Philip Kerr - The Other Side of Silence

Quite where I’d go I have no idea, although I hear North Africa is accommodating where Germans on a wanted list are concerned. There’s a Fabre Line boat that sails from Marseilles to Morocco every other day. That’s just the sort of thing that a concierge is supposed to know, although it’s much more likely that there are rather more of the hotel’s well-heeled guests who’ve fled from Algeria than there are those who want to go there. Since the massacre of pieds-noirs civilians at Philippeville last year, the war against the FLN in Algiers isn’t going so well for the French, and by all accounts the colony is ruled even more harshly than it ever was when the Nazis left it to the tender mercies of the Vichy government.

I’m not sure if the effortlessly handsome, dark-haired man I saw checking into one of the hotel’s best suites the day before I tried to asphyxiate myself was on any kind of wanted list, but he was certainly German and a criminal. Not that he looked like anything less affluent than a banker or a Hollywood film producer, and he spoke such excellent French that it was probably only me who would have known he was German. He was using the name Harold Heinz Hebel and gave an address in Bonn, but his real name was Hennig, Harold Hennig, and during the last few months of the war he’d been a captain in the SD. Now in his early forties, he wore a fine, gray lightweight suit that had been tailored for him and black, handmade shoes that were as shiny as a new centime. You tend to notice things like that when you’re working at a place like the Grand Hotel. These days I can spot a Savile Row suit from the other side of the lobby. His manners were as smooth as the silk Hermes tie around his neck, which suited him better than the noose it richly deserved. He tipped all of the porters handsomely from a wad of new notes that was as thick as a slice of bread, and after that the boys treated him and his Louis Vuitton luggage with more care than a case of Meissen porcelain. Coincidentally, the last time I’d seen him he’d also had some expensive luggage with him, filled with valuables he and his boss, the East Prussian gauleiter Erich Koch, had probably looted from the city. That had been in January 1945, sometime during the terrible Battle of Konigsberg. He’d been boarding the German passenger ship Wilhelm Gustloff , which was subsequently torpedoed by a Russian submarine with the loss of more than nine thousand civilian lives. He was one of the few rats that managed to escape from that particular sinking ship, which was a great pity since he’d helped to bring about its destruction.

If Harold Hennig recognized me he didn’t show it. In our black morning coats, the hotel’s desk staff all tend to look the same, of course. There’s that and the fact that I’m a little heavier now than I was back then, with less hair probably, not to mention a light tan that my wife used to say suited me. For a man who just tried to kill himself I’m in remarkably good shape, even though I say so myself. Alice, one of the maids I’ve taken a shine to since Elisabeth left, says I could easily pass for a man ten years younger. Which is just as well, as I have a soul that feels like it’s at least five hundred years old. It’s looked into the abyss so many times it feels like Dante’s walking stick.

Harold Hennig looked straight at me, and although I didn’t hold his gaze for more than a second or two, there was no need-being an ex-cop, I never forget a face, especially when it belongs to a mass murderer. Nine thousand people-men and women and a great many children-is a lot of reasons to remember a face like Harold Heinz Hennig’s.

But I have to admit that seeing him again, looking so prosperous and in such rude health, left me feeling very depressed. It’s one thing to know that there are people like Eichmann and Mengele who got away with the most appalling crimes. It’s another thing when several of the victims of a crime were your friends. There was a time when I might have tried to exact some kind of rough justice, but those days are long gone. These days, revenge is something of which my partner and I talk lightly at the end or perhaps the beginning of a game of bridge at La Voile d’Or, which is the only other good hotel in Cap Ferrat. I don’t even own a gun. If I did I certainly wouldn’t be here now. I’m a much better shot than I am a driver.

Between Nice and Monaco, Cap Ferrat is a pine-planted spur that projects into the sea like the dried-up and near useless sexual organs of some old French roue-an entirely appropriate comparison, given the Riviera’s reputation as a place where great age and precocious beauty go hand in wrinkly hand, usually to the beach, to the shops, to the bank, and then to bed, although not always in such decorous order. The Riviera often reminds me of how Berlin was immediately after the war, except that female companionship will cost you a lot more than a bar of chocolate or a few cigarettes. Down here it’s money that talks, even when it has nothing much to say except voulez vous or s’il vous plait. Most women would prefer to spend time with Monsieur Gateau to Mister Right, although unsurprisingly these often turn out to be one and the same. Certainly, if I had a bit more cash I, too, might find myself a pretty little companion with whom to make a fool of myself and generally spoil. I’m enough of a feebleminded idiot now to be quite sure that I don’t have what nearly all women on the Cote d’Azur are looking for, unless it’s directions to Beaulieu-sur-Mer, or the name of the best restaurant in Cannes (it’s Da Bouttau), or perhaps a couple of spare tickets to the Municipal Opera House in Nice. We see a lot of Monsieur Gateau and the firm, greenish apple of his rheumy eye at the Grand Hotel, but he has his confreres at the nearby La Voile d’Or, a smaller, elegant hotel situated on a high peninsula overlooking the blue lagoon that is the picturesque fishing port of Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat. This three-story French villa-formerly the Park Hotel-was established in 1925 by an English golf champion named Captain Powell, which probably explains the old wooden putters on the walls; either that or they have a very challenging hole in the hotel’s very elegant drawing room. That’s usually where I sit down and drink gimlets and play bridge with my only three friends, twice a week, without fail.

To be perfectly honest, they’re not what most people would call friends. This is France, after all, and real friends are thin on the ground, especially when you’re German. Besides, you don’t play bridge to make friends or to keep them either, and sometimes it helps if you actively dislike your opponents. My bridge partner, Antimo Spinola, an Italian, is the manager at the municipal casino in Nice. Fortunately he’s a much better player than I am, which is unfortunate for him. Our usual opponents are an English married couple, Mr. and Mrs. Rose, who have a small villa in the hills above Eze. I wouldn’t say I dislike either of them but they’re a typically English husband and wife, I think, in that they never seem to demonstrate much emotion, least of all for each other. I’ve seen Siamese fighting fish that were more affectionate. Mr. Rose was a top heart specialist in London’s Harley Street and made a small fortune treating some Greek millionaire before he retired to the South of France. Spinola says he likes playing with Rose because if he had a heart attack then Jack would know what to do, but I’m not so sure about that. Rose drinks more than I do and I’m not sure he even has a heart, which would seem to be a prerequisite for the job. His wife, Julia, was his nurse-receptionist and is by far the better player, with a real feel for the table and a memory like an elephant, which is the animal she most closely resembles, although not because of her size. She’d be a very good-looking woman if her oversize ears were not stuck on at right angles to her head. Crucially, she never discusses the hands she’s just played, as if she’s reluctant to give Spinola and me any clues as to how to play against them.