The One from the Other

TWENTY-EIGHT

I glanced up at the pewter Austrian sky from which snow was now descending onto the roof of the International Patrol vehicle, drifting there like a layer of whipped cream. Of the four elephants inside the truck, probably only the Russian corporal felt homesick when he saw the snow. The other three just looked cold and sick. Even the diamonds in an adjacent jewelry shop were looking a little chilly. I turned up my coat collar, pulled my hat over my ears, and walked quickly along the Graben, past the baroque monument that had been erected to the memory of the hundred thousand Viennese who had died in the plague of 1679. In spite of the snow, or perhaps even because of it, the Graben Café was doing a brisk business. Well-dressed, well-built women were hurrying through the revolving doors with their shopping. With half an hour to kill before my meeting with the Gruen family lawyers, I hurried after them.

In the back room there was a stage set for a small orchestra, and a few tables where some dead fish masquerading as men were playing dominoes, nursing empty coffee cups, reading the newspapers. Finding an empty table near the door, I sat down, unbuttoned my coat, eyed a handsome brunette, and then ordered a one-horse cab—black coffee in a tall glass with only one inch of cream on top. I also ordered a large cognac, because of the cold. That’s what I tried to persuade myself, anyway. But I knew it had more to do with meeting Gruen’s lawyers for the first time. Lawyers make me uncomfortable. Like the idea of catching syphilis. I drank the cognac but only half the coffee. I had my health to consider. Then I went outside again.

Situated at the top of the Graben, Kohlmarkt was a typical Viennese street, with an art gallery at one end and an expensive confectioner at the other. Kampfner and Partners occupied three floors at number fifty-six, between a shop selling leather goods and another selling antique religious reliquaries. As I went through the door I was almost tempted to buy myself a couple of rosaries. For luck.

Behind the first-floor reception desk sat a redhead with all the trimmings. I told her I was there to see Dr. Bekemeier. She asked me to take a seat in the waiting room. I walked over to a chair, ignored it, and stared out the window at the snow, the way you do when you’re wondering if you’re shoes are up to it. There was a fine pair of boots in Bretschneider’s that I and my expenses were thinking of getting acquainted with. Provided things worked out with the lawyer. I watched the snow as far as the window of the embroidery shop opposite, where Fanny Skolmann—according to the name painted on the window—and her several employees were stitching petit point in light that promised to make them blind in no time at all.

A throat cleared discreetly behind me and I turned to face a man wearing a neat, gray suit with a wing collar that looked as if it had been tailored by Pythagoras. Under white spats, his black shoes shone like the metalwork on a new bicycle. Or perhaps it was just more cream on top of yet more black coffee. He was a small man, and the smaller the man, the more carefully he seems to dress. This one was straight out of a shop window. He looked sharp. He couldn’t have been more than five feet tall and yet he had the look of a creature that killed weasels with his teeth. It was as if his mother had prayed for a baby terrier and changed her mind at the last minute.

“Dr. Gruen?” he asked.

For a moment I had to remind myself it was me he was talking to. I nodded. He bowed in a courtly kind of way.

“I am Dr. Bekemeier,” he said. He motioned me into the office behind him and continued speaking in a voice that creaked like the door on a Transylvanian castle. “Please, Herr Doktor. Step this way.”

I went into his office where a well-behaved fire was burning quietly, as fires in lawyers’ offices always do, for fear of being put out.

“May I take your coat?” he said.

I shrugged it off and watched him hang it on a mahogany hat stand. Then we sat down on opposite sides of a partner’s desk—I on a leather button-backed chair that was the little brother of the one he sat on.

“Before we proceed,” he said, “you will forgive me if I trouble you to confirm your identity, Herr Doktor. I am afraid that the sheer size of your late mother’s estate requires an extra amount of caution. Given these unusual circumstances I am sure you understand that it behooves me to be quite sure of your bona fides. May I look at your passport, please?”

I was already reaching for Gruen’s passport. Lawyers, underneath their library-pale skins, are all the same. They cast no shadows and they sleep in coffins. I handed it over without a word.

He opened the passport and scrutinized it, turning every page before coming back to the photograph and the description of the bearer. I let him roll his eyes across my face and then the photograph without comment. To have said anything at all might have invited suspicion. People always get gabby when they’re pulling a stroke and start to lose their nerve. I held my breath, enjoyed feeling the fumes of the cognac still inside my tubes, and waited. Eventually he nodded, and handed the passport back to me.

“Is that it?” I asked. “Formal identification of the body and all that?”

“Not quite.” He opened a file on his desktop, consulted something typewritten on the top sheet of paper and then closed the file again. “According to my information, Eric Gruen suffered an accident to his left hand, in 1938. He lost the two upper joints of his little finger. May I please see your left hand, Herr Doktor?”

I leaned forward and laid my left hand on his blotter. There was a smile on my face where, perhaps, there ought to have been a frown, for it now struck me as odd that the injury to Gruen’s hand should have occurred so long ago, and that he hadn’t made more of it in connection with the whole procedure of my identification as him. Somehow I had formed the now apparently incorrect impression that he had lost his little finger during the war, at the same time he had lost his spleen and the use of his legs. There was also the fact that the lawyer, Dr. Bekemeier, had been so very precise about the injury to Gruen’s little finger. And it occurred to me now that but for this detail there could have been no positive identification of myself as Eric Gruen. In other words, my finger, or lack of it, had been much more important than I could have known.

“Everything seems to be in order,” he said, smiling at last. Which was the first time I noticed that he had no eyebrows. And that the hair on his head appeared to be a wig. “There are of course some papers for you to sign, as the next of kin, Herr Gruen. And also so that you can establish the line of credit with the bank until the will has been administered. Not that I expect there will be any problems. I drew the will up myself. As you may know, your mother banked with Spaengler’s all her life, and naturally they will be expecting you to come in and attend to the withdrawals you specified in your telegram. You’ll find the manager, Herr Trenner, to be most helpful.”

“I’m sure I will,” I said.

“Am I correct in thinking that you’re staying at the Erzherzog Rainer, Herr Doktor?”

“Yes. Suite three twenty-five.”

“A wise choice, if you don’t mind my saying so. The manager, Herr Bentheim, is a friend of mine. You must keep us both informed if there’s anything we can do to make your stay in Vienna more agreeable.”

“Thank you.”

“The funeral service will be held at eleven o’clock tomorrow, at Karlskirche. It’s just a few blocks northeast of your hotel. At the opposite end of Gusshausstrasse. And the interment immediately afterward in the family vault at the Central Cemetery. That’s in the French sector.”

“I know where the Central Cemetery is, Dr. Bekemeier,” I said. “And while I remember, thank you for making all the arrangements. As you know, Mother and I didn’t exactly get on.”

“It was my honor and privilege to do so,” he said. “I was your mother’s lawyer for twenty years.”

“I imagine she had alienated everyone else,” I said, coolly.

“She was an old woman,” he said, as if this was all the explanation that was required for what had happened between Eric Gruen and his mother. “Even so, her death was still somewhat unexpected. I had thought she would be alive for several years yet.”

“So she didn’t suffer at all,” I said.

“Not at all. Indeed, I saw her the day before she died. At the Vienna General Hospital, on Garnisongasse. She seemed fit enough. Bedridden, but quite cheerful, really. Most curious.”

“What is?”

“The way death comes, sometimes. When we are not expecting it. Will you be attending, Dr. Gruen? The funeral?”

“Of course,” I said.

“Really?” He sounded a little surprised.

“Let bygones be bygones, that’s what I say.”

“Yes, well, that’s an admirable sentiment,” he said, as if he didn’t quite believe it himself.

I took out a pipe and began to fill it. I had started smoking the pipe in an effort to look and feel more like Eric Gruen. I didn’t much like pipes, or all the paraphernalia that went with them, but I couldn’t think of a better way of convincing myself I was Eric Gruen, short of buying a wheelchair. “Is there anyone else coming to the funeral I might know?” I asked, innocently

“There are one or two old servants coming,” he said. “I’m not sure if you would know them or not. There will be others, of course. The Gruen family name still resonates here in Vienna. As might be expected. I assume you won’t wish to lead the mourners yourself, Herr Dr. Gruen.”

“No, that would be too much,” I said. “I shall remain very much in the background throughout the proceedings.”

“Yes, yes, that would probably be best,” he said. “All things considered.” He leaned back in his chair and, with his elbows on the armrests, brought the ends of his fingers together like the poles of a tent. “In your telegram you said that it was your intention to liquidate your holdings in Gruen Sugar.”

“Yes.”

“Might I suggest that the announcement be delayed until perhaps you have left the city?” he said carefully. “It’s just that such a sale will attract a certain amount of attention. And with you being as private a man as you are, some of that attention may, perforce, be unwelcome. Vienna is a small city. People talk. The very fact of your being here at all will occasion a certain amount of comment perhaps. Perhaps even, dare I say, some notoriety.”

“All right,” I said. “I don’t mind delaying the announcement for a few days. As you said.”

He tapped his fingers together nervously as if my presence in his office unsettled him. “Might I also inquire if it is your intention to remain in Vienna for very long?”

“Not very long,” I said. “I have a private matter to attend to. Nothing that need concern you. After that I shall probably go back to Garmisch.”

He smiled in a way that left me thinking of a small stone Buddha. “Ah, Garmisch,” he said. “Such a lovely old town. My wife and I went there for the Winter Olympics, in ’thirty-six.”

“Did you see Hitler?” I asked, managing at last to light my pipe.

“Hitler?”

“You remember him, surely? The opening ceremony?”

The smile persisted but he let out a sigh, as if he had adjusted a small valve on his spats. “We were never very political, my wife and I,” he said. “But I think we did see him, albeit from a great distance away.”

“Safer that way,” I said.

“It all seems such a long time ago, now,” he said. “Like another life.”

“Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” I said. “Yes, I know exactly what you mean.”

A silence ensued and finally Bekemeier’s smile evaporated like a smudge on a windowpane.

“Well,” I said. “I had better sign these papers, hadn’t I?”

“Yes, yes, of course. Thank you for reminding me. With all of this pleasant reminiscence I’m afraid I had almost forgotten our main business.”

I doubted that. I couldn’t envisage Bekemeier forgetting anything, except perhaps Christmas, or his infant daughter’s birthday, always assuming that a creature with just one pair of chromosomes could reproduce anything more than a gelatinous specimen of legal pond life.

He opened a drawer and took out a pen case, from which he removed a gold Pelikan and handed it to me with both hands, as if he had been presenting me with a field marshal’s baton. About two or three dozen documents followed, which I signed with a perfect facsimile of Eric Gruen’s signature. I had practiced it in Garmisch, so that I might match the signature on the passport. Which, incidentally, Bekemeier remembered to check. Then I returned the pen and, our business apparently concluded, stood up and fetched my coat from his hat stand.

“It’s been a pleasure, Dr. Gruen,” he said, bowing again. “I shall always endeavor to serve your family’s interests. You may depend on that, sir. As you may also depend on my absolute discretion regarding your place of residence. Doubtless there will be inquiries as to how you may be contacted. Rest assured that I shall resist them with all my usual vigor, sir.” He shook his head with distaste. “These Viennese. They inhabit two worlds. One is the world of fact. The other is the world of rumor and gossip. The greater the wealth, the greater the attending rumor, I suppose. But what can you do, Herr Doktor?”

“I’m grateful for everything,” I said. “And I’ll see you tomorrow. At the funeral.”

“You’ll be there, then?”

“I said so, didn’t I?”

“Yes, you did. I’m sorry. I tell you frankly, sir, my memory is not what it was. It’s a terrible thing for a lawyer to admit to his client, but there it is. Things were hard for us here in Vienna, after the war. We all of us had to deal on the black market, just to stay alive. Sometimes it seems I’ve forgotten so much. And sometimes I think it’s best that way. Especially with me being a lawyer. I have to be careful. My reputation. The standing of this firm. I live in the Russian sector, you know. I’m sure you understand.”

I walked back to my hotel understanding only that there had been something I had not understood about Dr. Bekemeier. I felt like a man who had been trying to handle an eel. Every time I thought I had grasped it, the thing slipped away from me again. I decided to mention our curious conversation to Eric Gruen when I telephoned him with the good news that the meeting with the lawyer had gone without a hitch, and that his inheritance was as good as in the bank.

“How’s the weather in Vienna?” he asked. Gruen sounded like a man who wasn’t much interested in money. “It snowed a lot here last night. Heinrich is already waxing his skis.”

“It’s snowing here, too,” I reported.

“What’s your hotel like?”

I glanced around my suite. Gruen had done me proud. “I’m still waiting for the search party to come back from the bathroom and tell me what it’s like,” I said. “And apart from the echo everything is just fine.”

“Engelbertina’s right here,” he said. “And she says that she sends her love. And that she’s missing you.”

I bit some skin off the inside of my lip. “I miss her, too,” I lied. “Listen, Eric, this call is costing you a fortune, so I’d better come to the point. As I said, I met with Bekemeier, and everything went fine. Which is to say he seems quite convinced that I am you.”

“Good, good.”

“But there was something strange about him. Something he wasn’t telling me. Something he kept on creeping around. I couldn’t make out what it might be. Do you have any idea?”

“Yes, I think I might.” He laughed derisively and then his voice became awkward, like a man who has borrowed your car without telling you. “There was a time, years ago, when it was thought that old Bekemeier and my mother were, you know, lovers. If he seemed awkward to you, then that’s probably the reason. I guess he might have thought you knew about it. And was embarrassed. It was stupid of me not to have mentioned it.”

“Well,” I said, “that makes sense, I suppose. I’m going to see your old girlfriend this afternoon. The one you left with a bump in her road.”

“Remember what I said, Bernie. She mustn’t know the money comes from me. Otherwise she might not take it.”

“You told me. An anonymous benefactor.”

“Thanks, Bernie. I really appreciate it.”

“Forget it,” I said. And I dropped the phone back into its cradle.

After a while, I went out again and rode a number 1 bus clockwise around the Ring as far as the Hotel de France, for a spot of lunch. It was open to all, even though it was still under requisition by the French army of occupation. That was one thing against it. On the other hand, the food, according to the concierge at my own hotel, was the best in the city. Besides, it was just around the corner from my next port of call.