presently retired to an inner room with the man in shirt-sleeves, whom I judged to be the landlord, and in a little the flaxen-haired lady at the bar beckoned me over and bade me join them.
"This is Julius Zimmermann, the young man I have spoken of," said the Jew; then turning to me:
"Herr Haase is willing to take you on as waiter here on my recommendation, Julius, See that you do not make me repent of my kindness!"
Here the man in shirt-sleeves, a great, fat fellow with a bullet head and a huge double chin, chuckled loudly.
"Kolossal!" he cried. "Herr Kore loves his joke! Ausgezeichnet!" And he wagged his head roguishly at me.
On that Kore took his leave, promising to look in and see how I was faring in a few days' time. The landlord opened a low door in the corner and revealed a kind of large cupboard, windowless and horribly stale and stuffy, where there were two unsavoury-looking beds.
"You will sleep here with Otto," said the landlord. Pointing to a dirty white apron lying on one of the beds, he bade me take off my overcoat and jacket and put it on.
"It was Johann's," he said, "but Johann won't want it any more. A good lad, Johann, but rash. I always said he would come to a bad end." And he laughed noisily.
"You can go and help with the waiting now," he went on. "Otto will show you what to do!"
And so I found myself, within twenty-four hours, spy, male nurse and waiter in turn.
I am loth to dwell on the degradation of the days that followed. That cellar tavern was a foul sink of iniquity, and in serving the dregs of humanity that gathered nightly there I felt I had indeed sunk to the lowest depths. The place was a regular thieves' kitchen what is called in the hideous Yiddish jargon that is the criminal slang of modern Germany a "Kaschemme." Never in my life have I seen such brutish faces as those that leered at me nightly through the smoke haze as I shuffled from table to table in my mean German clothes. Gallows' birds, sneak thieves, receivers, bullies, prostitutes and harpies of every description came together every evening in Herr Haase's beer-cellar. Many of the men wore the soiled and faded field-grey of the soldier back from the front, and in looking at their sordid, vulpine faces, inflamed with drink, I felt I could fathom the very soul of Belgium's misery.
The conversation was all of crime and deeds of violence. The men back from the front told gloatingly of rapine and feastings in lonely Belgian villages or dwelt ghoulishly on the horrors of the battlefield, the mounds of decaying corpses, the ghastly mutilations they had seen in the dead. There were tales, too, of "vengeance" wreaked on "the treacherous English." One story, in particular, of the fate of a Scottish Sergeant "der Hochländer" they called him in this oft-told tale still makes me quiver with impotent rage when I think of it.
One evening the name of the Hotel Esplanade caught my ear. I approached the table and found two flashily dressed bullies and a bedraggled drab from the streets talking in admiration of my exploit.
"Clubfoot met his match that time," the woman cried. "The dirty dog! But why didn't this English spy make a job of it and kill the scum? Pah!"
And she spat elegantly into the sawdust on the floor.
"I wouldn't be in that fellow's shoes for something," muttered one of the men. "No one ever had the better of Clubfoot yet. Do you remember Meinhardt, Franz? He tried to cheat Clubfoot, and we know what happened to him!"
"They're raking the whole city for this Englishman," answered the other man. "Vogel, who works for Section Seven, you know the man I mean, was telling me. They've done every hotel in Berlin and the suburbs, but they haven't found him. They raided Bauer's in the Favoriten-Strasse last night. The Englishman wasn't there, but they got three or four others they were looking for—Fritz and another deserter included. I was nearly there myself!"
I was always hearing references of this kind to my exploit. I was never spoken of except in terms of admiration, but the name of Clubfoot—der Stelze—excited only execration and terror.
I lived in daily fear of a raid at Haase's. Why the place had escaped so long, with all that riff-raff assembled there nightly, I couldn't imagine. It was one of those defects in German organization which puzzle the best of us at times. In the meantime, I was powerless to escape. The first thing Haase had done was to take away my papers—to send them to the police, as he explained—but he never gave them back, and when I asked for them he put me off with an excuse.