I’d always enjoyed going to the cinema, even when Dr. Goebbels was pretending to be Louis B. Mayer. Being part of a cinema audience felt like something attractively infernal to me. There was the darkness and the smoke, of course; there was the grandiose architecture, the gold curtains and the cheap marble and the red velvet; there was the paradox of being anonymous among a group of people; and there was the drama taking place on the big screen, like watching the gods struggle and screw up badly. It was as if real life had been suspended or abruptly curtailed in some antechamber of purgatory. There was all of that and the fact that I’d always wanted to die in a cinema, for the simple reason that a movie would give me something better to think about than the actual business of breathing my last. Ava Gardner looking down on me with those emerald eyes of hers, not to mention the sight of her ample chest in a slightly too-tight British army shirt, was much better than some muttering po-faced priest every time.
It was only now I realized that it was Ava who Ursula Dorpmüller had reminded me of. Meeting her at the apartment in Nymphenburg it had been all too easy to imagine poor Friedrich Jauch falling in with this seductive siren’s plans; the wonder was how she’d ended up being married to a slob like Theo Dorpmüller in the first place. Maybe she’d married the poor bastard because it’s easier getting generous amounts of life insurance when you’re still in your thirties. I felt sorry for him. I even felt sorry for Friedrich Jauch. I hoped he’d enjoyed her body because where he was probably going they didn’t allow conjugal visits. West Germany might not have had the death penalty like France and Great Britain but from my own experience I knew that Landsberg Prison was no holiday camp.
After a while I tore my greedy eyes away from Ava’s chest and noticed that the seat immediately behind Jauch was now occupied by a figure wearing a fur coat and a lilac head scarf. The two lovers were pretending not to talk but then Jauch turned around and took her hand, which clinched it in my eyes. These two couldn’t have looked more guilty if they’d been Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra. Now all I had to do was get to a telephone and call Dumbo Dietrich.
I went through the fire exit and ran downstairs, and outside. If the cops were quick they could pick them both up, one after the other, when they left the movie theater like two strangers in the night. It was true that most of the evidence against them was circumstantial, but an experienced detective would easily break them down under interrogation; the only question was which of them would crack first. I had my own theory about that. Jauch had carried out the murder, so he had the most to lose—and she would rat him out. She wouldn’t be able to help it. That’s just what women do.
On the west side of Sendlinger Tor Platz, in front of the Nussbaum Gardens, was the Matthäuskirche, a soulless Protestant church built in 1953 with a high red-brick square tower that looked like somewhere to train firemen or, more likely, kill them. If he’d been looking, God must have thought German architects had lost all sense of reason. Nearby was a row of phone booths with more character than the church, and from one of these I called Dumbo. There were a couple of East German refugees begging in front of the church and I tossed a couple of coins their way when I came out of the phone booth. It wasn’t looking at refugees that upset me; it didn’t. It was them looking back that bothered me: one German staring at another and seeming to say, Why me and not you? The worst thing was how so many of the younger ones still managed to look like the blond, blue-eyed master race.
I hurried back to the cinema, where I bought another ticket, this time for the stalls. I breathed a sigh of relief. The lovers were seated together now where I’d left them, quite unaware of the disaster that was about to turn their world upside down.
Ava fixed her big green eyes on me and shook her head as if to say, How could you betray them, you rotten bastard? They couldn’t help it. That life insurance money was the only way they could make their love work.
Or some such crap. But then Ava was trouble. Anyone could see that. That was probably the reason I loved her. And it was just as well for us both that I’d promised myself to leave Ava alone.
FOURTEEN
–
Time passed, slowly, and then one freezing day near the middle of March, I got the summons to go upstairs for an audience with Mr. Alois Alzheimer himself—the kind of summons for which a bottle of oxygen might almost have been required, such was the rarefied atmosphere that existed on the fourth floor. When I got there Dietrich was already seated in a brown leather Biedermeier bergère and, for a moment, until I saw the bottle of Canadian Club in Alzheimer’s hand, I thought I was in some sort of trouble. That comes naturally to anyone who has as much to hide as I do.
“And here he is,” said Alzheimer, pouring me a large one in a crystal glass the size of a small goldfish bowl. “The man who saved us twenty thousand deutschmarks.”
Everything in the office was of the finest quality. There was so much oak paneling on the walls it was like being a Cuban cigar in a humidor, while the gray
