“Touché. Someday I will learn.”
“And all along,” said Felix, “I thought you hadn’t been back in touch with me because of Nastaran. I thought you felt guilty about her death.”
“There wasn’t much to feel guilty about. I didn’t invent the snow-storm that kept us from returning that night.”
“I’ve always wondered, Dirk.”
“What have you wondered?”
“Whether you knew when we left that she wouldn’t be there when you returned.”
“Felix!”
“It isn’t that improbable. You knew how unhappy she was. I wondered if she had talked you into taking the boys away, clearing a moment in which to end her own life.”
“That would have made me culpable.”
“Well. In a fashion, perhaps.”
“How dare you!” Dirk couldn’t speak of her. She had left a lambent stain that sometimes wicked itself forward into his nightly dreams from some casket locked during the daylight.
Felix shrugged. “I don’t mean it as an offense.”
“Anyone who might help someone take her own life is committing murder. I’m outraged.”
“You needn’t see it that way. Death might be the only way forward for someone. Or it might seem so at the time. The Werther solution. I wondered if you were plunged into regret for your complicity.”
“Complicity!”
“Oh, you’re capable of agitation. I oughtn’t be surprised. I’m wrong in this matter, too? So I’m wrong. You needn’t fuss so. Even the scope of your umbrage gives one pause, though.” He began to eat again. “They have a fine torte mit schlag here, I can’t recommend it highly enough.”
Dirk pushed his plate away. “I’ve had enough. I can’t eat any more. Let’s go.”
“Where do you propose?” Felix signaled the staff and withdrew a purse from a string around his neck. “Will you come home with me?”
He was ready for that. “Yes.”
“Very well.” Felix laid out the coin on the tabletop and from a standing position took a last forkful of veal. “Everyone will be thrilled to meet you.”
“Everyone?”
“Ethelinda and the children.”
Dirk jostled the table pushing back his chair. The plate rocked; the fork jumped to the floor. It landed like a thrown tool, its tines down in a seam between old floorboards.
68.
Felix Stahlbaum led Dirk Drosselmeier to a prosperous residential neighborhood of Munich, a boulevard that, somehow, Dirk had never before come across. Linden trees flanked both sides of the road and also stood in single file along a narrow strip of garden in the middle, which ran from one end of the road to the other. Snow began to fall with a sound like small claws—brittle pellets rasping against a few dried leaves clinging still. Felix stopped before a house at the bottom of the road and fished for a key in his greatcoat. The establishment was tall and warm-looking, its stucco the color of the flesh of pale Oriental peaches. White tinged with cream and blood. Lamps glowed behind windows that were shuttered on the ground level and draped in the upper stories.
“You’ve rooms here?”
“This is my home.” Felix bounded up the stone steps, gesturing. He turned as he was bending to insert the key, and winked. “Marriage confers considerable privileges, as perhaps you know. The boys are Günther and Sebastian.”
Dirk didn’t answer, but allowed himself to be swept into the vestibule and then the atrium.
A sort of banner ran above the lintels of the broad doors marking a margin between the ground-floor level and the gallery above. A frieze. It was colored like blancmange and animated with plaster bas-reliefs of Graeco-Roman figures cavorting in procession. The atrium rose two stories, a central well of chillier air within that cheery home. It was bright at the entry level and upon the stairs, and dark up at the ceiling; a canopy of glass upon black iron struts. Grey glass upon which snow had fallen.
Sounds of domestic mayhem sputtered behind closed doors. Unalloyed odors of tar soap and caramelized carrots gently offended. Someone was performing upon a clavichord with stupendous lack of aptitude. A door slammed, a child shrieked, a woman’s voice gave firm command, something fell and smashed. “Papi!” cried a child, and a figure—several figures actually—ran along the upstairs gallery, behind a balustrade with wrought iron teased into flourishes, spears, and sheaves. The noisy arrivants tumbled down the arched stone staircase at the back of the hall.
A manservant, meanwhile, had come to take Felix’s coat and brush the snow away. Dirk was handing his hat to the aide when a flaxen-haired child, a boy most likely, leapt into Felix’s arms. Just behind the lad capered a King Charles spaniel with tangerine markings. The dog, elegant enough, appeared confused and consequently frantic. It skidded to a halt before Felix and Dirk, and ran circles around them, leaping up and nipping at Dirk’s heels and calves.
“Otto! Otto von Blotto!” cried the child. “Stop that!”
But Otto von Blotto was aggravated, and his bark had the curve of the scimitar in it. The sound rang like steel against the marble noses of the busts of eighteenth-century unknowns. “God in heaven, an intruder at last!” called a woman’s voice from above. “So our meek Otto has the menace of the Cavalier in him after all!”
“What’s gotten into him?” asked Felix, laughing. “He’s never like this. Clearly he thinks you are somebody else.”
“I am somebody else,” said Dirk.
“Take Otto away and then come back and give our guest a proper good evening, Günther liebchen,” said Felix. “Oh, the surprise of it.” The child, Günther, picked up the agitated animal and turned away. The dog scrabbled to the boy’s shoulder, fixing Dirk with an accusatory eye, yapping with increased alarm at being exiled. Günther, in green velveteen, seemed all done up for an occasion of some sort. He couldn’t be more than seven, thought Dirk.
The woman descended. “Unexpected society, Felix.”
“Ethelinda, let me present an old friend—Herr Drosselmeier. Perhaps you remember him . . . ? Dirk, this is Frau Stahlbaum.”
Dirk took her measure. She had a slender belly and hips, with a high-waisted gown clasped by a cincture in the Empire style, though under her burgundy sleeves her shoulders were robust and thrown back in a military fashion. She wore a high stiff cap of uncompromising severity. Ethelinda’s eyes were kind and guarded, her skin powdered to bleakness, her chin retracted into her jaw like a turtle’s head into its shell.
“I couldn’t have had the pleasure,” she said. Dirk heard in her sentence a clever ambiguity. She was wary.
“Yes, of course, you might have, at least I think so?” replied Felix, grabbing at her hand and pulling it forward to place it in Dirk’s extended palm. “One summer at your father’s home. On the lake? Surely?”
Dirk raised an eyebrow. Felix had married— yes, he had. A von Koenig daughter. The sister of that university friend, what was his name. Kurt von Koenig.
Ethelinda Stahlbaum, née von Koenig, shook her head. “No matter. How pleasant to make your acquaintance, Herr Drosselmeier. But, Felix, you have forgotten our engagement with the Foersters. I have sent the man over to say you were detained and not to hold the meal. But really, we mustn’t delay.”