Crazy in Berlin Read Online Free PDF Page B

persistence with which, while he stood smeared with grease, Hellesponts shriveled to birdbaths. Having been alerted for his present function since he first reported to his draft board, having been, by unseen hands, guided to and through infantry OCS and later transferred to Intelligence by like means—Schatzi could suspect American naïveté, Schild could not afford to: the Party, with all its resources, could perform the miraculous only with the aid of history’s buffoons—sent to France and then to Berlin with the first Occupation troops, having on a word from X, a nod from Y, and a furtive motion of the elbow joint from Z, been put in touch with “Kurt,” who conducted him twice to the presence of “Schatzi” and vanished forever; symbolizing in his very position at this juncture, this square foot of wet sand, the energy and infinite pains of the agency whose creature he was—but that was just it, what small service he rendered! Two or three sheafs of trash a week, available to anybody who would walk into a bombed building and pick up a handful of scattered papers. Not to mention that the Red Army, which had got to Berlin a month before the Western powers, had surely missed little of consequence. Still, this seemed somehow his own deficiency notwithstanding the clear directions that limited him to the role, and he was conscious, in all the weak jealousy of the impotent, that herein lay another motive for aversion to his courier of the wide horizons.
    Schatzi left off his nonsense about the counterspies’ use of the B-Bag, or what, had it not arisen from his total dedication, would have been nonsense and resumed his original aim. “In any rate, in yesterday’s Stars and Stripes, on page number three, you will find a little item to announce the appointment of Nicholas G. Pope, civilian military-government official, as licenser of German newspapers in Bavaria. Kurt, Pope. The very man.”
    How loudly he spoke, how careless with the light. The very fact that the beach was abandoned and dark made it more conspicuous than the stage at the Titania Palast. Schild instinctively resisted the exposure of Kurt’s identity, learned it, that is, and didn’t learn it, a technique by which information could give comfort but not be divulged even under torture.
    Fortunate in all his cautions and fears, for they served, after all, to give him a constant business that his larger function did not, Schild arranged with Schatzi for their next assignation and sought to move off towards the broken timbers of the pavilion and the jeep on the forest road beyond. Schatzi’s hail was very like a shiv into the small of his back. As he turned to hear the not-forgotten-for-a-moment fate of the soccer-ball man, between the sound and the sense he saw in his memory Schatzi’s earlier flashlight motions. Across the water lay Kladow. Who there received his signals?
    “... so this guard made off with his cap and threw it over the top of the wire into this area that was not permitted for the prisoners and ordered him on the pain of death instantly to go and bring it back. The man climbed with the strange nimbleness of the fat, quite indifferent with the barbs going into the palms of the hands, got this cap, made it free of the snow with his underneath side of the arm, and then brought it down over his skull, which was of course shaven clean, down to the ears. On the climb again back, he was slow and breathed hard; on the top strand of wire, he let out some steam, for it was very cold, and at the time when just more than half of his weight was over—the guard had planned it well, you see, to ensure that the fall might be on the near side—the machine-pistol bullets released the air in him and the man did not fall as planned but shriveled and stayed on the wire like a soccer-ball bladder without the air. The wind even moved him. I think still he was a concealed policeman, shot in mistake. The guard vanished some time later.”
    Schild’s fingers