Goodbye Again

by Joseph Hone

  ‘Yes, we had a report – a man was found wounded in a Black Forest souvenir shop this morning. We are investigating, but he was not called “Fritz”. He was called Bruckner. Hans Bruckner. He was simply a robber who broke in and got himself injured somehow in the back of the shop. Not an art thief or a neo-Nazi.’

  ‘No? He was the caretaker in that hunting lodge for the other men. The man with the thin red hair and his thuggish friends, and the woman in the headscarf: the place must have been a hideout for these neo-Nazis.’

  ‘Herr Contini …’

  ‘The fact is they are all crooks, Superintendent. Drug traffickers, neo-Nazis, art looters, whatever. On that barge we took across France, in that hunting lodge, all in it together. Drug trafficking and looking for this hoard of looted art to pay for their new Nazi schemes.’

  ‘Indeed.’ He smiled. ‘And where is this hoard of looted art?’

  ‘I don’t know. Are we being charged with something?’

  ‘No, Herr Contini. We are simply making our enquiries.’

  ‘Are you? If you were, you should get out to that ruined hunting lodge straight away and look among the debris. The man with the red hair and the briefcase, he was the boss of this group. You’ll find plenty of neo-Nazi evidence in the ruins of that lodge.’

  ‘We have had no reports of any hunting lodge collapsing in the Black Forest, but we will look into it.’ He closed a notebook, in which he had written nothing. He wanted no formal record of our meeting. ‘So, you have made your statements, both of you. You must return home now.’

  ‘Yes, except that we’ve nothing to get home with. No clothes, passports, money, nothing. All in the ruins of that hunting lodge. Maybe we could all go back there?’

  ‘That will not be necessary, Herr Contini. You will go to your consuls in Munich for new passports. I will arrange money for you both, to get to Munich and then on home. Now, in fact. There is a train in an hour.’

  He wanted to get rid of us. Old Nazis? Neo-Nazis? Looted art? All far too hot to handle, in front of us, at least. He picked up a phone, spoke for some minutes, then turned. ‘You will have an advance of fifteen hundred marks. That will cover your hotel in Munich, food, new clothes and enough to get home with. You will repay us when you get home. One of my officers will accompany you on the train and see that you get to a hotel and your consuls, that you get temporary passports and that you leave Germany. Safely,’ he added politely.

  Every service, I thought, in the cause of putting all this unpleasantness under the carpet. A can of worms he wanted to reseal. But I wasn’t going to let him, if I could help it. ‘Look,’ I said. ‘We’re not making this up. It’s all true.’

  ‘Herr Contini, stop creating trouble for yourself.’ His tone was suddenly hard. ‘Go home. Forget it all. All your fantasies, all this Nazi nonsense. It never happened.’

  ‘That’s what they all like to say, don’t they? It never happened.’ The superintendent said nothing.

  A clerk arrived with an envelope. The superintendent opened it and handed me a wad of cash. Fifteen hundred marks, which I signed for. A plain-clothes policeman arrived later to take us to the station. We stopped on the way to buy some new clothes, then onto a fast train to Munich. The cop, a youngish, lively man, sat on the seat opposite. I knew he was listening to us. I’d managed to talk to Elsa briefly alone before we got on the train, telling her to say nothing to me of any of our previous troubles or plans. The man would report back anything we said, I was sure.

  On the train we spoke of easier things – cooking, dishes we liked. I told her how, on the trip to Italy I’d made with Katie two years before, to the marble town of Carrara up in the Apuan Alps, where I’d taught painting and sculpture at the local Academia delle Arte for a week – how I’d cooked us both Irish stew one evening. With barley, onions, carrots, and diced hunks of lamb, cooked it slowly for hours, so that it was nearly solid and you could cut it almost like a cake.

  ‘Sounds dire.’

  ‘No. It’s the old way in Ireland – how you’re supposed to do it.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘All right, cook us something better when we get home.’

  ‘I’ll try.’

  The cop took us to a small hotel off the Königsplatz. He met another plain-clothes cop here – young, polite and eager – who took over from him, escorting us to our room. A double, but with twin beds.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said to Elsa when he’d gone. ‘Don’t worry – twin beds and no handcuffs.’ Then I went over to her and whispered. ‘Don’t speak of anything in here.’ I pointed up to the ceiling, the lamps over the beds. ‘Could well be bugged.’

  Elsa’s ankle wasn’t badly twisted, just bruised and blue. I said we’d get some ointment for it and she had a bath, and I took a beer from the minibar, and sat looking out the window, which gave onto a restaurant terrace, coloured lights and an empty barbecue pit. No customers. I wouldn’t have wanted to eat there anyway. I wanted to be out and about in the ordinary world again. I was hungry and we had money in our pockets.

  When we reached the lobby half an hour later, the cop was still

  there, chatting up the blonde girl at reception. Clearly the place

  had connections with the Munich police.

  ‘Look,’ I said to him, ‘we’re going out to eat. But don’t worry about us, we’re not going to run away – no passports.’

  He feigned surprise. ‘Worry? Of course not, Herr Contini. I am only here to see that all goes well for you and that you both get home safely.’

  ‘Good. We’ll be back in an hour or so.’

  ‘Try the Bierkeller in the next street along. Excellent Bavarian food, Herr Contini.’

  He saw us out the door.

  ‘I bet we’re being followed,’ I said, taking her arm.

  ‘Christ, you’re being paranoid again.’

  We didn’t go to the Bavarian Bierkeller – last sort of place or food I wanted, and probably another cop haunt as well.

  We walked on and found an Italian trattoria off the Amalien-strasse, the Luna Caprese. We went through the restaurant to an open terrace behind and were given a table by a wall at the far end, where drifts of potted red geraniums cascaded down beside us.

  At once I remembered – the same tumble of red geraniums falling down from the balcony of our apartment overlooking the Piazza Gramsci in Carrara with Katie, two years before. And now a woman sitting in front of me who looked just like Katie, so that the real Katie, and that view over the piazza with its lion-mouthed fountains and heroic statuary, flashed before my eyes.

  The Luna Caprese was an old-fashioned trattoria – check tablecloths, candles in Chianti bottles, an Italian crooner, with a guitar, on a small stage to one side. Very Italian, and the past begun to run in my veins, that week with Katie in Carrara, the wine, and the water of those fountains.

  We ordered a bottle of chilled Frascati. A warm August night, rumours of pomodoro and garlic, the romantic chatter and the sentimental singer. I raised my glass.

  ‘To the real world at last!’

  She was slow in raising hers. She was fretful. ‘Yes, the real New York for me. And you?’

  ‘There’s the Modi still on the barge on the Rhine, and Katie’s journal with it. And the cats. I’ll have to get the picture back at least.’

  ‘I can’t help you there, Ben.’ She was terse. ‘You’ll have to do that on your own.’

  ‘Not certain I can even help myself. You see, besides Briefcase and his pals at the hunting lodge – and some of them may have survived – there must be others in that gang of crooks. They’ll have known how we were taken from the barge to the hunting lodge and escaped. So if I go back to the barge they could be waiting for me to turn up, so they can put the screws on me about where the rest of the looted art is hidden.’

  ‘Okay, Ben, so it’s perfectly clear – don’t go back to the barge. You’ve lost the picture, and that damn journal. Leave it at that, for God’s sake. We’ve had enough. You’ve got
us out of everything, and you’ve been great, but I’m not taking any more risks.’

  ‘You’re right. Except …’

  ‘Except what?’

  ‘Carrara – I’d like to go there and see if the stuff is really hidden somewhere up in those hills.’

  ‘Crazy.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Why don’t you stop “maybeing” and “excepting” and just stop this art hunt, which is really only an excuse for not going back to your real work?’

  ‘You’ve said that before. Just like Harry. That’s what everyone says, when there’s something unpleasant lurking up the other path in their life.’

  ‘Right, you play the hero – go on looking for something nasty up the other path. The truth hunter.’

  ‘You were that once, on the boat out of Killiney. Saying how you had to be truthful.’

  ‘Yes, I was so bloody conscientious about my principles. That’s probably why I lost Martha: I tyrannized her with them.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. I don’t have any principles now. They kill you, or what you have with someone you love. I just want to go home.’ She wouldn’t look at me as she spoke. Then at last she turned to me, vehement. ‘I’d prefer to be happy now, not truthful.’

  Maybe she was right. I wondered if my heart was really in it anymore. What did it matter? Maybe all this high-principled crusading of mine was just a way of avoiding my painting again, back in the empty Cotswold barn, without Katie. In the balmy scented evening, the chilled Frascati on my lips, I wanted Katie then, and it was easy to forget principles.

  I said, looking at her over my glass, ‘I’d throw away my principles, too, if I had the flesh-and-blood thing with someone again.’

  She said nothing, a vague nod, but it was clear enough – I wasn’t going to have these things with her. We ordered the food: a big plate of antipasti, then kidneys and parsley cooked in white wine. The crooner sang an old Italian song I remembered, ‘Volare’, and I ordered another bottle of Frascati.

  Italy was really moving in my veins now, whether I wanted it or not. And suddenly I wanted it. Wanted to fly there – to Carrara, to that apartment on the Via Plebiscito looking over the Piazza Gramsci, the chestnut trees, bandstand and heroic statuary where I stayed that week with Katie, with the white-marble quarries scarred into the mountains high above us, like snow. The summer art school, leaning over the shoulders of a dozen happy amateurs, lavish with their colours, or working away at small blocks of Carrara Cremo, dreaming of Bernini and Michelangelo.

  I could stop playing the hero and let that looted art rot up in the marble hills, if that’s where it was – along with whatever secrets I might find there about my father, or Elsa’s. I could lose the Modi nude and Katie’s journal. I’d loved the woman in the painting, and I’d loved Katie, but I wasn’t going to die for either of them by returning to the barge. All I had left was that last time with Katie in Carrara.

  A whole unencumbered week, eating in the evenings on the apartment terrace beneath the geraniums, high over the piazza gardens. The town band playing La Traviata, our lemony fingers tickling the frittura mista, little fish and clams doused in batter, flamed in oil, with the local white wine. Later, in the pool of light from the white-globed lamp above us, the blue flames from our coffee-beaned sambuca, smoke from my rolled tobacco keeping the midges from our golden halo.

  I looked again at Elsa, but the face I was pursuing now was the original picture – Katie’s face, vivid in the soft light from the lantern above our balcony in Carrara. And her face next morning, still as marble, in the gauzy Tuscan dawn from the bedroom window, when I turned and saw her, deep in peace, asleep on the crumpled pillow.

  Just remember this, I thought – Katie in the flesh, our bed, her lies, whatever. The lies didn’t matter, and nor did the marble quarries at Carrara or the sins of my father. All that mattered was the memory of Katie.

  All right, maybe it was crazy, thinking to resuscitate the love of a dead woman among the fountains and heroic statuary of those baroque gardens. But why not? I raised my glass to Elsa. ‘To us,’ I said, remembering Katie.

  Elsa’s Story

  We had to spend several days in Munich while our consuls checked us out before giving us temporary passports. I had time to go to the American Express office and get a new credit card. So, with the marks we had already, money was no problem for either of us now. Having my own money again, and the freedom of summer in the city – the nightmare was over.

  On the second balmy evening, tempted by the open terrace and accordion music coming from a cheerful-looking restaurant beyond the Königsplatz, we were eating and chatting when Ben, glancing over at a table with only a lone and incongruous-looking occupant – an elderly, very sombre German – remarked casually, ‘I wonder what he was doing sixty years ago, in the war?’

  ‘What does it matter now?’

  ‘No.’ Then he added, following his thought, ‘All the same, I’d not realized, Dachau, that camp – it’s just outside the city here. I’ve never seen one of those camps.’

  ‘Well, you go ahead then.’

  ‘Something to do while we wait here.’

  ‘Plenty of other far better things to do while we wait here.’

  ‘Why don’t we go?’ Then he rushed on, almost enthusiastic. ‘We can make a real end to all the things I’ve been worrying you about – the looted art, the war, the whole caboodle. Finish with it all. Here and now.’

  ‘You go on your own.’

  ‘Maybe I will.’

  But overnight, thinking of it, his suggestion seemed reasonable. We were free at last. We had survived the very worst and so we could face anything now, and besides, we were good friends, and so, above all, I owed Ben the duty of friendship. Next morning I went with him.

  Following him around the camp I hardly looked at the exhibits. Until one stopped me in my tracks. It was a glass case filled with old domestic and kitchen equipment. Broken tea cups, saucers and little wine glasses, rusted wire egg beaters, tin openers, tarnished knives and forks and spoons. These were the remnants of somehow precious things that the doomed travellers had taken with them to Dachau in their single suitcases, which the camp authorities had thrown out as rubbish and found years later buried in the poisoned soil.

  Almost hidden at the back of a glass case I noticed a small knife, a soiled kitchen devil. Once it must have gleamed, sharp as a razor, and had some special importance for the cook – why else take it in a cattle wagon halfway across Europe?

  Because it must have been very personal to the woman who had owned and used it, just as my own sharp kitchen devil was precious to me, and which I worked with every day in my New York kitchen. As I gazed at the little knife I thought of its use in good times before the war, used by some happy Jewish mama, all the family coming to dinner, cutting up a chicken for the barley soup.

  It wasn’t the mounds of hair, old shoes, the dissection tables and tins of Zyklon B that struck me in the other buildings. It was the little rusted kitchen devil that cut me to the heart, but when we left the huts and went out into the autumn sunlight all I said to Ben was ‘Grim.’

  ‘Yes,’ was all he said in return, and there was nothing more to be said. And I knew then, that if my father had been any part of what had happened here at Dachau, I couldn’t face life after what I’d seen today. We didn’t speak of Dachau again, but it lay there, like a vague ache all over my body, for days afterwards.

  The next afternoon, after getting our new passports, we were walking towards the Englischer Garten in the late-afternoon sun, moving through glades of chestnut trees, leaves beginning to droop, autumn creeping up on the calendar, a hint of an end to the summer.

  We heard a murmur, like swarming bees, ahead of us, and the faint sound of brass music. Taking an empty path through some bushes, we came out into the open. And there was a marvellous theatre – hundreds of people, strolling, and sitting in the formal gardens, on little chairs, on picnic benches, eating sausages an
d grilled fish cooked on small barbecues, drinking beer in chilled litre-steins from kiosks dotted here and there along the pathways. At the far side a Japanese pagoda and at the centre a bandstand, where brass bandsmen, in comic-opera uniforms, having finished their last tune and mopping their brows, picked up trumpets and horns again and embarked on a lively polka.

  Ben smiled over the whole proceedings. ‘Rather my style,’ he said. ‘And this’ll likely be even better beer than the real ale they have at my local in the Cotswolds.’

  ‘All that grilled fish and spicy sausage. Probably better even than my local deli.’

  ‘They do some things best of all in Germany.’

  We made for the entertainment, bought food and beer, and found an empty picnic bench at the far end of the garden, beyond the pagoda. A frothy stein of Löwenbräu for both of us. He raised his glass and drank long. I did too.

  ‘My God that’s good,’ he said. He shook his head. ‘Best beer I’ve ever had.’

  We nibbled at the food, saying nothing, letting the summer air and the music caress us.

  ‘So,’ he said. ‘You’re for New York and I’m for Carrara.’

  ‘But Carrara? Your father? The rest of those damn paintings?’

  ‘No, no, I told you, that’s why we went to the camp. I’ve given up on all that now. The painting, Katie’s journal, what my father did in the war, your father, Katie’s father – the lot. Just Carrara.’ He stopped, uncertain a moment. ‘That last time I was with Katie abroad, that summer – it was good. I’d like to go back.’

  ‘God, don’t. You’d be opening the wound again. That strange stuff you showed me in her journal – she must have been nuts.’

  ‘Was she, though? Maybe there was nothing going on between her and her father. I just use him as a stick to beat her with.’

  ‘You don’t kill yourself without a damn good reason, like you’re really ill, depressed or someone really important has died. So there’s very likely some connection between her father and her suicide.’

  ‘Maybe. Hardly matters now, anyway.’ He turned away, then turned back, abruptly. ‘But why should you believe what I say about Katie? She chucked me. I’m biased.’