Fiend, page 19
part #3 of Voice of Blood Series
I heard a persistent knocking on the door to my suite when I sat up. Too annoyed to dry myself off or find clothing, I stormed to the door and opened it, naked and dripping and covered in goose pimples. Liesl stood there, slouching, with a lit cigarette smoldering between her fingertips; she stared at me and clapped her hands over her mouth. I pulled her into my room and shut the door.
“Liesl—”
“I know, this is your room; and you didn’t get one for me, I notice. Where am I supposed to go? I don’t have anywhere to stay in Berlin yet. I only need a couple of nights; it won’t cost you any extra.” She let her eyes travel over me. “Oh, my. Are you going to get dressed?”
“I don’t see why I need to in the privacy of my own, private room.”
“Oh, if you think this is private, you are stupid. With all the politicians in here, every room is bugged. Oh, Herr Ricari, do let me stay; just for a few nights, please? I promise I’ll make it worth your while.” She hiked the skirt of her frock to display the tops of her stockings.
“What makes you think I want you, child?” I said starkly. “I am in no mood to be indulgent right now, Liesl; I suggest you find somewhere else to stay tonight. Now get out at once.”
Of course, Liesl had no choice but to obey me. I sat on the edge of my bed and sighed, then returned to my bath for a while. Instead of being refreshing, now it was displeasingly cold. I scrubbed myself thoroughly with the perfumed soap provided by the hotel, dried myself with their velvety-soft towels, and went to sleep several hours early in the cool, sweetly perfumed total darkness. It might have been the best sleep I’ve ever gotten.
When I came down at dusk, willing to give Berlin another try now that I had rested, I found Liesl outside the hotel, staring up at the window of my third-floor room. She jumped when I spoke to her, then threw her arms around me. “Finally, you’re up!” she exclaimed breathlessly. I could tell by the way her eyes looked that she had not gone anywhere to sleep the night before; that she’d just stood outside on the pavement, waiting for me. “Come on, baby, let’s go! I have so much to show you!”
I felt a little sick, a little sorry for her, and very hungry. I could take her, but I didn’t want to; not her. “All right,” I said, “let’s go.”
Liesl didn’t seem to have noticed the fact that she had been rejected, then waited outside for me all night. She was as full of pep and chatter as always. “Look, Hans gave me some wonderful cocaine last night. It’s the real thing, none of that baby-powder stuff, and incredibly pure. Here, try some.” I shook my head with a grimace. “Oh, you don’t like it? I didn’t like it either, at first. Later I found out that it was just bad cocaine. Hans gets his from Aztec Jan; he brought back about twenty pounds of it from Mexico, absolutely pure, the very best. It helps to keep me going.”
“Are we going to another theater?”
“Yes, I thought so. . . . Julian’s is so . . . you know. It’s just a place where I know everyone. I will be able to start work there again on Monday.”
“As an actress?”
“Well, no, as a coat-check girl. But I’ve acted before; I’ve been a chorus girl. If they need someone to step in, they know where to look. No, tonight, we’re going to the Streitpunkt. Tonight there will be a Dada performance.”
“A what?”
She blinked at me, as if I were slow. “You will know when you see it.”
I did not know when I saw it. None of it made any sense, from the curious, obscene, ridiculous costumes made out of papîer-maché and cardboard, to the random blasts of saxophone music played by a naked man who periodically ran across the stage, to the language, which was nothing I’d ever heard. I was glad we had sat at the very back, behind a pillar, so I could shield my eyes. “This is horrible,” I whispered to Liesl, who watched everything with her usual delighted expression.
“Yes!” she agreed cheerfully.
At the culmination, a tall, thin young man with a long, shaggy mane of black hair took the stage, and the rest of the performers drifted away. He wore the black tights and doublet, iconic shorthand for Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark, but the costume had obviously been made for a much larger man, quite a long time ago; the doublet hung open limply, and the baggy tights were laddered and threadbare. He held a leaf of paper in one hand but never looked at it; he continued to speak the nonsense to which we’d just been treated, but coming from his throat it was different. He had a beautiful, utterly masculine tenor speaking voice that easily filled the theater without any visible effort on his part, and his stage presence, with his long, thin limbs like rain-soaked twigs, his large head and broad shoulders, was the strongest I had ever experienced.
I actually rubbed my temples, momentarily doubting my sanity. It could not be—but how he resembled . . . !
With the white paint on his face, the sly dark eyes reduced to shadows, his wide mouth a dark double bow, the proud, sensual slump to his shoulders, and the muscles outlined along his slender, agile frame, I saw Lorenzo, transformed into an undead creature such as I!
But it could not be. The glow that emanated from him appeared supernatural, though I could see that it was only the dim inadequate stage light reflecting from his iridescent makeup, the handsomeness of his features, and the resonant power of his voice. It was his voice, more than anything, that redrew this actor in my mind and erased the shadow of Lorenzo once and for all. This Berliner’s voice was a semitone higher, biting off the edges of the words, and it lacked the fine edge of sarcasm that shaped every word Lorenzo said.
When I attempted to gain access to the actor’s mind, I saw only light.
That was that. And Almighty Father, forgive me.
At last, he gave a smirk and a shrug, and a wave of disregard of the paper he held. “I reject this shit called language,” he said in English, and lit a match under the sheet. In a flash, it vanished, to thunderous applause and cheering from the audience. The actor bowed very deeply, then spit on the front row of the theater and stalked back into the wings, grinning and wiggling his rear like a saucy showgirl.
“Isn’t he wonderfully talented?” said Liesl, turning and crushing my shoulder in her hands. “I’m so glad he’s still here. He was talking about leaving Berlin; things are so difficult here. But there’s no other place for him in the world; no other city could contain him! No other city would tolerate him, if truth be told.”
“Who is he?” I asked, a little breathless myself.
She seemed surprised that I didn’t know, though she knew that I had never been to Germany before. “Oh, but that’s Danny Blum. He’s going to become famous someday if it kills him; he’s not such a bad singer. He’s a better singer than he is an artist, though he’d tell you exactly the opposite.”
“Would you introduce us?”
To my surprise, Liesl laughed so hard that seltzer ran up into her nose, and I had to tap her back several times before she could stop coughing. “No, I’m afraid I can’t,” she said, wiping her streaming eyes. “We are enemies. We were in love once, and we both betrayed one another on the same night. He went with Eva, and I with Charlie. We fought and fought that night; I broke his nose! I said I would change his face for him, and I did! Isn’t it hilarious?”
I was too bemused to dispute her; all around us, in a soft buzz, like layers of sheer silken veils, came the name again and again, on dozens of pairs of lips: Danny. Daniel. Daniel Blum.
Through Black Smoke
In almost no time at all, I found myself as a patron of smaller Berlin theater.
I provided money for the printing of advertising posters for the show containing Liesl’s new role at Julian’s, and when the costumes for the play were stolen one night, I paid for replacements, rented from the costume department at the Ufa Film Studios. The manager at Julian’s, a congested man named Werner Luft, was delighted at the larger audiences, brought in by leafleting all over the city, and begged me to continue my philanthropy. The two costume girls were also grateful, and offered their bodies to me in recompense. I only smiled, and convinced them that it was not me that they wanted, but each other.
Berlin brought out my playful tendencies. Besides, one of them was tall and thin and the other short, round, and blond; it only seemed right that they should fall in love for a while.
It was all merely an ineffectual distraction. Try as I might, making enjoyable mischief, seeing all of the motion-picture shows in the brown-plush darkness at the Zoo-Palast, and compulsively buying “driving gloves” until I had two pairs for each day of the week, I was unable to get Daniel Blum out of my mind. I looked for him everywhere; how large could Berlin be? Yet he was as elusive, and as spectacular, as a white stag in a dense forest. No other man resembled him even slightly. I theorized that it was not the person of this singular gentleman that obsessed me, that it was instead the dazzle of stage lights reflecting from white makeup. So I combed the theaters, and saw scores of plays and performances, hoping against hope that the threadbare nonsense Hamlet would emerge from the shadows and take the boards.
He never did.
I heard of him, though, constantly, from all of Liesl’s theatrical comrades. His reputation was as immense and varied as Europe itself. Not a single person held a unilateral position on the matter of Danny Blum; everyone seemed to both love and despise him, respect him and denigrate him by turns. Liesl was far from being the only girl whose trust he betrayed, and by the expressions of some of her male comrades when this subject was discussed, he did not discriminate on the basis of sex. I wished I hadn’t known that.
He was a good singer; he had a voice like a toad. He dressed with verve and artistry; he looked like a circus clown, an old whore, a madman. He was a Jew, a Communist, a gangster; no, he wasn’t. The only thing that could be agreed upon was that he was not present.
“He was just here an hour ago,” they’d say, ordering another round of drinks on my tab.
I wandered the deserted nighttime streets around the official buildings of the centermost district of Mitte, adjusting myself to the future-present in relative calm and quiet. So many things impressed and frightened and intrigued me, and in the company of humans, I could not express my astonishment. I spent a great deal of time devising ingenious ways to get the humans to perform certain tasks for me so I could see how they were done. Also, once again, I was a foreigner, and my ignorance about the basics of German culture found an excuse. But at night, out on my own, I could listen, observe, and laugh.
But I had not come to Berlin to be alone; I came to see the sights of a fresh, dangerous new world. I moved out of my costly suite at the Adlon and into a less sumptuous, but still elegant, two-room flat on the second floor of a quality boardinghouse near the Tiergarten, so I could look at something green in the midst of the slate avenues of the city. With greater quiet at home, going out at night seemed more attractive. I found myself particularly drawn to the newly opened, huge entertainment complex, Haus Vaterland, four stories of sparkling restaurants, dance halls, cabarets, and sideshows, located at the frantic heart of the Potsdamer-Platz. Open until three in the morning, it became the place where I would begin each night. It was so vulgar and overdone that the air itself seemed thick and sleazy, though it supposedly catered to families. I would wait for the inevitable Liesl to find me; I sat in a different restaurant each night, challenging her. It did not matter. She was as keen as a bloodhound, and naturally so; aside from that first drink of blood from her neck, I had hardly even touched her, and she should not have been as attached as she was. I had never even kissed her.
If I was in the mood to see Liesl, we would stay at Vaterland until closing, and then I would see her home in a taxi and compel her to get a good morning’s sleep. If I wasn’t, I took her to one or another of the numerous clubs, and then I would disappear while she was distracted. We started out in the nicer cabarets and taverns, but as autumn became winter, I sought the strange and uneasy thrills that could be found in the gangster bars and transvestite clubs.
Our first visit was Liesl’s idea. She met me in the Tuscan plaza café at Vaterland, wearing a blue serge men’s business suit, her curly light-brown hair slicked onto her skull with Vaseline. The look did not flatter her, but it inevitably excited me nonetheless, and I wondered if I might find her attractive after all. “Yes. It is I, Herr Wankelmut. I am dressed appropriately for the Mikado,” she said to me, her voice clumsily gruff. It was all I could do to suppress a laugh. My attraction evaporated. She bent to me and gave me a wink. “Fooled you! It’s me, Liesl! Come and join me for a drink. This place is a scream.”
In the taxi, she anxiously awaited my response. When I offered none, enjoying too much her squirming and fidgeting with the crotch of her trousers, she punched me in the arm. “Well, aren’t you shocked?” she demanded.
“Oh, no, not at all. I’ve seen women dressed as men before.”
“Oh, you have?” she replied, crestfallen. “Where? When? Obviously not in Geneva! In Paris?”
“None of your business. But you look smashing, don’t worry.”
We alit from the taxi and walked into a peculiar and beautiful world that literally took my breath away at first glance.
I excused myself from Liesl once she had found a table, and stood in the back of the room, concealing myself from human eyes so that no one would notice me goggling at the spectacle. Along with the usual upscale cocktail crowd, there were girls dressed as men, men dressed as women, and some I could not distinguish at a glance, laughing and shouting and staring at one another and ignoring one another, against a backdrop of red lacquer screens and scrolls of Japanese watercolor painting. Some of the men wore evening gowns scintillating with rhinestones, while others had merely put on a workaday blouse and skirt and a tatty wig. The women in men’s suits were dazzlingly handsome, each and every one, willowy girls with rouge and watch fobs. In comparison to them, Liesl was dumpy and amateurish in her obviously borrowed burgher’s suit. This was not theater, not boys playing as girls in Shakespeare; this was life; this was reality. And yet it was as far from the reality that existed outside as possible.
My mind reeled. The cafés of Berlin were one massive stage, dizzying with special effects, curious makeup, and gorgeous, outlandish costumes, with the hostile, cold winter world a few feet over the threshold. Even I had a part to play on it, but I did not know my lines, or my marks, or who the director was.
“Dance with me,” said a young man in curly platinum-blond wig, cheap baubles, flaking red lipstick, and a skirt full enough to hide any untoward protuberances. His eyes were glassy and heavy-lidded, but he had seen me, and the black stubble on his forearms overwhelmed me with amusement and pity. So I accepted. He tried to pick my pocket, but I caught his hand and pressed it to my buttock tightly instead, smiling at him.
“Ah, ah, ah—it is I who shall steal from you,” I said.
From a distance, it appeared that we were deeply enmeshed in each other, locked and swaying together on the dance floor to the waxy sounds of the trombone and out-of-tune piano. Instead, I drew droplets of blood, cloudy with the poison of fatigue, from the four tiny puncture wounds I’d nipped into his neck. He had been dancing all night in high heels, trying to win patronage from the club itself; when he’d arrived that night, he looked as perfect as a film star. Underneath the flared skirt, his penis poked against me, as hard as a wooden ruler, and he mumbled into my ear, “Yes . . . my sweet . . . kiss me again. . . .”
When his erection had gone, I knew that I was done with him; so I walked with him back over to the bar seating area and handed him five marks. “Buy yourself some better lipstick,” I told him, and his comrades, listening, howled with laughter.
I returned to the table where Liesl sat, her brow as black as thunder. “See what you’ve done?” she complained. “Leaving me all alone like that while you danced with that repulsive line-boy Simon!”
“What have I done?” I asked mildly, a little flushed and smug. Simon had tasted good in those tiny amounts, like individual grains of caviar.
“You left me alone here, and Danny Blum came right up and spoke to me!”
At once I was alert again, my head threatening to twist itself off my neck, I turned it so suddenly. “He was here? Where is he?”
She drew upon her cigarette languidly. “He’s gone, of course! I told him he could stick his head up his asshole if he’s so awfully special.”
My vision blurred with the effort required to contain my annoyance and not tear Liesl’s throat out. “Oh, Liesl, you are not to do that again, do you understand? I should like to meet this young man Blum.” She made as if to protest, but I placed my fingertip flat against her forehead and stared into her eyes. “I think you can make it happen.” Her face assumed an expression of pain and alarm, and I adjusted the force of my directed thought until her face went blank. I didn’t want to hurt her if I didn’t have to, and I could blast her mind to flinders just by wishing it so. “Do you know where he is now?”
“No,” she said mechanically.
“Dammit, Liesl.” I relaxed and looked away, cracking my knuckles under my paper-thin kidskin gloves. Liesl shook her head and began to cry softly. She no doubt had a terrible headache, but I was in no mood for indulgence. “Stop being such a baby. You’re lucky I didn’t hurt you. You’re going to find Daniel Blum for me. It won’t be difficult.”
“You want him, and you don’t want me,” she wept. So it wasn’t about the headache. “You don’t like women at all, do you?”
I felt embarrassed for her. “I do like women,” I said, “exceptional women, women who are not like other women.”
“But you like boys more.”
I truthfully admitted that I did, partially to hurt her feelings and cure her lovesickness for me, and partially because it felt right to say it aloud, in that environment, among the Oriental lanterns and slick-haired women in morning jackets, dancing with one another without fear or furtiveness. “I am more susceptible to the charms of boys,” I said, “whereas I despair of ever finding a woman comparable to . . .” I shrugged rather than speak their names, or decide on one to mention. I could almost see them as a single being: Maria Elena Georgina. If you combined them, they produced me. “That’s all in the past. You should not trouble yourself over me. You could have a dozen boyfriends if you wanted. The only thing you need to do for me is to find Danny Blum, so that I can meet him.”
