and that’s why the Fräuleins suck their cocks dry. When darkness comes, the streetwalkers ripple out from Fürth to Nuremberg, throng about the railroad station (which still reeks of fire and decay and wet rust), hurry around the old city wall, the garbage-filled moat. No poor lightbulb glows on the shredded ivy of the tumbledown stone wall. There’s smooching and hootchy-kootching in the dark. Sometimes a match flares up and the night sends forth a Rembrandtesque blackamoor’s skull with a Camel in his kisser. Then someone whispers in the dark: “Sir, sir, listen, sir. My sister—sixteen years old . . .”

But we scoot past in beat-up jeeps, whoosh through the figures, our headlights hurling them into the background of the witch-hunt. The driver’s silhouette is like cast iron, a black, helmet-crowned wedge pushing them apart. He steers the light beams with one finger, his right arm embracing the seat at his side, his left foot propped on the clapped-down windshield, his right foot pressing on the gas . . .

we streak with the gale toward sparkling lights, a Christmas wonder candle: in a flood of neon, the Grand Hotel Excelsior rises from the German rubble-night like a mescaline vision. In the lightbulb Alhambra of the entrance, the doorman, the big fat uncle of Papa Czar, in a sky-blue admiral’s uniform, woven into the spaghetti tangle of his silver fourragères, assisted by iron men with machine guns, bayonets sticking out like flowers . . . They check the guests’ passes; he pushes them through the revolving door, bowing and scraping. “Good evening, sir! How are you tonight, sir? . . .”

Inside, fashionable thronging and jostling at the bar. Athletic backs in olive-brown uniform jackets, rugby-player legs in officer’s pinks, bare female shoulders, Chanel No. 5 from the PX in their armpits, Kleenex-cleansed necks under the touched-up hairlines: “I want you to promise me a job in Subsequent Procedures, darling—or where else should I go when this mess is over and they’re all hanged? . . .”

Britons here and there: a Labour MP with a pimp’s pompadour over the low furrowed forehead of a morning-gazette reader, surrounded by His Majesty’s Own Hampstead Archers: Kitchener mustaches under Semitic noses, ringdove voices, Mayfair accents with a touch of Budapest, Honvéd elegance in khaki: shoulder straps waxed to a mirror shine, discreet little stars on the epaulets. A Foreign Office man: pinstriped suit, striped shirt, striped tie, ascetic scholar’s head, boyish hair . . .

and Frenchmen: roundly shaped, with rattails under their noses, swift mouse eyes.

and Russians: in military tunics with board-like shoulder straps, shorn skulls, muzhik movements . . .