The Other Side of Silence

TEN

Sunday morning arrived as hot as a parboiled cicada. The Grand Hôtel’s honey-marble lobby was air-conditioned so relentlessly, however, that I was glad of my thick morning coat even though it made me look like my grandfather, who was a civil servant and worked all his life at the Prussian House of Representatives in Berlin where, in 1862, he’d heard Bismarck give his famous “Blood and Iron” speech. I missed my grandfather. And for a moment I remembered how, when I was a small boy, he would take me from his house near Fischerinsel to visit the bear pit nearby. Behind my desk I must have resembled a bear in a pit, standing up on my hind legs whenever a guest came close in the hope that I might please them and earn myself a tip. Hotel guests drifted in, drifted out, drifted upstairs, drifted out to the swimming pool, drifted in to breakfast, lunch, and dinner and all in a variety of holiday costumes, some of which were almost as absurd and unsuitable as the black wool morning coat worn by a grand hotel concierge. A few of the guests even drifted off to the church in Beaulieu, but mostly they stayed put at the refrigerated hotel. I didn’t blame them. It was too hot for religion but then, like many Prussians, I was always more pagan by inclination and background. For Bismarck it had been military spending—metaphorically, blood and iron—that had been the key to Prussia’s significance in Germany; for me it was always the fact that Prussia had remained a total stranger to Christianity until finally it was conquered by the pope’s Teutonic Knights in 1283. Ever since then, God has been punishing us harshly for the tardiness of our conversion to his church. Now, that’s what I call a chosen people. It explained a lot of German history. It explained the impenetrable black forest that was my own dark soul, and it certainly explained my sense of humor, which was never very far away when giving the hotel guests directions, buying tickets for the theater, or handling an exchange of foreign currency, usually involving U.S. dollars. Americans always complained about the rate of exchange in spite of the fact they were the richest tourists on the Riviera that year. Americans were the richest tourists on the Riviera every year, a reputation that seemed to bring most of them a great deal of enjoyment but also had the effect of their paying almost twice as much as anyone else did and which the French unashamedly called le tax américain. Price gouging was one thing and you could hardly blame the cash-strapped French for giving in to the temptation to demand too much money in restaurants and taxis. Demanding money with menaces was quite another. In my book, blackmail is one of the worst crimes there is, since it can and does often last a lifetime, and I can still remember the enormous pleasure with which I learned that Leopold Gast, Berlin’s most notorious blackmailer, had been sentenced to life imprisonment in 1929, after one of his many mostly female victims committed suicide, but not before writing a detailed letter to the police—a letter that later convicted him. Frankly, the guillotine would have been too good for a loathsome man like Gast. And it was with a similar degree of loathing that I now regarded Harold Heinz Hennig, aka Harold Hebel, as he walked nonchalantly across the hotel lobby to my station. He was smiling, too, like a wolf who’d just eaten the granny, which only served to exacerbate my hatred of the handsome, younger man. I caught a strong smell of cologne, noted the expensive Cartier gold watch on the tanned wrist of the arm resting on the desk, and found myself wanting to cut the limb off and make him eat it. It was with this pleasing image that I entertained myself while we spoke.

“Herr Hebel,” I said in German, staring coldly at him like a porcelain dog. “What can I do for you?”

He put a manicured hand inside the breast pocket of his Savile Row jacket and withdrew a buff-colored envelope, which he then handed to me. “If you have a spare few moments, I was wondering if you might write a translation of this letter from French into German for me? My French isn’t nearly as good as yours, Herr Wolf, and it contains some technical terms that are frankly beyond me.”

These were the first words he’d spoken to me since January 1945, and it took all of my self-control not to remind him of this or to punch him in the nose. Hebel knew that, of course, but it was all part of a careful act that he should pretend he and I were almost strangers. His voice carried the rasping edge of a growl, like a big cat, or a guard dog.

“Certainly, sir. I’ll get right onto it.”

“Take your time, my dear fellow,” he said affably. “There’s no hurry. Sometime this afternoon would be just fine.”

“Very well, sir.”

“You can leave both versions in my room if you like. I’ll pick them up tomorrow.”

And then he went out into the fierce heat and handed a tip to the parking valet, who ran off to fetch his car.

I was on my mid-morning break before I opened the envelope and carefully read Hebel’s typewritten instructions on how and where and when the blackmail money was to be paid. Then I went into the back office and called Somerset Maugham at the Villa Mauresque, and when his friend and secretary, Alan, fetched him to the phone, I told the old man to have the money ready for collection that same evening.

“He’s made contact then?” Maugham was speaking German, which suited me fine; he seemed to like speaking German to me.

“Yes.”

“What did you think of him?”

“The same thing I thought more than ten years ago. That I’d like to see him dead.”

“The offer’s still there.”

“No, thanks. I don’t care to murder anybody, Mr. Maugham. Even the people I don’t much like.”

“Can he be trusted?”

“No, of course he can’t. He’s a snake. But this is a big payday for him, and he’ll want things to proceed without any problems. So, to that extent, everything should go according to plan. At least tonight. After that, your guess is as good as mine.”

“How shall I pack it? The money, I mean. In a parcel?”

“A parcel would have to be unwrapped so the money could be counted. No, anything that slows things down tonight is to be avoided. A bag would be good. Preferably one that you don’t mind giving away to a bastard like Hebel.”

“Would a Pan American Airlines flight bag be suitable, do you think?”

“I don’t know. Can that hold fifty thousand dollars?”

“I should say so.”

“In which case, use it. Either way, have the money ready by seven o’clock. The meet is at eight. I’ll bring the negative and the photograph straight to the Villa Mauresque, as soon as I have them.”

“Fifty thousand dollars,” he exclaimed grumpily. “Must be the most expensive fucking photograph in history.”

“A picture can tell a thousand words. Isn’t that what they say?”

“Christ, I hope not. Otherwise I’m out of f-fucking work.”

“Look, sir, it’s probably best that none of the words that this particular picture can tell are ever heard outside of a Turkish bathhouse or a novel by Marcel Proust. So you’d best reconcile yourself to paying up.”

“That’s easy for you to say, Mr. Wolf. Fifty thousand dollars is fifty thousand dollars.”

“You’re right. And I’ll admit, fifty thousand pictures of Washington are fifty thousand stories I’d love to hear. So, don’t pay him. Tell him to go to hell and take the flak. It’s up to you, sir. But sometimes, when it’s absolutely necessary, everyone has to eat flies.”

“Suppose I give you the money and you drive straight for the Italian border? You could be in Genoa before midnight and on a boat to fuck knows where.”

“And leave my wonderful job here at the Grand Hôtel? I don’t think so. Every man likes to delude himself that he has some moral standards. For years I told myself that I was the most honest man I’d ever met. Of course, that was easy enough in Nazi Germany. But why take my word for it? Mark a few bills. Take a few serial numbers. I’d be easy enough to trace. I daresay even the French police wouldn’t have too much of a struggle to find me or it. Come to think of it, do that anyway. You never know.”

The rest of Sunday passed slowly as it often does, especially when there is an important task to be completed at the end of it. Hebel came back to the hotel just after lunch and went straight to his room without so much as a glance in my direction. He was a cool one, I’ll say that for him. I went out to his car and searched it; there was a brochure from the perfume factory in Grasse and I concluded that this was where he’d been. Meanwhile, the small of my back had started hurting, which is not unusual when I’ve been on my feet for much of the day, and I was keen to get home and have a bath. But first I had an important job to do. As soon as Hebel went out again—around six—I took his key and went upstairs to search the German’s room. I was nibbling around at the edge of his viperous person, keen to see what else he might have among his high-quality possessions that was potentially compromising to my vulnerable and easily compromised client. Letters, perhaps, or another photograph. It was my idea of room service. He had left nothing of value to him in the hotel safe, I knew, because I would certainly have known about it, and nothing in his car, either. That left his hotel suite and, perhaps, as I had suggested to Maugham, some local lawyer with a strong room and a weekly retainer. What I did find was surprising, although not in the way I might have expected.