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March, 1965. On the Set of "Help!", Obertauern, Austria

They were going to pay. 

They were all going to pay -- John and George and Ringo -- he could hear them giggling in the next room, stoned and laughing at him because once again, somehow, it was Paul McCartney who was left to talk about what had happened, to diplomatically explain the early excuses that had made no sense, to pour oil on troubled waters and to do it before the press got wind of anything.

In this case, it was left to Paul to explain how the four-bedroom luxury suite the Beatles had been enjoying during their stay had become trashed beyond reason.

It was a lot to explain, especially when he was still feeling thoroughly baked thanks to a multi-reefer lunch he’d enjoyed with the lads, and which currently had him craving something salty to munch on, and so yes, they were all going to pay – just as soon as Paul was done with this insurance investigator, whose name he’d forgotten as soon as she’d said it, and whom he had come to think of simply as “Frau Offiziale” – the Official Woman.

Admittedly, there had been an unseemly amount of damage to the suite, the sort of stuff one might expect to find in a Yank fraternity house on a college campus (they'd heard stories), or after a particularly raucous evening at any Irish pub in Liverpool, but never amid the tidy, house-proud Austrians, who liked things to be neat and orderly and whose housekeeping team had been shocked into hysterics that morning, upon entering the suite to find wallpaper and drapes hanging haphazardly in one of the bedrooms, a chest of drawers shattered in another bedroom, with water-damage and a broken mirror in its en suite bathroom, and with a valuable, hand-sculpted Chess set, meant for the common room, now missing.

Paul suspected that the piano, brought into that same common area specifically to please him and John -- and now sounding jammed in its low notes and featuring a bench with a permanent watermark that looked suspiciously like a naked human derriere (crack and all) and the shadow of what might be construed as a hint of wet, naked scrotum -- would be of particular interest to…well, everyone. 

He didn’t understand, though, why he needed to answer for anything much beyond the piano bench.  Seemed unfair, to him.

“Alright, Herr McCartney,” Frau Offizialle was saying.

“Mich Paul nenne -- you can call me Paul,” he smiled, using his rusty German to begin a McCharmley Offensive designed to soften up the grim woman, and by extension her report.

“About ze damage,” she answered in excellent English, not looking up from her surprisingly thick file. “Ve are curious to learn how ze wallpaper and draperies came apart. Can you explain, pliss?”

Paul stretched his long legs out and sank further down into a comfortable cube of a chair – part of the set design for their movie. “Wallpaper…” he sighed, trying to remember what he’d seen the night before. “Maybe the wallpaper was glued badly when it was installed, right? And it just sort of fell down by itself? You know?”

“Ze paper has been in place for almost a decade, Herr McCartney, and seems sound in ze rest of zer hotel.”

“Yeah, but wait, wasn’t their water damage?” Paul mused out loud. “I think I heard about water damage, right? So, like…maybe a shower or bath was running too hot and it steamed up the paper, and that’s how it fell! I bet that’s what happened! Steam did it.”

He smiled again, both in hopes that the frau would look up at him, and because he thought his answer both plausible and feckin’ brilliant.

“Ze bathroom vit zer vater damage, und ze broken mirror is in a different room altogezer than ze room vit ze vallpaper,” the woman said in a dry voice. She finally looked at him, her expression skeptical. “If ze paper in zat room is fine, it is unlikely zat diffused steam traveled into another room und affected its décor.”

“Well, but…good point!” Paul said, his eyes wide. “That’s really smart, innit?” He heard distinct chuckling coming from the room behind him and grimaced in renewed resentment. Why was he stuck doing this, again? Shouldn’t Lennon, that fast-talking know-it-all be handling this? Oh, yes, he was going to pay, was John.

With that Paul suddenly realized that what he wanted more than anything in the world was some chips. And some water. And some chips.

He tried smiling again at the unbreachable wall of a woman before him. She looked at him like a mother who enjoyed punishing her children. “About ze drapes,” she began.

“The drapes were Georgie’s fault,” Paul said with certainty. “He was hangin’ from them.”

Frau Offiziale looked up. “This is Herr Harrison, zen?”

“Right, Georgie.”

“Und vy vas he hanking up on ze drapes?”

“Well, it was Mal’s fault, wasn’t it,” Paul said, looking distractedly at his hands before shoving a finger into his mouth. “We’d been jousting, you know, and Mal – that’d be our assistant -- was a bit in his cups, weren’t he? So, when he tipped over, Georgie grabbed the drapes to keep from fallin’ and he was hangin’ there for a bit…and then the thing, you know, the rod? In the wall? It just broke away.” Paul shook his head. “Georgie’s pretty skinny so you’d think it would have held up. Shoddy installation,” he tried again.

The woman removed her glasses and rubbed her face tiredly. “I do not perfectly understand. You ver ‘joustink’, you say? Vhat is zat?”

“Oh, well, you know,” Paul became animated in his seat, glad that his memory here was very clear. “You get two stout lads, they’re the horses, yeah? And then two smaller lads get on their shoulders, and you make a runnin’ pass at each other and try to shove each other off. Mal was a horse. And someone from the crew was a horse, too. This was after the party, and all.”

“Vait…vait…dere vas a party in ze bedroom?”

“Oh, no, no, in the lounge-like, or whatever that room is downstairs. We had a little party, all impromptu-like, downstairs, with some drinkin’ and such. An’ John and me and the lads played music for everyone, didn’t we? Was a good time, that. Felt like bein’ in Hamburg again…”

“Herr McCartney, may ve continue?” The woman interrupted, sounding sounded slightly frazzled as she reset her glasses on her nose. “Now...you returned to your suite after a party downstairs, und you… ‘jousted,’ in ze bedroom, und thereby breaking the vall hankings.” she finished.

“Well, I didn’t do any of that, did I?” Paul seemed offended. “T’was Georgie and Ritchie shovin’ off on each other. John and I were perfectly innocent of it. We’d gone into…” Paul grew silent, frowning deeply as his attention wandered into a happier memory and stayed there. A small smile played on his face.

Suddenly a cough came from the "room" behind the set. It sounded suspiciously like “board games” or “bored, again.” Paul couldn’t tell.

“We were bored, so we played some board games,” he smiled brightly. Too brightly. “Man, I could use a nosh. A little schnitzel would set me right up,” he finished. Again, he heard snickers from behind.

“Vich board games, did you play,” The investigator asked, eyebrows up.

“Um…” Paul tried. All he could think of was Monopoly and Chinese Checkers, neither of which he could produce if needed as evidence. “We played ‘Cranko’.”

“Und vhat is dis ‘Crahnko’? I haff never heard of zis?” Now, the woman sounded suspicious.

Realizing that Frau Offiziale was much sharper than he was in his current state, Paul decided that his only hope was to dazzle her with bullshit. Whether he could keep track of his own lies, however, would be anyone’s guess.

“Cranko is a drinking game,” he began, "we invented it!"

“You said you ver playink a board game.”

“Well, yeah, it’s a board game and a drinking game,” Paul rushed, remembering the missing chess set. “You play the chess set like checkers, see, and then whoever jumps a piece has to take a shot. Whiskey, you know? But if you are doing the jumping with the knight, then you take two shots for every jump, because he’s a horse, right? Not a horse like for jousting, but a horse for jumping. And if you’re doing the jumping with the bishop, then everyone takes three shots because of the Holy Trinity.”

“Vait…vait,” off came the glasses again.

“But the other thing is, if you kill the pawns you have to replace them on the board with shots of whiskey, and then every time the king jumps a shotglass, the player has to drink it. And if you jump with the Queen, you have to answer a question, ‘Truth or Dare’, because the queen is a dirty gossip.”

From the other room a chorus of appreciative laughter erupted and then quickly silenced itself as Paul snapped his fingers, remembering (or inventing) something else. “The truth or dare part! That’s how the bureau got smashed,” he declared.

“Ze chest of drawers, vich ver solid ash, by zer vay, vas destroyed by ze game ‘Crahnko”?

“Sure, that works,” Paul decided, "let's go with that."

The Official Woman looked at him like an aristocrat beholding a serf. “Vun vord, Herr, McCartney." She leaned forward in a way that he found menacing (anyone would) and said, simply, "How?”

Paul McCartney sat there, mouth slightly open, suddenly in possession of a clear memory of a solid-ash bureau falling to pieces as it was being sexualized during a rough-and-ready response to a very specific, gravity-defying “dare” John had offered. One that he, Paul, had been quite eager to undertake.

“Well…” he began.

His partner made a sudden appearance, walking in from the “room” behind the set. “Sorry, sorry,” he said to Frau Offiziale, “just need a mo…” He stood before Paul, giving him a speaking look. “Paulie, I owe you a ciggie from before, here you go, lad.” He handed a stick to his partner.

“Oh,” Paul said, looking confused. “I musta forgot. But thanks, mate.” He leaned in for a light as Lennon took up the narrative. “That was some big cockroach we killed last night, eh? I’m still seein’ it every time I close my eyes.” He turned toward the woman. “Shoulda seen it! Size of your ‘ead it was, and me jumpin’ on the bed to get away from it, and Paulie here, climbin' up the chest of drawers to chase it and whack at it. Didja get hurt, son, when the thing broke in two and ye fell into it?”

“No,” Paul said, changing his tone after John pointedly widened his eyes at him. “Oh! I mean, nothing to speak of, right? Just a little sore on me shins, then.”

“You shoulda seen him,” John continued, facing the woman. “Downright heroic. Pulled out drawers to climb up and then he jumped up to reach the black monster and the whole thing split apart, din’t it? But he was intrepid, was our Paul. Got right up and chased the roach straight into the bathroom.”

“He was a fast bugger,” Paul agreed.

“Aye, and there was our Paul, chasin’ it with a bit of wood, hammerin’ after it before it could scurry down a drain.”

“That’s how I broke the mirror,” Paul offered, shamefacedly. “Bad luck, that, but I meant no harm.”

“Well, the roach’s fault,” John said sympathetically. “Shocking to find a great beast like that in such a swank place.”

“It is, you know,” Paul agreed. “Disgustin’ even.”

“Aye, we should lodge a complaint.”

“If only we’d kept the buggie after I’d smashed it.”

“You didn’t?” John frowned.

Paul looked at John like he was crazy. “Flushed it away, didn’t I? Not sleepin’ in a room with a bloodied corpse of a bat-sized roach, then!”

John smiled broadly, and with clear affection at his partner. “'Course, I remember. And then we finished our game,” he said to the Frau, “and we went to bed.”

“Each in our own wee rooms,” Paul added.

“So, there, you see,” John said, nodding his head as he prepared to make his exit. “That’s all there was to it. Very innocent stuff. George and Ringo were jousting in Ritchie’s room, Paul had bugs in his room and we’d been drinkin’ a bit. Nothin’ too nefarious, yeah?”

“Vun moment, please,” Frau Offiziales said, holding up a finger and ruffling through the papers in her file. “These chess pieces, would zey be the zame pieces zat were discovered inside the piano, zis mornink, all warped from wetness? Can eezer of you explehn? Alzo…zere is a matter of ze piano bench…”

Paul looked at John, his face a study of dawning horror.

John looked at Paul, wearing an identical expression.

“Cranko,” John began, “is a wicked, wicked game.”

“Y’see,” Paul began at the same time, “after killin’ the roach, I was sweaty so I took a bath…”

They continued to speak over each other.

“We’d been drinkin’ remember,” John said, grasping.

“And we finished the game, there. You know. As I bathed.”

“A moment, again." Frau Offiziale ordered. John and Paul fell silent.

"You played ze game in ze bath...together, then?” The woman’s tone indicated that this was the first thing she’d heard that sounded remotely believable.

“No, no, of course not,” Paul said hurriedly, “I was in the bath, and John was seated, you know, with the lid down…”

“And the board tipped over then, and the chess pieces fell in the bath…” John added.

“And so, John reached in and grabbed them out, so they wouldn’t be ruined…”

“Aye, and I took ‘em to…to dry ‘em out by the big window…”

“An’ I went with ‘im and we put ‘em on the piano, right, John? By the big window?”

The narrative stalled again, as the Frau gave them a quelling look.

“You put zem by zer vindow, to dry. At night." She stared, giving the boys time to realize how absurd they sounded.

“Alright, maybe that’s not all of it,” John said, looking resigned. "Maybe we thought they’d dry faster if we put them by the piano strings so the air around them would vibrate and they’d dry before they warped.”

“I’m zorry,” Frau Offiziales said, holding her forehead in her hand. “Are you zaying that you believe wibrating piano strings move ze air enough to dry wood?”

There was a long, mortified pause.

“Um...Yyyyessss?” Paul said, sounding wholly uncertain of himself.

“It did not occur to eezer of you zat if zis were zo…all vooden pianos vuld destroy zemselves mit playink." She raised her head. "From ze crazy wibrational air current, jawohl?”

A hissing sound came amid tight laughter from behind the set. All Paul could hear was the word "stupid." 

“Und, so, Herr McCartney, es ist dein arsch…” She sighed, willing herself back to thinking in English. “You are zayink zat it is your vet hintern…er, backside zat vee zee un zee piano bench? Und zat you ver playink --”

“Playing the piano while naked and wet, yes, Frau,” Paul admitted, his face burning scarlet. “Didn’t have a robe handy, did I?”

“We’d been drinking, you know,” John said again. He stood at the doorway to the set exit, his hand over his mouth, hiding a smile he could not stop. He had already decided that he would cherish his memory of Paul, wet and naked at the upright -- bellowing Irish chanties until the moment the chess pieces fell into the piano. But now this added sight, of his partner admitting to it all, red-faced, before this forbidding, holy terror of a woman, was adding to its sheen. A memory for the deathbed, it was.

“I – I’m sorry about that bench,” Paul was saying. “I suppose we should pay to have that refinished.”

The woman stood and turned her stern expression first on Paul, then on to John, and then toward Paul, again. “Ze hotel will pay for ze damage to your room und ze en suite; even if zere is no proof of ze cockroach, zey vill care about dere reputation. Und ze insuranze vill  pay for ze vall damage for ze erm…joustink," she added. "Und ze Chess set. Acczidents happen.”

Paul and John exhaled, glad to hear things would be so easily resolved.

“We’ll pay for the piano and bench,” Paul said, feeling grateful to be able to.

“Zere is no need,” the woman said, collecting her things and shoving them into her carry-all. “No damage done to ze upright,” she assured them.

“But the bench has an outline of Paul’s ass!” John exclaimed.

“Ja, ist es,” Frau Offizialle smiled at him, suddenly looking much younger than she had. “Und I vill purchase ze replacement myself, zis afternoon.”

As she reached the exit, she turned, smiling and batting her eyes in Paul’s direction. “Auf wiedersehen, Herr McCartney.”

John Lennon and Paul McCartney stood in silence together, mouths agape, as they watched the terrifying woman depart. They felt all-too-sober, and finally, fully in their wits.

“Holy shite, Paulie,” John said. “That scary woman is gonna sit on a representation of your ass and crotch. Maybe for the rest of your life. Certainly, for the rest of hers.”

“D’ye think I could buy it back at auction, at some point, maybe?” Paul wondered.

“But would you want it,” John shook his head. “Think on, ten years or so, lad. A decade of Frau Thingy slidin’ herself all over you.”

“It’s not to be borne,” Paul said, his expression stricken. “And it’s all your fault, you know.”

John turned to him with a frown. “How is this my fault?”

“I told you we should’t have been playin’ chess in the bathtub.”

“I told you we should have taken a shower after we’d broken the bureau.”

“Showers wouldn’t have helped with the splinters, though…”

“Well, love, I never thought you’d take that dare. The thing was much too high.”

“Aye, and so were we…”