The Lady from Zagreb

by Philip Kerr

  “I don’t blame you. And honestly, Inspector. What does it matter? In almost any country outside of Switzerland murder has ceased to be very shocking. And you can take my word for that. From what I’ve heard, murder’s a way of life in Poland. The person who murdered your lady in the lake was a rank amateur by comparison with some of the people I work for.”

  “That’s wartime for you, I suppose,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. “That’s wartime.” It was clear he had no idea what I was talking about; and I wasn’t much inclined to tell him. I felt ashamed enough of being German as it was.

  “All the same,” said Leuenberger, “to say what you say, Captain Gunther, and indeed the way you say it, is to believe in nothing. What about Christianity? What about love your neighbor? What about forgiving our enemies?”

  “Oh, I fully intend to forgive them. Just as soon as I’ve kicked them around the room and shot them in the head.”

  “You sound like a nihilist.”

  “No, I just don’t think that life has very much meaning.”

  “To be a nihilist,” he continued, “well—I think a man must feel very alone to believe in absolutely nothing, as you seem to.”

  “I don’t mind being alone. Being solitary—that’s an occupational hazard. Men in our profession need to be alone so that we can ignore the roar of our colleagues’ ignorance and stupidity and think for ourselves. But I’m not so crazy about being lonely. There’s a difference between that and solitude. Being lonely makes me feel sorry for myself and I can’t stand that. I end up doing things I shouldn’t do. Like drinking a little too much. Stealing other men’s wives. Trying to stay alive at all costs. And looking for just a little happiness in this life. You know, I often think if I hadn’t been a policeman, I might have been a really good man.”

  “Come now, Bernie, you are a good man,” said Meyer. “You’re just trying to shock us.”

  “Am I? I wonder, although mostly I wonder about the lady I’m going to see tomorrow. The lady on the lake. Perhaps if she wasn’t made to look so very like temptation I might find that kind of thing easier to resist. Then again, I guess that’s why women are shaped that way. If they were shaped any differently, I guess the human race would be much less successful.”

  “There’s a sting in the tail of nearly everything you say, Captain,” observed the inspector.

  “I come by it naturally. My own mother was a scorpion. Look, I’ll tell you one more thing about human nature and then I’ll go to bed before I drink too much and say something really cynical. The lady I’m seeing tomorrow certainly won’t thank me if I can’t stand up. She’s keen on good manners. Then again, maybe if I drink enough she won’t notice my nose being red. So, listen. This is some real wisdom for your next book, Paul. Good people are never as good as you probably think they are, and the bad ones aren’t as bad. Not half as bad. On different days we’re all good. And on other days, we’re evil. That’s the story of my life. That’s the story of everyone’s life.”

  Forty

  Dalia started to undress the minute she came through the door. It was almost as if she didn’t trust herself not to change her mind, or perhaps me not to start talking about Goebbels and the film role that was waiting for her back in Berlin. It worked, too. As soon as she threw off her Borsalino straw hat and her blue linen blazer and started to unbutton the white cotton blouse she was wearing, I felt obliged to come to her immediate assistance; her fingers were just too slow at pushing the buttons through their heavily starched holes. In just a matter of a few minutes I had her bare breasts balanced in my hands, after which it was impossible to think about anything else but her. Time passed quickly after that, as it always does under those circumstances. Anything compressed by desire shrinks a little. Goethe once compiled a list of what you needed to do in order to complement the sense of the beautiful that God had implanted in the human soul; and, to a list that included hearing a little music, reading a little poetry, and seeing a fine picture every day of your life, I would only have added contemplating the naked body of a beautiful woman like Dalia Dresner for a long half hour before making love to her. In fact, I think I might have placed that at the very top of the list.

  “Don’t stop,” she whispered as my mouth and fingers took their cue from her very visible pleasure.

  I had no intention of stopping, not even when, long behind her, I had finished and was little more than a pelvis pushing spasmodically at the space between her thighs like the last pumps of a dying heart as it attempted to delay the inevitability of our separation.

  We lay awhile without moving at all. And finally she said, “Your face looks like a stoplight. What happened to your nose?”

  “A wasp stung me.”

  Dalia did her best to suppress a giggle. “Does it hurt?”

  “Now you’re here, I don’t feel any pain at all.”

  “Good. I thought maybe someone had hit you.”

  “Who would want to do a thing like that?”

  “I can think of someone.”

  “Your husband, I suppose. I was afraid he was going to stop you from coming.”

  “You were right to worry. I nearly didn’t get here at all. Stefan took my car. His Rolls-Royce is in the shop. Or so he says.”

  “How did you get here?”

  “I have a motorboat moored to the jetty right outside.”

  “I never thought of that.”

  “Everyone in and around Zurich has a boat somewhere. That’s the main point of living here. I love boats. As a matter of fact, I’m rather glad that I had to take the boat today. There is roadwork on Seestrasse and the boat was certainly quicker than the car. Less than half an hour. Besides, the lake is lovely at this time of year. The water is a lot smoother than the road right now.”

  She kissed me fondly on the head, pushed me firmly back on the bed, and then kissed me on the chest and the belly before taking me in her mouth to “clean me up,” as she put it. I’ve never enjoyed feeling I needed cleaning quite so much.

  “I missed you,” she said when she’d finished.

  “I missed you, too, angel.”

  “I would have come last night, too, but I couldn’t get away. Someone from the polytechnic came to dinner. To talk about my mathematics course. It seems that I can start in September, just as long as I pass the entrance exam. Although to see if I was equal to that he did ask me if I could add together all of the numbers between one and one hundred in my head. It’s actually quite simple. All you have to do is add the numbers in pairs—the first and the last, the second and the second to last, and so on, and what you quickly realize is that you just get fifty lots of one hundred and one, which is five thousand and fifty.”

  “There’s no need to explain. I mean about you staying here in Switzerland. Not the maths. I get a headache just listening to all that. It’s as much as I can do to add two plus two and make five.”

  “I hate to tell you, but two plus two makes four.”

  “Not in Germany. Two plus two makes five is simple Nazi arithmetic as described by your friend Josef. Which reminds me. No one gets handed brains and beauty these days. He certainly didn’t. So which line were you in when you were born?”

  “Two plus two equals five isn’t a sum. It’s a prayer for a miracle. Dear Lord, grant that this be so. It’s a little like you and me, don’t you think?” She smiled, without artifice, and kissed my shoulder. “So. What did you do last night? Without me.”

  “I met up with the local police inspector. A fellow named Leuenberger. And the man who owns Wolfsberg Castle—the fellow I told you about.”

  “The detective writer.”

  “Yes. Paul Meyer-Schwertenbach. He’s a friend of the inspector’s.”

  “Good gracious, has there been a crime in Rapperswil? You astound me.”

  “Not exactly. No, we had dinner at the Schwanen Hotel, next door.”


  “I think I prefer this place. In fact, I never want to leave this room. We’ll stay here forever, shall we? And you can make love to me every day.”

  “I’d like that, too.”

  “What did you talk about? You and your two friends?”

  “I think Meyer wants me to help him write a book about an old murder case. The Lady in the Lake, he calls it. A couple of years ago, some woman was found murdered in a boat that was deliberately sunk in the Obersee not very far from here. As a matter of fact, he was a real bore about it.”

  “Deliberately? How could they tell something like that? I mean, boats sink, don’t they? I should know, I’ve sunk a few myself.”

  “From the fact that the planks in the hull looked like Swiss cheese. The murderer even left his drill in there.”

  “I do remember that case,” she said. “It was in all the Swiss newspapers, wasn’t it?”

  I nodded. “Anyway, the police are thinking of reopening it.”

  “Has there been some new evidence?”

  “No.” I sighed.

  “Why the long face?”

  “Because I behaved badly, last night—the way I taunted that policeman. I don’t think he’s the complete idiot I tried to make him feel he was. I don’t know, maybe I drank too much. These days, back in Berlin, I don’t often get the chance. To drink, I mean. Anyway, it’s all a waste of time, if you ask me. They still don’t even know who she was. Although she was wearing a big diamond, which is obviously the key to everything. They may not know who she was but I’m damned sure they could identify that Schmuck on her finger.”

  Dalia nodded. “I love you,” she said. “I suppose you do know that.”

  “And I love you, angel.”

  “Can you please stay here in Switzerland? Forever?”

  “I would but I don’t think the Swiss would like it. In fact, I’m sure of it. And there’s another thing. If I don’t go back, the Nazis will probably make things very difficult for my wife. That’s the only reason anyone ever goes back to Germany these days. If someone else is likely to suffer for it if they don’t.”

  “Oh, yes. I’d forgotten about her. The wife you say you had to marry to keep her out of the clutches of the Gestapo. Kirsten, wasn’t it? I’m very jealous of her.”

  “There’s no need to be. I’m not in love with her. You might almost say it was a marriage of convenience.”

  “That’s not what I’m jealous about, dear love. I’m jealous that you couldn’t do something as noble as that for me. Nobody has ever done something as noble as that for me. Someone should knight you for it. Or give you a medal. An Iron Cross on a nice ribbon. Or whatever it is they give you for acts as selfless as that.”

  “I don’t know that it was quite as selfless as you seem to think,” I admitted. “If I hadn’t married her, Goebbels would never have let me come to Switzerland to see you.”

  “Yes, I see what you mean.” She hit me on the arm. “You’ve spoiled it now.”

  “How?”

  “By telling me that. I much prefer to think of you as doing something noble.”

  “I’m not much good at being noble,” I said. “Frankly, there’s not a lot of call for it these days. Not in Germany.”

  “There is as far as I’m concerned. And I really think you’re selling yourself short. I think you’re every bit as noble as one of those crusading Teutonic knights of medieval history. What was their motto again? ‘Help, Defend, Heal.’ That’s you in a nutshell, Gunther. You’ll have your work cut out doing all that when I come back to Berlin again.”

  “I thought you were staying here to learn how to be Carl Friedrich Gauss.”

  “Oh, I expect you’ll think me terribly capricious but I have a strong sense that if I stay here, Stefan is going to get even more difficult than he is already. Lately he’s become much more possessive. Not to say unconscionably jealous. Which wasn’t our arrangement at all. I’m sure there’s absolutely nothing wrong with his damn car. I think he was just looking for an excuse to take mine so I couldn’t go anywhere today. The fact is, I’m beginning to think that Goebbels might be easier to handle. After all, he’s a lot smaller. And at least he’s got other things on his plate. Like winning an unwinnable war. Besides, there’s bound to be another actress before very long. One he likes better than me. With any luck I can even procure one for him. In fact, I think I know just the girl.”

  “You mean it?”

  She thought for a minute. “I think so.”

  “This is good news. I thought I was going to have to kidnap you and drive you back to Germany in the trunk of my car. Which is what Goebbels wants me to do. He sent me a telegram yesterday. I’m to use every argument I can think of to persuade you to come back. Including money. He’s offering you double what you were offered before. And more than Zarah Leander got last year for The Great Love. Whatever that was. And in whatever currency you want, as well.”

  “More than Zarah Leander,” said Dalia. “That is interesting. Me, paid more than her. The Diva of the Third Reich. I heard a rumor that Zarah got paid in Swedish kronor. Maybe I could get paid in American dollars. Hey, perhaps I could even share some of it with you.”

  “And if that fails, I’m to put you across my knee and spank your bare bottom very hard until you agree.”

  “You’re making that up.”

  “About the spanking, yes. But not the money. Not only that, but you get to keep the house in Griebnitzsee.” I shrugged. “Even Faust wasn’t offered a house like that one.”

  “He is a devil, isn’t he?”

  “If you make a deal with him, just make sure you have a couple of angels to intervene on your behalf when he comes to collect on the bargain.”

  “That’s where you come in, surely.”

  “My earthly powers are weak compared with his.”

  She smiled. “I wouldn’t say so. Not on the evidence of what just happened in this hotel room.”

  With that she climbed on top of me like a Valkyrie mounting Odin’s eight-legged horse and we made love again. I ought to have been paying more attention to the Mephisto story, of course, but in my own defense, it’s difficult to think clearly when the girl immolating herself on top of you is a nude movie star. It’s not every devil that will do absolutely everything in bed you ever dreamed of and make you feel like a god.

  Later on she asked me if I would drive her back to Berlin.

  “What about the motorboat outside?” I asked.

  “I didn’t mean right now, darling, I meant tonight. In your car. No, wait, first thing in the morning would be better. Like six a.m. Stefan won’t be out of bed. Agnes can pack me an overnight bag and then come on to Berlin by train in a few days with the rest of my luggage.”

  “I have to go back to Wolfsberg Castle and collect some things myself. But I can do what you’re asking, yes.”

  “Perhaps we could even find a hotel halfway. In Munich. The Bayerischer Hof. They know me there and they won’t ask too many questions as long as we take separate rooms. It’ll be blissful, don’t you think? We’ll be able to spend the whole night together. I can wake up in your arms. Wouldn’t you like that, too?”

  “You really want to do this? I can see you managing to keep Goebbels at bay. Just about. For obvious reasons, the doctor’s not as fast on his feet as you are. If anyone can do it, you can. But what happened to hating the whole stupid industry? What happened to not wanting to work with an anti-Semite like Veit Harlan? And what will you tell Stefan?”

  “If I’m as powerful as Zarah Leander, my love, then I can certainly get Veit Harlan taken off the picture,” she said. “I’ll have Joey appoint another film director. Someone a little less controversial. Rolf Hansen, perhaps. He directed The Great Love. He can direct me. In fact, I think he’d do a good job. Anyone that can make Zarah Leander look ladylike has got to be good. That woman’s a
giant. They had to use SS men in drag on that picture because they couldn’t find any chorus girls who were as tall as her. I’m not joking.” She shrugged. “As for Stefan, I shall just tell him that the money was too good to refuse. That’s something he can certainly understand.”

  “Then it’s settled. I’ll pick you up in the morning. At six.”

  A couple of hours later, we went onto the lakeshore where the citizens of Rapperswil were strolling around in the late afternoon sunshine, eating ice cream and studying the water almost as if they expected something to come out of it: a woman’s arm holding a sword, perhaps. At the café in front of the Schwanen Hotel, people were drinking coffee and watching a procession of ducks make its stately way toward the water. If a French painter of the rarer kind who was more interested in light than brandy had been on the scene, he’d have unfolded an easel and started work right away, and I wouldn’t have blamed him at all if he’d turned out one of those mottled masterpieces that make you think you need a better pair of glasses. A big bell was tolling in the church clock tower and everything felt like it was just another ordinary summer’s day. It didn’t feel that way to me. It’s never an ordinary day when a beautiful woman allows you the run of her naked body.

  Dalia led me a short distance from where the local steam ferries and the island water taxis plied their trade, to an L-shaped pontoon on which a selection of small runabouts were moored, including a smartly polished, mahogany speedboat with a little red-and-white Croatian flag on the stern. It looked like a floating sports car. Dalia kissed me fondly, lifted the hem of her skirt a little, and I held her hand while she stepped into the boat.

  “Could you untie me, darling?” she said, and pulled in the fenders.

  “Sure.”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow morning at six a.m.,” she said.

  I nodded and sniffed my fingers ostentatiously. She knew I hadn’t washed—I wanted to smell her on me long after she was gone—and she blushed.