He wondered whether this limited identification was another accepted local discretion or her own idea. But by falling in step without questioning it, he could conveniently by-pass his own perennial problem.
“Mine is Simon.”
She was a pleasant companion in spite of her incongruous seriousness, and the Saint was especially contented to have acquired her at that hour, for he hated to eat alone. His friend had recommended the new penthouse restaurant atop the Bavaria Brewery, overlooking the port, and presently they took a taxi there to lay a foundation for the night’s work.
“We must have eel soup,” she said as they considered the menus. “It’s one of the things Hamburg is famous for. Unless the idea shocks you?”
“What else goes into it — besides eels?”
“Vegetables, and herbs, and a sort of little dumpling, and prunes.”
“It sounds frightful,” he said, “But I’ll make the experiment, if you want to.”
Actually it turned out to be completely delectable, in an offbeat sweet-sour way. Afterwards they had the Vierländer Mastgeflügel, a tender broiled chicken, and a bottle of Dienhard’s Hanns Christof Wein of ’59 — that greatest year of the decade for the vineyards of the Rhine. And under the combination of mellowing influences their acquaintance warmed and ripened. She didn’t become unexpectedly stimulating and exciting, but she was absorbently easy to be with.
They sat beside one of the long plate-glass windows commanding a panorama of docks and warehouses and their associated machinery to which night and artificial lights lent an obviously meretricious but seductive glamor, and once when an attentive head waiter came by, Eva gestured outwards and asked, “What is that?”
“It is all part of the harbor of Hamburg. Just over there it is called the Grasbrook Hafen.”
Simon sat up.
“Not the place where good old Klaus Störtebeker got it in the neck — if I may use the expression?”
“Yes, that is the same place. But it would have looked much different then.”
“What are you talking about?” Eva asked, as the head waiter moved on.
“An old-time pirate in these parts,” said the Saint. “I was reading about him in a guide-book just before we met. He left a buried treasure somewhere, too.”
“How romantic.” Her cornflower-blue eyes danced with more animation than they had previously revealed. “Tell me about it.”
He brought out the little book and read her the passage which had captivated him.
“But I’m afraid,” he concluded, “that if you want to get rich quick you’ll have to think of something faster than looking for a goblet with a gallows on it.”
“I suppose so.” She was almost crestfallen, as if the goblet had been on the table and a commis had whisked it away with the soup plates. “There are no adventures of that kind any more.”
Of all men alive, few could have produced better grounds to contest that assertion, but for the moment Simon Templar preferred not to cite them. Instead, he said, “We’ll have to do the best we can with our own adventure. Is there anything special you want to see on the Reeperbahn?”
“Everything.”
“That might be a rather wide order.”
“I’ve heard they have women who wrestle in a tank full of mud.”
“Well, that might be a fairly romantic start,” he admitted. “I guess we could try that for an hors d’oeuvre, and play it by ear from there.”
The Reeperbahn in Hamburg (which once meant “The Street of Rope-Workers”) has long since lost its nautical connotation, except as regards the transient sailors who have made it the essential symbol of their port of call. It has become to Hamburg what Montmartre became to the tourist in Paris — who has no relationship with the Parisian. Along its few short blocks and up some of the side streets which lead off it is clustered a variety of establishments catering to the most generally deplored forms of human indulgence which even the citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah might have contemplated with some respect. “But unlike those classic citadels of depravity, the Reeperbahn, which was also destroyed by fire from the heavens delivered by the air raiders of World War II, has risen again from the ashes with still more reprehensible vigour and the added modern advantages of coruscating neon.
There is available every gratification traditionally craved by the male animal on a toot, from the brassy ballroom to the dim-lighted cabaret, from the costumed chorus to the table-top strip-tease, from the extrovert’s parade of flesh to the introvert’s pornography, literate or pictorial, still or motion picture, with companionship from overdressed to undressed, with all the necessary alcohols to make everything enticing, if you take enough of them — or, if you are harder to intoxicate, and want to seek just a little harder, more costly but more powerful narcotics. It is all there, with the effort of search scaled down to the minimum which any aspiring debauchee should be able to muster, or he should give up and stay home. Everything from the oldest sensations to the newest variations — down to such exotic eccentricities as the principal attraction at the Jungmühle, where they had agreed to start their sampling.
Simon and Eva sat at a front table in an auditorium like a small converted theater, in which the side walls near the stage were smeared and stained with peculiar splash marks which suggested that past performers had pelted an unappreciative audience with unsavory tokens of their indignation, instead of being thus showered themselves by dissatisfied spectators according to the antique custom. The reality and actuality of this wild hypothesis was promptly concretized by a servitor who arrived with two large sheets of plastic and politely but matter-of-factly indicated that they should be tucked on like oversized bibs before even ordering anything spillable.
“I shall drink beer all the time,” Eva said rather primly. “It’s the cheapest thing to order, and it’s always safe even in the worst places, and we shouldn’t get drunk in the first dive or two we try.”
“I suppose that’s a sound approach,” said the Saint, with respect.
The superannuated discard of a travelling opera company who had been sentimentally vocalizing on the stage bowed off, with the muted approval of the congregation; a tarpaulin cover was removed from what might have been a shallow orchestra pit, revealing that it had been converted into a kind of wading trough paved with moist brown mud; the spotlights brightened, and two women entered from opposite wings and met in the center of the stage, draped in vivid satin robes which they threw off as the loudspeakers identified them. Underneath they wore only bikini trunks and their own exuberant flesh and glands. The formalities having been complied with, they seized each other by the hair and fell into the tank with a juicy splash.
Thereafter it was much the same as the traditional ballet popularised in the commercial guise of wrestling by hundreds of artistes of the grunt and grimace and groan, except that these performers not only had an opportunity to illustrate the more delicate and sensitive feminine approach but had a shallow quagmire of lusciously textured sludge to do it in. This gave them a few extra vulnerable targets to kick, twist, and gouge, and an additional weapon to bring into play. While one of them was attempting to suffocate the other by grinding her face into the mud, she could suffer the indignity of having her panties pulled down and stuffed with the same goo and when not so intertwined they could throw gobs of it in each other’s faces, which if inaccurately aimed might splatter the scenery or the onlookers — which explained the spray flecks on the walk and the considerately furnished bibs. By the time this tender choreography had run its course both the exponents were decently covered from crown to toe with a succulent coating of gunk, and their sex appeal was almost equal to that of two hippopotami emerging from a wallow.