I buy another drink and sit at a table in the corner. Opening my notebook, I begin to describe my move to the apartment on Walter-Benjamin-Platz, and how I have become separated from what might commonly be perceived as the main action of my life. How I have cut loose. How I’m operating with a kind of freedom I never imagined. Sometimes, as I write, I’m aware of the Tchaikovsky, swelling and fading beyond the closed doors, but mostly it’s blotted out by the chatter of the bar staff and the clink of glasses. I glance down at the page. My handwriting looks unfamiliar to me.
I finish my wine and go outside. Wrapping my coat around me, I sit on the top step and look out over the Gendarmenmarkt. Floodlit churches on either side, the low cloud cover glowing orange. I’m about to open my notebook again when a man approaches. He starts up the steps, but stops when he sees me.
“How are you doing?” His voice has grit and gravel in it. His accent is American.
“Fine,” I say. “You?”
He stands three steps below me, hands in his trouser pockets. The traffic on the east side of the square is on a level with his face. Cars seem to go in one ear and out the other.
“What’s so funny?” he says.
I shake my head. “Nothing.” He’s wearing a gray plastic raincoat and a pair of tennis shoes. One of the laces is undone. “You’re not going to ask me for money, are you?”
“Money?” He looks south, towards the cathedral. “I’ve got more money than I know what to do with.” He takes out a twenty-euro note, holds it between finger and thumb, and sets fire to one corner with a lighter. His thumb and finger open. The burning banknote floats away into the darkness like a vivid ragged moth.
“Beautiful,” I say.
He laughs. It wasn’t the reaction he was expecting.
“Don’t you like Tchaikovsky?” he says.
“Maybe. I don’t know. One symphony’s enough.”
He nods, then gazes up into the sky. I close my notebook but leave it resting on my knees.
“What were you writing?” he asks.
“None of your business.” To anyone else this would be rude. With this man, though, it seems natural, appropriate.
“You were recording your impressions of the city,” he says. “Or your dreams. You always dream when you go somewhere new.”
“You don’t look rich,” I say.
He laughs again, then looks at me askance, across one cheek. “You know what they say about appearances.”
His face is blunt and dented as a boxer’s and his hair is thinning, wild. He’s probably about my father’s age but he has lived a very different life.
“I want to show you something,” he says.
First Oswald, now this stranger in a plastic coat. Everybody wants to show me something.
I hesitate. “But my friend —”
“He’s still inside?”
“Yes.”
“You’ll be back in five minutes. Ten at the most.” Mock-gallant, he places his hand on his heart. “I give you my word.”
We cross the Gendarmenmarkt. Turning right, then left, we emerge into another spacious paved area, bordered on the east side by the Staatsoper. According to the American, the opera house is closed for renovation work. In front of us, fifty meters away, a ghostly fan of light rises from the ground, reminding me of the photo booth in Hauptbahnhof Zoo. Portraits of me with my eyes closed, as if asleep or dead.
“That’s where we’re going,” he says.
Set in the middle of the square and flush with the paving stones is a thick glass pane. I stop at the edge. Beneath the pane is a brightly lit white room, its walls lined with shelves that are pristine, empty.
“This marks the place where the Nazis burned the books,” the man tells me. “One of the places, anyway. Forty thousand people gathered here to watch.”
The crackle of a fire. Pages lift, then shrivel.
The man looks away into the sky again. “In those days, the square was called Opernplatz, after the opera house. Now it’s named after August Bebel, one of the writers whose work was thrown into the flames.”
I stare down into the empty room. “If you keep looking you start to see a library.”
He nods. “Maybe that’s the whole idea.”
As he walks me back to the Gendarmenmarkt I ask what line of work he’s in.
“Import-export,” he says.
“I don’t know what that means.”
“I thought you knew everything.”
I give him a look. We’re acting as if we know each other, as if we’ve known each other for years, but he only walked out of the darkness half an hour ago.
“It’s an umbrella term,” he says. “Right now, I’m working with a bunch of Russians.” Outside the Konzerthaus, he turns to face me. “The city’s full of Russians.”
I sense a stirring inside me as if my body is a room with all its windows open and a breeze has just blown in. At that moment people come spilling down the steps. The concert is over. The man stands his ground, forcing the crowd to flow round him. Klaus appears, his mobile pressed to his ear.
“I’ve been looking for you everywhere,” he says.
“Did you think I’d gone?”
He puts his phone away. “No. I don’t know.”
“I came outside. I needed air.”
“You didn’t get cold?”
“No.”
The man gives Klaus a look that is challenging and oddly resolute, but Klaus doesn’t notice. Either that or he chooses to ignore it. Somehow it doesn’t feel right to introduce the two men to each other. I hardly know them myself.
“I called a taxi,” Klaus says.
As he turns away to scan the street, the man in the raincoat hands me a small white card. Putting his thumb to his ear and his forefinger to his cheek, he signals that I should call him, then he winks at me and walks away.
“Who was that man?” Klaus asks later, as we pass the Hotel Adlon.
I tilt the card so the streetlights play over it. “J. Halderman Cheadle,” I say, “apparently.”
“You met him tonight?”
I nod. “He’s some kind of messenger, I think.”
“Messenger?”
“He’s got something to tell me. That’s why he was there.” I look out of the window as the taxi accelerates past the Gedächtniskirche and on into the Ku’damm. “The weird thing was, he seemed to know it. They don’t usually know.”
“The way you talk.” Klaus gives a little exasperated waggle of his head. “You sound like a spy.”
I lean back, green and yellow neon streaming through the inside of the car. “So how was the Tchaikovsky?”
/
I meet Oswald on Tuesday evening, as planned, under the sign with the frankfurters and the flames. He tells me it’s a famous Treffpunkt — a meeting place — especially after hours. If you come at three in the morning you see millionaires, porn stars, criminals. He indicates the menu on the back wall. That should give me some idea, he says. Though the place functions as a fast-food outlet, offering the usual Currywurst and pommes-frites, I notice that Russian vodka is available, and Scotch, and even, at a price, Dom Perignon. All very interesting, but I have to remind Oswald, after a while, that I only agreed to meet him because he had something to show me. Unless, of course, this is it.