Metropolis by Philip Kerr

Author:Philip Kerr
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Quercus Editions Ltd
Published: 2019-02-23T12:17:32+00:00

Part Three

Sexuality

Triptych: a set of three associated artistic, literary or musical works intended to be appreciated together.

I was fond of seeing Berlin from a great height; the view from the cathedral roof is unparalleled. But the world looks different when you’re no higher than a dog’s arse and no more significant than that to the people around you. So close to the ground I felt like a small child, one of those street urchins in summer usually seen jumping naked into the river or shouting to a friend in some poor courtyard inside another courtyard, where the sun rarely if ever shone. I didn’t know if The Threepenny Opera had any klutzes in the cast, but it probably should have done; my wagon played a squeaky little tune as it bowled lamely along that put me in mind of one of the numbers from the show. Perhaps it was because I was pretending to be a cripple, but it was only now that I noticed the theatre was near the Charité hospital and on the edge of the city’s medical district, where surgical bookshops and specialist clinics were in plentiful evidence, along with orthopaedic stores featuring a variety of equipment, including shiny modern wheelchairs that looked far more attractive than the contraption I was in. But from the prices I saw advertised in the shop windows, anyone who could have afforded a decent wheelchair could never have passed for a beggar.

I launched myself across Schiffbauerdamm, dodging piles of horse shit – ­I’d forgotten how many delivery horses were still on the streets of Berlin – before being blasted by the horn of a tour company charabanc whose impatient driver leaned out of his window and shouted at me:

‘Watch where you’re going, you dopey klutz. You’re going the right way to lose your arms as well, do you know that?’

The travel group seated behind him stared at me and one of them even took a picture, as if I was a sight no less interesting than Old Fritz on Unter den Linden or the bronze bear in front of City Hall. I waved at them cheerily and made it onto the street corner, where I waited to cross with everyone else. I was surrounded by the shapely calves of young women who took me for a diminutive pervert spying on their stocking tops and by businessmen who assumed, not unreasonably, that I was a pickpocket and moved quickly away. They had good reason; many klutzes were thieves. No one took me for a person, least of all a person in need. But it was clear that people did take me for what I purported to be: a disabled beggar, and that was just fine. The stocking tops were fine, too. Can’t see too many of those.

Across the Spree in Reichstagufer was a row of houses next to the railway station where I was now headed and behind these, the leafy charms of Dorotheenstrasse and the church where, at the age

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