer is a connoisseur.”

“So I see.”

“Give me back my gun.”

“Why don’t we take a walk?”

“No!”

“What is it, Pirelli? I’m not going to kill you.”

“Listen to me, Sloam. It’s safer in here. I don’t want to die like the others.”

“Who killed them?”

Unexpectedly, Pirelli laughed. “No one,” he said. His whole body shook.

“Get up. We’re going outside.”

“You won’t dare shoot me here.”

“Only one way to find out. Move.”

Pirelli got up. “You’re a fool,” he said.

“Why was Ulla killed?” Gunther said. They walked to the doors. It was cooler outside, quieter. There were few cars on the street. In the distance he could hear the clop-clop-clop of a horse and carriage. The lights of the Ferris wheel spun.

“She was tight with the SS,” Pirelli said. “She supplied this place with half the whores. And then the other half too. They turned a blind eye to the drugs. First she bought from the soldiers her girls were sleeping with. Then, when that dried out, she put the pressure on me.”

“How did she do that?”

Pirelli shrugged. “Do you have a cigarette?”

Gunther kept one hand in his pocket, where he held Pirelli’s gun. He offered him the cigarette case with the other. The Luxembourgian lit up and coughed. “Filthy stuff,” he said.

“What did she have on you?”

“She knew about Erich. We had our own racket going before she came along. Everyone in this town has a racket. But she wanted it all.”

“You don’t sound as if you liked her much.”

“We did business. Business was good.”

“You were bringing the drugs in from Luxembourg? Shipping them inside what, old books?”

Pirelli smiled tiredly. “You’re not as stupid as you look.”

“You and Blucher were close?”

“What the hell do you mean?”

Gunther nodded, the pieces falling into place at last. Perhaps he’d been wrong about Ulla, he thought. Perhaps he’d been wrong all along. People changed; and she’d always had that hard, selfish core inside her, even in Berlin, during the war. He didn’t hold it against her. She was just another survivor in the end, and you can only survive for so long.

“Blucher didn’t know, did he?” Gunther said. “How you felt about him.”

“He loved that bitch!”

He opened his arms. His mouth opened, to speak, perhaps even to smile. There was a soft pop, like a bottle of champagne was opened. Pirelli fell on Gunther, his arms enfolding him in a hug. Gunther held him. When he lowered him, gently, to the ground, Pirelli’s mouth was a vomit of blood and he was no longer breathing.

8

THEY WERE DOWN NEAR THE RIVER by then. The shot could have come from anywhere. The Thames ran softly. The mud swallowed sound. Overhead clouds shaped portents of rain.

Gunther swore. Pirelli’s cigarette was on the ground, still burning. Gunther picked it upand put it to his mouth and took a drag. He knelt beside the corpse and searched through Pirelli’s pockets. He found a bottle of Pervitin and dryswallowed a handful. The hit was almost immediate. He stood up straighter, all his senses alert. Apart from the pills he found three hundred Reichsmarks, which he pocketed; the photo of an old woman in an old-fashioned dress with her arm around a tall, thin boy; and a comb. The boy in the photo could have been Pirelli. The comb was fine-toothed and made of ivory. Gunther stuffed both back into Pirelli’s pockets and added rocks – as many as he could find. Then he rolled up his sleeves and dragged the corpse by its feet into the water.

When the last of Pirelli’s head disappeared at last into the Thames, Gunther walked away. Something kept nagging away at him. Pirelli’s use of the past tense, he realised. As though their little operation here in London had already come to its end.

Had it been wound down, even before Gunther arrived? Or was Ulla’s death the catalyst? And why did the Luxembourgian spike his drink at the Lyric?

He needed to find the dwarf, he thought. The last piece of the puzzle.

Instead he found himself a girl.

“She reminded me of Ulla, that was all,” he told me later, in my office. “She was German, can you believe that? She was sending money back to her family in Munich. She said she was an actress, only times are hard.”

“They are all actresses, Sloam,” I said. “And if you can believe that you can believe anything.”

“She was a good girl!” He turned on me. He was a romantic to the core, even if he couldn’t admit it, not even to himself. “She was just doing what she could to make a life.”

“She’ll be used up within a year,” I told him. “And dead in two.”

I was being harsh on him; I wanted to provoke him.

He only shook his head tiredly. Like I said, by then the drugs had worn off and he was dead on his feet; he was done. “She was a good trooper,” he insisted.

“You can’t fight a war on your back.”

“What is it about you, Everly? Did someone you loved one day suddenly abandon you?”

“You could say that, Sloam. But then you could say a lot of things. What was her name?”

“Anna,” he said.

“They’re all called Anna.”

“What do you want from me, Everly? Shoot me and be done with it.”

“I still might,” I said. “Now answer my damn questions.”

Gunther met the girl walking back from the river. For a moment, the light framed her face and he thought it was Ulla, and his breath caught in his throat. But her nose was different and her face worn in a way Ulla’s never was, though this girl was young.

(“They’re all young, at the Berlin.”

“You sound quite the expert, Everly. Are you sure you weren’t there?”

“Just keep talking, Sloam.”)

He saw that she was crying. She hurried her steps when she saw Gunther. “Herr Pirelli—have you seen him?”

“Herr Pirelli has gone for a swim.”

She looked up at him with dark eyes. Her makeup was smudged. “I don’t understand.”

“I’m sorry,” Gunther said. “I was only making a joke. He had to leave. Urgent business elsewhere, he said. You look distraught.”

“It’s nothing, really.” She tried to smile, failed.

“Can I buy you a drink?”

“That’s awfully kind,” the girl said. “Only I need something a little stronger first, you understand? Just to take the edge off things.”

Gunther stuck his hand in his pocket, came back with a pill. The girl took it without a word. This time, she managed a smile.

(“They know how to smile, Sloam, believe me. They all smile like Ulla Blau in Die Große Liebe.”

“You sound bitter, Everly.”

“You’re an incurable romantic, Sloam.”

“You keep saying that. But it’s just basic decency.”

“Only you slept with her.”

“It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t like that at all.”)

Only maybe it was, a little bit. My men were only now getting there. The girl put the Pervitin pill between her teeth. She leaned into Gunther. He kissed her, hungrily. The pill dissolved between them. Her lips were hot and her eyes fevered. He imagined himself kissing Ulla. The girl threw her head back and laughed. “Let’s go!”

She led him at a run and he followed like a fool. My men pursued but then lost them. It took us a while to realize what had happened to Pirelli. It wasn’t that Gunther hadn’t been observed. It was just that people don’t willingly talk to the Gestapo.

She took him up the hill, along St. Martin’s Lane where the theatres still displayed playbills from the last decade. She had a room on the third story of a boarding house in Denmark Street. There was a wilted rose in a vase on the table—“From an admirer,” she said—and the bed was neatly made. Her only books were Mein Kampf and a copy of the Bible. Her only other reading materials were several out-of-date issues of Deutsches Kinomagazin, the latest of which had a radiant Leni Riefenstahl on the cover, posed with a camera on a tripod against a gloriously empty African savannah.

“Can I offer you a drink?”

Gunther sat on the edge of the bed. The girl slipped off her shoes and her coat. Underneath it she was wearing nothing but lingerie. She moved about quite unconcerned.

“Sure.”

“Scotch?”

“If you have it.”

The girl laughed. “You’re such a gentleman,” she said. Her eyes went over his body but dawdled on his pocket; where the pills were. “I keep drinks here for, you know.”

“Admirers.”

“Sure.” She opened a cabinet and brought out a bottle and poured him a glass and one for herself too. They clinked glasses. Gunther’s body was on fire and his mind was elsewhere. He kept thinking she was Ulla, and he knew that he wanted her.

There had been other girls, other rooms like these, hurried romances carried on in the dark. He’d never really let himself feel, after the war. Love was just another kind of transaction, another kind of scam.

He left the drink unfinished. He reached for her and she came willingly. Touching her lips was like completing a circuit. Electricity burned in him. “Ulla . . .” he said.

The girl recoiled. Her hand was on his naked chest. He did not remember when he’d taken off his clothes.

“She’s dead,” she said. “She was always good to me.”

“You’re crying,” he said, wonderingly. The girl shook her head and smiled sadly through the mist.

“No,” she said. “I’m not.”

Gunther touched his eyes and realized they were wet. He could not remember when he had last cried. He wondered if he should feel good for it. He felt nothing.

The girl pushed him on the bed. He lay on his back. The ceiling was cracked, the paint peeling. The girl climbed on top of him.

“Ulla . . .” he said.

“Shh,” the girl said. “I’ll be your Ulla.”

Gunther closed his eyes. The girl rocked above him. Gunther wondered if he’d ever loved Ulla, or if he was merely in love with the idea of being in love. After a while, it didn’t matter, nothing much did, only the slow build and the urgency, the creaking of the mattress springs, the girl’s soft cries.

He half-awoke in the night to find the girl smoking a cigarette by the window. He saw her profile in silhouette. She reclined, nude, her long legs drawn up to her chest. There was a long cigarette holder between her lips. He stood up, naked also. The girl didn’t turn her head. He went to the sink and filled a glass with lukewarm water, and downed it. He turned to the girl. From this angle he could see her face.

“She made us watch her in this old movie,” the girl said. “Over and over again, to teach us how to walk and how to talk.”

“Die Große Liebe?”

The girl looked at him vaguely. “What’s that?” she said.

“An old movie. It was very successful.”

“This was Der blaue Mond. It was alright. She played a good-time girl in trouble with the law. There’s a detective always chasing her. It was silly.”

“I never saw it.”

The girl shrugged. “No, well,” she said. “Why would you.”

“We were lovers, in Berlin.”

“She had many lovers,” the girl said. “I think the only one she really loved was herself.”

“Why were you looking for Pirelli, earlier?”

“He’s always been good to me. He’s not, you know . . .”

“I know.”

“He liked to pay us for our time and then just listen to us talk.” She laughed. “Most men just want us to shut up and get on our backs. One of the SS men likes me to spank him. He just doesnn’t want to, you know. Have a conversation about it.”

“And Pirelli? You looked distraught.”

“It was nothing, really. One of the other girls hasn’t been in to work for a couple of days. I thought maybe he’d seen her.”

“Does she owe you money?”

The girl laughed. “No, silly. She’s my friend.”

She got up and advanced on him. The cigarette in its holder was left to smoulder by the window. “Why do you have a gun in your coat?” she said.

“In case I get into trouble,” Gunther said.

“You look like the kind of man who’s always in trouble.”

“That’s just a role I play. In real life I’m a sweetheart.”

She melted into his arms. She was good at that sort of thing. “Shut up and kiss me,” she whispered.

So he did.

When they parted for air some of the fire inside him had calmed. The girl reached for his coat draped on the chair and reached into the pocket and took out the pills. “Do you mind?” she said. He shook his head, mutely.

He wondered if the line she’d used was from Ulla’s film, that the girl had memorised. He thought it was the sort of thing he would have written himself, a throwaway line in a B-movie script on a long afternoon.

The girl popped a pill.

Gunther decided it didn’t really matter. He took her in his arms and lifted her and carried her to the bed and she was laughing.

She lay there looking up at him. “I’ll be your Ulla,” she whispered.

“No,” he said. “This time, just be yourself.”

The night faded into torn strips of time. For a while, he slept.

When he woke up the girl was in the corner putting her stockings on in a businesslike fashion, and sitting in the chair facing Gunther was a man with a gun in his hand.

9

“I THOUGHT I WAS GONE FOR SURE,” Gunther said. He looked at me a little sadly, I thought. “But of course if they’d wanted me dead, I’d have been dead before I ever woke up.”

“And the girl?”

“She got dressed and left. It wasn’t her fault,” he said; almost pleading. “What could she do?”

“Did she take your money?”

He smiled. “And the pills.”

“You’re a sap, Gunther.”

“Yes,” he said. “That’s what people keep telling me.”

There were two of them. One on the chair, facing Gunther, and the other at the door. Both had guns.

The girl got dressed. “Are you going to hurt him?” she said. She didn’t look at Gunther once.

“What’s it to you, girl?”

“It’s nothing,” she said. “It’s nothing to me.”

“Then get lost, would you?” the gunman on the door said. The girl gave him a stare, but that’s all it was. She got lost.

“Get dressed,” the man on the chair said. Gunther sat up in bed. “I can’t,” he said. “I’m shy in front of strangers.”

“He thinks he’s clever,” the gunman on the chair complained. The gunman by the door looked over, slowly. “Everyone’s a comedian these days,” he said.

“He’s a regular Karl Valentin,” the other gunman said. “Come on, Sloam. Get dressed. You don’t want to be late.”

“He’d be late for his own funeral,” the gunman by the door said, and they both laughed. Gunther didn’t. He thought it was a cheap line. He got up and got dressed and he followed them outside.

A long black Mercedes was parked in the road. Gunther got in at the back. The gunmen sat on either side of him. A third man was driving.

“Where are we going?”

“To church.”

He let it go. He didn’t have a choice. They drove through the dark city streets. Few cars passed them, going the other way. London after the war wasn’t a place where people dawdled after dark. It was warm inside the car. The men on either side of him smelled of wet wool and incense. It was a peculiarly English smell. Outside the city projected like the flickering images of a black and white film. Bomb damage everywhere. He’d seen newsreels of the Luftwaffe bombing over the city, waves of bombers flying over Big Ben and St Paul’s Cathedral, over the Thames. It was not uncommon for children to play in the ruins of a house and find an unexploded ordnance. People died of the bombs even now.

He thought about Hitler announcing the successful invasion of England. The ships at Dover and the submarine that made it up the Thames and blew up the House of Commons. It’d taken them six months to hunt down Churchill. He’d been hiding in a bunker all that time.

Swastikas waving over Buckingham Palace. No one knew where the royal family was. Or knew but wasn’t saying. So many things you couldn’t say anymore. His mind wandered.

How does every German joke start? he thought.

By looking over your shoulder.

In time, London would be rebuilt and there’d be no sign left of the war.

“Wake up,” someone said. He was prodded awake. His heart was beating too fast and there was an acrid taste in his mouth. Beyond the car’s headlights he saw the lit front of a small church.

“Oh,” he said. “I thought you were kidding.”

“Just move it, will you? Boss wants to see you.”

Gunther got out of the car obligingly. There was a large electric red cross above the door. Its light spilled over the driveway and ran down the walls. It made everything look covered in blood. Gunther went inside the church. The two gunmen remained outside. The door shut behind Gunther.

There was an altar straight ahead. Stained-glass windows showed nativity scenes. The pews had been pushed aside and there were half-shut crates and boxes everywhere.

“Mr. Sloam. Thank you for coming. I understand you have been looking for me.”

Gunther started. For a moment he couldn’t locate the voice. Then a diminutive shadow detached itself from the chancel and approached him with the tread of soft feet. “Welcome to the mission, Mr. Sloam. We do God’s work here.”

Jurgen, the dwarf, wore horn-rimmed glasses and a crisp white shirt. The rolled-up sleeves showed muscled arms. His hair was reddish-brown and fine.

“With guns?” Gunther said.

Jurgen laughed softly. “These are dangerous times. One must take precautions.”

“How did you find me?”

Jurgen shrugged. “It wasn’t hard,” he said. “I have the ear of the poor, the desperate and the dispossessed. I understand Pirelli is dead.”

“Pirelli, Blucher, Ulla Blau,” Gunther said. He ticked them off one by one on his fingers. He watched Jurgen but Jurgen’s face bore nothing but a polite expression.

“Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil,” Jurgen said.

“Did you kill them?” Gunther said.

“Why would I do that, Mr. Sloam?”

“To protect your little racket,” Gunther said. “I knew it couldn’t be Ulla behind it all. Running drugs, suborning women. Those children who died in the hospital. It was all your doing, wasn’t it. Wasn’t it!”

He was shouting. Jurgen flinched. “Mr. Sloam,” he said. “Please. This is unseemly.”

“Just tell me,” Gunther whispered. The fight wasn’t in him anymore. “Tell me the truth.”

Jurgen rubbed his eyes. “I came to London to help these people. The poor, the needy. The war had destroyed their homes along with their futures. We provide medical supplies, food, bibles.” He shrugged. “The Führer won’t challenge the church. This much we still have.”

“You’re a banker.”

“I’m wealthy. My family is rich.”

“Did you kill them? Did you kill Ulla?”

“You want me to confess?” Jurgen looked amused. “We are in church, after all.”

“I don’t know what I want,” Gunther said.

“I believe in God, Mr. Sloam. I believe that the sins of the present age are but the prelude to the flood that is to come. This is Sodom and Gomorrah. The End of Days. Evil has won, Mr. Sloam. But evil cannot rule the world forever.”

“My God,” Gunther said. “You’re an agitator. A . . . a subversive.”

“Mr. Sloam, really,” Jurgen said. “Don’t be so melodramatic.”

“How are you still allowed to operate? Why is the Gestapo not knocking on your door as we speak?”

“Someone has to fund this occupation,” Jurgen said complacently. “Someone has to rebuild. Even Nazis need money, Mr. Sloam. I think you have the wrong impression of me. I did not kill Ulla. God knows I had reason to. You paint me so blackly, but Ulla Blau was exactly what you deny she was. She was a whoremonger and a poisoner. And a blackmailer, too, and many other things besides. I do not hold it against her. She did what she thought she must do. She had all the morals of an actress and all their brittle ruthlessness. I do not judge, Mr. Sloam. Only God does.”

“What other things?” Gunther said; whispered.

Jurgen shrugged. “Lives,” he said. “She sold lives.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Don’t you? Then perhaps it is better that way.”

“Who did she blackmail?” Then realization dawned. “You?”

“I have certain proclivities,” Jurgen said. “I am not proud of them, but I have my needs. And Ulla had a knack for finding these things out.”

“So you funded her?” Gunther said.

Jurgen shrugged again. “I paid her some money,” he allowed. “What she mostly wanted from me was a way of putting that money somewhere safe. She had saved almost enough, she told me. She was looking forward to retiring. She wanted to go back to Germany, somewhere far from Berlin. She dreamed of opening her own theatre. Can you believe it?” He gave a sudden, unexpected bark of a laugh. “She was never much of an actress,” he said.

“That’s not true.”

“Oh, Sloam. I liked her, too, you know. But I never went to bed with her.”

Gunther took a step toward him. Jurgen stood his ground. He smiled sardonically. “I’m sorry,” he said, and he sounded almost genuine. “I don’t know who killed her.”

“But you’re grateful,” Gunther said. He loomed over the smaller man, who looked at him evenly, unafraid.

“What’s one death,” he said, “amongst so many?”

Footsteps sounded behind Gunther. He began to turn, only to see a dark shape rise in the air towards him. The butt of a gun connected with the back of his head. Pain flared, and he fell to his knees.

“Take him outside. Dump him somewhere with the garbage.”

He tried to rise. They hit him again and, this time, he stayed down.

“I thought I was dead,” he said. “Until I woke up covered in rotting cabbage with a rat nibbling on my shoe. They really did dump me in the garbage.”

“Did they give you back your gun?”

“What gun?” he said. He looked at me blankly.

I sighed. “So who killed Ulla?” I said.

Gunther rubbed his eyes. “I don’t know,” he said. “And I don’t care anymore. I’ve had it, Everly. I’m going home.”

“You’re lucky to be alive.”

“Like you said, you can’t just kill me—I’m a faithful citizen of the Reich.”

I laughed. He looked hurt by that. “Who’s going to miss you, Gunther? I have your file. You’re a third-rate hack for pictures no one makes anymore. You have no wife, no friends, and not much of a future. Face it. You may as well be dead.”

He shrugged. He must have heard worse. It’s harder to break a man when he has nothing.

“If you’re going to do it, just do it,” he said.

“I would,” I said, “only I like you. We do things a little differently here, in England.”

I think it was true, too. He wasn’t a bad guy. He just kept believing the wrong people.

“Then that’s it? You’re just going to let me go?”

“There’s the door,” I said. “There’s a transport plane leaving in a couple of hours from Northolt. Why don’t you do yourself a favour and be on it this time.”

“I will,” he said, fervently. “I’ll be damned if I spend another minute in this town.”

I watched him get up. He walked to the door. He hesitated with his hand on the handle. “You’re a good sort, Everly,” he said.

“We’re a vanishing kind,” I said.

10

WHEN WE PICKED HIM UP he didn’t have the gun on him. He must have stashed it somewhere in the trash. From us he should have gone straight to the airport. He didn’t.

He made his way back to Dean Street. Back to the start. A car was parked in the street with the trunk open and packed suitcases on the ground. The old woman straightened when she saw him and said, dismissively, “Oh, it’s you.”

“Mrs. White. Going someplace?”

“The cold’s no good for my bones,” she said in her atrocious German. “I thought perhaps somewhere warm for the winter.”

“Can I help you with your luggage?”

“I’d rather you didn’t.”

Gunther took his gun out and pointed it at her.

She squinted. “What’s that for, then?” she said.

“Could you step away from the car?”

“You’re not going to shoot me, Gunther.”

He stared at her; but the gun never wavered. She straightened up, slowly. When she next spoke she seemed to shed forty years and her accent. “You came. I wasn’t sure you would but you did.”

“Just keep your hands where I can see them, Ulla.”

She smiled. It was her old familiar smile. He wondered how he didn’t see it before. “People keep telling me you’re not much of an actress,” he said, “but by God, you are!”

“You were always too kind to me,” she said. Gunther could see now under her makeup and the wig: it was her eyes she couldn’t truly mask. They were large and startled and innocent, like a wounded bird’s. It was her eyes which dominated the last few seconds of screen at the end of Die Große Liebe, as the picture slowly faded to black. How could he have ever forgotten them?

“How did you know, Gunther?”

“I didn’t, not for sure. It was just something this girl said.”

“My, you’ve wasted no time getting over me.”

He ignored her. “She was crying because one of her friends was missing. One of the other girls. And I thought how much she looked like you, how much all of them did. The Gestapo man said they all smiled like you.”

“Chance would be a fine thing!” she said, with a flash of anger.

“And there was no face, of course.”

“No,” she said. “There was no face left, was there.”

“How could you do it, Ulla? All of it? Not just the girls or the drugs, I can understand that, but those dead children, too?”

“They’d have died sooner or later, Gunther. This whole stinking country is a waiting room in a hospital’s terminal wing. You can’t pin that on me.”

“But why?”

“Why, why,” she said, aping him. Her voice was cruel. “Maybe because I couldn’t get a role anymore. So I had to make one for myself.” She shrugged. “Or maybe I just grew tired. It’s over now, anyway. It was just something to do to pass the time at the end of the world.”

“And the others?” he said. “Blucher, Pirelli?”

“I only did what I had to do.”

“Why me, Ulla?”

“Do you mind if I light a cigarette?”

“Do it slowly.”

“I do everything slowly, Gunther.”

She reached into her pocket and came back with a silver case. She put a cigarette between her lips and lit it with a match. She blew out smoke and looked at him, unconcerned. “I always liked you,” she said softly.

“Liked?”

“Maybe it was love. It was so long ago and who can remember anymore. You were just easy, Gunther. I don’t know how you’re still alive.”

He just stared at her. The sunlight framed her head. It was just an ordinary day.

“Put the gun down, Gunther. You know you’re not going to shoot me.” She wiped makeup off her face and smiled at him. He thought she must still be beautiful, underneath. “Come with me,” she said. “We’ll go back to the Continent, away from this awful place. I have money, we’d never have to work again. Come with me.”

“No.”

“Then step away!” She began loading the cases into the car. Gunther stood and watched her, helplessly.

I watched them from across the road. Neither of them saw me. It was obvious he wasn’t going to shoot. She knew it and I did. I think the only one who didn’t was Gunther.

I crossed the road to them. I wasn’t in a hurry. Gunther heard my footsteps first. He turned his head and looked at me in bewilderment.

“Give me the gun, Gunther.”

“No,” he said, “She’s got to pay, she’s got to pay for what she did.”

“To them, or to you?” I said. “Give me the gun, Gunther.”

I watched her all the while. She straightened up again, slowly, her eyes never leaving my own or blinking. She didn’t say a word. She didn’t have to.

“Give me the gun.”

He gave it to me. Ulla watched us without expression. I couldn’t see her hands.

I raised the gun and shot her.

A Luger makes a surprising amount of noise when it’s fired. The gunshot echoed from the walls. She fell slowly.

I’d blown half her face off, and the wig, which fell and lay on the ground matted in blood. Ulla Blau collapsed after it. She lay by the car and didn’t move. There was a small gun in her hand where she’d intended to shoot me.

I walked over to her and fired another bullet, just to be sure.

Gunther stood there all the while. He didn’t move. His eyes found mine at last. “What did you do that for?” he said numbly.

“You never asked her,” I said.

“Asked her what?”

“What else she did to earn a living. Someone must have told you.”

I could see it in his eyes. Someone must have said something but he never thought to follow it up. I said, “You want to know why she was so protected? She sold us Jews. To the Gestapo.”

“So?” he said.

“She worked in the theatre in the aftermath of the war. She recruited the girls. She knew where people were hiding. It was just another way to make a living, and buy some protection on the side.”

“So what?” he said. “They were just Jews.”

“Sure,” I said. “Sure. They were just Jews.”

He really looked at me then. I think it was the first time he really started to see things for what they were and not for what he thought they should be.

“But you can’t be,” he said. “You’re not—”

“I knew Tom Everly in Berlin, before the war,” I said. “We were at university together. He became a committed Nazi and when he went back to England he was already working for the Abwehr.”

I was watching Gunther’s eyes. He wanted to run but there was nowhere to go. You can’t outrun a bullet.

“We found him in the last few months of the war. Just enough time for me to take his place,” I said. “He had a wife and a son, but it’s no use having a family in this line of work.”

All Gunther did was keep shaking his head. No, no. “There are no more Jews,” he said.

“I told you,” I said. “We’re a vanishing kind.”

Later, I stood over him. I knelt beside him and put the gun in his hand. They looked good together, Ulla and him. I felt bad for Gunther. He wasn’t a bad guy, and none of this has really been his fault. He came to London following a woman, which is how these stories usually start, and he found her: which is how they usually end.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lavie Tidhar is the World Fantasy Award winning author of Osama (2011), The Violent Century (2013), the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize winning A Man Lies Dreaming (2014), and the Campbell Award winning Central Station (2016), in addition to many other works and several other awards. His latest novels are Unholy Land and debut children’s novel Candy. He works across genres, combining detective and thriller modes with poetry, science fiction and historical and autobiographical material. His work has been compared to that of Philip K. Dick by the Guardian and the Financial Times, and to Kurt Vonnegut’s by Locus.

ALSO BY LAVIE TIDHAR

NOVELS

The Tel Aviv Dossier*

Osama*

The Violent Century

A Man Lies Dreaming

Unholy Land

THE BOOKMAN HISTORIES

The Bookman

Camera Obscura

The Great Game

also available in omnibus form as The Bookman Histories

NOVELLAS

The Vanishing Kind*

Cloud Permutations*

Jesus & the Eightfold Path*

Gorel & the Pot-Bellied God*

COLLECTIONS

Black Gods Kiss*

HebrewPunk

The Apex Book of World SF (as editor)

The Apex Book of World SF 2 (as editor)

The Apex Book of World SF 3 (as editor)

*available as a JABberwocky ebook

THANK YOU FOR READING

This ebook has been brought to you by JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.

Did you enjoy this JABberwocky ebook? Please consider leaving a review! To see what other ebooks we have available, visit us at http://awfulagent.com/ebooks/.

Help us make our ebooks better!

We’d love to hear from you, whether it's just to say how much you liked it, if you noticed any errors or formatting issues, or if you have any other comments about this title. Send us an email at ebooks@awfulagent.com.

Sincerely,
The JABberwocky Team