Nights in Berlin Read online

  Nights in Berlin

  A Francis Bacon Mystery

  Janice Law

  MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

  To my friends at Fletcher Memorial Library

  As a teenager, the Anglo-Irish painter Francis Bacon was sent to Weimar Berlin with an uncle, but that fact has been surrounded by pure fiction. The characters and events are wholly imaginary and any resemblance to persons living or dead is truly coincidental.

  Chapter One

  Dear Francis,

  So they are sending you among the godless Huns. You will need to look sharp, dear boy, and mind yourself. They say a lot about Berlin, and I don’t doubt for a moment that most of it is true, as the city is full of heathens.

  Still, a trip to the continent is an education in itself. Remember that a young gentleman must be educated, and travel is undoubtedly the least painful means. Since you have not shown much taste for school, this may prove to be just the ticket. I do hope so, dear boy, for you have great capabilities.

  Now, as for getting home, I wish to see you beyond all things, but even if you were allowed back before your trip, I would not be in residence. Young Eddie is ready for school, the girls are away, and a nanny is, in your father’s opinion, superfluous. I have received my two weeks’ notice and must look for another position.

  As soon as you are settled in Berlin, send me a note in care of my sister in Brighton. She will forward mail to me.

  Keep a stout heart and a bright face, and never doubt your nan loves you.

  XXXX

  I folded up the letter, already well creased from reading, and put it back into my jacket pocket. Nan was leaving, and with her went the last possible reason for me to return to Ireland. As far as I can determine after nearly seventeen years of observation, my dear Nan is the one and only person who is always glad to see me. For the rest of the family, I have been the cuckoo in the nest. My main thought has been to take flight, and theirs, to see the back of me.

  Sitting on my trunk waiting for Uncle Lastings and anticipating the unknown delights of Berlin, I was feeling sorry for myself. This is something Nan always discouraged, self-pity being, in her mind, the eighth deadly sin. Hence my rereading of a letter that I already knew by heart. Count your blessings, Francis, she used to say, and yes, the last few months had brought some definite advantages: I was in London. Therefore, I was not in Ireland, which means I was not surrounded by the horses and dogs that cause my eyes to swell up and my lungs to close. I was also out of reach of my father, who dislikes me.

  My mother was mildly concerned about my conduct; my brothers and sisters, indifferent. But Father outright disapproved, and having dispatched me from home several months ago, he had now taken it into his head to reform me. From what? you may ask. Trifles, really. I was too fond of certain boys at school, hence my return to the family home, and then too partial to trying out Mother’s underwear and rouge, hence my exile to London.

  As Nan used to say, neither was a hanging offense by a long chalk, but I had been living by my wits in Soho ever since. Happily, liking boys there was no crime, makeup was all the rage, and my face, considered homely back at the manse, passed muster quite nicely. A good thing, too, as my allowance of three pounds a month did not stretch very far. Certainly not to decent dinners and glasses of wine and nice clothes.

  I had learned to make use of my assets, and I’d landed on my feet. Or to take Father’s point of view, I’d set out on the road to ruin. Now I was to be rescued by Uncle Lastings, who would return me to home and family as a model boy in the soldierly mode—my uncle, late of the royal Berkshires, being in Father’s words the right sort to make a man of you.

  That’s the way Father talked, and tedious it was, too, what with alternate references to the turf—he ran an unsuccessful race-training stable—and the military. You’d think he spent the Great War on the western front instead of in an office in London, for he was always going on about the need for guts and a willingness to go over the top, all delivered with a good deal of shouting and stamping and blows left and right.

  I was afraid his notion was to turn me into a similarly roaring bully. Good luck with that. Men like my father caught my eye, but I certainly didn’t want to be one of them. No siree, Bob. So I was determined that Uncle Lastings would have his work cut out for him. He could start by paying my landlady, although I had five pounds in my inner jacket pocket, thanks to a gentleman from Cyprus who took me to the Savoy and was generous afterward. But that was for me to know.

  The bell rang downstairs. I straightened my shoulders—how many times had Father screamed “Shoulders back!” at me?—and got ready for my uncle. If he was going to reform me, he was going to pay for the pleasure.

  Dear Nan,

  I am settled in Berlin in the Adlon Hotel, the best in the city. The bed curtains are silk and room service comes on silver trays. It’s beyond comfy and quite a change from my last digs at school! I am going about and seeing everything—believe me, there is plenty to see—and visiting all the galleries and museums, full of wild, wild stuff: green faces and purple horses and amazing etchings and drawings of grotesque heads and bodies—such as one sees on every sidewalk, because even on Unter der Linden, there are beggars and war wounded. Nonetheless, I feel quite at home, and Uncle Lastings is seeing that I learn a bit of German.

  I stopped right there. Every word was true, especially that I did feel at home. I did, I did! In Ireland I was a sinful freak, if not an outright criminal, and even in London, I was on thin ice most nights. Au contraire, in Berlin, my little indulgences passed without notice in what Uncle Lastings terms “the welcome circus of depravity.” My uncle had a way with words.

  The difficulty was that mine didn’t go far enough. I would have liked to tell Nan a bit more about my uncle and nighttime Berlin, which, believe me, presented some sights. I chewed the end of my pen and thought things over, because I had the feeling that Uncle Lastings, who always volunteered to mail my letters—I can save you the postage, Francis—read them. Too bad, as Uncle was a big part of what made Berlin so fascinating. Appearance, first: He was bigger than my father, probably six feet and a couple inches; he had a square red face and a lumpy nose above a mustache like General Kitchener’s; and he walked with a military strut, which helped conceal that he had put on some unmilitary pounds since he last went over the top, which I gathered he did.

  Unlike Father, my uncle didn’t have much to say about the war, having seen and heard enough of it. As he said to me the very first day we met, I’ll be damned if I’ll do anything from here on out but fuck around and enjoy myself. His motto, exactly, and one he lived up to daily, if not hourly. I was lucky, I realized, to get him to pay off my landlady!

  But Uncle Lastings always played a long game, as I learned almost as soon as we were on the boat train headed for the coast and our continental sleeper to Berlin. So, Francis, he had said and dropped his hand on my knee, the grand tour commences, eh?

  I took a better look at him then. There he sat, red-faced and clearly ex-army and just the sort to straighten out what Father has taken to calling his nancy-boy son. But what was this? His hand had migrated upward, and was that a most unmilitary twinkle in his eye? I believe it was.

  “Oh,” I said, for I have learned how to make myself agreeable, “I believe we will get along famously.”

  And we had. I had no problem with going to bed with Uncle Lastings, who certainly knew what he was about in that department. It was rather in other departments that my uncle gave me pause. I wondered how he afforded the Adlon Hotel and where he went afternoons when he was off on business and who the mysterious gents who showed up at odd hours and phoned him from the fancy bar downstairs we
re. He couldn’t have been sleeping with all of them—well, he could have been theoretically, given his appetite and stamina—but I thought he really was on some sort of mission, and I got bad feelings about his associates, fit young men with thin, tanned faces and wild eyes. They were not Berliners; they were there on business.

  And not what seemed to be the main business of the moment, either, which was the incredibly specialized flesh trade, offering something for every imaginable taste. The whores and rent boys came out at dusk to claim their turf according to their services, while lights went on in the upper rooms of even the most respectable-looking housing blocks. Before you knew it, there were streams of patrons at the front doors and jazz or tangoes on the gramophones.

  “The sovereign power of money over morals,” said Uncle Lastings, who headed off at night to the various clubs, semirespectable and otherwise. He was fond of the Resi, with its table telephones, all the better to proposition some darling on the other side of the room. Watching my uncle in the flirtatious mode was almost entertainment enough. Almost, but I didn’t need to be the wallflower at the party. While Uncle tried to charm some woman with money, I casted my eye among the younger waiters and the boys lined up outside who fancied their chances. Yes, I’d say evening was fine, if occasionally hard on the wallet.

  It was afternoon that was beginning to concern me. We got up late, as you might imagine. Breakfast in bed. Very satisfactory. Then Uncle took what he called his constitutional—a brisk walk in the park—while I took myself off to the galleries, where the paintings were nothing like the tame stuff done at home. Artists in Berlin felt free to express themselves and favored the exaggerated and grotesque; they were trying to catch what was on the streets right then. I didn’t know why I was so fascinated when everything they were painting was just outside, but I was. How does it get done? How to put the world into paint and onto canvas? How to turn emotion into color? That was what I would have liked to know, although I was not sure why just yet.

  I only returned to the hotel after the galleries closed. Sometimes Uncle Lastings was down in the bar, deep in conversation with one of his associates. Occasionally, two or three of them would be up in our room, the air brown with the smoke of their pipes and cigars, forcing me to take my dodgy lungs and retreat to the winter garden or the ornate lobby. After these meetings, my uncle was in one of two moods: expansive and cheerful, and we would head out for a fancy dinner and champagne, or surly, and he would go off alone and I would eat on the cheap.

  Sometimes he disappeared for a night or two, and when he did, he took his Webley revolver with him. Otherwise, it lay in the bottom of his case. He made frequent trips to one of the banks, and he carried very few marks—rely on the pound sterling, my boy—so whatever business he was doing must’ve been in hard currency. And quite profitable, too, because even with the power of the pound, the Adlon was expensive, not to mention Uncle Lastings’s other diversions.

  Though jovial and talkative about most things, my uncle was silent on his purpose for being in Berlin until early one afternoon when we were walking near the Alexanderplatz. The bustle of the city and the noise of the trolley and cabs were suddenly interrupted by a sound like a rising wind that soon became singing voices, accompanied by the rhythmic thump of marching boots on cobblestones.

  “Here they come,” said Uncle Lastings with a kind of relish.

  “Who?”

  “The Bolshies, of course. Damn Reds. Reason we’re here, boy! To fight the advance guard of the godless.” He pulled me back from the street as a mob of men and boys, eight abreast, marched by, shouting for jobs and food and death to speculators, all beneath a small forest of red flags and banners painted with slogans. There were songs, too, bellowed out in unison, and the marchers’ feet rang out so clearly that people threw their windows open and leaned out and cheered.

  Uncle Lastings, however, seemed to be waiting for something else. He kept scanning the spectators and looking down the side streets. The main marchers had just passed us when we heard the sound of breaking glass ahead. Uncle Lastings craned his neck as rocks started bouncing into the street, thrown by men who were coming out of the neighboring beer halls.

  “The Vikings,” Uncle Lastings said with satisfaction. “Or maybe the Brownshirts.” He grabbed my arm and pulled me into an alleyway. “Head down.”

  Within minutes, the orderly, seemingly irresistible march began to fragment. The songs broke off and the marching cadence dissolved as shouting men ran first one way and then another, advancing, retreating, swirling into fights and throwing whatever came to hand. Anyone who fell or was isolated was instantly set upon by men with clubs, or the splintered poles of the flags, or trampled beneath heavy boots. Several bleeding combatants took refuge behind the metal bins in our alley before we heard a bugle and the clatter, clink, and rattle of cavalry, familiar to me from my childhood near the Curragh. The mob flowed away in thunderous waves of running feet, pursued by saber-wielding horsemen.

  I found the march and its aftermath scary but curiously exciting, as if the prints and paintings I’d been admiring had come to life, their truth revealed. I was eager to get back out onto the street, but Uncle Lastings shook his head.

  “Stragglers are in danger in no-man’s-land,” he said with a chilly and distant look in his eyes. So we waited.

  After a while, he lit his pipe, and once he had communed with the tobacco, we stepped out of our hiding place. The street was strewn with glass and torn flags and slick in places with blood and manure. Some of the injured were still lying dazed in the gutter; others were being helped to safety by young women who came out of the apartments and tenements, some with bandages, as if this was no more than they’d been expecting.

  Reason we’re here, my uncle had said, and this seemed like a good chance to ask him just what he meant.

  “The men you meet—are they involved?” I asked.

  “Of course,” said Uncle Lastings. “A new force in Europe is very much needed.” He spat on the sidewalk. “Berlin’s a Red city. It pulls Prussia with it, next thing you know you’ve got a Bolshie state on the French border. And the Frogs are half-Red already, so time to make a stand.”

  I couldn’t see much difference between the groups of street fighters, or between the marchers and the rough and seedy-looking­ gents who met with my uncle. “They were throwing rocks,” I said.

  “The reason I’m at work, my boy. Rocks aren’t going to do it, not when the Reds have the numbers. Firepower and organization—those are the keys, and the Society for a Christian Europe is the means for both.”

  “The Society for a Christian Europe?” It sounded like a tract society, one of those outfits with religious leaflets that occasionally descended into Soho to warn that sex leads to damnation. I was already pretty well immune to that notion. “Does the society really exist?”

  He gave me a look, and, at first, I thought he was going to be angry, that I had overstepped and now would learn nothing. But he gave a little cynical smirk. “Such a skeptical boy! No wonder Eddy sent you off with me. Of course it exists; and I am its Berlin agent.” He pulled out an official-looking metal badge.

  “What do you do as the Berlin agent?”

  “Well, now, that is another matter. I assist the society by funneling money to the worthy, for a commission, of course.”

  Of course, along with rooms at the Adlon and nightly visits to the sex clubs and cafés and fancy restaurants. “And the men you meet?”

  “Gentlemen on the right, interested in arms. Which I can also arrange.”

  “For a commission?”

  “Naturally. It’s a delicate business, which, Francis, is why I have been pleased to have you along. Chaperoning a young nephew around Berlin lends credibility in certain quarters.”

  Although I thoroughly enjoyed nightspots like the Resi and the transvestite employees of the Eldorado, I was not sure they could be considered
innocent amusements. Not by a society aimed at Christian Europe.

  He must have read that on my face because he nodded after a moment and said, “Certainly the society could exist. Remember, Francis, whatever man can imagine, can exist. ”

  That seemed to be good advice in Berlin. And a bit of a warning.

  Chapter Two

  Dear Nan,

  Uncle Lastings is off on business, so I have the run of the Hotel Adlon, including all the behind-the-scenes areas, thanks to a hall boy I’ve befriended. Fritz wants to become a waiter and is keen to learn English. I can oblige, so I’m getting to know the hotel inside and out. Good thing, too, as my uncle has been very busy lately, writing up reports for the society and taking trips to other German cities. I have not been invited, but that doesn’t bother me because Berlin has enough interest for a dozen towns.

  Just between us, I think Uncle Lastings is in some difficulties. He’s been talking lately of being “down the rabbit hole,” which doesn’t sound good at all. At the moment, he has hopes of some National Socialist fellow who is due in town from Munich. Uncle thinks they might be the sort for the society to support in their fight against the Bolsheviks.

  More to the point was that Uncle Lastings thought this Goebbels Johnny would be a sure pigeon. Fresh out of the beer halls, my boy! They’ve named him Gauleiter of Berlin, and he’s going to need money to go with the title.

  True enough, but when I mentioned that was a mighty big Red march we’d seen the other day, Uncle Lastings just rubbed his hands. “Wouldn’t be worth our while otherwise,” he said. “Ever since the Republic scuttled the Freikorps, the right-wing outfits have been looking for funds and supplies. They’ve got to have newspapers and magazines and cash for their fighters. With a little luck and my commission, I avoid the rabbit hole, Francis, and get the old exchequer into the black.”