A Dandy in Aspic

by Derek Marlowe

  Eberlin sat down again and lit another cigarette and contemplated the check tablecloth.

  “I’m not the man for the job,” he said finally. “I’m a desk man. I couldn’t find him in a broom cupboard. You see what a fiasco happens if I try to do anything positive. Like this afternoon.”

  “Are you talking about Krasnevin?”

  “Weren’t you?”

  “Yes. Something like that,” murmured Gatiss vaguely, gesturing to a waiter. “Have you ever killed a man? I mean killed him–purposefully?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Curiosity. You strike me as somebody who could.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Try to attract the waiter’s attention, will you?”’ “Do I look like a killer, then?”

  “What?” said Gatiss, then laughed. “Perhaps.”

  “I’m tired. I need some sleep.”

  Eberlin got up and walked out of the café and waited on the pavement. He found that he had broken into a cold sweat, which bothered him. For an awesome moment, he re-entertained the notion that Gatiss knew his identity all the time, but dismissed it in a panic and glanced back toward the café to see Gatiss walking toward him and touching his arm.

  “Come with me,” he said quietly. “I want to show you something.”

  “What?”

  “Come on.”

  Eberlin hesitated, then said, “I must return to the hotel first.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh stop acting like a bloody school prefect,” snapped Eberlin. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

  He stalked off, watched by an amused Gatiss who wandered back to the café and ordered another Campari with ice.

  * * *

  The night porter was on duty when Eberlin arrived at the hotel. He nodded to him, muttered “Guten Abend” and hurried upstairs to the second floor. Pausing on the landing, Eberlin listened for a movement, but the hotel was asleep. He crept stealthily to Gatiss’s room and knocked softly on the door. There was no answer. He tried the handle but the door was locked. Hesitating only a fraction of a second, Eberlin hurried downstairs to the foyer once more and casually sauntered over to the desk.

  “Guten Abend,” he said again with a professional smile. “Guten Abend,” the night porter replied, smiling over a cold cup of coffee, a full ashtray and a copy of the day’s Bild.

  “I keep forgetting to collect my key,” Eberlin continued, offering the other man a cigarette. “I wonder if I could take it now.”

  The porter looked up, took the cigarette and gazed at Eberlin’s beaming face.

  “Looks like rain,” Eberlin remarked, pressing a loose corner of the blotting paper into its frame on the desk.

  “What number?”

  “Two four three.”

  The key to Gatiss’s room was handed across the counter, and Eberlin nodded.

  “Danke schon.”

  He returned upstairs and in two minutes was inside Gatiss’s room and face to face with the whore.

  “Do you speak English?” he asked, glancing out of the window. “Nein,” she replied and looked at the floor. Eberlin pulled the sheets from the girl’s bruised body, and she winced and backed against the wall, covering her large breasts with her arms.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” Eberlin whispered. “But you must get out before he cornes back.”

  The girl didn’t move but stared wide-eyed at Eberlin’s face. “Quickly,” he said. “The door’s open. Look.”

  He pointed to the door, demonstrating that it was open, and then handed the girl her clothes. Slowly, suspiciously, the girl took them one by one, gritting her teeth as the elastic of the underclothes bit into her flesh. Eberlin stared into the sink, hating everything, until she was ready, then he took her hand.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and put two hundred Marks into it. “I’m sorry,” he repeated.

  They both stood there staring over each other’s shoulder in embarrassed silence, as if posing for a sculpture, or caught practising a new dance. Finally Eberlin moved away, opened the door and glanced into the empty corridor. He nodded to the girl, and she shuffled out into the landing and stood there looking helplessly about.

  “You’d better leave by the back stairs,” Eberlin said and pointed to the corridor. He shook her hand like a guest bidding good-bye to a hostess at a party and said, “Well, good night.”

  Then he turned away toward his own room. The girl hesitated, suddenly kissed his sleeve, and then ran quickly down the corridor to the back stairs without glancing back. He heard her footsteps running down the stairs and disappearing into the night. Slowly, Eberlin walked to his own room which he always left open and switched on the light. Whatever Gatiss had in mind for tonight, Eberlin was determined to be prepared, so he crouched down and pulled his carryall from under the bed, assuming that this was where Gatiss would have put his gun. But he had miscalculated the time. Even as he unzipped the bag and reached for the gun hidden inside he heard the door open behind him, and glancing back saw Gatiss standing, towering over him, looking steadily into his eyes.

  “What exactly are you doing?” Gatiss asked. “Mmmm?” and lifted the top of the carryall with his foot to reveal Eberlin’s hand clutching the Browning.

  Eberlin stood up slowly, turning to face Gatiss and shrugged vaguely.

  “I just returned to collect the gun. I wondered where you had hidden it.”

  “So I see,” the other man said, pushing the door shut behind him. “Were you planning to kill anyone, then?”

  There was a moment’s dead silence, then Eberlin smiled. “I thought we might need it,” he said quickly.

  He stood holding the gun in his right hand, the muzzle pointing at the floor. Gatiss studied Eberlin’s face for a moment, then turned away and opened the door.

  “Put it back under the bed. You might be dangerous waving one of those around–being a desk man as you are. Put it back.”

  Eberlin found himself ridiculously replacing the gun in the case and walking dumbly to the door. On the way out, Gatiss said, pointing at the Playboy magazine on the floor:

  “Did you buy that?”

  “No. I found it.”

  “Not your kind of thing, I would have thought.” He closed the door. “You can’t get them in Berlin, can you?”

  Eberlin shrugged. Halfway down the stairs he realized he still had Gatiss’s key clutched tightly in his left hand.

  They reached the foyer, and Eberlin, lagging behind, muttered, “I’ll just leave my key at the desk.”

  He crossed quickly to the counter without looking back and was relieved to find that Gatiss didn’t follow. The key was handed over, then he hurried out into the night air, into the cool wind of the night, hurried after Gatiss toward the steel-blue Jensen waiting to take him away to another destination where he knew the pillars of his temple would begin finally to crumble.

  “I’d rather you didn’t smoke,” snapped Gatiss, closing the car door and revving the engine. “It would make it awfully stuffy in here, and we’ve got rather a long way to go.”

  The car slid out of the side street into the mainstream of the few cars in Joachimstaler Strasse, then roared fast, sometimes touching eighty, northwest along Otto-Suhr-Alee and up Tegeler-Weg and north along Kurt-Schumacher-Damm. Passing the Quartier Napoleon, Eberlin spoke for the first time. “Where are we going?” he said quickly.

  Gatiss, overtaking three cars on a dangerously sharp corner, replied:

  “To visit your friend in the shower.”

  Then he refused to say any more until they had arrived at their destination–a tall block of apartments near Wittenau, all brownstone and small-windowed and middle-class. It was ten minutes past one and beginning to rain.

  * * *

  Gatiss parked the car in a dark alley near a small florist shop and switched off the engine and lights. The two men sat there silently for a minute, then Eberlin, defying the other man’s prejudices, lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply.


  “Do we wait here for him?” he whispered, falling into the mood of the affair.

  “No,” replied Gatiss, winding down the window. “Do you have to smoke that damn thing?”

  “It’s a habit I’ve become attached to,” Eberlin replied sweetly and flicked some ash on the floor.

  “Henderson, or whatever his name is, lives in that block of apartments opposite. Number 25.”

  “How do you know?” asked Eberlin.

  “He sent me a postcard,” Gatiss replied curtly. “How the hell do you think I know? The bloody man is such an amateur, he’s been advertising himself for the last couple of days. He even followed me.”

  “I don’t think you ought to shout,” Eberlin said. “I mean, one doesn’t really, does one?”

  He smiled and puffed at the cigarette. Gatiss didn’t say anything for a moment, then:

  “He parks his car in the special car park just behind the building.

  I want you to wait for him, if he’s not there already.”

  “What about you?”

  “Don’t worry about me. Come on.”

  Gatiss got out of the car into the drizzling rain and crossed the street toward the dark recesses of the apartment building. Eberlin followed, hunching his shoulders under his jacket, until they reached the small car park, each space reserved for tenants only.

  “His car is not there,” Gatiss said, stopping under an arch. Eberlin peered across the yard and saw about a dozen cars parked neatly in a line in a small square, their noses pointing toward a row of badly planted mulberry bushes.

  “See that space over there,” Gatiss hissed in Eberlin’s ear, “in between the black Mercedes and the small Renault?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s where Henderson parks his car.”

  “The gray Volkswagen?”

  “The gray Volkswagen. Wait here out of sight until it returns.”

  “How do you know it will?”

  “I don’t. But it might.”

  Gatiss walked away, out of the arch and into the street and the darkness, and Eberlin was left alone, feeling confused, helpless and profoundly annoyed. He edged into a dry corner under the arch, took out a cigarette, thought better of it, and prepared to spend half the night in a vertical position staring at an eight-by-six rectangle of empty concrete. Where the hell was Rotopkin?

  The rain soon came down in buckets, flooding the yard and drumming incessantly on the steel roofs of the parked cars. It welled into puddles, seeped over onto the grass, stopped suddenly as if bored by it all, and then came down even heavier until Eberlin wondered if he would ever see a dry sky again. And still the gray Volkswagen did not arrive.

  Eberlin’s eyes ached, and once or twice he even closed them in a vain attempt to succumb to sleep. He found his mind wandering over a thousand things, thoughts popping up before him constantly like pheasants disturbed in the long grass. He thought of Caroline and that ridiculously naïve party he had attended decades ago, and of her lying beside him in his hotel sometime last century. He thought of Frazer, and his manservant, and of Pavel lying buried somewhere in an anonymous chunk of land. The poor insist on being buried. It’s usually the the only way they can insure of getting a garden of their own. He wondered who had said that or where he had read it, and then realized he had said it himself in one of his many cynical moods, aping Wilde sitting in the Café Royal. He had been there only once–more Café than Royal now–and had seen another of his romantic illusions shattered by the boxed EXIT signs over the doors and the commercialized beer mats on the tables. He remembered going downstairs there and being confronted by a polite concentration of thought when he inquired from the toilet attendant if Bosie had arrived yet.

  He thought of his son and remembered the boy’s face the last time he had seen him, at a small tea party on the boy’s second birthday. He had squatted on the floor with dozens of children and sung “Happy Birthday to You” with a red face, then, with a muttered apology, stumbled out drunk into the street on the pretense of buying some cigarettes and never gone back. Eberlin thought of Russia and his home which he would never see again, and of his apartment in London and the books he would never read. He thought of God and hoped that if He was everywhere, He wouldn’t have to stand through this, and he giggled to himself like a child. He began to work out small problems in his mind, like the one about the Chinaman with the fox, the chicken and the bag of grain and some thing about crossing a river, and the other one about the two guards who either lied or told the truth; and moved on to amassing groups of things, making endless lists, like London telephone exchanges, or novels whose titles began with An, or names of girls he had known. He thought of one in particular, for some unknown reason, a girl he had met in London two years after Jesse’s birth–a model or a ballerina–whom he inundated with presents like a dying millionaire, never to receive one in return. It had been a one-sided affair, yet he remembered her with fondness, though he couldn’t recollect her name; it might have been Joan or Jane or June. And as the hours of the night passed, and the Volkswagen seemed destined never to return, Eberlin began to make up epigrams and to talk to himself on quite intimate terms, answering himself in Russian. Then he began to think about women again, this time more tenderly. The purgatory of watching a girl no longer desired as she lingered over her dressing and laboriously appreciated a book on the bedside table. That presented him with a moment’s silence, and he lit a cigarette, throwing caution to the winds. Or to the damn rain. And finally he thought of Gatiss and how he would kill him, and this brought him back to reality. He thought of death and shuddered, for he knew that he himself was soon to die, and that whatever happened, no matter how far he ran, he would be killed in the end. It wouldn’t be by God’s hand, and it wouldn’t be by his own, but it would be there, and all this, this pitiful travesty, was merely marking time. And so he abandoned the pretense, gave up the subterfuge and strode out of his hiding place and almost under the wheels of a small gray Volkswagen that turned sharply from nowhere into the wet yard and parked neatly between a black Mercedes and a small Renault. It was there.

  Eberlin ducked back into the shadows, trusting to God he hadn’t been seen and wishing he had defied Gatiss and brought the gun. If Henderson was taken alive and forced to speak, it could be too late for him to do anything. The car door opened, and the small shape of the man in the shower got out and calmly locked the door, suspecting nothing. He stood by the Volkswagen for a moment adjusting a carnation in his buttonhole, then looked up at the sky despite the rain. He was about to walk toward the apartments when Gatiss, appearing suddenly from the shadows, said quietly in Russian:

  “Stay where you are.”

  Henderson stopped, stunned, and looked around helplessly, considering a panicked flight. Gatiss strode calmly across the flooded yard toward him, holding a small stubby Smith and Wesson in his hand and wearing preposterous dark glasses. Eberlin watched anxiously as Gatiss walked to a point ten yards from the Volkswagen and snapped out Eberlin’s name. There was nothing for it but to emerge from the arch. He sensed the shock and puzzlement as Henderson recognized him. Eberlin, limbs aching, avoided the man’s eye and walked to a two-tone Fairlane behind the Russian’s back. The three men made no move for some twenty seconds, then Gatiss made Eberlin the present of a blessed opportunity.

  “Search him,” he called. “See if he carries a gun.”

  Holding his breath, Eberlin crossed toward Henderson, wiping the rain from his face, and stared down into his fellow Russian’s frightened face. Leaning closely over him and feeling in the man’s pockets, Eberlin whispered:

  “Gatiss is going to kill you, but if you run when I shout out his name, I’ll try to save you.”

  Eberlin took a small Beretta from Henderson’s pocket, held it in his hand and walked away without glancing to see if the Russian had understood. He walked for about five yards, until he was masking Gatiss from the other man, then suddenly shouted:

  “Gatiss!”

  Hender
son made his desperate move for his life by beginning to run, and Eberlin coldly shot him through the head before he had covered two paces. The Russian collapsed immediately and was dead before he hit the ground.

  Anticipating Gatiss’s outburst of anger, Eberlin said quietly, “He was trying to escape.”

  Then he walked away through the arch, not bothering anymore for explanations and not even caring if Gatiss put a bullet through his back. But Gatiss didn’t. He ran after him, pushing him on the shoulder and shouting:

  “Come on, you bloody reckless bastard, and get in the car before we have half the Berlin polizei around us.”

  They both ran to the Jensen and drove away, leaving Henderson lying where he had fallen on the wet stones with only the sound of the rain and the approaching footsteps to keep him company.

  * * *

  They drove for about fifteen minutes in no particular direction, then Gatiss said:

  “What you did was your second mistake in twelve hours. That’s two too many.”

  * * *

  They decided it would be safer to separate as soon as possible, so they drove quickly for about fifteen minutes, mostly in silence, though the atmosphere in the car was heavy with distrust and anger. “That bloody Red was no use to us dead. Why on earth did you have to kill him?”

  And for the tenth time Eberlin replied, “I’m sorry. I didn’t think. It was just impulsive of me.”

  “They’ll never leave us alone now–now that we’ve come into the open. You can drop your Dancer role anyway, not that you ever adopted it.”

  “All right.”

  They parked near the Ka Da We, and Gatiss said, “I’m going back to search Henderson’s room. You avoid the hotel for an hour in case you’re followed, but meet me there at”–he glanced at his watch– “at six o’clock. In one hour.”

  Eberlin nodded.

  “You aimed for his head, didn’t you?”

  “What?” said Eberlin. “Oh, no Not really.”

  “Of course. You intrigue me, Eberlin. I want to find out more about you.”

  The sun appeared suddenly, dispersing the rain, and they both stared at the blue-glassed dominoes of the Kaiser Wilhelm Church. Then Eberlin opened the door of the Jensen only to be stopped by Gatiss.