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head with satisfaction.
    Everybody had witnessed this scene. It established Tiny as absolute dictator of the ward, a dictator who brutally and without scruples exploited his subjects. An Adolf in miniature.
    This was the reason Paul Stein now obeyed Tiny’s command and was quick about bringing some beer from the Sankt Pauli brewery. Without a word, he placed all ten bottles in the cardboard box under Tiny’s bed.
    Tiny ordered Mouritz to sing for him. It came to a hymn, a sad hymn about the salvation of the world. Tiny meanwhile interrupted his beer drinking and listened politely straight through the nine stanzas. His only comment was to dispatch a gob of spit after Mouritz. He ordered him to go to bed and rest, but not till he’d said a prayer for Tiny’s soul.
    When all orders had been duly carried out, Tiny drank a bit in silence. Eventually he had passed the stage of being simply ‘very drunk.’ He started bellowing a song. The tune hadn’t yet been okayed by the historians of music, and the text was such that it could have brought a charge of high treason on his neck.
Auf der Strasse nach Moskau
marschiert eine Kompagnie ,
das sind die Reste
von Adolfs ganzem Heer ,
Sie konnten schon Josef sehen ,
und mussten wieder stiften gehen ,
wie einst Napoleon .
    For a moment he was silent. Then, with renewed vigor, he roared to the same tune:
Hurra, wir haben den Krieg verloren
    ‘Anyone here itching for a fight?’ he queried into the darkness. A moment or two passed; then he added: ‘If so, I’d be glad to give your hides a tanning.’
    No answer.
    He flung the bottle out of the open window. It crashed against the street. A rasping voice rebounded from the walls by the Zirkusweg intersection. We could observe rapture in his face as he listened. Staggering to the window he neighed in anticipated triumph: ‘Look your jaws, you jackasses! Can’t you see you’re sailing past an army hospital? We must have quiet here. We’re sick people. Heroes! Don’t disturb the sick! If you do, I’ll come down and thrash you!’
    A male voice huffily took up the challenge and egged him on. It reverberated profoundly in the watchful silence of the night.
    ‘Holly blazes,’ Tiny yelled, making ready to jump through the window.
    In the next instant three or four of us were on top of him. We held him down firmly.
    ‘But he talks back, don’t you hear?’ Tiny was outraged. He shouted out of the window, ‘Just wait, you beggar, till I’m free. We’re fighters here. Defenders of our country. We’re heroes. What ideas can such a, such a . . .’
    The Legionnaire had to knock him out with a stool.
    Night came on and the ward was still.
    1 Schutzpolizei – the Civilian Police.

Aunt Dora thought of everything in terms of money. She stood behind her bar counter with the stuffed sword fish and supped akvavit with angostura bitters. Her eyes measured up all who entered by the revolving door.
    The Legionnaire sat on a tall bar stool across from her drinking pernod. This beverage, which looks innocent enough, tastes like licorice, is poisonously green and turns white when mixed with water.
    ‘Pernod is invented by the devil,’ he said, ‘but you don’t know till the eighth glass.’ Laughing, he handed the ninth to the girl.
    She undressed in one of the tiny niches. Her underthings were pitch black, quite sheer. Only her panties, which she refused to take off, were red, coral red. When she removed them upstairs, only Stein and Ewald, Aunt Dora’s assistant pimp, were watching.

IV
    Aunt Dora
    We often went to ‘Wind Force 11’ behind the Central Station. More correctly, we always went to ‘Wind Force 11’ behind the Central Station.
    Aunt Dora, the hostess of this ritzy saloon, was an unfeeling ugly woman. She measured everything in money. Some people, perhaps most, thought it was disgusting. To us, Death’s grooms, it seemed wise. Money can get you anything. ‘For money you can buy eternal life at the seat of Allah in the