The bar was busy and surprisingly inviting. A Welte-Mignon pianola was playing a selection of maudlin German tunes. I ordered a cognac and smoked a French cigarette and avoided the eye of the reptilian lieutenant who’d been on the train from Berlin. When he looked like he was headed my way, I finished my brandy and left. I rode the elevator up to the seventh floor and walked along the curving corridor to my room. A maid came out of another room and smiled. To my surprise, she spoke good German.
“Would you like me to turn down your bed linen for the night, sir?”
“Thanks,” I said and, opening my door, complimented her German.
“I’m Swiss. I grew up speaking French and German and Italian. My father runs a hotel in Bern. I came to Paris to get some experience.”
“Then we have something in common,” I told her. “Before the war I worked at the Hotel Adlon, in Berlin.”
She was impressed with that, which was of course my intention, as she was not without her charms. A little homely perhaps. But I was in the mood to think well of home and homely-looking girls. And when she finished her duties, I gave her some German money and the rest of my cigarettes for no other reason than I wanted her to think better of me than I thought of myself. Especially the man I saw in the mirror on the front of the wardrobe. In some pathetic little fantasy I imagined her coming back in the small hours, knocking on my door, and climbing into my bed. As things worked out, this wasn’t so far from the mark. But that was later on, and when she left I wished I hadn’t given her my last cigarettes.
“Well, at least you won’t fall asleep with a cigarette in your hand and set the bed on fire, Gunther,” I said, with one eye on the brass fire extinguisher that stood in the corner of the room next to the door. I closed the window, undressed, and went to bed. For a while I lay there feeling a little drunk, staring up at the blank ceiling and wondering if I should have gone to the Maison Chabanais after all. And perhaps I might even have got up and gone there if it hadn’t been for the thought of putting on my riding boots again. Sometimes morality is just a corollary of laziness. Besides, it felt good to be back in the world of grand-hotel luxury. The bed was a good one. Sleep quickly came my way and put an end to all thoughts of what I might have been missing at the Maison Chabanais. A deep sleep that became unnaturally deeper as the night progressed and almost put an end to all thoughts of Maison Chabanais and Paris and my mission. The kind of sleep that almost put an end to me.
17
I told myself I must have dreamed the whole thing. I was back in the dugout. Had to be, or else why could I smell wintergreen ointment? We used it as a winter warmer for weathered or chapped hands in the colder months, and in the trenches, that was nearly all of them. Wintergreen was also an excellent chest rub for when you had a fever or a cough or a sore throat, which, because of the lice, overcrowding, and damp, was much of the time. Sometimes we even fingered a bit of the stuff inside our nostrils, just to keep the smell of death and decay at bay.
I had a sore throat. And I had a cough. The cold was on my chest and so was something else, only it wasn’t wintergreen. It was a nurse and she was on top of me, and I was lifting her skirt so that she could mount me properly. Only, she wasn’t a nurse at all but a hotel maid, a nice homely girl from Bern, and she’d come to keep me company after all. I reached for her breasts and she slapped me hard, twice, hard enough to make me catch my breath and then cough some more. Twisting away from underneath her, I retched onto the floor. She jumped off the bed and, coughing herself, went to the window and threw it open and hung her head outside for a moment before she came back to me, hauled me off the bed, and tried to drag me toward the door.
I was still coughing and retching when two men in white jackets came and carried me away on a stretcher. Outside the hotel, on the boulevard Raspail, I started to feel a little better as I managed to haul some of the fresh morning air into my lungs.
They took me to the Lariboisière Hospital on rue Ambroise-Paré. There they put a drip in my arm and a German army doctor told me I’d been gassed.
“Gassed?” I said wheezily. “With what?”
“Carbon tetrachloride,” said the doctor. “It seems that the fire extinguisher in your room was faulty. But for the maid who detected the smell outside your room door, you’d probably be dead. The CTC converts to phosgene when it’s exposed to air, which is how it puts the fire out. It suffocates it. You, too, very nearly. You’re a lucky man, Captain Gunther. All the same, we’d like to keep you here for a while, to keep an eye on your liver and kidney functions.”
I started coughing again. My head felt like the Eiffel Tower had collapsed on top of it. My throat felt like I’d tried to swallow it. But at least I was alive. I’d seen plenty of men gassed in France, and this wasn’t anything like that. At least I wasn’t bringing anything up. You’ve got to see a man retching two liters of yellow liquid every hour, drowning in his own mucus, to know how appalling it is to die from a gas attack. It was said that Hitler had been gassed and was temporarily blinded, and if that was so, it explained a lot. Whenever I saw him on a newsreel yelling his head off, gesticulating wildly, beating his breast, choking with his hatred of the Jews or the French or the Bolsheviks, he always reminded me of someone who had just been gassed.
In the early evening I started to feel better. Well enough to receive a visitor. It was Paul Kestner.
“They said you had an accident with a fire extinguisher. What did you do? Drink it?”
“It wasn’t that type of a fire extinguisher.”
“I thought there was only the one kind. The kind that puts out a fire.”
“This one was the type that smothers a fire with chemicals. Takes away all the oxygen. That’s kind of what happened to me.”
“Someone catch you smoking in bed?”
“I’ve spent most of the day wondering that myself. And not liking any of the answers.”
“Such as what, for instance?”
“I used to work in a hotel. The Adlon, in Berlin. And I learned a lot about what they do and what they don’t do in hotels. And one of the things they don’t do is to put fire extinguishers in the bedrooms. One reason is in case a guest gets drunk and decides to hose down the curtains. The other reason is that a lot of extinguishers are more dangerous than the fires they’re meant to deal with. It’s a funny thing, but when I arrived at the Lutetia I don’t recall there being an extinguisher in my room. But there was one there last night. If I hadn’t been drunk myself, I might have paid more attention to it.”
“Are you suggesting someone tampered with it?”
“It seems so obvious to me that I wonder why you should sound surprised.”
“Surprised? Yes, of course I’m surprised, Bernie. You’re implying that someone tried to murder you in a hotel full of policemen.”
“Tampering with a fire extinguisher is just the sort of thing a cop would know about. Besides, none of us at the Lutetia has a room key.”
“That’s because we’re all on the same side. You can’t mean a German tried to kill you.”
“I do mean.”
“But why not a Frenchman? We did just fight a war with these people, after all. Surely if it was anyone—and I’m not convinced it was anything but an accident—it would be one of them. A porter, perhaps. Or a patriotic waiter.”
“And among all of the bastards he could have killed, he just chose me at random, is that it?” I shook my head, which seemed to provoke another violent fit of coughing.
Kestner poured a glass of water and handed it to me.