The One from the Other

TWENTY-SEVEN

“It’s a crazy idea,” said Eric Gruen, when I had finished describing my suggestion to him. “The craziest idea I ever heard of.”

“Why?” I asked. “You say you’ve never met the family lawyer. He doesn’t know you’re in a wheelchair. I show him your passport, and he sees an older, thicker version of the person in the photograph. I sign the papers. You get your estate. What could be simpler? Just as long as there’s no one who really remembers you.”

“My mother was a very difficult woman,” said Gruen. “With very few friends. It wasn’t just me with whom she had a problem. Even my father couldn’t stand her. She didn’t even go to his funeral. No, there’s just the lawyer. But look here, they know I’m a doctor. Suppose they ask you a medical question?”

“I’m collecting an inheritance,” I said. “Not applying for a job at a hospital.”

“True.” Gruen inspected the contents of his pipe. “All the same, there’s something about it that I don’t like. It feels dishonest.”

Engelbertina adjusted the rug over his legs. “Bernie’s right, Eric. What could be simpler?”

Gruen looked up at Henkell and handed him his passport. Henkell had yet to offer an opinion on my scheme. “What do you think, Heinrich?”

Henkell studied the photograph for a long moment. “I don’t think there’s any doubt that Bernie could easily pass for an older version of you, Eric,” he said. “And there’s no doubt that the money would be useful for our research. Major Jacobs is being difficult about buying that electron microscope we asked him for. He says we’ll have to wait until the spring of next year, when his department will get some new budgets.”

“I’d forgotten that,” said Gruen. “You’re right. The money would be very useful, wouldn’t it? My mother’s money could easily underwrite our work.” He laughed bitterly. “My God, she’d hate that.”

“I have spent quite a bit of my own money, Eric,” Henkell said. “Not that I mind a bit. You know that. I’ll do whatever it takes to isolate this vaccine. But Jacobs is becoming a nuisance. If we had access to some new funds, we could afford to get rid of him and the Amis. It would make this an exclusively German scientific effort. Just like it was before.”

“If Bernie did go in my place it really would solve a lot of problems, wouldn’t it?” he said. “I’m really not up to going myself. You were right about that.”

“The question is,” said Henkell, “whether you’re up to doing this yourself, Bernie. You’re only just back to full health. And you say you find yourself tiring very easily.”

“I’m all right,” I said, dusting off his concern. “I’ll be fine.”

In many ways staying at Henkell’s house had suited me very well. I was putting on some weight. Even my chess game had improved thanks to Gruen’s helpful hints. On the face of it, I couldn’t have been more comfortable if I had been a bug in the mane of the Emperor Caligula’s favorite horse. But I was keen to go to Vienna. One reason was that I had gone over the blank sheets of paper I had taken from Major Jacob’s pad and found the outline of an address in Vienna. Horlgasse, 42. Apartment 3. Ninth District. Curiously, this was the same address I had been given for Britta Warzok. But another reason was Engelbertina.

“Then I agree,” said Gruen, puffing some life back into his pipe. “I agree, but I have one or two conditions. And these cannot be set aside. The first condition, Bernie, is that you should be paid. My family is rich and I will be forever in your debt, so it ought to be a decent amount. I think twenty thousand Austrian schillings would be a suitable sum for performing such a valuable service.”

I started to protest that it was too much, but Gruen shook his head. “I won’t hear any objections. If you won’t agree to my fee, then I won’t agree to your going.”

I shrugged. “If you insist,” I said.

“And not just your fee but all your expenses,” he added. “You ought to stay in the kind of hotel I’d stay in myself, now that I’m rich.”

I nodded, hardly inclined to argue with such largesse.

“My third condition is more delicate,” he said. “I think you probably remember me telling you that I left a girl in trouble, in Vienna. It’s a bit late, I know, but I should like to make amends. Her child. My child, must be twenty-one years old by now. I’d like to give them both some money. Only I’d rather they didn’t know it was from me. So I’d like you to go and see them as if you were a private detective retained by a client who prefers to remain anonymous. Something like that, anyway. I’m sure you know the form, Bernie.”

“Suppose they’re dead,” I said.

“If they’re dead, they’re dead. I have an address. You could check it out for me.”

“I’ll get Jacobs to help with the relevant papers,” Henkell said. “You’ll need an Allied Forces Permit to pass through the British, French, and American zones. And a Gray Pass to go through the Russian zone of occupation. How will you get there?”

“I prefer to go by train,” I said. “I’ll attract less attention that way.”

“There’s a travel agency I use at the main station in Munich,” said Henkell. “I’ll get them to buy you a ticket. When will you go?”

“How soon can Jacobs get those travel documents?”

“Not long, I should think,” said Henkell. “He’s pretty well connected.”

“So I gathered.”

“Twenty-four hours?” said Henkell.

“Then I’ll go the day after tomorrow.”

“But in whose name should I book it?” asked Henkell. “Yours or Eric’s? We have to think this through carefully. Suppose you were searched and they found you had another passport. They’d assume one was false and that you were an illegal refugee from the Russian Zone. You’d be handed over to them and tossed into a labor camp.” He frowned. “It’s quite a risk, Bernie. Are you really sure you want to do this?”

“It would look odd if my travel warrant was in one name and my hotel registration in another,” I said. “That’s something your family lawyer might easily discover. No, for continuity’s sake, everything—tickets, travel warrants, hotel bookings—ought to be done in the name of Eric Gruen. And I’ll leave my own passport at my apartment in Munich.” I shrugged. “As it happens, I’d rather not use my own passport in Vienna. The Ivans might have flagged my name. The last time I was in Vienna, I had a run-in with an MVD colonel named Poroshin.”

“What about the funeral?” asked Gruen.

“Might be risky to go,” said Henkell.

“It would look odd if I didn’t,” I said.

“I agree,” said Gruen. “I’ll telegraph the lawyers to let them know I’m coming. I’ll have them open a drawing account at my mother’s bank. So you’ll have your money as soon as you get there. And your expenses, of course. Not to mention the money for Vera and her daughter.” He smiled sheepishly. “Vera Messmann. That’s her name. The one I left in the lurch, in Vienna.”

“I wish I could go to Vienna,” said Engelbertina, pouting girlishly.

I smiled, trying to seem indulgent, but the plain fact of the matter was that the other reason I was keen to go to Vienna was to get away from Engelbertina. For a while anyway. And I was beginning to understand just why her second husband, the Ami, had fled to Hamburg. I’ve known women who have slept with a lot of men. My wife for one, although maybe not four hundred of them. And when I was a cop, back in Berlin, there were always snappers who were in and out of the Alex. I’d been fond of one or two of them, too. It wasn’t Engelbertina’s promiscuous history that made me feel uncomfortable with her so much as the many other strange little things I had noticed about her.

For one thing, I noticed that she always stood up whenever Gruen or Henkell came into a room. I found it a little strange the way she exhibited a deference to them both that verged on the slavish. I also noticed that she never once met their eyes. Whenever either man glanced in her direction she would look at the floor, and sometimes even bow her head. Well, perhaps this wasn’t so unusual in a German employer-employee relationship. Especially given that they were doctors and she was a nurse. German doctors can be martinets, some of them, and quite intimidating, as I myself had discovered when Kirsten was dying.

Some of the other strange things I had noticed about Engelbertina I also found irritating, like lines of spider’s thread that I kept pulling off my face as our relationship went along. Such as her tendency to infantilism. Her room was full of soft toys that Henkell and Gruen had bought for her. Teddy bears mostly. There must have been three or four dozen of them. Shoulder to shoulder, their eyes beady and thoughtful, their mouths thin and tightly stitched, they looked as if they were planning a putsch to take over her room. And naturally I suspected that I would have been the first victim of the ursine purge that would have followed their takeover. The teddy bears and I did not see eye to eye. Except on one thing, perhaps. Very probably the second victim of the purge would have been her Philco tabletop radio phonograph, which had been a wedding present from her missing Ami. And if not the phonograph itself, then certainly the one record she seemed to own. This was a rather melancholy ballad—“Auf Wiedersehen,” from Sigmund Romberg’s musical Blue Paradise, and sung on her record by Lale Andersen. Engelbertina played it over and over again, and pretty soon it had me climbing the walls.

Then there was Engelbertina’s devotion to God. Every night, including the nights when she had been making love with me, she would get out of bed and, kneeling beside it, her hands clasped as tightly as her eyes were closed, she would pray out loud, as if she had been throwing herself on the mercy of a Prussian magistrate. And while she prayed, sometimes—on the nights when I felt too tired to get up and leave her room—I listened and was shocked to discover that Engelbertina’s hopes and aspirations for herself and the world were so banal, they would have left a stuffed panda stupefied with boredom. After praying, she would invariably open her Bible and literally riffle through the pages in search of her God’s answer. More often than not her random choice of chapter and verse allowed her to form the unlikely conclusion that she had indeed been given one.

But the strangest and most irritating thing about Engelbertina was her conceit that she possessed the gift of healing hands. Despite her medical training, which was genuine, she would sometimes place a tea towel on her head—quite unself-consciously—and her hands on her victim/patient and proceed to enter some kind of trance that left her breathing loudly through her nose and shaking violently like someone in an electric chair. She did it once with me, placing her hands on my chest and going into her Madame Blavatsky routine, managing to convince me only that she was a complete spinner.

These days the only time I enjoyed her company was when she was kneeling in front of me, with both hands clutching the sheet as if she hoped that very soon it would all be over. And usually it was. I wanted to get away from Engelbertina in the same way a cat wants to escape from the sticky clutches of a clumsily affectionate child. And as quickly as possible.