A German Requiem

Delighted with the effect she was having on me, Lotte smiled happily and took the glass from my hand.

'I hope you don't mind me undressing,' she said, 'only the gown is an expensive one and I had the strangest feeling that you were about to tear it off my back.'

'Why should I mind? It's not as if I haven't finished reading the evening paper.

Anyway, I like having a naked woman about the place.' I watched the slight wobble of her behind as she walked lazily to the other side of the sitting-room where she swallowed her drink and dropped the empty glass on to the sofa.

Suddenly I wanted to see her bottom shaking like a jelly against the rut of my abdomen. She seemed to sense this and, bending forwards, took hold of the radiator like a wrestler pulling against the ring ropes in his corner. Then she stood with her feet a short way apart and stood quietly with her backside towards me, as if waiting for a thoroughly unnecessary body-search. She glanced back over her shoulder, flexed her buttocks and then faced the wall again.

I'd had more eloquent invitations, but with the blood buzzing in my ears and battering those few brain cells not yet affected by alcohol or adrenalin, I really couldn't remember when. Probably I didn't even care. I tore off my pyjamas and stalked after her.

I'm no longer young enough, nor quite thin enough, to share a single bed with anything other than a hangover or a cigarette. So it was perhaps a sense of surprise that woke me from an unexpectedly comfortable sleep at around six o'clock. Lotte, who might otherwise have caused me a restless night, was no longer lying in the crook of my arm and for a brief, happy moment I supposed that she must have gone home. It was then that I heard a small, stifled sob coming from the sitting-room. Reluctantly I slipped out from under the covers and into my overcoat, and went to see what was wrong.

Still naked, Lotte had made a little ball of herself on the floor by the radiator where it was warm. I squatted down beside her and asked why she was crying. A fat tear rolled down a stained cheek and hung on her top lip like a translucent wart. She licked it away and sniffed as I handed her my handkerchief.

'What do you care?' she said bitterly. 'Now that you've had your fun.'

She had a point, but I went ahead and protested, enough to be polite. Lotte heard me out and when her vanity was satisfied she tried a crippled sort of smile that reminded me of the way an unhappy child will cheer up when you hand over 50 pfennigs or a penny-chew.

'You're very sweet,' she allowed finally, and wiped her red eyes. 'I'll be all right now, thank you.

'Do you want to tell me about it?'

Lotte glanced at me out of the corner of one eye. 'In this town? Better tell me your rates first, doctor.' She blew her nose and then uttered a short, hollow laugh. 'You might make a good screw doctor.'

'You seem quite sane to me,' I said, helping her to an armchair.

'I wouldn't bet on it.'

'Is that your professional advice?' I lit a couple of cigarettes and handed her one. She smoked it desperately, and without much apparent pleasure.

'That's my advice as a woman who's mad enough to have been having an affair with a man who just slapped her round like a circus clown.'

'K/nig? I never saw him as the violent type.'

'If he seems urbane that's only the morphine he uses.'

'He's an addict?'

'I don't know if he's an addict exactly. But whatever it was he did while he was in the SS, he needed morphine to get through the war.'

'So why did he paste you?'

She bit her lip fiercely. 'Well, it wasn't because he thought I could use a little colour.'

I laughed. I had to hand it to her, she was a tough one. I said, 'Not with that tan anyway.' I picked up the astrakhan jacket from the floor where she had dropped it and draped it around her shoulders. Lotte drew it close to her throat and smiled bitterly.

'Nobody puts his hand on my jaw,' she said, 'not if he ever wants to put his hand any place else. Tonight was the first and last time that he'll give me a pair of slaps, so help me.' She blew smoke from her nostrils as fiercely as a dragon. 'That's what you get when you try to help someone, I guess.'

'Help who?'

'K/nig came into the Oriental at around ten last night,' she explained. 'He was in a foul mood and when I asked him why, he wanted to know if I remembered a dentist who used to come into the club and gamble a bit.' She shrugged. 'Well, I did remember him. A bad player but certainly not half as bad as you like to pretend you are.' Her eyes flicked at me uncertainly.

I nodded, urgently. 'Go on.'

'Helmut wanted to know if Dr Heim, the dentist, had been in the place during the last couple of days. I told him I didn't think he had. Then he wanted me to ask some of the girls if they remembered him being there. Well, there was one particular girl I said he should be sure to speak to. A bit of a hard-luck case, but pretty with it. The doctors always went for her. I guess it was because she always looked that little bit more vulnerable, and there are some men who quite like that sort of thing. It so happened she was sitting at the bar, so I pointed her out to him.

I felt my stomach turning to quicksand. 'What was this girl's name?' I asked.

'Veronika something,' she said, and noticing my concern, added, 'Why? Do you know her?'

'A little,' I said. 'What happened then?'

'Helmut and one of his friends took Veronika next door.'

'To the hat shop?'

'Yes.' Her voice was soft now and just a little ashamed. 'Helmut's temper ' she flinched at the memory of it ' I was worried. Veronika's a nice girl. A doofy, but nice, you know. She's had a bit of a hard life but she's got plenty of guts.

Perhaps too many for her own good. I thought with Helmut the way he was, the mood he was in, it would be better for her to tell him if she knew anything or not, and to tell him quickly. He's not a very patient man. Just in case he turned nasty.' She grimaced. 'Not much of a corner to turn, when you know Helmut.'

'So I went after them. Veronika was crying when I found them. They'd already slapped her around quite hard. She'd had enough, and I told them to stop it.

That was when he slapped me. Twice.' She held her cheeks as if the pain lingered with the memory. 'Then he shoved me out into the corridor and told me to mind my own business and stay out of his.'

'What happened after that?'

I went to the Ladies, a couple of bars and came here, in that order.'

'Did you see what happened to Veronika?'

'They left with her, Helmut and the other man.'

'You mean they took her away somewhere?'

Lotte shrugged glumly. 'I guess so.'

'Where would they have taken her?' I stood up and walked into the bedroom.

'I don't know.'

'Try and think.'

'You're going after her?'

'Like you said, she's been through a lot already.' I started to dress. 'And what's more, I got her into this.'

'You. How come?'

While I finished dressing I described how, coming back from Grinzing with K/nig, I had explained how I would have gone about trying to find a missing person, in this case Dr Heim.

'I told him how we could check Heim's usual haunts if he could tell me where they were,' I told her. But I left out how I had thought it would never have got that far: how I assumed that with Mnller possibly Nebe and K/nig too arrested by Belinsky and the people from Crowcass, the need actually to look for Heim would never have arisen: how I thought that I had stalled K/nig into waiting until the meeting at Grinzing was over before we started to look for his dead dentist.