Philip Kerr - The Lady from Zagreb

Feeling a little braver now that I had a decent gun in my hand, I went to the kitchen door, opened it a fraction, and shone the flashlight around the yard in the faint hope that the farmer might still be alive and that I might offer him an escape. But I could tell I was too late. The farmer called Gottlob lay curled up on the cobbles as if he’d gone to sleep on the ground. He was dead, of course. His face looked as if it had been demolished by a wrecking ball. The light caught the bull’s big brown eye and he charged again. I closed the door quickly and bolted it just in time, top and bottom, even while the beast battered its head against timbers that barely held. Through planks thicker than my hand, the bull sounded as big as an elephant.

I went into the garage where we’d left the Mercedes and screwed the rocker plates on top of the gold bars and the panels back on the doors. There was a petrol pump so I filled the 190’s tank with gas, too. Then I washed myself in a pantry sink in the garage, straightened my tie, brushed off my suit, and generally tried to make myself look like someone who belonged in a nice hotel in Zurich. With any luck I might have a quiet night and then meet Inspector Weisendanger for breakfast as if nothing had happened. I was hardly proud of my night’s work. One way or another, six men — three Americans and three Germans — were now dead because of me. But I hadn’t asked for any of this. I’d much prefer to have spent the afternoon in bed with Dalia Dresner. Any man would.

At the Baur au Lac, the antique carriage clock on the mantelpiece said it was past ten o’clock. Everything was exactly as I had left it earlier that day, and in this oasis of lakeside calm it was hard to believe that organizations like the OSS and the Gestapo even existed, or that the world was even at war. The Russian front and the bombing of Hamburg and Berlin might have been taking place on another planet. The neatly bearded desk clerk was wearing a bow tie and a matching black morning coat and he had the cool, imperturbable air of a man for whom nothing was ever a surprise. He regarded my arrival back in the hotel’s elegant, wood-paneled lobby with a good show of pleasure, which is saying something for a Swiss. I suppose I just didn’t seem like the kind of guest who’d probably doubled the country’s annual homicide rate in just one night. And when I asked for my room key, he also handed me a note written on the hotel’s expensively thick stationery. If he could smell the alcohol on my breath and clothes, he didn’t let on.

“Is there anything else I can do for you this evening, Herr Gunther?”

“Yes. Please ask room service to send up a bottle of beer and some scrambled eggs, will you? Bread and cheese, some sausage and pickles. Anything at all. And as soon as possible, please. I’m ravenously hungry.”

Alone in my room I read Dalia’s note several times before my supper turned up. Then I had a hot bath. I thought about telephoning but it was late by Swiss standards and I decided to do it in the morning, after I’d had breakfast with Weisendanger. I went to bed thinking sweet thoughts of Dalia. In her note she apologized for her lateness — it seemed she’d been unable to escape from her husband until almost four p.m., and assumed my not being at the hotel had something to do with that — and she suggested we meet again the following day. There were lots of written kisses at the bottom of the notepaper and a real one made of lipstick. I felt like I was fifteen again. In a good way. The older you get, the more attractive that idea starts to seem. And when I saw her, it would be even sweeter than it might have been because I had survived a kidnapping and an attempted murder.

Perhaps it’s true what Goethe says, that destiny grants us our wishes, but in its own way, in order to give us something beyond our wishes. It’s curious, but often, just as I’m drifting off to sleep, I feel I might be Goethe. It could be his disdain for the church and the law and of course the Nazis — he would certainly have loathed Hitler; it’s certainly the Nazis he has in mind when he tells us to disdain those in whom the desire to punish is strong — but I once visited the famous Auerbachs Keller in Leipzig where the poet spent most of his student years drinking wine, and felt an affinity with the man that I’ve felt for no other. Then again, it might just have been all those pictures on the wooden walls of Faust drinking with Mephistopheles. I’ve often felt an affinity with him, too. How else was I to explain my still being alive? My mind sidestepped the present once again, and for a moment I was drinking in the medieval cellar’s subterranean depths; then I was astride a wine barrel as big as a bull and riding out the door and up into the marketplace where the last scene from Jud Süss was already under way, and poor Oppenheimer was screaming for his life to be spared as the cage carrying the gallows was raised to the top of a tower high above the citizenry’s heads. I stayed to watch before oblivion took us both to its black velvet bosom. It was a very German dream.

I’m normally an early riser. Especially in summer when the sun gets up before anyone. But that morning neither of us was quite ready for the Zurich police at 5:30 a.m. Weisendanger was there, of course, and stood quietly by while I dressed and his men searched my room, to find nothing. When I’d got back to the Baur the previous night I’d taken the precaution of hiding my gun behind the wheel of an enormous Duesenberg that was underneath a car cover in the parking lot, so that wasn’t anything to worry about.

“What’s this all about, Inspector? Was I late for breakfast? Or is it an especially nice dawn sky this morning?”

“Shut up and get dressed. You’ll find out.”

“The last time I got woken up like this I spent a very uncomfortable day with the Gestapo.”

“I told you we like to start early in the Swiss police.”

“I didn’t think you meant this early. Let’s hope the breakfast is better where we’re going now.”

We went to the Zurich police headquarters in Kasernenstrasse, which was about a fifteen-minute walk northwest of the hotel, and just a stone’s throw from the main railway station. I know that because I had to walk back to the Baur after they’d finished questioning me about the three Amis they’d found shot dead in the Huttenstrasse apartment. Police HQ was a disproportionately large, semi-castellated building with a big central clock and two white-painted wings, and what looked like an enormous parade ground to the rear.

“This is a hell of a shit factory for a country without much real crime,” I remarked as we trudged up four flights of stairs.

“Maybe that’s why we don’t have much crime,” said Weisendanger. “Did you ever think about that?”

We went into a top-floor room with three lateral bars across the window. I suppose they might have prevented a fat man from committing suicide by being thrown into the street — which was a favorite interrogation technique of the Gestapo — but only just. From the room where they questioned me I could see across the river to what looked like a military barracks and stables. I lit a cigarette and sat down.

“Where were you yesterday?” asked Weisendanger.

“After a very pleasant breakfast with you,” I said, “I spent the morning in Küsnacht. At the home of Dr. Stefan Obrenovic. I expect you can ask him. He’ll certainly remember my visit. He didn’t like me very much.”

“I wonder why?”

“The very same thing I was asking myself. After that, I took a drive around the lake. Which was nice. It’s a beautiful lake you have here. Then I went to the zoo, where I also had a late lunch. You could have asked me all this over a soft-boiled egg and a cup of coffee.”