The Other Side of Silence by Philip Kerr Read Free Book Online Page B

don’t fuck it up, dear boy.”
    â€œNo, sir. I’ll try not to.”
    â€œI’ve fucked and fucked up a great deal in my life.” He sighed. “Quite often of course they amount to the same thing. Seriously. I’d have been a knight of the realm by now if I hadn’t fucked quite so egregiously. But then I expect you’re used to that. You must see all kinds of egregious behavior down at the Grand Hôtel.”
    â€œOf course. But nothing I can talk about.”
    â€œThe rich have time to fuck. But the poor only have time to read about it. They’re too busy trying to make a living to fuck a lot.”
    â€œI expect you’re probably right.”
    â€œAnd before the war, Robin tells me that you used to be the house detective at the Adlon Hotel in Berlin.”
    â€œThat’s right.”
    â€œYou must have seen some even worse behavior then. Berlin was the place to be in the twenties. Especially for someone like me. My first play was produced in Berlin. By Max Reinhardt. At the Schall und Rauch cabaret theater. Tiny place.”
    â€œOn Kantstrasse. I remember it. Sadly, I seem to remember everything. There’s so much I’d like to forget but try as I might, it just doesn’t happen. It’s like I don’t seem to be able to remember how. It’s not too much to ask in life, is it? To forget the things that cause you pain. Somehow.”
    â€œBitter and maudlin. I like that, too.” He lit a cigarette from the silver box on the table. We were awaiting dinner and afterward the inevitable game of bridge. “I’ve remembered now. That’s it. ‘Funes the Memorious,’” said Maugham. “It’s a story by Borges on just that very subject. A man who could not forget.”
    â€œWhat happened to him?” asked Robin.
    â€œI’ve forgotten,” said Maugham, and then laughed uproariously. “Dear old Max. He was one of the lucky ones. Jews, I mean. Got out in thirty-eight, and went to America, where he died, much too soon, in nineteen forty-three. Nearly all of my friends are gone now. Including the wonderful Adlon. My, that was a good hotel. Whatever happened to the couple who owned the place? Louis Adlon and his sweet wife, Hedda.”
    â€œLouis was murdered by the Russians in nineteen forty-five. With his riding boots and waxed mustaches he was mistaken for a German general.” I shrugged dismissively. “Most of the Red Army were just peasants. Hedda? Well, I hate to think what happened to her. The same as the rest of the women in Berlin, I imagine. Raped. And raped again.”
    Maugham nodded sadly. “Tell me, Walter, how was it that you became the house detective at the Adlon?”
    â€œUntil nineteen thirty-two, I’d been a cop with the Berlinpolice. My politics meant that I had to leave. I was a Social Democrat. Which for the Nazis was tantamount to being a Communist.”
    â€œYes, of course. And how long were you a policeman?”
    â€œTen years.”
    â€œChrist. That’s a lifetime.”
    â€œIt certainly seemed that way at the time.”
    â€”
    A fter dinner and a couple of rubbers, Maugham said, “I want to talk to you in private.”
    â€œAll right.”
    He took me up a wooden stair to his writing space, which was inside a freestanding structure on top of a flat roof. There was a big refectory table, a fireplace, and no windows with a view that could distract a man from the simple business of writing a novel. A bookshelf held some favorite titles and, on a coffee table, a few copies of
Life
magazine. Another of Jersey Joe’s Tahitian sparring partners was up on the wall, but what with the beam from the lighthouse at the southwestern end of the Cap, it was a little like being on the deck of a ship of which Maugham was the Ahab-like captain. We sat down at opposite ends of a big sofa and then he came to the point.
    â€œYou strike me as an honest