by Philip Kerr
“You didn’t?” I shook my head. “Then why did you come here?” The butler smiled a curious little smile. It was like looking at a heavily weathered picket fence. “It’s like this, sir,” he said. “Your mother left us some money in her will. But she made it quite a while ago, and I daresay the sum she left for us would have done us very nicely if recently we hadn’t had that change in the value of the Austrian schilling. Of course, she meant to change it, but her dying so suddenly, well, she didn’t have time to do it. So we’re a bit stuck, now, the wife and I. What she left us isn’t enough to retire on, and at our time of life, we’re too old to look for another position. We were wondering if you’d care to help us, sir. You being a wealthy man, now. We’re not greedy people. We wouldn’t ask at all, if your mother hadn’t meant to change her will. You can ask Dr. Bekemeier, if you don’t believe me, sir.”
“I see,” I said. “If you don’t mind me saying so, Herr Medgyessy, your wife, Klara, didn’t sound like she wanted my help. Anything but.”
The butler shifted on his legs and came to the at-ease position.
“She was just a bit shook up, that’s all, sir. On account of the suddenness of your mother’s death in the hospital, sir. And also because, since she died, the International Patrol have been there, asking questions about you, sir. Wanting to know if you were coming back to Vienna for the funeral. That kind of thing.”
“Now, why would the Allied police be at all interested in me?” Even as I spoke I was recalling my getaway drive from the Central Cemetery. It was beginning to look as if my American driver might have made an error. As if it had been Eric Gruen the International Patrol had been pursuing, not a black marketer.
Medgyessy smiled his sylvan smile. “There’s no need for that, sir,” he said. “We’re not stupid people, the wife and I. Just because we never talk about it, doesn’t mean we don’t know about it.”
It was clear there was more here than just a girl left with a bump in her road. A lot more.
“So please don’t speak to me like I’m an idiot, sir. That won’t help either of us. All we’re asking is that we continue to serve your family, sir. In the only way we can now, since I can’t imagine you’ll be staying on in Vienna, sir. Not officially, anyway.”
“How exactly do you think you can serve me?” I asked him, patiently.
“With our silence, sir. I knew most of your mother’s affairs. Very trusting, she was. And very careless, too, if you know what I mean.”
“You’re trying to blackmail me, aren’t you?” I said. “So why don’t you just tell me how much?”
Medgyessy shook his head, irritably. “No, sir. It’s not blackmail. I wish you wouldn’t look at it that way. All we want is to serve the Gruen family, sir. That’s all. A proper reward for loyalty. That’s what this is all about. Maybe what you did was right, sir. That’s hardly for me to say. But it’s only fair that you should recognize your debt to us, sir. For not telling the police where you live, for instance. Garmisch, is it? Very nice. I’ve not been there myself, but I’ve heard it’s very beautiful.”
“How much?”
“Twenty-five thousand schillings, sir. That’s not much, considering. Not when you think about it, sir.”
I hardly knew what to say. It was now obvious that Eric Gruen had not been honest with me, and that there was something in his past that made his being in Vienna of interest to the Allies. Or had he been honest after all? Could it have been the execution of those prisoners of war, in France, that Engelbertina had mentioned? Why not? After all, the Allies already had dozens of SS men imprisoned in Landsberg for the Malmedy massacre. Why not another massacre involving Eric Gruen? Whatever the reason, one thing was clear: I needed to stall Medgyessy long enough to speak to Gruen himself. I had little choice but to go along with the butler’s blackmail, for now. With all the documentation I possessed being in the name of Eric Gruen, I could hardly go back to being Bernie Gunther.
“All right,” I said. “But I’ll need some time to get the money together. The will hasn’t yet been proved.”
His face grew harder. “Don’t play me for a fool, sir,” he said. “I’d never betray you. But the wife is a very different story. As you probably gathered at the funeral. Shall we say twenty-four hours? This time tomorrow.” He glanced at his pocket watch. “Two o’clock. That’ll give you plenty of time to get to Spaengler’s and make all the necessary arrangements.”
“Very well,” I said. “Until two o’clock tomorrow.” I opened the door for him and he limped out, like a man waltzing by himself. I had to hand it to him. He and his wife had handled it very nicely. Good cop, bad cop. And all of that guff about loyalty. It was an effective pitch. Especially the way he had dropped the name of Spaengler’s Bank and Garmisch.
I closed the door, picked up the phone, and asked the hotel operator to connect me with Henkell’s house in Sonnenbichl. After a few minutes the operator called me back and said there was no reply, so I put on my coat and hat and took a taxi to Dorotheengasse.
Most of the buildings in this narrow, cobbled street had been repaired. At one end was a yellow stucco church with a spire like a V-2 rocket, and at the other end, an ornate fountain with a lady who had picked the wrong day for going topless in Vienna. In its massive baroque portal, the green door of Spaengler’s Bank looked like Hitler’s train stuck in a railway tunnel. I approached the top-hatted doorman, informed him of the name of the person I had come to see, and was directed into what could have passed for the Hall of the Mountain King. And with footsteps echoing against the ceiling like the tintinnabulation of a broken bell, I walked up a staircase as wide as an autobahn.
The Gruen family’s bank manager, Herr Trenner, was waiting for me at the top of the stairs. He was younger than me but looked as if he had been born with gray hair and wearing glasses and a morning coat. He was as obsequious as a Japanese ivy plant. Wringing his hands as if he hoped to squeeze the milk of human kindness from his fingernails, he showed me to an upstairs room furnished with a table and two chairs. On top of the table was twenty-five thousand schillings and, as arranged, a smaller pile of cash, to cover my immediate expenses. On the floor beside the table was a plain leather holdall in which to carry the money. Trenner handed me a key to the door of the room, informed me that he would be at my service so long as I remained in the building, bowed gravely, and then left me alone. I pocketed the smaller pile of cash, locked the door, and went back downstairs to wait by the front door for Vera Messmann. It was ten minutes to three.
THIRTY-TWO
I waited until almost half past three, by which time I had concluded that Vera Messmann had had second thoughts about accepting Gruen’s money and wasn’t coming. So I went back upstairs, transferred the money to the holdall, and set off to find her.
It was a twenty-minute walk through the city center to Liechtensteinstrasse. I rang Vera’s doorbell and knocked at the door. I even shouted through the letterbox, but there was no one at home. Of course there’s no one at home, I told myself. It’s only four o’clock. She’s at her shop. Around the corner, on Wasagasse. She was at home yesterday afternoon only because it was early closing. But today is a normal working day. You’re some detective, Bernie Gunther.
So I went around the corner. I suppose I assumed she would change her mind about the money when she saw it in the bag. There’s something about the sight of hard cash that always makes people think in a different way. That has always been my own experience, anyway. And naturally I assumed Vera would be no different. That she would change her mind because she would see the money and listen to me and let herself be persuaded. And if that failed I would be stern with her and tell her she had to take Gruen’s money. How could she fail to do what she was told when, in the bedroom, she had been so willingly submissive?
The shop faced the back of Vienna University’s Institute of Chemistry. The sign above the window read “Vera Messmann. Salon for Made-to-Measure Corselettes, Bodices, Girdles, and Brassieres.” The window cont
ained a female tailor’s dummy wearing a pink silk corset and matching brassiere. Beside it was a show-card featuring a line drawing of a girl wearing a different ensemble. She had a bow in her hair and, but for her lack of glasses, she reminded me a little of Vera. A little bell tinkled above my head as I opened the door. There was a simple, glass-topped counter no bigger than a card table and, next to this, another anonymous girdled female trunk. In the back, a ceiling light was burning dimly near a heavily draped changing cubicle. In front of this sanctum sanctorum stood a French chair, as if someone might sit there and, with seignorial satisfaction, watch his lover or mistress appear from behind the curtain wearing some well-engineered undergarment. Who said I didn’t have a vivid imagination?
“Vera?” I called. “Vera, it’s me, Bernie. Why didn’t you show up at the bank?”
Idly, I drew open a narrow drawer to reveal a dozen or so black brassieres pressed together like slaves on a ship bound for the plantations in the West Indies. I picked one up and felt the wires in it hard underneath my fingers, thinking that it looked and felt like the harness for early and ill-advised attempt at human flight.
“Vera? I waited at the bank for half an hour. Did you forget, or did you just change your mind?”
The thing was, I hardly wanted to go blundering into the back of the shop and find some well-fed Vienna housewife wearing just her knickers. I tugged open another drawer and picked out an item of vaguely aqueductian shape that, eventually, I identified as being a garter belt. Another minute passed. A woman peered in the window and looked taken aback to see me standing there with something lacy suspended from my fingers, like a cat’s cradle. I put the undergarment down and advanced, boldly, into the back of the shop, thinking perhaps Vera was upstairs, if an upstairs there was.
“Vera?”
Then I saw it and my heart missed a beat. Protruding from under the drawn curtain of the changing cubicle was a woman’s stockinged foot. It was without a shoe. I took hold of the curtain, paused for a moment, bracing myself for what I knew I was about to find. And then I drew it aside. It was Vera and she was dead. The nylon stocking that had killed her was still wrapped tight around her neck like a near-invisible snake. I let out a long sigh and closed my eyes for a moment. After a minute or two I stopped behaving like a normal human being and started to think like a detective. I went back to the door and locked it, just in case. The last thing I wanted now was for one of Vera’s customers to walk in on me while I examined her dead body. Then I returned to the changing cubicle, drew the curtain behind me and knelt beside her corpse to make sure she really was dead. But her skin was quite cold and my fingers felt nothing when I pushed them underneath the twist in the stocking and against her jugular vein. She had been dead for several hours. There was dried blood in her nostrils and in her gums, and on the side of her face. And lots of scratches and finger marks around her chin and near the tie in the stocking. Her eyes were closed. I’d seen drunks look worse who were still alive. Her hair was a mess and her glasses lay broken on the floor. The changing cubicle chair had been knocked over and the mirror on the wall had a large crack in it. It was obvious that she had put up quite a struggle before yielding her life. It was a conclusion that I underlined when I lifted her hands and saw the bruises on her knuckles. It looked as if she had managed to punch her attacker. Perhaps several times.
I stood up, glanced around the floor, saw a cigarette end and picked it up. It was a Lucky, which wasn’t at all Lucky for me. There was an ashtray full of them back in my hotel room. I put the cigarette end in my pocket. There was enough circumstantial evidence against me already without giving the police a present of more. She and I had had sex the night before. I hadn’t been wearing a condom. Vera had said it was safe, which was another reason she had been keen to go to bed with me. A postmortem would find my blood type.
I looked around for Vera’s handbag, hoping to find her door key so that I might let myself into her apartment and reclaim my business card. But her bag was gone. I wondered if the murderer had taken it. Probably the same man who had let himself into her apartment the previous night. I cursed myself for having taken the key off the cord. But for that I could have let myself in. Doubtless the police would find my card. And doubtless the neighbor who had seen me returning to her apartment wearing just my trousers and carrying a hockey stick would be able to give the police a good description. That would tally with the description from the woman who had seen me through Vera’s shop window just a few minutes earlier. There was no doubt about it. I was in a tight spot.
I switched the light out and went around the shop polishing everything I had touched with a pair of knickers. My fingerprints would be all over her apartment of course, but I saw no sense in leaving them at the scene of the crime. I opened the front door, cleaned the door handle, closed it, locked up again, and then drew down the blinds on the door and the display window. With any luck it might be a day or two before her body was found.
A back door led into a courtyard. I turned up the collar of my coat, pulled the brim of my hat about my eyes, picked up the holdall containing Vera’s money, and stepped quietly outside. It was getting dark now and I kept to the center of the courtyard, away from lighted windows and an early patch of moonlight. At the opposite end of the courtyard I passed down an alley and opened a door that led onto the street that intersected with Wasagasse. This was Horlgasse and, for some reason, this seemed to mean something to me. Horlgasse. Horlgasse.
I walked southwest, onto Roosevelt Platz. A church stood in the middle of the square. The Votive Church. It had been built in gratitude to God for the preservation of the young Emperor Franz Josef’s life following an assassination attempt. I had half an idea that Roosevelt Platz had once been Göring Platz. It had been a while since I had thought of Göring. Briefly, back in 1936, he had been a client of mine. But Horlgasse hadn’t finished jostling with my brain cells. Horlgasse. Horlgasse. And then I remembered. Horlgasse. That was the address I had been given for Britta Warzok. The same address I had found indented on the notepad in Major Jacobs’s Buick. I took out my notebook and checked the street number. I had been planning to visit Britta Warzok’s given address as soon as Gruen’s business was concluded, but now seemed as good a time as any. Not least because I was asking myself if the contiguity of these two addresses—Britta Warzok and Vera Messmann—was simply a coincidence? Or more than simple coincidence? A meaningful coincidence, perhaps. Jung had a fancy word for this, which I might have remembered had not the circumstances of the coincidence pushed everything else from my mind. I might also have remembered that not every meaningful coincidence is a positive one.
I turned around and walked east along Horlgasse. It took me just two minutes to find number forty-two. It was situated just before the tram line, where Horlgasse merged with Turkenstrasse, and overlooking Schlick Platz. The Vienna Police Academy was only fifty yards away. I found myself facing yet another baroque portal. A couple of Atlantes were standing in for columns to support an entablature garlanded with boughs of ivy. A small door cut into the main door stood open. I went inside and stood opposite some letterboxes. There were only three apartments in the building, one on each floor. Appearing on the box belonging to the top apartment was the name “Warzok.” It was bulging with post that hadn’t been collected in several days, but I went up anyway.
I climbed the stairs. The door was open. I pushed it wide and poked my head into the unlit hallway. The place felt cold. Too cold for the comfort of anyone living there.
“Frau Warzok?” I called out. “Are you there?”
It was a big apartment with triple-height ceilings and double-height windows. One of these was open. Something unpleasant pricked my nostrils and the back of my throat. Something stale and rotten. I took out a handkerchief to cover my nose and mouth and discovered that I was holding the knickers I’d used to wipe my fingerprints from Vera Messmann’s shop. But it hardly seemed to matter. I advanced into the apartment telling myself first that no one co
uld be about, that no one could have stood the cold or that smell for very long. Then I told myself that someone must have opened the window, and recently, too. I walked over to the open window and looked out onto Schlick Platz as a tram went by, clanging like a fire alarm. I took a deep breath of fresh air and headed back into the shadows, to where the smell seemed to get worse. Then the lights went on and I spun around on my heel to find myself facing two men. They were both holding guns. And the guns were both pointed at me.
THIRTY-THREE
Neither man was very big, and, but for their guns, I might easily have pushed them aside like a pair of small swing doors. They looked a little more intelligent than the average gun-toting thug, although unremarkably so. Theirs were the kind of faces that resisted immediate description, like a field of grass or a gravel path. You had to look at them hard to fix them in your mind. I was looking hard. I look hard at anyone who points a gun at me. But this didn’t stop me from putting my hands up. That’s just good manners when a firearm comes into the room.
“What’s your name, Fritz? And what are you doing here?”
The one who spoke first had tried to affect a stern tone, like he was trying to forget some education and breeding for the sake of the effect it might have on me. He had gray-white hair and a beard and mustache that were arranged in a perfect heptagon around his mouth, and which lent his soft-skinned face some much-needed masculinity. Behind his light-framed glasses his eyes were wide, with too much white around his yellow-brown irises, as if he was uncertain of what he was doing. He wore a dark suit, a short leather coat, and a little trilby that made him look as if he were planning to balance a tray of bread on his head.
“Dr. Eric Gruen,” I said. Whatever the crime Eric Gruen had committed, with only Eric Gruen’s passport in my pocket I had no other choice but to say I was him. Besides, from what Medgyessy had told me, it was the Allied police who were after Gruen, not the Austrian police. And these were Austrian policemen, I was certain of that. They were both carrying the same gun—a shiny new Mauser automatic, the kind they gave to all the cops on Vienna’s denazified police force.
