The Other Side of Silence Read Online Free PDF Page B

I was disappointed to discover, first that she wasn’t at home and second that I was more disappointed than I told myself was appropriate, given everything I’d told myself and her about not getting involved with hotel guests. Meanwhile, the Roses drove Spinola home in their Bentley, which left me alone on the terrace with a last drink and cigarette, wondering if I should drive to Anne’s house in Villefranche and look for her in case she hadn’t heard the telephone or chosen not to answer it. It was the wrong thing to do, of course, and I was just about to do it all the same when an Englishman with a little dog spoke to me.
    â€œI see you here a lot,” he said. “Playing bridge, twice a week. I say, aren’t you the concierge at the Grand Hôtel?”
    â€œSometimes,” I said. “When I’m not playing bridge.”
    â€œIt is rather addictive, isn’t it?”
    He was probably about forty but looked older. Overweight and a little sweaty, he wore a double-breasted linen blazer, a white shirt with overextended double cuffs and gold links that looked like a modest day on the Klondike, gray cavalry twill trousers, a silk tie that was the color of a South American jaguar, and a matching silk handkerchief that was spilling out of his top pocket as if he were about to conjure a bunch of fake flowers, like a cheap magician. He was the same man I’d seen arguing outside the hotel entrance with Harold Hennig.
    â€œHello, I’m Robin Maugham.”
    â€œWalter Wolf.”
    We shook hands and he waved the waiter toward us. “Buy you a drink?”
    â€œSure.”
    We ordered drinks, some water for the dog, lit our cigarettes, took a table on the terrace facing the port, and generally tried to behave normally, or at least as normal as you can when one man isn’t homosexual and knows that the other man is, and the other man is fully aware that the first man understands all that. It was a little awkward, perhaps, but nothing more than that. I used to believe in a moral order, but then so did the Nazis, and their idea of moral order included murdering homosexuals in concentration camps, which was more than enough for me to change my own opinions. After the orgy of destruction Hitler inflicted upon Germany, it seems pointless to give a damn about what one man does in a bedroom with another.
    â€œYou’re German, aren’t you?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œIt’s all right. I’m not one of these Englishmen who doesn’t like Germans. I met a lot of your chaps in the war. Solid men, most of them. In forty-two I was in North Africa with the 4th County of London Yeomanry, in tanks. We were up against the DAK—the Deutsches Afrikakorps—which was the 15th Panzer Division in my neck of the woods. Good fighters, what? I’ll say so. I sustained a head injury at the Battle of Knightsbridge, which ended my war. At least that’s what we called it. Strictly speaking, it was the Battle of Gazala but one always thinks of it as the Battle of Knightsbridge.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œOh. Well, that was the code name for our defensive position on the Gazala line: Knightsbridge. But to be quite honest there were so many chaps I knew in the 8th Army from Eton and Cambridge and my Inn of Court that it sometimes felt as if one was shopping in Knightsbridge. Not that I was an officer, mind. I joined up as an ordinary trooper. On account of the fact that I was a bit of a bolshie. And just to pay my own bar bills, so to speak. I never much liked all that damned officer malarkey.”
    He made it all sound like a long day in the cricket field.
    â€œWhat about you, Walter?”
    â€œI was well behind our lines and quite safe in Berlin. A man without honor, I’m afraid. Too old for all that. I was a captain in the Intendant General’s Office. The Catering Corps.”
    â€œAh. I begin to see a pattern.”
    I nodded. “Before the war I