The One from the Other

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.

It’s funny the way you feel when you’ve made love after a long furlough. Like you joined the human race again. As things turned out I hadn’t done either of those two things. I didn’t know that then. But I was used to not knowing what was what. Being in the dark is an occupational hazard for a detective. Even when a case is closed, it’s remarkable how much you still don’t know. How much remains hidden. With Britta Warzok I wasn’t at all sure if she represented a closed case or not. It was true I had been paid, and handsomely. But there was so much that remained unexplained. One day I managed finally to remember her telephone number and resolved to ring her up and ask her some straight questions about what still puzzled me. Like how it was she knew Father Gotovina. Also, I thought it was time she became aware of just how hard her thousand marks had been earned. And so, while Engelbertina was helping Gruen in the bathroom, I picked up the telephone and dialed the number I had remembered.

I recognized the maid’s voice from before. Wallace Beery in a black dress. When I asked to speak to her mistress the already guarded voice grew scornful, as if I had suggested that we might meet for a romantic dinner before going back to my place. “My what?” she growled.

“Your mistress,” I said. “Frau Warzok.”

“Frau Warzok?” Scorn turned to derision. “She is not my mistress.”

“All right, then, who is?”

“That’s really none of your business,” she said.

“Look here,” I said, a little desperate now. “I’m a detective. I could make it my business.”

“A detective? Really?” The derision continued unabated. “You’re not much of a detective if you don’t know who lives here.”

She had a point. I felt it keenly, as if the point was one that had been made by Vlad the Impaler.

“I spoke to you one night a few weeks ago. I gave you my name and my telephone number and asked you to ask Frau Warzok to call me. And since she did I presume that you and she are at least on speaking terms. And here’s another thing. It’s an offense to obstruct a policeman in the execution of his duty,” I said. I hadn’t actually said I was a cop. That was an offense, too.

“Just a minute, please.” She put the phone down somewhere. It sounded like someone hitting the bass key on a xylophone. I heard muffled voices, and there was a longish pause before the receiver was gathered up again and someone else came on the line. The well-spoken voice was a man’s. I half-recognized it. But from where?

“Who is this, please?” asked the voice.

“My name is Bernhard Gunther,” I said. “I’m a detective. Frau Warzok is my client. She gave me this number to get in touch with her.”

“Frau Warzok does not live here,” said the man. He was cool but polite. “She never did live here. For a while we collected messages for her. When she was in Munich. But I believe she has gone home now.”

“Oh? And where’s that?”

“Vienna,” he said.

“Do you have a telephone number where I can reach her?”

“No, but I have an address,” he said. “Would you like me to give it to you?”

“Yes. Please.”

There was another longish pause while, I presumed, whoever it was looked up the address. “Horlgasse forty-two,” he said, finally. “Apartment three, Ninth District.”

“Thanks, Herr . . . ? Look, whoever are you? The butler? The maid’s sparring partner? What? How do I know that address isn’t a phony? Just to get rid of me.”

“I’ve told you all that I can,” he said. “Really.”

“Listen, chum, there’s money involved. A lot of money. Frau Warzok hired me to track down a legacy. And there’s a substantial recovery fee. I can’t collect if I don’t get a message to her. I’ll give you ten percent of what I’m on if you help me out here with some information. Like—”

“Good-bye,” said the voice. “And please don’t call again.”

The phone went dead. So I called again. What else could I do? But this time there was no reply. And the next time the operator told me that the number was out of order. Which left me sitting in the ink and without a change of trousers.

I was still pondering the possibility that Britta Warzok had kicked some sand in my eyes and was now a perfect stranger to me when another stranger came out of the bathroom. He was sitting in Gruen’s wheelchair, which was being pushed, as usual, by Engelbertina but, already confounded by my telephone conversation with Wallace Beery and friend, it was a few seconds before I realized the stranger was Eric Gruen.

“What do you think?” he said, stroking his now smoothly shaven face.

“You’ve shaved off your beard,” I said, like an idiot.

“Engelbertina did it,” he said. “What do you think?”

“You look much better without it,” she said.

“I know what you think,” he said. “I was asking Bernie.”

I shrugged. “You look much better without it,” I said.

“Younger,” she added. “Younger and better-looking.”

“You’re just saying that,” he said.

“No, it’s true,” she said. “Isn’t it, Bernie?”

I nodded, studying the face more carefully now. There was something familiar in its features. The broken nose, the pugnacious chin, the tight mouth, and the smooth forehead. “Younger? Yes, I believe so. But there’s something else I can’t quite put my finger on.” I shook my head. “I don’t know. Maybe you were right, Eric. When you said that you thought we’d met before. Now that you’ve got rid of the face guard, there’s something about you that does strike me as familiar.”

“Really?” He sounded vague now. As if he wasn’t quite sure himself.

Engelbertina uttered a loud tut of exasperation. “Can’t you see it?” she said. “You pair of idiots. Isn’t it obvious? You look like brothers. Yes, that’s it. Brothers.”

Gruen and I looked at each other and straightaway we knew that she was right. We did look quite alike. But she still fetched a hand mirror and obliged us to bow our heads together and view our reflection. “That’s who each of you is reminded of when you look at the other,” she announced, almost triumphantly. “Yourself, of course.”

“I always did want an older brother,” said Gruen.

“What’s with the older?” I asked.

“Well, it’s true,” he insisted, and started to fill his pipe. “You look like an older version of me. A little more gray and worn-looking. Harder-bitten, certainly. Perhaps even a little coarser, on the edges. And I think you look less intelligent than me. Or maybe just a little puzzled. Like you can’t remember where it was you left your hat.”

“You forgot to mention taller,” I said. “By about two and half feet.”

He looked at me squarely, grinned, and lit his pipe. “No, on second thought, I do mean less intelligent. Perhaps even a little stupid. The stupid detective.”

I thought of Britta Warzok and how it didn’t make any sense her retaining me if she had any idea that Father Gotovina was part of the Comradeship. Unless she did know all along and I was just too stupid to see through what she had been up to. Which of course I didn’t. The stupid detective. It had a nice ring to it. Like it might just have been true.