The Other Side of Silence

THIRTEEN

I took the stairs and walked along the thickly carpeted hall to room 28, where I knocked and waited patiently, although anyone observing the scene might have thought differently because of the gun I was holding in my hand—Hebel’s gun. It was pointed straight at the door handle, a last-minute decision that was calculated to try and put an end to the blackmail right then and there.

The smile he was wearing as he opened up flickered for a moment as he backed away with his hands rising slowly behind his neatly combed head.

“No need for guns. What is this?”

“It’s your gun. That’s what this is.” I kicked the room door shut behind me and tossed the Pan Am flight bag on the bed. “I thought you might recognize it.”

“My gun?”

“Yes. It was in your drawer next to the note for me.”

“Did you read it?”

“No. There’s nothing you have to say that’s of any interest to me.”

“I see.”

“No, you don’t. This is not what you think, at all. I intend to search your room and make sure that I get the negative and all the prints—not to mention any other items you might be saving so you can squeeze the lemon again. That’s just good business.” I pointed the hole in the end of the gun at the carpet. “On your knees. It’s been a while since I shot anyone just to wound them and I certainly wouldn’t like to answer for the present state of my marksmanship, so you’d better not try anything.”

Hebel knelt down at the edge of the bed and started to relax a little.

“Look, Gunther, I’m not armed. In spite of any evidence to the contrary, guns are always a mistake in this business. They’re generally a sign that negotiations have failed.”

“Is that what you call it? They’ll be asking you to address the UN General Assembly next.”

“There’s very little here but do go ahead and search. You’ll find the envelope with the prints and the neg on top of the chest of drawers. As I agreed with Herr Maugham. And I really don’t have anything else for sale. Fifty thousand dollars—I assume it’s in the flight bag—is a big score for me. Enough to retire on.”

I found the envelope, and having established the promised contents were indeed there, I opened the drawers and generally had a good look around his room. It was a nice room, with a fine view of the harbor. Nothing as grand as the Grand, but nice and comfortable and tastefully decorated. I almost preferred it.

“One thing I learned with the Berlin police,” I told him. “Money’s like a state pension. There’s never enough to retire on. Especially when you’re a crook.”

“I suppose you’re not going to pay me now.”

“That’s the general idea, smart guy.”

“But you still brought the money. You went to the house and fetched the money and now you’re here. Which must mean—no, don’t tell me that you’re planning to keep it yourself?”

“I thought about it.”

“Suppose I tell Mr. Maugham.”

“Suppose I slap your mouth with this pistol. Dentists aren’t so easy to find on a Sunday evening.”

“You know we could split the money. Fifty-fifty. With my silence guaranteed.”

“That would mean me becoming your partner. And that’s not going to happen, not after what happened in Königsberg.”

“Ah. I was wondering when we’d get to that.” He shook his head. “Look, that was all a very long time ago.”

“Hard to forget, though.”

“Perhaps you should try. If you’d read my letter in the drawer at the Grand you’d have seen my apology for that. Not that this matters very much. We’re all friends in Europe now, aren’t we? Allies in the struggle against world Communism?”

“The way I figure it is this. With or without the fifty thousand dollars, you’ll either come back with something else you want to sell, or you won’t. A print you kept back. Or something altogether different. A letter, perhaps. Simple as that. My guess is that you will be back. Because you people always come back. I haven’t forgotten the way you and that bastard Otto Schmidt squeezed poor Captain von Frisch for five years. I don’t think you’re the kind of leopard who knows where to buy a tin of paint or find a good plastic surgeon.”

“Suppose I tell the police who you really are?”

“And suppose I tell them exactly how you know that? Involving the cops is bad for us both, and you know it. My guess is that we’re both wanted men, in one half of Germany or the other. Frankly, you should be glad I don’t put a hole in you, which is what you deserve.”

“My dead body would be a little hard to explain.”

“People have disappeared from this hotel before. During the war the Resistance met here.”

“Oh. Well, it can’t have been very effective, that’s all I can say. I seem to recall this part of France was Nazi in all but name. Don’t you agree?”

“I think it’s time that you started answering the questions, not me.”

“I’ve got nothing to say that you don’t already know.”

“I don’t think so. When you squeeze a lemon, you flex your fist more than once.”

“Not this time.”

I picked up a pillow, folded it over the Sig, and pointed it at the heel of one of his handmade shoes.

“You’re not serious.”

“Let’s start with where you got the picture.”

“You know what these queers are like. Can’t trust any of them.”

“A name.”

“Louis Legrand.”

“Where did you buy it? Here in France? Where?”

“Here in France. In Nice.”

“When?”

“A few weeks ago.”

“Now tell me what else you have got on the old man, or I’ll put one through your heel. It won’t kill you, but you’ll never walk again without the aid of a stick.”

“Nothing. There’s nothing else, I promise. Just the neg and the prints in the envelope. Since you have my pistol you’ve obviously searched my room at the Grand and I daresay my car as well. You know I’m telling you the truth.”

“Stop wasting my time.” I kneed him in the back and sent him sprawling onto the carpet. “We both know it wouldn’t be in the least bit like you to bet everything on the one hand. That’s not how your kind of salesman works. You squeeze the lemon until there’s no juice in him and the pips have fallen out. So you’re going to tell me where you’ve stashed the rest of your samples, or I swear you’re only leaving this room in a wheelchair.”

I pressed the muzzle of the Sig against his Achilles to underline my meaning; I don’t know that I would actually have shot him, but he wasn’t to know that.

“All right, all right, I’ll tell you.”

I let him up onto his knees again, but he was slow to get started so I flicked his earlobe with the Sig a couple of times to encourage his soul—assuming he had one—to unburden itself.

“I’d forgotten what a violent temper you have, Gunther. There’s a fury in you I just didn’t remember.”

“You should see me when I can’t find my cigarettes. So talk, before I give you an ear piercing you won’t ever forget.”

“There’s a tape,” he said.

“What kind of a tape?”

“A tape. BASF. AEG. I don’t know. A sound recording.”

“Of what, exactly?”

“A man speaking. You might say that it’s a sort of confession.”

“Who is this man?”

“Ah, now this is where it gets interesting.”

I listened carefully as he started to describe what was on the tape. At first I was confused and then surprised, and then not really surprised at all. The whole thing sounded very clever. Too clever for an ordinary Fritz like me. Which is what I had half suspected all along. The only really strange part was that Hebel had decided to involve me in the whole rotten transaction. Then again, I seem to have a talent for finding trouble; it certainly seems to have no trouble in finding me. This couldn’t have looked more like trouble if someone had erected the word in fifty-foot-high letters on the summit of nearby Mont Boron. After a while he could see his explanation had made a real impression on me and he felt confident enough to stand up and go and help himself from the bottle of schnapps on the bedside table and light a cigarette without me waving the gun in his face again.

“You want one?” he asked, and poured a short glass for me anyway. “You look as though you need one.”

I took it from his hand and downed it quickly. It was good schnapps, cold as the Frisches Haff in January, and just the way I like it.

“Where is it now, this tape?”

“Safe. I’ll let you have a copy tomorrow so you can deliver it to the Villa Mauresque where Herr Maugham can listen to it at his leisure. I’ll even lend him my tape recorder so he can play it. Anyway, I expect he’ll know what to do next. After that the old man will have forty-eight hours to raise two hundred thousand dollars. Shouldn’t be too difficult given that he’s already raised fifty thousand of it. Let’s say that I’m letting you have the picture free as a sign of my good faith.”

“You’ve come a long way since blackmailing warm boys in the lavatories at Potsdamer Platz station,” I said. “I can see how you could squeeze Somerset Maugham. But this—this strikes me as foolhardy.”

“Some lemons are bigger than others, but they’ll squeeze just as easily. I learned that from the Nazis. Hitler’s grandmother was a practiced blackmailer, did you know that?”

“It doesn’t surprise me.”

When he’d finished talking I sat on the edge of the bed and thought things over for a minute or two before I spoke again.

“I’m not supposed to be here,” I said.

“Certainly you are. I suggested to Herr Maugham that you would be the man best placed to help him. You’re here because he needs you. And if it comes to that, so do I. You’re a perfect cutout, Bernie. Reliable. Intelligent. With much to lose. Useful to me, and to Herr Maugham.”

I shook my head. “What I mean is, I should be dead.”

“All of us who survived the war were fortunate,” said Hebel, and poured me another glass. “You and me perhaps especially so.”

“Were we? I wonder. Anyway, I’m not supposed to be alive right now. A little while ago I tried to kill myself. I sat in the garage with the car engine running and just waited for it to happen. I’m still not exactly sure why I kept on breathing air and not Fina gasoline but, for a while, I understood what death really is. Of course we all know we’re going to die. But until it happens, none of us really understands what it means to be dead. Me, I understood it, perfectly. I even saw the beauty of it. You see, Hebel, you don’t die; death isn’t something that just happens to you, no. It’s like you become death. You’re a part of it. All those billions who’ve lived and then died before you. You’ve joined them. And when you’ve felt that, it never goes away, even if you think you’re still alive. Just remember that when all this is over. Just remember that it was you who chose to involve a dead man like me in your little scheme.”

After that I told him we—by which I meant me and my client—would be in touch as soon as we’d listened to the tape. Then I collected the envelope with the photographs and the neg, the Pan Am flight bag with the money, pushed the muzzle of the gun under my waistband, and, without another word, left the room.

Downstairs in the hotel lobby, I returned to the front desk.

“When you speak to your friend in the PJ see what he can find out about a man called Louis Legrand.”

“I already did,” said Henri, writing down the name. “Speak to my friend, I mean. She left her scarf.”

“Who did?”

“The woman suspected of Spinola’s murder. I called my friend in the PJ and asked him, like you asked. Whoever it was shot him left a green chiffon scarf beside his dead body.”

“Is that all? Now, with her underwear they might have proved something. Sexual behavior. Hair color. Who she likes for the Tour de France. Anything.”

“It was in his hand. The scarf. Chances are she was wearing it when she shot him, at pretty close range, too. There was a powder burn on his shirt. So it must have been someone he trusted. That’s what my friend says, anyway.”

“Hmm.”

“What does ‘hmm’ mean?”

“I’m not a detective. So it means I really don’t know what to think about it, Henri.”

Of course this was hardly a surprise, given everything else that was now crowding in upon my mind; my head must have looked like a stowaway’s cabin on the ship in that Marx Brothers film. But most of the floor space was taken up with the realization that the whole thing involving Maugham hadn’t been much to do with blackmailing him, at all. Not really. That had just been the hors d’oeuvre. Hebel had something else for sale. Something much more important than a photograph of some naked men cavorting around a swimming pool in 1937. That had been nothing more than a lure, designed to secure everyone’s attention. To establish some credentials. Well, now he had them established, as if he had just presented them at the court of St. James while wearing white gloves and carrying a cocked hat with ostrich feathers.

“I did what you asked,” he said resentfully. “He was a good man, Spinola.”

“Sure, sure. I’ll look into it, okay, Henri? Maybe I’ll find something relevant. Maybe.”

But somehow the name of the woman who’d shot and killed our friend Spinola seemed of lesser importance besides an elaborate plot to blackmail the British Secret Intelligence Service.