twenty, the door of the Jockey Bar opened and, for a brief moment, an obtuse triangle of dim light fell on the patent-shiny sidewalk — long enough for me to see a woman wearing a raincoat and a hat and carrying a man’s umbrella. She looked one way and then the other before glancing at her watch. It was Arianne Tauber.
Abandoning my inadequate refuge I walked quickly forward and presented myself in front of her.
‘You look like a widow’s handkerchief,’ she said.
‘It’s only what happens when air turns back into water. You’re a chemist. You should know that.’
‘And you should know I changed my mind about letting you walk me home.’
‘Looks like I got wet for nothing then.’
‘That’s precisely why I’ve decided to walk you home, copper. All that water dripping off your hat. If we move your head the right way we can probably fill a couple of glasses. So it’s probably lucky that I managed to steal a half-bottle of Johnnie Walker to go with it. That’s the only reason I’m late. I had to wait for the right moment to lead the raiding party on Otto’s bar.’
‘With a pitch like that I might just allow you to walk me home and then up the stairs.’
‘Well, we can hardly drink it in the street.’
It’s quite a walk from Luther Strasse to Fasanenstrasse and it was fortunate that the rain eased soon after we began; even so, we were obliged to stop a couple of times and take a nibble off her bottle. Amundsen wouldn’t have approved of breaking into our supplies so soon after setting off from base camp, but then he had sled dogs and all we had were soaking wet shoes. By the time we reached my apartment, the half-bottle of Johnnie Walker was only a third, which is probably why we took off our clothes and, it being wartime when these things seemed to happen a little more quickly than of old, we went straight to bed and, after a few minutes of animal magic to remind us both of happier times before God got angry with the people who stole the fruit of his favourite tree, we resumed our earlier conversation with small glasses in our hands and, perhaps, a little less front. It’s pointless trying to maintain a persona concealing one’s true nature from the world when your damp clothes are lying in a hurried heap on the floor.
‘I never slept with a cop before.’
‘How was it?’
‘Now I know why cops have big feet.’
‘I hate to sound like a cop so soon after-’
‘You are going to arrest me.’
‘No, no.’
‘I won’t come quietly.’
‘So I noticed. No, Arianne, I’ve been thinking about your job at the Jockey Bar and wondering if you should give it up or not. In case Gustav does go back there looking for you.’
‘And what did you conclude, Commissar?’
‘That if the Gestapo had arrested him and brought him back to the bar to look for you, then you’d be in trouble.’
‘True. But even if I did leave the club, they wouldn’t have a problem finding me. Otto has all my details. My work book number, my address, everything. No, if I left there, I’d also have to leave my room and go underground. Which is impossible. That sort of thing takes money and connections.’
‘That’s the very same conclusion I came to myself. As I see it, there are two other possibilities. One is that he assumes you handed over the envelope, as agreed, and never comes back at all. He gave you that envelope to give to Paul because he was scared to give it to Paul himself; and that could mean he’s too scared ever to return to the club and ask you anything more about it. The other possibility is that he does come back, and if he does, then you find an excuse to telephone me at the Alex and then I come along and arrest him.’
‘Conveniently leaving me out of it, right?’
I nodded and drank some more of the Scotch. It was the first proper liquor I’d tasted since coming back from the Ukraine. Normally I don’t drink Scotch. But this tasted just fine. Like some fiery drink of the gods that might have been gathered from a hive of immortal bees. My own sting was gone, at least for the moment. But after the defilement of my flesh, I was beginning to feel divine again.
‘Conveniently leaving you out of it.’
‘You said Paul was found dead in Kleist Park. But you didn’t say any more.’
‘No, I didn’t.’
‘How do you know it was him? I was as close to him as I am to you now and I’m not sure I would have recognized him again.’
‘It was him all right. His injuries were those of a man who’d been hit by a car. And it’s not like there were any other unreported traffic accidents in that area that night.’
‘So who was he?’
‘Do you really want to know?’
‘I’m not sure. Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe you should decide, Gunther.’
I asked myself how much she ought to know, and when I told her it was mainly because I wanted to see how she would react. Despite our being in bed together — maybe because of it — I wasn’t yet satisfied that she was as innocent as she had led me to believe. But even if she did turn out to be rather more culpable than I had previously supposed I couldn’t imagine myself serving her up cold to the Gestapo.
‘The man you were paid to meet at Nolli, he was really a Czech called Franz Koci who was working for the Three Kings.’
‘You mean those terrorists who were in the newspapers earlier this year?’
‘Yes.’
‘Now I am scared.’ She closed her eyes and lay back against the pillow, then sat up abruptly and stared at me with wide eyes. ‘You know what that means, don’t you? It means that Gustav must be some sort of spy. For the Czechs.’
‘I’d say that was a pretty good guess.’
‘What am I going to do?’
‘You might try to remember some more about Gustav. And if that doesn’t happen, I might tie you over a table and beat it out of you myself. Like the Gestapo.’
‘Do they really do that? I’ve heard stories.’
‘All of them are true, I’m afraid.’
‘Maybe I should go underground, after all.’ She shook her head and shivered. ‘It must be bad enough to have someone hurt you to make you tell them something you know; but to have someone hurt you when you’ve got nothing you can tell them. That doesn’t bear thinking of.’
‘And that’s precisely why I want you to tell me all about Gustav. Once again. From the very beginning. Everything you remember and everything you might have forgotten. Your best chance of disappearing from this picture is to paint another. Of him.’
There’s a little red warning card with a hole in the middle that the Ministry of Propaganda likes you to slip over the tuning dial of your radio. ‘Racial comrades!’ it says. ‘You are Germans! It is your duty not to listen to foreign radio stations. Those who do so will be mercilessly punished!’ Now me, I’m a good listener. A lot of being a good detective is knowing when to shut up and let someone else do the talking. Arianne liked to talk — that much was obvious — and while she told me nothing new about Gustav she told me quite a lot about herself, which was of course the main point of the exercise.
She was from Dresden, where she’d gone to university. Her husband, Karl, also a student from Dresden, had joined the German Navy in the summer of 1938 and had been killed on a U-boat in February 1940. Three months later, her father, a commercial traveller, had been killed during a bombing raid while on a business trip to Hamburg.
Naturally I checked up on all of this later. Exactly as Arianne had described, her fiance’s boat, U-33, had been sunk by depth-charges from a British minesweeper in the River Clyde, in Scotland. Twenty-five men, including Karl and the boat’s commander, were lost. Her younger brother, Albrecht, had joined the Army in 1939 but now he was with the military police. Her father had worked for the pharmaceutical works in Dresden and often did business with E.H. Worlee, another chemical company, in Hamburg. Soon after Herr Tauber’s death Arianne had come to Berlin to work for BVG — the Berlin Transport Company — as a secretary to the director of Anhalter Railway Station. But she had quit this job — a good job — because, she said, he couldn’t keep his hands off her.
