The Berlin Connection (38 page)

A short, slight man, hat in one hand, a brief case in the other, bowed politely.

"Come in. Inspector Munro. My wife just confessed the entire business. I knew nothing of this." Behind me I heard Joan cry. "She did a very foolish thing and committed a punishable offense. At least no one came to any bodily harm."

"Well, it's not a capital offense." The inspector spoke good English. "Good morning, Mrs. Jordan. Please calm yourself."

"I'll be taken to court!"

"Well yes, but—"

"And I'll be sent to jail!"

"It is possible. Perhaps a suspended sentence. Or a fine. Naturally your driver's license will be revoked. Please, Mrs. Jordan, you must calm yourself. I'm very sorry, but my orders are to question you once more."

"Yes, darling," I said, "you must stop crying. Try to be reasonable now."

Joan slowly stopped sobbing.

"Fm so ashamed," she whispered. I offered her my handkerchief. "What I've done is a criminal offense, a terrible thing..."

Inspector Munro in his correct school-English tried to pacify her while he pulled paper and pen from his brief case. -

"Excuse me for one moment, please," I said. The black bag was hidden in a cupboard of my bedroom. I drank from the bottle until I fell on the bed gasping for breath.

(Transcriber's noter At this point Signore Jordan interrupted his taping for three days because of influenza. It enabled me to catch up with transcribing his report and to hand the entire manuscript to Professor Pontevivo. The followmg was taped on May eleventh, 1960.)

PROFESSOR pontevivo: Have you come to a conclusion regarding the treatment by hypnosis? SIGNORE JORDAN: Ycs. I agree to it.

PROFESSOR pontevivo: Good. We'll discuss the details tomorrow. It will take several sessions. While you were ill I caught up on your last tape transcriptions. Now for weeks you had lived in fear of your wife knowing all about you and your stepdaughter. It proved to be without foundation. In fact she had been afraid that you might find out about her car accident.

SIGNORE JORDAN: That's right and yet that's not all of it At the time of our filming in Essen I was already so exhausted that I could hardly think straight. Logically, I now had no more reason to be afraid. But the fear was still with me! I would say that after Inspector Munro's visit my fear increased. Perhaps I knew; I sensed that all this could not come_to a good end. I had prepared myself for the long overdue catastrophe. I had almost wished for an end of this torture, no matter how dreadful the end might be.

PROFESSOR PONTEvrvo: I Understand. And now, once more, your situation was as it had been in the beginning, with a loving, trusting wife . ..

SIGNORE JORDAN: You can imagine that when she confessed her "crime" to me, my reaction made her feel even more affectionate. She thought I was the best hus-

band in all the world. She kissed and hugged me even

while the inspector was still there.

PROFESSOR PONTEVivo: And the prospect of having to talk

to your unsuspecting wife ...

siONORE JORDAN: You Can understand how I felt, can't

you? It would have been easier if she had suspected

something, if she had mistrusted me! The fact that she

was so happy, so relieved made my life doubly difficult.

Right after the inspector left she went out and bought me

a gold cigarette case. And before I left for the night's

shooting—(unintelligible)

PROFESSOR PONTEVIVO: You Completed your shooting

without any kind of breakdown?

siGNORE JORDAN: Ycs. Schaubcrg now used medications

which must have been very strong. I frequently had dizzy

spells while I was working; I vomited a few times, I often

had intolerable headaches. To counteract those symptoms

Schauberg gave me more and more drugs.

We left Essen on a Friday, December fourth. For me there were another fifteen days of shooting. The scenes I did not appear in were to be shot later. The most difficult ones had been completed.

PROFESSOR PONTEVIVO: Your stepdaughter was all right again after you returned? How did she seem to you? SIGNORE JORDAN: She seemed very friendly but preoccupied. I often felt she did not recognize me when we talked. She was the same with her mother. She did her work, was pleasant and polite—and very reserved. PROFESSOR PONTEVIVO: She had promised you to explain her behavior once the operation had been performed. SIGNORE JORDAN: I did ask her about that. She asked me to be patient for another few days. PROFESSOR PONTEVIVO: Were you intimate? SIGNORE JORDAN: Not oncc since she had arrived in Europe. She seemed so strange that I did not even dare kiss her any more. Besides, I already mentioned it, Schau-berg's medications were making a physical and mental

wreck of me. Often when I walked, I thought I was falling. Again and again I dreamt the dream that I was locked in the elevator. Sometimes tears would be streaming down my face or I caught myself talking to myself. I tried desperately to control myself so as not to become suspicious.

PROFESSOR PONTEVivo: But day after day you were in front of the cameras.

siGNORE JORDAN: I had to finish the movie. As I think of it now, I had only one wish: to finish. Just to complete that movie.

PROFESSOR PONTEVTVo: Did your stepdaughter stiU see that man secretively?

SIGNORE JORDAN: Ycs. Schaubcfg and his student were still watching her but they never found out who-he was or where Shirley was meeting him. She always eluded her pursuers.

PROFESSOR PONTEVivo: But you did find out the truth. When did it happen?

SIGNORE JORDAN: On the twelfth of December. Things might have turned out differently if Schauberg had not asked me to be a witness to his marriage. PROFESSOR PONTEVIVO: Witness to his marriage? For heaven's sake, he was going to marry?

"Witness to your marriage?"

It was early morning on the fifth of December. Schauberg and I stood in the darkness outside the hotel entrance. It was snowing again and the exhaust from the Mercedes looked like a shivering white snake. Schauberg had just brought the car.

"Witness, that's right," he said.

"Surely, you're not going to marry!"

"But I am."

"Whom?"

"Kathe, of course."

The sudden shock made me slip on the snow and I came to rest on the fender.

"Why are you staring at me, my dear Mr. Jordan? We'd like you and Madam Misere to be our witnesses. You are my choice, Madam is Kathe's. The wedding Will take place on the twelfth of December at twelve noon. That's next Saturday. You'll be finished at the studio by then. Will you do us the honor?"

"Now tell me the point of the joke."

"It's no joke. Kathe and I want to marry." He smiled and once more reminded me of my father. His disarming smile, his elegance even in his uniform.

I rose.

"Your drugs have done it. I'm crazy. Do you know I just heard you say that you're going to marry Kathe?"

"That's what I did say."

"Then you're the crazy one. It's the morphine!"

"What's so crazy about my wanting to marry Kathe?"

"I can't believe it. Do you know why I admired you?"

"Why, dear Mr. Jordan?"

"For your perfect cynicism, your incorruptible frigid reason. I saw you as a man who had no false ideals, no empty talk. A man who would never fall victim to a treacherous, undefinable feeling ... let alone love."

"I'm sorry to disappoint you, dear Mr. Jordan. Apparently I have."

"You can't possibly love anybody!"

"Yes, I can. One person. Kathe. You admire my perfect cynicism. Thank you. Well—"

"I said I admired cynicism. It can't be perfect."

"Why not?"

"It would make love impossible."

"On the contrary. It proves very useful to my love. Were I an honorable, moral idealist—I could not marry a

whore who is working in a bordello: a woman who is dumb, primitive, simple, uneducated. Kathe is all those things, isn't she?"

I was silent.

Schauberg said, "For a cynic such as I am there is also a second Kathe who is more loyal than any woman I have ever met. In spite of what she does, she has retained a child-like innocence. She never lies; she will never betray me. She has stood by me when things were at their worst. Many times I have hurt her feelings, have offended her. She always loved me."

Now he did not remind me of my father. "I want to get away from here. I want to start anew, in spite of everything. I can't do it alone. With Kathe, who will stand by me, who wiU always be truthful and who does not have to fear evil because her innocence is stronger than evil—with her I will be able to succeed."

I was silent.

"You believed, naturally, that I would abandon Kathe."

"Naturally."

"It's understandable. It would have been the logical, reasonable thing to do. Of course, at first I thought that too. But in time, weeks, months, I discovered that I loved her. In her artlessness, her simplicity she did things . . . little things .. . which touched me ... things I admired."

"Such as?"

"Two men in Leipzig gave her seven eels which they had stolen. When pressure was put on her she escaped to the West just so she would not have to betray those men. She left everything, her home, her youth, Would you have betrayed those men?"

"Probably."

"I would have too. You see what I mean. What is love, Mr. Jordan? To go to bed together? To writhe, to groan with lust, to copulate in the manner of animals? How long

does that last? How long can it last? Two years? Three years? A month? And what follows then?"

"What?"

"Mostly nothing. Sometimes a human relationship. One needs the other. One trusts the other. Trust and need— that's probably love. And that's why we are going to marry."

"I understand."

"And you're terribly disappointed in me," said Schau-berg. He was still smiling and straightened his beret. Snow, crystalline and clean, fell on us, still clean because it had not yet come in contact with our dirty world.

Luck had been with us. We had worked so steadily that we were a day and a half ahead of our schedule. I talked to Kostasch in good time. He said, "If you are supposed to be at City Hall at noon you'll have to leave here at eleven. We could do a few scenes in which you don't appear and you can take Saturday off. You look as if you could use it. A day off will do you good!"

"I asked that all my scenes would be shot first. And it would give me enough time if I left here at eleven-thirty."

"No, no, you take Saturday off. Present from the boss. I already mentioned to Thornton that you look a little under the weather and he thinks so too. We don't want you to drop in your tracks during the last two weeks. You boozing too much?"

"No. No, I'm not."

"Then it's something else. I don't want to know. But we've all noticed something is wrong."

"If my work is not—"

"Something is wrong with you, I said. Your work is

okay. You are worrying us, Peter boy. Is there anything I can do?"

"I'm just tired, that's aU. Don't worry. I'll finish the last two weeks. And if I can really take Saturday oQ. ..."

"I told you you could!"

"Thanks."

So they had noticed that something was Wrong with me. Two more weeks. Only two more weeks. Just to get through those two weeks was what I most wanted now.

At ten o'clock on Saturday, the twelfth of December, Madam Misere gave one of her fabulous champagne breakfasts. Eleven of the girls joined us at breakfast while the other eleven were permitted to come to City Hall for the wedding ceremony.

Business could not be completely interrupted.

While the "first party" was breakfasting the members of the "second party" in their rooms above us were being noisily merry with some early guests.

Madam Misere, Schauberg and I were dressed in black. Kathe wore a blue suit; three orchids pinned to the lapel. For the first time since I met her she seemed a mature woman, not at all an adolescent. She wore little make-up and I was surprised how pretty she was'. Her blonde hair was pulled back, her blue eyes were sparkling and from time to time she had to dab her nose. She sat at the head of the table, radiant with happiness.

Soon Madam was reminding us to get ready to leave. A few of the girls were already high. Thereupon, the breakfast party went upstairs to work and the other eleven, unfamiliar in their best clothes, came giggling down the creaking staircase.

We were ready now. At that moment two foreign women, with the imperious manners of the spoiled rich, announced loudly why they had come. "We want two big blondes with two big 'godemiches'." Madam assured them that both were available in several shapes and forms. The two foreigners made their choices from among the girls of

the "first party" while Madam went in search of the key to the cupboard where she kept such accessories. The key could not be found.

Madam became nervous. The girls grew restive. It was twenty-five to twelve. One of the women had chosen Kathe but when told that she was about to leave for City Hall had said, "To marry a man? What a shame!" Kathe suddenly burst into tears and Schauberg tried to calm her.

"Let's go some place else," said one of the women.

Madam soothed the ladies, urging patience. At quarter to twelve the Mousetrap found the key in her room and had her face slapped by Madam Misere as a reward. "Got drunk afterward and forgot to return it, eh?" Madam opened the cupboard in her office and showed the two women a truly imposing collection.

"Boy, oh boy!" said one of them. "I think I'll take that one."

Then, hurriedly we left by taxi and in my car.

We had to wait in an anteroom. Two couples, ahead of us with their parties, eyed us suspiciously and whispered together although the girls were behaving most demurely.

Half an hour later Walter Schauberg and Kathe Madler were called and we entered an office. A small organ, chairs for the couple, for visitors and witnesses, a table draped with a red velvet cloth.

An old man played the organ. The eleven girls began to cry softly. It was contagious; even Madam succumbed. "It reminds me of my husband, may he rest m peace," she whispered to me.