A German Requiem

She and I followed the kapral back down the big staircase, our steps echoing up to the ornate cornice-work on the high ceiling, and through the arched glass doors into the street where he leaned over the pavement and spat copiously into the gutter.

'A mistake, eh?' He uttered a bitter laugh. 'Mark my words, I'll be the one that gets the blame for it.'

'I hope not,' I said, but the man just shrugged, adjusted his lambskin hat and trudged wearily back into his headquarters.

'I suppose I ought to thank you,' Lotte said, tying up the collar of her jacket.

'Forget it,' I said, and started walking towards the Ring. She hesitated for a moment and then tripped after me.

'Wait a minute,' she said.

I stopped and faced her again. Frontally her face was even more attractive than its profile, as the length of her nose seemed less noticeable. And she was not cold at all. Belinsky had been wrong about that, mistaking cynicism for general indifference. Indeed, I thought she seemed more apt to entice men, although an evening of watching her in the Casino had established that she was probably one of those unsatisfactory women who dangle intimacy, only to withdraw it at a later stage.

'Yes? What is it?'

'Look, you've already been very kind,' she said, 'but would you mind walking me home? It is very late for a decent girl to be on the streets, and I doubt if I'll be able to find a taxi at this time of night.'

I shrugged and looked at my watch. 'Where do you live?'

'It's not very far. The 3rd Bezirk, in the British sector.'

'All right.' I sighed with a conspicuous lack of enthusiasm. 'Lead the way.'

We walked eastwards, along streets that were as quiet as a house of Franciscan tertiaries.

'You haven't explained why you helped me,' she said, breaking the silence after a while.

'I wonder if that's what Andromeda said when Perseus had saved her from the sea-monster.'

'You seem a little less obviously heroic, Herr Gunther.'

'Don't be fooled by my manners,' I told her. 'I've got a whole chestful of medals down at my local pawnshop.'

'So you're not the sentimental type either.'

'No, I like sentiment. It looks fine on needlework and Christmas cards. Only it doesn't make much of an engraving on the Ivans. Or perhaps you weren't looking.'

'Oh, I was looking all right. It was very impressive the way you handled him. I never knew the Ivans could be greased like that.'

'You just have to know the right spot on the axle. That kapral would probably have been too scared to take some drop, and a major too proud. Not to mention the fact that I'd met our Captain Rustaveli before, when he was plain Lieutenant Rustaveli and both he and his girlfriend had a dose of drip. I got them some good penicillin, for which he was very grateful.'

'You don't look like any swing Heini.'

'I don't look like a swing, I don't look like a hero. What are you, the head of casting at Warner Brothers?'

'I only wish I were,' she murmured. And then: 'Anyway, you started it. You said to that Ivan that I didn't look like a chocolady. Coming from you I'd say it almost sounded like a compliment.'

'Like I said, I've seen you at the Oriental, selling nothing worse than bad luck. Incidentally, I hope you're a good card-player, because I'm supposed to go back and give him something for your liberty. Assuming you actually want to stay out of the cement.'

'How much will that be?'

'A couple of hundred dollars ought to do it.'

'A couple of hundred?' Her words echoed around Schwarzenbergplatz as we came past a great fountain, and crossed onto Rennweg. 'Where am I going to get that kind of mouse?'

'Same place you got the suntan and nice jacket, I imagine. Failing that you could ask him to the club and deal him a few aces off the bottom of the deck.'

'I could if I were that good. But I'm not.'

'That's too bad.'

She was quiet for a moment as she gave the matter some thought. 'Maybe you could persuade him to take less. After all, you seem to speak pretty good Russkie.'

'Maybe,' I allowed.

'I don't suppose it would do much good to go to court and protect my innocence, would it?'

'With the Ivans?' I laughed harshly. 'You might just as well appeal to the goddess Kali.'

'No, I didn't think so.'

We came up a side street or two and stopped outside an apartment building that was close by a small park.

'Would you like to come in for a drink?' She fumbled in her handbag for her key.

'I know I could use one.'

'I could suck one out of the rug,' I said, and followed her through the door, upstairs and into a cosy, solidly furnished apartment.

There was no ignoring the fact that Lotte Hartmann was attractive. Some women, you look at them and calculate what modest length of time you would be willing to settle for. Generally, the better-looking the girl the less time with which you tell yourself you would be satisfied. After all, a really attractive woman might have to accommodate a lot of similar wishes. Lotte was the kind of girl with whom you could have been persuaded to settle for five steamy, unfettered minutes. Just five minutes for her to let you and your imagination do what you wanted. Not too much to ask, you would have thought. The way things happened, though, it looked like she might actually have granted me rather longer than that. Perhaps even the full hour. But I was dog-tired, and perhaps I drank a little too much of her excellent whisky to pay much attention to the way she bit her bottom-lip and stared at me through those black-widow eyelashes. I was probably supposed to lie quietly on her bed with my muzzle resting on her impressively convex lap and let her fold my big, floppy ears, only I ended up falling asleep on the sofa.

Chapter 22

When I awoke later that same morning, I scribbled my address and telephone number on a piece of paper and, leaving Lotte asleep in bed, I caught a taxi back to my pension. There I washed, changed my clothes and ate a large breakfast, which did much to restore me. I was reading the morning's Wiener Zeitung when the telephone rang.

A man's voice, with only the smallest trace of a Viennese accent, asked me if it was speaking to Herr Bernhard Gunther. When I identified myself the voice said:

'I'm a friend of FrSulein Hartmann. She tells me that you very kindly helped her out of an awkward spot last night.'

'She's not exactly out of it yet,' I said.

'Quite so. I was hoping that we could meet and discuss the matter. FrSulein Hartmann mentioned the sum of $200 for this Russian captain. Also that you had offered to act as her intermediary.'

'Did I? I suppose I might have.'

'I was hoping I might give you the money to give to this wretched fellow. And I should like to thank you, personally.'

I felt sure that this was K/nig, but I stayed silent for a moment, not wishing to seem too eager to meet him.

'Are you still there?'

'Where do you suggest?' I asked reluctantly.

'Do you know the Amalienbad, on Reumannplatz?'

'I'll find it.'

'Shall we say in one hour? In the Turkish baths?'

'All right. But how will I recognize you? You haven't even told me your name yet.'

'No I haven't,' he said mysteriously, 'but I'll be whistling this tune.' And with that he proceeded to whistle it down the line.

'Bella, bella, bella Marie,' I said, recognizing a melody that had been irritatingly ubiquitous some months before.

'Precisely that,' said the man, and hung up.

It seemed a curiously conspiratorial mode of recognition, but I told myself that if it was K/nig, he had good reason to be cautious.

The Amalienbad was in the 10th Bezirk, in the Russian sector, which meant catching a number 67 south down Favoritenstrasse. The district was a working-class quarter with lots of dirty old factories, but the municipal baths on Reumannplatz was a seven-storeyed building of comparatively recent construction which, without any apparent exaggeration, advertised itself as the largest and most modern baths in Europe.

I paid for a bath and a towel, and after I had changed I went to find the men's steam-room. This was at the far end of a swimming pool that was as big as a football field, and possessed only a few Viennese who, wrapped in their bath-sheets, were trying to sweat off some of the weight that was rather easy to gain in the Austrian capital. Through the steam, at the far end of the luridly-tiled room, I heard someone whistling intermittently. I walked towards the source of the tune, and took it up as I approached.

I came upon the seated figure of a man with a uniformly white body and a uniformly brown face: it looked almost as if he had blacked-up, like Jolson, but of course this disparity in colour was a souvenir of his recent skiing holiday.

'I hate that tune,' he said, 'but FrSulein Hartmann is always humming it and I couldn't think of anything else. Herr Gunther?'

I nodded, circumspectly, as if I had come there only reluctantly.

'Permit me to introduce myself. My name is K/nig.' We shook hands and I sat down beside him.

He was a well-built man, with thick dark eyebrows and a large, flourishing moustache: it looked like some rare species of marten that had escaped on to his lip from some colder, more northerly clime. Drooping over K/nig's mouth, this small sable completed a generally lugubrious expression which started with his melancholy brown eyes. He was much as Becker had described him but for the absence of the small dog.

'I hope you like a Turkish bath, Herr Gunther?'

'Yes, when they're clean.'

'Then it's lucky I chose this one,' he said, 'instead of the Dianabad. Of course the Diana's war-damaged, but the place does seem to attract rather more than its fair share of incurables and other assorted lower humans. They go for the thermal pools they have there. You take a dip at your peril. You could go in with eczema and come out with syphilis.'

'It doesn't sound very healthy.'

'I dare say that I'm exaggerating a little,' K/nig smiled. 'You're not from Vienna, are you?'

'No, I'm from Berlin,' I said. 'I come and go from Vienna.'

'How is Berlin these days? From what one hears the situation there is getting worse. The Soviet delegation walked out of the Control Commission, did it not?'

'Yes,' I said, 'soon the only way in or out will be by military air transport.'

K/nig made a tutting noise and rubbed his big hairy chest wearily. 'Communists,' he sighed, 'that's what happens when you make deals with them. It was terrible what happened at Potsdam and Yalta. The Amis just let the Ivans take what they wanted. A great mistake, which makes another war a virtual certainty.'

'I doubt if anyone's got the stomach for another one,' I said, repeating the same line I had used on Neumann in Berlin. This was a fairly automatic reaction with me, but I genuinely believed it to be true.

'Not yet, maybe. But people forget, and in time ' he shrugged, ' who knows what may happen? Until then, we carry on with our lives and our businesses, doing the best that we can.' For a moment he rubbed his scalp furiously. Then he said: 'What business are you in? The only reason I ask is that I hoped that there might be some way in which I could repay you for helping FrSulein Hartmann. Such as putting a little business your way, perhaps.'

I shook my head. 'It's not necessary. If you really want to know, I'm in imports and exports. But to be frank with you, Herr K/nig, I helped her because I liked the smell of her scent.'

He nodded appreciatively. 'That's natural enough. She is very lovely.' But slowly, rapture gave way to perplexity. 'Strange though, don't you think? The way you were both picked up like that.'

'I can't answer for your friend, Herr K/nig, but in my line of work there are always business rivals who would be glad to see me out of the way. An occupational hazard, you might say.'

'By FrSulein Hartmann's account, it's a hazard to which you seem more than equal. I heard that you handled that Russian captain quite expertly. And she was most impressed that you could speak Russian.'

'I was a plenny,' I said, 'a POW in Russia.'

'That would certainly explain it. But tell me, do you believe that this Russian can be serious? That there were charges made against FrSulein Hartmann?'

'I'm afraid he was very serious.'

'Have you any idea where he could have got his information?'

'No more than I have about how he came to have my name. Perhaps the lady has someone with a tooth against her.'

'Maybe you could find out who. I'd be prepared to pay you.'

'Not my line,' I said, shaking my head. 'The chances are that it was an anonymous tip-off. Probably done out of spite. You'd be wasting your money. If you'll take my advice you'll just give the Ivan what he wants and pay up. Two hundred is not a lot of coal to get a name off a file. And when the Ivans decide to keep a dog away from a bitch it's best to settle the account without any trouble.'

K/nig smiled and then nodded. 'Perhaps you are right,' he said. 'But you know, it has occurred to me that you and this Ivan are in it together. It would after all be a nice way of raising money, wouldn't it? The Russian puts the squeeze on innocent people, and you offer to act as intermediary.' He kept on nodding as he surveyed the subtlety of his own scheme. 'Yes, it could be very profitable for someone with the right kind of background.'

'Keep going,' I laughed. 'Maybe you can make an ox out of an egg.'

'Surely you admit that it's possible.'

'Anything is possible in Vienna. But if you think I'm trying to give you some chocolate for a lousy two hundred, that's your affair. It may have escaped your attention, K/nig, but it was your ladyfriend who asked me to walk her home, and you who asked me to come here. Frankly, I've got better things to polish.' I stood up and made as if to leave.

'Please, Herr Gunther,' he said, 'accept my apologies. Perhaps I was allowing my imagination to run away with me. But I must confess that this whole affair has me intrigued. And even at the best of times, I find myself suspicious with regard to so many things that happen today.'

'Well, that sounds like a recipe for a long life,' I said, sitting down again.

'In my own particular line of work, it pays to be a little sceptical.'

'What line of work is that?'

'I used to be in advertising. But that is an odious, unrewarding business, full of very small minds with no real vision. I dissolved the company I owned and moved into business research. The flow of accurate information is essential in all walks of commerce. But it is something that one must treat with a degree of caution. Those who wish to be well-informed must first equip themselves with doubt. Doubt breeds questions, and questions beg answers. These things are essential to the growth of any new enterprise. And new enterprise is essential to the growth of a new Germany.'

'You sound like a politician.'

'Politics.' He smiled wearily, as if the subject was too childish for him to contemplate. 'A mere sideshow to the main event.'

'Which is?'

'Communism against the free world. Capitalism is our only hope of withstanding the Soviet tyranny, wouldn't you agree?'

'I'm no friend of the Ivans,' I said, 'but capitalism comes with its own particular faults.'

But K/nig was hardly listening. 'We fought the wrong war,' he said, 'the wrong enemy. We should have fought the Soviets, and only the Soviets. The Amis know that now. They know the mistake they made in letting Russia have a free hand in Eastern Europe. And they're not about to let Germany or Austria go the same way.'

I stretched my muscles in the heat and yawned wearily. K/nig was beginning to bore me.

'You know,' he said, 'my company could use a man with your special talents. A man with your background. Which part of the SS was it that you were in?' Noting the surprise that must have appeared on my face, he added: 'The scar under your arm. Doubtless you too were keen to remove your SS tattoo before being captured by the Russians.' He lifted his own arm to reveal an almost identical scar in his armpit.

'I was with Military Intelligence the Abwehr when the war ended,' I explained, 'not the SS. That was much earlier.'

But he had been right about the scar, the result of an obliterating and excrutiatingly painful burn sustained from the muzzle flash of an automatic pistol I had fired underneath my upper arm. It had been that or risk discovery and death at the hands of the NKVD.

K/nig himself offered no explanation for the removal of his own tattoo. Instead he proceeded to expand on his offer of employment.

This was all much more than I had hoped for. But I still had to be careful: it was only a few minutes since he had all but accused me of working in consort with Captain Rustaveli.

'It's not that working for someone else gives me the livers or anything,' I said, 'but right now I've got another bottle to finish.' I shrugged. 'Maybe when that's empty who knows? But thanks anyway.'

He did not seem offended that I had declined his offer, and merely shrugged philosophically.

'Where can I find you if I ever change my mind?'

'FrSulein Hartmann at the Casino Oriental will know where to contact me.' He collected a folded newspaper from beside his thigh and handed it to me. 'Open it carefully when you get outside. There are two $100 bills to pay off the Ivan, and one for your trouble.'

At that moment he groaned and took hold of his face, baring incisors and canines that were as even as a row of tiny milk-bottles. Observing my eyebrows and mistaking their inquiry for concern he explained that he was quite all right but that he had recently been fitted with two dental plates.

'I can't seem to get used to having them in my mouth,' he said, and briefly allowed the blind, slow worm that was his tongue to squirm along the upper and lower galleries of his jaw. 'And when I see myself in a mirror, it's like having some perfect stranger grinning back at me. Most disconcerting.' He sighed and shook his head sadly. 'A pity really. I always had such perfect teeth.'

He stood up, adjusting the sheet around his chest, and then shook my hand. 'It was a pleasure meeting you, Herr Gunther,' he said with easy Viennese charm.

'No, the pleasure was all mine,' I replied.

K/nig chuckled. 'We'll make an Austrian out of you yet, my friend.' Then he walked off into the steam, whistling that same maddening tune.

Chapter 23

There's nothing the Viennese love more than getting 'cosy'. They look to achieve this conviviality in bars and restaurants, to the accompaniment of a musical quartet comprising a bass, a violin, an accordion and a zither a strange instrument which resembles an empty box of chocolates with thirty or forty strings that are plucked like a guitar. For me, this omnipresent combination embodies everything that was phoney about Vienna, like the syrupy sentiment and the affected politeness. It did make me feel cosy. Only it was the kind of cosiness you might have experienced after you had been embalmed, sealed in a lead-lined coffin, and tidily deposited in one of those marble mausoleums up at the Central Cemetery.

I was waiting for Traudl Braunsteiner, in the Herrendorf, a restaurant on Herrengasse. The place was her choice, but she was late. When at last she arrived her face was red because she had been running, and also because of the cold.

'You have a less than Catholic air about you, the way you sit there in the shadows,' she said, sitting down at the dinner table.

'I work at that,' I said. 'Nobody wants a detective who looks as honest as the village postmaster. Being dimly lit is good for business.'

I waved to a waiter and we quickly ordered.

'Emil's upset that you haven't been to see him lately,' Traudl said, giving up her menu.

'If he wants to know what I've been doing, tell him I'll be sending him a bill for a shoe-repair. I've walked all over this damned city.'

'You know he goes to trial next week, don't you?'

'I'm not likely to be able to forget it, what with Liebl telephoning nearly every day.'

'Emil's not about to forget it either.' She spoke quietly, obviously upset.

'I'm sorry,' I said, 'that was a stupid thing to say. Look, I do have some good news. I've finally spoken to K/nig.'

Her face lit up with excitement. 'You have?' she said. 'When? Where?'

'This morning,' I said. 'At the Amalienbad.'

'What did he say?'

'He wanted me to work for him. I think it might not be a bad idea, as a way of getting close enough to him to find some sort of evidence.'

'Couldn't you just tell the police where he is so that they can arrest him?'

'On what charge?' I shrugged. 'As far as the police are concerned they've already got their man cold. Anyway, even if I could persuade them to do it, K/nig wouldn't be so easy to clip. The Americans can't go into the Russian sector and arrest him, even if they wanted to. No, Emil's best chance is that I gain K/nig's confidence as quickly as possible. And that's why I turned down his offer.'

Traudl bit her lip with exasperation. 'But why? I don't understand.'

'I have to make sure that K/nig believes I don't want to work for him. He was slightly suspicious of the way in which I got to meet his girlfriend. So here's what I want to do. Lotte's a croupier at the Oriental. I want you to give me some money to lose there tomorrow night. Enough to make it look like I've been cleaned out. Which would give me a reason to reconsider K/nig's offer.'

'This counts as legitimate expenses, does it?'

'I'm afraid it does.'

'How much?'

'Three or four thousand schillings ought to do it.'

She thought for a minute and then the waiter arrived with a bottle of Riesling.

When he had filled our glasses Traudl sipped some of her wine and said: 'All right then. But only on one condition: that I'm there to watch you lose it.'

From the set of her jaw I judged her to be quite determined. 'I don't suppose it would do much good to remind you that it could be dangerous. It's not as if you could accompany me. I can't afford to be seen with you in case somebody recognizes you as Emil's girl. If this weren't such a quiet place I would have insisted that we met at your house.'

'Don't worry about me,' she said firmly. 'I'll treat you like you were a sheet of glass.'

I started to speak again, but she held her hands over her small ears.

'No, I'm not listening to any more. I'm coming, and that's final. You're a spinner if you think that I'm just going to hand over 4,000 schillings without keeping an eye on what happens to it.'

'You have a point.' I stared at the limpid disc of wine in my glass for a moment, and then said, 'You love him a lot, don't you?'

Traudl swallowed hard, and nodded vigorously. After a short pause, she added, 'I'm carrying his child.'

I sighed and tried to think of something encouraging to say to her.

'Look,' I mumbled, 'don't worry. We'll get him out of this mess. There's no need to be the cockroach. Come on, come out of the dumps. Everything will work out, for you and the baby, I'm sure of it.' A pretty inadequate speech I thought and lacking any real conviction.

Traudl shook her head, and smiled. 'I'm all right, really I am. I was just thinking how the last time I was here was with Emil, when I told him that I was pregnant. We used to come here a lot. I never meant to fall in love with him, you know.'

'Nobody ever means to do it.' I noticed that my hand was on hers. 'It just happens that way. Like a car accident.' But looking at her elfin face I wasn't sure if I agreed with what I was saying. Her beauty wasn't the kind that's left smeared on your pillowcase in the morning, but the kind that would make a man proud that his child should have such a mother. I realized how much I envied Becker this woman, how much I myself would have wanted to fall in love with her if she had come my way. I let go her hand and quickly lit a cigarette to hide behind some smoke.

Chapter 24

The next evening found me hurrying from its sharp edge and hint of snow, although the calendar suggested something less inclement, and into the warm, lubricious fug of the Casino Oriental, my pockets packed tight with wads of Emil Becker's easy money.

I bought quite a lot of the highest denomination chips and then wandered over to the bar to await Lotte's arrival at one of the card-tables. Having ordered a drink, all I had to do was shoo away the sparklers and the chocoladies that buzzed around, intent on keeping me and my wallet company, which left me with a keener appreciation of what it must be like to be a horse's ass in high summer.

It was ten o'clock before Lotte showed up at one of the tables, by which time the flick of my tail was becoming more apathetic. I delayed another few minutes for appearance's sake before carrying my drink over to Lotte's stretch of green baize and sitting down directly opposite her.

She surveyed the pile of chips that I neatly arranged in front of me and made an equally neat purse of her lips. 'I didn't figure you for a quirk,' she said, meaning a gambler. 'I thought you had more sense.'

'Maybe your fingers will be lucky for me,' I said brightly.

'I wouldn't bet on it.'

'Yes, well, I'll certainly bear that in mind.' I'm not much of a card-player. I couldn't even have named the game I was playing. So it was with some considerable surprise that, at the end of twenty minutes' play, I realized that I had almost doubled my original stock of chips. It seemed a perverse logic that trying to lose money at cards should be every bit as difficult as trying to win it.

Lotte dealt from the shoe and once again I won. Glancing up from the table I noticed Traudl seated opposite me, nursing a small pile of chips. I hadn't seen her come into the club, but by now the place was so busy that I would have missed Rita Hayworth.

'I guess it's my lucky night,' I remarked to no one in particular as Lotte raked my winnings towards me. Traudl merely smiled politely as if I had been a stranger to her, and prepared to make her next modest bet.

I ordered another drink and, concentrating hard, tried to make a go of being a real loser, taking a card when I should have stayed, betting when I should have folded and generally trying to sidestep luck at every available opportunity. Now and again I tried to play sensibly in order to make what I was doing appear less obvious. But after another forty minutes I had succeeded in losing all of what I had won, as well as half my original capital. When Traudl left the table, having seen me lose enough of her boyfriend's money to be satisfied that it had been used for the purpose I had stated, I finished my drink and sighed exasperatedly.

'It looks as if it's not my lucky night after all,' I said grimly.

'Luck's got nothing to do with the way you play,' Lotte murmured. 'I just hope you were more skilful in dealing with that Russian captain.'

'Oh, don't worry about him, he's taken care of. You won't have any more problems there.'

'I'm glad to hear it.'

I gambled my last chip, lost it and then stood up from the table saying that maybe I was going to be grateful for K/nig's offer of a job after all. Smiling ruefully, I walked back to the bar where I ordered a drink and for a while watched a topless girl dancing in a parody of a Latin American step on the floor to the tinny, jerking sound of the Oriental's jazz band.

I didn't see Lotte leave the table to make a telephone call but after a while K/nig came down the stairs into the club. He was accompanied by a small terrier, which stayed close to his heels, and a taller, more distinguished-looking man who was wearing a Schiller jacket and a club-tie. This second man disappeared through a bead curtain at the back of the club while K/nig made a pantomime of catching my eye.

He walked over to the bar, nodding to Lotte and producing a fresh cigar from the top pocket of his green tweed suit as he came.

'Herr Gunther,' he said, smiling, 'how nice to meet you again.'

'Hello, K/nig,' I said. 'How are your teeth?'

'My teeth?' His smile vanished as if I had asked him how his chancre was.

'Don't you remember?' I explained. 'You were telling me about your plates.'

His face relaxed. 'So I was. They're much better, thank you.' Tipping in a smile again, he added, 'I hear you've had some bad luck at the tables.'

'Not according to FrSulein Hartmann. She told me that luck has nothing at all to do with the way I play cards.'

K/nig finished lighting his four-schilling corona and chuckled. 'Then you must allow me to buy you a drink.' He waved the barman over, ordered a scotch for himself and whatever I was drinking. 'Did you lose much?'

'More than I could afford,' I said unhappily. 'About 4,000 schillings.' I drained my glass and pushed it across the bartop for a refill. 'Stupid, really.

I shouldn't play at all. I have no real aptitude for cards. So I'm cleaned out now.' I toasted K/nig silently and swallowed some more vodka. 'Thank God I had the good sense to pay my hotel bill well in advance. Apart from that, there's very little to feel happy about.'

'Then you must allow me to show you something,' he said, and puffed at his cigar vigorously. He blew a large smoke ring into the air above his terrier's head and said, 'Time for a smoke, Lingo,' whereupon, and much to its owner's amusement, the brute leaped up and down, sniffing excitedly at the tobacco-enriched air like the most craven nicotine addict. 'That's a neat trick,' I smiled.

'Oh, it's no trick,' said K/nig. 'Lingo loves a good cigar almost as much as I do.' He bent down and patted the dog's head. 'Don't you, boy?' The dog barked by way of reply.

'Well, whatever you call it, it's money, not laughs I need right now. At least until I can get back to Berlin. You know it's fortunate you happened to come along. I was sitting here wondering how I might manage to broach the subject of that job with you again.'

'My dear fellow, all in good time. There's someone I want you to meet first. He is the Baron von Bolschwing and he runs a branch of the Austrian League for the United Nations here in Vienna. It's a publishing house called +sterreichischer Verlag. He's an old comrade too, and I know he would be interested to meet a man like yourself.'

I knew K/nig was referring to the SS. 'He wouldn't be associated with this research company of yours, would he?'

'Associated? Yes, associated,' he allowed. 'Accurate information is essential to a man like the Baron.'

I smiled and shook my head wryly. 'What a town this is for saying going-away party when what you really mean is a requiem mass. Your research sounds rather like my imports and exports, Herr K/nig: a fancy ribbon round a rather plain cake.'

'I can't believe that a man who served with the Abwehr could be much of a stranger to these necessary euphemisms, Herr Gunther. However, if you wish me to do so, I will, as the saying goes, uncover my batteries for you. But let us first move away from the bar.' He led me to a quiet table and we sat down.

'The organization of which I am a member is fundamentally an association of German officers, the primary aim and purpose of which is the collection of research excuse me, intelligence as to the threat that the Red Army poses to a free Europe. Although military ranks are seldom used, nevertheless we exist under military discipline and we remain officers and gentlemen. The fight against Communism is a desperate one, and there are times when we must do things we may find unpleasant. But for many old comrades struggling to adjust to civilian life, the satisfaction of continuing to serve in the creation of a new free Germany outweighs such considerations. And there are of course generous rewards.'

It sounded as if K/nig had said these words or their equivalent on a number of other occasions. I was beginning to think that there were more old comrades whose struggle to adjust to civilian life was remedied by the simple expedient of continuing under a form of military discipline than I could guess at. He spoke a lot more, most of which went in one ear and out of the other, and after a while he drained the remainder of his drink and said that if I were interested in his proposition then I should meet the Baron. When I told him that I was very much interested, he nodded satisfiedly and steered me towards the bead curtain.

We came along a corridor and then went up two flights of stairs.

'These are the premises of the hat shop next door,' explained K/nig. 'The owner is a member of our Org, and allows us to use them for recruiting.'

He stopped outside a door and knocked gently. Hearing a shout, he ushered me into a room which was lit only by a lamppost outside. But it was enough to make out the face of the man seated at a desk by the window. Tall, thin, clean-shaven, dark-haired and balding, I judged him to be about forty.

'Sit down, Herr Gunther,' he said and pointed at a chair on the other side of the desk.

I removed the stack of hat-boxes that lay on it while K/nig went over to the window behind the Baron and sat on the deep sill.

'Herr K/nig believes you might make a suitable representative for our company,' said the Baron.

'You mean an agent, don't you?' I said and lit a cigarette.

'If you like,' I saw him smile. 'But before that can happen it's up to me to learn something of your personality and circumstances. To question you in order that we might determine how best to use you.'

'Like a Fragebogen! Yes, I understand.'

'Let's start with your joining the S S,' said the Baron.

I told him all about my service with Kripo and the RSHA, and how I had automatically become an officer in the SS. I explained that I had gone to Minsk as a member of Arthur Nebe's Action Group, but, having no stomach for the murder of women and children, I had asked for a transfer to the front and how instead I had been sent to the Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau. The Baron questioned me closely but politely, and he seemed the perfect Austrian gentleman. Except that there was also about him an air of false modesty, a surreptitious aspect to his gestures and a way of speaking that seemed to indicate something of which any true gentleman might have felt less than proud.

'Tell me about your service with the War Crimes Bureau.'

'This was between January 1942 and February 1944,' I explained. 'I had the rank of Oberleutnant conducting investigations into both Russian and German atrocities.'

'And where was this, exactly?'

'I was based in Berlin, in Blumeshof, across from the War Ministry. From time to time I was required to work in the field. Specifically in the Crimea and the Ukraine. Later on, in August 1943, the OKW moved its offices to Torgau because of the bombing.'

The Baron smiled a supercilious smile and shook his head. 'Forgive me,' he said, 'it's just that I had no idea that such an institution had existed within the Wehrmacht.'

'It was no different to what happened within the Prussian Army during the Great War,' I told him. 'There have to be some accepted humanitarian values, even in wartime.'

'I suppose there do,' sighed the Baron, but he did not sound convinced of this.

'All right. Then what happened?'

'With the escalation of the war it became necessary to send all the able-bodied men to the Russian front. I joined General Schorner's northern army in White Russia in February 1944, promoted Hauptmann. I was an Intelligence officer.'

'In the Abwehr?'

'Yes. I spoke a fair bit of Russian by then. Some Polish too. The work was mostly interpreting.'

'And you were finally captured where?'

'K/nigsberg, in East Prussia. April 1945. I was sent to the copper mines in the Urals.'

'Where exactly in the Urals, if you don't mind?'

'Outside Sverdlovsk. That's where I perfected my Russian.'

'Were you questioned by the NKVD?'

'Of course. Many times. They were very interested in anyone who had been an Intelligence officer.'

'And what did you tell them?'

'Frankly, I told them everything I knew. The war was over by that stage and so it didn't seem to matter much. Naturally I left out my previous service with the S S, and my work with the OKW. The SS were taken to a separate camp where they were either shot or persuaded to work for the Soviets in the Free Germany Committee. That seems to be how most of the German People's Police were recruited. And I dare say the Staatspolizei here in Vienna.'

'Quite so.' His tone was testy. 'Do carry on, Herr Gunther.'

'One day a group of us were told that we were to be transferred to Frankfurt an der Oder. This would be in December 1946. They said they were sending us to a rest camp there. As you can imagine we thought that was pretty funny. Well, on the transport train I overheard a couple of the guards say that we were bound for a uranium mine in Saxony. I don't suppose either of them realized I could speak Russian.'

'Can you remember the name of this place?'

'Johannesgeorgenstadt, in the Erzebirge, on the Czech border.'

'Thank you,' the Baron said crisply, 'I know where it is.'

'I jumped the train as soon as I saw a chance, not long after we crossed the German-Polish border, and then I made my way back to Berlin.'

'Were you at one of the camps for returning POWs?'

'Yes. Staaken. I wasn't there for very long, thank God. The nurses there didn't think much of us plennys. All they were interested in was American soldiers.

Fortunately the Social Welfare Office of the Municipal Council found my wife at my old address almost immediately.'

'You've been very lucky, Herr Gunther,' said the Baron. 'In several respects.

Wouldn't you say so, Helmut?'

'As I told you Baron, Herr Gunther is a most resourceful man,' said K/nig, stroking his dog absently.

'Indeed he is. But tell me, Herr Gunther, did no one debrief you about your experiences in the Soviet Union?'

'Like who, for instance?'

It was K/nig who answered. 'Members of our Organization have interrogated a great many returning plennys,' he said. 'Our people present themselves as social workers, historical researchers, that kind of thing.'

I shook my head. 'Perhaps if I had been officially released, instead of escaping '

'Yes,' said the Baron. 'That must be the reason. In which case you must count yourself as doubly fortunate, Herr Gunther. Because if you had been officially released we should now almost certainly have been obliged to take the precaution of having you shot, in order to protect the security of our group. You see, what you said about the Germans who were persuaded to work for the Free Germany Committee was absolutely right. It is these traitors who were usually released first of all. Sent to a uranium mine in Erzebirge as you were, eight weeks is as long as you could have been expected to have lived. Being shot by the Russians would have been easier. So you see we can now be confident of you, knowing that the Russians were happy for you to die.'

The Baron stood up now, the interrogation evidently over. I saw that he was taller than I had supposed. K/nig slid off his window sill and stood beside him.

I pushed myself off my chair and silently shook the Baron's outstretched hand, and then K/nig's. Then K/nig smiled and handed me one of his cigars. 'My friend,' he said, 'welcome to the Org.'

Chapter 25

During the next couple of days K/nig met me at the hat shop next to the Oriental on several occasions in order to school me in the many elaborate and secret working methods of the Org. But first I had to sign a solemn declaration agreeing, on my honour as a German officer, not to disclose anything of the Org's covert activities. The declaration also stipulated that any breach of secrecy would be severely punished, and K/nig said that I would be well-advised to conceal my new employment not only from any friends and relatives but 'even' and these were his precise words 'even from our American colleagues'. This, and one or two other remarks he made, led me to believe that the Org was in fact fully funded by American Intelligence. So when my training considerably shortened in view of my experience with the Abwehr was complete I irately demanded of Belinsky that we should talk as quickly as possible.

'What's eating you, kraut?' he said when we met at a table I had reserved for us in a quiet corner at the сafé Schwarzenberg.

'If I'm not in my plate, it's only because you've been showing me the wrong map.'

'Oh? And how's that?' He set to work with one of his clove-scented toothpicks.

'You know damned well. K/nig's part of a German intelligence organization set up by your own people, Belinsky. I know because they've just finished recruiting me. So either you put me in the picture or I go to the Stiftskaserne and explain how I now believe that Linden was murdered by an American-sponsored organization of German spies.'

Belinsky looked around for a moment and then leaned purposefully across the table, his big arms framing it as if he was planning to pick it up and drop it on my head.

'I don't think that would be a very good idea,' he said quietly.

'No? Perhaps you think you can stop me. Like the way you stopped that Russian soldier. I might just mention that as well.'

'Perhaps I will kill you, kraut,' he said. 'It shouldn't be too difficult. I have a gun with a silencer. I could probably shoot you in here and nobody would notice. That's one of the nice things about the Viennese. With someone's brains spattered in their coffee cups, they'd still try and mind their own fucking business.' He chuckled at the idea and then shook his head, talking over me when I tried to reply.

'But what are we talking about?' he said. 'There's no need for us to fall out.

No need at all. You're right. Maybe I should have explained before now, but if you have been recruited by the Org then you've undoubtedly been obliged to sign a secrecy declaration. Am I right?'

I nodded.

'Maybe you don't take it very seriously, but at least you can understand when I tell you that my government required me to sign a similar declaration, and that I take it very seriously indeed. It's only now that I can take you into my complete confidence, which is ironic: I'm investigating the very same organization which your membership of now enables me to treat you as someone who no longer poses a security risk. How's that for a bit of cock-eyed logic?'

'All right,' I said. 'You've given me your excuse. Now how about telling me the whole story.'

'I mentioned Crowcass before now, right?'

'The War Crimes Commission? Yes.'

'Well, how shall I put it? The pursuit of Nazis and the employment of German intelligence personnel are not exactly separate considerations. For a long time the United States has been recruiting former members of the Abwehr to spy on the Soviets. An independent organization was set up at Pullach, headed by a senior German officer, to gather intelligence on behalf of CIC.'

'The South German Industrial Utilization Company?'

The same. When the Org was set up they had explicit instructions about exactly who they might recruit. This is supposed to be a clean operation, you understand. But for some time now we've had the suspicion that the Org is also recruiting SS, SD and Gestapo personnel in violation of its original mandate. We wanted intelligence people, for God's sake, not war-criminals. My job is to find out the level of penetration that these outlawed classes of personnel have achieved within the Org. You with me?'

I nodded. 'But where did Captain Linden fit into this?'

'As I explained before, Linden worked in records. It's possible that his position at the US Documents Centre enabled him to act as a consultant to members of the Org with regard to recruitment. Checking out people to see if their stories matched what could be discovered from their service records, that kind of thing. I am sure I don't have to tell you that the Org is keen to avoid any possible penetration by Germans who may have already been recruited by the Soviets in their prison camps.'

'Yes,' I said, 'I've already had that explained to me in no uncertain terms.'

'Maybe Linden even advised them on who might have been worth recruiting. But that's the bit we're not sure about. That and what this stuff your friend Becker was playing courier with.'

'Maybe he lent them some files when they were interrogating potential recruits who might have been under some suspicion,' I suggested.

'No, that simply couldn't have happened. Security at the Centre is tighter than a clam's ass. You see, after the war the army was scared your people might try to take the contents of the centre back. That or destroy them. You just don't walk out of that place with an armful of files. All documentary examinations are on-site and must be accounted for.'

'Then perhaps Linden altered some of the files.'

Belinsky shook his head. 'No, we've already thought of that and checked back from the original log to every single one of the files which Linden had sight of. There's no sign of anything having been removed or destroyed. It seems our best chance of finding out what the hell he was up to depends on your membership of the Org, kraut. Not to mention your best chance of finding something that will put your friend Becker in the clear.'

'I'm almost out of time with that. He goes to trial at the beginning of next week.'

Belinsky looked thoughtful. 'Maybe I could help you to cut a few corners with your new colleagues. If I were to provide you with some high-grade Soviet intelligence it could put you well in with the Org. Of course it would have to be stuff that my people had seen already, but the boys in the Org wouldn't know that. If I dressed it up with the right kind of provenance, that would make you look like a pretty good spy. How does that sound?'

'Good. While you're in such an inspired mood you can help me out of another fix.

After K/nig had got through instructing me in the use of the dead-letter box, he gave me my first assignment.'

'He did? Good. What was it?'

'They want me to kill Becker's girlfriend, Traudl.'

'That pretty little nurse?' He sounded quite outraged. 'The one at the General Hospital? Did they say why?'

'She came into the Casino Oriental to oversee me losing her boyfriend's money. I warned her about it, but she wouldn't listen. I guess it must have made them nervous or something.'

But this wasn't the reason that K/nig had given me.

'A bit of wet-work is often used as an early test of loyalty,' Belinsky explained. 'Did they say how to do it?'

'I'm to make it look like an accident,' I said. 'So naturally I'll need to get her out of Vienna as quickly as possible. And that's where you come in. Can you organize a travel warrant and a rail ticket for her?'

'Sure,' he said, 'but try and persuade her to leave as much behind as possible.

We'll drive her across the zone and get her on a train at Salzburg. That way we can make it look as if she's disappeared, maybe dead. Which would help you, right?'

'Let's just make sure that she gets safely out of Vienna,' I told him. 'If anyone has to take risks I'd rather it was me than her.'

'Leave it to me, kraut. It'll take a few hours to arrange, but the little lady is as good as out of here. I suggest that you go back to your hotel and wait for me to bring her papers. Then we'll go and pick her up. In which case, perhaps it would be better if you didn't speak to her before then. She might not want to leave your friend Becker to face the music on his own. It would be better if we could just pick her up and drive out of here. That way if she decides to protest about it there won't be much that she can do.'

After Belinsky had left to make the necessary arrangements, I wondered if he would have been so willing to help get Traudl safely out of Vienna if he had seen the photograph which K/nig had given to me. He had told me that Traudl Braunsteiner was an MVD agent. Knowing the girl as I did it seemed utterly absurd. But for anyone else most of all a member of CIC looking at the photograph that had been taken in a Vienna restaurant, in which Traudl was evidently enjoying the company of a Russian colonel of MVD, whose name was Poroshin, things might have seemed rather less than clear-cut.

Chapter 26

There was a letter from my wife waiting for me when I returned to the Pension Caspian. Recognizing the tight, almost child-like writing on the cheap manilla envelope, crushed and grimy from a couple of weeks at the mercy of a haphazard postal service, I balanced it on the mantelpiece in my sitting-room and stared at it for a while, recollecting the letter to her that I had positioned similarly on our own mantelpiece at home in Berlin, and regretting its peremptory tone.

Since then I had sent her only two telegrams: one to say that I had arrived safely in Vienna and giving my address; and the other telling her that the case might take a little longer than I had first anticipated.

I dare say a graphologist could easily have analysed Kirsten's hand and made a pretty good job of convincing me that it indicated the letter inside had been written by an adulterous woman who was in the frame of mind to tell her inattentive husband that despite his having left her $2,000 in gold she nevertheless intended divorcing him and using the money to emigrate to the United States with her handsome American schStzi.

I was still looking at the unopened envelope with some trepidation when the telephone rang. It was Shields.

'And how are we doing today?' he asked in his over-precise German.

'I am doing very well, thank you,' I said, mocking his way of speaking, but he didn't seem to notice. 'Exactly how may I be of service to you, Herr Shields?'

'Well, with your friend Becker about to go to trial, frankly I wondered what kind of detective you were. I was asking myself whether you had come up with anything pertinent to the case: if your client was going to get his $5,000 worth?'

He paused, waiting for me to reply, and when I said nothing he continued, rather more impatiently.

'So? What's the answer? Have you found the vital piece of evidence that will save Becker from the hangman's noose? Or does he take the drop?'

'I've found Becker's witness, if that's what you mean, Shields. Only I haven't got anything that connects him with Linden. Not yet anyway.'

'Well, you had better work fast, Gunther. When trials commence in this city they're apt to be a mite quick. I'd hate to see you get round to proving a dead man innocent. That looks bad all round, I'm sure you would agree. Bad for you, bad for us, but worst of all for the man on the rope.'

'Suppose I could set this other fellow up for you to arrest him as a material witness.' It was an almost desperate suggestion, but I thought it worth a try.

'There's no other way he'd show up in court?'

'No. At least it would give Becker someone to point the finger at.'

'You're asking me to make a dirty mark on a shiny floor.' Shields sighed. 'I hate not to give the other side a chance, you know. So I tell you what I'm going to do. I'll have a word with my Executive Officer, Major Wimberley, and see what he recommends. But I can't promise anything. Chances are, the major will tell me to go balls out and get a conviction, and to hell with your man's witness.

There's a lot of pressure on us to get a quick result here, you know. The Brig doesn't like it when American officers are murdered in his city. That's Brigadier-General Alexander O. Gorder, commanding the 796th. One tough son-of-a-bitch. I'll be in touch.'

'Thanks, Shields. I appreciate it.'

'Don't thank me yet, mister, he said.

I replaced the receiver and picked up my letter. After I'd fanned myself with it, and used it to clean my fingernails, I tore it open.

Kirsten was never much of a letter-writer. She was more one for a postcard, only a postcard from Berlin was no longer likely to inspire much in the way of wishful thinking. A view of the ruined Kaiser-Wilhelm church? Or one of the bombed-out Opera House? The execution shed at Plotzensee? I thought that it would be a good long while before there were any postcards sent from Berlin. I unfolded the paper and started to read:

Dear Bernie, I hope this letter reaches you, but things are so difficult here that it may not, in which case I may also try to send you a telegram, if only to tell you that everything is all right. Sokolovsky has demanded that the Soviet military police should control all traffic from Berlin to the West, and this may mean that the mail does not get through.

The real fear here is that this will all turn into a full-scale siege of the city in an effort to push the Americans, the British and the French out of Berlin although I don't suppose anyone would mind if we saw the back of the French. Nobody objects to the Amis and the Tommies bossing us around at least they fought and beat us. But Franz? They are such hypocrites. The fiction of a victorious French army is almost too much for a German to bear.

People say that the Amis and the Tommies won't stand by and see Berlin fall to the Ivans. I'm not so sure about the British. They've got their hands full in Palestine right now (all books on Zionist Nationalism have been removed from Berlin bookshops and libraries, which seems only too familiar). But just when you think that the British have more important things to do, one hears that they've been destroying more German shipping. The sea is full of fish for us to eat, and they're blowing up boats! Do they want to save us from the Russians in order that they can starve us?

One still hears rumours of cannibalism. There's a story going around Berlin that the police were called to a house in Kreuzberg where downstairs neighbours had heard the sounds of a terrible commotion, and found blood seeping through their ceiling. They burst in and found an old couple dining off the raw flesh of a pony that they had dragged off the street and killed with rocks. It may or may not be true, but I have the terrible feeling that it is. What is certain is that morale has sunk to new depths. The skies are full of transport planes and troops of all four Powers are increasingly jumpy.

You remember Frau Fersen's son, Karl? He came back from a Russian POW camp last week, but in very poor health. Apparently the doctor says that his lungs are finished, poor boy. She was telling me what he'd said about his time in Russia. It sounds awful! Why ever didn't you talk to me about it, Bernie?

Perhaps I would have been more understanding. Perhaps I could have helped. I am conscious that I haven't been much of a wife to you since the war. And now that you are no longer here, this seems harder to bear. So when you come back I thought that maybe we could use some of the money you left so much money! did you rob a bank? to go on holiday somewhere. To leave Berlin for a while, and spend time together.

Meanwhile, I have used some of the money to repair the ceiling. Yes, I know you had planned on doing it yourself, but I know how you kept putting it off.

Anyway, it's done now, and it looks very nice.

Come home and see it soon. I miss you.

Your loving wife, Kirsten.

So much for my imaginary graphologist, I reflected happily, and poured myself the last of Traudl's vodka. This had the immediate effect of melting my nervousness of telephoning Liebl to report on my almost imperceptible progress.

To hell with Belinsky, I said to myself, and resolved to solicit Liebl's opinion as to whether Becker would or would not be best served by trying to obtain K/nig's immediate arrest in order that he be forced to give evidence.

When Liebl finally came on the line he sounded like a man who had just come to the telephone after falling down a flight of stairs. His normally forthright and irascible manner was cowed and his voice was balanced precariously at the very edge of breakdown.

'Herr Gunther,' he said, and swallowed his way to a more decorous silence. Then I heard him take a deep breath as he took control of himself again. 'There's been the most terrible accident. FrSulein Braunsteiner has been killed.'

'Killed?' I repeated dumbly. 'How?'

'She was run over by a car,' Liebl said quietly.

'Where?'

'It happened virtually on the doorstep of the hospital where she worked.

Apparently it was instantaneous. There was nothing they could do for her.'

'When was this?'

'Just a couple of hours ago, when she was coming off duty. Unfortunately the driver did not stop.'

That part I could have guessed for myself.

'He was scared probably. Possibly he had been drinking. Who knows? Austrians are such bad drivers.'

'Did anyone see the the accident?' The words sounded almost angry in my mouth.

'There are no witnesses so far. But someone seems to recollect having seen a black Mercedes driving rather too fast much farther along Alser Strasse.'

'Christ,' I said weakly, 'that's just around the corner. To think I might even have heard the squeal of those car-tyres.'

'Yes, indeed, quite so,' Liebl murmured. 'But there was no pain. It was so quick that she could not have suffered. The car struck her in the middle of her back.

The doctor I spoke to said that her spine was completely shattered. Probably she was dead before she hit the ground.'

'Where is she now?'

'In the morgue at the General Hospital,' Liebl sighed. I heard him light a cigarette and take a long drag of smoke. 'Herr Gunther,' he said, 'we shall of course have to inform Herr Becker. Since you know him so much better than I '

'Oh no,' I said quickly, 'I get enough rotten jobs without contracting to do that one as well. Take her insurance policy and her will along if it makes it any easier for you.'

'I can assure you that I'm every bit as upset about this as you are, Herr Gunther. There's no need to be '

'Yes, you're right. I'm sorry. Look, I hate to sound callous, but let's see if we can't use this to get an adjournment.'

'I don't know if this quite qualifies as compassionate,' Liebl hummed. 'It's not as if they were married or anything.'

'She was going to have his baby, for Christ's sake.'

There was a brief, shocked silence. Then Liebl spluttered, 'I had no idea. Yes, you're right, of course. I'll see what I can do.'

'Do that.'

'But however am I going to tell Herr Becker?'

'Tell him she was murdered,' I said. He started to say something, but I was not in a mood to be contradicted. 'It was no accident, believe me. Tell Becker it was his old comrades who did it. Tell him that precisely. He'll understand. See if it doesn't jog his memory a little. Perhaps now he'll remember something he should have told me earlier. Tell him that if this doesn't make him give us everything he knows then he deserves a crushed windpipe.' There was a knock at the door. Belinsky with Traudl's travel papers. 'Tell him that,' I snapped and banged the receiver back onto its cradle. Then I crossed the floor of the room and hauled the door open.

Belinsky held Traudl's redundant travel papers in front of him and gave them a jaunty wave as he came into the room, too pleased with himself to notice my mood.

'It took a bit of doing, getting a pink as quickly as this,' he said, 'but old Belinsky managed it. Just don't ask me how.'

'She's dead,' I said flatly, and watched his big face fall.

'Shit,' he said, 'that's too bad. What the hell happened?'

'A hit-and-run driver.' I lit a cigarette and slumped into the armchair. 'Killed her outright. I've just had Becker's lawyer on the phone telling me. It happened not far from here, a couple of hours ago.'

Belinsky nodded and sat down on the sofa opposite me. Although I avoided his eye I still felt it trying to look into my soul. He shook his head for a while and then produced his pipe which he set about filling with tobacco. When he had finished he started to light the thing and in between fire-sustaining sucks of air, he said, 'Forgive me for asking but you didn't change your mind did you?'

'About what?' I growled belligerently.

He removed the pipe from his mouth and glanced into the bowl before replacing it between his big irregular teeth. 'I mean, about killing her yourself.'

Finding the answer on my rapidly colouring face he shook his head quickly. 'No, of course not. What a stupid question. I'm sorry.' He shrugged. 'All the same, I had to ask. You must agree, it's a bit of a coincidence, isn't it? The Org asks you to arrange an accident for her, and then almost immediately she gets herself knocked down and killed.'

'Maybe you did it,' I heard myself say.

'Maybe.' Belinsky sat forward on the sofa. 'Let's see now: I waste all afternoon getting this unfortunate little frSulein a pink and a ticket out of Austria.

Then I knock her down and kill her in cold blood on my way here to see you. Is that it?'

'What kind of car do you drive?'

'A Mercedes.'

'What colour?'

'Black.'

'Someone saw a black Mercedes speeding further up the street from the scene of the accident.'

'I dare say. I've yet to see the car which drives slowly in Vienna. And in case you hadn't noticed, just about every other non-military vehicle in this city is a black Mercedes.'

'All the same,' I persisted, 'maybe we should take a look at the front fenders, and check for dents.'

He spread his hands innocently, as if he had been about to give the sermon on the mount. 'Be my guest. Only you'll find dents all over the car. There seems to be a law against careful driving here.' He sucked some more of his pipe smoke.

'Look, Bernie, if you don't mind me saying so I think we're in danger of throwing the handle after the axe-head here. It's a real shame that Traudl's dead, but there's no sense in you and me falling out over it. Who knows? Maybe it was an accident. You know it's true what I said about Viennese drivers.

They're worse than the Soviets, and they take some beating. Jesus, it's like a chariot-race on these roads. Now I agree that it's a hell of a coincidence, but it's not an impossible one, by any stretch of the imagination. You must admit that, surely.'

I nodded slowly. 'All right. I admit it's not impossible.'

'On the other hand maybe the Org briefed more than one agent to kill her so that if you missed, somebody else was bound to get her. It's not unusual for assassinations to be handled that way. Certainly not in my own experience, anyway.' He paused, and then pointed his pipe at me. 'You know what I think? I think that the next time you see K/nig, you should simply keep quiet about it.

If he mentions it then you can assume that it probably was an accident and feel confident of taking the credit for it.' He searched in his jacket pocket and drew out a buff-coloured envelope which he threw into my lap. 'It makes this a little less necessary, but that can't be helped.'

'What's this?'

'From an MVD station near Sopron, close to the Hungarian border. It's the details of MVD personnel and methods throughout Hungary and Lower Austria.'

'And how am I supposed to account for this little lot?'

'I rather thought that you could handle the man who gave it to us. Frankly it's just the sort of material that they're keen on. The man's name is Yuri. That's all you need to know. There are map references and the location of the dead-letter box he's been using. There's a railway bridge near a little town called Mattersburg. On the bridge is a footpath and about two-thirds of the way along the handrail is broken. The top part is hollow cast metal. All you have to do is collect your information from there once a month, and leave some money and instructions.'

'How do I account for my relationship with him?'

'Until quite recently Yuri was stationed in Vienna. You used to buy identity papers for him. But now he's getting more ambitious, and you haven't the money to buy what he's got to offer. So you can offer him to the Org. CIC has already assessed his worth. We've had all we're going to get out of him, at least in the short term. There's no harm done if he gives all the same stuff to the Org.'

Belinsky re-lit his pipe and puffed vigorously while he awaited my reaction.

'Really,' he said, 'there's nothing to it. An operation of this sort is hardly deserving of the word intelligence. Believe me, very few of them are. But all in all a source like this and an apparently successful bit of murder leaves you pretty well accredited, old man.'

'You'll forgive my lack of enthusiasm,' I said drily, 'only I'm beginning to lose sight of what I'm doing here.'

Belinsky nodded vaguely. 'I thought you wanted to clear your old pitman.'

'Maybe you haven't been listening. Becker was never my friend. But I really think he is innocent of Linden's murder. And so did Traudl. So long as she was alive this case really felt as if it was worthwhile, there seemed to be some point in trying to prove Becker innocent. Now I'm not so sure.'

'Come on, Gunther,' Belinsky said. 'Becker's life without his girl is still better than no life at all. Do you honestly think that Traudl would have wanted you to give up?'

'Maybe, if she knew the kind of crap he was into. The kind of people he was dealing with.'

'You know that's not true. Becker was no altar-boy, that's for sure. But from what you've told me about her I'd bet she knew that. There's not much innocence left anymore. Not in Vienna.'

I sighed and rubbed my neck wearily. 'Maybe you're right,' I conceded. 'Maybe it's just me. I'm used to having things being a little more well-defined than this. A client came along, paid my fee and I'd point my suit in whatever direction seemed appropriate. Sometimes I even got to solve a case. That's a pretty good feeling, you know. But right now it's like there are too many people near me, telling me how to work. As if I've lost my independence. I've stopped feeling like a private investigator.'

Belinsky rocked his head on his shoulders like a man who has sold out of something. Explanations probably. He made a stab at one all the same. 'Come on, surely you must have worked undercover before now.'

'Sure,' I said. 'Only it was with a sharper sense of purpose. At least I got to see a criminal's picture. I knew what was right. But this isn't clear-cut anymore, and it's beginning to peel my reed.'

'Nothing stays the same, kraut. The war changed everything for everyone, private investigators included. But if you want to see criminals' photographs I can show you a hundred. Thousands probably. War-criminals, all of them.'

'Photographs of krauts? Listen, Belinsky, you're an American and you're a Jew.

It's a lot easier for you to see the right here. Me? I'm a German. For one brief, dirty moment I was even in the SS. If I met one of your war-criminals he'd probably shake me by the hand and call me an old comrade.'

He had no answer for that.

I found another cigarette and smoked it in silence. When it was finished I shook my head ruefully. 'Maybe it's just Vienna. Maybe it's being away from home for so long. My wife wrote to me. We weren't getting along too well when I left Berlin. Frankly I couldn't wait to leave, and so I took this case against my better judgement. Anyway she says that she hopes we can start again. And do you know, I can't wait to get back to her and give it a try. Maybe ' I shook my head. 'Maybe I need a drink.'

Belinsky grinned enthusiastically. 'Now you're talking, kraut,' he said. 'One thing I've learned in this job: if in doubt, pickle it in alcohol.'

Chapter 27

It was late when we drove back from the Melodies Bar, a nightclub in the 1st Bezirk. Belinsky drew up outside my pension and as I got out of the car a woman stepped quickly out of the shadow of a nearby doorway. It was Veronika Zartl. I smiled thinly at her, having drunk rather too much to care for any company.

'Thank God you've come,' she said. 'I've waited hours.' Then she flinched as through the open car door we both heard Belinsky utter an obscene remark.

'What's the matter?' I asked her.

'I need your help. There's a man in my room.'

'So what's new?' said Belinsky.

Veronika bit her lip. 'He's dead, Bernie. You've got to help me.'

'I'm not sure what I can do,' I said uncertainly, wishing that we'd stayed longer in the Melodies. I said to myself: 'A girl ought not to trust anyone these days.' To her I said: 'You know, it's really a job for the police.'

'I can't tell the police,' she groaned impatiently. 'That would mean the vice squad, the Austrian criminal police, public health officials and an inquest. I'd probably lose my room, everything. Don't you see?'

'All right, all right. What happened?'

'I think he had a heart attack.' Her head dropped. 'I'm sorry to bother you, only there is no one else I can turn to.'

I cursed myself again and then stuck my head back into Belinsky's car. 'The lady needs our help,' I grunted, without much enthusiasm.

'That's not all she needs.' But he started the engine and added: 'Come on, hop in, the pair of you.'

He drove to Rotenturmstrasse and parked outside the bomb-damaged building where Veronika had her room. When we got out of the car I pointed across the darkened cobbles of Stephansplatz to the partly restored cathedral.

'See if you can't find a tarpaulin over on the building site,' I told Belinsky.

'I'll go up and take a look. If there's something suitable, bring it up to the second floor.'

He was too drunk to argue. Instead he nodded dully and walked back towards the Cathedral scaffolding, while I turned and followed Veronika up the stairs to her room.

A large, lobster-coloured man of about fifty lay dead in her big oak bed.

Vomiting is quite common in cases of congestive heart failure. It covered his nose and mouth like a bad facial burn. I pressed my fingers against the man's clammy neck.

'How long has he been here?'

'Three or four hours.'

'It's lucky you kept him covered up,' I told her. 'Close that window.' I stripped the bedclothes from the dead man's body and started to raise the upper part of his torso. 'Give me a hand here,' I ordered.

'What are you doing?' She helped me to bend the torso over the legs as if I had been trying to shut an overstuffed suitcase.

'I'm keeping this bastard in shape,' I said. 'A bit of chiropractic ought to slow up the stiffening and make it easier for us to get him in and out of the car.' I pressed down hard on the back of his neck, and then, blowing hard from my exertions, pushed the man back against the puke-strewn pillows. 'Uncle here's been getting extra food-stamps,' I breathed. 'He must weigh more than a hundred kilos. It's lucky we've got Belinsky along to help.'

'Is Belinsky a policeman?' she asked.

'Sort of,' I said, 'but don't worry, he's not the kind of bull who cares much for the crime figures. Belinsky's got other fish to fry. He hunts Nazi war-criminals.' I started to bend the dead man's arms and legs.

'What are you going to do with him?' she said nauseously.

'Drop him on the railway line. With him being naked it will look like the Ivans gave him a little party and then threw him off a train. With any luck the express will go over him and fit him with a good disguise.'

'Please don't,' she said weakly. 'He was very kind to me.'

When I'd finished with the body I stood up and straightened my tie. 'This is hard work on a vodka supper. Now where the hell is Belinsky?' Spotting the man's clothes which were laid neatly over the back of a dining-chair by the grimy net curtains, I said: 'Have you been through his pockets yet?'

'No, of course not.'

'You are new at this game, aren't you?'

'You don't understand at all. He was a good friend of mine.'

'Evidently,' Belinsky said coming through the door. He held up a length of white material. 'I'm afraid that this was all I could find.'

'What is it?'

'An altar-cloth, I think. I found it in a cupboard inside the cathedral. It didn't look like it was being used.'

I told Veronika to help Belinsky wrap her friend in the cloth while I searched his pockets.

'He's good at that,' Belinsky told her. 'He went through my pockets once while I was still breathing. Tell me, honey, were you and fat boy actually doing it when he was scythed out?'

'Leave her alone, Belinsky.'

'Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth,' he chuckled. 'But me? I just hope I die in a good woman.'

I opened the man's wallet and thumbed a fold of dollar bills and schillings on to the dressing-table.

'What are you looking for?' asked Veronika.

'If I'm going to dispose of a man's body I like to know at least a little more about him than just the colour of his underwear.'

'His name was Karl Heim,' she said quietly.

I found a business card. 'Dr Karl Heim,' I said. 'A dentist, eh? Is he the one who got you the penicillin?'

'Yes.'

'A man who liked to take precautions, eh?' Belinsky murmured. 'From the look of this room, I can understand why.'

He nodded at the money on the dressing-table. 'You had better keep that money, sweetheart. Get yourself a new decorator.'

There was another business card in Heim's wallet. 'Belinsky,'

I said. 'Have you ever heard of a Major Jesse P. Breen? From something called the DP Screening Project?'

'Sure I have,' he said, coming over and taking the card out of my fingers. 'The DPSP is a special section of the 430th. Breen is the CIC's local liaison officer for the Org. If any of the Org's men get into trouble with the US military police, Breen is supposed to try and help them sort it out. That is unless it's anything really serious, like a murder. And I wouldn't put it past him to fix that as well, providing the victim was anyone but an American or an Englishman.

It looks as if our fat friend might have been one of your old comrades, Bernie.'

While Belinsky talked I quickly searched Heim's trouser pockets and found a set of keys.

'In that case it might be an idea if you and I were to take a look around the good doctor's surgery,' I said. 'I've got a feeling in my socks that we might just find something interesting there.'

We dumped Heim's naked body on a quiet stretch of railway track near the Ostbahnhof in the Russian sector of the city. I was keen to leave the scene as quickly as possible, but Belinsky insisted on sitting in the car and waiting to see the train finish the job. After about fifteen minutes a goods train bound for Budapest and the Orient came rumbling by, and Heim's corpse was lost under its many hundreds of pairs of wheels.

'For all flesh is grass,' Belinsky intoned, 'and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field: The grass withereth, and the flower fadeth.'

'Cut that out, will you?' I said. 'It makes me nervous.'

'But the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God and there shall no torment touch them. Anything you say, kraut.'

'Come on,' I said. 'Let's get away from here.'

We drove north to Wahring in the 18th Bezirk, and an elegant three-storey house on Tnrkenschanzplatz, close to a decent-sized park which was bisected by a small railway line.

'We could have dropped our passenger out here,' said Belinsky, 'on his own doorstep. And saved ourselves a trip into the Russian sector.'

'This is the American sector,' I reminded him. 'The only way to get thrown off a train round here is to travel without a ticket. They even wait until the train stops moving.'

'That's Uncle Sam for you, hey? No, you're right, Bernie. He's better off with the Ivans. It wouldn't be the first time they threw one of our people off a train. But I'd sure hate to be one of their trackmen. Damned dangerous, I'd say.'

We left the car and walked towards the house.

There was no sign that anyone was at home. Above the broad, toothy grin of a short wooden fence the darkened windows on the white stuccoed house stared back like the empty sockets in a great skull. A tarnished brass plate on the gatepost which, with typical Viennese exaggeration, bore the name of Dr Karl Heim, Consultant Orthodontic Surgeon, not to mention most of the letters of the alphabet, indicated two separate entrances: one to Heim's residence, and the other to his surgery.

'You look in the house,' I said, opening the front door with the keys. 'I'll go round the side and check the surgery.'

'Anything you say.' Belinsky produced a flashlight from his overcoat pocket.

Seeing my eyes fasten on the torch, he added: 'What's the matter? You scared of the dark or something?' He laughed. 'Here, you take it. I can see in the dark.

In my line of work you have to.'

I shrugged and relieved him of the light. Then he reached inside his jacket and took out his gun.

'Besides,' he said, screwing on the silencer. 'I like to keep one hand free for turning door handles.'

'Just watch who you shoot,' I said and walked away.

Round the side of the house I let myself in through the surgery door and, after closing it quietly behind me again, switched on the torch. I kept the light on the linoleum floor and away from the windows in case a nosy neighbour happened to be keeping an eye on the place.

I found myself in a small reception and waiting area which was home to a number of potted plants and a tankful of terrapins: it made a change from goldfish, I told myself, and mindful of the fact that their owner was now dead, I sprinkled some of the foul-smelling food that they ate on to the surface of their water.

That was my second good deed of the day. Charity was beginning to be a bit of a habit with me.

Behind the reception desk I opened the appointment-book and pointed the torch beam on to its pages. It didn't look like Heim had much of a practice to leave to his competition, always assuming he had any. There wasn't a lot of spare money around for curing toothache these days, and I didn't doubt that Heim would have made a better living selling drugs on the black market. Turning back the pages I could see that he averaged no more than two or three appointments a week. Several months back in the book I came across two names I knew: Max Abs and Helmut K/nig. Both of them were marked down for full extractions within a few days of each other. There were lots of other names listed for full extractions, but none that I recognized.

I went over to the filing cabinets and found them mostly empty, with the exception of one that contained details only of patients prior to 1940. The cabinet didn't look as if it had been opened since then, which struck me as odd as dentists tend to be quite meticulous about such things; and indeed, the Heim of pre-1940 had been conscientious with his patients' records, detailing residual teeth, fillings and denture-fitting marks for each one of them. Had he just got sloppy, I wondered, or had an inadequate volume of business ceased to make such careful records worthwhile? And why so many full extractions of late?

It was true, the war had left a great many men, myself included, with poor teeth. In my case this was one legacy of a year's starvation as a Soviet prisoner. But nevertheless I had still managed to keep a full set. And there were plenty of others like me. What need for K/nig then, who I remembered telling me that he had had such good teeth, to have had all of his teeth extracted? Or did he simply mean that his teeth had been good before they went bad? While none of this was enough for Conan Doyle to have turned into a short story, it certainly left me puzzled.

The surgery itself was much like any other I had ever been in. A little dirtier perhaps, but then nothing was as clean as it had been before the war. Beside the black-leather chair stood a large cylinder of anaesthetic gas. I turned the tap at the neck of the bottle and, hearing a hissing sound, switched it off again.

Everything looked like it was in proper working order.

Beyond a locked door was a small store-room, and it was there that Belinsky found me.

'Find anything?' he said.

I told him about the lack of records.

'You're right,' Belinsky said with what sounded like a smile, 'that doesn't sound at all German.'

I flashed the torch over the shelves in the store-room.

'Hello,' he said, 'what have we got here?' He reached out to touch a steel drum on the side of which was painted in yellow the chemical formula H2 SO4.

'I wouldn't, if I were you,' I said. 'That stuffs not from a schoolboy's chemistry set. Unless I'm very much mistaken, it's sulphuric acid.' I moved the torch beam up the side of the drum to where the words EXTREME CAUTION were also painted. 'Enough to turn you into a couple of litres of animal fat.'

'Kosher, I hope,' Belinsky said. 'What does a dentist want with a drum-load of sulphuric acid?'

'For all I know he soaks his false teeth in it overnight.'

On a shelf beside the drum, piled one on top of the other, were several kidney-shaped steel trays. I picked one of them up and brought it under the beam of the torch. The two of us stared at what looked like a handful of odd-shaped peppermints, all stuck together as if they had been half-sucked and then saved by some disgusting small boy. But there was also dried blood on some of them.

Belinsky's nose wrinkled with disgust. 'What the hell are these?'

'Teeth.' I handed him the torch and picked one of the spiky white objects out of the tray to hold it up to the light. 'Extracted teeth. And several mouthfuls of them too.'

'I hate dentists,' Belinsky hissed. He fumbled in his waistcoat and found one of his picks to chew.

'I'd say these normally end up in the drum of acid.'

'So?' But Belinsky had noticed my interest.

'What kind of dentist does nothing but full extractions?' I asked. 'The appointment-book is booked for nothing but full extractions.' I turned the tooth in my fingers. 'Would you say that there was much wrong with this molar? It hasn't even been filled.'

'It looks like a perfectly healthy tooth,' agreed Belinsky.

I stirred the sticky mass in the tray with my forefinger. 'Same as the rest of them,' I observed. 'I'm no dentist, but I don't see the point of pulling teeth that haven't even been filled yet.'

'Maybe Heim was on some kind of piece work. Maybe the guy just liked to pull teeth.'

'Better than he liked keeping records. There are no records for any of his recent patients.'

Belinsky picked up another kidney-tray and inspected its contents. 'Another full set,' he reported. But something rolled in the next tray. It looked like several tiny ball bearings. 'Well, what have we here?' He picked one up and regarded it with fascination. 'Unless I'm very much mistaken, I should say each one of these little confections contains a dose of potassium cyanide.'

'Lethal pills?'

'That's right. They were very popular with some of your old comrades, kraut.

Especially the SS and senior state and party officials who might have had the guts to prefer suicide to being captured by the Ivans. I believe that these were originally developed for German secret agents, but Arthur Nebe and the SS decided that the top brass had a greater need of them. A man would have his dentist make him a false tooth, or use an existing cavity, and then put this little baby inside. Nice and snug you'd be surprised. When he was captured he might even have a decoy cyanide brass cartridge in his pocket, which meant our people wouldn't bother with a dental examination. And then, when the man had decided the right time had come, he would work off the false tooth, tongue out this capsule and chew the thing until it broke. Death is almost instantaneous.

That's how Himmler killed himself.'

'Goering too, I heard.'

'No,' said Belinsky, 'he used one of the decoys. An American officer smuggled it back to him while he was in gaol. How about that, eh? One of our own people going soft on the fat bastard like that.' He dropped the capsule back into the tray and handed it to me.

I poured a few into my hand to get a closer look. It seemed almost astonishing that things which were so small could also be so deadly. Four tiny seed pearls for the deaths of four men. I did not think I could have carried one in my mouth, false tooth or not, and still enjoyed my dinner.

'You know what I think, kraut? I think we've got ourselves a lot of toothless Nazis running round Vienna.' I followed him back into the surgery. 'I take it that you're familiar with dental techniques for the identification of the dead.'

'As familiar as the next bull,' I said.

'It was damned useful after the war,' he said. 'The best way we had of establishing the identity of a corpse. Naturally enough there were many Nazis who were keen for us to believe that they were dead. And they went to a great deal of trouble to try and persuade us of it. Half-charred bodies carrying false papers, you know the sort of thing. Well of course the first thing we did was have a dentist take a look at a corpse's teeth. Even if you don't have a man's dental records you can at least determine his age from his teeth: periodontosis, root resorption, etc. you can say for sure that a corpse isn't who it is supposed to be.'

Belinsky paused and looked about the surgery. 'You finished looking around in here?'

I told him I was and asked if he had found anything in the house. He shook his head and said he hadn't. Then I said that we had better get the hell out of there.

He resumed his explanation as we climbed into the car.

'Take the case of Heinrich Mnller, chief of the Gestapo. He was last seen alive in Hitler's bunker in April 1945. Mnller was supposed to have been killed in the battle for Berlin in May 1945. But when after the war his body was exhumed, a dental expert specializing in jawbone surgery at a Berlin hospital in the British sector couldn't identify the teeth in the corpse as those belonging to a forty-four-year-old male. He thought that the corpse was more probably that of a man of no more than twenty-five.' Belinsky turned the ignition, gunned the engine for a second or two, and then slipped the car into gear.

Crouched over the steering-wheel, he drove badly for an American, double-declutching, missing his gears and generally over-steering. It was clear to me that driving required all of his attention, but he continued with his calm explanation, even after we had almost killed a passing motorcyclist.

'When we catch up with some of these bastards, they've got false papers, new hairstyles, moustaches, beards, glasses, you name it. But teeth are as good as a tattoo, or sometimes a fingerprint. So if any of them have had all their teeth pulled it removes yet another possible means of identification. After all, a man who can explode a cartridge under his arm to remove an SS number probably wouldn't baulk at wearing false teeth, would he?'

I thought of the burn scar under my own arm and reflected that he was probably right. To disguise myself from the Russians I would certainly have resorted to having my teeth out, assuming that I would have the same opportunity for painless extraction as Max Abs and Helmut K/nig.

'No, I guess not.'

'You can bet your life on it. Which is why I stole Heim's appointment-book.' He patted the breast of his coat where I assumed he was now keeping it. 'It might be interesting to find out who these men with bad teeth really are. Your friend K/nig, for instance. And Max Abs too. I mean, why would a little SS chauffeur feel the need to disguise what he had in his mouth? Unless he wasn't an SS corporal at all.' Belinsky chuckled enthusiastically at the thought of it.

'That's why I have to be able to see in the dark. Some of your old comrades really know how to mix the maps. You know, I wouldn't be at all surprised if we're still chasing some of these Nazi bastards when their kids are having to sugar their strawberries for them.'

'All the same,' I said, 'the longer it is before you catch them, the harder it will be to get a positive identification.'

'Don't you worry,' he snarled vindictively. 'There won't be a shortage of witnesses willing to come forward and testify against these shits. Or perhaps you think people like Mnller and Globocnik should be allowed to get away with it?'

'Who's Globocnik, when he's having a party?'

'Odilo Globocnik. He headed up Operation Reinhard, establishing most of the big death camps in Poland. Another one who is supposed to have committed suicide in '45. So come on, what do you think? There's a trial going on in Nuremberg right now. Otto Ohlendorf, commander of one of those S S special action groups. Do you think he should hang for his war crimes?'

'War crimes?' I repeated wearily. 'Listen, Belinsky, I worked in the Wehrmacht's War Crimes Bureau for three years. So don't think you can lecture me about fucking war crimes.'

'I'm just interested to know where you stand, kraut. Exactly what kind of war crimes did you Jerries investigate anyway?'

'Atrocities, by both sides. You've heard of Katyn Forest?'

'Of course. You investigated that?'

'I was part of the team.'

'How about that?' He seemed genuinely surprised. Most people were.

'Frankly, I think that the idea of charging fighting men with war crimes is absurd. The murderers of women and children should be punished, yes. But it wasn't just Jews and Poles who were killed by people like Mnller and Globocnik.

They murdered Germans, too. Perhaps if you'd given us half a chance we could have brought them to justice ourselves.'

Belinsky turned off Wahringer Strasse and drove south, past the long edifice of the General Hospital and on to Alser Strasse where, encountering the same recollection as myself, he slowed the car to a more respectful pace. I could tell he had been about to answer my point, but now he grew quiet, almost as if he felt obliged to avoid giving me any cause for offence. Drawing up outside my pension, he said: 'Did Traudl have any family?'

'Not that I know of. There's just Becker.' I wondered at that, though. The photograph of her and Colonel Poroshin still preyed on my mind.

'Well, that's all right. I'm not going to lose any sleep worrying about his grief.'

'He's my client, in case you'd forgotten. In helping you I'm supposed to be working to prove him innocent.'

'And you're convinced of that?'

'Yes, I am.'

'But surely you must know he's on the Crowcass list.'

'You're pretty cute,' I said dumbly, 'letting me make all the running like this, only to tell me that. Supposing that I do get lucky and win the race, am I going to be allowed to collect the prize?'

'Your friend is a murdering Nazi, Bernie. He commanded an execution squad in the Ukraine, massacring men, women and children. I'd say that he deserved to hang whether he killed Linden or not.'

'You're pretty cute, Belinsky,' I repeated bitterly, and started to get out of the car.

'But as far as I'm concerned, he's small fry. I'm after bigger fish than Emil Becker. You can help me. You can try and repair some of the damage that your country has done. A symbolic gesture, if you like. Who knows if enough Germans do the same then maybe the account could be settled.'

'What are you talking about?' I said, from the road. 'What account?' I leaned on the car door and bent forward to see Belinsky take out his pipe.

'God's account,' he said quietly. I laughed and shook my head in disbelief.

'What's the matter? Don't you believe in God?'

'I don't believe in trying to make a deal with him. You speak about God as if he sells secondhand cars. I've misjudged you. You're much more of an American than I thought you were.'

'Now that's where you're wrong. God likes making deals. Look at that covenant he made with Abraham, and with Noah. God's a huckster, Bernie. Only a German could mistake a deal for a direct order.'

'Get to the point, will you? There is a point, isn't there?' His manner seemed to indicate as much.

'I'm going to level with you '

'Oh? I seem to remember you doing that a little earlier on.'

'Everything I told you was true.'

'There's just more to come, right?'

Belinsky nodded and lit his pipe. I felt like smacking it out of his mouth.

Instead I got back into the car and closed the door.

'With your penchant for selective truth, you should get a job in an advertising agency. Let's hear it.'

'Just don't make a hot throat at me until I'm through, right?'

I nodded curtly.

'All right. For a start, we Crowcass believe Becker is innocent of Linden's murder. You see, the gun which killed him was used to kill somebody else in Berlin almost three years ago. The ballistics people matched that bullet with the one that killed Linden, and they were both fired from the same gun. For the time of the first killing Becker has a pretty good alibi: he was a Russian prisoner of war. Of course he could have acquired the gun since then, but I haven't come to the interesting part yet, the part that actually makes me want Becker to be innocent.

'The gun was a Standard SS-issue Walther P38. We traced the serial-number records held at the US Documents Centre and discovered that this same pistol was one of a batch that was issued to senior officers within the Gestapo. This particular weapon was given to Heinrich Mnller. It was a long shot but we compared the bullet that killed Linden with the one that killed the man we dug up who was supposed to be Mnller, and what do you know? Jackpot. Whoever killed Linden might also have been responsible for putting a false Heinrich Mnller in the ground. Do you see, Bernie? It's the best clue that we've ever had that Gestapo Mnller is still alive. It means that only a few months ago he might have been right here in Vienna, working for the Org, of which you are now a member.

He may even still be here.

'Do you know how important that is? Think about it, please. Mnller was the architect of the Nazi terror. For ten years he controlled the most brutal secret police the world has ever known. This was a man almost as powerful as Himmler himself. Can you imagine how many people he must have tortured? How many deaths he must have ordered? How many Jews, Poles even how many Germans he must have killed? Bernie, this is your opportunity to help avenge all those dead Germans.

To see that justice is done.'

I laughed scornfully. 'Is that what you call it when you let a man hang for something he didn't do? Correct me if I'm wrong, Belinsky, but isn't that part of your plan: to let Becker take the drop?'

'Naturally I hope that it doesn't come to that. But if it's necessary, then so be it. So long as the military police have Becker, Mnller won't be spooked. And if that includes hanging him, yes. Knowing what I know about Emil Becker, I won't lose much sleep.' Belinsky watched my face carefully for some sign of approval. 'Come on, you're a cop. You appreciate how these things work. Don't tell me you've never had to nail a man for one thing because you couldn't prove another. It all evens up, you know that.'

'Sure, I've done it. But not when a man's life was involved. I've never played games with a man's life.'

'Provided you help us to find Mnller we're prepared to forget about Becker.' The pipe emitted a short smoke signal, which seemed to bespeak a growing impatience on its owner's part. 'Look, all I'm suggesting is that you put Mnller in the dock instead of Becker.'

'And if I do find Mnller, what then? He's not about to let me walk up and put the cuffs on him. How am I supposed to bring him in without getting my head blown off?'

'You can leave that to me. All you have to do is establish exactly where he is.

Telephone me and my Crowcass team will do the rest.'

'How will I recognize him?'

Belinsky reached behind his seat and brought back a cheap leather briefcase. He unzipped it and took out an envelope from which he removed a passport-sized photograph.

'That's Mnller,' he said. 'Apparently he speaks with a very pronounced Munich accent, so even if he should have radically changed his appearance, you'll certainly have no trouble recognizing his voice.' He watched me turn the photograph towards the streetlight and stare at it for a while.

'He'd be forty-seven now. Not very tall, big peasant hands. He may still even be wearing his wedding ring.'

The photograph didn't say much about the man. It wasn't a very revealing face; and yet it was a remarkable one. Mnller had a squarish skull, a high forehead, and tense, narrow lips. But it was the eyes that really got to you, even on that small photograph. Mnller's eyes were like the eyes of a snowman: two black, frozen coals.

'Here's another one,' Belinsky said. 'These are the only two photographs of him known to exist.'

The second picture was a group shot. There were five men seated round an oak table as if they had been having dinner in a comfortable restaurant. Three of them I recognized. At the head of the table was Heinrich Himmler, playing with his pencil and smiling at Arthur Nebe on his right. Arthur Nebe: my old comrade, as Belinsky would have said. On Himmler's left, and apparently hanging on every one of the ReichsFnhrer-SS's words, was Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the RSHA, assassinated by Czech terrorists in 1942.

'When was this picture taken?' I asked.

'November 1939.' Belinsky leaned across and tapped one of the two other men in the picture with the stem of his pipe. 'That's Mnller there,' he said, 'sitting beside Heydrich.'

Mnller's hand had moved in the same half-second that the camera-shutter had opened and closed: it was blurred as if covering the order paper on the table, but even so, the wedding ring was clearly visible. He was looking down, almost not listening to Himmler at all. By comparison with Heydrich, Mnller's head was small. His hair was closely cropped, shaven even until it reached the very top of the cranium, where it had been permitted to grow a little in a small, carefully tended allotment.

'Who's the man sitting opposite Mnller?'

'The one taking notes? That's Franz Josef Huber. He was chief of the Gestapo here in Vienna. You can hang on to those pictures if you want. They're only prints.'

'I haven't agreed to help you yet.'

'But you will. You have to.'

'Right now I ought to tell you to go and fuck yourself, Belinsky. You see, I'm like an old piano I don't much like being played. But I'm tired. And I've had a few. Maybe I'll be able to think a little more clearly tomorrow.' I opened the car door and got out again.

Belinsky was right: the body work of the big black Mercedes was covered in dents.

'I'll call you in the morning,' he said.

'You do that,' I said, and slammed the door shut.

He drove away like he was the devil's own coachman.

Chapter 28

I did not sleep well. Troubled by what Belinsky had said, my thoughts made my limbs restless, and after only a few hours I woke before dawn in a cold sweat and did not sleep again. If only he hadn't mentioned God, I said to myself.

I was not a Catholic until I became a prisoner in Russia. The regime in the camp was so hard that it seemed to me that there was an even chance it would kill me, and, wishing to make my peace with the back of my mind, I had sought out the only churchman among my fellow prisoners, a Polish priest. I had been brought up as a Lutheran, but religious denomination seemed like a matter of small account in that dreadful place.

Becoming a Catholic in the full expectation of death only made me more tenacious of life, and after I'd escaped and returned to Berlin I continued to attend mass and to celebrate the faith that had apparently delivered me.

My newfound Church did not have a good record in its relation to the Nazis, and had now also distanced itself from any imputation of guilt. It followed that if the Catholic Church was not guilty, nor were its members. There was, it seemed, some theological basis for a rejection of German collective guilt. Guilt, said the priests, was really something personal between a man and his God, and its attribution to one nation by another was blasphemy, for this could only be a matter of divine prerogative. After that, all that there remained to do was pray for the dead, for those who had done wrong, and for the whole dreadful and embarrassing epoch to be forgotten as quickly as possible.

There were many who remained uneasy at the way the moral dirt was swept under the carpet. But it is certain that a nation cannot feel collective guilt, that each man must encounter it personally. Only now did I realize the nature of my own guilt and perhaps it was really not much different from that of many others: it was that I had not said anything, that I had not lifted my hand against the Nazis. I also realized that I had a personal sense of grievance against Heinrich Mnller, for as chief of the Gestapo he had done more than any other man to achieve the corruption of the police force of which I had once been a proud member. From that had flowed wholesale terror.

Now it seemed it was not too late to do something after all. It was just possible that, by seeking out Mnller, the symbol not just of my own corruption but Becker's too, and bringing him to justice, I might help to clear my own guilt for what had happened.

Belinsky rang early, almost as if he had already guessed my decision, and I told him that I would help him to find Gestapo Mnller not for Crowcass, nor for the United States Army, but for Germany. But mostly, I told him, I would help him to get Mnller for myself.

Chapter 29

First thing that morning, after telephoning K/nig and arranging a meeting to hand over Belinsky's ostensibly secret material, I went to Liebl's office in Judengasse in order that he might arrange for me to see Becker at the police prison.

'I want to show him a photograph,' I explained.

'A photograph?' Liebl sounded hopeful. 'Is this a photograph that might become an item of evidence?'

I shrugged. 'That depends on Becker.'

Liebl made a couple of swift telephone calls, trading on the death of Becker's fiancTe, the possibility of new evidence and the proximity of the trial, which gained us almost immediate access to the prison. It was a fine day and we made our way there by foot, with Liebl walking his umbrella like a colour sergeant in an imperial regiment of guards.

'Did you tell him about Traudl?' I asked.

'Last night.'

'How did he take it?'

The grey brow on the old lawyer's head shifted uncertainly. 'Surprisingly well, Herr Gunther. Like you, I had supposed our client would be devastated by the news.' The brow shifted again, more in consternation this time. 'But he was not.

No, it was his own unfortunate situation that seemed to preoccupy him. As well as your progress, or lack of it. Herr Becker does seem to have an extraordinary amount of faith in your powers of detection. Powers for which, if I may be frank with you, sir, I have seen little or no evidence.'

'You're entitled to your opinion, Dr Liebl. I guess you're like most lawyers I've met: if your own sister sent you an invitation to her wedding you'd be happy only if it was signed under seal and in the presence of two witnesses.

Perhaps if our client had been a little more forthcoming 'You suspect he's been holding something back? Yes, I remember you said as much on the telephone yesterday. Without knowing quite what you were talking about I did not feel able to take advantage of Herr Becker's ' he hesitated for a second while he debated whether or not he could reasonably use the word, and then decided that he could ' grief, to make such an allegation.'

'Very sensitive of you, I'm sure. But perhaps this photograph will jog his memory.'

'I do hope so. And perhaps his bereavement will have sunk in, and he will make a better show of his grief.'

It seemed like a very Viennese sort of sentiment.

But when we saw Becker he appeared hardly affected. After a packet of cigarettes had persuaded the guard to leave the three of us alone in the interview room I tried to find out why.

'I'm sorry about Traudl,' I said. 'She was a really lovely girl.'

He nodded expressionlessly, as if he had been listening to some boring point of legal procedure as explained by Liebl.

'I must say you don't seem very upset by it,' I remarked.

'I'm dealing with it in the best way I know how,' he said quietly. 'There's not a lot I can do here. Chances are they won't even let me attend the funeral. How do you think I feel?'

I turned to Liebl and asked him if he wouldn't mind leaving the room for a minute. 'There's something I wish to say to Herr Becker in private.'

Liebl glanced at Becker, who nodded curtly back at him. Neither of us spoke until the heavy door had closed behind the lawyer.

'Spit it out, Bernie,' Becker said, half-yawning at the same time. 'What's on your mind?'

'It was your friends in the Org who killed your girl,' I said, watching his long thin face closely for some sign of emotion. I wasn't sure if this was true or not, but I was keen to see what it might make him reveal. But there was nothing.

They actually asked me to kill her.'

'So,' he said, with his eyes narrowing, 'you're in the Org.' His tone was cautious. 'When did this happen?'

'Your friend K/nig recruited me.'

His face seemed to relax a little. 'Well, I guessed it was only a matter of time. To be honest, I wasn't at all sure whether or not you were in the Org when you first came to Vienna. With your background you're the kind of man they're quick to recruit. If you're in now, you have been busy. I'm impressed. Did K/nig say why he wanted you to kill Traudl?'

'He told me she was an MVD spy. He showed me a photograph of her talking to Colonel Poroshin.'

Becker smiled sadly. 'She was no spy,' he said, shaking his head, 'and she was not my girlfriend. She was Poroshin's girl. Originally she posed as my fiancTe so that I could stay in contact with Poroshin while I was in prison. Liebl knew nothing about it. Poroshin said that you hadn't been all that keen to come to Vienna. Said you didn't seem to have a very good opinion of me. He wondered if you would stay very long when you did come. So he thought it would be a good idea if Traudl worked on you a little and persuaded you that there was someone who loved me on the outside, someone who needed me. He's a shrewd judge of character, Bernie. Go on, admit it, she's half the reason why you've stuck to my case. Because you thought that mother and baby deserved the benefit of the doubt, even if I didn't.'

It was Becker who was watching me now, looking for some reaction. Oddly enough, I found I wasn't angry at all. I was used to discovering that at any one time I only ever had half the truth.

'So I don't suppose she was a nurse at all.'

'Oh, she was a nurse all right. She used to steal penicillin for me to sell on the black market. It was me who introduced her to Poroshin.' He shrugged. 'I didn't know about the two of them for a while. But I wasn't surprised. Traudl liked a good time, like most of the women in this city. She and I were even lovers for a brief while, but nothing like that lasts for very long in Vienna.'

'Your wife said that you got Poroshin some penicillin for a dose of drip? Was that true?'

'I got him some penicillin, sure, but it wasn't for him. It was for his son. He had cerebro-spinal fever. There's quite an epidemic of it, I believe. And a shortage of antibiotics, especially in Russia. There's a shortage of everything but manpower in the Soviet Union.

'After that, Poroshin did me one or two favours. Fixed papers, gave me a cigarette concession, that sort of thing. We became quite friendly. And when the Org's people got round to recruiting me, I told him all about it. Why not? I thought K/nig and his friends were a bunch of spinners. But I was happy to make money from them, and frankly I wasn't much involved with the Org beyond that odd bit of courier-work to Berlin. Poroshin was keen that I get closer to them however, and when he offered me a lot of money, I agreed to try. But they're absurdly suspicious, Bernie, and when I expressed some interest in doing more work for them they insisted that I subject myself to an interrogation about my service with the SS and my imprisonment in a Soviet POW camp. It bothered them a lot that I was released. They didn't say anything about it at the time, but in view of what has happened since, I guess they must have decided that they couldn't trust me, and put me out of the way.' Becker lit one of his cigarettes and leaned back on the hard chair.

'Why didn't you tell this to the police?'

He laughed. 'You think I didn't? When I told them about the Org those stupid bastards thought I was telling them about the Werewolf Underground. You know, that shit about a Nazi terrorist group.'

'So that's where Shields got the idea.'

'Shields?' Becker snorted. 'He's a fucking idiot.'

'All right, why didn't you tell me about the Org?'

'Like I said, Bernie, I wasn't sure if they hadn't already recruited you in Berlin. Ex-Kripo, ex-Abwehr, you'd have been exactly what they were looking for.

But if you hadn't been in the Org and I'd told you, you might well have gone round Vienna asking questions about it, in which case you would have ended up dead, like my two business partners. And if you were in the Org I thought that maybe that would just be in Berlin. Here in Vienna you'd be just another detective, albeit one I knew and trusted. Do you see?'

I grunted an affirmative and found my own cigarettes.

'You still should have told me.'

'Perhaps.' He drew fiercely on his cigarette. 'Listen, Bernie. My original offer still stands. Thirty thousand dollars if you can dig me out of this hole. So if you've got anything up your sleeve '

'There's this,' I said, cutting across him. I produced Mnller's photograph, the one that was passport-sized. 'Do you recognize him?'

'I don't think so. But I've seen this picture before, Bernie. At least I think I have. Traudl showed it to me before you came to Vienna.'

'Oh? Did she say how she came by it?'

'Poroshin, I guess.' He studied the picture more carefully. 'Oak-leaf collar patches, silver braid on the shoulders. An SS-BrigadeFnhrer by the look of him.

Who is it, anyway?'

'Heinrich Mnller.'

'Gestapo Mnller?'

'Officially he's dead, so I'd like you to keep quiet about all this for the moment. I've teamed up with this American agent from the War Crimes Commission who is interested in the Linden case. He worked for the same department.

Apparently the gun that was used to kill Linden belonged to Mnller, and was used to kill the man who was supposed to be Mnller. Which might leave Mnller still alive. Naturally the War Crimes people are anxious to get hold of Mnller at any price. Which leaves you firmly on the spot I'm afraid, at least for the moment.'

'I wouldn't mind if it was firmly. But the particular spot they have in mind has hinges on it. Do you mind explaining what this means exactly?'

'It means they're not prepared to do anything that might scare Mnller out of Vienna.'

'Assuming he's here.'

'That's right. Because this is an intelligence operation, they're not prepared to let the military police in on it. If the charges against you were to be dropped now, it might persuade the Org that the case was about to be reopened.'

'So where does that leave me, for Christ's sake?'

'This American agent I'm working with has promised to let you go if we can put Mnller in your place. We're going to try and draw him out into the open.'

'Until then they're just going to let the trial go ahead, maybe even the sentence too?'

'That's about the size of it.'

'And you're asking me to keep my mouth shut in the meantime.'

'What can you say? That Linden was possibly murdered by a man who's been dead for three years?'

'It's just so ' Becker flung his cigarette into the corner of the room ' so damned callous.'

'Do you want to take that biretta off your head? Look, they know about what you did in Minsk. Playing a game with your life isn't something they feel squeamish about. To be honest, they don't much care whether you swing or not. This is your only chance, and you know it.'

Becker nodded sullenly. 'All right,' he said.

I stood up to leave, but a sudden thought stopped me from walking to the door.

'As a matter of interest,' I said, 'why did they release you from the Soviet POW camp?'

'You were a prisoner. You know what it was like. Always scared they were going to find out you were in the SS.'

'That's why I'm asking.'

He hesitated for a moment. Then he said: 'There was a man who was due to be released. He was very sick, and would have died soon enough. What was the point in repatriating him?' He shrugged, and looked me square in the eye. 'So I strangled him. Ate some camphor to make myself sick damn near killed myself and took his place.' He stared me out. 'I was desperate, Bernie. You remember what it was like.'

'Yes, I remember.' I tried to conceal my distaste, and failed. 'All the same, if you'd told me that before today I'd have let them hang you.' I reached for the door handle.

'There's still time. Why don't you?'

If I'd told him the truth Becker wouldn't have understood what I was talking about. He probably thought that metaphysics was something you used to manufacture cheap penicillin for the black market. So instead I shook my head, and said, 'Let's just say that I made a deal with someone.'

Chapter 30

I met K/nig at the сafé Sperl in Gumpendorfer Strasse, which was in the French sector but close to the Ring. It was a big, gloomy place which the many art-nouveau-style mirrors on the walls did nothing to brighten, and was home to several half-size billiard tables. Each one of these was illuminated by a light which was fixed to the yellowing ceiling above with a brass fitting that looked like something out of an old U-boat.

K/nig's terrier sat a short way off from its master like the dog on the record label, watching him play a solitary but thoughtful game. I ordered a coffee and approached the table.

He judged his shot at a careful cue's length, and then applied a screw of chalk to the tip, silently acknowledging my presence with a short nod of his head.

'Our own Mozart was particularly fond of this game,' he said, lowering his eyes to the felt. 'Doubtless he found it a very congenial facsimile of the very precise dynamism of his intellect.' He fixed his eye on the cue-ball like a sniper taking aim, and after a long, painstaking moment, rifled the white on to one red and then the other. This second red coasted down the length of the table, teetered on the lip of the pocket and, enticing a small murmur of satisfaction from its translator for there exists no more graceful manifestation of the laws of gravity and motion slipped noiselessly out of sight.

'I, on the other hand, enjoy the game for rather more sensuous reasons. I love the sound of the balls hitting each other, and the way they run so smoothly.' He retrieved the red from the pocket and replaced it to his own satisfaction. 'But most of all I love the colour green. Did you know that among Celtic peoples the colour green is considered unlucky? No? They believe green is followed by black.

Probably because the English used to hang Irishmen for wearing green. Or was it the Scots?' For a moment K/nig stared almost insanely at the surface of the billiard table, as if he could have licked it with his tongue.

'Just look at it,' he breathed. 'Green is the colour of ambition, and of youth.

It's the colour of life, and of eternal rest. Requiem aeternam dona eis'

Reluctantly he laid his cue down on the cloth, and conjuring a large cigar from one of his pockets, turned away from the table. The terrier stood up expectantly. 'You said on the telephone that you had something for me. Something important.'

I handed him Belinsky's envelope. 'Sorry it's not in green ink,' I said, watching him take out the papers. 'Do you read Cyrillic?'

K/nig shook his head. 'I'm afraid it might as well be in Gaelic.' But he went ahead and spread the papers out on the billiard table and then lit his cigar.

When the dog barked he ordered it to be quiet. 'Perhaps you would be good enough to explain exactly what I am looking at?'

'These are details of MVD dispositions and methods in Hungary and Lower Austria.' I smiled coolly and sat down at an adjacent table where the waiter had just laid my coffee.

K/nig nodded slowly, stared uncomprehendingly at the papers for another few seconds, then scooped them up, replaced them in their envelope and slipped the papers inside his jacket pocket.

'Very interesting,' he said, sitting down at my table. 'Assuming for a moment that they're genuine '

'Oh, they're genuine all right,' I said quickly.

He smiled patiently, as if I could have had no idea of the lengthy process whereby such information was properly verified. 'Assuming they're genuine,' he repeated firmly, 'how exactly did you come by them?'

A couple of men came over to the billiard table and started a game. K/nig drew his chair away and jerked his head at me to follow him. 'It's all right,' said one of the players. 'There's plenty of room to get by.' But we moved our chairs anyway. And when we were at a more discreet distance from the table I started to give him the story I had rehearsed with Belinsky.

Only now K/nig shook his head firmly and picked up his dog, which licked his ear playfully.

'This isn't the right time or place,' he said. 'But I'm impressed at how busy you have been.' He raised his eyebrows and watched the two men at the billiard table with an air of distraction. 'I learned this morning that you had been successful in procuring some petrol coupons for that medical friend of mine. The one at the General Hospital.' I realized that he was talking about Traudl's murder. 'And so soon after we had discussed the matter too. It really was most efficient of you, I'm sure.' He puffed smoke at the dog on his lap which sniffed and then sneezed. 'It's so difficult to obtain reliable supplies of anything in Vienna these days.'

I shrugged. 'You just have to know the right people, that's all.'

'As you clearly do, my friend.' He patted the breast pocket of his green tweed suit, where he had put Belinsky's documents. 'In these special circumstances I feel I ought to introduce you to someone in the company who will be better able than I to judge the quality of your source. Someone who, as it happens, is keen to meet you, and decide how best a man of your skills and resourcefulness may be used. We had thought to wait a few weeks before making the introduction, but this new information changes everything. However, first I must make a telephone call. I shall be a few minutes.' He looked down the сafé and pointed to one of the other free billiard tables. 'Why don't you try a few shots while I'm away?'

'I've not much use for games of skill,' I said. 'I distrust a game that relies on anything but luck. That way I needn't blame myself if I lose. I have a tremendous capacity for self-recrimination.'

A twinkle came into K/nig's eye. 'My dear fellow,' he said standing up from the table, 'that seems hardly German.'

I watched him as he walked into the back of the сafé to use the phone, the terrier trotting faithfully after him. I wondered who it was that he was calling: the one who was better able to judge the quality of my source might even be Mnller. It seemed too much to hope for so soon.

When K/nig returned a few minutes later, he seemed excited. 'As I thought,' he said, nodding enthusiastically, 'there is someone who is keen to have immediate sight of this material, and to meet you. I have a car outside. Shall we go?'

K/nig's car was a black Mercedes, like Belinsky's. And like Belinsky he drove too fast for safety on a road that had seen a heavy morning rain. I said that it would be better to arrive late than not to arrive at all, but he paid no attention. My feeling of discomfort was made worse by K/nig's dog, which sat on his master's lap and barked excitedly at the road ahead for the whole of the journey, as if the brute had been giving directions on where we were going. I recognized the road as the one which led to Sievering Studios, but at that same moment the road forked and we turned north again on to Grinzinger Allee.

'Do you know Grinzing?' K/nig shouted over the dog's incessant barking. I said that I did not. 'Then you really don't know the Viennese,' he opined. 'Grinzing is famous for its wine production. In the summer everyone comes up here in the evening to go to one of the taverns selling the new vintage. They drink too much, listen to a Schrammel quartet and sing old songs.'

'It sounds very cosy,' I said, without much enthusiasm.

'Yes, it is. I own a couple of vineyards up here myself. Just two small fields you understand. But it's a start. A man must have some land, don't you think?

We'll come back here in the summer and then you can taste the new wine yourself.

The lifeblood of Vienna.'

Grinzing seemed hardly a suburb of Vienna at all, more a charming little village. But because of its proximity to the capital, its cosy country charm somehow appeared as false as one of the film sets they built over at Sievering.

We drove up a hill on a narrow winding lane which led between old Heurige Inns and cottage gardens, with K/nig declaring how pretty he thought it all was now that spring was here. But the sight of so much storybook provinciality merely served to stimulate my city-bred parts to contempt, and I restricted myself to a sullen grunt and a muttered sentence about tourists. To one more used to the perennial sight of rubble, Grinzing with its many trees and vineyards looked very green. However I made no mention of this impression for fear that it might set K/nig off on one of his queer little monologues about that sickly colour.

He stopped the car in front of a high yellow-brick wall which enclosed a large, yellow-painted house and a garden that looked as if it had spent all day in the beauty parlour. The house itself was a tall, three-storey building with a high-dormered roof. Apart from its bright colour, there was a certain austerity of detail about the facade which lent the house an institutional appearance. It looked like a rather opulent son of town hall.

I followed K/nig through the gates and up an immaculately bordered path to a heavy studded oak door of the kind that expected you to be holding a battle-axe when you knocked. We walked straight into the house and on to a creaking wooden floor that would have given a librarian a heart attack.

K/nig led me into a small sitting-room, told me to wait there and then left, closing the door behind him. I took a good look round, but there wasn't much to see beyond the fact of the owner's bucolic taste in furniture. A rough-hewn table blocked the French window, and a couple of cartwheel farmhouse chairs were ranged in front of an empty fireplace that was as big as a mineshaft. I sat down on a slightly more comfortable-looking ottoman and re-tied my shoelaces. Then I polished my toes with the edge of the threadbare rug. I must have waited there for an indifferent half-hour before K/nig came back to fetch me. He led me through a maze of rooms and corridors and up a flight of stairs to the back of the house, with the manner of a man whose jacket is lined with oak panelling.

Hardly caring if I insulted him or not now that I was about to meet someone more important, I said, 'If you changed that suit you'd make someone a wonderful butler.'

K/nig did not turn around, but I heard him bare his dentures and utter a short, dry laugh. 'I'm glad you think so. You know, although I like a sense of humour I would not advise you to exercise it with the general. Frankly, his character is most severe.' He opened a door and we came into a bright, airy room with a fire in the grate and hectares of empty bookshelves. Against the broad window, behind a long library table, stood a grey-suited figure with a closely-cropped head I half recognized. The man turned and smiled, his hooked nose unmistakably belonging to a face from my past.

'Hello, Gunther,' said the man.

K/nig looked quizzically at me as I blinked speechlessly at the grinning figure.

'Do you believe in ghosts, Herr K/nig?' I said.

'No. Do you?'

'I do now. If I'm not mistaken, the gentleman by the window was hanged in 1945 for his part in the plot to kill the Fnhrer.'

'You can leave us, Helmut,' said the man at the window. K/nig nodded curtly, turned on his heel and left.

Arthur Nebe pointed at a chair in front of the table on which Belinsky's documents lay spread out beside a pair of spectacles and a fountain pen. 'Sit down,' he said. 'Drink?' He laughed. 'You look as though you need one.'

'It's not every day I get to see a man raised from the dead,' I said quietly.

'Better make it a large one.'

Nebe opened a large carved-wood drinks cabinet, revealing a marble interior filled with several bottles. He took out a bottle of vodka and two small glasses, which he filled to the top.

'To old comrades,' he said, raising his glass. I smiled uncertainly. 'Drink up.

It won't make me disappear again.'

I tossed the vodka back and breathed deeply as it hit my stomach. 'Death agrees with you, Arthur. You look well.'

'Thanks. I've never felt better.'

I lit a cigarette and left it on my lip for a while.

'Minsk, wasn't it?' he said. 'In 1941. The last time we saw each other?'

'That's right. You got me transferred to the War Crimes Bureau.'

'I ought to have had you put on a charge for what you asked. Even had you shot.'

'From what I hear, you were keen on shooting that summer.' Nebe let that one pass. 'So why didn't you?'

'You were a damned good policeman. That's why.'

'So were you.' I sucked hard at my cigarette. 'At least, you were before the war. What made you change, Arthur?'

Nebe savoured his drink for a moment and then finished it with one swallow.

'This is good vodka,' he remarked quietly, almost to himself. 'Bernie, don't expect me to give you an explanation. I had my orders to carry out, and so it was them or me. Kill or be killed. That's how it always was with the SS. Ten, twenty, thirty thousand after you've calculated that to save your own life you must kill others then the number makes little or no difference. That was my final solution, Bernie: the final solution to the pressing problem of my own continued survival. You were fortunate that you were never required to make that same calculation.'

'Thanks to you.'

Nebe shrugged modestly, before pointing at the papers spread before him. 'I'm rather glad that I didn't have you shot, now that I've seen this lot. Naturally this material will have to be assessed by an expert, but on the face of it you appear to have won the lottery. All the same, I'd like to hear more about your source.'

I repeated my story, after which Nebe said:

'Can he be trusted, do you think? Your Russian?'

'He never let me down before,' I said. 'Of course, he was just fixing papers for me then.'

Nebe refilled our glasses and frowned.

'Is there a problem?' I asked.

'It's just that in the ten years I've known you Bernie, I can't find anything that can persuade me that you're now a common black-marketeer.'

'That shouldn't be any more difficult than the problem I have persuading myself that you're a war-criminal, Arthur. Or for that matter, accepting that you're not dead.'

Nebe smiled. 'You have a point. But with so many opportunities presented by the vast number of displaced persons, I'm surprised you didn't return to your old trade and become a private investigator again.'

'Private investigation and the black market are not mutually exclusive,' I said.

'Good information is just like penicillin or cigarettes. It has its price. And the better, the more illicit the information, the higher that price. It's always been like that. Incidentally, my Russian will want to be paid.'

'They always do. Sometimes I think that the Ivans have more confidence in the dollar than the Americans themselves.' Nebe clasped his hands and laid both forefingers along the length of his shrewd-looking nose. Then he pointed them at me as if he had been holding a pistol. 'You've done very well, Bernie. Very well indeed. But I must confess I am still puzzled,'

'About me as a black Peter?'

'I can accept the idea of that rather more easily than I can accept the idea of you killing Traudl Braunsteiner. Murder was never in your line.'

'I didn't kill her,' I said. 'K/nig told me to do it, and I thought I could, because she was a Communist. I learned to hate them while I was in a Soviet prison-camp. Even enough to kill one. But when I thought about it, I realized I couldn't do it. Not in cold blood. Maybe I could have done it if it had been a man, but not a girl. I was going to tell him that this morning, but when he congratulated me on having done it, I decided to keep my mouth shut and take the credit. I figured there might be some money in it.'

'So somebody else killed her. How very intriguing. You've no idea who, I suppose?'

I shook my head.

'A mystery, then.'

'Just like your resurrection, Arthur. How exactly did you manage it?'

'I'm afraid that I can't take any of the credit,' he said. 'It was something the intelligence people dreamed up. In the last few months of the war they simply doctored the service records of senior SS and party personnel, to the effect that we were dead. Most of us were executed for our part in Count Stauffenberg's plot to kill the Fnhrer. Well, what were another hundred or so executions on a list that was already thousands of names long? And then some of us were listed as killed in a bombing raid, or in the battle for Berlin. Then all that remained was to make sure that these records fell into the hands of the Americans.

'So the SS transported the records to a paper mill near Munich, and the owner a good Nazi was briefed to wait until the Amis were on his doorstep before he started to destroy anything.'Nebe laughed. 'I remember reading in the newspaper how pleased with themselves the Amis were. What a coup they thought they had scored. Of course, most of what they captured was genuine enough. But for those of us who were most at risk from their ridiculous war-crimes investigations, it provided a real breathing space, and enough time to establish a new identity.

There's nothing quite like being dead for giving one a little room.' He laughed again. 'Anyway, that US Documents Centre of theirs in Berlin is still working for us.'

'How do you mean?' I asked, wondering if I was about to learn something that would throw light on why Linden had been killed. Or perhaps he had simply found out that the records had been doctored before they fell into Allied hands?

Wouldn't that have been enough to justify killing him?

'No, I've said enough for the moment.' Nebe drank some more vodka and licked his lips appreciatively. 'These are interesting times we live in, Bernie. A man can be whoever he wants to be. Take me: my new name is Nolde, Arthur Nolde, and I make wine on this estate. Resurrected, you said. Well you're not so very far away from it there. Only our Nazi dead are raised incorruptible. We're changed, my friend. It's the Russians who are wearing the black hats and trying to take over the town. Now that we're working for the Americans, we're the good boys. Dr Schneider he's the man who set the Org up with the help of their CIC he has regular meetings with them at our headquarters in Pullach. He's even been to the United States to meet their Secretary of State. Can you imagine it? A senior German officer working with the President's number two? You don't get more incorruptible than that, not these days.'

'If you don't mind,' I said, 'I find it hard to think of the Amis as saints.

When I got back from Russia my wife was getting an extra ration from an American captain. Sometimes I think they're no better than the Ivans.'

Nebe shrugged. 'You're not the only one in the Org who thinks that,' he said.

'But for my part, I never heard of the Ivans asking a lady's permission or giving her a few bars of chocolate first. They're animals.' He smiled as a thought came into his head. 'All the same, I will admit that some of those women ought to be grateful to the Russians. But for them, they might never have known what it was like.'

It was a poor joke, and in bad taste, but I laughed along with him anyway. I was still sufficiently nervous of Nebe to want to be good company for him.

'So what did you do, about your wife and this American captain?' he asked when his laughter has subsided.

Something made me check myself before I replied. Arthur Nebe was a clever man.

Before the war, as chief of the criminal police, he had been Germany's most outstanding policeman. It would have been too risky to give an answer which suggested that I had wanted to kill an American Army captain. Nebe saw common factors worthy of investigation where other men only saw the hand of a capricious god. I knew him too well to believe that he would have forgotten how once he had assigned Becker to a murder inquiry I was leading. Any hint of an association, no matter how accidental, between the death of one American officer affecting Becker and the death of another affecting me and I didn't doubt that Nebe would have given orders to have had me killed. One American officer was bad enough. Two would have been too much of a coincidence. So I shrugged, lit a cigarette and said: 'What can you do but make sure it's her and not him who gets the slap in the mouth? American officers don't take kindly to being socked, least of all by krauts. It's one of the small privileges of conquest that you don't have to take any shit from your defeated enemy. I can't imagine you've forgotten that, Herr GruppenFnhrer. You of all people.'

I watched his grin with an extra curiosity. It was a cunning smile, in an old fox's face, but his teeth looked real enough.

'That was very wise of you,' he said. 'It doesn't do to go around killing Americans.' Confirming my nervousness of him, he added, after a long pause: 'Do you remember Emil Becker?'

It would have been stupid to have tried to affect a show of protracted remembering. He knew me better than that.

'Of course,' I said.

'It was his girlfriend that K/nig told you to kill. One of his girlfriends anyway.'

'But K/nig said she was MVD,' I frowned.

'And so she was. So was Becker. He killed an American officer. But not before he'd tried to infiltrate the Org.'

I shook my head slowly. 'A crook, maybe,' I said, 'but I can't see Becker as one of Ivan's spies.' Nebe nodded insistently. 'Here in Vienna?' He nodded again.

'Did he know about you being alive?'

'Of course not. We used him to do a little courier work now and again. It was a mistake. Becker was a black-marketeer, like you, Bernie. Rather a successful one, as it happens. But he had delusions regarding his own worth to us. He thought he was at the centre of a very big pond. But he was nowhere near it.

Quite frankly if a meteorite had landed in the middle of it, Becker wouldn't even have noticed the fucking ripple.'

'How did you find out about him?'

'His wife told us,' Nebe said. 'When he came back from a Soviet POW camp, our people in Berlin sent someone round to his house to see if we could recruit him to the Org. Well, they missed him, and by the time they got to speak to Becker's wife he had left home and was living here in Vienna. The wife told them about Becker's association with a Russian colonel of MVD. But for one reason and another actually it was sheer bloody inefficiency it was quite a while before that information reached us here in Vienna section. And by that time he had been recruited by one of our collectors.'

'So where is he now?'

'Here in Vienna. In gaol. The Americans are putting him on trial for murder, and he will most certainly hang.'

'That must be rather convenient for you,' I said, sticking my neck out a little way. 'Rather too convenient, if you ask me.'

'Professional instinct, Bernie?'

'Better just call it a hunch. That way, if I'm wrong it won't make me look like an amateur.'

'Still trusting your guts, eh?'

'Most of all now that I've got something inside them again, Arthur. Vienna's a fat city after Berlin.'

'So you think we killed the American?'

'That would depend on who he was, and if you had a good reason. Then all you would have to do is make sure they got someone's coat for it. Someone you might want out of the way. That way you could get to hit two flies with one swat. Am I right?'

Nebe inclined his head to one side a little. 'Perhaps. But don't ever try to remind me of just how good a detective you were by doing something as stupid as proving it. It's still a very sore point with some people in this section, so it might be best if you were to nail your beak about it altogether.

'You know, if you really felt like playing detective, you might like to give us the benefit of your advice as to how we should go about finding one of our own missing persons. His name is Dr Karl Heim and he's a dentist. A couple of our people were supposed to take him to Pullach early this morning, but when they went to his house there was no sign of him. Of course he may just have gone on the local cure,' Nebe meant a tour of the bars, 'but in this city there is always the possibility that the Ivans have snatched him. There are a couple of freelance gangs that the Russians have working here. In return they get concessions to sell black-market cigarettes. As far as we've been able to find out, both these gangs report to Becker's Russian colonel. That's probably how he got most of his supplies in the first place.'

'Sure,' I said, unnerved by this latest revelation of Becker's involvement with Colonel Poroshin. 'What do you want me to do?'

'Speak to K/nig,' Nebe instructed, 'give him some advice on how he might try and find Heim. If you get time, you could even give him some help.'

'That's simple enough,' I said. 'Anything else?'

'Yes, I'd like you to come back here tomorrow morning. There's one of our people who has specialized in all matters relating to the MVD. I have a feeling that he will be especially keen to talk to you about this source of yours. Shall we say ten o'clock?'

'Ten o'clock,' I repeated.

Nebe stood up and came round the table to shake my hand. 'It's good to see an old face, Bernie, even if it does look like my conscience.'

I smiled weakly and clasped his hand. 'What's past is past,' I said.

'Exactly so,' he said, dropping a hand on to my shoulder. 'Until tomorrow then.

K/nig will drive you back to town.' Nebe opened the door and led the way down the stairs back to the front of the house. 'I'm sorry to hear about that problem with your wife. I could arrange to have her sent some PX if you wanted.'

'Don't bother,' I said quickly. The last thing I wanted was anyone from the Org turning up at my apartment in Berlin and asking Kirsten awkward questions she wouldn't know how to answer. 'She works in an American сafé and gets all the PX she needs.'

In the hallway we found K/nig playing with his dog.

'Women,' Nebe laughed. 'It was a woman who bought K/nig his dog, isn't that so, Helmut?'

'Yes, Herr General.'

Nebe bent down to tickle the dog's stomach. It rolled over and presented itself submissively to Nebe's fingers.

'And do you know why she bought him a dog?' I caught K/nig's embarrassed little crease of a smile, and I sensed that Nebe was about to crack a joke. 'To teach the man obedience.'

I laughed right along with the two of them. But after only a few days' closer acquaintance with K/nig I thought that Lotte Hartmann would as soon have taught her boyfriend to recite the Torah.

Chapter 31