The noon sun burned through the grim overcast and the Porsche convertible sped along the harbor. Petra was at the wheel. The sports car hit 100 and Sean clung onto the passenger door, fighting the urge to plead, "Nicht so schnell."
Across the Elbe huge machines loaded and unloaded ships with thousands of containers. Sunlight sparkled off the river and Petra accelerated through narrow streets surrounding a bombed out church, explaining, "St. Nikolai was destroyed by the British bombers."
"Bomber Harris believed in total war."
"So did Hitler."
"Both of them failed." The Rathaus or city hall and buildings around the old canal system of the downtown looked like they had been there since Goethe.
"St. Nikolai is just a reminder that no one wins a war."
She shifted into top gear and Sean was pinned to his seat like an astronaut strapped to a V2 rocket.
The sports car broke free of the city and skirted a lake.
"The Aussenalster," said Petra, turning up the music.
German punk.
"Die Toten Hosen."
"Dead Sox. I liked telling Brits that Feldfarben were better than the Sex Pistols."
"You know them?'
"A punk bar."
Sailboats skimmed the surface and children chased one another in the lakeside playground. along the park. Petra passed a truck with millimeters to spare. He was certain that Petra's right eye was fake.
She turned up the stereo. Industrial noise blared over the back speakers, as the Porsche Targa raced along the park.
"You like this music?"
"Yes, it's very calming."
"Really? You are not telling me the truth."
"This is NTL."
"You know them."
"I worked in nightclubs. DJs play everything. Some good. Some bad. Rechtig?"
Ja, rechtig."
Petra glanced at her passenger. His face bore scars from fighting. The damage was nothing in comparison to hers. She turned off Harvestehuder Weg onto a small street lined by cafes and high-class stores, then swung right on a wider street.
"Now I show you the club."
Her right foot stamped on the gas and the Porsche illegally passed a line of cars at a red light. The road curved left into a commercial zone and Petra pointed out of two-story building painted an icy blue.
"There."
A jagged slash of red streaking across the wall and an unlit neon sign spelled out 'Malchek'. "The club was designed after CLOCKWORK ORANGE."
The movie based on Anthony Burgess' apocalyptic novel on the collapse of civilization had proved more prophetic than the author could have imagined, considering the advent of punks and skinheads exploiting the emptiness of western civilization.
"It's no Milk Bar."
"It is inside. Very 1969.” The music segued Kraftwerk's AUTOBAHN and the Porsche bat-turned across the pavement. On-coming traffic swerved aside and horns blared, as they headed in the opposite directio, even faster this time.
Sean gripped the dashboard.
"If you have a death wish, gut, but I want to live a few more days."
Petra stamped on the brakes and the car screeched to a halt.
"Maybe you can drive better?" Her nose had been broken more than one place and her chin was unnaturally flat.
"Slower, yes."
Denn du bist in control."
Petra squirmed onto his lap and the curve of her ass melted into his crotch.
An elderly couple walking with a dachshund muttered how this was not the Germany of a half-century ago.
"Ja, besser mitlos Hitler. Sieg Heil."
The old couple regarded him with all the hatred reserved for race traitors.
Sean flipped the finger and squeezed from underneath the brunette to get out of the car.
Petra laughed, "Are you going to walk?"
"No, I'm getting behind the wheel."
Sean pushed back the front seat two inches.
"I didn't think that Americans were so uncool." Petra took off the white leather jacket.
Her nipples were erect under her gossamer silk shirt.
"I've never been cool." Her playing easy to get was just a game to which he didn’t know all the rules.
"Too bad. I like cool."
"I'm sure you do." The steering wheel was cold, almost as if Petra possessed no body heat. His right hand encompassed the stick and his foot goosed the gas.
"So I've seen all the tourist sights. What about the Reeperbahn?"
"Every man wants to go to the Reeperbahn. You are all so predictable."
"What about Times Square?"
"Drugs, pimps, whores, and suckers."
"Sonderboch? That's what we call 'suckers'. The Reeperbahn is better at night, but I bet you that you cannot find the Reeperbahn. How much money do you have in your pocket?"
"Two hundred Marks. All the money I have in the world."
"Then this is the bet. Your two hundred versus making love with a beautiful woman. Believe me, you are getting a good deal."
"Sounds like a bargain to me, but I can't remember the last time I've been lost."
"You know where you are, but being lost has nothing to do with where you are going. Most men never want to admit they're lost."
"That's because sometimes we don't want to be found." Sean looked to the sky. The cardinal points of the compass set in his mind. The Reeperbahn could only be in one direction. "So I'm ready to go."
"One last condition. You have to find it in five minutes."
"No problem." Sean stomped on the gas. The whirling rear wheels scorched the street and the Porsche accelerated away from the curb. The wind blew back Petra's short hair and she said, "Now it is your turn to kill us."
"Not until after the Reeperbahn."
She reached to the console, her hand ready to yank up on the emergency brake. The light ahead turned yellow and her fingers tensed on the grip. Sean's foot pressed down on the gas and the Porsche breezed through the intersection.
"Yellow means fast."
"And red means schneller."
Sean shifted into fourth.
Opposite a concert hall he overtook a queue of cars delayed by a red light.
The malicious glare of every driver reinforced the old myth of how deeply the Germans respected order.
Sean responded by running another light. The Porsche approached a square with the road leading past a large gray statue of a very grim man and he turned the wheel to the right.
"Fucking Bismarck."
"Ehrlich? Bismarck led a Kulturkampf against the rich and the church."
"Realpolitik. I studied that at university. I do like his saying "Politics is the art of the possible" and impossibly we have arrived at our destination."
The street sign said Reeperbahn.
"A very good guess."
"I was my mother's navigator on long trips."
"Momma's boy, park there." Petra pointed to an open spot next to the St. Pauli U-bahn station.
"So I guess I won."
"A lucky man."
"Luck can compete with a good sense of direction."
Sean got out of the car and helped Petra to the sidewalk.
"So where first?"
"Like I said it's too early for the Reeperbahn. We'll go someplace much better."
"Show me the way."
She led him away from the broad avenue to a high metal barrier. A flock of female tourists scrambled to escape water thrown from the other side of the wall. The women shrieked down the street, as if they had just finished an amusement ride. Petra glared at them with disdain.
"Anything wrong?"
"The Reeperbahn was a free-zone for medieval workers. Sailors' brothels were established on the side streets and after World War II the pimps industrializing the sex trade. Herbertstrasse is been sealed off for the prostitutes to work out of windows in small houses. Normal women are denied entry, since they gawk at the whores like freaks, instead of women, who chose to be paid for sex outside of marriage."
"And the government doesn't try to shut it down? In New York the police harass streetwalkers and their 'johns', as if prostitution was a worse crime than murder or drug-dealing."
"Yes, they are hypocrites here too. In 1927 the Weimar government tried to close it. They failed and even the Nazis couldn’t shut it.” Petra pulled him through a narrow opening. Three overweight dominatrixes grabbed Sean, but their menace melted upon their seeing Petra. Each woman greeted her with a hug, then eyed Sean and one commented gutturally in German, "Ein drecksack."
Sean translated the words thanks to Bruder Karl and said, "Die Teufel."
"Die Teufel mit einen kleinen Schlange."
"Satan doesn't have a small cock."
They all laughed and Petra beckoned with an index finger.
"Follow me."
"To heaven or hell."
The brunette escorted him down the cobblestone street. The first-floor picture windows of the two-storey building were inhabited by women appealing to various libertine fantasies from the encyclopedia of sex. Several waved to Petra.
"Everyone seems to know you."
"In a small town there are no strangers, only people you avoid."
Sean was familiar with the distance people created for themselves, though her explanation was far from the truth, for passing a cluster of men discussing prices with a naked woman on her windowsill, they turned to follow Petra’s passage. She had once been one of these women and entered a house with an air of ownership. Tens of thousands of men had preceded him inside. Hundreds had been with her.
"Is this yours?"
"I own part."
"Another house."
"Not a house. Not a home. A brothel."
"And why are we going here?"
"Remember you won the bet."
She climbed the rickety stairs to an unlit landing and stepped into a small room wallpapered with scarlet brocade and furnished with baroque furniture. The drawn drapes were lush satin and he paused to take it in like a schoolboy on a field trip.
"Hast du ein problem?" Petra tilted her head to mask the more damaged side of her face with the half-light and threw her jacket over a chair.
"Ich habe kein problem?"
"Ah, so du konnst ein bissen Deutsche zu sprechen?" Petra pulled Sean inside.
"Enough to understand what that man was saying this morning."
"He is only getting what he paid for." Petra pushed him onto the bed. Her bracelets clanged together, as she undid his shirt.
"I figured as much."
“Is that wrong or right?" She spun on him. "No man can judge my sins, but every trick wants an explanation about how I had started in this business, almost as if the story could make me a better person. I tell them the truth."
"The truth?"
"It's different every time, because mostly what men want is a dirty fairy tale. When I graduated from high school, I understood society sentenced the women of my class to the slavery of 'Kinde-Kuche-Kirche' or 'child-kitchen-church'. Most of my girlfriends daydreamed about marrying rich, but they ended up working at the stores at Jungfernstieg and getting pregnant from their boyfriends before they were twenty. I had vowed never give it away for free. In Hamburg that means taking to the street.”
"Being a prostitute?"
"A whore or Huren." She pushed back her hair. "You can call it what you want. I serviced the car trade around Lange Reihe as a 'Streichenmadchen' or girl of the streets'. I hid my new career from my parents, though no nice girl ever earned the money they found in my pocketbook. Not in a week, let alone a day."
"So you told them a story?"
"Yes."
"A lie?"
"Not a lie, but not the truth. No parent wants to hear the truth."
"Which was?"
"I liked it."
"The sex?"
"No, I liked fooling the men into thinking I liked the sex. I had no trouble closing my eyes, when the man was on top or behind me. I practiced pants of pleasure, faked orgasms, and told the men they were the biggest. One day an electric-blue T-Bird stopped by the curb. The handsome man in the front seat was a welcome change from the usual rut of married men out for a short-time fuck, though I almost walked away, when he asked, "What is a girl like you doing here?" then he flashed a 1000-DM note and said my beauty was wasted on these streets.”
"Especially if you don't love them."
"Love is for children and dogs. I had no interest in anyone living off my back and Kurt said he wanted nothing from me. Maybe a favor one day. That night he arranged a date with an Exxon executive. That man moved me from the street into an Eppendorfer duplex, where I discreetly entertained Freier or customers. I out-earned all the girls on Lange Reite and I thought it could last forever."
"And it didn't?"
"No." Petra touched the right side of her face and opened the door for an older bleached-blonde woman in a leather harness. She rattled off several sentences in machine-gun German, then announced, "Marta will take care of you."
"Yes, but I thought...." Sean stammered, as Marta stroked his thighs.
Petra asked derisively in a husky voice, "You didn't actually think that we were going to have sex?"
Yes, we had a bet."
"Number one, you are crazy, if you think I cost two hundred marks." she explained what he had said to the girl on the bed, who chuckled harshly in unison with Petra.
"Well, what would I get for two hundred? Ten minutes, five, one?" Sean gently pushed away the older woman. "What about a kiss?"
"A kiss is a such a small thing." Petra signaled Marta to leave and once they were alone, Petra said, “Tell me why you left New York?”
Sean could have just said for a job, but had nothing to hide from Petra and confessed the truth. “Six months ago I was opening a nightclub. After-hours. We took on a Russian gangster to finance the final touches. It had all sounded good, until he walked into the Continental with my ex-girlfriend.”
“Did you still love her?” Men liked to talk, because it took longer than sex.
Meeting Lisa had played like a badly-written remake of CASABLANCA.
“Yes, and I was too blind to not understand what was happening, until it was too late. I paid off the police. Internal Affairs investigated those cops for corruption. The Russian investor lived off counterfeit money and my partner wore a wire for the FBI. After the Russian's partner was shot dead in front of the club, the police raided the spot and arrested everyone. I had been with my ex- at the Russian's apartment. I fled the country and she said she would join him in Paris.”
“And you believed her?”
“Every word. She said she loved me. I waited in Paris. A week went by, then another, till a month passed without her arrival. Every day I called New York, leaving messages on her answering machine. She had lied about leaving the Russian gangster and I treated the pain of her desertion with cocaine and heroin, each drug taking at a shot at killing me. One April morning I woke in a decrepit shooting gallery on Rue de l'Ouest. I couldn't smell the garbage, hear the wheezing of my lungs, or see the shadowy hands undoing my shoelaces. I had reached the bottom and went cold turkey for five bone-crushing days, then headed south to the Luberon to hike through the ancient villages. At the beginning of May I returned to New York with only one thing on my mind."
"Lisa?"
"Yes."
“Men are fools.”
"About love we are."
“So you came here to forget?”
“Like joining the Foreign Legion,” Sean sighed, then was surprised by Petra's kissing him for the briefest of seconds. "So tell me how much?"
"To fuck me, Herr Ami?"
She leaned against the brocaded wall, hands resting on her hips.
"The price is five thousand Marks."
"Three thousand dollars."
"More or less."
"Then I'll start saving my pfennigs."
"And I’ll hold my breath." She pushed him onto the bed and said in a dusty voice, "You must be tired.”
“Where are you going?”
"Just to see some friends outside. Go to sleep." Her command had a hypnotic effect and his eyelids grew heavy with weariness. He stared up at Petra one last time and closed his eyes.
The brunette walked to the door. She had not lost her touch, but most men would not have refused Marta. She glanced at him again, thinking maybe he wasn't like everyone else, then laughed at even thinking he could be different from all the other men in the world. The slam of the door marked her conviction that all men were dogs even if they dressed like a prince, because Hamburg was a funny way of killing fairy tales and Petra knew all too well how stories ended without happy endings.
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