Philip Kerr - The Lady from Zagreb

We talked for a while — the kind of fast and elegant talk that passes for conversation but is really just dueling with short swords, with a man and a woman making gentle attacks and parries and ripostes. No scars are given and the vital organs are always left well alone. A very pleasant hour was spent like this before we moved into a dining room that was no less elegant than the drawing room, with a ceiling high enough to accommodate a chandelier as big as a Christmas tree. The wood grain on the table was so perfect it looked like one of those inkblot tests designed to test your imagination. Mine was doing just fine thanks to the scent Dalia was wearing, the sibilance of her stockings, the curve of her neck, and the frequency of her dazzling white smiles. A couple of times we bowed our heads and cigarettes toward the same match and, once, she let me touch her blond hair, which was so fine it was like a child’s. Meanwhile Agnes served a dinner that Dalia assured me she’d cooked herself, although I hardly cared if she had or hadn’t. I wasn’t there for a good meal — although it had been at least a year since I’d eaten as well — any more than I was there because I was a fan of her pictures: I wasn’t. I don’t go to the cinema much these days because I don’t like being told that Jews are like rats, that great folk songs are not made but fall out of the sky, and that Frederick the Great was the best king who ever lived. Besides, there are the newsreels to cope with: all that relentlessly positive news about how well our troops are doing in Russia. No, I was there, eating Dalia Dresner’s food and drinking her Pol Roger champagne, because Goebbels had been right: this siren woman’s face was permanently illuminated, not by anything so crude as an electrical bulb placed on a stage by a clever cameraman but by her own special light — the sun or the moon or whatever star was shooting through the sky at the time. Every time she looked into my eyes the effect was devastating, as if my heart had been stopped by some beautiful Medusa.

Dalia herself hardly ate anything; mostly she just smoked and sipped champagne and watched me making a pig of myself, which wasn’t difficult. But I guess I must have made conversation because I know she laughed a lot at some of my jokes. Some of them were pretty feeble, too, which ought to have put me on my guard against whatever it was she wanted. Maybe it was me, after all; then again, I’m no catch, and in retrospect I figure she just hoped to make sure that I did my best to find her father when I got to Yugoslavia. What you might call an incentive. But as incentives go, what happened next, when we went back into the drawing room for coffee — real coffee — and brandies — real brandy — would take some beating.

“Well, Bernie Gunther, I think if you don’t kiss me soon, I shall die. You’ve been sitting there wondering if you should and I’ve been sitting here wishing that you would. Look, whatever it was that Josef told you, I’m a free agent and not his possession. Thanks to him it’s been a while since any man had the guts to kiss me. I think you’re just the man to fix that, don’t you?”

I slid toward her on the white sofa and pressed my lips to hers and she gave herself up to me. It wasn’t long before my lips were anticipating more intimate ones and the exquisite secret sweet-and-sour taste of the other sex that only men can know.

“An abominable mystery,” she said breathily.

“What is?”

“Sexual behavior. That’s what Darwin called it. An abominable mystery. I rather like that, don’t you? It implies that there’s very little control we can exert about what’s happening to us.”

“That’s certainly the way I feel about it right now.”

She kissed me again and then began to gently chew at my earlobe while I set about feasting on her perfumed neck, and I remembered that there’s nothing quite like the feel of skin and flesh younger than your own. Newly picked fresh fruit as opposed to the kind that’s been on the shelf for rather longer, like mine.

“I’ve often thought,” she said, “that there’s some important scientific work to be done concerning the mathematics of fatal attraction. The male and female gametophytes. The pollen grain. The embryo sac. The irresistible attraction to the ovule. The altruistic self-sacrifice of the pollen tube cell exploding to deliver the sperm cells to the embryo sac.”

“I bet you say that to all the Fritzes you know.”

“It’s just pure organic chemistry, of course, and where there’s chemistry, there’s mathematics, too.”

“I was never very good at maths. Or chemistry.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I think you’re pretty good at it, Bernie. In fact, I think you’re getting better at it by the minute.”

I kissed her again, warming to my appointed task, and why not? She was easy to kiss. The fact is, you never really forget how to do it. After a while she pushed me gently away and, taking me by the hand, led me out of the drawing room toward a curving iron staircase. “Shall we?”

“Are you sure?”

“No,” she said simply. “But that’s what makes it exciting, isn’t it? No one can ever be sure. Being truly human is all about risk, not certainty. At least that’s the way I always look at it.”

She put one hand on the polished wooden handrail and led me slowly up to the second-floor landing.

“Besides, I already told you, Bernie Gunther — I do like saying your name — I’m a clever girl. You don’t need to worry that you’re taking advantage of me.”

“Maybe it’s the other way around,” I heard myself say.

“Let me know when you want me to call you a taxi,” she said. “I’d hate to feel that I made you spend the night with me against your will.”

I felt my heart leap a little as she said this. But now that she had I knew that there was no going back. About halfway up the stairs I thought of Goebbels and the warning he’d given me. It didn’t work. Life seemed too short to care very much about tomorrow; if I ended up facing a military firing squad on a hill in Murellenberge — where all the death sentences of the Reich War Court were carried out — then it would have been worth it. If you’re going to die, you might as well die with a sweet memory of a woman like Dalia Dresner in your head.

At the door of her bedroom we met Agnes, who said nothing and didn’t even meet my eye, but it was clear she’d been in there to prepare for our arrival. The heavy curtains had been drawn; there was quiet band music coming out of the radio and the lights were low; the enormous bed had been turned down; a negligee lay on the top sheet; the flowers I’d bought were now in a vase on the dressing table; there was a drinks tray with several decanters and two brandy glasses; the cigarette box beside the bed was open; there was an armchair with a newspaper lying on the cushion; and in the en suite bathroom, a bath had been drawn. I realized that all of this had been planned in advance — not that I cared, particularly. There’s only so much blood a man has in his body — and clearly not nearly enough for his brain and what makes him a man. Which is probably just as well as I can’t see how the human race is going to survive in any other way. I just hoped that she wouldn’t eat me after it was all over like a praying mantis. Then again, it was probably a good way to go.

Dalia picked up her negligee. She didn’t need my help, it wasn’t very heavy. “Help yourself to a drink and to a cigarette,” she said. “Relax. I won’t be long.”

She went into the bathroom. I poured myself a drink, lit a cigarette, and then sat down in the armchair to look at the newspaper. I couldn’t have felt less relaxed if Goebbels had been sitting up in bed looking at me. I didn’t read the paper because I was too busy listening to the sound of her as she got into the bath and splashed around. It was certainly better than anything I could hear on the radio. After a while I noticed that there was a picture on the dressing table that had been laid facedown and, being a nosy sort of fellow, I picked it up. I didn’t recognize the man in the picture though I guessed he was Dalia’s husband because she and he were cutting a wedding cake. He was older and grayer than me, which pleased me enormously. In all the talk about Goebbels, she hadn’t mentioned her husband and I certainly wasn’t about to bring him up now. I replaced the picture facedown and went back to my newspaper. It was probably best that he didn’t see what I still hardly believed was going to happen.