by Philip Kerr
I shook my head. I was anxious to be out of that room. ‘Let’s go somewhere,’ I suggested.
‘All right. It beats staying here. How’s your head for heights? Because there’s only one place to go on a Sunday in Vienna.’
The amusement park of the Prater, with its great wheel, merry-go-rounds and switchback-railway, was somehow incongruous in that part of Vienna which, as the last to fall to the Red Army, still showed the greatest effects of the war and the clearest evidence of our being in an otherwise less amusing sector. Broken tanks and guns still littered the nearby meadows, while on every one of the dilapidated walls of houses all along the Ausstellungsstrasse was the faded chalk outline of the Cyrillic word ‘Atak’ivat’ (searched), which really meant ‘looted’.
From the top of the big wheel Veronika pointed out the piers of the Red Army Bridge, the star on the Soviet obelisk close by it and, beyond these, the Danube. Then, as the cabin carrying the two of us started its slow descent to the ground, she reached inside my coat and took hold of my balls, but snatched her hand away again when I sighed uncomfortably.
‘It could be that you would have preferred the Prater before the Nazis,’ she said peevishly, ‘when all the dolly-boys came here to pick up some trade.’
‘That’s not it at all,’ I laughed.
‘Maybe that’s what you meant when you said that I could help you.’
‘No, I’m just the nervous type. Try it again sometime when we’re not sixty metres up in the air.’
‘Highly strung, eh? I thought you said you had a head for heights.’
‘I lied. But you’re right, I do need your help.’
‘If vertigo’s your problem, then getting horizontal is the only treatment I’m qualified to prescribe.’
‘I’m looking for someone, Veronika: a girl who used to hang around the Casanova Club.’
‘Why else do men go to the Casanova except to look for a girl?’
‘This is one particular girl.’
‘Maybe you hadn’t noticed. None of the girls at the Casanova are that particular.’ She threw me a narrow-eyed look, as if she suddenly distrusted me. ‘I thought you sounded like them at the top. All that shit about drip and all. Are you working with that American?’
‘No, I’m a private investigator.’
‘Like the Thin Man?’
She laughed when I nodded.
‘I thought that stuff was just for the films. And you want me to help you with something you’re investigating, is that it?’
I nodded again.
‘I never saw myself quite like Myrna Loy,’ she said, ‘but I’ll help you if I can. Who is this girl you’re looking for?’
‘Her name is Lotte. I don’t know her last name. You might have seen her with a man called König. He wears a moustache and has a small terrier.’
Veronika nodded slowly. ‘Yes, I remember them. Actually I used to know Lotte reasonably well. Her name is Lotte Hartmann, but she hasn’t been around in a few weeks.’
‘No? Do you know where she is?’
‘Not exactly. They went skiing together — Lotte and Helmut König, her schätzi. Somewhere in the Austrian Tyrol, I believe.’
‘When was this?’
‘I don’t know. Two, three weeks ago. König seems to have plenty of money.’
‘Do you know when they’re coming back?’
‘I have no idea. I do know she said she’d be away for at least a month if things worked out between them. Knowing Lotte, that means it would depend on how much of a good time he showed her.’
‘Are you sure she’s coming back?’
‘It would take an avalanche to stop her coming back here. Lotte’s Viennese right up to her earlobes; she doesn’t know how to live anywhere else. I guess you want me to keep my eye close to the keyhole for them.’
‘That’s about the size of it,’ I said. ‘Naturally I’ll pay you.’
She shrugged. ‘There’s no need,’ she said, and pressed her nose against the windowpane. ‘People who save my life get themselves all sorts of generous discounts.’
‘I ought to warn you. It could be dangerous.’
‘You don’t have to tell me,’ she said coolly. ‘I’ve met König. He’s all smooth and charming at the club but he doesn’t fool me. Helmut’s the kind of man who takes his brass knuckles to confession.’
When we were on the ground again I used some of my coupons to buy us a bag of lingos, a Hungarian snack of fried dough sprinkled with garlic, from one of the stalls near the great wheel. After this modest lunch we took the Lilliput Railway down to the Olympic Stadium and walked back in the snow through the woods on Hauptallee.
Much later on, when we were in her room again, she said, ‘Are you still feeling nervous?’
I reached for her gourd-like breasts and found her blouse damp with perspiration. She helped me to unbutton her and while I enjoyed the weight of her bosom in my hand she unfastened her skirt. I stood back to give her room to step out of it. And when she had laid it over the back of a chair I took her by the hand and drew her towards me.
For a brief moment I held her tight, enjoying her short, husky breath on my neck, before searching down for the curve of her girdled behind, her membrane-tight stocking-tops, and then the soft, cool flesh between her gartered thighs. And after she had engineered the subtraction of what little remained to cover her, I kissed her and allowed an intrepid finger to enjoy a short exploration of her hidden places.
In bed she held a smile on her face as slowly I strove to fathom her. Catching sight of her open eyes, which were no more than dreamy, as if she was unable to forget my satisfaction in search of her own, I found that I was too excited to care much beyond what seemed polite. When at last she felt the wound I was making in her become more urgent, she raised her thighs on to her chest and, reaching down, spread herself open with the flats of her hands, as if holding taut a piece of cloth for the needle of a sewing-machine, so that I might see myself periodically drawn tight into her. A moment later I flexed against her as life worked its independent and juddering propulsion.
It snowed hard that night, and then the temperature fell into the sewers, freezing the whole of Vienna, to preserve it for a better day. I dreamed, not of a lasting city, but of the city which was to come.
PART TWO
19
‘A date for Herr Becker’s trial has now been set,’ Liebl told me, ‘which makes it absolutely imperative that we make all haste with the preparation of our defence. I trust you will forgive me, Herr Gunther, if I impress upon you the urgent need for evidence to substantiate our client’s account. While I have faith in your ability as a detective, I should very much like to know exactly what progress you have made so far, in order that I may best advise Herr Becker how we are to conduct his case in court.’
This conversation took place several weeks after my arrival in Vienna — but it was not the first time that Liebl had pressed me for some indication of my progress.
We were sitting in the Café Schwarzenberg, which had become the nearest thing I’d had to an office since before the war. The Viennese coffee house resembles a gentleman’s club, except in so far as that a day’s membership costs little more than the price of a cup of coffee. For that you can stay for as long as you like, read the papers and magazines that are provided, leave messages with waiters, receive mail, reserve a table for appointments and generally run a business in total confidence before all the world. The Viennese respect privacy in the same way that Americans worship antiquity, and a fellow patron of the Schwarzenberg would no more have stuck his nose over your shoulder than he would have stirred a cup of mocha with his forefinger.
On previous occasions I had told Liebl that an exact idea of progress was not something that existed in the world of the private investigator: that it was not the kind of business in which one might report that a specific course of action would definitely occur within a certain period. That’s the trouble with lawyers. They expect the rest of the world to wo
rk like the Code Napoléon. On this particular occasion however, I had rather more to tell Liebl.
‘König’s girlfriend, Lotte, is back in Vienna,’ I said.
‘She’s returned from her skiing holiday at long last?’
‘It looks like that.’
‘But you haven’t yet found her.’
‘Someone I know from the Casanova Club has a friend who spoke to her just a couple of days ago. She may even have been back for a week or so.’
‘A week?’ Liebl repeated. ‘Why has it taken so long to find that out?’
‘These things take time,’ I shrugged provocatively. I was fed up with Liebl’s constant quizzing and had started to take a childish delight in teasing him with these displays of apparent insouciance.
‘Yes,’ he grumbled, ‘so you’ve said before.’ He did not sound convinced.
‘It’s not like we have addresses for these people,’ I said. ‘And Lotte Hartmann hasn’t been near the Casanova since she’s been back. The girl who spoke to her said that Lotte had been trying to get a small part in a film at Sievering Studios.’
‘Sievering? Yes, that’s in the 19th Bezirk. The studio is owned by a Viennese called Karl Hartl. He used to be a client of mine. Hartl’s directed all the great stars: Pola Negri, Lya de Putti, Maria Corda, Vilma Banky, Lilian Harvey. Did you see The Gypsy Baron? Well that was Hartl.’
‘You don’t suppose he could know anything about the film studio where Becker found Linden’s body?’
‘Drittemann Film?’ Liebl stirred his coffee absently. ‘If it were a legitimate film company, Hartl would know about it. There’s not much that happens in Viennese film-production that Hartl doesn’t know about. But this wasn’t anything more than a name on a lease. There weren’t actually any films made there. You checked it out yourself, didn’t you?’
‘Yes,’ I said, recalling the fruitless afternoon I had spent there two weeks before. It turned out that even the lease had expired, and that the property had now reverted to the state. ‘You’re right. Linden was the first and last thing to be shot there.’ I shrugged. ‘It was just a thought.’
‘So what will you do now?’
‘Try and trace Lotte Hartmann at Sievering. That shouldn’t be too difficult. You don’t go after a part in a film without leaving an address where you can be contacted.’
Liebl sipped his coffee noisily, and then dabbed daintily at his mouth with a spinnaker-sized handkerchief.
‘Please waste no time in tracing this person,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry to have to press you like this, but until we discover Herr König’s whereabouts, we have nothing. Once you find him we might at least try and oblige him to be called as a material witness.’
I nodded meekly. There was more I could have told him but his tone irritated me, and any further explanation would have generated questions I was simply not equipped to answer yet. I could, for instance, have given him an account of what I had learned from Belinsky, at that same table in the Schwarzenberg, about a week after he had saved my skin — information that I was still turning over in my mind, and trying to make sense of. Nothing was as straightforward as Liebl somehow imagined.
‘First of all,’ Belinsky had explained, ‘the Drexlers were what they seemed. She survived Matthausm Concentration Camp, while he came out of the Lodz Ghetto and Auschwitz. They met in a Red Cross hospital after the war, and lived in Frankfurt for a while before they went to Berlin. Apparently they worked pretty closely with the Crowcass people and the public prosecutor’s office. They maintained a large number of files on wanted Nazis and pursued many cases simultaneously. Consequently our people in Berlin weren’t able to determine if there had been any one investigation which related to their deaths, or to Captain Linden’s. The local police are baffled, as they say. Which is probably the way they prefer it. Frankly, they don’t give much of a damn who killed the Drexlers, and the American MP investigation doesn’t look as if it’s going to get anywhere.
‘But it doesn’t seem likely that the Drexlers would have been very interested in Martin Albers. He was SS and SD clandestine operations chief in Budapest until 1944, when he was arrested for his part in Stauffenberg’s plot to kill Hitler, and hanged at Flossenburg Concentration Camp in April 1945. But I dare say he had it coming to him. From all accounts, Albers was a bit of a bastard, even if he did try and get rid of the Führer. A lot of you guys were a hell of a long time about that, you know. Our Intelligence people even think that Himmler knew about the plot all along and let it go ahead in the hope that he could take Hitler’s place himself.
‘Anyway, it turns out that this Max Abs guy was Albers’ servant, driver and general dogsbody, so it kind of looks as if he was honouring his old boss. The Albers family was killed in an air-raid, so I guess there was no one else to erect a stone in his memory.’
‘Rather an expensive gesture, wouldn’t you say?’
‘You think so? Well, I’d sure hate to get killed minding your ass, kraut.’
Then Belinsky told me about the Pullach company.
‘It’s an American-sponsored organization, run by the Germans, set up with the aim of rebuilding German commerce throughout Bizonia. The whole idea is that Germany should, become economically self-supporting as quickly as possible so that Uncle Sam won’t have to keep baling you all out. The company itself is located at an American mission called Camp Nicholas, which until a few months ago was occupied by the postal censorship authorities of the US Army. Camp Nicholas is a big compound that was originally built for Rudolf Hess and his family. But after he went AWOL Bormann had it for a while. And then Kesselring and his staff. Now it’s ours. There’s just enough security about the place to convince the locals that the camp is home to some kind of technical research establishment, but that’s no surprise given the history of the place. Anyway, the good people of Pullach give it a wide berth, preferring not to know too much about what’s happening there, even if it is something as harmless as an economic and commercial think-tank. I guess they’re good at that, what with Dachau just a few miles away.’
That seemed to take care of Pullach, I thought. But what of Abs? It didn’t seem to be in character for a man who wished to commemorate the memory of a hero of the German Resistance (such as it had existed), to kill an innocent man merely in order to remain anonymous. And how could Abs be connected with Linden, the Nazi-hunter, except as some kind of informer? Was it possible that Abs had also been killed, just like Linden and the Drexlers?
I finished my coffee, lit a cigarette and for the present moment I was content that these and other questions could not be asked in any forum other than my own mind.
The number 39 ran west along Sieveringer Strasse into Döbling and stopped just short of the Vienna Woods, a spur of the Alps which reaches as far as the Danube.
A film studio is not a place where you are likely to see any great evidence of industry. Equipment lies forever idle in the vans hired to transport it. Sets are never more than half-built even when they are finished. But mostly there are lots of people, all drawing a wage, who seem to do little more than stand around, smoking cigarettes and nursing cups of coffee; and these only stand because they are not considered important enough to be provided with a seat. For anyone foolish enough to have financed such an apparently profligate undertaking, film must seem like the most expensive length of material since Chinese silk, and would, I reflected, surely have driven Dr Liebl half-mad with impatience.
I inquired after the studio manager from a man with a clipboard, and he directed me to a small office on the first floor. There I found a tall, paunchy man with dyed hair, wearing a lilac-coloured cardigan and having the manner of an eccentric maiden aunt. He listened to my mission with one hand clasped on top of the other as if I had been requesting the hand of his warded niece.
‘What are you, some kind of policeman?’ he said combing an unruly eyebrow with his fingernail. From somewhere in the building came the sound of a very loud trumpet, which caused him to wince noticeably.
‘A detective,’ I said, disingenuously.
‘Well, we always like to cooperate with them at the top, I’m sure. What did you say this girl was casting for?’
‘I didn’t. I’m afraid I don’t know. But it was in the last two or three weeks.’
He picked up the telephone and pressed a switch.
‘Willy? It’s me, Otto. Could you be a love and step into my office for a moment?’ He replaced the receiver, and checked his hair. ‘Willy Reichmann’s a production manager here. He may be able to help you.’
‘Thanks,’ I said and offered him a cigarette.
He threaded it behind his ear. ‘How kind. I’ll smoke it later.’
‘What are you filming at the moment?’ I inquired while we waited. Whoever was playing the trumpet hit a couple of high notes that didn’t seem to match.
Otto emitted a groan and stared archly at the ceiling. ‘Well, it’s called The Angel with the Trumpet,’ he said with a conspicuous lack of enthusiasm. ‘It’s more or less finished now, but this director is such a perfectionist.’
‘Would that be Karl Hartl?’
‘Yes. Do you know him?’
‘Only The Gypsy Baron.’
‘Oh,’ he said sourly. ‘That.’
There was a knock at the door and a short man with bright red hair came into the office. He reminded me of a troll.
‘Willy, this is Herr Gunther. He’s a detective. If you’re willing to forgive the fact that he liked The Gypsy Baron you might like to give him some assistance. He’s looking for a girl, an actress who was at a casting session here not so long ago.’
Willy smiled uncertainly, revealing small uneven teeth that looked like a mouthful of rock salt, nodded and said in a high-pitched voice: ‘You’d best come into my office, Herr Gunther.’
‘Don’t keep Willy too long, Herr Gunther,’ Otto instructed as I followed Willy’s diminutive figure into the corridor. ‘He has an appointment in fifteen minutes.’
Willy turned on his heel and looked blankly at the studio manager. Otto sighed exasperatedly. ‘Don’t you ever write anything in your diary, Willy? We’ve got that Englishman coming from London Films. Mr Lyndon-Haynes? Remember?’
