The Sleepwalkers Read Online Free PDF Page B

you see, ten years old. Quite frequently he gets up in the middle of the night and starts walking around and talking . . . but he’s asleep. Sleepwalking. You’re never supposed to wakesleepwalkers, just lead them back to bed, which is what I do with Tommy. This lady had the same look . . . like she wasn’t awake. The eyes were open but she wasn’t really there. I had the strongest feeling I ought to lead her back inside. But like I said, is it my place to question our guests? And at just this moment the Italian foreign minister and his wife arrived. I had to attend to them. So I told the lady, the nearest S-Bahn station is at Friedrich Strasse. I asked if she wished me to hail her a taxi. ‘No, no,’ she said. ‘I want to walk.’ And that was the last of it. As I opened the minister’s door, I saw her going down Unter den Linden, alone, in that leopard coat and no hat!”
    “Did she tell you where on the S-Bahn she wanted to go?” Willi was astonished by the story. “Think, Rudy. This is important.”
    “Why, yes.” His eyes widened as he recalled. “Yes, she did. She said, ‘Where is the nearest S-Bahn that can take me to Spandau?’ ”
    “Spandau!” A shiver ran through Willi’s veins. “You’re sure?”
    “Yes, quite. I remember asking myself, does the S-Bahn even go to Spandau?”
    Willi pictured the station he’d seen there this morning.
    For a second he was speechless. Could it possibly be mere coincidence? He looked at his watch. It was nearly nine o’clock. Despite his exhaustion there was only one thing to do, he knew. Back to Spandau, again. By S-Bahn this time.

Four
    Even though he was almost thirty-six and had lived here all his life, hurtling across the capital on the elevated train still held the feel of a magic-carpet ride for Willi. The landscape ever mesmerizing. A vast city of brick and limestone, new by continental standards, most of it less than a century old, Berlin was Europe’s Chicago, ambitious, arrogant, driving itself ever onward. Toward what, he and 4 million other Berliners had no idea.
    From Friedrich Strasse they flew along the Spree River, passed the great glass dome of the Reichstag. After skirting the edge of the Tiergarten, the city’s great rustic park, the train shuttled into the fashionable West End, running parallel to block after block of handsome apartment buildings, allowing passengers unrivaled access into the lives of all whose shades were not tightly drawn. Scenes of domestic composure flew past Willi’seyes. Families listening to radios. Gathered around pianos. Trimming Christmas trees.
    The farther north and west they shuttled, the shabbier the buildings grew, and the sadder the pictures they presented. Bony housewives bent over ironing boards. Fathers in undershirts spanking their children. As the train slowed to round a bend beside an enormous warehouse, through its big, cracked windows he saw it had been turned into a dormitory for homeless men, packed with countless hundreds of souls, the stench of hopelessness all but reeking into the train car.
    Reaching the new housing estates built by Siemens Electronics, the carriage virtually emptied of passengers. On a Saturday night perhaps more people might be on it, Willi considered. But all in all it must have been a lonely ride for the princess. Why had she done it? What could have possessed her? Where had she gone when she reached the station? Forty-five minutes after leaving Friedrich Strasse they ground to a halt in Old Spandau, the end of the line.
    Down the steps to the street, darkness engulfed him. After the lights of central Berlin it always took a while to adjust to the dimness of the rest of the world. A single source of illumination caught his attention . . . directly across the street. The inn he’d noticed this morning, with the outdoor beer garden and swastika above the door. The Black Stag, he saw it was called. Unless someone at the station was waiting to pick her up, the