So at eleven Thursday morning I joined the ranks of the homeless, my worldly goods in a plastic bag. I stopped at a cafe for a croissant and coffee while I wondered what to do with myself. I thought later I’d look for a cheap pension or maybe just a pleasant bench in the park.
I went to the site of the theater. It was uncannily tidy, smartly fenced off to a height well over two meters. The buildings around it were perfectly unscathed. A demolition contractor could have demanded a bonus for a job done this neatly. The top of the iron spiral staircase was sticking up out of the rubble like the mast of a sinking schooner. The total experience wasn’t inspirational or educational or anything. I stood there looking through the fence for about five minutes, then left.
I paid a visit to Gustl Meyer’s shop of exotic leftovers. He was polite, even sympathetic, but had no suggestions.
I spent the afternoon at the library finding new ways to spell Michael and Dershinsky. I decided to take my list of numbers to Gustl Meyer’s shop on the morrow to see if he’d let me use his phone.
I returned to the hotel to see if anyone had responded to my advertisement. No one had.
I lingered over a pizza and a beer till it was quite dark. Then I started walking. This time I didn’t know where I was going except in a general way. I have a pretty good sense of direction, but if I didn’t find what I was looking for the first time out, so what. Time was one commodity I had plenty of.
I walked and walked, on feet already sore, and the sights and smells began to come back to me. As the social and economic atmosphere went down the scale, my spirits went up. I was heading into Radenau’s grimiest neighborhood, the domain of factories, machine shops, brickyards, and warehouses, inhabited at this hour only by night watchmen and guard dogs. Before long, I spotted a small, nondescript building just ahead, a sort of shed between a warehouse and a railroad yard, and I headed for it hoping the door would open, and it did, giving me a double lungful of cigarette smoke, booze, and “La Vie en Rose.” It was Little Bohemia, and by God it felt like home.
Albrecht
I made my way to a table at the back—all the way to the back, against a wall solid with framed drawings and prints, not one of them straight, not one of them with a piece of glass that had been cleaned in twenty years. At eye level when I sat down was a faded sketch of Igor Stravinsky that appeared to be signed by Picasso. Elsewhere it looked like nobody had moved since Charles and I had left three weeks before.
When the waitress came over to see what I wanted, I asked her if her name was really Theda.
“It really is,” she said with a smile. “Are you drinking Lagavulin tonight?”
“I’m drinking your cheapest rotgut, please, Theda,” I told her politely, but when it came, a couple minutes later, it tasted just like Lagavulin to me.
Someone spoke at my elbow and I looked up into a distantly familiar face. It was Albrecht, he of the giant intellect, the smirking twenty-year-old Englishman who volunteered to dump me in a lake the first time I visited the sub-sub-subbasement in the theater.
I said, “What?”
He said, sneering, “Are you B now?”
I thought about this some. I’ve never had much opportunity to learn how to deal with hostile people—some priests do and some don’t—but I feel like I must know the ABCs of it. I said to him, “Why don’t you sit down and tell me what’s on your mind.”
“Is the question too difficult for you?”
“Yes, it is,” I told him. With a triumph already in hand, he took a seat across from me. I said, “Why do you ask me this question?”
“You were being groomed, weren’t you? Isn’t that the word—‘groomed’?”
“Well, there is certainly such a word, but no one ever told me I was being groomed.”
He shrugged contemptuously.
“I’ve abandoned the priesthood,” I told him. This got a blink. “When I spoke with the man who originally sent me here, Fr. Lulfre, I told him that killing B had been a wasted effort, because B is still here—in the person of me—but I certainly don’t think I’m ready to begin where Shirin left off. And, by the way, I’ve deposited a tape of that conversation with a friend, otherwise I’d be a hunted man, possibly even a dead man by now.” This got three blinks in a rapid succession. I asked him if this answered his question—probably a mistake, since it seemed to put him back on track.
“Anyone can be hunted,” he said. “The question is, can you do what B did?”
“What exactly do you have in mind?”
“You took in their insights, but do you have any of your own? Are you a thinker and a teacher or just a reciter of Holy Writ? If all you can do is chant the scriptures, then you’re no more B than I am. You’re just an altar boy who has all the responses down pat.”
I downed some rotgut and wished this young whippersnapper was far, far away. Finally I said to him, “Albrecht, the past ten days have been a bit hectic for me, so it’s absolutely true that I haven’t added a single word to the teachings of B. Whether I can or not is another matter. Be that as it may, you’re absolutely right. If all I can do is chant the Holy Writ as I heard it from Charles and Shirin, then I’m no more than an altar boy.”
Albrecht smirked. “But you don’t really think you are, do you.”
“I don’t really think I am, no, but
I haven’t had a chance to prove myself one way or the other.”
“Do you want a chance to prove yourself?”