Philip Kerr - The Lady from Zagreb

“What are your plans now, Bernie?” asked Meyer.

“I can’t go back to Zurich. Not after what that stupid cop from police headquarters told me. I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to do now. It all depends on a telephone call I need to make. I have my own rather more mundane mission to complete.”

“You’re very welcome to use our telephone. And to stay here at Wolfsberg. For as long as you want.”

“Believe me, you and your wife wouldn’t want me for that long.”

“Schelli spoke very highly of you to me last night, after you’d gone to bed. He says he thinks you’d be a good man to have around in a tight spot.”

“Maybe. But of late the spots seem to be getting tighter.”

“I’d really like you to stay so that I could ask you a few more questions about your old cases. You know? For my next book. I’m thinking of a story of a Swiss cop with a Berlin connection. Before the war, of course.”

“Of course. When there was still some real crime about.” I smiled thinly. Somehow the idea of helping Meyer with his book appealed a lot less to me than the possibility of seeing Dalia again. “And some real detectives, too.”

“Exactly.”

“It’s kind of you, Paul, but I can’t. I thought I’d motor down to Rapperswil and send Goebbels a telegram, then wait for further instructions. I really can’t leave Switzerland until that’s happened. I’ve heard Rapperswil is very pretty. With a castle and everything.”

“Oh, it is. Very picturesque. But you know, I could drive you down there myself. It so happens that there’s an unsolved murder that took place in Rapperswil. The local police inspector is a friend of mine. Perhaps you might even remember me mentioning it when I was in Berlin last year.”

I didn’t, and of course I certainly wasn’t remotely interested in some old murder case but it occurred to me that if I did go to Rapperswil it might be useful to have a Swiss police inspector on my side, especially if I was going to be meeting in secret with the wife of a prominent local businessman. Besides, with the OSS probably still convinced that I was Walter Schellenberg, it couldn’t do any harm to have a cop to help me out if they again tried to kidnap me, or worse.

“I’ll be straight with you, Paul. I like you. I’m grateful for your hospitality and I wouldn’t like to embarrass you. But there’s a lady I have to see when I’m down there.”

“This actress who Dr. Goebbels is interested in. The one he wants to go back to work at UFA studios. Sure, I get it.”

“No, you don’t. The fact of the matter is, he’s not the only one who’s interested in her. You know what I mean? She and I — it’s complicated. She has a husband. In Küsnacht. Which is just up the lakeshore from Rapperswil, right?”

Meyer nodded.

“She and I had sort of planned that we might find a nice hotel. Just for the afternoon.”

“Bernie, I’m a detective writer, not a monk.”

“You’d be surprised what monks are capable of. Believe me, you could write a hell of a book about one particular monk that I met down in Croatia.”

“Look, I know just the place for you both. In Rapperswil. The Pension du Lac. I’ll check into the Schwanen Hotel, next door, so there won’t be any possibility of embarrassment for either one of you. We’ll drive down this afternoon. Have dinner with Inspector Leuenberger tonight. Chat about the case. You can see your lady friend tomorrow. And then we’ll drive back. What could be simpler?”

“Let me call her first.”

Rapperswil was a charming, cuckoo-clock town on the north shore of Lake Zurich and dominated by a William Tell sort of castle with a watchman’s tower and probably some crossbows for hire. I certainly wouldn’t have put it past the Swiss to have defended their country against a German invasion with crossbows.

It was a warm afternoon and the water looked as cool and inviting as an enormous gin and tonic. The sun shining on the calm blue water had encouraged a flock of sparrows to take a bath. I wouldn’t have minded a swim myself. A causeway about a kilometer long, including a swing bridge, connected Rapperswil with Hurden on the lake’s south shore, and separated Lake Zurich proper from the Obersee. Meyer explained that this causeway was built on an old moraine that had been breached many centuries before.

“Until then,” he added, “Zurich probably wasn’t on a lake at all.”

Being a metropolitan sort of fellow, I normally find places like Rapperswil just a little bit too quaint for my taste, but after Zagreb and Zurich, I liked the place just fine. I continued liking the place even when a wasp dropped out of a lime tree and stung me on the nose as I tried to brush it off my face. After all I’d been through in Croatia, it seemed almost laughable for anyone to take an injury like that at all seriously but, at Meyer’s insistence, we went to the nearby Schwanen Hotel to find some vinegar to dab on my reddening nose. That lessened the pain, but for the rest of my stay in Switzerland I looked like Grock the Clown. Quite what Dalia was going to think of me now I didn’t know. I was going to have to allow her a laugh or two at my expense. Then again, it might have been worse; the wasp could have crawled up a trouser leg and done some damage elsewhere. In the great economy of the universe — even when you’re planning to make love to a beautiful woman — a red nose isn’t such a hardship.

Having sent a message to Goebbels from the local telegraph office on Bahnhofplatz and received my new orders in his swift reply, I joined Meyer at the uncut sapphire that was the lakeside where he told me about the little town’s unsolved murder. But while he spoke, my mind wandered a little for a second and I got to wondering why a man like Meyer was so interested in murder in the first place. With me, it was just a job. Living in a beautiful place like Wolfsberg Castle with a wife as lovely as Patrizia — I think I’d have left the subject of murder well alone. Real murder is sticky under your shoes, and gets ugly in your nostrils and your stomach. And I prefer the smell of lime blossom in summer — unless there’s a wasp in it. What was more, I’d killed enough people myself to know that there’s nothing entertaining about it. So what was it about murder mysteries that made them so fascinating to people like Meyer? Maybe in the end it was because, in fiction, justice is always served. Which is the very essence of fiction, of course, and nothing at all to do with real life. Life doesn’t have neatly tied-up endings. And even when it does, it often takes several years to tie the bow; I had the evidence of the Kuhlo killings to support that point of view. But what kind of a neatly tied ending that served justice was ever going to satisfy the Russians, the British, the Americans, and the French? Not to mention the Jews, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Gypsies, and Serbs? I’d like to have seen the detective who was going to assemble all of Germany’s suspects in the library and tell them who was guilty and who was not. I thought that was going to need a bit more than just one chapter. Maybe the neatly tied ending was going to involve a gallows or two.

Meyer broke into my reverie. “As I was telling you, a couple of years ago some divers for a Swiss engineering firm were exploring the shallow upper part of the lake, which is called the Obersee. That’s the part to the right of the Seedamm that you see here. It was a routine safety check but it was their work that gave me the idea for Operation Noah. Anyway, on a submerged ledge they found a sunken boat — a gentleman’s day launch, I think you’d call it — and, the body of a woman. The body tied by the neck to the anchor. At its deepest part, the lake is almost one hundred and fifty meters deep but the boat had come to rest on a ledge that was less than fifty meters down. But for the ledge, they would probably never have found it. The local pike perch had eaten most of her face. The pathologist said he believed the body had been in the water for at least a year. To this day the woman has never been identified. But it’s clear that the woman had been murdered because, according to a local boatbuilder, the seacocks were open and there were several holes drilled in the boat’s planking, all consistent with the boat having been scuttled. There was even a drill left on the cabin floor. The woman had suffered a skull fracture, as if someone had hit her on the head, and it’s quite possible she was dead before the boat was deliberately sunk. Also, the name of the boat had been removed fore and aft with a blowtorch. No woman in the area was ever reported missing. Nor is there any report of a boat having been sunk or stolen. This sort of thing just doesn’t happen in Rapperswil.”