Philip Kerr - The Other Side of Silence

It’s a good example to take when it comes to discussing the war, as well. As far as anyone knows, Walter Wolf-that’s the name I’m living under in France-was a captain with the Intendant General’s Office in Berlin, with responsibility for army catering. It’s what you might expect of someone who’s worked in good hotels for much of his life. Jack Rose is quite convinced he remembers me from a stay at the Adlon Hotel. I sometimes wonder what they might think if they knew their opponent had once worn an SS uniform and been the near confidant of men like Heydrich and Goebbels.

I don’t think Spinola would be very surprised to discover I had a secret past. He speaks Ivan almost as well as I do, and I’m more or less certain he was an officer with the Italian 8th Army in Russia and must have been one of the lucky ones who got out in 1943 following the rout at the Battle of Nikolajewka. He doesn’t talk about the war, of course. That’s the great thing about bridge. Nobody talks about anything very much. It’s the perfect game for people who have something to hide. I tried to teach it to Elisabeth but she didn’t have the patience for the drills I wanted to show her that would have made her a better player. Another reason she didn’t take to the game was that she doesn’t speak English-which is the language we play bridge in because that’s the only language the Roses can speak.

A day or two after the arrival of Hennig at the Grand Hotel I went down to La Voile d’Or to play bridge with Spinola and the Roses. As usual they were late and I found Spinola sitting at the bar, staring blankly at the wallpaper. He was in a somber mood, chain-smoking Gauloises in his short ebony holder and drinking Americanos. With his dark curly hair, easy smile, and muscular good looks, he always reminded me a little of the film actor Cornel Wilde.

“What are you doing?” I asked, speaking Russian to him. Speaking Russian to each other was how we kept in practice, as there were few Russians who ever came to the hotel or to the casino.

“Enjoying the view.”

I turned and pointed at the terrace and beyond it, the view of the port.

“The view’s that way.”

“I’ve seen it before. Besides, I prefer this one. It doesn’t remind me of anything I’d rather not remember.”

“That kind of day, huh?”

“They’re all that kind of day down here. Don’t you find?”

“Sure. Life’s shit. But don’t tell anyone here in Cap Ferrat. The disappointment would kill them.”

He shook his head. “I know all about disappointment, believe me. I’ve been seeing this woman. And now I’m not. Which is a pity. But I had to end it. She was married and it was getting difficult. Anyway, she took it quite badly. Threatened to shoot herself.”

“That’s a very French thing to do. Shoot yourself. It’s the only kind of French marksmanship you can rely on in a fix.”

“You’re so very German, Walter.”

He bought me a drink and then looked at me squarely.

“Sometimes, I look in your eyes across the bridge table and I see a lot more than a hand of cards.”

“You’re telling me I’m a bad player.”

“I’m telling you that I see a man who was never in army catering.”

“I can see you’ve never tasted my cooking, Antimo.”

“Walter, how long have we known each other?”

“I don’t know. A couple of years.”

“But we’re friends, right?”

“I hope so.”

“So then. Spinola is not my real name. I had a different name during the war. Frankly, I wouldn’t have stayed alive for very long with a name like Spinola. I was never that kind of Italian. It’s a Jewish-Italian name.”

“It doesn’t matter to me what you are, Antimo. I was never that kind of German.”

“I like you, Walter. You don’t say more than you have to. And I sense that you can keep a confidence.”

“Don’t tell me anything you don’t have to,” I said. “At my time of life I can ill afford to lose a friend.”

“Understood.”

“If it comes to that, I can ill afford to lose people who don’t like me, either. Then I really would feel alone.”

On the bar top next to my gimlet was a Partagas cigar box, which Spinola now laid his hand on.

“I need a favor,” he said.

“Name it.”

“There’s something in there I’d like you to look after for me. Just for a while.”

“All right.”

I glanced around for the barman and seeing that he was safely outside on the terrace I lifted the box and peeked inside. But even before I’d flipped the lid open, I knew what was in there. It wasn’t cigars. There’s something about the twenty-three-ounce weight of a Walther police pistol that I would recognize in my sleep. I picked it up. This one was fully loaded and, to my nose at least, it had been recently fired.

“Not that it’s any of my business,” I said, closing the cigar box, “but this one smells like it’s been busy. I’ve shot people myself and that was nobody’s business, either. It’s just something that happens sometimes when guns are involved.”

“It’s her gun,” he explained.

“She must be quite a girl.”

“She is. I took it off her. Just to make sure she didn’t do anything stupid. And I don’t want it around the house in case she comes back. At least until she returns my door key.”

“Sure, I’ll look after it. A good bridge partner is hard to come by. Besides, I’ve missed having a gun about the place. A house feels kind of empty without a firearm in it. I’ll put it in the car, okay?”

“Thanks, Walter.”

I stepped outside, locked the gun in my glove box, and went back into the hotel just as the Roses drew up in their cream Bentley convertible. I waited a moment, and then instinctively opened the heavy car door for Mrs. Rose to step out. He always drove them to the La Voile d’Or, but she always drove them back, having allowed herself just the two gin and tonics next to his six or seven whiskeys.

“Mrs. Rose,” I said pleasantly, and gallantly picked up the green chiffon scarf she dropped on the ground as she got out of the car. It matched the green dress she was wearing. Green wasn’t her color, but I wasn’t going to let that interfere with my game. “How nice to see you again.”

She answered, smiling, but I was hardly paying much attention to her; my mind was still on Spinola’s girlfriend’s gun while my eyes were now drawn to two men having an argument at the opposite end of the hotel terrace. One of them was a florid-faced Englishman who was often hanging around La Voile d’Or. The other was Harold Hennig. Automatically I opened the front door for Mrs. Rose before allowing myself a second look at Hennig and the Englishman, which revealed it was, perhaps, less of an argument and more a case of a smiling Hennig telling the Englishman what to do and the Englishman not liking it very much. He had my sympathy. I never much liked taking orders from Harold Hennig myself. But I put it quickly out of my mind and followed Jack and Julia Rose inside, and for the first time in a while Spinola and I beat them, which trumped everything until I went back to the Grand to cover for our night porter, who’d phoned in sick with a summer cold, whatever that is. I’d had a winter cold in a Soviet POW camp for about two years and that was bad enough. A summer cold sounds just awful.

I don’t mind the late shift. It’s cool and the sound of cicadas is as soothing as the night honeysuckle that adorns the walls behind the emaciated statues near the front door. Also, there are fewer guests in evidence with questions and problems to solve and I spent the first hour on duty reading Nice-Matin to help improve my French. At about one o’clock I had to go and help a very rich American, Mr. Biltmore, up to his fourth-floor suite. He’d been drinking brandy all night and had managed to empty a bottle and the bar with his obnoxious remarks, which were mostly to do with the war and how the French hadn’t quite pulled their weight, and that Vichy had been a Nazi government in all but name. I wouldn’t have argued with any of that, unless I’d been a Frenchman. As Napoleon might have said, but didn’t, “French history is the version of past events that French people have decided to agree upon.” I found Biltmore slumped in a chair and barely conscious, which is the way I prefer hotel drunks, but he started to get a little loud and unruly as I went to rouse him politely. Then he took a swing at me, and then another, so that I was obliged to tap him on the chin with my fist, just enough to daze him and save us both from further injury. That left me with a different problem because he was as big as a sequoia and just as hard to fold across my shoulder, and it took almost all of my strength to get him into the elevator, and then the rest of it to haul him out of the cage and onto his bed. I didn’t undress him. As a concierge, the last thing you want is for a drunken American to regain consciousness when you’ve got his pants halfway down his legs. Amis don’t take kindly to being undressed, especially by another man. In a situation like that it’s not just teeth that can be lost but a job as well. On the Riviera, a concierge-even a good one, with all his teeth-can be replaced in no time at all, but no hotel wants to lose a guest like Mr. Biltmore, especially when he’s paying more than fifteen hundred francs a night, which is about four hundred dollars, to stay in a suite he’s booked for three whole weeks. No one can afford to lose thirty thousand francs plus bar bills and tips.