The Kingdom of Shadows by K. W. Jeter Read Free Book Online Page B

should be kept off the Reich’s motion picture screens, as a public service. He’d be damned if he’d be responsible for unleashing that beauty upon all the poor silly Hausfrauen of Germany, just so they could weep into their pillows that their husbands weren’t the cruel god incarnate they had seen up on the motion picture screens.
     
    He watched Gunther take a sip of mineral water. Gunther had never lacked for admirers. Back in the rowdy starving days that now seemed, in memory, like newsreels from another planet – Gunther had done his trolling on the Weidendammbrücke and the Tauentzienstraße with the other women, the real along with the false. Not far from the Romanische in fact, just beyond the Kaiser Wilhelm Kirche , that the night rain had darkened to a hulking stone beast. Von Behren could remember Gunther’s feral teenage face, with its slash of red lipstick and kohl-rimmed cat’s-eyes, chin brushing the ratty fur swathed around his neck, a spit-curled bob shining like black Japanese lacquer. The height of the glossy green-leather boots the Tauentzienstraße girls wore indicated their sexual specializations, and Gunther had tottered around in ones that signaled an absolute willingness to do anything.
     
    That will stand him in good stead now , thought von Behren. They had entered – not just Gunther and himself, or the patrons of the Romanische, but all Germany, and probably the rest of humanity as well – a world where the willingness to do anything would be a valuable commodity indeed.
     
    “Do you remember Conrad?” He whispered the question, knowing that if Gunther heard him against the café’s hubbub, the handsome other could pretend he hadn’t. Conrad had been another Tauentzienstraße prowler in his hungry days, the bones cutting through his narrow face giving him an emaciated, deathly glamour. But Conrad had managed to get into the films, back when they had been silent, and had stalked around as a murderous sleepwalker surrounded by crazy cardboard sets, doing so well at that and all the other parts that came his way, that now he was in Hollywood, putting on the worldly airs that impressed the Americans so much. Von Behren doubted if Conrad talked much of his Tauentzienstraße nights. But it did serve to demonstrate that it was true, in America – or at least Hollywood – you could reinvent yourself. If you were lucky.
     
    “Perhaps I should go to America,” mused von Behren aloud. He might as well have been sitting at the table alone.
     
    But Gunther had heard that. He turned his profile enough to give von Behren a glance of contempt, the look traitors and cowards receive.
     
    Von Behren found that tiresome. So many others were leaving, or thinking about it – why shouldn’t he? Just yesterday he had gone by Frank Wysbar’s flat, out by the Babelsberg studios, to look at some dreadful drum-beating script Goebbels’ ministry kept shoving into the UFA production queue. He had found Wysbar sitting at the writing table, practicing a new signature. “That is what my American contacts say I would have to change my name to,” Wysbar had said, turning around in his chair and displaying a sheet of paper with the name Frank Wisbar written upon it. “What do you think?”
     
    He had told Wysbar that it didn’t seem that much different, the letter i instead of the original y . What was a name, anyway? You did what you had to do, these days. Wysbar had sighed and said that he didn’t know, maybe he wouldn’t leave for America; at the least, he would try to hold out a while longer.
     
    Of course, von Behren knew, Wysbar had reasons for feeling gloomy. Goebbels and the NSDAP hacks beneath him at the Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda – what a joke; was there a word such as endarkenment ? – had given Wysbar nothing but grief about the last film he’d directed. All because he’d used a dark-haired actress – Sybille Schmitz, whom von Behren had always found