Philip Kerr - If the Dead Rise Not

“You turned the tap, thickhead, remember?”

I yawned. “Did I?”

“Drink up.”

“Here’s to her. She was a good woman. Too good for me. Do you have a wife?”

He shook his head.

“With the money in that bag you could afford several. And none of them would mind that you’re such an ugly bastard. A woman can overlook almost any shortcoming in a man when there’s a big bag of money on her dinner table. I’ll bet that bitch next door, Dora, doesn’t know about the bag, either. Otherwise, she’d have had it for sure. Mercenary little nanny-goat. Mind you, I will say this for her. I’ve seen her naked, and she’s a peach. Of course, you have to remember that every peach has a stone inside it. Dora’s got a bigger one than most, too. But she’s a peach, all right.”

My head felt as heavy as a stone. A giant peach stone. And when my head dropped onto my chest, it seemed to fall such a long way that, for a moment, I thought it had dropped into the leather basket beneath the falling ax. And I cried out, thinking I was dead. Opening my eyes, I took a deep, spasmodic breath and struggled to remain vaguely vertical, but now it was a losing battle.

“All right,” said Krempel. “You’ve had enough. Let’s try to get up, shall we?”

He stood up and gathered my coat collars in his pomegranate-sized fists, and hauled me roughly out of the bath. He was a strong man-too strong for me to try anything stupid. But I took a swing at him anyway and missed, before losing my balance and falling onto the bathroom floor, where Krempel kicked me in the ribs for my trouble.

“What about the money?” I asked, hardly feeling the pain. “You’re forgetting the money.”

“I guess I’ll just have to come back for it later.” He hauled me onto my feet again and maneuvered me out of the bathroom.

Dora was sitting on the sofa, reading a magazine. She was wearing a fur coat. I wondered if Reles had bought it for her.

“Oh, it’s you,” I said, raising my hat. “I didn’t recognize you with your clothes on. Then again, I expect a lot of people say that to you, sweetheart.”

She stood up, slapped my face, and was going to slap it again, only Krempel caught her wrist and twisted it.

“Go and fetch the car,” he told her.

“Yes,” I said. “Go and fetch the car. And hurry up. I want to fall down and pass out.”

Krempel had me propped against the wall like a steamer trunk. I closed my eyes for a moment, and when I opened them again she was gone. He shifted me out of the suite and along to the top of the stairs.

“It’s all the same to me how you go down these stairs, Gunther. I can help you down or I can push you down. But if you try anything, I can promise that you’ll be holding on to thin air.”

“Grateful to you,” I heard myself mumble, thickly.

We arrived at the bottom of the stairs, but I don’t know how. My legs belonged to Charlie Chaplin. I recognized the Wilhelmstrasse door and thought it was sensible of him to choose this way out of the hotel at that time of night. The Wilhelmstrasse door was always quieter than the one on Unter den Linden. The lobby was smaller, too. But if Krempel had hoped to avoid our meeting anyone I knew, he failed.

Most of the waiters at the Adlon had a mustache or were clean-shaven, and only one, Abd el-Krim, wore a beard. His name wasn’t Abd el-Krim. I didn’t know his real name, but he was Moroccan, and people called him that because he looked like the rebel leader who had surrendered to the French in 1926 and was now exiled to some shithole of an island. I can’t answer for the talents of the rebel, but our Abd el-Krim was an excellent waiter. Being a Mohammedan, he didn’t drink and eyed me with a mixture of shock and concern as, with one arm draped around the lintel that was Krempel’s shoulders, I lurched toward the exit.

“Herr Gunther?” he said in a voice full of solicitude. “Is everything all right, sir? You don’t look well.”

Words emptied out of my slack mouth like saliva. Perhaps saliva is all they were. I don’t know. Whatever I said didn’t make any sense to me, so I doubt that it would have made any sense to Abd el-Krim.

“He’s had too much to drink, I’m afraid,” Krempel told the waiter. “I’m taking him home before Behlert or either of the Adlons sees him like this.”

Abd el-Krim, dressed to go home, nodded gravely. “Yes, that is best, I think. Do you need any assistance, sir?”

“No, thanks. I’ve a car waiting for us outside. I think I’ll manage.”

The waiter bowed gravely and opened the door for my kidnapper as he waltzed me outside.

As soon as the cold air and rain hit my lungs, I started to retch into the gutter. The stuff I was retching you could have bottled and sold, as it tasted like pure Korn. A car immediately pulled up in front of me, and the spray from the tires splashed the cuffs of my trousers. My hat fell off again. The car door opened, and Krempel launched me onto the floor with the sole of his shoe. A moment later the car door slammed, and then we were moving-forward, I imagined, but it felt like we were going around and around in circles on a ride at Luna Park. I didn’t know where we were going, and I ceased to care very much. I couldn’t have felt any worse if I’d been laid out naked in an undertaker’s window.

THERE WAS A STORM AT SEA. The deck shifted like an accelerating elevator car, and then a wave of cold water hit me full in the face. I shook my head painfully and opened eyes that felt like two scooped-out oyster shells that were still swimming with Tabasco sauce. Another wave of water hit me. Except the water wasn’t from a wave, but from a bucket in the hands of Gerhard Krempel. But we were on the deck of a ship, or at least a largish boat. Behind him stood Max Reles, dressed like a rich man playing ship’s captain. He wore a blue blazer; white trousers; a white shirt and tie; and a white, soft-peaked cap. Everything around us was white, too, and it took me several moments to appreciate that it was daytime and we were probably surrounded with mist.

Reles’s mouth started moving, and white mist came out of that, too. It was cold. Very cold. For a second I thought he was speaking Norwegian. Something cold, anyway. Then it seemed a little closer to home-Danish, perhaps. Only when a third bucket of water, gathered on a rope from over the side of the boat, was flung into my face was I able to grasp that he actually was speaking German.

“Good morning,” Reles said. “And welcome back. We were beginning to get a little worried about you, Gunther. You know, I thought you krauts could hold your liquor. But you’ve been passed out for quite a while. At considerable inconvenience to myself, I might add.”

I was sitting on a polished wooden deck, looking up at him. I tried to get up and found my hands were tied on my lap. But worse, given that the boat appeared to be on the water, was that my feet also were tied, to a stack of gray concrete blocks lying beside me on the deck.

I leaned to one side and retched for almost a minute. And I marveled that such a sound could come from my body. It was the sound of a living creature turning itself inside out. While this was going on, Reles walked away, with a look of distaste on his knuckle of a face. When he returned, Dora was beside him. She was wearing her fur coat and a matching fur hat, carrying a glass of water.

She carried it to my lips and helped me to swallow. When the glass was empty I nodded genuine thanks and tried to appreciate my situation. I didn’t appreciate it very much. My hat, coat, and jacket were gone, and my head felt as if it had been used for the Mitropa cup final. And the pungent smell of Reles’s large cigar was turning my stomach. I was in a tight spot. I had the awful feeling in a whole crowd of awful feelings that Max Reles was planning to give me a practical demonstration of exactly how Erich Goerz had disposed of Isaac Deutsch’s dead body. I couldn’t have been in a tighter spot if I’d been a starving dog chained to a high-speed railway line.