The Lady from Zagreb Read Online Free PDF Page B

already decided for how long I was going to waste his time. He smiled a smile that wasn’t like any smile I’d seen outside a reptile house and leaned back in his chair while he waited for me to get comfortable. I didn’t, but that hardly mattered to someone as important as him. He fixed me with a look of almost comic pity and shook his head.
    “You’re not much of a writer, are you, Captain Gunther?”
    “The Nobel Prize Committee won’t be calling me anytime soon, if that’s what you mean. But Pearl Buck thinks I can improve.”
    “Does she, now?”
    “If she can win, anyone can, right?”
    “Perhaps. From what General Nebe has told me, this is to be your first time on your hind legs at the lectern in front of an audience.”
    “My first, and hopefully my last.” I nodded at the silver box on the desk in front of me. “Besides, I usually do all my best talking with a cigarette in my mouth.”
    He flipped open the box. “Help yourself.”
    I took one, latched it onto my lip, and lit myself quickly.
    “Tell me, how many delegates are expected at this IKPK conference?”
    I shrugged and took a puff at the nail in my mouth. Lately I’d been going for a double pull on my cigarettes before inhaling; that way I got more of a hit from the shitty tobacco when the smoke hit my lungs. But this was a good cigarette; good enough to enjoy; much too good to waste talking about something as trivial as what he had in mind.
    “From what I’ve been told by General Nebe, some senior government officials will be present,” he said.
    “I wouldn’t know about that, sir.”
    “Don’t get me wrong, what you’ve written, it’s all fascinating stuff, I’m sure, and you’re an interesting fellow right enough, but from what’s written here, you’ve certainly a lot to learn about public speaking.”
    “I’ve cheerfully avoided it until this present moment. Like the saying goes, it’s hard to press olive oil out of a stone. If it was down to me, Brutus and Cassius would have gotten away with it, and the First Crusade would never have happened. Not to mention Portia in
The Merchant of Venice
.”
    “What about her?”
    “With my speaking skills I’d never have gotten Antonio off the hook with Shylock. No, not even in Germany.”
    “Then let us be grateful that you don’t work for this ministry,” said Gutterer. “Shylock and his tribe are something of a specialty in our department.”
    “So I believe.”
    “And yours, too.”
    I tugged some more on his nail; that’s the great thing about a cigarette—it lets you off the hook sometimes; the only thing that need come out of your mouth is smoke, and they can’t arrest you for that; at least not yet. These are the freedoms that are important.
    Gutterer gathered the sheets of laboriously typed paper in a neat stack and pushed them across the desk as if they were a dangerous species of bacillus. They’d damn near killed me anyway; I was a lousy typist.
    “Your speech has been rewritten by me and retyped by my secretary,” he explained.
    “That’s enormously kind of her,” I said. “Did you really do that for me?”
    I turned in my chair and smiled warmly at the woman who had brought me to Gutterer. Positioned behind a shiny black Continental Silenta as big as a tank turret, she did her exasperated best to ignore me but a touch of color appearing on her cheek told me that she was losing the battle.
    “You didn’t have to.”
    “It’s her job,” said Gutterer. “And I told her to do it.”
    “Even so. Thanks a lot, Miss—?”
    “Ballack.”
    “Miss Ballack. Right.”
    “If we could get on, please,” said Gutterer. “Here’s your original back, so you can compare the two versions and see where I’ve improved or censored what you wrote, Captain. There were several places where you allowed yourself to become a little sentimental about how things were in the old Weimar Republic. Not to say flippant.” He frowned. “Did Charlie Chaplin really visit