The Other Side of Silence

by Philip Kerr

  I pressed the muzzle of the Sig against his Achilles to underline my meaning; I don’t know that I would actually have shot him, but he wasn’t to know that.

  “All right, all right, I’ll tell you.”

  I let him up onto his knees again, but he was slow to get started so I flicked his earlobe with the Sig a couple of times to encourage his soul—assuming he had one—to unburden itself.

  “I’d forgotten what a violent temper you have, Gunther. There’s a fury in you I just didn’t remember.”

  “You should see me when I can’t find my cigarettes. So talk, before I give you an ear piercing you won’t ever forget.”

  “There’s a tape,” he said.

  “What kind of a tape?”

  “A tape. BASF. AEG. I don’t know. A sound recording.”

  “Of what, exactly?”

  “A man speaking. You might say that it’s a sort of confession.”

  “Who is this man?”

  “Ah, now this is where it gets interesting.”

  I listened carefully as he started to describe what was on the tape. At first I was confused and then surprised, and then not really surprised at all. The whole thing sounded very clever. Too clever for an ordinary Fritz like me. Which is what I had half suspected all along. The only really strange part was that Hebel had decided to involve me in the whole rotten transaction. Then again, I seem to have a talent for finding trouble; it certainly seems to have no trouble in finding me. This couldn’t have looked more like trouble if someone had erected the word in fifty-foot-high letters on the summit of nearby Mont Boron. After a while he could see his explanation had made a real impression on me and he felt confident enough to stand up and go and help himself from the bottle of schnapps on the bedside table and light a cigarette without me waving the gun in his face again.

  “You want one?” he asked, and poured a short glass for me anyway. “You look as though you need one.”

  I took it from his hand and downed it quickly. It was good schnapps, cold as the Frisches Haff in January, and just the way I like it.

  “Where is it now, this tape?”

  “Safe. I’ll let you have a copy tomorrow so you can deliver it to the Villa Mauresque where Herr Maugham can listen to it at his leisure. I’ll even lend him my tape recorder so he can play it. Anyway, I expect he’ll know what to do next. After that the old man will have forty-eight hours to raise two hundred thousand dollars. Shouldn’t be too difficult given that he’s already raised fifty thousand of it. Let’s say that I’m letting you have the picture free as a sign of my good faith.”

  “You’ve come a long way since blackmailing warm boys in the lavatories at Potsdamer Platz station,” I said. “I can see how you could squeeze Somerset Maugham. But this—this strikes me as foolhardy.”

  “Some lemons are bigger than others, but they’ll squeeze just as easily. I learned that from the Nazis. Hitler’s grandmother was a practiced blackmailer, did you know that?”

  “It doesn’t surprise me.”

  When he’d finished talking I sat on the edge of the bed and thought things over for a minute or two before I spoke again.

  “I’m not supposed to be here,” I said.

  “Certainly you are. I suggested to Herr Maugham that you would be the man best placed to help him. You’re here because he needs you. And if it comes to that, so do I. You’re a perfect cutout, Bernie. Reliable. Intelligent. With much to lose. Useful to me, and to Herr Maugham.”

  I shook my head. “What I mean is, I should be dead.”

  “All of us who survived the war were fortunate,” said Hebel, and poured me another glass. “You and me perhaps especially so.”

  “Were we? I wonder. Anyway, I’m not supposed to be alive right now. A little while ago I tried to kill myself. I sat in the garage with the car engine running and just waited for it to happen. I’m still not exactly sure why I kept on breathing air and not Fina gasoline but, for a while, I understood what death really is. Of course we all know we’re going to die. But until it happens, none of us really understands what it means to be dead. Me, I understood it, perfectly. I even saw the beauty of it. You see, Hebel, you don’t die; death isn’t something that just happens to you, no. It’s like you become death. You’re a part of it. All those billions who’ve lived and then died before you. You’ve joined them. And when you’ve felt that, it never goes away, even if you think you’re still alive. Just remember that when all this is over. Just remember that it was you who chose to involve a dead man like me in your little scheme.”

  After that I told him we—by which I meant me and my client—would be in touch as soon as we’d listened to the tape. Then I collected the envelope with the photographs and the neg, the Pan Am flight bag with the money, pushed the muzzle of the gun under my waistband, and, without another word, left the room.

  Downstairs in the hotel lobby, I returned to the front desk.

  “When you speak to your friend in the PJ see what he can find out about a man called Louis Legrand.”

  “I already did,” said Henri, writing down the name. “Speak to my friend, I mean. She left her scarf.”

  “Who did?”

  “The woman suspected of Spinola’s murder. I called my friend in the PJ and asked him, like you asked. Whoever it was shot him left a green chiffon scarf beside his dead body.”

  “Is that all? Now, with her underwear they might have proved something. Sexual behavior. Hair color. Who she likes for the Tour de France. Anything.”

  “It was in his hand. The scarf. Chances are she was wearing it when she shot him, at pretty close range, too. There was a powder burn on his shirt. So it must have been someone he trusted. That’s what my friend says, anyway.”

  “Hmm.”

  “What does ‘hmm’ mean?”

  “I’m not a detective. So it means I really don’t know what to think about it, Henri.”

  Of course this was hardly a surprise, given everything else that was now crowding in upon my mind; my head must have looked like a stowaway’s cabin on the ship in that Marx Brothers film. But most of the floor space was taken up with the realization that the whole thing involving Maugham hadn’t been much to do with blackmailing him, at all. Not really. That had just been the hors d’oeuvre. Hebel had something else for sale. Something much more important than a photograph of some naked men cavorting around a swimming pool in 1937. That had been nothing more than a lure, designed to secure everyone’s attention. To establish some credentials. Well, now he had them established, as if he had just presented them at the court of St. James while wearing white gloves and carrying a cocked hat with ostrich feathers.

  “I did what you asked,” he said resentfully. “He was a good man, Spinola.”

  “Sure, sure. I’ll look into it, okay, Henri? Maybe I’ll find something relevant. Maybe.”

  But somehow the name of the woman who’d shot and killed our friend Spinola seemed of lesser importance besides an elaborate plot to blackmail the British Secret Intelligence Service.

  FOURTEEN

  Up at the Villa Mauresque they were finishing dinner; at least they were until I showed up with the money and the photograph. For a while I let them all think I’d done a great job of getting back the prints and the neg and somehow the fifty thousand dollars as well. I couldn’t have felt more popular there if I’d been Noël Coward wearing just a pair of sandals. I hadn’t the heart to tell any of them that the whole thing had been merely the first act in an opera that threatened to be longer than Tristan und Isolde. So we sat on the terrace under the starry sky, watched by a Pekingese dog and a couple of blackamoor wooden bishops, and I ate some corned-beef hash and drank amarone and even permitted Somerset Maugham to put my hand to his pink, rictus mouth and say that whatever they were paying me at the Grand Hôtel, he would double it if I came to work for him at the Villa Mauresque.

 
“Doing what, exactly?” I asked.

  The alligator eyes narrowed in their folds of brown skin as he considered the proposition. “I’m a r-rich man,” he said, “and it strikes me that I need protection of some kind. Especially at my time of life. I might be kidnapped. Or blackmailed again. And there are always unwanted visitors at the front gates wanting a book signed. You have no idea. But if you became my security adviser, Herr Wolf, then I’d feel a lot safer. And not just me. My guests, too. Some very famous people come and stay here from time to time. Very famous and just as often even richer than I am. Charlie Chaplin, Jerry Zipkin, the Queen of Spain. And then there’s my art collection. As you will doubtless have observed, I have paintings by Gauguin, Matisse, Renoir, Pissarro, Picasso, Toulouse-Lautrec, Bonnard, Monet, Utrillo. A man with a gun is just what the place needs most, I think.”

  “Who painted that one?” I said.

  But Robin Maugham agreed enthusiastically. “This is a brilliant idea, Uncle,” he said. “Your very own Simon Templar.”

  “You don’t know the first thing about me,” I said, with no idea of who Simon Templar was. “I am not a good man.”

  “Look around,” said Searle. “There are no honors and decorations coming the way of anyone in this house.”

  “No, indeed,” said Robin.

  “I know that you returned with fifty thousand dollars I thought I’d never see again,” said Maugham. “I think that b-bespeaks a certain devotion to principle.”

  “Then try this, sir. I’m not sure I could handle the predominantly male atmosphere up here at the villa. Pool parties and rent boys.”

  “We’re much too old for all those shenanigans now,” said Maugham. “Aren’t we, Alan?”

  “Speak for yourself,” said Searle.

  “What about you, Mr. Wolf? Is there anyone in your life? A woman, perhaps.”

  “You managed to make that sound queer,” I said.

  “It is,” he said. “To us.”

  “I’m not interested in anything like that anymore.”

  “You sound exactly like a man with a broken heart,” he said. “You fascinate me, Mr. Wolf. Who was the woman who made you so bitter?”

  I laughed. “It took more than just one.”

  “Love is just a dirty trick that’s played on us to achieve a continuation of the species,” said Maugham. “That’s what I think.”

  I shook my head. “It isn’t like that at all, Mr. Maugham. It isn’t something simply mechanistic, as you put it. Love and hate, human feelings and emotion, they’re all the same God-given illusion. It’s what convinces us that we’re here and that we count for something in this universe. When we don’t. Not for a second. Everything we feel and that we think—it’s all the same cosmic joke. You should know that more than most people, Mr. Maugham. You’ve been playing God and inflicting cosmic jokes on your characters for sixty years.”

  “I’d no idea you were a philosopher, Mr. Wolf.”

  “I’m a German, Mr. Maugham. For us, philosophy is a way of life.”

  I’d finished my dinner and now I asked him to show me the garden, and he took his pipe and I my cigarettes down to the grotto by the swimming pool, where there was a large Chinese bronze gong that sounded once a day to announce the cocktail hour. I’d missed that, of course, but Maugham had thoughtfully asked Ernest to prepare me a jug of cold gimlets and while we sat there, we talked and I drank myself into a slightly better mood. Or so I thought.

  “One of the disadvantages to playing G-God,” said Maugham, “is that I notice much more than most people. God is merely all-seeing. But I have other senses, too, and while my hearing may not be as good as it was, I can still detect a certain weltschmerz in your voice and manner that was not there before. Which is saying something, I can tell you. At the best of times you’re just bone dry. But tonight you make Heinrich Heine sound positively full of the joys of spring. So then. It’s not over, is it? With this man Hebel, I mean. It was kind of you to pretend it was, but there’s something else he’s got for sale. Something bigger than that photograph, I can tell.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Thank you for sparing the boys,” he said. “That was decent of you. They do worry so. But I think you’d better tell me now, don’t you?”

  “Yes, sir.” I lit another cigarette. “It has to do with your friend Guy Burgess, again.”

  “He’s not my friend, let’s make that quite clear now, shall we? The man is an absolute scoundrel.”

  “Clear. Well, it seems that after he and his fellow spy, Donald Maclean, escaped from England in nineteen fifty-one, they traveled by boat to Saint-Malo, where they were met by KGB officers and then driven south to Bordeaux. There they boarded a Soviet freighter bound for Leningrad. According to Hebel, that’s a voyage of several days, during which time they were debriefed, at length and separately, by KGB case officers as there was still some suspicion that the British had been complicit in the escape of these two traitors. Anyway, that debriefing was recorded on tape and it’s one of these tapes that Hebel’s now offering for sale. The unexpurgated confessions of Guy Burgess, is how Hebel described it to me. This is just one tape, but there are others being offered as part of the deal.”

  “Good God,” said Maugham. “Dynamite, in other words. Absolute dynamite. The man was a Russian spy at the heart of MI5 for two decades. There’s no telling what he knows.”

  “I think that’s the point of the tape. He is telling. All of it. I haven’t heard the tape but I’m to bring a copy here to you tomorrow, after it comes into my possession. He’s even lending you the tape recorder to play it on.”

  “But what’s this tape got to do with me, Walter? I haven’t seen Guy Burgess in almost twenty years.”

  “Look, this is as much as I know about it, sir. Apparently, Guy Burgess is a drunk and his conversation on the tape—which was described to me as uncensored and wide ranging—includes the allegations that the British suspected he was a spy for years but let him go in order not to compromise relations with the Americans; that he was here for an orgy at the Villa Mauresque, in nineteen thirty-seven. And that immediately following this, Burgess joined the BBC and then MI6. It seems as if the photograph was just the lure to get you to bite. As a way of involving you.”

  “If any of this is true, how on earth did Hebel come to be in possession of this tape? And what the fuck does he want me to do about it? I’m not in the service anymore.”

  “Look, without hearing the tape, my opinion is this: The whole thing has been cooked up by the Russians to blackmail the British secret service using Burgess and you as cutouts. You’re the back door to MI6 and MI5.”

  “Story of my life,” muttered Maugham.

  “Harold Heinz Hebel is possibly working for Soviet intelligence. The GRU. The KGB. Who knows which service? But it has to be a strong possibility that he came by this tape because the Russians gave it to him. He tells me he wants money for the tape or else he’ll send it to the New York Times.”

  “How much money does he want?”

  “Two hundred thousand dollars.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “I expect Hebel thinks you are best placed to pay the blackmail money yourself and then persuade—not to say blackmail—the British to pay you that money back. There’s Hebel’s security to think about, too. It’s one thing blackmailing the British down here on the French Riviera. It would be something else to try it in London.”

  “Could the Russians really be in it for the money? Nothing else?”

  “I don’t know. Look, this isn’t supposed to be a joke, but the opportunities for the USSR to trade with capitalist countries for some much needed foreign currency are limited. It just might be that extortion is their best export right now.”

  “And who better to extort money from than the British security services?” said Maugham. “It’s like something out of a novel by Jo
hn Buchan. Yes. I may not be in the security service loop anymore, but undeniably the last few years have been an intelligence disaster for my country. Richard Hannay may save the day for queen and country, but there are plenty of others who have managed to comprehensively fuck it up: Alan May, Burgess and Maclean, and the fellow now serving fourteen years in prison for handing all our atomic secrets over to the Russians—Klaus Fuchs. By all accounts, the American FBI thinks the British security services are a contradiction in terms, a laughingstock, and they’re probably not wrong. A lot has changed since my own service in nineteen seventeen. We were good then. Formidable. Back then boys went up to Cambridge from their public schools to learn how to be lawyers and civil servants, not Russian spies. Undoubtedly the British government would indeed prefer to keep all of this very quiet. Especially now there’s a possibility of our two countries renewing their cooperation on atomic research. And while there’s no danger of any of the British newspapers being permitted to publish any of these revelations, American papers are a lot harder to control. Two hundred thousand is probably cheap next to the price of what it’s costing Britain to develop an atomic bomb on its own account. Having said that, two hundred thousand is a lot of money for me. A hell of a lot.” He sighed. “Suppose I stump up the cash and the British refuse to reimburse me? What then? Some of these Whitehall people are very tight with money, you know. I mean, really stingy.”

  “Then you send it to the New York Times yourself.”

  “Would that make me a traitor? I don’t know.”

  “I’d say a good lawyer might convincingly argue that you bought the tape to protect the interests of your country. But that your country let you down.”

  “Yes, there is that argument, I suppose.”

  I shrugged. “Wait and hear the tape. Who knows? Maybe you’ll think it’s someone else’s problem after you’ve listened to it.”