The Other Side of Silence

“On Kantstrasse. I remember it. Sadly, I seem to remember everything. There’s so much I’d like to forget but try as I might, it just doesn’t happen. It’s like I don’t seem to be able to remember how. It’s not too much to ask in life, is it? To forget the things that cause you pain. Somehow.”

“Bitter and maudlin. I like that, too.” He lit a cigarette from the silver box on the table. We were awaiting dinner and afterward the inevitable game of bridge. “I’ve remembered now. That’s it. ‘Funes the Memorious,’” said Maugham. “It’s a story by Borges on just that very subject. A man who could not forget.”

“What happened to him?” asked Robin.

“I’ve forgotten,” said Maugham, and then laughed uproariously. “Dear old Max. He was one of the lucky ones. Jews, I mean. Got out in thirty-eight, and went to America, where he died, much too soon, in nineteen forty-three. Nearly all of my friends are gone now. Including the wonderful Adlon. My, that was a good hotel. Whatever happened to the couple who owned the place? Louis Adlon and his sweet wife, Hedda.”

“Louis was murdered by the Russians in nineteen forty-five. With his riding boots and waxed mustaches he was mistaken for a German general.” I shrugged dismissively. “Most of the Red Army were just peasants. Hedda? Well, I hate to think what happened to her. The same as the rest of the women in Berlin, I imagine. Raped. And raped again.”

Maugham nodded sadly. “Tell me, Walter, how was it that you became the house detective at the Adlon?”

“Until nineteen thirty-two, I’d been a cop with the Berlin police. My politics meant that I had to leave. I was a Social Democrat. Which for the Nazis was tantamount to being a Communist.”

“Yes, of course. And how long were you a policeman?”

“Ten years.”

“Christ. That’s a lifetime.”

“It certainly seemed that way at the time.”

After dinner and a couple of rubbers, Maugham said, “I want to talk to you in private.”

“All right.”

He took me up a wooden stair to his writing space, which was inside a freestanding structure on top of a flat roof. There was a big refectory table, a fireplace, and no windows with a view that could distract a man from the simple business of writing a novel. A bookshelf held some favorite titles and, on a coffee table, a few copies of Life magazine. Another of Jersey Joe’s Tahitian sparring partners was up on the wall, but what with the beam from the lighthouse at the southwestern end of the Cap, it was a little like being on the deck of a ship of which Maugham was the Ahab-like captain. We sat down at opposite ends of a big sofa and then he came to the point.

“You strike me as an honest man, Walter.”

“As far as it goes.”

“One imagines that you wouldn’t be working as a concierge at the Grand if you weren’t.”

“Perhaps. But good fortune rarely walks you out the door to your car. Not these days.” I shrugged. “What I mean to say is, we’re all trying to make a living, Mr. Maugham. And if we can pull off the pretense that we’re doing it honestly, then so much the better.”

“You’re an even bigger cynic than I am, Walter. I like you more and more.”

“I’m German, Mr. Maugham. I’ve had a lot more practice with cynicism. We all have. It’s the thousand-ton weight of German cynicism that caused the collapse of the Weimar Republic and gave us the thousand-year Reich.”

“I suppose so.”

“What can I do for you, sir? You didn’t bring me up here to help me confess my sins.”

“No, you’re right. I came to tell you about a few of mine. The fact is, Walter, I’m being blackmailed again.”

“Again?”

“I’m a rich old queer. I have more skeletons in my closets than the Roman catacombs. Being blackmailed is not so much an occupational hazard for a man like me as an existential condition. I fuck, therefore I am subject to demands for money, demands with menaces attached.”

“Pay him, whoever it is. You’re rich enough.”

“This one is a professional.”

“So go to the police.”

Maugham smiled thinly. “We both know that isn’t possible. Blackmailers work on the same principle as the Mafia. They prey upon a vulnerable minority of people who can’t go to the police. Their power is our silence.”

“What I meant was, why tell me?”

“Because you used to be a policeman, and because I want your help.”

“I don’t see how I can be of assistance, Mr. Maugham. I’m a concierge. My detective days are long gone. I have a hard job seeing off the merry widows at the hotel, let alone a professional blackmailer. Besides, I’m a little slow on the uptake these days. I’m still trying to work out how you know I used to be a detective.”

“You were ten years with the Berlin police. You told us yourself.”

“Yes, but it was someone else who told you I’d been the house bull at the Adlon Hotel.” I nodded. “But who? Wait, it was Hennig, wasn’t it? Harold Heinz Hennig. I saw him arguing with your nephew in front of La Voile d’Or a couple of weeks ago. So that’s his racket.”

“Never heard of him.”