Projekt Saucer: Inception Part 40

He thought of this with a certain amount of shame when he saw Ingrid sitting, in a fur-collared winter coat and broad-brimmed hat, at a table by the window of the Kranzler Cafe. Haunted by vague s.n.a.t.c.hes of memory from the previous evening's debauch... Hot dogs and beer at the Scala with Willi Brandt and Franck Ritter, then naked girls at the Schauspielhaus, then Ritter embracing a drunken sailor by the toilet in a Tanzbar, then an opium dream of sensual perversity with the endlessly inventive, amoral Brigette... Yes, haunted and guilty, he uneasily composed himself as he entered the cafe and joined Ingrid at her favourite table by the window.

'My dear,' he murmured, brushing her rouged cheek with his lips and then sitting facing her. 'Sorry I'm late.'

'You're always late,' she accused him.

'I can't always guarantee getting away on time. My superior

officers don't think that way. What are you drinking?'

'White wine.'

'Already? At lunchtime?'

Ingrid shrugged in an indifferent manner. 'It helps pa.s.s the time,'

she said. Not wanting her to drink alone, and feeling thirsty anyway, Ernst ordered a beer for himself.

'Shall I order lunch now?'

'I'm not really hungry,' Ingrid replied. 'But get yourself something.'

Ernst shook his head. 'I'm not hungry either,' he said, still feeling ill from the previous evening and yearning only to slake his thirst with the beer. 'Still, I think you should eat. You don't eat enough these days.'

'I'm just dieting, Ernst.'

'For me?'

'For you.'

'That's nice,' he said.

Knowing she didn't mean it, he was also discomfited by her steady gaze. Though still as green as jade, her gaze was not as bright as it had been. Sitting in this particular cafe reminded him of the day he had proposed to her, the day Hitler became chancellor, and filled him with remorse and incomprehension at how they had both changed. They had been young and in love then, but now, four years on, they were saddened adults who seemed to have lost each other along the way. Ingrid was still pretty, but in a less sensual, more matronly way, and the darkness in her eyes came from disillusionment, caused mainly by him. He knew it and was wounded by it, but could do little about it, since he too had changed beyond repair and not for the better.

Best not to dwell on that...

'So,' he said instead, 'how are the children?'

'They're fine,' she replied. 'They haven't changed much since last week. Ula complains that you only come home at weekends, but Alfred is still too young to miss you, so you needn't feel too bad.'

'You're being mean to me.'

'I'm not.'

'It's not my fault that I can only come home weekends. We're compelled to live in the barracks during the week, and that's all there is to it. I know it's not particularly nice for the children, but we'll just have to live with it.'

'You like being away from home. You can barely wait to get back to your SS friends. When you're home, you have little patience with me or with the children. You're not nice at all, Ernst.'

'That's not true,' he replied.

Yet as he took his first sip of the beer the waitress had brought, he had to acknowledge that Ingrid was right. His daughter Ula was now three years old and beautiful, his son Alfred was a mere two months old and lively, but he saw them so rarely these days, he hardly knew them at all. He felt guilty over that but could not ignore Ingrid's charge that deep down he preferred not being home.

In truth, he now felt suffocated by Ingrid's presence something that had begun after that dreadful weekend now remembered as the Night of the Long Knives. Ashamed of himself at the time, he now accepted the necessity of that b.l.o.o.d.y purge and could not tolerate the fact that Ingrid despised him for taking part in it.

For weeks after the purge, she had not let him touch her, meanwhile pouring scorn upon him; but later, after reluctantly surrendering to him and becoming pregnant with Alfred, she had rejected him with more finality than before.

'You have blood on your hands,' she had told him, 'so keep them off me. I don't want to be contaminated by you or what you represent. You've arrested and killed innocent people, once reluctantly, now willingly, and I can't bear the thought that my children will learn about what you do. Don't touch me. Don't ever touch me again. Take your pleasures elsewhere.'

Which is exactly what he had done. Which in turn was why he spent so much time with his comrades not just in the barracks, as he insisted on pretending with Ingrid, but in the drunken, decadent pleasures of a Berlin unrestrained by moral values, in the nightclubs and cafes and erotic Tanzbars of the night; and, most irresistible of all, in Brigette's snake-like embrace...

Just thinking about Brigette made him feel sick with l.u.s.t and shame, though he tried not to show that to Ingrid. After drinking some more beer, he placed the mug back on the table, wiped his lips, and smiled more casually than he felt.

'So, who have you arrested this week?' Ingrid asked him.

The remark wiped the smile from his face and filled him with anger.

'No one,' he said. 'As you know, I'm now based at k.u.mmersdorf West, in charge of technical intelligence. My duties involve the gathering of information relating to foreign and domestic scientific research. I don't arrest anyone.'