A German Requiem

'You said that you talked about the war. Didn't he tell you how many medals he won?'

'Yes, he did.'

'Then don't you think you should tell me?'

'I didn't think it was relevant.'

'I'll decide what's relevant. Come on, unpack it, Becker.'

He stared at the wall and then shrugged. 'As far as I remember, he said he had joined the Austrian Nazi Party when it was still illegal, in 1931. Later he got himself arrested for putting up posters. So he escaped to Germany to avoid arrest and joined the Bavarian police in Munich. He joined the SS in 1933, and stayed in until the end of the war.'

'Any rank?'

'He didn't say.'

'Did he give you any indication of where he served and in what sort of capacity?'

Becker shook his head.

'Not much of a conversation you two had. What were you reminiscing about, the price of bread? All right. What about the second man the one who came to your home with K/nig and asked you to look for Linden?'

Becker squeezed his temples. 'I've tried to remember his name, but it just won't come,' he said. 'He was a bit more of the senior officer type. You know, very stiff and proper. An aristocrat, maybe. Again he was aged about forty, tall, thin, clean-shaven, balding. Wore a Schiller jacket and a club-tie.' He shook his head. 'I'm not very good on club-ties. It could have been Herrenklub, I don't know.'

'And the man you saw come out of the studio where Linden was killed: what did he look like?'

'He was too far away for me to see much, except that he was quite short and very stocky. He wore a dark hat and coat and he was in a hurry.'

'I'll bet he was,' I said. 'The publicity firm, Reklaue & Werbe Zentrale. It's on Mariahilferstrasse, isn't it?'

'Was,' Becker said gloomily. 'It closed not long after I was arrested.'

'Tell me about it anyway. Was it always K/nig you saw there?'

'No. It was usually a fellow called Abs, Max Abs. He was an academic-looking type, chin-beard, little glasses, you know.' Becker helped himself to another of my cigarettes. 'There was one thing I was meaning to tell you. One time I was there I heard Abs take a telephone call, from a stonemason called Pichler. Maybe he had a funeral. I thought that maybe you could find Pichler and find out about Abs when you go to Linden's funeral this morning.'

'At twelve o'clock,' Liebl said.

'I thought that it might be worth a look, Bernie,' Becker explained.

'You're the client,' I said.

'See if any of Linden's friends show up. And then see Pichler. Most of Vienna's stonemasons are along the wall of the Central Cemetery, so it shouldn't be all that difficult to find him. Maybe you can discover if Max Abs left an address when he ordered his piece of stone.'

I didn't much care for having Becker describe my morning's work for me like this, but it seemed easier to humour him. A man facing a possible death sentence can demand certain indulgences of his private investigator. Especially when there's cash up front. So I said, 'Why not? I love a good funeral.' Then I stood up and walked about his cell a bit, as if I were the one who was nervous about being caged in. Maybe he was just more used to it than me.

'There's one thing still puzzling me here,' I said after a minute's thoughtful pacing.

'What's that?'

'Dr Liebl told me that you're not without friends and influence in this city.'

'Up to a point.'

'Well, how is it that none of your so-called friends tried to find K/nig? Or for that matter his girlfriend Lotte?'

'Who's saying they didn't?'

'Are you going to keep it to yourself, or do I have to give you a couple of bars of chocolate?'

Becker's tone turned placatory. 'Now, it's not certain what happened here, Bernie, so I don't want you getting the wrong idea about this job. There's no reason to suppose that '

'Cut the cold cabbage and just tell me what happened.'

'All right. A couple of my associates, fellows who knew what they were doing, asked around about K/nig and the girl. They checked a few of the nightclubs.

And ' he winced uncomfortably ' they haven't been seen since. Maybe they double-crossed me. Maybe they just left town.'

'Or maybe they got the same as Linden,' I suggested.

'Who knows? But that's why you're here, Bernie. I can trust you. I know the kind of fellow you are. I respect what you did back in Minsk, really I did. You're not the kind to let an innocent man hang.' He smiled meaningfully. 'I can't believe I'm the only one who's had a use for a man of your qualifications.'

'I do all right,' I said quickly, not caring much for flattery, least of all from clients like Emil Becker. 'You know, you probably deserve to hang,' I added. 'Even if you didn't kill Linden, there must have been plenty of others.'

'But I just didn't see it coming. Not until it was too late. Not like you. You were clever, and got out while you still had a choice. I never had that chance.

It was obey orders, or face a court martial and a firing squad. I didn't have the courage to do anything other than what I did.'

I shook my head. I really didn't care any more. 'Perhaps you're right.'

'You know I am. We were at war, Bernie.' He finished his cigarette and stood up to face me in the corner where I was leaning. He lowered his voice, as if he meant Liebl not to hear.

'Look,' he said, 'I know this is a dangerous job. But only you can do it. It needs to be done quietly, and privately, the way you do it best. Do you need a lighter?'

I had left the gun I'd taken off the dead Russian in Berlin, having had no wish to risk arrest for crossing a border with a pistol. I doubted that Poroshin's cigarette pass could have sorted that out. So I shrugged and said, 'You tell me.

This is your city.'

'I'd say you'll need one.'

'All right,' I said, 'but for Christ's sake make it a clean one.'

When we were outside the prison again Liebl smiled sarcastically and said: 'Is a lighter what I think it is?'

'Yes. But it's just a precaution.'

'The best precaution you can take while you're in Vienna is to stay out of the Russian sector. Especially late at night.'

I followed Liebl's gaze across the road and beyond, to the other side of the canal, where a red flag fluttered in the early morning breeze.

'There are a number of kidnapping gangs working for the Ivans in Vienna,' he explained. 'They snatch anyone they think might be spying for the Americans, and in return they're given black-market concessions to operate out of the Russian sector, which effectively puts them beyond the reach of the law. They took one woman out of her own house rolled up in a carpet, just like Cleopatra.'

'Well, I'll be careful not to fall asleep on the floor,' I said. 'Now, how do I get to the Central Cemetery?'

'It's in the British sector. You need to take a 71 from Schwarzenbergplatz, only your map calls it Stalinplatz. You can't miss it: there's an enormous statue to the Soviet soldier as liberator that we Viennese call the Unknown Plunderer.'

I smiled. 'Like I always say, Herr Doktor, we can survive defeat, but heaven help us from another liberation.'

Chapter 13

'The city of the other Viennese' was how Traudl Braunsteiner had described it.

This was no exaggeration. The Central Cemetery was bigger than several towns of my acquaintance and quite a bit more affluent too. There was no more chance of the average Austrian doing without a headstone than there was of him staying out of his favourite coffee house. It seemed there was nobody who was too poor for a decent piece of marble, and for the first time I began to appreciate the attractions of the undertaking business. A piano keyboard, an inspired muse, the introductory bars of a famous waltz there was nothing too ornate for Vienna's craftsmen, no flatulent fable or overstated allegory that was beyond the dead hand of their art. The huge necropolis even mirrored the religious and political divisions of its living counterpart, with its Jewish, Protestant and Catholic sections, not to mention those of the Four Powers.

There was quite a turnover of services at the first-wonder-of-the-world-sized chapel where Linden's obsequies were heard, and I found that I had missed the captain's mourners there by only a few minutes.

The little cortege wasn't difficult to spot as it drove slowly across the snowbound park to the French sector where Linden, a Catholic, was to be buried.

But for one on foot, as I was, it was rather more difficult to catch up; by the time I did the expensive casket was already being lowered slowly into the dark-brown trench like a dinghy let down into a dirty harbour. The Linden family, arms interlinked in the manner of a squad of riot-police, faced its grief as indomitably as if there had been medals to be won.

The colour party raised their rifles and took aim at the floating snow. It gave me an uncomfortable feeling as they fired, and for just a moment I was back in Minsk when, on a walk to staff headquarters, I had been summoned by the sound of gunshots: climbing up an embankment I had seen six men and women kneeling at the edge of a mass grave already filled with innumerable bodies, some of whom were still alive, and behind them an SS firing squad commanded by a young police officer. His name was Emil Becker.

'Are you a friend of his?' said a man, an American, appearing behind me.

'No,' I said. 'I came over because you don't expect to hear gunfire in a place like this.' I couldn't tell if the American had been at the funeral already or if he had followed me from the chapel. He didn't look like the man who had been standing outside Liebl's office. I pointed at the grave. 'Tell me, who's the-'

'A fellow called Linden.'

It is difficult for someone who does not speak German as a first language, so I might have been mistaken, but there seemed to be no trace of emotion in the American's voice.

When I had seen enough, and having ascertained that there was nobody even vaguely resembling K/nig among the mourners not that I really expected to see him there I walked quietly away. To my surprise I found the American walking alongside me.

'Cremation is so much kinder to the thoughts of the living,' he said. 'It consumes all sorts of hideous imaginings. For me the putrefaction of a loved one is quite unthinkable. It remains in the thoughts with the persistence of a tapeworm. Death is quite bad enough without letting the maggots make a meal of it. I should know. I've buried both parents and a sister. But these people are Catholics. They don't want anything to jeopardize their chances of bodily resurrection. As if God is going to bother with ' he waved his arm at the whole cemetery '- all this. Are you a Catholic, Herr ?'

'Sometimes,' I said. 'When I'm hurrying to catch a train, or trying to sober up.'

'Linden used to pray to St Anthony,' said the American. 'I believe he's the patron saint of lost things.'

Was he trying to be cryptic, I wondered. 'Never use him myself,' I said.

He followed me on to the road that led back to the chapel. It was a long avenue of severely pruned trees on which the gobbets of snow sitting on the sconce-like ends of the branches resembled the stumps of melted candles from some outsized requiem.

Pointing at one of the parked cars, a Mercedes, he said: 'Like a lift to town?

I've got a car here.'

It was true that I wasn't much of a Catholic. Killing men, even Russians, wasn't the kind of sin that was easy to explain to one's maker. All the same I didn't have to consult St Michael, the patron saint of policemen, to smell an MP.

'You can drop me at the main gate, if you like,' I heard myself reply.

'Sure, hop in.'

He paid the funeral and the mourners no more attention. After all he had me, a new face, to interest him now. Perhaps I was someone who might shed some light on a dark corner of the whole affair. I wondered what he would have said if he could have known that my intentions were the same as his own; and that it was in the vague hope of just such an encounter that I had allowed myself to be persuaded to come to Linden's funeral in the first place.

The American drove slowly, as if he were part of the cortFge, no doubt hoping to spin out his chance to discover who I was and why I was there.

'My name is Shields,' he volunteered. 'Roy Shields.'

'Bernhard Gunther,' I answered, seeing no reason to tease him with it.

'Are you from Vienna?'

'Not originally.'

'Where, originally?'

'Germany.'

'No, I didn't think you were Austrian.'

'Your friend Herr Linden,' I said, changing the subject. 'Did you know him well?'

The American laughed and found some cigarettes in the top pocket of his sports jacket. 'Linden? I didn't know him at all.' He pulled one clear with his lips and then handed me the packet.

'He got himself murdered a few weeks back, and my chief thought it would be a good idea if I were to represent our department at the funeral.'

'And what department is that?' I asked, although I was almost certain I already knew the answer.

'The International Patrol.' Lighting his cigarette he mimicked the style of the American radio broadcasters. 'For your protection, call A29500.' Then he handed me a book of matches from somewhere called the Zebra Club. 'Waste of valuable time if you ask me, coming all the way down here like this.'

'It's not that far,' I told him; and then: 'Perhaps your chief was hoping that the murderer would put in an appearance.'

'Hell, I should hope not,' he laughed. 'We've got that guy in gaol. No, the chief, Captain Clark, is the kind of fellow who likes to observe the proper protocols.' Shields turned the car south towards the chapel. 'Christ,' he muttered, 'this place is like a goddamned gridiron.'

'You know, Gunther, that road we just turned off is almost a kilometre, as straight as an arrow. I caught sight of you when you were still a couple of hundred metres short of Linden's funeral, and it looked to me like you were in a hurry to join us.' He grinned, to himself it seemed. 'Am I right?'

'My father is buried only a short way from Linden's grave. When I got there and saw the colour party I decided to come back a little later, when it's quieter.'

'You walked all that way and you didn't bring a wreath?'

'Did you bring one?'

'Sure did. Cost me fifty schillings.'

'Cost you, or cost your department?'

'I guess we did pass a hat round at that.'

'And you need to ask me why I didn't bring a wreath.'

'Come on, Gunther,' Shields laughed. 'There isn't one of you people who isn't involved in some kind of a racket. You're all exchanging schillings for dollar scrip, or selling cigarettes on the black market. You know, I sometimes think that the Austrians are making more from breaking the rules than we are.'

'That's because you're a policeman.'

We passed through the main gate on Simmeringer Hauptstrasse and drew up in front of the tram stop, where several men were already clinging to the outside of the packed tram car like a litter of hungry piglets on a sow's belly.

'Are you sure you don't want that lift into town?' said Shields.

'No thanks. I have some business with some of the stonemasons.'

'Well, it's your funeral,' he said with a grin, and sped away.

I walked along the high wall of the cemetery, where it seemed that most of Vienna's market gardeners and stonemasons had their premises, and found a pathetic old woman standing in my way. She held up a penny candle and asked me if I had a light.

'Here,' I said, and gave her Shields' book of matches.

When she made as if to take only one I told her to keep the whole book. 'I can't afford to pay you for it,' she said, with real apology.

Just as surely as you know that a man waiting for a train will look at his watch, I knew that I would be seeing Shields again. But I wished him back right then and there so that I could have shown him one Austrian who didn't have the price of a match, let alone a fifty-schilling wreath.

Herr Josef Pichler was a fairly typical Austrian: shorter and thinner than the average German, with pale, soft-looking skin, and a sparse, immature sort of moustache. The hangdog expression on his drawn-out muzzle of a face gave him the appearance of one who had consumed too much of the absurdly young wine that Austrians apparently consider drinkable. I met him standing in his yard, comparing the sketch-plan of a stone's inscription with its final execution.

'God's greeting to you,' he said sullenly. I replied in kind.

'Are you Herr Pichler, the celebrated sculptor?' I asked. Traudl had advised me that the Viennese have a passion for overblown titles and flattery.

'I am,' he said, with a slight swell of pride. 'Does the gallant gentleman wish to consider ordering a piece?' He spoke as if he had been the curator of an art-gallery on Dorotheergasse. 'A fine headstone perhaps.' He indicated a large slice of polished black marble on which names and a date had been inscribed and painted in gold. 'Something marmoreal? A carved figure? A statue perhaps?'

'To be honest, I am not entirely sure, Herr Pichler. I believe you recently created a fine piece for a friend of mine, Dr Max Abs. He was so delighted with it that I wondered if I might have something similar.'

'Yes, I think I remember the Herr Doktor.' Pichler took off his little chocolate cake of a hat and scratched the top of his grey head. 'But the particular design escapes me for the moment. Do you remember what kind of piece it was he had?'

'Only that he was delighted with it, I'm afraid.'

'No matter. Perhaps the honourable gentleman would care to return tomorrow, by which time I should have been able to find the Herr Doktor's specifications.

Permit me to explain.' He showed me the sketch in his hand, one for a deceased whose inscription described him as an 'Engineer of Urban Conduits and Conservancy'.

'Take this customer,' he said, warming to the theme of his own business. 'I have a design with his name and order number here. When this piece is completed the drawing will be filed away according to the nature of the piece. From then on I must consult my sales book to find the name of the customer. But right now I'm in something of a hurry to complete this piece and really ' he patted his stomach '- I'm dead today.' He shrugged apologetically. 'Last night, you understand. I'm short of staff, too.'

I thanked him and left him to his Engineer of Urban Conduits and Conservancy.

That was presumably what you called yourself if you were one of the city's plumbers. What sort of title, I wondered, did the private investigators give themselves? Balanced on the outside of the tram car back to town, I kept my mind off my precarious position by constructing a number of elegant titles for my rather vulgar profession: Practitioner of Solitary Masculine Lifestyle;

Non-metaphysical Inquiry Agent; Interrogative Intermediary to the Perplexed and Anxious; Confidential Solicitor for the Displaced and the Misplaced; Bespoke Grail-Finder; Seeker after Truth. I liked the last one best of all. But, at least as far as my client in the particular case before me was concerned, there was nothing which seemed properly to reflect the sense of working for a lost cause that might have deterred even the most dogmatic Flat Earther.

Chapter 14

According to all the guidebooks, the Viennese love dancing almost as passionately as they love music. But then the books were all written before the war, and I didn't think that their authors could ever have spent a whole evening at the Casanova Club in Dorotheergasse. There the band was led in a way that put you in mind of the most ignominious retreat, and the shit-kicking that passed for something approximately terpsichorean looked as if it might have been performed more in imitation of a polar bear kept in a very small cage. For passion you had to look to the sight of the ice yielding noisily to the spirit in your glass.

After an hour in the Casanova I was feeling as sour as a eunuch in a bathful of virgins. Counselling myself to be patient, I leaned back into my red velvet-and-satin booth and stared unhappily at the tent-like drapes on the ceiling: the last thing to do, unless I wanted to end up like Becker's two friends (whatever he said, I hadn't much doubt that they were dead), was to bounce around the place asking the regulars if they knew Helmut K/nig, or maybe his girlfriend Lotte.

On its ridiculously plush surface, the Casanova didn't look like the kind of place which a fearful angel might have preferred to avoid. There were no extra-large tuxedoes at the door, nor anyone about who looked as if he could be carrying anything more lethal than a silver toothpick, and the waiters were all commendably obsequious. If K/nig no longer frequented the Casanova it wasn't because he was afraid of having his pocket fingered.

'Has it started turning yet?'

She was a tall, striking girl with the sort of exaggeratedly made body that might have adorned a sixteenth-century Italian fresco: all breasts, belly and backside.

'The ceiling,' she explained, jerking her cigarette-holder vertically.

'Not yet, anyway.'

'Then you can buy me a drink,' she said, and sat down beside me.

'I was starting to worry you wouldn't show up.'

'I know, I'm the kind of girl you've been dreaming about. Well, here I am now.'

I waved to the waiter and let her order herself a whisky and soda.

'I'm not one for dreaming much,' I told her.

'Well, that's a pity, isn't it?'

She shrugged.

'What do you dream about?'

'Listen,' she said, shaking her head of long, shiny brown hair, 'this is Vienna.

It doesn't do to describe your dreams to anyone here. You never know, you might just be told what they really mean, and then where would you be?'

'That sounds almost as if you have something to hide.'

'I don't see you wearing sandwich boards. Most people have something to hide.

Especially these days. What's in their heads most of all.'

'Well, a name ought to be easy enough. Mine's Bernie.'

'Short for Bernhard? Like the dog that rescues mountaineers?'

'More or less. Whether or not I do any rescuing depends on how much brandy I'm carrying. I'm not as loyal when I'm loaded.'

'I never met a man who was.' She jerked her head down at my cigarette. 'Can you spare me one of those?'

I handed her a pack and watched as she screwed one into her holder. 'You didn't tell me your name,' I said, thumb-nailing a match alight for her.

'Veronika, Veronika Zartl. Pleased to meet you, I'm sure. I don't think I've ever seen your face in here. Where are you from? You sound like a pifke.'

'Berlin.'

'I thought so.'

'Anything wrong with that?'

'Not if you like pifkes. Most Austrians don't, as it happens.' She spoke in the slow, almost yokelish drawl that seemed typical of the modern Viennese. 'But I don't mind them. I get mistaken for a pifke myself sometimes. That's because I won't speak like the rest of them.' She chuckled. 'It's so funny when you hear some lawyer or dentist speaking like he was a tram-driver or a miner just so as he doesn't get mistaken for a German. Mostly they only do it in shops, to make sure that they get the good service that all Austrians think that they are entitled to. You want to try it yourself, Bernie, and see the difference it makes to the way you're treated. Viennese is quite easy, you know. Just speak like you're chewing something and add 'ish' onto the end of everything you say.

Cleverish, eh?'

The waiter returned with her drink which she regarded with some disapproval. 'No ice,' she muttered as I tossed a banknote on to the silver tray and left the change under Veronika's questioning eyebrow.

'With a tip like that you must be planning on coming back here.'

'You don't miss much, do you?'

'Are you? Planning on coming back here, I mean.'

'It could be that I am. But is it always like this? The trade here's about as busy as an empty fireplace.'

'Just wait until it gets crowded, and then you'll wish it was like this again.'

She sipped her drink and leaned back on the red-velvet-and-gilt chair, stroking the buttonback satin upholstery that covered the wall of our booth with the palm of her outstretched hand.

'You should be grateful for the quiet,' she told me. 'It gives us a chance to get to know each other. Just like those two.' She waved her holder meaningfully at a couple of girls who were dancing with each other. With their gaudy outfits, tight buns and flashing paste necklaces they looked like a pair of circus horses. Catching Veronika's eye they smiled and then whinnied a little confidence to each other at a coiffure's distance.

I watched them turn in elegant little circles. 'Friends of yours?'

'Not exactly.'

'Are they together?'

She shrugged. 'Only if you made it worth their while.' She laughed some smoke out of her pert little nose. 'They're just giving their high-heels some exercise, that's all.'

'Who's the taller one?'

'Ibolya. That's Hungarian for a violet.'

'And the blonde?'

'That's Mitzi.' Veronika was bristling a little as she named the other girl.

'Maybe you'd prefer to talk to them.' She took out her powder-compact and scrutinized her lipstick in the tiny mirror. 'I'm expected soon anyway. My mother will be getting worried.'

'There's no need to play the Little Red Riding Hood with me,' I told her. 'We both know that your mother doesn't mind if you leave the path and walk through the woods. And as for those two sparklers over there, a man can look in the window, can't he?'

'Sure, but there's no need to press your nose up against it. Not when you're with me, anyway.'

'It seems to me, Veronika,' I said, 'that you wouldn't have to try very hard to sound like someone's wife. Frankly, it's the sort of sound that drives a man to a place like this in the first place.' I smiled just to let her know I was still friendly. 'And then along you come with the rolling-pin in your voice. Well, it could put a man right back to where he was when he walked through the door.'

She smiled back at me. 'I guess you're right at that,' she said.

'You know, it strikes me that you're new at this chocolady thing.'

'Christ,' she said, her smile turning bitter, 'isn't everyone?'

But for the fact that I was tired I might have stayed longer at the Casanova, might even have gone home with Veronika. Instead I gave her a packet of cigarettes for her company and told her that I would be back the following evening.

On the town, late at night, was not the best time to compare Vienna to any metropolis, with the possible exception of the lost city of Atlantis. I had seen a moth-eaten umbrella stay open for longer than Vienna. Veronika had explained, over several more drinks, that Austrians preferred to spend their evenings at home, but that when they did choose to make a night of it, they traditionally made an early start as early as six or seven o'clock. Which left me trailing back to the Pension Caspian along an empty street at only 10.30, with just my shadow and the sound of my half-intoxicated footsteps for company.

After the combusted atmosphere of Berlin, Vienna's air tasted as pure as birdsong. But the night was a cold one, and shivering inside my overcoat I quickened my step, disliking the quiet, and remembering Dr Liebl's warning about the Soviet predilection for nocturnal kidnappings.

At the same time, however, crossing Heldenplatz in the direction of the Volksgarten, and beyond the Ring, Josefstadt and home, it was easy to find one's thoughts turning to the Ivans. As far away from the Soviet sector as I was, there was still ample evidence of their omnipresence. The Imperial Palace of the Habsburgs was one of the many public buildings in the internationally run city centre that was occupied by the Red Army. Over the main door was a colossal red star in the centre of which was a picture of Stalin in profile, set against a significantly dimmer one of Lenin.

It was as I passed the ruined Kunsthistorische that I felt there was someone behind me, someone hanging back between the shadows and the piles of rubble. I stopped in my tracks, looked around and saw nothing. Then, about thirty metres away, next to a statue of which only the torso remained, like something I had once seen in a mortuary drawer, I heard a noise, and a moment later saw some small stones roll down a high bank of rubble.

'Are you feeling a bit lonely?' I called out, having drunk just enough not to feel stupid asking such a ridiculous question. My voice echoed up the side of the ruined museum. 'If it's the museum you're interested in, we're closed.

Bombs, you know: dreadful things.' There was no reply, and I found myself laughing. 'If you're a spy, you're in luck. That's the new profession to be in.

Especially if you're a Viennese. You don't have to take my word for it. One of the Ivans told me.'

Still laughing to myself, I turned and walked away. I didn't bother to see if I was followed, but crossing onto Mariahilferstrasse I heard footsteps again as I paused to light a cigarette.

As anyone who knows Vienna could have told you, this wasn't exactly the most direct route back to Skodagasse. I even told myself. But there was a part of me, probably the part most affected by alcohol, that wanted to find out exactly who was following me and why.

The American sentry who stood out in front of the Stiftskaserne was having a cold time of it. He watched me carefully as I passed by on the other side of the empty street and I reflected that he might even recognize the man on my tail as a fellow American and member of the Special Investigations Section of his own military police. Probably they were in the same baseball team or whatever game it was that American soldiers played when they weren't eating or chasing women.

Further up the slope of the wide street I glanced to my left and through a doorway saw a narrow covered passage that seemed to lead down several flights of steps to an adjoining street. Instinctively I ducked inside. Vienna might not have been blessed with a fabulous nightlife but it was perfect for anyone on foot. A man who knew his way around the streets and the ruins, who could remember these convenient passages, would, I thought, provide even the most determined police cordon with a better chase than Jean Valjean.

Ahead of me, beyond my sight, someone else was making his way down the steps, and thinking that my tail might take these for my own footsteps, I pressed myself against a wall and waited for him in the dark.

After less than a minute I heard the approaching sound of a man running lightly.

Then the footsteps halted at the top of the passageway as he stood trying to judge whether or not it was safe to come after me. Hearing the other man's footsteps, he started forward.

I stepped out of the shadows and punched him hard in the stomach so hard I thought I would have to bend down and retrieve my knuckles and while he lay gasping on the steps where he had fallen, I tugged his coat off his shoulders and pulled it down to hold his arms. He wasn't carrying a gun, so I helped myself to the wallet in his breast pocket and picked out an ID card.

' Captain John Belinsky,' I read. ' 430th United States CIC. What's that?

Are you one of Mr Shields's friends?'

The man sat up slowly. 'Fuck you, kraut,' he said biliously.

'Have you orders to follow me?' I tossed the card on to his lap and searched the other compartments of his wallet. 'Because you'd better ask for another assignment, Johnny. You're not very good at this sort of thing I've seen less conspicuous striptease dancers than you.' There wasn't much of interest in his wallet: some dollar scrip, a few Austrian schillings, a ticket for the Yank Movie Theatre, some stamps, a room card from Sacher's Hotel and a photograph of a pretty girl.

'Have you finished with that?' he said in German.

I tossed him the wallet.

'That's a nice-looking girl you have there, Johnny,' I said. 'Did you follow her as well? Maybe I should give you my snapshot. Write my address on the back. Make it easier for you.'

'Fuck you, kraut.'

'Johnny,' I said, starting back up the steps to Mariahilferstrasse, 'I'll bet you say that to all the girls.'

Chapter 15

Pichler lay under a massive piece of stone like some primitive car mechanic repairing a neolithic stone-axle, with the tools of his trade a hammer and a chisel held tight in his dusty, blood-stained hands. It was almost as if while carving the black rock's inscription he had paused for a moment to draw breath and decipher the words that seemed to emerge vertically from his chest. But no mason ever worked in such a position, at right angles to his legend. And draw breath he never would again, for although the human chest is sufficiently strong a cage for those soft, mobile pets that are the heart and lungs, it is easily crushed by something as heavy as half a tonne of polished marble.

It looked like an accident, but there was one way to be sure. Leaving Pichler in the yard where I had found him, I went into the office.

I retained very little memory of the dead man's description of his business-accounting system. To me, the niceties of double-entry bookkeeping are about as useful as a pair of brogue galoshes. But as someone who ran a business himself, albeit a small one, I had a rudimentary knowledge of the petty, fastidious way in which the details of one ledger are supposed to correspond with those in another. And it didn't take William Randolph Hearst to see that Pilcher's books had been altered, not by any subtle accounting, but by the simple expedient of tearing out a couple of pages. There was only one financial analysis that was worth a spit, and that was that Pichler's death had been anything but accidental.

Wondering whether his murderer had thought to steal the sketch-design for Dr Max Abs' headstone, as well as the relevant pages from the ledgers, I went back into the yard to see if I might be able to find it. I had a good look round, and after a few minutes discovered a number of dusty art-files propped up against a wall in the workshop at the back of the yard. I untied the first file and started to sort through the draughtsman's drawings, working quickly since I had no wish to be found searching the premises of a man who lay crushed to death less than ten metres away. And when at last I found the drawing I was looking for I gave it no more than a cursory glance before folding it up and slipping it into my coat pocket.

I caught a 71 back to town and went to the сafé Schwarzenberg, close to the tram terminus on the KSrtner Ring. I ordered a mTlange and then spread the drawing out on the table in front of me. It was about the size of a double-page spread in a newspaper, with the customer's name Max Abs clearly marked on an order copy stapled to the top right-hand corner of the paper.

The mark-up for the inscription read: 'SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF MARTIN ALBERS, BORN 1899, MARTYRED 9 APRIL 1945. BELOVED OF WIFE LENI, AND SONS MANFRED AND

ROLF. BEHOLD, I SHEW YOU A MYSTERY; WE SHALL NOT ALL SLEEP, BUT WE SHALL ALL BE

CHANGED, IN A MOMENT, IN THE TWINKLING OF AN EYE, AT THE LAST TRUMP: FOR THE

TRUMPET SHALL SOUND, AND THE DEAD SHALL BE RAISED INCORRUPTIBLE, AND WE SHALL BE

CHANGED. I CORINTHIANS 15: 51-52.'

On Max Abs' order was written his address, but beyond the fact that the doctor had paid for a headstone in the name of a man who was dead a brother-in-law perhaps? and which had now occasioned the murder of the man who had carved it, I could not see that I had learned very much.

The waiter, wearing his grey frizzy hair on the back of his balding head like a halo, returning with the small tin tray that carried my mTlange and the glass of water customarily served with coffee in Viennese сafés. He glanced down at the drawing before I folded it away to make room for the tray, and said, with a sympathetic sort of smile: 'Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.'

I thanked him for his kind thought and, tipping him generously, asked him first from where I might send a telegram, and then where Berggasse was.

'The Central Telegraph Office is on B/rseplatz,' he answered, 'on the Schottenring. You'll find Berggasse just a couple of blocks north of there.'

An hour or so later, after sending my telegrams to Kirsten and to Neumann, I walked up to Berggasse, which ran between the police prison where Becker was locked up and the hospital where his girlfriend worked. This coincidence was more remarkable than the street itself, which seemed largely to be occupied by doctors and dentists. Nor did I think it particularly remarkable to discover from the old woman who owned the building in which Abs had occupied the mezzanine floor that only a few hours earlier he had told her he was leaving Vienna for good.

'He said his job urgently required him to go to Munich,' she explained in the kind of tone that left me feeling she was still a bit puzzled by this sudden departure. 'Or at least somewhere near Munich. He mentioned the name but I'm afraid that I've forgotten it.'

'It wasn't Pullach, was it?'

She tried to look thoughtful but only succeeded in looking bad-tempered. 'I don't know if it was or if it wasn't,' she said finally. The cloud lifted from her face as she returned to her normal bovine expression. 'Anyway, he said he would let me know where he was when he got himself settled.'

'Did he take all his things with him?'

'There wasn't much to take,' she said. 'Just a couple of suitcases. The apartment is furnished, you see.' She frowned again. 'Are you a policeman or something?'

'No, I was wondering about his rooms.'

'Well why didn't you say? Come in, Herr ?'

'It's Professor, actually,' I said with what I thought sounded like a typically Viennese punctiliousness. 'Professor Kurtz.' There was also the possibility that by giving myself the academic handle I might appeal to the snob in the woman.

'Dr Abs and myself are mutually acquainted with a Herr K/nig, who told me that he thought the Herr Doktor might be about to vacate some excellent rooms at this address.'

I followed the old woman through the door and into the big hallway which led to a tall glass door. Beyond the open door lay a courtyard with a solitary plane tree growing there. We turned up the wrought-iron staircase.

'I trust you will forgive my discretion,' I said. 'Only I wasn't sure how much credence to place on my friend's information. He was most insistent that they were excellent rooms, and I'm sure I don't have to tell you, madam, how difficult it can be for a gentleman to find an apartment of any quality in Vienna these days. Perhaps you know Herr K/nig?'

'No,' she said firmly. 'I don't think I ever met any of Dr Abs' friends. He was a very quiet man. But your friend is well informed. You won't find a better set of rooms for 400 schillings a month. This is a very good neighbourhood.' At the door to the apartment she lowered her voice. 'And entirely Jew-free.' She produced a key from the pocket of her jacket and slipped it into the keyhole of the great mahogany door. 'Of course, we had a few of them here before the Anschluss. Even in this house. But by the time the war came most of them had gone away.' She opened the door and showed me into the apartment.

'Here we are,' she said proudly. 'There are six rooms in total. It's not as big as some of the apartments in the street, but then not as expensive either. Fully furnished as I think I said.'

'Lovely,' I said looking about me.

'I'm afraid that I haven't yet had time to clean the place,' she apologized.

'Doctor Abs left a lot of rubbish to throw out. Not that I mind really. He gave me four weeks' money in lieu of notice.' She pointed at one door which was closed. 'There's still quite a bit of bomb damage showing in there. We had an incendiary in the courtyard when the Ivans came, but it's due to be repaired very soon.'

'I'm sure it's fine,' I said generously.

'Right then. I'll leave you to have a little look around on your own, Professor Kurtz. Let you get a feel for the place. Just lock up after you and knock on my door when you've seen everything.'

When the old woman had gone I wandered among the rooms, finding only that for a single man Abs seemed to have received an extraordinarily large number of Care parcels, those food parcels that came from the United States. I counted the empty cardboard boxes that bore the distinctive initials and the Broad Street, New York address and found that there were over fifty of them.

It didn't look like Care so much as good business.

When I had finished looking around I told the old woman that I was looking for something bigger and thanked her for allowing me to see the place. Then I strolled back to my pension in Skodagasse.

I wasn't back very long before there was a knock at my door.

'Herr Gunther?' said the one wearing the sergeant's stripes.

I nodded.

'I'm afraid you'll have to come with us, please.'

'Am I being arrested?'

'Excuse me, sir?'

I repeated the question in my uncertain English. The American MP shifted his chewing-gum around impatiently.

'It will be explained to you down at headquarters, sir.'

I picked up my jacket and slipped it on.

'You will remember to bring your papers, won't you, sir?' he smiled politely.

'Save us coming back for them.'

'Of course,' I said, collecting my hat and coat. 'Have you got transport? Or are we walking?'

'The truck's right outside the front door.'

The landlady caught my eye as we came through her lobby. To my surprise she looked not at all perturbed. Maybe she was used to her guests getting pulled in by the International Patrol. Or perhaps she just told herself that someone else was paying for my room whether I slept there or in a cell at the police prison.

We climbed into the truck and drove a few metres north before a short turn to the right took us south down Lederergasse, away from the city centre and the headquarters of the IMP.

'Aren't we going to KSrtnerstrasse?' I said.

'It isn't an International Patrol matter, sir,' the sergeant explained. 'This is American jurisdiction. We're going to the Stiftskaserne, on Mariahilferstrasse.'

'To see who? Shields or Belinsky?'

'It will be explained '

' when we get there, right.'

The mock-baroque entrance to the Stiftskaserne, the headquarters of the 796th Military Police, with its half-relief Doric columns, griffins and Greek warriors, was situated, somewhat incongruously, between the twin entrances of Tiller's department store, and was part of a four-storey building that fronted onto Mariahilferstrasse. We passed through the massive arch of this entrance and beyond the rear of the main building and a parade ground to another building, which housed a military barracks.

The truck drove through some gates and pulled up outside the barracks. I was escorted inside and up a couple of flights of stairs to a big bright office which commanded an impressive view of the anti-aircraft tower that stood on the other side of the parade ground.

Shields stood up from behind a desk and grinned like he was trying to impress the dentist.

'Come on in and sit down.' he said as if we were old friends. He looked at the sergeant. 'Did he come peaceably, Gene? Or did you have to beat the shit out of his ass?'

The sergeant grinned a little and mumbled something which I didn't catch. It was no wonder that one could never understand their English, I thought: Americans were forever chewing something.

'You better stick around a while, Gene,' Shields added. 'Just in case we have to get tough with this guy.' He uttered a short laugh and, hitching up his trousers, sat squarely in front of me, his heavy legs splayed apart like some samurai lord, except that he was probably twice as large as any Japanese.

'First of all, Gunther, I have to tell you that there's a Lieutenant Canfield, a real asshole Brit, down at International Headquarters who would love somebody to help him with a little problem he's got. It seems like some stonemason in the British sector got himself killed when a rock fell on his tits. Mostly everyone, including the lieutenant's boss, believes that it was probably an accident. Only the lieutenant's the keen type. He's read Sherlock Holmes and he wants to go to detective school when he leaves the army. He's got this theory that someone tampered with the dead man's books. Now I don't know if that's sufficient motive to kill a man or not, but I do remember seeing you go into Pichler's office yesterday morning after Captain Linden's funeral.' He chuckled. 'Hell, I admit it, Gunther. I was spying on you. Now what do you say to that?'

'Pichler's dead?'

'How about it you try it with a little more surprise? Don't tell me Pichler is dead! or My God, I don't believe what you are telling me! You wouldn't know what happened to him, would you, Gunther?'

I shrugged. 'Maybe the business was getting on top of him.'

Shields laughed at that one. He laughed like he had once taken a few classes in laughing, showing all his teeth, which were mostly bad, in a blue boxing-glove of a jaw that was wider than the top of his dark and balding head. He seemed loud, like most Americans, and then some. He was a big, brawny man with shoulders like a rhinoceros, and wore a suit of light-brown flannel with lapels that were as broad and sharp as two Swiss halberds. His tie deserved to hang over a сafé terrace, and his shoes were heavy brown Oxfords. Americans seemed to have an attraction for stout shoes in the same way that Ivans loved wristwatches: the only difference was that they generally bought them in shops.

'Frankly, I don't give a damn for that lieutenant's problems,' he said. 'It's shit in the British backyard, not mine. So let them sweep it up. No, I'm merely explaining your need to cooperate with me. You may have nothing at all to do with Pichler's death, but I'm sure that you don't want to waste a day explaining that to Lieutenant Canfield. So you help me and I'll help you: I'll forget I ever saw you go into Pichler's shop. Do you understand what I'm saying to you?'

'There's nothing wrong with your German,' I said. All the same it struck me with what venom he attacked the accent, tackling the consonants with a theatrical degree of precision, almost as if he regarded the language as one which needed to be spoken cruelly. 'I don't suppose it would matter if I said that I know absolutely nothing about what happened to Herr Pichler?'

Shields shrugged apologetically. 'As I said, it's a British problem, not mine.

Maybe you are innocent. But like I say, it sure would be a pain in the ass explaining it to those British. I swear they think every one of you krauts is a goddam Nazi.'

I threw up my hands in defeat. 'So how can I help you?'

'Well, naturally, when I heard that before coming to Captain Linden's party you visited his murderer in prison, my inquiring nature could not be constrained.'

His tone grew sharper. 'Come on, Gunther. I want to know what the hell is going on between you and Becker.'

'I take it you know Becker's side of the story.'

'Like it was engraved on my cigarette-case.'

'Well, Becker believes it. He's paying me to investigate it. And, he hopes, to prove it.'

'You're investigating it, you say. So what does that make you?'

'A private investigator.'

'A shamus? Well, well.' He leaned forwards on his chair, and taking hold of the edge of my jacket, felt the material with his finger and thumb. It was fortunate that there were no razor blades sewn on that particular number. 'No, I can't buy that. You're not half greasy enough.'

'Greasy or not, it's true.' I took out my wallet and showed him my ID. And then my old warrant disc. 'Before the war I was with the Berlin Criminal Police. I'm sure I don't have to tell you that Becker was too. That's how I know him.' I took out my cigarettes. 'Mind if I smoke?'

'Smoke, but don't let it stop your lips moving.'

'Well, after the war I didn't want to go back to the police. The force was full of Communists.' I was throwing him a line with that one. There wasn't one American I had met who seemed to like Communism. 'So I set up in business on my own. Actually, I had a period out of the force during the mid-thirties, and did a bit of private work then. So I'm not exactly new at this game. With so many displaced persons since the war, most people can use an honest bull. Believe me, thanks to the Ivans they're few and far between in Berlin.'

'Yeah, well it's the same here. Because the Soviets got here first they put all their own people in the top police jobs. Things are so bad that the Austrian government had to look to the chief of the Vienna Fire Service when they were trying to find a straight man to become the new vice-president of police.' He shook his head. 'You're one of Becker's old colleagues. How about that? What kind of cop was he, for Christ's sake?'

'The crooked kind.'

'No wonder this country's in such a mess. I suppose you were SS as well then?'

'Briefly. When I found out what was going on I asked for a transfer to the front. People did, you know.'

'Not enough of them. Your friend didn't, for one.'

'He's not exactly a friend.'

'So why did you take the case?'

'I needed the money. And I needed to get away from my wife for a while.'

'Do you mind telling me why?'

I paused, realizing that it was the first time I had talked about it. 'She's been seeing someone else. One of your brother officers. I thought that if I wasn't around for a while she might decide what was more important: her marriage or this schStzi of hers.'

Shields nodded and then made a sympathetic-sounding grunt.

'Naturally all your papers are in order?'

'Naturally.' I handed them over and watched him examine my identity card and my pink pass.

'Just a few dishonest ones.'

'Dishonest Russkies?'

'What other kind is there? Sure I had to grease some people, but the papers are genuine.'

Shields handed them back. 'Do you have your Fragebogen with you?'

I fished my denazification certificate out of my wallet and handed it over. He only glanced at it, having no desire to read through the 133 questions and answers it recorded. 'An exonerated person, eh? How come you weren't classed as an offender? All SS were automatically arrested.'

I saw out the end of the war in the army. On the Russian front. And, like I said, I got a transfer out of the SS.'

Shields grunted and handed back the Fragebogen. 'I don't like SS,' he growled.

'That makes two of us.'

Shields examined the big fraternity ring which gracelessly adorned one of his well-tufted fingers. He said: 'We checked Becker's story, you know. There was nothing in it.'

'I don't agree.'

'And what makes you think that?'

'Do you think he'd be willing to pay me $5,000 to dig around if his story were just hot air?'

'Five thousand?' Shields let out a whistle.

'Worth it if your head's in a noose.'

'Sure. Well, maybe you can prove that the guy was somewhere else when we actually caught him. Maybe you can find something that'll persuade the judge that his friends didn't shoot at us. Or that he wasn't carrying the gun that shot Linden. You got any bright ideas yet, shamus? Like maybe the one that took you to see Pichler?'

'It was a name that Becker remembered as having been mentioned by someone at Reklaue & Werbe Zentrale.'

'By who?'

'Dr Max Abs?'

Shields nodded, recognizing the name.

'I'd say it was him who killed Pichler. Probably he went to see him not long after I did and found out that someone claiming to be a friend of his had been asking questions. Maybe Pichler told him that he'd said I should come back the following day. So before I did Abs killed him and took away the paperwork with his name and address on. Or so he thought. He forgot something which led me to his address. Only by the time I got there he'd cleared out. According to his landlady he's halfway to Munich by now. You know, Shields, it might not be a bad idea if you were to have someone meet him off that train.'

Shields stroked his poorly-shaven jaw. 'It might not be at that.'

He stood up and went behind his desk where he picked up the telephone and proceeded to make a number of calls, but using a vocabulary and an accent that I was unable to comprehend. When finally he replaced the receiver in its cradle, he looked at his wristwatch and said: 'The train to Munich takes eleven and a half hours, so there's plenty of time to make sure he gets a warm hello when he gets off.'

The telephone rang. Shields answered it, staring at me open-mouthed and unblinking, as if there wasn't much of my story he had believed. But when he put down the telephone a second time he was grinning.

'One of my calls was to the Berlin Documents Centre,' he said. 'I'm sure you know what that is. And that Linden worked there?'

I nodded.

'I asked them if they had anything on this Max Abs guy. That was them calling back just now. It seems that he was SS too. Not actually wanted for any war crimes, but something of a coincidence, wouldn't you say? You, Becker, Abs, all former pupils of Himmler's little Ivy League.'

'A coincidence is all it is, I said wearily.

Shields settled back in his chair. 'You know, I'm perfectly prepared to believe that Becker was just the trigger-man for Linden. That your organization wanted him dead because he had found out something about you.'

'Oh?' I said without much enthusiasm for Shields's theory. 'And which organization is that?'

'The Werewolf Underground.'

I found myself laughing out loud. 'That old Nazi fifth-column story? The stay-behind fanatics who were going to continue a guerrilla war against our conquerors? You have to be joking, Shields.'

'Something wrong with that, you think?'

'Well, they're a bit late for a start. The war's been over for nearly three years. Surely you Americans have screwed enough of our women by now to realize that we never planned to cut your throats in bed. The Werewolves ' I shook my head pityingly. 'I thought they were something that your own intelligence people had dreamed up. But I must say I certainly never thought there was anyone who actually believed that shit. Look, maybe Linden did find out something about a couple of war-criminals, and maybe they wanted him out of the way. But not the Werewolf Underground. Let's try and find something a little more original, can we?' I started another cigarette and watched Shields nod and think his way through what I had said.

'What does the Berlin Documents Centre have to stay about Linden's work?' I said.

'Officially, he was no more than the Crowcass liaison officer the Central Registry of War Crimes and Security Suspects of the United States Army. They insist that Linden was simply an administrator and not a field agent. But then, if he were working in intelligence, those boys wouldn't tell us anyway. They've got more secrets than the surface of Mars.'

He got up from behind the desk and went to the window.

'You know, the other day I had eyes of a report that said as many as two out of every thousand Austrians were spying for the Soviets. Now there are over 1.8 million people in this city, Gunther. Which means that if Uncle Sam has as many spies as Uncle Joe there are over 7,000 spies right on my doorstep. To say nothing of what the British and the French are doing. Or what the Vienna state police get up to that's the Commie-run political police, not the ordinary Vienna police, although they're a bunch of Communists as well of course. And then only a few months ago we had a whole bunch of Hungarian state police infiltrated into Vienna in order to kidnap or murder a few of their own dissident nationals.'

He turned away from the window and came back to the seat in front of me.

Grasping the back of it as if he were planning to pick it up and crash it over my head, he sighed and said: 'What I'm trying to say, Gunther, is that this is a rotten town. I believe Hitler called it a pearl. Well, he must have meant one that was as yellow and worn as the last tooth in a dead dog. Frankly, I look out of that window and I see about as much that's precious about this place as I can see blue when I'm pissing in the Danube.'

Shields straightened up. Then he leaned across and took hold of my jacket lapels, pulling me up to my feet.

'Vienna disappoints me, Gunther, and that makes me feel bad. Don't you do the same, old fellow. If you turn up something I think I should know about and you don't come and tell me, I'll get real sore. I can think of a hundred good reasons to haul your ass out of this town even when I'm in a good mood, like I am now. Am I making myself clear?'

'Like you were made of crystal.' I brushed his hands off my jacket and straightened it on my shoulders. Halfway to the door I stopped and said: 'Does this new cooperation with the American Military Police extend as far as removing the tail you put on me?'

'Someone's following you?'

'He was until I took a poke at him last night.'

'This is a weird city, Gunther. Maybe he's queer for you.'

'That must be why I presumed he was working for you. The man's an American named John Belinsky.'

Shields shook his head, his eyes innocently wide. 'I never heard of him. Honest to God, I never ordered anyone to tail you. If someone's following you it has nothing to do with this office. You know what you should do?'

'Surprise me.'

'Go home to Berlin. There's nothing here for you.'

'Maybe I would, except that I'm not sure that there's anything there either.

That's one of the reasons I came, remember?'

Chapter 16

It was late by the time I got to the Casanova Club. The place was full of Frenchmen and they were full of whatever it is that Frenchmen drink when they want to get good and stiff. Veronika had been right after all: I did prefer the Casanova when it was quiet. Failing to spot her in the crowd I asked the waiter I had tipped so generously the previous night if she had been in the place.

'She was here only ten, fifteen minutes ago,' he said. 'I think she went to the Koralle, sir.' He lowered his voice, and dipped his head towards me. 'She doesn't much care for Frenchmen. And to tell the truth, neither do I. The British, the Americans, even the Russians, one can at least respect armies that took a hand in our defeat. But the French? They are bastards. Believe me, sir, I know. I live in the 15th Bezirk, in the French sector.' He straightened the tablecloth. 'And what will, the gentleman have to drink?'

'I think I might take a look at the Koralle myself. Where is it, do you know?'

'It's in the 9th Bezirk sir. Porzellangasse, just off Berggasse, and close to the police prison. Do you know where that is?'

I laughed. 'I'm beginning to.'

'Veronika is a nice girl,' the waiter added. 'For a chocolady.'

Rain blew into the Inner City from the east and the Russian sector. It turned to hail in the cold night air and stung the four faces of the International Patrol as they pulled up outside the Casanova. Nodding curtly to the doorman, and without a word, they passed me by and went inside to look for soldierly vice, that compromising manifestation of lust exacerbated by a combination of a foreign country, hungry women and a never-ending supply of cigarettes and chocolate.

At the now-familiar Schottenring I crossed on to WShringer Strasse and headed north across Rooseveltplatz in the moonlit shadow of the twin towers of the Votivkirche which, despite its enormous, sky-piercing height, had somehow survived all the bombs. I was turning into Berggasse for the second time that day when, from a large ruined building on the opposite side of the road, I heard a cry for help. Telling myself that it was none of my business I stopped for only a brief moment, intending to keep to my route. But then I heard it again: an almost recognizably contralto voice.

I felt fear crawl across my skin as I walked quickly in the direction of the sound. A high bank of rubble was piled against the building's curved wall and, having climbed to the top of it, I stared through an empty arched window into a semi-circular room that was of the proportions of a small-sized theatre.

There were three of them struggling in a little spot of moonlight against a straight wall that faced the windows. Two were Russian soldiers, filthy and ragged and laughing uproariously as they attempted forcibly to strip the clothes from the third figure, which was a woman. I knew it was Veronika even before she lifted her face to the light. She screamed and was slapped hard by the Russian who held her arms and the two flap sides of her dress that his comrade, kneeling on her toes, had torn open.

'Pakazhitye, dushka (show me, darling),' he guffawed, wrenching Veronika's underwear down over her knocking knees. He sat back on his haunches to admire her nakedness. 'Pryekrasnaya (beautiful),' he said, as if he had been looking at a painting, and then pushed his face into her pubic hair. 'Vkoosnaya, tozhe (tasty, too),' he growled.

The Russian looked round from between her legs as he heard my footfall on the debris that littered the floor, and seeing the length of lead pipe in my hand he stood up beside his friend, who now pushed Veronika aside.

'Get out of here, Veronika,' I shouted.

Needing little encouragement, she grabbed her coat and ran towards one of the windows. But the Russian who had licked her seemed to have other ideas, and snatched at her mane of hair. In the same moment I swung the pipe, which hit the side of his lousy-looking head with an audible clang, numbing my hand with the vibration from the blow. The thought was just crossing my mind that I had hit him much too hard when I felt a sharp kick in the ribs, and then a knee thudded into my groin. The pipe fell on to the brick-strewn floor and there was a taste of blood in my mouth as I slowly followed it. I drew my legs up to my chest and tensed myself as I waited for the man's great boot to smash into my body again and finish me. Instead I heard a short, mechanical punch of a sound, like the sound of a rivet-gun, and when the boot swung again it was well over my head.

With one leg still in the air, the man staggered for a second like a drunken ballet-dancer and then fell dead beside me, his forehead neatly trepanned with a well-aimed bullet. I groaned and for a moment shut my eyes. When I opened them again and raised myself on to my forearm, there was a third man squatting in front of me, and for a chilling moment he pointed the silenced barrel of his Luger at the centre of my face.

'Fuck you, kraut,' he said, and then, grinning broadly, helped me to my feet. 'I was going to belt you myself, but it looks like those two Ivans have saved me the trouble.'

'Belinsky,' I wheezed, holding my ribs. 'What are you, my guardian angel?'

'Yeah. It's a wonderful life. You all right, kraut?

'Maybe my chest would feel better if I quit smoking. Yes, I'm all right. Where the hell did you come from?'

'You didn't see me? Great. After what you said about tailing someone I read a book about it. I disguised myself as a Nazi so as you wouldn't notice me.'

I looked around. 'Did you see where Veronika went?'

'You mean you know that lady?' He meandered over to the soldier I had felled with the pipe, and who lay senseless on the floor. 'I thought you were just the Don Quixote type.'

'I only met her last night.'

'Before you met me, I guess. Belinsky stared down at the soldier for a moment, then levelled the Luger at the back of the man's head and pulled the trigger.

'She's outside,' he said with no more emotion than if he had shot at a beer-bottle.

'Shit,' I breathed, appalled at this display of callousness. 'They could certainly have used you in an Action Group.'

'What?'

'I said I hope I didn't make you miss your tram last night. Did you have to kill him?'

He shrugged and started to unscrew the Luger's silencer. 'Two dead is better than one left alive to testify in court. Believe me, I know what I'm talking about.' He kicked the man's head with the toe of his shoe. 'Anyway, these Ivans won't be missed. They're deserters.'

'How do you know?'

Belinsky pointed out two bundles of clothes and equipment that lay near the doorway, and next to them the remains of a fire and a meal.

'It looks like they've been hiding here for a couple of days. I guess they got bored and fancied some ' he searched for the right word in German and then, shaking his head, completed the sentence in English '- cunt.' He bolstered the Luger and dropped the silencer into his coat pocket. 'If they're found before the rats eat them up, the local boys will just figure that the MVD did it. But my bet is on the rats. Vienna's got the biggest rats you ever saw. They come straight up out of the sewers. Come to think of it, from the smell of these two, I'd say they'd been down there themselves. The main sewer comes out in the Stadt Park, just by the Soviet Kommendatura and the Russian sector.' He started towards the window, 'Come on, kraut, let's find this girl of yours.'

Veronika was standing a short way back down WShringer Strasse and looked ready to make a run for it if it had been the two Russians who came out of the building. 'When I saw your friend go in,' she explained, 'I waited to see what would happen.' She had buttoned her coat to the neck, and, but for a slight bruise on her cheek and the tears in her eyes, I wouldn't have said she looked like a girl who had narrowly missed being raped. She glanced nervously back at the building with a question in her eyes.

'It's all right,' said Belinsky. 'They won't bother us no more.' When Veronika had finished thanking me for saving her, and Belinsky for saving me, he and I walked her home to the half-ruin in Rotenturmstrasse where she had her room.

There she thanked us some more and invited us both to come up, an offer which we declined, and only after I had promised to visit her in the morning could she be persuaded to close the door and go to bed.

'From the look of you I'd say that you could use a drink,' Belinsky said. 'Let me buy you one. The Renaissance Bar is just around the corner. It's quiet there, and we can talk.'

Close by St Stephen's Cathedral, which was now being restored, the Renaissance in Singerstrasse was an imitation Hungarian tavern with gypsy music. The kind of place you see depicted on a jigsaw-puzzle, it was no doubt popular with the tourists, but just a concertina-squeeze too premeditated for my simple, gloomy taste. There was one significant compensation, as Belinsky explained. They served Csereszne, a clear Hungarian spirit made from cherries. And for one who had recently been subjected to a kicking, it tasted even better than Belinsky had promised.

'That's a nice girl,' he said, 'but she ought to be a bit more careful in Vienna. So should you for that matter. If you're going to go around playing Errol-fucking-Flynn you should have more than just a bit of hair under your arm.'

'I guess you're right.' I sipped at my second glass. 'But it seems strange you telling me that, you being a bull and all. Carrying a gun's not strictly legal for anyone but Allied personnel.'

'Who said I was a bull?' He shook his head. 'I'm CIC. The Counter-intelligence Corps. The MPs don't know shit about what we get up to.'

'You're a spy?'

'No, we're more like Uncle Sam's hotel detectives. We don't run spies, we catch them. Spies and war-criminals.' He poured some more of the Csereszne.

'So why are you following me?'

'It's hard to say, really.'

'I'm sure I could find you a German dictionary.'

Belinsky withdrew a ready-filled pipe from his pocket and while he explained what he meant he suck-started the thing into yielding a steady smoke.

'I'm investigating the murder of Captain Linden,' he said.

'What a coincidence. So am I.'

'We want to try and find out what it was that brought him to Vienna in the first place. He liked to keep things pretty close to his chest. Worked on his own a lot.'

'Was he in the CIC too?'

'Yes, the 970th, stationed in Germany. I'm 430th. We're stationed in Austria.

Really he should have let us know he was coming on to our patch.'

'And he didn't send so much as a postcard, eh?'

'Not a word. Probably because there was no earthly reason why he should have come. If he was working on anything that affected this country he should have told us.' Belinsky let out a balloon of smoke and waved it away from his face.

'He was what you might call a desk-investigator. An intellectual. The sort of fellow you could let loose on a wall full of files with instructions to find Himmler's optical prescription. The only problem is that because he was such a bright guy, he kept no case notes.' Belinsky tapped his forehead with the stem of his pipe. 'He kept everything up here. Which makes it a nuisance to find out what he was investigating that got him a lead lunch.'

'Your MPs think that the Werewolf Underground might have had something to do with it.'

'So I heard.' He inspected the smouldering contents of his cherrywood pipe bowl, and added: 'Frankly, we're all scraping around in the dark a bit on this one.

Anyway, that's where you walk into my life. We thought maybe you'd turn up something that we couldn't manage ourselves, you being a native, comparatively speaking. And if you did, I'd be there for the cause of free democracy.'

'Criminal investigation by proxy, eh? It wouldn't be the first time that it's happened. I hate to disappoint you, only I'm kind of in the dark myself.'

'Maybe not. After all, you already got the stonemason killed. In my book that rates as a result. It means you got someone upset, Kraut.'

I smiled. 'You can call me Bernie.'

'The way I figure it, Becker wouldn't bring you into the game without dealing you a few cards. Pichler's name was probably one of them.'

'You might be right,' I conceded. 'But all the same it's not a hand I'd care to put my shirt on.'

'Want to let me take a peek?'

'Why should I?'

'I saved your life, kraut,' he growled.

'Too sentimental. Be a little more practical.'

'All right then, maybe I can help.'

'Better. Much better.'

'What do you need?'

'Pichler was more than likely murdered by a man named Abs, Max Abs. According to the MPs he used to be SS, but small-time. Anyway, he boarded a train to Munich this afternoon and they were going to have someone meet him: I expect that they'll tell me what happens. But I need to find out more about Abs. For instance, who this fellow was.' I took out Pichler's drawing of Martin Albers' gravestone and spread it on the table in front of Belinsky. 'If I can find out who Martin Albers was and why Max Abs was willing to pay for his headstone I might be on my way to establishing why Abs thought it necessary to kill Pichler before he spoke to me.'

'Who is this Abs guy? What's his connection?'

'He used to work for an advertising firm here in Vienna. The same place that K/nig managed. K/nig's the man that briefed Becker to run files across the Green Frontier. Files that went to Linden.'

Belinsky nodded.

'All right then,' I said. 'Here's my next card. K/nig had a girlfriend called Lotte who hung around the Casanova. It could be that she sparkled there a bit, nibbled a little chocolate, I don't know yet. Some of Becker's friends crashed around there and a few other places and didn't come home for tea. My idea is to put the girl on to it. I thought I'd have to get to know her a bit first of all.

But of course now that she's seen me on my white horse and wearing my Sunday suit of armour I can hurry that along.'

'Suppose Veronika doesn't know this Lotte. What then?'

'Suppose you think of a better idea.'

Belinsky shrugged. 'On the other hand, your scheme has its points.'

'Here's another thing. Both Abs and Eddy Holl, who was Becker's contact in Berlin, are working for a company that's based in Pullach, near Munich. The South German Industries Utilization Company. You might like to try and find out something about it. Not to mention why Abs and Holl decided to move there.'

'They wouldn't be the first two krauts to go and live in the American Zone,' said Belinsky. 'Haven't you noticed? Relations are starting to get a shade difficult with our Communist allies. The news from Berlin is that they've started to tear up a lot of the roads connecting the east and west sectors of the city.' His face made plain his lack of enthusiasm, and then added: 'But I'll see what I can turn up. Anything else?'

'Before I left Berlin I came across a couple of amateur Nazi-hunters named Drexler. Linden used to take them Care parcels now and again. I wouldn't be surprised if they were working for him: everyone knows that's how the CIC pays its way. It would help if we knew who they had been looking for.'

'Can't we ask them?'

'It wouldn't do much good. They're dead. Someone slipped a tray-load of Zyklon-B pellets underneath their door.'

'Give me their address anyway.' He took out a notepad and pencil.

When I had given it to him he pursed his lips and rubbed his jaw. His was an impossibly broad face, with thick horns of eyebrows that curved halfway round his eye-sockets, some small animal's skull for a nose and intaglio laugh-lines which, added to his square chin and sharply angled nostrils, completed a perfectly septagonal figure: the overall impression was of a ram's head resting on a V-shaped plinth.

'You were right,' he admitted. 'It's not much of a hand, is it? But it's still better than the one I folded on.'

With the pipe clenched tight between his teeth, he crossed his arms and stared down at his glass. Perhaps it was his choice of drink, or perhaps it was his hair, styled longer than the crew-cut favoured by the majority of his countrymen, but he seemed curiously un-American.

'Where are you from?' I said eventually.

'Williamsburg, New York.'

'Belinsky,' I said, measuring each syllable. 'What kind of a name is that for an American?'

The man shrugged, unperturbed. 'I'm first-generation American. My dad's from Siberia originally. His family emigrated to escape one of the Tsar's Jewish pogroms. You see, the Ivans have got a tradition of anti-Semitism that's almost as good as yours. Belinsky was Irving Berlin's name before he changed it. And as names for Americans go, I don't think a yid-name like that sounds any worse than a kraut-name like Eisenhower, do you?'

'I guess not.'

'Talking of names, if you do speak to the MPs again it might be better if you didn't mention me, or the CIC, to them. On account of the fact that they recently screwed up an operation we had going. The MVD managed to steal some US

Military Police uniforms from the battalion HQ at the Stiftskaserne. They put them on and persuaded the MPs at the 19th Bezirk station to help them arrest one of our best informers in Vienna. A couple of days later another informant told us that the man was being interrogated at MVD headquarters in Mozartgasse. Not long after that we learned he had been shot. But not before he talked and gave away several other names.

'Well, there was an almighty row, and the American High Commissioner had to kick some ass for the poor security of the 796th. They court-martialled a lieutenant and broke a sergeant back to the ranks. As a result of which me being CIC is tantamount to having leprosy in the eyes of the Stiftskaserne. I suppose you might find that hard to understand, you being German.'

'On the contrary,' I said. 'I'd say being treated like lepers is something we krauts understand only too well.'

Chapter 17

The water arriving in the tap from the Styrian Alps tasted cleaner than the squeak of a dentist's fingers. I carried a glassful of it from the bathroom to answer the telephone ringing in my sitting-room, and sipped some more while I waited for Frau Blum-Weiss to switch the call through.

'Well, good-morning,' Shields said with affected enthusiasm. 'I hope I got you out of bed.'

'I was just cleaning my teeth.'

'And how are you today?' he said, still refusing to come to the point.

'A slight headache, that's all.' I had drunk too much of Belinsky's favourite liquor.

'Well, blame it on the f/hn,' suggested Shields, referring to the unseasonably warm and dry wind that occasionally descended on Vienna from the mountains.

'Everyone else in this city blames all kinds of strange behaviour on it. But all I notice is that it makes the smell of horseshit even worse than usual.'

'It's nice to talk to you again, Shields. What do you want?'

'Your friend Abs didn't get to Munich. We're pretty sure he got on the train, only there was no sign of him at the other end.'

'Maybe he got off somewhere else.'

'The only stop that train makes is in Salzburg, and we had that covered too.'

'Perhaps someone threw him off. While the train was still moving.' I knew only too well how that happened.

'Not in the American Zone.'

'Well, that doesn't start until you get to Linz. There's over a hundred kilometres of Russian Lower Austria between here and your zone. You said yourself that you're sure he got on the train. So what else does that leave?'

Then I recalled what Belinsky had said about the poor security of the US

Military Police. 'Of course, it's possible he simply gave your men the slip.

That he was too clever for them.'

Shields sighed. 'Sometime, Gunther, when you're not too busy with your old Nazi comrades, I'll drive you out to the DP camp at Auhof and you can see all the illegal Jewish emigrants who thought they were too smart for us.' He laughed.

'That is, if you're not scared that you might be recognized by someone from a concentration camp. It might even be fun to leave you there. Those Zionists don't have my sense of humour about the SS.'

'I'd certainly miss that, yes.'

There was a soft, almost furtive knock at the door.

'Look, I've got to go.'

'Just watch your step. If I so much as think that I can smell shit on your shoes I'll throw you in the cage.'

'Yes, well, if you do smell something it'll probably just be the f/hn.'

Shields laughed his ghost-train laugh and then hung up.

I went to the door and let in a short, shifty-looking type who brought to mind the print of a portrait by Klimt that was hanging in the breakfast-room. He wore a brown, belted raincoat, trousers that seemed a little short of his white socks and, barely covering his head of long fair hair, a small, black Tyrolean that was loaded with badges and feathers. Somewhat incongruously, his hands were enclosed in a large woollen muff.

'What are you selling, swing?' I asked him.

The shifty look turned suspicious. 'Aren't you Gunther?' he drawled in an improbable voice that was as low as a stolen bassoon.

'Relax,' I said, 'I'm Gunther. You must be Becker's personal gunsmith.'

'S'right. Name's Rudi.' He glanced around and grew easier. 'You alone in this watertight?'

'Like a hair on a widow's tit. Have you brought me a present?'

Rudi nodded and with a sly grin pulled one of his hands out of the muff. It held a revolver and it was pointed at my morning croissant. After a short, uncomfortable moment his grin widened and he released the handgrip to let the gun hang by the trigger-guard on his forefinger.

'If I stay in this city I'm going to have to shop for a new sense of humour,' I said, taking the revolver from him. It was a .38 Smith with a six-inch barrel and the words 'Military and Police' clearly engraved in the black finish. 'I suppose the bull who owned this let you have it for a few packets of cigarettes.' Rudi started to answer, but I got there first. 'Look, I told Becker a clean gun, not Exhibit A in a murder trial.'

'That's a new gun,' Rudi said indignantly. 'Squeeze your eye down the barrel.

It's still greased: hasn't been fired yet. I swear them at the top don't even know it's missing.'

'Where did you get it?'

'The Arsenal Warehouse. Honest, Herr Gunther, that gun's as clean as they come these days.'

I nodded reluctantly. 'Did you bring any ammunition?'

'There's six in it,' he said, and taking his other hand out of the muff laid a miserly handful of cartridges on to the sideboard, next to my two bottles from Traudl. 'And these.'

'What, did you buy them off the ration?'

Rudi shrugged. 'All I could get for the moment, I'm afraid. Eyeing the vodka he licked his lips.

'I've had my breakfast,' I told him, 'but you help yourself.'

'Just to keep the cold out, eh?' he said and poured a nervous glassful, which he quickly swallowed.

'Go ahead and have another. I never stand between a man and a good thirst.' I lit a cigarette and went over to the window. Outside, a Pan's pipes of icicles hung from the edge of the terrace roof. 'Especially on a day as chilly as this one.'

'Thanks,' said Rudi, 'thanks a lot.' He smiled thinly, and poured a second, steadier glass, which he sipped at slowly. 'So how's it coming along? The investigation, I mean.'

'If you've got any ideas I'd love to hear them. Right now the fish aren't exactly jumping on to the riverbank.'

Rudi flexed his shoulders. 'Well, the way I see it is that this Ami captain, the one that took the 71 '

He paused while I made the connection: the number 71 was the tram that went to the Central Cemetery. I nodded for him to continue.

'Well, he must have been involved in some kind of racket. Think about it,' he instructed, warming to his subject. 'He goes to a warehouse with some coat, and the place is stacked high with nails. I mean, why did they go there in the first place? It couldn't have been because the killer planned to shoot him there. He wouldn't have done it near his stash, would he? They must have gone to look at the merchandise, and had an argument.'

I had to admit there was something in what he said. I thought for a minute. 'Who sells cigarettes in Austria, Rudi?'

'Apart from everyone?'

'The main black-siders.'

'Excepting Emil, there's the Ivans; a mad American staff sergeant who lives in a castle near Salzburg; a Romanian Jew here in Vienna; and an Austrian named Kurtz. But Emil was the biggest. Most people have heard the name of Emil Becker in that particular connection.'

'Do you think it's possible that one of them could have framed Emil, to take him out of competition?'

'Sure. But not at the expense of losing all those nails. Forty cases of cigarettes, Herr Gunther. That's a big loss for someone to take.'

'When exactly was this tobacco factory on Thaliastrasse robbed?'

'Months ago.'

'Didn't the MPs have any idea who could have done it? Didn't they have any suspects?'

'Not a chance. Thaliastrasse is in the 16th Bezirk, part of the French sector.

The French MPs couldn't catch drip in this city.'

'What about the local bulls the Vienna police?'

Rudi shook his head firmly. 'Too busy fighting with the state police. The Ministry of the Interior has been trying to have the state mob absorbed into the regular force, but the Russians don't like it and are trying to fuck the thing up. Even if it means wrecking the whole force.' He grinned. 'I can't say I'd be sorry. No, the locals are almost as bad as the Frenchies. To be honest, the only bulls that are worth a damn in this city are the Amis. Even the Tommies are pretty stupid if you ask me.'

Rudi glanced at one of the several watches he had strapped to his arm. 'Look, I've got to go, otherwise I'll miss my pitch at Ressel. That's where you'll find me every morning if you need to, Herr Gunther. There, or at the Hauswirth сafé on Favoritenstrasse during the afternoon.' He drained his glass. 'Thanks for the drink.'

'Favoritenstrasse,' I repeated, frowning. 'That's in the Russian sector, isn't it?'

'True,' said Rudi. 'But it doesn't make me a Communist.' He raised his little hat and smiled. 'Just prudent.'

Chapter 18

The sad aspect to her face, with its downcast eyes and the tilt of her thickening jaw, not to mention her cheap and secondhand-looking clothes, made me think that Veronika could not have made much out of being a prostitute. And certainly there was nothing about the cold, cavern-sized room she rented in the heart of the city's red-light district that indicated anything other than an eked-out, hand-to-mouth kind of existence.

She thanked me again for helping her and, having inquired solicitously after my bruises, proceeded to make a pot of tea while she explained that one day she was planning to become an artist. I looked through her drawings and watercolours without much enjoyment.

Profoundly depressed by my gloomy surroundings, I asked her how it was that she had ended up on the sledge. This was foolish, because it never does to challenge a whore about anything, least of all her own immorality, and my only excuse was that I felt genuinely sorry for her. Had she once had a husband who had seen her frenching an Ami in a ruined building for a couple of bars of chocolate?

'Who said I was on the sledge?' she responded tartly.

I shrugged. 'It's not coffee that keeps you up half the night.'

'Maybe so. All the same, you won't find me working in one of those places on the Gnrtel where the numbers just walk up the stairs. And you won't find me selling it on the street outside the American Information Office, or the Atlantis Hotel.

Chocolady I may be, but I'm no sparkler. I have to like the gentleman.'

'That won't stop you getting hurt. Like last night, for instance. Not to mention venereal disease.'

'Listen to yourself,' she said with amused contempt. 'You sound just like one of those bastards in the vice squad. They pick you up, have a doctor examine you for a dose and then give you a lecture on the perils of drip. You're beginning to sound like a bull.'

'Maybe the police are right. Ever think of that?'

'Well, they never found anything wrong with me. Nor will they.' She smiled a shrewd little smile. 'Like I said, I'm careful. I have to like the gentleman.

Which means I won't do Ivans or niggers.'

'Nobody ever heard of an Ami or a Tommy with syphilis, I suppose.'

'Look, you play the percentages.' She scowled. 'What the hell do you know about it anyway? Saving my ass doesn't give you the right to read me the Ten Commandments, Bernie.'

'You don't have to be a swimmer to throw someone a life-preserver. I've met enough snappers in my time to know that most of them started out as selective as you. Then someone comes along and beats the shit out of them, and the next time, with the landlord chasing for his rent, they can't afford to be quite as choosy.

You talk about percentages. Well, there's not much percentage in french for ten schillings when you're forty. You're a nice girl, Veronika. If there were a priest around he'd maybe think you were worth a short homily, but since there isn't you'll have to make do with me.'

She smiled sadly and stroked my hair. 'You're not so bad. Not that I have any idea why you think it necessary. I'm really quite all right. I've got money saved. Soon I'll have enough to get myself into an art-school somewhere.'

I thought it just as likely that she would win a contract to repaint the Sistine Chapel, but I felt my mouth force its way up to a politely optimistic sort of smile. 'Sure you will,' I said. 'Look, maybe I can help. Maybe we can help each other.' It was a hopelessly flat-footed way of manoeuvring the conversation back to the main purpose of my visit.

'Maybe,' she said, serving the tea. 'One more thing and then you can give me a blessing. The vice squad has got files on over 5,000 girls in Vienna. But that's not even half of it. These days everyone has to do things that were once unthinkable. You too, probably. There's not much percentage in going hungry. And even less in going back to Czechoslovakia.'

'You're Czech?'

She sipped some of her tea, then took a cigarette from the packet I had given her the night before and collected a light.

'According to my papers I was born in Austria. But the fact is that I'm Czech: a Sudeten German-Jew. I spent most of the war hiding out in lavatories and attics.

Then I was with the partisans for a while, and after that a DP camp for six months before I escaped across the Green Frontier.

'Have you heard of a place called Wiener Neustadt? No? Well, it's a town about fifty kilometres outside Vienna, in the Russian Zone, with a collection centre for Soviet repatriations. There are 60,000 of them waiting there at any one time. The Ivans screen them into three groups: enemies of the Soviet Union are sent to labour camps; those they can't actually prove are enemies are sent to work outside the camps so either way you end up as some kind of slave labour; unless, that is, you're the third group and you're sick or old or very young, in which case you're shot right away.'

She swallowed hard and took a long drag of her cigarette. 'Do you want to know something? I think I would sleep with the whole of the British Army if it meant that the Russians couldn't claim me. And that includes the ones with syphilis.'

She tried a smile. 'But as it happens I have a medical friend who got me a few bottles of penicillin. I dose myself with it now and again just to be on the safe side.'

'That sounds expensive.'

'Like I said, he's a friend. It costs me nothing that could be spent on the reconstruction.' She picked up the teapot. 'Would you like some more tea?'

I shook my head. I was anxious to be out of that room. 'Let's go somewhere,' I suggested.

'All right. It beats staying here. How's your head for heights? Because there's only one place to go on a Sunday in Vienna.'

The amusement park of the Prater, with its great wheel, merry-go-rounds and switchback-railway, was somehow incongruous in that part of Vienna which, as the last to fall to the Red Army, still showed the greatest effects of the war and the clearest evidence of our being in an otherwise less amusing sector. Broken tanks and guns still littered the nearby meadows, while on every one of the dilapidated walls of houses all along the Ausstellungsstrasse was the faded chalk outline of the Cyrillic word 'Atak'ivat' (searched), which really meant 'looted'.

From the top of the big wheel Veronika pointed out the piers of the Red Army Bridge, the star on the Soviet obelisk close by it and, beyond these, the Danube. Then, as the cabin carrying the two of us started its slow descent to the ground, she reached inside my coat and took hold of my balls, but snatched her hand away again when I sighed uncomfortably.

'It could be that you would have preferred the Prater before the Nazis,' she said peevishly, 'when all the dolly-boys came here to pick up some trade.'

'That's not it at all,' I laughed.

'Maybe that's what you meant when you said that I could help you.'

'No, I'm just the nervous type. Try it again sometime when we're not sixty metres up in the air.'

'Highly strung, eh? I thought you said you had a head for heights.'

'I lied. But you're right, I do need your help.'

'If vertigo's your problem, then getting horizontal is the only treatment I'm qualified to prescribe.'

'I'm looking for someone, Veronika: a girl who used to hang around the Casanova Club.'

'Why else do men go to the Casanova except to look for a girl?'

'This is one particular girl.'

'Maybe you hadn't noticed. None of the girls at the Casanova are that particular.' She threw me a narrow-eyed look, as if she suddenly distrusted me.

'I thought you sounded like them at the top. All that shit about drip and all.

Are you working with that American?'

'No, I'm a private investigator.'

'Like the Thin Man?'

She laughed when I nodded.

'I thought that stuff was just for the films. And you want me to help you with something you're investigating, is that it?'

I nodded again.

'I never saw myself quite like Myrna Loy,' she said, 'but I'll help you if I can. Who is this girl you're looking for?'

'Her name is Lotte. I don't know her last name. You might have seen her with a man called K/nig. He wears a moustache and has a small terrier.'

Veronika nodded slowly. 'Yes, I remember them. Actually I used to know Lotte reasonably well. Her name is Lotte Hartmann, but she hasn't been around in a few weeks.'

'No? Do you know where she is?'

'Not exactly. They went skiing together Lotte and Helmut K/nig, her schStzi.

Somewhere in the Austrian Tyrol, I believe.'

'When was this?'

'I don't know. Two, three weeks ago. K/nig seems to have plenty of money.'

'Do you know when they're coming back?'

'I have no idea. I do know she said she'd be away for at least a month if things worked out between them. Knowing Lotte, that means it would depend on how much of a good time he showed her.'

'Are you sure she's coming back?'

'It would take an avalanche to stop her coming back here. Lotte's Viennese right up to her earlobes; she doesn't know how to live anywhere else. I guess you want me to keep my eye close to the keyhole for them.'

'That's about the size of it,' I said. 'Naturally I'll pay you.'

She shrugged. 'There's no need,' she said, and pressed her nose against the windowpane. 'People who save my life get themselves all sorts of generous discounts.'

'I ought to warn you. It could be dangerous.'

'You don't have to tell me,' she said coolly. 'I've met K/nig. He's all smooth and charming at the club but he doesn't fool me. Helmut's the kind of man who takes his brass knuckles to confession.'

When we were on the ground again I used some of my coupons to buy us a bag of lingos, a Hungarian snack of fried dough sprinkled with garlic, from one of the stalls near the great wheel. After this modest lunch we took the Lilliput Railway down to the Olympic Stadium and walked back in the snow through the woods on Hauptallee.

Much later on, when we were in her room again, she said, 'Are you still feeling nervous?'

I reached for her gourd-like breasts and found her blouse damp with perspiration. She helped me to unbutton her and while I enjoyed the weight of her bosom in my hand she unfastened her skirt. I stood back to give her room to step out of it. And when she had laid it over the back of a chair I took her by the hand and drew her towards me.

For a brief moment I held her tight, enjoying her short, husky breath on my neck, before searching down for the curve of her girdled behind, her membrane-tight stocking-tops, and then the soft, cool flesh between her gartered thighs. And after she had engineered the subtraction of what little remained to cover her, I kissed her and allowed an intrepid finger to enjoy a short exploration of her hidden places.

In bed she held a smile on her face as slowly I strove to fathom her. Catching sight of her open eyes, which were no more than dreamy, as if she was unable to forget my satisfaction in search of her own, I found that I was too excited to care much beyond what seemed polite. When at last she felt the wound I was making in her become more urgent, she raised her thighs on to her chest and, reaching down, spread herself open with the flats of her hands, as if holding taut a piece of cloth for the needle of a sewing-machine, so that I might see myself periodically drawn tight into her. A moment later I flexed against her as life worked its independent and juddering propulsion.

It snowed hard that night, and then the temperature fell into the sewers, freezing the whole of Vienna, to preserve it for a better day. I dreamed, not of a lasting city, but of the city which was to come.

PART TWO

Chapter 19

'A date for Herr Becker's trial has now been set,' Liebl told me, 'which makes it absolutely imperative that we make all haste with the preparation of our defence. I trust you will forgive me, Herr Gunther, if I impress upon you the urgent need for evidence to substantiate our client's account. While I have faith in your ability as a detective, I should very much like to know exactly what progress you have made so far, in order that I may best advise Herr Becker how we are to conduct his case in court.'

This conversation took place several weeks after my arrival in Vienna but it was not the first time that Liebl had pressed me for some indication of my progress.

We were sitting in the сafé Schwarzenberg, which had become the nearest thing I'd had to an office since before the war. The Viennese coffee house resembles a gentleman's club, except in so far as that a day's membership costs little more than the price of a cup of coffee. For that you can stay for as long as you like, read the papers and magazines that are provided, leave messages with waiters, receive mail, reserve a table for appointments and generally run a business in total confidence before all the world. The Viennese respect privacy in the same way that Americans worship antiquity, and a fellow patron of the Schwarzenberg would no more have stuck his nose over your shoulder than he would have stirred a cup of mocha with his forefinger.

On previous occasions I had told Liebl that an exact idea of progress was not something that existed in the world of the private investigator: that it was not the kind of business in which one might report that a specific course of action would definitely occur within a certain period. That's the trouble with lawyers.

They expect the rest of the world to work like the Code NapolTon. On this particular occasion however, I had rather more to tell Liebl.

'K/nig's girlfriend, Lotte, is back in Vienna,' I said.

'She's returned from her skiing holiday at long last?'

'It looks like that.'

'But you haven't yet found her.

'Someone I know from the Casanova Club has a friend who spoke to her just a couple of days ago. She may even have been back for a week or so.'

'A week?' Liebl repeated. 'Why has it taken so long to find that out?'

'These things take time,' I shrugged provocatively. I was fed up with Liebl's constant quizzing and had started to take a childish delight in teasing him with these displays of apparent insouciance.

'Yes,' he grumbled, 'so you've said before.' He did not sound convinced.

'It's not like we have addresses for these people,' I said. 'And Lotte Hartmann hasn't been near the Casanova since she's been back. The girl who spoke to her said that Lotte had been trying to get a small part in a film at Sievering Studios.'

'Sievering? Yes, that's in the 19th Bezirk. The studio is owned by a Viennese called Karl Hartl. He used to be a client of mine. Hartl's directed all the great stars: Pola Negri, Lya de Putti, Maria Corda, Vilma Banky, Lilian Harvey.

Did you see The Gypsy Baron? Well that was Hartl.'

'You don't suppose he could know anything about the film studio where Becker found Linden's body?'

'Drittemann Film?' Liebl stirred his coffee absently. 'If it were a legitimate film company, Hartl would know about it. There's not much that happens in Viennese film-production that Hartl doesn't know about. But this wasn't anything more than a name on a lease. There weren't actually any films made there. You checked it out yourself, didn't you?'

'Yes,' I said, recalling the fruitless afternoon I had spent there two weeks before. It turned out that even the lease had expired, and that the property had now reverted to the state. 'You're right. Linden was the first and last thing to be shot there.' I shrugged. 'It was just a thought.'

'So what will you do now?'

'Try and trace Lotte Hartmann at Sievering. That shouldn't be too difficult. You don't go after a part in a film without leaving an address where you can be contacted.'

Liebl sipped his coffee noisily, and then dabbed daintily at his mouth with a spinnaker-sized handkerchief.

'Please waste no time in tracing this person,' he said. 'I'm sorry to have to press you like this, but until we discover Herr K/nig's whereabouts, we have nothing. Once you find him we might at least try and oblige him to be called as a material witness.'

I nodded meekly. There was more I could have told him but his tone irritated me, and any further explanation would have generated questions I was simply not equipped to answer yet. I could, for instance, have given him an account of what I had learned from Belinsky, at that same table in the Schwarzenberg, about a week after he had saved my skin information that I was still turning over in my mind, and trying to make sense of. Nothing was as straightforward as Liebl somehow imagined.

'First of all,' Belinsky had explained, 'the Drexlers were what they seemed. She survived Matthausen Concentration Camp, while he came out of the Lodz Ghetto and Auschwitz. They met in a Red Cross hospital after the war, and lived in Frankfurt for a while before they went to Berlin. Apparently they worked pretty closely with the Crowcass people and the public prosecutor's office. They maintained a large number of files on wanted Nazis and pursued many cases simultaneously. Consequently our people in Berlin weren't able to determine if there had been any one investigation which related to their deaths, or to Captain Linden's. The local police are baffled, as they say. Which is probably the way they prefer it. Frankly, they don't give much of a damn who killed the Drexlers, and the American MP investigation doesn't look as if it's going to get anywhere.

'But it doesn't seem likely that the Drexlers would have been very interested in Martin Albers. He was S S and SD clandestine operations chief in Budapest until 1944, when he was arrested for his part in Stauffenberg's plot to kill Hitler, and hanged at Flossenburg Concentration Camp in April 1945. But I dare say he had it coming to him. From all accounts, Albers was a bit of a bastard, even if he did try and get rid of the Fnhrer. A lot of you guys were a hell of a long time about that, you know. Our Intelligence people even think that Himmler knew about the plot all along and let it go ahead in the hope that he could take Hitler's place himself.

'Anyway, it turns out that this Max Abs guy was Albers' servant, driver and general dogsbody, so it kind of looks as if he was honouring his old boss. The Albers family was killed in an air-raid, so I guess there was no one else to erect a stone in his memory.'

'Rather an expensive gesture, wouldn't you say?'

'You think so? Well, I'd sure hate to get killed minding your ass, kraut.'

Then Belinsky told me about the Pullach company.

'It's an American-sponsored organization, run by the Germans, set up with the aim of rebuilding German commerce throughout Bizonia. The whole idea is that Germany should become economically self-supporting as quickly as possible so that Uncle Sam won't have to keep baling you all out. The company itself is located at an American mission called Camp Nicholas, which until a few months ago was occupied by the postal censorship authorities of the US Army. Camp Nicholas is a big compound that was originally built for Rudolf Hess and his family. But after he went AWOL Bormann had it for a while. And then Kesselring and his staff. Now it's ours. There's just enough security about the place to convince the locals that the camp is home to some kind of technical research establishment, but that's no surprise given the history of the place. Anyway, the good people of Pullach give it a wide berth, preferring not to know too much about what's happening there, even if it is something as harmless as an economic and commercial think-tank. I guess they're good at that, what with Dachau just a few miles away.'

That seemed to take care of Pullach, I thought. But what of Abs? It didn't seem to be in character for a man who wished to commemorate the memory of a hero of the German Resistance (such as it had existed), to kill an innocent man merely in order to remain anonymous. And how could Abs be connected with Linden, the Nazi-hunter, except as some kind of informer? Was it possible that Abs had also been killed, just like Linden and the Drexlers?

I finished my coffee, lit a cigarette and for the present moment I was content that these and other questions could not be asked in any forum other than my own mind.

The number 39 ran west along Sieveringer Strasse into Dobling and stopped just short of the Vienna Woods, a spur of the Alps which reaches as far as the Danube.

A film studio is not a place where you are likely to see any great evidence of industry. Equipment lies forever idle in the vans hired to transport it. Sets are never more than half-built even when they are finished. But mostly there are lots of people, all drawing a wage, who seem to do little more than stand around, smoking cigarettes and nursing cups of coffee; and these only stand because they are not considered important enough to be provided with a seat. For anyone foolish enough to have financed such an apparently profligate undertaking, film must seem like the most expensive length of material since Chinese silk, and would, I reflected, surely have driven Dr Liebl half-mad with impatience.

I inquired after the studio manager from a man with a clipboard, and he directed me to a small office on the first floor. There I found a tall, paunchy man with dyed hair, wearing a lilac-coloured cardigan and having the manner of an eccentric maiden aunt. He listened to my mission with one hand clasped on top of the other as if I had been requesting the hand of his warded niece.

'What are you, some kind of policeman?' he said combing an unruly eyebrow with his fingernail. From somewhere in the building came the sound of a very loud trumpet, which caused him to wince noticeably.

'A detective,' I said, disingenuously.

'Well, we always like to cooperate with them at the top, I'm sure. What did you say this girl was casting for?'

'I didn't. I'm afraid I don't know. But it was in the last two or three weeks.'

He picked up the telephone and pressed a switch.

'Willy? It's me, Otto. Could you be a love and step into my office for a moment?' He replaced the receiver, and checked his hair. 'Willy Reichmann's a production manager here. He may be able to help you.'

'Thanks,' I said and offered him a cigarette.

He threaded it behind his ear. 'How kind. I'll smoke it later.'

'What are you filming at the moment?' I inquired while we waited. Whoever was playing the trumpet hit a couple of high notes that didn't seem to match.

Otto emitted a groan and stared archly at the ceiling. 'Well, it's called The Angel with the Trumpet,' he said with a conspicuous lack of enthusiasm. 'It's more or less finished now, but this director is such a perfectionist.'

'Would that be Karl Hartl?'

'Yes. Do you know him?'

'Only The Gypsy Baron.'

'Oh,' he said sourly. 'That.'

There was a knock at the door and a short man with bright red hair came into the office. He reminded me of a troll.

'Willy, this is Herr Gunther. He's a detective. If you're willing to forgive the fact that he liked The Gypsy Baron you might like to give him some assistance.

He's looking for a girl, an actress who was at a casting session here not so long ago.'

Willy smiled uncertainly, revealing small uneven teeth that looked like a mouthful of rock salt, nodded and said in a high-pitched voice: 'You'd best come into my office, Herr Gunther.'

'Don't keep Willy too long, Herr Gunther,' Otto instructed as I followed Willy's diminutive figure into the corridor. 'He has an appointment in fifteen minutes.'

Willy turned on his heel and looked blankly at the studio manager. Otto sighed exasperatedly. 'Don't you ever write anything in your diary, Willy? We've got that Englishman coming from London Films. Mr Lyndon-Haynes? Remember?'

Willy grunted something and then closed the door behind us. He led the way along the corridor to another office, and ushered me inside.

'Now, what is this girl's name?' he said, pointing me to a chair.

'Lotte Hartmann.'

'I don't suppose you know the name of the production company?'

'No, but I know that she came here within the last couple of weeks.'

He sat down and opened one of the desk drawers. 'Well, there were only three films casting here this past month, so it shouldn't be too difficult.' His short fingers picked out three files which he laid on the blotter and started to sort through their contents. 'Is she in trouble?'

'No. It's just that she may know someone who can help the police with an inquiry we are making.' This was true at least.

'Well if she's been up for a part this last month or so, she'll be in one of these files. We may be short of attractive ruins in Vienna, but one thing we've got plenty of is actresses. Half of them are chocoladies, mind you. Even at the best of times an actress is just a chocolady by another name.' He came to the end of one pile of papers and started on another.

'I can't say I miss your lack of ruins,' I remarked. 'I'm from Berlin myself.

We've got ruins on an epic scale.'

'Don't I know it. But this Englishman I have to see wants lots of ruins here in Vienna. Just like Berlin. Just like Rosellini.' He sighed disconsolately. 'I ask you: what is there apart from the Ring and the Opera district?'

I shook my head sympathetically.

'What does he expect? The war's been over for three years. Does he imagine that we delayed rebuilding just in case an English film crew turned up? Perhaps these things take longer in England than in Austria. It wouldn't surprise me, considering the amount of red-tape the British generate. Never known such a bureaucratic lot. Christ knows what I'm going to tell this fellow. By the time they start filming they'll be lucky to find a broken window.'

He skimmed a sheet of paper across the desk. Pinned to its top left-hand corner was a passport-sized photograph. 'Lotte Hartmann,' he announced.

I glanced at the name and the photograph. 'It looks like it.' 'Actually I remember her,' he said. 'She wasn't quite what we were looking for on that occasion, but I said I could probably find her something in this English production. Good-looking, I'll say that much for her. But to be frank with you, Herr Gunther, she isn't much of an actress. A couple of walk-on parts at the Burgtheater during the war and that's about it. Still, the English are making a film about the black market and so they want lots of chocoladies. In view of Lotte Hartmann's particular experience I thought she could be one of them.'

'Oh? What experience is that?'

'She used to be a greeter at the Casanova Club. And now she's a croupier at the Casino Oriental. At least that's what she told me. For all I know she could be one of the exotic dancers they have there. Anyway, if you're looking for her, that's the address she gave.'

'Mind if I borrow this sheet?'

'Be my guest.'

'One more thing: if for any reason FrSulein Hartmann gets in contact with you I'd be grateful if you would keep this under your hat.'

'Like it was a new toupee.'

I stood up to leave. 'Thanks,' I said, 'you've been very helpful. Oh, and good luck with your ruins.'

He grinned wryly. 'Yes, well, if you see any weak walls, give them a shove, there's a good fellow.'

I was at the Oriental that evening, just in time for the first show at 8.15. The girl dancing naked on the pagoda-like dance floor, to the accompaniment of a six-piece orchestra, had eyes that were as cold and hard as the blackest piece of Pichler's porphyry. Contempt was written into her face as indelibly as the birds tattooed on her small, girlish breasts. A couple of times she had to stifle a yawn, and once she grimaced at the gorilla who was detailed to watch over her in case anyone wanted to show the girl his appreciation. When after forty-five minutes she came to the end of her act, her curtsy was a mockery of those of us who had watched it.

I waved to a waiter and transferred my attention to the club itself. 'The wonderful Egyptian Night Cabaret' was how the Oriental described itself on the book of matches I had collected from the brass ashtray, and it was certainly greasy enough to have passed for something Middle Eastern, at least in the clichTd eye of some set-designer from Sievering Studios. A long, curving stairway led down into the Moorish-style interior with its gilt pillars, cupola'd ceiling and many Persian tapestries on the mock-mosaic walls. The dank, basement smell, cheap Turkish tobacco-smoke and number of prostitutes only added to the authentic Oriental atmosphere. I half expected to see the thief of Baghdad sit down at the wooden marquetry table I had taken. Instead I got a Viennese garter-handler. 'You looking for a nice girl?' he asked.

'If I were I wouldn't have come here.'

The pimp read this the wrong way up, and pointed out a big redhead who was seated at the anachronistic American bar. 'I can get you nice and cosy with that one there.'

'No thanks. I can smell her pants from here.'

'Listen, pifke, that little chocolady is so clean you could eat your supper off her crotch.'

'I'm not that hungry.'

'Perhaps something else, then. If it's drip you're worried about, I know where I can find some nice fresh snow, with no footprints. Know what I mean?' He leaned forwards across the table. 'A girl who hasn't even finished school yet. How does a splash like that sound to you?'

'Disappear, swing, before I shut your flap.'

He leaned back suddenly. 'Slow your blood down, pifke,' he sneered. 'I was only trying to ' He yelped with pain as he found himself drawn to his feet by one sideburn held between Belinsky's forefinger and thumb.

'You heard my friend,' he said with quiet menace, and pushing the man away he sat down opposite me. 'God, I hate pimps,' he muttered, shaking his head.

'I'd never have guessed,' I said, and waved again at the waiter, who seeing the pimp's manner of departure approached the table with more obsequiousness than an Egyptian houseboy. 'What'll you have?' I asked the American.

'A beer,' he said.

'Two Gossers,' I told the waiter.

'Immediately, gentlemen,' he said, and scuttled away.

'Well that's certainly made him more attentive,' I observed.

'Yeah, well, you don't come to the Casino Oriental for ritzy service. You come to lose money on the tables or in a bed.'

'What about the floor-show? You forgot the show.'

'The hell I did.' He laughed obscenely and proceeded to explain that he usually tried to catch the show at the Oriental at least once a week.

When I told him about the girl with the tattoos on her breasts he shook his head with worldly indifference, and for a while I was obliged to listen to him tell me about the strippers and exotic dancers he'd seen in the Far East, where a girl with a tattoo was considered nothing to write home about. This kind of conversation was of little interest to me, and when after several minutes Belinsky ran out of unholy anecdote, I was glad to be able to change the subject.

'I found K/nig's girlfriend, FrSulein Hartmann,' I announced.

'Yes? Where?'

'In the next room. Dealing cards.'

'The croupier? The blonde piece with the tan and the icicle up her ass?'

I nodded.

'I tried to buy her a drink,' he said, 'only I might as well have been selling brushes. If you're going to ingratiate yourself with that one you've got your work cut out, kraut. She's so cold her perfume makes your nostrils ache. Perhaps if you were to kidnap her you might stand some chance.'

'I was thinking along similar lines. Seriously, how low is your credit with the MPs here in Vienna?'

Belinsky shrugged. 'It's a real snake's ass. But say what you've got in mind and I'll tell you for sure.'

'How's this then? The International Patrol comes in here one night and arrests me and the girl on some pretext. Then they take us down to KSrtnerstrasse where I start talking tough about how a mistake has been made. Maybe some money even changes hands to make it look really convincing. After all, people like to believe that all police are corrupt, don't they? So she and K/nig might appreciate that little bit of fine detail. Anyway, when the police let us go I make out to Lotte Hartmann that the reason I helped her was because I find her attractive. Well naturally she's grateful and would like me to know it, only she's got this gentleman friend. Maybe he can repay me somehow or other. Put some business my way, that kind of thing.' I paused and lit a cigarette. 'Well, what do you think?'

'In the first place,' Belinsky said thoughtfully, 'the IP isn't allowed in this joint. There's a big sign at the front door to that effect. Your ten-schilling entrance buys a night's membership to what is, after all, a private club, which means the IP just can't come marching in here dirtying the carpet and scaring the flower-lady.'

'All right then,' I said, 'they wait outside and work a spot-check on people as they leave the club. Surely there's nothing to stop them doing that? They pull Lotte and me in on suspicion: her of being a chocolady, and me of working some racket.'

The waiter arrived with our beers. Meanwhile the second show was starting.

Belinsky swallowed a mouthful of his drink and sat back in his seat to watch.

'I like this one,' he growled, lighting his pipe. 'She's got an ass like the west coast of Africa. Just you wait until you see it.' Puffing contentedly, his pipe fixed between his grinning teeth, Belinsky kept his eyes on the girl peeling off her brassiere.

'It might just work at that,' he said eventually. 'Only forget trying to bribe one of the Americans. No, if it's grease you're trying to simulate then it really has to be an Ivan or a Frenchy. As it happens the CIC has turned a Russian captain in the IP. Apparently he's trying to work his passage to the United States, so he's good for service manuals, identity-papers, tip-offs, the usual kind of thing. A fake arrest ought to be within his abilities. And by a happy coincidence the Russians are in the chair this month, so it should be easy enough to arrange a night when he's on duty.'

Belinsky's grin widened as the dancing girl eased her pants over her substantial backside to reveal a tiny G-string.

'Oh, will you look at that?' he chuckled, with schoolboyish glee. Put a nice frame around her ass and I could hang it on my wall.' He tossed back his beer and winked lasciviously at me. 'I'll say one thing for you krauts. You build your women every bit as well as you build your automobiles.'

Chapter 20

My clothes actually seemed to fit me better. My trousers had stopped hanging loose around my waist like a clown's pantaloons. Slipping into my jacket was no longer reminiscent of a schoolboy optimistically trying on his dead father's suits. And my shirt-collar was as snug about my neck as the bandage on a coward's arm. There was no doubt that a couple of months in Vienna had put some weight on me, so that I now looked more like the man who had gone to a Soviet POW camp and less like the man who had returned from one. But while this pleased me, I saw it as no excuse to get out of condition, and I had resolved to spend less time sitting in the сafé Schwarzenberg, and to take more exercise.

It was the time of year when winter's denuded trees were starting to bud, and when the decision to wear an overcoat was no longer automatic. With only a chalk-mark of cloud on an otherwise uniformly blue board of sky, I decided to take a walk around the Ring and expose my pigments to the warm spring sunshine.

Like a chandelier that is too big for the room in which it hangs, so the official buildings on the Ringstrasse, built at a time of overbearing Imperial optimism, were somehow too grand, too opulent for the geographical realities of the new Austria. A country of six million people, Austria was little more than the butt-end of a very large cigar. It wasn't a Ring I went walking on so much as a wreath.

The American sentry outside the US-requisitioned Bristol Hotel had his pink face lifted up to catch the rays of the morning sun. His Russian counterpart guarding the similarly requisitioned Grand Hotel next door looked as if he had spent his whole life outdoors, so dark were his features.

Crossing on to the south side of the Ring in order to be close to the park as I came up the Schubertring, I found myself near the Russian Kommendatura, formerly the Imperial Hotel, as a large Red Army staff car drew up outside the enormous red star and four caryatids that marked the entrance. The car door opened and out stepped Colonel Poroshin.

He did not seem in any way surprised to see me. Indeed, it was almost as if he had expected to find me walking there, and for a moment he simply looked at me as if it had been only a few hours since I had sat in his office in the little Kremlin in Berlin. I suppose my jaw must have dropped, because after a second he smiled, murmured 'Dobraye ootra (Good-morning)', and then carried on into the Kommendatura followed closely by a couple of junior officers who stared suspiciously back at me, while I stood there, simply lost for words.

More than a little puzzled as to why Poroshin should have turned up in Vienna now, I wandered back across the road to the сafé Schwarzenberg, narrowly escaping being hit by an old lady on a bicycle who rang her bell furiously at me.

I sat down at my usual table to give some thought to Poroshin's arrival on the scene, and ordered a light snack, my new fitness resolution already ruined.

The colonel's presence in Vienna seemed easier to explain with some coffee and cake inside of me. There was, after all, no reason why he should not have come.

As an MVD colonel he could probably go wherever he liked. That he had not said more to me or inquired as to how my efforts were going on behalf of his friend I thought was probably due to the fact that he had no wish to discuss the matter in front of the two other officers. And he had only to pick up the telephone and ring the headquarters of the International Patrol in order to discover if Becker was still in prison or not.

All the same I had a feeling on the sole of my shoe that Poroshin's arrival from Berlin was connected with my own investigation, not necessarily for the better.

Like a man who has breakfasted on prunes, I told myself I was certain to notice something before very long.

Chapter 21

Each one of the Four Powers took administrative responsibility for the policing of the Inner City for a month at a time. 'In the chair' was how Belinsky had described it. The chair in question was located in a meeting-room at the combined forces headquarters in the Palais Auersperg, although it also affected who sat next to the driver in the International Patrol vehicle. But though the IP was an instrument of the Four Powers and subject in theory to orders from the combined forces, for all practical purposes it was American operated and supplied. All vehicles, petrol and oil, radios, radio spares, maintenance of the vehicles and the radios, operation of the radio network system and organization of the patrols were the responsibility of the US 796th. This meant that the American member of the patrol always drove the vehicle, operated the radio and performed the first-echelon maintenance. Thus, at least as far as the patrol itself was concerned, the idea of 'the chair' was a bit of a movable feast.

Although the Viennese referred to 'the four men in the jeep', or sometimes 'the four elephants in the jeep', in reality 'the jeep' had long been abandoned as too small to accommodate a patrol of four men, their short-wave transmitter, not to mention any prisoners; and a three-quarter-ton Command and Reconnaissance vehicle was now the favoured mode of transport.

All this I learned from the Russian corporal commanding the IP truck parked a short distance from the Casino Oriental on Petersplatz, in which I sat under arrest, waiting for the kapral's colleagues to pick up Lotte Hartmann. Speaking neither French nor English, and with only a smattering of German, the kapral was delighted to find someone with whom he could have a conversation, even if it was a Russian-speaking prisoner.

'I'm afraid I can't tell you very much about why you're being arrested, apart from the fact that it's for black-marketeering,' he apologised. 'You'll find out more when we get to the KSrtnerstrasse. We'll both find out, eh? All I can tell you about is the procedure. My captain will fill out an arrest-form, in duplicate everything's in duplicate and leave both copies with the Austrian police. They'll forward one copy to the Military Government Public-Safety Officer. If you're held for trial in a military court, a charge sheet will be prepared by my captain; and if you're held for trial in an Austrian court, the local police will be instructed accordingly.' The kapral frowned. 'To be honest with you, we don't bother much with black-market offences these days. Or vice for that matter. It's smugglers we're generally after, or illegal emigrants.

Those other three bastards think I've gone mad, I can tell. But I've got my orders.'

I smiled sympathetically and said how I appreciated him explaining. I was thinking of offering him a cigarette when the door of the truck opened and the French patrolman helped a very pale-looking Lotte Hartmann to climb up beside me. Then he and the Englishman came after her, locking the door from the inside.

The smell of her fear was only marginally weaker than the cloying scent of her perfume.

'Where are they taking us?' she whispered to me.

I told her we were going to the KSrtnerstrasse.

'No talking is allowed,' said the English MP in appalling German. 'Prisoners will keep quiet until we reach headquarters.'

I smiled quietly to myself. The language of bureaucracy was the only second language that an Englishman would ever be capable of speaking well.

The IP was headquartered in an old palace within a cigarette-end's flick of the State Opera. The truck drew up outside and we were marched through huge glass doors and into a baroque-style hall, where an assortment of atlantes and caryatids showed the omnipresent hand of the Viennese stonemason. We went up a staircase that was as wide as a railway track, past urns and busts of forgotten noblemen, through a pair of doors that were longer than the legs of a circus tall-man and into an arrangement of glass-fronted offices. The Russian kapral opened the door of one of them, ushered his two prisoners inside and told us to wait there.

'What did he say?' FrSulein Hartmann asked as he closed the door behind him.

'He said to wait.' I sat down, lit a cigarette and looked about the room. There was a desk, four chairs and on the wall a large wooden noticeboard of the kind you see outside churches, except that this one was in Cyrillic, with columns of chalked numbers and names, headed 'Wanted Persons', 'Absentees', 'Stolen Vehicles', 'Express Messages', 'Part I Orders' and 'Part II Orders'. In the column headed 'Wanted Persons' appeared my own name and that of Lotte Hartmann.

Belinsky's pet Russian was making things look very convincing.

'Have you any idea what this is all about?' she asked tremulously.

'No,' I lied. 'Have you?'

'No, of course not. There must be some kind of mistake.'

'Evidently.'

'You don't seem all that concerned. Or maybe you just don't understand that it's the Russians who ordered us to be brought here.'

'Do you speak Russian?'

'No, of course not,' she said impatiently. 'The American MP who arrested me said that this was a Russian call and nothing to do with him.'

'Well, the Ivans are in the chair this month,' I said reflectively. 'What did the Frenchman say?'

'Nothing. He just kept looking down the front of my dress.'

'He would.' I smiled at her. 'It's worth a look.'

She gave me a sarcastic sort of smile. 'Yes, well, I don't think they brought me here just to see the wood stacked in front of the cabin, do you?' She spoke with crisp distaste, but accepted the cigarette I offered her all the same.

'I can't think of a better reason.'

She swore under her breath.

'I've seen you, haven't I?' I said. 'At the Oriental?'

'What were you during the war an air spotter?'

'Be nice. Maybe I can help you.'

'Better help yourself first.'

'You can depend on that.'

When the office door finally opened it was a tall, burly-looking Red Army officer who came into the room. He introduced himself as Captain Rustaveli and took a seat behind the desk.

'Look here,' demanded Lotte Hartmann, 'would you mind telling me why I've been brought here in the middle of the night? What the hell is going on?'

'All in good time, FrSulein,' he replied in flawless German. 'Please sit down.'

She slumped on to a chair beside me and regarded him sullenly. The captain looked at me.

'Herr Gunther?'

I nodded and told him in Russian that the girl spoke only German. 'She'll think I'm a more impressive son-of-a-bitch if you and I confine ourselves to a language she can't understand.'

Captain Rustaveli stared coldly back at me and for a brief moment I wondered if something had gone wrong and Belinsky had not managed to make it clear to this Russian officer that our arrests were a put-up job.

'Very well,' he said after a long moment. 'Nevertheless, we shall at least have to go through the motions of an interrogation. May I see your papers please, Herr Gunther?' From his accent I took him for a Georgian. The same as Comrade Stalin.

I reached inside my jacket and handed over my identity card into which, at Belinsky's suggestion, I had inserted two $100 bills while sitting in the truck.

Rustaveli quickly slipped the money into his breeches pocket without blinking, and out of the corner of my eye I saw Lotte Hartmann's jaw drop on to her lap.

'Very generous,' he murmured, turning over my identity card in his hairy fingers. Then he opened a file with my name on it. 'Although quite unnecessary, I can assure you.'

'There's her feelings to think of, Captain. You wouldn't want me to disappoint her prejudice, would you?'

'No indeed. Good-looking, wouldn't you say?'

'Very.'

'A whore, do you think?'

'That, or something pretty close to it. I'm only guessing of course, but I'd say she was the type that likes to strip a man of a lot more than ten schillings and his underwear.'

'Not the sort of girl to fall in love with, eh?'

'It would be like putting your tail on an anvil.'

It was warm in Rustaveli's office and Lotte started to fan herself with her jacket, allowing the Russian several glimpses of her ample cleavage.

'It's rare that an interrogation is quite so amusing,' he said, and looking down at his papers added: 'She has nice tits. That's the kind of truth I can really respect.'

'I guess it's a lot easier for you Russians to look at.'

'Well, whatever this little show has been laid on to achieve, I hope you get to have her. I can't think of a better reason to go to all this trouble. Me, I've got a sexual disease: my tail swells up every time I see a woman.'

'I guess that makes you a fairly typical Russian.'

Rustaveli smiled wryly. 'Incidentally, you speak excellent Russian, Herr Gunther. For a German.'

'So do you, Captain. For a Georgian. Where are you from?'

'Tbilisi.'

'Stalin's birthplace?'

'No, thank God. That's Gori's misfortune.' Rustaveli closed my file. 'That should be enough to impress her, don't you think?'

'Yes.'

'What shall I tell her?'

'You have information that she's a whore,' I explained, 'so you're reluctant to let her go. But you let me talk you into it.'

'Well, that seems to be in order, Herr Gunther,' Rustaveli said, reverting to German again. 'My apologies for having detained you. Now you may leave.'

He handed back my identity card, and I stood up and made for the door.

'But what about me?' Lotte moaned.

Rustaveli shook his head. 'I'm afraid you must stay, FrSulein. The vice squad doctor will be here shortly. He will question you regarding your work at the Oriental.'

'But I'm a croupier,' she wailed, 'not a chocolady.'

'That is not our information.'

'What information?'

'Your name has been mentioned by several other girls.'

'What other girls?'

'Prostitutes, FrSulein. Possibly you may have to submit yourself for a medical examination.'

'A medical? What for?'

'For venereal disease, of course.'

'Venereal disease ?'

'Captain Rustaveli,' I said above Lotte's rising cry of outrage, 'I can vouch for this woman. I wouldn't say I knew her very well, but I've known her long enough to be able to state, quite categorically, that she is not a prostitute.'

'Well ' he cavilled.

'I ask you: does she look like a prostitute?'

'Frankly, I've yet to meet an Austrian girl who isn't selling it.' He closed his eyes for a second, and then shook his head. 'I can't go against the protocol.

These are serious charges. Many Russian soldiers have been infected.'

'As I recall, the Oriental where FrSulein Hartmann was arrested is off limits to the Red Army. I was under the impression that your men tended to go to the Moulin Rouge in Walfischgasse.'

Rustaveli pursed his lips and shrugged. 'That is true. But nevertheless '

'Perhaps if I were to meet you again, Captain, we might discuss the possibility of me compensating the Red Army for any embarrassment regarding a breach of the protocol. In the meantime, would you be able to accept my personal surety for the FrSulein's good character?'

Rustaveli scratched his stubble thoughtfully. 'Very well,' he said, 'your personal surety. But remember, I have your addresses. You can always be re-arrested.' He turned to Lotte Hartmann and told her that she was also free to leave.

'Thank God,' she breathed, and sprang to her feet.

Rustaveli nodded at the kapral standing guard on the other side of the grimy glass door, and then ordered him to escort us out of the building. Then the captain clicked his heels and apologised for 'the mistake', as much for the benefit of his kapral as for any effect it might have had on Lotte Hartmann.