Philip Kerr - If the Dead Rise Not

“I went out for a while. To cool down.”

“Where did you go?”

“ Parsifal . The opera.”

“You’re all surprises, you know that? I never figured you for a music lover.”

“I’m not. I stayed for five minutes and then felt an irresistible urge to come here and search for you.”

“Hmm. So what does that make me? A flower maiden? Klingsor’s slave-what’s her name? The one in Parsifal ?”

“I haven’t a clue.” I shrugged. “Like I said, I only stayed five minutes.”

Noreen put her arms around my neck. “I hope you brought Parsifal’s holy spear with you, Gunther, because I don’t happen to have one here.” She backed me across the room to the bed. “At least not yet, I don’t.”

“You think I should stay with you tonight?”

“In my humble opinion, yes.” She shrugged off the peignoir and let it fall onto the thick carpet with a whisper of chiffon.

I said, “You never held a humble opinion in your life,” and kissed her. This time she allowed my hands to roam the contours of her body as if they belonged to an impatient masseur. Mostly they stayed on her bottom, my fingers gathering chiffon until I could pull her into my groin. My right hand seemed to be making a miraculous recovery.

“So it’s true,” she said. “Adlon room service is the best in Europe.”

“The key to running a good hotel,” I said, cupping one of her breasts in my hand, “is to eliminate boredom. Nearly all of our problems are caused by the innocent curiosity of our guests.”

“I don’t think I’ve been accused of that,” she said. “Innocence. Not in a long time.” She shook her head. “I’m not the innocent type, Gunther.”

I grinned.

“I guess you don’t believe me,” she said, pulling a length of hair through her mouth. “Because I’m still wearing clothes.”

She pushed me down to sit on the edge of the bed and then stepped back in order to make a performance out of taking off her nightgown. Nude, she was worth a private room in Pompeii, and as far as performances go, it had Parsifal beat by several lewd acts. Looking at Noreen, you wondered why anyone ever bothered to draw or paint anything else but a woman’s naked body. Cubes might have done it for Braque, but I liked curves, and Noreen’s were good enough to satisfy Apollonius of Perga and probably Kepler, too. She drew my head against her belly and, pulling my hair, like the coat on a favorite dog, she teased me with the absence of all that made me a man.

“Why don’t you touch me?” she said softly. “I want you to touch me. Right now.”

She came and sat on my augmented lap and patiently permitted my impudent curiosities with eyes that were closed to anything else but her own pleasure. With nostrils flared, she breathed deeply, like a yogi concentrating her breath.

“So what changed your mind?” I asked, bending to kiss her hardening nipple. “About tonight?”

“Who says I changed my mind?” she said. “Maybe I planned this all along. Like this is a scene in a play I’ve written.” She pushed off my jacket and started to undo my tie. “This is just what I want your character to do. Maybe you’ve got very little choice in the matter. Do you really feel you have a choice here, Gunther?”

“No.” I bit her nipple. “Not now. But I got the impression earlier on that you were playing a little hard to get.”

“I am hard to get. Only not to you. You’re the first in a long time.”

“I could say the same.”

“You could. But it would be a lie. You’re one of the principal characters in my play, remember? I know all about you, Gunther.” She started to unbutton my shirt.

“Is Max Reles another character? You do know him, don’t you?”

“Do we have to talk about him now?”

“It can wait.”

“Good. Because I can’t wait. I never could, not since I was a little girl. Ask me about him later, when the waiting is over.”

THE CEILINGS IN THE SUITES at the Adlon were just the right distance from the floor. When you lay on the bed and blew a column of cigarette smoke straight up, the crystal chandelier looked like a remote and icy mountaintop surrounded with an ermine collar of cloud. I’d never paid the ceilings much attention before. Previous erotic encounters with Frieda Bamberger had been furtive, hurried affairs, conducted with one eye on the clock and the other on the door handle, and certainly I’d never felt sufficiently relaxed to fall asleep afterward. But now that I was looking at the lofty heights of this room, I found my soul climbing up the silky walls to sit on the picture rail, like some invisible gargoyle, and then to stare down with forensic fascination on the naked aftermath of what had gone before.

Our bare limbs still entwined, Noreen and Gunther lay side by sweating side, like Eros and Psyche fallen from some other, more heavenlike ceiling-although it was hard to imagine anything much more heavenly than what had just occurred. I felt like Saint Peter taking vacant possession of a smart new basilica.

“I bet you’ve never even been in one of these beds,” said Noreen, taking the cigarette from my fingers and smoking it with the exaggerated gestures of a drunk or someone onstage. “Have you?”

“No,” I lied. “It feels strange.”

She hardly wanted to hear about my private trysts with Frieda. Certainly not as much as I wanted to hear about Max Reles.

“He doesn’t seem to like you very much,” she said after I mentioned his name again.

“Why is that? After all, I’ve been doing a swell job of hiding how much I dislike him. No, really, I despise the man, but he’s a guest of this hotel, which obliges me not to punch him down six flights of stairs and then kick him out the door. That’s what I’d like to do. And I’d do it, too, if I had another job to go to.”

“Be careful, Bernie. He’s a dangerous man.”

“That much I already know. The question is, how do you know it?”

“We met on the SS Manhattan ,” she said. “On the voyage from New York to Hamburg. We were introduced at the captain’s table, and occasionally we met up to play gin rummy.” She shrugged. “He wasn’t a good player. Anyway, it was a longish voyage, and a single woman has to expect that she will become the focus of attention for single gentlemen. Maybe even a few married ones. There was another man, besides Max Reles. A Canadian lawyer called John Martin. I had a drink with him, and he got the wrong idea about me. The fact is, he started to believe that he and I-well, to use his words, that he and I had something special going on. Well, we didn’t. No, really we didn’t. But he couldn’t accept that and became something of a nuisance. He told me he loved me and that he wanted to marry me, and I didn’t like it. I tried to avoid him, only that’s not so easy on a boat.

“One night, off the coast of Ireland, I mentioned some of this to Max Reles over a game of gin rummy. He didn’t say very much. And it’s quite possible that I’m completely mistaken about this, but the very next day, this man Martin was reported missing, and it was presumed he must have fallen overboard. I believe they carried out a search, but it was for appearance’s sake, since there was no way he could have survived after several hours in the sea.

“Anyway, soon after, I formed the impression that Reles had something to do with the poor man’s disappearance. It was something he said. I can’t remember the exact words he used, but I do remember he was smiling when he said it.” Noreen shook her head. “You must think I’m crazy. I mean, this is all completely circumstantial. Which is the main reason I never mentioned this to anyone.”