The One From the Other (29 page)

It’s funny the way you feel when you’ve made love after a long furlough. Like you joined the human race again. As things turned out I hadn’t done either of those two things. I didn’t know that then. But I was used to not knowing what was what. Being in the dark is an occupational hazard for a detective. Even when a case is closed, it’s remarkable how much you still don’t know. How much remains hidden. With Britta Warzok I wasn’t at all sure if she represented a closed case or not. It was true I had been paid, and handsomely. But there was so much that remained unexplained. One day I managed finally to remember her telephone number and resolved to ring her up and ask her some straight questions about what still puzzled me. Like how it was she knew Father Gotovina. Also, I thought it was time she became aware of just how hard her thousand marks had been earned. And so, while Engelbertina was helping Gruen in the bathroom, I picked up the telephone and dialed the number I had remembered.

I recognized the maid’s voice from before. Wallace Beery in a black dress. When I asked to speak to her mistress the already guarded voice grew scornful, as if I had suggested that we might meet for a romantic dinner before going back to my place. “My what?” she growled.

“Your mistress,” I said. “Frau Warzok.”

“Frau Warzok?” Scorn turned to derision. “She is not my mistress.”

“All right, then, who is?”

“That’s really none of your business,” she said.

“Look here,” I said, a little desperate now. “I’m a detective. I could make it my business.”

“A detective? Really?” The derision continued unabated. “You’re not much of a detective if you don’t know who lives here.”

She had a point. I felt it keenly, as if the point was one that had been made by Vlad the Impaler.

“I spoke to you one night a few weeks ago. I gave you my name and my telephone number and asked you to ask Frau Warzok to call me. And since she did I presume that you and she are at least on speaking terms. And here’s another thing. It’s an offense to obstruct a policeman in the execution of his duty,” I said. I hadn’t actually said I was a cop. That was an offense, too.

“Just a minute, please.” She put the phone down somewhere. It sounded like someone hitting the bass key on a xylophone. I heard muffled voices, and there was a longish pause before the receiver was gathered up again and someone else came on the line. The well-spoken voice was a man’s. I half-recognized it. But from where?

“Who is this, please?” asked the voice.

“My name is Bernhard Gunther,” I said. “I’m a detective. Frau Warzok is my client. She gave me this number to get in touch with her.”

“Frau Warzok does not live here,” said the man. He was cool but polite. “She never did live here. For a while we collected messages for her. When she was in Munich. But I believe she has gone home now.”

“Oh? And where’s that?”

“Vienna,” he said.

“Do you have a telephone number where I can reach her?”

“No, but I have an address,” he said. “Would you like me to give it to you?”

“Yes. Please.”

There was another longish pause while, I presumed, whoever it was looked up the address. “Horlgasse forty-two,” he said, finally. “Apartment three, Ninth District.”

“Thanks, Herr . . . ? Look, whoever are you? The butler? The maid’s sparring partner? What? How do I know that address isn’t a phony? Just to get rid of me.”

“I’ve told you all that I can,” he said. “Really.”

“Listen, chum, there’s money involved. A lot of money. Frau Warzok hired me to track down a legacy. And there’s a substantial recovery fee. I can’t collect if I don’t get a message to her. I’ll give you ten percent of what I’m on if you help me out here with some information. Like—”

“Good-bye,” said the voice. “And please don’t call again.”

The phone went dead. So I called again. What else could I do? But this time there was no reply. And the next time the operator told me that the number was out of order. Which left me sitting in the ink and without a change of trousers.

I was still pondering the possibility that Britta Warzok had kicked some sand in my eyes and was now a perfect stranger to me when another stranger came out of the bathroom. He was sitting in Gruen’s wheelchair, which was being pushed, as usual, by Engelbertina but, already confounded by my telephone conversation with Wallace Beery and friend, it was a few seconds before I realized the stranger was Eric Gruen.

“What do you think?” he said, stroking his now smoothly shaven face.

“You’ve shaved off your beard,” I said, like an idiot.

“Engelbertina did it,” he said. “What do you think?”

“You look much better without it,” she said.

“I know what you think,” he said. “I was asking Bernie.”

I shrugged. “You look much better without it,” I said.

“Younger,” she added. “Younger and better-looking.”

“You’re just saying that,” he said.

“No, it’s true,” she said. “Isn’t it, Bernie?”

I nodded, studying the face more carefully now. There was something familiar in its features. The broken nose, the pugnacious chin, the tight mouth, and the smooth forehead. “Younger? Yes, I believe so. But there’s something else I can’t quite put my finger on.” I shook my head. “I don’t know. Maybe you were right, Eric. When you said that you thought we’d met before. Now that you’ve got rid of the face guard, there’s something about you that does strike me as familiar.”

“Really?” He sounded vague now. As if he wasn’t quite sure himself.

Engelbertina uttered a loud tut of exasperation. “Can’t you see it?” she said. “You pair of idiots. Isn’t it obvious? You look like brothers. Yes, that’s it. Brothers.”

Gruen and I looked at each other and straightaway we knew that she was right. We did look quite alike. But she still fetched a hand mirror and obliged us to bow our heads together and view our reflection. “That’s who each of you is reminded of when you look at the other,” she announced, almost triumphantly. “Yourself, of course.”

“I always did want an older brother,” said Gruen.

“What’s with the older?” I asked.

“Well, it’s true,” he insisted, and started to fill his pipe. “You look like an older version of me. A little more gray and worn-looking. Harder-bitten, certainly. Perhaps even a little coarser, on the edges. And I think you look less intelligent than me. Or maybe just a little puzzled. Like you can’t remember where it was you left your hat.”

“You forgot to mention taller,” I said. “By about two and half feet.”

He looked at me squarely, grinned, and lit his pipe. “No, on second thought, I do mean less intelligent. Perhaps even a little stupid. The stupid detective.”

I thought of Britta Warzok and how it didn’t make any sense her retaining me if she had any idea that Father Gotovina was part of the Comradeship. Unless she did know all along and I was just too stupid to see through what she had been up to. Which of course I didn’t. The stupid detective. It had a nice ring to it. Like it might just have been true.

TWENTY-FIVE

The next day Heinrich Henkell turned up for the weekend and declared he was going straight on to his laboratory. Gruen wasn’t feeling very well and had stayed in bed, so Henkell offered to take me with him.

“Besides,” he added, by way of an extra reason for me to accompany him. “You’ve not really seen anything of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, have you, Bernie?”

“No, not yet.”

“Well then, you must come along and have a look. It would do you good to get out of here for a while.”

We drove slowly down the mountain, which was just as well, since, around a bend, we encountered a small herd of cattle crossing the road that ran parallel to the railway track. A little farther on, Henkell explained just how significant the railway track was in Garmisch-Partenkirchen.

“The railway line provides the clearest division between the two old towns,” he said. “Garmisch, on our left and to the east of the track, is a little more modern. Not least because that’s where the Olympic ski stadium is. Partenkirchen, to the west of the track, feels a lot older. It’s also where most of the Amis are based.”

As we drove onto Bahnhofstrasse and along Zugspitzstrasse, he pointed out the façades of houses that were decorated with what were called “air paintings,” some of them resembling the façades on some of Munich’s elaborate rococo churches. Garmisch-Partenkirchen could not have seemed more Catholic if the pope had owned a ski chalet there. But the town also looked prosperous, and it was easy to see why. There were Americans everywhere, as if the war had only just ended. Most of the vehicles on the roads were Jeeps and U.S. Army trucks and, on every second building, was hanging the Stars and Stripes. It was hard to believe we were in Germany at all.

“My God, look at it,” I exclaimed. “Next thing, they’ll be painting frescoes of Mickey Mouse on the buildings they’ve requisitioned.”

“Oh, it’s not that bad,” said Henkell. “And you know, they mean well.”

“So did the Holy Inquisition,” I said. “Pull up at that tobacconist’s. I need to get some Luckies.”

“Didn’t I warn you about smoking?” he said, but he pulled up anyway.

“With all this fresh air around?” I said. “Where’s the harm?”

I stepped out of the car and went into the tobacconist’s. I bought some cigarettes and then walked several times around the shop, enjoying the sensation of behaving like a normal person again. The shopkeeper eyed me suspiciously.

“Was there something else?” he asked, pointing at me with the stem of his meerschaum.

“No, I was just looking,” I said.

He pushed the pipe back in his smug little face and rocked on a pair of shoes that were decorated with edelweiss, oak leaves, and Bavarian blue-and-white ribbons. They lacked only a Blue Max or an Iron Cross to be the most German-looking shoes I had ever seen. He said, “This is a shop, not a museum.”

“Not so as you’d notice,” I said, and went out quickly, the shop bell ringing in my ear.

“I bet this place is real cozy in winter,” I said to Henkell when I was back in the car. “The locals are about as affable as a cold pitchfork.”

“They’re really quite friendly when you get to know them,” he said.

“Funny. That’s the same thing people say after their dog has bitten you.”

We drove on toward the southwest of Partenkirchen, toward the foot of the Zugspitze, past the Post Hotel, the American Officers’ Club, the General Patton Hotel, the headquarters of the U.S. Army Southeastern Area Command, and the Green Arrow Ski Lodge. I might as well have been in Denver, Colorado. I had never been in Denver, Colorado, but I imagined it probably looked a lot like Partenkirchen. Patriotic, affected, overornamented, unfriendly in a friendly kind of way, and, ultimately, more than a little absurd.

Henkell drove down a street of typical old Alpine houses and pulled into the driveway of a two-story white stucco villa with a wraparound wooden balcony and an overhanging roof that was as big as the deck on an aircraft carrier. On the wall was a fresco of a German Olympic skier. I knew he was German because his right arm appeared to be reaching for something, but just what this might be there was no way of telling, as someone had painted over his hand and wrist. And perhaps only a German would now have realized what the skier’s right hand had really been up to. Everything in Garmisch-Partenkirchen looked so committed to Uncle Sam and his welfare that it was hard to believe Uncle Adolf had ever been here.

I stepped out of the Mercedes and glanced up at the Zugspitze that hung over the houses like a petrified wave of gray seawater. It was a hell of a lot of geology.

Hearing gunshots I flinched, probably even ducked a bit, and then looked behind me. Henkell laughed. “The Amis have a skeet range on the other side of the river,” he said, walking toward the front door. “Everything you see around here was requisitioned by the Amis. They let me use this place for my work. But before the war it was the science lab for the local hospital, on Maximilianstrasse.”

“Doesn’t the hospital need a lab anymore?”

“After the war the hospital became the prison hospice,” he said, searching for his door key. “For incurably sick German POWs.”

“What was wrong with them?”

“Psychiatric cases, most of them, poor fellows,” he said. “Shell shock, that kind of thing. Not my line really. Most of them died following an outbreak of viral meningitis. The rest they transferred to a hospital in Munich, about six months ago. The hospital is now being turned into a rest and recreation area for American service personnel.”

He opened the door and went inside. But I stayed where I was, staring at a car parked across the street. It was a car I had seen before. A nice, two-door Buick Roadmaster. Shiny green, with whitewall tires, a rear end as big as an Alpine hillside, and a front grille like a dentist’s star patient.

I followed Henkell through the door and into a narrow hallway that was noticeably warm. On the walls were several photographs of winter Olympians—Maxi Herber, Ernst Baier, Willy Bognor taking the Olympic oath, and a couple of ski jumpers who must have been thinking they could make it all the way to Valhalla. The air in the house had a chemical edge to it, as well as something decayed and botanical, like a pair of wet gardening gloves.

“Shut the door behind you,” yelled Henkell. “We have to keep it warm in here.”

As I turned to close the door I heard voices and when I turned back, I found the corridor blocked by someone I recognized. It was the American who had persuaded me to dig up my back garden in Dachau.

“Well, if it isn’t the kraut with principles,” he said.

“Coming from you, that’s not much of a compliment,” I said. “Stolen any Jewish gold lately?”

He grinned. “Not lately. There’s not so much of it about these days. And you? How’s the hotel business?” He didn’t wait for my answer and, without taking his eyes off me, inclined his head back across his shoulder and shouted, “Hey, Heinrich. Where did you find this kraut? And why the hell is he here?”