Philip Kerr - The Other Side of Silence

“In this particular case, getting away alive is the best revenge, don’t you think?”

“Says you. Me, I think I’d prefer to bash in her brains. But slowly, you know. I’d like to take the time to enjoy it. One blow a minute.”

“You’re just saying that. And you think it will be sweet. But take it from one who knows. It isn’t. It never is.”

“What are you? Hamlet? Look, Gunther, don’t try to handle me. I know what I want, okay?”

“Then it’s just as well she’s not here, I guess.”

“It makes no difference,” he said. “One day I will catch up with her and I’ll pay her back.”

“You mean that, don’t you?”

“Of course I do. She’ll walk into a hotel room and I’ll be there, waiting behind the door, with a garrote in my hand.”

I shrugged. “Have it your own way.”

“You really don’t feel the same? She betrayed you. She played you like a hand of cards. Believe me, if anyone should want to kill her, it’s you, Gunther.”

“Maybe you’re right.”

“Of course I’m right.”

“As a matter of interest, what were your orders, Hennig? Just to help discredit Roger Hollis, I suppose.”

“That’s right. It was a good operation, too. And it would have worked but for Anne French. She’s got a mad streak, don’t you think? Either that or the woman is made of steel. Probably both.”

“Of course, it’s perfectly conceivable that it wasn’t Anne who betrayed you, but Mielke and Wolf. That the whole operation was really meant to put Roger Hollis back in good odor with his Whitehall masters. That she was told to do it from the outset.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Don’t you? I’m afraid I’ve formed the opinion that she was always meant to betray your operation. Yes, from the very beginning. That those were General Wolf’s orders. I’m afraid I really didn’t buy all that stuff about falling out of love with the Communist Party. It would certainly explain why Wolf picked her and not someone with family back in the GDR, who could be threatened with reprisal. No one like that would ever have done what she did.”

But Hennig wasn’t having any of it. I didn’t blame him; it sounded madly convoluted to me, too. Just madly convoluted enough to be the kind of thing that people in the secret services might actually think of.

“Nonsense,” he said. “What you’re saying-there’s no way I wouldn’t have known about a plan like that. Mielke and Wolf would certainly have said something.”

“Why? Because you’re that important? Nonsense. The whole operation worked all the better if you were ignorant of it. Anne’s betrayal now puts Hollis in the clear. And forever after, probably. Which can only mean MI5’s deputy director was Moscow’s man all along and will remain so. That Othello was never meant to discredit Hollis but actually to achieve the exact opposite.”

“No, it was Anne who betrayed me. Not them. Wolf isn’t that clever. Nobody is.” He clenched his fists and walked around the room cursing Anne and swearing to a whole variety of ugly revenges on her. I almost felt sorry for him. And in a way for her, too.

“Kill the goldfish in the pond or burn the house down if it makes you feel any better,” I said.

“What would be the point of that? It’s not hers. It’s rented. She’s not coming back here. If I thought there was even half a chance of that happening, I’d wait here and burn the house down with her in it.”

“You know, there’s a difference between revenge and vengeance,” I said, putting my hand in my jacket pocket.

“Is there? I can’t say I appreciate the difference very much, or even care.”

“Revenge is personal. An act of passion. An injury is revenged. But I think vengeance is about justice. That’s something very different. Crimes are avenged, don’t you think so?”

“Does it matter which it is when you’re the one being shot?”

“Probably not,” I said, and brought my hand out of my pocket. There was a gun in it. Julia Rose’s Beretta 418. The one that had killed my friend Antimo Spinola.

“That’s the second time you’ve pointed a gun at me,” he said. “There better not be a third, Gunther. What’s the idea this time?”

“You’re going to have to try very hard to convince me why I shouldn’t kill you, that’s all.”

“You’re sore about the girl. I can see why. Look, she was sorry about that. She really liked you, Gunther. She liked you more than she liked me. She told me. She didn’t have to go to bed with you. That was her choice.”

“Sure.”

“Listen, Gunther, there’s ten thousand francs in my toilet bag at the Grand Hotel. That’s for you. And don’t forget that there’s a bank account in Monaco. At the Credit Foncier. That much is true. There’s another twenty thousand francs more in that account that was meant to finance this operation. You’re already a signatory. All you have to do is show your passport to the manager and the money is yours. We could go there right now. Get the cash. You needn’t ever see me again.”

“No.”

I worked the slide on the little gun and put one of the little twenty-five-caliber bullets in the chamber. It wasn’t much of a gun to kill a man, but at a range of less than two yards it didn’t have to be. Hennig knew that, too, and started backing away.

“You’re not the type to kill me, remember?” He was starting to sound scared now. “You said so yourself, Gunther. You’re a decent man. I knew that the first time I met you.”

“No, I said I wasn’t the type to leave a man to die chained to a radiator, like an abandoned dog. But this is different.” I pointed the gun at him.

“This is for those nine thousand people who died on the Wilhelm Gustloff in January nineteen forty-five. It’s been eleven years in coming, and for them this is an act of vengeance. But for Captain Achim von Frisch, Irmela Louise Schaper and her unborn child-my unborn child-it’s revenge, pure and simple.”

And then, as he was probably about to speak again and beg me for his life, I shot him in the chest five times and then once more between the eyes when he was oozing blood down on the floor.

I stepped outside the guesthouse for a moment and lit a cigarette to help slow my pounding heart. The cicadas were quiet now, holding their breath probably, shocked that human emotions could make other, more intelligent living creatures such as ourselves behave in such a barbarous fashion. What did they know about real tragedy anyway? Without emotion, pain is just pain; it’s human feeling that makes pain such absolute agony. I had no regrets about killing Harold Hennig, but I was wrong about revenge, of course. It was sweet, after all. And I wasn’t finished with it yet. Not by a long way.

I went back into the house, wiped my brandy glass and the little Beretta clean of fingerprints, and tossed it onto the floor next to Harold Hennig’s dead body. Then I placed the keys to Spinola’s apartment near the front of Anne’s desk drawer. I also wrote his address onto a card in her Rolodex, in block capital letters. It wasn’t much in the way of evidence for the police, but in my experience you don’t need to be a Georges Simenon to frame someone for murder, just a corpse and a murder weapon and a set of keys and perhaps a woman who’s suddenly left the country. The police love things to be neat like that. This one had crime of passion written all over it. I told myself I might even stay around the Cap just long enough to answer their questions and recall Anne and Herr Hebel in the bar at the Grand Hotel and perhaps remember something important I must have forgotten, about how Spinola had once mentioned a writer in Villefranche he was seeing sometimes and how he’d had a fight with her new German boyfriend. Threatened him. Either way I could easily cause enough trouble for Anne French to make sure she could never return to France. Or perhaps she would be extradited back to face a murder trial. But to carry off a story like that I would need to speak to someone else first. I would need to speak to a master storyteller. I would need to go and see Somerset Maugham.