The Informer (28 page)

I
n the morning her leg was stiff and a bandage left Armina with the sensation of a lump at the back of her leg, like awkwardness itself. The cotton pad was covered with the tarlike color of iodine. She sat at the side of the bed and looked at her feet, the veins blue just beneath the skin, and after a while she stood up and waited for a moment in the gray shadows of the apartment. The silence existed like something she could almost hear, like the pitch of a whistle for a dog.

She took a taxi to the Inspectorate, and as she climbed the steps to the front door, in a burst of pigeons like a feathery explosion, Linz came out.

“Armina,” he said. “Got a minute?”

“Sure, she said.

“Let’s go next door,” he said. “Let’s have a cup of coffee.”

The café had marble counters, small chairs made of heavy-gauge wire, round tables with marble tops, too, and it smelled of strudel and cinnamon, coffee and tobacco smoke, which hung like a blue cloud.

“You remember that night I came to your apartment,” said Linz.

“I remember,” said Armina.

“What a missed chance that night,” said Linz.

The waiter arrived in his brown apron and white shirt. They asked for coffee.

“It would have been a mistake,” said Armina.

“I don’t know. I don’t know. I wish we’d had a chance. I’m not such a bad guy. I can be nice. Considerate in bed.”

“I know,” said Armina.

The waiter put down the bitter coffee—just like the coffee in Vienna. Armina moved her leg one way and then another. Her thigh stopped hurting right after she moved it, but then instantly it started again, a cold sensation
that ran through her leg as though the pain were a liquid that wanted to drain itself into the ground.

“It would have made it easier to talk,” said Linz.

“Would it?” she said. She smiled and put a hand to her red hair. “Maybe we wouldn’t be talking at all. That’s the usual thing.”

“I’d like to think we’d still be talking,” he said. He took a sip of the coffee. “And that you’d trust me.”

“I trust you,” she said.

“And there’s no chance for us?” he said.

She shook her head and tasted the coffee. Just like Vienna.

“Well,” he said.

“Is that it?” she said.

“No,” he said. “You’ve got to trust me.”

“About what?”

“Ritter let your boy go,” he said.

“Felix?” said Armina.

“Ritter thought Felix would be better as an informant.”

“Did he?” said Armina. The throbbing came in the same cadence as her heart.

“Yes,” said Linz.

She reached for her handbag, but Linz stopped her.

“No,” he said. “Just wait a minute. Don’t go up there.”

“Why not?” she said.

“Don’t go up there angry,” said Linz.

“And how should I go up there?” she said.

“Trust me,” said Linz. “Can’t you trust me? He’ll get rid of you. Don’t you see? He’s playing you like a drum. He’ll get you angry and you’ll make a scene….”

“That’s right,” she said. “I’ll make a scene.”

The room was filled with the silver clink of the spoons, the click of a coffee cup against the marble, the sound of the cars in the street. Armina shifted her weight, but she couldn’t get away from that throb that ran down to the sole of her foot.

“I just wish we’d had a chance in your apartment,” said Linz. “It would have been nice.”

“Oh, Christ,” said Armina. “Give it a rest.”

She stood up. Linz had the keen, silly expression of regret.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Me, too,” he said.

She picked up her bag.

“I’ll get this,” he said. “I’ll pay for the coffee.”

“No,” she said. “No.”

She took a bill from her bag and slapped it on the table: the sound was like a fish dropped on a bed of ice.

“What are you going to do?” he said.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Well, think about it,” he said.

She went into the street and looked down the avenue. The lines disappeared into the distant clutter, horses, cars, exhaust, clouds like an ill-meaning ghost. She tried to walk, to escape, to think, but she was left with that throb. It was cold, inescapable, like the memory of being hurt in the snow. She took a taxi home and waited for Rainer.

“W
HEN YOU FEEL
this way, there’s only one thing to do,” said Rainer. “Let’s go out. Have a good time. Come on.”

Rainer wore a new jacket, a white shirt, a silk tie, and his hair was brushed back. He walked with a slight swagger, which Armina understood as a variety of defiance, just a small detail that was evidence of the desire to make a decision, no matter how difficult. They went up the avenue and walked along the lights from the cars, which coalesced into a bright stream. The restaurants they passed filled the street with fragrance, and Armina and Rainer played a game: what made such a delicious aroma, pheasant in wine with morels served with buttered peas? She could imagine the green circles of peas, the sheen of butter, the texture of the morels. Or maybe it was a roast of beef with horseradish sauce, served with thin, crisp potatoes. Fresh bread with a crust as delicate as eggshell, desserts, like strudel, with apples and cinnamon. The collection of scents seemed like vitality itself.

At the corner a movie theater showed
All Quiet on the Western Front
. A mob of Brownshirts was in the street, and they waved signs that said
PACIFIST
PROPAGANDA
. Their white faces, so pasty in the lights of the marquee, all turned in the same direction, like stalks of wheat in a breeze. Armina and Rainer came to the edge of the mob and then crossed the street and went along that same stream from the headlights of the cars. Then they turned into a side street to take a shortcut to the cabaret they wanted to go to, and as they turned off the avenue the shouts from the men in front of the theater diminished, like a repeating echo.

Rainer took her hand and said that, no matter what, he wanted her to know that he loved her. No one had ever understood him the way she had. And when he was with her he became someone he always wanted to be—that was why he really loved her—and this was far more than the fun they had, or his disappearing into a kind of golden haze when they got into bed. She made him think that he could live up to his own most secret hopes for what he could be. She forgave him, too, for his flaws in the way he wanted to be forgiven, and this wasn’t generic, but specific, in that her understanding was precise, never condescending (or better, almost conspiratorial) and always dependable. Anyway, no matter what happened he wanted her to know that.

His hand pressed against hers, and the warmth of being loved reminded her of the swans in Austria, one welded to its reflection in the mirror of the water, or the fireflies in that stand of enormous pines. This warm pleasure imbued the details of ordinary life, the touch of his hand, the restaurants they had passed, the aroma of the food, the pheasants and morels, the scents of cinnamon and apples, the appearance of the salads of baby lettuce leaves, green and silvery as they were dressed, all of it, in his presence, became evidence of the pleasures of being alive and the possibility of enjoying it, too. She walked along, not trusting herself to speak and realizing with a thrill that she didn’t have to.

The shadows in a side street hung like a black sheet. Armina and Rainer walked over the cobbles of the sidewalk and passed the darkened windows of houses where the glass seemed like ice. A sound seemed to emerge from the shades and dark planes, a steady pat, pat, pat. The blandness of it and the lack of light made it difficult for Armina to tell where the sound came from, and for an instant she thought it surrounded them, as though it were in the air. The street was almost empty and silent, too, aside
from that sound. Perhaps a roof of one of these building didn’t drain properly and the sound was a steady dripping of water from a pool after the last rain. She even imagined the drips as they fell, the drops like silver lines through the shadows, like wire against a black cloth.

She turned, but the street was empty, just the sheen on the cobbles and the darkened windows of the apartments—up ahead, at the next avenue, which wasn’t so busy as the one they had passed, the headlights floated away, as delicate as a dandelion in the breeze.

“Do you hear that?” she said.

“It’s nothing,” he said.

“How can you be so sure?”

Overhead the street was covered by an impenetrable fog, part clouds, part smoke, although it was filled with a muted, reddish glow. The sound came again, that steady pat, pat, pat. Leather, she guessed, on the small cobbles of the sidewalk. She stopped and turned, but the street was so dark, and there were so many openings under the stoops of the buildings, all opaque as the clouds overhead, that it was impossible to see. Was someone there or not? The silence was like that in the park when she had faced Felix and he had gotten behind her. Listen, he had said. It’s what you don’t know.

She tried to remember the times she and Rainer had danced, his chest against hers, and the heat that rose between them, like a soft weld. And the absence of it, too, when she had sat alone in her kitchen, brooding with a glass of brandy.

“There’s someone back there,” she said.

“Well,” he said. “The worst place to have an argument is in a place like this. Let’s just keep going.”

She swallowed and looked around and faced the impenetrable shapes, the geometry of darkness, those planes that were at once black and oddly filled with menace. Was it possible that ill will actually changed the dark so that the shadows had an almost imperceptible turmoil, like the surface of a river at night? She thought she detected the essence, at once delicate and so obvious, that surrounded a creature who lay in wait.

So, she thought, who is it? One of Ritter’s friends? Had someone really come from Moscow? And what would he be like, this man from Moscow?
Something else was in the shadows, too, a perfume of malice, as though all those mornings when she had stood at the bottom of a gully and looked at those torn stockings and marked skin had somehow been concentrated here.

A creature moved at the top of a building and then flew from the roof. She guessed that there were owls in the city that hunted rats after dark. Then she thought about the man from Moscow, who was just a sort of potential, but a pretty likely one. Then she thought about Ritter.

Would they come for me? she thought. As they had for Gaelle? What was to stop them? And then there was the darker layer, the one she didn’t want to consider but that the geometry of shadows seemed to insist on: Ritter had let Felix go because Felix had an interest in making her disappear. And to whom could she go for help? The police?

She concentrated on the tapping and tried to think clearly about two things. Was there someone there, and if so who was it? On the avenue, which was close now, a car honked with a sad yearning. Rainer said, “Here we are.”

The cabaret was on a corner of a side street at the edge of the park, and through the windows men and women, all of them hatchet-faced, pale, elegantly dressed, turned their faces toward a small stage.

“Come on,” said Rainer. “We’re going to miss it.”

The maître d’, in his evening clothes, took them to some seats at the rear of the room that had a table covered with a cloth made from a piece of the flag from the Republic. The red and yellow seemed oddly diminished here, not festive, but somehow like a dress that had been abandoned in a hotel room. They sat down and quickly ordered a salad, a lamb chop, roast potatoes, champagne. Armina fingered the tablecloth, her hands touching the edge. How long can a government last when its flag is used as a tablecloth? And what then?

On the other side of the room Ritter sat with another man. Their evening clothes made their skin seem white, as though powdered, and the other man’s fingers were nested together on the tablecloth, as though he was demonstrating infinite patience. Ritter spoke and the man nodded, Yes, yes. Of course. Then he looked across the room at Armina. He nodded again.

The needling of the bubbles of champagne on Armina’s tongue were keen, and yet the touch of them seemed to her like vulnerability itself, sharp, small, evanescent. They left a lingering sharpness, which she tried to make last, but soon it was gone, too.

A man stood on the stage, his hair glistening in the lights, his vest under his tuxedo made from a flowery material. The faces around Armina were at once restrained and oddly expectant: what next? The faces were pale if young, powdered if old, all distinguished by a fatigue that was kept going by a sad humor.

Armina stood up and walked across the room, and as she went Ritter and the other man followed her with their eyes, their expression blank as a stone: that was part of what made this difficult, since they gave no hint, nothing she could depend upon, nothing clear, nothing that she could use against them.

“Armina,” said Ritter. “How nice to see you.”

“You think so?” said Armina.

“Of course,” said Ritter.

“You let Felix go,” she said.

“Let’s not talk shop,” said Ritter. “Let’s have some fun. Let’s relax. Do you know my friend, Bruno Hauptmann?”

“Oh,” said Armina.

Hauptmann raised an eyebrow, stood up, and extended his hand. “I’ve heard a lot about you.” He turned to Ritter. “Haven’t I?”

“Yes,” said Ritter. “We were just talking about you.”

The pale fingers were extended in her direction, the nails manicured, the hand absolutely steady, marblelike, as though it were from a statute, and as she stood there, his hand had the attraction of the abyss at the edge of a cliff, somehow compelling if only for its horror: Armina reached out and took it, the fingers cool and dry. She looked him in the eye and then dropped his hand.

“You let Felix go,” she said to Ritter.

“He’s more useful this way,” he said. “We’ll pick him up later when we’ve gotten what we want.”

“How much later?” she said.

“Oh,” said Ritter. He hesitated and his eyes went over her face, as
though considering something he saw for the first time, as though looking at her when she was dead. “Soon. Soon.”