the One from the Other (2006)

by Kerr, Philip - Bernie Gunther 04

An old man, as thin as a pipe cleaner, wearing pince-nez and a black homburg, supplied an answer. “They’re arresting someone,” he said. “Don’t know who, though.”

  I nodded vaguely and then edged away, certain that it was me they were probably after. After the scene at the cemetery there could be little doubt about it. I saw no point in looking for another hotel, either. If they were looking for Eric Gruen, the other hotels and pensions would be the first places they would check. Then the railway stations, the bus stations, and the airport. A wind was getting up. The snow in my face felt like a case of frozen chicken pox. Hurrying through the darkened streets, hunted and with no place to go, I felt like Peter Lorre in M. As if I really had murdered two women. Friendless, harried, desperate, and cold. But at least I had money. I had plenty of money. With money the situation might yet be rescued.

  I walked across Karlsplatz and the Ring. On Schwarzenberg Strasse I stepped into a Hungarian bar called Czardasfurstin to figure out my next move. There was a band with a zither. I ordered coffee and cake and tried to think through the sentimental, melancholy music. I realized I needed to find somewhere I could stay the night, no questions asked. And I told myself there was only one place I knew where a bed could be had as easily as coffee and cake. A place where money was all that mattered. I was taking a bit of a risk going back there after only a couple of years. But I hadn’t much choice. For me, risk was now something unavoidable, like old age—if I was lucky—and death, if I wasn’t. I went to the Oriental, on Petersplatz.

  With its dimly lighted booths, scantily clad girls, sarcastic orchestra, pimps, and prostitutes, the Oriental was strongly reminiscent of some of the old clubs I’d known in Berlin during the decadent dog days of the Weimar Republic. It was said that the Oriental had been a great favorite with Vienna’s Nazi Bonzen—the bigwigs who ran the city. Now it was a favorite with black-marketeers and Vienna’s burgeoning intelligence community. As well as the Egyptian Night Cabaret—an excuse for a lot of girls to dress like slave girls, which is to say they wore very little at all—there was a casino. Where there is a casino there is always plenty of easy money. And where there is easy money there are snappers. When I had last been there the girls had been amateurs—widows and orphans doing it for cigarettes and chocolate, or just to make ends meet. I’d had a thing with a girl there. I couldn’t remember her name. Things had changed a lot since 1947. The girls in the Oriental were hard-faced professionals who were interested only in one thing: cash. To that extent, only the atmosphere seemed authentically oriental.

  I stepped down a curving stairway into the club, where the orchestra was playing some American tunes, such as “Time Out for Tears” and “I Want to Cry.” They must have heard I was coming. American servicemen were not allowed in the Oriental, but, of course, out of uniform and with plenty of money in their pockets, it was hard to keep them out. Which was why, from time to time, the place got raided by the IP. But usually not until much later on, by which time I hoped I would be gone. I sat down in a booth, ordered a bottle of cognac, some eggs, and a packet of Luckies and, confident that very soon I would find a bed for the night, I tried to make some sense of everything that had occurred that day. Of everything that had happened to me since my arrival in Vienna. And even earlier than that.

  It wasn’t easy. But as far as I was able to determine, I had been set up as the prime suspect in two murders, most probably by the CIA. The American with the green car described by Frau Warzok’s neighbor could only have been Major Jacobs. But as to the true identity of the woman who had come to see me in my offices in Munich, purporting to be Frau Warzok, I had no idea. The real Frau Warzok was dead, murdered by Jacobs, or some other agent of the CIA. Very likely I had been given her address in order that I could be implicated in her murder. The same reason I had been given Vera Messmann’s address by Eric Gruen. Which meant that he and Henkell and Jacobs were all in it together. Whatever it was.

  The cognac arrived with my cigarettes. I poured myself a glass and lit a cigarette. Already there were several girls gathered at the bar who were looking my way. I wondered if there was a pecking order, or if, as at a taxi stand, it would be whoever was next in line. I felt like a piece of fish in an alley full of cats. The band struck up with “Be a Clown,” which also seemed appropriate. I wasn’t much of a detective, that was certain at least. Detectives were supposed to notice things. Clowns, on the other hand, were supposed to be easily tricked, and to take the fall for the laughs. I had that part down pat. Back at the bar, two of the snappers were arguing. I supposed it was about which of them would have the dubious honor of picking me up. I hoped it would be the redhead. She looked like she had some life in her, and life was something I badly needed to be around. Because the more I thought about my situation, the more I wanted to blow my brains out. If I had owned a gun I might have considered it more seriously. Instead, I did some more thinking about the spot I was in, and how I had got there.

  If the fake Britta Warzok had been involved with Henkell, Gruen, and Jacobs from the very beginning, then there was a strong possibility that it had been them who had arranged for me to lose a finger and end up in hospital under Henkell’s care. The men who’d beaten me up had driven me to his hospital, hadn’t they? And Henkell himself had found me in the doorway. The handkerchief I had used to stanch the blood had ended up at the scene of the real Britta Warzok’s murder. Along with my business card. That was neat. And losing half my finger had been important. I could see that now. Without that I could hardly have passed as Eric Gruen. Of course, I hadn’t seen the physical similarity between myself and Gruen until after he had shaved off his beard. But they must have known. Probably as early as the day Jacobs had turned up at my hotel in Dachau. Hadn’t he said something then about me reminding him of someone? Was that when the idea had come to him? The idea of passing me off as Eric Gruen? So that the real Eric Gruen could go and be someone else? It was an idea that stood a better chance of success, of course, if someone called Eric Gruen was under arrest for war crimes. Whatever these war crimes were. A massacre of prisoners of war? Or something even worse. Something medical perhaps. Something sufficiently heinous that Jacobs would have known that war crimes investigators of every political shade and religious creed would not have rested until they had Dr. Eric Gruen in custody. No wonder people like Bekemeier and Elizabeth Gruen’s servants had been surprised to see me back in Vienna again. And to think I had actually volunteered for it all. That was really the clever part, the way they had let me make all the running. With a little help from Engelbertina, of course. No wonder I hadn’t realized what was happening with her there to kick sand in my eyes. To distract me with that fabulous body of hers. If I hadn’t thought of the idea of impersonating Eric Gruen, she would probably have suggested it herself. And yet they could hardly have predicted the death of Gruen’s mother. Unless someone had helped the old woman on her way. Was it possible Gruen had counseled the death of his own mother? Why not? There was no love lost between mother and son. Both Bekemeier and Medgyessy had mentioned the suddenness of the old woman’s death. Jacobs must have killed her, too. Or had someone kill her. Someone from the CIA or the ODESSA perhaps. But I still didn’t quite see why Vera Messmann and the real Britta Warzok had been killed.

  One thing was quite clear at any rate. I had been a damn fool. But what a lot of trouble they had taken. I felt like a very small picture by an old master, surrounded by an enormous and ornate gilt frame—the kind of frame that is supposed to accentuate the importance of the picture. Framed. The word seemed hardly adequate for the Byzantine conspiracy that had enveloped me. I didn’t feel like a stooge so much as all three at once, rolled into one pitiful idiot whose face deserved to have been slapped and slapped again. I was the paw of the stupidest cat that ever sat beside a fire and a monkey and a handful of hot chestnuts.

  “May I sit down?”

  I looked up and realized that the redhead had won. She looked a little flushed, as if the competition for the pleasure of my compa
ny had been keen. Half standing, which was the way I was feeling, I smiled and then indicated the seat on the opposite side of my table. “Please,” I said. “Be my guest.”

  “That’s what I’m here for,” she said, bending sinuously into the booth. Hers was a better sinuous bend than anything that was happening on the Oriental’s pagodalike stage. “My name is Lilly. What’s yours?”

  I almost laughed. My own Lilly Marlene. It was typical of a snapper to give herself a fancy name. There were times when I thought the only reason girls went walking a line was so they could give themselves a new Johanna. “Eric,” I said. “Would you like a drink, Lilly?” I beckoned the waiter toward me. He had Hindenburg’s mustache, Hitler’s blue eyes, and Adenauer’s personality. It was like being served by fifty years of German history. Lilly looked at the man with disdain.

  “He’s already got a bottle, right?” The waiter nodded. “Then just bring another glass. And a brown bowl. Yes, a brown bowl.” The waiter nodded and went away without a word.

  “You’re drinking coffee?” I said.

  “I might have a small glass of cognac, but so long as you’ve ordered a bottle, I can drink what I like,” she said. “That’s the rule.” She smiled. “You don’t mind, do you? Saves you a little money. Nothing wrong with that, eh?”

  “Nothing wrong with that at all,” I said.

  “Besides, it’s been a long day. During the day I work in a shoe shop.”

  “Which one?”

  “I couldn’t tell you that,” she said. “You might come along and drop me in it.”

  “I’d have to drop myself in it at the same time,” I said.

  “True,” she said. “But it’s best you don’t know. Imagine the shock if you saw the real me, fetching shoes and measuring feet.”

  She helped herself to one of my cigarettes, and while I put a match to it, I got a better look at her. Her face had just a few freckles around the nose, which was, perhaps, just a little too pointed. It made her seem sharp and speculating, which, of course, she probably was. Her eyes were a green shade of avarice. The teeth were small and very white with the bottom jaw just a little too prominent. With just the one expression so far, she looked like one of those Sonneberg dolls with the porcelain face and the kind of underwear that’s played with every day.

  My eggs arrived with her coffee—a bowl of half coffee, half milk. While I ate, she talked about herself and smoked, and sipped her coffee, and had a little cognac. “I haven’t seen you here before,” she observed.

  “It’s been a while,” I said. “I’ve been living in Munich.”

  “I’d like to live in Munich,” she said. “Somewhere farther west than Vienna, anyway. Somewhere there aren’t any Ivans around.”

  “You think the Amis are any better?”

  “Don’t you?”

  I let that one go. She didn’t want to hear my opinions of the Americans. “What do you say we go back to your place?”

  “Hey, quit stealing my lines,” she said. “I’m supposed to make the running, not you?”

  “Sorry.”

  “What’s your hurry, anyway?”

  “I’ve been on my shoes all day,” I said. “You should know what that’s like.”

  She tapped the cognac bottle with a fingernail as big as a paper knife. “This isn’t herbal tea you’re drinking here, Eric,” she said, sternly. “This is more of a put-you-down than a pick-me-up.”

  “I know, but it takes the edge off the ax I’ve been grinding for the last few hours.”

  “Oh? Against who?”

  “Me.”

  “Like that, huh?”

  I pushed my hand across the table and lifted it a little to let her see the hundred-schilling note that was under my palm. “I need a bit of looking after, that’s all. Nothing weird. Fact is, that’ll be the easiest hundred you ever put in your brassiere.”

  She regarded the hundred as she might have regarded a cannibal’s offer of a free lunch. “You need a hotel, mister,” she said. “Not a girl.”

  “I don’t like hotels,” I said. “Hotels are full of lonely strangers. People sitting alone in their rooms waiting until it’s time to go home. I don’t want that. I just need somewhere to stay until tomorrow morning.”

  She covered my hand with hers. “What the hell?” she said. “I could use an early night.”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Lilly’s apartment was across the Danube in the Second District, close to the Diana Baths, on Upper Danube Strasse. It was small but comfortable, and I enjoyed a relatively peaceful night’s sleep with Lilly that was broken only by the sound of a barge blowing its horn as it went south along the canal, toward the river. In the morning she seemed both surprised and pleased that she hadn’t had to satisfy anything other than my appetite for breakfast.

  “Well, that’s a first,” she said, making us some coffee. “I must be losing my touch. Either that, mister, or you’re keeping it nice and warm for the boys.”

  “Neither,” I said. “And how would you like to make another hundred?”

  A little less obdurate by day than by night, she agreed with alacrity. She wasn’t a bad sort of girl. Not really. Her parents had been killed in 1944, when she was just fifteen years old, and everything she had she’d worked for herself. It was a common enough story, including her being raped by a couple of Ivans. A good-looking girl, she knew she had been lucky it had been just two Ivans. There were women I knew in Berlin who had been raped as many as fifty or sixty times during the first months of the occupation. I liked her. I liked the way she didn’t complain. And I liked the way she didn’t ask too many questions. She was bright enough to know I was probably hiding from the police, and bright enough not to ask why.

  On her way to work—the shoe shop was Fortschritt, on Kärntnerstrasse—she showed me a barber’s shop where I could get a shave, as I had been obliged to leave my razor and everything that came with it back at the hotel. I took the holdall with me. I liked Lilly. But I didn’t trust her not to steal twenty-five thousand Austrian schillings. I had a shave and a haircut. And, at a men’s store inside the Ring, I bought a clean shirt, some underwear, some socks, and a pair of boots. It was important for me to look respectable. I was going to the Russian Kommandatura, in what used to be the city’s Board of Education, with the aim of examining their files on wanted war criminals. As someone who had been in the SS, who had escaped from a Russian POW transport, and killed a Russian soldier—not to mention more than two dozen NKVD—I was taking a considerable risk entering the Kommandatura at all. But it was a risk I calculated was slightly less than the risk of carrying out a similar inquiry at the IP headquarters. Besides, I spoke fluent Russian, knew the name of an important colonel of MVD, and was still possessed of Inspector Strauss’s business card. And if all else failed, I would try bribery. In my experience, all Russians in Vienna and, in Berlin for that matter, were open to bribery.

  The Palace of Justice, on Schmerlingplatz, in the Eighth District, was the meeting place for Vienna’s Inter-Allied Command, and the headquarters of the International Patrol. The flags of all four nations flew in front of this imposing building, with the flag of the nation that had temporary police control of the city—in this instance, the French—flying on top. Opposite the Palace of Justice stood the Russian Kommandatura, easily identifiable by the communist slogans and a large illuminated red star that lent the snow in front of the building a wet, pinkish hue. I walked into a grand entrance hall and asked one of the Red Army guards for the office responsible for the investigation of war crimes. Under his forage cap was a scar on his forehead that went down right to the skull, as if his head had once been scratched by something more lethal than a fingernail. Surprised to be spoken to in Russian and so politely, too, he directed me to a room at the top of the building and, with my heart in my mouth, I mounted the huge stone steps.

  Like all public buildings in Vienna, the Board of Education had been built at a time when the Emperor Franz Josef had ruled an empire comprising
51 million souls and 675,000 square kilometers. There were just over 6 million people living in Austria in 1949, and the greatest European empire was long gone, but you wouldn’t have known that walking up the stairs of this imposing building. At the top was a wooden fingerpost sign, crudely painted with department names in Cyrillic. I followed the sign around the balustrade to the other side of the building, where I found the office I was looking for. The sign on a little wooden stand beside the door was in German, and it read: “SOVIET WAR CRIMES COMMISSION, AUSTRIA. For the investigation and examination of the misdeeds of the German fascist invaders and their accomplices in the monstrous atrocities and crimes of the German government.” Which seemed to describe it pretty well, all things considered.

  I knocked on the door and went into a small outer office. Through a glass wall I could see a large room with several freestanding book-cases and about a dozen filing cabinets. On the wall of the office was a large picture of Stalin, and a smaller one of a plump-looking man in glasses who might have been Beria, the head of the Soviet secret police. A threadbare Soviet flag hung limply from a scout-size flagpole. Arranged along the wall behind the door was a montage of photographs featuring Hitler, a Nazi rally at Nuremberg, liberated concentration camps, piles of dead Jewish bodies, the Nuremberg war trial, and several convicted war criminals actually standing on the trap door of the gallows. It looked as clear a piece of inductive reasoning as you could have found outside a textbook on the general principles of logic. In the outer office, a thin, severe-looking woman wearing a uniform looked up from what she was typing and prepared to treat me like the fascist invader I had of course been. She had sad, hollow eyes, a spectacularly broken nose, a fringe of red hair, a sulky mouth, and cheekbones as high as the zygomatic bones on a Jolly Roger. The shoulder boards on her uniform were blue, which meant she was MVD. I wondered what she would have made of the Federal Republic’s Amnesty Law. Politely, in quite good German, she asked me my business. I handed her Inspector Strauss’s business card and, as if I had been auditioning for a part in a play by Chekhov, spoke to her in my best velikorruskij.