Dark Tunnel by Ross MacDonald Read Free Book Online

the house when I’m at home.”
    She laughed for no good reason and said, “Won’t you sit down?”
    I sat in an armchair by the window and she sat down facing me on a straight chair beside a desk. There was a typewriter with paper in it on the desk. Beside us two tall windows with the shutters thrown back opened on the air. Venetian blinds hid the room from the street.
    “I saw you in the street,” she said.
    “I wondered how you got to the door so fast.”
    She blushed and I said, “I like this room.”
    It was lovely and strange like the green-eyed woman. Chartreuse walls with Chinese bird-prints, pale green curtains the color of new leaves on a willow-tree, dark green leather chairs. Noon light seeped through the curtains and filled the room like quiet water. I felt like a fish at the bottom of a pool, a little strange but I liked it. Her hair shone steadily in the underwater light like an inextinguishable aureole.
    “Do you live here by yourself?”
    “Yes, I am a bachelor girl.”
    “I have no family, either.”
    “Oh, I have a family. My mother is dead, but my father lives on his estate near Köln.”
    “And you left him for a career?”
    “No, not exactly. I am not eager for a career. I do what I can. My father is a deputy in the Reichstag and I have not seen him since 1934.”
    “Because he supports Hitler? Hell, I sound like a questionnaire. Ask me some questions.”
    “I don’t mind your questions,” she said. “I think I can trust you. You’d be much more subtle if I couldn’t.”
    “You can trust me all right, but that’s no reason why you should answer my questions.”
    “I like to. There are so few people I can trust. My father would not be a member of the rump Reichstag if he wasn’t a Nazi. He was a member of von Papen’s Herrenklub, and he has supported Hitler since 1933, like many other rich men in Germany. He has been afraid of the people since the Revolution of 1918, afraid that the Communists would gain control of the country and seize his estates. Now he still has his estates but he has nothing else. Nothing at all.”
    “Not even you,” I said.
    “He has my brother Carl.”
    “What does he do?”
    “He was a student.”
    “Was?”
    “He is not any more.” There was a look of complete loneliness on her face as if she was an alien in a strange country. Two days in Germany had given me the same feeling but it was superficial compared with hers. Germany was not the only country I had.
    She didn’t want to talk about her brother and got up to offer me wine. We had Chianti out of a bulbous bottle with a long neck.
    Then we went downtown on a streetcar and had lunch together, and after that we went to the basement of the Hofbrauhaus for beer. I drank a couple of liters out of huge crockery mugs. I was feeling jolly and she was as light-hearted again as a young girl. I felt very jolly and forgot about Hitler and loved all the jolly, sweating Germans who were drinking beer and eating pale sausages in the basement of the Hofbrauhaus.
    I said to Ruth, “Munich is a wonderful city.”
    Something about my enthusiasm brought the ice age back to her eyes. “You’re fortunate to be able to think so. You don’t have to live in Germany. There is insane anger in this city, and all over Germany. Last summer I saw a group of teen-age boys kill another boy by beating his head on the sidewalk, because his father happened to be a Jew. When I tried to stop them, they drove me off with stones, and there was nothing I could do.”
    “Why don’t you leave Germany? You could get a job in America, or anywhere.”
    “Because I am a German and I can’t escape being a German. I am going to stay here.”
    The jolly faces seemed suddenly to glisten satanically along the tables and the pale sausages to wriggle like worms. We got up and left the rathskeller. As we came into the street, a regiment of boys went by at the double, looking to neither left nor right. Above the stone buildings, a single