Carter and Dasch crossed the street to where the Tatra was parked, with Ritter drifting along behind them, like his master’s second shadow.
The Bleihof club was closed now, its windows hidden behind shutters whose red paint still showed the dappled blistering of heat from the nearby buildings that had burned in the air raids years before.
‘Climb in,’ said Dasch.
‘Where are we going?’
‘Someplace where you can relax while you consider my offer.’
‘And what is your offer?’ asked Carter.
Dasch did not immediately reply to Carter’s question. Instead he turned to Ritter and exclaimed, ‘You see? This is what I like! This directness. This fearlessness.’ He chopped the knife edge of one hand into the palm of the other. ‘Cutting through the fog of ambiguity!’ Only now did he respond to Carter. ‘We may have our country back now, part of it anyway, but we have very little else. The lack of simple things we once took for granted, as you yourself did before you started living in a prison cell, has only increased our desire to possess them. The people who have these simple things◦– the cigarettes and chocolate and soap, which used to be such ordinary pleasures◦– are not the British or the French, and certainly not the Russians. They are the Americans, especially the soldiers over here. And I need somebody who can deal with them, preferably one of their own. But I can’t just wander out onto the dance floor of the Bleihof club and hire the first American I see, even if he were amenable to my offer. I need a person with proven experience in the complicated business of separating these luxuries from those who have enough and delivering them to those who do not. That person is you, Mr Carter. I knew it from the moment I first read about your story in the paper. And since then I have been waiting for the day when you were free again, just as you yourself have waited for so long.’
After travelling along Aachenerstrasse, the car entered the Rudolfplatz and pulled up beside the Hotel Europa, which had been one of many grand hotels in Cologne before the war and was now, having somehow managed to escape annihilation during the war, the only grand hotel. ‘Here we are,’ said Dasch. ‘Your home until tomorrow.’
‘I can’t afford to stay here,’ Carter protested.
‘Don’t worry about that,’ Dasch told him. ‘Just tell them your name. Everything is taken care of. And here…’ He rummaged in his pocket and pulled out a roll of money as thick as his fist. After peeling off a dozen bills, he handed them to Carter. ‘This will get you some new clothes, and a visit to the barber, as well.’
‘And what then?’ asked Carter.
‘I want you to make up your mind,’ said Dasch. ‘Either go home and try to make a life for yourself, ashamed of your past and hoping that no one learns about the things you’ve done. Or take that shame and turn it into something else. You can understand the actions which first drew you to my attention, and for which you have been punished, as evidence of the skills you have been granted in this life. I am offering you a chance to make use of those skills, among people who will respect you and welcome you, not turn their backs when they see you coming, or throw you once again into a concrete cell if given half the chance. I’ll send Ritter by in the morning. If you’re still here, you can begin your work immediately. If not,’ he shrugged, ‘then I will have misjudged your potential.’
Carter climbed out of the car and shut the door.
The Tatra sped away down the street, turned onto Hohenzollernring and was gone.
For a moment, Carter just stood there, staring up at the magnificent hotel with its revolving front door, lace curtains in the windows and flowers growing in window boxes on the balconies. But Carter did not enter the hotel right away. Instead, he waited until the car was out of sight, then he turned south and walked several blocks to the Zülpicherplatz, until he came to a little barber shop on the corner. A small, black and white enamel sign bolted above the door read ‘Militärrasierstube’, indicating that it was a place for soldiers to get their hair cut.
As Carter arrived, two British soldiers passed him on their way out of the shop. Buttoning their short, yellowy-brown wool overcoats, the men fitted their side caps carefully onto their freshly cropped heads and continued down the street. As they passed by Carter, the men barely seemed to notice he was there. To them, he was just another downtrodden survivor of a beaten army, struggling to forget the last five years of his life.
Carter smelled the aftershave that the barber had splashed on their necks. At the same time, he caught a breath of his own unwashed body, and the old sweat of a stranger steeped into the worn-out clothes that hung like scarecrow rags upon his undernourished frame.
Inside, a man in a white tunic was sweeping up the hair that had fallen around the barber’s chair. Facing the chair was a large mirror, its backing flaked around the edges so that the reflection appeared as if seen through a pair of cataracted eyes. Along the counter were jars of different coloured liquids, red and blue, containing combs and scissors and a straight edge razor.
The man glanced up at Carter. He did not smile. ‘The cost is three marks,’ he said, ‘and that is in advance.’
Carter pulled a twenty-mark note from his pocket. ‘Do you have change for this?’
The barber’s eyes widened at the sight of the large bill. Then he set his broom against the wall and spun the chair around for Carter to take a seat.
Carter removed his coat and hung it on a peg upon the wall, which was lightning-bolted with cracks, still unrepaired, from the seismic shock of a 10,000kg bomb known as a Grand Slam, which had been dropped by a Royal Air Force Lancaster on the night of 31st May 1942. The bomb had fallen six blocks away and where it landed, nothing remained in a two thousand foot radius but a crater, thirty foot deep in the middle, which had since filled with water, forming a pond in which old people, since there were only old people left in that part of town, sometimes went swimming. They floated peacefully, small islands of pale, sagging flesh, and stared down through the surprisingly clear water at the mosaic of broken stones, which were all that remained of the buildings they had once called home.
As Carter settled back into the chair, the barber folded down the collar of Carter’s shirt and gently wrapped around his neck a thin strip of papery fabric. Then, with a movement like a magician wafting his cape, the barber covered Carter’s upper body with a clean white cloth.
‘How should it be?’ he asked.
‘Short on the sides,’ said Carter, ‘and leave it long on top.’
The barber fished out a pair of needle-nosed scissors and a comb and began to snip away at Carter’s unkempt mass of hair.
At Langsdorf, prisoners received mandatory haircuts once every three months. The cuts were done by untrained soldiers using electric clippers and the hair was cut down to the scalp, frequently leaving gouges in the skin. It was possible to bribe the prison barbers with cigarettes or money, but all that got a person was a slower haircut; a little less painful, but just as ugly as everyone else’s.
As Carter closed his eyes and listened to the metallic swish of the scissors, the muscles in his back relaxed for the first time in so long he had mistaken them for bone. Suddenly, and catching him completely by surprise, tears spilled out of his eyes and ran down his cheeks.
The barber stopped his cutting, produced a clean handkerchief and dabbed away the tears. He made no comment, nor did he pause in his work for more than a couple of seconds. In a moment, he was back to snipping away tiny strands of hair raised up along the black, medicinal-smelling tines of the comb.
For the remainder of the haircut, Carter puzzled over why the tears had come. It was something about the peculiar anonymous gentleness with which the barber performed his task, set against the dull, uncaring brutality that surrounded almost every memory he had of prison life.