Philip Kerr - The Lady from Zagreb

“You mean it?”

She thought for a minute. “I think so.”

“This is good news. I thought I was going to have to kidnap you and drive you back to Germany in the trunk of my car. Which is what Goebbels wants me to do. He sent me a telegram yesterday. I’m to use every argument I can think of to persuade you to come back. Including money. He’s offering you double what you were offered before. And more than Zarah Leander got last year for The Great Love . Whatever that was. And in whatever currency you want, as well.”

“More than Zarah Leander,” said Dalia. “That is interesting. Me, paid more than her. The Diva of the Third Reich. I heard a rumor that Zarah got paid in Swedish kronor. Maybe I could get paid in American dollars. Hey, perhaps I could even share some of it with you.”

“And if that fails, I’m to put you across my knee and spank your bare bottom very hard until you agree.”

“You’re making that up.”

“About the spanking, yes. But not the money. Not only that, but you get to keep the house in Griebnitzsee.” I shrugged. “Even Faust wasn’t offered a house like that one.”

“He is a devil, isn’t he?”

“If you make a deal with him, just make sure you have a couple of angels to intervene on your behalf when he comes to collect on the bargain.”

“That’s where you come in, surely.”

“My earthly powers are weak compared with his.”

She smiled. “I wouldn’t say so. Not on the evidence of what just happened in this hotel room.”

With that she climbed on top of me like a Valkyrie mounting Odin’s eight-legged horse and we made love again. I ought to have been paying more attention to the Mephisto story, of course, but in my own defense, it’s difficult to think clearly when the girl immolating herself on top of you is a nude movie star. It’s not every devil that will do absolutely everything in bed you ever dreamed of and make you feel like a god.

Later on she asked me if I would drive her back to Berlin.

“What about the motorboat outside?” I asked.

“I didn’t mean right now, darling, I meant tonight. In your car. No, wait, first thing in the morning would be better. Like six a.m. Stefan won’t be out of bed. Agnes can pack me an overnight bag and then come on to Berlin by train in a few days with the rest of my luggage.”

“I have to go back to Wolfsberg Castle and collect some things myself. But I can do what you’re asking, yes.”

“Perhaps we could even find a hotel halfway. In Munich. The Bayerischer Hof. They know me there and they won’t ask too many questions as long as we take separate rooms. It’ll be blissful, don’t you think? We’ll be able to spend the whole night together. I can wake up in your arms. Wouldn’t you like that, too?”

“You really want to do this? I can see you managing to keep Goebbels at bay. Just about. For obvious reasons, the doctor’s not as fast on his feet as you are. If anyone can do it, you can. But what happened to hating the whole stupid industry? What happened to not wanting to work with an anti-Semite like Veit Harlan? And what will you tell Stefan?”

“If I’m as powerful as Zarah Leander, my love, then I can certainly get Veit Harlan taken off the picture,” she said. “I’ll have Joey appoint another film director. Someone a little less controversial. Rolf Hansen, perhaps. He directed The Great Love. He can direct me. In fact, I think he’d do a good job. Anyone that can make Zarah Leander look ladylike has got to be good. That woman’s a giant. They had to use SS men in drag on that picture because they couldn’t find any chorus girls who were as tall as her. I’m not joking.” She shrugged. “As for Stefan, I shall just tell him that the money was too good to refuse. That’s something he can certainly understand.”

“Then it’s settled. I’ll pick you up in the morning. At six.”

A couple of hours later, we went onto the lakeshore where the citizens of Rapperswil were strolling around in the late afternoon sunshine, eating ice cream and studying the water almost as if they expected something to come out of it: a woman’s arm holding a sword, perhaps. At the café in front of the Schwanen Hotel, people were drinking coffee and watching a procession of ducks make its stately way toward the water. If a French painter of the rarer kind who was more interested in light than brandy had been on the scene, he’d have unfolded an easel and started work right away, and I wouldn’t have blamed him at all if he’d turned out one of those mottled masterpieces that make you think you need a better pair of glasses. A big bell was tolling in the church clock tower and everything felt like it was just another ordinary summer’s day. It didn’t feel that way to me. It’s never an ordinary day when a beautiful woman allows you the run of her naked body.

Dalia led me a short distance from where the local steam ferries and the island water taxis plied their trade, to an L-shaped pontoon on which a selection of small runabouts were moored, including a smartly polished, mahogany speedboat with a little red-and-white Croatian flag on the stern. It looked like a floating sports car. Dalia kissed me fondly, lifted the hem of her skirt a little, and I held her hand while she stepped into the boat.

“Could you untie me, darling?” she said, and pulled in the fenders.

“Sure.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow morning at six a.m.,” she said.

I nodded and sniffed my fingers ostentatiously. She knew I hadn’t washed — I wanted to smell her on me long after she was gone — and she blushed.

“Stop it,” she said. “You’re making me feel shy.”

“I like that. It reminds me that you’re really human and not something that just stepped down from Olympus for the day.”

“Don’t come up the drive, tomorrow. Stay on the road and I’ll come and find you. All right?”

I nodded again.

“You won’t let me down, will you, Gunther? I don’t much like movies when the girl gets stood up.”

“I’ll be there, all right. Never doubt it. Teutonic knights are always on time. Especially when there’s a damsel involved.”

Dalia sat down behind the white leather steering wheel, lit a cigarette, put on some sunglasses, and adjusted her shapely behind on a seat cushion that matched the flag on the stern. She turned a key on the dashboard, a big engine coughed into life, and water spluttered out of the twin chrome exhausts that were on either side of the boat’s name in gold paint: The Gretchen . I coiled the wet ropes neatly and then dropped them onto the boat’s rubberized floor. By now several people were watching her, and I have to admit that Dalia couldn’t have looked more like a movie star if she’d been walking down a red carpet with Emil Jannings on one arm and Leni Riefenstahl on the other. And if that was all that she’d looked like I might have felt a surge of pride, given what had just taken place between us. I’d have said, “Gunther, old man, if you told some of these people what you and she have just been doing up in that hotel bedroom, they wouldn’t believe you.” I could hardly believe it myself, any more than I could accept the current evidence of my own eyes, which was that she — or someone very close to her — had very probably murdered Meyer-Schwertenbach’s lady in the lake. It wasn’t just the cushion cover with checkerboard red-and-white squares that seemed to match exactly the one found in the sunken wreck, or the knowledge that her big mansion in Küsnacht was possessed of a very convenient boathouse from which an expedition to scuttle a boat in the lake could easily have been launched; it wasn’t the large diamond ring I’d seen on Dalia’s own finger, which served to remind me that only someone who owned a ring as big as the one found on the dead woman’s hand — and very likely several others besides — could ever have afforded not to take it before sinking the boat; it wasn’t even the expert way she handled her own motorboat as she left the pontoon. Clearly she knew a great deal about boats. No, it was the way she had turned on a five-pfennig piece about returning to Germany almost the minute I’d told her that Inspector Leuenberger was planning to reopen the lady in the lake case. She’d been so adamant she didn’t want to work for Goebbels again when we’d talked about it earlier; and now she was preparing to come back to Berlin with me in the morning. Just like that. It didn’t make any sense, unless she’d had something to do with the murder and was now keen to leave Switzerland before Inspector Leuenberger found something incriminating to Dalia and her husband.