mens grooming kit<\/a>\u00a0stand to the mini-fridge in the back.\u00a0 He opened it and retrieved two bottles of Abita Amber, opened both of them quickly with the help of a disposable lighter, then emptied them both simultaneously into a glass growler.<\/p>\n\u201cThat\u2019s the only two you get, Harvey,\u201d Cristo warned.<\/p>\n
The old man sipped his beer and sat down with a huff into the other barber chair.\u00a0 \u201cAnd a good afternoon to you, Cass.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cCap.\u201d<\/p>\n
He looked almost chipper, which meant that he was unemployed yet again, out from under yet another shitty side job he\u2019d cajoled from someone who\u2019d never dealt with him before.\u00a0 Harvey never lasted long in the good graces of foremen, kitchen managers, or warehouse supervisors.\u00a0 He stomped his boots against the footrest, broke the filter off of a 100s cigarette, and lit it.\u00a0 His eyes fell on Ensign Edie, and he whistled.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou know why you never see pinups from World War I?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy\u2019s that.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWould you be inspired by a schoolmarm in a frock?\u201d<\/p>\n
Cristo laughed.\u00a0 \u201cI guess not.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHalter tops, short shorts, fishnets.\u00a0 Great achievements of the forties.\u00a0 I feel sorry for those bastards in the Great War trying to divine the shape of a woman\u2019s tits underneath seven layers of petticoats.\u00a0 Dear God, you move slow.\u00a0 Are you cutting his hairs individually?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cLook,\u201d Cristo countered, \u201cthis ain\u2019t no wham-bam-thank-you-mam VFW joint, all right?\u00a0 You want to look like you did back when you enlisted, go down to Golden Shears.\u201d<\/p>\n
Brave Captain Harvey took another swig of his beer.\u00a0 \u201cThey don\u2019t give you beer down there,\u201d he said.\u00a0 \u201cA good barber serves beer to his customers.\u00a0 I learned that in Berlin.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHere we go,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat\u2019s that supposed to mean?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNothing, let\u2019s hear it.\u00a0 When were you in Berlin?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI was helping occupy it in the fifties.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat branch were you with again?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cClassified.\u00a0 But this was early in my career. \u00a0Me and a handful of other guys\u2014mostly these old carryovers from the European theater\u2014were formed into a sort of marshal unit.\u00a0 You know, tracking down fugitives and other persons of interest.\u00a0 I was still in school when FDR put us in the war, and I started learning German right away.\u00a0 Threw my heart into it, really.\u00a0 Thought I\u2019d be a codebreaker or some shit, I don\u2019t know.\u00a0 So my fluency combined with these vague\u2014yet handsome\u2014features of mine made me a perfect candidate for a unit that needed to blend into all quadrants of the city.\u00a0 So anyway, I get transferred in with these old timberwolves and the C.O. tells me to start growing my hair out.\u00a0 I was still sporting the uniform crew cut, you understand.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cristo made a final snip at my temple and brushed me off.\u00a0 He flipped the cape away and Brave Captain Harvey and I switched seats.\u00a0 Cristo rolled his eyes at me indicating Harvey\u2019s mound of unkempt black and gray hair.\u00a0 Cristo deftly wrapped a paper collar around Harvey\u2019s mottled neck, snapped the cape closed, then picked up his tools again in his only hand.<\/p>\n
\u201cJust a little off the top,\u201d Harvey said, winking at me.\u00a0 \u201cAnyway, at first I didn\u2019t grasp the delicate nature of our work.\u00a0 We didn\u2019t just have to dance with the Russians and the French.\u00a0 We had to work around the spooks from the Company, too.\u00a0 Nothing was ever cut and dried.\u00a0 All the agencies in the area could want to track someone down for five different reasons.\u00a0 No one had a complete picture of all the multiple personalities these guys needed just to survive in Berlin at the time.\u00a0 The dossiers were a real mess.\u00a0 Some of them were translated from stolen files, half of them didn\u2019t include photos.\u00a0 Sometimes you had a folder on an unnamed man compiled from three tiny reports.\u00a0 Those reports could each have been on a separate person, but some analyst back home was convinced they were all applicable to one mystery man.\u00a0 Or the opposite could happen.\u00a0 Three separate files that were really describing the same man, just no one had talked to him long enough\u2014or hard enough\u2014to figure out he had all these aliases.<\/p>\n
\u201cI came to realize that jurisdiction was a nicety, a formality agreed upon in public but shat all over when it came to the dirty, daily work.\u00a0 The borders, the fences, the wall: the emperor\u2019s new clothes, know what I mean?\u00a0 If you wanted someone bad enough, you took them from somebody else, even if they were your ally.\u00a0 It didn\u2019t matter on paper that someone classified as \u2018Fugitive\u2019 was currently detained in the Eastern Sector and awaiting trial for embezzlement or sedition or stealing bread.\u00a0 It didn\u2019t matter whose toes you stepped on or what protocol you disrupted.\u00a0 If the brass wanted them, we went and got them somehow.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThat must have been real heady,\u201d I said, \u201cgetting in on the ground floor of American military arrogance.\u201d\u00a0 I instantly regretted it and braced in the chair for some kind of improvised projectile.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat the fuck is that supposed to mean?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cDon\u2019t move your head!\u201d Cristo shouted.<\/p>\n
\u201cNothing, Cap.\u00a0 Go on.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cMy hair grows fast, as Cristo here will tell you.\u00a0 I soon found that my frequent trips to the barber were great for picking up bits of rumors and having chance encounters with all kinds of known associates and men living double lives.\u00a0 And in the rocky maze of Berlin there were all these great barber shops.\u00a0 Warm little one-room joints with these big Jerries wearing striped aprons and mustaches and offering you liters of beer.\u00a0 Men lined up against the wall reading the papers and drinking and talking recklessly.\u00a0 For some reason, men will talk in a barbershop with no qualms.\u00a0 It\u2019s relaxed, it\u2019s old-fashioned, no matter the decade.\u00a0 Sit in the chair and open up.\u00a0 What else are you going to do?\u00a0 It didn\u2019t take long for me to be able to decipher the double-speak or the way a man with a past would talk around things.\u00a0 Ex-Nazis were always the easiest to spot.\u00a0 They were maniacal about how brightly their shoes should be shined.\u00a0 They wanted all the dust and grime and evidence of the blown-out Berlin they\u2019d been responsible for wiped clean.\u00a0 It bothered them.\u00a0 I\u2019d wait for a man to get into the chair, then run out to a phone.\u00a0 I could have a crew down there by the time the man paid and put his hat on.\u00a0 We\u2019d tail them until we could take our chance and put him in a bag.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cA literal bag?\u201d Cristo asked.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s just what we called it.\u00a0 Puttin\u2019 the ghosts in the bag.\u00a0 That was our job description.\u00a0 All those ghosts, man.\u00a0 A whole city of \u2018em.\u00a0 The ghosts of smugglers, sympathizers, prison guards.\u00a0 The ghosts of old soldiers possessing a businessman\u2019s body.\u00a0 Everyone in Berlin had two or three lives to live.\u201d<\/p>\n
Brave Captain Harvey paused, taking time to enjoy one of his own poignant sentences.\u00a0 It was one of his disgusting habits.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnyway, there was one shop, in particular, that I loved.\u00a0 Herr Klauten\u2019s.\u00a0 The old man had about a half dozen chessboards in the back corner of his shop.\u00a0 He played games with customers.\u00a0 They\u2019d come in and make their move.\u00a0 Klauten would make his move a day or two later, then wait for the three or four weeks to pass before his opponent came in again.\u00a0 He kept six of these games going in his head at a time.\u00a0 Incredible.\u00a0 One day I was in there, and as I was getting my trim I studied the games and noticed that he had a chance to put one guy away in about three moves.\u00a0 I asked if I could take over the spot when he did.\u00a0 I\u2019ll never forget, he pauses and licks his lips and goes, \u2018What do Americans know about chess?\u2019\u00a0 I asked him how he knew I was American.\u00a0 He said it was something intangible that we picked up in boot camp.\u00a0 \u2018American soldiers,\u2019 he said, \u2018they learn a different way of moving their eyes.\u00a0 A different way to watch things.\u00a0 They are unlike any other soldier of the world.\u2019\u00a0 Well, that got me a little self-conscious, and I tried to backtrack, distract him with talk about the weather.\u00a0 But when I\u2019m about to leave, though, he tells me, sure, he\u2019d like to play a game against me.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWho won?\u201d Cristo asked.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy you wanna rush me?\u00a0 I\u2019ll tell this story the same pace you cut my hair, how about that?\u00a0 Now stop a minute, let me drink this before it gets warm.\u201d\u00a0 Cristo pulled back half a step.\u00a0 Harvey reached for his growler and took a few good swallows.\u00a0 He set it back down and put his gray eyes back on mine.\u00a0 \u201cNow, Cass, you\u2019ve got to understand a thing or two about World War II.\u00a0 Yeah, it was big, it was bad, it was chaotic and murderous and massive.\u00a0 But as it wore on, it somehow picked up on its own drama, its own narrative.\u00a0 At a certain point, everyone guessed the ending and planned accordingly.\u00a0 It made the war easier to leave behind.\u00a0 The boys came back home and opened up car dealerships and insurance agencies and invented plastics and got their wives pregnant.\u00a0 It was the war you could wash your hands of.\u00a0 Now, it was easier for us cause we\u2019d never had it in our backyard.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Germans had the same idea, but it was much more difficult to get rid of this bad Nazi hangover.\u00a0 Some of them managed it, though.\u00a0 Klauten was one of \u2018em.\u00a0 The man was boisterous and smart and all his stories seemed to be about men getting cheated on by their wives or girlfriends in humorous ways.\u00a0 Walking into his shop was a true relief from duty.\u00a0 All the grimy bird-dogging and beatings and back-stabbing got trimmed away with my excess hair.\u00a0 Our chess game progressed over the months.\u00a0 Klauten told me, \u2018You Americans know your opening maneuvers.\u00a0 Just like Normandy.\u00a0 I am not so sure about the endgame, though.\u2019\u00a0 Now, I\u2019m no great prince of chess or anything, but I can hold my own.\u00a0 I\u2019d never been up against someone like Klauten, though.\u00a0 He played the game with a different mindset.\u00a0 He had an essential philosophy about the game that confused me a lot of the time, switching often between offensive and defensive schemes, or sometimes accomplishing both with a single move.\u00a0 Between my eagerness to see what he was going to do next and his inborn desire to prove how good he was, we abandoned the slow one-move-a-month format.\u00a0 I would drop by at closing time and we would play for a couple hours every evening, kept fresh by that good German beer.\u00a0 It was only later in life that I came across that style of play again\u2026when I passed the time with this old Russian priest while on assignment in San Francisco.\u201d<\/p>\n
I let out a low whistle.<\/p>\n
\u201cSee, Cass here already knows where this is going.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhere what is going?\u201d Cristo asked.\u00a0 \u201cYou\u2019d better hurry, I\u2019m almost done here.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cDon\u2019t forget the sideburns.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ll get them, I\u2019ll get them.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, one night, both of us get up and stretch our backs and light cigarettes and stare at the board while we make small talk.\u00a0 Neither of us, I think, has a clear advantage.\u00a0 We both have our queens and one rook.\u00a0 He has a few more pawns than I do, but I\u2019ve got plans for them.\u00a0 Klauten looks at me like he\u2019s trying to get up the courage to ask a big favor.\u00a0 I ask him what\u2019s up, and he says, \u2018I like you, Harvey, but you still make me nervous.\u00a0 A soldier without a uniform is one of the most dangerous kind.\u2019\u00a0 I stared him down for a moment.\u00a0 Still young, not as intuitive as I am now,\u201d\u2014Cristo rolled his eyes again\u2014\u201cI tell him, \u2018I\u2019m just an advisor.\u00a0 I know about metals and manufacturing.\u2019\u00a0 That\u2019s what our cover was.\u00a0 He looks at me hard and says, \u2018People talk about you when you\u2019re not here.\u00a0 I can\u2019t in good conscience admit anything beyond that.\u00a0 Just know that you\u2019re not anonymous.\u2019\u00a0 I laughed at that at the time.\u00a0 I went out and got drunk without knowing why.\u00a0 I charmed a cabaret dancer with money and we fooled around in a hotel room.\u00a0 You see what I\u2019m saying here?\u00a0 His little warning put the fear of God in my young heart, but I was too blind to the fear.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t stop by his shop for awhile, making excuses to myself.\u00a0 Eventually, though, I had to.\u00a0 I had to keep up appearances.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cristo pursed his lips and decided he was finished.\u00a0 He worked the brush over Brave Captain Harvey\u2019s shoulders then unclasped the plastic cape and threw it over the back of a chair.\u00a0 He went to the fridge and pulled out three beers, one for the each of us, tucking one under his upper amputated arm and cradling the other two between his solid fingers.\u00a0 He was sold now on the mystery, lost in the evocative fog of embarrassed, confused, thwarted post-war Berlin.\u00a0 I opened his beer for him and he drank, leaning against his desk.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I entered Klauten\u2019s shop that day, he had a man reclined in his chair with a towel over his eyes and lathered up for a shave.\u00a0 The barber was in the back on the phone and our eyes met.\u00a0 He looked for an instant like a trapped animal then turned to face the wall.\u00a0 The only other person in the shop was a napping drunk waiting his turn.\u00a0 I sat down and opened a paper, but kept my eye on the man about to be shaved.\u00a0 Something was up.\u00a0 Klauten ceased his whispering into the phone then resumed his preparations, drawing his razor across an old leather strop.\u00a0 I put down the paper and walked over to the chessboard where our pieces were frozen as we had left them that strange night.\u00a0 I moved my remaining rook opposite his stubborn queen in a gambit to move her away from a defensive position near the king then walked back to my seat.\u00a0 As I passed the man in the barber\u2019s chair Klauten uncovered part of his left cheek with the razor and I saw the man had a distinctive scar below his eye, exactly the type of scar described in one of my dossiers.\u00a0 I struggled to sit down nonchalantly and wrack my brain for the details.\u00a0 It didn\u2019t really matter if I could come up with the name or not: when I called the old bastards of my unit in, they were so rabid they would descend on an infant in a carriage if I told them to.<\/p>\n
\u201cKlauten continued to shave the man and make small talk with me.\u00a0 He knew something was up, and I could feel the tension in his voice.\u00a0 We played a separate game of verbal chess then and there, neither of us speaking in our home tongue.\u00a0 I figured it out almost instantly that afternoon, but about twelve months too late.\u00a0 Klauten was a Russian, working a different angle at the same job I had.\u00a0 I had decided to leave him be, make an excuse and just walk out of there, content to let the respect we shared for each other remain anonymous, but then something happened.\u00a0 Two American soldiers in MP uniforms bustled up to the door and spread inside throwing slang like a jukebox.\u00a0 They were obviously the victims of a few too many pints of well-made beer and harmless, but their boisterous advance spooked Klauten.\u00a0 Before I could do anything, he drew his straight razor across the neck of the man in his chair, pushing it down hard like on dull pencil, coaxing the blood to erupt and spray across his apron.\u00a0 As soon as he knew he\u2019d done irreparable damage he dropped the razor, opened a drawer at his station and withdrew a pistol.\u00a0 He shot wildly towards the door, hitting one of the servicemen clean through the shoulder and another in the ear before darting toward the back door, upsetting all the chessboards in his haste.\u00a0 Pawns and knights and bishops rattled across the hardwood and rolled, a half dozen games and months of maneuvers laid to waste.\u00a0 I bolted upright as soon as the barber was through the door, pulled my own Colt from inside my jacket, and followed him.\u00a0 But it was too late.\u00a0 He was gone in the maze, claimed by the city, sheltered by one of a hundred dark spots on our worthless maps.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt turned out, later, that the man he\u2019d killed was a low level Nazi Intelligence officer, someone who knew the location of a cache of files on the Soviets.\u00a0 Useful information for both sides.\u00a0 Klauten\u2014or whatever his name was\u2014decided it was more desirable that no one know the truth than for us to gain a negligible foothold.\u00a0 Two months after the incident one of the GIs was dead from sepsis and I was reassigned.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cristo and I sat in silence for a few minutes, sipping our beers and evaluating our lives.\u00a0 Harvey basked in the afterglow of another successful recounting of the life he may or may not have led.\u00a0 He appeared to be suddenly drowsy and layered with sweat.<\/p>\n
\u201cI guess I owe you some,\u201d Harvey finally said.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd for last time, too,\u201d Cristo told him.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s right.\u00a0 Damn.\u201d\u00a0 He pulled out a couple twenties from his wallet.\u00a0 Then, as if exhibiting an ace in the hole, he unfolded a wrinkled, faded deutschmark bill and laid it in Cristo\u2019s only palm.<\/p>\n
\u201cHere\u2019s your tip,\u201d he said.\u00a0 \u201cI\u2019ll catch you boys around.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I sat in the first chair inside Cristo\u2019s simple barbershop with my head pitched forward, staring at a pinup poster from World War II.\u00a0 The girl was labeled \u2018Ensign Edie,\u2019 a smiling redhead wearing an adapted sailor\u2019s outfit and cap, …<\/p>\n
Brave Captain Harvey and the Barbers of Berlin<\/span> Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,4],"tags":[143,68,64],"class_list":["post-451","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cass","category-stories","tag-captain-harvey","tag-cassander","tag-new-orleans"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/451","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=451"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/451\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4348,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/451\/revisions\/4348"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=451"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=451"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=451"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}