Agents And Patients by Anthony Powell

Author:Anthony Powell [Powell, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781446427729
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2015-03-11T23:00:00+00:00

4

ALTHOUGH THE JOURNEY to Berlin had been uneventful, Blore-Smith felt tired when he and Chipchase arrived at the Zoo Station. As they passed through the barrier a German girl, wearing a béret and a black oilskin coat, touched Chipchase’s arm. She showed him an envelope she carried addressed to himself. Chipchase tore it open, and after reading the letter inside he shook hands with the girl and said to Blore-Smith:

‘We’re going straight down to the film studios at Niebelheim. This is Fräulein Grundt, who will take us there.’

Blore-Smith shook hands with Fräulein Grundt, who had light blue eyes and straw-coloured hair. Only her thinness prevented her from having the appearance of a typical German girl in a French comic paper. A Rhine maiden in a mackintosh. She said in slow and very accurate English that a motor was waiting outside. They followed her in silence and climbed into the back of Maltravers’s gamboge car. There they sat without speaking while she drove along the wide streets between the red and yellow flat-blocks of Berlin Westen. Soon they left the town and began to pass through fir forests on either side of the straight white road. At one point Blore-Smith noticed stretches of water between the trunks of the trees and the coloured sails of little boats. Fräulein Grundt drove fast, much in the manner of Maltravers himself, scarcely slowing up at all as they went by occasional clumps of dark red-brick villas. At last she turned off into a narrow road and entered a lane that crossed it at right angles. At the end of this lane gates like those of a level-crossing blocked the way. On either side of the gates were lodges, and beyond them, at some distance off, stood a number of low square structures like aeroplane hangars. Rising out of the centre of these was a larger and more pretentious building, a sort of town hall, and beyond this again, on the horizon, the outline of Greek or Roman ruins stood out against the flat blue-grey sky. A triumphal arch stretched above the gates on which was written, in gothic characters, Niebelheimnazionalkunstfilmgesellschaft.

On recognising the car a porter came forward to open the gates and Fräulein Grundt drove through, gathering speed to about fifty-five along the asphalt way and passing on the left a group of tables and chairs like those of a café, where Blore-Smith noticed a few of Napoleon’s grenadiers eating and drinking. The car drew up in front of the edifice that dominated like a citadel the rest of this film-town. Fräulein Grundt jumped out and opened the door for Chipchase and Blore-Smith to descend.

‘Kommen Sie mit,’ she said.

They followed her into a hall lined with fire-buckets and green doors. Going through one of the doors they entered a pitchy-dark passage and, opening another door at the end, came out into a white-panelled room, full of Louis-Seize furniture and lined with eighteenth-century portraits. A curtain was drawn across the farther side. The room had

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