Trouble Is My Name by Stephen Marlowe

Author:Stephen Marlowe [Marlowe, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4532-9022-4
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 2012-11-05T14:42:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

I CAUGHT AN EARLY morning Lufthansa flight from Bonn to West Berlin. In a way it was like leaving Bar Harbour all over again. I’d left soon after finding Albert Bormann, without any answers worth putting in Freddy Severing’s diary or anyplace else. I hadn’t even seen Simon Koffin again. I hadn’t waited to see what the police would make of Bormann’s death. I had merely driven Ilse and Freddy Severing back to their hotel. There were no questions to ask that Ilse would answer or that would help me find her husband. There was no advice to be given and no advice wanted. It was a little like leaving a wake and not knowing what to say to the widow, whose face is frozen into the kind of smile you know is tearing up her insides.

In its own way, leaving Bonn was even worse, Buddy Leed’s cable had taken me off the case. Patty Keogh was ahead of me in Berlin somewhere because I’d taken her along to the Burschenschaft. All I had was Bronfenbrenner’s card in my pocket and the kind of hangover you get from lack of sleep, which is worse than any liquor hangover. That and the feeling I’d let a dead man down and led a girl to her executioners.

The Lufthansa plane landed at Tempelhof Airport in mid-morning. I got my bags and a taxi which took me through suburban Tempelhof to the Am Zoo Hotel, where I unpacked, shaved and showered, and looked at Bronfenbrenner’s card.

It was an address on Joachimstalerstrasse, not far from where it intersects with Kurfurstendamm to give West Berlin its Times Square. The name was Harry Stark but there was no indication as to what Harry Stark did to rate a business address in downtown Berlin. I walked over there through the noon crowds, wondering if Sieglinde Streicher and Otto Rust had got together and if they had reached Berlin ahead of me. The noon crowds looked prosperous but frenetic, as if they worked too hard and would play too hard in the same mould that cast the hurrying figures on New York’s Broadway or Washington’s F Street.

Harry Stark had an office on the third floor of a professional building. There was only his name on the door. Inside, the waiting room was Swedish modern and probably expensive. The walls were covered with eight-by-ten glossy prints of smiling men and women, most of them young and good-looking, who owed everything to Harry Stark or would say they did until some other agent came along to chop off his ten per cent.

The receptionist was a stunning blonde girl in a suit which had been tailored to minimize the impression she made, an impression which was explosive despite the suit. “Herr Schmitt?” she asked me.

I shook my head and explained in German which needed two crutches, a willing shoulder and a prayer, that I’d been given Stark’s name by Adolph Bronfenbrenner in Bonn.

“You’re an American?” she asked in English.

I said that I was.

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