the One from the Other (2006)

by Kerr, Philip - Bernie Gunther 04

  “I know it,” I said.

  “What do you do?”

  “I’m a private detective.”

  Her eyes lit up, and for a moment, I thought she was going to hire me to look for a missing pie. So it was fortunate that this was the moment Britta Warzok chose to come through the Marstallstrasse door.

  She was wearing a black full-length skirt, a white tailored jacket gathered at the waist, long black gloves, white patent high-heeled shoes, and a white hat that looked like it had been borrowed from a well-dressed Chinese coolie. It shaded the scars on her cheek very effectively. Around her neck were five strings of pearls and hooked over her arm was a bamboo-handle handbag that she opened while she was still greeting me and retrieved a five-mark note. The note went to the maître d’, who greeted her with a subservience worthy of a courtier at the court of the electress of Hannover. While he was abasing himself even further, I glanced over her forearm at the contents of her bag. It was just long enough to see a bottle of Miss Dior, a Hamburger Kreditbank checkbook, and a .25-caliber automatic that looked like the little sister of the one I had in my coat pocket. I wasn’t sure which I was more concerned about—the fact she banked in Hamburg or the nickel-plated rattle she was carrying.

  I followed her into the restaurant in a slipstream of perfume, deferential nods, and admiring glances. I didn’t blame anyone for looking. As well as the Miss Dior, she gave off an air of perfect self-assurance and poise, like a princess on her way to being crowned. I supposed it was her height that made her the automatic center of attention. It’s difficult to look regal when you’re no higher than a door handle. But it could just as easily have been her careful dress sense that got their attention. That and her natural beauty. It certainly wasn’t anything to do with the guy who was walking behind her and holding the brim of his hat like it was the train of her gown.

  We sat down. The maître d’, who seemed to have met her before, handed us menus the size of kitchen doors. She said she wasn’t all that hungry. I was, but for her sake I said I wasn’t hungry either. It’s difficult to tell a client that her husband is dead when your mouth is full of sausage and sauerkraut. We ordered drinks.

  “Do you come here very often?” I asked her.

  “Quite often, before the war.”

  “Before the war?” I smiled. “You don’t look old enough.”

  “Oh, but I am,” she said. “Do you flatter all your clients, Herr Gunther?”

  “Just the ugly ones. They need it. You don’t. Which is why I wasn’t flattering you. I was stating a matter of fact. You don’t look like you’re more than thirty.”

  “I was just eighteen when I married my husband, Herr Gunther,” she said. “In 1938. There now. I’ve told you how old I am. And I hope you feel ashamed of yourself at having added a year to my age. Especially that age. For another four months, I’m still in my twenties.”

  The drinks came. She had a brandy Alexander that matched her hat and jacket. I had a Gibson so that I could eat the onion. I let her drink some of her cocktail before I told her what I’d discovered. I told it straight, without any euphemisms or polite evasions, right down to the details about the Jewish assassination squad forcing Willy Hintze to dig his own grave and kneel down on the edge before being shot in the back of the head. After what she had told me in my office—about how she and her fiancé were hoping that if Warzok was alive he might be caught and extradited to a country where they hanged most of their Nazi war criminals—I was quite sure she could take it.

  “And you think that’s what happened to Friedrich?”

  “Yes. The man I spoke to is more or less certain of it.”

  “Poor Friedrich,” she said. “Not a very pleasant way to die, is it?”

  “I’ve seen worse,” I said. I lit a cigarette. “I would say I’m sorry but it hardly seems appropriate. And for a number of reasons.”

  “Poor, poor Friedrich,” she said again. She finished her drink and ordered another for us both. Her eyes were looking moist.

  “You say that like you almost mean it,” I said. “Almost.”

  “Let’s just say that he had his moments, shall we? Yes, in the beginning, he very definitely had his moments. And now he is dead.” She took out her handkerchief and, very deliberately, pressed it into the corner of each eye.

  “Knowing it is one thing, Frau Warzok. Proving it to the satisfaction of a church court is quite another. The Comradeship—the people who tried to help your husband—are not the kind to swear on anything except perhaps an SS dagger. The man I met made that quite clear to me in no uncertain terms.”

  “Nasty, eh?”

  “Like a common wart.”

  “And dangerous.”

  “I wouldn’t be at all surprised.”

  “Did he threaten you?”

  “Yes, I suppose he did,” I said. “But I wouldn’t let it concern you at all. Being threatened is an occupational hazard for someone like me. I almost didn’t notice it.”

  “Please be careful, Herr Gunther,” she said. “I would not like to have you on my conscience.”

  The second round of drinks arrived. I finished my first one and placed the empty on the waiter’s tray. The fat lady and her son who worked for American Overseas Airline came in and sat at the next table. I ate my cocktail onion quickly before she could ask for it. The son was German. But the wine-colored gabardine suit he wore looked like something out of Esquire magazine. Or maybe a Chicago nightclub. The jacket was oversize, with wide lapels and even wider shoulders, and the trousers were baggy and low on the crotch and narrowed dramatically at the ankle, as if to accentuate his brown and white shoes. His shirt was plain white, his tie an electric shade of pink. The whole ensemble was made complete by a double key chain of exaggerated length that hung from a narrow leather belt. Assuming she wouldn’t have eaten it I imagined that he was probably the apple of his mother’s eye. Not that he would have noticed given that his own eye was already crawling over Britta Warzok like an invisible tongue. The next second he was pushing his chair back, putting down his pillowcase-size napkin, standing up, and coming over to our table like maybe he knew her. Smiling as if his life depended on it and bowing stiffly, which looked all wrong in the easygoing suit he was wearing, he said:

  “How are you, dear lady? How are you enjoying Munich?”

  Frau Warzok regarded him blankly. He bowed again almost as if he hoped that the movement might jog her memory.

  “Felix Klingerhoefer? Don’t you remember? We met on the plane.”

  She started to shake her head. “I think you must be mistaking me for someone else, Herr—?”

  I almost laughed out loud. The idea that Britta Warzok could have been mistaken for anyone, except perhaps one of the three Graces, was too absurd. Especially with those three scars on her face. Eva Braun would have been more forgettable.

  “No, no,” insisted Klingerhoefer. “There’s no mistake.”

  Silently I agreed with him, thinking it rather clumsy of her to pretend to have forgotten his name like that, especially since he had just finished mentioning it. I remained silent, waiting to see how this would play out.

  Ignoring him altogether now, Britta Warzok looked at me and said, “What were we talking about, Bernie?”

  I thought it odd that it should have been that particular moment she chose to use my Christian name for the first time. I didn’t look at her. Instead, I kept my eyes on Klingerhoefer in the hope it might encourage him to say something else. I even smiled at him, I think. Just so he wouldn’t get the idea I was going to get rough with him. But he was stranded like a dog on an ice floe. And bowing a third time, he muttered an apology and went back to his own table with his face turning the color of his strange suit.

  “I think I was telling you about some of the odd people this job brings me into contact with,” I said.

  “Doesn’t it just?” she whispered, glancing nervously in Klingerhoefer’s direction. “Honestly. I don’t know where on earth he got the idea that we
were acquainted. I’ve never seen him before.”

  Honestly. I just love it when clients talk like that. Especially the females. All my doubts about her veracity were instantly removed, of course.

  “In that suit, I think I’d have remembered him,” she added, quite redundantly.

  “No doubt about it,” I said, watching the man. “You certainly would.”

  She opened her bag and took out an envelope that she handed to me. “I promised you a bonus,” she said. “And here it is.”

  I glanced inside the envelope at some banknotes. There were ten of them and they were all red. It wasn’t five thousand marks. But it was still more than generous. I told her it was too generous. “After all,” I said. “The evidence doesn’t help your cause very much.”

  “On the contrary,” she said. “It helps me a great deal.” She tapped her forehead with an immaculate fingernail. “In here. Even if it doesn’t help my cause, as you say, you’ve no idea what a load off my mind this is. To know that he won’t be coming back.” And taking hold of my hand, she picked it up and kissed it with what looked like real gratitude. “Thank you, Herr Gunther. Thank you, very much.”

  “It’s been a pleasure,” I said.

  I put the envelope in my inside pocket and buttoned it down for safekeeping. I liked the way she had kissed my hand. I liked the bonus, too. I liked the fact that she’d paid it in hundred-mark notes. Nice new ones with the lady reading a book beside a mounted terrestrial globe. I even liked her hat, and the three scars on her face. I liked pretty much everything about her except the little gun in her bag.

  I dislike women who carry guns almost as much as I dislike men who carry them. The gun and the little incident with Herr Klingerhoefer—not to mention the way she had avoided having me back to her home—made me think there was much more to Britta Warzok than met the eye. And given that she met the eye like Cleopatra, that gave me a cramp in a muscle that suddenly I felt I just had to stretch.

  “You’re a pretty strict Roman Catholic, Frau Warzok,” I said. “Am I right?”

  “Unfortunately, yes. Why do you ask?”

  “Only because I was speaking to a priest about your dilemma and he recommended that you employ the good old Jesuit device of equivocation,” I said. “It means saying one thing while thinking quite another, in pursuit of a good cause. Apparently it’s something that was recommended by the founder of the Jesuits, Ulrich Zwingli. According to this priest I was speaking to, Zwingli writes about it in a book called Spiritual Exercises. Maybe you should read it. Zwingli says that the greater sin than the lie itself would be the evil action that would result from not telling a lie. In this case, that you’re a good-looking young woman who wants to get married and start a family. The priest I spoke to reckons that if you were to forget about the fact that you saw your husband alive in the spring of 1946, you would only have to get the Dienststelle to declare that he was dead, and then there would be no need to involve the church at all. And now that you know that he really is dead, where would the harm be in that?”

  Frau Warzok shrugged. “What you say is interesting, Herr Gunther,” she said. “Perhaps we will speak to a Jesuit and see what he recommends. But I couldn’t lie about such a thing. Not to a priest. I’m afraid that, for a Catholic, there are no easy shortcuts.” She finished her drink and then dabbed at her mouth with her napkin.

  “It’s just a suggestion,” I said.

  She dipped into her bag again, put five dollars on the table, and then made as if to go. “No, please don’t get up,” she said. “I feel awful having stopped you from having dinner. Do please stay and order something. There’s enough there to cover more or less whatever you want. At least finish your drink.”

  I stood up, kissed her hand, and watched her go. She didn’t even glance at Herr Klingerhoefer, who blushed again, fiddled with his key chain, and then forced a smile at his mother. Half of me wanted to follow her. Half of me wanted to stay and see what I could get out of Klingerhoefer. Klingerhoefer won.

  All clients are liars, I told myself. I haven’t yet met one who didn’t treat the truth as if it was something on the ration. And the detective who knows that his client is a liar knows all the truth that need concern him, for he will then have the advantage. It was no concern of mine to know the absolute truth about Britta Warzok, assuming that such a thing existed. Like any other client she would have had her reasons for not telling me everything. Of course, I was a little out of practice. She was only my third client since starting my business in Munich. All the same, I told myself, I ought to have been a little less dazzled by her. That way I might have been less surprised, not to catch her lying so outrageously, but to find her lying at all. She was no more of a strict Roman Catholic than I was. A strict Roman Catholic would not necessarily have known that Ulrich Zwingli had been the sixteenth-century leader of Swiss Protestantism. But she would certainly have known that it was Ignatius of Loyola who had founded the Jesuits. And if she was prepared to lie about being a Roman Catholic, then it seemed to me she was quite prepared to lie about everything else as well. Including poor Herr Klingerhoefer. I picked up the dollars and went over to his table.

  Frau Klingerhoefer seemed to have overcome all her previous reservations about the price of dinner in the Walterspiel and was working on a leg of lamb like a mechanic going after a set of rusty spark plugs with a wrench and a rubber hammer. She didn’t stop eating for a moment. Not even when I bowed and said hello. She probably wouldn’t have stopped if the lamb had let out a bleat and inquired where Mary was. Her son, Felix, was partnered with the veal, cutting neat little triangles off it like one of those newspaper cartoons we were always seeing of Stalin carving slices from a map of Europe.

  “Herr Klingerhoefer,” I said. “I believe we owe you an apology. This is not the first time this kind of thing has happened. You see, the lady is much too vain to wear glasses. It’s quite possible that you have indeed met before, but I’m afraid she was much too shortsighted to recognize you from wherever it was that you might have met. On a plane, I think you said?”

  Klingerhoefer stood up politely. “Yes,” he said. “On a plane from Vienna. My business often takes me there. That’s where she lives, isn’t it? Vienna?”

  “Is that what she told you?”

  “Yes,” he said, obviously disarmed by my question. “Is she in any kind of trouble? My mother told me you’re a detective.”

  “That’s right, I am. No, she’s not in any kind of trouble. I look after her personal security. Like a kind of bodyguard.” I smiled. “She flies. I go by train.”

  “Such a good-looking woman,” said Frau Klingerhoefer, gouging the marrow out of the lamb bone with the tip of her knife.

  “Yes, isn’t she?” I said. “Frau Warzok’s divorcing her husband,” I added. “As far as I’m aware, she’s undecided whether she’s going to stay on in Vienna. Or live here in Munich. Which is why I was a little surprised to hear that she mentioned living in Vienna to you.”

  Klingerhoefer was looking thoughtful and shaking his head. “Warzok? No, I’m sure that wasn’t the name she used,” he said.

  “I expect she was using her maiden name,” I suggested.

  “No, it was definitely Frau something-else,” he insisted. “And not Fräulein. I mean, a good-looking woman like that. It’s the first thing you listen out for. If she’s married or not. Especially when you’re a bachelor who’s as keen to get married as I am.”

  “You’ll find someone,” said his mother, licking the marrow off her knife. “You just have to be patient, that’s all.”

  “Was it Schmidt?” I asked. That was the name she had used when first she had contacted Herr Krumper, my late wife’s lawyer.

  “No, it wasn’t Schmidt,” he said. “I’d have remembered that, too.”

  “My maiden name was Schmidt,” his mother explained, helpfully.

  I hovered for a second in the hope that he might remember the name she had used. But he didn’t. And after a while, I apolog
ized once again and made for the door.

  The maître d’ rushed to my side, his elbows held high and pumping him forward like a dancer. “Was everything all right, sir?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said, handing over her dollars. “Tell me something. Have you ever seen that lady before?”

  “No, sir,” he said. “I’d have remembered that lady anywhere.”

  “I just got the impression that maybe you had met her before,” I said. I fished in my pocket and took out a five-mark note. “Or maybe this was the lady you recognized?”

  The maître d’ smiled and almost looked bashful. “Yes, sir,” he said. “I’m afraid it was.”

  “Nothing to be afraid of,” I said. “She won’t bite. Not this lady. But if you ever see that other lady again, I’d like to hear about it.” I tucked the note and my card into the breast pocket of his cutaway.

  “Yes, sir. Of course, sir.”

  I went out onto Marstallstrasse in the vague hope that I might catch a glimpse of Britta Warzok getting into a car, but she was gone. The street was empty. I said to hell with her and started to walk back to where I had left my car.

  All clients are liars.

  SIXTEEN

  Walking down Marstallstrasse onto Maximilianstrasse, I was already thinking of how I was going to spend the next day. It was going to be a day without Nazi war criminals and Red Jackets and crooked Croatian priests and mysterious rich widows. I was going to spend the morning with my wife, apologizing for all my earlier neglect of her. I was finally going to call Herr Gartner, the undertaker, and provide him with the words I wanted on Kirsten’s memorial tablet. And I was going to speak to Krumper and tell him to drop the price on the hotel. Again. Maybe the weather at the cemetery would be fine. I didn’t think Kirsten would mind if, while I was in the garden of remembrance where her ashes were scattered, I got a little sun on my face. Then, in the afternoon, maybe I’d head back to that art gallery—the one next to the Red Cross building—and see if I could sign up for a crash course in art appreciation. The kind where a slim but attractive younger woman takes you by the nose and escorts you around a few museums and tells you what’s what and what’s not, and how to tell when a chimpanzee painted one picture and a fellow wearing a little black beret painted another. And if that didn’t pan out, I would head to the Hofbrauhaus with my English dictionary and a packet of cigarettes and spend the evening with a nice brunette. Several brunettes probably—the silent kind, with nice creamy heads and not a hard-luck story between them, all lined up along a bartop. Whatever I ended up doing I was going to forget all about the things that were now bothering me about Britta Warzok.