The Other Side of Silence

“I’d forgotten what a violent temper you have, Gunther. There’s a fury in you I just didn’t remember.”

“You should see me when I can’t find my cigarettes. So talk, before I give you an ear piercing you won’t ever forget.”

“There’s a tape,” he said.

“What kind of a tape?”

“A tape. BASF. AEG. I don’t know. A sound recording.”

“Of what, exactly?”

“A man speaking. You might say that it’s a sort of confession.”

“Who is this man?”

“Ah, now this is where it gets interesting.”

I listened carefully as he started to describe what was on the tape. At first I was confused and then surprised, and then not really surprised at all. The whole thing sounded very clever. Too clever for an ordinary Fritz like me. Which is what I had half suspected all along. The only really strange part was that Hebel had decided to involve me in the whole rotten transaction. Then again, I seem to have a talent for finding trouble; it certainly seems to have no trouble in finding me. This couldn’t have looked more like trouble if someone had erected the word in fifty-foot-high letters on the summit of nearby Mont Boron. After a while he could see his explanation had made a real impression on me and he felt confident enough to stand up and go and help himself from the bottle of schnapps on the bedside table and light a cigarette without me waving the gun in his face again.

“You want one?” he asked, and poured a short glass for me anyway. “You look as though you need one.”

I took it from his hand and downed it quickly. It was good schnapps, cold as the Frisches Haff in January, and just the way I like it.

“Where is it now, this tape?”

“Safe. I’ll let you have a copy tomorrow so you can deliver it to the Villa Mauresque where Herr Maugham can listen to it at his leisure. I’ll even lend him my tape recorder so he can play it. Anyway, I expect he’ll know what to do next. After that the old man will have forty-eight hours to raise two hundred thousand dollars. Shouldn’t be too difficult given that he’s already raised fifty thousand of it. Let’s say that I’m letting you have the picture free as a sign of my good faith.”

“You’ve come a long way since blackmailing warm boys in the lavatories at Potsdamer Platz station,” I said. “I can see how you could squeeze Somerset Maugham. But this-this strikes me as foolhardy.”

“Some lemons are bigger than others, but they’ll squeeze just as easily. I learned that from the Nazis. Hitler’s grandmother was a practiced blackmailer, did you know that?”

“It doesn’t surprise me.”

When he’d finished talking I sat on the edge of the bed and thought things over for a minute or two before I spoke again.

“I’m not supposed to be here,” I said.

“Certainly you are. I suggested to Herr Maugham that you would be the man best placed to help him. You’re here because he needs you. And if it comes to that, so do I. You’re a perfect cutout, Bernie. Reliable. Intelligent. With much to lose. Useful to me, and to Herr Maugham.”

I shook my head. “What I mean is, I should be dead.”

“All of us who survived the war were fortunate,” said Hebel, and poured me another glass. “You and me perhaps especially so.”

“Were we? I wonder. Anyway, I’m not supposed to be alive right now. A little while ago I tried to kill myself. I sat in the garage with the car engine running and just waited for it to happen. I’m still not exactly sure why I kept on breathing air and not Fina gasoline but, for a while, I understood what death really is. Of course we all know we’re going to die. But until it happens, none of us really understands what it means to be dead. Me, I understood it, perfectly. I even saw the beauty of it. You see, Hebel, you don’t die; death isn’t something that just happens to you, no. It’s like you become death. You’re a part of it. All those billions who’ve lived and then died before you. You’ve joined them. And when you’ve felt that, it never goes away, even if you think you’re still alive. Just remember that when all this is over. Just remember that it was you who chose to involve a dead man like me in your little scheme.”

After that I told him we-by which I meant me and my client-would be in touch as soon as we’d listened to the tape. Then I collected the envelope with the photographs and the neg, the Pan Am flight bag with the money, pushed the muzzle of the gun under my waistband, and, without another word, left the room.

Downstairs in the hotel lobby, I returned to the front desk.

“When you speak to your friend in the PJ see what he can find out about a man called Louis Legrand.”

“I already did,” said Henri, writing down the name. “Speak to my friend, I mean. She left her scarf.”

“Who did?”

“The woman suspected of Spinola’s murder. I called my friend in the PJ and asked him, like you asked. Whoever it was shot him left a green chiffon scarf beside his dead body.”

“Is that all? Now, with her underwear they might have proved something. Sexual behavior. Hair color. Who she likes for the Tour de France. Anything.”