The One From the Other (20 page)

I walked through the front door ready to give the place the benefit of my extensive hotel-keeping experience. Inside was lots of marble and wood, which matched the faces and expressions of the penguins working there. An American in uniform was complaining loudly in English about something to the concierge, who caught my eye in the vain hope that I might sock the Ami in the ear and make him pipe down a bit. For what they charged a night I thought he would probably just have to put up with it. An undertaker type in a cutaway coat came alongside me like a pilot fish and, bowing slightly from the hip, asked if he could help me with something. It’s what the big hotels call Service, but to me it just looked officious, as if he was wondering why someone with shoulders like mine would have the nerve to even think I could go rub them with the kind of people they had in there. I smiled and tried to keep the knuckles out of my voice.

“Yes, thank you,” I said. “I’m meeting someone in the restaurant. The Walterspiel.”

“A guest in the hotel?”

“I don’t believe so.”

“You’re aware that this is a foreign currency hotel, sir.”

I liked it that he called me sir. It was decent of him. He probably threw it in because I’d had a bath that morning. And probably because I was a little too large for him to throw his weight at.

“I am aware of it, yes,” I said. “I don’t like it, now that you mention it. But I am aware of it. The person I’m meeting is aware of it, too. I mentioned it to her when she suggested this place on the telephone. And when I objected and said I could think of a hundred better places, she said it wouldn’t be a problem. By which I assumed she meant that she was in possession of foreign currency. I haven’t actually seen the color of her money yet, but when she gets here, how about you and I search her handbag, just so you can have some peace of mind when you see us drinking your liquor?”

“I’m sure that won’t be necessary, sir,” he said stiffly.

“And don’t worry,” I said. “I won’t order anything until she actually shows up.”

“From February next year, the hotel will be accepting deutschmarks,” he said.

“Well, let’s hope she gets here before then,” I said.

“The Walterspiel is that way, sir. To your left.”

“Thank you. I appreciate your help. I used to be in the hotel business myself. I was the house bull at the Adlon in Berlin for a while. But you know what? I think this place has got it beat for efficiency. No one at the Adlon would ever have had the presence of mind to ask someone like me if he could have afforded it or not. Wouldn’t have crossed their minds. Keep it up. You’re doing a fine job.”

I went through to the restaurant. There was another doorway out onto Marstallstrasse and a row of silk-covered chairs for people waiting for cars. I took one look at the menu and the prices and then sat down on one of the chairs to await my client’s arrival with the dollars, or foreign exchange coupons or whatever else she was planning to use when she handed over the ransom-money rates they were asking in the Walterspiel. The maître d’ flicked his gaze on me for a second and asked if I would be dining that night. I said I hoped so and that was the end of it. Most of the jaundice in his eye was reserved for a large woman sitting on one of the other chairs. I say large but I really mean fat. That’s what happens when you’ve been married for a while. You stop saying what you mean. That’s the only reason people ever stay married. All successful marriages are based on some necessary hypocrisies. It’s only the unsuccessful ones where people always tell the truth to each other.

The woman sitting opposite me was fat. She was hungry, too. I could tell that because she kept eating things she brought out of her handbag when she thought the maître d’ wasn’t looking: a biscuit, an apple, a piece of chocolate, another biscuit, a small sandwich. Food came forth from her handbag the way some women bring out a compact, a lipstick, and an eyeliner. Her skin was very pale and white and loose on the pink flesh underneath and looked like it had just been plucked clean of feathers. Big amber earrings hung off her skull like two toffees. In an emergency she’d probably have eaten them as well. Watching her eat a sandwich was like watching a hyena devour a leg of pork. Things just seemed to gravitate toward her strudel hole.

“I’m waiting for someone,” she explained.

“Coincidence.”

“My son works for the Amis,” she said, thickly. “He’s taking me to dinner. But I don’t like to go in there until he comes. It’s so expensive.”

I nodded, not because I agreed with her but just to let her know I could. I had the idea that if I stopped moving for a while she would have eaten me, too.

“So expensive,” she repeated. “I’m eating now so that I don’t eat too much when we go in. It’s such a waste of money, I think. Just for dinner.” She started to eat another sandwich. “My son is the director of American Overseas Airlines, on Karlsplatz.”

“I know it,” I said.

“What do you do?”

“I’m a private detective.”

Her eyes lit up, and for a moment, I thought she was going to hire me to look for a missing pie. So it was fortunate that this was the moment Britta Warzok chose to come through the Marstallstrasse door.

She was wearing a black full-length skirt, a white tailored jacket gathered at the waist, long black gloves, white patent high-heeled shoes, and a white hat that looked like it had been borrowed from a well-dressed Chinese coolie. It shaded the scars on her cheek very effectively. Around her neck were five strings of pearls and hooked over her arm was a bamboo-handle handbag that she opened while she was still greeting me and retrieved a five-mark note. The note went to the maître d’, who greeted her with a subservience worthy of a courtier at the court of the electress of Hannover. While he was abasing himself even further, I glanced over her forearm at the contents of her bag. It was just long enough to see a bottle of Miss Dior, a Hamburger Kreditbank checkbook, and a .25-caliber automatic that looked like the little sister of the one I had in my coat pocket. I wasn’t sure which I was more concerned about—the fact she banked in Hamburg or the nickel-plated rattle she was carrying.

I followed her into the restaurant in a slipstream of perfume, deferential nods, and admiring glances. I didn’t blame anyone for looking. As well as the Miss Dior, she gave off an air of perfect self-assurance and poise, like a princess on her way to being crowned. I supposed it was her height that made her the automatic center of attention. It’s difficult to look regal when you’re no higher than a door handle. But it could just as easily have been her careful dress sense that got their attention. That and her natural beauty. It certainly wasn’t anything to do with the guy who was walking behind her and holding the brim of his hat like it was the train of her gown.

We sat down. The maître d’, who seemed to have met her before, handed us menus the size of kitchen doors. She said she wasn’t all that hungry. I was, but for her sake I said I wasn’t hungry either. It’s difficult to tell a client that her husband is dead when your mouth is full of sausage and sauerkraut. We ordered drinks.

“Do you come here very often?” I asked her.

“Quite often, before the war.”

“Before the war?” I smiled. “You don’t look old enough.”

“Oh, but I am,” she said. “Do you flatter all your clients, Herr Gunther?”

“Just the ugly ones. They need it. You don’t. Which is why I wasn’t flattering you. I was stating a matter of fact. You don’t look like you’re more than thirty.”

“I was just eighteen when I married my husband, Herr Gunther,” she said. “In 1938. There now. I’ve told you how old I am. And I hope you feel ashamed of yourself at having added a year to my age. Especially that age. For another four months, I’m still in my twenties.”

The drinks came. She had a brandy Alexander that matched her hat and jacket. I had a Gibson so that I could eat the onion. I let her drink some of her cocktail before I told her what I’d discovered. I told it straight, without any euphemisms or polite evasions, right down to the details about the Jewish assassination squad forcing Willy Hintze to dig his own grave and kneel down on the edge before being shot in the back of the head. After what she had told me in my office—about how she and her fiancé were hoping that if Warzok was alive he might be caught and extradited to a country where they hanged most of their Nazi war criminals—I was quite sure she could take it.

“And you think that’s what happened to Friedrich?”

“Yes. The man I spoke to is more or less certain of it.”

“Poor Friedrich,” she said. “Not a very pleasant way to die, is it?”

“I’ve seen worse,” I said. I lit a cigarette. “I would say I’m sorry but it hardly seems appropriate. And for a number of reasons.”

“Poor, poor Friedrich,” she said again. She finished her drink and ordered another for us both. Her eyes were looking moist.

“You say that like you almost mean it,” I said. “Almost.”

“Let’s just say that he had his moments, shall we? Yes, in the beginning, he very definitely had his moments. And now he is dead.” She took out her handkerchief and, very deliberately, pressed it into the corner of each eye.

“Knowing it is one thing, Frau Warzok. Proving it to the satisfaction of a church court is quite another. The Comradeship—the people who tried to help your husband—are not the kind to swear on anything except perhaps an SS dagger. The man I met made that quite clear to me in no uncertain terms.”

“Nasty, eh?”

“Like a common wart.”

“And dangerous.”

“I wouldn’t be at all surprised.”

“Did he threaten you?”

“Yes, I suppose he did,” I said. “But I wouldn’t let it concern you at all. Being threatened is an occupational hazard for someone like me. I almost didn’t notice it.”

“Please be careful, Herr Gunther,” she said. “I would not like to have you on my conscience.”

The second round of drinks arrived. I finished my first one and placed the empty on the waiter’s tray. The fat lady and her son who worked for American Overseas Airline came in and sat at the next table. I ate my cocktail onion quickly before she could ask for it. The son was German. But the wine-colored gabardine suit he wore looked like something out of
Esquire
magazine. Or maybe a Chicago nightclub. The jacket was oversize, with wide lapels and even wider shoulders, and the trousers were baggy and low on the crotch and narrowed dramatically at the ankle, as if to accentuate his brown and white shoes. His shirt was plain white, his tie an electric shade of pink. The whole ensemble was made complete by a double key chain of exaggerated length that hung from a narrow leather belt. Assuming she wouldn’t have eaten it I imagined that he was probably the apple of his mother’s eye. Not that he would have noticed given that his own eye was already crawling over Britta Warzok like an invisible tongue. The next second he was pushing his chair back, putting down his pillowcase-size napkin, standing up, and coming over to our table like maybe he knew her. Smiling as if his life depended on it and bowing stiffly, which looked all wrong in the easygoing suit he was wearing, he said:

“How are you, dear lady? How are you enjoying Munich?”

Frau Warzok regarded him blankly. He bowed again almost as if he hoped that the movement might jog her memory.

“Felix Klingerhoefer? Don’t you remember? We met on the plane.”

She started to shake her head. “I think you must be mistaking me for someone else, Herr—?”

I almost laughed out loud. The idea that Britta Warzok could have been mistaken for anyone, except perhaps one of the three Graces, was too absurd. Especially with those three scars on her face. Eva Braun would have been more forgettable.

“No, no,” insisted Klingerhoefer. “There’s no mistake.”

Silently I agreed with him, thinking it rather clumsy of her to pretend to have forgotten his name like that, especially since he had just finished mentioning it. I remained silent, waiting to see how this would play out.

Ignoring him altogether now, Britta Warzok looked at me and said, “What were we talking about, Bernie?”

I thought it odd that it should have been that particular moment she chose to use my Christian name for the first time. I didn’t look at her. Instead, I kept my eyes on Klingerhoefer in the hope it might encourage him to say something else. I even smiled at him, I think. Just so he wouldn’t get the idea I was going to get rough with him. But he was stranded like a dog on an ice floe. And bowing a third time, he muttered an apology and went back to his own table with his face turning the color of his strange suit.

“I think I was telling you about some of the odd people this job brings me into contact with,” I said.

“Doesn’t it just?” she whispered, glancing nervously in Klingerhoefer’s direction. “Honestly. I don’t know where on earth he got the idea that we were acquainted. I’ve never seen him before.”

Honestly.
I just love it when clients talk like that. Especially the females. All my doubts about her veracity were instantly removed, of course.

“In that suit, I think I’d have remembered him,” she added, quite redundantly.

“No doubt about it,” I said, watching the man. “You certainly would.”

She opened her bag and took out an envelope that she handed to me. “I promised you a bonus,” she said. “And here it is.”

I glanced inside the envelope at some banknotes. There were ten of them and they were all red. It wasn’t five thousand marks. But it was still more than generous. I told her it was too generous. “After all,” I said. “The evidence doesn’t help your cause very much.”

“On the contrary,” she said. “It helps me a great deal.” She tapped her forehead with an immaculate fingernail. “In here. Even if it doesn’t help my cause, as you say, you’ve no idea what a load off my mind this is. To know that he won’t be coming back.” And taking hold of my hand, she picked it up and kissed it with what looked like real gratitude. “Thank you, Herr Gunther. Thank you, very much.”