The One from the Other

TWENTY-SIX

When they first make you a cop they put you on a beat. They make you walk so you have enough time to notice things. No one ever notices much from the inside of a stripe wagon traveling at thirty miles an hour. “Flatfoot” and “gumshoe” are words that come at you when you wear hobnailed boots. If I had left Henkell’s laboratory in the Mercedes, I would never have glanced in the window of Major Jacob’s Buick and I would never have seen that he had left it unlocked. Nor would I have looked back at the villa and remembered that it was impossible to see the road and the car from the office window. I didn’t like Major Jacobs, in spite of his approximate apology. That was no reason to search his car, of course. But then, “snooper” is another word for what I do and what I am. I am a professional sniffer, an oven-peeper, a nosey parker, and I was feeling very nosy about a man who had dug up my back garden in search of Jewish gold and who was sufficiently secretive—not to say paranoid—to lock away an old copy of Life magazine in order to stop me from looking at it.

I liked his Buick. The front seat was as big as the bunk in a Pullman sleeping car, with a steering wheel the size of a bicycle tire and a car radio that looked like it had been borrowed from a café jukebox. The speedometer said it went up to one hundred twenty miles per hour, and with its straight eight and Dynaflow transmission, I figured it was good for at least a hundred of that. About a yard away from the speedometer, on the sunny side of the dash, was a matching clock, so you’d know when it was time to go and buy more gas. Below the clock was a glove box for a man with bigger hands than Jacobs had. Actually it looked like a glove box for the goddess Kali with room for a couple of garlands of skulls as well.

I leaned across the seat, thumbed it open, and raked around for a moment. There was a snub-nosed thirty-eight-caliber Smith & Wesson—a J-frame with a nice rubberized grip. The one he had pointed at me in Dachau. A Michelin road map of Germany. A commemorative postcard to celebrate Goethe’s two hundredth anniversary. An American edition of The Goebbels Diaries. A Blue Guide to northern Italy. Inside the Blue Guide, at the pages for Milan, was a receipt from a jeweler’s shop. The jeweler’s name was Primo Ottolenghi, and the receipt was for ten thousand dollars. It seemed reasonable to assume that Milan had been where Jacobs had sold the box of Jewish valuables dug up in my back garden, especially since the receipt was dated a week or so after his stay with us. There was a letter from the Rochester Strong Memorial Hospital, in the State of New York, itemizing some medical equipment delivered to Garmisch-Partenkirchen, via the Rhein-Main Air Base. There was a notepad. The first page was blank, but I could just make out the indentation of what had been written on the previous page. I tore off the first few pages in the hope that later on I might shade up whatever Jacobs had written down.

I returned everything else to the glove box, closed it, and then glanced over my shoulder at the backseat. There were copies of the Paris edition of the Herald and the Süddeutsche Zeitung, and a rolled-up umbrella. Nothing else. It wasn’t much, but I knew a little more about Jacobs than before. I knew he was serious about guns. I knew where he was likely to hawk the family heirlooms. And I knew he was interested in Joey the Crip. Maybe that kraut Goethe, too, on a good day. Sometimes knowing only a little is a preface to knowing a lot.

I got out of the car, shut the door quietly, and, keeping the River Loisach on my right, walked northeast, in the direction of Sonnenbichl, taking a shortcut through the grounds of what had once been the hospital and was now being turned into an R&R center for American servicemen.

I started to think about returning to Munich to pick up the threads of my business. I decided that, in the absence of any new clients, I might see if I could find any trace of the last one. Perhaps I would go back to the Holy Ghost Church and hope that she turned up there. Or speak to poor Felix Klingerhoefer at American Overseas Airlines. Perhaps he could remember something about Britta Warzok other than that she had come from Vienna.

The walk back to Mönch took longer than I had bargained for. I had forgotten that a lot of the walk, most of it in fact, was uphill, and even without a knapsack on my back I was something less than the happy wanderer by the time I crept into the house, crawled onto my bed, unlaced my shoes, and closed my eyes. It was several minutes before Engelbertina realized I had returned and came to find me. Her face told me immediately that something was wrong.

“Eric had a telegram,” she explained. “From Vienna. His mother is dead. He’s rather upset about it.”

“Really? I thought they hated each other.”

“They did,” she said. “I think that’s part of the problem. He realizes he won’t ever be able to make it up with her now. Not ever.” She showed me the telegram.

“I don’t think I should be reading his telegram,” I said, reading his telegram all the same. “Where is he now?”

“In his room. He said he just wanted to be left alone.”

“I can understand that,” I said. “Your mother dies, it’s not like losing a cat. Not unless you’re a cat.”

Engelbertina smiled sadly and took my hand. “Do you have a mother?”

“Naturally I used to have one,” I said. “A father, too, if memory serves. Only somewhere along the way I seem to have lost them both. Careless of me.”

“Me, too,” she said. “That’s something else we have in common, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said, without much enthusiasm. As far as I was concerned, there was only one thing we seemed to have in common, and that was what went on in her bedroom, or mine. I looked at Gruen’s telegram again. “This suggests that he has come into a considerable fortune,” I said.

“Yes, but only if he goes to Vienna to see the lawyers in person and claims it,” she said. “And somehow I can’t see that happening. Not in his present condition. Can you?”

“Just how sick is he anyway?” I asked her.

“If it was just the use of his legs he had lost, he wouldn’t be so bad,” she said. “But he lost his spleen as well.”

“I didn’t know that,” I said. “Is that serious?”

“Losing your spleen increases your risk of infection,” she said. “The spleen is a kind of blood filter and reserve supply. That’s why he runs out of energy so easily.” She shook her head. “I really don’t think he could make it to Vienna. Even in Heinrich’s car. Vienna’s almost three hundred miles away, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s a long time since I was in Vienna. What’s more, when you do get there it seems even farther away than you had bargained for. If you know what I mean. There’s something about the Viennese I don’t like. They turn out a very Austrian sort of German.”

“You mean like Hitler?”

“No, Hitler was a very German sort of Austrian. There’s a difference.” I thought for a moment. “How much money is involved, do you think? With Eric’s family, I mean.”

“I’m not exactly sure,” she said. “But the Gruen family owned one of the largest sugar factories in Central Europe.” She shrugged. “So it could be quite a lot. Everyone has a sweet tooth, don’t they?”

“They do in Austria,” I said. “But that’s as sweet as they ever get.”

“Aren’t you forgetting something?” she said. “I’m Austrian.”

“And I bet that makes you really proud,” I said. “When the Nazis annexed Austria, in 1938, I was living in Berlin. I remember Austrian Jews coming to live in Berlin because they thought Berliners would be more tolerant than the Viennese.”

“And were they?”

“For a while. The Nazis never really liked Berlin, you know. It took them a long time to bring the city to heel. A long time and a lot of blood. Berlin was just the showcase for what happened. But the real heart of Nazism was Munich. Still is, I shouldn’t wonder.” I lit a cigarette. “You know, I envy you, Engelbertina. At least you have a choice between calling yourself an Austrian and calling yourself a Jew. I’m a German and there’s nothing I can do about that. Right now it feels like the mark of Cain.”

Engelbertina squeezed the hand she was still holding. “Cain had a brother,” she said. “And in a way, so do you, Bernie. Or at least someone who looks a lot like your brother. Maybe you can help him. That’s your job, isn’t it? Helping people?”

“You make it sound like a very noble calling,” I said. “Parsifal and the Holy Grail and five hours of Wagner. That’s not me at all, Engelbertina. I’m more your beer mug kind of knight with three minutes of Gerhard Winkler and his Regent Classic Orchestra.”

“Then make it something noble,” she said. “Do something better. Something selfless and unmercenary. I’m sure you can think of a noble thing you could do. For Eric, perhaps.”

“I don’t know. Where’s the profit in doing something selfless and unmercenary?”

“Oh, I can tell you,” she said. “If you’ve got the time and patience to listen. And the willingness to make a change in your life.”

I knew she was talking about religion. It wasn’t one of my favorite topics of conversation, especially with her. “No, but maybe there is something I could do,” I said, quickly changing the subject. “Something sort of noble. At least, it’s as noble an idea as I’m capable of thinking up without a couple of drinks inside me.”

“Then let’s hear it,” she said. “I’m in the mood to be impressed by you.”

“My dear girl, you are always in the mood to be impressed by me,” I said. “Which I am unable to account for. You look at me and you seem to think I can do no wrong. I can and I do.” I paused for a moment and then added: “Tell me, do you really think I look a lot like Eric?”

She nodded. “You know you do, Bernie.”

“And there was just his mother, right?”

“Yes. Just his mother.”

“And she didn’t know he was in a wheelchair?”

“She knew he’d been badly injured,” she said. “But that’s all. Nothing more specific.”

“Then answer me this,” I said. “Do you think I could pass for him? In Vienna. With his family lawyers.”

She looked me square in the face and thought about that for a moment and then started to nod. “That’s a great idea,” she said. “As far as I know, he hasn’t been back to Vienna in twenty years. People can change a lot in twenty years.”

“Especially the last twenty years,” I said, wiggling my fingers. “I used to be the church organist. Where’s his passport?”

“It’s a brilliant idea,” she said enthusiastically.

“It’s not very noble,” I said.

“But it’s practical. And maybe in this particular situation, practical is better than noble. I’d never have thought of something like that.”

Engelbertina stood up and opened a bureau from which she removed a manila envelope. She handed me the envelope.

I opened it and took out a passport. I checked the date and the photograph. The passport was still valid. I studied the photograph critically. Then I handed it to her. She looked at the picture and then ran her fingers through my hair as if checking out the amount of gray there and wondering if perhaps it was too much. “Of course, we’d have to change your hairstyle,” she said. “You’re older than Eric. The funny thing is, though, you don’t look much older. But, yes, you could pass for him.” She bounced a little on the edge of my bed. “Why don’t we ask him what he thinks?”

“No,” I said. “Let’s wait awhile. Let’s wait until this evening. Right now he’s probably too upset to think clearly about anything very much.”