Read Online The Eighth Dwarf by Ross Thomas - Free Book Online Page A

it?”
    â€œYou were watching?”
    â€œFrom over there.”
    â€œIt was a carp.”
    â€œThat’s what I thought it was,” Bodden said. “A carp.”
    It took Bodden a little more than an hour and a half to reach the center of Lübeck. Before the war it had had a population of about 100,000, but German refugees from the East and displaced persons from almost everywhere had swollen that figure to nearly double its prewar size. Some of this Bodden learned when he stopped several times to ask directions. The refugees and the DP’s flocked to Lübeck because it had been bombed only once, on Palm Sunday in 1942. The raid was supposed to have taken out the docks and the industrial belt, but instead it had wiped out about a third of the old city center.
    â€œBecause of Coventry, you know,” one old man told Bodden. “We hit Coventry; they hit us. Retaliation.”
    The DP’s, Bodden learned, were mostly Poles and Latvians and Estonians, and nobody liked them. Many of them were thieves—clever thieves, one man said, who “lust after bicycles.” Whatever they stole often turned up on the black market which flourished in a small street that was pointed out to Bodden.
    The street was called Botcherstrasse, and it seemed to contain not only the town’s black market but also its brothels. Because it led from Fischergrube to Beckergrube, which was on his way, Bodden took it. He found that one could buy almost anything for a price in that one short block. There were cigarettes, of course, mostly British, as well as coffee, meat, poultry, fats, and clothing. Bodden even found a pair of shoelaces, which he quickly bought from a Pole who brandished a thick wad of notes. Bodden had looked for two months in Berlin for a pair of laces without luck. The ones that he bought after the customary bargaining seemed new, probably prewar, and he felt lucky to have found them despite their exorbitant price.
    From Beckergrube it was only a short walk to the newspaper plant on Königstrasse. It was a crowded, busy street packed with pedestrians and bicycles, and Bodden had to shoulder his way to the entrance of the Lübecker Post. The street floor was given over to a job printing shop, and after inquiries Bodden was sent to the director’s office on the second floor.
    He had to wait, of course. The Herr Direktor was a busy man, with many important affairs and responsibilities that commanded his time, but if Bodden would care to wait, it was just possible that he would be granted an audience, although a brief one.
    The director’s secretary hadn’t asked him to sit while he waited, but Bodden sat anyway, in a straight-backed wooden chair. He sat for fifteen minutes, almost without moving, and then crossed his legs. The secretary was a stern-faced woman of about forty, skinny almost to the point of emaciation, who pounded away industriously on an old typewriter. The telephone rang four times while Bodden waited the first fifteen minutes; five times while he waited the second fifteen.
    Three minutes later, he was shown into the presence of the director, Dieter Rapke, who, Bodden thought, was too young for the self-important air that he gave himself. At forty-two, Rapke looked like a man whom the war and its aftermath had cheated out of middle-aged plumpness. He had a round head that by now should have been growing some double chins, but wasn’t. It gave him a curiously unfinished look. When times get better, Bodden thought, that one will eat.
    Rapke peered up at the man who stood before his littered desk. He didn’t ask the man to sit down. It didn’t occur to him. After a moment he took off his rimless glasses, polished them with a handkerchief, and put them back on.
    â€œSo,” Rapke said, “you are a printer.”
    â€œYes,” Bodden said, “and a good one.”
    â€œFrom Berlin.”
    â€œFrom Berlin.”
    â€œThere is no work for a