CHAPTER EIGHT
Nightowl (Part 1)
Laurentine St. Odine answered the door to her room wearing a bathrobe, with a towel wrapped around her hair. "I was in the tub," she said.
"Don't let me stop you."
"Who are you again?" she asked. "You've been gone so long."
"I'm with the Plywood Research Council."
"I thought you were with American Express."
Bond grinned. "I don't even sound American."
"You better come in. I'm dripping dry and you look as if you need a drink."
Laurentine's room was beginning to get a sense of being lived in. Goods purchased with her alimony were lined against a wall, in their bags. Her clothes crowded the modest-sized closet.
As she walked to the bathroom, she gestured to the dresser where a tray held bottles, glasses and an ice bucket. "Go and build two drinks."
"One for you and one for me," he divined.
He groped through the assortment of random bottles, found sufficient ingredients, and mixed up a pair of martinis served in tooth glasses.
The bathroom was all white tiles and radiant heat and more evidence that she was in for a long time. Lotions crowded the counter space, as did an assortment of different brushes, loose rubber bands, hair spray canisters, and rollers. Lotion and salts were precariously balanced on the tub's sill.
Laurentine floated in the tub along with a rich lather of bubbles. "Well, don't just stand there, hand over."
Bond passed her a tooth glass full of martini. "You seem to be naked, madame."
"I don't know how they do it in England, but in America, we take off our clothes for bathing."
"You're in Germany."
She sipped the drink. "What the hell is this?"'
"Martini," he said, "vermouth and gin."
"Ugh. Pour it out and do it again."
"What's wrong with it?"
"Stronger, plywood man, stronger. Gin and only a hint of vermouth. In fact, don't really put any vermouth in the glass, just wave it in the direction of the bottle."
Bond laughed. "All right."
"Just suggest the vermouth. Six molecules should be sufficient."
Bond brought her a much stronger mix. She had already finished her bath and was now wrapped in towels. Laurentine downed the new martini in a single gulp. "Put some music on," she ordered, "while I get cleaned up."
"Can I dry your back, or...?"
"Music. Now."
Bond tuned the room's radio to a jazz station. Claire Austin sang I'm Through With Love through a two-inch speaker.
Laurentine came in wrapped in a robe. With a brisk movement, she picked up a pack of Benson & Hedges and fished out a single stick.
Bond came over with his light. "I got it," she said to him. Her lighter was gold and crystal.
She inhaled the smoke with a cheek-sunken concentration and blew a warm happy cloud of blue-white smoke at the ceiling. Her eyes were enormous, and they studied Bond carefully as he stood by the window. "You're the best thing in this crummy town, you know that?" she said.
"Aw, you say the nicest things."
"Where've you been hiding all my life?"
"If I tell you that," he said, "I'll have to find a new hiding place."
She stood and came over to him. Her skin was warm and damp and her body smelled of fresh talcum. "Kiss me, plywood man."
Bond complied without hurrying.
After a few moments, she pulled back, then moved to the improvised cocktail bar, stroking her upper arms. "Martini?" she asked.
"Still working on this one."
She assembled herself another one, and turned to face Bond with a charming smile worthy of a dentifrice ad. She said, "I don't know why I'm still here." The smile weakened, and she said. "Why am I here?"
"Why are any of us here?" Bond answered. "I believe Kierkegaard said that life is full of absurdity and we must make our own values in an otherwise indifferent world."
The smile returned with that. "Neitzsche said that life is worth living only if there are goals to inspire you."
"Neitzsche spent the last two decades of his life in an insane asylum, so there's that."
The radio was still rasping the silk-and-sandpaper voice of Claire Austin.
She nodded again and gave Bond a long hard look. "Any time that entertaining me has become too much of a chore, let me know."
Bond said, "Stop pouting, and put on some clothes. Let's get out of here and get a proper drink in a proper bar."
She came across to Bond. Up close, her forehead was large and under it her blue-grey eyes studied each part of his face. When she spoke, her voice was fresh and childlike and there was no hardness left. "If you say so," she said.
Bond kissed her gently on the lips. "I do say so." He applied another kiss, and then whispered, "Now get dressed, and we'll get ourselves a halfway decent dinner somewhere."
"Don't over-sell it," she said. "And after that?"
"Concert, theatre, whatever strikes our fancy."
"And after that?"
"More dinner."
"And after that?" She offered him a goofy grin. Then as suddenly, her mood changed. "I'd like a concert. Someplace fancy, with orchestra and stuff."
"Orchestra and stuff it is."
"I'll wear my chiffon dress," she threatened. "Can we?"
"Certainly."
Laurentine kissed him again, and a strand of her hair was mixed into their kiss.
As she pulled back from him, long strands of hair were gummed to her cheeks. She gazed up at him, her eyes moist, and then she pushed away roughly and yelled, "My neutralizer!"
"What?"
"My neutralizer," she exclaimed and broke away from their embrace. "I'm trying out a skin dye, I should have put it on ten minutes ago!"
She disappeared into the bathroom, unwrapping the robe, leaving Bond baffled.
# # #
It was a place she had heard of but never visited, on the feathery edge of Berlin. Damp leaves shone underfoot in the sodium-mercury light like a carpet of newly struck pennies. Ferns demarcating either side of the narrow lane had shrivelled into intricate bronze abstracts.
The kabarett wasn't in sight yet, but the clear air, crisp in October's night, seemed to have cleared Laurentine's mood. "I swear, she believed that her teeth moved."
Bond frowned. He had slowed his pace to accommodate her, as she had sped up hers for him, and they moved in an easy rythme up the street. "Well, that happens. They get loose, they wiggle."
"No," she said, "she was convinced they moved. Like, the bicuspids and the molars would change places. They would line up shortest to tallest, or tall-short-tall-short-tall-short. And just before she woke up, they'd all scramble back into place."
"That is insane," Bond agreed.
"My sixth-grade English teacher."
Underfoot, the sickly sweet smell of leaves mouldering back into soil rose like perfume. Leaves retaining damp squished under their shoes.
Laurentine had insisted upon something outside of Berlin proper, just to get away from its depressing environs. Bond didn't mind. As they made their way out to the suburbs south of the borough of Spandau, he kept an eye out for anybody following them.
Nobody that he could see, meaning either they were called off, or they'd gone to a better grade of hoodlum.
The kabarett was called 'Der Nightowl' and it was in a converted 19th-century church. As they got closer, Bond could hear what passed for music seeping out through the walls of the building ⸺ Dansevise, which he had recognized from last year's Eurovision. Through stone walls and at a distance, it didn't sound too bad.
The door opened with a vibratory screech and a cadaver at a podium just inside collected their premium for entering.
Lights shine in through the stained-glass windows. Watery images of Isaiah, John the Baptist, Saint Augustine and the Archangel Gabriel lightly dusted the walls. Complexities in brass hung from the ceiling, glinting like medieval oil refineries.
Laurentine held Bond's hand as they entered the crowded nave. "My doctor told me to watch my drinking. So now I drink in front of a mirror."
The kabarett was devoid of almost all its religious ornamentation. Where the chancel used to be was now a circular stage where three women in tall boots, bikinis and luminescent paint gyrated to The Tornados' Telstar, in what Bond assumed was a pop form of religious ecstasy. Around the floor, men in rough-knit cardigans or lightweight suits stood at attention with drinks in hands or laid nearly vertical in the few careworn armchairs sprinkled into corners or against walls, all of them making a big thing about being big shots.
"Fräulein!' one shouted to a passing waitress, "Noch eine Runde Bier!"
A man in an ascot declared in English, "Best damn photographer in the country!"
As they moved through, a buzz of conversation inundated them ⸺ art and life and business, designed to be overheard and repeated.
"⸺ designs all the costumes, down to socks ⸺"
"⸺ mein Gott, es war wunderschön. Als würde man den Himmel selbst betrachten ⸺"
"⸺ would be a challenge to paint it in sexual terms ⸺"
A man in suede chukka boots said, "He did, too. Put sales up six and three-quarter percent, and got himself all sorts of recognition." His laugh was deep and manly.
Laurentine refused to let go of his hand. They struggled through gyrating bodies, across the nave and to the starboard transcept where a stained-glass Joseph and Mary riding an ass glowered down on the bar built into the space. She hiked herself onto a recently-vacated stool. Girls with camel coats and cowboy boots and black tights were drinking Pimms gin and exchanging catty gossip.
He nodded to the woman next to him, in an enormous auburn beehive and layered eye make-up that made her more cat than woman, then gestured to the bartender. "Haben Sie schottischen Whisky?" he asked.
"Scottish," said the bartender. "Nein."
"Ah. Well, then, Wodka und Tonic, mit Angostura Bitter."
"Very good,mein herr," he said, and set to work.
"What did you order?" Laurentine asked.
"Vodka tonic, with bitters."
"Sounds yummy. My whole family were big drinkers. When I was a kid, I went missing. They put my picture on a bottle of Scotch."
He squeezed in next to her, saying, "Entschuldige mich," to the beehive next to him. The beehive muttered something back at him, but moved off.
The music had shifted to Wonderful Land by The Shadows.
"How did you hear about this place?" Bond demanded over the music.
"I asked around. I didn't expect this," she confessed. "This is good."
"The cabaret?"
"This drink? What's it called?"
"Alcohol."
"Hmm. I like it. I could get used to this."