Death Instinct - Jed Rubenfeld [48]
“We spoke French of course,” she answered.
“No German at all?” asked Freud. “When you were a child, perhaps?”
“Grandmother was Austrian—she knew German,” said Colette, smiling. “She used to play a game with us in German when we were very little. She would hide her face behind her hands and say fort, then show us her face again and say da.”
“Fort and da—‘gone’ and ‘there.’”
Colette washed the dishes.
“You’re pensive, Fräulein,” he said.
“I’m not,” she replied, looking steadily at her work. “I was just wishing I could speak German.”
“If what you’re concealing,” answered Freud, “is connected to your brother, Miss Rousseau, I should like to know it. Otherwise, I have no wish to intrude.”
The Three Hussars, located on a quaint, uneven lane in the oldest quarter of Vienna, came alive at eleven-thirty Thursday morning. Shutters parted, windows opened, the front door was unlocked, and an aproned waiter, all black and white, came out to sweep the sidewalk. This man was approached by a very pretty French girl, who smiled shyly and was directed by him into the restaurant.
Younger, installed at a café down the street, watched and waited. Ten minutes later, the girl emerged, anxiety furrowing her forehead. Younger followed her.
Every street in Vienna’s old quarter leads to a single large square—the Stephansplatz—where stands the cathedral of St. Stephen, massive, dark, Gothic, and impregnable, its roof incongruously striped with red and green zigzags, its south tower as absurdly huge as the left claw of a fiddler crab, dwarfing the rest of the body.
Colette passed through the gigantic wooden doors of the cathedral. She lit a candle, dipped two fingers into a stone bowl of water, crossed herself, took a seat on a lonely pew in the cavernous hall near a column three times her width, and bowed her head. A long while later, she got up and hurried out, never seeing Younger in the shadowy recesses of one of the chapels.
She walked more than a mile, stopping several times to ask for directions, showing a piece of paper that evidently bore an address. Having crossed the Ring and then the canal, she entered a large, ungainly building. It was a police station. After perhaps half an hour, she came out again. Younger, smoking, was waiting for her next to the doorway.
“So your Hans is alive,” he said.
She froze as if a spotlight had picked her out of the darkness. “You followed me?”
He hadn’t answered when a kindly-looking, mutton-chopped police officer hurried out of the station. “Ah, Mademoiselle, I forgot to tell you,” he said in broken French. “Visiting hours end at two. They are very strict at the prison. If you’re not there before two, you won’t see your fiancé until tomorrow.”
“Thank you,” said Colette in the awkward silence that ensued.
“Not at all,” replied the officer, beaming genially. He must have taken Younger for a friend or member of the family, because he said to him, “So touching, two young people falling in love during the war, one from either side. If a single good thing can come from all the death, maybe this will be it.” The officer bid Colette good-bye and returned into the station.
“You should have told me,” said Younger.
“I—”
“I’d still have brought you to Vienna. I’d still have introduced you to Freud. I’d probably have paid for your honeymoon. Whatever you’d asked me, I would have given you.”
She surprised him with her answer: “You want to kill me.”
“I want to marry you.”
She shook her head: “I can’t.”
They looked at each other. “I’m too late,” said Younger, “aren’t I?”
Colette looked away—then nodded.
Younger dined, despite himself, at the Three Hussars that evening, a wood-beamed, low-ceilinged restaurant with uneven floors and tables barely large enough to fit the enormous schnitzels served to virtually every customer.
When the waiter was clearing his dishes, Younger placed a substantial number of bank notes on the table and told the man that he was looking for an old friend of his named Hans