Midnight in Berlin (18 page)

“Do you believe in God?”

I’d have stared out the window, but it had gotten dark and there was nothing to see out there anyhow. “No.”

“Why not?”

“Shit, you want a list? Start with the Holocaust and work down from there.”

He stretched out, all long and lean beside me. I was on his right, so all I could see was the good-looking side. He looked damn good, but suddenly I wanted to see the other side of him, the side that looked like a bomb had hit it. I shifted restlessly, and maybe he read my mind again as he turned on his side to look at me full-on.

It was weirdly steadying. “Remember that brother I told you about? Ben was five years older than me. He was a great guy—taught me how to ride a bike and pitch a ball, all kinds of shit like that.” He’d been more like a dad to me than a brother, what with Dad being so busy at the hospital all the time. “When a bunch of losers in high school started beating on me for being a fag, he went to all of their houses and gave them a talk about tolerance and understanding and how he’d beat the crap out of each and every one of them if they ever did it again.” My mouth twisted. “When he went away to Yale, I cried myself to sleep that night.”

“How did he die?”

Fuck, I couldn’t get comfortable. “Did they put rocks in this goddamn mattress?” I muttered, turning on my stomach. I felt way too vulnerable like that, so I sat up instead. “Meningitis. He woke up with a headache the day after he graduated, but hell, he’d been celebrating. Even he thought it was just a hangover.” I ran a hand through my hair, the curls trying to trap my fingers.

“He was too late getting treatment,” Christoph said softly. It wasn’t a question. Hell, it didn’t need to be.

I shrugged, but it was kind of jerky. “You asked why I don’t believe in God. If shit like that can happen to a guy like Ben—what the hell is the fucking point?”

He kissed me.

On the shoulder, but shit, it was still a kiss.

I felt like I’d been running up an escalator that had broken down, and it had suddenly started up again—in the wrong direction. Like I’d gotten on a plane to France and ended up in China. “I don’t love you,” I blurted out. Maybe if I said it out loud, it’d be true, and I wouldn’t have to deal with that loss again.

“I know,” Christoph said softly, and the hollow space I’d just dug inside me got a little bigger, the pain a little sharper. “It’s all right. I don’t expect anything from you.”

And that was just it, wasn’t it? The story of my whole useless life. I’d spent it making damn sure no one would ever expect anything from me. Funny how they all still ended up disappointed anyhow. “I’ll come with you tomorrow, okay?” I said it fast, before my better judgment could wake up and smell the cyanide. “But it doesn’t mean anything. I just—it’s just crazy, you going after the whole damn lot of them by yourself. It’s suicide. So I’ll come with you—but that’s it. After that, it’s over.”

He didn’t tell me I didn’t have to go. He didn’t even ask me if I was sure about it. He just pulled me back down and slipped his arms around me, kissing me again on the shoulder.

After a while, unbelievably, we slept.

We were woken up late the next morning by some asshole banging on the door and shouting the place down. I staggered out of bed to open the door just as one of the Turkish ladies came up the stairs to see what the racket was about. She took one look at me, threw up her hands and stomped off, muttering. Shit. I guess I should have remembered to put some pants on first. I glared at Jon, who’d woken me up and hadn’t even had the decency to shield my junk from her horrified view.

“Leon.” Jon looked like crap. Sunken eyes really didn’t go with the whole surfer-dude look. I grabbed his arm and pulled him inside the room.

“Jon, I—wait a moment while I get some clothes on, okay?” I hunted around on the floor for my jeans but gave up on the shirt, pulling a fresh—well, fresh-ish—one from my backpack.

Christoph was way ahead of me there, sitting on the edge of the bed half-dressed already. I wasn’t sure if I was glad or sorry the whole question of how to behave to the guy the morning after had been taken out of my hands.

“I want to be like you,” Jon said.

“What?” I stared at him, my fingers faltering on the buttons. “Like me, how?” If he’d suddenly decided to embrace his inner Judy Garland, he must be more screwed up over Silke than I’d thought.

Jon made an angry gesture, or tried to. It’d have worked better if his hand hadn’t been so shaky. “The wolf thing. I want that too. I want to be with Silke. You have to do this for me.”

“Hold on a minute. I told you, Silke’s not like us. She’s…” A proper wolf. “When she changes, she turns into a wolf. Just like the real thing. I mean, we saw wolves at the zoo, and they looked just like her.”

“You left her in the zoo?” His eyes wild, Jon lunged at me, hands outstretched, but I dodged him easy. I stood wary for a moment, but he just sank down on the bed with his head in his hands. “You fucking asshole.”

“Jeez, will you listen to me for a minute? We left her with some werewolves, okay? They run the security at the zoo. Not with the actual wolves,” I added to make it crystal clear even to a guy running on empty as much as Jon obviously was. “Christoph figured she’d be better off with her own kind.”

Jon spun around to turn the daggers in his eyes on Christoph. I could have kicked myself.
Nice going, Leon. Way to drop your boyfriend in the shit.

Except he wasn’t my boyfriend, was he? I’d made it pretty damn clear to him that wasn’t what I wanted. God, I was so fucked up.

Christoph didn’t look too fazed about Jon giving him a hard time. I guess he’d probably just see it as a warm-up for the main event. Which, by the way, I’d managed to forget about for the last five minutes. Heaviness hit my chest like a love tap from a wrecking ball, and my legs turned to Jell-O. I sat down on the bed across from Jon before I fell down. Shit. Did I really agree to go with Christoph on his suicide mission last night?

“Jon.” Christoph’s voice made us both look up from our own private pits of despair. “We can’t give you what you’re after. You need to go to the zoo. Speak to anyone in a security uniform. They’ll know what you’re talking about.”

“Hey, hold on, there!” I stood, not liking this one bit. “You’re just telling him to go off and get himself bitten? Don’t you think he ought to consider this some more first?” I wheeled around to Jon. “You’ve only just met the girl! You really think she’s worth throwing your life away for?”

“He won’t be throwing away his life—” Christoph started.

“Butt out!” I sat down on the bed next to Jon and put my arm around him. I couldn’t swear to it, but the temperature of Christoph’s side of the room seemed to drop a couple degrees. It was kind of satisfying in more ways than one. “You’ve got a whole future waiting for you back in the States,” I said. “Are you sure you want to throw that away?”

“Dude, I love her,” Jon said helplessly. “I know we only just met, but it’s like we had a connection, you know? I can’t leave her. Even if she’s a wolf, I can’t leave her. You’re telling me you’ve never loved anyone so much you’d give up everything for them?”

“Never,” I said. I had to clear my throat. With all the lies I told, you’d have thought they’d have gotten a little easier by now.

Jon tried to smile. It mostly just looked sad. “Maybe you will one day. I hope you will.” He got up. “Maybe I’ll see you around, hey?”

Maybe he would. I wasn’t counting on it, though. Suddenly I didn’t want him to go. “Jon—” My throat was clogged up with something, so I coughed to clear it. “Jon.” Shit. What the hell was I going to say to him? “You take care, okay?”

“Hey, man, you too.” He smiled again and clapped me on the shoulder.

Then he was gone.

Silence fell like a shroud on the room. I couldn’t look at Christoph. If I looked at him, he’d know what I was thinking. Know I was scared shitless of what I’d promised last night. If he knew that, he’d offer me an out. Tell me he wouldn’t hold me to it. Because Christoph was an honorable man—and me? I was just a cheap bullshitting coward. If he offered me a chance to save myself, I’d take it. I knew I would.

“Leon—”

I didn’t give him the chance to go on. I couldn’t. “We should get some breakfast. Before we go see Schreiber. Don’t want to fight on an empty stomach.” I still didn’t look at him. “Wanna eat out? I think I may have worn out our welcome here.”

“Leon…” I looked up, and Christoph fell silent. Shook his head. Then he nodded, like he’d just had a whole conversation with himself. “Where would you like to eat?”

Call me weird, but I’d never given a whole lot of thought to what I might want my last meal on this earth to be. I guess if you’d have asked me before all this shit happened, just as a hypothetical question, I’d have said something like lobster or caviar or some other rich crap. Now, though, there was just one thing I was craving. “McDonalds.”

Christoph laughed. I grinned back at him. “What? You’re dissing my country’s national cuisine?”

“Did I say anything? Fine. We’ll go to McDonalds. I’ll buy you a Happy Meal.”

“If it doesn’t come with a toy, I’m not eating it,” I warned him.

“Health-wise, that may be the better option…”

“Hey! I said no dissing the great American hamburger!”

“American? I have friends from Hamburg who may want to dispute that with you—”

“Bring ’em on, pal, bring ’em on!”

We were joking around, sure—but there was a brittle edge to it that ratcheted up the tension rather than relieving it. Any minute now I was going to break and do something stupid, like telling Christoph I’d been lying when I said I didn’t love him and could we please, for fuck’s sake, not go and get ourselves killed now? It was probably just as well there was a knock on the door at that point. I wrenched it open to find Burak on the other side.

He wasn’t smiling. I had a pretty good idea why. Flashing your host’s grandma: never a good move. Not if you want to be invited back anytime in the next millennium. I figured it’d be better all around if I got in there first. “Hey, Burak. Jon was just here—did you see him? Listen, thanks for the hospitality. We’ll be moving out now. Maybe we’ll see you again sometime? Look me up anytime you’re in—shit, I don’t have a clue where I’ll be, but you’ll be welcome anytime. It’s been great.” I looked around and finally spotted yesterday’s shirt, crumpled up under the sink. I shoved it into my backpack, checked I had my shaving kit in there and slung the pack on my shoulder. Christoph followed my lead, jamming his feet into his sneakers.

Burak’s expression eased like I’d just saved him from a fate worse than death. I guess I hadn’t been wrong about him coming up to tell us to get lost. “You’ll be okay? You have somewhere to go?”

Christoph smiled. It looked kinda grim to me, but Burak didn’t seem to notice—or maybe he was just being careful not to. “We’re going back to my house near the Wannsee.”

“Ah! You have a house?” Burak looked confused, but I guess he was just too well brought up to ask what the hell we’d been doing darkening
his
doorstep in that case. “Good, good. I hope you have a pleasant journey.” He didn’t tell us to come back soon, just dug in his pocket for the keys to Christoph’s Porsche and gave us some quick directions to the parking lot. I just hoped most of it would still be there.

We didn’t head down there to check straight off—breakfast was calling. I remembered there was a McDonalds in the Wrangelstrasse, not far from the Imbiss we’d eaten at with Silke and Jon, so we wandered on down there. “You know there was an outcry when they built this place?” Christoph said as we walked in, the glaring red-and-yellow color scheme like balm to my tacky little soul. For once it didn’t bother me that the place was full of people. It was a McDonalds. It was
supposed
to smell like food.

I looked around. “Seems pretty popular now. What the hell was their problem?”

“Do you want me to tell you, or do you want to eat?” Christoph sounded amused. I didn’t get the joke.

“We’ll eat,” I said. I ordered two Sausage McMuffins—and when the guy handed them over, I seriously considered asking for the same again. Had the portions gotten smaller or something? Christoph went for a couple of McRibs. If we didn’t start catching our own food again soon, this wolf business was going to get expensive.

Not that it was likely to be a problem for either of us after today. Shit. I bit into my first muffin savagely, letting the familiar flavors of meat, ketchup and grease calm my stomach. Damn, it had been a while.

“Bring back memories?” Christoph asked, his mouth half full but still managing to look superior.

I just smiled. “First boy I ever fooled around with, it was out the back of one of these places. Daryl. He was nineteen, working his way through college flipping burgers. I was fifteen, and I thought he was the best-looking guy I’d ever seen.”

“How long were you together?”

“Around a week and a half.” I laughed. “Took him that long to find out I was underage—he flipped out when he heard. Dumped me for a guy who was old enough to drive.” I mopped up a little ketchup with the edge of my muffin. “How about you? First time, I mean?”

Christoph shrugged. “A boy from school. We were the same age—it was all very innocent. We used to sit at the back of the class and hold hands under our desks.”

I got a mental picture of a teenage Christoph, all high cheekbones and serious looks, sitting at his desk and pretending to study while his mind ran on other lines entirely. Or maybe it didn’t; if any guy could convince me he’d felt chaste, romantic love for another guy, it was Christoph. “How did it end?”

“He decided girls were more socially acceptable.”

“That sucks. So how about the first time you—you know.”

“Fucked?” Christoph wasn’t laughing at me but only because he was making an effort. “A couple of years after that. It’s not a great story.”

“So tell me anyhow.”

Christoph sighed. “He was older than I was. A lot older. I didn’t enjoy it much.”

“Okay, so tell me the first time you fell in love.”

“You first.”