For the past forty years Hollywood had scorchingly portrayed every German as a Nazi. Most young Germans were no different than Americans, wanting the war to be over for good. 'Germany' to Sean conjured up the Black Forest, Mad Ludwig's castles, the Rhine, beer, knockwurst, koo-koo clocks, lederhosen, Goethe, Bach, Beethoven, Schiller, Mann, Hesse, Wagner, Marlene Dietrich, LILI MARLENE, Rommel, the Wehrmacht at Stalingrad, Ilsa of the SS, and inescapably Hitler. Not once in his life had he ever thought about visiting this city. Even after seeing AN AMERICAN FRIEND.
He left his motorcycle on East 11th Street and Avenue D. A dangerous block. Uncle Carmine owned a lot there. It was safe. The Sicilian plumber had once been a merchant marine. He smiled upon hearing Sean’s plan.
“Hamburg, I went there a few times in the Sixties.”
“You see the Beatles there.?”
“No, I only had time to visit the whores and they were plenty of those and pimps. A nasty town. Be careful. It was safe, but some parts were as bad as the East Village. Who you have staying at your place?”
“A young Swedish weightlifter.”
“Swedes are good subleasees. Clean. Pay on time. Any problems call me.” He knew all about his problems with the 9th Precinct.
“If anyone asks about me, tell them I’m in Hamburg.”
“Better I say nothing.” Like most Sicilians honored the traditions of omertà or holding his sand. Sean went back to his apartment and packed a bag, then dressed in a black shirt, suede shoes, and an midnight blue English suit. His mother had bought it for his college graduation. Sine laude. His Swedish subleasee sat in the chair by the window. He wished he was him. Before leaving for JFK the young man asked Sean, "Didn't the Beatles play there?”
“Yes."
Everyone knew that.
Sean took a taxi to JFK. No one asked him anything at Immigration or Customs. He was dressed as a good citizen. His bag only had clothing and a journal. It told everything and more. The trans-Atlantic flight was on schedule and took off on time and for the first time in weeks he fell asleep with all his cares in the world behind him.
A little after dawn the Lufthansa flight from Frankfort slipped beneath the European overcast and landed at his destination on time. All the travel books mentioned the Star Club and proclaimed Hamburg as a vibrant port city. Now he was there.
As the 747 taxied through the morning mist Sean had asked himself,, ”What am I doing in Germany?"
Going back to New York was not an option, yet Sean remained in his seat, as the other passengers deboarded the plane. The flight crew motioned for him to leave and Sean walked off the 747 into the nearly empty terminal. After retrieving his one bag, he approached customs and immigration.
"Passport, bitte." The officer regarded his papers and stamped a six-month visa in his passport. He passed through the arrival doors. Unknown faces greeted Sean. No Kurt or Bertram. He was exactly where and when he should be. He went to a phone booth and he dialed Kurt’s number. There was no answer.
The other passengers and their families vacated the terminal. A pale-faced police officer in a green uniform passed Sean. Loitering in an airport terminal wasn’t a crime be a crime and he was too tired to worry about setting a bad example. He sat on a bench. The struggle to keep his eyes open lasted only a few seconds.
Thirty minutes later a herd of businessmen in pinstriped suits hurried into the terminal. Sean snapped awake. His bag was at his feet, attesting to Germans’ honesty, if nothing else.
A young policeman walked past him and a paranoia-driven delusion that the long arm of the NYPD had alerted Interpol to his arrival seized him. He sat upright, as the uniformed officer addressed him in German, then politely asked in English, "Are you lost?"
Sean lifted a piece of paper.
“No, my friends were supposed to meet me. I didn’t know how to call them.”
"Maybe I can help." The officer looked at the paper and dialed the number.
After thirty seconds he hung up and pressed 'O' and then spoke German too rapidly for Sean. He wrote down an address and said, "Your friends live on Kaiserringstrasse. Maybe twenty minutes by taxi. It should cost forty marks."
"Viele Danke." Sean’s dealings with New York cops had ill-prepared such cooperation or the German policeman wishing his good-bye. “Have a good stay in Hamburg.”
Outside the terminal he walked to a waiting taxi. A rap on the Mercedes’ window, woke the scruffy driver. The back door's lock popped up and Sean sat in the rear. The car smelled of the driver’s hours behind the wheel. Some things remained the same from city to city. He cracked the window and handed the address to the driver, who grunted and drove away from the airport.
The road was smooth and the streets were inordinately clean. The houses were orderly and their lawns were well-manicured. The passing suburbs could have passed for any affluent city in the western world, except the billboards were in German. Sean read a few, but soon gave into exhaustion and didn't open his eyes, until the taxi stopped before a high brick wall on a tree-shaded street.
"Ein Kaiserringstrasse," The driver pointed to a faded blue door and told his passenger, "Vierzig mark, bitte."
The Mercedes abandoned him to the quiet street. A cool mist veiled the white sun and sea salt was in the air. The house was close to the Elbe River. There was no buzzer.Sean pushed the door open with his foot and entered a neglected garden.
Tall weeds choked the yard. Creeping ivy strangled twisted oaks. A dirt path led through the wasteland to a Gothic mansion. Cracks crawled up the masonry, paint flaked off the wall in sheets, and the roof missed many shingles.
Only the BMW and Porsche in the driveway suggested any inhabitants and Sean climbed the crumbling limestone steps, expecting the timeworn building to dissolve into thin air, as a raspy breeze curled through the reeds by an algae-choked pond surrounded by statues of headless nymphs. Sean shivered and called out, "Bertram. Kurt."
The names died without any echo from the garden.
The front door was ajar and the musty air from within the house was tainted by the sting of fresh paint. He called out again and stepped inside, his footsteps creaking across the warped floorboards. Heavy curtains blocked the light from the first room and Sean groped for a light switch against the wall. His fingers tapped a greasy button and electricity blazed from a chandelier precariously fastened to the buckled ceiling.
A clutter of paint tubes and cans in the former dining room surrounded an easel. Empty champagne bottles stood in the far corner. Color-smeared rags partially carpeted the floor. In the midst of the chaos a painting of a nude brunette with a pageboy haircut viewed through broken glass rested on an once-elegant chair.
"Anyone here?" Sean's voice quickly drowned in the neglect, as he admired the voyeuristic skill with which the artist had captured the shattered woman’s wantonness. Sean dropped his bag on the floor. He had slept in worst places, except a savage growl vibrated through the house to be succeeded by a woman's guttural cries. Sean picked up an empty champagne bottle, then charged up the crooked stairs down the gloomy second-floor hallway to where the woman gasped, "Nein, nein, nein. Nicht wie das."
Sean peered into the room. Sputtering candles lit the near-naked brunette from the painting. A pale-skinned man was on his knees and she was far from helpless.
Thigh-high black patent leather boots with stiletto heels rose above her knees. A studded dog collar encircled her neck. The cuirass of steel chains draped across her chest partially hid her pointed breasts. Metal rings tightly encircled their tips, so her blunt nipples were achingly erect. A belt was looped in her right hand. On most women the entire ensemble was a folly, but the brunette pulled her attire, as if it were her second skin.
A spider web of thin scars latticed her torso. None had been accidental. Her heavily made-up eyes and lips coated with a shiny black lacquer failed to disguise her facial features had been catastrophically warped like the tectonic plates of the Earth. Neither her deformities nor the man with stringy whitish-blonde hair crawling at her feet detracted from the illusion of her simultaneously being an angel and whore, although Sean cringed, as the belt repeatedly cracked against the man’s flesh.
Her victim sagged forward, as he tensed for the next blow. The leather fell again and again, ripping mercilessly into the flesh. The man grabbed onto the iron bedstead. She knocked away his hands and he flopped onto the floor. Her talon-tipped fingers wrapped around the man's hair, as she said, "Ja, nichts, du bist nichts, mein Mistvieh."
When the brunette turned her head, Sean nearly kneeled to join the slavish worship. A sheen of sweat on her skin shone in the candlelight, as the cold amber eyes examined the stranger without any alarm before she brunette reached down to strangle the man. His panting was strained, yet his red face glowed with anticipated pleasure. A video camera in the corner recorded the entire erotic asphyxiation. The images played on a TV screen. Sean was embarrassed by his arousal of their elaborate ritual and backed away from the doorway.
On his way down the stairs their struggle seemed to intensify.
Back in the painting studio he lay on the carpet and stuck wet paper wads in his ears to block out the noise. His eyes were shut, but the images of this woman unfolded in his mind like crumpled photos of pin-up girls from the ancient Playboy magazines, the creases forming the same tangle of scars across her skin.
Upstairs Petra doubled the thick belt in her hand. A whip was more effective, except Lukas' back had not recovered from the severe lacerations of their previous appointment. Only Petra Wessel had the proper motive to exact the proper penance from his flesh.
"Koter." Petra pushed off Lukas like a dog in heat.
"Ich bin Ein Koter." He declared himself a cur and assumed a crouching position with outstretched arms. "Schlag mir. Bitte."
Petra had long ago perceived someone being 'top' to another's 'bottom' hardly demarcated who was master and who was slave. She showed no mercy for Lukas. The belt smacked explosively on his back. The pain reverberated through his trembling limbs. At number ten Petra halted for several seconds. His old wounds had re-opened and the blood trickled down his back to form a red delta at the base of his spine. Lukas watched the red drops drip from his chest to the stone floor and Petra dug her spike heel into his calf mercilessly. "Willst du mehr?" Lukas nodded. His breathing paced ragged at twenty, his skin gleamed with blood and sweat at thirty, his hands shook at forty, then at fifty he cried out with pleasure, as the release of endomorphins pulsated from his back like a priceless morphine shot and he murmured the safety word.
Petra stopped and panted from exertion. Her thighs were flecked with blood. She lowered the belt to her side and sat on the chair, sticking her boots underneath his head. He licked them clean, as his tongue departed from the glossy leather to that first raised ridge of scar tissue slightly above her knee.
Petra directed his attention to whatever he had missed with a riding crop, telling Lukas that he was a good dog, which signaled this session’s end. Lukas got to his feet, as if he had snapped out of a trance and asked, “You ever wonder why?”
“Why what?” Petra unfastened her outfit like a gladiator weary from combat.
"Why the pain?" Lukas wiped away the blood with a towel without exhibiting any discomfort from his new wounds, as if to prove invulnerability.
“I’m no psychologist.” Petra never asked any ‘freier’ questions, but the customers always wanted to confess their motives and Lukas was no different. “I’ve tried everything; cocaine, heroin, homosexuality, orgies in search of the ultimate sensation, but only pain makes me feel alive. I thought you of all people would understand that epiphany.”
Before Petra had luckily passed out from her beating, each blow from her assailants had dragged her through an intense agony, She touched her left eye instinctively, recalling the horror of it popping out. She hated Lukas speaking, as if these meetings bestowed upon him an insight into true suffering, because she possessed a realistic grasp of the truth and countered, "Doesn’t your wife make you happy?"
"Marrying her was a mistake." Lukas stroked the lacerations on his back, as if they were a work of art. "One I am stuck with at the moment. Your friend, Kurt, is very much in love with my wife, but if she went with him, then I will be free to marry you."
"You would marry me?" While men had offered to rescue her from a life of sin, none had proposed marriage. An elopement with Petra would scandalize all of Hamburg, but Lukas was a big a fool as any ‘trick’, if he believed her salvation could be achieved through a sacrament.
"If Vanessa was out of the way, I will." Lukas had gained nothing from Vanessa other than having a wife other men wanted. He put on his shirt, the silk blotting with splotches of red. Petra will never take him seriously, until his wife was out of the way. “You know we are made for one another.”
"Do not say that." She threw Lukas his clothes. "I have to attend to my guest."
"Ah, yes, your guest.” Lukas pulled on his trousers and slipped on his shoes. “Who is he?”
"Kurt hired him to work at the nightclub." Petra stuck with Kurt’s cover story.
"Another American in Hamburg," Lukas stated in reference to Wim Wenders' AMERICAN FRIEND.
Petra regarded movies as a pale reflection of life and hoped, Lukas would leave without launching into a discourse about his beloved cinema. “Yes, they come and go."
As he crossed his tie, Lukas smiled inwardly, since the American might be involved in Kurt and Cali’s plans and he asked, "What about tomorrow?"
"You’re paying the rent here. You can come and go as you pleased as long as you pay for my time too." Petra was amazed at his capacity for pain as well as his paying an exorbitant price for one session. His obsession for pain did not prevent her from keeping a gun at her bedside, because Lukas was rumored to have killed two men in Morocco during the 1970s. He was not to be trusted, then again no man was.
Lukas lay an envelope containing 5000 DMs on a table, as if it were a down payment on her soul and left the room without another word. Once certain he had left the house, Petra went downstairs to the studio. The American was sleeping on the floor. She pulled open a curtain and nudged him with her naked foot.
Sean sat up and opened his eyes.
The brunette’s electric-blue silk nightgown barely softened her nail-tough exterior. Without her high heels she was his height. Heavy gold bracelets, earrings, and chains on her wrists, neck, waist, and ears indicated a distrust of banks. She examined him with narrowed eyes and said, "Kurt told me you could pass for a young Orson Welles playing a cop."
"That's the Irish in me." Sean stood up and brushed the sticky rags from his jeans.
"Coll isn’t an Irish name." Her left eye was icier than the right and Sean noticed its movement was out of synch with the right. In fact the color didn’t match the other and he suspected it was fake. "No, my grandfather used an alias to cross the border into America. Somehow it stuck. I'm sorry about the intrusion.”
"Herr Coll, I heard you on the steps." She folded her arms, pushing her breasts together, then smiled mockingly to infuriate Sean, who said, "You could have locked the door."
"And spoil the mood?" The woman walked out of the room. "Come with me, I will show you where to sleep."
Sean trailed her to the neighboring room. The windows gave a view of a fog-shrouded tanker on the river. She pointed to the small bed in the corner.
"You can sleep there."
"What about Bertram and Kurt? They were supposed to meet me at the airport."
"It was a late night at the club and you managed to get here on your own."
She leaned against the door, her legs apart, so the silk lay against her pelvis. He hadn’t slept with a woman since Lisa six months ago. Her stance warned he should save his offer for a more accommodating woman.
“Guess they were right. What is your name?"
"My name?" The silk robe slipped from her left shoulder, revealing a rounded breast, its nipple swollen. The shiny blue material further separated to show her soft belly bisected by a gold chain. Her left hand closed the robe and said, "Petra Wessel."
"Wessel? Like Horst Wessel?" Sean referred to the old Nazi martyr from the 1930s.
"So you are up on your history.” Maybe if the Nazis had won, she might have been royalty, but those ghosts are better left dead and buried. “Maybe we can have a test someday."
She stepped away from the door, leaving behind the musky smell of another man on her skin. Her footsteps climbed the stairs and a door slammed shut. It was a foreign city, a haunting house, a strange way to wake up, and this woman. For today his problems had been left in New York. Sean took off his boots and lay on the bed. Sleep was hardly what he experienced next, but no dreams of H-bombs invaded his dreams and he was happy.
Least for now. SIX The Peugeot 405 labored up the hills to Joux Plateau through the villages above Lac Leman and the summer wind combed through golden hay. Cows grazed in the pastures, their tails swinging lazily, while farmers tended to their chores. Tourists loved the bucolic scenery, but this was not a joyride for the gray man behind the wheel.
