Hitler's blue eyes, and Adenauer's personality. It was like being served by fifty years of German history. Lilly looked at the man with disdain.
'He's already got a bottle, right?' The waiter nodded. 'Then just bring another glass. And a brown bowl. Yes, a brown bowl.' The waiter nodded and went away without a word.
'You're drinking coffee?' I said.
'I might have a small glass of cognac, but so long as you've ordered a bottle, I can drink what I like,' she said. 'That's the rule.' She smiled. 'You don't mind, do you? Saves you a little money. Nothing wrong with that, eh?'
'Nothing wrong with that at all,' I said.
'Besides, it's been a long day. During the day I work in a shoe shop.'
'Which one?'
'I couldn't tell you that,' she said. 'You might come along and drop me in it.'
'I'd have to drop myself in it at the same time,' I said.
'True,' she said. 'But it's best you don't know. Imagine the shock if you saw the real me, fetching shoes and measuring feet.'
She helped herself to one of my cigarettes, and while I put a match to it, I got a better look at her. Her face had just a few freckles around the nose, which was, perhaps, just a little too pointed. It made her seem sharp and speculating, which, of course, she probably was. Her eyes were a green shade of avarice. The teeth were small and very white with the bottom jaw just a little too prominent. With just the one expression so far, she looked like one of those Sonneberg dolls with the porcelain face and the kind of underwear that's played with every day.
My eggs arrived with her coffee--a bowl of half coffee, half milk. While I ate, she talked about herself and smoked, and sipped her coffee, and had a little cognac. 'I haven't seen you here before,' she observed.
'It's been a while,' I said. 'I've been living in Munich.'
'I'd like to live in Munich,' she said. 'Somewhere farther west than Vienna, anyway. Somewhere there aren't any Ivans around.'
'You think the Amis are any better?'
'Don't you?'
I let that one go. She didn't want to hear my opinions of the Americans. 'What do you say we go back to your place?'
'Hey, quit stealing my lines,' she said. 'I'm supposed to make the running, not you?'
'Sorry.'
'What's your hurry, anyway?'
'I've been on my shoes all day,' I said. 'You should know what that's like.'
She tapped the cognac bottle with a fingernail as big as a paper knife. 'This isn't herbal tea you're drinking here, Eric,' she said, sternly. 'This is more of a put-you-down than a pick-me-up.'
'I know, but it takes the edge off the ax I've been grinding for the last few hours.'
'Oh? Against who?'
'Me.'
'Like that, huh?'
I pushed my hand across the table and lifted it a little to let her see the hundred-schilling note that was under my palm. 'I need a bit of looking after, that's all. Nothing weird. Fact is, that'll be the easiest hundred you ever put in your brassiere.'
She regarded the hundred as she might have regarded a cannibal's offer of a free lunch. 'You need a hotel, mister,' she said. 'Not a girl.'
'I don't like hotels,' I said. 'Hotels are full of lonely strangers. People sitting alone in their rooms waiting until it's time to go home. I don't want that. I just need somewhere to stay until tomorrow morning.'
She covered my hand with hers. 'What the hell?' she said. 'I could use an early night.'
THIRTY-FIVE
Lilly's apartment was across the Danube in the Second District, close to the Diana Baths, on Upper Danube Strasse. It was small but comfortable, and I enjoyed a relatively peaceful night's sleep with Lilly that was broken only by the sound of a barge blowing its horn as it went south along the canal, toward the river. In the morning she seemed both surprised and pleased that she hadn't had to satisfy anything other than my appetite for breakfast.
'Well, that's a first,' she said, making us some coffee. 'I must be losing my touch. Either that, mister, or you're keeping it nice and warm for the boys.'
'Neither,' I said. 'And how would you like to make another hundred?'
A little less obdurate by day than by night, she agreed with alacrity. She wasn't a bad sort of girl. Not really. Her parents had been killed in 1944, when she was just fifteen years old, and everything she had she'd worked for herself. It was a common enough story, including her being raped by a couple of Ivans. A good-looking girl, she knew she had been lucky it had been just two Ivans. There were women I knew in Berlin who had been raped as many as fifty or sixty times during the first months of the occupation. I liked her. I liked the way she didn't complain. And I liked the way she didn't ask too many questions. She was bright enough to know I was probably hiding from the police, and bright enough not to ask why.
On her way to work--the shoe shop was Fortschritt, on Karntnerstrasse--she showed me a barber's shop where I could get a shave, as I had been obliged to leave my razor and everything that came with it back at the hotel. I took the holdall with me. I liked Lilly. But I didn't trust her not to steal twenty-five thousand Austrian schillings. I had a shave and a haircut. And, at a men's store inside the Ring, I bought a clean shirt, some underwear, some socks, and a pair of boots. It was important for me to look respectable. I was going to the Russian Kommandatura, in what used to be the city's Board of Education, with the aim of examining their files on wanted war criminals. As someone who had been in the SS, who had escaped from a Russian POW transport, and killed a Russian soldier--not to mention more than two dozen NKVD--I was taking a considerable risk entering the Kommandatura at all. But it was a risk I calculated was slightly less than the risk of carrying out a similar inquiry at the IP headquarters. Besides, I spoke fluent Russian, knew the name of an important colonel of MVD, and was still possessed of Inspector Strauss's business card. And if all else failed, I would try bribery. In my experience, all Russians in Vienna and, in Berlin for that matter, were open to bribery.
The Palace of Justice, on Schmerlingplatz, in the Eighth District, was the meeting place for Vienna's Inter- Allied Command, and the headquarters of the International Patrol. The flags of all four nations flew in front of this imposing building, with the flag of the nation that had temporary police control of the city--in this instance, the French--flying on top. Opposite the Palace of Justice stood the Russian Kommandatura, easily identifiable by the communist slogans and a large illuminated red star that lent the snow in front of the building a wet, pinkish hue. I walked into a grand entrance hall and asked one of the Red Army guards for the office responsible for the investigation of war crimes. Under his forage cap was a scar on his forehead that went down right to the skull, as if his head had once been scratched by something more lethal than a fingernail. Surprised to be spoken to in Russian and so politely, too, he directed me to a room at the top of the building and, with my heart in my mouth, I mounted the huge stone steps.
Like all public buildings in Vienna, the Board of Education had been built at a time when the Emperor Franz Josef had ruled an empire comprising 51 million souls and 675,000 square kilometers. There were just over 6 million people living in Austria in 1949, and the greatest European empire was long gone, but you wouldn't have known that walking up the stairs of this imposing building. At the top was a wooden fingerpost sign, crudely painted with department names in Cyrillic. I followed the sign around the balustrade to the other side of the building, where I found the office I was looking for. The sign on a little wooden stand beside the door was in German, and it read: 'SOVIET WAR CRIMES COMMISSION, AUSTRIA. For the investigation and examination of the misdeeds of the German fascist invaders and their accomplices in the monstrous atrocities and crimes of the German government.' Which seemed to describe it pretty well, all things considered.
I knocked on the door and went into a small outer office. Through a glass wall I could see a large room with several freestanding book-cases and about a dozen filing cabinets. On the wall of the office was a large picture of Stalin, and a smaller one of a plump-looking man in glasses who might have been Beria, the head of the Soviet
