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E-BookEPUBePub WasserzeichenE-Book
416 Seiten
Englisch
Salterschienen am15.07.2024
A naked, burning man runs up a hill of rubble on the last day of the Second World War in Berlin. In one hand are fragments of a white flower and he whispers 'Ich liebe Sie alle,' I love you all. He is saved by a young Irish-American colonel, Kells. Certain the man with no identity or memory will die, Kells gives him the name 'Hyman Kaplan' who Kells, as part of Operation Lucy, has been sent to kill because, absurdly, Hyman is part of Lucy, and Lucy kills her own to remain secure. Pickering's new novel is a sensationally readable tale of intrigue, sex, horrific killings, and sacrifice.

Paul Pickering is the author of six novels: Wild About Harry, Perfect English, The Blue Gate of Babylon, Charlie Peace, The Leopard's Wife and Over the Rainbow. The Blue Gate of Babylon was a New York Times notable book of the year, who dubbed it 'superior literature'. Often compared to Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, Pickering was chosen as one of the top ten young British novelists by bookseller WH Smith and has been long-listed for the Booker Prize three times. The novelist J.G. Ballard said Pickering's work is 'truly subversive'. As well as short stories and poetry, he has written several plays, film scripts and columns for The Times and Sunday Times. He lives in London with his wife and daughter.mehr
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Produkt

KlappentextA naked, burning man runs up a hill of rubble on the last day of the Second World War in Berlin. In one hand are fragments of a white flower and he whispers 'Ich liebe Sie alle,' I love you all. He is saved by a young Irish-American colonel, Kells. Certain the man with no identity or memory will die, Kells gives him the name 'Hyman Kaplan' who Kells, as part of Operation Lucy, has been sent to kill because, absurdly, Hyman is part of Lucy, and Lucy kills her own to remain secure. Pickering's new novel is a sensationally readable tale of intrigue, sex, horrific killings, and sacrifice.

Paul Pickering is the author of six novels: Wild About Harry, Perfect English, The Blue Gate of Babylon, Charlie Peace, The Leopard's Wife and Over the Rainbow. The Blue Gate of Babylon was a New York Times notable book of the year, who dubbed it 'superior literature'. Often compared to Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, Pickering was chosen as one of the top ten young British novelists by bookseller WH Smith and has been long-listed for the Booker Prize three times. The novelist J.G. Ballard said Pickering's work is 'truly subversive'. As well as short stories and poetry, he has written several plays, film scripts and columns for The Times and Sunday Times. He lives in London with his wife and daughter.
Details
Weitere ISBN/GTIN9781784633257
ProduktartE-Book
EinbandartE-Book
FormatEPUB
Format HinweisePub Wasserzeichen
FormatE101
Verlag
Erscheinungsjahr2024
Erscheinungsdatum15.07.2024
ReiheSalt Modern Fiction
Seiten416 Seiten
SpracheEnglisch
Dateigrösse1370 Kbytes
Artikel-Nr.16439659
Rubriken
Genre9201

Inhalt/Kritik

Leseprobe



II


Holy shit! where are you, man?

A young American colonel sprinted into the blue-grey smoke that had been a hill of rubble and waited for the dust to clear. He had seen the burning man from afar and knew he had to save a heretic angel who had not given in to the surrounding madness. The colonel blinked away the grit in his eyes and found himself looking at an unconscious, naked man who had been terribly burned down the left-hand side of his head and body. The man had several wounds to his chest and there was a large hole in his skull; it was possible to see the pearlescent yellow-white folds of his brains. Yet he began to move. He was breathing. He opened his good eye.

He had an erection.

By the man was what looked like half the head of a statue of Frederick the Great. The colonel smiled. Who wants to live forever? he said, out loud, quoting the playfully ambiguous question to his troops by the King of Prussia. The colonel looked at his watch. It was exactly four in the afternoon on April 30, 1945, in the last days of the siege of Berlin, and what every sane person hoped was the end of World War II in Europe

The colonel had no idea where the last huge explosion had come from, which side had dropped a bomb or fired a shell, but then, a couple of yards away to his left, two Russian paratroopers shook their brown-clad bodies free from under the plaster and bricks. They must have heard him.

He levelled his pistol as one paratrooper, a man with sergeant´s stripes, cocked his papasha submachine gun and pointed it at him while barking a command. The second paratrooper, a private, no more than a boy, turned his weapon at the man on the ground, smiling at the erection, but glazed over with the same fatal obedience as when ordered to kill one of his father´s pigs.

Please stop! came a shout behind them. Pozhaluysta ostanovis´!

The private spun around. But the Russians did not fire. It may have been the use of the word please that startled them. The speaker nervously held a white handkerchief on a stick. Behind him was a small group of soldiers with American flag patches on their uniforms and for several more seconds the two sides aimed their machine guns at each other, breathless, terrified.

The colonel then dropped his pistol to his side, smiling and showing his white teeth, and took a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket. His long blond hair hung down below his helmet where someone had painted Hollywood in flowing script to one side of a silver eagle denoting his rank as colonel. The cigarettes were Lucky Strike. The red circle on the front of the packet shone like a ruby. He threw them to the Russian private, who caught them easily with one hand. A tall, angular American soldier ran past the Russians to the man on the pile of rubble. The soldier had a Catholic chaplain´s cross on his shoulder straps.

This wretched man´s still just alive. My God, he is... aroused. The priest picked up a cheap brown coat lying close by the man and grey with dust. He began to rub at the coat to expose a yellow badge. There´s the Star of David on this coat. If it´s his, he may have been a prisoner in Gestapo headquarters, over there. He has the Jewish star. He´s trying to say something in German. About love.

The young colonel´s clear blue eyes had the innocence of the altar boy he had once been. He nodded. The priest was with them because he spoke good Russian and, Kells thought, to make the mission more idealistic than it was.

The man´s infectious bid for freedom had even stopped the butchery for a moment or three. That had to be worth something.

Tell the comrades we want this man. We are an observer unit trying to track down Americans who were being held and tortured in the Gestapo headquarters, near Mr. Hitler´s bunker. We´ve clearance from Marshal Konev. Yeah, I see they know that name. We want to ask the burned-up man about our boys. This man is harmless and nearly dead. If they give him to us, we´ll give them more cigarettes and chocolates. I´ll get them Mae West´s phone number from my cousin who´s in pictures. How´s about it? Is that a deal? He talked fast and loud because he was shit scared and afraid he might dry up as a bullet zipped past.

The two Russian soldiers listened without emotion while his words were translated by the priest.

One turned to the other and shrugged. Americans were not officially meant to be in Berlin and the Russians, especially the private, looked as if they did not entirely believe in them, as they no longer completely believed in saints and angels.

Before the Russians could answer, there was another barrage of shellfire that landed in the park to the south and set fire to an asphalt path. The Zoo Flack Tower, a bulbous, dark, medieval-style keep that loomed on the horizon, raked the ground with fire from its anti-aircraft guns. The young colonel felt the heat on his face as most of his men hit the ground. The Russian private ran forward and grabbed the packets of cigarettes and chocolate from an orderly standing by the colonel and with his sergeant disappeared like rats into the labyrinth of desolation. Two more American soldiers appeared from the shelter of a nearby doorway carrying a stretcher.

We got to get out of here before those Russians eat the chocolate and want Mae West, said the colonel, pleased.

Colonel Kells Hollywood Vardy was twenty-five years old and had been shot at now for nine months and twenty-four days and knew no one got past six months without a serious wound. That was not cool man, as the black guys in his unit said. But he had to save the burning man.

If things fucking fall apart, at least bring something back, the infantry general had said. The colonel had expected to find the men he was looking for in the Swiss Embassy on Posierplatz, but there did not seem to be anything much of Posierplatz left. Maps are only any good when there are streets and buildings. There did not seem to be much of anywhere left and he had openly contradictory orders from military intelligence not to let the men in the embassy, in particular a Hyman Kaplan, fall into Russian hands as they had gone over to the other side, whichever that was, and to do whatever was necessary.

The colonel did not like this leaden wink-wink-nudge-nudge double talk. Killing resistance fighters was totally wrong, but if he objected, he might have bought all of them a boat ride to the Far East.

Still, the killing of the real Hyman Kaplan had most certainly been done for him.

The Russians were killing everyone. Sometimes, as with the last barrage, they killed each other. They even shot the animals in the Tiergarten Zoo. The colonel had seen two dead zebras and a strange kind of ostrich among the human bodies by the Ostrich House, which was a fake Egyptian temple covered in hieroglyphics painted in yellow, blue and red. The primary colours howled out of the black and white newsreel of a day. It was like something from a studio film set he had been on with his writer cousin, after a surfing trip to Malibu Beach. The animals, not the men, made him feel sorry and angry and he said the Ave Maria , though he had put his Catholic upbringing on the other side of a glass screen many years ago because it became too hurtful.

Kells lit a cigarette and stared at the awkward boned priest. He was a young man with an over-prominent Adam´s apple and despairing eyes.

This poor soul has been through a lot. My God. How´s man expected to live such a life? He has something in his hand... It´s almost too burned up... I´ll be damned... It´s the dried petals of a white flower.

The colonel smiled back, wistfully. We fight on the side of romance! It may bring us luck ...

He fingered the Mickey Mouse Club badge he had in his lapel. His mother had given it him for luck when he went to high school.

He noted the disapproval of his new Italian sergeant, who was wearing a brown leather jacket and had a gold eye-tooth. You weren´t meant to mention Luck. His sergeant did not think he took things seriously, that he did not pay war its proper respect. The colonel glanced around him as a bullet hissed past.

The intelligence operation they were part of that day was so fucking secret no one, not the army nor the intelligence people, had told him its name.

He had not felt part of this lunacy since parachuting into Normandy and had sleep-walked through his command. He felt no guilt, no need for absolution. Nothing.

The war was behind another wall of glass. Until today. Kells was fascinated with the burning man.

The wounded man was put on the stretcher and the colonel flicked his cigarette away. They dodged and ran through the Tiergarten and, now and again, amid the smell of burning and cordite and high explosive, there was the scent of blossom on the hot spring wind.

Did you catch what the burning guy said? Kells asked the priest, when they stopped behind a line of...

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Autor

Paul Pickering is the author of six novels: Wild About Harry, Perfect English, The Blue Gate of Babylon, Charlie Peace, The Leopard's Wife and Over the Rainbow. The Blue Gate of Babylon was a New York Times notable book of the year, who dubbed it 'superior literature'. Often compared to Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, Pickering was chosen as one of the top ten young British novelists by bookseller WH Smith and has been long-listed for the Booker Prize three times. The novelist J.G. Ballard said Pickering's work is 'truly subversive'. As well as short stories and poetry, he has written several plays, film scripts and columns for The Times and Sunday Times. He lives in London with his wife and daughter.