“It’s too late to sound like a proper detective now,” he said. “The damage is already done.” He used two matches to get his smoke going and then threw the box back. “Evidence? Oh, I don’t know. The way she looks at you. The girl’s a proper Rembrandt where you’re concerned, old boy. Her eyes follow you all the way around the room. The way she touches her hair all the time when she’s speaking to you. The way she bites her lip when you leave the room, as if she was already missing you. Take it from me, Bernie. I know the signs. There are two things in life that I have a feel for. Rubber tires and romance. Believe it or not, I used to be quite a ladies’ man. I may be in a wheelchair, but I haven’t lost my understanding of women.” He puffed his pipe and grinned at me. “Yes, she’s a little in love with you. Astounding, isn’t it? Matter of fact, I’m a little surprised myself. Surprised and a little jealous, I don’t mind confessing. Still, it’s a common enough mistake, I suppose, to assume that just because a girl is very good-looking she also has good taste in her choice of men.”
I laughed. “She might have fallen for you if you didn’t have all that wire wool on your face,” I said.
He touched his beard self-consciously. “You think I should get rid of it?”
“If I were you I’d drop it in a sack with a couple of heavy stones and then look for a nice deep river. You would only be putting the poor creature out of its misery.”
“But I like this beard,” he said. “It took a long time to grow.”
“So does a prize pumpkin. But you wouldn’t want to take one to bed with you.”
“I expect you’re right,” he said, good-humored as always. “Although I can think of better reasons than a beard for her not being interested in me. It wasn’t just the use of my legs I lost in the war, you know.”
“How did it happen?”
“Really, there’s not much to tell. You might just as well explain how an armor-piercing round works. A solid manganese round encased in a strong steel shell. There’s no explosive charge. The manganese round depends on kinetic energy to penetrate the tank armor, and then just bounces around inside the tank like a rubber ball, killing and maiming everything it hits until it runs out of steam. Simple but very effective. I was the only one inside my tank to survive. Although not so as you would have noticed at the time. It was Heinrich who saved my life. If he hadn’t been a doctor, then I wouldn’t be here now.”
“How did you two meet?”
“We know each other from before the war,” he said. “We met at medical school, in Frankfurt. In 1928. I would have studied in Vienna, where I was born, but for the fact that I had to leave in rather a hurry. There was a girl I left in a bit of a clamp. You know the kind of thing. Rather an inglorious moment, I’m afraid. Still, these things happen, eh? After med school I got a job at a hospital in West Africa for a while. Then Bremen. When the war started neither Heinrich nor I was much interested in saving lives, I’m afraid. So we joined the Waffen-SS. Heinrich was interested in tanks—the way he’s interested in nearly everything with an engine. I went along for the ride, so to speak. My parents were not very pleased with my choice of military service. They didn’t like Hitler or the Nazis. My father is dead now, but my mother hasn’t spoken to me since the war. Anyway, things went all right for us until the last weeks of the war. Then I got hit. That’s it. That’s my story. No medals. No glory. And definitely no pity, if you don’t mind. Frankly, I had it coming. I did something wrong, once. And I don’t mean that poor girl I left bumped up. I mean in the SS. The way we went through France and Holland just killing people whenever the idea took us.”
“We all did things we’re not proud of,” I said.
“Perhaps,” he said. “Sometimes I find it very hard to believe that any of it happened at all.”
“It’s the difference between war and peace, that’s all,” I told him. “War makes killing seem feasible and matter-of-fact. In peacetime, it isn’t. Not in the same way. In peacetime everyone just worries that if you kill someone it will leave a dreadful mess on the carpet. Worrying about the mess on the carpet and whether it matters is the only real difference between war and peace.” I took a hit on my cigarette. “It’s not Tolstoy, but I’m working on it.”
“No, I like it,” he said. “For one thing it’s a lot shorter than Tolstoy. These days I fall asleep when I read anything longer than a bus ticket. I like you, Bernie. Enough to give you some good advice about Engelbertina.”
“I like you, too, Eric. But there’s no need to tell me to lay off her because you think of her like a sister. Believe it or not, I’m not the kind to take advantage.”
“That’s just it,” he said. “You couldn’t take advantage of Engelbertina if your middle name was Svengali and she wanted to sing at the Regina Palace Hotel. No, if anyone takes advantage it will be her. Believe me. It’s you who needs to be careful. She’ll play you like a Steinway if you let her onto your piano stool. Sometimes it’s fun to be played. But only if you know it and you don’t mind it. I’m just telling you so that you don’t fall all the way for her. Specifically this: She isn’t the marrying kind.” He removed the pipe from his mouth and studied the bowl judiciously. I tossed him the matches again. “The plain fact of the matter is, she’s married already.”
“I get it,” I said. “The husband disappeared in a camp.”
“No. Not at all. He’s an American soldier who was stationed over at Oberammergau. She married him and then he disappeared. Most likely deserted. Her and the army. It would be a shame if you let her sucker you into taking her on as client, to look for the guy. He’s no good, and it would be best if he stayed disappeared.”
“That’s kind of up to her, isn’t it? She’s a big girl.”
“Yes, I saw you noticing that,” he said. “Have it your own way, shamus. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
I flicked my cigarette away and then kicked off the brake on his chair. “Keep your seat,” I told him. “I’m all through with blondes and missing husbands. It was looking for a missing husband that cost me my damned finger. I’m real easy to educate that way. Like Pavlov’s dog. Some housewife so much as hints that her old man is late back from a card game and could I maybe go look for him, and I’m going to be looking for a pair of concrete gardening gloves. That or a suit of armor.” I shook my head. “I’m getting old, Eric. I don’t bounce as high as I used to when I take a beating.”
I wheeled Gruen back to the house. He was feeling tired, so he went to lie down, and I went to my room. After a moment or two there was a knock at the door. It was Engelbertina. She had a gun in her hand. A Mauser. It was made for shooting bigger things than mice. Fortunately it wasn’t pointed at me.
“I wonder if I might ask you to look after this for me,” she said.
“Don’t tell me you’ve killed someone.”
“No, but I’m afraid Eric might kill himself with it. You see, it’s his gun. And, well, sometimes he gets depressed. Depressed enough to use this on himself. I thought that it might be best if it was somewhere safe.”
“He’s a big boy,” I said, taking the gun from her and checking that it was safe. It wasn’t. I thumbed on the safety. “He ought to be able to look after his own gun. Besides, he doesn’t strike me as the type to kill himself.”
“It’s all an act,” she said. “His cheerfulness. He’s not really like that. Inside he’s very low. Look, I was going to throw it away, but then I thought that wasn’t a good idea. Someone might find it and have an accident. And then I thought, you being a detective, you would know what to do with a gun.” She grasped my hand urgently. “Please. If he has to ask you for it, then he won’t be able to do anything without talking to someone first.”
“All right,” I said. After she had gone, I hid the gun behind the hot-water tank in the bathroom.
As usual, something delicious was happening in the kitchen. I wondered what was for dinner. And I wondered if what Gruen had said about Engelbertina could really be true. I didn’t have long to wait before any doubts I had on that score were removed.
TWENTY-FOUR
From time to time, Engelbertina would take my temperature, dose me with penicillin, and inspect the scarred stump of my little finger with the same amount of loving concern a child might have displayed for a sick rabbit. When she took to kissing it I knew that her bedside manner implied a little more bed than was usual. I had never asked her the story of her life. I decided that if she ever wanted to talk about what had happened to her, she would. And one day, while examining my finger in the flirtatious manner already described, she did:
“I’m Austrian,” she said. “Did I tell you that before? No, perhaps not. Sometimes I say I’m from Canada. Not because I’m from Canada, but because Canada saved my life. Not the country. I don’t mean the country. Canada was what they called one of the sorting areas at Auschwitz where we girls—there were about five hundred of us—had to look through the belongings of all the arriving prisoners for valuables, before they were gassed.” She spoke without emotion, as if she had been describing any kind of routine factory work. “At Canada we got better food, nicer clothes, enough sleep. We were even allowed to grow our hair again.
“I went to Auschwitz in 1942. First I worked in the fields. That was very hard. I would have died if I’d continued doing that, I think. And the work ruined my hands. I went to Canada in 1943. Of course it wasn’t a holiday camp. Things still happened. Bad things. I was raped three times by SS men while I was there.” She shrugged it off. “The first time was the worst. He beat me afterward. Out of guilt I suppose. But he could just as easily have killed me, which sometimes happened out of fear that the girl would tell someone. The second and third time I didn’t resist, so I don’t know that you could call it rape, really. I didn’t want it. But I didn’t want to get hurt, either. The third time I even tried to enjoy it, which was a mistake. Because when they opened the camp brothel later that year, someone remembered that and I was transferred to work there, as a prostitute.
“No one called it a brothel, mind. And we certainly didn’t think of ourselves as prostitutes, at the time. We were just doing our job, which was to stay alive. It was just Block Twenty-four and we were treated comparatively well. We had clean clothes, showers, exercise, and access to medical attention. We even had perfume. I can’t tell you what that was like. To smell nice again. After smelling of sweat, and worse, for a whole year. The men we had sex with weren’t SS. They weren’t allowed. Some of them risked it. But most restricted themselves to looking through the spy holes in the doors while we were doing it. I made a regular friend in the Auschwitz fire brigade. A Czech man, who treated me very kindly. One hot day, he even sneaked me into the fire-brigade swimming pool. I didn’t wear a costume. I remember how nice it felt to feel the sun on my naked body. And how kind all the men were. How they treated me like an object of veneration and worship. It seemed like the happiest day of my life. He was a Catholic and we went through a sort of secret marriage ceremony that was conducted by a priest.
“Things were okay for us until October 1944, when there was a mutiny in the camp. My friend was involved and he was hanged. Then, with the Red Army just a few miles away, they marched us out. That march was the worst thing. Worse than anything I had experienced before. People dropped in the snow and were shot where they fell. Eventually we were herded onto trains and went to Bergen-Belsen, which was much worse than Auschwitz and more terrible than I describe. For a start, there was no food. Nothing. I starved for two months. If I hadn’t been so well fed in Block Twenty-four, I would certainly have died at Belsen. When the British liberated the camp in April 1945, I weighed just seventy-five pounds. But I was alive. That was the main thing. Nothing else matters besides that, does it?”
“Nothing at all,” I said.
She shrugged. “It happened. I had sex four hundred and sixteen times at Auschwitz. I counted every one of them so that I knew exactly what my survival cost me. I’m proud of my survival. And I’m telling you because of that, and because I want people to know what was done to Jews and communists and Gypsies and homosexuals in the name of National Socialism. I’m also telling you because I like you, Bernie, and because if you should happen to want to go to bed with me, then it’s best you know all the facts. After the war I married an Ami. He ran away when he found out what kind of woman I was. Eric thinks that it bothers me, but it doesn’t really. It doesn’t bother me at all. And why should it matter how many men I slept with? I never killed anyone. To me that would seem like a much worse thing to bear. Like Eric. He shot some French partisans in retaliation for the killing of some men in a German army ambulance. Well, I wouldn’t want his conscience. I think to have murder on your conscience would be something much worse than the memory of what I have to live with. Don’t you agree?”
“Yes,” I said. “I do.”
I touched her face with my fingertips. There were no scars on her cheek, but I couldn’t help think of the scars she had inside. At least four hundred of them, probably. What she had been through made my own experience seem ordinary, though I knew it wasn’t. I had seen some service during the Great War, so I was probably better prepared for it than she had been. Some men might be repelled by what she had told me—like her Ami. I wasn’t. Perhaps it would have been better for me if I had been. But what she said made me think we had something in common.
Engelbertina finished smearing ointment on the stump of my finger and then covered it with a piece of gauze and sticking plaster. She said, “Anyway, now you know all of that, you’ll know how it is I come to have a whore’s manner. And that it’s not something I can help. When I like a man, I go to bed with him. It’s as simple as that. And I like you, Bernie. I like you a lot.”
I’d had more straightforward and matter-of-fact propositions, but only in my dreams. If I’m being honest, I might have judged her more harshly if she’d looked like Lotte Lenya or Fanny Blankers-Koen. But since she looked like the Three Graces rolled into one Hellenistic erotic show, I was more than happy to let myself be played. Like a Steinway, if she felt so inclined. Besides, it had been a while since a woman had looked at me with anything more than puzzlement or curiosity. So, later that night, while Gruen was asleep and Henkell back at the state hospital in Munich, she came to my room to administer a different kind of healing. And over the next ten days, my recovery proceeded to our mutual satisfaction. Mine, anyway.