by Philip Kerr
I didn’t, and of course I certainly wasn’t remotely interested in some old murder case but it occurred to me that if I did go to Rapperswil it might be useful to have a Swiss police inspector on my side, especially if I was going to be meeting in secret with the wife of a prominent local businessman. Besides, with the OSS probably still convinced that I was Walter Schellenberg, it couldn’t do any harm to have a cop to help me out if they again tried to kidnap me, or worse.
“I’ll be straight with you, Paul. I like you. I’m grateful for your hospitality and I wouldn’t like to embarrass you. But there’s a lady I have to see when I’m down there.”
“This actress who Dr. Goebbels is interested in. The one he wants to go back to work at UFA studios. Sure, I get it.”
“No, you don’t. The fact of the matter is, he’s not the only one who’s interested in her. You know what I mean? She and I—it’s complicated. She has a husband. In Küsnacht. Which is just up the lakeshore from Rapperswil, right?”
Meyer nodded.
“She and I had sort of planned that we might find a nice hotel. Just for the afternoon.”
“Bernie, I’m a detective writer, not a monk.”
“You’d be surprised what monks are capable of. Believe me, you could write a hell of a book about one particular monk that I met down in Croatia.”
“Look, I know just the place for you both. In Rapperswil. The Pension du Lac. I’ll check into the Schwanen Hotel, next door, so there won’t be any possibility of embarrassment for either one of you. We’ll drive down this afternoon. Have dinner with Inspector Leuenberger tonight. Chat about the case. You can see your lady friend tomorrow. And then we’ll drive back. What could be simpler?”
“Let me call her first.”
Thirty-nine
Rapperswil was a charming, cuckoo-clock town on the north shore of Lake Zurich and dominated by a William Tell sort of castle with a watchman’s tower and probably some crossbows for hire. I certainly wouldn’t have put it past the Swiss to have defended their country against a German invasion with crossbows.
It was a warm afternoon and the water looked as cool and inviting as an enormous gin and tonic. The sun shining on the calm blue water had encouraged a flock of sparrows to take a bath. I wouldn’t have minded a swim myself. A causeway about a kilometer long, including a swing bridge, connected Rapperswil with Hurden on the lake’s south shore, and separated Lake Zurich proper from the Obersee. Meyer explained that this causeway was built on an old moraine that had been breached many centuries before.
“Until then,” he added, “Zurich probably wasn’t on a lake at all.”
Being a metropolitan sort of fellow, I normally find places like Rapperswil just a little bit too quaint for my taste, but after Zagreb and Zurich, I liked the place just fine. I continued liking the place even when a wasp dropped out of a lime tree and stung me on the nose as I tried to brush it off my face. After all I’d been through in Croatia, it seemed almost laughable for anyone to take an injury like that at all seriously but, at Meyer’s insistence, we went to the nearby Schwanen Hotel to find some vinegar to dab on my reddening nose. That lessened the pain, but for the rest of my stay in Switzerland I looked like Grock the Clown. Quite what Dalia was going to think of me now I didn’t know. I was going to have to allow her a laugh or two at my expense. Then again, it might have been worse; the wasp could have crawled up a trouser leg and done some damage elsewhere. In the great economy of the universe—even when you’re planning to make love to a beautiful woman—a red nose isn’t such a hardship.
Having sent a message to Goebbels from the local telegraph office on Bahnhofplatz and received my new orders in his swift reply, I joined Meyer at the uncut sapphire that was the lakeside where he told me about the little town’s unsolved murder. But while he spoke, my mind wandered a little for a second and I got to wondering why a man like Meyer was so interested in murder in the first place. With me, it was just a job. Living in a beautiful place like Wolfsberg Castle with a wife as lovely as Patrizia—I think I’d have left the subject of murder well alone. Real murder is sticky under your shoes, and gets ugly in your nostrils and your stomach. And I prefer the smell of lime blossom in summer—unless there’s a wasp in it. What was more, I’d killed enough people myself to know that there’s nothing entertaining about it. So what was it about murder mysteries that made them so fascinating to people like Meyer? Maybe in the end it was because, in fiction, justice is always served. Which is the very essence of fiction, of course, and nothing at all to do with real life. Life doesn’t have neatly tied-up endings. And even when it does, it often takes several years to tie the bow; I had the evidence of the Kuhlo killings to support that point of view. But what kind of a neatly tied ending that served justice was ever going to satisfy the Russians, the British, the Americans, and the French? Not to mention the Jews, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Gypsies, and Serbs? I’d like to have seen the detective who was going to assemble all of Germany’s suspects in the library and tell them who was guilty and who was not. I thought that was going to need a bit more than just one chapter. Maybe the neatly tied ending was going to involve a gallows or two.
Meyer broke into my reverie. “As I was telling you, a couple of years ago some divers for a Swiss engineering firm were exploring the shallow upper part of the lake, which is called the Obersee. That’s the part to the right of the Seedamm that you see here. It was a routine safety check but it was their work that gave me the idea for Operation Noah. Anyway, on a submerged ledge they found a sunken boat—a gentleman’s day launch, I think you’d call it—and, the body of a woman. The body tied by the neck to the anchor. At its deepest part, the lake is almost one hundred and fifty meters deep but the boat had come to rest on a ledge that was less than fifty meters down. But for the ledge, they would probably never have found it. The local pike perch had eaten most of her face. The pathologist said he believed the body had been in the water for at least a year. To this day the woman has never been identified. But it’s clear that the woman had been murdered because, according to a local boatbuilder, the seacocks were open and there were several holes drilled in the boat’s planking, all consistent with the boat having been scuttled. There was even a drill left on the cabin floor. The woman had suffered a skull fracture, as if someone had hit her on the head, and it’s quite possible she was dead before the boat was deliberately sunk. Also, the name of the boat had been removed fore and aft with a blowtorch. No woman in the area was ever reported missing. Nor is there any report of a boat having been sunk or stolen. This sort of thing just doesn’t happen in Rapperswil.”
I lit a cigarette, flicked the match into the lake, and almost immediately regretted it when an old Swiss woman tutted loudly and gave me a look of disgust. It was only then that I noticed how clean the water was. Probably that was why the sparrows were having a wash in it.
“What do you think, Bernie?”
“About what?”
“About this murder.”
“I’ll admit, it doesn’t sound much like suicide,” I said. “But without seeing the boat or the body, I’m not sure there’s much I can say. It sounds like the perfect murder. I’ll be sure to think of this if ever I want to murder my wife.”
“The body was buried long ago,” said Meyer. “But we can still see the boat, if you like.”
I stifled a yawn. “All right. I’ll take a look. But in my experience, with a cold case like this, there’s really very little to go on. It was an absolute fluke that I caught Gormann. I couldn’t say it at the conference last summer, for obvious reasons. But it was. I might have said more about that but my bosses in the RSHA wouldn’t have liked it. They’re wedded to the idea of German efficiency and police omniscience. Now, that’s what I call fiction.”
We walked along the Strandweg to a ramshackle boatyard with the word RAPPERSWIL painted in large letters on a sliding yard door, in case there was any doubt
about where we were. A sign advertising boat-hire lay propped half-forgotten against the wall; looking around the yard, it was hard to see a boat that could have kept your feet dry. A diminutive bearded man as brown as an oven-baked nut with a briar pipe in his face was carefully craning a polished motorboat out of the lake and into the yard. There was a hole in its hull. Most of the other boats in the yard were in similar stages of disrepair. Across the yard, another man with an oxyacetylene torch was welding a rudder back together. A small dog lay asleep inside the rim of a large car tire and a radio was playing some German band music. The bearded man seemed to recognize Meyer and left off craning the boat for a moment to chat in the weird German that people spoke in and around Lake Zurich. I’d long given up trying to understand it. We followed the man into the corner of the yard, picking our way carefully between boats, trailers, tool kits, coils of rope, fenders and buoys, oil drums, planks of wood, and outboard engines. Puffing his pipe and possibly himself back into life, he pulled away a tarpaulin to reveal a boat that was about nine meters long, with a beam of about two meters, and a little cabin at the back. The boatman found us some steps and we stood on these and peered into the boat’s dilapidated interior, which told me absolutely nothing. Not that I expected the boat to tell me anything. It was beginning to feel embarrassing the way Meyer seemed to regard me as some kind of great detective, one of these other omniscient sleuths from popular fiction. I wanted to tell him that these detectives were no more real than the gods they seemed to imitate and perhaps even just as false in the devotion they seemed to inspire.
“The lady was found in a fetal position on the floor,” said Meyer. “Which suggested that she’d been killed and placed there before rigor mortis could set in. The knot on the rope around her neck was a bit unusual. A bit like the knot in a cravat. And the lady was wearing a pink pinafore-style dress, expensive shoes, silk stockings, and—most interesting of all—a good diamond ring. And I mean a good diamond. At least three carats in size and worth a lot of anyone’s money. I mean, it’s hard to imagine someone not taking that ring before disposing of the body. That’s what made the newspapers take notice. The size of the diamond. What else? Red-and-white cushion covers on the seats of the boat. Nothing unusual about that. Swiss people are fond of red and white, the colors of our national flag. That’s about all, I think.”
“I don’t understand,” I told Meyer. “A woman’s body was found in the lake. So what? Why does this interest you? Paul, this is 1943. If it’s dead bodies you want, I’ll take you to the Ukraine and show you thousands.”
“This is Switzerland, Bernie. Murders like this just don’t happen here. In peacetime we have one of the lowest homicide rates in Europe. Most murder is domestic, and in half of these cases a firearm is involved. Less than ten percent of our murder cases remain unsolved. But it was the ring that awoke the public’s interest. I mean, a three-carat ring is the size of a bird’s egg. So she had to be somebody, right? That’s what interests me. One day I want to write a book about this case. I thought I might call it The Lady in the Lake. It’s a good title, don’t you think?”
“Oh, sure. But look, Paul, everyone is somebody. Even when they’re nobody. That’s the first thing you tell yourself when you join the Murder Commission. Doesn’t matter if it’s a homeless old man, a ten-year-old child, Walther Rathenau, or the king of Yugoslavia. They all rate investigation. At least they used to before our government started doing most of the killing.”
It sounded good but the truth was that after what I’d seen in the Katyn Forest earlier that year, I was hardly inclined to think of one woman’s death as in any way important. Death had undone so many since the beginning of the war that one more murder seemed irrelevant.
“Of course, of course, I just thought that something might occur to you, that’s all,” said Meyer. “In your speech last year you said that a cold case is nothing but all of the false and misleading evidence that, over a period of years, has come to be accepted as true. In other words, you start by patiently challenging almost everything you think you know.”
I nodded. I didn’t want to be rude to Meyer after his kind hospitality but it was all I could do to stop myself from telling him he was wasting his time and mine. From what I’d seen so far, this case was as cold as the Ypres Salient. And it wasn’t his fault that he’d managed to get through the war without seeing a single body. I envied him that, just as much as I envied him his lovely château at Wolfsberg and his beautiful wife. Besides, my nose was hurting and I really only had room for one thing in my mind and that was seeing Dalia once more. Especially now that I had a telegram from Goebbels. At least after our hotel tryst I’d be able to tell him that I’d seen her again. Maybe I could walk her up to the telegraph office in Rapperswil and get her to send him a telegram; that way I’d be off the hook.
Dinner at the Schwanen Hotel with Meyer and Police Inspector Leuenberger wasn’t any more interesting than my afternoon trip to the Rapperswil boatyard. Very thoughtfully, the Swiss cop brought some color photographs to the table but I didn’t look at them and there are better after-dinner subjects to talk about than a woman who’s been half-eaten by some pike perch, especially when that’s what’s on the menu. In spite of everything I now knew about their diet, I’m fond of pike perch. But the Riesling was a good Trocken and I drank a little too much of it, or at least enough to ask some questions about the lady in the lake, and from these I gathered only that the Rapperswil police were utterly clueless. It seemed that even a top detective from Bern had turned up and pronounced himself completely baffled.
“Maybe she had it coming,” I suggested when we finished the wine and started on the schnapps. “Maybe nobody came forward because people were glad to see this lady dead. That happens, you know. It’s not just nice, innocent people who get murdered. Not so innocent ones do, too. Perhaps someone bashed her head in because she deserved it. Did you think about that for a motive? That someone did the world a favor?”
Inspector Leuenberger frowned. “I don’t believe that for a second. No one should die that way. And it’s a very cruel thing to say about a woman you don’t know.”
I almost laughed. “Cruel? Yes, I suppose I have become cruel. Which isn’t a surprise, really. I’ve learned from the experts. But what I say still stands. If no one reported this lady missing, then it can only be because no one missed her. And if no one missed her, then it might be because people were glad to see the back of her. Look, forget about the lady in the lake, think about that diamond ring. No one missed that, either. That ought to tell you something. It takes a lot of hate to overcome the love of a good diamond, especially one as big as a bird’s egg. Either that, or a lot of money. From what you’ve told me, you’ve been looking for a murderer among the kind of people who commit murder. Crooks and gangsters. The usual suspects. But that’s all wrong. You want to know something? I think I can already give you a perfect description of the person who killed this woman. In fact, I’m sure of it. Believe me, it’s easy to spot a murderer. They’re nearly always decent people, Inspector. You’d better look for someone who’s law-abiding.”
“He’s right,” Meyer told Leuenberger. “Gormann worked in a bank, didn’t he, Bernie? He was respectable.”
I nodded and lit a cigarette.
“So maybe we should look elsewhere for a suspect. Someone respectable.”
“Of course it’s someone respectable,” I said. “This murderer has been living right under your nose all this time and you didn’t notice. It’s your next-door neighbor. Your boss. Your dentist. Your doctor. The local banker. That’s how they got away with it. That’s how they all get away with it. That’s why when the police finally do carry a fellow off to the local shit house, the rest of the neighbors will all stand around in the street looking bemused and say, ‘Who would have thought old so-and-so was a murderer? To look at him you’d have thought he wouldn’t have harmed a fly.’”
Meyer was taking notes now
and as well oiled as I now was, I had warmed to my subject at last.
“Maybe you couldn’t identify your lady. So maybe you should try to identify the Schmuck—I mean the ring on her finger. Did you show it to some dealers? Did you ever put a picture of it in the newspaper?”
“No.”
“Why the hell not?”
Leuenberger colored. “Because we didn’t want to have to deal with a lot of time-wasters claiming it was theirs, when it wasn’t. That’s why not.”
I laughed again. “Dealing with time-wasters is what this job is all about, Inspector. That’s why they pay us. To waste our time. I’m perfectly serious. That’s what police work mostly is. A waste of time. Whenever I hear a copper say, ‘They don’t pay me to waste my time,’ I say, ‘That’s exactly what they do pay you for.’ Inspector, if I were you I’d take that ring to every diamond dealer in this canton. And then the next canton. Ninety-nine percent of your effort will be wasted, of course. But it’s quite possible that one percent of it will be useful. Just see if I’m wrong. It strikes me that you’ve only ever carried out half of this investigation. Most of the real police work has yet to be done. The body and the boat are probably the least important parts of this whole case.”
“Maybe you should reopen the case,” said Meyer.
“Maybe,” said Leuenberger. “I’d have to ask the commissioner. I’m not sure he’d agree. Reopening a case is not something we very often do in Switzerland. People here prefer a quiet life. To reopen a case I would need some real evidence. And to get that, I’d need to justify a budget to my boss. Which I can’t do, right now. Money’s tight here.”
I poured myself another glass of schnapps and laughed again, enjoying the inspector’s very obvious discomfort. Sometimes the only fun of coming from a big city is to make people who come from somewhere small feel even smaller.