The Sleepwalkers (9 page)

Afterward he tried not to but couldn’t help weeping softly in her arms. It had been such a long time.

A long, empty, painful time.

She stroked his hair and kissed his forehead and whispered, “It’s okay, Willi. People need each other.”

He felt guilty and ashamed.

And thrilled beyond belief.

He couldn’t get close enough to her.

“Your turn next.” He ran his nose along her velvety shoulders.

“You’d better believe it, lover.”

She was naked except for the little, black demi-gloves, which he found unbelievably erotic.

“Give me a sec. I’ll be right back.” She kissed him.

For a few minutes she was gone in the bathroom, and when she climbed into bed again, it was in the most wistful, dreamy mood.

“What choice was there for a girl like me?” She told him about her life as they lay in each other’s arms. “A factory. A go at show business. I tried both. Believe me. Can you picture me at sixteen standing ten hours a day twisting yarn into mop heads? For two years I did it. Until the Depression. Then I was out on my ass like everyone else. I figured I’d better use it. What did I know about dancing? Well, it wasn’t my skills in tap or ballet that got me in the chorus line,
Liebchen
.”

“Now, now, I’ve no doubt you were the most stunning girl in the show.”

He took her breasts and kissed each one.

“I was pretty darn fantastic, actually.”

“You don’t have to convince me.”

She seemed to ponder, then sat up, apparently deciding to prove her point. “Want to see?”

He had no chance to answer before she’d leaped from bed, pulling the cover with her, leaving him there stark naked. Cranking
up a phonograph with great determination, she wrapped the coverlet around her waist and began raising and lowering her hip in time to the syncopated music launched into the popular hit, “Naughty Lola,” the wisest girl on earth, whose pianola got “worked for all its worth.” Holding out her arms as if embracing girls on either side she kicked first one leg than the other, Can-Can style. Up, down. Round and round. Her big white breasts bouncing in rhythm. He watched as if in a dream, thinking: My God, she’s magnificent.

When she bowed, breathless, he applauded joyfully. She really was terribly good, he thought. Perhaps, had fate dealt her a different hand, it might have been her on the silver screen. And her demanding people about at the Hotel Adlon. But it wasn’t. And inside something tugged at his heart. If only she’d sung about something a tad less . . . autobiographical.

“What is it, Willi?” She climbed back into bed and wrapped them both under the faded roses. “Don’t you like my singing?”

“I love it.” He kissed her.

The moment her tongue penetrated his mouth, the animal leapt back awake, ravenous again. How had he lived all this time neglecting its demands? But even as his body burned with delight, he couldn’t help hearing her song playing over and over like a broken record:
The boys all love my music. I can’t keep them away. So my little pianola . . . keeps working night and—

Oh!

He felt himself nearing climax, but she pushed him away, hard.

“Don’t you dare, buster.”

He laughed, glad she wasn’t a woman to hide her needs and make a man pay for it later. Kissing his way lovingly down her stomach, he gently lifted her legs.

“No. Not that. Do as I tell you.”

A cold panic shot through him, threatening to send even the hungry beast into retreat. He saw those purple spike-heeled boots.
Heard her asking if he’d been a naughty boy. Felt himself bound tightly to the bed, his back and butt mercilessly whipped by her leather riding crop. But she surprised him, flipping onto her stomach, slowly, enticingly raising her buttocks.

“Spank me, Willi,” she commanded. “And don’t be gentle about it.”

Now he really recoiled. Even more terrible than the thought of being bound and whipped was the idea of having to do it to someone else.

“You don’t understand,
Liebchen
.” She turned and looked back at him, her green eyes flaming with desire. “It’s how I get my pleasure. Please, Willi. For me.”

Arching, she raised her full white backside to him again.

And still he could not bring himself to hit her.

“Do it!” she commanded.

But it only made him shrink.

“For God’s sakes, Willi.” She was begging now. “You know how little pleasure I get in li—”

He smacked her hard with his open palm, then stared at the bright red fingers emerging on her flesh.

“Yes,” she whimpered. “More please, Willi. Until I beg you to stop.”

He awoke in the morning as if in a dream. No idea where he was. When he realized the weight on his arm was Paula, he pulled her to him and began making love to her the way he felt she should be made love to: gently, worshipfully. But again, at the height of their passion, she wanted him to spank her. He couldn’t this time. He climbed from bed and looked around in a daze, stunned to realize it was seven o’clock, and that he was going to have to go to work in the same clothes he wore yesterday.

“You’ll call again, I know.” Paula pulled him by the tie as he tried to get out the door.

He kissed her quickly on the lips.

“Yes,” he said. “But only because you’re getting me onto the Great Gustave’s yacht, my dear. Not because you want some schoolmaster to whip you into shape.”

As he fled the dingy building, he made a note to call his cousin Kurt the moment he got to the office.

On the S-Bahn, even he got a jolt by the morning headlines:
Hindenburg Appoints New Chancellor—von Schleicher Vows Iron Fist!

Von Schleicher, chancellor now. The third in as many years. “Stick with me, Kraus,” the words reverberated. “You won’t regret it.”

Willi sure prayed not.

Down the long flight of steps from the station he emerged onto Alexanderplatz, the smell of grilled sausages from an open cart reminding him he hadn’t had breakfast. It had got cold out. Cold enough to snow, he thought, although the sky was bright blue. As he stood on the corner devouring a leberwurst, he could still feel Paula’s warm body in his arms. He comprehended why an impoverished young woman could turn to prostitution. But the pleasure she took from pain distressed him. He hadn’t liked hitting her. Not any of the times she made him do it. The gratification it gave her though was undeniable. Why? Why did people get pleasure from pain? Wasn’t life painful enough without confusing that which hurt and that which felt good?

Despite the sunshine and upbeat holiday windows at Tietz, featuring lingerie-clad mannequins flying reindeer toward 1933, as he trudged toward the Police Presidium, Willi felt miserable. He didn’t understand life. Didn’t want to. If only Paula could be different. How happy he could be with her. It was the first time since Vicki he felt this way. Alive.

Pausing for a double-decked bus with its bright blue ad for toothpaste, he thought . . . perhaps I can help her. Perhaps we could help each other.

Traffic swirled around Alexanderplatz, oblivious to the concentric
worlds of life along the sidewalks. Up against the buildings, rows of beggars in little more than rags held out hats to passersby, many veterans of the Great War, legless, eyeless, noseless. Nearer the curbside, hundreds of the
Arbeitslos,
the out-of-work, milled about smoking listlessly, chatting pointlessly. Some spread blankets on the pavement, selling matches, pencils, shoelaces. Others stood with handwritten signs begging for a job. Most just hung about waiting for the weekly dole or the soup kitchen down the block to open. Hands in pockets, collars over ears, hats between their sunken shoulders. The Great Depression had left three-quarters of a million Berliners unemployed. One man with all his worldly possessions packed in filthy cardboard boxes on his shoulders shuffled past with wide dead eyes. Another sleepwalker, Willi thought.

A streetcar rolled by with a clattering screech, pulling several cars behind, each urging a visit to Wertheim’s giant holiday sale just across the square. Leaning up against an advertising column with competing Nazi and Communist slogans—
Work, Freedom, and Bread!
versus
Work, Bread, and Freedom!
—Willi noticed an old pal of his, if that’s what you could call him.

“Kai.” He stopped and held out his hand.

The boy looked up startled, then broke into a huge grin, his thick, dangling gold earring glistening in the sun.

“Inspektor Kraus!” He took Willi’s hand, shaking it gladly. “Always a pleasure. Particularly today, seeing as it’s such a great morning for me.”

Even among the myriad souls milling about the Alexanderplatz, Kai stood out. He was one of Berlin’s most famous Wild Boys, gangs of homeless teens who roamed together, surviving in basements and abandoned buildings, supporting themselves by everything from sidewalk performances to prostitution. Kai had his own gang, the Red Apaches, who worked the Tietz Department Store side of the square. They were easily identifiable by their red kerchiefs and black makeup around the eyes. Kai, their chieftain, a genuine blue-eyed Aryan, was always the
most flamboyantly dressed, in a striped wool Mexican poncho, feathered bush cap, and of course his trademark gold earring. As tall as Gunther but far more chisled and muscular, Kai was defiantly proud of his preference for boys. While he and his ilk were abhorrent to people like the Nazis, the Red Apaches had been instrumental in helping find the Child Eater. The SA for all its drumbeating had been useless.

“And what is so special about today?” Willi noticed a particular gleam in the boy’s eyes.

“Why, it’s my eighteenth birthday, and I’ve decided to settle down. So I’ve given up the gang. Handed it over to Huegler. At four this afternoon I report to my new position.”

Knowing Kai hadn’t attended a day of school since he was seven, Willi couldn’t imagine a terribly upstanding career in store for him, despite the many fine characteristics he possessed. So he simply wished him the best of luck and added, “Remember, if there’s anything I can ever do for you—”

“It’s
I
who soon may be in a position to do things for
you,
Herr Inspektor.” Kai winked mysteriously.

“She was there!” Gunther’s cobalt gaze sizzled as if with X-ray vision.

Thank goodness he looked right through Willi’s being in the same clothes as yesterday, although Ruta certainly hadn’t.

“I sat there all night drinking beer. God, I love this assignment, Chief. Anyway, I kept steering the conversations to women’s legs like you suggested. You’d be amazed how many leg-men there are. I always thought breasts were the thing. But not at that place. Finally, third or fourth guy I spoke with, I get into one of these greatest-legs-I-ever-saw conversations and he brings up this exotic-looking minx that showed up at the Black Stag last weekend wearing, check this out—a leopard coat!”

Well, there it was, Willi thought.

The princess, having first seen Dr. Meckel and then having
been hypnotized by the Great Gustave, went back to the Adlon, got ready for bed, then at midnight put on her leopard coat and took the train to Spandau, where she went into the Black Stag Inn and was never seen again. It still did not explain why, if she was absolutely normal after the hypnosis as her husband insisted, she would willingly deliver herself several hours later directly into her kidnappers’ hands.

“What about Schumann and pal?” Willi asked.

Gunther shook his head. “
Nichts.
But I did hear something about an institute where several of the doctors worked. Couldn’t get a name.”

“Keep drinking with the swine,” Willi said. “We’re getting somewhere here. Although, where that is I’m not certain I really want to go.”

Arriving at the Berlin Center for Psychoanalysis, Willi was amazed to discover Kurt hard at work packing all his books away into crates.

“Mensch,”
he said, “what gives here?”

His tall, bald, bespectacled cousin smiled somberly.

“You look good, Willi. Better than you’ve any right to. What does it seem like’s going on? I’m closing shop. Getting out. If you had any sense, you’d do the same.”

Just what Einstein said to him yesterday. Funny. He’d always viewed Kurt, two years younger, as the Einstein of his family. A genius who’d soared to the top of his profession, published papers, and gave university lectures. So superrational. Why this sudden hysteria?

“You know what we had here last week? Storm troopers. A whole gang of them. Must have been thirty. Burst right in during
the middle of the day, marching up and down the hallways shouting, ‘Down with Jewish science! Germany for Germans!’ ”

“So you’re running?”

Was it because Willi’d fought in the war, he wondered, faced the greatest dangers a man could, that he didn’t feel this wave of panic gripping so many others?

Kurt stopped packing. “Yes, Willi. I am. I am taking Kathe and the kids and never looking back.”

Willi felt a pit open in his stomach. “Where to?”

“Palestine. January second we leave for Bremerhaven. From there we sail to Haifa. My sister’s rented a place for us to live. In Tel Aviv.”

Willi had a sister in Tel Aviv, too. Greta had emigrated with her husband in 1925 because they felt there was no future in Europe for Jews. Willi got letters from her telling him about the first Hebrew city since ancient times, how free one felt there, how beautiful and white and fresh it was, built right along the sea. He liked the sea all right but—

“At least get the boys out.” Kurt’s eyes burned behind his glasses. “Do you have any idea what’s going on in the schools? They’re turning the Jewish kids into outcasts.”

“We’re sending Erich back to Jewish school,” Willi conceded. “Right after the New Year.”

“Willi, things are not going to get any better, don’t you see that? They’ve unleashed the genie. There’s no putting it back. You want to know about hypnosis? Listen to Hitler and Goebbels. You’ll learn all you have to. They’re hypnotizing Germany. Turning it into a nation of sleepwalkers.”

“Von Schleicher’s in control now. And he despises the Nazis.”