Taken by Berlin. Nicolas Scheerbarth
questions! Save us the trouble. Are you hungry now?"
"No. Thank you. Give me another cup, please. And then let them know. Whoever."
She gave him something to drink and told them. Then they amazed him for the first time.
***
Astonished, he looked at Tom next to him.
"Or did you think we'd light our city with torches?" – Tom.
"No, but... floodlight... I didn't expect that."
"You want to snow me."
"No, I don't! I didn't... nobody knows there's so much electricity in Berlin."
"Silajev, don't make a woman a fool! Well, we don't let you snoop around too much, but you have your spies. Not to mention the Chinese satellites."
"Those... ha!" Joschi sputters to his androgynous driver: "Do you think the Chinese let us see their satellite pictures? That would be too nice... the Triads, showing us their photos of Europe! No, no, that's a long way off. Last year the Brazilians had to send three containers full of rare minerals to Shanghai for a few months of old photos."
"See, that's one of the reasons you're sitting here. But you also have your spies all over the Zone. We've grabbed them by their pants so many times that we're beginning to believe that if we send them all away, we become underpopulated."
"Those moles... intelligence people... I still don't know who you really are, but you seem like people who know their opponent. Know him in detail. Intelligence people are out of fashion. They still exist, that's right. Someone's always there who needs them to sleep better. But in general, they seem as impressive as the Salvation Army. No one reads these pompous little reports."
"And you don't even know there's electricity in Berlin?"
"Obviously not. At least not that it’s enough for floodlights. But where does this amount of electricity come from?"
"Ah, a little wannabe spy, huh?"
"No, I'm just curious. Tell me or leave it alone."
"Have you ever heard the word 'fusion'?"
He grows stiff. Ramps, bridges, entanglements of brightly lit concrete rise up in front of them... huge like the ruins of a sunken empire, dreaming of former greatness... the Spandauer Tor at the 2nd Ring. The sky is orange as it was then. Light, no flames, not the torches of the first SA, the burning Reichstag, the city in the hail of bombs, not the fires of Kreuzberg, Marzahn, Little Ankara during the ghetto wars, not the blazing pine forests of the Mark from the time of the Great Catastrophe. Flames of shame, flames of a fire that... as they believe in Strasbourg, Damascus or Brasilia... only the Chinese can ignite.
"I can't believe it! A European Council member... and doesn't know that Berlin has had functioning fusion reactors for almost sixty years!"
"I know." Joschi has wet eyes. "It's... a kind of weakness. We can't think right anymore. The Zone is the Zone, and that's the end... that's our attitude. Nobody gets the idea anymore to check, what the hell, even to think about what's existing elsewhere... in areas with which we no longer want to have anything to do. Africa, India, Russia... they are nothing. I'm beginning to sense why you took me. Our younger ones can't even see the problem anymore: Europe is big, they say. And we're still fine! Then they stare at China without lifting a finger. And they're as happy as children when a piece of bread falls under the table of the Triads."
"Gee, Silajev, you're getting really melancholic."
"If we're gonna be friends, call me Joschi, please."
"Oh, Silajev... don't take it wrong, but not that way! I'm not going to become your brother and sister here on Berlin's Heerstraße, just behind Spandauer Tor. No, no. Let's leave it with Silajev. Or do you think my name is Tom for real?"
"I haven't known what to think in five or six days."
"Then relax a little. We're almost there, and I guess you'll have a lot to think about in the near future."
***
"We're not Nazis," Susie assured him.
Susie was almost two heads shorter than him... a cheerful, energetic woman in her mid-thirties, with shoulder-length blonde curls, an ironic smile around the corners of her mouth and a straight brow, which raised and lowered dramatically... dressed like everyone else in the pseudo-uniform of course, dark grey cloth trousers and firm, highly laced combat boots. Joschi was unclear whether as a sign of her rank or for practical reasons, she also wore a sleeveless vest that seemed to contain a well-equipped materials store. The vest was open, and Susie was well equipped underneath too. But Joshi was in no condition to be distracted by that.
"What else?" he replied, hoarse and uncertain.
He didn't believe it himself anymore. But he wanted to know something about these women... four of them stood in the small monastery cell around him... and his slightly provocative unbelief seemed to him to be the best tactic at the moment. It was also the only way he could think of in his condition.
"We're not Nazis. Believe it or not. Besides," – the brow rose – "you know that too."
That hit. The political professional now awakened in him and warned him to treat these women like ordinary citizens of the Union. They were strangers... far stranger than he would have thought from the outside. But pretense was part of his craft. He tried to appear more irritated and unsuspecting than he was. Perhaps they were impatient to tell him more than if they thought he was a clever little fellow.
"I don't know anything!" he burst out. "I was kidnapped by a horde of Nazis. I was abused and locked up. My companions were brutally and mercilessly butchered. Are you going to deny it? Did you only use the Nazis to help? Or are you working with them anyway?"
"None of it! Do we look as if we had to make such a mess to get someone like you?"
"Well, Madam Susie, I may not see what's going on here. But I've been kidnapped, that's for sure! And now you are standing here in front of me, and I am certainly not here voluntarily, that's for sure too. What you call a mess, I call a brutal, cowardly murder... and without these murders no one, Nazi or else, would have come near me."
"You think" – the dry answer.
"Susie, please!" interrupted a rough voice.
Joschi had already heard this voice when he opened his coffin. At first, he thought it was a man... someone they called Tom. But Tom was a... though very masculine looking... wirily slim woman.
"All right," Susie continued. "We kidnapped you, to put it this way, from the Nazis. Stole you. And just as elegantly we would have gotten you out of somewhere else..."
"Although we also killed one of them," his friendly guard interjected disrespectfully.
They seemed to form a solid, well-oiled force, and Susie was their leader. Otherwise, Joschi could not discern anything that could be compared with conventional military manners. They stood casually around his bed and each said what they thought was right.
"A Nazi!" Tom made a throw-away gesture. "A mercenary, a soldier, a beadle. I'm not saying he wasn't human... but a person with the job of holding out his balls. When fighters die, it's not an occupational hazard. It's part of the job! I mean, Kandy, we know that best ourselves... that fighting is a shit job. You have to do it sometimes, but you can't transfigure it... otherwise we are soon on the way back into the hell of the last centuries... when fighting was heroic and sublime because it makes you so wonderfully dead."
"Tom, you're already talking like Bonnet and the other broads from headquarters," Susie said. "But we should take care of our guest now before we sit down to knit stockings."
Kandy and the fourth woman in the room... she was older than the others, perhaps in her mid-forties, broad and extremely strong, martial with a long, white scar on her right breast... bent with laughter, and Tom, not at all offended, grinned with them about the inside joke. Joschi didn't know how this was funny, but he thought it all the more informative: