Good People Read Online Free Page A

types from Hermann Kreizinger’s old gang. Hermann himself, who now wore a shiny SS uniform, had stopped running around with them a long time ago.
    ‘Thomas, people say hard times are in store,’ Frau Tschammer nagged him, worried.
    ‘I have to get to the meeting.’ For a moment he was distracted. Fifteen years earlier, in the summer of 1923, a week after his father was fired by the Junkers aircraft company, he sat with him in the back of a café in Unter den Linden. His father complained about the madness that had gripped Germany. Those had truly been strange times: their whole world was being stuffed into a straitjacket and people were muttering about the end of days, while the hungry masses were staring at the advertisements that glowed in the skies of the city. Banknotes were printed with the paintbrush of imagination. People carted off salaries in the millions in wheelbarrows, but by evening those piles of paper weren’t enough for a beer and a sausage.
    Suddenly, Hermann’s gang burst into the café. Thomas greeted him with a nod, as usual, but Hermann pretended he hadn’t seen him, which was how he had behaved ever since finishing school. Once Thomas had met him by chance and said hello, but Hermann only gave him a strange look, as if Thomas’s voice itself had made him feel ill.
    Thomas didn’t understand the meaning of such behaviour. After all, they had until recently been close friends. When Hermann’s father had committed suicide, leaving his wife and children penniless, Thomas had been the one who sold their property for them, and at a fantastic price. He had taken Hermann under his wing.
    That was truly a miserable affair. After the war Kreizinger’s World of Toys had collapsed. They had imported toys, electric gadgets from America, whimsical novelties that arrived by steamship—hardly essential things, but people loved them. The day came when Herr Kreizinger couldn’t even buy a pencil from the Americans, so they sold him some merchandise on credit and hired a lawyer to sue him. The lawyer had taken everything, and Hermann’s father had lain down on the railroad tracks. Thomas preferred people who jumped from the tops of towers. A moment of soaring through the air—at least one brief instant of greatness—why not get one last thing out of life?
    After his father died, Hermann went hungry. Thomas was generous with him and taught him how you could get all kinds of things in Berlin for free. At least once a week, after school, they would make a circuit of a few upmarket hotels. Thomas would enter the lobby in the guise of an exiled Russian prince, for whom German luxury was a kind of insult, while Hermann, who played his faithful attendant, carried his suitcase. If the doorman asked too many questions, Thomas would put on an arrogant air and dumbfound him with a volley of Russian phrases. Hermann would then translate, in measured tones, a sequence of horrible insults and threats. Usually the doorman would retreat and bow before the young prince.
    They would stroll along the corridors, ride the elevators and roam the stairs, with a single aim: to fill the suitcase with food. Sometimes they would come upon baskets of rolls or saucers of jam outside rooms, but usually they scouted for some festive event: a reception in honour of senior executives at Siemens-Schuckert, a family wedding, a party of American movie producers. On such occasions, it was easy to find crisp rolls and smoked sausages, cheeses and—on good days—beef cooked in prunes. Sometimes they dared to sit in the hotel restaurant, and Thomas would charm the waiters with the innocent look of a pampered youngster who never imagined that his father might be late for a meal, just as it never occurred to him that any delicacy might be beyond the reach of his lazy fingers. And there was that summer night,when they drank wine in the lounge of the Adlon, listening to a Mozart divertimento, and, as though they had all the time in the world,