The lift in the I.G. Farben building was an open-shaft, endless-belted affair with platforms that had to be hopped onto. Baker-Bates hopped onto one and rode it up to the third floor, where he hopped off. A staff sergeant jerked a thumb over his shoulder at Lieutenant Meyer’s office, and Baker-Bates went in. The Lieutenant was seated behind his desk wearing a very large, but quite humorless, smile.
“I was looking for Lieutenant Meyer,” Baker-Bates said, “But I seem to have come across the Cheshire Cat.”
“Meow, sir.”
“You have something, I take it — something that I don’t have but wish to God that I did.”
“Exactly.”
“But you are going to share, aren’t you, Lieutenant?”
“I’m still savoring it, Major.”
“That tasty, eh?”
“Scrumptious.”
“This could go on all afternoon.”
“A picture.”
“Well, now.”
“A photograph. To be more precise, a snapshot.”
“Where was it?”
“We finally located someone who knew someone who knew him. And this someone who knew him had managed to hang on to a photo album. In fact, that’s all he managed to hang on to, but there, on the fifth from the last page, was a photograph taken in 1936 in Darmstadt.”
Lieutenant Meyer reached under the blotter on his desk and flipped a photograph over to Baker-Bates. “Meet Kurt Oppenheimer at twenty-two.”
The photograph was of a young man with rolled-up sleeves, leather shorts, and heavy shoes. He sat astride a bicycle. His mouth was open as if he were about to say something jocular. He was about six feet tall and, even in the photograph, looked tanned and fit.
Baker-Bates took only one look at the photograph before he softly said, “Damn!” And then, not quite so softly, “Goddamn sonofabitch!”
For the face in the photograph, although ten years younger, was the same as that of the new American Major from Abilene, Texas, who had bought Baker-Bates a drink only an hour and thirteen minutes before.
14
The Golden Rose was located only a few blocks from the Hauptbahnhof in the old Kneipen district of Frankfurt, which, before the war, had consisted mostly of drinking dives and after-hours joints. Now it was largely rubble — all kinds of rubble: some waist high, some shoulder high, and some two stories high. In several blocks, paths had been cleared that were wide enough for two men to walk abreast. In others, the paths were more like one-way streets, just wide enough for a single automobile. But in many side streets there were no paths at all, and those who, for whatever their reasons, wanted to traverse these streets had to climb up and over the rubble.
The Golden Rose was the only building in its block that had been spared — partially spared, anyway. It once had been a three-story building, but now the top story was completely gone. The second story was gone too, except for a bathroom, although its walls had also vanished, leaving the tub and toilet exposed. They both looked curiously naked.
Bodden entered the Golden Rose, pushing his way through the inevitable heavy curtain. Inside, several candles had been stuck here and there to help out the weak single electric bulb that hung by a long cord from the ceiling. Under it, perhaps to catch what little heat it afforded, real or imaginary, was the proprietor, leaning on the counter that served as a bar. The proprietor was a thin man with a fire-scarred face and bitter eyes. He looked up at Bodden; muttered “Guté MOR-je” in the Frankfurt accent, despite the fact that it was long past noon; and went back to the newspaper he had been reading. The paper was the American-controlled Frankfurter Rundschau. The bitter-eyed man didn’t seem to like what it said.
Bodden said good morning back to the man and then waited for his eyes to adjust themselves to the gloom. There were several persons, mostly men, sitting alone at tables with glasses of thin beer before them. All still wore their hats, overcoats — and gloves, if they had them. The Golden Rose had no heat.
The young woman in the fur coat sat at a table by herself. There was nothing on the table, only her folded hands. Bodden walked back to where she sat, but before he could sit down she said, “Have you eaten?”
“Not since yesterday.”
She rose. “Come,” she said.
Bodden followed her past the proprietor and back to a curtained-off passageway. Beyond the passageway was a flight of stairs that led down to the cellar. It seemed to grow warmer as Bodden and the woman descended the stairs. Bodden also thought he could smell food. Pork, by God.
He and the woman pushed through yet another heavy curtain and entered a whitewashed room lit by two bulbs, this time, and a number of candles. A middle-aged woman stood before a large coal cookstove stirring a pot of something that bubbled. She looked around at the young woman in the fur coat; nodded in recognition, if not in welcome; and gestured with the spoon toward one of the six tables.
All the tables were empty except for one. At it sat a heavy, well-dressed man with pink jowls. Before him was a plate filled with boiled potatoes and a thick slab of pork. The man was cramming a forkful of potatoes into his mouth. He seemed to find no pleasure in his food. That one is just feeding the furnace, Bodden thought, and realized that his own mouth was watering.
The young woman chose the table that was the farthest away from the eating man.
“We will eat first,” she said.
“A fine idea, but I cannot pay.”
The woman shrugged slightly and brought a hand out of the pocket of her coat. In it were two packages of Camel cigarettes.
“One packet of these will pay for the meal,” she said, and slid them across the table to Bodden. “And a drink too, if you wish.”
“I wish very much,” Bodden said, eyeing the cigarettes.
“Smoke them, if you like,” the woman said. “There are more.”
He lit one just as the middle-aged woman approached. Her eyes were as bitter as the man’s upstairs, and Bodden tried to guess whether she and the man were husband and wife or brother and sister. He decided on husband and wife. They sometimes grow to look alike, he thought, if they live together long enough and discover that they hate it
“Yes,” the middle-aged woman said, and sniffed noisily, as though she had a bad cold.
“Pay her first,” the young woman told Bodden. He handed over the unopened cigarette package.
“We’ll have two plates of what the big one back there is stuffing himself with,” the young woman ordered crisply. “And buttered bread, too.”
“No butter, just bread,” the middle-aged woman said, and sniffed again.
The young woman shrugged. “Very well, then two Schnapps. Two large ones.”
The woman sniffed noisily for the third time, swallowed what she had sniffed, and went away. The Schnapps that she brought back turned out to be potato gin. Bodden took a big swallow of his, felt it burn its way down and spread warmly through his stomach.
“A drink, a cigarette, a meal on the way, and a pretty companion,” he said. “One would almost think that we were living in a civilized world.”
“If that’s your idea of civilization,” the young woman said, shrugging out of her fur coat and letting it drape itself over the back of her chair.
“My needs, like my tastes, have been reduced to the basics,” Bodden said, and allowed his gaze to rest for a moment on the woman’s breast, which thrust at the gray material of her dress. This one, he told himself, has been eating better than I thought.