Where Dead Men Meet

by Mark Mills

  Back on terra firma, they let the sun dry them off. Luke fell almost at once into a deep, dreamless sleep. When he awoke, it was to see Pippi sitting cross-legged on the grass, watching him.

  “How long have I …?”

  “An hour,” she replied. “You were snoring.”

  “I don’t snore.”

  “And you don’t float. Is there anything else you don’t do that you do do?”

  He thought on it. “Yes, I never lick my plate clean when no one’s looking.”

  She laughed. “It wasn’t easy, but I left you some strudel.” She nodded at a tray on the grass behind him.

  “Is that tea?”

  “Coffee. Cold coffee.” She started to rise. “I’ll get you another one.”

  “Don’t worry, this will do.” It was lukewarm, and weak.

  “Tell me what happened with Kapitän Wilke.”

  The question caught him off guard. “I thought we weren’t going to talk about it until tomorrow.”

  “I need to know.”

  “I told you already. I fired at the car. It crashed and rolled over.”

  “You thought he was dead?”

  A dim warning bell sounded in his head. “I wasn’t sure.”

  “You didn’t check?”

  The bell got louder. “Obviously not, or he wouldn’t have ended up firing at us from the jetty.”

  “Why not?” she demanded.

  “It all happened so fast.”

  “You should have checked.”

  “And what? Finished him off?”

  “A man like that will kill again. You would have saved lives.”

  Was she really trying to make him feel bad for failing to execute Wilke in cold blood?

  “Pippi, listen to me. I couldn’t have done it. I’d just shot a man—no, a boy—right here in the chest.” He stabbed his finger against his sternum.

  “So? You’ve killed before.”

  “That was combat, from the air, at a distance. This was close up, in the middle of the street and in broad daylight.”

  “In self-defense.”

  “Yes, him or me. But it doesn’t make his face go away.” He hesitated. “I didn’t sleep last night because of that face.”

  She absorbed this information impassively. “I’m sorry it wasn’t Wilke’s face.”

  “So am I, but there it is.”

  It was his way of drawing a line under the conversation, but Pippi wasn’t finished yet.

  “I would have done it.”

  “Bully for you,” he said, his hackles rising.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Look it up in a dictionary.”

  “I want to know what it means.”

  “It means you were ready to throw your life away, and now you’re alive. Doesn’t that count for something?”

  “Not while he’s alive.”

  “So, after Zurich, go back to Germany and finish the job.”

  “I plan to.”

  “Then you’re a fool.”

  “You weren’t there,” said Pippi darkly. “I stood and watched it happen. I could have done something.”

  “Yes—made it worse. Got yourself killed. The others, too.”

  She shook her head. “No.”

  “For certain. And you’re twice a fool if you can’t see it.”

  “No one speaks to me like that.”

  “Well, maybe there’s the problem.”

  It was a cheap shot, and he regretted it until she replied, “I was starting to like you.”

  “Ouch. Lucky for me I have enough friends already.”

  Her face took on a sneer. “You’re good at this, aren’t you?”

  “I’ve had a lot of practice.”

  Pippi bundled up her clothes and got to her feet.

  “The question is, can you do it again?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Kill a man close up. Because you might have to.”

  He held her hard gaze. “I’m not sure.”

  “Well, I need to be. If you can’t, it changes things.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I think I can do it again if I have to.”

  “Good, because we don’t know what’s waiting for us in Zurich.”

  “There’s no guarantee Borodin will even show up.”

  “Oh, he’ll be there,” she said.

  He watched her make off toward the changing cubicles. It was easy to resent her for breaking the code of silence she herself had imposed, souring the playful mood of the past few hours in the process, but she was entitled to be swept away by the fervor of her feelings. He had never had to stand by and watch the one he loved being kicked to death before his eyes.

  What images haunted her while she lay in bed at night?

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  It occurred to Erwin only as the train was approaching the station at Kemmental. Rather than transferring to the lakeside branch line at Kreuzlingen, he could get off here and cut the corner to Seedorf on foot. It was a glorious day, and he had many hours to kill before nightfall.

  He walked east from the town, passing farms and orchards before leaving the lane and striking out across the patchwork of sun-drenched pastures and cornfields. He kept to a leisurely pace and even stopped to chat with a gang of farm laborers taking a break from the harvest and the heat in the shade of a tarpaulin slung between two hay carts.

  They were curious to know what he was doing out here in the middle of nowhere. And why the black eye and the split lip? Had he by any chance escaped from the asylum for the insane just over the hill at Münsterlingen? Because if so, he was heading straight back toward it and would be wise to turn around and make off the way he’d come. He laughed along with them, ascribing the wounds inflicted by Otto to a street brawl with some Nazi fanatics back home in Konstanz. It was the same explanation they had offered for Johan’s injuries when they took him to the hospital that night. The police had wanted to investigate the matter further, but Kapitän Wilke had, for obvious reasons, used his authority to ensure their story was allowed to stand unchallenged.

  Rested and watered, Erwin continued on his way, up and over a densely wooded rise. Beyond, the fields dipped gently down toward Münsterlingen: a straggle of low houses dwarfed by the mental asylum, which stood austere and forbidding on a promontory jutting out into the lake. He could make out Meersburg directly across the water, and to his left, Konstanz. He lit a cigarette and surveyed the scene of yesterday’s disaster, giving thanks for his good fortune.

  Twenty-four hours ago, he had been lying trussed up like a pig for slaughter, in the darkness of that stinking compartment at the back of the motor launch. He wouldn’t have been surprised if Pippi had followed through on Otto’s threat and pitched him over the side, tied to the anchor, once the professor and his family were safely delivered. But he had seized his moment and turned the tables on them all, winning favor with the British major, trading the truth about Hamilton for a train ticket, some Swiss francs, a pack of cigarettes, and the key to the motor launch.

  He had no reason to think the boat wouldn’t be where they left it—the Swiss were notoriously law-abiding—but he still felt a rush of relief when, after working his way south along the shore, he came across it. The sight of it tied up at the remote landing stage brought a smile to his lips.

  He fired up the motor and checked the fuel gauge. Everything was in order. Herr Salzmann would get his boat back—a little later than arranged, admittedly, but that could be smoothed over easily enough.

  As he stretched out in the sunshine on the bench seat in the stern, he began to believe that his life could actually be repaired. Like a vase that had been broken and then carefully glued back together, the finished product wouldn’t be perfect, but it would be presentable enough.

  Pippi and Otto we
re accomplices to the killing of a German official, and not just any official—an agent of the Abwehr. Returning to Germany would mean certain death for them both. He would have to explain away their sudden departure to friends and other associates, but with a little thought he could hatch a convincing story. His chief cause for concern was Kapitän Wilke, who would be wanting blood after yesterday’s disaster. It would take a lot to appease him. In fact, it was probably best to avoid him for a while. Let the dust settle. Wilke was the sort of man who, when enraged, was apt to lash out at anything within reach.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The Palace Hotel in Luzern lived up to its name. Filling a long stretch of the lakeside promenade, it was six or seven floors of high Victorian pomp, with an elaborately carved facade and an entrance lobby that was a feast of swirling marble.

  Pippi was set on staying there, and although Luke offered a few token words of caution about the cost, he was thinking of a hot bath and a cold beer, preferably taken together. There were no twin rooms with a lake view available, but there was a suite. The rate was staggering.

  “Hang the expense,” Pippi said to the concierge. “We could die tomorrow.” A line intended for Luke’s ears.

  “Not before settling your bill, I hope,” the concierge replied, his face so stony straight that they couldn’t be sure he was joking.

  Upstairs, they found themselves in a drawing room large enough to swallow two sofas, a dining table, and a satinwood grand piano with no trouble. The two spacious bedrooms came with en suite bathrooms done out in pale gray marble. The view from the balcony was spectacular. Across the lake, beyond the soft swell of the hills, the humped and jagged profile of a lone mountain stood out against the blue sweep of sky.

  “That’s Pilatus,” said Pippi. “I’ve been up there.”

  “Really?”

  “There’s a special train that goes to the top.” She had been ten years old at the time, on holiday with her parents and her brothers. “We stayed here at the Palace Hotel.”

  “Under happier circumstances.”

  “Not by much,” she replied enigmatically.

  She could have elaborated, and he could have pressed her to. That neither did was an indication of their current level of rapport. The drive from Interlaken had passed in strained silence, punctuated by an occasional polite exchange about the striking beauty of the scenery they were passing through. No mention had been made of their earlier argument, no apology offered, no quarter given. Each waited for the other to make the first overture, and that showed no sign of happening anytime soon.

  They arranged to meet in the drawing room at seven thirty, dressed for dinner. Then they went their separate ways, Luke to a steaming bath and a cold glass of pilsner ordered from room service. The heat and the alcohol did for him, driving him to his big bed. When the alarm clock dragged him back to wakefulness an hour later, he found a note under his door. Pippi had gone for a stroll and would meet him downstairs.

  He found her seated at a table in the bar, although his eyes passed over her twice before he realized it was her.

  “You look magnificent.”

  She smiled up at him. “Thank you.”

  He hadn’t been there when she tried on the evening gown at the boutique, and it was immediately clear to him why she had bought it. The sapphire-blue silk was cut daringly low in front, rising to a halter neck that exposed her pale, delicate shoulders.

  “What was that?” he asked, pointing to an empty glass on the table in front of her.

  “A Tom Collins.”

  He ordered two more from the waiter.

  “How was your walk?”

  “I couldn’t go far in this,” she replied. “It reaches to the floor.”

  He could picture heads turning on the promenade: the admiring eyes of the men, the envious glances of the women.

  “I reserved us a good table on the terrace.”

  Some of the tension seemed to have left her, possibly helped on its way by the cocktail. When he asked about her last trip to Luzern, she spoke with engaging frankness about that family holiday and some of the other ones, then about the cloying privilege of her upbringing, and her father’s ham-fisted efforts to steer her into an early marriage with the terminally dim son of a business associate.

  Their union would have put the seal on a merger that had been brewing for a number of years: her father had the factories, the other man the transport network. The notion of signing away her life to a wealthy halfwit in order to drive up business was so utterly absurd to Pippi that she never once wavered in her refusal to go along with the plan, even when her mother—usually her ally against the three overbearing men of the household—was enlisted to lean on her.

  The only person to take her side was Margaret, her English nanny, whom the family had kept on past any obvious usefulness, because she had nowhere else to go.

  “So that’s where you get your English from.”

  “Margaret from Godalming,” said Pippi in an impeccable Home Counties accent. “It’s what my brothers and I called her, because that’s how she always introduced herself.”

  Margaret was a well of quiet wisdom, which she dispensed from her room on the top floor. She was canny enough to know that publicly siding with Pippi would jeopardize her own precarious position, so she spoke out against Pippi’s decision to study at Freiburg University (although it was Margaret herself who had suggested Freiburg over Munich, since it would allow Pippi to put some distance between herself and her family).

  The cooling of relations soon deepened into a sharp frostiness when her older brother decided to inform himself about Pippi’s new life in Freiburg. The first she or anyone else knew of his snooping was when he asked her over the dinner table at Christmastime if it was true she was consorting with a Jew.

  “Ask Father the same question. I believe most of the people he does business with are Jews.”

  “By ‘consorting,’ I meant ‘sleeping with.’”

  “I know what you meant, Rolf.”

  The battle lines had been drawn in the shocked silence that followed the revelation. Looking back, she could see that the schism was inevitable, not because her family was anti-Semitic—they had never shown such prejudices before—but because they were greedy. Hitler and his henchmen were set on a course that would soon see Jews struggling to hold on to their businesses. She hadn’t known this at the time, but her father and brothers had. They understood that there would be rich pickings—factories and other concerns—to be snapped up on the cheap by those close to the Nazi elite.

  What better way to prepare yourself for the moral dilemma ahead, to justify the gains you were set to make at the expense of the Jews, than by learning to demonize them ahead of time? It looked like racism, but it was far worse than that: avarice dressed up as racism—two ugly peas in the same rotten pod. And it left no place for an errant daughter’s whimsical attachment to a Jewish student at the university she was attending.

  “Whatever you think about Hitler,” she said, “he is a clever man. He knew who he had to buy, and he bought them with the money of the people he hates. That is genius. That is madness. That is why we must fight him.”

  By now, they had moved to their table on the front terrace, and Pippi cast an anxious glance around her at the other candlelit diners, forgetting for a moment where she was, forgetting that in Switzerland she was free to speak her mind without fear of denunciation or reprisal.

  When he asked her about Johan, she shrugged and replied, “There’s not much to say.”

  She was still talking about him when the waiter arrived to remove their entrée plates.

  “My family didn’t approve of our relationship, but his family were the same. I was not the right girl for him.”

  “Not Jewish, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “You could have converted.”

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sp; “We talked about it. I said I would.”

  “So?”

  “He wouldn’t let me. He was … a complicated man.”

  He certainly was. Johan had dissuaded her from following him into his faith, on the grounds that she would be consigning herself to a life of persecution, and possibly worse. At first, she had taken this noble stance at face value. With time, however, she had begun to sense that something else lay behind it. “He didn’t trust my feelings for him. He thought I was just a rich girl playing a game.”

  “I’m sure that’s not true.”

  “He said it to me. More than once.” She adjusted the napkin on her lap, smoothing it out.

  “Everybody says things they don’t really mean. He was probably just testing you.”

  She looked up sharply. “Why? I gave him everything.”

  “Maybe he couldn’t quite believe his luck.”

  “It’s kind of you to try, but he didn’t love me as I loved him.”

  “Love doesn’t have to be requited to be real.”

  “Requited?” she asked.

  “Returned. Maybe the purest kind of love is the one that stands alone, by itself.”

  “You don’t believe that.”

  “And you have obviously never loved a cat.”

  She laughed and raised her wineglass. “Yes, I shall think of Johan as a cat.”

  She told him about the surly Siamese she had grown up with, and the talk then turned to pets and other animals, to the lanky hunting hounds favored by her father, and to the horses in the paddock beside the house, which she had ridden from an early age, all the way to victory in numerous jumping competitions. Listening to her wind back the years, Luke felt a mild sorrow steal over him. To picture her as a young girl, happy enough and carefree, seemed to point up the horrors that had been visited upon them both.

  Their filet mignons arrived, along with a second bottle of French claret.

  “Pippi …”

  “Yes?”

  “Earlier, at the lake, I said some hurtful things to you.”