The Other Side of Silence

NINE

I sipped the perfectly mixed gimlet that Maugham’s stone-faced butler had just brought up to the rooftop writing aerie and winced a little as I felt the navy-strength gin entering my hardening arteries like a good quality formaldehyde. Why else does anyone drink? Then I lit a cigarette, pulled hard on the filter, and waited for the sweet Virginia tobacco to deliver the coup de grâce to my senses after the dulling effect of the alcohol. Why else does anyone smoke? Meanwhile, a thin black cat had entered the room, and something about its stealthy, careful movements suggested that it was my own soul’s dark relation, come to make sure that I didn’t tell the old English writer too much. Never trust a writer, the cat seemed to be telling me; they write all sorts of things down. Things you didn’t mean to tell them. Especially this one. He already knows your name; don’t give him any more information. He’ll use it in some book he’s writing.

“I’d be grateful if you kept all that to yourself,” I said. “Me being a former detective from Berlin. It’s not something I want people to know about.”

“Of course. You have my word.”

“Anyway it’s not a story in which anyone comes out with very much credit,” I said. “Myself included.”

“That’s rather the point of a good story,” said Maugham. “I dislike heroes at the best of times and I much prefer men with flaws. Believe me, that’s what sells these days.”

“Then the surprise is that I haven’t been in a novel already. Seriously, though. In retrospect, I should have done a lot more to talk the captain out of his chosen course of action. But he was my old commander and I was used to doing what he asked. Which isn’t enough of an excuse, really. But there it is. It’s just another regret I have in the ten-volume apologia that’s the story of my life.”

“Ten volumes, eh? That sounds interesting.”

“Big print, though.”

“So what h-happened?” he asked. “In your story.”

“Nothing good,” I said. “It was a disaster for the captain, and in time for me, as well. It brought me back to the attention of General Heydrich, who, later that year, blackmailed me into returning to the police, which meant working for him and, eventually, the SD.”

“Blackmailed? What did he have on you?”

I smiled. “Nothing in particular. Only the threat of extreme violence. That’s the most effective blackmail of all. The Nazis had so many ways of threatening violence to a person that it’s sometimes hard to remember that this was the German government we’re talking about and not a bunch of Chicago gangsters. If I’d refused to do what he asked—work for him—I’d have been a dead man. No question. Heydrich always got what he wanted.”

The cat blinked up at me with slow disbelief, as if questioning the truth of that assertion. Cats just know when someone is lying or, in my case, bending the truth to suit my new persona. That’s probably why I don’t own a cat.

“And did you go to Gestapo headquarters? To put your head in the lion’s mouth?”

“Yes. I met with Huber and Fehling. They were the two Gestapo officers who were charged with investigating the von Fritsch case. It was immediately clear to me that these two possessed the arrogance of men who enjoyed the full confidence of people much higher in rank than themselves—Himmler, I think, and probably Heydrich, too. As you can imagine, they were less than helpful; they certainly didn’t like the idea of their case against the general going up in smoke because Otto Schmidt was about to be proved an obvious liar. It was lucky for me that while I was there I actually saw their boss, Arthur Nebe. He didn’t speak to me, but after he’d had a word with Huber, they decided to let me go. Nebe always had a soft spot for me, so I figure it was his call. All the same, I was warned in no uncertain terms that I was forbidden to make contact with Captain von Frisch again or with the general’s legal counsel, Count Rüdiger von der Goltz. But I was always an insubordinate sort and I went to army headquarters anyway, where I spoke to another military judge—Karl Sack was his name—and put him in the picture. And it was he who informed the general’s lawyers of my captain’s willingness to give evidence against the Gestapo’s star witness, Otto Schmidt.

“By then things were moving more quickly than I knew, and with a greater ruthlessness than even I could have conceived. Captain von Frisch had already been arrested at his home in Lichterfelde and taken into what the Gestapo laughingly called ‘protective custody’ at their Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse HQ. That usually meant something bad was going to happen, and it did. There they subjected him to a terrible beating from which he never really recovered. But he was immensely brave and refused to change his story—that he was the von Frisch who had actually committed the homosexual act in the lavatories at Potsdamer Platz station, not the general—and eventually they were obliged to let him go. Hennig made me and my partner come and fetch von Frisch from his cell in the basement of the Gestapo HQ, which I can still remember in awful detail. It’s not the kind of thing you ever really forget.

“He was lying naked on the floor of the cell in a pool of blood and urine and, for several minutes, we thought he was dead. His whole body was as purple as a ripe plum—he was actually bleeding through his ears—and it was only when I touched him that he moaned and we realized that, incredibly, he was still alive. The Gestapo were very good at beating a man within an inch of his life, and sometimes nearer than that. A cursory examination of his body revealed he was suffering, probably, from several broken ribs, a broken collarbone, a broken jaw, and multiple contusions. All of his fingernails and several of his teeth had been torn out with a pair of pliers and one of his eyes was bulging horribly out of its socket. I’d seen men beaten before, but never as badly as that and certainly never one as old. Without a stretcher on which to carry him we were obliged to lift him out to my car in a filthy old blanket and only permitted to take him to the Charité Hospital on condition that we did not tell the medical staff the truth of how he had come by his injuries, so we were obliged to make up a real Bremen Town musician of a tale that he had sleepwalked his way out of the house and into the path of a tram. Not that they believed us, mind. They’d seen men, and women, who’d been beaten up by the Gestapo and SA many times before. How he’d resisted all of that and stuck to his story I’ll never know.

“In spite of his injuries, somehow the captain managed to stage enough of a recovery for him to make it into the military court some five weeks later. On March second, nineteen thirty-eight, he gave his evidence and directly contradicted the story given by his original blackmailer, Otto Schmidt. The proceedings were an absolute farce. I sat and watched the whole thing in the Preussenhaus and even Hermann Göring looked embarrassed. Everyone could see he’d been badly beaten and everyone knew by who but somehow this evidence was ignored. Thanks to the captain, General von Fritsch was acquitted. But the mischief was already done, and while he retained his military rank he was not reinstated as commander in chief. He subsequently returned to his regiment and was killed during the invasion of Poland in September nineteen thirty-nine. There are some who believe he put himself in the way of a hero’s death. And that would have been quite typical of a man of that background.

“After his dismally unconvincing performance in court, I heard Otto Schmidt was rearrested a couple of weeks later and taken to a concentration camp—probably Sachsenhausen—where I imagine he died wearing a pink triangle. Jews in the camps were forced to wear a yellow star. Homosexuals wore a pink triangle. It meant that the guards could devise punishments to fit the crime, as they saw it. Which must have been terrible. Because of the six million, it’s usually forgotten that lots of German homosexuals also met violent deaths in the camps. The Nazis never seemed to run short of minorities to persecute.”

“Dreadful,” said Maugham. “It’s tragic the number of queers who are blackmailed. You would think the very frequency of it would make it less tragic somehow, and that those of us with coarser frames could hardly bear much of it. And yet queers like me regard it almost as an occupational hazard. I often wonder what it is that other men seem to have against queers. I think it’s the importance we attach to things that most men find trivial and the cynicism with which we regard the subjects the common man holds essential to his spiritual welfare. That and an abnormal interest in other men’s c-cocks.”

I laughed. “Yes, probably.”

“And the poor old captain?” he asked. “What became of him?”

“His health was completely broken after the Gestapo’s treatment. I kept up with him for a month or two after that, but then he was obliged to leave his house in Lichterfelde for lack of money and I’m afraid I lost touch with him. His eventual fate is unknown to me but it’s quite possible he also ended up in a concentration camp for one reason or another. By then the captain’s posh army friends were hardly in a position to prevent something like that from happening. Hitler had achieved his aims of becoming commander in chief and minister of War within the space of a few weeks. A few days after the von Fritsch verdict, Germany invaded Austria and von Blomberg and the von Fritsch case were immediately forgotten as almost all of Germany and Austria now hailed Adolf Hitler as the new Messiah. In Berlin not quite so much as in Vienna. In defense of my own city, I feel obliged to mention that left-leaning Berliners never took to Hitler the way the Austrians did. But that’s another, longer story.

“Harold Hennig was demoted and later transferred to the security police in Königsberg; we met again when I was transferred there from Berlin, in nineteen forty-four, but again, that’s another story, too. This man has been blackmailing men like you, sir, for more than twenty years. He’s a professional and he knows what he’s doing. We mustn’t expect him to make any mistakes of the kind that were typical of the way the Nazis handled the case against General von Fritsch. He won’t. In fact, it’s my guess he intends to put the squeeze on me, in a smaller way than with you, sir. After all, he knows my real identity and a great deal of my true history. I’d say that he’ll squeeze me not because he can make money out of me—I don’t have much—but just because he can. With him it’s a matter of inclination and habit. A way of demonstrating his power over another person.”

“I’m sorry.”

Maugham sipped his dry martini; I could smell the absinthe in his glass. It lent the cold vermouth and vodka a sort of corrupt edge, a bit like the inscrutable old man himself.

“Might I ask you a personal question?”

“You can ask but I may not answer.”

“Have you ever killed a man?”

“Killing’s legal in wartime. Or so we were often told.”

“I’ll take that as a yes. But do you think you could ever do it again?”

“It’s like having a drink. It’s hard to stop after just one. But it’s a lot more difficult to kill someone than it ever seems on the pages of a novel.”

“Ah, yes, where would art be without murder?”

“And yet it’s a lot easier, too. Anyone who can slice a loaf can cut a throat. But it’s been a long time since I pulled the trigger on a man. Believe it or not, I came down here to get away from all that.”

“What I’m asking is if perhaps you could arrange for Herr Hebel to have an accident. What I mean to say is that a car might easily knock him down. Or the brakes on his own car might be fixed to fail on some precipitous corner. There are plenty of those around here. I’d be quite prepared to pay you what I’m going to have to pay him, just to be sure that he’s not going to come back and ask for more. I mean it. Fifty thousand dollars if you bump him off. At my age one is inclined to consider anything for a quiet life. Even murder. And frankly that isn’t such a crime these days, is it? Not since the war. Look, all I’m asking is that you think about it.”

“I know what you’re asking, sir. And the answer is no. I’d much prefer to disappear again than have to kill our friend Harold Hebel. Fiat justitia, pereat mundus. Let justice reign even if the world should perish from it. That’s just my version of the starry skies above me and the moral law within me.”

“What’s that—Kant?”

I nodded. “It’s not because I care what happens to Hebel. I wish him as much ill as can befall any man. And there was certainly a time when I’d have cheerfully murdered him without a second thought. It’s that I care about what happens to me rather more than him. I have no wish to add an eleventh volume to that ten-volume apologia pro vita sua I was telling you about before. Besides, you have no way of knowing what elaborate precautions a man like that has already taken with his life. He almost expects to be murdered. I daresay he has already sent a local lawyer an envelope that is to be opened in the event of his sudden death while he’s down here in Cap Ferrat.”

“That’s a disturbing thought.”

“It’s certainly what I would do in his handmade English brogues.”

“Yes, Robin noticed them, too. It’s just too awful to be blackmailed by a chap who goes to the same shoemaker as oneself. At least Louis Legrand looked like what he was: a cheap little hustler. Apparently, this fellow looks like a successful businessman.”

Maugham lit a cigarette and his eyes turned melancholy.

“Pity,” he said with a touch of sardonic amusement. “That we can’t kill him, I mean. I should like to have helped commit one truly criminal act in my life. Especially now that I am so highly regarded. It would have amused me greatly if I’d been able to attend the royal wedding while planning a murder.”

“There’s nothing to stop you killing him,” I said.

“Even when I was in the service in Russia and I had to carry a revolver I was never much of a shot. And my eyesight is not up to much. So I’d be sure to miss. Unless it was a critic I was shooting at. I’m damned sure I could hit Harold Hobson, the theater critic, with no problem at all.”

“Then one of your friends. Your butler, if he’s as handy with a gun as he is with the gin. Or Robin, perhaps.”

“If one had a revolver, one might almost suggest it to him,” said Maugham. “But I’m afraid I wouldn’t know where to get such a thing.”

“Guns are easily obtained,” I said. “It’s the guts to use one in cold blood that are harder to find.”

“I suppose so.” Maugham thought for a moment. “Robin could do it, I think. Kill Hebel, I mean. I’m certain he killed people during the war. Your people. He was mentioned in dispatches, you know. But on second thought he’d certainly botch something like a murder and leave a crucial piece of evidence behind: one of those monogrammed gold cuff links, perhaps. Or more likely his fucking business card. In many ways Robin is very unworldly. My fault, really. I’ve insulated him from the real world for pretty much all his life.”

“Then you’d best not ask him in case he feels obliged to say yes.”

“I think you’re probably right.”

“What happens now? Did Hebel explain if I’m supposed to make contact with him? Or if he’ll make contact with me? And what about the money? Do you have that ready for him?”

“The cash is in my safe downstairs. And he said he would leave a note for you, explaining where and when he wants the money paid. The sooner the better, one imagines.”