The One From the Other (34 page)

“Drink?” she said. “I have schnapps, cognac, and whiskey.”

“Schnapps,” I said. “Thanks.”

“Please smoke if you want. I don’t smoke myself but I enjoy the smell of it.” She handed me my drink and steered us to the blue chairs.

I sat down, took out my pipe, looked at it for a moment, and then slipped it back into my pocket. I was Bernie Gunther now, not Eric Gruen, and Bernie Gunther smoked cigarettes. I found some Reemtsmas and began a roll-up with the pipe tobacco.

“I love to watch a man make one of those,” she said, leaning forward on her chair.

“If my fingers weren’t so cold,” I said, “I might make a better job of it.”

“You’re doing fine,” she said. “I might have a puff of that when you’re finished.” I finished with the makings, lit the cigarette, puffed it, and then handed it to her. She smoked it with genuine pleasure, as if it had been the choicest delicacy. Then she handed it back again. Without so much as a cough.

“Of course, I know who it is,” she said. “My anonymous benefactor. It’s Eric, isn’t it?” She shook her head. “It’s all right. You don’t have to say anything. But I know. It so happened that I did see a newspaper, a few days ago. There was something in it about his mother’s death. You don’t have to be Hercule Poirot to work out that particular chain of causation. He’s got his hands on her money and now he wants to make amends. Always supposing that such a thing is possible after the dreadful thing he did. I’m not at all surprised that he sent you instead of coming here in person. I expect he doesn’t dare show his face for fear of, whatever it is that someone like him is in fear of.” She shrugged and sipped some of her drink. “Just for the record? When he ran out on me, in 1928, I was just eighteen years old. He wasn’t much older, I suppose. I gave birth to a daughter. Magda.”

“Yes, I was going to ask about your daughter,” I said. “I’m to give her the same sum as I’ve given you.”

“Well, you can’t,” she said. “Magda is dead. She was killed during an air raid, in 1944. A bomb hit her school.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

Vera Messmann kicked off her shoes and folded her stockinged feet underneath her nicely curved behind. “For what it’s worth, I don’t hold any of that against him. Compared with what happened during the war, it’s not much of a crime, is it? To leave a girl with a bump in her road?”

“No, I suppose not,” I said.

“But I’m glad he sent you,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to see him again. Especially now Madga’s dead. That would be too unpleasant. Also, I should be much more reluctant to take his money if it was him in person. But twenty-five thousand schillings . . . I can’t say that wouldn’t come in handy. Despite what you see here, I’ve not got much saved. All of this furniture is quite valuable, but it was my mother’s, and this apartment is all that I’ve got to remind me of her. This apartment was hers. She had excellent taste.”

“Yes,” I said, glancing around, politely. “She did indeed.”

“There’s no point in selling any of it, though,” she said. “Not right now. There’s no money for this kind of stuff. Not even the Amis want it. Not yet. I’m waiting for the market to come back. But now”—she toasted me, silently—“now, maybe, I won’t have to wait for the market at all.” She drank some more. “And all I have to do is turn up at this bank and sign a receipt?”

“That’s all. You won’t even have to mention his name.”

“That’s a relief,” she said.

“Just walk in the door and I’ll be waiting for you. We’ll go to a private room and I’ll hand you the cash. Or a banker’s draft, as you prefer. Simple as that.”

“It would be nice to think so,” she said. “But nothing involving money is ever simple.”

“Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,” I said. “That’s my advice.”

“It’s bad advice, Herr Gunther,” she said. “Think about it. All those veterinary bills if the nag is no good. And let’s not forget what happened to those poor dumb Trojans. Maybe if they had listened to Cassandra instead of Sinon they might have done just that. If they’d looked the Greek gift horse in the mouth they would have seen Odysseus and all his Greek friends huddled inside.” She smiled. “Benefits of a classical education.”

“You have a point,” I said. “But it’s difficult to see how you could do it in this particular case.”

“That’s because you’re just a cop who’s not a cop,” she said. “Oh, I don’t mean to be rude, but maybe if you had a little more imagination you could think of a way for me to get a closer look at the pony you walked in here.”

She removed the roll-up from my fingers and took another short puff on it before extinguishing it in an ashtray. Then she snatched off her glasses and leaned toward me until her mouth was just an inch or two away from mine.

“Open wide,” she said, and opening her lips and teeth, she pressed her luscious mouth against mine.

We were there for quite a while. When she pulled herself back, there was honey in her eyes.

“So what did you discover?” I asked. “Any sign of a Greek hero?”

“I haven’t finished looking,” she said. “Yet.” And standing up she took me by the hand and tugged me up onto my feet.

“Where are we going now?” I asked.

“Helen is taking you into her palace boudoir,” she said.

“Are you sure about this?” I stayed put for a moment, curling my toes to get a better grip on the carpet. “Maybe it’s my turn to play Cassandra. Maybe if I had a little more imagination I might think I was just handsome enough to rate this kind of hospitality. But we both know I’m not. Maybe we should delay this until after you’ve had your twenty-five thousand.”

“I appreciate what you said,” she said, still holding my hand. “But I’m not exactly in the first flush of youth myself, Herr Gunther. Let me tell you about myself. I’m a corset maker. A good one. I own a shop on Wasagasse. All of my clients are women, it goes without saying. Most of the men I once knew are dead, or maimed. You’re the first able-bodied, reasonable-looking man I’ve spoken to in six months. The last man I exchanged more than two dozen words with was my dentist, and I’m long overdue for a checkup. He’s sixty-seven and has a clubfoot, which is probably the only reason he’s still alive. I’m thirty-nine years old in two weeks, and I’m already taking evening classes in spinsterhood. I even have a cat. He’s out of course. Having a better life than I have. Today is early closing at the shop. But most evenings I come home, cook a meal, read a detective story, have a bath, read some more, and then go to bed, alone. Once a week I go to Maria am Gestade, and every so often I seek absolution for what I jokingly refer to as my sins. You get the picture?” She smiled, a little bitterly it seemed to me. “Your business card says you’re from Munich, which implies that when your business is concluded in Vienna, you’ll be going back there. That gives us maybe three or four days at most. What I said about Schiller? And not being overcautious. I was perfectly serious.”

“You’re right about my going back to Munich,” I told her. “I think you’d probably make quite a good private detective.”

“I’m afraid I don’t think you’d make much of a corset maker.”

“You’d be surprised what I know about women’s corsets,” I said.

“Oh, I do hope so,” she said. “Either way I intend to find out. Do I make myself clear?”

“Very.” I kissed her again. “Are you wearing a corset?”

“Not for much longer,” she said, and looked at her watch. “In about five minutes, you’re going to take it off. You know how to take a woman’s corset off, don’t you? You just pull all the little hooks out of all the little eyelets until your mouth goes dry and you start to hear me breathing. You could try and tear it off, of course. But my corsets are well-made. They don’t tear off that easily.”

I followed her into her bedroom. “That classical education of yours,” I said.

“What about it?”

“What happened to Cassandra, anyway?”

“The Greeks dragged her out of the Temple of Athena and raped her,” she said, kicking the door shut behind her. “Me, I’m perfectly willing.”

“Perfectly willing sounds perfectly good to me,” I said.

She stepped out of her dress and I stood back to get a better look at her. Call it professional courtesy, if you like. She had a fine, well-proportioned figure. I felt like Kepler admiring his Golden Section. Except I knew I was going to have more fun than he ever did. He’d probably never looked at a woman wearing a well-tailored corset. If he had, then I might have been a better mathematician when I was at school.

THIRTY

I stayed the night, which was just as well, since, just after midnight, Vera’s apartment had an intruder.

After our early-evening performance she was trying to coax me into a putting on a late show, when she froze on top of me for a moment. “Listen,” she whispered. “Did you hear that?” And then, when I failed to hear anything other than the sound of my own heavy breathing, she added: “There’s someone in the sitting room.” She lay down beside me, pulled the bedclothes up to her chin and waited for me to agree with her.

I lay still, long enough to hear footsteps on the parquet floor, and then sprang out of bed. “Are you expecting anyone?” I asked, hauling on my trousers, and thumbing my braces over my naked shoulders.

“Of course not,” she hissed. “It’s midnight.”

“Do you have any kind of a weapon?”

“You’re the detective. Don’t you have a gun?”

“Sometimes,” I said. “But not when I have to travel through the Russian Zone. Carrying a gun would get me sent to a labor camp. Or worse.”

I grabbed a hockey stick and threw open the door. “Who’s there?” I said, loudly, and groped for a light switch.

Something moved in the dark. I heard someone go into the hall and through the front door. I caught a vague scent of beer and tobacco and men’s cologne, and then the sound of footsteps down the stairwell. I sprinted after him and got as far as the first-floor landing before my bare feet slipped and I fell. I picked myself up, limped down the last flight of stairs, and ran out into the street just in time to see a man disappear around the corner of Turkenstrasse. If I had been wearing shoes I might have gone after him, but in bare feet, in an inch of snow and ice, there was nothing I could do but go back upstairs.

Vera’s neighbor was standing outside her front door when I arrived on the top floor. She eyed me with suspicious, shrewish eyes, which was a bit of a nerve given she looked like the kind of bride Frankenstein’s monster would have left standing at the altar. She had the same Nefertiti hairstyle, reptilian clawlike hands, and long shroud of a white nightgown, but even a scientist as mad as a March hare would have known better than to try to pass off a midget creature with a mustache as a plausible-looking woman.

“Fräulein Messmann,” I said, limply. “There was an intruder in her apartment.”

Saying nothing, the hideous, sharp-boned creature gave a little jerk, like a frightened bird, and then darted inside her own apartment, slamming the door behind her so that the whole icy stairwell echoed like a forgotten tomb.

Back in Vera Messmann’s apartment, I found her wearing a dressing gown and a worried look on her face.

“He got away,” I said, shivering.

She took off the dressing gown and put it around my shoulders and, unashamedly naked, went into the kitchen. “I’ll make some coffee,” she said.

“Is anything missing?” I asked, following her.

“Not as far as I can see,” she said. “My handbag was in the bedroom.”

“Anything in particular he might have been after?”

She filled a drip coffeemaker and placed it on the stove. “Nothing that’s easy to carry,” she said.

“Ever have a break-in before?”

“Never,” she said. “Not even a Russian. This is a very safe area.”

I watched her naked body absently as it moved around the kitchen and, for a moment, my mind turned to Cassandra’s fate. I decided not to mention the possibility that the intruder had had something other than theft on his mind.

“Strange it should have happened while you were here,” she said.

“It was you who persuaded me to stay,” I said. “Remember?”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t mention it.” I went back into the hallway with the intention of examining the lock on the door. It was an Evva. An excellent lock. But there would have been no need to have picked, raked, or forced it. It was immediately clear to me how the intruder had gained entry to her apartment. The front door key was hanging on a length of cord, below the letterbox. “He didn’t break in,” I announced. “He didn’t need to. Look.”

She stepped into the corridor and watched me tug away the cord from her door. “Not exactly the most sensible thing to do with your key when you’re a woman living on her own,” I said.

“No,” she said, sheepishly. “Normally I bolt the door when I go to bed. But I must have had something else on my mind tonight.”

I bolted the door. “I can see I’m going to have to teach you a lesson about crime prevention,” I said, leading her back into the bedroom.

THIRTY-ONE

Following a thinly attended service at Karlskirche on Karlsplatz, the funeral cortege attending Elizabeth Gruen’s casket drove slowly along Simmeringer Hauptstrasse, to Vienna’s Central Cemetery. I traveled to and from the baroque church, with its landmark green copper dome, in a Cadillac Fleetwood driven by an off-duty American soldier who was running a chauffeur business on the side out of a PX garage in Roetzergasse. Everyone in Vienna had something on the side. Except perhaps the dead. All the same, if you are dead, then Vienna is probably the best place in the world to be. The Central Cemetery, in the Eleventh District, is, at five hundred acres and with two million residents, like a city within a city, a necropolis of trees and flowers, elegant avenues, handsome statuary, and distinguished architecture. Provided that you have the money and you are dead, of course, you may spend eternity here inhabiting the sort of monumental grandeur normally afforded only to self-aggrandizing emperors, dynastic monarchs, and tyrannous satraps.