sample chapter

ONE

Stepping out of his apartment building, pausing an instant to listen for the thick metal doors to click-and lock---behind him, Arthur Cape caught a blast of rain in the face. The storm was far worse than he'd imagined. He wiped his eyes with gloved hands. He bent over to stretch the hems of his blue jeans down to the ankles of his ostrich-skin cowboy boots.

A few yards from his door, a chestnut tree had fallen into the street. Blue lights flashed atop police cars. Maintenance crews swarmed. In front of Arthur, in the street, buffeted by wind, stood a heavy man with a pale round face. The face looked familiar and strange at the same time, the features of someone Arthur had known, but could no longer name. The man stared at him, and for a moment, Arthur froze.

The stranger squeezed between two small cars, one French, one German, parked vertically against the curb. His hair hung to his shoulders, concealing everything but the inner gleams of two dark eyes, a cavernous nose, and thick, parted lips. He raised a white chop of hand in greeting. Arthur felt the glimmer of familiarity between them, the unmistakable surge of a connection. But he couldn't nail it down, and this sensation frightened him for reasons that he didn't quite understand. He felt an urge to run.

No one else seemed to notice the man. People on the street, on their way to the warmth of the Portuguese café at the corner of Apostel Paulus Strasse and Akkazien Strasse, either kept their heads down against the storm or stole a glance at the smashed chestnut. The crews broke out chainsaws, and the cops blocked the end of  Apostel Paulus with cones. Drivers leaned on horns. The tree had thrashed down onto a row of recycling bins and scared the hell out of a heroin junkie, but otherwise, its demise hadn't harmed a soul. Arthur looked at it for a second.  When he glanced back, the stranger between the cars had gone.

*

He hurried left down Apostel Paulus Strasse. Anna's apartment lay six blocks away, but it would seem like a mile in this cyclone. Air howled, rattling jalousies, hoisting trash cans. It was an hour before midnight, and western Berlin lay under siege.

Arthur peered over his shoulder, thinking to catch another glimpse of the face. It could have been one of the Bosnians from the ground floor of his building. They had moved into the room he was passing at that very moment, the studio to his left, formerly a copy shop, three adults and two children, from Banja Luka. One of them was an older man, but he could not be described as overweight or unkempt. Of course, the flash of  police lights, the blur of storm, might have distorted his vision. That was possible.

Arthur paused a moment, listening. Rain sheeted the pavement. Voices receded. He had a sense of isolation, as if curtains had closed around him.  Then, he experienced a certainty. Someone close to him had died. A gust of wind stung his eyes, and he snapped the collar of his coat up, regretting that he had worn his boots. They were already soaked.

As a journalist, Arthur worked more by intuition than observation; certain phenomena haunted him, and he pursued them until they coalesced into stories. Hampton, his senior colleague, called it "copy conjuring".  Arthur did not like this term. It made him feel like a fraud. But he understood what Hampton meant. He was sensitive to invisible strands. The stranger in the street had news for him. Such messengers were called revenants; it was wartime in central Europe, and revenants were walking the land.

*

He turned into Merseburgerstrasse, boot heels skidding across black, wet exposed brick. He shouldn't have worn the boots, but  when he wore them, Anna called him her grosse Texaner, and he liked it. Apartment buildings rose six stories on either side of him, like the walls of an arroyo.

It was cold, but he thought warm thoughts. Anna would be wearing her little black party dress, and she would have been dancing for hours, perspiring, drinking goblets of sangria punch. She would look sexy as hell. She would smell like sex itself. She would want to go into the closet. The party would last till dawn.

He spun around. An old woman trailed him with a dachshund. Her eyes widened in fear.

"Was ist denn los?" she asked Arthur with palpable anxiety.

"Nichts," replied Arthur, shaking his head in dismay, apologizing. "Tut mir Leid."

She hurried her animal away. But Arthur lingered, peering back down  Merseburger toward his own street.  He saw a figure there, where the Apostel Paulus Strasse flowed past his line of vision, the shape of a big round man limned by the intermittent flashing of police lights. The women in Arthur's family had inklings when people died, but Arthur never had. Not so long ago, war had been here, too, in this street. One could still find bullet holes in the walls. Bones must still lie beneath the concrete under his feet, a thousand restless ghosts for every inch of Berlin. But no, he saw, it was nothing. The shape became a series of shapes, clumps of people moving, like Arthur, against the rain and darkness.

*

The war in the Balkans upset Arthur. Maybe it was that he had never been so close to a war before. Vietnam had been on television until he was eight or nine. His uncle had flown a chopper there, but the war had never been real. Or maybe it was that he felt guilty and ashamed that he had not been sent to cover the biggest story in Europe; or that he had not put up more of a fight for the job. Maybe it was the children who lived on the first floor of his apartment building and had lost their mother. The super in the building, a Bosnian who had lived in Berlin for many years, had told him that the mother had been murdered before their eyes. The children were becoming beggars.

Tears welled into his eyes. It was Marta. For an instant, he felt blind on the street. He fought back by telling himself that he would get very drunk on sangria. He would dance. His woman would do a flamenco to her favorite song, a one hit wonder by Maxine Nightingale. After drinking, dancing and maybe fucking, he would sit on the floor and listen to the war correspondents. Eric Hampton would be there. His colleague had left Sarajevo at the beginning of the week and promised to be in Berlin for the party. He never missed Anna's Halloweens, unparalleled opportunities to network and schmooze, though Hampton wouldn't have put it quite that way. Arthur loved to listen to Hampton. He covered war zones with aplomb and rage, as if thirty years of being escorted down ministerial halls had made him immune to bullets but not to their effects. He took Bosnia as his cause. He called for the return of Margaret Thatcher and invoked the Spanish Civil War. He talked about the two cities, an idea borrowed from Saint Augustine, applied to everything; the city of God, the city of man; la cite reel, la cite ideal; city of facts, city of fictions, and on and on, divided, burning cities running through every aspect of his thought.

Arthur turned into Wartburgstrasse and stood at Anna's door. He stared up at the facade and was struck by overwhelming sorrow. The facade had been annihilated in the Second World War and replaced by a sheet of poured gray concrete, dead lines from the top of the building to the street, interrupted at intervals by balconies. He started to ring the buzzer, but hesitated. The feeling of presence would not go away. It was Marta, a voice kept telling him. Something had happened to Marta. How could he go to a Halloween party?

Lots of American expats threw Halloween parties, but Anna, a German, had a reputation for throwing the very best that the city of Berlin had ever seen.  She knew everyone who mattered. As a press flak for the city's cultural ministry, she had lots of government contacts. So the bureaucrats came. As a lapsed performance artist, she had countless artistic and intellectual friends who worked on hundreds of different, well-funded projects: cabaret singers, memoirists, unpublished metaphysical philosophers, avant garde composers, adherents of fluxus and situationism, constructivists, minimalists, lots of video and Internet pioneers, though no conventional painters or sculptors, never any of these.

Also in attendance would be the two strands of her father's side of the family, members of the local German aristocracy and civil servants of the former East Germany, two mutually hostile groups from different branches of the von Hakenberg line, torn asunder by population relocations at the end of the Second World War and rejoined uneasily by German Unification. Anna's Cousin Guenter, a former East German interpreter and self-confessed paid informant for the government security apparatus, was her particular favorite. For the last three years, he had helped her make her celebrated pumpkin pies.

Through Anna's mother came a fair number of boozy, chain-smoking, hard-living filmmakers of the 1960's generation, men who had had romantic ties of one kind or another with Fran von Hakenberg, who had come to Berlin in 1961,  married and divorced Nikolai von Hakenberg, slept with a lot of cinematographers, then died of lung cancer before Anna turned five.

Finally, there were the journalists. As a gorgeous 28-year-old brunette who spoke perfect English as well as German, Anna had been the most popular interpreter and fixer for the English-language press during the months of revolution and upheaval in 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, and the world changed. Every news organization in the world had come to the city and set up shop. Arthur himself had been part of that vast rolling wave. Hundreds of hacks had stayed, though most of them now spent their time down south, covering the Bosnian War, unlike Arthur, who followed the fighting from a distance but had never received an assignment from his magazine to go there and had never asked for one. His colleague Hampton owned that story, and Arthur respected deeply the lines of authority within the camps of Sense magazine. Also, he was afraid of dying. Journalists had been killed down there.

Anna had thrown open the French doors of her balcony, the only way to cool off the rooms, packed to overload with hundreds of people, and Arthur could hear the spirit of the party. He could hear people talking about Belgrade, Auschwitz, and New York. Drumbeats pounded the background like a cannon. He could hear Russians.

History engulfed Berlin. This is what Arthur felt. History engulfed the city---in every conversation and every street name, in each café, in every bland wall. Marta had left him in this place, where he didn't belong. Thanks to her, he had never been able to leave the city. Thanks to her, he had drifted to Anna, the substitute, the ersatz, the child of East and West; before that division, her Nazi grandfather had shaken Field Marshal Hermann Goering's hand; and before that, the family name dated back seven centuries, into the world of knights and nobility . There was a ruined castle in Saxony. What a bore for Anna! But it secretly thrilled Arthur. Anna slid through History like an eel through dark waters. Arthur was a child of Dallas, Texas, a place not much older than the first radio; the oldest thing in Dallas, Texas, was a log cabin, and it was a fake.

Arthur pressed the door buzzer and waited. He rang again. No one heard him.

"Goddammit!" he shouted up at the balcony. "Will someone please let me in?!"