The Case

by Leopold Borstinski

  The first thing I did after the boy had pocketed my money was to split the double bed back into two singles with at least two feet between them. If I would be sleeping in the same room as Larsen, I saw no reason why we needed to be in the same bed as well.

  Larsen took his small bag and hung up his scant clothing onto hangers in the cupboard. A couple of pairs of pants, the odd shirt and a spare jacket. All light materials, some looked like linen.

  Meantime, I sat in one of the chairs and watched him, trying to gauge what this guy was about. Larsen had a deep tan: he had spent time in the sun - and I mean a lot of time and a lot of sun, judging by his blue eyes and blond hair. This was a man with solid European ancestry, not Mediterranean but northern European. Not the kind, to be sure, of people who’d be into tanning.

  So that showed me he had spent many years in sunny climes. Given he’d arrived in the City of Angels by boat, I guessed he’d come straight from South America somewhere.

  Larsen finished putting his things away and sat on his bed, legs crossed. I smiled at him.

  “My name’s Jack Adkins, but you can call me Jake.”

  He nodded but said nothing.

  “I know your last name is Larsen. May I ask what’s your first name? What should I call you?” He smiled and nodded, but said not a word.

  I smiled back at Larsen and tapped my fingers on the arm rest rhythmically. Larsen just sat there and stared at me.

  “You don’t say much, do you?” I asked after a minute or two.

  He shook his head and smiled, so at least I knew he could understand me, even if the guy was taciturn.

  “Okay, buddy. If that’s how you want to play it, but we will be spending several days together in this room and time will go pretty slowly.”

  “Don’t call me buddy,” were the only words that shot out of his mouth. And they came with a thick European accent, which I couldn’t quite place because I had only four words to work with.

  “That’s okay. What would you prefer I call you, Mr. Larsen?”

  “Mr. Larsen will do fine.”

  “Bit formal wouldn’t you say?”

  “It’ll help remind you that you are my servant and not my friend, Jake. I only let my friends speak to me - how you say? - informally.”

  “Okay, Mr. Larsen, no worries.”

  Lovely that he saw me as his servant. Obviously, my billing hadn’t been explained the same way to him as it had been to me.

  “Is there anything I can get for you right now?”

  “No, nothing. I’d like some peace and quiet and Die Zeit in the morning.”

  “What suit?”

  “Huh? No, Die Zeit. It’s a newspaper.”

  “Oh, my mistake. Say it for me again,” and Larsen did so I could get the name in my head long enough to call down to the concierge to get it organized.

  Then I watched him lie down on his bed with his hands behind his head and stare at the ceiling. I gave him the silence he had requested. For an hour.

  DURING THIS TIME, I got to think about Larsen. There he was, lying there, a middle-aged man with a receding hair line, black-to-gray in colour, and a dark tan. His hands looked like they had never been used before. The nails were cut short, well manicured. He had not seen a hard day’s work in his life. Whatever he was up to before he landed in the US was not manual labor.

  As for his clothes, he had a cream linen three-piece suit, which made him look crumpled. Like he’d been thrown on the bed in a messy pile, but I guessed that linen was precisely the right material to have in a suit if he’d been spending his time in an Amazonian jungle. Or whatever.

  The more I considered his name, the more I realized it couldn’t be real. I worked out Larsen was a Scandinavian name. I couldn’t say if it came from Sweden or Denmark, but I knew it was Scandinavian. And Larsen had asked for a German language newspaper. What Swede would read a German paper when they had been living in South America for many years? Made no sense.

  Or rather, it made no sense if I believed he was from Scandinavia. However, if I thought he was German then his choice of paper made sense and his name was plain nonsense.

  He was a German who had spent many years in South America. Now you don’t have to be a tremendous student of history to know it had only been six years since the end of the war and many of the old German soldiers had fled to Bolivia, Argentina and Peru before the Nuremberg trials began. And when I say soldiers I mean the High Command and members of the elite SS.

  So Larsen - or whatever his name - was most likely a Nazi. A goddamn Nazi. I was being paid to nursemaid a fucking Nazi. My Dad must have rolled over in his grave.

  He joined up when Pearl Harbor was attacked and spent three tours in Europe. Dad was a marine, a Red Beret, and he was one hell of a fighter. He didn’t talk much about his time in the army, but the way his eyes glazed over, you could tell it was tough out there.

  I was named after my old man, but I refused to be called Jack Jr. Even from an early age, I wanted to be my own man.

  He was in one of the early landing vehicles during Operation Barbarossa and then fought his way through the soft belly of Europe and into France, then into Germany. We received a letter from him when they first entered German soil and were on the final push to Berlin.

  35

  JACK SOUNDED UPBEAT and earnest, as he always was. My mother told me he had always been a serious man, which was one of the things that attracted her to him. She’d had a string of fellas who’d been flighty, to say the least, from the odd story she’d shared about her younger years.

  There was one more letter that arrived from him after they reached Berlin. After that furore, his unit powered through into Poland and were one of the first to get into the camps, just ahead of the Russians. It was hard for us to tell if they were more concerned with liberating the people in the camps or merely wanted to beat the Russians at something. My old partner, Ed told me he didn’t believe anyone cared about the Jews; it was only ever about the power struggle between the Russians and the Americans.

  I don’t know either way, but I do know the last letter was posted the day after he’d been inside Belsen. It was a dark, moody letter, in which he decried the whole of humanity and all the evil that human beings were capable of.

  The next day, he stepped on a land mine and his body was splintered into a million pieces. We got a letter from Uncle Sam in the fullness of time telling us how sorry he was that a land mine had killed Jack Adkins Sr. Uncle Sam wasn’t as sorry as I was though, despite the kind words in the letter.

  In case it’s not obvious, I figured that the land mine had been placed there by the Germans and I blamed them entirely for his death. And here was Larsen, a German who was secretly entering the country a few years after the war having spent the intervening time in Bolivia or wherever.

  The only believable conclusion was that the guy was a Nazi. And that didn’t sit well with me. Not at all. Not the way Jack died. I could feel myself tense my back molars, not grind them, but the pressure on them massively intensified due to my jaw muscles. This German Larsen was no friend of mine and I was stuck in the room with him for at least two days. Two long days.

  And then I thought about the implications of Larsen’s arrival in the US. Why was he here and why now? My employer was not a government department. You can tell government men by the way they walk and the shoes they wear - and their hair length.

  That meant Kurtz was from the private sector. And what would a company want with an old Nazi with not much personality? Made no sense.

  Perhaps he was one of those charismatic dudes, who only lit up a room when he switched on, but kept himself to himself at all other times. Maybe he was here to give a speech to the company, and they didn’t want to make a big song and dance over his arrival.

  Or, more likely, because of his past, Larsen couldn’t get a visa to enter the country in the first place.

  Alternatively, maybe Kurtz was just his benefactor, and the guy needed to come to the US for medica
l attention. That he only wanted to lie down and do nothing showed a certain lethargy in his character. Or he was just bored being in the same room as me. Both options were possible.

  If he was ill, what was I going to do if he took a turn for the worse? I mean, it’s not like we could take him to the nearest ER because he wasn’t really in the country, if you see what I mean.

  I could call down to the concierge, but there was little he could do, I guessed. Truth was there would be some quack Kurtz had lined up, ready and waiting, in case something occurred. But at that point, I had no idea what the deal was.

  “Tell me, Larsen, what are you doing here?”

  Larsen opened an eye and stared at me then shook his head and closed the eyelid again.

  “Look, we will be together for the next couple of days, the least you can do is talk to me a while.”

  Larsen snorted but said not a word.

  “Jeez,” I said under my breath.

  “Leave your messiah out of it, boy.”

  I raised an eyebrow at that unexpected interjection.

  “I do not need to hear your prayers to your god, thank you very much,” he added. Well, at least I’d got him to talk to me.

  “Excuse me, sir.”

  “Indeed.”

  “I’m just tired of the stone cold treatment.”

  “Understand, boy. I have spent much time on my own and I tend not to play nicely in the playground anymore.”

  “Da nada,” and we were silent for a spell. This period of unspoken time didn’t feel like it was forced on me, but was a mutual respect for each other’s thoughts. After a few minutes, I killed the silence dead:

  “I’m sorry if my American ways annoyed you. We’re quite chatty is all.”

  “It does not annoy. I just find them tiresome.”

  “Thanks for your honesty,” I replied, trying not to lace my response with the sarcasm it deserved.

  “You can rest assured that I am always honest. I do not waste my time with lies.” Beat. “Lies exist so that weak men can be guided by the strong in the absence of self-evident facts.”

  NOW THAT WAS a phrase that tripped off his tongue with consummate ease. That was part of a much longer speech, which he’d given before or was planning on giving fairly soon. He sure was the friendlier type of Nazi. Despite myself, I warmed to his frankness.

  In a business where you spend all your time second guessing what everyone is saying to you, Larsen’s straight talking was refreshing. I might have only been in the business a couple of years but I’d had it up to my neck with the bullshit people come up with to hide what they’re doing or hide what they really think. So an honest Nazi appealed to me in that room on that day in Los Angeles.

  “I assume that Larsen is not your actual name, then.”

  Larsen smiled and nodded.

  “Is there a false first name I could use instead of a false last name?”

  “Call me Herman. Many people do even though it’s not my name.” Now it was my turn to smile.

  “Okay, Herman. I shall do so.” I was doing my best to keep our conversation factual and to the point. Herman didn’t like small talk as it rubbed him up the wrong way. Who could blame him?

  He settled back into his bed, closed his eyes again and covered them with one of his arms, as if to fend off the light of the day from himself.

  I let the silence hang again in the air, because there wasn’t much that I wanted to ask him, which I thought he might answer. ‘Are you, or have you ever been, a member of the Nazi Party?’ appeared on the visa waiver program form in the 80s, but it’s not something you should ask someone you think actually was a member of the Nazi Party between 1933 and ’45.

  “Tell me,” said Herman breaking the silence in the room.

  “What?”

  “You are being paid to sit with me, correct?”

  “Yes, Herman. That’s what I’m being paid to do.”

  “And do you know why you are doing this, beyond the money of course?”

  “No, Herman. I do not. I have some ideas, but I have not been told what you are doing in this country.”

  “It is best if that situation remains. Best for you and for me, that is.”

  “Shame, I’m intrigued to find out, Herman.”

  “I am sure you are, Jake, but this will not happen.”

  “Figured. Never mind.”

  “The money will have to be sufficient for you.”

  “I reckon it will have to be, Herman. It’ll have to be.”

  Herman smiled at me and sat up.

  “Is there a drink I could have?”

  “Sure thing. What d’you like: a coffee, a soda or some liquor?”

  “Oh, a coffee was all I was thinking of.”

  36

  I GOT UP from my chair and went to a coffee machine, placed in the room by the hotel staff. There were ground beans, mugs and in the fridge minibar was some milk. Five minutes later and there were two strong cups of java being sipped by the pair of us.

  “So tell me, Jake.”

  “Yes?”

  “What if I doubled your bounty, would you help me leave this hotel and go off for an hour or two?”

  “That’s a mighty fine proposition, Herman. Mighty fine.” My mind raced, weighing up the risks and the rewards: double the very high existing fee and take the consequences from Kurtz.

  “Herman. No disrespect to you at all, but I think I will have to say no. I’ve already made a commitment to Mr. Kurtz and I don’t believe I should go back on my word.” The truth was I was afraid of what Kurtz might do if I failed him.

  “Jake, I respect a man who believes in keeping his word. If you don’t hold onto your word, you have nothing. You are no better than pond scum. Absolute scum.”

  Herman stared at me with those piercing blue eyes. If he had been testing me then I had passed, but he continued to unnerve me, nonetheless.

  I thought I’d be a bit fresh and see what happened, partly as a defense mechanism because of how he was making me feel. I’m a child at heart.

  “So do you have anyone back home?”

  “What?”

  “Back home. Is there a wife, girlfriend? Children perhaps?”

  “What an impertinent question.”

  “No offence, bud, I was just wondering if you were missing anyone, is all.”

  “Oh, missing people.” Beat. “No, there is nobody back where I live. Not any more.”

  “Was there a someone, then?”

  “Yes. There was once. Two years ago, actually.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. Her name was Selena Cabral, and she looked after my needs for three years.”

  “All your needs?”

  Herman squinted an eye at me and smiled.

  “Yes, Jake, all my needs. She cooked and cleaned and washed my clothes. She conversed with me and she slept with me. All my needs.”

  “What happened to her? You speak of her in the past tense.”

  “I did because Selena is dead. Would you like to hear the story of her passing?”

  “If you’re willing to tell me, sure.”

  “Then I shall. I first met Selena three years ago. She was my housekeeper. As I told you, she cooked for me, she cleaned my house, she shined my shoes. Her job was to look after me and to make sure I wanted for nothing. And she was very good at her job. I was fully satisfied with her work.”

  “WHAT I HAD not told you was that she was young, barely twenty years old with round breasts, long black hair and a full mouth. Although she was not my type, you might say, I did feel a fascination for her. For her young body. So one day, after she’s completed the typing for me I’d left on my dictaphone, I went up behind her and placed my hand on the back of her neck.

  “She let me touch her neck and her face and shortly after, I had ripped off her clothes and took her from behind on the oak desk in my office.”

  I inhaled deeply, hearing Herman’s tale, not knowing how much to believe and how much to trust the man, bu
t he continued.

  “From that point on, I would have my way with Selena once or twice a week. As I get older, I have found that my sex drive has reduced.”

  “Your libido.”

  “Yes, as you say, my libido. So it was never the case we spent much time having intercourse, but when the urge seized me and she was around, I would let my desires overtake me.”

  “Sounds perfect: no strings and as much of it as you wanted.”

  “Perfect indeed, but my prolonged time with Selena proved her undoing. By giving her my attention, I allowed my focus to slip somewhat with respect to the work she was conducting for me.

  “I have already mentioned that she did typing for me. Well, she also looked after my filing and correspondence, along with the other more menial tasks I told you initially.

  “This meant she gained an insight into my affairs that no other human has had since my wife ... died.”

  Yet again, there was a silence in the room as Herman dwelt on the thought of his wife and her demise.

  “Go on if you are able,” I commented, hoping beyond hope he would carry on, but I was aware the man had bumped into grief over his wife’s death all over again.

  “What? Surely ... Selena learned more about me than any other woman since the end of the war. She knew about my past and about what I was doing and where I was going. And that would have been acceptable because I had learned to trust her.

  “Of course, that trust came at a price. Selena dropped little ideas into my lap about what she knew and what action she would take on the basis of that knowledge. And this was when we started to have problems between us.

  “On each occasion when she threw out these thoughts, I would make it clear to her there would be terrible negative consequences for her if she acted on these notions. I hoped she believed me and understood these were not merely empty threats.