The Other Side of Silence

When I’m not feeling sorry for myself I play bridge, or read books about playing bridge, which might strike a lot of people as a pretty good reason on its own to kill yourself. But it’s a game I find stimulating. Bridge helps to keep my mind sharp and occupied with something other than thoughts of home-and all those women, of course. In retrospect it seems that a great many of them must have been blondes, and not just because they were German, or close to being German. Rather too late in life I’ve learned that there’s a type of woman I’m attracted to, which is the wrong type, and it often happens that this includes a certain shade of hair color that just spells trouble for a man like me. Risky mate search and sexual cannibalism are a lot more common than you might think, although more usual among spiders. Apparently the females assess the nutritional value of a male rather than a male’s value as a mate. Which more or less sums up the history of my entire personal life. I’ve been eaten alive so many times I feel like I’ve got eight legs, although by now it’s probably just three or four. It’s not much of an insight, I know, and like I say, it hardly matters now, but even if it happens late in life a degree of self-awareness has to be better than none at all. That’s what my wife used to tell me, anyway.

Self-awareness certainly worked for her: She woke up one morning and realized just how bored and disappointed she was with me and our new life in France and went back home the very next day. I can’t say that I blame her. She never managed to learn French, appreciate the food, or even enjoy the sun very much, and that’s the only thing down here of which there’s a free and plentiful supply. At least in Berlin you always know why you’re miserable. That’s what Berlin luft is all about: an attempt to try to whistle your way out of the gloom. Here, on the Riviera, you would think there’s everything to whistle about and no reason at all to be down in the mouth, but somehow I managed it and she couldn’t take that anymore.

I suppose I was miserable largely because I’m bored as hell. I miss my old detective’s life. I’d give anything to walk through the doors of the Police Praesidium on Alexanderplatz-by all accounts it’s been demolished by the so-called East Germans, which is to say the Communists-and to go upstairs to my desk in the Murder Commission. These days I’m a concierge at the Grand Hotel du Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat. That’s a little bit like being a policeman if your idea of being a policeman is directing traffic, and I should know. It’s exactly thirty-five years since I was first in uniform, on traffic duty at Potsdamer Platz. But I know the hotel business of old; for a while after the Nazis got into power I was the house detective at Berlin’s famous Adlon Hotel. Being a concierge is very different from that. Mostly it’s about making restaurant reservations, booking taxis and boats, coordinating porter service, shooing away prostitutes-which isn’t as easy as it sounds; these days only American women can afford to look like prostitutes-and giving directions to witless tourists who can’t read a map and don’t speak French. Only very occasionally is there an unruly guest or a theft, and I dream of having to assist the local Surete to solve a series of daring jewel robberies of the kind I saw in Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief. Of course, that’s all it is: a dream. I wouldn’t ever volunteer to help the local police, not because they’re French-although that would be a good reason not to help them-but because I’m living under a false passport, and not just any false passport, but one that was given to me by none other than Erich Mielke, who is currently the deputy head of the Stasi, the East German Security Police. That’s the kind of favor that sometimes comes with a high price tag and, one day, I expect him to come calling to get me to pay it. Which will probably be the day when I have to go on my travels again. Compared to me, the Flying Dutchman was the Rock of Gibraltar. I suspect my wife knew this, since she also knew Mielke, and better than I did.

Quite where I’d go I have no idea, although I hear North Africa is accommodating where Germans on a wanted list are concerned. There’s a Fabre Line boat that sails from Marseilles to Morocco every other day. That’s just the sort of thing that a concierge is supposed to know, although it’s much more likely that there are rather more of the hotel’s well-heeled guests who’ve fled from Algeria than there are those who want to go there. Since the massacre of pieds-noirs civilians at Philippeville last year, the war against the FLN in Algiers isn’t going so well for the French, and by all accounts the colony is ruled even more harshly than it ever was when the Nazis left it to the tender mercies of the Vichy government.