The pulsing agony from Cali's wound kept him awake. Luckily the penthouse apartment on Mitterlweg was stocked with videos. Throughout the night he watched SUPERFLY, SHAFT, and RAGING BULL without concentrating on any of the dialogue or subtitles, though during the last film's fight scenes, the blows body-punched his body.
By dawn Cali felt like a million Lira in a dirty bag. He should have taken the doctor's advice and gone to a hospital, except a six-inch gash was long enough to have the hospital call the police and he wasn't in the mood to answer questions.
"Not today.
Not tomorrow.
Cali bit his lip and gazed enviously at the sleeping woman on the bed. The Valiums had blessed the blonde with a quiet night, although her lips mouthed indecipherable words. He should have left the apartment in favor of a more secure safe house, but he owed his dead friend the favor of watching over Vanessa, if only for being his first real friend.
Cali's earliest contact with the outside world came through visits from his Grossmuti. Her flinty stare warned him to keep his distance. Every visit the old woman muttered Nigger under her breath and his mother hushed the gray-haired lady. The word meant nothing to Cali and he hoped it might be a term of endearment. He found out soon enough how mistaken he was.
When his mother was hired by a small shipping company, she left the young boy alone and instructed him to never go outside without explaining why. Being a dutiful son, he obeyed her edict and day after day Cali watched the other boys of his age playing in the rubble of the reconstructed quayside.
Soon he thought of little else other than joining these hooligans in throwing rocks at the scraggly rats lurking by the garbage, setting the derelicts' shacks on fire, hurling cats into the harbor, or being chased by the shopkeepers after they stole candy.
Finally their endless cries of delight lured him to open the apartment door. The hallway was empty. He was a good son, but the laughter from the street was an irresistable siren song. He shut the door and crept down the stairs, as if he expected a policeman to arrest him for escaping his cell. When he reached the ground floor, he stepped outside on his own for the first time in his life.
He was four years old.
Upon seeing him, the boys stopped what they were doing and sauntered over to his doorway. At first he thought they would hug him like his mother did, except their eyes were icy cold like those of his grandmother.
He heard the word 'Schwartzer' and understood that they were talking about his skin color. Worst names flew from the mouths of the children, for Hafenstrasse was a tough street and its children were all older than their years. One blond boy emerged from the pack. Cali held out his hand and the boy pushed it away with a laugh. The other boys joined in and so did Cali, until the other boy slapped his face.
The sudden smack came as a shock, though nothing could have prepared him for the combined attack of the street gang. Cali went down after the second punch, then sat helplessly, as they all gleefully took shots at the young black boy. After a few minutes they were exhausted or bored and the pack of boys returned to their games.
Even a six-year old's fist hurts, when there are too many of them. No one helped Cali to his feet. He crawled upstairs and lay on the couch, waiting for his mother to come home. The sight of the bruises horrified her and she scolded him for leaving the house. Her son said he was sorry. She told him he was not to blame. When he asked why the boys had attacked him, she said it was their way of playing. Later in life she would believe she had not lied to him, though that was only because she had not told him the truth.
Instead of remaining inside, he bravely ventured out to endure the same beating day after day.
While the ten-on-ones rarely varied in intensity or length of time, this regularity gave him a chance to throw two or three punches before the collective pummeling buried him. Each day he returned for more and picked a new face to hit, although he never gave out worse than he got.
One day, as the weather was getting colder, Cali came out of the apartment building, wearing the new coat his mother had bought him. The street boys discussed who was getting the first punch. The tall blond boy decided he should have the honors and ordered Cali to give him his coat.
"No."
"No? That is a mistake. I tell you what, little man, I will give you the first punch."
"Okay." Cali swung his fist and hit him in the jaw. The tall boy dropped like a sack of potatoes , his nose bleeding. The felling of their leader by the smaller boy momentarily stunned the pack, because no one had seen Cali pick up a rock with which he had struck the older boy.
He attacked them before they had a chance to regroup, hoping to avenge all the previous beatings in one day, but within seconds a flurry of punches and kicks swarmed over Cali. The young boys' knuckles popped against his head and Cali joined the blond boy on the cobblestones. Booted feet thudded into his body and he soon felt like he was drowning.
Suddenly the beating ended when someone broke rank to help him.
At seven years-old Kurt Oster had witnessed hundreds of fights on Hafenstrasse.
Sailors used knives. Boys fought with sticks and stones. and couple battered each other with firsts and frying pans.
At first the street urchins' daily attacks on the young black boy had been an amusing diversion. Nothing out of the ordinary for the harbor street, except the younger boy never shed any tears. Soon he respected the black boy's courage and realized that the younger boy would never break, so he jumped into the fray to stop the one-sided beating.
The butcher's stepson flailed at the black boy's persecutors with the thick leather strap his stepfather used on him. The strop sliced through the air and cracked indiscriminately on the pig pile of young boys. They lit out like rats with their tails on fire, taking their fallen comrade with them. Kurt Oster stood victorious without bragging, since no one on Hafenstrasse won all their fights and tomorrow he might be the one on the bottom.
"Thanks," Cali said, then tongued his lip, tasting the salty blood.
"You know why they did that?" Kurt grabbed the young boy's hand and lifted him to his feet.
"No." Cali swiped at his nose.
"Because you are a nigger. A black man." Kurt led him upstairs to the apartment over the butcher shop. "They hate you for being different. For not being 100% German, but none of them are 100%. Me too."
"Why did you help me?" Cali fought back the tears of gratitude.
"I was getting tired of seeing you get beaten up." Kurt washed away the dirt and blood with an old towel. "Plus you are a bastard and so am I."
"I thought you had a father." Cali had seen Kurt working at the butcher shop for the thick-necked man cutting meat off the bone.
"That pig is my step-father," Kurt announced with disgust, then went to the icebox and took out a hambone, savagely slicing off several slabs of pink meat to make the younger boy a sandwich. "He tells everyone what a great soldier he was. If he was a Nazi, then I hate all Nazis. Someday I will kill him."
"Then who is your real father?" These were the most words anyone other than his mother had ever spoken to him.
"He died on the Eastern Front fighting with the Wehrmacht." Kurt poured two glasses of milk and sat down at the table. He picked up his sandwich and took a bite, chewing the meat like a dog gnawing an old bone.
"I never knew my father," Cali mumbled through his first bite. It was the best sandwich he ever tasted and the young boy remembered his mother telling him that the butcher always saved the best pieces of meat for himself.
"He was probably an American. Maybe from Harlem."
"Where's that?"
"America. You'll learn all about it in school. They killed millions of us and ruined the cities with their bombs."
Later once Cali learned to add and subtract, he discovered the numbers between the war and Kurt's birth was out of synch. Cali forgave his friend this lie, because he too made up a story about his mysterious father, which he believed more than the people to whom he told the tale.
Cali always remembered Kurt's help and the two had remained close friends throughout the years. The boys in the neighborhood called them Salz und Pfeiffer. In later years the Hamburg Kripo would borrow the title of a Michael Jackson/Paul McCartney duet, EBONY AND IVORY to describe what they viewed as a criminal partnership. Now only EBONY was left and it was only now Cali realized how great a loss he had suffered.
During the night he had been told that his friend's body had been placed in the house on Rue de la Tour. In the morning the maid would discover him. She would scream and call the police. The 'flics' would take him down to the morgue along the Seine. He would have someone identify him. The body would be taken up to Pere-Lachaise and the cremated ashes spread over Chopin's grave. They had each discussed their deaths and their burials hundreds of times and Kurt had never wavered from his wish.
Cali reckoned if he was going to die, yesterday would have been the day, for it's not every day you survive an ax attack. He weighed out the pros and cons of his failure. His ribs were staved in. Kurt was dead. SS Tommy had killed Willi and the banker. The Eroscenter was in chaos. The police were after him, as they always were, when something bad happened in Hamburg. SS Tommy's being dead and his being alive were about the only pluses along with Vanessa's being saved from whatever his ex-associate had planned for her.
Kurt and Cali had underestimated the baron and paid dearly for that mistake. What was worst was that Lukas had a good shot at getting away with it all. If the baron had been someone of Cali's class, murdering him would not be a problem, however the government came down heavy, whenever one of the privileged class got what coming to them.
As disastrous as yesterday turned out, Cali fully intended on preventing today from being the second bad day in a row. His main concern was that Petra was still after him. Everyone else involved in the beating had paid their pound of flesh. There was very little he could do to make everything right for Petra, but if it meant going down on his knees, then that was what he would do, even if there was no guarantee begging would grant him forgiveness. Not because it was the right, but it was the only choice he had left.
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