“It’s been a pleasure,” I said.
I put the envelope in my inside pocket and buttoned it down for safekeeping. I liked the way she had kissed my hand. I liked the bonus, too. I liked the fact that she’d paid it in hundred-mark notes. Nice new ones with the lady reading a book beside a mounted terrestrial globe. I even liked her hat, and the three scars on her face. I liked pretty much everything about her except the little gun in her bag.
I dislike women who carry guns almost as much as I dislike men who carry them. The gun and the little incident with Herr Klingerhoefer—not to mention the way she had avoided having me back to her home—made me think there was much more to Britta Warzok than met the eye. And given that she met the eye like Cleopatra, that gave me a cramp in a muscle that suddenly I felt I just had to stretch.
“You’re a pretty strict Roman Catholic, Frau Warzok,” I said. “Am I right?”
“Unfortunately, yes. Why do you ask?”
“Only because I was speaking to a priest about your dilemma and he recommended that you employ the good old Jesuit device of equivocation,” I said. “It means saying one thing while thinking quite another, in pursuit of a good cause. Apparently it’s something that was recommended by the founder of the Jesuits, Ulrich Zwingli. According to this priest I was speaking to, Zwingli writes about it in a book called
Spiritual Exercises.
Maybe you should read it. Zwingli says that the greater sin than the lie itself would be the evil action that would result from not telling a lie. In this case, that you’re a good-looking young woman who wants to get married and start a family. The priest I spoke to reckons that if you were to forget about the fact that you saw your husband alive in the spring of 1946, you would only have to get the Dienststelle to declare that he was dead, and then there would be no need to involve the church at all. And now that you know that he really is dead, where would the harm be in that?”
Frau Warzok shrugged. “What you say is interesting, Herr Gunther,” she said. “Perhaps we will speak to a Jesuit and see what he recommends. But I couldn’t lie about such a thing. Not to a priest. I’m afraid that, for a Catholic, there are no easy shortcuts.” She finished her drink and then dabbed at her mouth with her napkin.
“It’s just a suggestion,” I said.
She dipped into her bag again, put five dollars on the table, and then made as if to go. “No, please don’t get up,” she said. “I feel awful having stopped you from having dinner. Do please stay and order something. There’s enough there to cover more or less whatever you want. At least finish your drink.”
I stood up, kissed her hand, and watched her go. She didn’t even glance at Herr Klingerhoefer, who blushed again, fiddled with his key chain, and then forced a smile at his mother. Half of me wanted to follow her. Half of me wanted to stay and see what I could get out of Klingerhoefer. Klingerhoefer won.
All clients are liars, I told myself. I haven’t yet met one who didn’t treat the truth as if it was something on the ration. And the detective who knows that his client is a liar knows all the truth that need concern him, for he will then have the advantage. It was no concern of mine to know the absolute truth about Britta Warzok, assuming that such a thing existed. Like any other client she would have had her reasons for not telling me everything. Of course, I was a little out of practice. She was only my third client since starting my business in Munich. All the same, I told myself, I ought to have been a little less dazzled by her. That way I might have been less surprised, not to catch her lying so outrageously, but to find her lying at all. She was no more of a strict Roman Catholic than I was. A strict Roman Catholic would not necessarily have known that Ulrich Zwingli had been the sixteenth-century leader of Swiss Protestantism. But she would certainly have known that it was Ignatius of Loyola who had founded the Jesuits. And if she was prepared to lie about being a Roman Catholic, then it seemed to me she was quite prepared to lie about everything else as well. Including poor Herr Klingerhoefer. I picked up the dollars and went over to his table.
Frau Klingerhoefer seemed to have overcome all her previous reservations about the price of dinner in the Walterspiel and was working on a leg of lamb like a mechanic going after a set of rusty spark plugs with a wrench and a rubber hammer. She didn’t stop eating for a moment. Not even when I bowed and said hello. She probably wouldn’t have stopped if the lamb had let out a bleat and inquired where Mary was. Her son, Felix, was partnered with the veal, cutting neat little triangles off it like one of those newspaper cartoons we were always seeing of Stalin carving slices from a map of Europe.
“Herr Klingerhoefer,” I said. “I believe we owe you an apology. This is not the first time this kind of thing has happened. You see, the lady is much too vain to wear glasses. It’s quite possible that you have indeed met before, but I’m afraid she was much too shortsighted to recognize you from wherever it was that you might have met. On a plane, I think you said?”
Klingerhoefer stood up politely. “Yes,” he said. “On a plane from Vienna. My business often takes me there. That’s where she lives, isn’t it? Vienna?”
“Is that what she told you?”
“Yes,” he said, obviously disarmed by my question. “Is she in any kind of trouble? My mother told me you’re a detective.”
“That’s right, I am. No, she’s not in any kind of trouble. I look after her personal security. Like a kind of bodyguard.” I smiled. “She flies. I go by train.”
“Such a good-looking woman,” said Frau Klingerhoefer, gouging the marrow out of the lamb bone with the tip of her knife.
“Yes, isn’t she?” I said. “Frau Warzok’s divorcing her husband,” I added. “As far as I’m aware, she’s undecided whether she’s going to stay on in Vienna. Or live here in Munich. Which is why I was a little surprised to hear that she mentioned living in Vienna to you.”
Klingerhoefer was looking thoughtful and shaking his head. “Warzok? No, I’m sure that wasn’t the name she used,” he said.
“I expect she was using her maiden name,” I suggested.
“No, it was definitely Frau something-else,” he insisted. “And not Fräulein. I mean, a good-looking woman like that. It’s the first thing you listen out for. If she’s married or not. Especially when you’re a bachelor who’s as keen to get married as I am.”
“You’ll find someone,” said his mother, licking the marrow off her knife. “You just have to be patient, that’s all.”
“Was it Schmidt?” I asked. That was the name she had used when first she had contacted Herr Krumper, my late wife’s lawyer.
“No, it wasn’t Schmidt,” he said. “I’d have remembered that, too.”
“My maiden name was Schmidt,” his mother explained, helpfully.
I hovered for a second in the hope that he might remember the name she had used. But he didn’t. And after a while, I apologized once again and made for the door.
The maître d’ rushed to my side, his elbows held high and pumping him forward like a dancer. “Was everything all right, sir?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, handing over her dollars. “Tell me something. Have you ever seen that lady before?”
“No, sir,” he said. “I’d have remembered that lady anywhere.”
“I just got the impression that maybe you had met her before,” I said. I fished in my pocket and took out a five-mark note. “Or maybe this was the lady you recognized?”
The maître d’ smiled and almost looked bashful. “Yes, sir,” he said. “I’m afraid it was.”
“Nothing to be afraid of,” I said. “She won’t bite. Not this lady. But if you ever see that other lady again, I’d like to hear about it.” I tucked the note and my card into the breast pocket of his cutaway.
“Yes, sir. Of course, sir.”
I went out onto Marstallstrasse in the vague hope that I might catch a glimpse of Britta Warzok getting into a car, but she was gone. The street was empty. I said to hell with her and started to walk back to where I had left my car.
All clients are liars.
SIXTEEN
Walking down Marstallstrasse onto Maximilianstrasse, I was already thinking of how I was going to spend the next day. It was going to be a day without Nazi war criminals and Red Jackets and crooked Croatian priests and mysterious rich widows. I was going to spend the morning with my wife, apologizing for all my earlier neglect of her. I was finally going to call Herr Gartner, the undertaker, and provide him with the words I wanted on Kirsten’s memorial tablet. And I was going to speak to Krumper and tell him to drop the price on the hotel. Again. Maybe the weather at the cemetery would be fine. I didn’t think Kirsten would mind if, while I was in the garden of remembrance where her ashes were scattered, I got a little sun on my face. Then, in the afternoon, maybe I’d head back to that art gallery—the one next to the Red Cross building—and see if I could sign up for a crash course in art appreciation. The kind where a slim but attractive younger woman takes you by the nose and escorts you around a few museums and tells you what’s what and what’s not, and how to tell when a chimpanzee painted one picture and a fellow wearing a little black beret painted another. And if that didn’t pan out, I would head to the Hofbrauhaus with my English dictionary and a packet of cigarettes and spend the evening with a nice brunette. Several brunettes probably—the silent kind, with nice creamy heads and not a hard-luck story between them, all lined up along a bartop. Whatever I ended up doing I was going to forget all about the things that were now bothering me about Britta Warzok.
I had left my car parked a few blocks east of the Vier Jahreszeiten, pointed west toward Ramersdorf, in case I fancied the idea of checking out that address she’d given me. I didn’t fancy it much. Not on top of two Gibsons. Britta Warzok had been right about that much, at least. The Vier Jahreszeiten did serve an excellent cocktail. Near the car, Maximilianstrasse widens into an elongated square called the Forum. I guess someone must have thought the square reminded them of ancient Rome, probably because there are four statues there that look vaguely classical. I daresay it looks more like the ancient Roman Forum than it once did, because the Ethnographic Museum, which is on the right side of the square as you go toward the river, is a bombed-out ruin. And it was from this direction that the first of them came. Built like a watchtower and wearing a badly creased, beige linen suit, he walked meanderingly toward me with his arms spread wide, like a shepherd trying to intercept escaping sheep.
Having no wish to be intercepted by anyone, let alone someone as large as this fellow, I turned immediately north, in the direction of St. Anna’s and found a second man coming my way down Seitz-strasse. He wore a leather coat, a bowler hat, and carried a walking-stick. There was something in his face I didn’t like. Mostly it was just his face. His eyes were the color of concrete and the smile on his cracked lips reminded me of a length of barbed wire. The two men broke into a run as I turned quickly on my heel and sprinted back up Maximilianstrasse and straight into the path of a third man advancing on me from the corner of Herzog-Rudolf-Strasse. He didn’t look like he was collecting for charity either.
I reached for the gun in my pocket about five seconds too late. I hadn’t taken Stuber’s advice and left one in the barrel, and I would have had to work the slide to put one up the spout and make it ready to fire. It probably wouldn’t have made any difference anyway. No sooner was it in my fist than the man with the stick caught up with me and hit my wrist with it. For a moment I thought he’d broken my arm. The little gun clattered harmlessly onto the road and I almost went down with it, such was the pain in my forearm. Fortunately I have two arms, and the other drove my elbow back into his stomach. It was a hard, solid blow and sufficiently well delivered to knock some of my bowler-hatted attacker’s breath from his body. I smelled it whistle past my ear, but there wasn’t nearly enough of it to put him down on the ground.
The other two were on me by now. I lifted my paws, squared up to them, jabbed hard into the face of one and connected a decent right hook with the chin of the other. I felt his head shift against my knuckles like a balloon on a stick and ducked a fist the size of a small Alp. But it was no use. The walking stick hit me hard across the shoulders, and my hands dropped like a drummer’s arms. One hauled my jacket down over my shoulders so that my arms were pinned by my sides, and then another delivered a punch to my stomach that scraped against my backbone and left me on my knees, throwing up the remains of my cocktail-onion dinner onto the little Beretta.
“Aw, look at his little gun,” said one of my new friends, and he kicked it away, just in case I felt stupid enough to try to pick it up. I didn’t.
“Get him on his feet,” said the one with the bowler.
The biggest one grabbed me by my coat collar and hauled me up to a position that only vaguely resembled standing. I hung from his grip for a moment, like a man who had dropped his change, my hat slipping slowly off the top of my head. A big car drew up in a squeal of tires. Someone thoughtfully caught my hat as, finally, it tipped off my head. Then the one holding my collar tucked his fingers under my belt and shifted me toward the curbside. There seemed little point in struggling. They knew what they were doing. They’d done it many times before, you could tell. They were a neat little triangle around me now. One of them opening the car door and throwing my hat onto the backseat, one of them handling me like a sack of potatoes, and one of them with the stick in his hand, in case I changed my mind about going to the picnic with them all. Up close they looked and smelled like something out of a painting by Hieronymus Bosch—my own pale, compliant, sweating face surrounded with a triad of stupidity, bestiality, and hate. Broken noses. Gap teeth. Leering eyes. Five-o’clock shadows. Beery breath. Nicotine fingers. Belligerent chins. And yet more beery breath. They’d had quite a few before keeping their appointment with me. It was like being kidnapped by a Bavarian brewers’ guild.