The Other Side of Silence

TWO

Between Nice and Monaco, Cap Ferrat is a pine-planted spur that projects into the sea like the dried-up and near useless sexual organs of some old French roué—an entirely appropriate comparison, given the Riviera’s reputation as a place where great age and precocious beauty go hand in wrinkly hand, usually to the beach, to the shops, to the bank, and then to bed, although not always in such decorous order. The Riviera often reminds me of how Berlin was immediately after the war, except that female companionship will cost you a lot more than a bar of chocolate or a few cigarettes. Down here it’s money that talks, even when it has nothing much to say except voulez vous or s’il vous plaît. Most women would prefer to spend time with Monsieur Gateau to Mister Right, although unsurprisingly these often turn out to be one and the same. Certainly, if I had a bit more cash I, too, might find myself a pretty little companion with whom to make a fool of myself and generally spoil. I’m enough of a feebleminded idiot now to be quite sure that I don’t have what nearly all women on the Côte d’Azur are looking for, unless it’s directions to Beaulieu-sur-Mer, or the name of the best restaurant in Cannes (it’s Da Bouttau), or perhaps a couple of spare tickets to the Municipal Opera House in Nice. We see a lot of Monsieur Gateau and the firm, greenish apple of his rheumy eye at the Grand Hôtel, but he has his confrères at the nearby La Voile d’Or, a smaller, elegant hotel situated on a high peninsula overlooking the blue lagoon that is the picturesque fishing port of Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat. This three-story French villa—formerly the Park Hotel—was established in 1925 by an English golf champion named Captain Powell, which probably explains the old wooden putters on the walls; either that or they have a very challenging hole in the hotel’s very elegant drawing room. That’s usually where I sit down and drink gimlets and play bridge with my only three friends, twice a week, without fail.

To be perfectly honest, they’re not what most people would call friends. This is France, after all, and real friends are thin on the ground, especially when you’re German. Besides, you don’t play bridge to make friends or to keep them either, and sometimes it helps if you actively dislike your opponents. My bridge partner, Antimo Spinola, an Italian, is the manager at the municipal casino in Nice. Fortunately he’s a much better player than I am, which is unfortunate for him. Our usual opponents are an English married couple, Mr. and Mrs. Rose, who have a small villa in the hills above Èze. I wouldn’t say I dislike either of them but they’re a typically English husband and wife, I think, in that they never seem to demonstrate much emotion, least of all for each other. I’ve seen Siamese fighting fish that were more affectionate. Mr. Rose was a top heart specialist in London’s Harley Street and made a small fortune treating some Greek millionaire before he retired to the South of France. Spinola says he likes playing with Rose because if he had a heart attack then Jack would know what to do, but I’m not so sure about that. Rose drinks more than I do and I’m not sure he even has a heart, which would seem to be a prerequisite for the job. His wife, Julia, was his nurse-receptionist and is by far the better player, with a real feel for the table and a memory like an elephant, which is the animal she most closely resembles, although not because of her size. She’d be a very good-looking woman if her oversize ears were not stuck on at right angles to her head. Crucially, she never discusses the hands she’s just played, as if she’s reluctant to give Spinola and me any clues as to how to play against them.

It’s a good example to take when it comes to discussing the war, as well. As far as anyone knows, Walter Wolf—that’s the name I’m living under in France—was a captain with the Intendant General’s Office in Berlin, with responsibility for army catering. It’s what you might expect of someone who’s worked in good hotels for much of his life. Jack Rose is quite convinced he remembers me from a stay at the Adlon Hotel. I sometimes wonder what they might think if they knew their opponent had once worn an SS uniform and been the near confidant of men like Heydrich and Goebbels.

I don’t think Spinola would be very surprised to discover I had a secret past. He speaks Ivan almost as well as I do, and I’m more or less certain he was an officer with the Italian 8th Army in Russia and must have been one of the lucky ones who got out in 1943 following the rout at the Battle of Nikolajewka. He doesn’t talk about the war, of course. That’s the great thing about bridge. Nobody talks about anything very much. It’s the perfect game for people who have something to hide. I tried to teach it to Elisabeth but she didn’t have the patience for the drills I wanted to show her that would have made her a better player. Another reason she didn’t take to the game was that she doesn’t speak English—which is the language we play bridge in because that’s the only language the Roses can speak.

A day or two after the arrival of Hennig at the Grand Hôtel I went down to La Voile d’Or to play bridge with Spinola and the Roses. As usual they were late and I found Spinola sitting at the bar, staring blankly at the wallpaper. He was in a somber mood, chain-smoking Gauloises in his short ebony holder and drinking Americanos. With his dark curly hair, easy smile, and muscular good looks, he always reminded me a little of the film actor Cornel Wilde.

“What are you doing?” I asked, speaking Russian to him. Speaking Russian to each other was how we kept in practice, as there were few Russians who ever came to the hotel or to the casino.

“Enjoying the view.”

I turned and pointed at the terrace and beyond it, the view of the port.

“The view’s that way.”

“I’ve seen it before. Besides, I prefer this one. It doesn’t remind me of anything I’d rather not remember.”

“That kind of day, huh?”

“They’re all that kind of day down here. Don’t you find?”

“Sure. Life’s shit. But don’t tell anyone here in Cap Ferrat. The disappointment would kill them.”

He shook his head. “I know all about disappointment, believe me. I’ve been seeing this woman. And now I’m not. Which is a pity. But I had to end it. She was married and it was getting difficult. Anyway, she took it quite badly. Threatened to shoot herself.”

“That’s a very French thing to do. Shoot yourself. It’s the only kind of French marksmanship you can rely on in a fix.”

“You’re so very German, Walter.”

He bought me a drink and then looked at me squarely.

“Sometimes, I look in your eyes across the bridge table and I see a lot more than a hand of cards.”

“You’re telling me I’m a bad player.”

“I’m telling you that I see a man who was never in army catering.”

“I can see you’ve never tasted my cooking, Antimo.”

“Walter, how long have we known each other?”

“I don’t know. A couple of years.”

“But we’re friends, right?”

“I hope so.”

“So then. Spinola is not my real name. I had a different name during the war. Frankly, I wouldn’t have stayed alive for very long with a name like Spinola. I was never that kind of Italian. It’s a Jewish-Italian name.”

“It doesn’t matter to me what you are, Antimo. I was never that kind of German.”

“I like you, Walter. You don’t say more than you have to. And I sense that you can keep a confidence.”

“Don’t tell me anything you don’t have to,” I said. “At my time of life I can ill afford to lose a friend.”

“Understood.”

“If it comes to that, I can ill afford to lose people who don’t like me, either. Then I really would feel alone.”

On the bar top next to my gimlet was a Partagas cigar box, which Spinola now laid his hand on.

“I need a favor,” he said.

“Name it.”

“There’s something in there I’d like you to look after for me. Just for a while.”

“All right.”

I glanced around for the barman and seeing that he was safely outside on the terrace I lifted the box and peeked inside. But even before I’d flipped the lid open, I knew what was in there. It wasn’t cigars. There’s something about the twenty-three-ounce weight of a Walther police pistol that I would recognize in my sleep. I picked it up. This one was fully loaded and, to my nose at least, it had been recently fired.

“Not that it’s any of my business,” I said, closing the cigar box, “but this one smells like it’s been busy. I’ve shot people myself and that was nobody’s business, either. It’s just something that happens sometimes when guns are involved.”

“It’s her gun,” he explained.

“She must be quite a girl.”

“She is. I took it off her. Just to make sure she didn’t do anything stupid. And I don’t want it around the house in case she comes back. At least until she returns my door key.”

“Sure, I’ll look after it. A good bridge partner is hard to come by. Besides, I’ve missed having a gun about the place. A house feels kind of empty without a firearm in it. I’ll put it in the car, okay?”

“Thanks, Walter.”

I stepped outside, locked the gun in my glove box, and went back into the hotel just as the Roses drew up in their cream Bentley convertible. I waited a moment, and then instinctively opened the heavy car door for Mrs. Rose to step out. He always drove them to the La Voile d’Or, but she always drove them back, having allowed herself just the two gin and tonics next to his six or seven whiskeys.

“Mrs. Rose,” I said pleasantly, and gallantly picked up the green chiffon scarf she dropped on the ground as she got out of the car. It matched the green dress she was wearing. Green wasn’t her color, but I wasn’t going to let that interfere with my game. “How nice to see you again.”

She answered, smiling, but I was hardly paying much attention to her; my mind was still on Spinola’s girlfriend’s gun while my eyes were now drawn to two men having an argument at the opposite end of the hotel terrace. One of them was a florid-faced Englishman who was often hanging around La Voile d’Or. The other was Harold Hennig. Automatically I opened the front door for Mrs. Rose before allowing myself a second look at Hennig and the Englishman, which revealed it was, perhaps, less of an argument and more a case of a smiling Hennig telling the Englishman what to do and the Englishman not liking it very much. He had my sympathy. I never much liked taking orders from Harold Hennig myself. But I put it quickly out of my mind and followed Jack and Julia Rose inside, and for the first time in a while Spinola and I beat them, which trumped everything until I went back to the Grand to cover for our night porter, who’d phoned in sick with a summer cold, whatever that is. I’d had a winter cold in a Soviet POW camp for about two years and that was bad enough. A summer cold sounds just awful.

I don’t mind the late shift. It’s cool and the sound of cicadas is as soothing as the night honeysuckle that adorns the walls behind the emaciated statues near the front door. Also, there are fewer guests in evidence with questions and problems to solve and I spent the first hour on duty reading Nice-Matin to help improve my French. At about one o’clock I had to go and help a very rich American, Mr. Biltmore, up to his fourth-floor suite. He’d been drinking brandy all night and had managed to empty a bottle and the bar with his obnoxious remarks, which were mostly to do with the war and how the French hadn’t quite pulled their weight, and that Vichy had been a Nazi government in all but name. I wouldn’t have argued with any of that, unless I’d been a Frenchman. As Napoleon might have said, but didn’t, “French history is the version of past events that French people have decided to agree upon.” I found Biltmore slumped in a chair and barely conscious, which is the way I prefer hotel drunks, but he started to get a little loud and unruly as I went to rouse him politely. Then he took a swing at me, and then another, so that I was obliged to tap him on the chin with my fist, just enough to daze him and save us both from further injury. That left me with a different problem because he was as big as a sequoia and just as hard to fold across my shoulder, and it took almost all of my strength to get him into the elevator, and then the rest of it to haul him out of the cage and onto his bed. I didn’t undress him. As a concierge, the last thing you want is for a drunken American to regain consciousness when you’ve got his pants halfway down his legs. Amis don’t take kindly to being undressed, especially by another man. In a situation like that it’s not just teeth that can be lost but a job as well. On the Riviera, a concierge—even a good one, with all his teeth—can be replaced in no time at all, but no hotel wants to lose a guest like Mr. Biltmore, especially when he’s paying more than fifteen hundred francs a night, which is about four hundred dollars, to stay in a suite he’s booked for three whole weeks. No one can afford to lose thirty thousand francs plus bar bills and tips.

By the time I went back downstairs I was as warm as a Chinaman’s pressing cloth. So I went back into the bar and had the barman make me an ice-cold gimlet with the good stuff—the 57 percent Plymouth Navy Strength gin they give the sailors in nuclear submarines—just to help the four weaker ones I’d already drunk at La Voile d’Or to take the strain. I hurried it down with my evening meal, which was a couple of olives and a handful of pretzels.

I’d just finished eating dinner when another guest presented herself at the front desk. And it was quite a present: lightly scented, sober, tightly wrapped in black, which left you a pretty good idea of what was under the paper, and with a nice little diamond bow on the front. I don’t know much about fashion but hers was a sort of ballerina bodice-shaped dress, with one shoulder uncovered and, now that I looked at it again, not a bow on the waist at all but a little diamond flower. In her matching black gloves and shoes, she looked every bit as fine as Christian Dior’s bank balance. Mrs. French was one of our local regulars, a rich and extremely attractive English lady in her forties whose father was a famous artist who’d once lived and worked on the Riviera. She’s a writer by all accounts and rents a local house in Villefranche, but she spends much of her free time at the Grand Hôtel. She swims a lot in our pool, reads a book in the bar, uses the telephone a great deal, and then has a late dinner in the restaurant. Often she’s alone, but sometimes she’s with friends. A few weeks ago, Mrs. French seemed to be making a play for the French minister of national defense, Monsieur Bourgès-Maunoury, who was staying here, but that came to nothing. It seemed that the minister had other things on his mind—like the Islamic threat posed by the Algerian FLN, not to mention Egypt’s cut-price Hitler, Gamal Abdel Nasser, and perhaps the anonymous woman who was in the room next to his. He’s not a bad-looking fellow, I suppose; dark-haired, dark-eyed, perhaps a little oily, a bit small, and frankly a couple of leagues below where Mrs. French plays. I thought a nice brunette like her could do better. Then again, Maurice Bourgès-Maunoury is tipped to be the next prime minister of France.

“Good evening, Mrs. French,” I said. “I hope you enjoyed your dinner.”

“Yes, it wasn’t bad.”

“That doesn’t sound nearly as good as it should be.”

She sighed. “It could have been better.”

“Was it the food? Or perhaps the service?”

“To be honest, neither one of them was at fault. And yet there was something lacking. With only my book for company, I fear it was nothing that can be easily remedied by anyone here in the Grand Hôtel.”

“Then might I ask what it is you’re reading, Mrs. French?” My manners have improved a lot since I started working in hotels again. Sometimes I sound almost civil.

She opened her crocodile-leather dispatch bag and showed me her book: The Quiet American by Graham Greene. My cop’s eyes took quick note of the bottle of Mystikum, a sheaf of French francs, a gold compact, and a little purple screw-top tin that might have contained a powder puff but more probably contained her diaphragm.

“Not one I’ve read,” I said.

“No. But I think you’ve probably forgotten more about how to render an American acceptably quiet than Graham Greene has ever learned.” She smiled. “Poor Mr. Biltmore. Let’s hope he puts his sore head down to alcohol tomorrow and not your fist.”

“Oh, you saw that. Pity. I had thought the bar was empty.”

“I was seated behind a pillar. But you handled it very well. Like an expert. I’d say you’ve done that kind of thing before. Professionally.”

I shrugged. “The hotel business always presents a number of interesting challenges.”

“If you say so.”

“Perhaps I can recommend something else for you to read,” I offered, hurrying to change the subject.

“Why not? You are a concierge, after all. Although in my own experience playing Robert Benchley is perhaps above and beyond the call of your normal duties.”

I mentioned a book by Albert Camus that had impressed me.

“No, I don’t like him,” she said. “He’s too French for my tastes. Too political, as well. But now that I think about it, maybe you could recommend a book about bridge. I’d like to learn the game and I know you play it often, Mr. Wolf.”

“I’d be happy to lend you some of my own books, Mrs. French. Anything by Terence Reese or S. J. Simon would do, I think.”

“Better still, you could teach me the game yourself. I’d be happy to pay you for some private lessons.”

“I’m afraid my duties here wouldn’t really permit that, Mrs. French. On second thought, I think you’re probably best to start with Iain Macleod’s Bridge Is an Easy Game.”

If she was disappointed she didn’t show it. “That sounds just right. Will you bring it tomorrow?”

“Of course. I regret I won’t be here to give it you myself, Mrs. French, but I’ll certainly leave it with one of my colleagues.”

“You’re not working tomorrow? Pity. I enjoy our little chats.”

I smiled diplomatically and bowed. “Always glad to be of service, Mrs. French.”

In bridge that’s what we call No Bid.