by Philip Kerr
Willy grunted something and then closed the door behind us. He led the way along the corridor to another office, and ushered me inside.
‘Now, what is this girl’s name?’ he said, pointing me to a chair.
‘Lotte Hartmann.’
‘I don’t suppose you know the name of the production company?’
‘No, but I know that she came here within the last couple of weeks.’
He sat down and opened one of the desk drawers. ‘Well, there were only three films casting here this past month, so it shouldn’t be too difficult.’ His short fingers picked out three files which he laid on the blotter and started to sort through their contents. ‘Is she in trouble?’
‘No. It’s just that she may know someone who can help the police with an inquiry we are making.’ This was true at least.
‘Well if she’s been up for a part this last month or so, she’ll be in one of these files. We may be short of attractive ruins in Vienna, but one thing we’ve got plenty of is actresses. Half of them are chocoladies, mind you. Even at the best of times an actress is just a chocolady by another name.’ He came to the end of one pile of papers and started on another.
‘I can’t say I miss your lack of ruins,’ I remarked. ‘I’m from Berlin myself. We’ve got ruins on an epic scale.’
‘Don’t I know it. But this Englishman I have to see wants lots of ruins here in Vienna. Just like Berlin. Just like Rosellini.’ He sighed disconsolately. ‘I ask you: what is there apart from the Ring and the Opera district?’
I shook my head sympathetically.
‘What does he expect? The war’s been over for three years. Does he imagine that we delayed rebuilding just in case an English film crew turned up? Perhaps these things take longer in England than in Austria. It wouldn’t surprise me, considering the amount of red-tape the British generate. Never known such a bureaucratic lot. Christ knows what I’m going to tell this fellow. By the time they start filming they’ll be lucky to find a broken window.’
He skimmed a sheet of paper across the desk. Pinned to its top left-hand corner was a passport-sized photograph. ‘Lotte Hartmann,’ he announced.
I glanced at the name and the photograph. ‘It looks like it.’
‘Actually I remember her,’ he said. ‘She wasn’t quite what we were looking for on that occasion, but I said I could probably find her something in this English production. Good-looking, I’ll say that much for her. But to be frank with you, Herr Gunther, she isn’t much of an actress. A couple of walk-on parts at the Burgtheater during the war and that’s about it. Still, the English are making a film about the black market and so they want lots of chocoladies. In view of Lotte Hartmann’s particular experience I thought she could be one of them.’
‘Oh? What experience is that?’
‘She used to be a greeter at the Casanova Club. And now she’s a croupier at the Casino Oriental. At least that’s what she told me. For all I know she could be one of the exotic dancers they have there. Anyway, if you’re looking for her, that’s the address she gave.’
‘Mind if I borrow this sheet?’
‘Be my guest.’
‘One more thing: if for any reason Fräulein Hartmann gets in contact with you I’d be grateful if you would keep this under your hat.’
‘Like it was a new toupee.’
I stood up to leave. ‘Thanks,’ I said, ‘you’ve been very helpful. Oh, and good luck with your ruins.’
He grinned wryly. ‘Yes, well, if you see any weak walls, give them a shove, there’s a good fellow.’
I was at the Oriental that evening, just in time for the first show at 8.15. The girl dancing naked on the pagoda-like dance floor, to the accompaniment of a six-piece orchestra, had eyes that were as cold and hard as the blackest piece of Pichler’s porphyry. Contempt was written into her face as indelibly as the birds tattooed on her small, girlish breasts. A couple of times she had to stifle a yawn, and once she grimaced at the gorilla who was detailed to watch over her in case anyone wanted to show the girl his appreciation. When after forty-five minutes she came to the end of her act, her curtsy was a mockery of those of us who had watched it.
I waved to a waiter and transferred my attention to the club itself. ‘The wonderful Egyptian Night Cabaret’ was how the Oriental described itself on the book of matches I had collected from the brass ashtray, and it was certainly greasy enough to have passed for something Middle Eastern, at least in the clichéd eye of some set-designer from Sievering Studios. A long, curving stairway led down into the Moorish-style interior with its gilt pillars, cupola’d ceiling and many Persian tapestries on the mock-mosaic walls. The dank, basement smell, cheap Turkish tobacco-smoke and number of prostitutes only added to the authentic Oriental atmosphere. I half expected to see the thief of Baghdad sit down at the wooden marquetry table I had taken. Instead I got a Viennese garter-handler.
‘You looking for a nice girl?’ he asked.
‘If I were I wouldn’t have come here.’
The pimp read this the wrong way up, and pointed out a big redhead who was seated at the anachronistic American bar. ‘I can get you nice and cosy with that one there.’
‘No thanks. I can smell her pants from here.’
‘Listen, pifke, that little chocolady is so clean you could eat your supper off her crotch.’
‘I’m not that hungry.’
‘Perhaps something else, then. If it’s drip you’re worried about, I know where I can find some nice fresh snow, with no footprints. Know what I mean?’ He leaned forwards across the table. ‘A girl who hasn’t even finished school yet. How does a splash like that sound to you?’
‘Disappear, swing, before I shut your flap.’
He leaned back suddenly. ‘Slow your blood down, pifke,’ he sneered. ‘I was only trying to —’ He yelped with pain as he found himself drawn to his feet by one sideburn held between Belinsky’s forefinger and thumb.
‘You heard my friend,’ he said with quiet menace, and pushing the man away he sat down opposite me. ‘God, I hate pimps,’ he muttered, shaking his head.
‘I’d never have guessed,’ I said, and waved again at the waiter, who seeing the pimp’s manner of departure approached the table with more obsequiousness than an Egyptian houseboy. ‘What’ll you have?’ I asked the American.
‘A beer,’ he said.
‘Two Gossers,’ I told the waiter.
‘Immediately, gentlemen,’ he said, and scuttled away.
‘Well that’s certainly made him more attentive,’ I observed.
‘Yeah, well, you don’t come to the Casino Oriental for ritzy service. You come to lose money on the tables or in a bed.’
‘What about the floor-show? You forgot the show.’
‘The hell I did.’ He laughed obscenely and proceeded to explain that he usually tried to catch the show at the Oriental at least once a week.
When I told him about the girl with the tattoos on her breasts he shook his head with worldly indifference, and for a while I was obliged to listen to him tell me about the strippers and exotic dancers he’d seen in the Far East, where a girl with a tattoo was considered nothing to write home about. This kind of conversation was of little interest to me, and when after several minutes Belinsky ran out of unholy anecdote, I was glad to be able to change the subject.
‘I found König’s girlfriend, Fräulein Hartmann,’ I announced.
‘Yes? Where?’
‘In the next room. Dealing cards.’
‘The croupier? The blonde piece with the tan and the icicle up her ass?’
I nodded.
‘I tried to buy her a drink,’ he said, ‘only I might as well have been selling brushes. If you’re going to ingratiate yourself with that one you’ve got your work cut out, kraut. She’s so cold her perfume makes your nostrils ache. Perhaps if you were to kidnap her you might stand some chance.’
‘I was thinking along similar lines. Seriously, how low is your credit with the MPs here in Vienna?’
Belinsky shrugged. ‘It’s a real snake’s ass. But say what you’ve got in mind and I’ll tell you for sure.’
‘How’s this then? The International Patrol comes in here one night and arrests me and the girl on some pretext. Then they take us down to Kärtnerstrasse where I start talking tough about how a mistake has been made. Maybe some money even changes hands to make it look really convincing. After all, people like to believe that all police are corrupt, don’t they? So she and König might appreciate that little bit of fine detail. Anyway, when the police let us go I make out to Lotte Hartmann that the reason I helped her was because I find her attractive. Well naturally she’s grateful and would like me to know it, only she’s got this gentleman friend. Maybe he can repay me somehow or other. Put some business my way, that kind of thing.’ I paused and lit a cigarette. ‘Well, what do you think?’
‘In the first place,’ Belinsky said thoughtfully, ‘the IP isn’t allowed in this joint. There’s a big sign at the front door to that effect. Your ten-schilling entrance buys a night’s membership to what is, after all, a private club, which means the IP just can’t come marching in here dirtying the carpet and scaring the flower-lady.’
‘All right then,’ I said, ‘they wait outside and work a spot-check on people as they leave the club. Surely there’s nothing to stop them doing that? They pull Lotte and me in on suspicion: her of being a chocolady, and me of working some racket.’
The waiter arrived with our beers. Meanwhile the second show was starting. Belinsky swallowed a mouthful of his drink and sat back in his seat to watch.
‘I like this one,’ he growled, lighting his pipe. ‘She’s got an ass like the west coast of Africa. Just you wait until you see it.’ Puffing contentedly, his pipe fixed between his grinning teeth, Belinsky kept his eyes on the girl peeling off her brassière.
‘It might just work at that,’ he said eventually. ‘Only forget trying to bribe one of the Americans. No, if it’s grease you’re trying to simulate then it really has to be an Ivan or a Frenchy. As it happens the CIC has turned a Russian captain in the IP. Apparently he’s trying to work his passage to the United States, so he’s good for service manuals, identity-papers, tip-offs, the usual kind of thing. A fake arrest ought to be within his abilities. And by a happy coincidence the Russians are in the chair this month, so it should be easy enough to arrange a night when he’s on duty.’
Belinsky’s grin widened as the dancing girl eased her pants over her substantial backside to reveal a tiny G-string.
‘Oh, will you look at that?’ he chuckled, with schoolboyish glee. ‘Put a nice frame around her ass and I could hang it on my wall.’ He tossed back his beer and winked lasciviously at me. ‘I’ll say one thing for you krauts. You build your women every bit as well as you build your automobiles.’
20
My clothes actually seemed to fit me better. My trousers had stopped hanging loose around my waist like a clown’s pantaloons. Slipping into my jacket was no longer reminiscent of a schoolboy optimistically trying on his dead father’s suits. And my shirt-collar was as snug about my neck as the bandage on a coward’s arm. There was no doubt that a couple of months in Vienna had put some weight on me, so that I now looked more like the man who had gone to a Soviet POW camp and less like the man who had returned from one. But while this pleased me, I saw it as no excuse to get out of condition, and I had resolved to spend less time sitting in the Café Schwarzenberg, and to take more exercise.
It was the time of year when winter’s denuded trees were starting to bud, and when the decision to wear an overcoat was no longer automatic. With only a chalk-mark of cloud on an otherwise uniformly blue board of sky, I decided to take a walk around the Ring and expose my pigments to the warm spring sunshine.
Like a chandelier that is too big for the room in which it hangs, so the official buildings on the Ringstrasse, built at a time of overbearing Imperial optimism, were somehow too grand, too opulent for the geographical realities of the new Austria. A country of six million people, Austria was little more than the butt-end of a very large cigar. It wasn’t a Ring I went walking on so much as a wreath.
The American sentry outside the US-requisitioned Bristol Hotel had his pink face lifted up to catch the rays of the morning sun. His Russian counterpart guarding the similarly requisitioned Grand Hotel next door looked as if he had spent his whole life outdoors, so dark were his features.
Crossing on to the south side of the Ring in order to be close to the park as I came up the Schubertring, I found myself near the Russian Kommendatura, formerly the Imperial Hotel, as a large Red Army staff car drew up outside the enormous red star and four caryatids that marked the entrance. The car door opened and out stepped Colonel Poroshin.
He did not seem in any way surprised to see me. Indeed, it was almost as if he had expected to find me walking there, and for a moment he simply looked at me as if it had been only a few hours since I had sat in his office in the little Kremlin in Berlin. I suppose my jaw must have dropped, because after a second he smiled, murmured ‘Dobraye ootra (Good-morning)’, and then carried on into the Kommendatura followed closely by a couple of junior officers who stared suspiciously back at me, while I stood there, simply lost for words.
More than a little puzzled as to why Poroshin should have turned up in Vienna now, I wandered back across the road to the Café Schwarzenberg, narrowly escaping being hit by an old lady on a bicycle who rang her bell furiously at me.
I sat down at my usual table to give some thought to Poroshin’s arrival on the scene, and ordered a light snack, my new fitness resolution already ruined.
The colonel’s presence in Vienna seemed easier to explain with some coffee and cake inside of me. There was, after all, no reason why he should not have come. As an MVD colonel he could probably go wherever he liked. That he had not said more to me or inquired as to how my efforts were going on behalf of his friend I thought was probably due to the fact that he had no wish to discuss the matter in front of the two other officers. And he had only to pick up the telephone and ring the headquarters of the International Patrol in order to discover if Becker was still in prison or not.
All the same I had a feeling on the sole of my shoe that Poroshin’s arrival from Berlin was connected with my own investigation, not necessarily for the better. Like a man who has breakfasted on prunes, I told myself I was certain to notice something before very long.
21
Each one of the Four Powers took administrative responsibility for the policing of the Inner City for a month at a time. ‘In the chair’ was how Belinsky had described it. The chair in question was located in a meeting-room at the combined forces headquarters in the Palais Auersperg, although it also affected who sat next to the driver in the International Patrol vehicle. But though the IP was an instrument of the Four Powers and subject in theory to orders from the combined forces, for all practical purposes it was American operated and supplied. All vehicles, petrol and oil, radios, radio spares, maintenance of the vehicles and the radios, operation of the radio network system and organization of the patrols were the responsibility of the US 796th. This meant that the American member of the patrol always drove the vehicle, operated the radio and performed the first-echelon maintenance. Thus, at least as far as the patrol itself was concerned, the idea of ‘the chair’ was a bit of a movable feast.
Although the Viennese referred to ‘the four men in the jeep’, or sometimes ‘the four elephants in the jeep’, in reality ‘the jeep’ had long been abandoned as too small to accommodate a patrol of four men, their short-wave transmitter, not to mention any prisoners; and a three-quarter-ton Command and Reconnaissance vehicle was now the favoured mode of transport.
All this I learned from the Russian corporal commanding the IP truck parked a short distance from the Casino Oriental on Petersplatz, in which I sat under arrest, waiting for the kapral’s colleagues to pick up Lotte Hartmann. Speaking neither French nor English, and with only a smattering o
f German, the kapral was delighted to find someone with whom he could have a conversation, even if it was a Russian-speaking prisoner.
‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you very much about why you’re being arrested, apart from the fact that it’s for black-marketeering,’ he apologised. ‘You’ll find out more when we get to the Kärtnerstrasse. We’ll both find out, eh? All I can tell you about is the procedure. My captain will fill out an arrest-form, in duplicate — everything’s in duplicate — and leave both copies with the Austrian police. They’ll forward one copy to the Military Government Public-Safety Officer. If you’re held for trial in a military court, a charge sheet will be prepared by my captain; and if you’re held for trial in an Austrian court, the local police will be instructed accordingly.’ The kapral frowned. ‘To be honest with you, we don’t bother much with black-market offences these days. Or vice for that matter. It’s smugglers we’re generally after, or illegal emigrants. Those other three bastards think I’ve gone mad, I can tell. But I’ve got my orders.’
I smiled sympathetically and said how I appreciated him explaining. I was thinking of offering him a cigarette when the door of the truck opened and the French patrolman helped a very pale-looking Lotte Hartmann to climb up beside me. Then he and the Englishman came after her, locking the door from the inside. The smell of her fear was only marginally weaker than the cloying scent of her perfume.
‘Where are they taking us?’ she whispered to me.
I told her we were going to the Kärtnerstrasse.
‘No talking is allowed,’ said the English MP in appalling German. ‘Prisoners will keep quiet until we reach headquarters.’
I smiled quietly to myself. The language of bureaucracy was the only second language that an Englishman would ever be capable of speaking well.
