by Philip Kerr
Krempel regarded me with no more feeling than if I’d been a dried-up loofah, and sat down on the toilet lid. His eyes were two puffy slits, as if they’d been bitten by a snake. He lit a cigarette, crossed his long legs, and let out a long, tobacco-flavored sigh.
Several minutes passed. They were idle ones for him, but for me they were increasingly hazardous and intoxicated. The booze was strong-arming me into spineless submission.
“Gerhard? How would you like to make a lot of money? And I mean a lot of money. Thousands of marks.”
“Thousands, is it?” His body twitched as it expelled a derisive laugh. “And this from you, Gunther. A man with a hole in his shoe who gets the bus home. When you’ve got the fare.”
“You have got that right, my friend.” With my backside on the floor of the canyon-deep bath and my Salamanders in the air, I felt like Bobby Leach going over Niagara in a barrel. Every so often my stomach seemed to fall away beneath me. I turned the tap and splashed some cold water onto my sweat-covered face. “But. There is money to be had. My friend. A lot of money. Behind you there’s a panel that is screwed on top of the lavatory cistern. Hidden in there is a bag. A bag containing banknotes. In several currencies. A Thompson submachine gun. And enough Swiss gold coins to start a chocolate shop.”
“It’s a little early for Christmas,” said Krempel. He tutted loudly. “And I didn’t even leave a boot by the fireplace.”
“Last year, mine was full of twigs. But it’s there, all right. The money, I mean. I figure Reles must have hidden it there. I mean, a Thompson’s not the kind of thing you can leave in the hotel safe. Even here.”
“Don’t let me stop you drinking,” Krempel growled, and, leaning forward on the lavatory seat, he tapped the sole of my shoe—the one with the hole in it—with the barrel of the gun.
I filled my cheeks with the obnoxious liquid, swallowed uncomfortably, and let out a deep, nauseated breath. “I found it. When I searched this suite. A little while ago.”
“And you just left it there?”
“I’m a lot of things, Gerhard. But I’m not a thief. You have the advantage of me there. There’s a screwdriver old Max keeps in this suite. Somewhere. To remove said panel. I’m sure of it. I was looking for it a bit earlier on. So that I could greet you with it when you showed up with the Mauser in your mitt. Nothing personal, you understand. But a Thompson gets a click of the heels and a salute in any language.”
I closed my eyes for a moment, raised the sausagelike bottle in a silent toast, and swallowed some more. When I opened them again, Krempel was examining the screws on the panel with interest.
“There’s enough there to buy several companies, or to bribe whoever needs bribing. Yes, there’s a lot of coal in that bag. A lot more than he’s paying you, Gerhard.”
“Shut up, Gunther.”
“Can’t. I always was a gabby drunk. Last time I got tripped like this was when my wife died. Spanish flu. Have you ever wondered why they call it Spanish flu, Gerhard? It started in Kansas, you know. But the Amis censored that because of the war censorship still in force. And it didn’t make the newspapers until it reached Spain, where they didn’t have any wartime censorship. Ever had the flu, Gerhard? That’s what I feel like now. Like I got a one-man epidemic of the stuff. Jesus, I think I even wet myself.”
“You turned the tap, thickhead, remember?”
I yawned. “Did I?”
“Drink up.”
“Here’s to her. She was a good woman. Too good for me. Do you have a wife?”
He shook his head.
“With the money in that bag you could afford several. And none of them would mind that you’re such an ugly bastard. A woman can overlook almost any shortcoming in a man when there’s a big bag of money on her dinner table. I’ll bet that bitch next door, Dora, doesn’t know about the bag, either. Otherwise, she’d have had it for sure. Mercenary little nanny-goat. Mind you, I will say this for her. I’ve seen her naked, and she’s a peach. Of course, you have to remember that every peach has a stone inside it. Dora’s got a bigger one than most, too. But she’s a peach, all right.”
My head felt as heavy as a stone. A giant peach stone. And when my head dropped onto my chest, it seemed to fall such a long way that, for a moment, I thought it had dropped into the leather basket beneath the falling ax. And I cried out, thinking I was dead. Opening my eyes, I took a deep, spasmodic breath and struggled to remain vaguely vertical, but now it was a losing battle.
“All right,” said Krempel. “You’ve had enough. Let’s try to get up, shall we?”
He stood up and gathered my coat collars in his pomegranate-sized fists, and hauled me roughly out of the bath. He was a strong man—too strong for me to try anything stupid. But I took a swing at him anyway and missed, before losing my balance and falling onto the bathroom floor, where Krempel kicked me in the ribs for my trouble.
“What about the money?” I asked, hardly feeling the pain. “You’re forgetting the money.”
“I guess I’ll just have to come back for it later.” He hauled me onto my feet again and maneuvered me out of the bathroom.
Dora was sitting on the sofa, reading a magazine. She was wearing a fur coat. I wondered if Reles had bought it for her.
“Oh, it’s you,” I said, raising my hat. “I didn’t recognize you with your clothes on. Then again, I expect a lot of people say that to you, sweetheart.”
She stood up, slapped my face, and was going to slap it again, only Krempel caught her wrist and twisted it.
“Go and fetch the car,” he told her.
“Yes,” I said. “Go and fetch the car. And hurry up. I want to fall down and pass out.”
Krempel had me propped against the wall like a steamer trunk. I closed my eyes for a moment, and when I opened them again she was gone. He shifted me out of the suite and along to the top of the stairs.
“It’s all the same to me how you go down these stairs, Gunther. I can help you down or I can push you down. But if you try anything, I can promise that you’ll be holding on to thin air.”
“Grateful to you,” I heard myself mumble, thickly.
We arrived at the bottom of the stairs, but I don’t know how. My legs belonged to Charlie Chaplin. I recognized the Wilhelmstrasse door and thought it was sensible of him to choose this way out of the hotel at that time of night. The Wilhelmstrasse door was always quieter than the one on Unter den Linden. The lobby was smaller, too. But if Krempel had hoped to avoid our meeting anyone I knew, he failed.
Most of the waiters at the Adlon had a mustache or were clean-shaven, and only one, Abd el-Krim, wore a beard. His name wasn’t Abd el-Krim. I didn’t know his real name, but he was Moroccan, and people called him that because he looked like the rebel leader who had surrendered to the French in 1926 and was now exiled to some shithole of an island. I can’t answer for the talents of the rebel, but our Abd el-Krim was an excellent waiter. Being a Mohammedan, he didn’t drink and eyed me with a mixture of shock and concern as, with one arm draped around the lintel that was Krempel’s shoulders, I lurched toward the exit.
“Herr Gunther?” he said in a voice full of solicitude. “Is everything all right, sir? You don’t look well.”
Words emptied out of my slack mouth like saliva. Perhaps saliva is all they were. I don’t know. Whatever I said didn’t make any sense to me, so I doubt that it would have made any sense to Abd el-Krim.
“He’s had too much to drink, I’m afraid,” Krempel told the waiter. “I’m taking him home before Behlert or either of the Adlons sees him like this.”
Abd el-Krim, dressed to go home, nodded gravely. “Yes, that is best, I think. Do you need any assistance, sir?”
“No, thanks. I’ve a car waiting for us outside. I think I’ll manage.”
The waiter bowed gravely and opened the door for my kidnapper as he waltzed me outside.
As soon as the cold air and rain hit my lungs, I started to retch into the gutter. The stuff I was retching you could
have bottled and sold, as it tasted like pure Korn. A car immediately pulled up in front of me, and the spray from the tires splashed the cuffs of my trousers. My hat fell off again. The car door opened, and Krempel launched me onto the floor with the sole of his shoe. A moment later the car door slammed, and then we were moving—forward, I imagined, but it felt like we were going around and around in circles on a ride at Luna Park. I didn’t know where we were going, and I ceased to care very much. I couldn’t have felt any worse if I’d been laid out naked in an undertaker’s window.
32
THERE WAS A STORM AT SEA . The deck shifted like an accelerating elevator car, and then a wave of cold water hit me full in the face. I shook my head painfully and opened eyes that felt like two scooped-out oyster shells that were still swimming with Tabasco sauce. Another wave of water hit me. Except the water wasn’t from a wave, but from a bucket in the hands of Gerhard Krempel. But we were on the deck of a ship, or at least a largish boat. Behind him stood Max Reles, dressed like a rich man playing ship’s captain. He wore a blue blazer; white trousers; a white shirt and tie; and a white, soft-peaked cap. Everything around us was white, too, and it took me several moments to appreciate that it was daytime and we were probably surrounded with mist.
Reles’s mouth started moving, and white mist came out of that, too. It was cold. Very cold. For a second I thought he was speaking Norwegian. Something cold, anyway. Then it seemed a little closer to home—Danish, perhaps. Only when a third bucket of water, gathered on a rope from over the side of the boat, was flung into my face was I able to grasp that he actually was speaking German.
“Good morning,” Reles said. “And welcome back. We were beginning to get a little worried about you, Gunther. You know, I thought you krauts could hold your liquor. But you’ve been passed out for quite a while. At considerable inconvenience to myself, I might add.”
I was sitting on a polished wooden deck, looking up at him. I tried to get up and found my hands were tied on my lap. But worse, given that the boat appeared to be on the water, was that my feet also were tied, to a stack of gray concrete blocks lying beside me on the deck.
I leaned to one side and retched for almost a minute. And I marveled that such a sound could come from my body. It was the sound of a living creature turning itself inside out. While this was going on, Reles walked away, with a look of distaste on his knuckle of a face. When he returned, Dora was beside him. She was wearing her fur coat and a matching fur hat, carrying a glass of water.
She carried it to my lips and helped me to swallow. When the glass was empty I nodded genuine thanks and tried to appreciate my situation. I didn’t appreciate it very much. My hat, coat, and jacket were gone, and my head felt as if it had been used for the Mitropa cup final. And the pungent smell of Reles’s large cigar was turning my stomach. I was in a tight spot. I had the awful feeling in a whole crowd of awful feelings that Max Reles was planning to give me a practical demonstration of exactly how Erich Goerz had disposed of Isaac Deutsch’s dead body. I couldn’t have been in a tighter spot if I’d been a starving dog chained to a high-speed railway line.
“Feeling any better?” He sat down on the pile of concrete blocks. “It’s a little early for that, you might think. But I’m afraid that the way you are feeling now is likely to be as good as it gets, for the rest of your life. In fact, I can guarantee it.”
He relit his cigar and chuckled. Dora leaned on the rail of the boat and looked out into what appeared as a limbo, in which we were floating like lost souls. Standing with his fists on his hips, Krempel looked ready to hit me anytime he was asked.
“You should have listened to Count von Helldorf. I mean, he couldn’t have been more explicit. But, no, you had to be Sam fucking Spade and stick your cornet where it wasn’t wanted. I just don’t get that. Really, I don’t. You must have appreciated that there was just too much money involved, and too many important people getting a big fat slice of the Black Forest cherry cake called the Olympic Games for anything to be allowed to spoil that. Certainly anything as easily disposable as you, Gunther.”
I closed my eyes for a minute.
“You know, you’re not a bad fellow at all. I almost like you. No, really. I even thought of cutting you in and offering you a job. A proper job, not that joke job you have at the Adlon. But there’s something about you that makes me think I just couldn’t trust you. I think it’s that you were once a cop.” He shook his head. “No, that can’t be right. I’ve bought plenty of cops in my time. I guess it must be that you were an honest cop. And a good one, from what I hear. I admire integrity. But I’ve got no use for it right now. I don’t think anyone has. Not in Germany. Not this year.
“Really, you wouldn’t believe how many fucking pigs there are who want to feed at this trough. Of course, they needed someone like me to show them how it’s done. I mean, we—by which I mean the people I represent in the States—we made a lot back in thirty-two with the Los Angeles Olympics. But the Nazis really know how to do business. Brundage couldn’t believe it when he first turned up here. It was him who tipped us off in Chicago about all the money that was to be made out here.”
“And the East Asian artifacts are some payback for that.”
“Right. A few bits and pieces of the kind he collects and appreciates, but which no one here is going to miss. He’s also going to pick up a nice contract to build a new German embassy in Washington. Which is the real treasure, if you ask me. You see, with Hitler the sky is the limit. I’m delighted to say that the man has absolutely no idea of economy. If he wants something, he gets it and to hell with the cost. In the beginning the Olympic budget was, what, twenty million marks? Now it’s probably four or five times that. And I guess the skim must be fifteen or twenty percent. Can you imagine?
“Of course, it’s not always straightforward dealing with Hitler. The man is capricious, you know? You see, I’d already bought a company that makes ready-mixed concrete, and done a deal with the architect, Werner March, only to discover that Hitler doesn’t like fucking concrete. In fact, he hates it. He hates anything that’s in any way modern. It doesn’t matter a damn to him that half of all the new buildings in Europe are made of fucking concrete. That isn’t what he wants, and he won’t budge.
“When Werner March showed him the plans and specifications for the new stadium, Hitler went nuts. Only limestone would be good enough. And not any goddamn limestone, you understand. It had to be German limestone. So I had to buy a limestone company in a hurry and then make sure my new company—Würzburg Jura Limestone—was awarded the contract. Too much of a hurry, if the truth be told. Given more time, I could have smoothed things over, but. Well, you know all about that part, you sonofabitch. It’s left me with a lot of concrete, but you’re going to help me to get rid of some of that, Gunther. These three breeze blocks I’m sitting on are going to the bottom of Lake Tegel, and you’re going with them.”
“Just like Isaac Deutsch,” I croaked. “I take it Erich Goerz works for you.”
“That’s right. He does. He’s a good man, Erich. But he lacks experience in this kind of work. So this time I’m doing it myself, to make sure the job gets done properly. We don’t want you rising up from the bottom like Deutsch. I always say if you want someone disposed of properly, you’d better do it yourself.” He sighed. “These things happen, eh? Even to the best of us.”
He puffed the cigar for a moment and then blew out a funnel of smoke that might have come from the funnel above my head. The boat was maybe thirty feet long, and I thought maybe I’d seen it somewhere before.
“I figure it was a mistake to dump that sonofabitch, Isaac, in the canal. Nine meters. Not deep enough. But out here the water is sixteen meters deep. That’s not Lake Michigan or the Hudson River, but it’ll do. Yes, there’s that and the fact that I’m not exactly a stranger to this shit. So relax, you’re in good hands. The one remaining question I have for you, Gunther—and it’s an important one from your point of view, so I advise you to pay
attention—is whether we deep-six you dead or alive. I’ve seen both, and it’s my considered opinion that it’s best you go down dead. Drowning’s not quick, I don’t think. Me, I’d prefer a bullet in the head beforehand.”
“I’ll try to remember that.”
“But don’t let me sway you. This is your decision. Only, I need to know what you know, Gunther. Everything. Who you’ve told about me, and what. Think it over for a minute. I have to take a leak and put a coat on. It’s a little chilly out here on the water, don’t you think? Dora? Give him another glass of water. It might help to make him talk.”
He turned and walked away. Krempel followed, and in the absence of a personal cuspidor, I spat after them.
Dora gave me some more water. I drank it down greedily. “Guess I’ll have all the water I can drink in a little while,” I said.
“That’s not even funny.” She wiped my mouth with my tie.
“I’d forgotten how beautiful you are.”
“Thanks.”
“Nope. You’re still not laughing. I guess that wasn’t funny, either.”
She glared at me like I was dermatitis.
“You know, in Grand Hotel, Joan Crawford’s not supposed to fall for Wallace Beery,” I said.
“Max? He’s not so bad.”
“I’ll try to remember that when I reach the bottom of the lake.”
“I suppose you think you’re like John Barrymore.”
“Not with this profile. But I do think I’d like a cigarette, if you have one. You can call it one last request, since I’ve already seen you naked. At least now I can be sure when you’re wearing a wig.”
“A regular Curt Valentin, aren’t you?”
Under the fur she was wearing a lavender-colored knitted dress that hugged her figure like a coat of emulsion, and over her wrist was a drawstring pouch bag that contained a handsome gold cigarette case and lighter.
