by Philip Kerr
“Stop it,” she said. “You’re making me feel shy.”
“I like that. It reminds me that you’re really human and not something that just stepped down from Olympus for the day.”
“Don’t come up the drive, tomorrow. Stay on the road and I’ll come and find you. All right?”
I nodded again.
“You won’t let me down, will you, Gunther? I don’t much like movies when the girl gets stood up.”
“I’ll be there, all right. Never doubt it. Teutonic knights are always on time. Especially when there’s a damsel involved.”
Dalia sat down behind the white leather steering wheel, lit a cigarette, put on some sunglasses, and adjusted her shapely behind on a seat cushion that matched the flag on the stern. She turned a key on the dashboard, a big engine coughed into life, and water spluttered out of the twin chrome exhausts that were on either side of the boat’s name in gold paint: The Gretchen. I coiled the wet ropes neatly and then dropped them onto the boat’s rubberized floor. By now several people were watching her, and I have to admit that Dalia couldn’t have looked more like a movie star if she’d been walking down a red carpet with Emil Jannings on one arm and Leni Riefenstahl on the other. And if that was all that she’d looked like I might have felt a surge of pride, given what had just taken place between us. I’d have said, “Gunther, old man, if you told some of these people what you and she have just been doing up in that hotel bedroom, they wouldn’t believe you.” I could hardly believe it myself, any more than I could accept the current evidence of my own eyes, which was that she—or someone very close to her—had very probably murdered Meyer-Schwertenbach’s lady in the lake. It wasn’t just the cushion cover with checkerboard red-and-white squares that seemed to match exactly the one found in the sunken wreck, or the knowledge that her big mansion in Küsnacht was possessed of a very convenient boathouse from which an expedition to scuttle a boat in the lake could easily have been launched; it wasn’t the large diamond ring I’d seen on Dalia’s own finger, which served to remind me that only someone who owned a ring as big as the one found on the dead woman’s hand—and very likely several others besides—could ever have afforded not to take it before sinking the boat; it wasn’t even the expert way she handled her own motorboat as she left the pontoon. Clearly she knew a great deal about boats. No, it was the way she had turned on a five-pfennig piece about returning to Germany almost the minute I’d told her that Inspector Leuenberger was planning to reopen the lady in the lake case. She’d been so adamant she didn’t want to work for Goebbels again when we’d talked about it earlier; and now she was preparing to come back to Berlin with me in the morning. Just like that. It didn’t make any sense, unless she’d had something to do with the murder and was now keen to leave Switzerland before Inspector Leuenberger found something incriminating to Dalia and her husband.
I watched the motorboat until it was a silver speck racing across the navy blue thread that was the horizon. My eyes might have been narrowed against the dazzling sun but they could still see that she was probably using me. Not that I minded very much about that. Sometimes being used is fine if you know that this is what’s happening. You go along with it. Especially when you’re a man and it’s a beautiful woman who’s doing the using. Exploitation can feel a lot worse than something as human as that. That’s certainly how I felt about it. We’re all using someone else for something if we’re really honest about that. Some sort of deal or transaction lies at the heart of most human relationships. Karl Marx knew all about that. He wrote a very large book about the subject. Of course, the part of me that was still a cop wanted to go to the Schwanen Hotel, find Paul Meyer-Schwertenbach, take him around the corner to the police station in Rapperswil where I would describe the seat cushion in Dalia’s boat to Inspector Leuenberger, and then suggest that he mount a search of her house in Küsnacht. At the very least, she and Stefan Obrenovic had some serious explaining to do. That’s certainly what I might have done before the war, when things like murder and being a cop, like law and justice, seemed to matter. How naïve we were to imagine that such things were always going to be important. Perhaps one day they would matter again, but right now, the part of me that was a man said something very different about how I should handle this latest discovery and, even as that antique part—the cop part—was still speaking, I put my fingers to my nostrils and inhaled the most precious, intimate scent of Dalia’s pleasure, and straightaway I was certain I was never going to talk her up for a murder that everyone else in Switzerland seemed to have forgotten about anyway. I knew as surely as Heinrich Steinweg knew how to make a good piano that I was going to be waiting in a car outside the house in Küsnacht at six the following morning. Short of Inspector Weisendanger turning up at Wolfsberg Castle or a whole truckload of OSS agents kidnapping me again, there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of me not being there.
Forty-one
The Kon Tiki Bar in the basement of the Hotel Bayerischer Hof was supposed to look like something on an exotic Polynesian island but it seemed a little gloomy to convince anyone that we were in the South Pacific instead of Munich’s city center. I don’t know if the totem poles and tribal masks that lined the walls and the puffer fish hanging from the bamboo ceilings were the real thing, but the cocktails tasted real enough (even though they were mostly sugar), especially after Dalia produced a bottle of rum from a hornback alligator handbag to put some extra snap in them. She was full of surprises like that. We were certainly in the mood for a few drinks following the long drive from Küsnacht and, with several under our belts, we probably wouldn’t have noticed if the whole of the RAF had come calling while we were in there, especially as the bar doubled as the hotel’s bomb shelter. But for once it was a quiet night—rare for a full moon—and we decided to take a walk to get some Munich air and generally try to sober up a little before going to bed. Just outside the hotel—which was Munich’s best—on Promenadestrasse was the street where Kurt Eisner, Bavaria’s first prime minister after the abolition of the monarchy, was murdered by an anti-Semite, in 1919. It was the first of many similar, politically motivated murders. And perhaps it was the combination of this and several rum cocktails that prompted me to mention the delicate subject of the murder while we walked through the cobbled streets all the way to the infamous Hofbräuhaus. We didn’t go inside the beer hall where Hitler had proclaimed the program of the Nazi Party in 1920, which was why the place was treated like a shrine, with Nazi flags and a policeman to guard them. Rum and the watered-down beer they were probably serving don’t mix any more than a jolly brass band in your ear and a whispered half-accusation of murder. Instead we stood under the arches of the entrance, peered through the glass door for a moment at some of the men in their lederhosen and extraordinary Tyrolean hats, and then retired to a safer distance.
“You know, it’s really none of my business, and frankly I can’t bring myself to give a damn about it one way or the other. I’m sure you had your reasons for what happened—good reasons, too—but yesterday, when we were in Rapperswil, I had the strange idea that it was you or someone close to you who killed that girl who was found at the bottom of Lake Zurich.”
“Whatever makes you say a thing like that, Gunther?” She took a cigarette from the case in my pocket and lit it so calmly she might have been playing a scene in a movie. “Frankly, I’m a little bewildered that you could even say such a thing.”
“I certainly wouldn’t tell anyone in the Swiss police, angel. You needn’t worry on that score. Real police work has long ceased to interest me very much. And I’m only mentioning this now because I want you to think highly of me. I know what I’m saying sounds strange, but the fact is your opinion of me suddenly matters more than it did yesterday. So wait until I’m through and then you can talk.
“When you told me how you did that mental arithmetic for your friend from the polytechnic the other night, I was impressed. Afterwards I sat down with a pencil and pap
er and worked it out for myself and saw it was just as you’d said it was—that each first and last number made one hundred and one, and that there were fifty lots of them. Then I got to thinking that I wasn’t smart enough for you. It’s not that I mind about that, particularly. I’ve met plenty of women who were smarter than me. Usually I like it that way. It keeps me on my toes to be around clever women. It saves having to explain myself. But I realized that it’s important to me that you understand that, in my own crude way I’m smart, too. Maybe not quite as smart as you, angel, but still smart enough to have worked out in my head that you had something to do with the lady in the lake. I’m not sure I can explain how and that it all adds up as neatly as the way you explained those numbers yesterday. I can’t even tell you if it makes a nice number like five thousand and fifty, but everything under my hairline tells me you knew her and that only you can tell me how she ended up searching the bottom of Lake Zurich for someone’s surplus sword.”
“You’ll forgive me if I ask to hear how you worked this out,” she said, still looking skeptical.
“Oh, sure. Here, let me show you.”
I took her small but surprisingly strong hand, opened it and, like a gypsy reading a palm, I took each finger, starting with her pinkie, and gave it a reason for why I thought what I did. But the real clincher was her forefinger. I held on to that for quite a while as I explained how a cushion cover in the sunken boat was the red-and-white Croatian flag and identical to one on her own motorboat—The Gretchen—that I’d seen underneath her own behind the previous day and how, if they really paid attention to what they were doing, even the Swiss police could probably match the one to the other.
“Red and white,” she said. “That’s not such an unusual color combination in Switzerland, Gunther. They even make little pocketknives that are red and white. I’ll buy you one for your birthday if you can remember when that is.”
“No, that’s quite true. Red and white. I get that. But the cushion on The Gretchen—like the one on the sunken boat—is curved at the front and straight at the back, with twenty-five red-and-silver squares. They look white but the heraldic boys like to describe them as silver. Thirteen red and twelve silver. I counted them. The chessboard—that’s what they call it, isn’t it?”
“A Šahovnica,” she muttered. “Yes.”
“Right. So, there’s no doubt about it, angel. That’s the Croatian flag, all right. I spent enough time in Zagreb and in several hellholes south of there, seeing that damn flag every day, to know it like the back of my hand, and wishing frankly that I’d never see it again. Like Pavlov’s dog, I don’t think I’ll ever see Croatia’s flag again without associating it with murder. So when I saw it under your beautiful behind, angel—the behind I’d not long finished kissing so fondly at the Pension du Lac—well, it kind of caught my attention.”
She smiled as the door of the beer hall opened and we heard the band in the Hofbräuhaus strike up with “So Long Old Peter,” which was enough to put a smile on anyone’s face.
“All right, I’m impressed,” she said. “Let’s agree that you’re not as dumb as you look. What of it?”
I took her by the arm and led her farther away from the beer hall and down a quiet alley.
“If I’m going to perform dressage for you, angel, I need to know what happened. That’s all. You see, when you’re a detective and you find out that someone killed someone else, it says on page one of the police manual that you’re supposed to do something about it. It’s just good professional conduct. Like I said, that was then. But I still have to look at myself in the shaving mirror every morning. And it wouldn’t do for me to lose all my self-respect about this. Not that there’s much of that left, you understand, but maybe there’s still enough that I need to be able to meet my own eye. Any detective would tell you the same thing. Finding out things, cracking a case open, solving crimes—even if that doesn’t amount to much more than solving the crossword in today’s newspaper—it’s what detectives do, angel, even when we choose never to do anything about it afterward. That’s all I’m saying. I’ve got an itch and I want you to help me scratch it. After that we can forget all about it. Honest. But I need to know, see?”
She sighed, snatched a drag on the cigarette, and then shot me a sulky look.
“Talk to me,” I said, taking hold of her elbow. “You knew her. Tell me what happened.”
“All right,” she said, pulling her elbow away again. “But it wasn’t murder, Gunther. You’re wrong about that. I promise you, I didn’t mean to kill her. It was an accident.”
“Who was she? The woman in the boat.”
“Does it matter now?”
“I think so.”
“All right. She was an old girlfriend of mine. Someone who lived in Zurich. She came to the house in Küsnacht one night, got stinking drunk, and we had an argument. Maybe I was a bit drunk, too, I don’t know. We argued about a man. What else? She was planning to go and see this man and I said that she shouldn’t. Maybe I was a little more forceful than that. Anyway, the argument grew a bit heated and I’m not sure why but she took a swing at me and missed, and then I hit her back. I slapped her, hoping to bring her back to her senses. It didn’t. I slapped her a little too hard and caught her right on the chin and she went down like Schmeling in the first. Hit her head on a big cast-iron firedog and that was it. She was dead. Agnes used to be a nurse and checked her pulse, but it was no good. There was blood all over the carpet and it was obvious to anyone that she was dead. Have you ever killed your best friend? It has its low points. I sat around for a long time, crying and wondering what to do. Feeling sorry for her but sorrier for myself, I guess. Well, I wasn’t married to Stefan at the time—we were just sort of living in the same house. The Swiss could have deported me at any time. Anyway, when he came home he took charge of everything. It was Stefan who suggested that we should dispose of the body. That it certainly wouldn’t help my movie career or him if we involved the police. By then I was a little calmer. So, in the middle of the night, we carried her down to the boathouse and took her out in this old boat that was moored in there. Stefan drove that boat while I followed in The Gretchen. We sailed down the lakeshore for a bit and then scuttled her. That’s it. Before you ask, I married Stefan the following week. She stayed down in the water for almost a year before they found her, but by then it was almost impossible to identify her, of course. So, I figured I was in the clear. At least I did until yesterday, Gunther.” She tossed her cigarette away and stamped her foot. “Why did you have to—” She sighed. “Be so damned clever? I hate you knowing this. I could kill you, Gunther. Really I could.”
“This is a nice quiet place. Nobody’s around. Maybe now’s your chance.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
I took the Walther out of its shoulder holster, worked the slide to put one in the chamber, put it in her hand, and lifted her arm so that the gun was pointed straight at my heart.
“You said yourself that nobody has ever done something noble for you. Well, now I’m doing it. Sacrificing myself to your happiness. Just like one of those Teutonic knights.”
“Be careful. I’ll do it. You just watch me.”
“Go ahead,” I said. “Be my guest. That’s a P38 you’re holding. It fires eight rounds of nine-millimeter Luger ammunition. But at this kind of range one’s more than enough to put a decent-sized hole in me.”
“Don’t be so sure I won’t do it, you big stupid ape.”
“That’s really the point of the whole exercise, my love. A month or two ago I’d have said you’d be doing me a favor or something like that. But since I met you, I’ve changed my opinion.”
“You’re drunk.”
“Not so drunk that I don’t know exactly what I’m doing. All you’ve got to do is pull the trigger, drop the gun, and walk quickly away. That’s right. Think about it. With me gone, there’s no one in Germany who’s
ever going to know that you killed that girl. You can go on being a movie star without a care in the world. No one will ever figure a beautiful woman like you for a shooter. Especially not in Munich. Unlike Prussians, Bavarians are a little old-fashioned like that. Go ahead and shoot.”
“Stop it, Gunther.”
“You can do it if you want to do it. You said you wanted to kill me. Believe me, on a dark night, in a quiet street, with a loaded gun in your hand, you’ll never get a better chance than this.”
“Stop it,” she said. “Of course I don’t want to kill you, Gunther. I was just saying that. Why would I want you dead, you idiot? I told you I love you, didn’t I? Well, I do.”
She lowered the gun and turned her face to the wall. I took the gun away from her and let the hammer down gently. The safety was still on—had been all along—but she wasn’t to know that. It’s the good thing about the P38—it’s always been very safe, for a gun. You can keep one quite safely in the chamber all the time without worrying that you’re going to blow your ear off. I returned the P38 to my shoulder holster, took her in my arms and then kissed her face, which was now wet with tears.
“Only now I’m sure of that,” I said quietly. “And that’s really all that matters, isn’t it?”
“You’re crazy,” she said. “Suppose I’d shot you?”
“You didn’t. And if you had shot me, it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. The fact is, I really don’t like the idea of carrying on without you in my life. You’d have been doing me a favor, angel.”
“I don’t believe that,” she said.
I kissed her again. “Sure you do.”
“What happens now? About the other thing?”
“The lady in the lake?”
She nodded.
“Nothing. Maybe you weren’t listening. These days murder isn’t a crime, it’s a map of Germany’s so-called protectorates and puppet states with the numbers of dead proudly delivered and announced as birthday presents for the leader. There’s no reason why you should understand what I mean by that, or why anyone should tell you. Maybe one day I’ll explain it, but not now. So forget about all that and we’ll make it just this: whatever happened, whatever you did, I don’t give a damn. All that matters now is today. And that’s all that will matter tomorrow. And the day after. Your secret is safe with me. And anytime you bid me to go and throw someone or something into a lake for you, angel, I’m your man.”