Crazy in Berlin Read Online Free PDF

Have I told you I once have played the piano in a splendid club where the tables were connected each to each in a system of tubes from which the air is exhausted—what do you say for them?—vacuum, so, vacuum tubes, through which the people in this place could communicate on little pieces of paper—this was the same place where Emil Jannings was controller of the W.C. Haha! Did you hear of this film The Last Laugh ?” He allowed the insatiable black space over the water to swallow his light’s beam for a moment, then reclaimed it to thrust into Schild’s eyes. “You will never drown in the water to mock the hangman, not you. I will just as soon choke myself as to have you know my real name. Without respect for this famous naïveté, there is something sinister about an American.”
    “You seemed to have no worry about Kurt.”
    “Kurt lived until aged ten in Budapest, Paris to the age of eleven and a half, Budapest again for three years, then Rome to the age of twenty, and finally Washington. His father is in the diplomatic service, his mother is an Hungarian and the influence. Do you know Kurt’s actual identity? In yesterday’s Stars and Stripes —a queer journal, by the bye! What are these letters at the lower-left hand of page two, this so-called ‘B-Bag’?”
    The damp had begun an osmotic affection for Schild’s feet. “Oh,” he answered in a momentary quicksand of sorrow which sucked the life from his voice but was all to the good for the present purpose: “That’s supposed to be the uninhibited feelings of the enlisted men with complaints, the vox populi of ersatz democracy. The name comes from an expression, ‘Blow it out your barracks bag,’ let off steam, air your gripes. The enlisted men used to carry their gear in two bags, one labeled ‘A,’ the other, ‘B.’ ”
    “I tell you that tells nothing. I have read a letter yesterday which said”—he broke off and produced the very clipping, holding the light for Schild to read:
You can search the whole Enclave until your goddam corns are thumping and you won’t find one place where EM can get anything better to drink than flat beer that the Krauts made when Hitler was a PFC. Yet every ninety-day wonder in my outfit wallows in Haig & Haig. The chickens are getting bigger and I don’t have to say what is getting deeper. Yours for World War III,
    T/5 P.....-OFF
    Bremen
    “Yes, that’s the sort of thing.”
    “Do you ever use it?”
    “No,” said Schild. “As I say, it’s essentially for enlisted men. Besides,” smiling in irony, his profession, place, and time’s surrogate for good humor, which Schatzi could not see because he was again being nervous with the flashlight, “my complaints are not so simple.”
    Schatzi laughed, for a change in a pleasant tone, perhaps owing to the fact that he had nothing to gain or lose from the passage: “As to this B-Bag, obscure name still, I do not believe from a swift look that the code would be too hard to break. It is not a device without imagination, but surely American Espionage has better means for important messages. I think these are no more than general intelligences for each sector. However, it would be that one can do worse than to attempt to decode the letters signed Berlin, a damp finger to the wind, one could say.”
    When Schatzi spoke like a neurasthenic spinster he was not fooling, even though it was only at such times that he amused Schild, an extraordinary achievement. In good Middle European style Schatzi was most suspicious of what was most innocuous, and perhaps the reverse, although in that he had not been tested. Almost to Schild’s disappointment, there was nothing dangerous, complex, or oblique in the Berlin situation. As American Intelligence analyst, he inspected confiscated Nazi correspondence files; as something else entirely, he chose interesting items for transmission to Schatzi, the jobs meshing beautifully.
    But Schild was a great over-preparer, despite the