by Philip Kerr
“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, shiver
ing.
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.
The Gruen family vault comprised a bunker of black marble about the size of a gun turret on the Bismarck. Carved into the main body of the mausoleum, in modest gold letters, were the words “Familie Gruen” and, near the base of the edifice, the names of several individual Gruens who were interred inside it, including Eric’s father, Friedrich. The stepped façade featured a bronze of a somewhat scantily clad female figure who was supposed to be prostrate with grief, only, somehow, she managed to look more like a chocolady who had enjoyed a hard night of it at the Oriental Club. The temptation to find her a warm coat and a cup of strong, black coffee was almost overwhelming.
The vault was modest by the standard of an Egyptian pharaoh. But with its four matching sphinxes—one on each corner—I was sure a whole litter of Ptolemies would have felt perfectly at home in its three-for-the-price-of-one interior. And when I emerged from inside, having paid my formal respects to Eric’s mother, I half expected the sexton to frisk me for gold scarabs and shards of lapis lazuli. As it was, I had so many strange looks and suspicious, even hostile stares you would have thought I was Mozart looking for his unmarked grave. Even the priest conducting the burial service—who, in his purple cape, resembled a French cake in Demel’s window—gave me the evil eye.
I had hoped that by remaining at a distance from the other mourners and wearing a pair of dark glasses—it was a very cold but bright sunny day—I would remain relatively anonymous. Dr. Bekemeier knew who he thought I was and, in the circumstances, this was all that really mattered. But I hadn’t bargained on a hostile reception from one of Elizabeth Gruen’s servants, who let me know what she thought of Eric Gruen being there at all.
She was a red-faced, bony, ill-dressed creature, like a rib of beef in a sack, and when she spoke her plate shifted on her upper jaw as if the result of a small earthquake in her head. “You’ve got a nerve, showing your face here like this,” said the crone, with evident distaste. “After all these years. After what you did. Your mother was ashamed of you, that’s what she was. Ashamed and disgusted that a Gruen should behave in such a way. Disgrace. That’s what you brought to your family name. Disgrace. Your father would have horsewhipped you.”
I murmured some bromide about this all being a very long time ago and then walked swiftly back to the main gate where I had left the American with the car. Despite the icy weather, the cemetery was busy. Other funerals were in progress and there were several people heading the same way as me. I paid them little or no regard. Not even to the IP Jeep that was parked a short way away from the Cadillac. I jumped in and the American driver took off at speed, like a wanted criminal.
“What the hell’s going on?” I shouted once I had picked myself off the floor. “I’ve been attending a funeral not robbing a bank.”
The driver, who wasn’t much more than a kid, with hedgehog hair and ears like two trophy handles, nodded at his rearview mirror. “International Patrol,” he said, in reasonable German.
I turned to look through the rear window. Sure enough the Jeep was on our tail. “What do they want?” I yelled as, gunning the engine loudly, he veered the car off Simmeringer and down a narrow side street.
“Either they’re after you for something, buddy,” he said, “or they’re after me.”
“You? What have you done?”
“The gasoline in this car is PX,” shouted my driver. “Occupation personnel only. So is the car. And so are the cigarettes and booze and nylons in the trunk.”
“Great,” I said. “Thanks a lot. I really want to be in trouble with the police on the day of my mother’s funeral.” It was just something to say to make him feel bad.
“Don’t worry,” he said, with a big, well-brushed grin. “They gotta catch us first. And this car has the edge on a Jeep with four elephants in it. So long as they don’t radio in for an intercept car we’ll probably lose them. Besides, an American has to drive that IPV. That’s the rule. Our vehicle, our driver. And American drivers aren’t usually crazy. Now, if it was the Ivan driving, we might have a problem. Those Ivans are the craziest drivers you ever saw.”
Having been driven before by a Russian, I knew he wasn’t exaggerating.
We hurtled through the eastern approaches to the city center. The Jeep kept us in sight as far as the railway line before we lost them.
“Here,” I said, tossing some banknotes onto the backseat as we skidded around Modena Park. “Let me out on the corner. I’ll walk the rest of the way. My nerves can’t stand it.”
I jumped out, slammed the door shut, and watched the Cadillac sprint away with a loud squeal of tires along Zaunergasse. I walked after it, onto Stalin Platz, and then down Gusshausstrasse, back to my hotel. It felt like it had been quite a morning. But my day had hardly started.
I had a light lunch and then went back up to my room for a rest before going to meet Vera Messmann at the bank. I hadn’t been lying on my bed for long when there was a light knock at the door, and thinking it was the maid, I got up and opened it. I recognized the man standing there from the funeral. For a moment I thought I was going to receive another earful of abuse about how I had broug
ht disgrace on the Gruen family name. Instead the man snatched off his hat respectfully and stood holding the brim tightly in front of him like the reins on a small pony and cart.
“Yes?” I said. “What do you want?”
“Sir, I was your mother’s butler, sir,” he said, in what I suppose was a Hungarian accent. “Tibor, sir. Tibor Medgyessy, sir. May I speak with you a moment, please, sir?” He glanced nervously along the hotel corridor. “In private, sir? Just a few minutes, sir. If you’d be so kind.”
He was tall and well-built for a man his age, which I estimated was around sixty-five. Possibly older. He had a full head of white, curly hair that looked as if it had been shorn from the back of a sheep. His teeth looked like they were made of wood. He wore thick, metal-framed glasses, and a dark suit and tie. His bearing was almost military and I guessed the Gruens preferred it that way.
“All right, come in.” I watched him limp into my room. It was a limp that made you think there was something wrong with his hip rather than his knee or his ankle. I closed the door. “Well? What is it? What do you want?”
Medgyessy glanced around the suite with obvious appreciation. “Very nice, sir,” he said. “Very nice, indeed. I don’t blame you for staying here rather than your mother’s house, sir. Especially not after what happened at the funeral this morning. Most regrettable that was. And quite uncalled for. I’ve reprimanded her already, sir. Fifteen years I was your mother’s butler, sir, and that was the first time I ever heard Klara speak out of turn.”
“Klara, was it, you say?”
“Yes, sir. My wife.”
I shrugged. “Look, forget about it,” I said. “Less said the better, eh? I appreciate you coming here like this, to apologize, but really it doesn’t matter.”
“Oh, I didn’t come here to apologize, sir,” he said.