“Cooper, do you see those men by the door? If they were any bigger their knuckles would drag on the floor. If men that size don’t want you to leave, then you don’t leave unless you’re prepared to shoot them full of holes. You are not prepared to do that. I am. So don’t try to leave without me.”
He looked back at me. “And if you see me beating your goddamn sister into chopped liver, I’m telling you that you interfere at your own risk. I’m getting very survival-oriented all of a sudden. Brendel should not have been told ahead of time. That changes everything. Our only advantage is gone.” He thrust a hand past me and I flinched again, Walter Mitty to the end. “Doctor Roeschler,” he said, shaking hands with Roeschler, who managed to look like Carl Sandburg even in evening dress. “It’s nice to see a familiar face.” Peterson was glazed with the phoniest smile I had ever seen. He was fully capable of shooting some people, pulling the trigger instead of shaking hands, and Roeschler seemed so gentle, a man whose compromises had been made so long ago.
“Well, you’ve certainly gotten inside the battlements,” Roeschler said. I kept looking back into the crowd for a trace of Lise. I couldn’t quite believe the way she had behaved; it made no sense to me. How could she have betrayed me?
“You’ve seen Lise,” he said, his voice rumbling, Adam’s apple bobbing behind the black tie. “I can tell.”
“I didn’t recognize her. Very confusing, Doctor Roeschler.”
“Absolutely nuts,” Peterson said. “God, it’s hot in here.”
“Mr. Peterson has a point,” Doctor Roeschler said so softly that I had to incline toward him. “It’s her style and in certain cases style is another name for madness. There is more than one Lise. …” He paused and touched my arm pointedly. “She is schizoid—I couldn’t tell you that until you’d seen it for yourself. Not a psychosis, but pronounced nevertheless. She just comes and goes, one mask after another. She will never be sure who she is, Mr. Cooper,” Roeschler said sadly. It was impossible to tell how figuratively he was speaking.
“We will, though,” Peterson said. He was tense.
“One wonders,” Roeschler said. He moved away, leaned for a moment against a chair, took a glass of champagne, drained it off, and walked slowly away into the crowd.
“He’s an old man,” Peterson said. “I wonder what’s left for him?”
“What’s left for her?” I couldn’t get hold of the evening.
“I don’t know, but she’s trouble, John. You can’t trust her. Do you hear me, John—don’t make a bad mistake.”
The music swept across the crowd. Peterson went to find the buffet. The vast, immense men stood by the front doors chatting, looking surly. The knot in my stomach tightened.
It was all so uncertain. We were there, but why? What was supposed to happen? Lise had turned out so badly: that was no ally, no friend in the enemy camp. I couldn’t shake my terrible fear. Fear. Cowardice. What difference did it make?
It was all so serious, but I found myself awaiting the arrival of Porky Pig and Bugs Bunny and it didn’t make sense. The room, the people, the fear were all tightening on me, squeezing me, and I kept wanting to giggle and go to the toilet from fright. I turned toward a French window which stood slightly ajar, wiped my face with a handkerchief, felt the draft cold on my sweat.
When I looked back the scene reminded me of one of Hieronymus Bosch’s lesser canvases. For an instant it seemed a rioting madhouse and then there was Lise sailing toward me. I recognized Gunter Brendel following in the wake. She was smiling, the geometry of her face somehow off-center. I didn’t realize that Siegfried Hauptmann was with them until they were on top of me.
“Ah, Mr. Cooper,” she called airily, heads turning as she approached, “here you are at last! We’ve been searching so diligently for you and here you are all by yourself enjoying the music!” Brendel stared at me levelly through this absurd recital, waiting.
“My husband, Gunter Brendel,” she said, turning first to one, then to the other, “and my dear friend, Siegfried Hauptmann, both of whom have been dying to meet you all evening. Haven’t you, darling?” She lobbed the ball into her husband’s court.
He bowed a fraction. “How do you do, Mr. Cooper. I remember your brother very well.” He smiled thinly, turning to Siegfried.
“Mr. Cooper.” His eyes were like windows onto a bright sunny sky, his hair yellow as straw.
Lise burst out laughing, a false laugh which skirted the last outposts of real mirth. Her husband regarded her warily. “Well, you three must have so much to talk about!” she exclaimed loudly.
“Please, Mr. Cooper, you must forgive my wife’s high spirits. Parties frequently have this effect on her. She becomes overexcited—”
“No, not actually,” she said stridently. “As a matter of fact I behave this way for a very specific reason.”
“I’m sure you do, my dear,” Brendel said. He was suddenly frightened of her, squeezed her hand in his. “I’m so glad you could join us, Mr. Cooper. Lise is right—I have much to discuss with you. Perhaps you will remain long enough to join Herr Hauptmann and me for a brandy later—”
She interrupted, pulling her hand away. Her glasses slid down her nose. Siegfried looked on with vague amusement as if it were an old, weary, but still faintly diverting act.
“And the reason I behave this way,” she said with exaggerated English diction, “is that I am so fucking bored by this whole stupid world! These lumpish slugs you call your friends—” Her voice dropped as two startled matrons peered quizzically from behind a fern of their own. I shrank back, felt the edge of the open door in the center of my back. She hissed: “And all your tired old Nazis. …” Brendel reached for her arm again but he was too late; she jerked away, knocked Siegfried’s champagne glass to the floor, leaned groggily against him. A thick vein bulged in Brendel’s neck. But his eyes told me he’d been through it before.
“Siegfried,” he said, tight-lipped, “will you please see Lise upstairs?”
Lise’s voice was thick. “He knows the way, doesn’t he, darling?” She grinned, off-center, at her husband, eyes heavy-lidded, hooded, crafty. “But then we all have so much in common—” She switched into German and lost me. Brendel turned to me, ignoring her, as Siegfried began to move away with her. He spoke as if we were old friends.
“My wife is not particularly well, Mr. Cooper. She has an overworked imagination and too much free time—a very modern woman, I’m afraid.” He shrugged, went on in his perfect English: “And this is the result—I’m terribly sorry. She was right about my wanting a word with you. She told me how far you’d come to see her and that you were asking the same questions your brother had. I knew it would upset her. Your brother had upset her. And now”—another stiff shrug—“here you are and it starts all over again.” He stopped walking, released my arm. “This cannot go on, Mr. Cooper. My wife’s stability is too insecure, too easily unsettled. And she also mentioned your interest in our political activities.” He paused to survey his guests, squared his shoulders. Without looking at me, a fixed public smile on his smooth, tanned skier’s face, he said: “We’re going to lay all this to rest tonight, Mr. Cooper, absolutely to rest. Please enjoy the party, by all means enjoy the party, and we will have a long talk with Siegfried later. Don’t even think of leaving here.” He smiled at me. “I won’t hear of it.” He gave me that abbreviated bow. “Excuse me.”
Across the room I saw Roeschler watching us. Ponderously, he moved off behind Brendel, ever faithful, the healer who tried to help him understand his wife. Across the years, their wives helped to bond them together.
I wondered where Peterson had gone, when he was coming back.
But I was seriously wondering if even Peterson could do me any good anymore. I had come all this way, I knew that this man Brendel was trying to kill me, I had no idea whatsoever if Lise was my sister, and I had willingly come to this party, this house. … It was incomprehensible when I thought about it: I just couldn’t have done it. I had swe
at in my eyes, the back of my neck was wet, my shirt clung stickily. I took another glass of champagne and pushed through the crowd. Long draperies swayed and I moved slowly on into other rooms until I found myself staring eye to eye with Martin St. John.
His hair hung like a dirty flag across his forehead, his dinner clothes were rumpled, and a morsel of crab dip reposed neatly on his lapel. He swiped at his face with a red bandanna and grinned puckishly when he saw me. He winked broadly, stuffed the red cloth into a hip pocket. With his other hand he stabbed a stub of cigarette into his mouth, puffed laboriously, and ran his tongue over thick lips.
“Mr. Cooper,” he said. “How good to see you again! Your researches have taken you a very long way.”
“What are you doing here?” Roca was scouring Tierra del Fuego for him and he was enjoying the party in Munich and he was smiling at me: these people didn’t seem to mind being caught in their lies. He was chortling and sweating, the aging soldier of fortune up to his ears in his last big caper.
“A bit of this, a bit of that. Always working on something. Things always happening, deals to make. What are you doing here, my boy? Still looking for that girl?” He smiled broadly. The piece of crab came unstuck, rolled down his coat. He puffed at the cigarette and nudged me with his elbow. “Found her at last, haven’t you?” He had the sly grin of a man dealing in pornographic films, changed from the opera board man in Buenos Aires.
“Yes, I found her at last.”
“And you’re thinking badly of me, I know, I know.” He guided me past a potted tree of some sort and pulled me down on a settee out of the line of traffic. “And I can’t blame you, thinking ill of old St. John, but you really shouldn’t, not really. We’re all soldiers under the surface, aren’t we? We’ve all got our marching orders, don’t you see? Our lives are not quite our own, we’re all merely cogs—egad, what a boring speech, what? Reminds me of a sergeant major I once knew in Singapore, poor man eventually died—one of Wingate’s men, of course. But I’m rambling.” He patted my knee and dropped the cigarette into yet another tree pot. He fumbled for another, scratched a match on the urn.
“You lied to me,” I said. “I can’t help wondering why.”
“Well, now, about what?”
“I don’t even know anymore. But you could have helped me.”
“Why, I did help you—I sent you to Kottmann, I gave you the picture. Now if that isn’t helping you, old Martin St. John doesn’t know help when he sees it.”
“Part of the truth. Why not all of it?”
“And whoever knows all the truth, Mr. Cooper? I told you what I could. We all have our orders, don’t we?”
“Whose orders do you follow, then? Who’s your master?”
“Ah, well, there you are—that would be telling, wouldn’t it?” His jowls shook, he pushed the hair back, pursed his fat lips. “And I can’t do that, Mr. Cooper. You’ll have to do without that.” He sighed. “But you’ve come so far, perhaps you’ll go on a bit longer.”
“I rather doubt it. I don’t think I’m going much farther.” I stood up. He watched me amiably, dribbled ash on his cummerbund. “Are you in this with Brendel? Are you all in it together? Die Spinne—the Spider?”
“Die Spinne?”
“You bet your ass,” I said.
“I’m amazed,” he said slowly.
“That I know?”
“No. That you’d tell me that you know.” All the cordial bonhomie had bleached out of his voice. “Just offhand that strikes me as not particularly bright.”
“Well, then it’s in character, isn’t it? I haven’t been bright at all. Just sort of vaguely human.”
“Not enough, old boy. A man’s got to be a good bit more than that these days. Any days. I’m sorry—I find myself sorry about things more often the older I get. Do sit down, this is hurting my neck, looking up. …”
“Are you all in it, then?”
“More of us than anyone really thinks, I suppose. Enough of us, certainly.” He was becoming his old self again. But there was an arctic waste stretching out behind his eyes. Something had changed.
“Is this the center of it? Here in Munich?”
“Here in this house,” he said, “is closer the mark. There is apparently one more stop after this, too—even Brendel is a soldier who takes his orders. But this is where it stops for me. In this house. With this man.”
He stood up and brushed ashes off his lapels.
“Well, Mr. Cooper, it has been … fascinating talking to you again.” His hand was warm and dry, his smile automatic. He had always been human, warm, lying. Now he was remote.
“Am I going to get out of here alive?”
The thick lips pursed.
“I shouldn’t count on it, Mr. Cooper. Not realistically, don’t you see?” His weary eyes met mine. “Don’t think badly of old St. John. I’m only a soldier. And I am truly sorry.” He turned his back at the last moment. “For whatever comfort it may be, once you’re my age you find yourself looking back and wondering what the point was … if there was a point at all. You won’t be missing anything worthwhile, I assure you.” He seemed to be bearing a heavy burden.
Alone, a pariah, one of the dead, I moved slowly back through the maze of rooms, corridors full of urns and statuary and paintings and plaster cherubs beaming indolently down from the molding. The level of noise was rising as the party gathered life and rhythm of its own. Near a bookcase, standing in close conversation with a tall man in evening clothes, a man with slicked-back, dyed black hair, whose bearing was military and whose face was strangely familiar, was Alfried Kottmann, the other half of the famed Buenos Aires comedy team. Boffo in Munich!
Kottmann must have felt my eyes boring into him. He looked up and saw me, returned my stare coldly, inclined his head minutely, expressionlessly. He kept talking to the familiar-looking man who seemed to have had a successful face-lift which gave him a slightly plastic, unseamed quality, a counterfeit youthfulness.
Across the room, through one of the French windows, Peterson appeared, brushing a sprinkling of snow from his shoulders. I got to him before he disappeared.
“We’re going to die,” I said abruptly.
“Who told you that, for God’s sake?”
“Oh, hell”—I waved my hand—“all of them. Brendel, Siegfried. …” I laughed a trifle hysterically. “Martin St. John. I just talked to him. He said he was sorry about it but that was the way it was. He was really quite nice.”
“Cooper, listen to what I’m saying. You are about half drunk right now. If you don’t sober up you won’t have to worry about these people killing you—because I’ll kill you.” He paused for effect while I blinked; it was entirely possible that he meant it. “Now where the hell did you see him?”
“Back there.” I motioned over my shoulder. “He told me that he’s just a soldier and that he takes his marching orders from Brendel. He said that this house is the center of it all, the headquarters of Die Spinne. He told me there was one other source, the place Brendel’s orders come from—he didn’t know where that was, though.” I sighed. Peterson took my champagne away from me, emptied it into yet another urn.
Snow was melting in his hair. “The amazing thing about it all is the structure, like a piece of sculpture, spokes and curves all intersecting and when you step back from it you realize the shape—we’ve been so close, just seeing pieces of the skeleton. But step back and you see what it is. …”
“What is it?”
“A globe, I think. And to think that your brother just stumbled into it.” He cocked his head at me. “Think how it must drive them crazy when they think of it. One man just wandering into their work of art and breaking first this piece, then bending that, fucking it up. …” He shook his head vigorously, as if it rested on top of a coiled spring. “Think of it, think of how important it is to them … and this poor son of a bitch wanders in looking for his sillyass sister and blows the whistle on them. Jesus, it’s quite a world, ain’t it?”
<
br /> He seemed to be forgetting our immediate problems. Among other things I had to go to the bathroom.
“Where have you been, anyway?” I asked.
“I went and got the car. Put it at the end of the walk, bullied those imbeciles, said I didn’t want it parked in the rows with the others—doors might get scratched. It’s out in front now. Proves the attendants haven’t been told about us.”
“I’ve got to find the bathroom.”
“Upstairs.” He moved beside me to the foyer where we’d entered. It was nearly midnight and the rheostats had been turned down dramatically, dimming the lights in the crystal chandeliers. Servants were moving unobtrusively along the walls lighting candles in ornate fixtures. Shadows flickered, the people milled all the more, enjoying themselves in the lateness of the hour. Wrinkles faded, baldness no longer gleamed, and chests full of medals glinted and gleamed, diamonds spun webs of fire as gestures grew languid.
“Is that man your friend St. John?” He gestured with a cigar. I nodded.
“My God,” he said with generous disgust. “The man is covered with food. Well, he and I have a few things to discuss. You go find the bathroom—ah, there’s Doctor Roeschler. Doesn’t look any better than he did before. He worries me, talk to him if you have the chance. …” He was somewhat distracted, watching St. John, who was holding a plate of food and chatting with a young woman whose long blond hair kept brushing his salad. He patted my arm and abruptly sneezed. “That’s what I get for running around in the goddamn snow. I’ll always associate you with snow.”
As the stairway curled around, there was a room-sized landing with heavy draperies at the sides of immensely tall windows which disappeared in darkness like mountaintops in the clouds before they reached the ceiling. Candles in heavy sconces cast a warm, dim glow. My legs were weak with fear and I sat on a broad old couch beneath the window, out of sight from the foyer, quite alone. There was a writing desk, a huge leather chair, and a bookcase on the landing. Behind the couch, with its high, tufted leather back cracked with age, there was a bay window seat and a view of a lengthy, apparently six-car garage. Snow was falling heavily through the penumbra of the driveway lamps; the lawn was smooth, like deep white frosting, without a trace of a footprint. It was a lovely scene but I had to find a bathroom.
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