by Philip Kerr
Five days after Dalia left Germany for good I received a visitor. A little to my surprise it was State Secretary Gutterer, from the Ministry of Truth. He’d put on a little more weight since the last time I’d seen him but he was just as supercilious as ever; all the same I was pleased to see him. I’d have been pleased to see anyone after spending almost a week by myself. Even a man wearing a black top hat.
“You’re very fortunate you’re not going to stay in here for a lot longer,” he said. “It’s lucky for you you’ve got some friends with influence.”
I nodded. “That sounds promising.”
“As soon as it can be arranged, you’re leaving Berlin,” he said. “You can spend a couple of weeks on Rügen Island with your wife and then you’re to join army intelligence on the Panther-Wotan line. It’s an insignificant section of the defensive line that runs between Lake Peipus and the Baltic Sea on our Eastern Front. You’ll be a lieutenant in the 132nd Infantry Division, part of Army Group North, where a man of your negligible talents can be properly appreciated. Right now, I believe it’s uncomfortably hot there. Lots of mosquitoes. But you won’t be surprised to learn that it gets very cold in winter. Which is only a couple of months away. And of course let’s not forget the Russians are coming. They should keep you occupied for as long as you manage to stay alive.”
I nodded. “Fresh air, sounds good,” I said. “And Rügen Island with my wife. That will be nice. Thank you. She’ll like that.”
Gutterer paused. “What? No jokes, Lieutenant Gunther?”
“No, not this time.”
“I’m disappointed in you. No, really.”
“Lately—I’m not quite sure why—I’ve lost my sense of humor, Herr State Secretary. I suppose it weighs a bit heavily on me, being in the Linden Hotel, of course. This isn’t a place for mirth. That and the fact that I’ve just come down to earth with a loud bump and realized that I am no longer a god. The fact is, I’ve suddenly stopped feeling as if I were painted with gold and lived on Mount Olympus.”
“I could have told you that, Gunther.”
“For a short while she made me feel that way. I walked as tall as the tallest man, breathed the purest air, and took an absurd delight in myself. I even managed to face myself in the shaving mirror. I thought, if she can look at me with pleasure, then perhaps I can, too. But now I shall have to get used to being ordinary again. I am, in short, exactly like you, Gutterer: ignoble, inhuman, small-minded, sterile, ugly, with a mind like a paper knife.”
“You’re making no sense at all, you know that, don’t you?”
“I daresay that a man with your great wordsmith’s skills could have written that speech better for me, Herr State Secretary. But you’ll forgive me if I say you couldn’t ever have felt any of those things. Not in a thousand years. You were never a Teutonic knight of the Holy Roman Empire. You’ve never fought and defeated a troll or a dragon. You’ve never sacrificed yourself for a noble cause. You’ve never pledged a woman loyalty on your sword. Which is really what’s important in life.”
Gutterer sneered.
“Let me tell you something,” he said. “And you can take this from the Ministry of Truth. She’s going to forget all about you, Gunther. Maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow, but as time goes by, I can absolutely guarantee it. You’ll certainly never hear from her again. My ministry is going to make absolutely sure of that. Any letters sent to or received from her house in Switzerland won’t ever arrive. Telegrams will be ignored. Nothing. You mark my words, by the time Christmas comes she won’t even remember your name. You’ll just be a sentimental little adventure she had one summer when she played Lili Marlene to your soon-to-be-dead soldier. A footnote in the life of a minor film actress of insignificant talent. Think about that when you’re sitting in a cold foxhole on the Dnieper River and waiting for an ignominious death. Think about her, wrapped in a fox fur, and in some other man’s arms, her husband, perhaps, or some other fool like you who thinks he’s more than just her favorite toy.”
Gutterer got up to leave.
“Oh, I nearly forgot something important.” He tossed an official-looking envelope onto the table in front of us and smiled unpleasantly. “Those are two tickets to the cinema for you. A last gift from Dr. Goebbels. The Saint That Never Was starring Dalia Dresner is playing at the Kammerlichtspiele in the Café Vaterland. The minister thought that you might like them so you can see her and know that you’re never going to see her again.”
“Kind of him. But that makes two of us, doesn’t it?”
As Gutterer walked out of my cell, I remembered the graffiti on my cell and for no reason I can think of, I said it out loud.
“Long live our sacred Germany.”
I don’t expect he understood what it meant. In fact, I’m fairly certain of it.
Epilogue
I’m not sure the ending of my story would ever have satisfied a proper writer like Paul Meyer-Schwertenbach. There was no restoration of moral order—at least none that I could see; such a thing seemed impossible while the Nazis remained in power. Not to mention the fact that the detective had helped the murderer to escape. Twice. This would have been bad enough, but in my story the cop had been so slow on the uptake he’d needed the help of the killer to understand what had happened in front of his own eyes. And I’d nearly forgotten the fact that the detective himself had killed two people. Three, if you count death by farmer’s bull. That wasn’t good, either. Detectives are supposed to solve murders, not commit them. All in all I thought it was a pretty poor excuse for a detective story. In fact, the only murder that was properly solved—that of Dr. Heckholz, and even that was little more than a good guess—was promptly ignored. Perhaps that was why only the detective himself was punished. At least that’s what it felt like. I don’t know how else to describe it when you meet a girl, fall for her in a big way, and never get to see her again, except on the cinema screen, which, as I think I said before, is itself a very subtle kind of punishment. It’s a bit like what happened to that demigod Tantalus, for whom food and water were placed forever and tantalizingly out of reach.
These days I read a lot. In the winter there’s not much else to do on the Côte d’Azur. The Greek and the German philosophers—I love that crap. I can’t see the point of reading a book by someone who’s dumber than you are, which accounts for most modern fiction, in my humble opinion. Plato talks about something called anamnesis, which is when something long forgotten comes to the surface of a man’s consciousness. Now, I’ll admit that just sounds like a fancy word for remembering something, but actually it’s more than that because, with remembering, it’s not necessary to have forgotten anything, which makes for a subtle distinction. That’s what cinema does. It brings long-forgotten things to the surface. When you’re least expecting it, too—which is how you come to walk out of a pretty bad film in La Ciotat with tears streaming down your face. Goebbels had been a very subtle torturer when he’d had Gutterer hand me those cinema tickets at the Linden Hotel in Potsdam. Ever since then I’d avoided seeing Dalia’s movies; the pain had been too much. But after more than a decade I thought I was over that and it came as a bit of a shock to discover that I could still cry like a baby when I saw her up on the screen. Fortunately, it was a matinee and there was no one else to see me. Not that I think there’s anything wrong with anyone crying in a movie. If a movie can’t make you cry, then nothing can. When I saw Dumbo, I thought I’d never stop crying.
I walked out of the Eden and along the seafront to a bar I often went to in the summer after finishing my work at the Miramar Hotel. But right now it was winter and the hotel was closing and I was wondering how I was going to survive until spring. It was only the serious yachtsmen who came to La Ciotat in November, although some of the bars stayed open all year around to get their trade. It could be worth it, too. If you can afford a yacht, you can afford a lot. While I drank my coffee and schnapps I borrowed the bar o
wner’s binoculars and watched a very serious-looking yacht as it docked. If you have a peculiar sense of humor like mine you can get a lot of laughs watching some fellow scrape his very expensive toy and then bawl someone out for it, usually his wife. But with this one, they knew what they were doing. It was a wooden-hulled, schooner-rigged boat about thirty-five meters long and maybe a hundred or more tons with a French flag on the stern. The owner and his crew came ashore and walked straight by my table in a haze of cigarettes, expensive perfumes, and a variety of accents.
To my surprise, one of them stopped and stared at me. I stared back. I never forget a face and I wished I’d forgotten this one, but his name still eluded me. He spoke to me in German.
“Gunther, isn’t it?”
“Not me,” I said, in German. “My name is Wolf, Walter Wolf.”
The man turned to his friends. “I’ll catch you up,” he said, and sat down.
After they’d gone away, he offered me a cigarette, which I declined, and waved the bar owner over. “What are you drinking, Herr Wolf?”
“Schnapps,” I said.
“Two schnapps,” he said. “Better bring the bottle. Make it the good stuff, if you have any.” He lit a cigarette and smiled. “I seem to remember you have a taste for schnapps.”
“Your memory is better than mine, I’m afraid. You have the advantage of me, Herr—”
“Leuthard. Ueli Leuthard.”
I nodded.
The bar owner came back with a bottle of good Korn and two glasses and left them on the table.
“The last time we did this was in July 1942.” Leuthard poured two glasses. “In the Tiergarten. Don’t you remember, now? You’d stolen the bottle and the glasses from the Villa Minoux in Wannsee. I was impressed with your enterprise. But I was young then.”
“Now I come to think of it, I do kind of remember. That was the night you smashed a man’s head in with a bust of Hitler, wasn’t it? Heckholz. Dr. Heckholz. That was his name.”
“I knew you’d remember.”
“What was it made you kill him anyway?”
“Does it really matter now?”
“No. I suppose not.”
Leuthard looked somber for a moment. “Believe me, I’m not proud of killing him. Frankly, it’s bothered me ever since. But it had to be done. I had my orders. My general told me to shut Heckholz up for good and so that’s what I did. I’d have shot him if I’d been allowed to carry a gun in Germany, but I wasn’t, so I was forced to improvise. And look here, it was wartime, after all. Even for Switzerland. We may not have been at war but it wasn’t for want of Germany’s desire to take over our country. So, I had to kill him. It would have been embarrassing for the Swiss government if it had been generally known how much business we did with the German government and, in particular, the SS. Not to say compromising, diplomatically. Our neutrality was at stake.”
“I’m sure I don’t care. No, really. It’s none of my business. It was the war. Really, that’s all that needs to be said about it.”
“Did you change your name because you were SS? I mean, let’s be honest, Gunther. I bet you have a past, too, right?”
“No, that wasn’t the reason. But you’re right. I have a past. There’s quite a bit of it, actually. And each year it seems there’s just a little bit more of that than there is a future, perhaps.”
“I heard how you figured it was me who killed that lawyer. Paul Meyer told me. That was clever of you.”
“Not really. How is he? Your friend Meyer.”
“Still writing books. But we were never really friends. He was pretty pissed about what happened that night.”
“I liked him.”
“He liked you. And your friend—that dyed-in-the-wool Nazi, General Schellenberg.”
“That Nazi helped to save Switzerland, too.”
“Really?” Leuthard looked less than convinced by this argument but I didn’t feel much inclined to argue Schellenberg’s case. “I read somewhere that he was dead, didn’t I?”
“That’s right. Four years ago.”
“He couldn’t have been much more than forty.”
“Forty-two. He had a liver condition. The same one I’ve got, I imagine. It’s the one you get when you keep using your liver to process very large quantities of alcohol.”
“Talking of which.” Leuthard raised his glass. “What shall we drink to?”
“How about absent friends?”
“Absent friends.”
We drank and then Leuthard poured two more.
“What are you doing these days?” he asked.
“I work at a hotel round here.”
“Is it a good one? I speak as someone who would prefer to sleep on land tonight.”
“Not really. Fortunately for you it’s just closed for the winter, which saves us both the trouble of my recommendation, which would be untruthful.”
“That’s my yacht on the pontoon.”
“Yes, I saw it dock. Very impressive. I didn’t see the name.”
“The Zaca. It’s very nice but the beds are a little hard. I’m going to have to have them replaced. Either that or get myself a new yacht. You used to work at another hotel, didn’t you? The Hotel Adlon, wasn’t it? In Berlin?”
I nodded. “That’s right. I was the house detective. I tried running a hotel myself after the war but it didn’t work out.”
“Oh? What went wrong?”
“It was in the wrong place. For a hotel that’s always more important than you think it is.”
“It’s a tough business. Especially in winter. I should know, I run a hotel myself. It belongs to someone else. But I help to run the place. The Grand Hôtel du Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat. Perhaps you’ve heard of it.”
I smiled. “Everyone on the Riviera has heard of the Grand Hôtel du Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat. That’s like asking a German if they’ve heard of Konrad Adenauer.”
“As a matter of fact, he stayed with us, last summer.”
“I wouldn’t expect anything else of a good Christian Democrat.”
“What else have you heard? About the hotel, I mean?”
“That it’s the best on the Côte d’Azur.”
“You don’t rate the Pavillon Eden-Roc in Cap d’Antibes as highly? Or any of the others as much?”
“The Pavillon has a bigger swimming pool, but the service lets it down and the décor is a little tired. And maybe they’re a little inflexible with credit. The Grand in Cap Martin isn’t doing so well right now; rumor has it that the whole hotel is going to close and become apartments before very long. The rumor’s true, by the way. Being right on the main road, the Carlton in Cannes is too noisy, and so is the Majestic. Not only that but people can see into the rooms with a sea view when guests leave the French windows open, which isn’t very private for more famous guests. The Negresco in Nice has the best barman on the Riviera but the new chef isn’t working out. I hear he drinks. The Hôtel de Paris in Monaco is full of crooks and Americans—the crooks follow the Americans, so you’d better watch your purse—and much too expensive for what it is. It’s no accident that Alfred Hitchcock chose to base much of his very colorful film in that hotel. You’ll find more thieves working in the restaurant than in the casino. Fifty francs for an omelette is pushing it, even for the Riviera. No, if it was my money and I had enough of it, I’d stay at your hotel. But I’d still ask for a winter rate.”
Leuthard smiled. “And here? Where would you stay round here?”
I shrugged. “Like I say, it’s out of season right now. But if you really wanted to sleep on land, I’d pick the Rose Thé, on the Avenue Wilson. It’s not the fanciest hotel, but it’s clean and comfortable and for one night, it should be fine. Good restaurant, too. Better than most. You should eat the red mullet. And drink the local Bandol rosé. Oh, and by the way, I’d leave someone to watch your boat. Som
e of the locals can be a little light-fingered at this time of year when their employment prospects dry up. You can’t blame them for that.”
“I’m impressed.”
“Don’t be. After you’ve been a Berlin cop for twenty years, information just sort of sticks to your hands like white lint to a pair of black trousers. There was a time when I could tell you if an informer was to be relied upon. Or if a man was armed just by the way he buttoned his coat. Now I can tell you only which taxi service is the most reliable. Or if a girl is on the make or not.”
“How do you tell that? I’m interested.”
“Down here? They’re all on the make.”
“You’re not including the wives, I hope.”
“Especially the wives.”
Leuthard smiled. “Tell me, Gunther—”
“Wolf, Walter Wolf.”
“Apart from German, what languages do you speak?”
“French. Spanish. Russian. My English is getting better.”
“Well, there’s not much call for Russian on the Riviera and, thanks to their socialist government, the English have no money. But it seems to me I could use a man like you. A man with particular skills.”
“I’ll be sixty quite soon. My detective days are over, Herr Leuthard. I couldn’t find a missing person in a phone booth.”
“I need a good concierge, not a detective. Someone who speaks languages, who’s good with information. A good concierge has to be a little bit like a detective, I think. He’s expected to know things. How to fix things. Sometimes he even has to know things he’s not supposed to know. And do things that others wouldn’t want to do. Pleasing guests can be a tricky business. Especially the ones with a lot of money. Handling guests who’ve had too much to drink, or who’ve just smacked their wives—I’m certain you could do this in your sleep. I had to let the last concierge go. Actually we have three. But Armand was our head concierge.”
