Last Flight to Stalingrad by Graham Hurley (simple ebook reader .TXT) 📗

moved his precious pots of chilli plants into the sunshine, and then knelt on the carpet and nuzzled the soft cleft between her buttocks. He was a small man, slight, nimble. After a while, gazing out at the street, she began to move under his tongue. Over the past few months, whenever he was in Berlin, Nehmann had become more than familiar with the repertoire of tiny grunts and sighs that signalled pleasure. The Georgian had a gipsy talent for lovemaking. It went with his origins, and his rumpled face, and the mischief in his eyes, and his reputation for a certain reckless charm that had opened countless doors across this wonderful city, but as far as women were concerned he’d never met anyone so responsive, so eager and so candid in her many demands. Remarkably for an actress, in bed or otherwise, she never faked it.

‘Time?’ she asked again.

Nehmann was on his feet by now, unbuttoned, moving sweetly inside her.

‘Two minutes,’ he said. ‘The man is never late.’

‘You’re lying.’

‘I am. It’s what I do.’

‘Ja… ich kenne… so why am I not surprised?’She looked to the right, towards the station, and reached for one of the glasses. ‘Any ideas?’

She glanced backwards, over her shoulder. Nehmann smiled at her and then shrugged. She knows I lie. Everyone lies. That’s the currency you use in this place. Spend your lies wisely and you might end up as rich as Guram. In Prague that might count as a sin. Here, it keeps a head on your shoulders and buys you champagne.

Outside the window, the gigantic crowd was beginning to stir. Over Hedvika’s shoulder, across the street, Nehmann could see balcony after balcony crowded with faces and flags, children fighting their way through a forest of legs to get a better view, heads turning towards the oncoming growl of the motorcade.

Nehmann paused for a moment, reaching for the other glass, then began to quicken. A moment like this, he’d decided, deserved every kind of tribute.

‘Don’t,’ she murmured. ‘Not yet.’

The crowd was cheering now, thousands of voices, Berlin at full volume. Nehmann began to move again, deep, slow, taking his time, then he murmured an apology and withdrew for a second or two. Hedvika, he suspected, had barely registered his absence. At a moment like this, like every other spectator, she was in the hands of a quite different experience, no less overwhelming.

Nehmann was right. The blouse she’d thrown on earlier had become unbuttoned, but she didn’t care. She leaned forward over the windowsill, her slender arms outstretched in welcome. Hitler’s open Mercedes was barely metres away, at the head of the huge motorcade. He was standing at the front, beside the driver, both hands gripping the top of the windscreen, looking neither to left nor to right, grim, implacable, victorious.

Other women might have wanted him to smile for once, to risk one of those natural moments of warmth the newsreel cameras sometimes caught at the Berghof when he was playing with somebody’s children, but not Hedvika. Berlin had been a good swap for Prague. Her heart was bursting for this man-God who’d shown the rest of Europe just who was in charge. Berlin, indeed the whole of Germany, was getting no less than it deserved. Thanks to the unbending figure below her window.

‘Heil!’she screamed. ‘Mein Führer!’

The Mercedes moved on towards the Chancellery and the Brandenburger Tor and in its wake came the long procession of equally sleek limousines, each one laden with more of the faces that Hedvika had come to know from their lingering visits to the studios. But these men she regarded as mere walk-ons, riffraff, nobodies, bit-part players in the unfolding triumphs of the Reich. Hitler, to his great credit, never stooped to studio visits.

She peered to the left and offered a last wave to her departing Führer, and then – as the crowd began to thin – she looked down towards the pavement. Hitler gone, there was an emptiness deep inside her and she knew exactly how to fill it.

‘Faster,’ she murmured.

Nehmann obliged as he always did. She pushed back against him, finding the rhythm, then a single face among the crowds below caught her attention. Everyone was still on tiptoe, looking at the last of the cars, but this single face had no interest in the motorcade. Instead, it was looking up. At her.

For a moment, she couldn’t believe it. The curly hair he deliberately wore long. The suntan he worked so effortlessly to maintain. The simplicity of the open white shirt. The lumpy peasant contours of his face. The broadness of his grin. Even the champagne glass, nearly empty, lifted in salute. Werner Nehmann.

But wasn’t he behind her? Making love to her? Perfectly à deux?

Still moving sweetly, she looked over her shoulder. It was Guram, Nehmann’s friend, his fellow countryman. She’d met him twice before, once here in Berlin, and once in Munich, both times when she was with the little Georgian. He was a large man, with a belly to match, and he had Nehmann’s talent for making her laugh. In Munich, an evening in one of the city’s bierkellers had ended with all three of them in bed, a night she remembered with great affection. Generous people, she thought. In all kinds of ways.

Now, Guram’s perfectly manicured hands had settled on the tops of her hips. Two rings, one featuring a showy bloodstone.

‘Guten Tag.’ Georgian accent. Pleasant smile. ‘Wie geht es dir?’

‘I’m fine. Why aren’t you in Paris? Making lots of money?’

‘Business called me back.’ He smiled. ‘Faster?’

She held his gaze for a moment, then nodded.

‘Ja,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell you when.’

She turned back to the street, trying to work out how a thing like this could ever happen, trying to catch the rhythm again. Nehmann, she knew, loved practical jokes, pranks, any kind of mischief, but this had to be in a league of its own. Nehmann’s friend owns the flat, she thought. He has every right to be here. The two men grew up