The Lufthansa flight from Frankfort descended through the gray dawn. The plane landed smoothly and taxied across the tarmac. The pilot welcomed the passengers to Hamburg. The doors opened and the other travelers deboarded the plane. Sean remained seated and asked himself, "What am I doing in Germany?"
The word conjured up the Black Forest, Mad Ludwig's castles, the Rhine, beer, knockwurst, koo-koo clocks, lederhosen, Goethe, Bach, Beethoven, Schiller, Mann, Hesse, Wagner, Marlene Dietrich, LILI MARLENE, Rommel, the Wehrmacht at Stalingrad, Ilsa of the SS, and inescapably Hitler and his gang. Before leaving New York, several friends had revealed their slim knowledge of Hamburg by asking, "Didn't the Beatles play there?"
A male steward approached his seat and asked in perfect English, "Are you alright, sir?"
"Yes, just a little disoriented, that's all." Sean stood up with his bag in hand and walked off the plane down the ramp into the near-empty terminal, then proceeded to customs and immigration.
"Passport, bitte."
The officer stamped his passport with a six-month visa and motioned for him to continue through the arrival doors. Neither Kurt nor Bertram were on the other side. He changed $40 into Deutschemarks and went to a phone booth, where he dialed Kurt’s number. Ten rings later he hung up and called again.
No answer and Sean sat on a bench.
A pale-faced police officer in a green uniform passed Sean twice.
The struggle to keep his eyes open lasted a few seconds.
Thirty minutes later Sean snapped awake, as a herd of businessmen in pinstriped suits hurried into the terminal. Nobody had touched his bag and Sean once more called the number without any response. The young policeman approached Sean, who was seized by the paranoid delusion that the NYPD had alerted Interpol to his arrival, but the uniformed officer addressed him in German, then politely asked in English, "Are you lost?"
"No, my friends were supposed to meet me." Sean showed the phone number. "I telephoned them and no one answered."
"Maybe I can help." The officer dialed the number. After thirty seconds he hung up and pressed 'O' and then spoke German too rapidly for Sean. He wrote down an address and said, "Your friends live at Ein Kaiserringstrasse. Maybe twenty minutes away by taxi. It should only cost forty marks."
"Viele Danke." Sean’s dealings with New York cops had ill-prepared him for such cooperation or the German policeman saluting his good-bye.
“Have a good stay in Hamburg.”
"I'll try."
Outside the terminal he walked to a taxi and rapped on the Mercedes’ window, waking the scruffy driver. The back door's lock popped up and Sean sat in the car, which smelled of the driver’s many hours behind the wheel. Some things remained the same from city to city. He cracked the window and handed the address to the driver, who grunted and drove away from the airport. The well-paved road orderly houses with tidy lawns. The passing suburbs could have passed for any affluent city in the western world, except the billboards were in German. Sean read a few, but he once more gave into exhaustion and nodded off, until the taxi stopped on a tree-shaded street.
"Ein Kaiserringstrasse," The driver pointed to a faded blue door in a lopsided brick wall.
"Vierzig mark, bitte."
Sean exited from the taxi and the Mercedes abandoned him to the street's unearthly quiet. A cool fog veiled the white sun and he tasted salt in the air. The house had to be close the Elbe. Unable to find a buzzer Sean pushed the door open with his foot and entered an untended garden.
Creeping ivy strangled twisted oaks. Tall weeds choked the dirt path leading to a Gothic mansion. Cracks crawled up the masonry, paint flaked off the wall in sheets, and the roof was missing sections of stone slates. Sean half-expected the timeworn building to dissolve on the raspy breeze curling through the reed-choked pond surrounded by headless statues.
A Mercedes and Porsche were parked in the driveway and Sean shouted out, "Bertram. Kurt."
The names died in the silent garden.
He climbed the limestone steps to the open front door seeping the smell of must. He yelled the names again. No reply and he stepped inside the mansion, his footsteps creaking on the warped floorboards.
Heavy curtains blocked the light and Sean groped for a light switch against the wall. His fingers tapped a greasy button and electricity blazed from a chandelier precariously fastened to the buckled ceiling.
A clutter of paint tubes and cans in the former dining room surrounded an easel. Empty champagne bottles occupied the far corner. Color-smeared rags carpeted the floor. In the midst of the chaos a painting of a nude brunette with a pageboy haircut viewed through broken glass rested on an elegant chair.
A savage growl vibrated through the house succeeded by a woman's screams. Sean picked up an empty champagne bottle and charged up the crooked stairs.
Down the hallways a woman gasped, "Nein, nein, nein. Nicht wie das."
Inside a bedroom the brunette from the painting stood over a kneeling naked man. The thigh-high black patent leather boots rose above her knees. A studded dog collar encircled her neck and a cuirass of steel chains partially hid her pointed breasts. Metal rings tightly encircled her blunt nipples. A thick belt was looped in her right hand.
A sheen of sweat shone on her skin and a spider web of thin scars latticed her torso. Her heavily made-up eyes and lips coated with a shiny black lacquer failed to mask her facial features having been catastrophically warped like the tectonic plates of the Earth. Neither her deformities nor the man with stringy whitish-blonde hair crawling at her feet detracted from the illusion of her simultaneously being an angel and whore, although Sean cringed with the crack of the belt against the blonde man’s flesh.
Her victim tensed for the next blow. The leather strap ripped across his back and the man flopped onto the floor, the woman saying, "Ich bin ein Mistvieh."
When the brunette turned her head, Sean nearly dropped to his knees to join her slave's devoted worship.
Her cold amber eyes examined the stranger without any alarm before she reached down to strangle the man with the belt. His panting was strained, yet his red face glowed with anticipated pleasure. A video camera in the corner recorded his asphyxiation and played the scene on several televisions. No one was in danger and Sean backed away from the doorway, leaving the empty champagne bottle in the hallway.
Their struggle seemed to intensify with his every step.
Back in the studio Sean cleared a space on the floor. He had slept in worst places and stuck wet paper wads in his ears to block out the noise. He lay on the carpet with his bag under his head. His eyes might have been shut, but the images of this woman unfolded in his mind like crumpled photos of pin-up girls from the ancient Playboy magazines, the creases forming the same tangle of scars across her skin.
Upstairs Petra doubled the thick belt.
"Ich bin Ein Koter," he declared himself a cur and assumed a crouching position with outstretched arms. "Schlag mir. Bitte."
Petra struck Lukas without counting the blows and the belt exploded on his back. The pain reverberated through his trembling limbs. Blood trickled from old wounds and red drops dripped from his chest onto the floor.
Petra panted from exertion and he cried out with pleasure, then murmured the safety word, “Genug.”
“Enough? I have more to give."
Petra’s thighs were flecked with blood.
“That won't be necessary."
"Up to you."
She settled into a chair and stuck her boots underneath his head. He licked them clean, as his tongue departed from the glossy leather to that first raised ridge of scar tissue just above her knee.
"Your groveling disgusts me." Petra directed his attention to whatever he might have missed with a riding crop. Finally Lukas rose to his feet, as if he had snapped out of a trance, and asked, “You ever wonder why?”
“Why what? This?” She snapped the crop against his thigh.
“Yes.”
“I am in it for the money.” Petra unfastened her heavy-metal costume like a gladiator weary from combat. She was strictly in this for the money.
"No I am talking about me.”
“I don't care why you're into it as long as you pay for the session. I am no psychologist.” Petra never asked any of her ‘freier’ questions, but they always wanted to confess their motives and Lukas was no different.
“I’ve tried everything; cocaine, heroin, homosexuality, orgies in search of the ultimate sensation, but only pain makes me feel alive. I thought you of all people would understand that epiphany.”
"I don't understand my life, so why try and to understand the lives of others." Petra touched her right eye and recalled the horror of it popping out. She hated Lukas speaking, as if these meetings bestowed upon him an insight into true suffering, and she said, "Doesn’t your wife make you happy?"
"Happy? Marrying her was a mistake." Lukas stroked the lacerations on his back, as if they were a work of art. "One I am stuck with for the moment. Your friend, Kurt, is very much in love with my wife and if she went with him, I would be free to marry you."
"You really would marry me?" she laughed.
"If Vanessa was out of the way, ja." Lukas put on his shirt. Blood stained the silk.
“You know we are made for one another.”
"I was not made for anyone." She wrapped a robe around her body. "You know the way out. I have to attend to my guest."
"Ah, yes, your guest.” Lukas pulled on his trousers and slipped on his shoes. “Who is he?”
"An American Kurt hired to work at the nightclub." Petra stuck with Kurt’s cover story. Lukas suspected that the American might be involved in Kurt and Cali’s plans and said, "Another American in Hamburg like Wim Wenders' AMERICAN FRIEND.
Petra regarded movies as a pale reflection of life and hoped Lukas spared her a discourse about his beloved cinema.
“Yes, they come and go."
“And what about tomorrow?"
"You’re paying the rent here. You can come and go as you pleased as long as you pay me too." Petra was amazed at his addiction to pain, but she kept a gun upstairs, for Lukas was rumored to have killed two men in Morocco during the 1970s. He was not to be trusted, then again no man was worthy of trust.
Lukas placed an envelope containing 5000 DMs on a table, as if it were a down payment on her soul and left the room without saying another word.
Once he was gone, Petra went downstairs to the studio and nudged the intruder with her naked foot.
Sean opened his eyes.
The brunette’s electric-blue silk nightgown hardly softened her nail-tough exterior and her icy left eye wandered out of synch with the right.
"So you must be the American. Kurt told me you could pass for a young Orson Welles playing a cop."
"That's the Irish in me." Sean stood up and brushed sticky rags from his jeans.
"I'm sorry about the intrusion.”
"Herr Coll, I heard you on the steps.”
"You could have locked the door."
"The expression on your face was too precious for words." The woman walked out of the room. "Come with me, I will show you where to sleep."
Sean trailed her to a room. The windows had a view of the river.
She pointed to the small bed in the corner.
"You can sleep there."
"What about Bertram and Kurt? They were supposed to meet me at the airport."
"It was a late night at the club and they figured you could get it here on your own." She leaned against the door and parted her legs. "We can meet them later." “At the club."
"Where else, but the Malchek?"
"And what is your name?"
The silk robe opened a few inches. A gold chain encircled her waist. The scars covered her belly. She had been spared nothing by her attacker.
"Petra Wessel."
"Wessel? Like Horst Wessel?" Sean referred to the Nazi martyr from the 1930s.
"So you are up on your history, but I am not related to Horst Wessel.”
She stepped away from the door, leaving behind the smell of another man on her skin. Her footsteps climbed the stairs and a door slammed shut to leave him alone in a foreign city.
Hamburg was not New York
Sean shucked off his boots and lay on the bed. Sleep was hardly what he experienced next, but no dreams of H-bombs invaded his dreams and he was happy.
Least for now.
