dying so suddenly, well, she didn't have time to do it. So we're a bit stuck, now, the wife and I. What she left us isn't enough to retire on, and at our time of life, we're too old to look for another position. We were wondering if you'd care to help us, sir. You being a wealthy man, now. We're not greedy people. We wouldn't ask at all, if your mother hadn't meant to change her will. You can ask Dr. Bekemeier, if you don't believe me, sir.'
'I see,' I said. 'If you don't mind me saying so, Herr Medgyessy, your wife, Klara, didn't sound like she wanted my help. Anything but.'
The butler shifted on his legs and came to the at-ease position.
'She was just a bit shook up, that's all, sir. On account of the suddenness of your mother's death in the hospital, sir. And also because, since she died, the International Patrol have been there, asking questions about you, sir. Wanting to know if you were coming back to Vienna for the funeral. That kind of thing.'
'Now, why would the Allied police be at all interested in me?' Even as I spoke I was recalling my getaway drive from the Central Cemetery. It was beginning to look as if my American driver might have made an error. As if it had been Eric Gruen the International Patrol had been pursuing, not a black marketer.
Medgyessy smiled his sylvan smile. 'There's no need for that, sir,' he said. 'We're not stupid people, the wife and I. Just because we never talk about it, doesn't mean we don't know about it.'
It was clear there was more here than just a girl left with a bump in her road. A lot more.
'So please don't speak to me like I'm an idiot, sir. That won't help either of us. All we're asking is that we continue to serve your family, sir. In the only way we can now, since I can't imagine you'll be staying on in Vienna, sir. Not officially, anyway.'
'How exactly do you think you can serve me?' I asked him, patiently.
'With our silence, sir. I knew most of your mother's affairs. Very trusting, she was. And very careless, too, if you know what I mean.'
'You're trying to blackmail me, aren't you?' I said. 'So why don't you just tell me how much?'
Medgyessy shook his head, irritably. 'No, sir. It's not blackmail. I wish you wouldn't look at it that way. All we want is to serve the Gruen family, sir. That's all. A proper reward for loyalty. That's what this is all about. Maybe what you did was right, sir. That's hardly for me to say. But it's only fair that you should recognize your debt to us, sir. For not telling the police where you live, for instance. Garmisch, is it? Very nice. I've not been there myself, but I've heard it's very beautiful.'
'How much?'
'Twenty-five thousand schillings, sir. That's not much, considering. Not when you think about it, sir.'
I hardly knew what to say. It was now obvious that Eric Gruen had not been honest with me, and that there was something in his past that made his being in Vienna of interest to the Allies. Or had he been honest after all? Could it have been the execution of those prisoners of war, in France, that Engelbertina had mentioned? Why not? After all, the Allies already had dozens of SS men imprisoned in Landsberg for the Malmedy massacre. Why not another massacre involving Eric Gruen? Whatever the reason, one thing was clear: I needed to stall Medgyessy long enough to speak to Gruen himself. I had little choice but to go along with the butler's blackmail, for now. With all the documentation I possessed being in the name of Eric Gruen, I could hardly go back to being Bernie Gunther.
'All right,' I said. 'But I'll need some time to get the money together. The will hasn't yet been proved.'
His face grew harder. 'Don't play me for a fool, sir,' he said. '
'Very well,' I said. 'Until two o'clock tomorrow.' I opened the door for him and he limped out, like a man waltzing by himself. I had to hand it to him. He and his wife had handled it very nicely. Good cop, bad cop. And all of that guff about loyalty. It was an effective pitch. Especially the way he had dropped the name of Spaengler's Bank and Garmisch.
I closed the door, picked up the phone, and asked the hotel operator to connect me with Henkell's house in Sonnenbichl. After a few minutes the operator called me back and said there was no reply, so I put on my coat and hat and took a taxi to Dorotheengasse.
Most of the buildings in this narrow, cobbled street had been repaired. At one end was a yellow stucco church with a spire like a V-2 rocket, and at the other end, an ornate fountain with a lady who had picked the wrong day for going topless in Vienna. In its massive baroque portal, the green door of Spaengler's Bank looked like Hitler's train stuck in a railway tunnel. I approached the top-hatted doorman, informed him of the name of the person I had come to see, and was directed into what could have passed for the Hall of the Mountain King. And with footsteps echoing against the ceiling like the tintinnabulation of a broken bell, I walked up a staircase as wide as an autobahn.
The Gruen family's bank manager, Herr Trenner, was waiting for me at the top of the stairs. He was younger than me but looked as if he had been born with gray hair and wearing glasses and a morning coat. He was as obsequious as a Japanese ivy plant. Wringing his hands as if he hoped to squeeze the milk of human kindness from his fingernails, he showed me to an upstairs room furnished with a table and two chairs. On top of the table was twenty-five thousand schillings and, as arranged, a smaller pile of cash, to cover my immediate expenses. On the floor beside the table was a plain leather holdall in which to carry the money. Trenner handed me a key to the door of the room, informed me that he would be at my service so long as I remained in the building, bowed gravely, and then left me alone. I pocketed the smaller pile of cash, locked the door, and went back downstairs to wait by the front door for Vera Messmann. It was ten minutes to three.
THIRTY-TWO
I waited until almost half past three, by which time I had concluded that Vera Messmann had had second thoughts about accepting Gruen's money and wasn't coming. So I went back upstairs, transferred the money to the holdall, and set off to find her.
It was a twenty-minute walk through the city center to Liechtensteinstrasse. I rang Vera's doorbell and knocked at the door. I even shouted through the letterbox, but there was no one at home. Of course there's no one at home, I told myself. It's only four o'clock. She's at her shop. Around the corner, on Wasagasse. She was at home yesterday afternoon only because it was early closing. But today is a normal working day. You're some detective, Bernie Gunther.
So I went around the corner. I suppose I assumed she would change her mind about the money when she saw it in the bag. There's something about the sight of hard cash that always makes people think in a different way. That has always been my own experience, anyway. And naturally I assumed Vera would be no different. That she would change her mind because she would see the money and listen to me and let herself be persuaded. And if that failed I would be stern with her and tell her she had to take Gruen's money. How could she fail to do what she was told when, in the bedroom, she had been so willingly submissive?
The shop faced the back of Vienna University's Institute of Chemistry. The sign above the window read 'Vera Messmann. Salon for Made-to-Measure Corselettes, Bodices, Girdles, and Brassieres.' The window contained a female tailor's dummy wearing a pink silk corset and matching brassiere. Beside it was a show-card featuring a line drawing of a girl wearing a different ensemble. She had a bow in her hair and, but for her lack of glasses, she reminded me a little of Vera. A little bell tinkled above my head as I opened the door. There was a simple, glass- topped counter no bigger than a card table and, next to this, another anonymous girdled female trunk. In the back, a ceiling light was burning dimly near a heavily draped changing cubicle. In front of this sanctum sanctorum stood a French chair, as if someone might sit there and, with seignorial satisfaction, watch his lover or mistress appear from behind the curtain wearing some well-engineered undergarment. Who said I didn't have a vivid imagination?
'Vera?' I called. 'Vera, it's me, Bernie. Why didn't you show up at the bank?'
Idly, I drew open a narrow drawer to reveal a dozen or so black brassieres pressed together like slaves on a ship bound for the plantations in the West Indies. I picked one up and felt the wires in it hard underneath my fingers, thinking that it looked and felt like the harness for early and ill-advised attempt at human flight.
'Vera? I waited at the bank for half an hour. Did you forget, or did you just change your mind?'
The thing was, I hardly wanted to go blundering into the back of the shop and find some well-fed Vienna
