Clive La Pensée’s, The Last Stop

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A Berlin Story of Sex and Sedition

Beer writer and New London Writers blogger, Clive La Pensée, made a  name for himself writing about craft-beer brewing. Critics put The Historical Companion to House-Brewing in the ten best beer books ever written. That was back in 1990. Brewers have told him that his beer books contributed to the craft-ale revival we now witness. In order to sidestep the demands of the publishing industry, he created one of the first Indie Publishers – Montag Publications.

Five beer books on, he decided to crack the fiction-writing genre. He turned down requests from CAMRA for further books and started writing his first thriller – The Last Stop. It plays in Berlin, currently among the most vibrant of European cities, and is a tale of underdogs fighting back.

The Last Stop explores the moral dilemma of exploitation. If the exploited defend themselves, can the end ever justify the means, if the means are illegal?

The main protagonist is Maria, an innocent from Poland, embroiled in the Berlin sex industry. She can only survive by fighting back. Short term, her tactic works but once she is on their radar, the chase is on. She recruits Jack, the artless retired tax inspector from sleepy Leamington Spa, thought he was on holiday. The Last Stop is a compulsive page-turner and despite the difficult subject matter it is filled with crackling good humour.

Clive believes there has to be a philosophy behind dabbling in literature, art, film etc. Art for art’s sake is not his thing. His reason for writing is the desire to expose exploitation and repression. ‘Only when we cease to abuse and subjugate others, can we be free ourselves.’

 

Chapter 1

 

 

 

‘The bus or train?’

Jack Precious was not ashamed of talking to himself. After all, a simple decision can change a life, and discussing it, even as a monologue, often clarified things. He wanted nothing but a speedy transfer to his hotel.

Jack was the wrong side of sixty, comfortably plump round the middle, thinly thatched on top, spot on the median height for a north-european white male and uninteresting to members of the opposite sex, unless they were widowed or divorced, in which case his more than useful pension as a retired tax inspector would make up for physical shortcomings.

He knew the bus would be quicker, but it was also riskier. Buses always are. They get held up in traffic, are subject to unknown deviations and, as a stranger in town, he hated the pressure of wondering where the next bus stop would be. Furthermore, this particular bus journey would involve a change. Always tricky in a new city. So he did the steady-Eddie routine and headed off, under the sign of a train, towards the station. At heart, that’s what he was – a steady Eddie.

Jack still doubted the wisdom of this move. The bus stood panting and hissing right outside the airport exit – the station was a full five-minute drag of a heavy case, followed by stairs down and up, in order to get to the trains. He could take the ramps, but they seemed endless. However, the weather was bright, cool and fresh so the walk seemed good.

Had he chosen the bus, he later reflected, the following months of his life would have been so different. No! That was wrong. The rest of his life altered the moment he rejected the bus. He was to be thrown from his predestined orbit like a meteor that had come too close to a star. The star was a woman. He would have missed Maria, twenty something, high cheek bones showing an eastern European origin, medium height, dark blue, darting, observant eyes, dressed in a tatty overcoat, despite the fine weather, sitting on her tattier suitcase, in the shadows of the entrance to the station, looking with imploring eyes at passers-by.

If a girl stands in the shadows, then the imploring looks do not attract much attention. He would have overlooked her, too, but Jack was a face person and noticed Maria’s face. Although not pretty, it was interesting. It looked puffy from old tears and the eyes were reddening in preparation for new ones.

Jack was versed in life’s realities. He knew that an interesting-looking woman in her late teens or early twenties only looks at a sexagenarian if she wants something and so he would have been justified in calling over, ‘I still fancy you, but you wouldn’t normally give me the time of day, so on your bike!’

But he didn’t. He knew that he was a member of the blessed generation – born post war into a world of full employment, penicillin with no resistant bacterial strains, anaesthetics, effective contraception and no wars in which he was the right age to fight. That meant he, along with many other men and women in their sixties, had enough money, was in good health and had filled his boots in his youth. This young woman’s generation, he once surmised, would never have it that good. As a rule, one should help. He hoped that if his daughters or granddaughters ever stood at a railway station, with tears in their eyes, someone would stop and make an effort on their behalf.

Jack knew Berlin’s history and its position within the old communist bloc. The girl looked Polish and was possibly in real trouble, possibly had nothing except the tatty-looking clothes she stood in or were in her suitcase, possibly had erred into Germany looking for work and found that there was no shortage of destitute young woman from the east, desperately seeking work. She possibly didn’t speak German. Jack became tired of the ‘possibly,’ options. They were manifold and all sad.

‘There is nothing else for it,’ he thought. ‘I’ve got mug stamped right across my forehead . . . but . . . a crying woman is a worthy cause.’

He drew breath. ‘Brauchen Sie Hilfe?’ he slowed his step to receive a reply.

‘Do you speak English?’ she whispered across the gap. Jack struggled to hear her.

‘Of course,’ he replied.

‘Please, give me three euros for a ticket.’

Jack knew his instinct had been correct. No streetwise kid gets tearful over a three euro train fare; they would travel without a ticket and chance getting caught. She was green. And the question flew through his mind. ‘How do you end up outside an international airport, in a land where you don’t speak the language, with less than three euros in your pocket? The ticket machine takes credit cards so she has no credit. If it were a sting,’ he reasoned, ‘she’d go for more than three euros. No! She is in trouble and I will have to help.’

He wanted to swear at her – loudly. Why did he always get stung by penniless no-hopers? How many burgers had he bought old men down on their luck, but with grumbling stomachs? He knew not. And he didn’t swear.

‘I don’t have three euros in change,’ he replied, knowing all his small change was in the recesses of his suitcase and he had large notes in his wallet. ‘But I can help. Just walk this way with me,’ and he pointed toward the tunnel leading to the trains. He was proud of this security measure and once certain they weren’t being followed by a wallet snatcher, he stopped and took out his wallet. He handed her an unused ticket.

She looked at it and said, ‘But it is for zones B and C.’

Jack was impressed that she knew the system so well – not so green after all.

‘Where do you need to get to?’

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