The Weimar Triangle (9 page)

He was referring to
Menschen im Hotel
, which was now being serialized in the
Berliner Illustrirte
[
Menschen im Hotel
is the novel on which the film
Grand Hotel,
starring Greta Garbo, was based. It was published in 1929, however, not in 1927.]

“
Oh yes,” she replied happily. “I have no idea why. It’s no better than the nine other novels I published before. The joke is that nobody noticed I was making fun of the world I was describing. People thought I took it seriously. Even though the subtitle of my book was ‘a dime novel with undercurrents’.”

“It would make a very good movie,”Erwin observed. “Maybe you thought of that while you were working on it. I liked the novel a lot. You are a born story teller. Each of your case histories is an account of a basic human experience, whether you thought you were making fun of the characters or not. You concocted them most ingeniously out of hackneyed popular fiction and breathed life into them. That is why your readers are taking them straight, and that is all that matters.”

“Tell me more,
Herr Doktor
,” Vicky beamed.

“Let me try and remember. Your jewel thief: human decency and compassion. Your terminally ill accountant who is actually your hero: wisdom, humility and bravery. Your Russian dancer: loneliness and courage. Your lecherous business tycoon on the verge of despair: recklessness and ruthlessness. Your star-struck stenographer: naïveté and cunning.”

Yella was beginning to feel a sensation in the lower part of her abdomen that she had not felt since falling in love with Kurt Simonsky three years ago. So it was happening to her again! With Kurt it was his expertise on Max Liebermann and Otto Dix that bowled her over. What was it this time? The civility and empathy he displayed toward Vicky? The great feat of memory
—
that he could remember so clearly what he had read?

“By the way, Vicky,” Erwin continued, “I was interested in the way you dealt with the hotel switchboard as the nerve centre, and the concierge
—
what was his name, Senf?
—
as your … your Virgil.”

“My what?”

Erwin laughed.

“I knew this would stump you. Your Virgil. Straight out of Dante.”

“Oh,
Virgil
. Now I understand.
Herr Doktor
, I think you’re overdoing it a bit.”

“Not at all. I admit I have to stretch things a little when I think of your work as a detective story. But it
is
a detective story, in the sense that it is a gradual revelation of what happened, though there is not one crime, nor is there one detective. In
Hamlet,
there is one crime and one detective
—
Hamlet. In
Oedipus Rex,
there is also one crime and one detective
—
Oedipus.”

“You are placing me in very high-class company,” Vicky exclaimed. “Please continue!”

“I will. I admit there are some minor differences between your work and the two venerable detective stories I have cited. As in
Hamlet,
you have a violent death. The ghost tells him who did it and the audience believes him but he, the detective, requires confirmation. In your case, too, the reader knows who was responsible, so there is no puzzle to be solved and no confirmation is required. You can concentrate on being human.” Erwin smiled. “By the way,” he continued, “I have discovered that many of the writers of detective stories I have read use the hotel lobby as a central space, but very differently from the way you use it. I am thinking of Conan Doyle, Emile Gaborian, Sven Elvestad, Maurice LeBlanc, Paul Rosenhayn, Frank Heller and Gustave LeRoux
—
all literary descendants of Edgar Allan Poe. You use the lobby as the central space of the world in which we all live, populated by ordinary people. But for writers of standard detective stories, the hotel lobby is a place where a low form of fragmented, isolated, unfulfilled men and women reside, presided over by a puppet-like shell of a dehumanized hotel manager, very different from the Higher Being who is supposed to govern the real world.”

“Well, well, well.” McAndrew was amused. “The next thing you’ll tell us, Erwin, is that in your field of study a Higher Being dispatches the detective down to Earth to do his work for him.”

“Yes, Julian,” Erwin said. “That is exactly what I will tell you. The detective, by the simple reason of being a detective, is equipped to find the truth, and in the end he invariably does. He has to. The laws of metaphysics make him do it. Therefore, he occupies a place slightly above ordinary human beings. The hotel lobby is the locus of objective truth. The stories themselves are allegories and don’t describe human beings as human beings at all
—
in dramatic contrast to your story, Vicky. By the way, I read somewhere that you even got a job as a chamber maid in the Esplanade Hotel for six weeks, to find out what a big hotel feels like.”

“You are correct,
Herr Doktor
. A most revealing experience. I discovered that the girls were not a bit interested in who the guests were and what they were doing, even if they were celebrities. They were working too hard, were always tired and preoccupied with their own troubles.”

“I’m not a bit surprised,” Erwin said. “Unlike you, the writers of detective stories see the rational world in a distorting mirror. All efforts to describe the world as it is are sacrificed to the fascination of solving the puzzle. There is one outsider
—
he is the criminal. The police represent Law and Order and rationality, as the police should, whereas the detective has no relation to either rationality or irrationality, nor has he any personal ties or commitments. This makes it possible for him to be detached.”

Kant and Hegel must be smiling in Heaven at their magnificent heir’s ingenious exercise in applied philosophy.

The bell rang. Intermission was over. The conversation had been so animated that, before flocking back to the hall to listen to the Kreutzer Sonata
—
not easy for Yella since her mind was now on Erwin Herzberg
—
they resolved to meet again after the concert in the little restaurant at the back of the hall. Vicky Baum excused herself.

That is what happened.

There they were joined by the eminent and amiable Ernesto Uzielli, the man who owned the lock of Beethoven’s hair. Konrad Edler had spotted him in the audience. They seemed well acquainted and on excellent terms.

Erwin Herzberg, too, was delighted to see him. They obviously knew each other well. No, more than that. The three of them had had a common, very recent experience of considerable significance.

The reason for Uzielli’s presence in Frankfurt was that the Institute for Social Research had invited him to give a series of lectures on the early Karl Marx. When Uzielli received the invitation he suddenly remembered he had read somewhere that to celebrate Beethoven’s centenary the City of Frankfurt had organized an international exhibition of
musicalia
. So, without informing anybody in advance, he put the locket in a pigskin case normally used for toiletries, and carried it in his suitcase. His intention was to lend it to the authorities as a prize exhibit. If they rejected it for any reason, it would not be a great calamity. His reputation was not at stake.

He had checked in the Frankfurter Hof on Monday. Today was Saturday. Having once been robbed while staying in a private suite at the Ritz in Paris, Uzielli never trusted hotels again. So on arrival he asked the concierge to put the leather case in the hotel safe. He was given a receipt, which he put in his wallet. On Tuesday and Wednesday, Uzielli visited assorted bureaucrats and curators at the exhibition and at City Hall and described the projected exhibit to them, offering to show it to them if they were interested. They rejected it politely on various grounds, without bothering to inspect it first.

On Thursday morning the director of the institute had called Uzielli to suggest they have lunch together at the Café Laumer on the Bockenheimer Landstrasse to discuss the possibility of publishing his lectures. The Café Laumer, he explained, was a favourite of the institute’s staff and graduate students. Seminars were held in spacious rooms on the second floor.

Uzielli told the director about the locket of Beethoven’s hair and its rejections. The director was intrigued and amused and asked whether he would mind showing it to him at lunch.

Oh, not at all.

The director said he intended to invite Erwin Herzberg, who was always anxious to meet distinguished visitors, professionally and personally, and also one of the institute’s most gifted graduate students, Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno, who happened to be a composer and music critic. They would be bound to be interested in the lock.

The director told Teddy to wait in the wings at the café until he was called to the table. Teddy was so thrilled by the prospect of seeing a locket of Beethoven’s dark-grey hair that he could not help telling a few friends about it right away. Erwin did not tell a soul.

On arrival at the restaurant, Uzielli put the briefcase
—
containing the pigskin case
—
on the floor next to his chair. During lunch the director, Uzielli and Erwin talked about all kinds of things. After the dessert the director waved to Teddy, who was impatiently waiting at a nearby table, tapping the opening rhythms of Stravinsky’s
Rite of Spring
on a book he had brought along. He and Erwin exchanged cordial greetings, after which the director introduced Teddy to Uzielli. They made small talk.

Uzielli picked up the briefcase.

The leather case containing the locket had disappeared.

Two hours later, the police had been called and the gruff, mustachioed Detective Sergeant Günther Holzmann, the upholder of Law and Order, had come to ask a few routine questions. He did not inspire much confidence. In the meantime Erwin had called his friend Konrad Edler, an amateur detective who loved solving puzzles and had lots of money of mysterious origin. Since Konrad had an arrangement with the Frankfurter Hof, where the concierge was a friend of his, he began his investigation in the hotel lobby
—
according to Erwin’s philosophical studies, the locus of objective truth.

This was on Thursday. By Friday morning
—
yesterday
—
Konrad had solved the puzzle.

The first thing Konrad always did when he was consulted on matters of this sort was to ask himself whether any obvious possible motive came to mind. Here are two of the more than twenty motivations he thought of.

Suspect A was a descendant of Johann Nepomuk Hummel. Konrad had heard that the Hummel family was furious about the way their ancestor’s friend Beethoven was being fêted. Hummel was just as great a composer, they said. All Hummel wanted was to give joy to the world. It was outrageous that badtempered Beethoven got all the publicity. It was time to set the record straight.

Suspect B was a researcher at the Paul Ehrlich Institute. Ehrlich discovered the drug Salvarsan, which cures syphilis. He received the Nobel Prize in 1908. Any researcher of the institute who somehow had got wind of the locket in Uzielli’s briefcase would, of course, seize it
—
legitimately or illegitimately
—
to find out whether Beethoven had syphilis and, if so, whether that was the reason he became deaf. (The answer to both those questions is no.)

Having decided it would take too much time at this stage to follow up on these and other suppositions, Konrad asked the director whether anyone else knew about the content of Uzielli’s briefcase. The answer was, of course, Teddy.

Teddy was summoned. He was asked to whom he had spoken before lunch. He revealed he had spoken to Gérard Montbleu, the tramp whom one of the institute’s students had met in Paris and had invited back to Frankfurt to serve as a resource on the underclass for their empirical research. The director had warned staff and students not to leave any expensive coats around that might tempt Monsieur Montbleu.

Like many other friends of the institute, Konrad had heard of Montbleu. When the police arrived at the
clochard
’s room to cross-examine him, they discovered he had vanished. Two hours later he was arrested at the Hauptbahnhof as he tried to board the Paris train with the locket of Beethoven’s hair in his suitcase. A virtuoso pickpocket and jewel thief, he had had no difficulty, posing as a waiter, in extricating the locket while the director, Uzielli and Erwin were having their lunch.

This is how Erwin concluded his summary:

“The situation is ideal raw material for whatever writer is ready to tell the story and make a fortune. We have the setting of a famous metropolitan hotel to provide the necessary metaphor for the world at large. We have a detached, unremarkable detective, a man whose sources of wealth are unknown, free to act rationally or on wild intuition, whatever method he found most rewarding. We have the forgettable policeman, limited to the use of rational procedures. representing Law and Order. Above all, we have the criminal, the perfect, quintessential outsider.”

A man capable of constructing such a superb analysis had to be Yella’s body and soul, at least for a week or two.

Interlude One

S
igmund Pfeiffer, junior partner of the Littmann Bank, had acquired an impressive tan playing golf in Tuscany. He had silvery hair, was in his late fifties, and never apologized to Jay for missing his first appointment.

“Oh yes, of course I remember it well,” he said when Jay mentioned their joint venture rescuing the Polish bicycle manufacturer. “I don’t think that story had a particularly happy ending.”

“Oh?”

“We had a number of enquiries about it from the Canadian embassy who told us their government had some sort of tax problem with the Bank of Ontario.”

This seemed highly implausible to Jay.

“There must have been a misunderstanding,” he said. “I never heard of it.”

“That is entirely possible, Mr. Gordonson. We all know what bureaucracies are like. And another thing: I read in one of our financial papers that you people at the Bank of Ontario were hurt badly in the Lehmann Brothers disaster. Apparently your bank was the only Canadian bank that had a substantial trading account with them. I hope you have recovered?”