Grand Hotel

by Vicki Baum

  Obviously talk of this kind opened up a world of misunderstanding between him and his accomplices. They took little account of courage, though they all had an adequate share of it. Emmy—with her trim auburn hair—had once attempted an explanation. “He makes a sport of it,” she said. She knew Gaigern well and was probably right. Now, at any rate, at twenty minutes past ten, as he clung to the façade of the Grand Hotel, he was like a rock-climber in a difficult chimney or the leader of a raid about to attack a dangerous position.

  The chief danger lay in the projecting bay behind which lay Grusinskaya’s bathroom. Here the architect’s fancy had chosen smooth surfaces. Also there were no window ledges, for the bathroom was tucked away behind and looked out upon the courtyard where the Baron had been observed staring up at the antenna. On the other side, however, of this smooth space, some two and a half meters farther, were the thin iron rods that fenced in the balcony of Room No. 68. Panting slightly and whistling and cursing by turns, Gaigern paused a while on the last projection that gave him some support before this smooth surface. The muscles of his thighs quivered and his ankles felt the hot vibrating pulse-beat of extreme exertion. For the rest, he was very well satisfied with his situation, and the circumstances, gone over a hundred times in his mind, answered to his expectations.

  For instance, Gaigern was completely protected by the powerful lights recently fixed up on the hotel façade against being observed from the street, which from up here looked like a track swarming with ants. Anyone who looked up would be blinded by the rays of white light. It would be quite impossible to see the small, dark blue figure making his way along in the black shadow behind these aggressive rays. Gaigern had picked up this trick by watching a conjurer at a variety show who had in the same fashion dazzled the eyes of the audience while he executed his hocus-pocus against a velvet hanging. He had sawed women in two and made skeletons hover above the stage. Gaigern looked down on the street while he took a rest behind the second arc lamp. At this unusually sharp angle the world had a distorted and flattened appearance. The wall descending sheer down from his feet looked perilous and threatening. He craned his head forward and looked down without venturing to breathe or blink an eyelid. He felt not a trace of dizziness—only in his pulse, the sweet and tingling sensation that climbers know well. The round tower of the little Gaigern castle at Ried was higher than this. And at the college at Feldkirch when you absconded from school at night you had to descend the whole length of the lightning rod. The Three Pinnacles in the Dolomites were no joke either. The two and a half meters to the balcony were not easy going, but he had been in worse places. Gaigern ceased looking down and looked upwards. On the roof opposite there was an electric sign: the bubbles of a glass of champagne burst upwards in a spray of bright light. There was no sky. The city ended abruptly just above the roofs and wires and antennas. Gaigern moved his fingers inside his gloves. They stuck, and probably they were bleeding. He tried his wind and found it in order again. Collecting his strength and bracing himself for the jump, he took a blind leap into vacancy. The air rushed past his ears and then he found himself hanging on by the rods of the balcony railing, the iron edges cutting into his fingers. He let himself hang there for a second with his heart thumping, then he drew himself up like an acrobat on a trapeze, got over the railing, and let go. Yes, he was lying now on the balcony with the door open into Grusinskaya’s room.

  “Well now,” he said with satisfaction, and for the moment lay where he was on the narrow cement-floored balcony, catching his breath. Far overhead he heard the engine of an airplane and then he saw straight above his eyes the gleam of its lighted cabin moving across the lurid haze that hung over the city. The street below sent up its loud confused roar. For a few minutes Gaigern lay as though on an island of exhaustion and semi-consciousness, while beneath him cars hooted impatiently to reach the hotel entrance, for the League of Humanity was giving a banquet in the Little Salon, and women in opera cloaks were creeping like colored beetles out of limousines and ascending the three steps into the second entrance of the hotel. Lord, what wouldn’t I give for a cigarette, thought Gaigern, but this relief for his exhausted nerves was out of the question. He pulled the glove off his right hand and sucked the cut on his forefinger. A bleeding paw would never do for the job he was on. The thin metallic taste vexed him. He felt the welcome coolness of the cement against his moist back. The return journey would be more difficult, he reflected, and looking through the railing of the balcony he measured the distance with his eye. He had a rope with him. Later he would have to attach it to the balcony and swing himself across. “Congratulations,” he said to himself in the smart officer’s voice of his army days. He pulled on his glove again as though he were about to pay a ceremonious call and getting up, stepped from the balcony into Grusinskaya’s bedroom.

  The French window did not move, only the curtain swayed gently in the air. The parquet floor, too, was benevolently silent. Two clocks ticked in the dark room, one nearly twice as fast as the other. There was a strong smell suggestive of a funeral or a cremation. From the electric sign across the way a triangle of yellow light fell on the floor and extended as far as the edge of the carpet. Gaigern took out his flashlight, an ordinary cylindrical one. With this he proceeded cautiously to look around the room. Thanks to his brief dialogue with Suzette on the threshold he had its shape and furniture in his head. He was prepared to counter every artful dodge and to bring the pearls to light wherever they might be concealed, to force trunks, break open cupboards and to unravel the secret of any lock. But after following the circular oval of his flashlight around the room he experienced an almost comic surprise when he saw his own image coming toward him three times in the dressing-table mirror.

  On the dressing table by the mirror lay the case quite peacefully, innocently reflecting the beam of the flashlight in its leather surface. Steady, thought Gaigern, pulling himself together, for the excitement of the chase was beginning to rush to his head. First he put his right hand into his right pocket for safe custody, for it was still bleeding and it would have to remain there to prevent its making mischief and leaving traces behind. He held the light between his teeth. With his gloved left hand he carefully took hold of the case. Yes, there it was. His fingers rested on the smooth and polished leather. He turned off the flashlight and put it down, pausing for reflection. There was an oppressive funereal smell suggestive of the interment of a deceased grandfather and a funeral oration. Gaigern began to laugh in the darkness when he hit on the explanation. “Laurels,” he remembered, recalling Suzette’s voice. “Madame had laurels sent to her, Monsieur. The French Ambassador sent a whole basketful.” He knelt down in front of the dressing table—now the floor creaked ominously as if it were alive—and grasped the case with his left hand in the darkness. No, no, he thought and let it go again. Such things brought bad luck. Pocket books, cases, purses—they were all sinister things. They had a tendency to refuse to be burnt, to emerge again from the rivers into which they were thrown, to be discovered in drains by sewer men and finally to be laid most disconcertingly on the table during criminal proceedings. Also, it was not a very pleasant prospect to face two and a half meters across a surface as smooth as ice with a case weighing about four pounds between one’s teeth. Gaigern drew back his hand and thought again. He turned on the flashlight and gazed at the two locks on the little case in deep absorption. God alone knew what secret mechanism kept Grusinskaya’s treasure safely shut up there. As an experiment Gaigern took out a tool and pressed on the round brass disc of the lock.

  The lock sprang open.

  The case was not locked at all!

  Gaigern had started at the snap of the spring. It was so utterly unexpected that his face for the moment looked perfectly blank. “Well, that’s good,” he said to himself three or four times. “Well, that’s good.” He raised the lid and opened the jewel case. Yes, there lay Grusinskaya’s pearls.

  They were no more after all than a little heap of baubles, v
ery little, if you think of it, compared with all the tales that had been spread abroad about this gift from a murdered grand-duke for the adornment of a dancer’s neck. An old-fashioned and charming sautoir and a rope of medium-sized but perfectly matched pearls, three rings, two earrings with incredibly round and large pearls—there they lay idly in their little bed of velvet while the flashlight waked their slumbering reflections. Taking every precaution Gaigern removed them from their case with his gloved left hand and put them in his pocket. It struck him as so ridiculous to have come upon these pearls lying open and unprotected that he felt a reaction almost of sobering disappointment. He was exhausted after the tremendous exertions, which after all were superfluous. For a moment he even wondered whether he might not simply go back to his room along the passage. Perhaps the women have left the bedroom door open as well, he thought, with the incredulity that since his first sight of the pearls had kept his upper teeth exposed in a foolish and childish smile.

  The door, however, was locked. In the corridor the elevator could be heard ascending at irregular intervals and its gate closing with a click, for Room No. 68 was very nearly opposite it. Gaigern sat for a few moments in an armchair in the dark collecting his strength for the return journey. His longing for a cigarette was maddening. But he did not dare smoke in case the smell left a clue. He was as cautious as a savage who guards himself against a taboo. He thought of many things at once and, most clearly, of his father’s gun cupboard. The large tin boxes containing the Herzegovinian tobacco were always kept in the top of this cupboard, and every three days the old Baron would put a small slice of carrot in each box. Gaigern’s thoughts were wafted to his home and this sweet sharp scent; he was running down the worn steps at Ried and he lost count of time while he fancied himself in the nook where, as a seventeen-year-old cadet, he used to lie hidden and smoke. He came back with a jolt to the job at hand. “Look alive, Flix,” he said to himself. “Don’t go to sleep, get on with it.” He gave himself nicknames now and then, encouraging himself, treating himself tenderly and praising or berating his own limbs. “You swine,” he said reproachfully to his cut finger, which kept on bleeding and sticking to his glove. “You swine, can’t you leave me in peace.” And he clapped his thighs as if they were horses and praised them. “You’re fine fellows. Fine, good beasts. Look alive, Flix.”

  Leaving the scent of laurel in Room No. 68 behind, he stuck his nose outside and sniffed. There was that indefinable smell of Berlin in March, gasoline fumes mingled with the dampness of the Tiergarten, and as he pushed past the gently billowing curtain he had already observed that something was not as it should be. It took a few seconds before he realized what it was—his face and body were lighted up in a way they had not been before. He saw the silken reflections on the sleeves of his pajamas and shrank back instinctively into the darkness of the room, like a beast which, after scenting the breeze at the edge of a clearing, glides back into the darkness of the forest. And there he stood, breathing rapidly and straining every nerve. The ticking of the two clocks came to him with extreme clarity, and then from some distant part of the great city the hour struck faintly from a church tower—eleven o’clock. The walls of the houses across the street were bright and dark by turns as the electric signs winked on and off again. “Damn my bad luck,” Gaigern muttered and went out on to the balcony. This time he gave free rein to his exasperation as fully and freely as if Room No. 68 had been his own room.

  The big electric floodlights on the front of the hotel had gone out. The new installation was on the blink again. In the little banquet room the League of Humanity sat in darkness, and in the cellar electricians were busy with the electrical switchboard to no avail. Below on the street a small crowd stood and stared with delight at the hotel front, where the four arc lights went spasmodically on and off. Among them was a policeman. Traffic was held up and cars were honking their impatience. The electric signs opposite were in full play, proclaiming brands of champagne and doing their utmost to illuminate the hotel front. Finally two men in blue overalls crept out of a window one floor below, established themselves on the glass roof over the main entrance, and began to investigate the faulty wires. Now that the hotel front was a center of interest, the way back across those seven meters of it was blocked.

  Congratulations, thought Gaigern again and laughed angrily. Now I’m really in a pickle, and if I want to get out I’ll have to break open the door.

  He took out his tools and the flashlight and began, with all due precaution, to fiddle about with the keyhole; but without success. A dressing gown hanging near the door fell to the ground. It touched his face softly as it fell and the fright it gave him was beyond all bounds. He felt the arteries of his neck pulsing like machines. The corridor outside, too, was in an uproar. Footsteps went to and fro, people coughed, the elevator gate clicked as the elevator went up and down, a chambermaid called out and ran past and another one called back. Gaigern gave up on the refractory door lock and stole out again onto the balcony. Three meters below, the two electricians crept about on the glass roof with wires in their mouths. They were being watched with great interest from the street. Gaigern committed one of his characteristic audacities. Leaning over the railings he called out: “What’s up with the light?”

  “Short circuit,” said one of the men.

  “How long will it be?” asked Gaigern. A shrug of the shoulders was the only reply. Idiots, thought Gaigern savagely. The pompous self-importance of these two bunglers on the glass roof annoyed him intensely. Anyway, in ten minutes they’ll leave off, he thought, and after looking down at them for a short while, he retired again into the room. Suddenly a sense of danger came over him, but it lasted only for a second and then receded. And there he stood in the middle of the room in his socks. At least they would leave no footprints to betray him.

  Well, at all events, I mustn’t go to sleep, he thought. To cheer himself up he felt for the pearls in his pocket. They were warm from his body. He took off his gloves so as to feel how smooth and how precious they were. The touch of them delighted him. At the same moment, it occurred to him that his chauffeur could not catch the train for Springe now and that a new timetable would have to be made. Nothing was going according to plan. The pearls instead of giving anybody any trouble had been left in an unlocked case, and now, in revenge, his little climb was all botched.

  A thought that made him laugh interrupted his reflections.

  What kind of woman is this, he thought. What a very odd sort of woman to leave her pearls lying about like that. He shook his head in astonishment and laughed more deeply. He knew plenty of women. He found them pleasing enough, but nothing wonderful, and he thought it wonderful that a woman should go out and leave all she possessed in front of a window opening on to a balcony, for anyone to take who chose to. She must be a regular happy-go-lucky gypsy, he thought. Or else she must have a great heart, he answered himself. And now in spite of everything he felt sleepy. He went in the darkness to the door and picked up the dressing gown that had fallen to the ground a few minutes before and sniffed it inquisitively. An unfamiliar bittersweet scent came from it, but it did not at all suggest the woman in a muslin ballet costume at whose performances Gaigern had been bored on innumerable occasions. In any case, he wished Grunsinskaya all the best. He found her quite sympathetic. He hung the dressing gown up carelessly, leaving ten casual fingerprints on the silk, and strolled out onto the balcony again to kill time. The two blue bats were still flapping about over their short circuit. Gaigern wished himself a pleasant time of it and then took up his station between the lace hangings and the door curtain, as erect and alert as a sentry in a sentry box, to await further developments.

  KRINGELEIN peered at the stage through his glasses. A lot of puzzling things were happening over there and it was all going much too fast. He would have liked very much to see one of the girls more clearly, a short dark one in the second row who was always smiling. But there was no chance. There were no pauses in Grusinskaya’
s ballet. It was a perpetual shimmer as they kept flitting in and out and around one another. Sometimes the girls formed up in lines on either side of the stage, touching the edges of their skirts with downward curving hands and leaving room for Grusinskaya herself.