The Lady from Zagreb

by Philip Kerr

  Even I was surprised at what happened next. I’d heard horror stories of what happened when a Flammenwerfer went in to clear a trench on the Western Front—horror stories of human torches and burning Frenchmen—but I’m pleased to say I’d never seen it myself. It wasn’t a weapon that I could ever have used with a clear conscience. It’s one thing putting a rifle bullet in a man’s head, or even a bayonet through his gut, but it’s something else to set him on fire. As soon as the rakija—which Geiger had said was more than eighty-proof alcohol—hit the flame from Edouard’s lighter, it ignited the hands, shoulders, jackets, faces, heads, and hair of both men; in fact, it set fire to anything that the rakija from my drunken mouth had landed on, including the railing. A ruthless Flammenwerfer couldn’t have done a better job. A strong smell of singed human hair and burning flesh filled the bright and fiery air alongside their screams. Edouard plucked at his burning hair and a piece of it came away in his burning hand. Nölle twisted one way and then the other in hideous slow motion like a living Roman candle. The next second the alcohol had burned off and the flames were gone. For a moment they stopped screaming. At the very least, I’d blinded them.

  I hardly hesitated. I reached down, grabbed Nölle around the ankles, lifted him up and then tipped him over the railing like the trash from a ship at sea. Edouard guessed what had happened and lashed blindly out in front of him. I caught his wrist, twisted his arm hard around his back, bent him over the railing, and tried to get a hand under his knee. But like a stubborn mule, he splayed his feet and stayed put until I punched hard at his balls several times and then felt him relax a little. He puked some, I think, and then I lifted him off his feet.

  “No, don’t, please,” he yelled, but it was too late. The next second he fell through the air, screaming like an injured fox, and it was only when he vanished through the treetops and hit the ground that the silence of the mountaintop was restored.

  Horrified at what I had done and yet relieved still to be alive, I sat down and took another swig of the rakija. Then I threw up.

  Thirty-three

  Trembling violently as if I’d just touched a live electrical wire, I drove back down the mountain in the Citroën to the safe house in Ringlikon. The night was not yet over. A truckload of milk churns was parked on the edge of the field. The lights were on in the safe house and a man—the dairy farmer, I presumed—was moving between the kitchen and the farmyard. He was a tall, powerful man wearing a black, short-sleeved jacket with red piping, a white shirt, and black leather trousers. It was probably all the fashion in Zurich. I didn’t want to harm him—I’d had enough violence for one evening—but I wanted my passport and my wallet and my car back more, and I couldn’t see how I was going to get them unless I had a gun in my hand. So I sat in the Citroën for several minutes trying to compose myself and wondering if I could bluff him, but I wasn’t able to think of anything that stood even half a chance. You didn’t run a safe house for the Gestapo without being just a bit hard to fool, not to say treacherous. Nölle had described him as a die-hard Nazi and as someone who would have fed me to his pigs. Even though I hadn’t actually seen any pigs, that certainly sealed his fate as far as I was concerned. I didn’t think this man was going to let me go on my sweet way without a fight. At first I thought to sneak up behind him and hit him with something. But then a low bellow ripped through the Swiss night air and I asked myself if I could enlist the help of the bull in the shed. I knew nothing at all about bulls except that they were often dangerous. Especially when there was a big sign above a doorway into the yard inviting you to beware of one. There ought to have been a sign above my head, as well. Fed up with the way the day had turned out and deprived of a pleasant afternoon with a female of my own species, I was feeling kind of pissed off and dangerous myself.

  I stepped out of the car and very carefully tried the handle on the front door. It was not locked. A Swiss village isn’t the kind of place where people lock their doors. I walked back down the street and climbed the fence into the field so that I could enter the yard that way. Up close, the bull was even meaner than I had supposed. His horns were quite short but that didn’t handicap his ability to intimidate. Clearly the farmer thought the same way because the bull had a ring through his massive pink nose and it was attached to a short chain that led up his muzzle and onto a loop around each horn. It looked like the last thing you wanted to find yourself holding when you were looking to flush the lavatory in the dark. Even as I approached his stall, the bull backed off from the gate a little, snorted, flicked his tail, lowered his hay bale of a head, and started to sweep the straw back with one hoof. After a while he realized I was safe behind the gate and, appearing to tire of this, he turned around as if to show off his balls, which were bigger than a silk stocking full of grapefruit. It all seemed designed to tell me just one thing: bulls are dangerous. I looked around for something to goad him with and caught sight of a pitchfork, which seemed ideal. So I picked it up and poked him several times with the blunt end. And when that didn’t work I gave him a short jab with the sharp end, which soon had him giving me the eye again. This time he bellowed for good measure and butted his head at the gate, which shook like a cheap car on a rutted road. It was time for me to execute my improvised plan. I drew the bolt on the gate, opened it a few centimeters, and then ran. In my haste to be away I slipped on the cobbled ground and almost fell, but once safely over the fence and into the field, I climbed back onto the road and came around the front of the house. I had a clear view of everything. The bull was now loose in the dimly lit yard. He was standing there, head lowered with intent, snorting his frustration at not finding me beside him and looking more than a little like the Ox Fountain of Fertility in Berlin’s Arnswalder Platz where the childless sometimes went in search of miracles.

  Meanwhile the farmer didn’t seem to have noticed anything was amiss. I needed to get him out of the house and into the farmyard so I could run into the house and bolt the kitchen door behind him. So I picked up a milk bottle off the front step and lobbed it into the yard, where it exploded like a glass grenade. Then another. I heard a question shouted in the house and then heavy bolts on the kitchen door being drawn. I opened the front door, waited a second, and then ran into the house just in time to see the farmer advancing from his brightly lit kitchen and into the near darkness of the yard. I sprinted into the kitchen and slammed the door shut behind him. The farmer turned around and started to hammer on the door, still unaware of just how precarious his situation really was.

  “What the hell?” he yelled. “Open this damn door. Is that you, Edouard? Stop fucking around, will you? I’ve had a long day and I’m tired and I’m not in the mood for any stupid jokes. D’you hear? Open this fucking door.”

  I didn’t see what happened next. For one thing I was busy looking for my passport, the car keys, and a gun; and for another, there wasn’t a window that looked out onto the farmyard. But I heard more or less everything that took place.

  “Oh, Jesus,” the farmer screamed. “For Christ’s sake, open the door. Oh Christ. Oh Jesus.”

  I could hardly avoid hearing it. I’ve heard some awful things in my life—the noise of the trenches will live with me forever—but this ran that a very close second.

  I heard the bull bellow loudly, then the sound of hoofbeats on the cobbles. The farmer screamed again and the next second the kitchen door shook as if it had been struck by a panzer tank. And then again. All told, the door was battered in this way five times before it stopped and everything was silent in the yard again. I didn’t like to think what had happened on the other side of that door. And I felt guilty, as if I’d stabbed the farmer with the pitchfork. Telling myself that Gottlob would certainly have shot me if he’d got the chance, I carried on looking for my things and eventually found them in the kitchen drawer, alongside a flashlight and an Arminius—a .22 caliber pistol made by Hermann Weihrauch, a company that also manufactured bicycles—and a box of ammunition. T
he Arminius was only a bit more threatening than a loaded bicycle but not much. I pushed the gun under the waistband of my trousers and the box of ammunition in my pocket but only until I saw the Walther P38 hanging in a shoulder holster on the back of the front door. I checked the Walther and, finding it was loaded, returned the Arminius to the drawer. A .38 always feels better in your hand than a .22. Especially when you’re trying to make your point in an argument.

  Feeling a little braver now that I had a decent gun in my hand, I went to the kitchen door, opened it a fraction, and shone the flashlight around the yard in the faint hope that the farmer might still be alive and that I might offer him an escape. But I could tell I was too late. The farmer called Gottlob lay curled up on the cobbles as if he’d gone to sleep on the ground. He was dead, of course. His face looked as if it had been demolished by a wrecking ball. The light caught the bull’s big brown eye and he charged again. I closed the door quickly and bolted it just in time, top and bottom, even while the beast battered its head against timbers that barely held. Through planks thicker than my hand, the bull sounded as big as an elephant.

  I went into the garage where we’d left the Mercedes and screwed the rocker plates on top of the gold bars and the panels back on the doors. There was a petrol pump so I filled the 190’s tank with gas, too. Then I washed myself in a pantry sink in the garage, straightened my tie, brushed off my suit, and generally tried to make myself look like someone who belonged in a nice hotel in Zurich. With any luck I might have a quiet night and then meet Inspector Weisendanger for breakfast as if nothing had happened. I was hardly proud of my night’s work. One way or another, six men—three Americans and three Germans—were now dead because of me. But I hadn’t asked for any of this. I’d much prefer to have spent the afternoon in bed with Dalia Dresner. Any man would.

  At the Baur au Lac, the antique carriage clock on the mantelpiece said it was past ten o’clock. Everything was exactly as I had left it earlier that day, and in this oasis of lakeside calm it was hard to believe that organizations like the OSS and the Gestapo even existed, or that the world was even at war. The Russian front and the bombing of Hamburg and Berlin might have been taking place on another planet. The neatly bearded desk clerk was wearing a bow tie and a matching black morning coat and he had the cool, imperturbable air of a man for whom nothing was ever a surprise. He regarded my arrival back in the hotel’s elegant, wood-paneled lobby with a good show of pleasure, which is saying something for a Swiss. I suppose I just didn’t seem like the kind of guest who’d probably doubled the country’s annual homicide rate in just one night. And when I asked for my room key, he also handed me a note written on the hotel’s expensively thick stationery. If he could smell the alcohol on my breath and clothes, he didn’t let on.

  “Is there anything else I can do for you this evening, Herr Gunther?”

  “Yes. Please ask room service to send up a bottle of beer and some scrambled eggs, will you? Bread and cheese, some sausage and pickles. Anything at all. And as soon as possible, please. I’m ravenously hungry.”

  Alone in my room I read Dalia’s note several times before my supper turned up. Then I had a hot bath. I thought about telephoning but it was late by Swiss standards and I decided to do it in the morning, after I’d had breakfast with Weisendanger. I went to bed thinking sweet thoughts of Dalia. In her note she apologized for her lateness—it seemed she’d been unable to escape from her husband until almost four p.m., and assumed my not being at the hotel had something to do with that—and she suggested we meet again the following day. There were lots of written kisses at the bottom of the notepaper and a real one made of lipstick. I felt like I was fifteen again. In a good way. The older you get, the more attractive that idea starts to seem. And when I saw her, it would be even sweeter than it might have been because I had survived a kidnapping and an attempted murder.

  Perhaps it’s true what Goethe says, that destiny grants us our wishes, but in its own way, in order to give us something beyond our wishes. It’s curious, but often, just as I’m drifting off to sleep, I feel I might be Goethe. It could be his disdain for the church and the law and of course the Nazis—he would certainly have loathed Hitler; it’s certainly the Nazis he has in mind when he tells us to disdain those in whom the desire to punish is strong—but I once visited the famous Auerbachs Keller in Leipzig where the poet spent most of his student years drinking wine, and felt an affinity with the man that I’ve felt for no other. Then again, it might just have been all those pictures on the wooden walls of Faust drinking with Mephistopheles. I’ve often felt an affinity with him, too. How else was I to explain my still being alive? My mind sidestepped the present once again, and for a moment I was drinking in the medieval cellar’s subterranean depths; then I was astride a wine barrel as big as a bull and riding out the door and up into the marketplace where the last scene from Jud Süss was already under way, and poor Oppenheimer was screaming for his life to be spared as the cage carrying the gallows was raised to the top of a tower high above the citizenry’s heads. I stayed to watch before oblivion took us both to its black velvet bosom. It was a very German dream.

  Thirty-four

  I’m normally an early riser. Especially in summer when the sun gets up before anyone. But that morning neither of us was quite ready for the Zurich police at 5:30 a.m. Weisendanger was there, of course, and stood quietly by while I dressed and his men searched my room, to find nothing. When I’d got back to the Baur the previous night I’d taken the precaution of hiding my gun behind the wheel of an enormous Duesenberg that was underneath a car cover in the parking lot, so that wasn’t anything to worry about.

  “What’s this all about, Inspector? Was I late for breakfast? Or is it an especially nice dawn sky this morning?”

  “Shut up and get dressed. You’ll find out.”

  “The last time I got woken up like this I spent a very uncomfortable day with the Gestapo.”

  “I told you we like to start early in the Swiss police.”

  “I didn’t think you meant this early. Let’s hope the breakfast is better where we’re going now.”

  We went to the Zurich police headquarters in Kasernenstrasse, which was about a fifteen-minute walk northwest of the hotel, and just a stone’s throw from the main railway station. I know that because I had to walk back to the Baur after they’d finished questioning me about the three Amis they’d found shot dead in the Huttenstrasse apartment. Police HQ was a disproportionately large, semi-castellated building with a big central clock and two white-painted wings, and what looked like an enormous parade ground to the rear.

  “This is a hell of a shit factory for a country without much real crime,” I remarked as we trudged up four flights of stairs.

  “Maybe that’s why we don’t have much crime,” said Weisendanger. “Did you ever think about that?”

  We went into a top-floor room with three lateral bars across the window. I suppose they might have prevented a fat man from committing suicide by being thrown into the street—which was a favorite interrogation technique of the Gestapo—but only just. From the room where they questioned me I could see across the river to what looked like a military barracks and stables. I lit a cigarette and sat down.

  “Where were you yesterday?” asked Weisendanger.

  “After a very pleasant breakfast with you,” I said, “I spent the morning in Küsnacht. At the home of Dr. Stefan Obrenovic. I expect you can ask him. He’ll certainly remember my visit. He didn’t like me very much.”

  “I wonder why?”

  “The very same thing I was asking myself. After that, I took a drive around the lake. Which was nice. It’s a beautiful lake you have here. Then I went to the zoo, where I also had a late lunch. You could have asked me all this over a soft-boiled egg and a cup of coffee.”

  “The zoo?”

  “Yes, it’s on the slopes of the Allmend. And better than Berlin Zoo, I have to admit. A
lot of our animals have been eaten, you know. It’s a short-sighted policy for a zoo, I think.”

  “What animals did you see?”

  “Lions and tigers. Things with fur. The usual kind.”

  “Then what did you do?”

  “Let’s see. I had a coffee at Sprüngli on Paradeplatz. No trip to Zurich would be complete without that. Then a beer at the Kronenhalle. Maybe two or three because I fell asleep in the car. Came back here at around nine o’clock.”

  “The desk clerk said it was more like ten.”

  “Was it really that late?”

  “You weren’t anywhere near Huttenstrasse?”

  “Not to my knowledge. What’s in Huttenstrasse?”

  “Right now the bodies of three dead Americans.”

  “And you think I had something to do with that?”

  “For five hundred years we’ve had democracy and peace in this town. Then the day after you show up we have three shootings in one day. That’s a hell of a coincidence, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Would you be as upset if they were Germans who’d died?”

  “Try me.”

  “I hate to sound like the elder statesman here, but when I was a detective in Berlin, I used to look for something we quaintly called ‘evidence’ before bringing a suspect in for questioning. That way I could catch him out if he was lying. You might try that sometime. You’d be surprised how effective it can be in a situation like this.”

  “You think you’re pretty smart, don’t you, Gunther? A typically arrogant German.”