A Shark Out of Water

by Emma Lathen

  “How long between your two trips?”

  “Who can tell? Five or ten minutes.” Then, remembering an illicit cigarette, “A little longer, maybe.” And that exhausted the kitchen’s contribution. Determined to share his dissatisfaction with someone, Oblonski tracked Leonhard Bach from hotel to BADA switchboard to delegates’ lounge. While the eastern German clearly remembered escorting Madame Nordstrom to the back door, he was surprised to learn that other guests had followed suit.

  “They probably asked a waiter for a shortcut to cars out back,” he suggested.

  “That must be it.”

  Unappeased by this conversation, Oblonski growled at Alex. “We’ll take that American banker next, the one who was with the Jesilko woman and Madame Nordstrom.”

  “I understand you met Frau Jesilko during the party,” the colonel began after assimilating the splendors of the Sloan’s new office. John Thatcher admitted as much but could only hazard a guess as to the time.

  “Somewhere between ten-thirty and eleven-thirty, I’d say.”

  “And what did you discuss?”

  “Nothing,” said Thatcher firmly. “When I came downstairs I ran into Frau Jesilko, who was with Zabriski’s son and Madame Nordstrom. I was merely a spectator.”

  “Better still. That makes you impartial. How much had she been drinking?”

  Thatcher tried to be accurate in a gray area. “Too much. But, she was not dead drunk.”

  Oblonski recognized a witness who was being meticulous and appreciated it.

  “So much for her alcoholic condition. What about her mental condition?”

  “You mean was she suicidal?” Thatcher translated.

  Oblonski considered this. “You did not think she was suicidal?”

  “I’d only met her briefly, but she didn’t sound that way to me.”

  “Perhaps you could tell me what you remember of the conversation.” During his brief recapitulation Thatcher was conscious that the colonel was scribbling industriously in his notebook. Trying to ignore this silent editorializing, he was glad to finish.

  “And after Herr Bach took Madame Nordstrom away? Did Frau Jesilko say anything more then?”

  “I have no idea,” Thatcher said thankfully. “I didn’t intend to be stuck with the remaining two and I left immediately.”

  “Then let’s go back to these travels of hers. Frau Jesilko said she was going on a cruise? That would be difficult now. They are common in the summer and even during Christmas season, but not during autumn.”

  “I’m sorry if I misled you. That was my choice of word. She spoke merely of visiting a string of Baltic ports for the last time.”

  “And even the idea of a sentimental pilgrimage did not suggest suicide?”

  “Not to me,” said Thatcher. Accepting that bald denial, Oblonski rose and formally thanked Thatcher for his time.

  One courtesy deserved another. “Please don’t hesitate to call me, Colonel, if I can be of any further help.”

  But before he left the Nissan Building, Oblonski decided to seek assistance elsewhere. “We’re talking to the wrong people,” he announced to Alex. “These BADA delegates and their illustrious visitors are too grand to know the real dirt. Get some men over to BADA to find out what the clerks and messengers are saying.”

  Bill Gomulka already knew. “Talk to the ones who know what’s going on and you hear the real story,” he reported not long after Oblonski left

  Everett Gabler deplored gossip in all its forms until it had been elevated to the level of fact-finding; Thatcher had to emulate this excellent example. Only Carol suffered no inhibitions. Tell us,” she urged, eyes dancing with anticipation.

  “It all started with a bust-up between Annamarie Nordstrom and Zabriski,” Bill began. “By now so much Technicolor has been added that it’s hard to say what really happened. Apparently she threatened to fire him if he didn’t straighten out his act. Then he said he had so much on her she wouldn’t dare try.”

  “No wonder it had the place buzzing.” Carol was savoring every word. “When was all this?”

  “Right after they got back from Kiel.”

  “But surely there are more details than that,” Thatcher reasoned.

  “Hundreds of them.” Bill grinned. “For starters, Zabriski chased her out of his office, foaming at the mouth. Or he talked about blowing the whistle on her and she clutched her heart and nearly fainted. Personally I like the one about Zabriski later sobbing heartbrokenly in his office. Want more?”

  “Let’s dismiss the flights of fancy,” said Thatcher austerely. “Do you have any facts?”

  “Some,” Gomulka said obligingly. “It seems that Madame Nordstrom went through Zabriski’s files.”

  Everett had been listening with patent disapproval. “I fail to see how that can be regarded as significant. She has made no secret of her determination to find out the nature of Zabriski’s discovery.”

  “Sure, if that was the way it happened.” Bill deliberately let the suspense mount, then continued. “But it turns out she called for those files before Zabriski was killed. Actually right after their fight.” There was a brief silence.

  “That could cut both ways,” Thatcher began slowly. “She could have been trying to find out what ammunition he really had.”

  “Or,” Gabler ended for him, “she had decided to dismiss Zabriski and was planning to use his performance as an excuse.”

  “That was my other interpretation, Ev.”

  “Of course nobody at BADA cares about files,” Bill went on chattily. “What they want is a sensational scandal at the top. That’s why they’ve fastened on what Bach said in the delegates’ lounge.”

  One member of his audience had not been there. “What did he say?” Carol demanded.

  “Bach talked about a really big scam with lots of money at stake. So it wasn’t Zabriski going ape because somebody was just stealing office supplies or siphoning gas. The BADA cafeteria claims that, with millions of dollars involved, it had to be pulled upstairs.”

  “No!” Thatcher and Gabler said simultaneously.

  When Gabler yielded the floor, Thatcher continued. “That was simply another Zabriski exaggeration. It was probably on the order of . . . well, Ev, you’re the one to tell us; you’ve been looking at the financials.”

  “$500,000 maximum. BADA simply could not support losses in the millions.” When Everett Gabler spoke the subject was supposed to be concluded. To everybody’s surprise Bill Gomulka produced an addendum. “One U.S. dollar buys you 14,000 zlotys.”

  Everett was affronted by this superfluous information but Thatcher said, “I see what you mean, Bill. Since inflation, everybody in Poland talks in terms of millions.”

  “And this guy Bach is a German who deals in deutsche marks,” said Bill, warming to this theory. They could have been talking about totally different things.”

  Everett disagreed vigorously. “If Zabriski was speaking in zlotys, then the defalcations were too small to justify a report to the council.”

  “It was a nice point, Bill,” Thatcher said encouragingly, “but it doesn’t really make any difference. Zabriski certainly gave Bach the impression that he was talking about something big, and that is why these suspicions center on the upper echelons.”

  “If they have any substance at all.” After this ringing correction Gabler rolled on. “Apart from Zabriski himself, Madame Nordstrom virtually is the upper echelon at BADA. Any substantial embezzlement implies her participation or her inefficiency. The first is ludicrous. She would never endanger her own future for sums that are paltry to a woman of her wealth. As for this so-called incompetence, my research at BADA suggests quite the contrary.” If he had done nothing else, he had effectively silenced both Thatcher and Bill Gomulka.

  Unfortunately Carol was inspired to say, “I didn’t know you felt that way about her.”

  Gabler was rigid with steely disapproval. “That,” he proclaimed, “has absolutely nothing to do with my evaluation.”<
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  Colonel Oblonski was also being accused of bias. “Of course I realize that you don’t like Madame Nordstrom,” Alex said hesitantly.

  “I admit that I am not favorably impressed by femmes formidables, but that has nothing to do with it,” retorted Oblonski, sounding exactly like Everett Gabler. “She was on bad terms with Zabriski, he had accused her of irregularities, and he was taking his report to the general council rather than to her.” In fact, the colonel was still smarting from his just-completed exchange of salvos with Madame Nordstrom.

  “Slipped away through the back door?” she repeated ironically. “I could not possibly have made a more public departure.”

  Each and every question had been received as scornfully. “Certainly I was planning to fire Stefan. In view of his recent record, very few chairmen would have considered any other course of action.”

  As for Zabriski’s accusation . . . “Your investigation must be even more incomplete than I imagined, Colonel, if you have not learned that Stefan regularly ascribed moral delinquency to all methods other than his own.”

  Even the absence of an alibi had been dismissed as inconsequential. “No, I was not at home to receive the first call about Stefan’s death. I was expecting my husband, so I stopped at the street stalls to buy flowers and some of the cheeses he particularly likes.”

  With those icy tones still ringing in their ears, Alex knew he had his work cut out for him. But action against Madame Nordstrom was so lined with pitfalls for innocent policemen, he thought it his duty to encourage second thoughts. “She knew that everyone in the kitchen would remember her.”

  “So she herself observed. That woman has an answer for everything.”

  “And it seems to me quite natural that a wife should welcome her husband with special treats.”

  “Ha! She’s probably the reason he spends so much time on the road.”

  This was not promising, but Alex, seeing his own career go down in flames, soldiered on. “We have discovered over ten occasions on which Zabriski described other people’s behavior, apparently without justification, as venal, corrupt, immoral, and unprincipled.”

  “The boy who cried wolf finally did see one. Then he ended up dead too.” The discussion had carried them back to headquarters where a patrolman charged with questioning Wanda’s neighbors had produced a witness.

  He was not preening himself on his find. “I think she’s just one of the curious kind,” he said apologetically.

  But Frau Bremer saw herself as the center of the investigation. “Of course I knew her well,” she proclaimed. “We lived on the same floor and saw each other all the time. I can tell you all about Wanda.”

  Patiently Oblonski extracted details of the acquaintance. On Sundays Wanda and the Bremers usually attended the same Mass, walking to church together. “And we marketed in the same place so we’d often meet there. She was always ready for a chat.” But the foundation of the relationship, oddly enough, had been laid by the previous tenant of Wanda’s apartment, who had been a regular fourth in card games with the Bremers and a retired widower on the floor above.

  “Wanda wasn’t available all that often,” Frau Bremer said regretfully, “but, when she was, she liked to join us. She was a good player.”

  When Oblonski asked if there had been any interaction with Zabriski, she drew herself upright. “Well, hardly. They weren’t married. And it’s not pleasant having to explain that sort of thing to your little daughter.”

  Moreover, thought Oblonski to himself, Wanda on her own had been more useful for those card games. “Can you remember if you saw her in the period immediately before Herr Zabriski’s death?”

  Brow wrinkled, Frau Bremer struggled to organize fleeting thoughts before nodding. “It must have been about two days before that when we had our last game. I remember Wanda was free because he was out of town. But she was terribly distracted, making so many mistakes that she finally apologized. She said there was some trouble at the office, but I wasn’t deceived for a minute.”

  “You weren’t?”

  “I wasn’t born yesterday, Colonel,” Frau Bremer explained unnecessarily. “When a woman is so bothered she can’t think of anything else, then it has to be her children or her man, doesn’t it?” Reflecting that, in this instance, the office and Zabriski were the same thing to Wanda, Oblonski nodded.

  Frau Bremer was now shaking her head dolefully. “Wanda was such an enthusiastic, lively woman. I can hardly believe that she’s gone.” But accompanying these conventional exclamations of sorrow there was an avid lust for detail in Frau Bremer’s eyes. Nothing this interesting had happened in her world for a long time.

  “And that’s all she said?”

  “Yes, but she must have been really absentminded because the next morning she borrowed some coffee from me. And she was very orderly in her shopping. I was the one who ran out of things.”

  “And I suppose after the murder she was simply grieving?”

  “That’s right, until she went to Warsaw for the funeral. And my, wasn’t that something! We saw it all on television. But I must say,” she continued, her voice tinged with resentment, “I don’t know why Wanda never told me what an important man Herr Zabriski was.”

  “You knew he was chief of staff at BADA didn’t you?”

  “Yes, but I didn’t realize that was anything special. The cardinal and the president were there. And that parade!” For a moment Frau Bremer was speechless, reviewing the magnificence of the obsequies. Oblonski had a shrewd suspicion that she was regretting lost opportunities. If Zabriski, his sins condoned, had been welcomed to the Bremer household, Frau Bremer would now be in the happy position of boasting about her familiarity with the fallen great.

  “What about when she came back from Warsaw?”

  “That was funny. On Friday night when she returned she was just the way you’d expect, exhausted but pleased with all the tributes and eulogies. Usually after the funeral a woman is more subdued and accepting, if you know what I mean. But on Saturday evening when I took in some stew she had turned feverish and irritable, really almost impolite. She was making an appointment on the phone with somebody called Adam. Would that be Herr Zabriski’s son, the one I saw as chief mourner?”

  “Yes,” the colonel grunted grimly.

  “And they said he’s a politician in the government. The Zabriskis seem to be a very important family. I suppose that’s why Wanda did it.” Oblonski wrenched his mind back from considerations of trouble at BADA. Was Frau Bremer another proponent of the suicide theory?

  “Did what?”

  “Committed adultery. Of course I knew it would end badly, it always does. I’ve explained it all to my Grete. No matter how persuasive the man is, no matter how honeyed his words, it’s still a sin. And it’s always the woman who pays.” Stefan Zabriski as a veritable Lothario was difficult for Oblonski to swallow.

  “This time both of them seem to have suffered a considerable penalty,” he said mildly. But his witness was not departing from the script. Wanda, she informed the colonel, may have tried to hide dissatisfaction with her lot, but Frau Bremer knew better. Beneath that cheerful, bustling facade there had been a woman suffering all the inevitable torments of her situation.

  Chapter 24

  Uncharted Waters

  “They were very happy together,” the next lady to sit across the desk insisted.

  “From what I have heard about Herr Zabriski, he could be difficult at times,” the colonel ventured.

  Wanda’s elder sister was red-eyed but composed, the predominant expression on her pleasant, sad face one of overwhelming bewilderment. “Oh, there’s no denying he was a man who had to be handled, but Wanda had learned to do that while she was still just his secretary. She was not only good at it, she enjoyed it. Besides after her husband . . .” Sofia Niemcewicz’s voice trailed away in embarrassment. Then she said hopefully, “But perhaps you already know about him?” Silently Oblonski nodded.

  Relieved to have the
sordid facts provided by others, she went on. “Well, after Tadeucz, almost any man would have been an improvement. But even apart from the fact that Stefan was not an alcoholic and a gambler, he and Wanda got along well. He was musical, you know, and Wanda liked that. Then we always enjoyed having them over and I know Wanda was welcomed by his old friends. On the whole they had a very pleasant life in Warsaw. Of course there were hardships involved in coming to Gdansk. She left her family and he left his own circle. That was the only thing Wanda complained about, and then she’d laugh and say Stefan was spending such long hours at work they wouldn’t have much time to see other people anyway.”

  This picture of a perfectly normal relationship with perfectly normal drawbacks was not a great deal of help, but Oblonski was merely establishing the general background against which the events of the last few weeks had taken place.

  While he had been silent Sofia Niemcewicz’s confusion had spilled over. “I still don’t understand it!” she burst forth. “That someone should murder Wanda. What could anybody have against her? She wouldn’t have hurt a soul.”

  “It has been suggested that her death might be suicide,” he murmured deliberately.

  She bristled instantly. “How wicked! Who would dare say anything like that?”

  “Actually the suggestion came from Adam Zabriski.”

  That one,” she almost spat, two angry red spots blossoming on her cheeks. “He’s doing exactly what Wanda predicted. Trying to brush things under the rug.”

  Oblonski did not make the mistake of pouncing on this gratifying statement. Instead he activated his intercom to order coffee. Then he leaned back, intent on creating a relaxed, leisurely pace. “So you’d been in contact with your sister recently?”

  “Oh, yes, I saw her at the funeral. Mostly she was the way I expected her to be, very tired and drawn as if she’d been sobbing nonstop for days. The thing that surprised me was that she also seemed relieved. She said she was so grateful that nothing happened to stop the funeral, that Stefan had been laid to rest just the way she wanted. Naturally I wondered why she should have expected anything to interfere, but it was no time to say so. I even put off urging her to move back to Warsaw. I thought I’d give her a few more days.”