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“Captain Lacey!”
Algy fought the urge to roll his eyes. “Hullo, Lottie. Is your brother here?”
“Lotte,” Lotte corrected, punctiliously.
“Tell you what. I’ll call you Lotte when you call me Algy.”
When she had opened the door of the flat, Lotte had regarded him with the sort of smoothly impenetrable look which had reminded him horribly of her older brother; which was a not unimpressive feat, with her little page-boy hat askew and one stocking held clutched in her hand. Now, she had a look that he could only describe as ‘speculative’; and that reminded him of her brother too.
“I was about to leave you a note,” she said, opening the door to let him enter. “Erich wanted me to pass on a message – he said he was terribly sorry, but business has kept him at Tempelhof until late, and he would have to talk with you tomorrow at the office instead.”
“Oh,” said Algy, stopping in the doorway until Lotte prodded him inside and closed the door. “Are you off out? I don’t want to hold you up – “
“You won’t,” said Lotte, matter-of-factly, as she sat on the hall floor to pull her second stocking on. Algy averted his eyes with a tact he knew she would neither notice nor appreciate. “As a matter of fact you’re here at precisely the right moment. “
Algy felt his heart sink. “How’s that?”
“You can take me to Conrad’s,” said Lotte, fastening her stocking top to the garter clip with expert fingers. “I was about to go by myself, but this is much better.”
Algy opened his mouth, then shut it again. “I think you’d probably be a lot more welcome by yourself than you would with me,” he said, practically.
Lotte smiled encouragement at him. “Nonsense, they’re very cosmopolitan.”
“Does your brother know you’re planning this little excursion?”
“Of course he doesn’t!” said Lotte, much affronted. “He’d never let me go. He thinks I’m still thirteen.”
“Whereas of course at eighteen you can certainly be trusted to spend the evening at one of the most notorious dives in Berlin.”
Lotte shrugged. “This is what comes of letting me go to art school,” she explained. “But it’s hardly a dive, Captain Lacey – it’s really very exclusive.”
“I don’t think it’s the exclusivity that your brother would take exception to.”
“Oh, don’t come over all Victorian!” Lotte complained, jumping up with that extraordinary animal grace of hers. She was a little taller than he was, standing, and her dark gold hair was set in gleaming waves, like a helmet. “I know Erich has to play the stern grandfather when it comes to my moral welfare, it’s his job. But you don’t. And I’m quite certain that you’ve been to dives just as disreputable, haven’t you? You seem to spend half the year in Monte Carlo, you must have been to heaps of clubs every bit as bad.”
She looked so hopeful that Algy nearly laughed. “Not that sort of club,” he pointed out.
It was Lotte’s turn to roll her eyes. “Well, honestly, if that’s all you’re concerned about, I should think that was my problem, not yours.”
“Your brother may not look at it like that.”
Lotte pondered, then brightened, slipping on her silver dancing shoes. “Well, how about this then – I’ll be going whether you come with me or not. Erich would be much more cross with you if you let me go alone than if you came along as chaperone, wouldn’t he?”
Algy grimaced. “That’s blackmail.”
“That’s a sound negotiating position,” Lotte answered.
“I could call him at Tempelhof.”
“The phone’s out of order.”
“I could bundle you into your own bathroom and put a chair under the door handle.”
Her eyes, like von Stalhein’s, were blue-grey steel. “Try it.”
Algy sighed. “Are we getting the tram?”
Lotte clattered down the stairs beside him, matching him step for step. She gave a friendly little wave in the direction of stair-keeper, who glowered up at them from the basement. It was a warm evening for early spring, and all the windows of the apartment block were open, letting the sounds of half a hundred households spill out.
“So why Conrad’s?” Algy asked, as they waited at the S-bahn stop. “Have you ditched Rudi at last?”
He could almost have convinced himself that she flushed a little then, if it hadn’t been so completely out of character. “No, he’s working. They’re busy on the print run of the new pamphlet. I wouldn’t normally – well, you know. But Bobby told me that Claire Waldoff is going to be playing at Conrad’s tonight, and I simply have to see her.”
Algy considered. “You know, I think I saw her in a review last year.“
“Lucky beast,” said Lotte gloomily. “Erich said he thought I was too young. He’s going to be saying that until I’m fifty and he’s practically dead.”
Her English, like her brother’s, was almost perfect: clear, grammatical, almost unaccented. Algy had a nasty feeling that any interjections of slang might be at least in part his fault.
He thought about the review. “He might be right.”
Conrad’s he knew, though he had never visited, for fairly obvious reasons. You didn’t spend long in certain sections of Berlin nightlife without knowing of Conrad’s. Fortunately he had come to von Stalhein’s flat this evening after dining, and his evening dress, while hardly passing muster for the Hotel Adlon, would at least mean he didn’t get laughed at by the doorman at a nightclub. And he knew enough people in that particular circle that he could probably weasel them inside. But all the same –
He kept imagining von Stalhein’s face when he found out. That might almost make it worthwhile.
“Look here, Lottie,” he muttered to her, when they stood swaying side by side from the leather hand-straps in the crowded tram, “I don’t want to pour cold water on your worldly acuity, but – do you really know the sort of place Conrad’s is? I mean to say – who it’s for?”
“I believe they call them ‘homosexuals’, now,” said Lotte, with an expression of crushing sophistication that made her look about twelve years old.
Algy could feel the middle-aged man standing behind him glaring between his shoulder-blades. “Yes, I think they do,” he echoed, meekly, and then took a deep breath. “Women who go with women. Yes.”
“Are you shocked I should know about a place like that?”
“Well – frankly, yes, a little.”
Lotte crowed with laughed. “How very English of you! Everyone English thinks that everyone who is not English is terribly ignorant and provincial.”
“I’m shocked,” Algy shot back, “because you’re eighteen, not interested in other women – as far as I’m aware, feel free to correct me – and because your brother is Erich von Stalhein. Who, you’ll recall, has something of the sensibilities of an elderly maiden aunt when it comes to Berlin nightlife.”
Lotte nodded, seriously. “Yes, Erich is very provincial, it’s true. But I’m not. Half the people who go there are Communists anyway, I’ve met them heaps of times.”
Algy rubbed his right eye with his free hand. It was nearly eleven, and he felt extremely tired already. “All right. All right! Have it your way. But you’re the one who’s going to explain to von Stalhein why you were out so late.”
“Why must you always call him by his surname?” Lotte asked, with interest. “Is it an English habit? Nobody I know would dream of calling his close friend by their last name. Frankly using their real first name would be a little gauche.”
“You call me Captain Lacey,” Algy pointed out.
“Yes, but that is because Erich calls you that,” Lotte said. “Which is also absurd.” She considered for a moment. “You should begin to call him Erich. I think he would appreciate it. And then he would feel that he had to call you Algy in return.”
Algy found that his mind actually rebelled at the idea of von Stalhein addressing him as ‘Algy’.
“I’ll think about it,” he promised, as the tram hurried them on through the night.
The door of Conrad’s was on the shabby corner of a shabby modern block of flats, grey-painted and scuffed and poster-streaked. It didn’t look like an especially exclusive destination. But there were plenty of people on the pavement outside: people greeting friends, hailing acquaintances, shouting insults at passers-by who looked at them askance. Women, mostly. Unsurprisingly. Even in the street the cigarette smoke was rising in a dark cloud, like incense.
There were some men there – mostly quite obviously strangers, gawkers, with a few mixed in tourists. Some wore the fashionable tight waists, sharply padded shoulders, bright spats; some were in the unofficial communist uniform of billowing blouses and slacks. Algy, the only man there in English evening wear, exchanged nods with someone he vaguely recognised from the American bar of some hotel or other, smiled at a man he’d met at a dance club, and held on to Lotte’s hand as she worked her way through the press.
The man on the doors, Algy was relieved to discover, was also not a stranger: he worked a couple of days a week at the Troika, and Algy had stood him a cigarette more than once. Sometimes he chatted to Algy, to improve his English. He wanted to be in pictures. He grinned a little as they squeezed past, and shouted something to Algy’s retreating back about his girlfriend, but he let them through, down the steps, where the smoke swirled like mist over the sea in the early morning, and made even Algy’s eyes sting and water as they ducked down into it.
Smoke in the air; smoke dimming the red silk lanterns, the shimmer of copper table-tops, the sparkle of glasses. A woman with short hair in male evening dress playing the piano, improvising, slipping between jazz standards, show tunes, Bach chorales played in the style of Kurt Weill, a quietly virtuoso display almost drowned out by the noise of the crowd. Women everywhere – women dancing, women smoking, women drinking great glasses of beer and small glasses of clear liquid, women laughing uproariously and engaged in heated debate. To Algy, who had gone from an all-male boarding school to 266 squadron to a flat with his cousin and evenings spent in male-only clubs, it felt curiously like the school holidays back before the War: when all his sisters would converge on the old house from their different schools and colleges and jobs and families, and the staid old place was suddenly jangling with gramophones and parlour games and noisy arguments.
Then he caught the thought, and scolded himself. It really wasn’t anything like that, of course.
Lotte looked about herself with interest, and then with a pleased ‘oh!’ darted off through the press of bodies.
“Aunt Marie!” said Lotte, in German. “What on earth are you doing here?”
Lotte had accosted a young woman who sat at a small table, alone, in a slightly out-of-the-way corner. The woman stood to greet her, allowing her hand to be seized, eyes flitting with a sort of gentle irony over Lotte’s smart frock and fashionable cap.
“Lotte my dear child – I should be asking you that! Does Erich know you’re here?”
Her voice was delightful – silvery, laughing, like a fall of fast water. Algy revised his initial impression. Not that young, in fact – at least not by Berlin standards, where everyone seemed to be frightfully young – certainly not younger than Algy, and perhaps a few years older. It was the slender grace of her that seemed young, and the wideness of her china blue eyes. But she dressed old – old and resolutely unfashionable, her fair hair long enough to be worn back in a tidy knot, her skirts demurely grey, nearly ankle length.
Lotte pulled a face. “No, of course he doesn’t! But I am eighteen now, I really shouldn’t have to consult him before I go out for the evening!”
“I hope you at least left a note for him? Otherwise you know he’ll worry.”
Lotte had the decency to look embarrassed. “Well – no – “
“Lotte!”
“He’d probably come to drag me home!” Lotte complained. “You know what an old maid he can be!”
The woman’s lips twitched, and her expression, while hardly changing at all, was somehow pure mischief. “Yes, I do. Oh, Lotte, what a menace you are!”
“But I’ve been extremely sensible!” said Lotte, triumphantly, pulling Algy forward by the arm. “See, I brought a chaperone and everything!”
The woman’s eyes darted to him; made a quick, efficient, evaluation; and she smiled a little more, as her eyes caught his. “Oh, yes, I can quite see what a respectable person he is.”
“He’s a friend of Erich’s,” said Lotte, with dignity, “so you see he must be extremely respectable really.”
“I’m not, you know,” Algy put in.
“Hush, of course you are. Aunt Marie, this is Captain Lacey. Captain Lacey, this is Aunt Marie.”
“Very pleased to meet you,” said Algy, putting out his hand. She took it in her cool, dry clasp, and shook it gravely. Her eyes were dancing. “Aunt?”
“Honorary,” she answered. “Captain?”
“Occasionally.”
“Are you English?”
Algy grimaced. “All right, I thought my accent was improving - ”
“Your accent is perfectly good. But ‘Captain Lacey’ sounds extremely English, does it not? Would you be more comfortable if we spoke in English? I used to be quite fluent.”
“No, thanks, I need to work on my German,” said Algy, as Marie gestured them both to sit down at her table. “Lotte and von Stalhein will insist on speaking English to me, so I don’t improve as fast as I’d like.”
“And what shall I call you?” asked Marie. “I can’t very well call you ‘Captain Lacey’, it would feel absurd.”
Algy grinned at her. “You know, you’re about the first person I’ve met in Berlin to feel that way? Do, please, I beg of you, call me Algy.”
“Algy…Lacey,” she repeated, as though trying the words over in her mouth. “Extremely English. And I suppose you have known Erich for a while now, if Lotte is bullying you this comprehensively?”
“A few years,” said Algy, a little evasively. “We work together sometimes.”
“Are you a pilot?”
“When I can get the work, yes.”
She nodded, and stood. “I will go and find drinks for us. I would ask what you want, only you can never be sure what they will have here. It’s best just to hope that you can drink what they’ve got. Excuse me.”
“Isn’t she marvellous?” Lotte breathed in his ear, as Marie made her way towards the bar. “She always manages to be so terribly chic, even though she’s never in the least fashionable. Not at all like an aunt, really, but I’ve always called her that.”
“A friend of the family, then?”
“Oh, yes, since forever. Or at any rate since I was very young. I think Erich got to know her during the War – she used to come round and dine with us before Mama died.” She leaned a little closer, conspiratorially. “Between you and me, I think Erich wanted to marry her once.”
Algy’s eyebrows shot up. “Good God, really?”
“Don’t you think she’s attractive?”
“Oh, well, yes, I suppose so – but the idea of your brother wanting to marry anyone – “
Lotte gave a peal of laughter. “I know – it’s a scream, isn’t it? You might as well expect the moon to get married, or Mount Everest. But I think he did, once upon a time. There’s something in the way he looks at her sometimes, when he thinks she isn’t watching. As I said, we saw an awful lot of her towards the end of the War – and then it all just seemed to – fizzle out, I suppose. Whether he actually asked her or not I don’t know. But I think he meant to. I know he had Mother’s engagement ring resized – I found it tucked away in a jeweller’s bag with the receipt when I was helping clear Mama’s room.” She smiled, fondly. “And isn’t that so terribly like Erich? To have found out a girl’s ring-size and have the ring all ready to go, even before he’s thought to actually ask her?”
It was like Erich, thought Algy, as a woman emerged onto the little stage area to a chorus of hooting, clapping and appreciative shouts. It was also oddly sad – and that wasn’t like von Stalhein at all. In all the time they’d spent together this last year – the jobs, the flights, the concerts, dinners, walks – he’d never known von Stalhein talk about women. And he’d never really wondered at that, either. Lotte was right – it would be like the moon suddenly confessing to romantic longings, or Mount Everest pouring out its troubles of the heart.
The singer was heavy-set, dark-haired, brilliant eyed; and as the applause died down she exchanged a few cutting remarks with friends in the front row in a snarling rumble that was pure Berlin.
“I adore Claire Waldoff,” said Marie, who had returned with a bottle of red wine and a handful of glasses. “I saw her show at the Wintergarten last year, and nearly laughed myself sick.”
“And do you come here often?” Algy asked, pouring the wine, and only realising once the words were out of his mouth that in this club, the question might have certain – implications.
Marie looked at him. She had very pronounced dimples, when she was refraining from smiling. “Not often, no. You?”
Algy coughed. “No. Not often.”
The first song started then, thankfully: something from that new revue over in Kurfürstendamm he’d been meaning to see, Frl. Waldorff and her accompanist tripping through the flirtatious little tune with arch enjoyment, Oh meine treue Freundin! Oh meine süße Freundin!
“Have you lived in Berlin for long?” Marie asked, when a lull in the music came.
“Oh, I don’t live here,” said Algy. “At least, not all the time. I’m mostly in London still.”
“But surely you must be here for work very often? Or do you look after the London end of operations?”
“I don’t think Von Stalhein does much work in London,” said Algy, dryly. “Or at any rate not stuff that he tells me about.”
“But isn’t that terribly expensive?”
“Well – a little, yes. But the work pays well enough to cover it. And I like being here.”
“Erich must be doing better than I thought,” Marie murmured. “Or perhaps he thinks you’re worth the price.”
Algy laughed. “Seems unlikely.”
“So why do you live this awkward way? Why live in London and work in Berlin? Do you have family there?”
She sipped her wine, regarding him with wide, bright blue eyes over the rim of the glass.
Algy fiddled with his. “Well – I have plenty of family around the country, of course, though I don’t see so very much of them usually. I room with my cousin when I’m in town.”
“And was he also a pilot? It often runs in families, I think.”
“He was, actually. Well – is, really. Like me, he works when he can.”
“But he does not work with Erich?”
Algy turned the glass about in his fingers. “No, he doesn’t.”
“And does he not mind that you spend so much time abroad? Does he miss you?”
“I – well, I suppose he might. When he notices.” What a ridiculous thing to say. He laughed, self-consciously. “I mean - he’s normally more than capable of entertaining himself.”
“Of course. I hear London is very diverting.”
Algy drank; the wine was rough, tannic, just as astringent as he needed. “And you? What do you do when you’re not in Conrad’s?”
Marie smiled. “I’m a nurse.”
“Did you meet von Stalhein through your work?”
“Actually, yes. It was during the war.”
“Lottie said.”
“I suppose she told you that he proposed to me?”
Lotte, who had been sitting with her elbows on her knees and her chin on her hands, eyes fixed on the stage, sat up, very abruptly. “Oh, Aunt Marie!”
Marie dimpled. “It’s quite all right, darling, I know you tell everyone sooner or later. I think it’s very sweet that you’re so devoted to the idea of your brother’s romantic history.”
“One day, I shall be big enough that you don’t tease me as you did when I was eight,” said Lotte, scowling.
“I still tease Erich,” Marie pointed out, “and he’s far bigger than you.”
A new song was starting – he’d heard this one before, in some club or other – Johnny, when your birthday comes I’ll stay with you all night –
“Aren’t you going to ask?”
“Sorry?”
“Well, I’ve been asking you all sorts of nosy questions,” said Marie, laughing. “If I were you, I’d take the first opportunity of embarrassing me in return.”
“I think you’re quite difficult to embarrass.”
“You are right,” Marie admitted.
Quite suddenly, he noticed he was angry. Angry with von Stalhein for standing him up, angry with Lotte for dragging him out, angry with this sweltering club where everyone seemed to be having such a wonderful bloody time apart from him, and especially angry with Aunt Marie, with her dimples and her friendly questions. It was a pleasantly cleansing feeling.
“No, I’m not going to ask,” he said coldly. “If it were any of my business, then he would have told me.”
“Would he really?”
“It doesn’t really matter much to me either way.”
Lotte was looking between the two of them with an expression of surprised embarrassment. Algy glowered at the scuffed and sticky surface of the table.
A cool little hand touched the back of his own, gravely and gently.
“Forgive me,” said Marie, and for the first time she didn’t seem entertained. “I’m in a poisonous mood tonight. But I’m mostly in a poisonous mood with Erich, which is hardly your fault.” She smiled, conciliatingly, at Lotte. “Lotte my angel, cover your ears, I’m about to gossip about your brother.”
Lotte sniffed, and moved her stool a grudging few feet away.
“Look here,” said Algy, awkwardly, “I really don’t want – “
“Yes, I know, it’s all very laudable,” said Marie, waving a hand. “But I want to tell it. And Erich wouldn’t mind, you may be sure of that.” That little smile was a wry one; a smile of no illusions. “He did propose; I turned him down. I turned him down because I didn’t love him and I don’t believe he loved me. To begin with I wasn’t sure that mattered, but then – well, then I found that it did. To me, at any rate. It might have come to matter to him. If he were to marry it should be to some pleasant Prussian girl who would give him a couple of dutiful children and then not trouble him for the rest of her life. But really – he’s not the marrying kind.” She sipped her wine; smoothed a stray strand of fine hair back behind her ear. “There are other things he values far more highly than affection. Though of course he has always delighted in being hip-deep in conspiracies. I’m not sure that even he knows what he really wants.”
Algy snorted. “Well of course I know that. I first met him in the War too, you know, and our first meeting wasn’t nearly as pleasant as I assume yours was.”
“Then – forgive me, but I must ask – what are you doing here?” Her gesture took in the crowd, the room, the fog of cigarette smoke. “If not from affection, why are you here in Berlin? Chaperoning Erich's little sister to a nightclub? Is this some cunningly contrived trap on your part, Captain Lacey?”
“Algy,” Algy corrected, automatically. “No, of course it isn’t. It’s just – it’s just business. At least as far as I’m concerned.”
Marie raised an eyebrow. “He must be paying you extremely well. Is it just business for him too?”
He found he didn’t have an answer for that. Just a couple of years of questions.
“Do be careful of him.”
There was something going on in the entranceway – loud voices, a shuffle and stamp of people on the stairs. He realised that he had been aware of it around the edges of his hearing for a few minutes now. It sent prickles across the back of his neck.
“Trouble?” Marie said, quietly.
“I’m not sure – “
Frl. Waldorff had stopped singing; was having a hurried conversation with the pianist. There was a thrum of tension in the air; a ripple of movement in the crowd; shouts outside.
“Look here, I don’t like this,” said Algy.
Marie shook her head. “No. A raid, do you think?”
“Or those idiots in brown throwing their weight around again. They tried it on with a club on Nollendorfplatz last week, there was a beautiful row.”
“I should take Lotte home.”
Algy nodded. “If things start to get out of hand there could be a hell of a crush down here. And von Stalhein would skin me alive if anything happened to her.”
“There’s a side-entrance out this way,” said Marie, indicating a doorway almost invisible in the gloom in the dingy corner behind their table. “Will you come?”
“I’m going to try to calm things down here for a bit,” said Algy.
Marie nodded. Then, with sudden brilliance, she smiled, wide and uncomplicated, and took hold of his hand in both of hers. “Good luck. I’m pleased to have met you at last, at any rate.”
Algy watched them out, as Lotte’s hissed complaints and Marie’s murmured replies were cut off by the closing door. He gave it a minute or two after they left before turning towards the entryway. The crowd was turning noisy, now, turning angry: loud conversations, shouts, complaints, a growing rumble of discontent.
Pushing their way down the stairs were a couple of solid looking boys of perhaps nineteen, in the ubiquitous brown shirts, red armbands. There were a couple more at their backs.
“Aren’t you ashamed, as a German, to come to a place like this?” one of them shouted at him over the noise of the crowd.
Algy grinned back. “Fuck ti, dwi'n cymraeg.”
He really had meant to try to calm things down. And, as Algy was very careful to explain to von Stalhein rather later, it was in fact the woman next to him who threw the first punch, not him.
* * *
“Oi! Your Lordship! On your feet!”
Algy had been dozing with his arm over his eyes, to block out the flickering light from the hanging bulb above the bench he was lying on; cautiously, he unstuck the arm from his forehead and lifted it half an inch, just enough to see who was standing in the doorway of the cell.
Then he groaned, and let it flop back onto his face. “Oh, God. Can’t you just let them deport me?”
“Don’t tempt me,” muttered the officer in charge of the cells. “All yours, sir.”
“Thank you for your assistance.”
Von Stalhein had his best official manner on, Algy noted dourly, as he swung his legs to the side of the bench and heaved himself into a seated position, bracing his arms at his sides. Best official manner, best grey wool suit, best monocle, best frozen Prussian look on his face. Algy considered clicking his heels as he stood up, but thought that might be pushing it, under the circumstances. But there was something about Official von Stalhein that put his back up, especially in a urine-stinking lock-up somewhere in Nollendorf at – what time was it?
“What time is it?” he asked, voice scratchy, as he shuffled out, trying to shake life back into the arm he had been resting his head on.
“It is half past four,” said von Stalhein, curtly.
Algy cast a cautious look his way. The other man quite conspicuously didn’t look at him.
“Right,” the sergeant was saying – or at least that was about the rank Algy would have pegged him for in England, God only knew what he was here – as he sloped around to the other side of the custody officer’s desk and started rummaging. “Coat. Watch. Pen. Pocket book. Wallet containing one hundred and forty-three marks – count it, please.”
“Is there much point?” asked Algy, grudgingly complying. “It’s either here or it isn’t, and I’m hardly like to complain about it either way. Yes, that’s it.”
The sergeant nodded in official satisfaction. “Seven marks fifty-five pfennigs in change – count it, please – “
“Oh for heaven’s sake – “
“I think we can rely on everything being here,” said von Stalhein.
The sergeant visibly straightened, and Algy rolled his eyes. Probably a corporal in the war. They could smell the officer on von Stalhein at fifty paces. “Of course, sir. You’re in luck, “ He said, addressing Algy again, and there was no ‘sir’ for him, of course. “You’ve got friends in high places. But if I catch you causing a ruckus on my patch again, you’ll get worse than a night in a nice cool cell.”
“Have you ever spent a night in one of your cells?” Algy asked, morosely, before an insistent hand pressed the small of his back.
“If they’d only punch a few more brown shirts for themselves, then maybe private citizens wouldn’t have to do it for them,” Algy grumbled quietly as they left the building.
“Do you have your papers?”
“I didn’t have them with me. I know better than that.”
Von Stalhein nodded once, then crossed the deserted road to where his great sleek black car was parked. Wordlessly, he opened the passenger door and held it open.
“You know, I can walk from here quite well – “ Algy began.
“Please. I would like to talk with you a little.”
Algy considered arguing the toss – he was tired, hungry, thirsty, aching all over, and his eye and his head were still throbbing in unison – but decided against it. As the dentist would say – better to have the whole thing out at once. So he got in, meekly enough, and von Stalhein shut the door.
They drove a little way through empty streets, and Algy began to get a grip on where he was – he’d been half out of things when they’d brought him in, and he’d had no idea which of the many cruddy little police stations they had bundled him off to. The sky was clear, a shimmering pale blue-green, streaked across with iridescent clouds that were catching the glow of the sun before it rose. It was going to be a beautiful day.
They weren’t going towards his rooms, he noticed. Nor towards von Stalhein’s flat.
He stole another look at the man, eyes fixed on the road, mouth drawn tight.
The car pulled over at the edge of the Tiergarten. Von Stalhein sat for a moment, hands still on the wheel.
Algy nodded towards the trees. “Planning to shoot me and dump my corpse in a convenient bush?”
Von Stalhein sighed. “Captain Lacey, I have been awake since four this - yesterday morning. I would not like to be responsible for the consequences to either of us if I drove much longer. I thought some fresh air might wake me enough to let me drive home.”
“I could drive.”
“You have a visible lump somewhat behind your left ear.”
“Fair point.”
Von Stalhein looked towards the cabmen’s shelter on the corner. “Coffee?”
There was coffee, and sugar that Algy could ladle in to cushion the strong black brew; there were fresh white rolls stuffed with slices of fried meat, and pickles, and bright yellow mustard, which Algy wolfed down with considerable relish, even if it was only the condemned man being allowed a hearty breakfast; and there were a couple of aspirin, which von Stalhein handed to him wordlessly, and which he swallowed even more gratefully than the roll.
Von Stalhein slipped the proprietor a few more coins for the loan of the enamel mugs, and they walked beneath the trees. Somewhere to the east, beyond the Brandenburg Gate, the sun was coming up.
“Look, if you don’t want your delinquent little sister frequenting places like that,” Algy began, abruptly, taking up from the point his argument with von Stalhein had reached in his head, “then you really ought to take it up with her, not me.”
“I agree,” said von Stalhein.
“Well – good. Because while it’s sometimes my job to be your guardian angel, I can’t say the same for her. But I couldn’t very well let her run off by herself – “
“I appreciate that you tried to keep Lotte out of trouble.”
Algy cast a suspicious sideways look at von Stalhein. He felt like he was waiting for the other shoe to drop.
He did look rather tired, now Algy looked at him properly: the rays of the sun, striped between the trunks of the trees, shone aslant the fine lines at the corners of his eyes, his mouth, between his brows. “I rather assumed you were going to read me the riot act.”
“What for?”
“For taking your baby sister to – well, you know what sort of place that is.”
“I was rather under the impression that she took you.”
“True enough,” Algy muttered. “Look here, you do know what sort of place that is, don’t you?”
“I believe so, yes.”
“I – well, I rather thought you would be annoyed.”
“Oh?”
Algy took a mouthful of over-sweet coffee. “It was just a cabaret. It might as well have been at the Scala, for all Lotte cared.”
“But it was not at the Scala, was it? It was at Conrad’s.”
“Good God, Erich, it’s 1928. Do you think homosexuality is contagious?”
He saw the other man’s shoulders stiffen, imperceptibly enough that perhaps no one else would have noticed. “That was not what I wished to talk with you about.”
“No, let’s talk about it,” Algy went on, with cheerful belligerence. Tonight, he really felt like starting some fights. “What is it that you object to about Conrad’s? That it’s run by a Jew? That it’s run by a woman? That it’s for – what would you call them? Inverts? Degenerates?”
“I would not,” von Stalhein snapped. “You ask what I object to? It is the – “ He paused, swore, searched for a word. “The blatency. The people who visit such places – they do not take any consideration for the danger in which they place themselves.”
“Do you think they should be making furtive assignations in the Tiergarten in the small hours then?” Algy asked, helpfully indicating the accommodating undergrowth away from the path.
“It might be safer.”
“Safer? They’re much more likely to get knifed in the park by one of those idiots in brown out for an evening constitutional than they are in a bar in Nollendorf. Secrecy doesn’t keep people safe, it just keeps them scared. You can’t get blackmailed for something you’re open about.”
“It is not blackmail they should perhaps be concerned for.”
The path had come to one of the streams that meandered through the gardens. Von Stalhein leaned for a moment against the wrought-iron parapet of the bridge, looking down into the water below, grey-brown, swift with spring rain. Above it danced low clouds of insects, passing into sunlight and out again
“People who are – that way,” said Algy, awkwardly aware of the many words he could use to say what he meant, knowing that none of them would quite do – “They’ve been on their knees with a boot on their necks for two thousand years. Don’t you think it’s about time to let them stand up?”
“What I think does not really matter.”
Algy leaned back against the parapet. “I think it might.”
“This ‘new Berlin’ that wishes to show itself the modern marvel of Europe – “ Algy could hear the sarcastic curve of von Stalhein’s lips, even without looking. “Whatever I may think of it, it could vanish like – like one of those flies, swallowed up by a big fish. Just as the Berlin that I knew as a child was swallowed up, and the Berlin of 1919. I do not know when the next big fish will come along. Perhaps it will be many years. But when it does – all those people who have made themselves so conspicuous. Will they still wish to be seen?” He finished his coffee. “I have always thought that it would be safer to be – less obvious.”
“They may think it’s worth the risk.”
“They are children,” said von Stalhein, brusquely. “They do not think of the risk. And you – if you had been charged after that little brawl this evening, in such a place – that would have made you obvious, too. Do you know how difficult it would have been for me to justify continuing your employment?”
“Any time you feel like terminating my contract – “ Algy began hotly.
“I did not say so,” von Stalhein interrupted, turning round so they were side by side. “I can protect you – I would protect you, if need be. But I do not think you would want that.”
“The day I need that sort of protection is probably the day I should be leaving Berlin,” said Algy.
Von Stalhein sighed. “You are very probably right. But I should be – disappointed – all the same.”
Algy could see von Stalhein in his peripheral vision: saw him reach up, take out the monocle, rub wearily at the skin beneath.
“Thanks for getting me out of chokey,” he said, abruptly. “I’m very grateful you saved me from a criminal record, even if you only did it so you wouldn’t have to justify having an ex-con on the books.”
He saw the corner of von Stalhein’s lips twitch, the faintest approach to a smile. “Where else would I find someone with your unique gifts of tact and diplomacy?” he said dryly, as he put the monocle back in again. “I am tired. I am not expressing myself well. That was the fourth police-station I had checked while looking for you. I would just – ask you to be a little more discreet?”
Algy wondered – not for the first time – just how much von Stalhein knew or guessed about his other activities in Berlin.
Probably enough.
“Well – you would,” he pointed out. “You’re a spy. Discretion is rather your raison d’être.”
The sky was banded, blue to green to pink to gold. High, high above, the first swifts of the year were calling.
“Did your cousin ever mention a girl he once met near Maranique, towards the end of the war? Her name was Marie.”
Algy turned his head sharply to look at the man at his side. Von Stalhein was looking into the blue of the sky, tracing the swifts as they flew. “Yes. She made rather an impression on him, as a matter of fact.”
“You met her this evening.”
It was amazing, thought some distant part of Algy. Even when he thought he had himself barricaded against whatever surprises von Stalhein had to throw at him –
“I can’t have,” he said blankly. “She died. Biggles was half out of his mind with grief. Your side bombed the farmhouse – “
“She was not there.” Von Stalhein was looking at him now, blue-grey eyes steady. “She escaped, and made her way down into Spain and eventually back to Germany.”
“She was one of your agents,” said Algy, slowly, but his mind was racing through the implications.
“I never ran her – we trained together. We were colleagues.”
Algy couldn’t help the little gasp of laughter. “She did say she met you during the war. I just assumed – well, more fool me, I suppose. You never thought to mention this before?”
“It was never relevant.”
“Of course it was bloody relevant!” Algy snarled. “You weren’t there. You didn’t - he nearly drank himself to death over her, did you know? He got shot down - I saw his plane go down, for a moment I thought - “ He swallowed; he remembered the whisky, and the Camel tumbling towards the German lines, and all that came after in that terrible first year of peace -
“I did not know,” said von Stalhein, quietly. “But that would never have been Marie’s intention. She - “
“What do I care about her intentions!” Algy snapped. “What she did - she couldn’t have found a better way to break him up if she’d worked on it for a hundred years. He’d been at the front nearly two years - he was the best of us - and in two weeks she found a way to smash him so flat he still hasn’t put himself together again. It made your little escapade in Palestine look like amateur work. I - “ Then he broke off: those patchwork months of 1918 stuttering through his mind like a badly-aligned newsreel at the pictures. Palestine in April; the smash in August. “Was - was it you who sent her to Maranique? Did you know that Biggles was there? My God, if you - “
“I did not ‘send’ her,” said von Stalhein sharply. “And no, I did not know Bigglesworth was there. At that time I did not even know his name.”
“But that’s absurd!”
Von Stalhein shrugged, eloquently. “I agree. As a coincidence, it is absurd. But in some matters I have developed an odd notion of fate. And I think perhaps that it was fate which meant Marie should refuse to marry me, because she had fallen in love with the man who bested me in Palestine.” He shot Algy an unreadable look: evaluating, thought Algy distantly, just like his sister. A card-sharper, trying to see how far the gull could be pushed before he pushed back. “Just as perhaps it was fate that I should have run into you, of all people, that day in the Neues Museum.”
“I didn’t believe that then, and I don’t believe it now,” Algy spat. “Fate! Things can look very much like fate if someone is pulling the strings.” There was an odd, jagged lump of a thing in his chest – anger, and disappointment, and disgust most of all – disgust with himself, because he knew what von Stalhein was, he knew, the man hardly troubled to hide it, and yet over and over Algy let himself overlook it, let himself - “Do you ever wonder why I took you up on your offer?”
“Yes.”
The word was so quiet that Algy almost hesitated, but he made himself plunge on. “So do I. Oh, yes, the pay was good, and the work was interesting, and Berlin is a charming place especially in the spring, but I think really it was because it seemed so straightforward compared with – with things at home. What did it matter if you kept things from me, or left me out of decisions? That’s what you do! If I didn’t trust you in the first place, then you wouldn’t be able to double-cross me. You can’t let me down if I don’t expect anything better from you, can you? But somehow you always manage to pull something special out of the hat.”
“I have not ‘double-crossed’ you.”
Algy grinned, a sharp baring of teeth. “No, but you’re never quite straight with me either, are you?”
“I have always told you as much as I thought was possible,” said von Stalhein, stiffly. “I am sure your cousin would do no more.”
“You,” Algy grated out, “are not him. You’re not even close. And this wasn’t an operational matter – it was a matter of personal courtesy. Or perhaps you didn’t think it was important, that the girl who drove him half out of his mind was not, in fact, dead, but was, in fact, living a couple of miles away and doing very nicely for herself, thank you. You should have told me before.”
“I did not need to tell you now!”
That pulled Algy up short. The words, and the wrenching, half wretched way they were spoken.
“Would you have thought anything of it, if you had never seen Marie again after today?” von Stalhein pointed out. His eyes were glittering with a sort of furious determination. “Of course not! You would never have given her another thought. And I could have arranged that – easily. And if I had been so intent on ‘pulling the strings’, as you put it, I should have done so. You would never have known who she was, you would never have suspected me of keeping things from you, and we should not be having this extremely frustrating conversation. But the fact is that I have nothing to hide from you in this matter. I did not bring about Marie Janis’s meeting with your cousin ten years ago, just as I did not bring about my meeting with you. I have tried my best to earn your trust – “
“Oh yes, you’ve been positively ostentatious about that!” Algy scoffed. “You’ve taken me into your home, introduced me to your family, brought me into your business – but all that tells me is that you’ve decided that’s the best way to win me over. And that you don’t rate my ability to cause you trouble very highly.”
Von Stalhein’s eyes were sparks of blue fire. “Captain Lacey, I have taken you into my home – I have introduced you to my family – and yes, of course I have done that in the hope of gaining your trust. I do not understand how that is different from friendship!”
It was very still, now, in the silence afterwards: still enough to hear the faintly ragged edge to von Stalhein’s breath.
He turned: very straight, very stiff, very Prussian, very correct. He was still holding the enamel coffee cup in one capable brown hand; he seemed to become aware of the absurdity of it at the same moment as Algy did, and set it down on the parapet with a careful click. He needed a shave, and a good night’s sleep.
“I consider you to be my friend – amongst my closest friends,” he said, very distinctly. His accent was stronger when he was tired, his sentences very slightly more clipped. “I value your friendship highly. And so – yes. I hope to gain your trust. I rather hoped that I had already earned at least the benefit of the doubt.”
Algy let out a long gust of breath, suddenly feeling the ache of tension across his shoulders, the throbbing of his head, of his pulse in his ears. “Oh, hell,” he muttered. “What a wretched mess. Look here, von Stalhein – I’m sorry. I don’t – I don’t react very well to being left out of the loop. This whole business – “ He scrubbed his hand through his hair; winced, on finding that tender patch where the blow from the baton had fallen. “You weren’t there. You didn’t see him. I can’t - It’s been a very long night.”
Von Stalhein sighed, and turned to lean back against the bridge, pushing his hands into his trouser pockets. It was, Algy noted, irrelevantly, the sort of lounging position that really showed to best advantage his long, lithe shape. “For me also,” he said, before adding: “Why is it that Englishmen only call someone by their Christian name when they wish to antagonise them?”
“I’m not English,” Algy repeated, by rote, before saying: “What?”
“You called me Erich before,” von Stalhein said. He was examining a scuff on one highly polished toecap. “When you were busy berating me. ‘Good God, Erich, it’s 1928.’”
The mimicry was cuttingly precise. Algy’s eyebrows shot up. “Did I?”
Von Stalhein looked up, and met his eyes. “I would not mind it,” he said.
There was something oddly tentative about the statement, like a cat putting its paw down into the first snow fall of winter. He seemed, Algy thought, a little shifty: as if caught admitting that he preferred French wine to German, or that he had a fondness for the racier novels of Elinor Glyn. There was something deeply unPrussian about wanting an Englishman to call him by his given name.
Algy narrowed his eyes. “Would it mean that you stopped calling me ‘Captain Lacey’?”
Von Stalhein grimaced. “Not necessarily.”
“You could try ‘Montgomery’ if it’s easier than Algy,” Algy put in helpfully. “It’s my middle name. I don’t use it much, but if you prefer – “
“Thank you, it is not.” Von Stalhein pinched the bridge of his nose, as if warding off a headache. “Would you prefer it?”
Algy smiled, a little crookedly. “Not necessarily.”
“I will – consider the matter.”
There was thick dew on the grass, enough to soak the cuffs of their trousers; it caught the sun, and shone.
Von Stalhein sighed. “I should have told you before,” he admitted. “I know it. I knew myself to be at fault. But to begin with I did not think of it, and then – then I did not know how to begin. I knew how ridiculous it would sound.”
“Suspicious,” said Algy. “It sounds suspicious.”
He nodded. “Yes, if you are inclined to suspicion.”
“Which I am.”
“I suppose you have good reasons for being so.” He drew himself upright; picked up the mug, and tilted his head a little, enquiringly. “Shall we return? I think I may be fit to drive now, at least for a little.”
“Amazing how a little blood-letting gets the circulation going, isn’t it?” said Algy brightly; and they fell into step alongside one another, easily, comfortably, as if he hadn’t called him a liar to his face within the last ten minutes, as if it didn’t matter.
“Is she what you expected?”
There was the noise of cars now, from the roads around the edge of the park; cars, motor lorries, the clop of hooves and jingle of harnesses as delivery drays plodded homeward, as nighttime Berlin was tidied away and daytime Berlin, smart as paint, rushed to take its place.
“I didn’t expect anything,” said Algy. “I thought she was dead.” Then he exhaled, slowly; he thought perhaps he owed von Stalhein a little more than that: for the admission of guilt, if nothing else. “No. I expected - I don’t know. Something like one of those Mata Hari women in a Le Queux novel, have you ever read one?”
“I’ve not had that pleasure.”
“Probably for the best. Perhaps that wouldn’t have worked on Biggles though - goodness knows there have been enough people who’ve tried the direct approach since and not had much to show for it.” He swallowed; he wanted to keep the words light, to preserve this fragile peace between them, but other words kept trying to spill out: because there had been Biggles before Marie, and Biggles after Marie, and between them a jagged rent, and something had been lost and he’d never found it again. Even Palestine hadn’t done that. “I thought she was - interesting. Sharp. Clever.” (He could have found a dozen other words, but what would be the use?) “But he - She bowled him clean off his feet.” He smiled: a very little. “I suppose I didn’t get the full effect of it, one way and another.”
“Marie’s effect can be - hard to quantify.”
Algy cast a look at him as they walked: at the hard line of his mouth. “Clearly. I take it she was the one who told you I was likely to need bailing out?”
“She did.”
“She clocked me straight away, didn’t she? ‘Algy Lacey’, she said, as though she’d heard it before and just needed a moment to work out where.”
Von Stalhein nodded. “Your cousin mentioned you, apparently. Often enough that the name stuck in her mind. She does have an extraordinary memory for that sort of detail, but in this case - the week rather stuck in her mind for other reasons.” A short pause. “And - you have a look of him, a little, in some lights.”
He often did that, Algy had noticed: talked about Biggles without saying his name. Maybe it was a case of ‘speak of the devil and he shall appear’; but Algy rather suspected it wasn’t. More like Sherlock Holmes always talking of Irene Adler as the woman: when there was really only one person who mattered, then you didn’t need to name them.
He didn’t want to unpack that thought: not now. There were a lot of things he didn’t want to think about right now.
“All those delicate little questions about my family, about London,” Algy went on. “I thought she was just going out of her way to make me feel uncomfortable. But it wasn’t about me at all.”
“Marie seldom does things for only one reason.”
Algy stopped in the long shadow of a horse chestnut tree, already shining in its first brilliantly chartreuse leaves, and hunted out his cigarette case. The cigarettes, he found, had all been extracted at the police-station.
Von Stalhein smiled, slightly, opened his own case, and held it across.
“And she bowled you over too,” said Algy, the cigarette bobbing between his lips, not looking at von Stalhein, patting his pockets for the match box he was sure he had somewhere. All his bits and bobs were carelessly shovelled together, nothing in its usual place. “That’s what Lotte thinks, anyway.”
“My sister is an incorrigible romantic.”
It had happened before: the rasp of the match, von Stalhein holding it out to him, Algy taking his hand to steady it as he leaned close. Small moments, when they managed to come within arm’s reach of each other.
Von Stalhein lit his own cigarette from the same match; straightened up, and shook the flame out. “Would you be surprised, if she had?”
Algy shrugged. “Yes. A little. You don’t seem the bowled-over type.”
“I suspect we all have our moments.”
“And she threw you over, for him.”
He chose particularly blunt words: clumsy, unromantic, the opposite of extraordinary: the sort of tawdry domestic drama that might happen in any corner of any city on any given day.
Von Stalhein examined the cigarette in its holder; his hand, so steady the smoke could rise up straight and still. “She was never mine to begin with. Only an idea of her. I have come to believe she was quite right. That it was for the best.”
Algy let the smoke out in a grey-blue cloud, dim in the dappled sunlight. “What a wretched mess,” he repeated, softly.
They returned the coffee mugs and walked back to the car mostly in silence. Algy could feel his feet starting to drag.
“Morning off?” he asked, hopefully, as he slid into the passenger seat.
Erich’s lips quirked. “You’re scheduled to take a load of newsreels over to Hamburg for distribution in time for the first matinée - “
“For pity’s sake - “
“But I can rearrange it. Frankly, in your current state I wouldn’t want you in charge of a child’s push-bike, let alone an extremely valuable aeroplane.”
Algy grinned, lazily, letting his head fall back against the comfortable leather seat. “I knew there was a reason I liked working for you.”
He half dozed on the short drive back to his rooms; and the landlady would have a proper piece of her mind to give him, he knew, sloping in with the morning milk and still in his best suit, with a black eye to set off the look.
“Thanks for the lift,” he said, when the car had stopped and he had forced himself awake enough to open the door. “Don’t drive into anything I wouldn’t drive into.”
“I will do my best.”
Algy paused for a moment, his hand on the door release. “Your friend Marie said she was in a poisonous mood with you, last night.”
A very faint, dry wisp of a smile. “Yes, she said that to me too.”
“Mind if I ask about what?”
There was that curious stillness that came over him sometimes. He was a man, thought Algy muzzily, who was very good at freezing in place until the hunter had passed him by; or perhaps until his prey had looked away. “Quite a number of things, as it turned out. Good night, Captain Lacey.”
“Algy.”
“I will think about it.”
Algy clambered out of the car; watched, as it drifted away down the quiet street.