The Other Side of Silence

Sunday morning arrived as hot as a parboiled cicada. The Grand Hotel’s honey-marble lobby was air-conditioned so relentlessly, however, that I was glad of my thick morning coat even though it made me look like my grandfather, who was a civil servant and worked all his life at the Prussian House of Representatives in Berlin where, in 1862, he’d heard Bismarck give his famous “Blood and Iron” speech. I missed my grandfather. And for a moment I remembered how, when I was a small boy, he would take me from his house near Fischerinsel to visit the bear pit nearby. Behind my desk I must have resembled a bear in a pit, standing up on my hind legs whenever a guest came close in the hope that I might please them and earn myself a tip. Hotel guests drifted in, drifted out, drifted upstairs, drifted out to the swimming pool, drifted in to breakfast, lunch, and dinner and all in a variety of holiday costumes, some of which were almost as absurd and unsuitable as the black wool morning coat worn by a grand hotel concierge. A few of the guests even drifted off to the church in Beaulieu, but mostly they stayed put at the refrigerated hotel. I didn’t blame them. It was too hot for religion but then, like many Prussians, I was always more pagan by inclination and background. For Bismarck it had been military spending-metaphorically, blood and iron-that had been the key to Prussia’s significance in Germany; for me it was always the fact that Prussia had remained a total stranger to Christianity until finally it was conquered by the pope’s Teutonic Knights in 1283. Ever since then, God has been punishing us harshly for the tardiness of our conversion to his church. Now, that’s what I call a chosen people. It explained a lot of German history. It explained the impenetrable black forest that was my own dark soul, and it certainly explained my sense of humor, which was never very far away when giving the hotel guests directions, buying tickets for the theater, or handling an exchange of foreign currency, usually involving U.S. dollars. Americans always complained about the rate of exchange in spite of the fact they were the richest tourists on the Riviera that year. Americans were the richest tourists on the Riviera every year, a reputation that seemed to bring most of them a great deal of enjoyment but also had the effect of their paying almost twice as much as anyone else did and which the French unashamedly called le tax americain. Price gouging was one thing and you could hardly blame the cash-strapped French for giving in to the temptation to demand too much money in restaurants and taxis. Demanding money with menaces was quite another. In my book, blackmail is one of the worst crimes there is, since it can and does often last a lifetime, and I can still remember the enormous pleasure with which I learned that Leopold Gast, Berlin’s most notorious blackmailer, had been sentenced to life imprisonment in 1929, after one of his many mostly female victims committed suicide, but not before writing a detailed letter to the police-a letter that later convicted him. Frankly, the guillotine would have been too good for a loathsome man like Gast. And it was with a similar degree of loathing that I now regarded Harold Heinz Hennig, aka Harold Hebel, as he walked nonchalantly across the hotel lobby to my station. He was smiling, too, like a wolf who’d just eaten the granny, which only served to exacerbate my hatred of the handsome, younger man. I caught a strong smell of cologne, noted the expensive Cartier gold watch on the tanned wrist of the arm resting on the desk, and found myself wanting to cut the limb off and make him eat it. It was with this pleasing image that I entertained myself while we spoke.

“Herr Hebel,” I said in German, staring coldly at him like a porcelain dog. “What can I do for you?”

He put a manicured hand inside the breast pocket of his Savile Row jacket and withdrew a buff-colored envelope, which he then handed to me. “If you have a spare few moments, I was wondering if you might write a translation of this letter from French into German for me? My French isn’t nearly as good as yours, Herr Wolf, and it contains some technical terms that are frankly beyond me.”

These were the first words he’d spoken to me since January 1945, and it took all of my self-control not to remind him of this or to punch him in the nose. Hebel knew that, of course, but it was all part of a careful act that he should pretend he and I were almost strangers. His voice carried the rasping edge of a growl, like a big cat, or a guard dog.

“Certainly, sir. I’ll get right onto it.”

“Take your time, my dear fellow,” he said affably. “There’s no hurry. Sometime this afternoon would be just fine.”

“Very well, sir.”

“You can leave both versions in my room if you like. I’ll pick them up tomorrow.”

And then he went out into the fierce heat and handed a tip to the parking valet, who ran off to fetch his car.