Alex Horner stopped and caught his breath. He knew enough about fighting to know when to stop. He looked up the moonlit street; there were coaches waiting to collect guests, their coachmen huddled against the cold night, faces lit by glowing cigarettes, the breath of the horses making clouds of white vapour. It was very cold, as only Berlin can be, with a few snowflakes drifting in the wind and a film of ice on everything. The city was silent, and yet it was not the empty stillness of the countryside; it was the brooding quiet of a crowded, sleeping city. From somewhere nearby came the sound of a powerful motorcar engine starting, and the squeal of tyres. That would be Graf; the fellow was often to be seen in his big motorcar.
Alex reached into his pocket for a cigarette and stood there on the street smoking as he thought about what had happened. Thank God, Graf had had plenty to drink – he’d have been a formidable adversary sober. Better to forget the whole business, he decided. Graf and his ilk had friends in high places and in the Bendlerblock the army bureaucrats were now referring to Röhm’s storm troops as the ‘Black Reichswehr’, treating them as a secret army reserve. Testifying against Graf might well mar his career prospects. Any last delusion that the army kept out of politics had long since gone. Getting promoted in this curious postwar army was like walking through a minefield.
By the time Alex Horner had finished his cigarette and returned to the party, it was almost as if nothing untoward had occurred. Hauser was in bed and being attended by a doctor, the bloodstains had been scrubbed from the carpet, the band was playing, and the guests were dancing as if nothing had happened. In fact, many of the guests were not aware of the murderous scuffie on the back stairs.
Peter Winter was dancing with a glorious girl in a decorative evening dress of a quality that was seldom seen in Germany in these austere times. The girl had brazenly approached Peter and asked him to dance. ‘I hear you’re a good dancer, Herr Winter. How would you like to prove it to me?’
Her German was not good. The grammar was adequate, but the accent was outlandish. Not the hard consonantal growl of the Hungarian or the Czech, this was a strange, flat drawling accent of a sort he couldn’t for a moment distinguish.
‘Are you Austrian?’ Peter asked.
She laughed in a way that was almost unladylike. ‘You flatterer! I heard you were a ladies’ man, Peter Winter, and now I declare it’s true. You know my German is not good enough for me to be Austrian. Is that what you say to any girl you encounter with a weird accent you don’t recognize?’
Peter blushed. It was exactly what he said to any girl whose accent he couldn’t place. ‘Of course not,’ he muttered.
‘I’m from California, U.S.A.,’ she said. ‘We’re almost family. Your mother was at school with my aunt.’
‘That’s not family,’ said Peter.
She laughed. ‘You Germans all have such a wonderful sense of humour.’ But Peter was not amused to be the butt of her joke. ‘Well,’ she said, stretching her long, pale arm towards him, ‘aren’t you going to ask me to dance?’
Peter clicked his heels and bowed formally. She laughed again. Peter felt confused, almost panic-stricken, and this was a strange, new experience for him. He wanted to flee but he couldn’t. He was afraid of this girl, afraid that she would think him a fool. He wanted her to like him and respect him, and that, of course, is how love first strikes the unwary.
‘Yes, you dance quite well,’ she said as they stepped out onto the dance floor to the smooth romantic chords of ‘Poor Butterfly’. Her name was Lottie Danziger and her father owned two hotels, three movie theatres, and some orange groves in California. She wore the most attention-getting evening dress of anyone there. It had a tubelike shape that deprived her of breasts and bottom. It was short and sleeveless, and its bodice was embroidered with bugle beads and imitation baroque pearls in the sort of Egyptian motif that had been all the rage since Howard Carter’s amazing discoveries in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings. The trouble was that the beadwork was so heavy that it made Lottie want to sit down, and so fragile that she was frightened of doing so.
Lottie was like no other woman that Peter Winter had ever met. She was not like the German girls he’d known, or even like any of the Rensselaer family. She was beautiful, with pale skin and naturally wavy jet-black hair, cut very short in a style that was new to Berlin, not like the short hairstyles that were necessary to get the close-fitting cloche hats on, but bobbed almost like a man’s. She had dark, wicked eyes and a mouth that was perhaps a little too big, and very white, even teeth that flashed when she smiled. And she smiled a lot. Not the polite, tight-lipped smiles that well-bred German girls were taught, but big open-mouthed laughs that were infectious: Peter found himself laughing, too. But above all Lottie was intense; she was a fountain of energy, so that everything she did, from dancing to telling jokes about the young men she’d encountered on the ocean liner, was uniquely wonderful, and Peter was beguiled by every movement she made.
‘But I have a chaperon, darling. We couldn’t possibly go without her.’ It was her crazy transatlantic style to call Peter ‘darling’ right from the first moment, but her flippant use of the word made it no less tantalizing. Every suggestion he made for seeing her again was met with some wretched rule about her chaperon. She was playing with him: they both knew that she could meet with him alone if she really wanted to, and it was this that put an extra edge on their exchanges. She was so desirable that his need for her pushed all other thoughts and aspirations out of his head.
‘But you don’t look like a Rensselaer,’ she said, having for a moment silenced his attempts to arrange another meeting. She swung her head back to see him better and cocked it on one side, so that her dark, wavy hair shone in the lights. ‘No, you don’t look like a Rensselaer at all.’
She was teasing him, of course, but he readily joined her game. ‘And what do the Rensselaers look like?’
‘Gorgeous. You have only to look at your mother to know that. The Rensselaers are the most beautiful family in the whole of New York. Why, when your uncle Glenn came back from the war he must have been getting on for forty years old, and yet there wasn’t a girl in the city who didn’t dream of capturing him. The groans and gnashing of teeth when he married were to be heard from Hoboken to Hollywood. Your uncle Glenn came here just after the war, didn’t he?’
‘He was an Air Corps major attached to the Armistice Commission. He wanted Mother to go back to New York, but Father was against it.’
‘Why?’
‘He said it would look bad. All through the war he’d been saying that Mother was at heart a German. That was how he prevented her from being interned. How would it look, he said, if when the Allies won she went running back to America?’
‘Her parents are too old to travel, and they’d give anything to see her again.’
‘Papa was adamant.’
‘Do all German families obey Father so readily?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Peter.
‘In America your father would find life more difficult. You should have heard what my father said when I first told them I was coming to Europe.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He cut me off without a penny, darling,’ she said with a laugh. ‘But eventually he came around.’ She hummed the melody: ‘“Poor Butterfly”, it’s such a beautiful tune, isn’t it? I never hear it but I think of the war: all those poor butterflies that never came back.’
‘Yes,’ he said without being sure that he understood. Until now he’d not liked Americans, not the Rensselaers, not President Wilson, not any of them. They were not easy to understand. But this one – with her hair bobbed