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Other explanations? A gigantic conspiracy? Terrific, that’s not just schizophrenia, that’s paranoid schizophrenia. Paranoia’s related to memory, that’s clear, Alzheimer’s patients attacking their kids, becoming suspicious, who are all these strangers pretending to love me? Happening to me too, inevitable. And Shelly Zubkoff-did that really happen at all, or was that a fantasy too, an excuse to retreat from reality, like the CIA rays that make necessary the wearing of tinfoil helmets?
Why would Krebs do such a thing? If he’s Krebs the criminal, why am I still with him? He’s got the painting. A handshake and good-bye for Wilmot would be more to the point, or a knock on the head-thinking of Eric Hebborn, greatest faker of the last century, besides me, had his head cracked open in Rome, murder never solved. How would someone like Krebs handle forgers who’ve outlived their usefulness? He’s pla
But all this is just what a paranoid maniac would think, the desperate attempt of a mind unhinged to seek some rational explanation that doesn’t involve the One Big Fact: that everything I remember about the last few decades of my life is false. That I’m Someone Else. So my thoughts go around and around, Krebs sitting next to me; I’m a silk-wrapped fly in his web. I can’t look at him.
Meanwhile, underneath all these thoughts, like a suppurating ulcer you can’t stand to look at, was what happened in New York, those paintings. That was real all right, and an insinuating voice in my head was saying, Oh, Chaz, come back, come back to your real and only life.
Right, shit, it’s easy to sit here and recount or try to recount what went through my head on that fucking car ride, but it’s a lot harder to recapture the feelings, the hamster in a wire wheel spi
Every so often we slid through a town, old squares lined by half-timbered houses with overhanging roofs, and the churches of the local stone with their clocked steeples mosaicked with stones of different colors, some wonderful anonymous artists of the baroque, and it made me feel good to see that. Later the towns came more infrequently and the land rose a thousand feet or so; the forest closed in on the road, and we turned in to the forest itself, dark with shafts of light shooting down through the trees, reddening as the sun got lower, the kind of effect that was transcendent in the baroque and kitsch in the late nineteenth century, acres of Teutonic landscapes stuffing third-rate museums. Then down an allée of beeches entwined overhead, and at last the house.
I suppose I had imagined a Dracula castle, black sweating stone with Gothic turrets and gargoyles, but this was just a large, three-story Bavarian house, with the usual sharply peaked, hipped roof and half-timbering. I wanted it to exude an air of menace, but it just sat there, clumsy and plain as pumpernickel. It might have originally been the manor house of a substantial estate. There were some outbuildings in a more modern style clustered around it; one was a garage. Franco stopped the car in front of it and we all got out.
Just like on Masterpiece Theater, I was glad to see, the staff gathered at the front door to greet the returning master. Two middle-aged people, Herr and Frau Bieneke, she the housekeeper, he the majordomo, butler, whatever you call it, plain and competent looking; a couple of young housemaids, Liesl and Gerda, goggling at me shyly; the cook, Frau Bo
We went through the entrance foyer into what seemed to be the main hall, and here my imagination was at last satisfied: flagged floors with scattered Oriental rugs, heavy black furnishings with studded red leather upholstery, a stone fireplace, deer antlers up and down the walls with a couple of boars’ heads mounted among them, a full suit of armor standing in one corner, and over the fireplace a vast trophy, a shield with a coat of arms on it and a dozen or so swords and pole-arms. A bearskin with snarling head lay in front of the fireplace to complete the Teutonic splendorama.
I got the whole tour. Top floor servants’ quarters, Bieneke and the frau live in a farmhouse on the property. The master has his suite, office, bedroom, study, on the ground floor; I was shown the door, but not the inside. At the back of the house, a wonder, a huge artist’s studio; the man tells me that Herr Krebs’s father added it to the house. A wall of windows co
Below the main floor are the kitchen, storerooms, the usual, and a door in the back leading to the basement. We descend the stairs. All old stonework, original, must be seventeenth century at least, arches and niches suitable for hogsheads of wine and beer, now filled with wine racks and central heating equipment. In a corner I see a small ironbound door, low, set into the wall, looks original to the house. What’s down there? Nothing, sir, an old well, dangerous, kept locked at all times. Aha, there’s the secret, I thought, the Bluebeard room, where the dead wives are kept, the Nazi memorabilia, the crates of gold coins.
Then up a staircase with heavy carved banisters to the second floor and down a hall to a room, mine. Nice room, simply furnished: a wooden bed with posts, checked bedspread, goosefeather pillows, a desk, chair, the usual lamps, a door to a bathroom, fortunately the latest, not at all what you’d expect, obviously a great deal of expensive renovations in the recent past.
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