In Germany it is hard to be hungry for long without realizing it. The Germans are surely the munchingest people in the world. It is rare to pass three pedestrians in a row without noticing that at least one of them is chewing on something that looks, sounds, and smells delicious. If they have to walk more than 150 feet without sight of a bakery or a Schnell lmbiss -a hot-snack stand-they become perceptibly anxious, even panicky. As a result, railroad stations, airports, and other public places are lined with tiny stand-up bars selling sausages, beer, cakes, and other restoratives, generally of high quality.
The Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof was no exception, and the first thing I did when I got there was to order a chunk of warm Leberkase and a roll, served with a dab of sweet German mustard on a paper plate, along with a half-liter of beer. I stood with two other men at a table made from a big barrel and downed the meal happily, wondering, not for the first time, how this pulpy, slippery, delicious sausage is made. (I've never dared to ask. There are some things…)
The Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof was typical of big-city Germany in other ways too, being cavernous, bustling, clean, and pleasantly located, fronting a lively square from which a mall led a few blocks into the heart of the city.
But in Frankfurt's case something has gone wrong. When you head down the pedestrian shopping mall, the Kaiserstrasse, you quickly see that although the pavement is clean, the architecture generally handsome, and the lamp standards charming, a sleazy urban rot has taken hold. It is as if the office-supply stores and flower shops are there on sufferance, and their clients and personnel had better be gone before dark if they know what's good for them.
Obviously, Peter hadn't known. It was here, within a few blocks of the Hauptbahnhof, that he had died in the gutter. I hadn't come to Frankfurt with that on my mind, except in a general sense, but now that I was there with two hours before I was due at the airport, it seemed a natural thing to want to see the place where he'd been killed. Whether a sort of veneration was operating, or simply an unwholesome curiosity, I didn't ask myself. I left my shoulder bag in a locker and walked east from the station, buttoning my coat collar against the dreary gray snow flurries.
It was about as much fun as starting from Market and Turk in San Francisco and strolling into the Tenderloin. The scenery was different, but the cast of characters was the same. Men with faces as leathery and corrugated as old valises, many with crusty sores on cheeks or foreheads, stood hunched in shivering, unsteady groups of three or four, or leaned shakily against the walls of buildings, staring with bleary hostility at well-dressed passersby who kept their own eyes straight ahead, their expressions judiciously non-observant. Younger men, earringed and leather-jacketed, stared more openly and aggressively.
Every other storefront was whitewashed or curtained, with a sign that said Sex-Shop or Sex-Kino-or, in one enterprising case, Sex-Supermarkt -and near their doorways, and other doorways as well, there were miniskirted, fat-thighed hookers, red-splotched from the cold, with grubby hands and mean, pinched faces. A respectable-looking man in shirtsleeves and tie came out of a photographic-equipment store to shoo one of them away from his entrance. He did it with a vigorous slap on the rear. The woman moved on with a silent grimace and a disgusted flap of her hand at him; he went back into his store flushed and laughing, hooting something to a customer.
There were no big, blond Utelindes. The wigs were all jet black or copper-wire red. It took me a while to locate the Hotel Paradies, because I didn't know where it was and it wasn't listed in the telephone book. I found it finally in a forlorn alley between Kaiserstrasse and Taunusstrasse. It looked the way I had expected it to. Had it been in America, there would have been sad, torn window shades and a red neon sign. Here, those windows that weren't covered by drab metal blinds had grimy, ancient gauze curtains in them, and Hotel Paradies was painted directly on the gray stucco wall in rusty, faded brown.
It took only one look to convince me of what I should have known days before; that Anne had been right in her conviction, that Harry had been right in his conjecture, and that the Polizei, Robey, and I had gotten it all wrong. Peter van Cortlandt, with his taintless French cuffs and clean, slender hands, would never have gone near the place; not willingly. The man, as Anne had said, was just too fastidious. And if that doesn't sound like a cogent reason, all I can say is that if you'd known him, you'd have thought so, too.
And that meant, of course, what Anne had said it did: that his death had not been a straightforward, squalid little affair but a more complex matter trumped up to look like something it wasn't. Unexpectedly, I felt a whooshing rush of relief. Funny to be relieved when you realize that someone you liked hadn't died in an accident after all but had been murdered. But that's what I felt. Regardless of what I'd been telling myself, I'd been troubled by the sordidness of the thing, and finding out I'd been wrong made a big difference.
I had stood too long staring at the Hotel Paradies; long enough for the wet snow to collect on my eyebrows, long enough for a puffy-faced woman with copper hair to open the front door and call out across the street to me.
I turned and walked back to the Hauptbahnhof, reflecting. What about motive? Was there really any reason to think, as Anne did, and Harry seemed to, that it was anything more complicated than a robbery? Peter did carry a lot of cash on him; once I saw him ask a waiter if he could change a thousand-dollar bill at the Thanh Longh, a tiny Vietnamese restaurant on Geary, not far from the museum. (I wound up paying the $9.80 lunch check for the two of us, although Peter had repaid me by 2:00 p.m.)
More than that, Peter looked rich-the way he talked, lit his cigarette, crossed one slim leg over the other. As considerate and polite as he was to anyone who came his way, he moved in an aura of self-assured complacence that would probably make a really poor man want to kill him on sight.
So the obvious motive was robbery, especially since the valuables he'd carried with him were missing. And yet, by the time I took my seat on the smooth, silent airport train, I knew I didn't buy it. It was too elaborate for so ordinary a theft: watch, ring, wallet. Peter's killer-or killers-had gone to a great deal of trouble throwing up a smoke screen to befuddle the police. They must have drugged him, put him into a walking trance so that witnesses would remember seeing him "drunk" in a couple of bars, dragged him into that awful hotel, arranged for the tattooed Utelinde… but why go through all that when a blow on the head and a quick toss into the Main would have sufficed? Why kill him at all?
And if it wasn't robbery, then I could think of only one reasonable alternative: Anne's hypothesis that "they" had killed him to keep him quiet about the forgery he'd found, the forgery he'd been so quietly jocular about. The idea no longer seemed absurd. One week he discovers a forgery in The Plundered Past, and the next he's murdered in a well-planned setup; set up to have no apparent connection with the show, set up to make his friends, his associates, his family only too happy to see the resulting inquiry get as little publicity as possible. Given the circumstances, "they" must have reasoned, there was hardly likely to be an outcry for an exhaustive investigation. The sooner he was buried, the sooner his miserable end could be forgotten.
It made sense, but it was all conjecture. No, not all. He was murdered; of that I was now certain, and his murder was not what it seemed. It had been natural enough for Harry to think along those lines, but why, I wondered irritably, had Anne been able to see it from the beginning, while I, with all my smug condescension, had not? Well, I would tell her that she was right and I was wrong when I saw her next, and I would try to say a few more things too.