The Love Machine (59 page)

They checked into the Four Seasons hotel. The suite was Old World in its charm and furnishings. Oriental-type rugs, thick comforters on the bed. Sergio went right to the phone and began to call all the Boesches listed in the directory. Robin ordered a bottle of vodka and sat at the window, sipping his drink and watching the darkness fall on the city. People were waiting for buses. Mothers were dragging children down the street as the stores began to close. The Alster River looked serene and dark. So this was the enemy he had bombed. The city the British had bombed. It looked like any city in America. He half listened to Sergio’s faultless German as he made call after call. On the eighth call, Sergio called to him excitedly. He was writing a number, an address.

“We have luck,” he said as he hung up. “These Boesches said they are distant cousins of a Herta. We can see them tomorrow.”

“Keep trying,” Robin said. “There might be more than one Herta.”

At the end of an hour they had located five Herta Boesches who had gone to America. One was still living in Milwaukee—that ruled her out. The others had not been heard from.

Sergio looked crestfallen. “I have not been a success and it seemed like such a good plan. I am most sorry, Robin.”

“Sorry! Are you going just to sit there and cry in your beer? At least show me Hamburg. Is there any night life in this town?”

Sergio laughed aloud. “Robin—no town in the world has the kind of night life Hamburg has.”

“You’ve got to be kidding! Better than Paris?”

“Paris! They are prudes. Their clubs are for tourists. Come, I will show you night life. But we will take no more than one hundred dollars with us, and get it changed into small bills at the desk. Where I am going to take you, it is most easy to be robbed.”

They took a cab and Sergio directed the driver to a given point then they got out and walked. “This is the St. Pauli district,” Sergio explained.

They walked down the brightly lit street. “This is the Reeperbahn.” It was more brightly lighted than Broadway. A skyscraper
stood next to a bar called Wimpy’s. Across the street was a bowling alley. But what struck Robin most was the people. Masses of people, all walking in a leisurely way. It reminded him of a shopping crowd on Fifth Avenue before Christmas, without the frantic pace. These people were strolling aimlessly. Robin and Sergio walked on silently passing a conglomeration of stores-auction houses, furniture shops—the entire street was a maze of neon lights. Men with goods, hawking like American auctioneers and everywhere the smell of sausage. On impulse Robin stopped at a stand. “Two
Weisswurst
, please.”

Sergio stared at it. “What is it, Robin? It looks like a white hot dog.”

Robin bit into it and speared the hot sauerkraut.
“Weisswurst
. I haven’t had it since—” He stopped, suddenly speechless. “I just saw her, Sergio! I saw a crummy little round table and a beautiful lady with black hair place a dish of this before a little boy. It was hot and good.” Robin pushed the plate away. “This is junk compared to the way she made it.”

They left the stand and walked in silence. “I saw her face,” Robin kept muttering. “I’m beginning to see everything. She was beautiful—dark with flashing black eyes, like a gypsy.”

“I am glad,” Sergio said.

“She was still a whore. But at least I remember now. God, she was beautiful. Let’s celebrate, Sergio. We’re not going to spend the whole night walking down a German midway, are we? This may be your idea of night life, but it isn’t mine.”

Sergio took his arm and led him across the street. They turned right and walked a block. “Ah, this is it,” Sergio said, “the Silber-sackstrasse.”

Robin stared as if they had suddenly entered another world. Girls accosted them openly.
“Amerikaner—Spiel?”
One of the bolder ones chased after them. “Three-way good time, all of us?”

Robin smiled and they walked on. Every few steps a girl emerged from an alley or a doorway. The proposition never varied. They made the girls who paraded down Seventh Avenue and Central Park South look like debutantes. These were rough little Fräuleins, educated to cater to the sailors with their striped shirts and eager appetites. They cut through another street and
Sergio stopped before a dark, wooden planked gate. The white painted letters read:
VERBOTEN!
Sergio opened the door. Robin followed him in silent amazement.

“This is Herbertstrasse,” Sergio whispered.

Robin couldn’t believe it. The long cobbled street was narrow and lined on both sides with solid rows of tiny two-story houses. The windows of the downstairs rooms went from floor to ceiling. And in each lighted window sat a girl. A few windows were dark. Sergio pointed to the upper room: “That means she is working.” People flowed up and down the street studying the girls. To Robin’s amazement he saw women walking there with men. He spotted a well-known movie star with dark glasses and a bandanna—the German representative from her picture company was giving her a “tour.” Robin felt as open-mouthed as the actress. He couldn’t believe anything like this still existed. The girls behind the windows seemed oblivious of the people who walked along the street. They sat in tiny bras and G-strings, sipping glasses of wine. Their hard mascaraed eyes seemed to stare past the spectators. Occasionally one girl would turn to her companion in the next window and make a comment. The other would laugh.
Laugh
? How could there be laughter in a world like this? What did these girls feel and think? How could they laugh?

“Christmas Eve is the sad night,” Sergio whispered. “They actually have little trees in the windows and they give each other gifts. Then at midnight they cry.”

“How do you know all this?”

“My sister worked here,” Sergio said quietly.

“Your sister!”

“I was born during the war. My father was killed in Tunisia. My mother did the best she could to support me and my three brothers. We were all under ten. My sister was fourteen. She began working the streets to bring us food from the Americans. Later she wound up here in the Herbertstrasse. She died last year at thirty-five. That is a long life for a girl in the Herbertstrasse. Come, I will show you where they go after they are thirty.” He led Robin into an alleyway off the main section of the Herbertstrasse. Here the windows faced a blank wall. They were relegated to fat older women in their thirties. Robin looked at a blowsy
hennaed woman with a gold tooth and muddy eyes. A beery-faced man with a red-veined nose knocked on her window. She opened it. He stood with three other men. A guttural argument ensued. Suddenly she slammed her window shut. The men shrugged and tapped the next window where a straw-haired woman sat with a kimono covering flattened breasts that hung to her waist. There was more conversation. She opened the door and the men entered. The lights went off as the group went upstairs.

“What was that all about?” Robin asked.

“It was a matter of price,” Sergio explained. “They were willing to pay the proper amount of marks for the man who would have the affair, but the others wanted to be allowed to watch for a small bit of money.”

Robin laughed. “A group plan.”

Sergio nodded. “The second one agreed, but she made them promise that if they masturbated while watching she would make them pay to clean the rug.”

They walked back to the main section of the Herbertstrasse. In one window, Robin saw a girl who reminded him of the prostitute he had beaten. She was standing wearing boots and held a whip.

“Advertising her talent,” Sergio whispered.

They returned to the Reeperbahn and wandered into a discothèque where they were quickly shown to the door. Robin had a quick glimpse of women dancing together, holding hands at the bar. Here men were
verboten
. They stopped at a café where the barker at the door promised “wonderful nudes.” Robin shrugged and Sergio followed him inside. The place was jammed with sailors and they were shown to a small table in the back. The nightclub floor was elevated and a girl had stripped down to complete nudity—no pasties or G-String. There was a scattering of applause and the girl went off. Now music began. Another girl came on—she looked about nineteen—fresh-eyed and eager in a pink chiffon dress, and her smile held the guilelessness of a girl going to her first prom. “This one probably sings,” Robin decided.

She walked around the floor grinning at all the sailors and tossing greetings to them. They shouted back good-naturedly—she was obviously a favorite. Then the music began and she started to
strip. Robin couldn’t believe it. She was attractive and fresh-she would have looked more natural as a young junior secretary at the IBC network than strutting on that floor, chatting with the sailors. Suddenly she was completely nude. She stood there and pivoted with the same cheerful grin. The bitch enjoyed her work. Then she pulled a chair to the center of the floor and sat on it and spread her legs, grinning merrily all the while. She finally left the chair and walked around the club, leaning down to each table and allowing the men to suck at her breasts. She came to their table, looked at Robin and Sergio, then laughed and shook her head. She winked at them knowingly and went on her way.

Robin threw some money on the table and started out of the room. Sergio hurried after him. They walked down the street in silence.

“That girl,” Robin said. “She couldn’t have been more than twenty. Why?
How?”

“Robin—these girls are the product of the war. They grew up struggling for food. And children like that grow up with a different set of values. To them sex is not love—sex is not even for pleasure.
It is a way to survive.”

As they walked down the street, girls accosted them every five feet. “Look, I’m packing it in,” Robin said.

“Come to one more place before we go back to the hotel.”

They entered a cabaret on Grosse Freiheit Strasse. It was elegant and subdued. And attractive people were sitting quietly at tables, conversing with one another as a muted string trio played German love songs. It was a long room dimly lighted, paneled with Austrian drapes. There were groups of men, which aroused Robin’s suspicions, until he saw several heterosexual couples, holding hands and listening to the music.

“The food is excellent here at the Maison Bleue,” Sergio said.

“You eat. I want to get loaded.”

Sergio ordered a steak which he attacked with such eagerness that Robin felt guilty—he had forgotten they had skipped dinner. Robin ordered a bottle of hundred-proof vodka to be left on the table. He sipped it straight. It felt like hot white velvet… .

The string ensemble stopped playing. A drummer joined the band, cymbals were crashed, a guttural announcement was made,
and the show began. Robin watched without too much interest. It was obviously a high-class supper club. A French
chanteuse
named Véronique came out. She was good, a true contralto. She finished to polite applause. He poured himself another shot of vodka. He narrowed his eyes to place the next girl in focus. She was blond and vapidly pretty and she was singing something from
Gypsy
. Ethel Merman didn’t have to worry. He looked up groggily as the orchestra went into a fanfare. Then the leader shouted,
“Brazillia!”
And a slim dark girl stepped into the spotlight.

Robin sat up. She was worth the fanfare. She wore a man’s evening jacket over a leotard. Her black hair was tucked into a French knot under a black slouch hat worn at a rakish angle. Slowly she began an apache dance. It was amazingly good. The girl had a solid classical ballet background. She finished in a frenzy and whipped off her hat and let her black hair cascade down to her shoulders. The applause was strong, but she did not leave. She waited until it subsided, then the music began the familiar beat. She swayed suggestively and removed her coat. Slowly she fell to her knees, then like a snake shedding its skin, she writhed her way out of the leotard, revealing a smooth white body with tiny silver bikini pants and bra.

The music went faster, the lights began to flicker; he saw the silver-and-white body leaping into the air, falling into splits. The lights dimmed. She pulled off the bra and bikini pants, the lights came up to give the audience a fleeting flash of the nude slim body and the small compact breasts. Then the lights went off, and she disappeared to loud applause. The show was over and Robin was quite drunk.

“I want to meet Brazillia,” he announced.

“We’ll go to Liesel’s down the street where they all go for breakfast. You’ll see Brazillia there.”

Robin looked at his watch. “Are you kidding? It’s three A.M. This place is about to pack in. Nothing will be open.”

“There are places in Hamburg open twenty-four hours.”

Robin paid the bill, but insisted upon sending a note to Brazillia telling her to meet them at Liesel’s. Sergio patiently wrote it in German and gave it to the waiter along with a handful of marks. The waiter returned and an exchange of German passed
between him and Sergio. “She will be there,” he told Robin. “Come—we will leave.” Robin followed obediently.

Liesel’s was obviously owned by the fat woman who greeted them and led them into a cellar with small tables and checked cloths. Sergio ordered beer. Robin’s gaze wandered as he sipped vodka. A tall good-looking man entered and sat at a table across the room. Soon a few effeminate men joined him. The tall man stared at Sergio. Robin was drunk but he was able to detect the instant radar that went up between Sergio and the man. “You’re sure this is where Brazillia comes, and not just a faggot hangout?”