The Conduct of Major Maxim

by Gavin Lyall

  Maxim began chewing again, slowly. "The death certificate must have been pure opportunism. She really did get hurt by The Bomber." He remembered Agnes advising: '

  'Keep your eye on the opportunists…"

  "Oh yes. He was waiting for opportunities. He had his plans."

  "It can't have been only because she didn't want to go over to the Russians with him… Christ, he must havehated her. "

  "Perhaps we should forget all the war, the politics. It is not the first time a man kills his wife. It is not the first time he hates her because she got pregnant and he must marry her. And for Gustav- perhaps she would denounce him to the Gestapo if he did not marry her. But about that we cannot know. "

  Maxim pushed the last stringy bit of the escalope to the side of his plate and sat back, sipping a glass of thin red wine.

  "How long have you had this idea?"

  "It never was probable that Brigittewould do nothing when he took the baby away. "

  "But Guy Husband was still talking about bigamy on Saturday. You heard him. "

  Sims shrugged again. "We had no proof. And I cannot decide what Guy will say when he tells everybody what his department is doing." The contempt in his voice was quite blatant.

  So there was Husband all set to take the credit for proving Gustav Eismark a bigamist and when it suddenly turned out that he was a murderer instead, it would be horribly clear that Guy had had nothing to do with it at all.

  "I'llthink about taking that job at Six," Maxim said.

  "Please do." Sims grinned and canted his wristwatch to catch the candle-light. "We have time for coffee before we visit your good friend Bruno. "

  Chapter 22

  Bruno again had the flat door open and wore a smile, but he kept his right hand behind his back and beyond him Maxim saw the silhouette of a second man in the dark hallway. He walked in well past Bruno, keeping his hands unmistakably high so that when Sims rushed the door behind him he was close to the second man and already had his hand raised to smash him across the bridge of the nose. He heard the clatter of Bruno's Lugerhitting the floor and shuddered as he recalled the likely condition of the gun's springs. Then they all hustled through into the fragrance of Fraulein Winkelmann'sreception room.

  "Is the Frauleinhere?" Sims demanded. He was holding a small automatic near Bruno's chest.

  "No. No. She is out." Bruno was white and his lips were trembling, and he was clutching the point of his right shoulder where Sims had whacked it with the automatic.

  "Good. Sit down. Do you want this?" Sims offered Maxim the Lugerand he took it, rather the way a vet might take an ailing tarantula, and cleared the cartridge from the breech. He wasn't going to need it as a gun; the second man was sitting back in a chair trying to stifle a nose-bleed diluted by streaming tears. He had a narrow face, big ears and a flick-knife in his jacket pocket.

  Sims smiled at Bruno. "We've been here all this time and you haven't offered us a drink, yet."

  "What would you like to drink?" He had trouble getting the words out.

  "What would we like to drink? What have you got to drink?"

  Bruno stumbled through a list; the flat was surprisingly wellstocked until you remembered what it was stocked for.

  "I'll have a Scotch. What about you?" Maxim shook his head. He was having trouble enough keeping up with Sims's quick-fire German. Sims let Bruno make the drink for him, giving him a freedom of movement to rub in the realisation that he daren't exploit it, that he was completely subservient to the little gun and the constant smile.

  "Cheers. You live well, for a procurer. Do you ever get a nibble at the old lady in between acts? Or do you just live out of her handbag? You should have stuck to that, not tried to make money out of my good friend here. "

  "I haven't got the money now. But I can get it for you. "

  "You can get it? Oh no, you meanshe can get it. Roll on her back a few more times to save your little investment schemes. How soon canshe get it?"

  Bruno's eyes flickered side-to-side but he found no help in sight. "I could… at the end of the day after tomorrow."

  "And how many times… ach, never mind. We can wait. Now let's talk about the papers you gave my friend. I think there was something missing. Find me that and we might not worry too much about the money. "

  "But I gave him everything. "

  Sims nodded, still smiling. "No trouble. Just find it. "

  "But truly, I -"

  Sims moved so suddenly that Maxim could never have stopped him even if he'd tried. Bruno went staggering back with Sims slashing his head with the pistol. He collapsed on a sofa, wrapping his arms around his face. Blood seeped out between his fingers.

  Sims sat down again, his smile unchanged. "I do wish people would listen to what one says. It saves so much trouble."

  Maxim went over to look at Bruno. He had a cut on his left cheekbone and a graze on his temple. "I do recommend you to give my colleague what he wants." Bruno spaced his fingers and one anguished eye rolled at Maxim.

  "Shall I take a look around?" he asked, hoping Sims got the real message, Can I Trust You Alone With Him? The first thing he found was a bathroom and brought back a hand-towel forthe man with the nose-bleed. Then he went looking for Bruno's room.

  It was as obviously masculine as the rest of the flat was feminine. Not just untidy but quite unplanned, with stacks of suitcases and old newspapers, a small refrigerator full of bottled beer and a freestanding old wardrobe too small for the number of clothes – rather expensive clothes – that Bruno had come by. There was no desk, just a table with an ultraviolet sun-tan lamp sitting among the mess. Maxim started opening drawers and suitcases at random.

  He had been doing that for five minutes when Bruno screamed again.

  This time he was huddled in an overstuffed chair and Sims was still beating at his head as if he really meant to destroy him. This was no act; the other man was staring horrified over his bloodstained towel.

  "For Christ's sake -" Maxim grabbed Sims's arm and then with both hands as Sims turned, wild-eyed, trying to ram the pistol against Maxim's stomach. They stood for a moment in a weird pose that might have looked good in a self-defence manual, then the anger clouded over in Sims's eyes.

  Maxim pushed the pistol hand carefully away. "He's not much alive but he could be a problem dead. We haven't got a certificate for him, remember?"

  Sims's smile flashed on. "I don't like being cheated."

  "Sure. Go and have a snoop. His room's the one with the light on."

  Sims stepped into the hallway and Maxim took another look at Bruno. His head was bleeding from another cut, but Sims had been lucky or careful enough to stay clear of the thin pterion are of the temples; most of the new damage was to Bruno's hands.

  "I'm sorry about him, "he said. "He gets these crazy rages. I can't do much about them. Give me something, anything, before he comes back. "

  The tough, stocky Bruno of yesterday had shrunk and melted so that he was part of the flabby lines of the chair.

  "Just anything," Maxim said earnestly. "Any old thing, to keep him happy. Then I can get him away from here. "

  Bruno's mouth opened and shut stickily. "I told him… I didn't do it… it was done already. I just noticed it by chance…"

  "What are you talking about?"

  "The certificate, one of the certificates… it must have been that Corporal Blagg…"

  There was a muffled crash as Sims 'searched' something heavy.

  "Never mind the certificates: the photographs. Tell me something about the photographs. He didn't like the ones you gave me."

  "They are in the bank. "

  "Oh dear life, dear life. He won't like that. I'm sure it's true, but he so much wants somethingnow. Let's say you keep thenegatives in the bank. That would be sensible." There was another clatter from some other room. "But the prints -you'd take the trouble to print them up. Can you think of any prints, any prints that would look right?

  "Of course, " he added, "they'd have
to be off infra-red film. He'd know the difference…"

  "In the door of my refrigerator," Bruno croaked. "Inside it."

  Outside the door, Sims said: "I heard that. You were good. I really could work with you. "

  "You really are working with me, if you hadn't noticed." Even with only Sims, he kept speaking German. To change to English would have broken the flow of the action. "Get on with it."

  He watched as Sims unscrewed the moulded plastic lining from inside the door and took out a plain envelope. Inside was a second strip of Minox film – so Bruno had been lying about the bank, as usual – and four black-and-white prints of about half-plate size. It was easy to see why Bruno hadn't taken them in for colour-printing at a shop.

  "Well, what do you think?" Sims asked.

  Maxim's cheeks felt a little warm. "She looks a little young for what he's doing to her. "

  'Yes, but she doesn't seem to mind. And I'm sure she was well paid for it."

  "By your Mrs Howard. I'm assuming he's the Standesbeamte, Hochhauser."

  "It must be. I'd say he wasn't doing badly for a man close to his pension."

  "If those got about, he'd've been a long long way from his pension."

  "That would be the point. " Sims slid the prints back into the envelope.

  "You'd been expecting something like that."

  "Something." Sims was looking at him with tolerant amusement. "Are you shocked, Major?"

  "No… but I see why she wanted Blagg and the gun and all, going to show Hochhauserthese. Why didn't she stick to bribery?"

  "It is usual to combine bribery and blackmail. Sugar-bread and the whip. With bribery alone, he could have reported her to the police."

  "Why don't you dig her up and ask her if she wouldn't have preferred that?"

  "She was a good agent. And a good friend." Sims was no longer amused.

  "All right, all right. Can we go now? I hope it was all worth the trouble."

  "Major: it could have been Mrs Howard in the pictures; I did not know what Hochhauser's taste was. And either way, they were skilled pictures taken on specialised film. It shrieks of the trade. A dangerous loose end to leave about – particularly with a man like Bruno. "

  Maxim nodded. "You're right. Perhaps I was a bit shocked."

  The front door suddenly opened and Fraulein Winkelmannwas surging down the hallway and coming to a quivering stop as she saw Bruno and the man with the nose-bleed. Between them there was quite a lot of blood on display.

  "Wasshat sie…?" She hit a soaring operatic note until both Sims and Maxim instinctively held up their pistols. She recognised Maxim. "Oh yes, the English Herr Major. I think we might talk to the police aboutthis."

  Maxim shrugged. "Happy to. You were right about himsniffing cocaine, by the way. If the police come… well, it isn't where he hid it. It's where I hid it. "

  There was a long pause and her carefully preserved expression collapsed into rouged meat. Maxim said soothingly: "He only got a bit knocked about. He's got money for the doctor. I do know that. "

  "Thatmoney, that was yesterday." She looked around the room. "You animals. You rotten animals."

  Sims had edged past her to the hallway, smiling hard. "We're on our way, gracious lady. "

  She followed them to the door. Maxim said: "I've taken his gun."

  "Oh yes. First you take his balls, why not take his cock? You know who he'll beat up for all this, after a sniff and a few drinks."

  He didn't know what to say to that.

  "Leave the gun with me," she suggested. "Show me how it works. Just for protection. He won't know I've got it. "

  Maxim hesitated. "You don't want to shoot him."

  "How do you know what I want to do? You beat him, he beats me, who do I beat?"

  Sims said: "Try poisoning him. You could get away with it."

  She looked at him, gathered her face into a gracious smile and spat in the middle of his chest. "Animals." She slammed the door.

  As they clattered down the stairs, Sims asked: "Was it true, about the cocaine?"

  "No. But I think she believed it. "

  "I think she did. It was a good idea. But for a moment there, I thought you were going to stand out on the landing and teach her to fire that Luger! Bang! You know what she would have done then? Shot you in the back – bang! They hate their men and they protect them like she-bears. And she called us animals. My God, why did your Corporal Blagg go to her? Does he have fantasies about fornicating with his own mother?"

  God alone knew what fantasies Blagg's childhood had left him with, and Fraulein Winkelmannhad fulfilled; Maximwasn't going to play psychiatrist, least of all in front of Sims. Anyway, whatever Blagg did in that perfumed garden of an apartment was less risk to world peace than when Sims's mob persuaded him to 'help out'.

  "I don't know. Drive me across the river, would you? I want to lose this thing permanently." The old Lugerwith its weak return spring and chancy sear was one gun even a soldier was happy to throw away.

  The air conditioning in Sims's room worked at nothing less than full power, and there was no turning it off until Sims had stopped chain-smoking so Maxim was deliberately drinking whisky and luke-warm water against the chill.

  Sims was slumped in a chair, turning the pages of the old Focus on Germany, "Will you go back to Dornhausen tomorrow?" They spoke English again; Maxim's German was out of practice and blurred easily late in the evening.

  "It's a bit risky, and I don't know what we'll learn, even if the picture's still there, and I swear it wasn't…" His sentence structure was crumbling, too. "How about the Karls Hospital? I could get somebody from the Army to find out if the 1945 records still exist. Asking about that wouldn't give anything away. But it's a bit too neat to expect proof of her discharge, all alive-o… And we haven't got any real evidence except for a false statement on the certificate…" Something flickered in his memory like a movement seen from the corner of an eye, but when he tried to concentrate, it blurred with his weariness. He shook his head. "And it's a bit late to find her body… do you really think you can find something?"

  "A witness."

  "To themurder?"

  "That she was alive after April 15."

  Maxim picked up the bottle and gently toppled more Scotch into his glass. "That might do it… but who?"

  "The sister. Mina Eismark. Or Linnarz."

  "Isn't she dead?"

  "No. She is in England, now. "

  "When did you learn that?"

  "Just now. And we know that after The Bomber Gustavwent to find her – perhaps she would have the papers to make him Eismark again – so she could have seen Brigitte."

  "Will she tell you, though? You can't hit her on the head with a pistol."

  Sims smiled. "Perhaps you will come and help, like with Bruno."

  "Sure… How are you going to get the certificates back into the Standesamt?"The flicker of memory came again, escaped again.

  "Somehow. There is no rush. They have been gone for three weeks now, and who looks for death certificates of thirty-five years ago?"

  "There's a rush now. They're all supposed to be microfilmed next month. "

  "How do you know that?"

  Blast. That was tiredness making him careless. Blastand damn.

  "An Army friend rang up for me. That wouldn't make anybody suspicious. "

  "How can you be sure?" Sims was suddenly all bristles, up on his feet and prowling, stabbing out one cigarette and lighting another.

  "It was less risk than me going out to Dornhausen again."

  "It is my job to decide the risks. Always you must tell me, if we are to work together properly. I thought I was getting you trained."

  That was either quite an insult or quite a compliment, and probably Sims was giving him the choice.

  "All right," Maxim said mildly. "I'm sorry. But your Mrs Howard got in just in time. Next month she wouldn't have had any choice but to ask for a copy. "

  "Yes." Sims was still prowling, instinctively
suspicious of all the hiding places in the room. He picked up the wad of certificates and put them down again.

  Maxim remembered. "Something Bruno said – before the photographs; were you listening? Something he hadn't done to the certificate, something Blagg must have done… what the hell was he talking about? Something he'd noticed…"

  He got up and went to the certificates and picked up the Schickert one. It looked just as it had before.

  Sims said: "He could have meant another one."

  "We don't care about the other ones." Maxim held the old paper up against the light, but that did nothing. He put it down, quite near Sims's ultra-violet lamp. There had been one of those in Bruno's room, too.

  Now hedid remember something from the Ashford course. "Turn off the lights, will you?" He fumbled around with the sun-tan lamp's lead.

  The lamp came on with its searing brilliance as the last of the room lights went out. Sims held up a hand to shade his face. "There are some glasses to use…"

  Maxim ignored him, tilting the certificate at the edge of the glare, so that it glowed faintly, fluorescing as almost anything does under ultra-violet. Two lines of the certificate glowed more brightly than the rest. Maxim held it down so that Sims could see the lines: istam…15. April 1945…um…11…Uhr…30…Minuten in…Dornhausen…verstorben.

  "That was the only part we were interested in. " He gave the certificate to Sims and went to switch on the room lights again. "Bruno would know something about altered documents, looking for signs of chemical eraser under ultra-violet. With a mind like his, the first thing he'd think about an official document is to see if somebody's faked it. And for once he was right."

  Sims was still twisting the certificate under the lamp; Maxim turned it off. "Only it wasn't Blagg who did it: it was Mrs Howard. We thought she was collecting those certificates, that night. No: she was giving them back. And in a month they would have been microfilmed and thrown away, the forgery would never show on the film and Gustavwould be immortalised as a liar. Neat. That was really why she wanted the whole batch: so that Hochhauserwouldn't notice she'd been fiddling just one of them."

  "What do you believe it said?" Sims's voice was toneless.