by Philip Kerr
“This is the whole point of a good picture. To work with the available light and shade. To find definition and meaning in black and white where none seems obvious. And perhaps to illuminate a mystery.”
She made it sound like being a detective.
“Well, aren’t you going to buy me a drink?” she asked.
“In there?”
“Why not?”
“If you’d ever been through the door you’d know the answer to that question. No, let’s go somewhere else.” I dipped my head beside her ear for a second and sniffed loudly, for effect. “That’s Mystikum, and I’d prefer to enjoy it because you’re wearing it, not because it hides the smell of fish.”
“I’m impressed. That you know my perfume.”
“I’m a concierge. It’s my job to know these things. Besides, I saw the bottle in your handbag last night when you showed me your book.”
“You have keen eyes.”
“Not for very much, I’m afraid.”
She nodded. “I won’t argue about going somewhere else. It does smell of fish around here.”
“Good.”
“Where shall we go?”
“This is Villefranche. There are more bars in this town than there are mailboxes. Which probably explains why the post is so slow.”
“I’ve a better idea. Why don’t we go to your house and then you can give me that bridge book?”
“I think I may have misled you, Mrs. French. When I said it was a house what I actually meant was a lobster pot.”
“And you’re the lobster, is that it?”
“Certainly. There’s no room in there for much more than me and a local fisherman’s hand.”
“All right. Why don’t you go home, fetch the book, and then bring it to my house? Avenue des Hespérides, number eight. We can have a drink there if you like. There’s quite a substantial wine cellar I’ve hardly touched since I rented the place.”
“Didn’t the Garden of the Hesperides have some golden apples that were guarded by a never-sleeping, hundred-headed dragon named Ladon?”
“We had a guard dog, but he died. I do have a cat. His name is Robbie. I don’t think that you need to worry about him. But if you’d rather not—”
“It’s like this, Mrs. French, so you don’t mistake me. We might easily become friends. But suppose we fell out again afterward? You want me to teach you bridge. There are drills. Homework. Suppose I said you were not a diligent pupil? What then? Suppose I had to get rough with you when you played your hand all wrong? Believe me, it’s been known.” I shrugged. “It’s just that like all lobsters I’m anxious not to get myself into hot water. Staff are discouraged from fraternizing with people who stay at the hotel and I wouldn’t want to lose my job. It’s not a great job but it’s all I have right now. The movie business is a little slow down here since Alfred Hitchcock left town.”
“Well, that’s all right then. I never stay there. I hate staying in hotels. Especially grand hotels. They’re actually very lonely places. All of the rooms have locks on the doors and I always find that rather claustrophobic.”
“You’re very persistent.”
“I certainly wouldn’t want you to feel uncomfortable, Mr. Wolf.”
She winced, and I sensed that it was me who’d made her feel uncomfortable, which made me feel bad. That’s a problem I have sometimes; I never like making people feel bad, especially when they look like Anne French.
“Walter. Please call me Walter. And yes, of course, I’d love to come. Shall we say in half an hour? That will give me time to fetch the book and to change my shirt. For a lobster it’s the most painless way there is to change color.”
“I think pink would suit you,” she said.
“My mother certainly thought so when I was a baby. Right up until the moment she discovered I was a boy.”
“It’s hard to imagine that you had parents.”
“I had two of them as a matter of fact.”
“What I mean is you seem like a very serious man.”
“Don’t let that fool you, Mrs. French. I’m German. And like all Germans I’m easily led astray.”
Back home I did a lot more than change my shirt. I washed, and combed my hair. I even splashed on a little Pino Silvestre that a guest had left behind in his hotel bedroom. I get a lot of my stuff that way. It smells like a mixture of mothballs and a Christmas tree, but it does repel mosquitoes, which are a real problem down here and it’s better than my natural body odor, which is always a little sour these days.
Mrs. French’s villa occupied a beautiful garden that was a series of lawned terraces that hung on the edge of the rocks above Villefranche and looked as if it had been landscaped by someone from Babylon with a head for heights. The semi-rusticated pink stucco house had a round corner tower and an elegant first-floor terrace with an awning. There was a pool and a clay tennis court and a guest villa and a caretaker’s house with an empty dog kennel that was only a little smaller than the place where I lived. I took one look at the basket and the dog bowl and thought about applying for the vacancy. We sat on the terrace that faced the floodlit, aquamarine pool and she handed me a bottle of Tavel that matched the color of the stucco and helped take away the taste of my cologne.
Inside, the place was full of books and art of the kind that takes a lifetime to collect, or paint, depending on whether it’s taste or talent you have, and since I have neither, I just stood in front of it all and nodded, dumbly, careful not to admit that I thought it was all a bit like Picasso, and which she might reasonably have taken as a compliment but for the fact that I can’t stand Picasso. These days all his faces look as ugly as mine and it seemed unlikely that my face should be of any interest to a woman who was at least ten years younger than I am. I wasn’t sure what she was up to; at least not yet. Perhaps she really did want me to teach her bridge, but there are schools for that, and teachers, even on the Riviera. Maybe I’m just being cynical, but she showed no real interest in the book when I gave it to her and it stayed unopened on the table for as long as it took us to finish one bottle and open another.
We talked about nothing in particular, which is a subject on which I am something of an expert. And after a while she went into the kitchen to prepare us some snacks, leaving me alone to smoke and go inside the house to snoop among her books. I brought one back to the terrace and read it for a while. But finally she came out and soon after that, to the point.
“I expect you’re wondering why I’m so keen to learn the game of bridge,” she said.
“No, not for a minute. These days I try to do as little wondering as possible. The guests tend to prefer it that way.”
“I told you I’m a writer.”
“Yes, I noticed all the books. They must come in handy when you’re thinking of something to write.”
“Some of them belonged to my father.” She picked the book I’d been reading off the table for a moment and then tossed it back. “Including that one. Russian Glory, by Philip Jordan. What’s it about?”
“It’s a sort of panegyric about Stalin and the Russian people, and the evils of capitalism.”
“Why on earth were you reading that?”
“It’s like meeting a rather naïve old friend. For a while during the war it was the only book that was available to me.”
“That sounds uncomfortable.”
“It was. But you were telling me about why you’re so keen to learn the game of bridge.”
“How much do you know about William Somerset Maugham? The writer.”
“Enough to know that he wouldn’t be interested in you, Mrs. French. For one thing you’re not young enough. And for another, you’re the wrong sex.”
“That’s true. Which is why I want to learn bridge. I was thinking it might provide me with the means of getting to meet him. From what I’ve heard, he plays cards almost every ni
ght.”
“Why do you want to meet him?”
“I’m a big fan of his writing. He’s perhaps the greatest novelist alive today. Certainly the most popular. Which is why he can afford to live down here in such splendor at the Villa Mauresque.”
“You’re not doing so bad yourself.”
“I’m renting this place. I don’t own it. I wish I did.”
“What’s the real reason you want to meet him?”
“I don’t know what you mean. Maybe you didn’t notice it, but I have an entire collection of his first editions and I would dearly like him to sign them all before—before he dies. He is very old. Which of course would make them worth a lot more. I suppose there’s that.”
“We’re getting warmer,” I said. “But I’ll bet that’s still not the real reason. You don’t look like a book dealer. Not in those pants.”
Anne French bridled a little.
“All right then, it’s because I have an offer from an American publisher called Victor Weybright to write his biography,” she said. “Fifty thousand dollars, to be precise.”
“That’s a much better reason. Or to be more accurate, fifty thousand of them.”
“I’d really like to meet him, but as you’ve observed I’m the wrong sex.”
“Why don’t you just write to him and tell him about the book?”
“Because that would get me nowhere. Somerset Maugham is notoriously private. He hates the idea of being written about and, so far, has resisted all biographers. Which is one reason why the money is so good. Nobody has managed to do it. I was thinking that if I learned to play bridge I might inveigle my way into his circle and pick up some conversation and some color. He’d never agree to meet me if he knew I was writing a book about him. No, the only way is to give him a reason to invite me. By all accounts he used to play with Dorothy Parker. And rather more recently with the Queen of Spain and Lady Doverdale.”
“Bridge isn’t the kind of card game you can just pick up and play, Mrs. French. It takes time to become good. From what I hear, Somerset Maugham’s been playing all his life. I’m not sure even I’d be in his league.”
“I’d still like to try. And I’d be willing to pay you to come here and teach me. How does a hundred francs a lesson sound?”
“I’ve got a better idea. What kind of cook are you, Mrs. French?”
“If it’s just me, I tend to go to the hotel. But I can cook. Why?”
“So I’ll make you a deal. My wife left me a while ago. I miss a cooked meal. Make me dinner twice a week and I’ll teach you how to play bridge. How’s that?”
She nodded. “Agreed.”
So that was my deal. And in bridge the dealer is entitled to make the first call.
FOUR
For a couple of weeks my arrangement with Anne French worked well. She was a quick study and took to the game like a new deck and a dealer’s shoe. She wasn’t a bad cook and I even managed to put on a few extra pounds. Best of all, she made a hell of a gimlet, the kind you can taste and feel for hours afterward. This might even be why, once or twice, I got the idea she wanted me to kiss her, but I managed to resist the temptation, which is unusual for me. Temptation is not something I can easily avoid when it comes wearing Mystikum behind its rose petal ears and you can see its smaller washing still hanging on the line outside the kitchen door. It wasn’t that I didn’t find her attractive, or that I couldn’t have used a little affection—or that I didn’t like her underwear—but I’ve been bitten so many times that I’m as twice shy as the wild pigs that came into the trees at the bottom of her garden after dark and truffled around for something to eat. Shy and apt to think that someone might have a rifle pointed at my ear. Meanwhile, I continued going to La Voile d’Or for my biweekly game and my life continued along the same monotonous path as before. Life can be appreciated best when you have a regular job and a goodish salary and you can avoid thinking about anything more important than what’s happening in Egypt. At least, that’s what I told myself. But one night Spinola was drunk—too drunk to play bridge—and I was actually pleased because it gave me an excuse to call Anne to see if she wanted to take the Italian’s place at the table. I was disappointed to discover, first that she wasn’t at home and second that I was more disappointed than I told myself was appropriate, given everything I’d told myself and her about not getting involved with hotel guests. Meanwhile, the Roses drove Spinola home in their Bentley, which left me alone on the terrace with a last drink and cigarette, wondering if I should drive to Anne’s house in Villefranche and look for her in case she hadn’t heard the telephone or chosen not to answer it. It was the wrong thing to do, of course, and I was just about to do it all the same when an Englishman with a little dog spoke to me.
“I see you here a lot,” he said. “Playing bridge, twice a week. I say, aren’t you the concierge at the Grand Hôtel?”
“Sometimes,” I said. “When I’m not playing bridge.”
“It is rather addictive, isn’t it?”
He was probably about forty but looked older. Overweight and a little sweaty, he wore a double-breasted linen blazer, a white shirt with overextended double cuffs and gold links that looked like a modest day on the Klondike, gray cavalry twill trousers, a silk tie that was the color of a South American jaguar, and a matching silk handkerchief that was spilling out of his top pocket as if he were about to conjure a bunch of fake flowers, like a cheap magician. He was the same man I’d seen arguing outside the hotel entrance with Harold Hennig.
“Hello, I’m Robin Maugham.”
“Walter Wolf.”
We shook hands and he waved the waiter toward us. “Buy you a drink?”
“Sure.”
We ordered drinks, some water for the dog, lit our cigarettes, took a table on the terrace facing the port, and generally tried to behave normally, or at least as normal as you can when one man isn’t homosexual and knows that the other man is, and the other man is fully aware that the first man understands all that. It was a little awkward, perhaps, but nothing more than that. I used to believe in a moral order, but then so did the Nazis, and their idea of moral order included murdering homosexuals in concentration camps, which was more than enough for me to change my own opinions. After the orgy of destruction Hitler inflicted upon Germany, it seems pointless to give a damn about what one man does in a bedroom with another.
“You’re German, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“It’s all right. I’m not one of these Englishmen who doesn’t like Germans. I met a lot of your chaps in the war. Solid men, most of them. In forty-two I was in North Africa with the 4th County of London Yeomanry, in tanks. We were up against the DAK—the Deutsches Afrikakorps—which was the 15th Panzer Division in my neck of the woods. Good fighters, what? I’ll say so. I sustained a head injury at the Battle of Knightsbridge, which ended my war. At least that’s what we called it. Strictly speaking, it was the Battle of Gazala but one always thinks of it as the Battle of Knightsbridge.”
“Why?”
“Oh. Well, that was the code name for our defensive position on the Gazala line: Knightsbridge. But to be quite honest there were so many chaps I knew in the 8th Army from Eton and Cambridge and my Inn of Court that it sometimes felt as if one was shopping in Knightsbridge. Not that I was an officer, mind. I joined up as an ordinary trooper. On account of the fact that I was a bit of a bolshie. And just to pay my own bar bills, so to speak. I never much liked all that damned officer malarkey.”
He made it all sound like a long day in the cricket field.
“What about you, Walter?”
“I was well behind our lines and quite safe in Berlin. A man without honor, I’m afraid. Too old for all that. I was a captain in the Intendant General’s Office. The Catering Corps.”
“Ah. I begin to see a pattern.”
I nodded. “Before the war I worke
d at the Hotel Adlon.”
“Right. Everyone stays at the Adlon. Grand Hotel. The film, I mean. Vicki Baum, wasn’t it? The Austrian writer.”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Thought so. I’m a writer myself. Books, plays. Working on a play right now. A comedy that’s based on Shakespeare’s King Lear. It’s about a man who has three daughters.”
“There’s a coincidence.”
Maugham laughed. “Quite.”
“I suppose it would be too much of a coincidence if you were not related to the other Maugham who lives around here.”
“He’s my uncle. Matter of fact, he used to know Vicki Baum, when he was living in Berlin before the first war.”
The drinks arrived and Robin Maugham grabbed his glass of white wine off the waiter’s tin tray with the impatience of the true drunk. I should know; my own greenish glass had taken on the aura of the holy grail.
“He likes Germans, too. Willie. That’s what we call the old man. Speaks it fluently. On account of the fact that before med school he spent a year at the University of Heidelberg. Uncle Willie loves Germany. He’s particularly fond of Goethe. Still reads it in German. Which is saying something for an Englishman, I can tell you.”
“Then we have something in common.”
“You too, eh? Jolly good.”
It was easy to see that Robin Maugham was a playwright. He had an easy way of speech about him, a talky, bantering sort of chat that concealed as much as it revealed, like a character you knew was going to prove much more consequential than he seemed if only by virtue of his prominence on the theater bill.
“You know, what with the bridge and the German, perhaps you’d like to make up a four at the Villa Mauresque one night. The old man is always keen to meet interesting new people. Of course, he’s notoriously private, but I’ll hazard a guess that the concierge at the Grand Hôtel—not to mention someone who worked at the famous Adlon—well, that person must be used to keeping a few confidences, what?”
“I’d be delighted to come,” I said. “And you needn’t worry about my mouth.”