scares me a bit, your night world.”
“You’ll be my young apprentice, watching my every move. With the maestro, there will be no danger.”
“We’ll see, Callard.”
He wiped away the excess ointment to reveal a startled look on his face, as if someone had clapped together a pair of pot lids behind his back. The Belgian astringent was working, but perhaps concocted with too heavy a hand.
As he walked away down the hall with his curious, almost sideways walk, he looked back over his shoulder and adjusted his black jacket and long scarf. The black beret finished his look, decidedly un-American and non-military. Four hours of bliss, then I turn into a sewer rat, he said; he dipped ever so slightly and rounded the corner.
The men of the Polish quarter were in for a surprise tonight. Or not.
The next day at lunch, Callard had recovered enough for conversation and he motioned for Follum and me to sit with him. Most of the other enlisted men shunned Callard’s table because of his gamey talk and tainted reputation. Murgon was the source of his bad standing, I was sure.
“I had the most amazing offer at the Krakow Klub last night,” he said.
Follum said, “Are you sure we want to hear?”
“Nothing salacious, Follum. There was this old woman at the Stammtisch, a Nazi widow, who reached across the table. She grabbed my hand in both of hers and said that I resembled her son, Manfred, dead at Stalingrad. So young, so sad.” He put his own hand to the side of his face, now relaxed from the rigors of Belgium.
I said, “So the elixir was already paying dividends.”
“She was most pleasant, smiling, talking to her companions about the resemblance.”
I asked, “So what was her offer?”
“Don’t rush me. I could understand a little of what she said to her friends as they all nodded their heads, but then she switched to English. Spoke it well. She asked me if I had an auto. All young men needed an automobile now, for their sweeties on the other side of town.”
“She offered you her car?”
“No, it was her son’s Mercedes. A nineteen thirty-seven four-door sedan with ‘Wasserford’ bud-vases. She bought it for him on his nineteenth birthday, pulling in favors owed his father, a high-ranking bureaucrat. Now it sits in her garage, nobody using it. Father and son both dead.”
“Is a Wasserford vase really Waterford vase?”
“I think so. She mentioned the bud-vases several times, Englischerkristal für die blumen, she said. Sehr schön.”
She’s going to give the Mercedes to you?”
“She will sell it to me, a very cheap price for her son. For Stalingrad. It does her no good there in the garage, gives her the bad memories every week when she starts the engine, to make sure it still runs.”
“How much?”
“A thousand Deutsch Marks. I immediately said yes, a thousand thanks, Frau Mueller.”
“That’s two hundred fifty dollars. Do you have that?”
“No, of course not, but I have an idea.” He put his finger to his lips and looked sideways.
Callard’s scheme was to sell cigarettes on the Black Market. We all knew that there was an active exchange in the village nights of Bad Issel. A carton of cigarettes, for which we paid one dollar at the PX, brought ten dollars down in the village. That was forty Deutsch Marks. We only needed to sell ten cartons, he said.
Follum said, “But that’s only four hundred marks.”
Callard answered, “I have a little tucked away from another enterprise.”
I said, “I don’t want to be involved in the Black Market, Callard. And I speak for Follum, too. It’s highly illegal and too risky. A life sentence in the stockade.”
“No problem, my betters taught me how to disappear into walls when needed, to blend with the night, to creep around the corner. I’ll do all the undercover work. Just buy me your monthly allotment of four cartons each. I’ll use two from my allotment, and, there we have it, four hundred marks plus my stash makes a thousand.”
Weeks ago Follum and I had talked about how it would be to have a car, to be able to drive away from Bad Issel on weekends, but an enlisted man could not make a dent in such a purchase. My pay was sixty dollars a month, Follum’s fifty-five. Here was the possibility of partial ownership, just for giving up the cigarettes that neither of us smoked.
I said, “Callard, we’ll do it for full half-ownership, a quarter for Follum and a quarter for me.”
“Where did you learn to bargain, Bradford? So harshly with such a dear friend? Very unlike what I know of other gentle West Texans.”
I knew that now was the time to press our advantage. “Half the time we get to use the car without you. Fair?”
He considered for a few seconds, then said, “Fair.”
We bought our month’s quota of cigarettes the next weekend and gave them to Callard. He reported back later about his dealings in Bad Issel. He asked around the village fountain before taking any cigarettes down there. An old man told him that the market was designed to confuse the authorities, to make a trail the polizei cannot follow.
A potential seller went into the Issel Stube and ordered a glass of beer, asking if the accordionist could play the third verse of Lilli Marlene. This signaled that there were three cartons for sale. The fifth verse would mean five cartons. The waitress would be shocked and say it was forbidden to play that song, but she would ask. If the market was in operation that night, she said yes when she returned with the beer, Alles ist gut. Of course, the accordionist would not really play it.
Then, after a spell, the seller walked outside and across to the village fountain where a woman with a cane sat waiting. Without breaking stride, he must deposit his cartons, wrapped in brown paper, into the shoulder-bag that she briefly opened. The seller continued on quickly away in the opposite direction from the woman, who hobbled off with her fat satchel safely under one arm. This led the seller to the church door, deep-set and in the shadows, where a man or perhaps another woman paid him thirty marks. They parted without conversing. If other people loitered around the fountain, there would be no market. If there was a full moon, there would be no market.
Callard said, “It took me four trips up and down the hill, but here it all is.” He had a stack of mark notes, our contribution and his own. Follum went with Callard on Sunday to buy the Mercedes from the widow in case his mechanic’s expertise might be needed to get it going again. By late afternoon, they pulled into the usually vacant slot marked “Enlisted Parking” in the forecourt of Schloss Issel. They had detoured by the Bad Issel cemetery to snip the last of autumn’s roses, now fragrant in the bud-vases. We drove triumphantly around Bad Issel, turning on and off the headlights in full daylight, running the windshield wipers on dry glass and lightly honking the horn.
He said, “I told Frau Mueller that the vases would always have roses for Stalingrad. Tonight I will drive to the Krakow
