Free The Informer by Craig Nova Page A

was amazed they worked when the men were kicking and grunting, shoving and hitting. One of the young men in a white shirt was bleeding from the nose, and the drops on the floor looked like red buttons that weren’t the same size. Thisman reached down, still dripping from the nose, and dragged a friend of his outside, onto the platform. Then Mani, Georg, Karl, and the other Red Front Fighters tumbled out the door onto the platform, too.
    They formed up into two sides. Georg, Mani, and Karl and the other members of their group on one side and the young men in brown pants and white shirts on the other. Everyone hesitated, thinking things over. They swore at one another. Mani spit at the men in brown pants. Georg threw a ball bearing. Gaelle came up to the door, and as she was about to step out onto the platform, the door slid shut.
    The train jerked. Karl turned from the men who were opposite him and looked at Gaelle, not seeming to judge her so much as to understand. Mani turned away from the line of men, too, and as his eyes caught hers, with the faintly greasy piece of glass of the door between them, he nodded and then, as clearly as though he were speaking out loud, he asked by his expression, the movement of his eyes, in the electric moment when he reached into his pocket for a ball bearing, just how she was going to make up for this.
    Karl went on staring at her as the train began to move, and when someone hit him, he just shrugged if off and continue to stare, a little hurt now, or so it seemed, and this only made Gaelle angrier. How dare anyone accuse her? What the fuck did they know? Had they been down on their knees in front of a park bench? Had they put a face next to that of a beautiful young woman to see what fate had done just to show its power, its delight in the chaotic? Then Mani, Karl, and the others disappeared into a jumble of arms and legs as a large, brown, earth-colored thing flew over the platform. Gaelle realized that it was a potato with nails in it.
    Gaelle sat there, her hands shaking. Every now and then one of the people in the car looked at her, but she didn’t look back. Had someone been killed, and if that had happened, was she involved? Would she pay the price, even though she had clearly told Mani to get lost, to go screw himself, since as far as she could tell, no one else would do it. Would the police track her down in the park or at her apartment? She thought of the three-room place she had rented not too far from the Tiergarten. Her fingers trembled at her lips, and the movement reminded her of the wings of a moth she had once touched. When she looked down, she realized that thefight could have been an illusion, and if it hadn’t been for the stain on the floor, she could almost convince herself of that. Underneath it all she was disappointed she had let herself consider love or affection or anything like that at all, and now she told herself she would put that into her own, most dark recesses, into a place that was going to be sealed up for good. She trembled with the effort, to get ready to do business, since that was what was so obviously required.
    The train stopped. She got off and stood on the platform. Then she turned to look back along the tracks where the train had come from, and in the distance, vastly diminished, she thought she could make out the platform where Mani and Georg and the others might still be fighting. The rails were shiny and curved away into the distance. She paced back and forth, looking for an angle, a way to fix this up, to make sure she had some help. The atmosphere on the platform, which was a kind of perfume of fear, was precisely what Hauptmann had left her with: it was the scent of being alone. Then she was angry that she had found herself so neatly suspended, as she often was, between what she tried to do and what it got her.
    She crossed under the tracks to the other side of the station so she could catch the next train back the way she had come. Blocks