The Eighth Dwarf

by Ross Thomas

  In its first postwar year Bonn remained what it had always been since the Romans founded it in 12 B.C.—sleepy, which was a guidebook euphemism for dull. And if Bonn was sleepy, Bad Godesberg was unconscious.

  The Godesberg Hotel was a three-story building on a side street just off the Ringsdorf. Jackson and Ploscaru had only time enough to check in, unpack, and settle down in the dwarf’s room over a drink before someone started knocking at the door.

  The dwarf opened it, looked up, and smiled. “Well,” he said, “what a delightful surprise. Do come in, Gilbert—and your friend, too.”

  Maj. Gilbert Baker-Bates, dressed, in a tweed jacket and gray trousers, came into the room, followed by the man with yellow hair. Jackson decided that the jacket and trousers were the same that Baker-Bates had worn in Mexico. He tried to remember what the pay of a British major was, but couldn’t. He wondered whether it would be worthwhile finding out, but decided not. The dwarf would know. The dwarf always knew things like that.

  Once in the room, Baker-Bates didn’t look at Ploscaru. Instead, he let his gaze wander around. When it reached Jackson he nodded, the way one might nod to a dimly remembered acquaintance at a large but dull cocktail party.

  Still not looking at Ploscaru, Baker-Bates said, “How are you, Nick?”

  “Well. Quite well, in fact. And you?”

  Baker-Bates turned to the yellow-haired man. “This one’s Ploscaru, of course. And that one over there is Jackson. Minor Jackson.”

  The yellow-haired man nodded, but only once.

  Ploscaru smiled up at him. “I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure.”

  “It’s not going to be one, Nick. His name’s Von Staden. Heinrich von Staden. He’s your new nanny. Where you go, he goes.”

  “Von Staden,” Ploscaru murmured. “Von Staden. Yes, I seem to remember now. You were one of Canaris’s bright young men, weren’t you? In Madrid for quite a while, I believe.”

  Von Staden said nothing. Instead, he continued to examine the dwarf as if trying to decide whether to add him to some collection.

  Rebuffs, however, were Ploscaru’s specialty and had been for a long time. He smiled cheerfully and said, “Let’s all have a drink, Gilbert, and Minor will show you a letter that you should find most interesting.”

  “We’ll take the drink, but there’s no need to wave that letter around. I know what’s in it and who signed it, and I’m not impressed. One misstep and we clap you in jail, both of you, and if there’s a fuss, well, we’ll let Berlin sort it out.”

  Jackson mixed two drinks. He handed one of them to Von Staden, who accepted it silently. When he handed Baker-Bates his, Jackson nodded toward Von Staden and said, “Doesn’t he ever shut up?”

  “He’s a watcher, not a talker. You should’ve taken my advice and stayed away from Ploscaru.” Baker-Bates looked down at the dwarf. “He’s a treacherous little sod—aren’t you, Nick?”

  “All Romanians are,” Ploscaru said with another cheerful smile. “It’s in our blood. But let’s talk about what we’re all interested in. Let’s talk about Kurt Oppenheimer. Tell us why you’re really interested in him, Gilbert.”

  “You know why,” Baker-Bates said. “Because we bloody well don’t want him in Palestine.”

  “I mean your real reason. No need to be shy; we’re all friends here.”

  “You just heard it.”

  “But that’s the public reason, Gilbert. Now tell us the private one—the one that scarcely anyone knows.”

  “There is no private one, as you call it.”

  “No? How strange. I thought there was. I mean, one can understand why you wouldn’t want Oppenheimer in Palestine. But with the Empire crumbling all about you, I thought there would be several spots where you could use a man of his peculiar talents. Greece, for example; Malaya; even India. I mean places where a spot of judicious killing might be in order.”

  Baker-Bates stared down at the dwarf for several moments and then smiled, but it was a thin, tight-lipped smile without humor or teeth. “I’d almost forgotten how absolutely mad you really are, Nick.”

  The dwarf shook his head and smiled reasonably. “No, not really. A trifle neurotic perhaps, but then, I have reason to be. Now, we know for a fact that the Russians want poor Oppenheimer. And the Americans, too. And I assume that both would pay a modest sum to whoever might deliver him into their eager hands. But what about your people, Gilbert? How much would they bid if he were, so to speak, offered up to them on a silver platter?”

  “How much?”

  “Yes. How much.”

  “Nothing,” Baker-Bates said, putting his drink down. “Not a penny.”

  “What a shame.”

  Baker-Bates shook his head slowly. “Don’t try it, Nick. Don’t try it or we’ll step on you the same way that we’d step on a bug.” He paused. “A small bug.”

  He turned and started for the door. Von Staden moved over quickly and opened it. But Baker-Bates turned back to stare for a long moment at Jackson. The Major nodded at the dwarf. “You can’t trust him, you know. You really can’t.”

  Jackson smiled. “I know.”

  27

  As soon as Baker-Bates had gone, Ploscaru put his drink down, reached into a pocket, brought out a large wad of German marks, and put them on a table. He then reached into another pocket and brought out another wad. He kept on doing this until the table was almost covered with money. After that he looked up at Jackson and said, “Bait.”

  “Bait?”

  The dwarf nodded. “For our trap.”

  “Of course. Hell yes. Why didn’t I think of that?”

  Ploscaru smiled. “You’re not quite with me yet, Minor.”

  Jackson turned to the bottle and poured some more whiskey into his glass. “I didn’t think it showed.” He turned back. “Tell me.”

  “We’re going to be quite busy this afternoon and evening.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Why, baiting our trap.” Ploscaru used a forefinger to stir the marks around. “This is what we were paid for the contents of the cellar this morning. There are approximately one hundred thousand German marks here—about five hundred American dollars. Provided, of course, that we could change them for dollars, which we can’t. Still, one hundred thousand marks is quite a tidy sum, and that’s what we’ll offer.”

  “What’re we buying?”

  “Betrayal.”

  “From a Judas, I take it.”

  “Yes, I suppose you could say that.”

  “Who’ll sell out Oppenheimer.”

  The dwarf looked at Jackson surprised. “Oh, heavens, no. I’m sorry, Minor, but you do have such a logical mind. We really must work on that when we get the chance. But for now, let’s start from Square One. What facts do we have?”

  “Hardly any.”

  “No, we have several. The first is that somewhere in either Bonn or Godesberg is young Oppenheimer’s next intended victim, right?”

  Jackson nodded.

  “Good. Now, if I recall what you told me correctly, we have a partial address for that victim.”

  “You mean what that American officer in the Opel plant remembered?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s no partial address.”

  “A fragment, then. It was a low number, wasn’t it—in the teens?”

  Again, Jackson nodded.

  “And it was on Something-strasse.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Now, just who do you think young Oppenheimer’s next victim will be?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea.”

  Ploscaru shook his head in mild exasperation. “Of course you do.”

  “Okay. He’d probably have been a Party member with something to hide.”

  “A reasonably high party member—one who had the necessary funds to buy his new identity. Or hers. It could be a woman. Now, then: before the war, what were Bonn and Godesberg noted for?”

  “Not much.”

  “Exactly. Not m
uch. They were both quiet places with hardly any industry; particularly suitable for what?”

  Jackson shrugged. “Okay, what?”

  “Why, retirement, my boy. Retirement. Many people, even a number of British, retired here simply because it’s such a somnolent place.”

  “Dull.”

  “Indeed. Dull. Now, then: what does retirement suggest?”

  “Age?”

  “Good. But something else, too. Money. You have to have money to retire here comfortably. Quite a bit of money, in fact. Now, we can safely assume, I think, that young Oppenheimer’s intended victim has money and that he or she is living comfortably and privately. Privacy, of course, suggests a house, possibly even a villa. So, our search is narrowed to someone who lives quite comfortably and privately in a house or villa with a low number in the teens on Something-strasse.”

  “Or in one room up in a garret. It could be that way too, Nick. Your theory’s fine up to a point. But it could be that whoever bought his new identity from that guy who was selling them—Damm, wasn’t it? Well, maybe he or she had only just enough money for that and nothing else. Take that interpreter at the Opel plant, for instance. He didn’t have any money.”

  Ploscaru shook his head. “Anonymity, Minor. You’re forgetting anonymity. Without money, a big city is best for that. With it—well, with it you swim with the other fish: one retired person among many. What could be more anonymous?”

  Jackson grinned. “It’s all hunch, isn’t it, Nick?”

  The dwarf thought about it for a moment and then shrugged. “I prefer to call it intuition—with a strong underpinning of facts.”

  “Or guesses.”

  “All right. Guesses. But here’s something that we don’t have to guess about. And that’s the sheer joy and delight that the average German finds in assuming the role of informer. They positively dote on it, you know. Children turn in their parents; wives their husbands; brothers their sisters, and so on. They do it for money, for revenge, for personal gain, and probably just because it makes them feel good. During the war, informing was almost a major industry. It still is, except that now they inform to the Americans or the British or what-have-you, because if they do, they might get the job or the room of the person they inform against. So that’s what we do this afternoon. We go looking for informers.”

  “Where?”

  “In cafés, bars, Bierstuben—everywhere. We pass the word that we’re looking for a former Party bigwig—such a delightful word; is it English or American?”

  “Both, I’d say.”

  “Yes, well, we pass the word along, acting properly mysterious, of course, and mention ever so casually that whoever performs this patriotic service will be suitably rewarded—and at that point we might even flash a little money. And finally, we set a deadline.”

  “For when?”

  “Say, midnight?”

  “All right. Midnight.”

  The dwarf sighed. “I do wish, Minor, that you had a more, well, gregarious personality, like mine. It’s such a help in this kind of work. You’re so terribly reserved for an American.”

  “I always thought I was friendly as hell.”

  “Just a bit more bonhomie wouldn’t be at all amiss.”

  “Golly, Nick, I’ll sure try.”

  “I know you will.”

  “What about our yellow-haired chaperon? Who gets him?”

  “He can’t follow us both, can he?”

  “Not very well.”

  Once again, the dwarf sighed. “Leave him to me.”

  “Okay. And we’ll meet back here when—around eleven?”

  “No later, I’d think.”

  “And if this doesn’t work, Nick, what then?”

  “Why, we try something else, of course.”

  “What?”

  The dwarf grinned. “I really have no idea.”

  It had cost Kurt Oppenheimer another one of his diamonds to get to Bonn. The diamond had gone to the captain of a Dutch barge that was heading for Cologne with a load of much-needed grain. The barge had been twice searched, once by the Americans and once by the British, but the captain was an experienced smuggler, which was how he had survived the war, and hiding one rather thin man had presented no problem at all.

  The barge had anchored for the night on the west bank of the Rhine just opposite the section of Bad Godesberg known as Mehlem. The captain was rowing Oppenheimer to shore in a small skiff. Neither of them spoke. When the skiff reached the shore, Oppenheimer jumped out. He turned to look at the barge captain, who stared at him for several moments, then shrugged and started rowing back out into the Rhine. Oppenheimer scrambled up the river-bank.

  A trolley took him into the center of Bonn, and after that it took him nearly an hour to find exactly what he was looking for.

  The whore he decided on wasn’t the youngest he had noticed, or the prettiest, or possibly the cleanest. She stood in a dark doorway, a woman not far from forty, and offered her wares in a hoarse, tired, almost disconsolate voice—as though business were bad and she really didn’t expect it to get any better.

  Oppenheimer had walked past her once, and now he came back. The whore remembered him.

  “Change your mind, handsome?”

  He smiled. “Perhaps.”

  “You won’t be sorry.”

  “You have a room?”

  “Of course I have a room.”

  “A quiet room?”

  One badly drawn eyebrow went up. “How quiet?”

  “Very quiet—the kind that the police never bother.”

  “It’s quiet enough.”

  “How much?”

  “It depends. If you want French tricks, that’s extra.”

  “For all night.”

  “You have cigarettes?”

  “Yes.”

  “American?”

  “Yes.”

  “Two hundred cigarettes for all night.” It was her starting price. She had no idea that it would be paid. It never had been.

  “Agreed.” He handed her a ten-dollar bill. She looked at it suspiciously. “You said two hundred cigarettes.

  “That’s for our refreshments. Some wine or Schnapps. And some food. Anything. All right?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’ll go to your room first. Then you can go back out and buy the wine and other things.”

  She nodded. “This way.”

  Like the whore, the room was none too clean, but it had a bed and a chair and a table. It was on the third floor of an old building. Oppenheimer put his briefcase down on the table and looked around. “It’s fine,” he said.

  “It stinks,” the whore said.

  The printer had walked most of the way from the Autobahn to the ferry that would take him across the Rhine to Bad Godesberg. In Frankfurt, he had bribed a truck driver to let him ride in the rear with a load of turnips. It had been an uncomfortable trip, but far safer than the train. Once across the river, he could rest his throbbing knee in the Gasthaus where Eva Scheel had instructed him to stay. She had said that the owner of the Gasthaus was a sympathizer. A silent one, hoped Bodden, who was in no mood for a political discussion.

  The Gasthaus was a half-timbered affair of eleven rooms with a bar and a sign that said it had been established in 1634. The proprietor’s wife showed Bodden to his room, and her only comment was, “There’s no heat, but the bed is warm.”

  Just as the woman was leaving, Bodden asked her the time. She told him that it was a quarter to ten and left, closing the door behind her. Bodden sat down on the bed and started massaging his knee. The long walk had done it no good, although the pain was not nearly so severe as it had been just after the dwarf had smashed it with the pistol.

  You have three-quarters of an hour, Bodden told himself as he lay down on the bed. You can use it to rest your leg and think about the dwarf and all the nasty things that you would like to do to him. And the money. You can think about that, too, and how you’re going to spend it.

  Against al
l regulations, Lt. LaFollette Meyer had given both Leah Oppenheimer and Eva Scheel a ride to Bonn in the Army’s 1946 Ford. He had dropped them off at the Park Hotel in Bad Godesberg and gone in search of Gilbert Baker-Bates.

  The two women had had dinner in the hotel and afterward had gone to their rooms. At ten o’clock that night Eva Scheel went downstairs and inquired at the desk for directions to the Gasthaus that had been established in 1634. It was not a long walk, she was told—not more than thirty minutes. She thanked the desk clerk and started back up the stairs to her room so that she could get her fur coat. If she had brought the coat with her, she might have turned the other way and noticed the dwarf as he moved across the lobby and into the hotel bar.

  Outside the Park Hotel the yellow-haired man leaned against a wall and waited for the dwarf to come out. While he waited, Von Staden counted up the number of bars, cafés, and hotels that Ploscaru had ducked into and out of that night. Fifteen so far, he thought. This one would make sixteen. He wondered, as he had wondered all evening, what the dwarf was doing. There had been no opportunity to find out. Tomorrow, he promised himself; tomorrow I will revisit each place and ask. They’ll remember him. People always remember a dwarf.

  He recognized the fur coat first. She came out and stood on the steps in the hotel’s dim light as if trying to decide which way to go. Von Staden got a good look at her profile and then turned quickly away. It was the little rabbit, all right—the one who had lost him in the rubble near the Golden Rose in Frankfurt. The Major had been unhappy about that, Von Staden remembered. Most unhappy. Well, which was it to be tonight, the dwarf or the rabbit?

  Because Von Staden had a quick, logical mind, he made his choice almost immediately. He knew where the dwarf had been that night and where he was staying. All the cafés and bars and hotels were carefully written down. They could wait until tomorrow. Tonight he would follow the little rabbit. And this time he would not let her lose him so easily.

  At a few minutes past eleven o’clock that night, Bodden and Eva Scheel came out of the Gasthaus and turned right toward the Rhine. They walked slowly, because Bodden’s knee had grown stiff. Bodden had to favor the knee, and in doing so he limped slightly.

  Across the street, shielded by the dark and the trunks of the old trees, Von Staden felt his excitement mount. Despite the chill in the air, he was sweating slightly. Well, printer, he thought, where did you acquire the limp? And what have you and the little rabbit to talk about? That would be even more interesting.