She knew what he meant at once. 'Another murder? Oh, my God, poor woman.'
'Which poor woman?' he asked. 'The daughter he killed, or the mother when I had to tell her that her daughter had been murdered and dumped in a garbage bin?'
'I'm sure you broke the news as gently as possible.'
He laughed bitterly. 'Imagine she was concerned about me. It must be very hard on me too, she said, would I be all right?'
'It is hard on you, darling, I can see it is. Sleep for a little. I'll bring you up something to eat later. I saw a bottle of Mosel among Mr Ashburner's presents. We'll open that too.'
'I have to get him before he kills again,' muttered Dietrich. Then, exhausted, he fell asleep.
Herr Rodel's tailor's workshop was on the veranda of the house on Ithweg which he, his wife and Heidi shared with two other families. Only four window panes had survived the pressure waves of the bombing, the splinters raining down from anti-aircraft shelling and the Red Army's salvoes of machine-gun fire. The other fifty-six were covered with cardboard or celluloid that had originally been made for the windows of Wehrmacht military vehicles. Rodel had bartered several reels of sewing silk for this material; he needed plenty of light to work by.
'How I'm going to manage in winter is a mystery to me. You can't heat this place — no use sticking a hot stovepipe through the cardboard.'
'There's a piece of tin lying in our garden at home. You can have that,' Ben offered. If you cut a hole in it you could stick the stovepipe through.' Ben was dropping in more and more often. It gave him a sense of getting closer to his suit. He watched with interest as Rodel took apart a threadbare overcoat brought in by a customer to be turned.
'You wash the parts in cold water so the colour doesn't run. Then you iron them dry and put them together again inside out, and there's your new coat. Luckily I still have some horsehair and padding.'
'I hope you have some for my double-breasted suit too.' Ben could already see himself in that perfect suit, turn-ups of the trousers exactly five centimetres high, just brushing his suede shoes so that there was no more than the suggestion of a fold above them. He stroked the length of fabric in the cupboard, full of the pride of possession. It was the best pre-war wool, firm and soft, the classic, grey-brown pattern with a red thread woven into it. 'The English call it Prince of Wales check, don't they? I read that in a gentlemen's magazine.'
'Fingers off, young man. Business first.'
Ben took Mr Brubaker's carton of Camels out from under his shirt and put it on the tailor's table. 'That's three thousand Allimarks, right?'
'Two fifty.' Rodel noted it down with his tailor's chalk on the suiting, which already bore notes of previous instalments paid. 'You still need a lot of credit. Better hurry up, my boy. Herr Kraschinski next door is thinking of selling his watch to buy his son a suit for his wedding day.'
Ben was indignant. 'You can't do that, Herr Rodel. I've already paid you seven thousand, nine hundred marks.'
The tailor looked at him over the top of his glasses. 'I'll be happy to make you a top-quality suit, but I can't wait much longer. My wife needs shoes. And she's found a source of poultry and winter potatoes. That costs money. Yes, and we want a little real coffee for Christmas too.'
'Christmas is in December. This is August,' Ben reminded him. 'You'll get the rest really soon, I promise.'
But there was a long and arduous way to go between making that promise and keeping it. Although there were definite possibilities at the GYA in Bruckstrasse. Where there were Yanks, he knew from experience, there were good pickings to be had.
The ZehlendorfGYA Club was housed in a big villa. The Signal Corps colonel in charge had detailed a sergeant who knew a little German to be club leader. Sergeant Allen was a young sports teacher from Philadelphia who was able to arouse enthusiasm in his young charges, and he had immediately set up a baseball team. Ben hung around the club and kept his eyes open. You just had to have patience.
His patience was rewarded a few days later when an army delivery truck brought several cartons. Ben read the labels with growing interest. 'Mars Bars, 250' one of them said. Another, according to its label, contained 300 Sunshine Marshmallows, and a third 500 Hershey Bars, chocolate and hazelnut flavour.
These riches came from the Catholic garrison chaplain, Major Baker, who had generous donations from home at his disposal. Baker was a regular guest at the club. 'He says he'll start handing out some of the stuff from those cartons next week,' said one club member. 'Only after his Bible class, of course.' The man of God was a realist.
Under Sergeant Allen's supervision, Herr Appel took the cartons off the delivery truck. Herr Appel, who looked after the building, was a greyheaded man with a short parting in his hair and bulging eyes. Like all German employees of the Americans, he wore a dyed army uniform. He had been caretaker of a boys' school until it was demolished by Russian rocketlaunchers. Appel didn't speak a word of English, not that anyone noticed, since he hardly spoke at all. He became talkative only on the subject of his allotment; he was chairman of the South-West Allotment Gardeners' association.
Ben helped Herr Appel to carry the cartons. Sergeant Allen locked them in the old storeroom in the cellar. There was no way of getting at them for the moment. But he couldn't let those treasures lie there untouched, or Major Baker really would end up distributing the goodies to his flock. Ben began giving the situation his undivided attention. The black-market rate for chocolate was rising.
'That villain's name is Franz!' a voice proclaimed in the big basement room of the clubhouse one afternoon. The drama group was rehearsing Schiller's The Robbers. Ben was sitting on a bench, yawning. He'd rather have a good Western any day. Heidi Rodel was holding a Reclam edition of the play. She didn't know the part of Amalia by heart yet, but she had mastered a toss of the head, not planned by the director, which sent her hair tumbling around her shoulders. It did not, however, have the desired effect. Ben's eyes were fixed not on her silky hair but on the door to the storeroom. The loot down there was very tempting.
Getting at it was the problem. The key was in the pencil tray on the office desk, and either Sergeant Allen or his deputy Corporal Kauwe, a small Hawaiian with a shining moon-face, always sat behind the desk. All through the third and fourth acts, Ben was thinking hard. But no solution occurred to him.
'The man can yet be helped,' announced Gert Schlomm, the director, probably the first to play the robber-hero, Karl Moor, in short lederhosen, as the rehearsal came to an end. The words sounded like a prophecy.
Heidi came up to the edge of the stage. 'How did I do?' She pulled her skirt up to her tanned thighs, jumped off the improvised platform, twisted her left ankle as she landed on her wedge heel in front of Ben and, with a little cry, grasped his shoulders for balance. Her body felt warm and soft, and gave off a pleasantly astringent perfume.
'You were OK.' He helped her to sit on the bench.
She rubbed her ankle. 'I must go home now. Will you take me, Gert? I can hardly walk.'
'I'm busy. Ben can take you,' said the great actor from up on the stage.
Ben looked at the seventeen-year-old's hairy thighs with distaste. What on earth, he thought scornfully, does she see in him? Aren't you in the modelmaking group?' he asked Heidi.
She was still rubbing her ankle. 'Yes, were making a doll's house for the local kindergarten, with Corporal Kauwe. Want to come along?'
'No thanks, not my thing. Could you take a little break from building your doll's house?'
'What for?'
'To make a board with hooks for keys on it. I'll have a word with the painting group, they can paint flowers and varnish the whole thing. it's for Sergeant Allen's birthday next week, it would look good in his office. We can screw it to the door as a surprise.'