Berlin: A Novel

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THE BOY NEVER took his eyes off the soldier. The American removed the last Lucky Strike from its packet and tossed the empty wrappings on the tracks. He lit the cigarette and waited for the U-Bahn train coming in from Krumme Lanke station to stop. If the Yank was going only one station up the line to Oskar-Helene-Heim, he'd throw the half-smoked cigarette away as he got out, it would fly through the air in a wide arc, and the boy could retrieve it.

A dozen cigarette butts of that length, once the burnt end had been neatly trimmed away with a razor blade, would earn him forty marks. But if the Yank was travelling further the prospects weren't so good, because then he'd probably tread out that coveted cigarette on the floor of the car or chuck it out of the window, which was open in the summer weather. Yanks were entirely indifferent to such things.

With equal indifference, the US Army quartermaster had ordered that a square mile around the Onkel Toms Hiitte U-Bahn station was to be fenced in with barbed wire, leaving only one narrow passage available to German passengers for access. The shopping streets on both the longer sides of the station were off limits too, and had become a centre for the soldiers billeted in the requisitioned apartment buildings around it.

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