“Is there anything else I can do for you this evening, Herr Gunther?”
“Yes. Please ask room service to send up a bottle of beer and some scrambled eggs, will you? Bread and cheese, some sausage and pickles. Anything at all. And as soon as possible, please. I’m ravenously hungry.”
Alone in my room I read Dalia’s note several times before my supper turned up. Then I had a hot bath. I thought about telephoning but it was late by Swiss standards and I decided to do it in the morning, after I’d had breakfast with Weisendanger. I went to bed thinking sweet thoughts of Dalia. In her note she apologized for her lateness — it seemed she’d been unable to escape from her husband until almost four p.m., and assumed my not being at the hotel had something to do with that — and she suggested we meet again the following day. There were lots of written kisses at the bottom of the notepaper and a real one made of lipstick. I felt like I was fifteen again. In a good way. The older you get, the more attractive that idea starts to seem. And when I saw her, it would be even sweeter than it might have been because I had survived a kidnapping and an attempted murder.
Perhaps it’s true what Goethe says, that destiny grants us our wishes, but in its own way, in order to give us something beyond our wishes. It’s curious, but often, just as I’m drifting off to sleep, I feel I might be Goethe. It could be his disdain for the church and the law and of course the Nazis — he would certainly have loathed Hitler; it’s certainly the Nazis he has in mind when he tells us to disdain those in whom the desire to punish is strong — but I once visited the famous Auerbachs Keller in Leipzig where the poet spent most of his student years drinking wine, and felt an affinity with the man that I’ve felt for no other. Then again, it might just have been all those pictures on the wooden walls of Faust drinking with Mephistopheles. I’ve often felt an affinity with him, too. How else was I to explain my still being alive? My mind sidestepped the present once again, and for a moment I was drinking in the medieval cellar’s subterranean depths; then I was astride a wine barrel as big as a bull and riding out the door and up into the marketplace where the last scene from Jud Süss was already under way, and poor Oppenheimer was screaming for his life to be spared as the cage carrying the gallows was raised to the top of a tower high above the citizenry’s heads. I stayed to watch before oblivion took us both to its black velvet bosom. It was a very German dream.
Thirty-four
I’m normally an early riser. Especially in summer when the sun gets up before anyone. But that morning neither of us was quite ready for the Zurich police at 5:30 a.m. Weisendanger was there, of course, and stood quietly by while I dressed and his men searched my room, to find nothing. When I’d got back to the Baur the previous night I’d taken the precaution of hiding my gun behind the wheel of an enormous Duesenberg that was underneath a car cover in the parking lot, so that wasn’t anything to worry about.
“What’s this all about, Inspector? Was I late for breakfast? Or is it an especially nice dawn sky this morning?”
“Shut up and get dressed. You’ll find out.”
“The last time I got woken up like this I spent a very uncomfortable day with the Gestapo.”
“I told you we like to start early in the Swiss police.”
“I didn’t think you meant this early. Let’s hope the breakfast is better where we’re going now.”
We went to the Zurich police headquarters in Kasernenstrasse, which was about a fifteen-minute walk northwest of the hotel, and just a stone’s throw from the main railway station. I know that because I had to walk back to the Baur after they’d finished questioning me about the three Amis they’d found shot dead in the Huttenstrasse apartment. Police HQ was a disproportionately large, semi-castellated building with a big central clock and two white-painted wings, and what looked like an enormous parade ground to the rear.
“This is a hell of a shit factory for a country without much real crime,” I remarked as we trudged up four flights of stairs.
“Maybe that’s why we don’t have much crime,” said Weisendanger. “Did you ever think about that?”
We went into a top-floor room with three lateral bars across the window. I suppose they might have prevented a fat man from committing suicide by being thrown into the street — which was a favorite interrogation technique of the Gestapo — but only just. From the room where they questioned me I could see across the river to what looked like a military barracks and stables. I lit a cigarette and sat down.
“Where were you yesterday?” asked Weisendanger.
“After a very pleasant breakfast with you,” I said, “I spent the morning in Küsnacht. At the home of Dr. Stefan Obrenovic. I expect you can ask him. He’ll certainly remember my visit. He didn’t like me very much.”
“I wonder why?”
“The very same thing I was asking myself. After that, I took a drive around the lake. Which was nice. It’s a beautiful lake you have here. Then I went to the zoo, where I also had a late lunch. You could have asked me all this over a soft-boiled egg and a cup of coffee.”
“The zoo?”
“Yes, it’s on the slopes of the Allmend. And better than Berlin Zoo, I have to admit. A lot of our animals have been eaten, you know. It’s a short-sighted policy for a zoo, I think.”
“What animals did you see?”
“Lions and tigers. Things with fur. The usual kind.”
“Then what did you do?”
“Let’s see. I had a coffee at Sprüngli on Paradeplatz. No trip to Zurich would be complete without that. Then a beer at the Kronenhalle. Maybe two or three because I fell asleep in the car. Came back here at around nine o’clock.”
“The desk clerk said it was more like ten.”
“Was it really that late?”
“You weren’t anywhere near Huttenstrasse?”
“Not to my knowledge. What’s in Huttenstrasse?”
“Right now the bodies of three dead Americans.”
“And you think I had something to do with that?”
“For five hundred years we’ve had democracy and peace in this town. Then the day after you show up we have three shootings in one day. That’s a hell of a coincidence, wouldn’t you say?”
“Would you be as upset if they were Germans who’d died?”
“Try me.”
“I hate to sound like the elder statesman here, but when I was a detective in Berlin, I used to look for something we quaintly called ‘evidence’ before bringing a suspect in for questioning. That way I could catch him out if he was lying. You might try that sometime. You’d be surprised how effective it can be in a situation like this.”
“You think you’re pretty smart, don’t you, Gunther? A typically arrogant German.”
“The last time I looked, that wasn’t a crime. Even in Switzerland.”
“You know, I’d be well within my rights to throw you out of the country right now.”
“If you were going to do it you’d have done it already. That much is obvious. So why am I here? It can’t be the view. And it’s certainly not the coffee. I know the Swiss like to go fishing but it’s common practice to hang your hook in water that’s deeper than a couple of centimeters. You’re staring into a puddle of piss and you know it.”