“And how am I to succeed with you shadowing my every effort?”
He smirked at me then, shaking his head. “Don’t worry. I’ll stay in the shadows and just watch your back. At any rate, in two hours you’ll be begging me to help you find a nice, clean little whorehouse and get it over with.”
“Humph.” I straightened my shoulders and strode away toward the first tavern that presented itself, hearing Edward’s boots clicking on the stones close behind. I would certainly show him. Yes, I would. I would march into one of these merry little enclaves and have a drink at the bar and strike up a conversation with one beautiful young miss. And I would charm her with my Viennese gentility and regale her with jokes and compliment her person and her scents and her magnetism, and soon she would be batting her eyelashes at me and blushing and whispering hints of a private room nearby in the servants’ quarters of a town councilman. And long before dawn we would be making mad and passionate love, for perhaps the third or fourth time, upon all manners of furniture and with utterly ecstatic abandon!
Two hours later, I emerged from the fourth such establishment. I was utterly defeated, and hoping that the sheets of brothel beds were at the very least turned over after every ghastly visit.
“I told you,” Edward said without genuine reproach, but rather a melancholy tone in concert with my defeat. After all, he knew that the Colonel expected him to guide me in my quest, and to assure its success.
We stood in the square just outside this latest tavern of disaster. Edward was smoking, and as always he instinctively offered me the cigarette tin. Though I had always declined before, in this instance I succumbed, and he nodded and lit my smoke with an army lighter. I coughed terribly, waiting for the rancid substance to somehow calm my nerves.
There had certainly been an abundance of suitable women in all the establishments. Of all sorts of ages, shapes and sizes, they laughed and danced and drank from deep steins of watery wartime beer. They leaned upon the shoulders of rough-looking army officers, and they pressed their cleavaged bosoms against coarse uniforms and lifted their legs to show their calves. And although in the course of two long hours I managed to elicit a dance from one matronly, middle-aged, half-drunken farm woman, essentially I felt like a boy on his first deer hunt, staring wide-eyed at the potential prey and clutching a weapon I had no idea how to use correctly. Utter disaster.
Simultaneously, Edward and I crushed out our cigarettes, sighed, and remounted the staff car. He did indeed seem able to follow the scents emanating from some distant house of ill repute, though in fact he was simply observing the direction taken by wandering army troops of the lower ranks. A quartet of half-inebriated panzer drivers sang “Ach du lieber Augustin” as they staggered along a narrow road, elbows locked and joking about the deleterious effects of alcohol on proper erections, and Edward knew to simply tag along with the car.
He stopped as we approached a row of tall, narrow, three-story apartment buildings. Their faces were of broken brickwork, and they were squeezed together like gravestones in an overcrowded cemetery. Two of the buildings had large street-front windows, with heavy brocade curtains and a reddish lamp glow bleeding through the frays. Apparently, this was a signal which clearly spoke to the corporal, though it was unrecognized by me.
“Come, boy,” he said, and I steeled myself and followed him into the first such building. He passed through the heavy front door without so much as flipping the iron knocker, and immediately we found ourselves in a dark and decrepit sitting room, occupied by an elderly matron cocooned in a threadbare housecoat and woolen slippers. She sat upon a worn purple divan, reading a pfennig novel by candlelight, and I prayed that this gray-haired matron was not the only prospect in the house. She looked up and grinned, her mouth a garden of broken teeth.
“Guten Abend!” she croaked. “Your pleasure, gentlemen?”
“Yes, that,” Edward snapped. “If there’s anything here to please us.”
“Einen Moment.” The old woman struggled to her feet and hobbled away somewhere, while I jammed my hands into my pockets, looking about at the fading portraits of German composers and Alpine apple orchards, and attempted to summon my most casual whistle. It was nowhere within me.
A pair of women sauntered into the room. The first of them was black-haired, middle-aged, and powerful in the appearance of her musculature beneath a heavy emerald dress. The thick makeup upon her face looked almost clownish, her lips heavy and blood red, her eyes outlined in inky borders, and the upper portion of her dress was unlaced, revealing a bosom that appeared to me to be as large as the rump of a pig. The second woman was somewhat more youthful and substantially smaller of stature. Her dark blond hair was braided into “strudel” coils astride her ears, and her attire resembled that of a beer-garden waitress, replete with its white bodice and billowing short sleeves. Upon her feet she wore high black boots, laced up the center to her shins, and her face was also overly masked with paint. I tried to blur the image of her mouth, for its lipstick was somewhat askew and I dared not imagine the cause.
“You take Sylvia?” The old woman, who now peeked from behind her prostitutes, gestured at the larger of the two women and winked at Edward.
“All right,” he said, and I was immediately grateful, as he was clearly volunteering to mount this creature in deference to the better choice for me.
“And you want Heidi, ja?” The old woman lightly slapped the rump of the blonde “waitress” as she jutted her trembling chin in my direction. Heidi smiled, showing a chipped front tooth and the tip of her tongue.
I managed a nod, even as I experienced an icy chill throughout my spine.
“Twenty reichsmarks apiece,” said the madame, very curtly.
“Ten.” Edward snapped a reply.
“Fifteen!” The old woman raised a gnarled finger.
I was then engaged in turning my trouser pocket inside out, and counting some rumpled bills and coins.
“I am afraid I have no more than ten,” I stuttered.
“Ten it’ll be, then,” Edward said to the old one. “Or nothing.”
“All right.” The madame stuck her thumbs in the belt of her housecoat. “But you can fuck them for fifteen minutes. No more.”
“Half an hour,” Edward shot back.
“Twenty minutes!” She returned his serve.
I was certain I would require no more than a paltry minute myself, and only that if my already rebelling penis would suddenly take flight in an Olympian miracle.
Edward took the black-haired wench by her wrist and immediately moved toward a creaking stairway, and as he passed me by he whispered, “Just think of Ava Gardner.”
I stared after him. I did not know who that was, and was lost for a substitute image. I found myself temporarily immobilized, while Heidi lifted the hem of her dress and too mounted the stairway. She stopped after a meter’s progress, turned to me and beckoned with a finger, and I swallowed hard and followed.
Within a minute, I found myself standing before her in a small and dimly lit room, rather like the cabin of a steamship. There may have been a washstand, a small desk and a single chair, but I do not really recall, for my eyes were locked on the narrow bed covered with rumpled and graying sheets.
Heidi immediately plopped herself down on the edge of this newlyweds’ paradise, sitting quite erect and spreading her boots. She regarded me with what she might have supposed to be doe’s eyes, and placed a flirtatious finger in her mouth. With her other hand, she quickly lifted her dress and gathered its hem about her waist, revealing short, puffy white bloomers encasing her bare thighs. Then, with the practiced grace of a magician’s assistant, she quickly dragged them off, down over her knees, and allowed them to hang about one ankle, while I stood there and stared at her in utter shock, as if the furry mouth that now presented itself to me was the maw of a dragon.
I could not move. My hands were clenched into tight