And Then There Were None
It is our third day in Gasthof Kohlern, a small, isolated hotel in Süd Tirol, tucked into a mountain’s gentle slope. All 17 rooms are full, and breakfast and dinner are served in the large front dining room with blond pine floors and picture windows overlooking the valley. In between bites of their spinach Spätzel and appreciative sighs at the views, the guests steal glances at one another, sizing each other up, murmuring their conclusions across the table to their husbands and wives, falling silent as a waiter approaches with a bottle of red wine.
The whole setup is Agatha Christie, or murder mystery dinner theater. I wouldn’t bat an eyelash if the hotel manager stepped into the dining room, just as dessert was being served, to announce in a stricken voice that Professor Doktor Hensel, the Swiss historian, had been found at the bottom of the pool – drowned. The police are on their way. Gasps from the ladies, nervous coughs from the men, anxious tugs at mothers’ blouses from the children. Whodunnit? Was it the sturdy 75-year-old Bavarian hiking enthusiast, with his wiry wife acting as an accomplice? Or was it the blond, beaming mother of two, not quite as beatific as she appears? Or the chatty Polish waitress – a crime of passion, perhaps?
But aside from egregiously ill-chosen hiking outfits, no crime has occurred since our arrival, to my knowledge. Still, all of the guests regard each other furtively, as though taking mental notes, should an investigation suddenly take place. We are each prepared to be the star witness.
But who needs a murder mystery when there is the alluringly banal detective work of working out who everyone else is? Is it possible that the conservatively dressed, middle-aged trio – two men (one skinny and blond, one sturdy and balding) and the accompanying brunette – are a threesome? That one week here, each year, is the only place they can live out their forbidden affections for one another? And how on earth has that tanned couple, who are over 75 years old if they’re a day, stayed so shockingly fit? And what about the manager of the hotel, the suave forty-something with a dry sense of humor and a watchful eye? Is the tough broad with a toothy grin who mans the reception his mother? If so, has she kept him here, chained to this hotel, grinning through his resentment, granting the guests their littlest, pettiest wishes, until one day he snaps, and the professor is found, floating, in the pool? Back to Agatha Christie. Or perhaps it’s Le Carre, whose novels I love to devour on vacation.
As a kid, one of my favorite books was Harriet the Spy, about a little girl who takes copious notes on her self-appointed spy route every day after school. Here, such surveillance is a given. Everyone is an undercover detective, affecting a nonchalant, “isn’t it a gorgeous day; marvelous that the weather cleared up” air. There are ample opportunities to observe, and sometimes you see more than you would like, especially in the sauna. Every now and then, one of the guests/spies slips and blurts out a personal question; in the stairwell or the whirlpool: “Where is it you’re from?” “How long will you be staying?”
But it’s only the two seven-year-old girls, who’ve become best, giggling friends in the past 24 hours, that divulge anything of import to one another. They whisper their deepest secrets into each other’s ear at the edge of the swimming pool while their parents, perched on deck chairs in the sauna’s relaxation room, try to guess what the couple who just left the room in a huff were arguing about, before turning back to flipping the pages of Vogue and the FT, careful to cover up their own ancient crimes, from each other and everyone else.