Naked Cruelty

by Colleen McCullough

  She, thought Helen, must have a pedigree that makes the von Fahlendorfs look like hayseeds and yokels. I bet Catherine de Medici was an ancestress, right along with Lucrezia Borgia. I am going to have fun!

  Josef was opposite Helen, and gave her what was probably his most charming smile. “Breakfast is a hurried meal,” he said, his English more heavily accented than that of his in-laws. “I look forward to a more leisurely conversation at dinner, Helen.”

  “No more than I,” she said, trying to simper; Josef looked like a man who would succumb to a simper.

  He gave her another smile, got to his feet, bowed, and clicked his heels before leaving.

  “Oh, dear, flog the in-laws, eh?” said Helen, crunching her roll. “What a delicious breakfast! Nothing sweet in sight, yet nothing slimming. I love it. Is the sausage bologna?”

  “No, kaiserfleisch,” said Kurt, who seemed to think it was his job to keep the peace. “It is more delicate.”

  “It’s yummy.” Helen piled some on to another roll, well buttered. “I could get fat on this breakfast, Kurt. Seriously, though, is Josef off to work?”

  “We all are,” said Dagmar, a touch of ice in her voice. “Dinner is at eight, but we assemble in the red drawing room for an aperitif at half past seven. Macken will send someone for you, otherwise you might get lost.”

  “Good thinking,” said Helen, on her third roll. “Kurt, do go with your sister, please. I’m off for a drive later anyway.”

  He smiled at her and hurried after Dagmar’s retreating form.

  Not much of a dresser for a rich woman, Helen was thinking as she watched them; her skirt, sweater and coat hadn’t come from Chanel or Balenciaga. In New York, I’d pick her as shopping at Bloomingdale’s, not Bergdorf’s. She wouldn’t bother driving to Boston to do Filene’s basement either. Not a clothes horse. Therefore, who is the mysterious woman who can rival the Duchess of Windsor? The Baroness is sartorially up to it, but she’s too old. And there’s something about her … A flaw in what looks like a perfect stone until you really look …

  Macken was pottering around the blue, cream and gilt room when Helen walked in at a quarter of eight.

  “What does a German butler do?” she asked as he led her down a long, fussily decorated hall. “My father has a butler at Chubb House, but he’s more a superintendent of staff than anything else. He doesn’t open the front door unless he happens to be passing, for instance, and he doesn’t have a pantry full of silverware. We hire an indigent scholarship student to polish the silver.”

  She chattered on, apparently oblivious to Macken’s horror at her familiarity, until, passing into the ballroom, she decided she had softened him up sufficiently.

  “Macken,” she said earnestly, her eyes on his seamed face rather than the splendor of a room that would have done credit to any palace, “you must understand that I’m far more your class of person than I am of the von Fahlendorfs. And no, I am not going to marry Kurt, so there’s no indiscretion involved. I’m here because Herr Kurt had a horrible time while he was kidnapped, and he needed company to come home. In other words, I’m everybody’s friend, nobody’s fiancée.”

  His eyes were grey and keen; they regarded her with liking and respect. “I understand, Miss Helen.”

  “Good! We’re supposed to fly home on Monday, but don’t be surprised if it’s tomorrow—Sunday. Kurt’s unhappy here.”

  “Yes. It is Herr Josef. Kurt cannot forgive him for the injuries to his sister.”

  “What was Josef’s real name?” she asked, not varying the amount of curiosity in her voice. “Was it aristocratic?”

  “No, not at all. His name was Richter,” said Macken.

  “Where does he come from? His accent in English is different.”

  “I do not know, Miss Helen, but I think East Germany.” He swept his hand around in pride. “Is it not a beautiful room?”

  “For a family of five, I think it’s downright hedonistic,” Helen said tartly. “I know the family is very wealthy, Macken, but this place must cost a fortune to keep up.”

  The dam wall was broken; the old man loved her, and would have told her almost anything. “Indeed, indeed, Miss Helen! It is killing them, but Graf von Fahlendorf will not hear of selling Evensong—that is its name in English.”

  “Pretty soon Swansong, sounds like.”

  They left; it was a long trek to the front door.

  “Do you miss Kurt?” she asked.

  “Yes, and no. His work has always interested him more than the factory or life anywhere, I think.”

  “Is the factory actually open on a Saturday?”

  “Not the factory itself, but Herr Josef and Miss Dagmar go in to the office. It was a wonderful thing, that you found Kurt before the ransom was paid.”

  “Why, particularly?”

  “Because it was the Baroness’s money, her dowry for the grandchildren.” He opened one leaf of the front door. “Kurt has left you a map in the car, Miss Helen, with the factory and Evensong marked on it.”

  She looked at the high blue sky, the sun bathing the park around this palace in warmth, and smiled. “What a shame to have to slave in an office on a day like this,” she said, laughing.

  “Herr Josef does not,” Macken said, insisting on escorting her down the great bank of steps. “He leaves the office at noon to visit his mother.”

  “Do you know her?” Helen asked, looking at the black Porsche parked exactly where the door would coincide with her knees as she came off the bottom step. Trust Kurt! Control was his middle name.

  And there she was, free in tons of time to get used to the Porsche’s quirks, even time to get lost. But driving in Munich wasn’t difficult the way driving in Great Britain had been, with traffic on the wrong side of the road. Germans drove on the correct side, the right. That was the Brits, though: island mentality.

  Traffic was light compared to New York City, lighter even than Holloman; clearly not every Bavarian owned a car as yet, or maybe there were fewer two-car families? She cruised around contentedly, taking in the sights, but by half after eleven she was parked outside Fahlendorf Farben at the entrance she had decided looked like the one to the offices.

  If Josef came out, she had a good chance of catching him here. What chewed at her was that if he didn’t use this entrance, she’d lost her only chance to investigate Josef as an entity divorced from the von Fahlendorfs. However, her instincts said that he was the kind who detested seeming soiled or working class; if her reading was correct, then she would succeed. At first the showy Porsche had worried her, but after a couple of hours in the city, she had seen enough Porsches on the roads to believe Josef wouldn’t notice her, parked far down the block and behind a cheap Ford. Come on, Josef, prove me right! .

  At noon precisely he came through the imposing glass doors and strode across the wide thoroughfare to a dark red Mercedes she hadn’t noticed until that moment. It must have just pulled up. Dark red … She couldn’t really see, but she suspected that the driver was a woman. Slipping the Porsche into gear, she watched the Mercedes ease into traffic, and followed it at a distance that put two cars between it and her.

  It proceeded at a pace well within the speed limit and turned off the main road within a kilometre. From that point the red auto drove with purpose, behaving as if its driver had no idea she was being followed. Traffic became sparse so Helen had to stay well back, but she never stood in any danger of losing her quarry. Right into one street, left into another, always moving out of the city central. At no time did the Mercedes navigate a poor district; quite the contrary. When it stopped at last, thirty minutes later, the street was affluent and the house that apparently was its goal was as imposing as the rest. Not in an American way, this affluence, but the three-storeyed and well painted residences were all situated in reasonable gardens.

  A young man ran down the ten steps from the front doo
r and across to where a self-contained garage had been constructed at a later date; he used a key on its padlock and then rolled up the door. Very dark, very handsome, very like Josef to look at. The car drove in, but no one came out. There must be a walkway to the house, Helen concluded, easing the Porsche into a vacant space two hundred metres away on the same side of the road.

  Now what do I do? Get a closer look at the young man and the woman who might or might not be the woman who obtained the prison plans from Correctional Institutions.

  The street was fairly quiet, but not deserted as it would have been in America. People were out and about, walking their dogs, all on leashes. The sidewalks were mined with dog turds, so she would have to be careful where she stepped—gross! It was going to be hard to access the house as each residence was surrounded by an iron rod fence topped with spear heads, and each had a big bay window looking down on the front fence.

  Helen took to the sidewalk herself, cursing her jeans and windcheater: they looked wrong in a place where every woman was in grey or brown tweeds and snappy little hats. If she was accosted, she’d pretend to be an English au pair girl; they wouldn’t believe an American au pair girl, popularly supposed to throw the baby out with the bath water. Or so Helen’s friends had assured her when they swapped yarns of life’s adventures.

  “Mausie! Mausie!” she called, as if searching for a small and delinquent dog.

  Where the garage stood—most houses seemed to make do with kerbside parking—was a little gap, like a side passage; Helen ducked into it quickly and ran toward the backyard, expecting to be brought up short by a connecting corridor. But no such existed. Around the back she discovered why. The house had a fourth floor half buried in the ground; these were by far the most private rooms, as the windows were almost at ceiling level.

  She looked down on three people sitting at a table: Josef, the young man, and a woman of about forty. As they were speaking German, she couldn’t have understood what they were saying even if she had been able to hear it, which she couldn’t. The room was insulated, probably air-conditioned: a rarity for Munich. It was also expensively furnished and attractively decorated—a lot of money had been spent on this basement flat. Presumably it was designed for Josef and his visits, which meant the house’s occupants didn’t want the neighbors looking in to see Josef. Well, well …

  But this was definitely the woman who had obtained the plans, because she was dressed to rival the Duchess of Windsor, and did. Her outfit was dark red rather than maroon, but it was French and extremely expensive. What were the odds? It had to be the same woman! A beautiful face perfectly made up, as dark as Josef’s—was she his sister, then? And who was the young man, a son or a nephew? He was about eighteen or nineteen years old, Helen estimated, and he was stylishly dressed in the European idea of casual. They were, in fact, a trio any couturier would die for.

  She had Kurt’s and Dagmar’s phone numbers and there was a call box at the end of the road, but she decided not to call them. First, see what ensued at dinner tonight.

  When the woman in dark red Dior dropped Josef one street over from the factory, Helen learned something else: unless incest was in the equation, she wasn’t Josef’s sister. They exchanged a passionate kiss before Josef transferred from her car to his, a top of the line BMW. So they were lovers. Richter, Richter … Though there was another possibility, given that this youth was about four or five years older than Josef’s eldest by Dagmar. What if Josef and this woman were husband and wife, the marriage to Dagmar bigamous? That would not please a toplofty clan of Prussian junkers with an Italian aristocrat thrown in the mix!

  The family dressed for dinner, which Helen, no novice, took to mean black tie for the men and evening gowns for the women. Well, no long dresses for her! Helen climbed into a miniskirted dress of amber with an amber lace overdress—I’ll drown those two bitches in this color! Sheer gold pantyhose and gold shoes, a gold bag, and down her back the famous MacIntosh apricot hair. Out of a dye bottle, indeed! Eat your hearts out, you anemic, skinny blondes!

  The look on Macken’s face said he hadn’t seen anyone look like this since Aphrodite, and two footmen in dark green livery stood gaping until Macken barked at them. A smile fixed to her face, Helen swept into the crimson, cream and gilt drawing room, where the three male von Fahlendorfs gaped at her.

  The Baroness, exquisitely garbed in charcoal grey with white touches that displayed and vanished as she moved, came up to Helen and brushed cheeks. “My dear, such beautiful legs! You must have done ballet and gymnastics.”

  “Track and field, actually,” Helen drawled, vowing that Miss Procter’s would be proud of her.

  “We have a perfect table tonight,” said Dagmar, brushing in her turn. “Three couples.”

  She was wearing, Helen noted, a dowager-style dress of beads and billows in an unflattering pastel blue—why do blondes wear blue? It diminishes them. The dress screamed Hong Kong and made her look sixty—oh, Dagmar, Dagmar!

  The Baron, who thus far hadn’t really impinged on Helen, served sherry or Campari as an aperitif and wandered around the room with Helen in tow, showing her his favorite paintings.

  “I would wish for Delacroix or Rossetti, but the museums have them,” he sighed.

  “That’s where I’m lucky,” Helen said, grinning evilly. “I get to borrow some of the Chubb collection, though it’s more Impressionist. One of these days the Parsons Foundation will have to cough up its el Grecos, Poussins and whatevers, but until then Dad refuses to build the Chubb art gallery.”

  The Baron, she saw, was lost; wasted ammunition. The old man lived in a dream world, and she felt sorry for him, dominated by his wife and daughter. Yet, she noticed, he didn’t seem at all comfortable when marooned with Kurt—I must remember to put that in my journal, she vowed mentally. Kurt sets them on edge, he’s too alien, with his muons and particles. It’s The Bomb, of course. Europe’s in the first line of fire, so to speak, and they’re really paranoid about The Bomb. Look at how they hoped John F. Kennedy would save them. His death meant more over here, and now the von Fahlendorfs have spawned an atomic scientist. Brr!

  The children came as a shock. A dowdy little governess shepherded them into the drawing room like clockwork dolls; it had horrified Helen to learn that they shared no meals with the adults—oh, think what she had learned at Dad’s table as a child! They were so stiff and polite—the two boys bowed and clicked heels, the two girls curtsied. Amazing! Even the fifteen-year-old boy, with fuzz on his legs, wore short pants and knee socks. Astounding! Martin and Klaus-Maria, older than the girls, were also darker, though none of the four was as dark as the father. Annelise looked as if she might give the governess trouble, but, Helen was assured, it was Ursel, the youngest, who had inherited the genius. A promising research chemist of the future.

  From her tiny conversation with the children, she learned that the family was Roman Catholic—why had Kurt led her to believe they were Lutherans? Because I assumed it, and he just couldn’t be bothered correcting me. He’s a physicist, he believes in time and timespace, whatever that is, and he told me that there is no life after death, it flies in the face of the laws of physics.

  Even with all its leaves removed the dining table was too big for six people, especially since the Baron chose to sit at one end and the Baroness at the other. There was more than a yard of space between her and Dagmar on one side, Kurt and Josef on the other; she faced Josef, Dagmar faced Kurt.

  “Where did you meet your husband, Dagmar?” Helen asked as a mediocre soup was removed.

  “At the polytechnic in Bonn,” Dagmar said, it seemed willing to view this question as permissible. “We were in the same year, and both doing chemistry.”

  “Had you done a general degree first? Arts? Science?”

  “No. I knew what I wanted to do, so why waste time?”

  “Um—you don’t think that four years of college can put a poli
sh on whatever you want to do later on?”

  The arctically blue, cold eyes surveyed her from the gold of her head to the hand-made gold lace of her dress. Contemptuously. “A foolish waste of time, which is the most precious article in life. Before you know it, you will be an old woman.”

  Especially wearing a dress like that, said Helen’s eyes. “Nothing’s wasted that broadens a life, I believe. Look at me—a Harvard graduate one moment, dealing with Queens traffic the next. Harvard was a help.”

  “The Queen has traffic?” Dagmar asked blankly. “In what?”

  Her laughter broke all conversation into a transfixed stop-motion; everyone stared, and Helen realized that one didn’t howl with laughter at a von Fahlendorf table. Too bad. “No, you misunderstand. Queens is a borough of New York City, and I was a traffic cop there for two years.”

  Someone pressed the button: movement resumed.

  “An extraordinary job,” said Josef, dark eyes admiring. “I think you left it, yes?”

  “Yes, to train as a detective in Holloman, my home town.”

  “Such unfeminine work,” said the Baroness, looking itchy to leave even though the fish was just coming in.

  “Work is work,” said Helen in a flat voice, staring at the glaucous eye of a sole above its pursed little rubbery lips. “People give work a sex, when it shouldn’t have one. Detection of crime is eminently suited to the talents of women.”

  “Why?” asked Kurt, smiling.

  “Because women are naturally nosey, Kurt, love.”

  “It cannot pay much,” said the Baron, scraping one side of his sole down to its skeleton and eating with relish.

  “I don’t need to worry about money, Baron. I have an income of a million dollars a year from a trust fund.”

  Stop-motion again.

  “You are enormously rich!” said Josef on a squawk.

  “Not for my family,” said Helen, laying knife and fork down together to indicate that she found the fish inedible. “The thing is, we made our money several generations ago, and thanks to good management, we’ve been able to do useful things with it. My father is a famous educator, my parents have brought my brother and me up to regard philanthropy as necessary, and we work to benefit our family reputation, our home state, and our country.”