There was a heavy thump – something hitting the frozen ground – and the customers of Café Bellevue stared up at the jagged top of the ruined block opposite, then down at the first floor where a cloud of dust was rolling upwards, like a bomb had gone off.
‘Oh, it’s a body!’
‘No!’ a woman cried.
‘Someone jumped!’
‘Good on ’em,’ a drunken woman’s voice cawed. ‘Jump and be done with it. Ha! Just jump, I say.’
‘Shut up!’ someone shouted at the drunk, but everyone fell silent and waited for the dust to clear.
Kasper didn’t move; to take his hands out of the deep pockets of his woollen coat would have meant them freezing unnecessarily. He pushed his chin further into the American flannel shirt that he used as a scarf and squinted at the dust cloud, watching it clear to reveal a flattened shape – the vague form of a pale corpse with an outstretched arm and dark eye sockets.
‘Is it a woman?’ a young girl said, but by the time the dust had rolled to their feet they saw that it was only the stone lintel of a window, one end – head-sized – surrounded by chunks of decayed brick and mortar.
‘I said it wasn’t a woman,’ came the same girl’s voice and the customers’ chatter rose to a gossipy babble that filled the cold March street. Something splintered high up and another brick fell, knocking hollow like a ball on a bat, followed by a few spinning shreds of wallpaper, but no one paid any attention now.
‘Do you think it’s going to go?’
Kasper looked up. A man, too plump to be German, but with no perceivable accent, was standing looking up at the building with his hands in his pockets. ‘Would be a shame to have survived the war and be crushed by a falling building,’ the man said. ‘Don’t you think it’s rather ironic when you hear of people setting their apartments on fire or falling through the ice on the Spree?’
‘I don’t think ironic’s the word,’ Kasper said.
‘What’s the word then?’
‘How about, bloody depressing?’
The man laughed. ‘Herr Meier, isn’t it?’
Kasper frowned. ‘Who are you?’
‘I was told he’d be waiting for me at Café Bellevue,’ he said, eyeing the cold metal chairs and the groups of customers clustered together around mismatched tables, their heads pulled down into their coats like pigeons and their voices forming clouds of condensing breath over their grain coffee. ‘I haven’t checked every table,’ he said, ‘but you’re the only one-eyed queer I’ve spotted so far.’
Kasper closed his dead eye self-consciously and said, ‘With a mouth like that, I hope you have something exceptional to offer, or I might . . .’
The man sat down in front of Kasper and pushed his grinning face forward. ‘You might what?’
An American soldier standing nearby turned, holding onto the rifle slung over his shoulder, and eyed the pair.
Kasper looked down at his knees. ‘Nothing,’ he said under his breath.
‘Good,’ the man said. He took the ripped page of a book out of his pocket and shoved it at Kasper’s chest. Kasper took it and unfolded it – it was from an art catalogue, a yellow sheet with a slight sheen to it. It contained a reproduction of a modern painting – a woman resting her chin on her hand, her teeth bared, holding a small glass bottle and a cup. ‘I’ve been told you can find things. This is what you need to find for me, all right?’
