The Other Side of Silence

“You’re going to have to try very hard to convince me why I shouldn’t kill you, that’s all.”

“You’re sore about the girl. I can see why. Look, she was sorry about that. She really liked you, Gunther. She liked you more than she liked me. She told me. She didn’t have to go to bed with you. That was her choice.”

“Sure.”

“Listen, Gunther, there’s ten thousand francs in my toilet bag at the Grand Hotel. That’s for you. And don’t forget that there’s a bank account in Monaco. At the Credit Foncier. That much is true. There’s another twenty thousand francs more in that account that was meant to finance this operation. You’re already a signatory. All you have to do is show your passport to the manager and the money is yours. We could go there right now. Get the cash. You needn’t ever see me again.”

“No.”

I worked the slide on the little gun and put one of the little twenty-five-caliber bullets in the chamber. It wasn’t much of a gun to kill a man, but at a range of less than two yards it didn’t have to be. Hennig knew that, too, and started backing away.

“You’re not the type to kill me, remember?” He was starting to sound scared now. “You said so yourself, Gunther. You’re a decent man. I knew that the first time I met you.”

“No, I said I wasn’t the type to leave a man to die chained to a radiator, like an abandoned dog. But this is different.” I pointed the gun at him.

“This is for those nine thousand people who died on the Wilhelm Gustloff in January nineteen forty-five. It’s been eleven years in coming, and for them this is an act of vengeance. But for Captain Achim von Frisch, Irmela Louise Schaper and her unborn child-my unborn child-it’s revenge, pure and simple.”

And then, as he was probably about to speak again and beg me for his life, I shot him in the chest five times and then once more between the eyes when he was oozing blood down on the floor.

I stepped outside the guesthouse for a moment and lit a cigarette to help slow my pounding heart. The cicadas were quiet now, holding their breath probably, shocked that human emotions could make other, more intelligent living creatures such as ourselves behave in such a barbarous fashion. What did they know about real tragedy anyway? Without emotion, pain is just pain; it’s human feeling that makes pain such absolute agony. I had no regrets about killing Harold Hennig, but I was wrong about revenge, of course. It was sweet, after all. And I wasn’t finished with it yet. Not by a long way.

I went back into the house, wiped my brandy glass and the little Beretta clean of fingerprints, and tossed it onto the floor next to Harold Hennig’s dead body. Then I placed the keys to Spinola’s apartment near the front of Anne’s desk drawer. I also wrote his address onto a card in her Rolodex, in block capital letters. It wasn’t much in the way of evidence for the police, but in my experience you don’t need to be a Georges Simenon to frame someone for murder, just a corpse and a murder weapon and a set of keys and perhaps a woman who’s suddenly left the country. The police love things to be neat like that. This one had crime of passion written all over it. I told myself I might even stay around the Cap just long enough to answer their questions and recall Anne and Herr Hebel in the bar at the Grand Hotel and perhaps remember something important I must have forgotten, about how Spinola had once mentioned a writer in Villefranche he was seeing sometimes and how he’d had a fight with her new German boyfriend. Threatened him. Either way I could easily cause enough trouble for Anne French to make sure she could never return to France. Or perhaps she would be extradited back to face a murder trial. But to carry off a story like that I would need to speak to someone else first. I would need to speak to a master storyteller. I would need to go and see Somerset Maugham.

THIRTY-THREE

I walked home, washed and shaved, changed into my working clothes, flung a suitcase into the back of my car, and drove up to the Villa Mauresque. It was still early and little was stirring at Maugham’s beautiful house, certainly not the great man himself, or his nephew, or Alan Searle. Only the butler was up and around, and he seemed not at all surprised to see me again, even with a large bruise on my jaw and the suitcase in my hand.

“How is he?” I asked.

“Who?”

“The master, of course.”

“Oh, him. Much better, sir. It was only a mild stroke, I’m happy to say.”

“Good.” I meant it, too.

“Have you come to stay, sir?” he asked, checking the buttons on his white jacket.

“Not this time,” I said, as if nothing much had happened since the last time we’d seen each other. “Mr. Maugham isn’t expecting me, but he’ll want to see me nonetheless. It’s all to do with the events of the other night. When all the other Englishmen were here.”

“I understand. Would you care for some breakfast?”

“Yes, I would.”