Philip Kerr - The Lady from Zagreb

The finials on the wrought-iron fence in front of the address I’d been given looked like oak trees; there were smaller ones in the front garden. I hadn’t ever seen the Alhambra, but I imagine there were parts of it — the guesthouse perhaps — that resembled the place I was looking at now. Built of cream-colored stone, with redbrick details and church windows, it even had towers and castellations, not to mention a car parked on the gravel driveway that was the exact twin of the one I’d just left on the street. It was exactly the kind of house where you expected to meet a movie star, so the little lozenge-sized scar on the right-hand side of the doorpost from where a mezuzah had once been fixed to the doorframe brought me up short. You didn’t have to be the local rabbi or see a bar mitzvah party in the garden to know that this large eccentric house had once belonged to a family of Jews.

I cranked the old-fashioned silver doorbell handle and heard it ring loudly in the hall. I waited and cranked it again, and when nothing happened I peered through the glass in the door for a while but, seeing nothing but a hall tree and bench with a mirror as big as a cinema screen, I walked around to the back where the lawn rolled gently down to the side of the lake. Several orange marker buoys had been deployed in the water to remind any unwelcome visitors with boats that the residents of the house weren’t ever home to visitors. But I wasn’t looking at the water, I was looking at the green baize lawn and what was on the lawn, because it was there, lying on a large white linen spread, that I first laid eyes on Dalia Dresner in the flesh, of which there was rather more on show than I’d been expecting. She was as naked as a Potsdam Giant’s bayonet and every bit as hazardous to men, as I was about to discover. Tiresias at least had the good grace to cover his eyes when he accidentally walked in on Athena taking a shower. I did not. Eventually my own natural good manners persuaded me that — certainly after five minutes — I should have announced myself or at least cleared my throat.

“When Dr. Goebbels asked me to come and see you I had no idea that this is what he meant.”

She sat up quickly and covered herself with the linen spread, but not before she’d made sure I had seen everything.

“Oh,” was all she said.

“I’m sorry,” I said, although I wasn’t sorry at all. “I rang the bell but no one answered.”

“I gave the maid the day off today.”

“If she doesn’t come back, I’ll take the job.”

“You’re Gunther, of course. The detective. Josef said you were coming.”

“I’m Gunther.”

“The studio makes us lie in the sun like this. To get a tan. I can’t imagine it’s very good for my skin but Josef insists that this is what the public wants.”

“I’ve got no argument with that.”

She smiled shyly.

“Perhaps I ought to wait in the house.”

“It’s all right. You stay here. I’ll go and put on some clothes. I won’t be long.”

She got up and went into the house. “Help yourself to some lemonade,” she said without looking back.

It was only now that I noticed the garden chairs and table and the jug of lemonade that was standing on it. If there’d been a pink elephant in the garden I probably wouldn’t have noticed that, either. I unbuttoned my tunic and sat down and lit a cigarette and put my face in the warm July sunshine. There was a smile on it now although really there shouldn’t have been. After all, I’d seen Dalia Dresner naked before. Millions had seen her naked. It was the only high spot of The Saint That Never Was , a Jud Süss — in — reverse movie about a woman called Hypatia who was a fourth-century Greek philosopher. At the end of the movie, also directed by Veit Harlan, Hypatia, played by Dalia Dresner, is stripped naked and stoned to death by the Jews of Alexandria. Until that moment it had been a very boring film and there were some women I knew who said that Hypatia had it coming — that Dresner’s was not a great performance. Others, less critical of actors and acting and mostly men such as myself, enjoyed the film for what it was — a good excuse to see a beautiful woman taking off her clothes. Goebbels knew half of his audience, anyway. The smile on my face persisted; but instead of rerunning a sequence of shots inside my mind’s eye of Fräulein Dresner’s naked body, I ought to have asked myself how, if she knew I was coming to the house on Kaiser-Strasse, she’d prepared so carefully for my arrival — after all, there were two glasses on the table next to the lemonade jug — by being splinter-naked in her garden.

A few minutes later she came back wearing a dark blue floral dress. The brown cowboy boots were an eccentric, individual touch. I’d never seen a German woman wearing cowboy boots, least of all with bare legs. I liked her legs. They were long and brown and muscular and they were attached to her backside, which had seemed just right, for me. Her golden-blond hair was now gathered into a bunch. On her strong wrist was a gold Rolex and on her ring finger a sapphire as big as a five-pfennig piece. Her nails were nicely manicured and varnished with pink, like the perfectly formed petals of little geraniums. She sat down and stared at me with the most direct stare I’d ever received from a woman; when she looked at me it was like facing down a cat with blue eyes. The kind of cat that plays with a mouse until the mouse can’t stand the game for another minute, and then some more.

“Josef said that you’re a famous detective.” Her voice was low and soft, like an eiderdown pillow. “I always thought they’d be men with waxed mustaches and pipes.”

“Oh, I’ll smoke a pipe when I can get the tobacco. And you’re the famous one, Fräulein Dresner. Not me.”

“But you are a detective.”

I showed her my beer-token — my little brass warrant disc.

“Tell me about yourself,” she said.

“The important stuff?”

“Of course.”

I shrugged. “I’m forty-seven. I smoke too much. I drink too much. When I can.”

“I’m afraid all I have out here is some lemonade.”

“Lemonade will be fine, thanks.”

She poured two glasses and handed one to me.

“Why do you drink too much?”

“I’ve got no wife and I’ve got no children. I work for the army right now because the police — the real police — they don’t want me anymore. You see, there’s no room in this country for people who want to know the truth, about anything. People like me, that is. I have one good suit and a pair of shoes that I have to stuff with newspaper in the winter. I have a bed with a broken leg. That’s in a tiny apartment in Fasanenstrasse. I hate the Nazis and I hate myself, but not always in that order. That’s why.” I smiled ruefully. “I’ll tell you a secret, fräulein. I don’t know why but I will. There are times when I think I’d like to be someone else.”

She smiled to reveal a row of perfect teeth. Everything about this woman looked perfect. I was beginning to appreciate her.

“That’s something I know a little about. Who? Who do you wish you were?”

“It doesn’t really matter who. The important thing is what.”

“What, then?”

“Dead.”

“That must be easy enough to fix in Germany.”

“You would think so, wouldn’t you? But you see, there’s two kinds of dead. There’s ordinary dead and then there’s Nazi dead. The worst kind is Nazi dead. I don’t want to die until I’ve seen the last Nazi do it first.”

“You don’t sound like a detective. You sound like a man who’s lost all his faith. Who’s full of doubt, about everything.”

“That’s what makes me a good detective. That and a certain romantic charm I might have.”