I thought it just as likely that she would win a contract to repaint the Sistine Chapel, but I felt my mouth force its way up to a politely optimistic sort of smile. 'Sure you will,' I said. 'Look, maybe I can help. Maybe we can help each other.' It was a hopelessly flat-footed way of manoeuvring the conversation back to the main purpose of my visit.
'Maybe,' she said, serving the tea. 'One more thing and then you can give me a blessing. The vice squad has got files on over 5,000 girls in Vienna. But that's not even half of it. These days everyone has to do things that were once unthinkable. You too, probably. There's not much percentage in going hungry. And even less in going back to Czechoslovakia.'
'You're Czech?'
She sipped some of her tea, then took a cigarette from the packet I had given her the night before and collected a light.
'According to my papers I was born in Austria. But the fact is that I'm Czech: a Sudeten German-Jew. I spent most of the war hiding out in lavatories and attics.
Then I was with the partisans for a while, and after that a DP camp for six months before I escaped across the Green Frontier.
'Have you heard of a place called Wiener Neustadt? No? Well, it's a town about fifty kilometres outside Vienna, in the Russian Zone, with a collection centre for Soviet repatriations. There are 60,000 of them waiting there at any one time. The Ivans screen them into three groups: enemies of the Soviet Union are sent to labour camps; those they can't actually prove are enemies are sent to work outside the camps so either way you end up as some kind of slave labour; unless, that is, you're the third group and you're sick or old or very young, in which case you're shot right away.'
She swallowed hard and took a long drag of her cigarette. 'Do you want to know something? I think I would sleep with the whole of the British Army if it meant that the Russians couldn't claim me. And that includes the ones with syphilis.'
She tried a smile. 'But as it happens I have a medical friend who got me a few bottles of penicillin. I dose myself with it now and again just to be on the safe side.'
'That sounds expensive.'
'Like I said, he's a friend. It costs me nothing that could be spent on the reconstruction.' She picked up the teapot. 'Would you like some more tea?'
I shook my head. I was anxious to be out of that room. 'Let's go somewhere,' I suggested.
'All right. It beats staying here. How's your head for heights? Because there's only one place to go on a Sunday in Vienna.'
The amusement park of the Prater, with its great wheel, merry-go-rounds and switchback-railway, was somehow incongruous in that part of Vienna which, as the last to fall to the Red Army, still showed the greatest effects of the war and the clearest evidence of our being in an otherwise less amusing sector. Broken tanks and guns still littered the nearby meadows, while on every one of the dilapidated walls of houses all along the Ausstellungsstrasse was the faded chalk outline of the Cyrillic word 'Atak'ivat' (searched), which really meant 'looted'.
From the top of the big wheel Veronika pointed out the piers of the Red Army Bridge, the star on the Soviet obelisk close by it and, beyond these, the Danube. Then, as the cabin carrying the two of us started its slow descent to the ground, she reached inside my coat and took hold of my balls, but snatched her hand away again when I sighed uncomfortably.
'It could be that you would have preferred the Prater before the Nazis,' she said peevishly, 'when all the dolly-boys came here to pick up some trade.'
'That's not it at all,' I laughed.
'Maybe that's what you meant when you said that I could help you.'
'No, I'm just the nervous type. Try it again sometime when we're not sixty metres up in the air.'
'Highly strung, eh? I thought you said you had a head for heights.'
'I lied. But you're right, I do need your help.'
'If vertigo's your problem, then getting horizontal is the only treatment I'm qualified to prescribe.'
'I'm looking for someone, Veronika: a girl who used to hang around the Casanova Club.'
'Why else do men go to the Casanova except to look for a girl?'
'This is one particular girl.'
'Maybe you hadn't noticed. None of the girls at the Casanova are that particular.' She threw me a narrow- eyed look, as if she suddenly distrusted me.
'I thought you sounded like them at the top. All that shit about drip and all.
Are you working with that American?'
'No, I'm a private investigator.'
'Like the Thin Man?'
She laughed when I nodded.
'I thought that stuff was just for the films. And you want me to help you with something you're investigating, is that it?'
I nodded again.
'I never saw myself quite like Myrna Loy,' she said, 'but I'll help you if I can. Who is this girl you're looking for?'
'Her name is Lotte. I don't know her last name. You might have seen her with a man called K/nig. He wears a moustache and has a small terrier.'
Veronika nodded slowly. 'Yes, I remember them. Actually I used to know Lotte reasonably well. Her name is Lotte Hartmann, but she hasn't been around in a few weeks.'
'No? Do you know where she is?'
'Not exactly. They went skiing together Lotte and Helmut K/nig, her schStzi.
Somewhere in the Austrian Tyrol, I believe.'
'When was this?'
'I don't know. Two, three weeks ago. K/nig seems to have plenty of money.'
'Do you know when they're coming back?'
'I have no idea. I do know she said she'd be away for at least a month if things worked out between them. Knowing Lotte, that means it would depend on how much of a good time he showed her.'
'Are you sure she's coming back?'
'It would take an avalanche to stop her coming back here. Lotte's Viennese right up to her earlobes; she doesn't know how to live anywhere else. I guess you want me to keep my eye close to the keyhole for them.'
'That's about the size of it,' I said. 'Naturally I'll pay you.'
She shrugged. 'There's no need,' she said, and pressed her nose against the windowpane. 'People who save my life get themselves all sorts of generous discounts.'
'I ought to warn you. It could be dangerous.'
'You don't have to tell me,' she said coolly. 'I've met K/nig. He's all smooth and charming at the club but he doesn't fool me. Helmut's the kind of man who takes his brass knuckles to confession.'
When we were on the ground again I used some of my coupons to buy us a bag of lingos, a Hungarian snack of fried dough sprinkled with garlic, from one of the stalls near the great wheel. After this modest lunch we took the Lilliput Railway down to the Olympic Stadium and walked back in the snow through the woods on Hauptallee.
Much later on, when we were in her room again, she said, 'Are you still feeling nervous?'
I reached for her gourd-like breasts and found her blouse damp with perspiration. She helped me to unbutton her and while I enjoyed the weight of her bosom in my hand she unfastened her skirt. I stood back to give her room to step out of it. And when she had laid it over the back of a chair I took her by the hand and drew her towards me.
For a brief moment I held her tight, enjoying her short, husky breath on my neck, before searching down for the curve of her girdled behind, her membrane-tight stocking-tops, and then the soft, cool flesh between her gartered thighs. And after she had engineered the subtraction of what little remained to cover her, I kissed her and allowed an intrepid finger to enjoy a short exploration of her hidden places.
In bed she held a smile on her face as slowly I strove to fathom her. Catching sight of her open eyes, which
