by Vicki Baum
Kringelein, too, in Room No. 70, heard it and woke up. He had been dreaming of Grusinskaya. She had come to him in the office and put before him some unpaid accounts. He was beginning to feel at home, this Otto Kringelein, this bookkeeper from Fredersdorf, this sufferer from claustrophobia, who wanted to seize one hour of crowded life before he died. His hunger was infinite, but he could not stand very much. His weak body many a time got the better of him during these days and forced him to retreat from the hustle and bustle to his bedroom. Kringelein began to hate his ailments, although without them he would never have made his escape from Fredersdorf. He had bought himself some medicine—Hundt’s Elixir. From time to time he takes a sip, hoping for the best. It has a bitter taste of cinnamon, and he gulps it down and even feels better afterward.
He holds out his cold fingers in the darkness and begins on a calculation. It was disconcerting that his fingers always seemed to start the process of dying while he was asleep. He seemed to see numerals with bent heads prowling round his room, till at last he rose and turned on the light. Unfortunately, this lifelong habit of the impecunious Kringelein would not desert him now that he was a man of wealth. He could not help reckoning up numbers. Numbers were always up to mischief in his head. They formed themselves into columns one below the other and added and subtracted themselves whether he wanted them to or not. Kringelein had a little notebook bound in shiny black oilcloth, which he had brought with him from Fredersdorf, and he sat at it for hours at a time. He entered his expenses in it, the reckless expenses of a man who was learning to enjoy life and spending a month’s salary in two days. Sometimes he was so dizzy that all four walls with their tulip wallpaper seemed to fall in upon him. Sometimes he was happy, not entirely happy nor as he imagined the rich being happy, but all the same, happy. Sometimes, again, he sat on the edge of his bed and thought of his approaching death. He thought of it hard and with horror, while his ears went cold and he blinked in an anguish of the heart. In spite of that he couldn’t imagine what it would be like. He hoped that it would be much the same as going under anesthesia, except that you came to again after anesthesia and found yourself in a bad way and in agonizing pain—blue pain, Kringelein had called it in his own mind—and also that all those familiar tortures were now to be borne beforehand, not afterwards. When he had thought as far as this, he began to shudder. Yes, Kringelein actually shuddered at the thought of death, although he could not form a clear idea of it.
There was a good deal of sleeplessness behind the locked double doors of the sleeping hotel. Doctor Otternschlag, indeed, about this time of the night laid a little hypodermic syringe down on his washstand and, throwing himself on his bed, floated away on the light clouds of a morphine trance. Witte, the conductor, who had Room No. 221 in the left wing, could not sleep either. Old people sleep so little. His room was the counterpart of Doctor Otternschlag’s. There, too, the water gurgled in the wall and the elevator rumbled up and down. It was little better than a servant’s room. He was sitting at his window, pressing his forehead against the windowpane and staring out at the blank wall opposite. Fragments of a Beethoven symphony were going through his head. He had never conducted it. He heard Bach—the tremendous “Crucify Him” from the St. Matthew Passion. I have wasted all my life, thought old Witte, and all the never-sung music of his life formed a bitter lump in his throat and he gulped it down. There was the rehearsal for the ballet at half-past eight in the morning. He would sit at the piano and play the same old march to the convolutions of the ballet, always the same Spring Waltz and Mazurka and Bacchanal. He ought to have left Elisaveta while there was still time, he thought. Now it was too late. Elisaveta had become an old woman, and one could not leave her now. They would have to see it through with her for the few years that remained . . .
Elisaveta Alexandrovna Grusinskaya could not sleep either. In the depth of night she heard the swift and never-ceasing flight of time. There was a two-fold ticking in the dark room—from a bronze clock on the desk and from her wristwatch on the bedside table. Each told the flight of the seconds, and yet one ticked faster than the other. It made her heart pound to listen to them. She turned on the light and got out of bed, put her feet into her worn slippers and went to the mirror. The passage of time meets her there—there most of all. It meets her too in her press notices, in the shocking rudeness of the newspapers, in the success of the ugly and clumsy dancers that were now in fashion, in the losses on her tours, in the feeble applause, in the vulgar way her manager, Meyerheim, talked—everywhere, everywhere, she saw the passage of time. The years she had danced away were in her tired ankles, in the shortness of breath that overcomes her after thirty-two tours of classical dances, and also in her blood that now often pulses in her neck and flushes her cheeks. It was hot in her room, though the French window onto the balcony was wide open. Outside the cars hoot all night long. Grusinskaya took her pearls out of the small suitcase, two handfuls of cool pearls, and put her face down to them. In vain. Her eyelids were still hot and still smarted from the makeup and the footlights; her thoughts still troubled her, and the clock and the watch still raced on. Grusinskaya wore a rubber bandage under her chin, her hands and lips were smeared with ointment. The sight of herself in the mirror was so hateful that she quickly turned out the light. In the darkness she swallowed a Veronal tablet and began to weep the hot tears of a lonely and passionate woman; then the drug took hold, and at last she fell asleep.
Just outside someone got out of the elevator. It might have been the young man from Nice. Grusinskaya took him along into her Veronal dream. He was in Room No. 69 and he was the handsomest man she had ever seen . . .
•
He whistled softly on his way to his room, not unpleasantly, happily. In his room he was careful to make no noise, and once in his pajamas and smart blue leather slippers, he was more silent than ever. There was something of the wildcat in this handsome young man. Whenever he passed through the Lobby it was as if a window of sunshine were opened in a cold room. He was a marvelous dancer, cool and yet passionate. There were always flowers in his room. He loved them and their scent. When he was alone he stroked and even licked their petals—like an animal. He was quick to follow girls in the street. Sometimes he would merely look at them with pleasure, sometimes he would speak to them, and sometimes he would go home with them or take them to a second-rate hotel. Next morning the hall porter would smile, when with a feline and innocent air he returned to the elegant and more or less irreproachable Lobby of the Grand Hotel and asked for his key. Sometimes too he got drunk, but in so amiable and high-spirited a fashion that no one could take it amiss. In the mornings it was not very pleasant to have the room beneath his, for then he went through his physical exercises, and soft thuds came at regular intervals through the ceiling. He wore smart bow ties and low-cut waistcoats. His clothes sat as easily on his muscular body as the hide on a pedigree animal. Sometimes he went off in his little four-seater and nothing more was seen of him for a couple of days. For hours together he pottered about in automobile showrooms, sticking his head under the hoods of cars, breathing in gasoline fumes, lubricating oil, and the smell of the warmed-up engine, tapping the chassis, stroking the enamel, the leather and the upholstery, blue, red or beige. If he was left alone, perhaps he would lick this too with his tongue. He bought laces from street vendors, cigarette lighters that would not light, little birds of India rubber and countless boxes of matches. Suddenly a longing for horses would come over him. Then he got up at six, went by bus to the riding school and inhaled with delight the scent of sawdust, saddlery, stable manure and sweat. If an animal took his fancy, he rode in the Tiergarten, breathing his fill of the gray early mist of a March morning among the trees, and returned well satisfied to the hotel. He had been found before now in the kitchen courtyard behind the service stairs standing beside a gutter full of slops and refuse and staring up to the top of the five stories where the antenna hung beneath the colorless sky. Possibly he had designs on the one pretty cham
bermaid in the hotel. Her morals were questionable and she had already been given notice. He made many friends in the hotel, for he was always ready to oblige with a postage-stamp, to give advice about long-distance flights, to take an old lady out in his car, or to make a fourth at bridge, and he was well informed as to the resources of the hotel cellar. He wore a signet ring of lapis lazuli on his right forefinger with the Gaigern crest, a falcon over wavy lines. At night as he lay in bed he would speak in Bavarian dialect to his pillow. “Good evening, old friend,” he would say. “Yes, you are good. You are my dear old bed. You are fine!” He was never long in falling asleep and never disturbed his neighbors by snoring, gargling or throwing his boots around. His chauffeur said, down in the servants’ quarters, that the Baron was quite a good fellow, but a bit simple. But even a Baron Gaigern sleeps behind double doors and even he has his secrets and hidden motives . . .
“No other news then?” he asked his chauffeur. He was sitting naked on the carpet in the middle of his room and massaging his legs. He had a magnificent body, and the almost excessively developed chest of a boxer. The skin of his shoulders and legs was a light tan. The only part of him that was not tanned was the part between his thighs and his trunk, which was covered in summer by his shorts. “Is that all you have to say?”
“Quite enough, too,” replied the chauffeur. He was reclining on the couch with its imitation Kelim rug, a cigarette hung from his underlip and he was smoking. “Do you suppose they will wait on and on in Amsterdam for the business? Schalhorn has paid out five thousand already. Do you suppose that will go on forever? Emmy’s been lying low in Springe for the last month, ready to take over the goods. In Paris it was a washout. At Nice it was a washout. And if you don’t bring it off today it will be a washout here too. If Schalhorn gets stuck with the five thousand, he’ll—”
“Is Schalhorn the boss?” asked the Baron, sprinkling eau de cologne into the palms of his hands.
“A boss should be able to do the job. That’s what I say,” grumbled the chauffeur.
“When the time comes, certainly. It doesn’t suit me to work the way you and Schalhorn do. The two of you are always messing things up. I’ve never yet messed anything up and Schalhorn has never yet been let down. If Emmy is getting nervous in Springe, she’s no use to me, and I told her as much last time. If she can’t keep quiet in her art workshop and let Möhl get on with his copies of antique settings—”
“We don’t care a damn for your copies of antiques. Get hold of the pearls first. Then you can get on with your antiques. All that’s only one of your notions. It looked all right at first. The pearls are worth five hundred thousand. True enough. And after reckoning two months’ expenses there’ll still be something left. It may be true that we could get rid of them better in antique settings. Good. Granted. Meanwhile Möhl stays in Springe making copies of your grandmother’s jewelry, Emmy’s going crazy, and Schalhorn’s going crazy. Just don’t depend on that woman, I tell you. If she loses patience she might play you a dirty trick. So what’s to be done? When are you going to leave off amusing yourself and get down to business once more?”
“You’re getting hungry again, are you? You’ve forgotten the twenty-two thousand you had from Nice and now you are turning nasty, are you,” said the Baron, still in tolerably good humor; he had now put on black silk socks with white silk garters and the smart patent-leather shoes which he wore to dance in. Otherwise he was still naked.
There was something about this easy, careless nakedness that irritated the chauffeur. Perhaps it was the relaxed drop of the shoulders or the supple play of ribs beneath the skin as they distended in breathing. He spat the end of his cigarette into the middle of the room and stood up.
“I don’t mind telling you,” he said, leaning over the table, “we’re fed up with you. You can’t take anything seriously, I tell you. It isn’t in you, and no good will ever come out of you. Whether it’s cards or betting or relieving an old dame of two and twenty thousand or collaring pearls worth five hundred thousand—it’s bloody well all one to you. But there’s a difference all the same, and a man who doesn’t know when it’s time to be serious isn’t fit to be boss. And if you won’t get on with it of your own accord, then you’ll be made to. See?”
“Down,” said Gaigern amiably and quietly put the chauffeur’s fist aside with a little jujitsu grip. “I don’t need your help to get on with it. All you have to do is to see to our alibi tonight. Then you can start for Springe at 12:28 with the pearls. At 8:16 tomorrow morning you’ll be back again. I’ll ring for you at 9:00—at which time you’ll be in your bed. Then we’ll invite someone to come for a drive. If you can’t keep a straight face during the brouhaha that’ll break out in the hotel tomorrow morning, I’ll have you arrested. I’ve asked you before if you had any further news?”
The chauffeur put his hand back in his pocket. There was a red mark round the wrist. It looked as if he weren’t going to answer, but then he did. “She starts for the theater every evening now at half-past six, because she’s nervous,” he grumbled, subdued in spite of himself. “After the performance there’s a farewell supper at the French Embassy. It’ll be over by two o’clock. Tomorrow at eleven she leaves for Prague, two days there and then to Vienna. I’d like to know how you’re going to get the pearls away from her between the performance and the supper and have it go off without a hitch. You couldn’t ask for better than that unlighted hole of a theater courtyard,” he added with an attempt to assert himself, but he did not look at the Baron who meanwhile was putting on his evening clothes.
“She’s not wearing the pearls any longer. She just leaves them in the hotel,” said Gaigern as he tied his black tie. “She said so, in fact, to some idiot of an interviewer. You can read it in the newspapers.”
“What? She just leaves them, she hasn’t even handed them over to be kept in the hotel safe? What? You can just go into her room and take them?”
“Pretty well,” said Baron Gaigern. “Now I want to rest a bit,” he said to his gaping accomplice. He saw the open mouth with its black and decayed teeth and a sudden fit of rage came over him at the thought of the kind of men he was mixed up with. The muscles of his neck contracted.
“Leave now,” was all he said. “Be at the main entrance with the car at eight.”
The chauffeur looked at Gaigern’s face and retreated meekly. He could not utter a word of all those he had on the tip of his tongue. He even picked the blue pajamas up off the floor with the servility of a valet, and concluded his report in a whisper. “The man in No. 70 is harmless. A wealthy eccentric who has come into a fortune and is throwing his money around.”
The Baron paid no further attention. The chauffeur passed through the double doors and superstitiously spat three times over his shoulder. Then he silently shut the door behind him.
Just before eight that evening the Baron made his appearance in the Lobby. He was in excellent form. He was wearing his blue raincoat over his dinner jacket and it never entered the head of Pilzheim, the hotel detective, that this engaging Apollo was industriously preparing an alibi.
Doctor Otternschlag, who was sitting in the Lobby with the exhausted Kringelein over coffee before they went together to see Grusinskaya, raised one stiff finger and pointed it straight at the Baron. “Look, Kringelein, there’s the sort of fellow one ought to be,” he said with envious mockery.
The Baron put a coin into the hand of pageboy No. 18. “My kind regards to your girl,” he said and stepped to the hall porter’s desk. Senf looked at him with alert though sleepless eyes. (It was now the third night and still he had to keep his anxiety to himself.)
“You’ve got my seat for the theater? Fifteen marks? Fine,” he said. “If anyone inquires for me, say I’m at the theater and after that, at the West End Club,” he said and turned to Count Rohna.
“Imagine whom I came across: Rutzov, that tall fellow, Rutzov! Wasn’t he with you and my brother in the 74th Uhlans? He’s in the car business now. You’re all
of you such competent fellows. It’s only I who am good for nothing, a lily of the field, eh? My chauffeur here yet, Senf?”
He took the warm air with him through the revolving door, and in the Lobby all eyes followed him with an indulgent smile. He got into his little four-seater and went off after his alibi. At half-past ten he even rang up the hotel from the club.
“Baron Gaigern speaking. Has anybody been to inquire for me? I’m speaking from the West End Club. I shall not be back before two, or even later. My chauffeur can go to bed.”
At the very moment that this voice on the telephone was establishing a gentlemanly and carefree alibi, Gaigern himself was clinging to the front façade of the Grand Hotel between two blocks of imitation sandstone. His position was not exactly a comfortable one, yet he enjoyed it. It filled him with the joy of the hunter, the fighter, and the rock climber. He had lightheartedly kept on his blue pajamas for the undertaking, and on his feet he had light chrome leather shoes such as boxers wear. Over these, in case of accidents, were woolen socks, a pair that he used for winter sports. They were a precaution against leaving undesired footprints. Gaigern was on his way from his own window to Grusinskaya’s room. He had just short of seven meters to go in all and he was now halfway there. The sham sandstone of the Grand Hotel was copied from the rough-hewn blocks of the Palazzo Pitti. It looked magnificent, and, as long as it did not break away, all was fine. Gaigern carefully embedded his toes in the recesses between the blocks. He had gloves on and was finding them a nuisance. Nor could he pull them off while he crawled like a beetle along the wall of the second story. “Damn,” he said as mortar and molding broke off and fell a floor lower down onto the zinc roof of a balcony. He felt his throat getting dry and he husbanded his breath like a runner on a cinder track. Once more he came to a halt, supported himself for a moment, risking his life on the toe of one foot, and then moved his rear leg half a meter farther on. He whistled softly. He was wound up to a high pitch now and so he whistled and kept a cool head. As to the pearls, the very reason he was there, no thought of them entered his head. After all he could have got hold of them in several other ways. He could have given Suzette a blow on the head when she left the theater at night with the case. He could have broken into Grusinskaya’s room at night. Or lastly, four steps farther along the passage, a skeleton key, and an innocent air if he were discovered in the wrong bedroom. But that was not his way. It was not his way at all. “Everyone must do as his nature bids,” as Gaigern had tried to explain to his confederates, that little band of crooks whom for two and a half years he had kept balanced on the verge of mutiny. “I don’t catch game in snares. I don’t go up mountains with the funicular. What I can’t take with my own hands I’ll do without.”