Jasmine Nights (43 page)

She stepped through the door remembering Ellie’s
Feather on head, tail on bum. No panic
.

Otto was booming at her side and holding her arm as she walked through a low-ceilinged room blurry and blue with smoke. Twenty or so young men stood around laughing, talking, drinking. They looked taller than most of the young men she knew, some of the younger ones were extremely good-looking with their high cheekbones and strong, athletic bodies. The two or three young girls there were mostly bottle blondes in cheap-looking frocks and high heels. When Saba walked in, there was a dip in conversation, a low murmur of appreciation as the men smiled at her or made quick sly comments to each other.

A small stage had been rigged up for them in a bay window at the far end of the room, but Engel wanted to feed them first from a table in the kitchen groaning with cheeses and hunks of pâté, German sausages, booze. He was sweating in his eagerness.

‘First we play.’ Felipe was all winning smiles now; it was as if he’d never known a bad moment in his life. ‘Later we drink.’

He straightened his bow tie and bounded towards the stage. ‘Let’s go, babeee.’ He bared his teeth in the fake Satchmo grin that usually made her laugh.

Ten minutes later they leapt into ‘Zu Zu Gazoo’. Saba felt tense to start, but after a while the galloping rhythms of Felipe’s guitar claimed her. It felt good playing together like this – no drums, no piano, just them.

The two primitive spotlights that had been placed next to the stage shone too brightly. Before their next number, Felipe fiddled with them discreetly and made the stage more intimate by sitting them both in a circle of light surrounded by shadows. He smiled at Saba, a gentle conspiratorial smile that said
we can do this
, and began a silky version of ‘Besame Mucho’. When he said something in German to the group of young men waiting silent around the beer keg, she knew he was saying this was a song about kissing written by a Mexican girl who’d never been kissed in her life. They suddenly roared their approval.

‘
Besame, besame mucho
. . .’ Saba sat on her stool loving the clever variations Felipe was playing. She narrowed her eyes, scanning the room. No monsters here, or none visible, just a crush of men, miles away from home, watching her with hopeful, hungry eyes. From here she felt like a large reflecting mirror that could control them and make them feel what she wanted them to feel – already one or two of them had their lips puckered up like children waiting for their night-night kiss.

One man in particular stood out. He was tall and blond with a sensitive suffering face, and she was aware of him watching her closely but discreetly. When she asked Felipe during the break if he was the pilot, Felipe said no. ‘That man is called Severin – Severin Mueller. You danced with him at Ozan’s party? He works for the embassy in Ankara.

‘Jenke won’t come tonight,’ he added. He smiled suavely, half at the audience, half at her; he fiddled with his guitar. ‘In five minutes I’m going to leave you and go upstairs – you stay here and sing.’

She did as she was told, but she was terrified. She sang two Turkish songs, and waggled her hips, aware that the tall blond man was slightly frowning at her as if to say
this is not my kind of music
. When she stopped singing he clapped quietly, and then in a gesture that seemed not to fit his anxious aesthetic face, he touched his lips with his long fingers and blew her a kiss.

They were an instant success – without much competition. The Germans loved them, begged them to come back. They needed, it seemed, some magic added to that anonymous house so far from home. But the two parties they went to there seemed so strange to Saba. Both times there were obscene amounts of food – bratwurst and smoked salmon and cheeses, hams and sausages; and booze too – crates of Bollinger under the kitchen table, schnapps, German beer. Cocaine upstairs. Women – daring secretaries from local embassies, lonely wives, heavily made-up blondes; White Russians – pale girls with jutting cheekbones for whom the Germans seemed to have a particular weakness.

Her own drug was the joy of singing with Felipe, which made it almost disturbingly easy to forget where she was. As they raced through the woods on the way to the parties, he taught her new songs: songs by Brecht, songs by a Cuban composer, a lovely Spanish song called ‘La Rosa y el Viento’, the black version of ‘The Choo Choo Train’ that he’d learned in a club in Harlem. One night, he said: ‘If you make a mistake in a song, don’t forget every breath is a new beginning and a new chance.’

But the magic wasn’t always reliable, and there were times when the room, with its mismatched furniture, flickering lamps and poor acoustics, felt like some hastily assembled approximation of home on a stage somewhere, and the eyes of the girls sitting on the men’s knees looked glazed and peculiar, almost as if they distrusted her too, and the whole experience took on a nightmarish quality. Sometimes the men took the girls upstairs to snort cocaine or to make love in makeshift bedrooms where a red scarf was thrown over the bedside lamp to give instant atmosphere. On the nights when there were no girls, the men stood around a beer keg playing drinking games. And it was then that Saba almost pitied them: they looked like large lost children determined to have a midnight feast.

But what was good was that bit by bit, Felipe was managing to put a detailed map together, and the Germans, drugged by their music, seemed to suspect nothing. Gradually Saba began to get to know some of the principal players: Severin, the blond attaché from Ankara, and Finkel the Frog, as she and Felipe called Otto Engel, who stood too close to her, his protruding eyes working their way up and down her as he mentally undressed her.

When the other men flirted with her in a more respectful way, she replied with shrugs and helpless glances towards Felipe, her translator. They asked for requests. They often wanted their pictures taken with her, and she always agreed.

On the night it happened, Felipe parked the car for the first time outside the gates. He turned off the engine. ‘Jenke will come here tonight,’ he said softly. He pointed towards a gap between two cypress trees, ‘There’s a broken piece of the fence there, do you see it? That’s the quickest way out, if we should ever need it, but it won’t happen like that.’ He shrugged. ‘It never has. I’m telling you just in case.’ And she believed him, because she wanted to.

‘How do you know?’

‘Cleeve. I met him yesterday.’

‘Thank God for that.’ She was growing impatient with the pilot and the parties. ‘What took him so long?’

‘I don’t know.’ Felipe’s face was in shadow. ‘All I know is they want Jenke urgently back in North Africa. Cleeve said something about enemy airfields.’ The war, he said in a quick aside, was at boiling point over there.

She felt herself go cold. She couldn’t bear to think of Dom.

‘So, tonight. The passport. Let’s go through the routine again.’

Felipe turned and picked up a songbook from the back seat of the car. One of the pages was held with a paper clip.

‘His name as far as the Germans are concerned is Josef Jenke. He’s a medium-sized man, muscular, brown hair. He’ll be wearing a red waistcoat. He will request “My Funny Valentine”. You will get the nod from me. All the documents he needs are on page fourteen of this book.’ He placed it in her hands.

‘After you’ve sung the song, slip the loose page from the book, but leave it on the music stand – he can collect it later when it’s safe to do so. Don’t hand it to him. Wait. After that, all you have to do is the nice smiley photo with him. He will take care of the rest. All very simple.’

Felipe smiled at her. He looked especially elegant tonight – the thin moustache trimmed, the carefully folded black handkerchief in the pocket of his cream dinner jacket. His skin shiny and freshly shaved.

‘You look beautiful tonight.’ When the words flew out of her, she was embarrassed.

‘You ain’t so bad yourself, kid,’ he growled in his Satchmo voice. ‘Gimme some skin.’

She leaned over and hugged him.

‘I’ve had the best time singing with you,’ she said, and his wounded eyes looked back at her.

‘Yes,’ he said softly and shook his head.

As usual, it was Otto who stepped out of the noisy crowd to greet them. He spoke to Felipe in German which Felipe translated into a mixture of pidgin English and Turkish. When Felipe admired his latest smoking jacket – a gaudy affair in blue silk – he preened for Saba and told Felipe it was one of a set he’d got a tailor at the Grand Bazaar to run up for him. He kissed the back of her hand, leaving a little of the froth from the beer he had been drinking. When he laughed and licked it off it gave her the creeps though she tried not to show it. Tonight, he told them, they were celebrating some good news from Berlin – his brother had had his first child, and everyone was to help themselves to what they wanted to drink – champagne, beer, schnapps, kanyak, he added, pointing towards the Turkish brandy, although he personally – a roar of laughter here – thought it tasted like horse piss.

‘He says no offence to you, little lady.’ Otto kissed her hand again and waggled his eyebrows. ‘He’s an idiot,’ Felipe added softly, still smiling.

As the evening progressed, the roar of sound from the sitting room rose until it seemed to form a solid wall. At the end of the room, near the big bay window, a group of men stood around a wooden beer keg shouting, ‘
Stein, Stein, Stein
,’ and then gulping down huge glasses of beer. Three young girls, drafted in from God knows where, sat on the sofa looking tense and expectant. Only one of them, with bare goose-pimpled legs and wearing a cheap thin frock, was laughing heartily as if she got the joke.

It was so hot that Saba could feel sweat coiling down her back like a snake. When Severin opened the shutters, a cool breeze flowed through the room. When Felipe started to play, it was Severin who shushed the drinkers and stared at Saba as if he could will her to begin. She’d noticed before he was hungry for music like a drug addict, in the way the others weren’t. When she sang, she saw how his tense finely boned face relaxed – how he seemed to visibly exhale as if some secret crisis was over.

Felipe, who’d made it his business to drink with as many of the Germans as he could, had told her that Severin was lonely. He was only twenty-six years old and had a wife in Munich and a child born while he was away. He hadn’t seen them for three years. He missed them. Felipe said this with no warmth –
bastard
, he may as well have added,
it serves you right
.

Saba didn’t feel like that. In certain lights, Severin’s ascetic face looked both innocent and lost and there was a quick, intuitive sympathy in his glance. It was confusing to know that if he hadn’t been German she would definitely have talked to him, had fun with him; become, at the very least, friends.

Felipe was adjusting his guitar for the next song when there was a small commotion near the door where more guests had arrived. Otto was clapping them on the shoulder; laughing his braying laugh.

Felipe turned to her and breathed in her hair, ‘The pilot is here – the one on the right. Keep singing.

‘And for our next song,’ he announced in German, ‘a very hot Spanish love song.’

The drinking Germans gave a drunken
wooohhhhh
. Those who were dancing put their cheeks next to the Russian girls. Saba picked up the microphone.

She glanced at the pilot; they briefly locked eyes and then he looked away. He had a pleasant, nondescript face: medium height, short military hair, a genial air. He was standing next to Engel, who was already drunk; he was laughing at something Engel said.

He looked so relaxed, so happy to be here that she wondered for an instant whether there were people who got a positive kick out of spying – the way some people loved secrets. She knew now she wasn’t one of them.

A Russian girl moved towards him. There were tufts of damp hair under her arms when she lifted them up. She wanted to dance. Saba sensed Felipe frowning beside her. A girl might complicate things.

Saba sang a Turkish song now – one Tan had taught her as a child. Out of the corner of her eye she was aware of Severin watching her impatiently. This kind of folk thing bored him stiff – his requests were always for jazz, or the new blues singers. As soon as she’d finished, he walked up to Felipe and spoke to him in German.

Felipe looked at Saba and smiled. He played the opening bars to Bessie Smith’s ‘Fine and Mellow’ and she sang along, careful as always to add some Turkish-sounding English, which was never difficult – she simply imitated Tan. Felipe’s supple guitar riffs were like calm waves breaking.

She glanced across the room again. The pilot had disappeared into the crowd; he was keeping his distance, biding his time.

She wanted Severin to leave now, to join the dancers to keep the coast clear, but he was sitting quietly near them watching her, watching Felipe, waiting for his next fix, and as usual the song seemed to affect him powerfully – she saw his young man’s Adam’s apple bob at the end of it as he turned away.

Otto appeared, waggling his finger, swaying his stout hips. He’d dropped a glob of sour cream on the lapel of his smoking jacket. He wanted them to play ‘Lili Marleen’ – a banned song now in Germany because it was so popular with the English, but he loved it and so did the other men.

She sang the words in German as Felipe had taught her and when she got to the bit about Lili’s sweet face appearing in dreams, a cluster of men formed around the small stage. Every boy in the world had it seemed fallen for Lili – that husky-voiced tramp waiting under a streetlight outside the barracks. These men who, half an hour ago, had roared like hogs over their drinking games seemed so sad suddenly, as if they’d all been recently jilted.

‘
Noch! Noch!
’ Otto shouted in a kind of childish ecstasy before the song was even over, his scarlet face running with sweat.

Now the pilot was standing near the window. When she looked at him he shook his head slightly, and then joined in with the singing which had become hearty and jarring, like trays of crockery breaking.