“That’s an automatic pistol for you. It seems to have a mind of its own, and no mistake. Sometimes God or the devil just takes over a trigger and there’s nothing you can do about it. The number of times I wanted to fire just the one shot and ended up firing two or three. It’s the difference between life and death.”
I sipped the brandy and let her walk up to the explanation in her own way.
“Have you got a handkerchief?” she asked.
I handed her mine. She blew her nose and, laughing nervously, apologized for the loud noise it made. “Sorry.”
“Forget about it. And take your time, angel.”
“He wasn’t my father.”
“I understand that. Although I’m not sure how.”
“Last night, in Munich, you asked me if I’d had anything to do with the death of the lady in the lake and I told you everything about her except for one thing. Her name. You remember when we sat in this room and I told you my real name was Dragica Djurkovic? Well, it’s not, it’s Sofia Brankovic. Dragica Djurkovic is the lady who was in the lake. You understand? Everything I told you about how she came to be there is true. I mean about it being an accident. It was. Dragica and I were friends. Good friends, for a while. But the fact is that Dragica Djurkovic was this man’s daughter.”
“I see.”
“No, you don’t. Not yet. In 1930 my real father, Vladimir Brankovic, was assassinated by the man you see lying on the floor — Antun Dragan Djurkovic. My father was murdered because he was a prominent Serb politician. Almost no one but my mother knew who’d done this and, fearing for our lives, my mother and I fled Croatia to Switzerland, where I became Dalia Dresner. We started a new life and tried not to pay too much attention to what was happening back in Yugoslavia. Which was easy enough in Zurich. Swiss neutrality isn’t just political, it’s temperamental, too. After a while, news reached us that Djurkovic had repented what he’d done and become a Franciscan monk in Banja Luka, but since he’d been an army chaplain during the Great War, my mother said that his repentance wouldn’t last longer than a short summer and that the leopard couldn’t change his spots. She was right, of course.
“About eight years later I was at a party given by my future husband in Zurich, and it was there I met Djurkovic’s real daughter, Dragica. We’d been friends at school in Zagreb, but for a while we didn’t even recognize each other. She was living under the name Stepinac, and it turned out that she’d come to live in Geneva with her grandmother to get away from her father, whom she hated because he used to beat her mother and had tried to rape her. With my own acting career taking off, I made the decision that I would befriend her again and try to help her. And we had a great deal in common; we liked the same books, the same music, the same movies, we shared the same taste in clothes — we even looked a bit like each other. Then her grandmother died and Dragica started drinking heavily. Several times I paid for her to go to a clinic and dry out. But when news of her father’s activities in the Ustaše started to reach Switzerland, her drinking got worse. I could hardly blame her for that. He’d left his monastery and was rumored to be part of a murder squad that was now killing thousands of Jews and Serbs. Which is how our argument came about. Dragica had arranged to travel back to Yugoslavia, and the night before she was to leave she came to the house in Küsnacht and explained that she was going back to try to persuade him to change his ways. I’m not sure how she thought she was going to do this, but anyway we argued about it and because she was drunk, she tried to hit me, but I hit her instead and she fell and hit her head and was killed. And Stefan and I hid her body in the lake.
“Time passed and eventually the body was found, of course. Stefan and I held our breath for a while and waited but it was soon clear that no one was ever going to find out who she was. Everyone in Zurich thought Dragica had gone back to Yugoslavia, and because of the war, it was impossible to prove that she hadn’t. No one had even supposed she was missing. Meanwhile we started to hear some more about Colonel Dragan’s atrocities in Croatia and, being good Yugoslavs, we — Stefan and I — we decided to try to do something about it. Stefan is a Serb and quite a patriot, you know, and has long wanted to do something to help his country. But with me, it was always just revenge. I’m a Serb, too, and vengeance runs deep with us.
“The plan was that I would take advantage of my new friendship with Goebbels, who was clearly obsessed with me. It seemed there was nothing he wouldn’t do for his latest starlet. Hardly anyone in Berlin knew my real name was Sofia Brankovic. All they seemed to care about was that I wasn’t Jewish. Goebbels took my word for it and organized my Lesser Aryan certificate himself. And then I asked him if he could help me find my father. Which is where you come in. I’m sorry about that. I’m not sorry that I met you, Bernie, but that I lied to you. The plan was that I would pretend to be Dragica. We were the same age. Both from Zagreb. And Dragica was just as pretty as me — I mean she could easily have been a film star herself. After you had found the colonel, we would get Goebbels to organize an invitation from the foreign office for him to come to Berlin in the hope that he might be reconciled to his long-lost daughter, Dragica. The letter encouraged him to do just that. And the plan was that when he did turn up in Berlin, we’d meet somewhere nice and private — the kind of place where you might organize a private reunion — and while we were talking there, Stefan would kill him.
“But then you came back from Croatia and told us that Colonel Dragan had been killed. The detail you provided seemed to be quite convincing. There’s not much news coming out of Yugoslavia right now to contradict what you said. Either way it was clear that Dragan wasn’t going to be arriving in Berlin for some kind of family reunion anytime soon. I was relieved, frankly. If Dragica’s death taught me one thing, it was that I can’t stand to have that kind of thing on my conscience. And now this.
“When the doorbell rang I thought it was you, of course. But it was him. For a minute he just stood there and then he started crying. I let him embrace me, which was loathsome. It seems he really did think I might be Dragica. After all, she’d been just a child when last he’d seen her so he really wasn’t to know I wasn’t her. But there was no time to give it very much thought. I knew that if I didn’t kill him right away, then I’d never do it. Not just that, but I might never get a better chance to do it. I remembered you’d left your gun on the back of the chair in my bedroom. So I asked him to wait down here in the drawing room and then went upstairs to fetch it. And the minute I came back into the drawing room, I saw that picture and started shooting. Then you turned up.”
“So I see. You did a good job. From the look of the body, every one of the bullets in the magazine must have hit him. If I had a goldfish, I’d give it to you, little girl.”
I felt a tremendous sense of relief that I’d not been part of something as awful as a daughter killing her own father. I almost felt decent again. And it was now clear to me where the true path to my own future lay. Perhaps I could do something noble for a change.
“Would you have stopped me?” she asked.
“Probably not. He had it coming with a trumpet fanfare and a red carpet.”
“Oh, dear,” she sighed. “They chop people’s heads off in Germany, don’t they? For murder?”
I didn’t answer. For a brief second I remembered Gormann the strangler and the awful moment when the men with black top hats had slid him, kicking and screaming, under the blade of the falling ax. If I never did anything else with my life, I was going to prevent that from happening to Dalia. Even if that meant putting my own neck under the blade. What else was a Teutonic knight supposed to do, anyway? If I’d had a sword I’d have knelt and given her an oath of loyalty.