excerpt
The Informer
By Craig Nova
Shaye Areheart Books
ISBN: 9780307236937
PART I
Berlin—1930
Gaelle turned away from the
man in the car and stepped out onto the sidewalk, the money in her hand. The
instant she slammed the door, she was sure of it. They were coming for her. The
black cars on the avenue seemed to be a funeral procession, their movement oddly
ponderous and mysterious, too. She had sold information, and yet, at the time
she had done it, the future had seemed so impossibly distant, but now, of
course, it arrived like claustrophobia. Perhaps the next car would be the one
she was afraid of, and if not that, then maybe the one after. She guessed they
would slash her, but if she was lucky they wouldn’t do that or spend any time
“talking” to her. Perhaps they would send a woman to kill her, but would that be
any better?
It wasn’t the actual being dead, she told herself, that
mattered so much as how she got that way. That’s why she hated knowing that it
was coming, since it exaggerated her fear, the glint of the knife, the
expression of malice, the frankness of the job. Perhaps she would be able to
make them pay a price, since she had a small knife in her bag, but a lot of
informers had carried knives, and what good had it done them? And she had heard
rumors, too, that some of the women in the park had been blinded before they had
been killed.
She hugged her shoulders and stood there, trying to find a
way to cheer herself up. It was only a matter of going back to the darkness of
the time before she had been born, but then this left her trembling, since she
knew the darkness before she was born was a matter of coming toward the light,
but now, if she entered it again (no, when she entered it again) she would be
going away from the light. Please, she thought. Please. Then she stood there and
trembled. It was the knives that got to her. How long did she have, one hour,
two, a night? Maybe even an extra day.
The men who had come to see her,
and a couple of the women, too, had tried to impress her, even though she had
been paid. They had bragged about what they had done, what they were going to
do, how much money was coming from Moscow, what lies the Brownshirts were going
to tell, where arms were being stored. She had traded all of it, to the left and
to the right, and she hadn’t done so badly, either, that is in terms of money.
At least she had her funeral-society dues paid up to Immertreu, one of the
Rings, or gangs, in the city.
Gaelle suspected there was a difference in
military terms between being a source of information, a sort of glorified
gossip, and a spy. Spies were taken out and shot. Or worse. Maybe they talked to
a spy for a while first. But in the end it came down to the same thing. And each
group had an army. The Socialists, who were trying to run the government, had
the Reichsbanner. Then there were the Brownshirts. The Communists had the Red
Front Fighters. There were other vaguely military groups, too, the Steel
Helmets, Organization Consul, Organization Escherich. She had spied for all of
them, or she guessed she had, since often she only knew that a bit of
information had been important, but not to whom or why.
Felix smiled at
her as she came away from the car, and even in this light his bad teeth were
visible. He was sixteen years old, his jacket a little too large for him, but it
didn’t make him seem like a child in a coat, but a man who had shrunk. You could
see it in his tired, cagey eyes, and in his face, too, which was like that of a
feral creature who knew that the most important quality was patience. His
fingers touched a button on Gaelle’s blouse and then undid it to expose her
underwear.
She gave him the money she had just made, and he reached into
his pocket for the other bills and folded the new ones into the
pile.
“It’s about like last night,” he said. “Maybe a little slower. But
it’ll pick up after midnight. That’s when the gentlemen come out. Why, they may
have to spend a little time drinking to get up their courage, but they’re good
tippers, you know?”
Gaelle glanced at him uneasily and said, “Yeah. Late.
That’s always the way.”
He was beginning to develop some peach fuzz and a
little acne, too. Six months before she had found him looking for food in a
trash can and had taken him to a restaurant. When he had finished a bowl of
soup, a plate of sausages, boiled potatoes, and cabbage, he had said, “Now, why
would you do something like that?” He had pointed at the empty bowl. “Why would
you waste money on food for someone like me?”
“You’ve got to eat,” she
had said. “Why, I’ve been hungry myself. After a couple of days you think about
eating your shoes. You’ve got to eat something. Why, I may be trouble but I’m
not so bad as to leave you hungry.”
His eyes had widened for a moment,
but his surprise, which seemed innocent, only allowed a deeper look into that
wary darkness. He shook his head as though someone had hit him with a stick.
“Oh, you’d buy me food? You shouldn’t do that. No, you shouldn’t, my cream
puff.” He wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “That is an unnecessary expense. We
will cut down on unnecessary expenses.” The bottom of the bowl had a little
broth in it and he tipped it up to get that. Then he had said, “You and me. We
can do some business.”
“You think so?” she said.
“Yeah,” he said.
“You could use a little help.”
He lifted his pants and showed the holder
he had made for the ice pick he carried inside his sock. The handle was taped to
give him a good grip, and he pulled it out to show the tip, which had been
ground on the curbs and stone sidewalks of Berlin. The tip showed like a star in
the night sky. Then he put it away. The ice pick made him more trustworthy, or
dangerous, although Gaelle saw the two as being intimately related.
He
had started right away, holding the money, negotiating a price, mak- ing sure
her clothes were clean and that she ate something when she forgot. He had been
living in an abandoned building with some other boys his age.
Gaelle
turned back to the avenue where the cars came along with that casual searching.
She hadn’t thought of the information as a betrayal so much as a way of making a
little extra money. And she liked the idea of having something serious on
someone. It could work to protect you, or it could turn into a good reason for
someone to get rid of you. She had thought it would work for protection, and now
she saw that wasn’t anywhere near as likely as she had supposed.
So she
stood there, looking at the lights, trying to judge which were looking for
excitement and which were looking for her in particular.
“You look
worried,” said Felix. “What’s bothering you?”
Gaelle just shrugged. She
thought about that glint.
“I know,” said Felix. “Why, people think they
can get away with things, that we’re just a limping boy and a girl with a scar.”
He looked around. “Oh, I know how to look like I’m keeping my place. But they
better be careful.”
“I’ve got things on my mind,” she said.
Well,
he thought, maybe a gravelstone was allowed to be moody, but these women with a
deformity of one kind or another had value in the nighttime market of Berlin.
That’s something he could depend on.
“You’re not eating,” he said. “And
you got to keep your clothes better . . .”
She wished she could go home
and get into the hot water of her bath, where she looked at herself in the
mirrors around the tub. Nothing had happened to her body. That was the same,
even better now: she was thin, small breasted, blond, twenty-two years old. The
scar on one side of her face had changed her forever, but in the slick skin of
the burn her features seemed about to emerge, and it was this suggestion of
metamorphosis that people craved. People saw something trying to get out, and
whatever this quality was, it made them gasp. Her scar was like seeing a movie
star through filmy silk that hinted at a beauty greater than the one that might
actually be seen when the silk was dropped. This possibility of emerging
loveliness, at once contradictory and compelling, brought the high prices she
charged in nighttime Berlin. Her face suggested everything that was beautiful
and yet doomed. It was a perfect expression of the erotic, or of that tension
between the impulse to live and the forces arrayed against it.
She had a
wild desire to go home, too, to her parents’ apartment with its solid furniture,
its tables and a sofa with lion’s feet, the pictures of hanging game on the
wall, the scent of cologne that her father, an assistant manager in a bank, wore
when he went out the door in his striped trousers, his vest, his dark coat. Her
mother was always glad to see her, and wanted nothing more than to be in
Gaelle’s presence, as though if the two of them could be together, why then
there was hope. Still, the scar, which Gaelle had gotten in an automobile
accident two years before, had changed everything: as far as her parents were
concerned, the scar was evidence of a curse, of a lack of hope, of how they had
been deceived by what they had assumed was the progression of ordinary life.
Gaelle still felt the odd swaying of the automobile before it had turned
sideways and rolled over and then the colognelike coolness of gasoline on the
side of her face.
A car swept up to the curb with a slow, tidal movement,
its brakes perfectly silent. A driver in front and one dark figure in back.
Beyond the car the trees in the Tiergarten appeared like enormous black feathers
against the lights of the city. The driver reached over and stared out the
passenger window, as though he wasn’t sure this was the right place, but after a
while he crooked one of his white fingers. Come here.
Gaelle wanted to
ask for help, but it occurred to her that maybe it was better to say nothing.
Maybe they might grab Felix first, and the less he was on his guard, the more he
would operate like a canary in a basket in a coal mine. If they grabbed him,
she’d try to disappear into the shadows, or run into the Tiergarten, getting rid
of her shoes first.
“Go on,” she said. “See what they want.”
Continues...
Excerpted from The Informer by Craig Nova Excerpted by permission.
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