Philip Kerr - The Lady from Zagreb

I watched the motorboat until it was a silver speck racing across the navy blue thread that was the horizon. My eyes might have been narrowed against the dazzling sun but they could still see that she was probably using me. Not that I minded very much about that. Sometimes being used is fine if you know that this is what’s happening. You go along with it. Especially when you’re a man and it’s a beautiful woman who’s doing the using. Exploitation can feel a lot worse than something as human as that. That’s certainly how I felt about it. We’re all using someone else for something if we’re really honest about that. Some sort of deal or transaction lies at the heart of most human relationships. Karl Marx knew all about that. He wrote a very large book about the subject. Of course, the part of me that was still a cop wanted to go to the Schwanen Hotel, find Paul Meyer-Schwertenbach, take him around the corner to the police station in Rapperswil where I would describe the seat cushion in Dalia’s boat to Inspector Leuenberger, and then suggest that he mount a search of her house in Küsnacht. At the very least, she and Stefan Obrenovic had some serious explaining to do. That’s certainly what I might have done before the war, when things like murder and being a cop, like law and justice, seemed to matter. How naïve we were to imagine that such things were always going to be important. Perhaps one day they would matter again, but right now, the part of me that was a man said something very different about how I should handle this latest discovery and, even as that antique part — the cop part — was still speaking, I put my fingers to my nostrils and inhaled the most precious, intimate scent of Dalia’s pleasure, and straightaway I was certain I was never going to talk her up for a murder that everyone else in Switzerland seemed to have forgotten about anyway. I knew as surely as Heinrich Steinweg knew how to make a good piano that I was going to be waiting in a car outside the house in Küsnacht at six the following morning. Short of Inspector Weisendanger turning up at Wolfsberg Castle or a whole truckload of OSS agents kidnapping me again, there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of me not being there.

The Kon Tiki Bar in the basement of the Hotel Bayerischer Hof was supposed to look like something on an exotic Polynesian island but it seemed a little gloomy to convince anyone that we were in the South Pacific instead of Munich’s city center. I don’t know if the totem poles and tribal masks that lined the walls and the puffer fish hanging from the bamboo ceilings were the real thing, but the cocktails tasted real enough (even though they were mostly sugar), especially after Dalia produced a bottle of rum from a hornback alligator handbag to put some extra snap in them. She was full of surprises like that. We were certainly in the mood for a few drinks following the long drive from Küsnacht and, with several under our belts, we probably wouldn’t have noticed if the whole of the RAF had come calling while we were in there, especially as the bar doubled as the hotel’s bomb shelter. But for once it was a quiet night — rare for a full moon — and we decided to take a walk to get some Munich air and generally try to sober up a little before going to bed. Just outside the hotel — which was Munich’s best — on Promenadestrasse was the street where Kurt Eisner, Bavaria’s first prime minister after the abolition of the monarchy, was murdered by an anti-Semite, in 1919. It was the first of many similar, politically motivated murders. And perhaps it was the combination of this and several rum cocktails that prompted me to mention the delicate subject of the murder while we walked through the cobbled streets all the way to the infamous Hofbräuhaus. We didn’t go inside the beer hall where Hitler had proclaimed the program of the Nazi Party in 1920, which was why the place was treated like a shrine, with Nazi flags and a policeman to guard them. Rum and the watered-down beer they were probably serving don’t mix any more than a jolly brass band in your ear and a whispered half-accusation of murder. Instead we stood under the arches of the entrance, peered through the glass door for a moment at some of the men in their lederhosen and extraordinary Tyrolean hats, and then retired to a safer distance.

“You know, it’s really none of my business, and frankly I can’t bring myself to give a damn about it one way or the other. I’m sure you had your reasons for what happened — good reasons, too — but yesterday, when we were in Rapperswil, I had the strange idea that it was you or someone close to you who killed that girl who was found at the bottom of Lake Zurich.”

“Whatever makes you say a thing like that, Gunther?” She took a cigarette from the case in my pocket and lit it so calmly she might have been playing a scene in a movie. “Frankly, I’m a little bewildered that you could even say such a thing.”

“I certainly wouldn’t tell anyone in the Swiss police, angel. You needn’t worry on that score. Real police work has long ceased to interest me very much. And I’m only mentioning this now because I want you to think highly of me. I know what I’m saying sounds strange, but the fact is your opinion of me suddenly matters more than it did yesterday. So wait until I’m through and then you can talk.

“When you told me how you did that mental arithmetic for your friend from the polytechnic the other night, I was impressed. Afterwards I sat down with a pencil and paper and worked it out for myself and saw it was just as you’d said it was — that each first and last number made one hundred and one, and that there were fifty lots of them. Then I got to thinking that I wasn’t smart enough for you. It’s not that I mind about that, particularly. I’ve met plenty of women who were smarter than me. Usually I like it that way. It keeps me on my toes to be around clever women. It saves having to explain myself. But I realized that it’s important to me that you understand that, in my own crude way I’m smart, too. Maybe not quite as smart as you, angel, but still smart enough to have worked out in my head that you had something to do with the lady in the lake. I’m not sure I can explain how and that it all adds up as neatly as the way you explained those numbers yesterday. I can’t even tell you if it makes a nice number like five thousand and fifty, but everything under my hairline tells me you knew her and that only you can tell me how she ended up searching the bottom of Lake Zurich for someone’s surplus sword.”

“You’ll forgive me if I ask to hear how you worked this out,” she said, still looking skeptical.

“Oh, sure. Here, let me show you.”

I took her small but surprisingly strong hand, opened it and, like a gypsy reading a palm, I took each finger, starting with her pinkie, and gave it a reason for why I thought what I did. But the real clincher was her forefinger. I held on to that for quite a while as I explained how a cushion cover in the sunken boat was the red-and-white Croatian flag and identical to one on her own motorboat — The Gretchen — that I’d seen underneath her own behind the previous day and how, if they really paid attention to what they were doing, even the Swiss police could probably match the one to the other.

“Red and white,” she said. “That’s not such an unusual color combination in Switzerland, Gunther. They even make little pocketknives that are red and white. I’ll buy you one for your birthday if you can remember when that is.”

“No, that’s quite true. Red and white. I get that. But the cushion on The Gretchen — like the one on the sunken boat — is curved at the front and straight at the back, with twenty-five red-and-silver squares. They look white but the heraldic boys like to describe them as silver. Thirteen red and twelve silver. I counted them. The chessboard — that’s what they call it, isn’t it?”