The two men stood silently side by side staring at the floor indicator as the lift heaved itself sluggishly upward. Eberlin, his hands in his pockets and still feeling deathly sober, glanced out of the corner of his eye at the other man, who was carefully flicking through the magazine, dismissing the wads of words and stopping only at the photos of the retouched, paintbox-colored nudes from Little Nowhere, Wisconsin. The charmless array of backsides and bosoms seemed endless and Eberlin looked away and was about to light a cigarette when he was thrown forward and back as the lift panicked to a halt halfway between the third and fourth stories, and the magazine was flung to the floor throwing open its triple-fold Playmate of the Month who pouted demurely up at Eberlin’s astonished face. The other man, his right index finger jammed into the red STOP button of the lift panel, spoke in Russian with a slight trace of a Ukraine accent.
“Your reflexes are incredibly lax lately, Krasnevin. You really must ask your doctor for a tonic or something.”
Eberlin stared across at the man and said nothing.
“Look, we haven’t much time since there’s a limit to how long one can jam a lift. Do light a cigarette and offer me one. My name’s Sobakevich. How do you do?”
Eberlin didn’t move. The name Sobakevich was very familiar to him.
“Well,” Sobakevich continued unperturbed, “we’d just like to say how sorry we are that we had to treat you so badly at Friedrichstrasse yesterday. But don’t you realize that we cannot afford to lose you from your present position? In Russia you are worthless to us.”
“I’ll be worthless to you here if you don’t do something quickly,” replied Eberlin vehemently. “Aren’t you supposed to protect me?”
“You refer of course to Gatiss?”
“And others.”
A buzzer from the seventh floor rang. Sobakevich ignored it. “Can you contact us tonight?” he said. “We might have an answer.”
“I can’t. Gatiss is watching me all the time.”
“Yes, I saw him. Why were you at Greiser’s?” The buzzer sounded again impatiently.
“Look, we’d better get this lift moving before they haul us up.
We’ll get in touch with you.”
“Soon.”
“We’ll do our best. But relax.”
Eberlin swore. Sobakevich transferred his finger to the 6 button and the lift shuddered for a moment, hesitated, then churned upward.
“Is Rotopkin here?” Sobakevich looked up, irritated.
“This is no place to talk. Haven’t you got any sense of timing?”
He smiled as the doors opened on the sixth floor and walked away, turning only to say, in German:
“Don’t forget your magazine. Read it in private.”
He disappeared around a corner as the doors closed, leaving Eberlin angrily lighting a cigarette and stooping to pick up the Playboy as the lift reached its delayed destination.
He pushed his way through the puzzled, complaining faces of the half-dozen people on the seventh floor and hurried into the restaurant. Prentiss was sitting at a small table before three empty coffee cups and staring anxiously at the entrance. They saw each other immediately, and Eberlin gave a quick smile and pointed to a door marked HERREN. Prentiss nodded with a grin, and Eberlin hurried across the room toward the door and entered.
Sitting on the toilet, trousers still belted around his waist, Eberlin flicked through the magazine, then held it up by the spine, shaking it. No stray piece of paper appeared. Eberlin sighed and turned to page one. It was all so bloody childish. Fortunately he found what he was looking for after a few pages. On a page headed PARTY JOKES and decorated with pen drawings of overdeveloped prepubescent girls, Eberlin found the message. Drawn in ink over the left breast of one of the nudes was a clumsy piece of graffiti. It was badly presented and with a poor sense of perspective, but the point was to Eberlin unerringly clear. There, over the black and white heart of the girl, was etched a miniscule Star of David.
Eberlin ripped the center pages out and flushed them down the toilet. Then he unlocked the door, thrusting the magazine into his pocket, and throwing the cigarette into the urinal, left the toilet; left the white-tiled toilet and walked over toward Prentiss.
* * *
“We’re all back to square one,” said Prentiss ordering two more coffees. “All the way back to square one.”
He was a large man, six foot one or so, with dark hair, a remote Welsh origin, and utterly likable. He was one of those uncomplicated people who appear to treat everyone they meet as if they were the most precious thing on earth, and consequently women adored him. In this latter respect, however, he adhered rigidly to a penchant for young, pretty girls in their late teens, who fell in love with him after a week, and remained loyal to him months after he had moved on, sending him passionate letters from Torremelinos or their country house in Oxfordshire, with poetic comments on the heat of the sun or the state of their pregnancy. All this Prentiss took in his stride with a wry smile and a bashful grin when close friends discussed his pedigree of prettily rich ex-lovers, and would repeat over pints of beer at his Chelsea pub, when others admired his latest girl-child: “I would give her to you but she’s part of a set,” and she invariably was.
He seemed to care deeply about only two things: his work and his religion. He worried about the former because it constantly involved him, and about the latter because it didn’t. “He is what you call a lapsed Catholic,” Eberlin had re-remarked once of him, “that is, he still accepts Jesus Christ rising from the dead and walking on the water, but thinks the bit about Him riding on the back of a donkey is a little far-fetched.”
“It’s a bit of blow I must admit. Coming like that,” Prentiss said gloomily, staring at the remains of Eberlin’s lunch.
“How do you mean?”
“Well, did Gatiss tell you I received a PB message from Frazer to contact Loomis in Düsseldorf?”
“No.”
“Well I did. Incredible panic about it.”
“What did Loomis want?” Eberlin asked.
“They found the man whom we thought was Krasnevin. He was dead.”
Eberlin stared at Prentiss for a second, then looked away. A man at the next table leaned over and asked to borrow the menu. When no one answered him, he snatched it.
“How do you know he wasn’t Krasnevin?” Eberlin said finally, keeping his voice low.
“Well, we checked him out and found he had been living in London for four years under the name of Jeffries, and before that, when we learned that the man hadn’t been out of the country at all in that time. He just hadn’t moved. Which made it impossible for him to kill anyone–at least anyone we are concerned about.”
“How could you be sure?”
“Well, it’s rather embarrassing for all concerned. Frazer’s gone off to the Scillies to recover.”
Prentiss lit a cigarette and glanced out of the window at a blond fraülein selling newspapers on the pavement below.
“You know how we all feel about the CIA,” he continued. “Well, it was they who proved that the dead man wasn’t Krasnevin. Apparently they had a file on him all the time. The man’s called Pavel. He’s a Russian all right, or was, but he’s no assassin. Just a contact man.”
“They had a file on him all the time?”
“Yes. You can understand how Frazer felt when he found out. He had to go on his knees before Sir Hugh and explain this trivial oversight. And then telling him that they had been upstaged by the CIA–well, it was pathetic. No one spoke to each other for a week, so Loomis said. He was glad to get out. Well, anyway, Frazer refused to let the CIA be so smug about it and started shouting at them, even throwing the Bay of Pigs in as a rejoinder. He was pretty annoyed. So–back to square one.”
“Does Gatiss know this?”
“Yes. He just nodded as though he knew all the time. You know how Gatiss is.”
Eberlin didn’t answer.
“But the most incredible thing is, who the hell is
Krasnevin?
Even the CIA is wary about that.”
“How do you mean?”
“You wouldn’t believe it,” said Prentiss, sipping at the coffee, “but they hinted that this Krasnevin was actually a double. One of us. Well, you can imagine Frazer’s reaction to that one.”
“What was it exactly?” asked Eberlin. “Well, he–”
Prentiss stopped and laughed. “It’s quite an interesting theory, you must admit. Plausible.” Then he said, “Is that this month’s Playboy in your pocket?”
Eberlin didn’t answer, and allowed Prentiss to take the magazine and glanced through it.
“The Playmate’s missing as usual,” Prentiss muttered. “I didn’t know you read stuff like this?”
He caught Eberlin’s expression and put the magazine away.
“I’m sorry about that,” Prentiss said quietly.
Eberlin stirred the coffee pensively and glanced across the room.
“It doesn’t help you much, does it? I mean not knowing even what he looks like.”
Eberlin looked up at Prentiss’s face and then didn’t say a word for a long time.
“Your car’s outside, by the way,” ventured Prentiss but Eberlin wasn’t listening. Self-consciously Prentiss opened the magazine again and began to read parts of it halfheartedly, conscious of the silence, then with a shy smile said:
“What do you think of the girls in Berlin? Mmm? Not like the luncheon in München ones I bet, but casual enough I should think….”
Eberlin lit a cigarette and ignored him.
“Oh by the way,” continued Prentiss gamely, “you know that Suzanne girl I was going to marry? Well, that fell through. As soon as she knew how interested I was, she changed. Everything cooled and in one second we were back to nervous introductions…. You know? I started being moody, then aggressive and all the recognized elements of the game. But I was alone. She said, ‘You hate me now, don’t you? People always do,’ and then she went off somewhere. Spain, I think.”
“Could I have the bill please?” Eberlin said suddenly to a passing waiter, and then to Prentiss: “What did you say?”
“Oh, just about Suzanne going to Spain.”
“Didn’t you go with her?”
“Well I suggested it to her but she said ‘No.’ So I asked her if I would see her when she returned and she just shrugged and talked about Giacometti.”
“I like his earlier sculptures best,” said Eberlin without enthusiasm.
“So she went. I must have been a fool.”
Prentiss stared into space, one hand clutching a cold cup of coffee, as Eberlin paid the bill.
“I think someone, sometime, must have burned out her soul,” Prentiss said quietly and stood up.
Picking up the change, Eberlin hurried across the restaurant followed by Prentiss, who caught up with him and said, “Still, there’s plenty more fish in the sea,” and became embarrassed.
Eberlin grunted and stared straight ahead of him as the lift descended. Then, when they reached the ground floor, he turned and asked, “Where did you say the Mistrale was?”
* * *
It seemed just like new. He walked around it five times, prodding it, stroking it, standing back and looking at it from different angles, then actually sitting inside it and holding the wheel. It felt wrong but it was definitely the same car. The initials were there. As he sat numbed into a state of lethargy despite the awesome implications of the day, Prentiss knocked on the window and said:
“You know, perhaps no one burned out her soul. Perhaps she never had one. Perhaps I just tried to intellectualize her, create a positive personality for her because I wanted something to match her physical qualities.”
Eberlin sighed. “Get in,” he said.
Prentiss nodded and walked around the Mistrale and sat next to Eberlin, and stared at a girl standing outside the Kempinski who was wearing a white wool dress and carrying a copy of Paris Match. “Tourist,” Prentiss commented. “By the way, what happened this afternoon?”
“Bloody Gatiss barged in again like God Almighty. It was worth trying Breysach–I mean, what else have we come up with?”
“Perhaps. But you would have been looking for someone who looked like that man Pavel, wouldn’t you?”
Eberlin drove the car slowly to the hotel, conscious of the admiring faces of the pedestrians as he passed.
“He hates you, you know,” Prentiss said. “Gatiss does?”
“Intensely,” replied Prentiss, chewing at a fingernail. “But then he’s hardly in love with me. He thinks I’m a sentimental romantic. Utterly without justification of course …” and he smiled at a girl waiting at a crossing.
“What makes you think he hates me?”
“I don’t know. I just know he does. Drop me just here.”
“Aren’t you staying at the same hotel?”
“Yes. But I’ve got a couple of things to do first. Anyway, Gatiss wants to see you about something.”
Prentiss got out of the car opposite the Drei Bären. As he closed the door, he glanced back at Eberlin and said:
“Be careful when you get back there. He’s got some girl with him. Pretty sick.”
Prentiss hurried across the street toward a small shop selling transistor radios at ridiculously low prices, which intrigued him greatly, since he’d promised a cousin in Norwich that he would buy one as a silver wedding present.
13
Au Suivant
The thought of suicide is a great consolation; with
the help of it one has got through many a bad night.
–NIETZSCHE
THE name of the whore in Gatiss’s room was Hedwig. When Eberlin returned to the hotel, he found it was about seven o’clock. He hesitated outside Gatiss’s door, knocked and was told to enter, and was stunned to see the familiar face of the girl in the brothel. But only the face was familiar, not the expression. No wink or grin greeted him this time. Instead, the platinum-blond whore stared wide-eyed at the ceiling, clutching the sheets of the bed before her, her knuckles white as if she were in pain. Eberlin could see it in the girl’s eyes. He hesitated at the door and muttered an apology, but Gatiss, who was standing dressing before the washstand, waved him in. Eberlin closed the door and hovered self-consciously in the corner of the room, attempting to avoid looking at the girl but finding himself drawn to the wretched face. He stared blankly at the bed, hating the oppressive atmosphere, and attempted to relax by offering the girl a cigarette.
“Don’t give her one,” Gatiss said sharply. Eberlin looked up, stung by the tone of the voice. “Don’t give her a thing.”
“I was just offering her a cigarette–” Eberlin began. “Nothing. She’s a hun. A Nazi.”
Eberlin recoiled from this, turned his back on Gatiss and held out the cigarette toward the girl, saying to Gatiss:
“Don’t be so damn inhuman.”
The cigarette was violently knocked out of his hand and Gatiss pushed him away against the wardrobe.
“The only inhumanity,” Gatiss said coldly, “is that her and her race are still alive, and that six million of mine are dead. That is the only inhumanity.”
He turned back to the mirror and studied a spot that had appeared on the left side of his jaw. Eberlin stood in the dead silence of the room for two minutes, staring at the floor, and then the girl began to sob. Tears ran down her pale cheeks and her body quivered under the bedclothes, and she buried her face in shame in the recesses of the grubby, coverless pillow, so that the sheet pulled away from her shoulder and revealed her back, mutilated by bruises and weals already beginning to swell. Eberlin stared at her body in horror and turned toward Gatiss.
“You bastard,” he said inadequately and left the room and returned to his own and lay on the bed in the dark. In half an hour, Gatiss knocked on the door and invited him for a drink, and they both strolled to a pleasant little café nearby and ordered two Camparis with plenty of ice. It looked like rain but the weather was deceptive in these
parts.
* * *
“Women, Dancer, are destructive animals. One can meet a beautiful woman one day and she will kiss your feet the next. You surrender your identity to them, allow them to share your waking moments in rapidly enlarging installments, and soon you will find they are using you. They wave their neuroses before you like a leper’s bell, knowing you cannot ignore them, and you suffer them their self-pity and their pathetic bleats of negative living until one day you find yourself eaten by them, degraded, scoured out, tied to the rack of their pathetic nullity. Women use us, Eberlin, and the only way to treat them is to use them. Use them to sleep with, use them to cook for you, use them to run errands, but never, never allow yourself to enter that mental tic of their femininity. If you do, you are nothing. Your own laughingstock. You yourself do and that is why you are a fool. But then you are a fool about everything.”
They had been sitting in the café for an hour now and Gatiss had consumed almost half a bottle of Campari. It had grown dark, and he sat lounging in the chair staring blandly into the night, talking incessantly in that dogmatic way of his, not caring if he was heard or not. Eberlin had said almost nothing, for he was thinking of other things. He was thinking when he would kill Gatiss. That was obviously what Kuzmich wanted. Eberlin wondered how they would contact him, if indeed they were watching him now. He felt slightly more relaxed–partly due to the drink and partly due to the offer of help from Sobakevich. It was the first positive gesture he had had. But he had to kill Gatiss for them. He could do it tomorrow. In the afternoon. If it was sunny.
“I mean, people ask me why I only sleep with whores,” Gatiss was saying, “but that is strictly an inaccurate statement. All women are whores, Dancer. All women are whores. The ones who do it for money just happen to be the cheapest, that’s all.”
Eberlin sighed and stood up, stretching his back. “Going somewhere?” asked Gatiss.
“Pardon?” replied Eberlin. “Please sit down. I’m talking.”
“It’s late.”
“Oh hardly. Anyway, you’re here on business–in case you’ve forgotten.”
A Dandy in Aspic Page 17
