Two Brothers (10 page)

‘Light me,’ she said, helping herself to one of Wolfgang’s American cigarettes that were lying beside his drink. ‘I like a Lucky. They’re toasted, you know.’

Wolfgang struck a match on the sole of his shoe and held it up for her. She touched his hands as she leant forward to place the tip of her cigarette into the flame. The light flared, highlighting her fine cheekbones and casting shadows across her temples.

‘We come here,’ Kurt said finally, ‘
if
I might be allowed to get a word in edgeways, because of the music. And more to the point, Mr Trumpet, because of you.’

‘Thanks a lot,’ Wolfgang said, draining the double shot he’d been given in one gulp. ‘Well, I’m here each night, and all paying customers are welcome.’

‘You are very hot,’ Katharina said slowly, and for a moment she fixed her heavily lidded eyes upon his, gazing unblinkingly into them through the smoke that curled up from her purple-painted lips. ‘I like trumpet players. They know how to coordinate their mouths and fingers.’

Wolfgang actually blushed at this and Kurt roared with laughter.

‘Stop flirting, you goofy Dora!’ he shouted, slapping Katharina’s bottom. ‘I’m doing business here.’

‘Really?’ Katharina replied. ‘OK, well here’s some business for you, sonny: give me fifty American dollars now or try and find another girl as beautiful as me to make you look like a man instead of the damned little schoolboy that you are. And don’t
ever
slap my ass again.’

Kurt giggled foolishly. ‘Isn’t she a scream? Too too cruel. It’s what I love. I must be a masochist.’

Then to Wolfgang’s astonishment, Kurt took out a gold money clip and counted out five US ten-dollar bills, which Katharina took without a smile or even a nod of acknowledgement. Then raising her slim coltish leg on to the foot of a bar stool, she briskly pulled the hem of her dress along her thigh and slipped the money into her garter.

Her eyes flipped up and caught Wolfgang staring.

‘I’m afraid my dress doesn’t have any pockets,’ she said.

Wolfgang gulped. He needed to get home.

‘Business?’ he said quickly, trying to pretend it had been the hard currency and not Katharina’s leg he’d been looking at. ‘What business are you doing and what’s it got to do with me?’

‘You’re the fixer in this juice joint, am I right?’ Kurt enquired. ‘You book the band, do the sheets and work out the set list?’

‘Yes, they’re all my arrangements. I do it all.’

‘Well, I
like
what you do, Daddy. I’m starting up my own club and I want you to fix for me.’

Wolfgang tried not to laugh.

‘You? Starting up a club? Forgive me, Kurt, but how old are you?’

‘I’m eighteen.’

‘He’s seventeen,’ said Katharina.

‘I’m using the Russian calendar,’ Kurt shot back, ‘out of solidarity with the murdered Romanovs.’

Wolfgang laughed. The kid certainly had charm.

‘They shouldn’t even let you
in
a club, let alone buy one,’ he said.

‘They let in anyone with dollars,’ Kurt pointed out. ‘I have a
lot
of dollars. And francs and gold sovereigns. Anything you want. Come and join me at my table. Meet my friends, we can discuss it.’

Wolfgang looked across the crowded room towards where Kurt was nodding. Kurt’s friends looked almost as young as he was.

‘Shouldn’t you all be studying for college or something?’

‘There is nothing old people can teach us. Absolutely nothing,’ Kurt said with a weary shrug, ‘except how to crawl. How to starve. How to sit about wishing that it was still 1913 until you curl up and die. We know more already than those stupid old bastards ever knew, which is why we’re drinking French champagne and listening to hot jazz while they queue for soup or march about the streets in tin helmets looking for Jews to shoot. Come on, I want you to meet my friends.’

Perhaps it was Kurt’s money that made Wolfgang linger. Perhaps it was his girlfriend. Either way he allowed himself to be led over to the table where Kurt’s ‘crowd’ was seated and where he was greeted with enthusiastic applause.

‘This is Hans,’ Kurt said, referring to an athletic-looking young man with a thin Douglas Fairbanks moustache, which Wolfgang suspected had been beefed up with mascara. ‘One year ago he failed his final Latin exam, now he deals in automobiles.’

‘Anything from a Flivver to a Roller,’ Hans boasted, slurring his words somewhat. ‘You want it, I’ll get it. Take my card. Discount for a man who plays like you.’

Wolfgang explained that he was happy with his bicycle but took the card anyway, noticing that Hans’s pupils were mere pinpricks. There was also a girl slumped on his shoulder, dead to the world.

‘This is Dorf,’ Kurt went on, ignoring the unconscious girl and indicating a bookish-looking man with horn-rimmed spectacles sitting on the other side of her. ‘He’s in currency, his father thinks he should be studying law.’

‘He wants me to be an articled clerk when I’m twenty-one,’ Dorf said primly, ‘which is rather funny actually because, without me, my old man would starve! Mother doesn’t tell him of course.’

Kurt and Hans both laughed at this, causing the girl between them to begin to slide slowly under the table. Hans put an arm across her to arrest her progress.

‘And here’s Helmut,’ Kurt said, referring to a beautiful blond youth with piercing blue eyes that matched his cobalt blue earrings. ‘He’s what you might call—’

‘A queer pimp,’ Katharina interrupted.

‘Actually I was going to say a social consultant,’ Kurt said.

‘I prefer queer pimp,’ Helmut remarked archly, at which there was more laughter, and once more Hans’s girl had to be set up straight.

‘So now you know my friends, Mr Trumpet. They’re all big fans of yours.’

Again there was applause.

‘You haven’t said what you do?’ Wolfgang asked. ‘What’s your game, Kurt?’

‘Well, as I mentioned before, amongst other things I am a club owner,’ Kurt replied.

‘Oh? Which club do you own?’

‘I haven’t decided yet. Maybe this one, or one of the others. Perhaps all of them, we shall see.’

‘So you don’t own them yet?’

‘Details. Details. I’ll get them if I want them.’

‘How will you get them, Kurt?’ Wolfgang asked, wishing he could think of a smart way to cut this cocksure youth down to size, but uncomfortably aware that Kurt would not even notice if he did.

‘Improvise, of course! Like the good little jazz kid that I am … In fact,’ Kurt went on, clearly delighted with this image, ‘that’s what I do! I’m a
jazz economist
. I improvise. You borrow notes. And so do I!
Banknotes!
Isn’t that a scream?’

‘But where do you borrow them from?’

‘The same place you get yours! Thin air! I borrow what I need on the security of the thing I’m buying and pay off the loan next week when it’s worth a thousand times less. Anyone could do it.’

‘Why don’t they, then?’

‘Why don’t you?’

Wolfgang knew Kurt was right. He
could
do it. He could buy anything he wanted. Anything at all. He just had to have the guts. The sheer chutzpah to borrow enough to do it. It didn’t really even take guts, because with money depreciating so quickly debt was just an illusion.

Anyone
could
do it.

But it was only people like Kurt who actually
did
.

And the big boys of course. The industrialists who were manipulating the same situation as Kurt, except they were buying whole industries while Kurt bought only champagne and drugs.

And in the meantime everybody else was trying to work out where their next meal was coming from.

Which reminded Wolfgang he needed to get home so Frieda could go to the markets. The wages in his pocket were depreciating at the same speed as Kurt’s debt. By simply standing right there, he was getting poorer while Kurt got richer.

‘I’ll tell you what,’ Wolfgang said, draining his glass and putting it on the table, ‘you buy your club and make me an offer. If it’s a good one, then I’ll be your fixer. Meantime I really do think I should be getting home.’

Katharina was standing beside him at the table and he had felt her hand brush against his more than once. He was pretty sure that she knew it too. Hands didn’t brush against each other more than once by accident.

Which was rather exciting.

And also why he needed to get home.

Wolfgang had never been short of female admirers, girls made eyes at him all the time. He was good-looking and, more importantly, he was a jazz man and the jazz babies loved nothing better, particularly trumpet players.

Usually Wolfgang was entirely resistant. Immune to the coquettish glances of over-excited flappers on the dance floor. He was happy to look at their shaking, shimmying bottoms and swinging breasts bouncing in front of his little stage in their next-to-nothing dresses, but he was not tempted to touch. Katharina, however, was different. She had truly caught his eye, and that was dangerous, because he seemed to have caught hers.

‘I’ll be playing here tomorrow night,’ Wolfgang said to Kurt matter-of-factly, ‘you can speak to me then.’

‘If you’re playing here tomorrow night,’ Kurt said, ‘then I’ll already be your boss. So I certainly will speak to you.’

This splendid piece of bravado elicited further cheers and much table thumping from Kurt’s friends, the vibrations of which caused the unconscious girl to finally slide fully under the table.

Wolfgang shook Kurt’s hand and nodded briefly at Katharina. Her face remained as cool and impassive as ever as she nodded back, a brief, dismissive farewell.

And then, as if on impulse, she leant forward and kissed him on the mouth. For one brief moment her lips were alive against his, he felt the waxy quality of her lipstick and smelt the perfume in her hair. Then, just as abruptly, she stepped back, her face a mask once more.

‘You see!’ Kurt shouted. ‘Told you she was flirting. You’re honoured – she never kisses
me
goodbye.’

‘You don’t play trumpet,’ Katharina said, smiling properly for the first time.

‘Yes, well,’ Wolfgang said, trying to regain his composure. ‘Like I say, got to go. Wife and kids at home and all that.’

He said this last sentence for Katharina’s benefit. He didn’t normally talk about his domestic status at work. Too humdrum. Not very jazz.

Which was why he said it now. He wanted to make Katharina aware at once, because she had disturbed him, and in his experience nothing dampened a jazz baby’s libido quicker than mention of the wife and kids.

‘Give Frau Trumpet our love,’ Kurt said.

‘Yes, yes I will.’

He needed to get home.

Funny Money

Berlin, 1923

THE CRUCIAL THING was to move fast. When a kilo of carrots could leap in price fifty-thousand-fold in the space of a day, a young couple with children to feed were wise not to leave their shopping until the afternoon.

Wolfgang was fortunate in that being a musician he finished work only an hour or two before the commercial day began. He would grab his pay from the manager, in bundles of freshly printed notes, some still damp having been produced only hours earlier on one of the twelve printing presses that the Reichsbank kept running twenty-four hours a day. Then he’d rush out of the back door of whatever club he had been playing at, lash his trumpet and his violin to the rack of his bicycle and pedal off in a fever of anxiety lest the inflation render his wages worthless before he had the chance to spend them.

In February he had two or three hundred thousand marks stuffed into his pockets in five-and ten-thousand-mark notes. By the summer he had begun carrying his instruments on his back and his wages strapped to his bicycle rack in a bulging suitcase.

Knowing that the drinks he had had with Kurt and Katharina had made him late, Wolfgang laboured mightily at the pedals of his bicycle. His teeth rattled as he forced the ungeared old bone-shaker across the cobbles and uneven flagstones of Berlin’s nineteenth-century back streets, his mouth clamped firmly shut for fear that he would bite his tongue as he bounced along.

He chained his bike up by the communal bins in the internal well of their apartment block, rushed in through the front entrance and summoned the lift. For some reason, wherever Wolfgang was in the building, be it at the top or the bottom, the lift was always at the opposite end of the shaft. Usually he stood cursing quietly at this purest example of sod’s law, but on this occasion he had cause to be thankful, for as he waited on the ground floor, listening to the lift’s laborious, clanking descent, his mind returned to his recent encounter and in particular of course to Katharina and her goodbye kiss.

He remembered her hand drawing his face towards hers. The lazy eyes behind the cigarette smoke. Her mouth momentarily alive.