The Lady from Zagreb

by Philip Kerr

  “Yes, yes, of course. Well, please do that. And I’ll have someone make the arrangements for you to travel down to Zagreb on the next available plane.”

  “It’s just that Brandenburg is sixty kilometers away and I’m going to need a car to get me there and back.”

  “Of course. And yes, you may borrow the roadster until tomorrow. Just have it back here before ten. I’m planning a picnic at Schwanenwerder tomorrow.”

  I got up to leave and began the long journey toward the door.

  Halfway there, he said, “What you were saying just now about Fräulein Dresner. I liked it. I liked it very much. She is, as you say, beautiful in a fantastic, unearthly, in-your-dreams sort of way. But that’s all it can ever be for someone like you, Gunther. She can exist only in your dreams, Herr Gunther. And only ever in your dreams. Do we understand each other?”

  “As always, Herr Doctor, you make your meaning very clear.”

  Seventeen

  It wasn’t unusual for Germans to have the words of Dr. Goebbels ringing in their ears as they went about their daily business. He was often on the radio, of course, making some important speech from the Sportpalast or the Radio House. Everyone still remembered with a shudder the speech he’d made in February when he called for “total war,” which somehow managed to seem even more frightening than the war with which we had already become wearily familiar. Mostly we’d learned not to pay much attention to what Joey said. But the speech he’d made as I left his city mansion was different; this particular speech was just for me. A speech that ought to have scared me as much as the one about total war.

  After I’d been home and put on a clean shirt and my best lounge suit I jumped back in the car, shooed away some boys who were staring at it as if it had arrived from another planet, and started the engine. And now thinking it best that Goebbels didn’t know I wasn’t going to Brandenburg at all but to dinner with the woman he loved, I decided to take a few detours along the way, just in case I was being followed. But mostly I just put my foot on the gas when I had my ticket for the AVUS speedway because the 540K could outrun almost any other car on the road.

  I got back to the house on Griebnitzsee just a little before eight and parked the car several streets away, just in case anyone noticed that there were two identical red roadsters on the driveway. I checked the street for cars but it was empty; if Goebbels was having her watched it could only have been from the window of one of those other enormous houses. Without those pips on the lapel of my uniform I figured I was harder to identify but I pulled the brim of my hat down over my eyes anyway, just in case. When you’re trying your best to steal the minister’s girl it’s as well to be a little careful. I’d bought some flowers from Harry Lehmann’s on Friedrichstrasse and, holding these like some lovesick young suitor, I cranked the doorbell again. This time the maid answered. She gave me a slow up-and-down like I was something the cat had brought to the door, and then pulled a face.

  “So you’re it,” she said. “The reason my day off had to be cut short in order that her royal highness can play Arsène Avignon in the kitchen.”

  “Who’s he?” I asked, advancing into the hall.

  “You wouldn’t know him. He’s a French chef. Cooks at the Ritz. That’s an expensive hotel, in case you didn’t know that, either. What’s this you’re holding? Some kind of cheap umbrella?”

  “Pour votre maîtresse,” I said.

  “I thought all the cemeteries were closed at this time of night. Kind of small, aren’t they?”

  Dalia appeared behind her maid’s shoulder. She was wearing an iridescent navy taffeta evening gown with a quilted collar and hem, cut very close to the line of her hips, which was where my eyes lingered for more than a moment or two.

  “Are those for me?” she asked. “Oh, Harry Lehmann. How lovely. And how thoughtful.”

  “I’d have brought a nice juicy bone if I’d known you had such a fierce dog looking out for you.”

  Dalia took the flowers from me and handed them to her maid.

  “Agnes, put these in some water, will you please?”

  “I thought you said he was handsome,” Agnes said sourly. “And an officer, to boot. Did you check his teeth? This one looks kind of old for that beef you’ve cooked, princess.”

  I took Dalia’s hand and kissed it.

  “Take my advice with this one, princess,” said Agnes. “Look before you leap. For snakes among sweet flowers do creep.”

  Agnes went one way along the corridor, Dalia and I went the other.

  “Is she always this friendly?”

  “As a matter of fact, she likes you.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “Telepathy. I warned you I was clever, didn’t I? You should hear her when Joey turns up at the door. You would think she was talking to the coal man.”

  “I’d like a front seat for the next time that happens.”

  “She told Veit Harlan that he should write a suicide scene with himself as the star.”

  There were lots of suicides in Harlan’s movies; his wife, the Swedish actress Kristina Söderbaum, was always taking her life in his films, which must have made her wonder if he was trying to tell her something.

  “I’m beginning to see why you keep her around. She doesn’t just growl. She bites, too.”

  “Yes, she does. But not as much as I do.”

  In the drawing room was a Swan Biedermeier living room set upholstered in white leather, several elegant tables, and a tall chest of drawers, only you didn’t notice the furniture much because of the paintings on the wall. Brightly colored, they were also recognizable, which is how I like my modern art. She told me they were by the German artist Emil Nolde and had been hanging on the walls of Joey’s city mansion until Hitler had seen them.

  “He told Josef they were degenerate and to get rid of them, so now they’re here. I rather like them, don’t you?”

  “I do now you’ve told me that story. In fact, Emil Nolde just became my favorite German artist.”

  There was a black lyre-shaped clock on the mantelpiece and a mahogany grand piano, which couldn’t have been played much because there were as many photographs of Dalia on the lid as there were winged horses on the rug. In most of the photographs she was with someone famous like Emil Jannings, Werner Krauss, Viktoria von Ballasko, or Leni Riefenstahl. She pointed me toward an ice bucket and a bottle of Pol Roger and I managed to open it without scaring the pet white rabbit that was hopping around the floor.

  “If that’s dinner, it’s looking a little undercooked for my taste.”

  She pretended to scold me and then made me sit beside her on the sofa, which suited me nicely. It was quite a small sofa.

  “So, what did you discover this afternoon?” she asked.

  “About Yugoslavia? Only that a lot of people have advised me not to go there, Fräulein Dresner. And to be careful if I do. I thought Germany could teach the world something about hatred but it seems your countrymen know a thing or two about hate themselves. About all that I’ve learned to my advantage has been the name of the best hotel in Zagreb—the Esplanade. Which is where I’m staying, I think.”

  “So you are going?”

  “Yes, I’m going. Just as soon as Joey can get me on a plane.”

  “Thank you,” she said quietly. “I’m so grateful to you, Herr Gunther. But please call me Dalia. And if I’m going to sit next to you on this sofa I can hardly call you Herr Gunther. I used to know a butcher in Zurich called Herr Gunther and if we’re not careful I shall ask you for some sausage. And that wouldn’t do at all.”

  “Bernie,” I said. “It’s Bernie.”

  We talked for a while—the kind of fast and elegant talk that passes for conversation but is really just dueling with short swords, with a man and a woman making gentle attacks and parries and ripostes. No scars are given and the vital organs are always lef
t well alone. A very pleasant hour was spent like this before we moved into a dining room that was no less elegant than the drawing room, with a ceiling high enough to accommodate a chandelier as big as a Christmas tree. The wood grain on the table was so perfect it looked like one of those inkblot tests designed to test your imagination. Mine was doing just fine thanks to the scent Dalia was wearing, the sibilance of her stockings, the curve of her neck, and the frequency of her dazzling white smiles. A couple of times we bowed our heads and cigarettes toward the same match and, once, she let me touch her blond hair, which was so fine it was like a child’s. Meanwhile Agnes served a dinner that Dalia assured me she’d cooked herself, although I hardly cared if she had or hadn’t. I wasn’t there for a good meal—although it had been at least a year since I’d eaten as well—any more than I was there because I was a fan of her pictures: I wasn’t. I don’t go to the cinema much these days because I don’t like being told that Jews are like rats, that great folk songs are not made but fall out of the sky, and that Frederick the Great was the best king who ever lived. Besides, there are the newsreels to cope with: all that relentlessly positive news about how well our troops are doing in Russia. No, I was there, eating Dalia Dresner’s food and drinking her Pol Roger champagne, because Goebbels had been right: this siren woman’s face was permanently illuminated, not by anything so crude as an electrical bulb placed on a stage by a clever cameraman but by her own special light—the sun or the moon or whatever star was shooting through the sky at the time. Every time she looked into my eyes the effect was devastating, as if my heart had been stopped by some beautiful Medusa.

  Dalia herself hardly ate anything; mostly she just smoked and sipped champagne and watched me making a pig of myself, which wasn’t difficult. But I guess I must have made conversation because I know she laughed a lot at some of my jokes. Some of them were pretty feeble, too, which ought to have put me on my guard against whatever it was she wanted. Maybe it was me, after all; then again, I’m no catch, and in retrospect I figure she just hoped to make sure that I did my best to find her father when I got to Yugoslavia. What you might call an incentive. But as incentives go, what happened next, when we went back into the drawing room for coffee—real coffee—and brandies—real brandy—would take some beating.

  “Well, Bernie Gunther, I think if you don’t kiss me soon, I shall die. You’ve been sitting there wondering if you should and I’ve been sitting here wishing that you would. Look, whatever it was that Josef told you, I’m a free agent and not his possession. Thanks to him it’s been a while since any man had the guts to kiss me. I think you’re just the man to fix that, don’t you?”

  I slid toward her on the white sofa and pressed my lips to hers and she gave herself up to me. It wasn’t long before my lips were anticipating more intimate ones and the exquisite secret sweet-and-sour taste of the other sex that only men can know.

  “An abominable mystery,” she said breathily.

  “What is?”

  “Sexual behavior. That’s what Darwin called it. An abominable mystery. I rather like that, don’t you? It implies that there’s very little control we can exert about what’s happening to us.”

  “That’s certainly the way I feel about it right now.”

  She kissed me again and then began to gently chew at my earlobe while I set about feasting on her perfumed neck, and I remembered that there’s nothing quite like the feel of skin and flesh younger than your own. Newly picked fresh fruit as opposed to the kind that’s been on the shelf for rather longer, like mine.

  “I’ve often thought,” she said, “that there’s some important scientific work to be done concerning the mathematics of fatal attraction. The male and female gametophytes. The pollen grain. The embryo sac. The irresistible attraction to the ovule. The altruistic self-sacrifice of the pollen tube cell exploding to deliver the sperm cells to the embryo sac.”

  “I bet you say that to all the Fritzes you know.”

  “It’s just pure organic chemistry, of course, and where there’s chemistry, there’s mathematics, too.”

  “I was never very good at maths. Or chemistry.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I think you’re pretty good at it, Bernie. In fact, I think you’re getting better at it by the minute.”

  I kissed her again, warming to my appointed task, and why not? She was easy to kiss. The fact is, you never really forget how to do it. After a while she pushed me gently away and, taking me by the hand, led me out of the drawing room toward a curving iron staircase. “Shall we?”

  “Are you sure?”

  “No,” she said simply. “But that’s what makes it exciting, isn’t it? No one can ever be sure. Being truly human is all about risk, not certainty. At least that’s the way I always look at it.”

  She put one hand on the polished wooden handrail and led me slowly up to the second-floor landing.

  “Besides, I already told you, Bernie Gunther—I do like saying your name—I’m a clever girl. You don’t need to worry that you’re taking advantage of me.”

  “Maybe it’s the other way around,” I heard myself say.

  “Let me know when you want me to call you a taxi,” she said. “I’d hate to feel that I made you spend the night with me against your will.”

  I felt my heart leap a little as she said this. But now that she had I knew that there was no going back. About halfway up the stairs I thought of Goebbels and the warning he’d given me. It didn’t work. Life seemed too short to care very much about tomorrow; if I ended up facing a military firing squad on a hill in Murellenberge—where all the death sentences of the Reich War Court were carried out—then it would have been worth it. If you’re going to die, you might as well die with a sweet memory of a woman like Dalia Dresner in your head.

  At the door of her bedroom we met Agnes, who said nothing and didn’t even meet my eye, but it was clear she’d been in there to prepare for our arrival. The heavy curtains had been drawn; there was quiet band music coming out of the radio and the lights were low; the enormous bed had been turned down; a negligee lay on the top sheet; the flowers I’d bought were now in a vase on the dressing table; there was a drinks tray with several decanters and two brandy glasses; the cigarette box beside the bed was open; there was an armchair with a newspaper lying on the cushion; and in the en suite bathroom, a bath had been drawn. I realized that all of this had been planned in advance—not that I cared, particularly. There’s only so much blood a man has in his body—and clearly not nearly enough for his brain and what makes him a man. Which is probably just as well as I can’t see how the human race is going to survive in any other way. I just hoped that she wouldn’t eat me after it was all over like a praying mantis. Then again, it was probably a good way to go.

  Dalia picked up her negligee. She didn’t need my help, it wasn’t very heavy. “Help yourself to a drink and to a cigarette,” she said. “Relax. I won’t be long.”

  She went into the bathroom. I poured myself a drink, lit a cigarette, and then sat down in the armchair to look at the newspaper. I couldn’t have felt less relaxed if Goebbels had been sitting up in bed looking at me. I didn’t read the paper because I was too busy listening to the sound of her as she got into the bath and splashed around. It was certainly better than anything I could hear on the radio. After a while I noticed that there was a picture on the dressing table that had been laid facedown and, being a nosy sort of fellow, I picked it up. I didn’t recognize the man in the picture though I guessed he was Dalia’s husband because she and he were cutting a wedding cake. He was older and grayer than me, which pleased me enormously. In all the talk about Goebbels, she hadn’t mentioned her husband and I certainly wasn’t about to bring him up now. I replaced the picture facedown and went back to my newspaper. It was probably best that he didn’t see what I still hardly believed was going to happen.

  When she came out of the bathroom she was wearing the negligee. At lea
st I think she was. Frankly it was so thin and transparent it might have been the brandy I was seeing through. But I wasn’t worried the alcohol I’d consumed was going to stop me from making love to her. Goebbels and her husband—Stefan?—could have hit me on the head with a sledgehammer and I wouldn’t have noticed it. Nothing was going to stop me now.

  “Like it?” she said, turning around a couple of times so that I could appreciate her almost-there garment and the very shapely contents.

  “I like it and I like you,” I said. “Very much. I like any girl who knows what she wants. You go out after it and nothing stops you from getting it. I have the most wonderful feeling that you’ve been planning for this to happen since I left here this morning.”

  “Oh, I knew it was going to happen as soon as I saw you,” she said matter-of-factly. “This morning, when you caught me sunbathing in the nude, I knew that if you’d taken me right then and there I’d have let you do whatever you wanted. In fact that’s what I wanted myself. Couldn’t you tell? I was sure you could.”

  “You know, in Byelorussia, there were these women in the Russian Army. Marksmen and snipers. Rifle babushkas, we used to call them. Dead shots all of them. Once they had you in their sights, you’d had it because they seldom ever missed. They always got their man, is what we used to say. That’s what you remind me of. I feel like I just got one in the head.”

  This was only partly true; when these women were caught, the German Army called them “rifle sluts” and hanged them, but under the circumstances, I didn’t think she needed that amount of detail. No one did.

  She smiled. “I guess that answers a question I was going to ask you,” she said.

  “Which was?”

  “Where you got those big sad-looking blue eyes of yours.”