“You are Herr McCorkle?” he asked, giving my name a fine gutteral pronunciation.
“That’s correct. I called just after it happened.”
“I’m Lieutenant Wentzel.”
We shook hands. I asked him if he would like a drink. He said he would have a brandy. We waited while Karl poured it, said prosit, and he drank. Then back to business.
“You saw this happen?” Wentzel asked.
“Some of it. Not all.”
He nodded, his blue eyes direct and steady, his mouth a thin straight line that offered neither sympathy nor suspicion. He could have been asking about how the fender got dented.
“Please, would you mind telling me what happened just as you remember it? Omit nothing, no matter how trivial.”
I told it to him as it had happened from the time I left Berlin, leaving out only Padillo’s presence, which I suppose was something less than trivial. While I talked the technical crew came in, took pictures, dusted for fingerprints, examined the body, put it on a stretcher, threw a blanket over it, and carted it off to wherever they take dead bodies. The morgue, I suppose.
Wentzel listened carefully but took no notes. I guessed that he had that kind of mind. He never prompted or asked a question. He merely listened, occasionally glancing at his fingernails. They were clean, and so was the white shirt whose widespread collar was plugged by a double-Windsor knot tied into a brown-and-black tie. It didn’t do much for his dark-blue suit. He had shaved sometime during the day and he smelled faintly of lotion.
I finally ran down, but he kept on listening. The silence grew and I resisted the temptation to add a little frosting here and there. I offered him a cigarette, which he accepted.
“Uh — this man Maas?”
“Yes.”
“You had never seen him before?”
“Never.”
“But yet he managed to meet you on the plane at Tempelhof, became friendly with you, secured a ride with you to Godesberg — in fact, to exactly the same destination — and here you observed him running from your establishment after his companion had been shot. Is this not true?”
“That’s what happened.”
“Of course,” Wentzel murmured, “of course. But do you not think, Herr McCorkle, do you not think it is something of a coincidence — indeed, an amazing coincidence — that this man should sit next to you, that you should offer him a ride, that he should be going to your establishment, where he was to meet a man who was to be killed?”
“It had struck me that way,” I said.
“Your partner, Herr Padillo, was not here?”
“No; he’s away on a business trip.”
“I see. If this man Maas attempts to get in touch with you by some fashion, you will notify us immediately?”
“You’ll be the first.”
“And tomorrow would it be possible for you to come down to our bureau to sign a statement? It will be necessary for your employees to come also. At eleven hours, shall we say?”
“Good. Anything else?”
He looked at me carefully. He would remember my face ten years from now.
“No,” he said. “Not for the present.”
I offered the other three a drink; they looked at Wentzel, who nodded. They ordered brandy and drank it at a gulp. It was just as well. Karl had not poured the best. We shook hands all around and Wentzel marched off into the afternoon. I stared at the corner table where Maas and his friend had sat. There was nothing there now. Just some tables and chairs that almost looked inviting.
If it weren’t for money, I told myself, I would sell out and go to Santa Fe or Kalispell and open a bar where the only problem would be how to get old Jack Hudson back to the ranch of a Saturday night. But there is a lot of difference in saloon-keeping. Here in the shadow of the Siebengebirge, in the purple shadows of the seven hills where once lived Snow White and the Seven Drawfs and where Siegfried slew the fearsome dragon, I was more or less the Sherman Billingsley of the Rhine. A community fixture, friend and confidant of minister and jackanapes alike. Respected. Even admired.
I was also making a great deal of money and could probably retire at forty-five. The fact that my partner was a spook for busybodies who flitted about looking under God knows what rocks for the blueprints of the Russians’ next spaceship to Saturn was incidental — even trifling. And the fact that my place was actually our place — the spooks and I — and the fact that they used it, for all I knew, as an international message center with the secret codes imbedded in the Gibson onions — all this would only serve as cocktail conversation over a couple of tall cold ones at the Top of the Mark in the good days to come.
And the fact that two masked desperadoes burst into the saloon, shot some little man dead, and then walked out followed by a fat stranger I met on a plane would only serve to lend an air of international glamour and intrigue: a decided asset. It was like postwar Vienna in the movies, where Orson Welles went around muttering so low and fast you couldn’t understand what he was saying except that he was up to no good.
There was the money. And the good cars. And the imported clothes, the thick steaks, and the choice wines that came gratis to my table, the gifts of friendly cellars from the Moselle, the Ahr and the Rhine. And then there was the fact that Bonn abounded in women. With that cheery thought I took down my mental “for sale” sign, told Karl to watch the cash register, checked to see that the chef was sober, and went out into the street, bound for the apartment of an interesting young lady who went by the name of Fredl Arndt.
Chapter 5
It was around six-thirty when I arrived at Fräulein Doktor Arndt’s apartment, which was on the top floor of a ten-story hochaus that commanded a splendid view of the Rhine, the Seven Hills, and the red crumbling ruins of the castle called Drachenfels.
I rang her bell, told her who it was over the almost inaudible intercommunication system, and pushed open the thick glass door as she rang the unlocking buzzer. She was waiting for me at her door as I stepped out of the elevator, which happened to be working that day.
“Guten Abend, Fräulein Doktor,” I murmured, bending low over her hand, a continental touch that had taken me a few rainy afternoons to perfect under the watchful eye of an old Hungarian countess who had taken a shine to me when she had learned I ran a saloon. I had brushed up on my manners while the countess had run up a sizeable bar bill. We had parted, mutually satisfied.
Fredl smiled. “What brings you around, Mac? Sober, I mean.”
“There’s a cure for that,” I said, handing her a bottle of Chivas Regal.
“You’re in time for the early show. I was going to wash my hair. After that I was going to bed.”
“You already have an engagement then?”
“Solo. For a girl on the wrong side of thirty in this town it’s the usual way.”
While it was true that the female population greatly outnumbered the tired but happy male population of Bonn that year, Fredl wasn’t one of those who sat by the phone hoping that it would ring so she could go to the junior prom. She was distinctively pretty in that European way that seems to wear almost forever and then changes slowly into beauty. And she was smart. The Fräulein Doktor title was real. She covered politics for one of the Frankfurt papers, the intellectual one, and she had spent a year in Washington, most of the time on the White House assignment.
“Fix us a drink. It makes the years slough away. You’ll feel like sixteen.”
“I was sixteen in ’forty-nine and part of a teenage gang that played the black market with GI cigarettes to work our way through school.”