Philip Kerr - The Other Side of Silence

“That’s true. Which is why I want to learn bridge. I was thinking it might provide me with the means of getting to meet him. From what I’ve heard, he plays cards almost every night.”

“Why do you want to meet him?”

“I’m a big fan of his writing. He’s perhaps the greatest novelist alive today. Certainly the most popular. Which is why he can afford to live down here in such splendor at the Villa Mauresque.”

“You’re not doing so bad yourself.”

“I’m renting this place. I don’t own it. I wish I did.”

“What’s the real reason you want to meet him?”

“I don’t know what you mean. Maybe you didn’t notice it, but I have an entire collection of his first editions and I would dearly like him to sign them all before-before he dies. He is very old. Which of course would make them worth a lot more. I suppose there’s that.”

“We’re getting warmer,” I said. “But I’ll bet that’s still not the real reason. You don’t look like a book dealer. Not in those pants.”

Anne French bridled a little.

“All right then, it’s because I have an offer from an American publisher called Victor Weybright to write his biography,” she said. “Fifty thousand dollars, to be precise.”

“That’s a much better reason. Or to be more accurate, fifty thousand of them.”

“I’d really like to meet him, but as you’ve observed I’m the wrong sex.”

“Why don’t you just write to him and tell him about the book?”

“Because that would get me nowhere. Somerset Maugham is notoriously private. He hates the idea of being written about and, so far, has resisted all biographers. Which is one reason why the money is so good. Nobody has managed to do it. I was thinking that if I learned to play bridge I might inveigle my way into his circle and pick up some conversation and some color. He’d never agree to meet me if he knew I was writing a book about him. No, the only way is to give him a reason to invite me. By all accounts he used to play with Dorothy Parker. And rather more recently with the Queen of Spain and Lady Doverdale.”

“Bridge isn’t the kind of card game you can just pick up and play, Mrs. French. It takes time to become good. From what I hear, Somerset Maugham’s been playing all his life. I’m not sure even I’d be in his league.”

“I’d still like to try. And I’d be willing to pay you to come here and teach me. How does a hundred francs a lesson sound?”

“I’ve got a better idea. What kind of cook are you, Mrs. French?”

“If it’s just me, I tend to go to the hotel. But I can cook. Why?”

“So I’ll make you a deal. My wife left me a while ago. I miss a cooked meal. Make me dinner twice a week and I’ll teach you how to play bridge. How’s that?”

She nodded. “Agreed.”

So that was my deal. And in bridge the dealer is entitled to make the first call.

For a couple of weeks my arrangement with Anne French worked well. She was a quick study and took to the game like a new deck and a dealer’s shoe. She wasn’t a bad cook and I even managed to put on a few extra pounds. Best of all, she made a hell of a gimlet, the kind you can taste and feel for hours afterward. This might even be why, once or twice, I got the idea she wanted me to kiss her, but I managed to resist the temptation, which is unusual for me. Temptation is not something I can easily avoid when it comes wearing Mystikum behind its rose petal ears and you can see its smaller washing still hanging on the line outside the kitchen door. It wasn’t that I didn’t find her attractive, or that I couldn’t have used a little affection-or that I didn’t like her underwear-but I’ve been bitten so many times that I’m as twice shy as the wild pigs that came into the trees at the bottom of her garden after dark and truffled around for something to eat. Shy and apt to think that someone might have a rifle pointed at my ear. Meanwhile, I continued going to La Voile d’Or for my biweekly game and my life continued along the same monotonous path as before. Life can be appreciated best when you have a regular job and a goodish salary and you can avoid thinking about anything more important than what’s happening in Egypt. At least, that’s what I told myself. But one night Spinola was drunk-too drunk to play bridge-and I was actually pleased because it gave me an excuse to call Anne to see if she wanted to take the Italian’s place at the table. I was disappointed to discover, first that she wasn’t at home and second that I was more disappointed than I told myself was appropriate, given everything I’d told myself and her about not getting involved with hotel guests. Meanwhile, the Roses drove Spinola home in their Bentley, which left me alone on the terrace with a last drink and cigarette, wondering if I should drive to Anne’s house in Villefranche and look for her in case she hadn’t heard the telephone or chosen not to answer it. It was the wrong thing to do, of course, and I was just about to do it all the same when an Englishman with a little dog spoke to me.

“I see you here a lot,” he said. “Playing bridge, twice a week. I say, aren’t you the concierge at the Grand Hotel?”

“Sometimes,” I said. “When I’m not playing bridge.”

“It is rather addictive, isn’t it?”

He was probably about forty but looked older. Overweight and a little sweaty, he wore a double-breasted linen blazer, a white shirt with overextended double cuffs and gold links that looked like a modest day on the Klondike, gray cavalry twill trousers, a silk tie that was the color of a South American jaguar, and a matching silk handkerchief that was spilling out of his top pocket as if he were about to conjure a bunch of fake flowers, like a cheap magician. He was the same man I’d seen arguing outside the hotel entrance with Harold Hennig.

“Hello, I’m Robin Maugham.”

“Walter Wolf.”

We shook hands and he waved the waiter toward us. “Buy you a drink?”

“Sure.”

We ordered drinks, some water for the dog, lit our cigarettes, took a table on the terrace facing the port, and generally tried to behave normally, or at least as normal as you can when one man isn’t homosexual and knows that the other man is, and the other man is fully aware that the first man understands all that. It was a little awkward, perhaps, but nothing more than that. I used to believe in a moral order, but then so did the Nazis, and their idea of moral order included murdering homosexuals in concentration camps, which was more than enough for me to change my own opinions. After the orgy of destruction Hitler inflicted upon Germany, it seems pointless to give a damn about what one man does in a bedroom with another.

“You’re German, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“It’s all right. I’m not one of these Englishmen who doesn’t like Germans. I met a lot of your chaps in the war. Solid men, most of them. In forty-two I was in North Africa with the 4th County of London Yeomanry, in tanks. We were up against the DAK-the Deutsches Afrikakorps-which was the 15th Panzer Division in my neck of the woods. Good fighters, what? I’ll say so. I sustained a head injury at the Battle of Knightsbridge, which ended my war. At least that’s what we called it. Strictly speaking, it was the Battle of Gazala but one always thinks of it as the Battle of Knightsbridge.”

“Why?”

“Oh. Well, that was the code name for our defensive position on the Gazala line: Knightsbridge. But to be quite honest there were so many chaps I knew in the 8th Army from Eton and Cambridge and my Inn of Court that it sometimes felt as if one was shopping in Knightsbridge. Not that I was an officer, mind. I joined up as an ordinary trooper. On account of the fact that I was a bit of a bolshie. And just to pay my own bar bills, so to speak. I never much liked all that damned officer malarkey.”