Dear Mr. G.I. Sorry but you cannot come in.
Tonight is open only to club members.
The Manager
I went in and ordered a schnapps and sat across from a chesty, frizzy-haired woman I took to be a whore. She smiled at me and I smiled back and shook my head no. When the bartender brought my drink I asked him about Meister Geld and he said, “Nicht verstehen.” I repeated the question in French and invoked Archie Bell as my contact, but the barman still didn’t get me. The woman came to my table and asked in French what I wanted and when I told her she said the barman didn’t know anybody by that name but she did, and then in English asked, “What you want with Meister Geld?”
“It has to do with money,” I told her.
She made a phone call and came back and said she would take me to him. I drank my schnapps and we went out. It was April in Frankfurt, a sunny day with a bit of a nip to it, and I made a mental note to buy a lighter-weight German suit for the summer.
“You speak bad French,” the woman said, taking my arm. “Why not speak you English to the man?”
“I didn’t want him to know I was American.”
“But you look like American, speak German like American, have American haircut. The man said polite, please leave, American.”
I shrugged and wondered was my disguise also transparent to the MPs? I walked with the young woman, who, erect, had a provocative shape and sprightly gait. The phrase “abundantly frolicsome” occurred to me. I asked her how long she’d been a whore and she said she’d worked as a mechanic for the Luftwaffe during the war, now repaired auto engines, and only sometimes worked as a whore.
“Where are we going?” I asked her.
“It does not matter,” she said. “He follow us where we go.”
“Who does?”
“Meister Geld. He always look to people before he meets. We go here,” and she pointed to a café with a window full of seven-layer chocolate cakes, cream tarts, glazed Apfelkuchen, and other ambrosial wonders. She said she loved sweet food and then ordered two kinds of chocolate cake. She was rosencheeked, a characteristic in many German women that I took to be seasonal, or perhaps dietetic. Her face, with very modest makeup, was a map of sensuality, her eyes wizened with what I construed to be sexual wisdom. Her tight sweater covered only unencumbered natural uplift. Was there a reason beyond money that she became a whore?
“Only money,” she said. “For money I used to carry a piece of carpet so when I lay down in the ruins to fuck my boys I would not tear my clothes. I made much money but later I am unhappy that I will die in disgrace. Now I want to live only old and please self, so I eat sweet cake. I hungry now. In war days I only sometimes hungry, sometimes whore. Now I always hungry, always whore. Now I live to eat.”
I nodded and asked when Meister Geld was coming. She looked in my eye and said, “I know you do not want me, but I always pay for cake.”
She opened her blouse and presented her naked breasts to my gaze. They were abundant and firm, underlined below by a long, jagged horizontal scar on her stomach. “Gift from lover,” she said, touching the scar. She closed her blouse and stood up.
“I know nobody with name Meister Geld,” she said. “It is silly name.” Then she left the café.
What was I to make of that? Conned out of two pieces of cake by a sugar whore? Was that all there was to it? I paid the check, and as I left the café, thinking about my next move, a black Mercedes pulled alongside me; and from the rear seat came a greeting.
“Good afternoon, Lieutenant. I have your tidings from Archie Bell,” this in very good English from a man in a dark blue leather coat, and a dark suit of color and cut not unlike the suit on my back. The man was corpulent, with the red beard of a Viking warrior. I judged him to be forty.
“Meister Geld?” I asked, and when he smiled and opened the car door I got in beside him.
In my hierarchy of personal demons at the time of the fall, Meister Geld holds a position of eminence. He had been wounded by the weather in December, 1941, on the day the Russians stopped Hitler at Stalingrad. Forty-two degrees below zero, and his left foot froze into the similitude of marble; a frozen foot as good as a bullet in the chest. He ran barefoot in the snow to gain circulation, then stole a felt shoe from a Russian soldier who lay dead in the street, needless of the shod life. He did not steal the Russian’s right shoe but kept his own, a piece of cracked leather. His foot of marble recovered in the felt, but his right foot congealed and died inside the sodden leather. Also a hole in his glove cost him his right thumb.
The Meister told me all this when he saw me staring at that peculiar ersatz thumb: an unlikely length of glove-covered hard rubber, tied with a finger-threading thong. And, in the shoe where the front half of his foot used to be, a piece of toe-shaped wood. Why had the Meister not understood his thumb was freezing? Why had he not stolen the Russian’s right shoe along with the left? Look to the minor devils of war for answers.
My simple task, to change two thousand marks for dollars, was achieved in the first moments of talking, the Meister excavating from a vast interior coat pocket a leather bag thick with banknotes, and giving me the going street rate of exchange.
“A formidable amount of marks, Lieutenant,” the Meister said. “You have been saving your pfennigs.”
“Some belong to an associate of mine,” I said.
“Archie Bell?”
“No. Archie handles his own.”
“So you not only deal in money, you are also a courier for others. And out of uniform. You have the air of the adventurer about you, Lieutenant.”
The thought pleased me. I began to think of myself as Orson-at-large, Orson-on-the-town. Other than manipulating cards and a few black-market cigarette sales, I had done very little in life that could be construed as illegal. My moral stance on cards was that it was a survival tactic; also I gave back as much as I stole, although not always to the same citizens. I knew I was an adept, a figure of reasonable power in an unreasonable world, flush now with money, love awaiting at the other end of a taxi ride, Europe at my doorstep, needful only of a weekend or three-day pass to know the glories of civilized empire, including the empires of love, lust, beauty, and freedom (temporal for the moment, but longitude will develop; all things wait on the man who embraces the muse of freedom). And now, as I rode in the Mercedes with an underworld figure of notable dimension, I moved into a realm of possibility that included illegalities permissible to The Man Who Is, always stopping short of what might be considered serious criminality, of course. No need to venture that far into a new career.
Meister Geld took me to a small movie theater where we stood in the back and watched a scene from a German melodrama in black and white: A woman in a kitchen backs away from a threatening man and reaches for a knife. Close on the knife, as man of menace, undeterred, comes toward her. She thrusts. Close on knife entering his stomach. He crumples. She backs away, runs out of house. Close on man, dead. He opens eyes, removes knife from his stomach, no wound visible, rises, puts knife in sink, no blood visible on it, opens cabinet, takes down whiskey, pours self a drink, drinks, looks toward door, smiles.
The Meister grew bored and climbed the stairs to a second- floor office beside the windowed projection booth, the office similarly windowed to give access to the screen. The office was cluttered with German movie posters and photographs of naked women. The Meister hung his coat upon a hook, sat in his leather chair, and asked: “Do you like to travel, Lieutenant? May I call you Orson?”
“Travel pleases me. Orson is my name.”