“The Reich sports leader?”
“Yes.”
“And the general standing behind him?”
“Von Reichenau.” She had answered without a moment’s hesitation. “The bald one is Walther Funk, from the Propaganda Ministry.”
“I’m impressed,” I said, with genuine admiration.
The woman smiled. She wore spectacles. Not a beauty, but she looked intelligent in an attractive way. “It’s my job to know who these people are,” she explained. “I’m a photographic editor at the
Berlin Illustrated News
.” Still scrutinizing the box, she shook her head. “I don’t recognize the tall one, though. The one with the face like a blunt instrument. Or for that matter the rather attractive girl who seems to be with him. They seem to be the host and hostess, but either she’s too young for him or he’s too old for her. I’m not quite sure which it is.”
“He’s an American,” I said. “His name is Max Reles. And the girl is his stenographer.”
“You think so?”
I borrowed the opera glasses and looked again. I could see no sign that Dora Bauer was anything more to Reles than a secretary. She had a notepad in her hand and seemed to be writing something. Then again, she was looking extremely attractive and hardly like a stenographer. The necklace she was wearing glittered like the huge electric chandelier above our heads. As I watched, she put down the pad and, picking up a bottle of champagne, proceeded to fill everyone’s glass. Another woman appeared. Von Tschammer und Osten drained his glass and then held it out for another refill. Reles lit a large cigar. The general laughed at his own joke and then leered at the second woman’s cleavage. This was worth the cost of a set of opera glasses on its own.
“It looks like quite a party,” I said.
“It might be, if this wasn’t
Parsifal
.”
I looked at her blankly.
“
Parsifal
lasts for five hours.” The lady with the glasses looked at her watch. “And there are still three hours of it left to go.”
“Thanks for the tip,” I said, and left.
I RETURNED TO THE ADLON, borrowed a passkey from the desk, and climbed the stairs to suite 114. The rooms smelled strongly of cigars and cologne. The closets were full of tailor-made suits, and the drawers with neatly folded shirts. Even his shoes were handmade by a company in London. Just looking at his wardrobe, I felt I was in the wrong job. Then again, I didn’t have to look at a pair of shoes owned by Max Reles to know that. Whatever the American did for a living, it was obviously paying him very well. The way I imagined everything did. He had that look about him. A selection of gold watches and rings on his bedside table only served to underline the impression of a man who was almost indifferent to his personal security or the Adlon’s Matterhorn-high room rates.
The Torpedo on the table in the window had a cover on it, but the alphabetical accordion file on the floor underneath told me it was getting plenty of use. The thing was full of correspondence to and from construction companies, gas companies, timber companies, rubber companies, plumbers, electricians, engineers, carpenters—and from all over Germany, too: everywhere from Bremen to Würzburg. Some of the letters were in English, of course, and several of these were addressed to the Avery Brundage Company in Chicago, which seemed like it ought to have meant something to me, but didn’t.
I raked through the wastepaper basket and smoothed out a few carbon copies to read before folding these and putting them in my pocket. I told myself Max Reles would hardly miss some correspondence from his wastepaper basket, although in truth I hardly cared if, on the face of it, Reles was helping to fix Olympic contracts. In a Germany governed by an ill assortment of murderers and fraudsters, I could see no point in trying to persuade an understandably reluctant Otto Trettin to take on a case that probably involved senior Nazi officials. I was looking for something more obviously criminal. I had no real idea of just what this might amount to. All the same, I thought I might recognize this if ever I saw it.
Of course, I was motivated by not much more than my own dislike and distrust of the man. These were feelings that had always served me well enough in the past. At the Alex we always said that an ordinary cop’s job is to suspect the man who everyone else thinks is guilty, but a detective’s job is to suspect the man who everyone else thinks is innocent.
Something caught my eye. The idea of Max Reles having such a thing as a ratchet screwdriver in a suite at the Adlon seemed a little out of place. It was lying on the window ledge in the bathroom. I was about to conclude that it might have been left there by a maintenance man, when I noticed what was written on the handle:
Yankee No. 15 North Bros. Mfg. Co. Phil. Penna. USA
. Reles must have brought the screwdriver from America. But why? The proximity of four screwheads in a marble-tiled panel concealing the lavatory cistern seemed to command investigation, and these were much easier to undo than perhaps they ought to have been.
With the panel removed, I peered into the space underneath the cistern and saw a canvas bag. I picked it up. The bag was heavy. I lifted it out of the cavity, placed it on the lavatory seat, and unlaced the neck.
While the ownership of firearms, especially pistols, was restricted in Germany, people with a legitimate reason to own one were permitted to do so, and for a three-mark fee, a weapons license could easily be obtained from any magistrate. A rifle, a revolver, even an automatic pistol could be owned quite legally by almost anyone. But I didn’t think there was a magistrate anywhere in the country who would have signed a permit for a Thompson submachine gun with a drum magazine. The bag also contained several hundred rounds of ammunition, two Colt semi-automatic pistols with rubberized grips, and a folding switch-blade. Inside the bag was another, smaller leather bag holding five thick bundles of thousand-dollar bills featuring a portrait of President Cleveland, and several thinner packets of German marks. There was also a leather wallet containing about a hundred Swiss gold francs and several dozen benzedrine inhalers still in their Smith Kline & French boxes.
All of it—especially the Chicago typewriter—looked like prima facie evidence that Max Reles was some kind of gangster.
I put everything back in the canvas bag, returned it to the hiding place under the cistern, and then replaced the tiled panel. When everything was exactly as I had found it, I slipped out of the suite and walked back along the corridor, pausing at the foot of the stairs, and wondering if I dared go up to 201 and use the passkey to let myself into Noreen’s suite. For a moment I let my imagination throw me in the back of a fast car and run along the AVUS speedway as far as Potsdam. Then I stared hard at the key for almost ten seconds before dropping it into my jacket pocket and pointing my libido downstairs.
Steady on, Gunther, I told myself. You heard what the lady said. She doesn’t like to be hurried.
But behind the desk there was another message waiting for me. It was from Noreen and more than a couple of hours old. I went back upstairs and pressed my ear to her door. In view of what was in the note, I might legitimately have used the passkey and let myself in. But German good manners got the better of me and I knocked.
A very long minute passed before she opened the door.
“Oh. It’s you.” She sounded almost disappointed.
“Were you expecting someone else?”
Noreen was wearing a brown chiffon peignoir and, underneath, a matching nightgown. She smelled like honeysuckle, and there was enough sleep still in her blue eyes to persuade me that she might want to go back to bed again, only this time with me. Maybe. She hustled me inside and closed the door.
“What I meant was, I left that note for you a couple of hours ago. I thought you’d come straightaway. I must have fallen asleep.”
“I went out for a while. To cool down.”
“Where did you go?”
“
Parsifal
. The opera.”
“You’re all surprises, you know that? I never figured you for a music lover.”
“I’m not. I stayed for five minutes and then felt an irresistible urge to come here and search for you.”
“Hmm. So what does that make me? A flower maiden? Klingsor’s slave—what’s her name? The one in
Parsifal
?”
“I haven’t a clue.” I shrugged. “Like I said, I only stayed five minutes.”
Noreen put her arms around my neck. “I hope you brought Parsifal’s holy spear with you, Gunther, because I don’t happen to have one here.” She backed me across the room to the bed. “At least not yet, I don’t.”
“You think I should stay with you tonight?”
“In my humble opinion, yes.” She shrugged off the peignoir and let it fall onto the thick carpet with a whisper of chiffon.
I said, “You never held a humble opinion in your life,” and kissed her. This time she allowed my hands to roam the contours of her body as if they belonged to an impatient masseur. Mostly they stayed on her bottom, my fingers gathering chiffon until I could pull her into my groin. My right hand seemed to be making a miraculous recovery.
“So it’s true,” she said. “Adlon room service is the best in Europe.”
“The key to running a good hotel,” I said, cupping one of her breasts in my hand, “is to eliminate boredom. Nearly all of our problems are caused by the innocent curiosity of our guests.”
“I don’t think I’ve been accused of that,” she said. “Innocence. Not in a long time.” She shook her head. “I’m not the innocent type, Gunther.”
I grinned.
“I guess you don’t believe me,” she said, pulling a length of hair through her mouth. “Because I’m still wearing clothes.”
She pushed me down to sit on the edge of the bed and then stepped back in order to make a performance out of taking off her nightgown. Nude, she was worth a private room in Pompeii, and as far as performances go, it had
Parsifal
beat by several lewd acts. Looking at Noreen, you wondered why anyone ever bothered to draw or paint anything else but a woman’s naked body. Cubes might have done it for Braque, but I liked curves, and Noreen’s were good enough to satisfy Apollonius of Perga and probably Kepler, too. She drew my head against her belly and, pulling my hair, like the coat on a favorite dog, she teased me with the absence of all that made me a man.
“Why don’t you touch me?” she said softly. “I want you to touch me. Right now.”
She came and sat on my augmented lap and patiently permitted my impudent curiosities with eyes that were closed to anything else but her own pleasure. With nostrils flared, she breathed deeply, like a yogi concentrating her breath.
“So what changed your mind?” I asked, bending to kiss her hardening nipple. “About tonight?”
“Who says I changed my mind?” she said. “Maybe I planned this all along. Like this is a scene in a play I’ve written.” She pushed off my jacket and started to undo my tie. “This is just what I want your character to do. Maybe you’ve got very little choice in the matter. Do you really feel you have a choice here, Gunther?”
“No.” I bit her nipple. “Not now. But I got the impression earlier on that you were playing a little hard to get.”
“I am hard to get. Only not to you. You’re the first in a long time.”
“I could say the same.”
“You could. But it would be a lie. You’re one of the principal characters in my play, remember? I know all about you, Gunther.” She started to unbutton my shirt.
“Is Max Reles another character? You do know him, don’t you?”
“Do we have to talk about him now?”
“It can wait.”
“Good. Because I can’t wait. I never could, not since I was a little girl. Ask me about him later, when the waiting is over.”
18
T
HE CEILINGS IN THE SUITES at the Adlon were just the right distance from the floor. When you lay on the bed and blew a column of cigarette smoke straight up, the crystal chandelier looked like a remote and icy mountaintop surrounded with an ermine collar of cloud. I’d never paid the ceilings much attention before. Previous erotic encounters with Frieda Bamberger had been furtive, hurried affairs, conducted with one eye on the clock and the other on the door handle, and certainly I’d never felt sufficiently relaxed to fall asleep afterward. But now that I was looking at the lofty heights of this room, I found my soul climbing up the silky walls to sit on the picture rail, like some invisible gargoyle, and then to stare down with forensic fascination on the naked aftermath of what had gone before.
Our bare limbs still entwined, Noreen and Gunther lay side by sweating side, like Eros and Psyche fallen from some other, more heavenlike ceiling—although it was hard to imagine anything much more heavenly than what had just occurred. I felt like Saint Peter taking vacant possession of a smart new basilica.
“I bet you’ve never even been in one of these beds,” said Noreen, taking the cigarette from my fingers and smoking it with the exaggerated gestures of a drunk or someone onstage. “Have you?”
“No,” I lied. “It feels strange.”
She hardly wanted to hear about my private trysts with Frieda. Certainly not as much as I wanted to hear about Max Reles.
“He doesn’t seem to like you very much,” she said after I mentioned his name again.
“Why is that? After all, I’ve been doing a swell job of hiding how much I dislike him. No, really, I despise the man, but he’s a guest of this hotel, which obliges me not to punch him down six flights of stairs and then kick him out the door. That’s what I’d like to do. And I’d do it, too, if I had another job to go to.”
“Be careful, Bernie. He’s a dangerous man.”
“That much I already know. The question is, how do you know it?”
“We met on the SS
Manhattan
,” she said. “On the voyage from New York to Hamburg. We were introduced at the captain’s table, and occasionally we met up to play gin rummy.” She shrugged. “He wasn’t a good player. Anyway, it was a longish voyage, and a single woman has to expect that she will become the focus of attention for single gentlemen. Maybe even a few married ones. There was another man, besides Max Reles. A Canadian lawyer called John Martin. I had a drink with him, and he got the wrong idea about me. The fact is, he started to believe that he and I—well, to use his words, that he and I had something special going on. Well, we didn’t. No, really we didn’t. But he couldn’t accept that and became something of a nuisance. He told me he loved me and that he wanted to marry me, and I didn’t like it. I tried to avoid him, only that’s not so easy on a boat.