Chapters (50)
- Praise
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- ONE
- TWO
- THREE
- FOUR
- FIVE
- SIX
- SEVEN
- EIGHT
- NINE
- TEN
- ELEVEN
- TWELVE
- THIRTEEN
- FOURTEEN
- FIFTEEN
- SIXTEEN
- SEVENTEEN
- EIGHTEEN
- NINETEEN
- TWENTY
- TWENTY-ONE
- TWENTY-TWO
- TWENTY-THREE
- TWENTY-FOUR
- TWENTY-FIVE
- TWENTY-SIX
- TWENTY-SEVEN
- TWENTY-EIGHT
- TWENTY-NINE
- THIRTY
- THIRTY-ONE
- THIRTY-TWO
- THIRTY-THREE
- THIRTY-FOUR
- THIRTY-FIVE
- THIRTY-SIX
- THIRTY-SEVEN
- THIRTY-EIGHT
- THIRTY-NINE
- FORTY
- FORTY-ONE
- FORTY-TWO
- EPILOGUE
- AUTHOR’S NOTE
- Teaser chapter
“That’s right,” he said. “Me and my manicure.”
I climbed out of the hole and stared at him, then down at the box. “You’re a bastard, all right,” I said. “But I’ve met a lot of bastards in my time—some of the biggest, bigger than you—and I know what I’m talking about. There are lots of reasons to shoot a man dead in cold blood, but refusing to carry a box to a car isn’t one of them. So I’m going into the house to wash up and fetch myself a beer, and you can go to hell.”
I turned and walked back to the house. He didn’t pull the trigger.
About five minutes later I looked out my bathroom window and saw Wolf carrying the box slowly to the Buick. Still holding his gun, and glancing nervously up at the windows of the hotel as if I might have a rifle, the American opened the trunk and Wolf dropped the box inside. Then the two of them got into the car and drove quickly away. I went downstairs, fetched a beer from the bar, and then locked the front door. The American had been right about one thing. I was a lousy hotel-keeper. And it was high time I recognized that in some practical way. I found some paper and, in large red letters, wrote on it “CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.” Then I taped the sign to the glass in the door and went back into the bar.
A couple of hours, and twice as many beers later, I caught one of the new electric trains into Munich’s main railway station. From there I walked through the bomb-damaged city center to the corner of Ludwigstrasse, where, in front of the charred ruins of the Leuchtenberg Palais and the Odeon, once the best concert halls in Munich, I took a tram north, in the direction of Schwabing. Here, nearly all of the buildings reminded me of myself, with only the housefronts standing, so that while the general appearance of the street seemed hardly impaired, everything was in reality badly damaged and burned out. It was high time I made some repairs. But I didn’t see how that was possible doing what I was doing. Working as the Adlon house detective in the early thirties, I had learned a little about running a grand hotel, but this had been very poor preparation for running a small one. The Ami was right. I had to go back to what I knew best. I was going to tell Kirsten that I intended to put the hotel up for sale, and that I planned to become a private detective again. Of course, telling her was one thing; expecting her to register any sign of comprehension was quite another. And whereas I still had a façade, Kirsten seemed like a complete ruin of her former self.