The Sleepwalkers (14 page)

“No.”

“If you could make love with any man in this room . . . who would it be?”

“You.”

There was generous applause.

Gustave bowed modestly. “All right then, Melina. You and I are going to make love. Right here. Right now. Is that okay?”

“No.”

“When I count to three, Melina, you and I are going to make love. Mad. Passionate. Insane love. It will be like nothing you have ever experienced in your life. It will thrill you to the core. Every cell in your body will pulsate with pleasure. And you will have orgasms, Melina. Not one or two. But every time I command you to, you will have another orgasm. And you will love it, Melina. You will love it like you’ve never loved anything before. Are you ready?”

“No.”

“One.”

“No.”

“Two.”

“No.”

“Three!”

The woman’s arms sprang from her sides and she let out a deep, almost frightening shriek that sent shivers through the audience. Gustave stood back with his arms behind him, watching as she desperately clutched a completely imaginary lover to her breast.

“Oh, yes, Gustave. Yes, yes. You don’t know how long I’ve waited for this.” Her face went bright red and her breathing quickened as she lifted her legs and began squirming in the chair. “Oh, yes, Gustave. Yes!”

“Climax now, Melina,” Gustave ordered. “Climax!”

“Yes. Oh, yes. Oh, yes, yes, yes!”

“And again, Melina. Climax again.”

“Yes. Yes. Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God!”

Seventeen times, those who kept count swore afterward.

The armchair had to be thrown away.

But Melina von Auerlicht, poor thing, was commanded to recall nothing of her adventure—and the moment she came out of the trance she proudly denounced Gustave as a fraud, unable to hypnotize anyone with a willpower that could match his own!

“Get me out of here,” Paula whispered.

Willi saw her face had turned green.

He hustled her upstairs, feeling how cold and clammy her skin had become, hoping to get her out to the deck before she fainted, or vomited, or both. Gradually, outside, the fresh air revived her.

“I’ve never seen anything so horrible.” She clutched her demi-gloved hands to her throat. “It was like . . . he raped her.”

Willi put his arms around her waist and felt, despite the unseasonably warm day, the calm lake all around them slapping against the hull, that Paula was really traumatized. Trembling to the core. As if something had touched a raw nerve and was squeezing it with metal pliers.

“Willi,” she whispered. “Get me off this boat. Even if we have to swim.”

Before setting off for the evening,
The Third Eye
was scheduled
to pick up latecomers from a place called Peacock Island. Paula and Willi were the only two to disembark. Another twenty or so merrymakers pushed past them to join the fun. Among them Willi noticed five or six officers in full black uniform, each escorting a bejeweled blonde. As they brushed by in opposite directions, one knocked into Willi’s shoulder.

“Pardon me,” he said with a smile, tipping his SS officer’s hat as he continued up the ramp. From his big-gapped bunny teeth Willi instantly recognized him.

It was Josef, his friend from the Black Stag Inn.

When the ship pulled away, Willi and Paula stood there, his arm around her cape as it fluttered in the breeze. It wasn’t even four o’clock, and such a strange, warm afternoon. The air almost sultry. As the sound of the jazz band from the ship faded, he could feel Paula’s breathing return to normal, the trembling ease from her bones. He yanked off his wig and ran his fingers through his dark, curly hair. That phrase went through his mind again from the psychology text on masochism: a
neurotic eroticizing
of childhood trauma.

Poor girl, he thought. God knows what you’ve been through.

But what a wonderful place to find themselves now. The breeze so fresh. The pine trees so green. Tiny Peacock Island, between Wannsee and Babelsberg, had been fashioned into a nature reserve at the end of the eighteenth century. A park now, it was widely regarded as an apotheosis of German romanticism. Walking its picturesque paths, Paula leaning on him in her tight pink gown, clasping him for support, they sauntered past emerald fields alive with strutting peacocks, sun-filled meadows, and little garden pavilions built to look like the ruins of medieval castles.

Everything was so calm. So rustically peaceful.

Paula began to cry. “Why can’t the world be beautiful like this?”

Why? He handed her a handkerchief.

The world’s oldest question.

At the end of the island a little ferry shuttled them back to the mainland. Paula still didn’t feel well. She wanted to go home. They had to take the S-Bahn back to fetch Willi’s car in Wannsee. Neither had much to say. Besides feeling bad for her, Willi simmered with frustration. It had been a fruitless afternoon. He certainly hadn’t got any smoking gun on Gustave. He hadn’t got anything. Only a depressing glimpse of the future. And another lesson on the wretchedness of humankind.

As if he needed it.

As he drove back into town, a dozen thoughts competed in his brain. Just about now, he knew, his sons should be arriving in Paris with Ava and the Gottmans. When would he see them again? How long would they have to stay away? He already missed them so much it hurt. But so far, all his efforts on the Mermaid and the Bulgarian-princess cases hadn’t got him far, nor scored him any points with his boss. In fact, the Kommissar had made it clear that von Hindenburg was most disappointed in Willi’s lack of results. The king of Bulgaria had personally hung up on the Reichs president. A great humiliation. In other words, Willi was causing an international incident. Horthstaler reminded von Hindenburg that it had taken Willi many months—and many children’s lives—to catch the
Kinderfresser
. Was this a compliment or an insult?

It was getting hard to tell these days who or what was on your side.

He’d considered bringing more of his Detektivs onto the case, but two already had full workloads. And the third he didn’t trust. Pasty-faced Herbert Thurmann had joined his unit under a most dubious promotional route, and Willi had more than once found him snooping in files he didn’t belong in. Rife were rumors of how the Nazis were attempting to infiltrate the Berlin police. If true, his own little fascist mole had to be Thurmann. He had no intention of letting the man anywhere near this case.

And then there was Paula. Could he ever really trust her? What the hell was he doing with this child anyway, in her pink gown and black marabou? Last night he tried to imagine introducing her to his sons. To his parents-in-law. It was ridiculous. The whole thing. Completely irrational. Did he think he could reform her, for God’s sakes?

A boot whore?

The literal fork-in-the-road came along Spandauer Damm, past the baroque gardens of the Charlottenburg Palace. To his left, the bridge across the Spree into Berlin-North where she lived. To the right, the Kaiser Friedrich Strasse into Berlin-West, and his place.

“Well, which is it going to be,
Liebchen
?” She spoke his thoughts. “I won’t hold it against you if you take me home. Really. I never expected anything. I’ll miss you of course. But what the hell. We can say hi when we pass on Tauentzien, huh?”

He made the right, unable to leave her. He didn’t care if it was rational or not.

What was rational these days?

As he drove, he felt her hand slip through his arm and her head lean on his shoulder. “Oh, Willi, Willi, you’re such a good boy.”

“You know what I’d really like to do tonight?” she said, yawning, when they reached his apartment. He expected Paula to say go to sleep nice and early. But no. She wanted to go out. As ordinary people do on a Saturday night. “Yes, just like ordinary people.” The idea seemed to entice her like a beautiful doll might a child. “We’ll freshen up and put on casual clothes and go to a movie and out to dinner. Doesn’t that sound divine? Just like an ordinary couple.”

Freshen up,
Willi noticed, inevitably meant a long time in the bathroom with her handbag. In the meantime, he phoned Paris. His family had just arrived in the Gare du Nord, Aunt Hedda
informed him. They were on their way over by taxi now. Everything had gone smoothly. Everyone was fine.

“Send them my love,” Willi told her. “I’ll call again tomorrow, when they’re settled in.”

“Yowsah! Look at the Christmas lights,” Paula exclaimed as they strolled arm in arm onto the Ku-damm. The whole boulevard seemed to glow. Neon flashing. Store windows sparkling. Towering rows of self-illuminating advertising columns, radiating countless promises. Around Breitscheidplatz, cinema after cinema competed for the crowds. Loudspeaker barkers screamed out the titles and the movie stars’ names. The smell of fresh-roasted chestnuts filled the air. Not even the Brownshirts shaking their cans seemed to damper the holiday spirit. At the new Universum, a long, sleek, ultramodern building designed by the very same Mendelsohn who did Fritz’s house, a soaring color marquee board displayed the great British actor Charles Laughton portraying Nero, fiddling madly while Rome burned. It was Cecil B. DeMille’s latest spectacular,
The Sign of the Cross
.

“Oh, let’s see this.” Paula pulled his arm. “It’s got Claudette Colbert.”

Only Hollywood, only DeMille, could have made such a movie. The screen overflowed with images of wanton cruelty, vice, and degradation. Christians, old men, women and babies, thrown to the tigers. Crucified. Burned alive to the cheering of thousands. Men battling bulls. Women battling pygmies. Elephants treading on people’s heads. Paula was absolutely entranced, standing along with the rest of the audience to applaud the final triumph of good.

“Wasn’t Colbert magnificent?” She took Willi’s arm as they left the theater. “That milk bath. I’ve never seen anything so sensual. Would you like me to take a bath in milk, Willi? Would you, huh? You can tell me—”

“All I want you to do in milk,” he replied firmly, “is boil oatmeal. So. Where would you like to go for dinner?”

Paula grabbed his jacket lapel. “Promise you won’t laugh?” She shook a fist at him menacingly.

“I won’t. I promise I won’t.”

But when she told him, he couldn’t help it.

The “Jolliest Place in Berlin!” The “Department Store of Restaurants!” An “Inexpensive Holiday Trip Around the World in Twelve Eating Environments!”

Kempinski’s Haus Vaterland was unrivaled among Berlin’s entertainment venues. Brilliantly lit, its great domed roof rising above the Potsdamer Platz, a pinwheel of spinning, flashing neon sparkling across the city, it offered twelve bands, fifty cabaret acts, and the famous Haus Vaterland Girls.

Willi had been to it numerous times. His father-in-law adored it. The Bavarian Beer Garden seating a thousand, including a man-made lake, barmaids in traditional dirndles and yodeling waiters. The Wine Terrace on the Rhine, with its paddleboats floating past miniature castles, and every hour on the hour a five-minute rainstorm. The Hungarian Pastry Restaurant. The Japanese Tea Garden. The Wild West Saloon. There was nothing else like it in Europe. Feeding six thousand customers simultaneously, the place was an absolute madhouse.

Paula chose the Viennese Café, a hundred crowded tables overlooking a diorama of Old Vienna and the river Danube. A massive trompe l’oeil of the central railway station with electric trains crossing bridges and mechanical boats sailing beneath. Scores of couples twirling madly to an orchestra playing Strauss waltzes.

“What the hell. You only live once, heh?” she cried as the waiter brought them menus. It was a splendid evening. They danced. They laughed.

Just like an ordinary couple.

Both were plenty tipsy when the taxi dropped them home. Paula made coffee and they sat up babbling about their childhoods. As the crow flies, they calculated, Willi having spread a big city map on the table, they’d grown up only a few kilometers
apart. Yet it might as well have been on different planets. Neither landscape occupied by the other seemed the least familiar. Willi could not believe that she had never once been to Berlin’s greatest park, the Tiergarten.

“It’s an outrage,” he said. “You’re culturally deprived. Tomorrow,” he commanded, folding the map back up. “We go.”

As they readied for bed, she disappeared again into the bathroom, and when she came out, she was like a soft, clinging, needy kitten. She sat on his lap and put her arms around his neck, running the lace-gloved hands through his hair. Out of the blue she wanted to talk about Gina.

“Tell me the truth.” She cuddled him purposefully. “I need to know, Willi. What happened to her, really? How did they kill her?”

His defenses were down. He felt so close to her. He made her sit opposite him.

“It’s ugly, Paula. You sure you want to know?”

“I need to, Willi. Don’t ask me why.”

He told her everything.

“Experimented on? Oh, that can’t be true! Willi, it just can’t be! No one could be so cruel.”

In dark, mournful tones she slowly confessed that she and Gina had been more than just roommates. Much more. And that all this time she’d burned with guilt because she hadn’t kept Gina away from Gustave, who everyone knew was a swine and surrounded himself with worse. She looked at Willi full of fear, expecting him to strike her or toss her in the gutter. Or kick her face in. But instead he took her in his arms, embracing her like a lost child, a precious unearthed treasure.

They made love like newlyweds. At one with the universe. With each other.

“Willi, don’t deny me,” she panted desperately. “I need you so terribly. I need you
to.
Do you understand? Not just with your hand this time, but your belt. Hard!

“Don’t be a coward. Oh, God, please don’t. . . . Don’t think you’re hurting me. . . .

“Ahhh . . . yes.

“That’s it, Willi, harder! Don’t think you’re—

“Ahhh. Yes. Yes.

“Harder, Willi.

“Harder!”

Monday morning was foggy. Gray. Paula stayed in bed. It was Christmas Eve. She was going to visit her mother. Did Willi want to join? The food wasn’t going to be much. Not like Haus Vaterland. But . . .