Not exactly a healthy attitude, but at the time it seemed the only thing I could do.
Eventually I moved past the anger, came out the other side.
I thought less and less about what I would do if I ever found the driver of that car. I let myself say goodbye to Elaine. I believed that the wound had sealed up.
***
“What are we doing here?” Clayton asks.
We’re parked at the side of the road, next to the patch of wall that was repaired months after our car had smashed through the dyke, and rolled through the crops.
I stand a little away from him, leaning against the car. The bodywork feels cool against my flat palms.
“This is the route I think you took home.”
“But why stop here? This… this doesn’t mean anything to me.”
He’s looking at the field where she died. Right at it. He’s looking at the place he should have been looking at on the night he drove home, damn near blackout drunk.
All the excuses he has in the world, all the stress he claims he was under, it doesn’t matter. Because his actions cost someone else their life that night.
“I thought…” I have to stop for a moment, gather myself. “I thought it might help, maybe, to take a moment. Maybe see if anything stirs memories.”
He’s silent for a second. Doesn’t look back.
I watch him. I think about walking up, taking a rock, maybe, smashing in the back of his head. I think about whether I could kill him.
I’ve killed before. Self-defense, but I’ve done it. I can take another life if I have to.
But what about if I want to?
I think about a man I used to know. A crime boss. Thought he saw something of himself in me. He once told me that, if I allowed myself, I would find it easy to take a life.
I had believed then that he was wrong.
But now?
I’m not so sure.
Would it restore balance to the universe? If I killed Lucas Clayton, would that make up for her death?
Justice is about redressing balance. If I submit a report to the police, I know that all the evidence I have is circumstantial. Nothing will happen. Nothing that will bring Elaine back, or make my wounds close up again.
There has to be some justice, doesn’t there? Natural and legal justice don’t always seem weighted equally.
He turns to face me. There are tears in the corners of his eyes. “You know, I keep trying to remember,” he says. “I always thought that something happened like you told me. That I got flat-out drunk. I mean, driving in that state…” He takes a breath. “I could have hurt someone.”
I can’t look away from his eyes. He doesn’t remember. He has no idea what happened that night.
I feel something on the back of my neck, suddenly. Like a breath. Or a kiss. Gentle. Reassuring.
I break eye contact. “The worst part about this job,” I say, “is that sometimes you can’t give people the answers they’re looking for.”
“We’ve got something,” he says.
“Do you really want to know?” I ask. “If you hurt someone, would you really want to know? What would you do? What would you say to them?”
“I’d tell them I was sorry,” he says. “It wouldn’t be enough, I know. Not for them.”
That breeze again. And something on my arm. Like fingers brushing against my skin.
***
Back in Dundee, I drop him off outside his flat. I tell him I’m sorry there’s nothing else I can do for him. I just don’t know that I can give him the answers he’s looking for. I tell him I’ll refund his advance. He tries to refuse. I insist.
I go back to the office. I think about going home, decide that I can’t. Not yet. I find a box at the back of a cupboard. I open it, pull out things I could never move to my new place. Old photographs. Old memories.
I look at a picture of Elaine.
I think about the invisible fingers touching my arm.
Not a ghost. I don’t believe in ghosts.
A memory. A reminder.
When I’m done, I put the box away.
A Wonderful Time
Lavie Tidhar
In another time and place, Shomer stands with his back to the wall of the ghetto. He turns the precious postcard over and over in his hands.
“Having a wonderful time,” it says, and nothing more—nor can it, for even the mere arrival of this missive from the outside is a miracle. It is signed Betsheba, and hidden in its bland exterior—a picture of the Niagara Falls, in distant America beyond the seas—is a world of meaning. For she has made it, Fanya’s sister, she has escaped the war in Europe and the murder of the Jews and she is in America, she is safe, she’s free.
And Shomer marvels: how a small rectangle of paper can offer so much hope. He will take it home and show his wife, and they will celebrate. For himself he has no more concern: if only he could get out Fanya and the children…
But the ghetto is encircled by the German soldiers, and more and more the trains come to the Umschlagplatz: they depart laden with Jews and they return empty. And more and more they come.
And Shomer hides the postcard on his person, and he measures out his steps like a prisoner in the prison yard. For he does not yet know how much time they have left.
Only his mind is free, and in his mind, as always, he constructs a story, a cheap and nasty tale of shund or pulp. For only in his fantasy can he escape this time and place.
***
The postcard said, “Having a wonderful time.” I turned it over and over in my hands. It was addressed to me in a girlish hand. The address read, “Herr Wolf, Detektiv. Above the Jew baker shop, Berwick Street, London.”
It was dated 15 March, 1938. It was a month out of date.
“You don’t look much like a detective,” the policeman said. His partner sniggered. I could smell fresh bread from the bakery downstairs, and Kaiserschmarrn mit apfelkompott, a Bavarian specialty—it is like a rich torn pancake served with applesauce. It made my stomach rumble. I have always loved sweet things.
I swept my hand across the bare office. “I have a desk and two chairs, one for visitors, a hat stand and a typewriter–” I said, then gave up. The typewriter was out of ink, anyway, and only my hat hung on the hat stand. It was a nice hat. A fedora. It was a little beat-up by life, just as I was. But it was still hanging.
“Who is it from?” I said.
“This is what we hoped you would tell us,” the policeman said. His name was Redgrave.
“And since when do the fuzz deliver the mail?”
They looked at each other, then looked at me.
“What?” I said. I had a sudden bad feeling about all this. “I don’t know nothing.”
“Do you not,” the other policeman, Lockwood, said.
“Says he doesn’t,” Redgrave said.
“You believe him?” Lockwood said.
“Seems a trustworthy sort,” Redgrave said, and they both chuckled. Then Lockwood dangled handcuffs at me with his index finger.
“We’d like you to come with us, Mr. Wolf.”
“But I didn’t do nothing, I told you!”
“Come, come, Mr. Wolf.”
Redgrave’s hand went to his night stick and stayed there. I gave up.
But I was most certainly not having a wonderful time.
***
There’s a certain righteous cruelty in the face of your typical Bavarian schoolmistress, as though she had seen everything in the world and found nothing but disappointment, yet was still determined to carry out her duty. It was the sort of face to put fear into old men and young boys alike. There was just one small thing: she was dead.
In death she looked equally disappointed—as though when the big moment finally came it was nothing but a letdown. I’d seen people die before
and helped a few more on their way, but that kind of a death mask was new to me.
I said, “I don’t know her.” I stared some more. That face, there was something about it, like a horse one once rode in somebody else’s stables.
“You sure, gumshoe?”
I nodded, slowly.
“Then why was she carrying a postcard addressed to you in the pocket of her coat?” Redgrave said.
It was a not unreasonable question.
I’d been wondering the same thing myself.
“Where did you find her?” I said.
“Tossed in the back of the picture house on Shaftesbury Avenue,” he said, “by the bins.”
“The Avenue Pavilion?” I said. I knew the cinema vaguely.
He nodded.
“And with a .43 slug in the back of her head.”
“Nasty.”
Execution style, I thought. Neat and professional. I liked things neat. And I appreciated a professional.
“German?”
“Refugee, probably,” Redgrave said, with a little distaste in his voice.
“Illegal, most likely,” Lockwood said. He shrugged. “Not much we can do, then, I suppose,” he said.
“What do you mean?” I said. “This is a murder!”
He just shrugged again. “Do you know how many of you there are now?” he said.
“Too many,” his partner said.
“Coming over here, like rats from a drowning ship.”
“Germans,” Redgrave said, with loathing.
“Illegals. More and more of you each day. Well, we did the best we could.”
“Best we could.”
“If we were going to arrest anyone, it would probably be you,” said Lockwood.
“Me?” I said. “But I didn’t do anything!”
“Oh,” he said. “But I’m sure you have, Mr. Wolf.” He looked at me, almost curiously. “Didn’t you used to be somebody, once?”
I had nothing to say to that. He smiled, thinly, and covered the woman’s face.
“You can go,” he said.
And that was that.
***
Back in 1923, briefly, I had been somebody. Standing in the huge hall of the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich, with the smell of spilled beer and damp coats and cheap cigars and women’s perfume, I gave a speech. I had been good at giving speeches. There had been an anger then in Germany that was palpable, as thick in the air as the fug of cigarette smoke is during Oktoberfest. Girls in dirndls served the patrons, and giant swastika flags hung from the walls under the glass chandeliers. I told my audience that Germany was suffering. That Germany needed saving. That the Jews were the cancer and that I was the cure.
Oh, they cheered. How they cheered! It was time, I told them. It was time to take back control!
They loved it. They lapped it all up.
Then we marched on the Odeonsplatz and everything went to shit. Someone shot Max Scheubner-Richter through the lungs and the f–ker fell and, since we had linked our arms together, he brought me down with him. I’d dislocated my shoulder and was in quite great pain. I almost wished he would come back to life just so I could shoot him myself.
After the firefight I ran. We had a getaway car, but it broke down on the way to the Alps and so instead I headed to this little village called Uffing, on the shores of the Staffelsee. It is a very pretty place.
***
I stared at the postcard in my hands now. The two police officers had left it with me. Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stayed these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds. As Herodotus would have said.
The postcard showed a view I knew well. It was the Staffelsee.
It is a charming lake. I had once gone boating there in the summer. It had been a beautiful, sunny day. But back in 1923, I made my way there in the dark, and at last knocked on the door of the Hanfstaengls’ house in Uffing. The money-grabbing Hanfstaengls, some called them. Putzi and Helene. Putzi had been with me in Munich, but he ran just as soon as trouble started. He’d be halfway to Austria by now, and snorting Pervitin in Piesendorf before the night was out.
Helene opened the door.
By God, but there was a woman! She had the sort of legs you could suck for popsicles and the bush of a French prostitute. She was American, but of good Aryan stock. What she was doing married to a Hanfstaengl was anybody’s guess.
“Adolf?” she said. Her hand rose to her mouth—too theatrically, I thought. You know those hausfraus and their flair for amateur dramatics. “I heard the news on the wireless, is Putzi—”
“Putzi’s fine,” I said—cursing him inwardly. “He should be halfway across the Alps by now. I would be too if it weren’t for the d—n Maybach breaking down.”
“You poor thing,” she said. She ushered me in. “You’re wounded!” she said.
“I bleed for Germany,” I told her.
“Oh, Adolf!”
She busied herself around me like a bitch in heat. I could smell the foliage of her garden getting all moist.
I knew she wanted me. Women always did, back then, you see.
I let her minister to me.
***
Later, the G-d d—ned village policeman came to arrest me.
***
“That’s it!” I said.
Two pigeons flew away, startled, and an old homeless woman, pushing a cart filled with dirty clothes, leered at me.
“What’s it, ducky?” she said. “Come give old Mildred a kiss.”
She stuck her tongue out at me through broken black teeth.
“Get away from me, you filthy whore!”
Old Mildred lifted her skirt at me and leered some more. There were broken red veins in her nose. I tried not to look at what was under the skirt. “You’ll come around, ducky,” she said. “Sooner or later, they all do.”
I shuddered and walked away.
I knew who the dead woman was, after all, I realized. Anna or Marta, one of those names. She had been the Hanfstaengls’ maid back in Uffing.
How she turned up dead, in London, and with my name on her person, I had no idea.
It really wasn’t my business to get involved in. I wasn’t getting paid. Though someone must have had a reason to off the old woman, and in London, in this cold year of our Lord 1938, that reason was more often than not hard, cold money.
People died just as much from the simple reason of being a foreigner, of course. But that usually involved a beating, not an execution.
“Schiesse!” I said, to no one in particular. A pigeon came and landed by my feet and stared up at me with the dispassionate gaze of an SS Rottenführer.
I was out of work and I was out of luck and I was going to take on this
s—tshow of a case, just on the off-chance there was something in it for me.
***
It took me three tries and on the fourth I struck lucky. I’d gone through Soho, to those boarding houses I knew where they hired out rooms to foreigners. There had been an influx of refugees from Germany after the Fall, when the Soviets took over and my former cause was stomped under the boot of Jewish communism. The communists had thrown me in a concentration camp and, though I managed to escape, my leg still ached in cold weather—which, in London, was always.
I passed a shop with a sign that said “No Germans, No Dogs.” On the wall I saw a poster of my old friend, Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists. He had a thin moustache and a mouth like a smiling rat’s. Word was he was going to run for Prime Minister and, if so, he might just get in.
The last boarding house was on Greek Street. It was run by a Madame Blavatsky—not the one who talked to ghosts, though she claimed to be a distant relation. I had run into this Blavatsky on a previous case. Now she glared at me suspiciously from beh
ind her tea service.
“You again? What do you want?”
“It’s nice to see you too,” I said. “Nice weather we’re having, what?”
“What?”
“What?”
“What?”
“I said, nice weather we’re—oh, forget it,” I said. “Listen to me, you old crone, I’m looking for a woman who might have been staying here. Bavarian, late fifties. As ugly as a bulldog and twice as vicious, at a guess.”
“Anna Maria Fischer,” Madame Blavatsky said. I was a little taken aback.
“Really?”
“Found her, didn’t they,” she said. “Knew it had to be her. Someone stuck a bullet in that gob of hers. She still owes me two weeks’ rent.” She looked at me with mournful eyes. “Who’s gonna pay me now, Wolf?”
“Don’t look at me,” I said. “I haven’t a farthing to my name.”
“Listen, you f—king kraut,” she said. “You wouldn’t be here at all if you didn’t think there was something in it for you down the road. So I’ll tell you what. You can go up and rummage through her knickers drawer to your heart’s content, but if you find any money later on along the way, you bring it here, you hear?”
“You’d trust me to do that?” I said.
She shrugged, lifted a dainty foot, and farted. “Got nothing to lose, have I,” she said.
She reached for the radio and twiddled the knob until the Lord Haw-Haw Half-Time Show came on. He was spouting off as usual.
“England for the English! For too long have we lived under the yoke of Europe on our doorstep, the encroachment of foreigners onto our sacred soil! No more! It is time to take back con—and now for a word from our sponsor.”
I left her there and went up the stairs as angelic trumpets played on the wireless and an angelic voice entreated me to Smoke Chesterfields—The Way To More Smoking Pleasure!
“F—king Lord Haw-Haw,” I said, with feeling.
I found the room. It was more like a closet. The bed had been made and some cheap undergarments hung to dry from a string tied between the bedpost and the wardrobe. When I looked in the wardrobe, I found a copy of my single book, My Struggle, in the original Franz Eher first edition, with both volumes bound together in a later binding. Quite a nice little copy, I thought. When I opened it to the title page, I realized with some surprise that it was inscribed.
The Book of Extraordinary Amateur Sleuth and Private Eye Stories Page 27