Philip Kerr - The Lady from Zagreb

When she came out of the bathroom she was wearing the negligee. At least I think she was. Frankly it was so thin and transparent it might have been the brandy I was seeing through. But I wasn’t worried the alcohol I’d consumed was going to stop me from making love to her. Goebbels and her husband — Stefan? — could have hit me on the head with a sledgehammer and I wouldn’t have noticed it. Nothing was going to stop me now.

“Like it?” she said, turning around a couple of times so that I could appreciate her almost-there garment and the very shapely contents.

“I like it and I like you,” I said. “Very much. I like any girl who knows what she wants. You go out after it and nothing stops you from getting it. I have the most wonderful feeling that you’ve been planning for this to happen since I left here this morning.”

“Oh, I knew it was going to happen as soon as I saw you,” she said matter-of-factly. “This morning, when you caught me sunbathing in the nude, I knew that if you’d taken me right then and there I’d have let you do whatever you wanted. In fact that’s what I wanted myself. Couldn’t you tell? I was sure you could.”

“You know, in Byelorussia, there were these women in the Russian Army. Marksmen and snipers. Rifle babushkas , we used to call them. Dead shots all of them. Once they had you in their sights, you’d had it because they seldom ever missed. They always got their man, is what we used to say. That’s what you remind me of. I feel like I just got one in the head.”

This was only partly true; when these women were caught, the German Army called them “rifle sluts” and hanged them, but under the circumstances, I didn’t think she needed that amount of detail. No one did.

She smiled. “I guess that answers a question I was going to ask you,” she said.

“Which was?”

“Where you got those big sad-looking blue eyes of yours.”

“You want to know why they’re sad? Because they haven’t seen you in years.”

She sat on my lap and kissed my eyelids.

“Besides,” I added. “My eyes. They’re not so sad right now. As a matter of fact, I was just thinking how this is the first time in a very long time that I’ve felt as if life was actually worth the candle. That I can actually manage a smile that isn’t oiled with sarcasm.”

“I’m glad about that,” she said.

“I could get to like it here, with you.”

“Good. I hope you’ll come again. By the way, I ran you a bath just in case you wanted one. Would you like me to wash you?”

“Back in Berlin they have several words for girls like you.”

She frowned. “Oh? Such as?”

“Astonishing. Amazing. Astounding.”

She smiled. “It was a simple question, Bernie Gunther. Would you like me to bathe you?”

“Do you think I need bathing?”

“Need has got absolutely nothing to do with it,” she purred. “Want is all that matters now. What you want me to do for you, what will bring you delight.”

Dalia took my head in her perfumed hands and started to cover it with tiny kisses as small as her pink fingernails. Through the negligee I could see and feel every part of her delicious body. I ran my hand over her breast and onto her bottom; now that I actually had it in my hand it was even more perfect than I’d realized. She shifted and parted her thighs slightly so that my fingers could pleasure her a little.

“That’s all that matters when you’re with me, Bernie Gunther.” Each word she spoke was punctuated with a kiss now. “All you’ve ever wanted from a woman is exactly what you’re going to get. So, please. Try to relax and get it through your beautiful big head that when you’re here, in this room, giving you pleasure is what I’m for. More pleasure than you’ve ever had from a woman before.”

“You know something? I think that, all things considered, I’d really like to have a bath.”

The Fieseler Fi-156 Storch liaison aircraft dropped through the warm air toward Borongaj airfield, east of Zagreb. The three-seater Storch was well named; with its long legs and big wings the aircraft resembled a stork, only this one wasn’t delivering babies, just myself and a bad-tempered Austrian SS police general named August Meyszner. The general was arriving in Yugoslavia after a week’s leave in Berlin, to take command of an anti-partisan offensive in Bosnia, and regarded my mission — whatever it was — as of little or no consequence, and during the flight he made it quite clear that I should not speak to him unless addressed directly. This suited me very well since it inhibited me from mentioning that it was well known in Berlin police circles that Meyszner — a notorious anti-Semite — had a brother, Rudolf, who just happened to be married to the famously Jewish stepdaughter of the famous composer and conductor Johann Strauss II.

From the air the countryside surrounding Zagreb was mostly woodland with large fields that were divided into long, narrow strips, as if the land were still farmed according to feudal principles of agriculture. This wasn’t so far from the truth. As the Storch neared the ground, General Meyszner forgot that he was trying to ignore me and explained that most Yugoslavians were “Swabian peasants” and had “no more idea of enclosures and crop rotation than they did of single variable calculus.” I said nothing. Inside the cabin I took hold of the seat in front of me and closed my eyes as a gust of wind caught the wings and the plane wobbled uncertainly, which did nothing for my nerves or my underwear. A few trips in a plane had given me a grudging respect for Heydrich, who, in the months leading up to his death, had seen some active service with the Luftwaffe, first as a rear gunner in a Dornier and then as a trainee fighter pilot, until a crash and then Himmler had obliged him to quit. I could no more have served in our air force than I could have gone over the Reichenbach Falls in a beer barrel.

We landed and I let out a breath that steamed up the whole window next to me. After a minute or two I climbed unsteadily out of the plane just in time to see the general disappear in the only transport that seemed to have been provided — a Horch driven by the local field police, who were easily identifiable from the silver dog collar warrants that hung around their necks. I picked up my bag and walked toward the airport building where, after waiting almost half an hour, I was able to get a lift into town from the Storch’s suddenly garrulous German pilot, who proceeded to give me a tour guide’s explanation for how things were in modern Yugoslavia.

The Hotel Esplanade on Mihanoviceva had been built during the previous century as a railway hotel for the Vienna-Zagreb stage of the Orient Express. It contained a quarryful of black-and-white marble, several art deco ceilings, a ballroom as big as a circus tent, and a formal courtesy that seemed better suited to Vienna and absurdly excessive for a city of just one hundred thousand people. It was like finding a tram driver wearing a white tuxedo. Come to think of it, these days that kind of old-world formality seems inappropriate for Vienna, too. But that Austro-Hungarian imperial past died hard in Zagreb; indeed it was perhaps what the Ustaše mistakenly imagined they were fighting for.

And yet — according to my driver — the old enmity between Croat and Serb could not simply be dismissed as a conflict of two defunct empires. If Croats hated their Serbian near-neighbors it wasn’t entirely because of their Ottoman past. Croats might have been anti-Semites but they were tolerant of Islam. Why else would they have built a mosque in one of their main squares?

Once I’d checked in, I went to find Schellenberg’s local SD officer, Sturmbannführer Emil Koob, but he was out so I left a message for him at the hotel’s reception. Then I looked for the local army liaison officer, who also had an office in the Esplanade. He was a lieutenant in the Wehrmacht and, like Meyszner, another Austrian. His name was Kurt Waldheim. Very lean and tall, with a nose like a billhook, I guessed he was probably in his mid-twenties, and he reminded me more than a little of Heydrich. I showed him my credentials — which were of course impeccable — and explained my mission.