Early in the morning, having given up the battle to get some badly needed sleep, I called a financial reporter for Der Spiegel, whom I had known slightly in Leipzig.
“Elisabeth,” I said, “I need to track down Gerhard Stoessel.”
“The great Gerhard Stoessel himself? I’m sure he’s in Munich. That’s where the headquarters of Neue Welt are.”
But he wasn’t in Munich, as I had learned after some preliminary calling. “What about Bonn?” I asked.
“I won’t ask why you want to reach Stoessel,” she said, sensing the urgency in my voice. “But you should know that he is not easy to get to. Let me make some calls.”
She called back twenty minutes later. “He’s in Baden-Baden.”
“I won’t ask your source, but I assume it’s reliable.”
“Very much so.” Before I could ask, she added: “And he invariably stays at Brenner’s Park Hotel and Spa.”
In the nineteenth century Baden-Baden had swarmed with European nobility; it was there that, having lost everything at the Spielbank casino, Dostoyevski in despair wrote The Gambler. Now Germans and other Europeans went there to ski, play golf or tennis, watch the horse races at Iffezheim Track, and partake of the mineral-rich baths fed by artesian wells deep beneath the Florentiner Mountain.
The day had started out overcast and quite cold, and by the time we approached Brenner’s Park Hotel and Spa, surrounded by a private park by the Oosbach River, a chill drizzle had begun to fall. Baden-Baden seemed a town accustomed to grandeur and festivity; the tree-lined Lichtentaler Allee, with its vibrant adornments of rhododendrons, azaleas, and roses, was its centerpiece, its great promenade. But now it looked forlorn and deserted, resentful and furtive.
Molly waited for me in the Mercedes while I entered the hotel’s spacious and quiet lobby. I had traveled such a distance in these last few months, I reflected. So much had happened to me, to both of us, since that rainswept March day in upstate New York when we laid Harrison Sinclair’s coffin in the ground, and here we were, in a deserted German spa in the Schwarzwald, and once again it was raining.
The uniformed desk clerk who appeared to be in charge of the registration desk was a tall young man in his mid-twenties, towheaded and officious. “May I help you, sir?”
“Ich habe eine dringende Nachricht für Herrn Stoessel,” I said as importantly as possible, holding in one hand a business-size envelope. I have an urgent message for Mr. Stoessel.
I introduced myself as Christian Bartlett, a second attaché with the Canadian consulate on Tal Strasse in Munich. “Will you please give him this letter?” I said in my heavily accented but still serviceable German.
“Yes, of course, sir,” the clerk said, reaching for the envelope. “But he is not here. He is gone for the afternoon.”
“Where is he?” I slipped the envelope in my breast pocket.
“The baths, I believe.”
“Which one?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m sorry.”
There are really only two leading spas in Baden-Baden, both on Romerplatz: the Old Baths, also called the Friedrichsbad, and the Caracalla-Therme. At the first one I came to, Caracalla-Therme, I went through my routine, and was met by blank stares. There was no Herr Stoessel here, I was told. One of the older attendants, however, had overheard the conversation and said, “Mr. Stoessel doesn’t come here. Try the Friedrichsbad.”
At the Friedrichsbad, the attendant-bulky, sallow-faced, and middle-aged-nodded. Yes, he said. Mr. Stoessel was here.
“Ich bin Christian Bartlett,” I told him, “von der Kanadischen Botschaft. Es ist äusserst wichtig und dringend, dass ich Herrn Stoessel erreiche.” It is urgent that I reach Stoessel.
The attendant shook his head slowly, with mulelike truculence. “Er nimmt gerade ein Dampfbad.” He is taking the steam. “Man darf ihn auf gar keinen Fall stören.” He has instructed us not to disturb him.
The attendant was, however, awed and impressed by my imperiousness, and perhaps by my foreignness, and agreed to escort me into the private thermal steam bath where the great Herr Stoessel was. If it really was a matter of urgency, he would see what he could do. We passed white-uniformed stewards carting silver trays of mineral water and other cold drinks, and others carrying stacks of thick white cotton towels, and finally reached a corridor that seemed to be off limits to the other employees.
Outside the steam room sat a wide, potato-faced man in a gray security officer’s uniform, sweating profusely and visibly uncomfortable. He was obviously a bodyguard.
He looked up as we approached and snarled: “Sie dürfen nicht dort hineingehen!” You can’t go in there!
I looked at him, surprised, and smiled. In one lightning-fast motion I pulled my gun from my front pocket and slammed the butt against the side of the bodyguard’s head. He groaned and slumped to the ground. Whirling the gun back the other way, I caught the attendant on the back of his head, with the same result.
Moving quickly, I dragged both bodies into a nearby service alcove and out of sight, then closed the doors to close the area off. The attendant’s white uniform slipped off easily. It hung on me, but it would have to do.
I grabbed an empty tray from the stainless steel counter and several bottles of mineral water from a small refrigerator, and ambled casually to the steam room door. I gave it a hard tug and it came open with a loud hiss.
The steam swirled about me, thick and opaque like absorbent cotton, an undulating scrim. The room was unbearably hot, stifling, the steam sulfurous and acrid. I could taste it. The vaulted walls were tiled in white ceramic.
“Wer ist da? Was ist los?” Who’s there? What’s going on?
Through the gauzy mist I could just make out a pair of corpulent, reddened, nude bodies. They rested on a long stone bench, on white towels like carcasses in a slaughterhouse.
The voice came from the body nearest me, hairy-chested and round. As I advanced through the dense clouds, holding the tray aloft, I could make out his prominent ears, his balding dome, his large nose. Gerhard Stoessel. I had studied his photograph in Der Spiegel that morning; there was no question it was him. I couldn’t quite see who his companion was, except that it was another middle-aged man, hairless, with short legs.
“Erfrischungen?” Stoessel barked out. Refreshments? “Nein!”
Wordlessly, I backed out of the chamber, closing the door behind me.
The bodyguard and the attendant were still unconscious. Swiftly and deliberately, I paced the corridors outside the steam bath until I found what I wanted: a windowless door located at what would have been the rear of the chamber. It was the maintenance crawl space that I knew had to be there, in which the spa’s workers could do repair work on the steam pipes. It was not locked; there was no reason for it to be. I opened it and quickly, nervously, ducked into the low-ceilinged space. It was completely dark. The walls were slimy with moisture and mineral deposits. Momentarily losing my balance, I reached up to steady myself and accidentally grasped a scalding-hot pipe. Only with great effort was I able to restrain myself from bellowing in pain.