A German Requiem

BERLIN, 1947

These days, if you are a German you spend your time in Purgatory before you die, in earthly suffering for all your country’s unpunished and unrepented sins, until the day when, with the aid of the prayers of the Powers – or three of them, anyway – Germany is finally purified.

For now we live in fear. Mostly it is fear of the Ivans, matched only by the almost universal dread of venereal disease, which has become something of an epidemic, although both afflictions are generally held to be synonymous.

1

It was a cold, beautiful day, the kind you can best appreciate with a fire to stoke and a dog to scratch. I had neither, but then there wasn’t any fuel about and I never much liked dogs. But thanks to the quilt I had wrapped around my legs I was warm, and I had just started to congratulate myself on being able to work from home – the sitting-room doubled as my office – when there was a knock at what passed for the front door.

I cursed and got off my couch.

‘This will take a minute,’ I shouted through the wood, ‘so don’t go away.’ I worked the key in the lock and started to pull at the big brass handle. ‘It helps if you push it from your side,’ I shouted again. I heard the scrape of shoes on the landing and then felt a pressure on the other side of the door. Finally it shuddered open.

He was a tall man of about sixty. With his high cheekbones, thin short snout, old-fashioned side-whiskers and angry expression, he reminded me of a mean old king baboon.

‘I think I must have pulled something,’ he grunted, rubbing his shoulder.

‘I’m sorry about that,’ I said, and stood aside to let him in. ‘There’s been quite a bit of subsidence in the building. The door needs rehanging, but of course you can’t get the tools.’ I showed him into the sitting-room. ‘Still, we’re not too badly off here. We’ve had some new glass, and the roof seems to keep out the rain. Sit down.’ I pointed to the only armchair and resumed my position on the couch.

The man put down his briefcase, took off his bowler hat and sat down with an exhausted sigh. He didn’t loosen his grey overcoat and I didn’t blame him for it.

‘I saw your little advertisement on a wall on the Kurfürstendamm,’ he explained.

‘You don’t say,’ I said, vaguely recalling the words I had used on a small square of card the previous week. Kirsten’s idea. With all the notices advertising life-partners and marriage-markets that covered the walls of Berlin’s derelict buildings, I had supposed that nobody would bother to read it. But she had been right after all.

‘My name is Novak,’ he said. ‘Dr Novak. I am an engineer. A process metallurgist, at a factory in Wernigerode. My work is concerned with the extraction and production of non-ferrous metals.’

‘Wernigerode,’ I said. ‘That’s in the Harz Mountains, isn’t it? In the Eastern Zone?’

He nodded. ‘I came to Berlin to deliver a series of lectures at the university. This morning I received a telegram at my hotel, the Mitropa —’

I frowned, trying to remember it.

‘It’s one of those bunker-hotels,’ said Novak. For a moment he seemed inclined to tell me about it, and then changed his mind. ‘The telegram was from my wife, urging me to cut short my trip and return home.’

‘Any particular reason?’

He handed me the telegram. ‘It says that my mother is unwell.’

I unfolded the paper, glanced at the typewritten message, and noted that it actually said she was dangerously ill.

‘I’m sorry to hear it.’

Dr Novak shook his head.

‘You don’t believe her?’

‘I don’t believe my wife ever sent this,’ he said. ‘My mother may indeed be old, but she is in remarkably good health. Only two days ago she was chopping wood. No, I suspect that this has been cooked up by the Russians, to get me back as quickly as possible.’

‘Why?’

‘There is a great shortage of scientists in the Soviet Union. I think that they intend to deport me to work in one of their factories.’

I shrugged. ‘Then why allow you to travel to Berlin in the first place?’

‘That would be to grant the Soviet Military Authority a degree of efficiency which it simply does not possess. My guess is that an order for my deportation has only just arrived from Moscow, and that the SMA wishes to get me back at the earliest opportunity.’

‘Have you telegraphed your wife? To have this confirmed?’

‘Yes. She replied only that I should come at once.’

‘So you want to know if the Ivans have got her.’

‘I’ve been to the military police here in Berlin,’ he said, ‘but —’

His deep sigh told me with what success.

‘No, they won’t help,’ I said. ‘You were right to come here.’

‘Can you help me, Herr Gunther?’

‘It means going into the Zone,’ I said, half to myself, as if I needed some persuasion, which I did. ‘To Potsdam. There’s someone I know I can bribe at the headquarters of the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany. It’ll cost you, and I don’t mean a couple of candy-bars.’

He nodded solemnly.

‘You wouldn’t happen to have any dollars, I suppose, Dr Novak?’

He shook his head.

‘Then there’s also the matter of my own fee.’

‘What would you suggest?’

I nodded at his briefcase. ‘What have you got?’

‘Just papers, I’m afraid.’

‘You must have something. Think. Perhaps something at your hotel.’

He lowered his head and uttered another sigh as he tried to recall a possession that might be of some value.

‘Look, Herr Doktor, have you asked yourself what you will do if it turns out your wife is being held by the Russians?’

‘Yes,’ he said gloomily, his eyes glazing over for a moment.

This was sufficiently articulate. Things did not look good for Frau Novak.

‘Wait a moment,’ he said, dipping his hand inside the breast of his coat, and coming up with a gold fountain-pen. ‘There’s this.’

He handed me the pen.

‘It’s a Parker. Eighteen carat.’

I quickly appraised its worth. ‘About fourteen hundred dollars on the black market,’ I said. ‘Yes, that’ll take care of Ivan. They love fountain-pens almost as much as they love watches.’ I raised my eyebrows suggestively.

‘I’m afraid I couldn’t part with my watch,’ said Novak. ‘It was a present — from my wife.’ He smiled thinly as he perceived the irony.

I nodded sympathetically and decided to move things along before guilt got the better of him.

‘Now, as to my own fee. You mentioned metallurgy. You wouldn’t happen to have access to a laboratory, would you?’

‘But of course.’

‘And a smelter?’

He nodded thoughtfully, and then more vigorously as the light dawned. ‘You want some coal, don’t you?’

‘Can you get some?’

‘How much do you want?’

‘Fifty kilos would be about right.’

‘Very well.’

‘Be back here in twenty-four hours,’ I told him. ‘I should have some information by then.’

Thirty minutes later, after leaving a note for my wife, I was out of the apartment and on my way to the railway station.

In late 1947 Berlin still resembled a colossal Acropolis of fallen masonry and ruined edifice, a vast and unequivocal megalith to the waste of war and the power of 75,000 tonnes of high explosive. Unparalleled was the destruction that had been rained on the capital of Hitler’s ambition: devastation on a Wagnerian scale with the Ring come full circle — the final illumination of that twilight of the gods.

In many parts of the city a street map would have been of little more use than a window-cleaner’s leather. Main roads meandered like rivers around high banks of debris. Footpaths wound precipitously over shifting mountains of treacherous rubble which sometimes, in warmer weather, yielded a clue unmistakable to the nostrils that something other than household furniture was buried there.

With compasses in short supply you needed a lot of nerve to find your way along facsimile streets on which only the fronts of shops and hotels remained standing unsteadily like some abandoned film-set; and you needed a good memory for the buildings where people still lived in damp cellars, or more precariously on the lower floors of apartment blocks from which a whole wall had been neatly removed, exposing all the rooms and life inside, like some giant doll’s house: there were few who risked the upper floors, not least because there were so few undamaged roofs and so many dangerous staircases.

Life amidst the wreckage of Germany was frequently as unsafe as it had been in “the last days of the war: a collapsing wall here, an unexploded bomb there. It was still a bit of a lottery.

At the railway station I bought what I hoped might just be a winning ticket.

2

That night, on the last train back to Berlin from Potsdam, I sat in a carriage by myself. I ought to have been more careful, only I was feeling pleased with myself for having successfully concluded the doctor’s case: but I was also tired, since this business had taken almost the whole day and a substantial part of the evening.

Not the least part of my time had been taken up in travel. Generally this took two or three times as long as it had done before the war; and what had once been a half-hour’s journey to Potsdam now took nearer two. I was closing my eyes for a nap when the train started to slow, and then juddered to a halt.

Several minutes passed before the carriage-door opened and a large and extremely smelly Russian soldier climbed aboard. He mumbled a greeting at me, to which I nodded politely. But almost immediately I braced myself as, swaying gently on his huge feet, he unslung his Mosin Nagant carbine and operated the bolt action. Instead of pointing it at me, he turned and fired his weapon out of the carriage window, and after a brief pause my lungs started to move again as I realized that he had been signalling to the driver.

The Russian burped, sat down heavily as the train started to move again, swept off his lambskin cap with the back of his filthy hand and, leaning back, closed his eyes.

I pulled a copy of the British-run Telegraf out of my coat-pocket. Keeping one eye on the Ivan, I pretended to read. Most of the news was about crime: rape and robbery in the Eastern Zone were as common as the cheap vodka which, as often as not, occasioned their commission. Sometimes it seemed as if Germany was still in the bloody grip of the Thirty Years’ War.

I knew just a handful of women who could not describe an incident in which they had been raped or molested by a Russian. And even if one makes an allowance for the fantasies of a few neurotics, there was still a staggering number of sex-related crimes. My wife knew several-girls who had been attacked only quite recently, on the eve of the thirtieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution. One of these girls, raped by no less than five Red Army soldiers “at a police station in Rangsdorff, and infected with syphilis as a result, tried to bring criminal charges, but found herself subjected to a forcible medical examination and charged with prostitution. But there were also some who said that the Ivans merely took by force that which German women were only too willing to sell to the British and the Americans.

Complaints to the Soviet Kommendatura that you had been robbed by Red Army soldiers were equally in vain. You were likely to be informed that ‘all the German people have is a gift from the people of the Soviet Union’. This was sufficient sanction for indiscriminate robbery throughout the Zone, and you were sometimes lucky if you survived to report the matter. The depredations of the Red Army and its many deserters made travel in the Zone only slightly less dangerous than a flight on the Hindenburg. Travellers on the Berlin-Magdeburg railway had been stripped naked and thrown off the train; and the road from Berlin to Leipzig was so dangerous that vehicles often drove in convoy: the Telegraf had reported a robbery in which four boxers, on their way to a fight in Leipzig, had been held up and robbed of everything except their lives. Most notorious of all were the seventy-five robberies committed by the Blue Limousine Gang, which had operated on the Berlin–Michendorf road, and which had included among its leaders the vice-president of the Soviet-controlled Potsdam police.

To people who were thinking of visiting the Eastern Zone, I said ‘don’t’; and then if they still wanted to go, I said ‘Don’t wear a wristwatch — the Ivans like to steal them; don’t wear anything but your oldest coat and shoes — the Ivans like quality; don’t argue or answer back — the Ivans don’t mind shooting you: if you must talk to them speak loudly of American fascists; and don’t read any newspaper except their own Taegliche Rundschau.’

This was all good advice and I would have done well to have taken it myself, for suddenly the Ivan in my carriage was on his feet and standing unsteadily over me.

‘Vi vihodeetye (are you getting off)?’ I asked him.

He blinked crapulously and then stared malevolently at me and my newspaper before snatching it from my hands.

He was a hill-tribesman type, a big stupid Chechen with almond-shaped black eyes, a gnarled jaw as broad as the steppes and a chest like an upturned church-bell: the kind of Ivan we made jokes about — how they didn’t know what lavatories were and how they put their food in the toilet bowls thinking that they were refrigerators (some of these stories were even true).

‘Lzhy (lies),’ he snarled, brandishing the paper in front of him, his open, drooling mouth showing great yellow kerbstones of teeth. Putting his boot on the seat beside me, he leaned closer. ‘Lganyo,’ he repeated in tones lower than the smell of sausage and beer which his breath carried to my helplessly flaring nostrils. He seemed to sense my disgust and rolled the idea of it around in his grizzled head like a boiled sweet. Dropping the Telegraf to the floor he held out his horny hand.

‘Ya hachoo padarok,’ he said, and then slowly in German, ‘… I want present.’

I grinned at him, nodding like an idiot, and realized that I was going to have to kill him or be killed myself. ‘Padarok,’ I repeated. ‘Padarok.’

I stood up slowly and, still grinning and nodding, gently pulled back the sleeve of my left arm to reveal my bare wrist. The Ivan was grinning too by now, thinking he was on to a good thing. I shrugged.

‘Oo menya nyet chasov,’ I said, explaining that I didn’t have a watch to give him.

‘Shto oo vas yest (what have you got)?’

‘Nichto,’ I said, shaking my head and inviting him to search my coat pockets. ‘Nothing.’

‘Shto oo vas yest?’ he said again, more loudly this time.

It was, I reflected, like me talking to poor Dr Novak, whose wife I had been able to confirm was indeed being held by the MVD. Trying to discover what he could trade.

‘Nichto,’ I repeated.

The grin disappeared from the Ivan’s face. He spat on the carriage floor.

‘Vroon (liar),’ he growled, and pushed me on the arm.

I shook my head and told him that I wasn’t lying.

He reached to push me again, only this time he checked his hand and took hold of the sleeve with his dirty finger and thumb. ‘Doraga (expensive),’ he said, appreciatively, feeling the material.

I shook my head, but the coat was black cashmere — the sort of coat I had no business wearing in the Zone — and it was no use arguing: the Ivan was already unbuckling his belt.

‘Ya hachoo vashi koyt,’ he said, removing his own well-patched greatcoat. Then, stepping to the other side of the carriage, he flung open the door and informed me that either I could hand over the coat or he would throw me off the train.

I had no doubt that he would throw me out whether I gave him my coat or not. It was my turn to spit.

‘Nu, nyelzya (nothing doing),’ I said. ‘You want this coat? You come and get it, you stupid fucking svinya, you ugly, dumb kryestyan’in. Come on, take it from me, you drunken bastard.’

The Ivan snarled angrily and picked up his carbine from the seat where he had left it. That was his first mistake. Having seen him signal to the engine-driver by firing his weapon out of the window, I knew that there could not be a live cartridge in the breech. It was a deductive process he made only a moment behind me, but by the time he was working the bolt action a second time I had buried the toe of my boot in his groin.

The carbine clattered to the floor as the Ivan doubled over painfully, and with one hand reached between his legs: with the other he lashed out hard, catching me an agonizing blow on the thigh that left my leg feeling as dead as mutton.

As he straightened up again I swung with my right, and found my fist caught firmly in his big paw. He snatched at my throat and I headbutted him full in the face, which made him release my fist as he instinctively cupped his turnip-sized nose. I swung again and this time he ducked and seized me by the coat lapels. That was his second mistake, but for a brief, puzzled half-second I did not realize it. Unaccountably he cried out and staggered back from me, his hands raised in the air in front of him like a scrubbed-up surgeon, his lacerated fingertips pouring with blood. It was only then that I remembered the razor-blades I had sewn under my lapels many months before, for just this eventuality.

My flying tackle carried him crashing to the floor and half a torso’s length beyond the open door of the fast-moving train. Lying on his bucking legs I struggled to prevent the Ivan pulling himself back into the carriage. Hands that were sticky with blood clawed at my face and then fastened desperately round my neck. His grip tightened and I heard the air gurgle from my own throat like the sound of an espresso-machine.

I punched him hard under the chin, not once but several times, and then pressed the heel of my hand against it as I sought to push him back into the racing night air. The skin on my forehead tightened as I gasped for breath.

A terrible roaring filled my ears, as if a grenade had burst directly in front of my face, and, for a second his fingers seemed to loosen. I lunged at his head and connected with the empty space that was now mercifully signalled by an abruptly terminated stump of bloody human vertebra. A tree, or perhaps a telegraph pole, had neatly decapitated him.

My chest a heaving sack of rabbits, I collapsed back into the carriage, too exhausted to yield to the wave of nausea that was beginning to overtake me. But after only a few seconds more I could no longer resist it and summoned forward by the sudden contraction of my stomach, I vomited copiously over the dead soldier’s body.

It was several minutes before I felt strong enough to tip the corpse out of the door, with the carbine quickly following. I picked the Ivan’s malodorous greatcoat off the seat to throw it out as well, but the weight of it made me hesitate. Searching the pockets I found a Czechoslovakian-made .38 automatic, a handful of wristwatches — probably all stolen — and a half-empty bottle of Moscowskaya. After deciding to keep the gun and the watches, I uncorked the vodka, wiped the neck, and raised the bottle to the freezing night-sky.

‘Alla rasi bo sun (God save you),’ I said, and swallowed a generous mouthful. Then I flung the bottle and the greatcoat off the train and closed the door.

Back at the railway station snow floated in the air like fragments of lint and collected in small ski-slopes in the angle between the station wall and the road. It was colder than it had been all week and the sky was heavy with the threat of something worse. A fog lay on the white streets like cigar smoke drifting across a well starched tablecloth. Close by, a streetlight burned with no great intensity, but it was still bright enough to light up my face for the scrutiny of a British soldier staggering home with several bottles of beer in each hand. The bemused grin of intoxication on his face changed to something more circumspect as he caught sight of me, and he swore with what sounded like fright.

I limped quickly past him and heard the sound of a bottle breaking on the road as it slipped from nervous fingers. It suddenly occurred to me that my hands and face were covered with the Ivan’s blood, not to mention my own. I must have looked like Julius Caesar’s last toga.

Ducking into a nearby alley I washed myself with some snow. It seemed to remove not only the blood but the skin as well, and probably left my face looking every bit as red as before. My icy toilette completed, I walked on, as smartly as I was able, and reached home without further adventure.

It had gone midnight by the time I shouldered open my front door — at least it was easier getting in than out. Expecting my wife to be in bed, I was not surprised to find the apartment in darkness, but when I went into the bedroom I saw that she was not there.

I emptied my pockets and prepared for bed.

Laid out on the dressing-table, the Ivan’s watches — a Rolex, a Mickey Mouse, a gold Patek and a Doxas — were all working and adjusted to within a minute or two of each other. But the sight of so much accurate time-keeping seemed only to underline Kirsten’s lateness. I might have been concerned for her but for the suspicion I held as to where she was and what she was doing, and the fact that I was worn through to my tripe.

My hands trembling with fatigue, my cortex aching as if I had been pounded with a meat-tenderizer, I crawled to bed with no more spirit than if I had been driven from among men to eat grass like an ox.

3

I awoke to the sound of a distant explosion. They were always dynamiting dangerous ruins. A wolf’s howl of wind whipped against the window and I pressed myself closer to Kirsten’s warm body while my mind slowly decoded the clues that led me back into the dark labyrinth of doubt: the scent on her neck, the cigarette smoke sticking to her hair.

I had not heard her come to bed.

Gradually a duet of pain between my right leg and my head began to make itself felt, and closing my eyes again I groaned and rolled wearily on to my back, remembering the awful events of the previous night. I had killed a man. Worst of all I had killed a Russian soldier. That I had acted in self-defence would, I knew, be a matter of very little consequence to a Soviet appointed court. There was only one penalty for killing soldiers of the Red Army.

Now I asked myself how many people might have seen me walking from Potsdamer Railway Station with the hands and face of a South American headhunter. I resolved that, for several months at least, it might be better if I were to stay out of the Eastern Zone. But staring at the bomb-damaged ceiling of the bedroom I was reminded of the possibility that the Zone might choose to come to me: there was Berlin, an open patch of lathing on an otherwise immaculate expanse of plasterwork, while in the corner of the bedroom was the bag of black-market builder’s gypsum with which I was one day intending to cover it over. There were few people, myself included, who did not believe that Stalin was intent on a similar mission to cover over the small bare patch of freedom that was Berlin.

I rose from my side of the bed, washed at the ewer, dressed, and went into the kitchen to find some breakfast.

On the table were several grocery items that had not been there the night before: coffee, butter, a tin of condensed milk and a couple of bars of chocolate — all from the Post Exchange, or PX, the only shops with anything in them, and shops that were restricted to American servicemen. Rationing meant that the German shops were emptied almost as soon as the supplies came in.

Any food was welcome: with cards totalling less than 3,500 calories a day between Kirsten and me, we often went hungry — I had lost more than fifteen kilos since the end of the war. At the same time I had my doubts about Kirsten’s method of obtaining these extra supplies. But for the moment I put away my suspicions and fried a few potatoes with ersatz coffee-grounds to give them some taste.

Summoned by the smell of cooking Kirsten appeared in the kitchen doorway.

‘Enough there for two?’ she asked.

‘Of course,’ I said, and set a plate in front of her.

Now she noticed the bruise on my face. ‘My god, Bernie, what the hell happened to you?’

‘I had a run-in with an Ivan last night.’ I let her touch my face and demonstrate her concern for a brief moment before sitting down to eat my breakfast. ‘Bastard tried to rob me. We slugged it out for a minute and then he took off. I think he must have had a busy evening. He left some watches behind.’ I wasn’t going to tell her that he was dead. There was no sense in us both feeling anxious.

‘I saw them. They look nice. Must be a couple of thousand dollars’ worth there.’

‘I’ll go up to the Reichstag this morning and see if I can’t find some Ivans to buy them.’

‘Be careful he doesn’t come there looking for you.’

‘Don’t worry. I’ll be all right.’ I forked some potatoes into my mouth, picked up the tin of American coffee and stared at it impassively. ‘A bit late last night, weren’t you?’

‘You were sleeping like a baby when I got home.’ Kirsten checked her hair with the flat of her hand and added, ‘We were very busy yesterday. One of the Yanks took the place over for his birthday party.’

‘I see.’

My wife was a schoolteacher, but worked as a waitress at an American bar in Zehlendorf which was open to American servicemen only. Underneath the overcoat which the cold obliged her to wear about our apartment, she was already dressed in the red chintz frock arid tiny frilled apron that was her uniform.

I weighed the coffee in my hand. ‘Did you steal this lot?’

She nodded, avoiding my eye.

‘I don’t know how you get away with it,’ I said. ‘Don’t they bother to search any of you? Don’t they notice a shortage in the store-room?’

She laughed. ‘You’ve no idea how much food there is in that place. Those Yanks are on over 4,000 calories a day. A GI eats your monthly meat ration in just one night, and still has room for ice-cream.’ She finished her breakfast and produced a packet of Lucky Strike from her coat pocket. ‘Want one?’

‘Did you steal those as well?’ But I took one anyway and bowed my head to the match she was striking.

‘Always the detective,’ she muttered, adding, rather more irritatedly, ‘As a matter of fact these were a present, from one of the Yanks. Some of them are just boys, you know. They can be very kind.’

‘I’ll bet they can,’ I heard myself growl.

‘They like to talk, that’s all.’

‘I’m sure your English must be improving.’ I smiled broadly to defuse any sarcasm that was in my voice. This was not the time. Not yet anyway. I wondered if she would say anything about the bottle of Chanel that I had recently found hidden in one of her drawers. But she did not mention it.

Long after Kirsten had gone to the snack bar there was a knock at the door. Still nervous about the death of the Ivan I put his automatic in my jacket pocket before going to answer it.

‘Who’s there?’

‘Dr Novak.’

Our business was swiftly concluded. I explained that my informer from the headquarters of the GSOV had confirmed with one telephone call on the landline to the police in Magdeburg, which was the nearest city in the Zone to Wernigerode, that Frau Novak was indeed being held in ‘protective custody’ by the MVD. Upon Novak’s return home both he and his wife were to be deported immediately for ‘work vital to the interests of the peoples of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics’ to the city of Kharkov in the Ukraine.

Novak nodded grimly. ‘That would follow,’ he sighed. ‘Most of their metallurgical research is centred there.’

‘What will you do now?’ I asked.

He shook his head with such a look of despondency that I felt quite sorry for him. But not as sorry as I felt for Frau Novak. She was stuck.

‘Well, you know where to find me if I can be of any further service to you.’

Novak nodded at the bag of coal I had helped him carry up from his taxi and said, ‘From the look of your face, I should imagine that you earned that coal.’

‘Let’s just say that burning it all at once wouldn’t make this room half as hot.’ I paused. ‘It’s none of my business Dr Novak, but will you go back?’

‘You’re right, it’s none of your business.’

I wished him luck anyway, and when he was gone carried a shovelful of coal into the sitting-room, and with a care that was only disturbed by my growing anticipation of being once more warm in my home, I built and lit a fire in the stove.

I spent a pleasant morning laid up on the couch, and was almost inclined to stay at home for the rest of the day. But in the afternoon I found a walking-stick in the cupboard and limped up to the Kurfürstendamm where, after queuing for at least half an hour, I caught a tram eastwards.

‘Black market,’ shouted the conductor when we came within sight of the old ruined Reichstag, and the tram emptied itself.

No German, however respectable, considered himself to be above a little black-marketeering now and again, and with an average weekly income of about 200 marks — enough to buy a packet of cigarettes — even legitimate businesses had plenty of occasions to rely on black-market commodities to pay employees. People used their virtually useless Reichsmarks only to pay the rent and to buy their miserable ration allowances. For the student of classical economics, Berlin presented the perfect model of a business cycle that was determined by greed and need.

In front of the blackened Reichstag on a field the size of a football pitch as many as a thousand people were standing about in little knots of conspiracy, holding what they had come to sell in front of them, like passports at a busy frontier: packets of saccharine, cigarettes, sewing-machine needles, coffee, ration coupons (mostly forged), chocolate and condoms. Others wandered around, glancing with deliberate disdain at the items held up for inspection, and searching for whatever it was they had come to buy. There was nothing that couldn’t be bought here: anything from the title-deeds to some bombed-out property to a fake denazification certificate guaranteeing the bearer to be free of Nazi ‘infection’ and therefore employable in some capacity that was subject to Allied control, be it orchestra conductor or road-sweeper.

But it wasn’t just Germans who came to trade. Far from it. The French came to buy jewellery for their girlfriends back home, and the British to buy cameras for their seaside holidays. The Americans bought antiques that had been expertly faked in one of the many workshops off Savignyplatz. And the Ivans came to spend their months of backpay on watches; or so I hoped.

I took up a position next to a man on crutches whose tin leg stuck out of the top of the haversack he was carrying on his back. I held up my watches by their straps. After a while I nodded amicably at my one-legged neighbour who apparently had nothing which he could display, and asked him what he was selling.

He jerked the back of his head at his haversack. ‘My leg,’ he said without any trace of regret.

‘That’s too bad.’

His face registered quiet resignation. Then he looked at my watches. ‘Nice,’ he said. ‘There was an Ivan round here about fifteen minutes ago who was looking for a good watch. For to per cent I’ll see if I can find him for you.’

I tried to think how long I might have to stand there in the cold before making a sale. ‘Five,’ I heard myself say. ‘If he buys.’

The man nodded, and lurched off, a moving tripod, in the direction of the Kroll Opera House. Ten minutes later he was back, breathing heavily and accompanied by not one but two Russian soldiers who, after a great deal of argument, bought the Mickey Mouse and the gold Patek for $1,700.

When they had gone I peeled nine of the greasy bills off the wad I had taken from the Ivans and handed them over.

‘Maybe you can hang on to that leg of yours now.’

‘Maybe,’ he said with a sniff, but later on I saw him sell it for five cartons of Winston.

I had no more luck that afternoon, and having fastened the two remaining watches to my wrists, I decided to go home. But passing close to the ghostly fabric of the Reichstag, with its bricked-up windows and its precarious-looking dome, my mind was changed by one particular piece of graffiti that was daubed there, reproducing itself on the lining of my stomach: ‘What our women do makes a German weep, and a GI come in his pants.’

The train to Zehlendorf and the American sector of Berlin dropped me only a short way south of Kronprinzenallee and Johnny’s American Bar where Kirsten worked, less than a kilometre from US Military Headquarters.

It was dark by the time I found Johnny’s, a bright, noisy place with steamed-up windows, and several jeeps parked in front. A sign above the cheap-looking entrance declared that the bar was only open to First Three Graders, whatever they were. Outside the door was an old man with a stoop like an igloo — one of the city’s many thousands of tip-collectors who made a living from picking up cigarette-ends: like prostitutes each tip-collector had his own beat, with the pavements outside American bars and clubs the most coveted of all, where on a good day a man or woman could recover as many as a hundred butts a day: enough for about ten or fifteen whole cigarettes, and worth a total of about five dollars.

‘Hey, uncle,’ I said to him, ‘want to earn yourself four Winston?’ I took out the packet I had bought at the Reichstag and tapped four into the palm of my hand. The man’s rheumy eyes travelled eagerly from the cigarettes to my face.

‘What’s the job?’

‘Two now, two when you come and tell me when this lady comes out of here.’ I gave him the photograph of Kirsten I kept in my wallet.

‘Very attractive piece,’ he leered.

‘Never mind that.’ I jerked my thumb at a dirty-looking Café further up Kronprinzenallee, in the direction of the US Military HQ. ‘See that Café?’ He nodded. ‘I’ll be waiting there.’

The tip-collector saluted with his finger and quickly trousering the photograph and the two Winston, he started to turn back to scan his flagstones. But I held him by the grubby handkerchief he wore tied round his stubbly throat. ‘Don’t forget now, will you?’ I said, twisting it tight. ‘This looks like a good beat. So I’ll know where to go looking if you don’t remember to come and tell me. Got that?’

The old man seemed to sense my anxiety. He grinned horribly. ‘She might have forgotten you, sir, but you can rest assured that I won’t.’ His face, a garage floor of shiny spots and oily patches, reddened as for a moment I tightened my grip.

‘See that you don’t,’ I said and let him go, feeling a certain amount of guilt for handling him so roughly. I handed him another cigarette by way of compensation and, discounting his exaggerated endorsements of my own good character, I walked up the street to the dingy Café.

For what felt like hours, but wasn’t quite two, I sat silently nursing a large and inferior-tasting brandy, smoking several cigarettes and listening to the voices around me. When the tip-collector came to fetch me his scrofulous features wore a triumphant grin. I followed him outside and back into the street.

‘The lady, sir,’ he said, pointing urgently towards the railway station. ‘She went that way.’ He paused as I paid him the balance of his fee, and then added, ‘With her schätzi. A captain, I think. Anyway, a handsome young fellow, whoever he is.’

I didn’t stay to hear any more and walked as briskly as I was able in the direction which he had indicated.

I soon caught sight of Kirsten and the American officer who accompanied her, his arm wrapped around her shoulders. I followed them at a distance, the full moon affording me a clear view of their leisurely progress, until they came to a bombed-out apartment block, with six layers of flaky-pastry floors collapsed one on top of the other. They disappeared inside. Should I go in after them, I asked myself. Did I need to see everything?

Bitter bile percolated up from my liver to break down the fatty doubt that lay heavy in my gut.

Like mosquitoes I heard them before I saw them. Their English was more fluent than my understanding, but she seemed to be explaining that she could not be late home two nights in a row. A cloud drifted across the moon, darkening the landscape, and I crept behind an enormous pile of scree, where I thought I might get a better view. When the cloud sailed on, and the moonlight shone undiminished through the bare rafters of the roof, I had a clear sight of them, silent now. For a moment they were a facsimile of innocence as she knelt before him while he laid his hands upon her head as if delivering holy benediction. I puzzled as to why Kirsten’s head should be rocking on her shoulders, but when he groaned my understanding of what was happening was as swift as the feeling of emptiness which accompanied it.

I stole silently away and drank myself stupid.

4

I spent the night on the couch, an occurrence which Kirsten, asleep in bed by the time I finally staggered home, would have wrongly attributed to the drink on my breath. I feigned sleep until I heard her leave the apartment, although I could not escape her kissing me on the forehead before she went. She was whistling as she stepped down the stairs and into the street. I got up and watched her from the window as she walked north up Fasanenstrasse towards Zoo Station and her train to Zehlendorf.

When I lost sight of her I set about trying to salvage some remnant of myself with which I could face the day. My head throbbed like an excited Dobermann, but after a wash with an ice-cold flannel, a couple of cups of the captain’s coffee and a cigarette, I started to feel a little better. Still, I was much too preoccupied with the memory of Kirsten frenching the American captain and thoughts of the harm I could bring to him to even remember the harm I had already caused a soldier of the Red Army, and I was not as careful in answering a knock at the door as I should have been.

The Russian was short and yet he stood taller than the tallest man in the Red Army, thanks to the three gold stars and light-blue braid border on his greatcoat’s silver epaulettes identifying him as a palkovnik, a colonel, of the MVD — the Soviet secret political police.

‘Herr Gunther?’ he asked politely.

I nodded sullenly, angry with myself for not having been more careful. I wondered where I had left the dead Ivan’s gun, and if I dared to make a break for it. Or would he have men waiting at the foot of the stairs for just such an eventuality?

The officer took off his cap, clicked his heels like a Prussian and head-butted the air. ‘Palkovnik Poroshin, at your service. May I come in?’ He did not wait for an answer. He wasn’t the type who was used to waiting for anything other than his own wind.

No more than about thirty years old, the colonel wore his hair long for a soldier. Pushing it clear of his pale blue eyes and back over his narrow head, he rendered the veneer of a smile as he turned to face me in my sitting-room. He was enjoying my discomfort.

‘It is Herr Bernhard Gunther, is it not? I have to be sure.’

Knowing my name like that was a bit of a surprise. And so was the handsome gold cigarette-case which he flicked open in front of me. The tan on the ends of his cadaverous fingers suggested that he didn’t bother with selling cigarettes as much as smoking them. And the MVD didn’t normally bother to share a smoke with a man they were about to arrest. So I took one and owned up to my name.

He fed a cigarette into his lantern jaw and produced a matching Dunhill to light us both.

And you are a — he winced as the smoke billowed into his eye ‘— sh’pek … what is the German word -?’

‘Private detective,’ I said, translating automatically and regretting my alacrity almost at the very same moment.

Poroshin’s eyebrows lifted on his high forehead. ‘Well, well,’ he remarked with a quiet surprise that turned quickly first to interest and then sadistic pleasure, ‘you speak Russian.’

I shrugged. ‘A little.’

‘But that is not a common word. Not for someone who only speaks a little Russian. Sh’pek is also the Russian word for salted pig fat. Did you know that as well?’

‘No,’ I said. But as a Soviet prisoner of war I had eaten enough of it smeared on coarse black bread to know it only too well. Did he guess that?

‘Nye shooti (seriously)?’ he grinned. ‘I bet you do. Just as I’d bet you know that I’m MVD, eh?’ Now he laughed out loud. ‘Do you see how good at my job I am? I haven’t been talking to you for five minutes and already I’m able to say that you are keen to conceal that you speak good Russian. But why?’

‘Why don’t you tell me what you want, Colonel?’

‘Come now,’ he said. ‘As an Intelligence officer it is only natural for me to wonder why. You of all people must understand that kind of curiosity, yes?’ Smoke trailed from his shark’s fin of a nose as he pursed his lips in a rictus of apology.

‘It doesn’t do for Germans to be too curious,’ I said. ‘Not these days.’

He shrugged and wandered over to my desk and looked at the two watches that were lying on it. ‘Perhaps,’ he murmured thoughtfully.

I hoped that he wouldn’t presume to open the drawer where I now remembered I had put the dead Ivan’s automatic. Trying to steer him back to whatever it was he had wanted to see me about, I said: ‘Isn’t it true that all private detective and information agencies are forbidden in your zone?’

At last he came away from the desk.

‘Vyerno (quite right), Herr Gunther. And that is because such institutions serve no purpose in a democracy —’

Poroshin tut-tutted as I started to interrupt.

‘No, please don’t say it, Herr Gunther. You were going to say that the Soviet Union can hardly be called a democracy. But if you did, the Comrade Chairman might hear you and send terrible men like me to kidnap you and your wife.

‘Of course we both know that the only people making a living in this city now are the prostitutes, the black-marketeers and the spies. There will always be prostitutes, and the black-marketeers will last only for as long as the German currency remains unreformed. That leaves spying. That’s the new profession to be in, Herr Gunther. You should forget about being a private detective when there are so many new opportunities for people like yourself.’

‘That sounds almost as if you are offering me a job, Colonel.’

He smiled wryly. ‘Not a bad idea at that. But it isn’t why I came.’ He looked behind him at the armchair. ‘May I sit down?’

‘Be my guest. I’m afraid I can’t offer you much besides coffee.’

‘Thank you, no. I find it a rather excitable drink.’

I arranged myself on the couch and waited for him to start.

‘There is a mutual friend of ours, Emil Becker, who has got himself into the devil’s kitchen, as you say.’

‘Becker?’ I thought for a moment and recalled a face from the Russian offensive of 1941; and before that, in the Reichskriminal police — the Kripo. ‘I haven’t seen him in a long time. I wouldn’t call him a friend exactly, but what’s he done? What are you holding him for?’

Poroshin shook his head. ‘You misunderstand. He isn’t in trouble with us, but with the Americans. To be precise, their Vienna military police.’

‘So if you haven’t got him, and the Americans have, he must have actually committed a crime.’

Poroshin ignored my sarcasm. ‘He has been charged with the murder of an American officer, an army captain.’

‘Well, we’ve all felt like doing that at some time.’ I shook my head at Poroshin’s questioning look. ‘No, it doesn’t matter.’

‘What matters here is that Becker did not kill this American,’ he said firmly. ‘He is innocent. Nevertheless, the Americans have a good case, and he will certainly hang if someone does not help him.

‘I don’t see what I can do.’

‘He wishes to engage you in your capacity as a private detective, naturally. To prove him innocent. For this he will pay you generously. Win or lose, the sum of $5,000.’

I heard myself whistle. ‘That’s a lot of money.’

‘Half to be paid now, in gold. The balance payable upon your arrival in Vienna.’

‘And what’s your interest in all this, Colonel?’

He flexed his neck across the tight collar of his immaculate tunic. ‘As I said, Becker is a friend.’

‘Do you mind explaining how?’

‘He saved my life, Herr Gunther. I must do whatever I can to help him. But it would be politically difficult for me to assist him officially, you understand.’

‘How do you come to be so familiar with Becker’s wishes in this affair? I can hardly imagine that he telephones you from an American gaol.’

‘He has a lawyer, of course. It was Becker’s lawyer who asked me to try and find you; and to ask you to help your old comrade.’

‘He was never that. It’s true we once worked together. But “old comrades”, no.’

Poroshin shrugged. ‘As you wish.’

‘Five thousand dollars. Where does Becker get $5,000?’

‘He is resourceful man.’

‘That’s one word for it. What’s he doing now?’

‘He runs an import and export business, here and in Vienna.’

‘A nice enough euphemism. Black-market, I suppose.’

Poroshin nodded apologetically and offered me another cigarette from his gold case. I smoked it with slow deliberation, wondering what small percentage of all this might be on the level.

‘Well, what do you say?’

‘I can’t do it,’ I said eventually. ‘I’ll give you the polite reason first.’

I stood up and went to the window. In the street below stood a shiny new BMW with a Russian pennant on the bonnet; leaning on it was a big, tough-looking Red Army soldier.

‘Colonel Poroshin, it wouldn’t have escaped your attention that it’s not getting any easier to get in or out of this city. After all, you have Berlin surrounded with half the Red Army. But quite apart from the ordinary travel restrictions affecting Germans, things do seem to have got quite a lot worse during the last few weeks, even for your so-called allies. And with so many displaced persons trying to enter Austria illegally, the Austrians are quite happy that journeys there should be discouraged. All right. That’s the polite reason.’

‘But none of this is a problem,’ Poroshin said smoothly. ‘For an old friend like Emil I will gladly pull a few wires. Rail warrants, a pink pass, tickets — it can all be easily fixed. You can trust me to handle all the necessary arrangements.’

‘Well, I suppose that’s the second reason why I’m not going to do it. The less polite reason. I don’t trust you, Colonel. Why should I? You talk about pulling a few strings to help Emil. But you could just as easily pull them the other way. Things are rather fickle on your side of the fence. I know a man who came back from the war to find Communist Party officials living in his house — officials for whom nothing was simpler than to pull a few strings in order to ensure his committal to a lunatic asylum just so they could keep the house.

‘And, only a month or two ago, I left a couple of friends drinking in a bar in your sector of Berlin, only to learn later that minutes after I had gone Soviet forces surrounded the place and pressed everyone in the bar into a couple of weeks of forced labour.

‘So I repeat, Colonel: I don’t trust you and see no reason why I should. For all I know I might be arrested the minute I step into your sector.’

Poroshin laughed out loud. ‘But why? Why should you be arrested?’

‘I never noticed that you need much of a reason.’ I shrugged exasperatedly. ‘Maybe because I’m a private detective. For the MVD that’s as good as being an American spy. I believe that the old concentration camp at Sachsenhausen which your people took over from the Nazis is now full of Germans who’ve been accused of spying for the Americans.’

‘If you will permit me one small arrogance, Herr Gunther: do you seriously believe that I, an MVD palkovnik, would consider that the matter of your deception and arrest was more important than the affairs of the Allied Control Council?’

‘You’re a member of the Kommendatura?’ I was surprised.

‘I have the honour to be Intelligence officer to the Soviet Deputy Military Governor. You may inquire at the council headquarters in Elsholzstrasse if you don’t believe me.’ He paused, waiting for some reaction from me. ‘Come now. What do you say?’

When I still said nothing, he sighed and shook his head. ‘I’ll never understand you Germans.’

‘You speak the language well enough. Don’t forget, Marx was a German.’

‘Yes, but he was also a Jew. Your countrymen spent twelve years trying to make those two circumstances mutually exclusive. That’s one of the things I can’t understand. Change your mind?’

I shook my head.

‘Very well.’

The Colonel showed no sign of being irritated at my refusal. He looked at his watch and then stood up.

‘I must be going,’ he said. Taking out a notebook he started to write on a piece of paper. ‘If you do change your mind you can reach me at this number in Karlshorst. That’s 55-16-44. Ask for General Kaverntsev’s Special Security Section. And there’s my home telephone number as well: 05-00-19.’

Poroshin smiled and nodded at the note as I took it from him. ‘If you should be arrested by the Americans, I wouldn’t let them see that if I were you. They’ll probably think you’re a spy.’

He was still laughing about that as he went down the stairs.

5

For those who had believed in the Fatherland, it was not the defeat which gave the lie to that patriarchal view of society, but the rebuilding. And with the example of Berlin, ruined by the vanity of men, could be learned the lesson that when a war has been fought, when the soldiers are dead and the walls are destroyed, a city consists of its women.

I walked towards a grey granite canyon which might have concealed a heavily worked mine, from where a short train of brick-laden trucks was even now emerging under the supervision of a group of rubble-women. On the side of one of their trucks was chalked ‘No time for love’. You didn’t need reminding in view of their dusty faces and wrestlers’ bodies. But they had hearts as big as their biceps.

Smiling through their catcalls and whistles of derision — where were my hands now that the city needed to be reconstructed? — and waving my walking-stick like a sick-note, I carried on until I came to Pestalozzistrasse where Friedrich Korsch (an old friend from my days with Kripo, and now a Kommissar with Berlin’s Communist-dominated police force) had told me that I could find Emil Becker’s wife.

Number 21 was a damaged five-storey building of basin-flats with paper windows, and inside the front doorway, smelling heavily of burnt toast, was a sign which warned ‘Unsafe Staircase! In use at visitor’s own risk’. Fortunately for me, the names and apartment-numbers that were chalked on the wall inside the door told me that Frau Becker lived on the ground floor.

I walked down a dark, dank corridor to her door. Between it and the landing washbasin an old woman was picking large chunks of fungus off the damp wall and collecting them in a cardboard box.

‘Are you from the Red Cross?’ she asked.

I told her I wasn’t, knocked at the door and waited.

She smiled. ‘It’s all right, you know. We’re really quite well-off here.’ There was a quiet insanity in her voice.

I knocked again, more loudly this time, and heard a muffled sound, and then bolts being drawn on the other side of the door.

‘We don’t go hungry,’ said the old woman. ‘The Lord provides.’ She pointed at her shards of fungus in the box. ‘Look. There are even fresh mushrooms growing here.’ And so saying she pulled a piece of fungus from the wall and ate it.

When the door finally opened, I was momentarily unable to speak from disgust. Frau Becker, catching sight of the old woman, brushed me aside and stepped smartly into the corridor, where with many loud insults she shooed the old woman away.

‘Filthy old baggage,’ she muttered. ‘She’s always coming into this building and eating that mould. The woman’s mad. A complete spinner.’

‘Something she ate no doubt,’ I said queasily.

Frau Becker fixed me with the awl of her bespectacled eye. ‘Now who are you and what do you want?’ she asked brusquely.

‘My name is Bernhard Gunther —’ I started.

‘Heard of you,’ she snapped. ‘You’re with Kripo.’

‘I was.’

‘You’d better come in.’ She followed me into the icy-cold sitting-room, slammed the door shut and closed the bolts as if in mortal fear of something. Noticing how this took me aback, she added by way of explanation: ‘Can’t be too careful these days.’

‘No indeed.’

I looked around at the loathsome walls, the threadbare carpet and the old furniture. It wasn’t much but it was neatly kept. There was little she could have done about the damp.

‘Charlottenburg’s not too badly off,’ I offered by way of mitigation, ‘in comparison with some areas.’

‘Maybe so,’ she said, ‘but I can tell you, if you’d come after dark and knocked till kingdom come, I wouldn’t have answered. We get all sorts of rats round here at night.’ So saying she picked up a large sheet of plywood from off the couch, and for a moment in the gloom of the place I thought she was working on a jigsaw-puzzle. Then I saw the numerous packets of Olleschau cigarette papers, the bags of butts, the piles of salvaged tobacco, and the serried ranks of re-rolls.

I sat down on the couch, took out my Winston and offered her one.

‘Thanks,’ she said grudgingly, and threaded the cigarette behind her ear. ‘I’ll smoke it later.’ But I didn’t doubt that she would sell it with the rest.

‘What’s the going rate for one of those re-cycled nails?’

‘About 5 marks,’ she said. ‘I pay my collectors five US for 150 tips. That rolls about twenty good ones. Sell them for about ten US. What, are you writing an article about it for the Tagesspiegel? Spare me the Victor Gollancz-Save Berlin routine, Herr Gunther. You’re here about that lousy husband of mine, aren’t you? Well, I haven’t seen him in a long while. And I hope I never clap eyes on him again. I expect you know he’s in a Viennese gaol, do you?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘You may as well know that when the American MPs came to tell me he’d been arrested, I was glad. I could forgive him for deserting me, but not our son.’

There was no telling if Frau Becker had turned witch before or after her husband had jumped his wife’s bail. But on first acquaintance she wasn’t the type to have persuaded me that her absconding husband had made the wrong choice. She had a bitter mouth, prominent lower jaw and small sharp teeth. No sooner had I explained the purpose of my visit than she started to chew the air around my ears. It cost me the rest of my cigarettes to placate her enough to answer my questions.

‘Exactly what happened? Can you tell me?’

‘The MPs said that he shot and killed an American army captain in Vienna. They caught him red-handed apparently. That’s all I was told.’

‘What about this Colonel Poroshin? Do you know anything about him?’

‘You want to know if you can trust him or not. That’s what you want to know. Well, he’s an Ivan,’ she sneered. ‘That’s all you should need to know.’ She shook her head and added, impatiently: ‘Oh, they knew each other here in Berlin because of one of Emil’s rackets. Penicillin, I think it was. Emil said that Poroshin caught syphilis off some girl he was keen on. More like the other way round, I thought. Anyway this was the worst kind of syphilis: the sort that makes you swell up. Salvarsan didn’t seem to work. Emil got them some penicillin. Well, you know how rare that is, the good stuff I mean. That could be one reason why Poroshin’s trying to help Emil. They’re all the same, these Russians. It’s not just their brains that are in their balls. It’s their hearts too. Poroshin’s gratitude comes straight from his scrotum.’

‘And another reason?’

Her brow darkened.

‘You said that could be one reason.’

‘Well of course. It can’t simply be a matter of pulling Poroshin’s tail out of the fire, can it? I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Emil had been spying for him.’

‘Got any evidence for that? Did he see much of Poroshin when he was still here in Berlin?’

‘I can’t say he did, I can’t say he didn’t.’

‘But he’s not charged with anything besides murder. He’s not been charged with spying.’

‘What would be the point? They’ve got enough to hang him as it is.’

‘That’s not the way it works. If he had been spying, they would have wanted to know everything. Those American MPs would have asked you a lot of questions about your husband’s associates. Did they?’

She shrugged. ‘Not that I can remember.’

‘If there was any suspicion of spying they would have investigated it, if only to find out what sort of information he might have got hold of. Did they search this place?’

Frau Becker shook her head. ‘Either way, I hope he hangs,’ she said bitterly. ‘You can tell him that if you see him. I certainly won’t.’

‘When did you last see him?’

‘A year ago. He came back from a Soviet POW camp in July and he legged it three months later.’

‘And when was he captured?’

‘February 1943, at Briansk.’ Her mouth tightened. ‘To think that I waited three years for that man. All those other men who I turned away. I kept myself for him, and look what happened.’ A thought seemed to occur to her. ‘There’s your evidence for spying, if you need any. How was it that he managed to get himself released, eh? Answer me that. How did he get home when so many others are still there?’

I stood up to leave. Perhaps the situation with my own wife made me more inclined to take Becker’s part. But I had heard enough to realize that he would need all the help he could get — possibly more, if this woman had anything to do with it.

I said: ‘I was in a Soviet prisoner-of-war camp myself, Frau Becker. For less time than your husband, as it happens. It didn’t make me a spy. Lucky maybe, but not a spy.’ I went to the door, opened it, and hesitated. ‘Shall I tell you what it did make me? With people like the police, with people like you, Frau Becker, with people like my own wife, who’s hardly let me touch her since I came home. Shall I tell you what it made me? It made me unwelcome.’

6

It is said that a hungry dog will eat a dirty pudding. But hunger doesn’t just affect your standards of hygiene. It also dulls the wits, blunts the memory — not to mention the sex-drive — and generally produces a feeling of listlessness. So it was no surprise to me that there had been a number of occasions during the course of 1947 when, with senses pinched from want of nourishment, I had nearly met with an accident. It was for this very reason I decided to reflect upon my present, rather irrational inclination, which was to take Becker’s case after all, with the benefit of a full stomach.

Formerly Berlin’s finest, most famous hotel, the Adlon was now little more than a ruin. Somehow it remained open to guests, with fifteen available rooms which, because it was in the Soviet sector, were usually taken by Russian officers. A small restaurant not only survived in the basement, but did brisk business too, a result of it being exclusive to Germans with food coupons who might therefore lunch or dine there without fear of being thrown off a table in favour of some more obviously affluent Americans or British, as happened in most other Berlin restaurants.

The Adlon’s improbable entrance was underneath a pile of rubble on Wilhelmstrasse, only a short distance away from the Führerbunker where Hitler had met his death, and which could be toured for the price of a couple of cigarettes in the hand of any one of the policemen who were supposed to keep people out of it. All Berlin’s bulls were doubling as touts since the end of the war.

I ate a late lunch of lentil soup, turnip ‘hamburger’ and tinned fruit; and having sufficiently turned over Becker’s problem in my metabolized mind, I handed over my coupons and went up to what passed for the hotel reception desk to use the telephone.

My call to the Soviet Military Authority, the SMA, in Karlshorst was connected quickly enough, but I seemed to wait forever to be put through to Colonel Poroshin. Nor did speaking in Russian speed the progress of my call; it merely earned me a look of suspicion from the hotel porter. When finally I got through to Poroshin he seemed genuinely pleased that I had changed my mind and told me that I should wait by the picture of Stalin on Unter den Linden, where his staff car would collect me in fifteen minutes.

The afternoon had turned as raw as a boxer’s lip and I stood in the door of the Adlon for ten minutes before heading back up the small service stairs and towards the top of the Wilhelmstrasse. Then, with the Brandenburg Gate at my back, I walked up to the house-sized picture of the Comrade Chairman that dominated the centre of the avenue, flanked by two smaller plinths, each bearing the Soviet hammer and sickle.

As I waited for the car, Stalin seemed to watch me, a sensation which, I supposed, was intended: the eyes were as deep, black and unpleasant as the inside of a postman’s boot, and under the cockroach moustaches the smile was hard permafrost. It always amazed me that there were people who referred to this murdering monster as ‘Uncle’ Joe: he seemed to me to be about as avuncular as King Herod.

Poroshin’s car arrived, its engine drowned by the noise of a squadron of YAK 3 fighters passing overhead. I climbed aboard, and rolled helplessly in the back seat as the broad-shouldered, Tatar-faced driver hit the BMW’s accelerator, sending the car speeding east towards Alexanderplatz, and beyond to the Frankfurter Allee and Karlshorst.

‘I always thought that German civilians were forbidden to ride in staff cars,’ I said to the driver in Russian.

‘True,’ he said, ‘but the colonel said that if we are stopped I’m just to say that you’re being arrested.’

The Tatar laughed uproariously at my look of obvious alarm, and I could only console myself with the fact that while we were driving at such a speed, it was unlikely that we could be stopped by anything other than an anti-tank gun.

We reached Karlshorst minutes later.

A villa colony with a steeplechase course, Karlshorst, nicknamed ‘the little Kremlin’, was now a completely isolated Russian enclave which Germans could only enter by special permit. Or the kind of pennant on the front of Poroshin’s car. We were waved through several checkpoints and finally drew up alongside the old St Antonius Hospital on Zeppelin Strasse now housing the SMA for Berlin. The car ground to a halt in the shadow of a five-metre-high plinth on top of which was a big red Soviet star. Poroshin’s driver sprang out of his seat, opened my door smartly and, ignoring the sentries, squired me up the steps to the front door. I paused in the doorway for a moment, surveying the shiny new BMW cars and motorcycles in the car park.

‘Someone been shopping?’ I said.

‘From the BMW factory at Eisenbach,’ said my driver proudly. ‘Now Russian.’

With this depressing thought he left me in a waiting-room that smelled strongly of carbolic. The room’s only concession to decoration was another picture of Stalin with a slogan underneath that read: ‘Stalin, the wise teacher and protector of the working people’. Even Lenin, portrayed in a smaller frame alongside the wise one, seemed from his expression to have one or two problems with that particular sentiment.

I met these same two popular faces hanging on the wall of Poroshin’s office on the top floor of the SMA building. The young colonel’s neatly pressed olive-brown tunic was hanging on the back of the glass door, and he was wearing a Circassian-style shirt, belted with a black strap. But for the polish on his soft calf-leather boots he might have passed for a student at Moscow University. He set down his mug and stood up from behind his desk as the Tatar ushered me into his office.

‘Sit down, please, Herr Gunther,’ said Poroshin, pointing at a bentwood chair. The Tatar waited to be dismissed. Poroshin lifted his mug and held it up for my inspection. ‘Would you like some Ovaltine, Herr Gunther?’

‘Ovaltine? No, thanks, I hate the stuff.’

‘Do you?’ He sounded surprised. ‘I love it.’

‘It’s kind of early to be thinking of going to bed, isn’t it?’

Poroshin smiled patiently. ‘Perhaps you would prefer some vodka.’ He pulled open his desk drawer and took out a bottle and a glass, which he placed on the desk in front of me.

I poured myself a large one. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the Tatar rub his thirst with the back of his paw. Poroshin saw it too. He filled another glass and laid it on the filing cabinet so that it was immediately next to the man’s head.

‘You have to train these Cossack bastards like dogs,’ he explained. ‘For them drunkenness is an almost religious ordinance. Isn’t that so, Yeroshka?’

‘Yes, sir,’ he said blankly.

‘He smashed a bar up, assaulted a waitress, punched a sergeant, and but for me he might have been shot. Still might be shot, eh, Yeroshka? The minute you touch that glass without my permission. Understand?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Poroshin produced a big, heavy revolver and laid it on the desk to emphasize his point. Then he sat down again.

‘I imagine you know quite a lot about discipline with your record, Herr Gunther? Where did you say you served during the war?’

‘I didn’t say.’

He leaned back in his chair and swung his boots on to the desk. The vodka trembled over the edge of my glass as they thudded down on the blotter.

‘No, you didn’t, did you? But I imagine that with your qualifications you would have served in some Intelligence capacity.’

‘What qualifications?’

‘Come now, you’re being too modest. Your spoken Russian, your experience with Kripo. Ah yes, Emil’s lawyer told me about that. I’m told that you and he were once part of the Berlin Murder Commission. And you a Kommissar, too. That’s quite senior, isn’t it?’

I sipped my vodka and tried to keep calm. I told myself that I ought to have expected something like this.

‘I was just an ordinary soldier, obeying orders,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t even a Party member.’

‘So few were, it would now seem. I find that really quite remarkable.’ He smiled and raised a salutary index finger. ‘Be as coy as you like Herr Gunther, but I shall find out about you. Mark my words. If only to satisfy my curiosity.’

‘Sometimes curiosity is a bit like Yeroshka’s thirst,’ I said, ‘— best left unsatisfied. Unless it’s the disinterested, intellectual kind of curiosity that belongs properly to the philosophers. Answers have a habit of disappointing.’ I finished the glass and laid it on the blotter next to his boots. ‘But I didn’t come here with a cipher in my socks to play your afternoon’s vexed question, Colonel. So how about you feed me with one of those Lucky Strikes you were smoking this morning and satisfy my curiosity at least as far as telling me one or two facts about this case?’

Poroshin leaned forward and knocked open a silver cigarette box on the desk. ‘Help yourself,’ he said.

I took one and lit it with a fancy silver lighter that was cast in the shape of a field gun; then I looked at it critically, as if judging its value in a pawnshop. He had irritated me and I wanted to kick back at him somehow. ‘You’ve got some nice loot,’ I said. ‘This is a German field gun. Did you buy it, or was there nobody at home when you called?’

Poroshin closed his eyes, snorted a little laugh, then got up and went over to the window. He drew up the sash and unbuttoned his fly. ‘That’s the trouble with drinking all that Ovaltine,’ he said, apparently unperturbed by my attempt to insult him. ‘It goes straight through you.’ When he started to pee, he glanced back across his shoulder at the Tatar who remained standing by the filing cabinet and the glass of vodka which stood on it. ‘Drink it and get out, pig.’

The Tatar didn’t hesitate. He emptied the glass with one jerk of his head and stepped swiftly out of the office, closing the door behind him.

‘If you saw how peasants like him leave the toilets here, you would understand why I prefer to piss out of the window,’ said Poroshin, buttoning himself. He closed the window and resumed his seat. The boots thudded back on to the blotter. ‘My fellow Russians can make life in this sector rather trying at times. Thank God for people like Emil. He is a most amusing man to have around on occasion. And very resourceful too. There is simply nothing that he cannot get hold of. What is the word you have for these black-market types?’

‘Swing Heinis.’

‘Yes, swings. If one wanted entertainment, Emil would be the swing to arrange it.’ He laughed fondly at the thought of him, which was more than I could do. ‘I never met a man who knew so many girls. Of course they are all prostitutes and chocoladies, but that is not such a great crime these days, is it?’

‘It depends on the chocolady,’ I said.

‘Also, Emil is most ingenious at getting things across the border — the Green Frontier you call it, don’t you?’

I nodded. ‘Through the woods.’

‘An accomplished smuggler. He’s made a great deal of money. Until this happened he was living very well in Vienna. A big house, a fine car and an attractive girlfriend.’

‘Have you ever made use of his services? And I don’t mean his acquaintance with chocoladies.’

Poroshin confined himself to repeating that Emil could get hold of anything.

‘Does that include information?’

He shrugged. ‘Now and again. But whatever Emil does, he does for money. I find it hard to believe he would not have also been doing things for the Americans.

‘In this case, however, he had a job from an Austrian. A man called König, who was in the advertising and publicity business. The company was called Reklaue & Werbe Zentrale, and they had offices here in Berlin and in Vienna. König wanted Emil to collect layouts from the Vienna office to bring to Berlin, on a regular basis. He said that the work was too important to trust to the post or to a courier, and König couldn’t go himself as he was awaiting denazification. Of course Emil suspected that the parcels contained things besides advertisements, but the money was good enough for him to ask no questions, and since he came to and from Berlin on a fairly regular basis anyway, it wasn’t going to cause him any extra problems. Or so he thought.

‘For a while Emil’s deliveries went without a problem. When he was bringing cigarettes or some such contraband into Berlin he would also bring one of König’s parcels. He handed them over to a man called Eddy Holl and collected his money. It was as simple as that.

‘Well, one night Emil was in Berlin and went to a nightclub in Berlin-Schönberg called the Gay Island. By accident he met this man, Eddy Holl. He was drunk and introduced him to an American army captain called Linden. Eddy described Emil to Captain Linden as “their Vienna courier”. The next day Eddy telephoned Emil and apologised for being drunk and suggested that it would be better for all their sakes if Emil forgot all about Captain Linden.

‘Several weeks later, when Emil was back in Vienna, he got a call from this Captain Linden, who said that he would like to meet him again. So they met at some bar and the American started to ask questions about the advertising firm, Reklaue & Werbe. There wasn’t much that Emil could tell him, but Linden’s being there worried him. He thought that if Linden was in Vienna that there might not be any more need for his own services. It would be a shame, he thought, to see the end of such easy money. So he followed Linden around Vienna for a while. After a couple of days Linden met another man, and followed by Emil they went to an old film studio. Minutes later Emil heard a shot and the man came out, alone. Emil waited until this man was gone. Then he went in and found Captain Linden’s dead body, and a load of stolen tobacco. Naturally enough he did not inform the police. Emil tries to have as little to do with them as possible.

‘The next day, König and a third man came to see him. Don’t ask me his name, I don’t know. They said that an American friend had gone missing, and that they were worried something might have happened to him. In view of the fact that Emil had once been a detective with Kripo, would he, for a substantial reward, look into it for them. Emil agreed, seeing an easy way to make some money, and perhaps an opportunity to help himself to some of the tobacco.

‘After a day or so, and having had the studio watched for a while, Emil and a couple of his boys decided it was safe to go back there with a van. They found the International Patrol waiting for them. Emil’s boys were a couple of pleasure-shooters and got themselves killed. Emil was arrested.’

‘Does he know who tipped them off?’

‘I asked my people in Vienna to find that out. It seems the tip-off was anonymous.’ Poroshin smiled appreciatively. ‘Now here’s the good part. Emil’s gun is a Walther P38. He took it with him to the studio. But when he was arrested and surrendered it he noticed that it wasn’t his P38 after all. This one had a German eagle on the handgrip. And there was another important difference. The local ballistics expert quickly identified this as the same gun that had shot and killed Captain Linden.’

‘Someone switched it for Becker’s own gun, eh?’ I said. ‘Yes, it’s not the sort of thing you’d notice right away, is it? Very neat. A man, conveniently carrying the murder weapon, returns to the scene of the crime, ostensibly to collect his stolen tobacco. Quite a strong case there I’d say.’

I took a last puff of my cigarette before extinguishing it in Poroshin’s silver desk-ashtray and helping myself to another. ‘I’m not sure what I would be able to do,’ I said. ‘Turning water into wine isn’t in my normal line of work.’

‘Emil is anxious, so his lawyer, Dr Liebl, tells me, that you should find this man König. He seems to have disappeared.’

‘I’ll bet he has. Do you think it was König who made the switch, when he came to Becker’s house?

‘It certainly looks that way. König or perhaps the third man.’

‘Do you know anything about König, or this publicity firm?’

‘Nyet.’

There was a knock at the door and an officer came into Poroshin’s office.

‘We have Am Kupfergraben on the line, sir,’ he announced in Russian. ‘They say it’s urgent.’

I pricked up my ears. Am Kupfergraben was the location of Berlin’s biggest MVD gaol. With so many displaced and missing persons in my line of work, it paid to keep your ears open.

Poroshin glanced at me, almost as if he knew what I was thinking, and then said to the other officer, ‘It will have to wait, Jegoroff. Any other calls?’

‘Zaisser from K–5.’

‘If that Nazi bastard wants to speak to me he can damn well wait outside my door. Tell him that. Now leave us please.’ He waited until the door had closed behind his subordinate. ‘K–5 mean anything to you, Gunther?’

‘Should it?’

‘Not yet, no. But in time, who knows?’ He did not elaborate, but instead glanced at his wristwatch. ‘We really must get on. I have an appointment this evening. Jegoroff will arrange all your necessary papers — pink pass, travel permit, a ration card, an Austrian identity card — do you have a photograph? Never mind. Jegoroff will have one taken. Oh yes, I think it would be a good idea if you were to have one of our new tobacco permits. It allows you to sell cigarettes throughout the Eastern Zone, and obliges all Soviet personnel to be of assistance to you wherever it is possible. It might just get you out of any trouble.’

‘I thought the black market was illegal in your zone,’ I said, curious as to the reason for this blatant piece of official hypocrisy.

‘It is illegal,’ Poroshin said, without any trace of embarrassment. ‘This is an officially licensed black market. It allows us to raise some foreign currency. Rather a good idea don’t you think? Naturally we will supply you with a few cartons of cigarettes to make it look convincing.’

‘You seem to have thought of everything. What about my money?’

‘It will be delivered to your home at the same time as your papers. The day after tomorrow.’

‘And where is the money coming from? This Dr Liebl, or from your cigarette concessions?’

‘Liebl will be sending me money. Until then this matter will be handled by the SMA.’

I didn’t like this much, but there wasn’t much of an alternative. Take money from the Russians, or go to Vienna and trust that the money would be paid in my absence.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘Just one more thing. What do you know about Captain Linden? You said that Becker met him in Berlin. Was he stationed here?’

‘Yes. I was forgetting him, wasn’t I?’ Poroshin stood up and went over to the filing cabinet on which the Tatar had left his empty glass. He opened one of the drawers and fingered his way across the tops of his files until he found the one he was searching for.

‘Captain Edward Linden,’ he read, coming back to his chair. ‘Born Brooklyn, New York, 22 February 1907. Graduated Cornell University, with a degree in German, 1930; serving 970th Counter-intelligence Corps; formerly 26th Infantry, stationed at Camp King Interrogation Centre, Oberusel as denazification officer; currently attached to US Documents Centre in Berlin as Crowcass liaison officer. Crowcass is the Central Registry of War Crimes and Security Suspects of the United States Army. It’s not very much, I’m afraid.’

He dropped the file open in front of me. The strange, Greek-looking letters covered no more than half a sheet of paper.

‘I’m not much good with Cyrillic,’ I said.

Poroshin did not look convinced.

‘What exactly is the United States Documents Centre?’

‘It’s a building in the American sector, near the edge of the Grünewald. The Berlin Documents Centre is the depository for Nazi ministerial and party documents captured by the Americans and the British towards the end of the war. It’s quite comprehensive. They’ve got the complete NSDAP membership records, which makes it easy to find out when people lie on their denazification questionnaires. I’ll bet they’ve even got your name there somewhere.’

‘Like I said, I was never a Party member.’

‘No,’ he grinned, ‘of course not.’ Poroshin took the file and returned it to the filing cabinet. ‘You were only obeying orders.’

It was plain he didn’t believe me any more than he believed that I was unable to decipher St Cyril’s Byzantine alphabet: in that at least he would have been justified.

‘And now, if you have no more questions, I really must leave you. I am due at the State Opera in the Admiralspalast in half an hour.’ He took off his belt and, yelling the names of Yeroshka and Jegoroff, slipped into his tunic.

‘Have you ever been to Vienna?’ he asked, fixing the cross belt under his epaulette.

‘No, never.’

‘The people are just like the architecture,’ he said, inspecting his appearance in the window’s reflection. ‘They are all front. Everything that’s interesting about them seems to be on the surface. Inside they’re very different. Now there’s a people I could really work with. All Viennese were born to be spies.’

7

‘You were late again last night,’ I said.

‘I didn’t wake you, did I?’ She slid naked out of bed and went over to the full-length mirror in the corner of our bedroom. ‘Anyway, you were kind of late yourself the other night. She started to examine her body. ‘It’s so nice having a warm house again. Where on earth did you find the coal?’

‘A client.’

Watching her standing there, stroking her pubic hair and flattening her stomach with the palm of her hand, lifting her breasts, scrutinizing her tight, finely-lined mouth with its waxy sheen, concave cheeks and shrinking gums, and finally twisting around to assess her gently sagging bottom, her bony hand with the rings on the fingers slightly looser than before, pulling at the flesh of one buttock, I didn’t need to be told what was going through her mind. She was an attractive, mature woman intent on making full use of what time she had left.

Feeling hurt and irritated, I jack-knifed out of bed to find my leg buckling beneath me.

‘You look fine,’ I said wearily, and limped into the kitchen.

‘That sounds a little short for a love sonnet,’ she called out.

There were some more PX goods on the kitchen table: a couple of cans of soup, a bar of real soap, a few saccharine cards and a packet of condoms.

Still naked, Kirsten followed me into the kitchen and watched me examining her haul. Was it just the one American? Or were there more?

‘I see you’ve been busy again,’ I said, picking up the packet of Parisians. ‘How many calories are these?’

She laughed behind her hand. ‘The manager keeps a load under the counter.’ She sat down on a chair. ‘I thought it would be nice. You know, it’s been quite a while since we did anything.’ She let her thighs yawn as if to let me see a little more of her. ‘There’s time now, if you want.’

It was quickly done, expedited with an almost professional nonchalance on her part, as if she had been administering an enema. No sooner had I finished than she was heading towards the bathroom with hardly a blush on her cheek, carrying the used Parisian as if it were a dead mouse she had found under the bed.

Half an hour later, dressed and ready to leave for work, she paused in the sitting-room where I had stoked the ashes in the stove and was now adding some more coal. For a moment she watched me bring the fire to life again.

‘You’re good at that,’ she said. I couldn’t tell whether any sarcasm was intended. Then she gave me a peremptory kiss and went out.

The morning was colder than a mohel’s knife, and I was glad to start the day in a reading library on Hardenbergstrasse. The library assistant was a man with a mouth so badly scarred that it was impossible to say where his lips were until he started to speak.

‘No,’ he said, in a voice that belonged properly to a sea-lion, ‘there are no books about the BDC. But there have been a couple of newspaper articles published in the last few months. One in the Telegraf, I think, and the other in the Military Government Information Bulletin.’

He collected his crutches and shouldered his one-legged way to a cabinet housing a large card-index where, as he had remembered, he found references for both these articles: one, published in the Telegraf in May, an interview with the Centre’s commanding officer, a Lieutenant-Colonel Hans W. Helm; the other an account of the Centre’s early history, written by a junior staff member in August.

I thanked the assistant, who told me where to find the library’s copies of both publications.

‘Lucky for you that you came today,’ he said. ‘I’m travelling to Giessen tomorrow, to have my artificial leg fitted.’

Reading the articles I realized that I had never thought the Americans were capable of such efficiency. Admittedly, there had been a certain amount of luck involved in the accumulation of some of the Centre’s documentary collections. For example, troops of the US Seventh Army had stumbled on the complete Nazi Party membership records at a paper mill near Munich, where they were about to be pulped. But staff at the Centre had set about the creation and organization of the most comprehensive archive, so that it could be determined with complete accuracy exactly who was a Nazi. As well as the NSDAP master files, the Centre included in its collection the NSDAP membership applications, Party correspondence, SS service records, Reich Security Office records, SS racial records, proceedings of the Supreme Party Court and the People’s Court — everything from the membership files of the National Socialist Schoolteachers’ Organization to a file detailing expulsions from the Hitler Youth.

Another thought occurred to me as I left the library and made my way to the railway station. I would never have believed that the Nazis could have been stupid enough to have recorded their own activities in such comprehensive and incriminating detail.

I left the U-Bahn — a stop too early as it turned out — at a station in the American sector which, for no reason to do with their occupation of the city, was called Uncle Tom’s Hut, and walked down Argentinische Allee.

Surrounded by the tall fir trees of the Grünewald, and only a short distance from a small lake, the Berlin Documents Centre stood in well-guarded grounds at the end of Wasserkäfersteig, a cobblestoned cul-de-sac. Inside a wire fence the Centre comprised a number of buildings, but the main part of the BDC appeared to be a two-storey affair at the end of a raised pathway, painted white and with green shutters on the windows. It was a nice-looking place, although I soon remembered it as the headquarters of the old Forschungsamt — the Nazis’ telephone-tapping centre.

The soldier at the gatehouse, a big, gap-toothed Negro, eyed me suspiciously as I halted at his checkpoint. He was probably more used to dealing with people in cars, or military vehicles, than with a lone pedestrian.

‘What do you want, Fritzy?’ he said, clapping his woolly gloves together and stamping his boots to keep warm.

‘I was a friend of Captain Linden’s,’ I said in my halting English. ‘I have just heard the terrible news, and I came to say how sorry my wife and I were. He was kind to us both. Gave us PX, you know.’ From my pocket I produced the short letter I had composed on the train. ‘Perhaps you would be kind enough to deliver this to Colonel Helm.’

The soldier’s tone changed immediately.

‘Yes sir, I’ll give it to him.’ He took the letter and regarded it awkwardly. ‘Very kind of you to think of him.’

‘It is just a few marks, for some flowers,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘And a card. My wife and I wanted something on Captain Linden’s grave. We would go to the funeral if it was in Berlin, but we thought that his family would be taking him home.’

‘Well, no, sir,’ he said. ‘The funeral’s in Vienna, this Friday morning. Family wanted it that way. Less trouble than shipping a body all the way home I guess.’

I shrugged. ‘For a Berliner that might as well be in America. Travel is not easy these days.’ I sighed and glanced at my watch. ‘I had better be getting along. I have quite a walk ahead of me.’ When I turned to walk away, I groaned, and clutching my knee and affecting a broad grimace, I sat squarely down on the road in front of the barrier, my stick clattering on the cobbles beside me. Quite a performance. The soldier side-stepped his checkpoint.

‘Are you all right?’ he said, collecting my stick and helping me to my feet.

‘A bit of Russian shrapnel. It gives me some trouble now and again. I’ll be all right in a minute or two.’

‘Hey, come on in to the gatehouse and sit down for a couple of minutes.’ He led me round the barrier and through the little door of his hut.

‘Thank you. It is very kind of you.’

‘Kind, nothing. Any friend of Captain Linden’s …’

I sat down heavily and rubbed my almost painless knee. ‘Did you know him well?’

‘Me, I’m just a Pfc. I can’t say I knew him, but I used to drive him now and again.’

I smiled and shook my head. ‘Could you speak more slowly please? My English is not so good.’

‘I drove him now and again,’ the soldier said more loudly, and he imitated the action of turning a steering-wheel. ‘You say that he gave you PX?’

‘Yes, he was very kind.’

‘Yeah, that sounds like Linden. Always had plenty of PX to give away.’ He paused as a thought occurred to him. ‘There was one particular couple — well, he was like a son to them. Always taking them Care packages. Perhaps you know them. The Drexlers?’

I frowned and rubbed my jaw thoughtfully. ‘Not the couple who live in —’ I snapped my fingers as if the street name were on the tip of my tongue ‘— where is it now?’

‘Steglitz,’ he said, prompting me. ‘Handjery Strasse.’

I shook my head. ‘No, I must be thinking of someone else. Sorry.’

‘Hey, don’t mention it.’

‘I suppose the police must have asked you a lot of questions about Captain Linden’s murder.’

‘Nope. They asked us nothing, on account of the fact that they already got the guy who did it.’

‘They’ve got someone? That is good news. Who is he?’

‘Some Austrian.’

‘But why did he do it? Did he say?’

‘Nope. Crazy, I guess. How d’you meet the captain, anyway?’

‘I met him at a nightclub. The Gay Island.’

‘Yeah, I know it. Never go there myself. Me, I prefer those places down on the Ku-damm: Ronny’s Bar, and the Club Royale. But Linden used to go to the Gay Island a lot. He had a lot of German friends, I guess, and that’s where they liked to go.’

‘Well, he spoke such good German.’

‘That he did, sir. Like a native.’

‘My wife and I used to wonder why he never had a regular girl. We even offered to introduce him to some. Nice girls, from good families.’

The soldier shrugged. ‘Too busy, I guess.’ He chuckled. ‘He sure had plenty of others. Gee, that man liked to frat.’

After a moment I realized he meant fraternize, which was the euphemism in general military usage for what another American officer was doing to my wife. I squeezed my knee experimentally and stood up.

‘Sure you’re all right now?’ said the soldier.

‘Yes, thank you. You have been most kind.

‘Kind, nothing. Any friend of Captain Linden’s …’

8

I inquired after the Drexlers at the Steglitz local post office on Sintenis Platz, a quiet, peaceful square, once covered in grass and now given over to the cultivation of things edible.

The postmistress, a woman with an enormous Ionic curl on either side of her head, informed me crisply that her office knew of the Drexlers and that like most people in the area they collected their mail from the office. Therefore, she explained, their precise address on Handjery Strasse was not known. But she did add that the Drexlers’ usually considerable mail was now even larger in view of the fact that it was several days since they had bothered to collect it. She used the word ‘bothered’ with more than a little distaste, and I wondered if there was some reason she should have disliked the Drexlers. My offer to deliver their mail was swiftly rebuffed. That would not have been proper. But she told me that I could certainly remind them to come and take it away as it was becoming a nuisance.

Next I decided to try at the Schönberg Police Praesidium on nearby Grünewald Strasse. Walking there, under the uneasy shadow of gorgonzola walls that leaned forwards as if permanently on tiptoe, past buildings otherwise unscathed but with just a corner balustrade missing, like an illicitly sampled wedding cake, took me right by the Gay Island nightclub, where Becker had reportedly met Captain Linden. It was a dreary, cheerless-looking place with a cheap neon sign, and I felt almost glad that it was closed.

The bull on the desk at the Police Praesidium had a face as long as a mandarin’s thumbnail, but he was an obliging sort of fellow and while he consulted the local registration records he told me that the Drexlers were not unknown to the Schönberg police.

‘They’re a Jewish couple,’ he explained. ‘Lawyers. Quite well known around here. You might even say that they were notorious.’

‘Oh? Why’s that?’

‘It’s not that they break any laws, you understand.’ The sergeant’s wurst-sized finger found their name in his ledger and traversed the page to the street and the number. ‘Here we are. Handjery Strasse. Number seventeen.’

‘Thank you, Sergeant. So what is it about them?’

‘Are you a friend of theirs?’ He sounded circumspect.

‘No, I’m not.’

‘Well sir, it’s just that people don’t like that kind of thing. They want to forget about what happened. I don’t think there’s any good in raking over the past like that.’

‘Forgive me, Sergeant, but what is it that they do exactly?’

‘They hunt so-called Nazi war-criminals, sir.’

I nodded. ‘Yes, I can see how that might not make them very popular with the neighbours.’

‘It was wrong what happened. But we have to rebuild, start again. And we can hardly do that if the war follows us around like a bad smell.’

I needed some more information from him, so I agreed. Then I asked about the Gay Island.

‘It’s not the sort of place I’d let my missus catch me in, sir. It’s run by a sparkler called Kathy Fiege. The place is full of them. But there’s never any trouble there, apart from the occasional drunken Yank. Not that you can call that trouble. And if the rumours are true we’ll all be Yanks soon — leastways all of us in the American sector, eh?’

I thanked him and walked to the station door. ‘One more thing, sergeant,’ I said, turning on my heels. ‘The Drexlers? Do they ever find any war-criminals?’

The sergeant’s long face took on an amused, sly aspect.

‘Not if we can help it, sir.’

The Drexlers lived a short way south from the Police Praesidium, in a recently renovated building close to the S–Bahn line and opposite a small school. But there was no reply when I knocked at the door of their top-floor apartment.

I lit a cigarette to rid my nostrils of the strong smell of disinfectant that hung about the landing, and knocked again. Glancing down I saw two cigarette-ends lying, unaccountably uncollected, on the floor close to the door. It didn’t look as if anyone had been through the door in a while. Bending down to pick them up I found the smell even stronger. Dropping into a press-up position I pushed my nose up to the gap between floor and door and retched as the air inside the apartment caught my throat and lungs. I rolled quickly away and coughed half my insides on to the stairs below.

When I had recovered my breath I stood up and shook my head. It seemed hardly possible that anyone could live in such an atmosphere. I glanced down the stairwell. There was nobody about.

I stepped back from the door and kicked hard at the lock with my better leg, but it budged hardly at all. Once more I checked the stairwell to see if the noise had drawn anyone out of their apartment and, finding myself undetected, I kicked again.

The door sprang open and a terrible, pestilent smell flew forth, so strong that I reeled back for a moment and almost fell downstairs. Pulling my coat lapel across my nose and mouth I bounded into the darkened apartment, and, spying the faint outline of a curtain valance, I tore the heavy velvet drapes aside and threw open the window.

Cold air stripped the tears from my eyes as I leaned into the fresh air. Children on their way home from school waved to me and weakly I waved back at them.

When I was sure that the draught between the door and the window had ventilated the room I ducked inside to find whatever I would find. I didn’t think it was the kind of smell that was meant to take care of any pest smaller than a rogue elephant.

I went over to the front door and pushed it back and forwards on its hinges to fan some more clean air through while I surveyed the desk, the chairs, the bookcases, the filing cabinets and the piles of books and papers that filled the little room. Beyond was an open door, and the edge of a brass bedstead.

My foot kicked something on the floor as I moved towards the bedroom. A cheap tin tray of the kind you find in a bar or a Café.

But for the congestion in the two faces that lay side by side on their pillows, you might have thought they were still sleeping. If your name is on someone’s death-card, there are worse ways than asphyxia while asleep to collect it.

I pulled back the quilt and undid Herr Drexler’s pyjama top, revealing a well-swollen stomach marbled with veins and blebs like a piece of blue cheese. I pressed it with my forefinger: it felt tight. Sure enough, a harder pressure with my hand produced a fart from the corpse, indicating a gaseous disruption of the internal organs. It appeared as if the pair of them had been dead for at least a week.

I drew the quilt over them again and returned to the front room. For a while I stared hopelessly at the books and papers which lay on the desk, even making a desultory attempt to find some clue or other, but since I had as yet only the vaguest appreciation of the puzzle, I soon abandoned this as a waste of time.

Outside, under a mother-of-pearl-coloured sky, I was just starting up the street towards the S-Bahn when something caught my eye. There was so much discarded military equipment still lying about Berlin that, but for the manner of the Drexlers’ death, I should have paid the thing no regard. Lying on a heap of rubble that had collected in the gutter was a gasmask. An empty tin can rolled to my feet as I tugged at the rubber strap. Rapidly colouring in the outline scenario of the murder, I abandoned the mask and squatted down on to the backs of my legs to read the label on the rusting metallic curve.

‘Zyklon-B. Poisonous gas! Danger! Keep cool and dry! Protect from the sun and from naked flame. Open and use with extreme caution. Kaliwerke A. G. Kolin.’

In my mind’s eye I pictured a man standing outside the Drexlers’ door. It was late at night. Nervously he half-smoked a couple of cigarettes before pulling on the gas-mask, checking the straps to make sure he had a tight fit. Then he opened the can of crystallized prussic acid, tipped the pellets — already liquefying on contact with the air — on to the tray he had brought with him, and quickly slid it under the door, into the Drexlers’ apartment. The sleeping couple breathed deeply, lapsing into unconsciousness as the Zyklon-B gas, first used on human beings in the concentration camps, started to block the uptake of oxygen in their blood. Small chance that the Drexlers would have left a window open in this weather. But perhaps the murderer laid something — a coat or a blanket — across the bottom of the door to prevent a draught of fresh air into the apartment, or to prevent anyone else in the building from being killed. One part in two thousand of the gas was lethal. Finally, after fifteen or twenty minutes, when the pellets were fully dissolved, and the murderer was satisfied that the gas had done its silent, deadly work — that two more Jews had, for whatever reason, joined the six million — he would have collected up his coat, his mask and his empty can (perhaps he hadn’t meant to leave the tray: not that it mattered, he would surely have worn gloves to handle the Zyklon-B), and walked into the night.

You could almost admire its simplicity.

9

Somewhere, further up the street, a jeep grumbled off into the snow-charged blackness. I wiped the condensation off the window with my sleeve, and saw the reflection of a face that I recognized.

‘Herr Gunther,’ he said, as I turned in my seat, ‘I thought it was you.’ A thin layer of snow covered the man’s head. With its squared-off skull and prominent, perfectly round ears, it reminded me of an ice-bucket.

‘Neumann,’ I said, ‘I thought you were dead for sure.’

He wiped his head and took off his coat. ‘Mind if I join you? My girl hasn’t turned up yet.’

‘When did you ever have a girl, Neumann? At least, one you hadn’t already paid for.’

He twitched nervously. ‘Look, if you’re going to be —’

‘Relax,’ I said. ‘Sit down.’ I waved to the waiter. ‘What will you have?’

‘Just a beer, thanks.’ He sat down and with narrowed eyes regarded me critically. ‘You haven’t changed much, Herr Gunther. Older-looking, a bit greyer, and rather thinner than you used to be, but still the same.’

‘I hate to think what I’d be like if you thought I looked any different,’ I said pointedly. ‘But what you say sounds like a fairly accurate description of eight years.’

‘Is that how long it’s been? Since we last met?’

‘Give or take a world war. You still listening at keyholes?’

‘Herr Gunther, you don’t know the half of it,’ he snorted. ‘I’m a prison warder at Tegel.’

‘I don’t believe it. You? You’re as bent as a stolen rocking-chair.’

‘Honest, Herr Gunther, it’s true. The Yanks have got me guarding Nazi war-criminals.’

‘And you’re the hard-labour, right?’

Neumann twitched again.

‘Here comes your beer.’

The waiter laid the glass in front of him. I started to speak but the Americans at the next table burst into loud laughter. Then one of them, a sergeant, said something else and this time even Neumann laughed.

‘He said that he doesn’t believe in fraternization,’ Neumann explained. ‘He said he doesn’t want to treat any fräulein the way he’d treat his brother.’

I smiled and looked over at the Americans. ‘Did you learn to speak English working in Tegel?’

‘Sure. I learn a lot of things.’

‘You were always a good informer.’

‘For instance,’ he lowered his voice, ‘I heard that the Soviets stopped a British military train at the border to take off two cars containing German passengers. The word is that it’s in retaliation for the establishment of Bizonia.’ He meant the merging of the British and American zones of Germany. Neumann drank some of his beer and shrugged. ‘Maybe there will be another war.’

‘I don’t see how,’ I said. ‘Nobody’s got much stomach for another dose of it.’

‘I dunno. Maybe.’

He set his glass down and produced a box of snuff which he offered to me. I shook my head and grimaced as I watched him take a pinch and slide it under his lip.

‘Did you see any action during the war?’

‘Come on, Neumann, you should know better. Nobody asks a question like that these days. Do you hear me asking how you got a denazification certificate?’

‘I’ll have you know that I got that quite legitimately.’ He fished out his wallet and unfolded a piece of paper. ‘I was never involved in anything. Free from Nazi infection this says, and that’s what I am, and proud of it. I didn’t even join the army.’

‘Only because they wouldn’t have you.’

‘Free from Nazi infection,’ he repeated angrily.

‘Must be about the only infection you never had.’

‘What are you doing here anyway?’ he sneered back.

‘I love coming to the Gay Island.’

‘I’ve never seen you here before, and I’ve been coming here a while.’

‘Yes, it looks like the kind of place you’d feel comfortable in. But how do you afford it, on a warder’s pay?’

Neumann shrugged evasively.

‘You must do a lot of errands for people,’ I suggested.

‘Well, you have to, don’t you.’ He smiled thinly. ‘I’ll bet you’re here on a case, aren’t you?’

‘Maybe.’

‘I might be able to help. Like I say, I come here a lot.’

‘All right then.’ I took out my wallet and held up a five-dollar bill. ‘You ever hear of a man called Eddy Holl? He comes in here sometimes. He’s in the advertising and publicity business. A firm called Reklaue & Werbe Zentrale.’

Neumann swallowed and stared dismally at the bill. ‘No,’ he said reluctantly, ‘I don’t know him. But I could ask around. The barman’s a friend. He might —’

‘I already tried him. Not the talkative type. But from what he did say, I don’t think he knew Holl.’

‘This advertising mob. What did you say they were called?’

‘Reklaue & Werbe Zentrale. They’re in Wilmersdorfer Strasse. I was there this afternoon. According to them Herr Eddy Holl is at the offices of their parent company in Pullach.’

‘Well, maybe he is. In Pullach.’

‘I’ve never even heard of it. I can’t imagine the headquarters of anything being in Pullach.’

‘Well, you’d be wrong.’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’m ready to be surprised.’

Neumann smiled and nodded at the five dollars I was slipping back into my wallet. ‘For five dollars I could tell you everything I know about it.’

‘No cold cabbage.’

He nodded and I tossed him the bill. ‘This had better be good.’

‘Pullach is a small suburb of Munich. It is also the headquarters of the Postal Censorship Authorities of the United States Army. The mail for all the GIs at Tegel has to go through there.’

‘Is that it?’

‘What do you want, the average rainfall?’

‘All right, I’m not sure what that tells me, but thanks anyway.’

‘Maybe I can keep my eyes open for this Eddy Holl.’

‘Why not? I’m off to Vienna tomorrow. When I get there I’ll telegraph you with the address where I’ll be staying in case you get something. Cash on delivery.’

‘Christ, I wish I was going. I love Vienna.’

‘You never struck me as the cosmopolitan type, Neumann.’

‘I don’t suppose you fancy delivering a few letters when you’re there, do you? I’ve got quite a few Austrians on my landing.’

‘What, play postman for Nazi war-criminals? No thanks.’ I finished my drink and looked at my watch. ‘You think she’s coming, this girl of yours?’ I stood up to leave.

‘What time is it?’ he said, frowning.

I showed him the face of the Rolex on my wrist. I had more or less decided not to sell it. Neumann winced as he saw the time.

‘I expect she got held up,’ I said.

He shook his head sadly. ‘She won’t come now. Women.’

I gave him a cigarette. ‘These days the only woman you can trust is another man’s wife.’

‘It’s a rotten world, Herr Gunther.’

‘Yeah, well, don’t tell anyone, will you.’

10

On the train to Vienna I met a man who talked about what we had done to the Jews.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘they can’t blame us for what happened. It was preordained. We were merely fulfilling their own Old Testament prophecy: the one about Joseph and his brothers. There you have Joseph, a repressive father’s youngest and most favoured son, and whom we can take to be symbolic of the whole Jewish race. And then you have all the other brothers, symbolic of gentiles everywhere, but let’s assume they are Germans who are quite naturally jealous of the little velvet boy. He’s better looking than they are. He has a coat of many colours. My God, no wonder they hate him. No wonder they sell him into slavery. But the important point to note is that what the brothers do is as much a reaction against a stern and authoritarian father — a fatherland if you like — as it is against an apparently over-privileged brother.’ The man shrugged and started to knead the lobe of one of his question-mark shaped ears thoughtfully. ‘Really, when you think about it, they ought to thank us.’

‘How do you work that out?’ I said, with considerable want of faith.

‘Had it not been for what Joseph’s brothers did, the children of Israel would never have been enslaved in Egypt, would never have been led to the Promised Land by Moses. Similarly, had it not been for what we Germans did, the Jews would never have gone back to Palestine. Why even now, they are on the verge of establishing a new state.’ The man’s little eyes narrowed as if he had been one of the few allowed a peek in God’s desk-diary. ‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘it was a prophecy fulfilled, all right.’

‘I don’t know about any prophecy,’ I growled, and jerked my thumb at the scene skimming by the carriage window: an apparently endless Red Army troop convoy, moving south along the autobahn, parallel to the railway line, ‘but it certainly looks like we ended up in the Red Sea.’

It was well named, this infinite column of savage, omnivorous red ants, ravaging the land and gathering all that they could carry — more than their individual body weights — to take back to their semi-permanent, worker-run colonies. And like some Brazilian planter who had seen his coffee crop devastated by these social creatures, my hatred of the Russians was tempered by an equal measure of respect. For seven long years I had fought them, killed them, been imprisoned by them, learned their language and finally escaped from one of their labour camps. Seven thin ears of corn blasted with the east wind, devouring the seven good ears.

At the outbreak of the war I had been a Kriminalkommissar in Section 5 of the RSHA, the Reich Main Security Office, and automatically ranked as a full lieutenant in the SS. Apart from the oath of loyalty to Adolf Hitler, my being an SS-Obersturmführer had not seemed much of a problem until June 1941, when Arthur Nebe, formerly the director of the Reichs Criminal Police, and newly promoted SS-Gruppenführer, was given command of an Action Group as part of the invasion of Russia.

I was just one of the various police personnel who were drafted to Nebe’s group, the aim of which, so I believed, was to follow the Wehrmacht into occupied White Russia and combat lawbreaking and terrorism of whatever description. My own duties at the Group’s Minsk headquarters had involved the seizure of the records of the Russian NKVD and the capture of an NKVD death-squad that had massacred hundreds of White Russian political prisoners to prevent them from being liberated by the German Army. But mass murder is endemic in any war of conquest, and it soon became apparent to me that my own side was also arbitrarily massacring Russian prisoners. Then came the discovery that the primary purpose of the Action Groups was not the elimination of terrorists but the systematic murder of Jewish civilians.

In all my four years’ service in the first, Great War, I never saw anything which had a more devastating effect on my spirit than what I witnessed in the summer of 1941. Although I was not personally charged with the task of commanding any of these mass-execution squads, I reasoned that it could only be a matter of time before I was so ordered, and, as an inevitable corollary, before I was shot for refusing to obey. So I requested an immediate transfer to the Wehrmacht and the front line.

As the commanding general of the Action Group, Nebe could have had me sent to a punishment battalion. He could even have ordered my execution. Instead he acceded to my request for a transfer, and after several more weeks in White Russia, during which time I assisted General Gehlen’s Foreign Armies East Intelligence Section with the organization of the captured NKVD records, I was transferred, not to the front line, but to the War Crimes Bureau of the Military High Command in Berlin. By that time Arthur Nebe had personally supervised the murders of over 30,000 men, women and children.

After my return to Berlin I never saw him again. Years later I met an old friend from Kripo who told me that Nebe, always an ambiguous sort of Nazi, had been executed in early 1945 as one of the members of Count Stauffenberg’s plot to kill Hitler.

It always gave me a strange kind of feeling to know that I very possibly owed my life to a mass-murderer.

To my great relief, the man with the curious line in hermeneutics left the train at Dresden, and I slept between there and Prague. But most of the time I thought about Kirsten and the abruptly worded note I had left her, explaining that I would be away for several weeks and accounting for the presence of the gold sovereigns in the apartment, which constituted half of my fee for taking Becker’s case, and which Poroshin had taken it upon himself to deliver the previous day.

I cursed myself for not writing more, for failing to say that there was nothing I wouldn’t have done for her, no Herculean labour I would not have gladly performed on her behalf. All of this she knew of course, made manifest as it was in the packet of extravagantly worded letters that she kept in her drawer. Next to her unmentioned bottle of Chanel.

11

The journey between Berlin and Vienna is a long time to spend brooding about the infidelity of your wife, so it was just as well that Poroshin’s aide had got me a ticket on a train that took the most direct route — nineteen and a half hours, via Dresden, Prague and Brno — as opposed to the twenty-seven-and-a-half-hour train which went via Leipzig and Nuremberg. With a screech of wheels the train drew slowly to a halt in Franz Josefs Bahnhof, mantling the platform’s few occupants in a steamy limbo.

At the ticket barrier I presented my papers to an American MP and, having explained my presence in Vienna to his satisfaction, walked into the station, dropped my bag and looked around for some sign that my arrival was both expected and welcomed by someone in the small crowd of waiting people.

The approach of a medium-sized, grey-haired man signalled that I was correct in the first of these calculations, although I was soon to be apprised of the vanity of the second. He informed me that his name was Dr Liebl and that he had the honour of acting as Emil Becker’s legal representative.

‘I have a taxi waiting,’ he said, glancing uncertainly at my luggage. ‘Even so, it isn’t very far to my offices and had you brought a smaller bag we might have walked there.’

‘I know it sounds pessimistic,’ I said, ‘but I rather thought I’d have to stay overnight.’

I followed him across the station floor.

‘I trust that you had a good journey, Herr Gunther.’

‘I’m here, aren’t I?’ I said, forcing an affable sort of chuckle. ‘How else does one define a good journey these days?’

‘I really couldn’t say,’ he said crisply. ‘Myself, I never leave Vienna.’ He waved his hand dismissively at a group of ragged-looking DPs who seemed to have camped out in the station. ‘Today, with the whole world on some kind of journey, it seems imprudent that I should expect God to look out for the kind of traveller who would only wish to be able to return from whence he started.’

He ushered me to a waiting taxi, and I handed my bag to the driver and climbed into the back seat, only to find the bag come after me again.

‘There’s an extra charge for luggage carried outside,’ Liebl explained, pushing the bag on to my lap. ‘As I said, it’s not very far and taxis are expensive. While you’re here I recommend that you use the tramways — it’s a very good service.’ The car moved away at speed, the first corner pressing us together like a couple of lovers in a cinema theatre. Liebl chuckled. ‘It’s also a lot safer, Viennese drivers being what they are.’

I pointed to our left. ‘Is that the Danube?’

‘Good God, no. That’s the canal. The Danube is in the Russian sector, further east.’ He pointed to our right, at a grim-looking building. ‘That’s the police prison, where our client is currently residing. We have an appointment there first thing tomorrow, after which you may wish to attend Captain Linden’s funeral at the Central Cemetery.’ Liebl nodded back at the prison. ‘Herr Becker is not long in there, as it happens. The Americans were initially disposed to treat the case as a matter of military security and as a result they held him in their POW cage at the Stiftskaserne — the headquarters of their military police in Vienna. I had the very devil of a job getting in and out of there, I can tell you. However, the Military Government Public Safety Officer has now decided that the case is one for the Austrian courts, and so he’ll be held there until the trial, whenever that may be.’

Liebl leaned forwards, tapped the driver on the shoulder and told him to make a right and head towards the General Hospital.

‘Now that we’re paying for this, we may as well drop your bag off,’ he said. ‘It’s only a short detour. At least you’ve seen where your friend is, so you can appreciate the gravity of his situation.

‘I don’t wish to be rude, Herr Gunther, but I should tell you that I was against you coming to Vienna at all. It isn’t as if there aren’t any private detectives here. There are. I’ve used many of them myself, and they know Vienna better than you. I hope you won’t mind me saying that. I mean, you don’t know this city at all, do you?’

‘I appreciate your frankness, Dr Liebl,’ I said, not appreciating it much at all. ‘And you’re right, I don’t know this city. As a matter of fact I’ve never been here in my life. So let me speak frankly. With twenty-five years of police work behind me I’m not particularly disposed to give much of a damn what you think. Why Becker should hire me instead of some local sniffer is his business. The fact that he’s prepared to pay me generously is mine. There’s nothing in between, for you or anyone else. Not now. When you get to court I’ll sit on your lap and comb your hair if you want me to. But until then you read your lawbooks and I’ll worry about what you’re going to say that’ll get the stupid bastard off.’

‘Good enough,’ Liebl growled, his mouth teetering on the edge of a smile. ‘Veracity becomes you rather well. Like most lawyers I have a sneaking admiration for people who seem to believe what they say. Yes, I have a high regard for the probity of others, if only because we lawyers are so brimful of artifice.’

‘I thought you spoke plainly enough.’

‘A mere feint, I asssure you,’ he said loftily.

We left my luggage at a comfortable-looking pension in the 8th Bezirk, in the American sector, and drove on to Liebl’s office in the inner city. Like Berlin, Vienna was divided among the Four Powers, with each of them controlling a separate sector. The only difference was that Vienna’s inner city, surrounded by the wide open boulevard of grand hotels and palaces that was called the Ring, was under the control of all four Powers at once in the shape of the International Patrol. Another, more immediately noticeable difference was in the Austrian capital’s state of repair. It was true the city had been bombed about a bit, but compared with Berlin Vienna looked tidier than an undertaker’s shop window.

When at last we were sitting in Liebl’s office, he found Becker’s files and ran through the facts of the case with me.

‘Naturally, the strongest piece of evidence against Herr Becker is his possession of the murder weapon,’ Liebl said, handing me a couple of photographs of the gun which had killed Captain Linden.

‘Walther P38,’ I said. ‘SS handgrip. I used one myself in the last year of the war. They rattle a bit, but once the unusual trigger pull is mastered you can generally shoot them fairly accurately. I never much cared for the external hammer though. No, I prefer the PPK myself.’ I handed back the pictures. ‘Do you have any of the pathologist’s snaps of the captain?’

Liebl passed me an envelope with evident distaste.

‘Funny how they look when they’re all cleaned up again,’ I said as I looked at the photographs. ‘You shoot a man in the face with a .38 and he looks no worse than if he’d had a mole removed. Good-looking son of a bitch, I’ll say that much for him. Did they find the bullet?’

‘Next picture.’

I nodded as I found it. Not much to kill a man, I thought.

‘The police also found several cartons of cigarettes at Herr Becker’s home,’ said Liebl. ‘Cigarettes of the same kind that were in the old studio where Linden was shot.’

I shrugged. ‘He likes to smoke. I don’t see what a few boxes of nails can pin on him.’

‘No? Then let me explain. These were cigarettes stolen from the tobacco factory on Thaliastrasse, which is quite near the studio. Whoever stole the cigarettes was using the studio to store them. When Becker first found Captain Linden’s body he helped himself to a few cartons before he went home.’

‘That sounds like Becker, all right,’ I sighed. ‘He always did have long fingers.’

‘Well, it’s the length of his neck that matters now. I need not remind you that this is a capital case, Herr Gunther.’

‘You can remind me of it as often as you think fit, Herr Doktor. Tell me, who owned the studio?’

‘Drittemann Film-und Senderaum GMBH. At least that was the name of the company on the lease. But nobody seems to remember any films being made there. When the police searched the place they didn’t find so much as an old spotlight.’

‘Could I get a look inside?’

‘I’ll see if I can arrange it. Now, if you have any more questions, Herr Gunther, I suggest that you save them until tomorrow morning when we see Herr Becker. Meanwhile, there are one or two arrangements that you and I must conclude, such as the balance of your fee, and your expenses. Please excuse me for a moment while I get your money from the safe.’ He stood up and went out of the room.

Liebl’s practice, in Judengasse, was on the first floor of a shoemaker’s shop. When he came back into his office carrying two bundles of banknotes, he found me standing at the window.

‘Two thousand five hundred American dollars, in cash, as agreed,’ he said coolly, ‘and 1,000 Austrian schillings to cover your expenses. Any more will need to be authorized by Fräulein Braunsteiner — she’s Herr Becker’s girlfriend. The costs of your accommodation will be taken care of by this office.’ He handed me a pen. ‘Will you sign this receipt, please?’

I glanced over the writing and signed. ‘I’d like to meet her,’ I said. ‘I’d like to meet all Becker’s friends.’

‘My instructions are that she will contact you at your pension.’

I pocketed the money and returned to the window.

‘I trust that if the police pick you up with all those dollars, I may rely on your discretion? There are currency regulations which —’

‘I’ll leave your name out of it, don’t worry. As a matter of interest, what’s to stop me taking the money and returning home?’

‘You merely echo my own warning to Herr Becker. In the first place, he said that you were an honourable man, and that if you were paid to do a job, you would do it. Not the type to leave him to hang. He was quite dogmatic about it.’

‘I’m touched,’ I said. ‘And in the second place?’

‘Can I be frank?’

‘Why stop now?’

‘Very well. Herr Becker is one of the worst racketeers in Vienna. Despite his present predicament he is not entirely without influence in certain, shall we say, more nefarious quarters of this city.’ His face looked pained. ‘I should be reluctant to say any more at the risk of sounding like a common thug.’

‘That’s quite candid enough, Herr Doktor. Thank you.’

He came over to the window. ‘What are you looking at?’

‘I think I’m being followed. Do you see that man -?’

‘The man reading the newspaper?’

‘I’m sure I saw him at the railway station.’

Liebl removed his spectacles from his top pocket and bent them round his furry old ears. ‘He doesn’t look Austrian,’ he pronounced finally. ‘What paper is he reading?’

I squinted for a moment. ‘The Wiener Kurier.’

‘Hmm. Not a Communist, anyway, He’s probably an American, a field agent from the Special Investigation Section of their military police.’

‘Wearing plainclothes?’

‘I believe that they are no longer required to wear uniform. At least in Vienna.’ He removed his glasses and turned away. ‘I dare say it’ll be something routine. They’ll want to know all about any friend of Herr Becker. You should expect to be pulled in sometime, for questioning.’

‘Thanks for the warning.’ I started to move away from the window but found my hand lingered on the big shutter, with its solid-looking cross bar. ‘They certainly knew how to build these old places, didn’t they? This thing looks as if it was meant to keep out an army.’

‘Not an army, Herr Gunther. A mob. This was once the heart of the ghetto. In the fifteenth century, when the house was built; they had to be prepared for the occasional pogrom. Nothing changes so very much, does it?’

I sat down opposite him and smoked a Memphis from the packet I had brought from Poroshin’s supplies. I waved the packet at Liebl who took one and put it carefully into a cigarette-case. He and I hadn’t had the best of starts. It was time to repair a few bridges. ‘Keep the pack,’ I told him.

‘You’re very kind,’ he said, handing me an ashtray in return.

Watching him light one now, I wondered what genealogy of debauch had jaspered his once handsome face. His grey cheeks were heavily wrinked with almost glacial striations, and his nose was slightly puckered, as if someone had told a sick joke. His lips were very red and very thin and he smiled like a wily old snake, which only served to enhance the look of dissipation that the years, and, most probably, the war had etched on his features. He himself provided an explanation.

‘I was in a concentration camp for a while. Before the war I was a member of the Christian Social Party. You know, people prefer to forget, but there was a very great feeling for Hitler in Austria.’ He coughed a little as the first smoke filled his lungs. ‘It is very convenient for us that the Allies decided that Austria was a victim of Nazi aggression instead of a collaborator with it. But it is also absurd. We are perfect bureaucrats, Herr Gunther. It is remarkable the number of Austrians who came to occupy crucial roles in the organization of Hitler’s crimes. And many of these same men — and quite a few Germans — are living right here in Vienna. Even now the Security Directorate for Upper Austria is investigating the theft of a number of identity cards from the Vienna State Printing Office. So you can see that for those who wish to stay here, there is always a means of doing so. The truth is that these men, these Nazis, enjoy living in my country. They have five hundred years of Jew-hatred to make them feel at home.

‘I mention these things because as a pifke —’ he smiled apologetically ‘— as a Prussian, you may find that you encounter a certain amount of hostility in Vienna. These days Austrians tend to reject everything German. They work very hard at being Austrian. An accent like yours might serve to remind some Viennese that for seven years they were National Socialists. An unpalatable fact that most people now prefer to believe was little more than a bad dream.’

‘I’ll bear it in mind.’

When I finished my meeting with Liebl I went back to the pension in Skodagasse, where I found a message from Becker’s girlfriend to say that that she would drop by around six to make sure that I was comfortable. The Pension Caspian was a first-class little place. I had a bedroom with a small adjoining sittingroom and bathroom. There was even a tiny covered veranda where I might have sat in summer. The place was warm and there seemed to be a never-ending supply of hot water — an unaccustomed luxury. I had not long finished a bath, the duration of which even Marat might have baulked at, when there was a knock at my sitting-room door, and, glancing at my wristwatch, I saw that it was almost six. I slipped into my overcoat and opened the door.

She was small and bright-eyed, with a child’s rosy cheeks and dark hair that looked as if it rarely felt a comb. Her well-toothed smile straightened a little as she saw my bare feet.

‘Herr Gunther?’ she said, hesitantly.

‘Fräulein Traudl Braunsteiner.’

She nodded.

‘Come in. I’m afraid I spent rather longer in the bath than I should have, but the last time I had really hot water was when I came back from the Soviet labour camp. Have a seat while I throw on some clothes.’

When I came back into the sitting-room I saw that she had brought a bottle of vodka and was pouring two glasses out on a table by the French window. She handed me my drink and we sat down.

‘Welcome to Vienna,’ she said. ‘Emil said I should bring you a bottle.’ She kicked the bag by her leg. ‘Actually I brought two. They’ve been hanging out of the window of the hospital all day, so the vodka is nice and cold. I don’t like vodka any other way.’

We clinked glasses and drank, the bottom of her glass beating my own to the table-top.

‘You’re not unwell, I hope? You mentioned a hospital.’

‘I’m a nurse, at the General. You can see it if you walk to the top of the street. That’s partly why I booked you in here — because it’s so near. But also because I know the owner, Frau Blum-Weiss. She was a friend of my mother’s. Also I thought you’d prefer to stay close to the Ring, and to the place where the American captain was shot. That’s in Dettergasse, on the other side of Vienna’s outer ring, the Gürtel.’

‘This place suits me very nicely. To be honest it’s a lot more comfortable than what I’m used to at home, back in Berlin. Things are quite hard there.’ I poured us another drink. ‘Exactly how much do you know about what happened?’

‘I know everything that Dr Liebl has told you; and everything that Emil will tell you tomorrow morning.’

‘What about Emil’s business?’

Traudl Braunsteiner smiled coyly and uttered a little snigger. ‘There’s not much I don’t know about Emil’s business either.’ Noticing a button that was hanging by a thread from her crumpled raincoat, she tugged it off and pocketed it. She was like a fine lace handkerchief that was in need of laundering. ‘Being a nurse, I guess I’m a little relaxed about that sort of thing: black market. I’ve stolen a few drugs myself, I don’t mind admitting it. Actually, all the girls do it at some time or another. For some it’s a simple choice: sell penicillin or sell your body. I guess we are lucky enough to have something else to sell.’ She shrugged and swallowed her second vodka. ‘Seeing people suffering and dying doesn’t breed a very healthy respect for law and order.’ She laughed apologetically. ‘Money’s no good if you’re not fit to spend it. God, what are the Krupp family worth? Billions probably. But they’ve got one of them at an insane asylum here in Vienna.’

‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t asking you to justify it to me.’ But plainly she was trying to justify it to herself.

Traudl tucked her legs underneath her behind. She sat carelessly in the armchair, not seeming to mind any more than I did that I could see her stocking-tops and garters, and the edge of her smooth, white thighs.

‘What can you do?’ she said, biting her fingernail. ‘Now and again everyone in Vienna has to buy something that’s a bit Ressel Park.’ She explained that this was the city’s main centre for the black market.

‘It’s the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin,’ I said. ‘And in front of the Reichstag.’

‘How funny,’ she chuckled mischievously. ‘There would be a scandal in Vienna if that sort of thing went on outside our parliament.’

‘That’s because you have a parliament. Here the Allies just supervise. But they actually govern in Germany.’ My view of her underwear disappeared now as she tugged at the hem of her skirt.

‘I didn’t know that. Not that it would matter. There would still be a scandal in Vienna, parliament or no parliament. Austrians are such hypocrites. You would think they would feel easier about these things. There’s been a black market here since the Habsburgs. It wasn’t cigarettes then of course, but favours, patronage. Personal contacts still count for a lot.’

‘Speaking of which, how did you meet Becker?’

‘He fixed some papers for a friend of mine, a nurse at the hospital. And we stole some penicillin for him. That was when there was still some about. This wasn’t long after my mother died.’ Her bright eyes widened as if she was struggling to comprehend something. ‘She threw herself under a tram.’ Forcing a smile and a bemused sort of laugh, she managed to contain her feelings. ‘My mother was a very Viennese type of Austrian, Bernie. We’re always committing suicide, you know. It’s a way of life for us.

‘Anyway, Emil was very kind and great fun. He took me away from my grief, really. I’ve no other family, you see. My father was killed in an air-raid. And my brother died in Yugoslavia, fighting the partisans. Without Emil I really don’t know what might have become of me. If something were to happen to him now —’ Traudl’s mouth stiffened as she pictured the fate that seemed most likely to befall her lover. ‘You will do your best for him, won’t you? Emil said you were the only person he could trust to find something that might give him half a chance.’

‘I’ll do everything I can for him, Traudl, you have my word on that.’ I lit us both a cigarette and handed one to her. ‘It may interest you to know that normally I’d convict my own mother if she were standing over a dead body with a gun in her hand. But for what it’s worth I believe Becker’s story, if only because it’s so plausibly bad. At least until I’ve heard it from him. That may not surprise you very much, but it sure as hell impresses me.

‘Only look at my fingertips. They’re a little short on saintly aura. And the hat on the sideboard there? It wasn’t meant for stalking deer. So if I’m to guide him out of that condemned cell your boyfriend is going to have to find me a ball of thread. Tomorrow morning, he’d better have something to say for himself or this show won’t be worth the price of the greasepaint.’

12

The Law’s most terrible punishment is always what happens in a man’s own imagination: the prospect of one’s own, judicially executed killing is food for thought of the most ingeniously masochistic kind. To put a man on trial for his life is to fill his mind with thoughts crueller than any punishment yet devised. And naturally enough the idea of what it must be like to drop metres through a trap-door, to be brought up short of the ground by a length of rope tied round the neck takes its toll on a man. He finds it hard to sleep, loses his appetite, and not uncommonly his heart starts to suffer under the strain of what his own mind has imposed. Even the most dull, unimaginative intellect need only roll his head around on his shoulders, and listen to the crunching gristle sound of his vertebrae in order to appreciate, in the pit of his stomach, the ghastly horror of hanging.

So I was not surprised to find Becker a thinner, etiolated sketch of his former self. We met in a small, barely furnished interview room at the prison on Rossauer Lände. When he came into the room he silently shook me by the hand before turning to address the warder who had stationed himself against the door.

‘Hey, Pepi,’ Becker said jovially, ‘do you mind?’ He reached inside his shirt pocket and retrieved a packet of cigarettes which he tossed across the room. The warder called Pepi caught them with the tips of his fingers and inspected the brand. ‘Have a smoke outside the door, OK?’

‘All right,’ said Pepi, and left.

Becker nodded appreciatively as the three of us seated ourselves round the table bolted to the yellow-tiled wall.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said to Dr Liebl. ‘All the warders are at it in here. Much better than the Stiftskaserne, I can tell you. None of those fucking Yanks could be greased. There’s nothing those bastards want that they can’t get for themselves.’

‘You’re telling me,’ I said, and found my own cigarettes. Liebl shook his head when I offered him one. ‘These come from your friend Poroshin,’ I explained as Becker slipped one out of the pack.

‘Quite a fellow, isn’t he?’

‘Your wife thinks he’s your boss.’

Becker lit us both and blew a cloud of smoke across my shoulder. ‘You spoke to Ella?’ he said, but he didn’t sound surprised.

‘Apart from the five thousand, she’s the only reason I’m here,’ I said. ‘With her on your case I decided you probably needed all the help you could get. As far as she’s concerned you’re already swinging.’

‘Hates me that bad, eh?’

‘Like a cold sore.’

‘Well she’s got the right, I guess.’ He sighed and shook his head. Then he took a long, nervous drag of his cigarette that barely left the paper on the tobacco. For a moment he stared at me, his bloodshot eyes blinking hard through the smoke. After several seconds he coughed and smiled all at once. ‘Go ahead and ask me.’

‘All right. Did you kill Captain Linden?’

‘As God is my witness, no.’ He laughed. ‘Can I go now, sir?’ He took another desperate suck at his smoke. ‘You do believe me, don’t you, Bernie?’

‘I believe you’d have a better story if you were lying. I credit you with that much sense. But as I was saying to your girlfriend —’

‘You’ve met Traudl? Good. She’s great, isn’t she?’

‘Yes, she is. Christ only knows what she sees in you.’

‘She enjoys my after-dinner conversation of course. That’s why she doesn’t like to see me locked up in here. She misses our little fireside chats about Wittgenstein.’ The smile disappeared as his hand reached across the table and clutched at my forearm. ‘Look, you’ve got to get me out of here, Bernie. The five thousand was just to get you in the game. You prove that I’m innocent and I’ll treble your fee.’

‘We both know that it isn’t going to be easy.’

Becker misunderstood.

‘Money’s not a problem: I’ve got plenty of money. There’s a car parked in a garage in Hernals with $30,000 in the boot. It’s yours if you get me off.’

Liebl winced as his client continued to demonstrate his apparent lack of business acumen. ‘Really, Herr Becker, as your lawyer I must protest. This is not the way to —’

‘Shut up,’ Becker said savagely. ‘When I want your advice I’ll ask for it.’

Liebl gave a diplomatic sort of shrug, and leaned back on his chair.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘let’s talk about a bonus when you’re out. The money’s fine. You’ve already paid me well. I wasn’t talking about the money. No, what I’d like now are a few ideas. So how about you start by telling me about Herr König: where you met him, what he looks like and whether you think he likes cream in his coffee. OK?’

Becker nodded and ground his cigarette out on the floor. He clasped and unclasped his hands and started to squeeze his knuckles uncomfortably. Probably he had been over the story too many times to feel happy about repeating it.

‘All right. Well then, let’s see. I met Helmut König in the Koralle. That’s a nightclub in the 9th Bezirk. Porzellangasse. He just came up and introduced himself. Said he’d heard of me, and wanted to buy me a drink. So I let him. We talked about the usual things. The war, me being in Russia, me being in Kripo before the SS, same as you really. Only you left, didn’t you, Bernie?’

‘Just keep to the point.’

‘He said he’d heard of me from friends. He didn’t say who. There was some business he’d like to put my way: a regular delivery across the Green Frontier. Cash money, no questions asked. It was easy. All I had to do was collect a small parcel from an office here in Vienna and take it to another office in Berlin. But only when I was going anyway, with a lorry load of cigarettes, that kind of thing. If I’d been picked up they probably wouldn’t even have noticed König’s parcel. At first I thought it was drugs. But then I opened one of the parcels. It was just a few files: Party files, army files, SS files. The old stuff. I couldn’t see what made it worth money to them.’

‘Was it always just files?’

He nodded.

‘Captain Linden worked for the US Documents Centre in Berlin,’ I explained. ‘He was a Nazi-hunter. These files — do you remember any names?’

‘Bernie, they were tadpoles, small fry. SS corporals and army pay-clerks. Any Nazi-hunter would just have thrown them back. Those fellows are after the big fish, people like Bormann and Eichmann. Not fucking little pay-clerks.’

‘Nevertheless, the files were important to Linden. Whoever it was that killed him also arranged to have a couple of amateur detectives he knew murdered. Two Jews who had survived the camps and were out to settle a few scores. I found them dead a few days ago. They’d been that way a while. Perhaps the files were for them. So it would help if you could try and remember some of the names.’

‘Sure, anything you say, Bernie. I’ll try to fit it into my busy schedule.’

‘You do that. Now tell me about König. What did he look like?’

‘Let’s see: he was about forty, I’d say. Well-built, dark, thick moustache, weighed about ninety kilos, one-ninety tall; wore a good tweed suit, smoked cigars and always had a dog with him -a little terrier. He was Austrian for sure. Sometimes he had a girl around. Her name was Lotte. I don’t know her surname, but she worked at the Casanova Club. Good-looking bitch, blonde. That’s all I remember.’

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

‘Yes, he did.’

‘Then don’t you think you should tell me?’

‘I didn’t think it was relevant.’

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

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

‘Any rank?’

‘He didn’t say.’

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

Becker shook his head.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Tell me about it anyway. Was it always König you saw there?’

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

‘At twelve o’clock,’ Liebl said.

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

‘You’re the client,’ I said.

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

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

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

‘What’s that?’

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

‘Up to a point.’

‘Well, how is it that none of your so-called friends tried to find König? Or for that matter his girlfriend Lotte?’

‘Who’s saying they didn’t?’

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

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

‘Cut the cold cabbage and just tell me what happened.’

‘All right. A couple of my associates, fellows who knew what they were doing, asked around about König and the girl. They checked a few of the nightclubs. And …’ he winced uncomfortably ‘… they haven’t been seen since. Maybe they doublecrossed me. Maybe they just left town.’

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

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

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

‘But I just didn’t see it coming. Not until it was too late. Not like you. You were clever, and got out while you still had a choice. I never had that chance. It was obey orders, or face a court martial and a firing squad. I didn’t have the courage to do anything other than what I did.’

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

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

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

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

‘I’d say you’ll need one.’

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

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

‘Yes. But it’s just a precaution.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

13

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

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

The little cortège wasn’t difficult to spot as it drove slowly across the snowbound park to the French sector where Linden, a Catholic, was to be buried. But for one on foot, as I was, it was rather more difficult to catch up: by the time I did the expensive casket was already being lowered slowly into the darkbrown trench like a dinghy let down into a dirty harbour. The Linden family, arms interlinked in the manner of a squad of riot-police, faced its grief as indomitably as if there had been medals to be won.

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

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

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

‘A fellow called Linden.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pointing at one of the parked cars, a Mercedes, he said: ‘Like a lift to town? I’ve got a car here.’

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

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

‘Sure, hop in.’

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

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

‘My name is Shields,’ he volunteered. ‘Roy Shields.’

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

‘Are you from Vienna?’

‘Not originally.’

‘Where, originally?’

‘Germany.’

‘No, I didn’t think you were Austrian.’

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

The American laughed and found some cigarettes in the top pocket of his sports jacket. ‘Linden? I didn’t know him at all.’ He pulled one clear with his lips and then handed me the packet. ‘He got himself murdered a few weeks back, and my chief thought it would be a good idea if I were to represent our department at the funeral.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Did you bring one?’

‘Sure did. Cost me fifty schillings.’

‘Cost you, or cost your department?’

‘I guess we did pass a hat round at that.’

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

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

‘That’s because you’re a policeman.’

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

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

‘No thanks. I have some business with some of the stonemasons.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘No matter. Perhaps the honourable gentleman would care to return tomorrow, by which time I should have been able to find the Herr Doktor’s specifications. Permit me to explain.’ He showed me the sketch in his hand, one for a deceased whose inscription described him as an ‘Engineer of Urban Conduits and Conservancy’.

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

I thanked him and left him to his Engineer of Urban Conduits and Conservancy. That was presumably what you called yourself if you were one of the city’s plumbers. What sort of title, I wondered, did the private investigators give themselves? Balanced on the outside of the tram car back to town, I kept my mind off my precarious position by constructing a number of elegant titles for my rather vulgar profession: Practitioner of Solitary Masculine Lifestyle; Non-metaphysical Inquiry Agent; Interrogative Intermediary to the Perplexed and Anxious; Confidential Solicitor for the Displaced and the Misplaced; Bespoke Grail-Finder; Seeker after Truth. I liked the last one best of all. But, at least as far as my client in the particular case before me was concerned, there was nothing which seemed properly to reflect the sense of working for a lost cause that might have deterred even the most dogmatic Flat Earther.

14

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

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

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

‘Has it started turning yet?’

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

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

‘Not yet, anyway.’

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

‘I was starting to worry you wouldn’t show up.’

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

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

‘I’m not one for dreaming much,’ I told her.

‘Well, that’s a pity, isn’t it?’

She shrugged.

‘What do you dream about?’

‘Listen,’ she said, shaking her head of long, shiny brown hair, ‘this is Vienna. It doesn’t do to describe your dreams to anyone here. You never know, you might just be told what they really mean, and then where would you be?’

‘That sounds almost as if you have something to hide.’

‘I don’t see you wearing sandwich boards. Most people have something to hide. Especially these days. What’s in their heads most of all.’

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

‘Short for Bernhard? Like the dog that rescues mountaineers?’

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

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

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

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

‘Berlin.’

‘I thought so.’

‘Anything wrong with that?’

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

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

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

‘You don’t miss much, do you?’

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

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

‘Just wait until it gets crowded, and then you’ll wish it was like this again.’ She sipped her drink and leaned back on the red-velvet-and-gilt chair, stroking the buttonback satin upholstery that covered the wall of our booth with the palm of her outstretched hand.

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

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

‘Not exactly.’

‘Are they — together?’

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

‘Who’s the taller one?’

‘Ibolya. That’s Hungarian for a violet.’

‘And the blonde?’

‘That’s Mitzi.’ Veronika was bristling a little as she named the other girl. ‘Maybe you’d prefer to talk to them.’ She took out her powder-compact and scrutinized her lipstick in the tiny mirror. ‘I’m expected soon anyway. My mother will be getting worried.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Are you feeling a bit lonely?’ I called out, having drunk just enough not to feel stupid asking such a ridiculous question. My voice echoed up the side of the ruined museum. ‘If it’s the museum you’re interested in, we’re closed. Bombs, you know: dreadful things.’ There was no reply, and I found myself laughing. ‘If you’re a spy, you’re in luck. That’s the new profession to be in. Especially if you’re a Viennese. You don’t have to take my word for it. One of the Ivans told me.’

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

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

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

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

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

After less than a minute I heard the approaching sound of a man running lightly. Then the footsteps halted at the top of the passageway as he stood trying to judge whether or not it was safe to come after me. Hearing the other man’s footsteps, he started forward.

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

‘“Captain John Belinsky”,’ I read. ‘“430th United States CIC”. What’s that? Are you one of Mr Shields’s friends?’

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

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

‘Have you finished with that?’ he said in German.

I tossed him the wallet.

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

‘Fuck you, kraut.’

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

15

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

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

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

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

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

The mark-up for the inscription read: ‘SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF MARTIN ALBERS, BORN 1899, MARTYRED 9 APRIL 1945. BELOVED OF WIFE LENI, AND SONS MANFRED AND ROLF. BEHOLD, I SHEW YOU A MYSTERY; WE SHALL NOT ALL SLEEP, BUT WE SHALL ALL BE CHANGED, IN A MOMENT, IN THE TWINKLING OF AN EYE, AT THE LAST TRUMP: FOR THE TRUMPET SHALL SOUND, AND THE DEAD SHALL BE RAISED INCORRUPTIBLE, AND WE SHALL BE CHANGED. I CORINTHIANS 15: 51-52.’

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

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

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

‘The Central Telegraph Office is on Börseplatz,’ he answered, ‘on the Schottenring. You’ll find Berggasse just a couple of blocks north of there.’

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

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

‘It wasn’t Pullach, was it?’

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

‘Did he take all his things with him?’

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

‘No, I was wondering about his rooms.’

‘Well why didn’t you say? Come in, Herr —?’

‘It’s Professor, actually,’ I said with what I thought sounded like a typically Viennese punctiliousness. ‘Professor Kurtz.’ There was also the possibility that by giving myself the academic handle I might appeal to the snob in the woman. ‘Dr Abs and myself are mutually acquainted with a Herr König, who told me that he thought the Herr Doktor might be about to vacate some excellent rooms at this address.’

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

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

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

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

‘Lovely,’ I said looking about me.

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

‘I’m sure it’s fine,’ I said generously.

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

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

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

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

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

‘Herr Gunther?’ said the one wearing the sergeant’s stripes.

I nodded.

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

‘Am I being arrested?’

‘Excuse me, sir?’

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

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

I picked up my jacket and slipped it on.

‘You will remember to bring your papers, won’t you, sir?’ he smiled politely. ‘Save us coming back for them.’

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

‘The truck’s right outside the front door.’

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

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

‘Aren’t we going to Kärtnerstrasse?’ I said.

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

‘To see who? Shields or Belinsky?’

‘It will be explained —’

‘— when we get there, right.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Pichler’s dead?’

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

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

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

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

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

Shields shrugged apologetically. ‘As I said, it’s a British problem, not mine. Maybe you are innocent. But like I say, it sure would be a pain in the ass explaining it to those British. I swear they think every one of you krauts is a goddam Nazi.’

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

‘Well, naturally, when I heard that before coming to Captain Linden’s party you visited his murderer in prison, my inquiring nature could not be constrained.’ His tone grew sharper. ‘Come on, Gunther. I want to know what the hell is going on between you and Becker.’

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

‘Like it was engraved on my cigarette-case.’

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

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

‘A private investigator.’

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

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

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

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

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

‘The crooked kind.’

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

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

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

‘He’s not exactly a friend.’

‘So why did you take the case?’

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

‘Do you mind telling me why?’

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

Shields nodded and then made a sympathetic-sounding grunt.

‘Naturally all your papers are in order?’

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

‘I see you came through the Russian Zone. For a man who doesn’t like Ivans you must have some pretty good contacts in Berlin.’

‘Just a few dishonest ones.’

‘Dishonest Russkies?’

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

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

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

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

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

‘That makes two of us.’

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

‘I don’t agree.’

‘And what makes you think that?’

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

‘Five thousand?’ Shields let out a whistle.

‘Worth it if your head’s in a noose.’

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

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

‘By who?’

‘Dr Max Abs?’

Shields nodded, recognizing the name.

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

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

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

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

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

I nodded.

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

‘A coincidence is all it is,’ I said wearily.

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

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

‘The Werewolf Underground.’

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

‘Something wrong with that, you think?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Someone’s following you?’

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

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

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

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

‘Surprise me.’

‘Go home to Berlin. There’s nothing here for you.’

‘Maybe I would, except that I’m not sure that there’s anything there either. That’s one of the reasons I came, remember?’

16

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

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

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

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

I laughed. ‘I’m beginning to.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Get out of here, Veronika,’ I shouted.

Needing little encouragement, she grabbed her coat and ran towards one of the windows. But the Russian who had licked her seemed to have other ideas, and snatched at her mane of hair. In the same moment I swung the pipe, which hit the side of his lousy-looking head with an audible clang, numbing my hand with the vibration from the blow. The thought was just crossing my mind that I had hit him much too hard when I felt a sharp kick in the ribs, and then a knee thudded into my groin. The pipe fell on to the brick-strewn floor and there was a taste of blood in my mouth as I slowly followed it. I drew my legs up to my chest and tensed myself as I waited for the man’s great boot to smash into my body again and finish me. Instead I heard a short, mechanical punch of a sound, like the sound of a rivet-gun, and when the boot swung again it was well over my head. With one leg still in the air, the man staggered for a second like a drunken ballet-dancer and then fell dead beside me, his forehead neatly trepanned with a well-aimed bullet. I groaned and for a moment shut my eyes. When I opened them again and raised myself on to my forearm, there was a third man squatting in front of me, and for a chilling moment he pointed the silenced barrel of his Luger at the centre of my face.

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

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

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

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

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

I looked around. ‘Did you see where Veronika went?’

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

‘I only met her last night.’

‘Before you met me, I guess. Belinsky stared down at the soldier for a moment, then levelled the Luger at the back of the man’s head and pulled the trigger. ‘She’s outside,’ he said with no more emotion than if he had shot at a beer-bottle.

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

‘What?’

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

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

‘How do you know?’

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

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

Veronika was standing a short way back down Währinger Strasse and looked ready to make a run for it if it had been the two Russians who came out of the building. ‘When I saw your friend go in,’ she explained, ‘I waited to see what would happen.’

She had buttoned her coat to the neck, and, but for a slight bruise on her cheek and the tears in her eyes, I wouldn’t have said she looked like a girl who had narrowly missed being raped. She glanced nervously back at the building with a question in her eyes.

‘It’s all right,’ said Belinsky. ‘They won’t bother us no more.’ When Veronika had finished thanking me for saving her, and Belinsky for saving me, he and I walked her home to the halfruin in Rotenturmstrasse where she had her room. There she thanked us some more and invited us both to come up, an offer which we declined, and only after I had promised to visit her in the morning could she be persuaded to close the door and go to bed.

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

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

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

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

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

‘You’re a spy?’

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

‘So why are you following me?’

‘It’s hard to say, really.’

‘I’m sure I could find you a German dictionary.’

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

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

‘What a coincidence. So am I.’

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

‘Was he in the CIC too?’

‘Yes, the 970th, stationed in Germany. I’m 430th. We’re stationed in Austria. Really he should have let us know he was coming on to our patch.’

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

‘Not a word. Probably because there was no earthly reason why he should have come. If he was working on anything that affected this country he should have told us.’ Belinsky let out a balloon of smoke and waved it away from his face. ‘He was what you might call a desk-investigator. An intellectual. The sort of fellow you could let loose on a wall full of files with instructions to find Himmler’s optical prescription. The only problem is that because he was such a bright guy, he kept no case notes.’ Belinsky tapped his forehead with the stem of his pipe. ‘He kept everything up here. Which makes it a nuisance to find out what he was investigating that got him a lead lunch.’

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

‘So I heard.’ He inspected the smouldering contents of his cherrywood pipe bowl, and added: ‘Frankly, we’re all scraping around in the dark a bit on this one. Anyway, that’s where you walk into my life. We thought maybe you’d turn up something that we couldn’t manage ourselves, you being a native, comparatively speaking. And if you did, I’d be there for the cause of free democracy.’

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

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

I smiled. ‘You can call me Bernie.’

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

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

‘Want to let me take a peek?’

‘Why should I?’

‘I saved your life, kraut,’ he growled.

‘Too sentimental. Be a little more practical.’

‘All right then, maybe I can help.’

‘Better. Much better.’

‘What do you need?’

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

‘Who is this Abs guy? What’s his connection?’

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

Belinsky nodded.

‘All right then,’ I said. ‘Here’s my next card. König had a girlfriend called Lotte who hung around the Casanova. It could be that she sparkled there a bit, nibbled a little chocolate, I don’t know yet. Some of Becker’s friends crashed around there and a few other places and didn’t come home for tea. My idea is to put the girl on to it. I thought I’d have to get to know her a bit first of all. But of course now that she’s seen me on my white horse and wearing my Sunday suit of armour I can hurry that along.’

‘Suppose Veronika doesn’t know this Lotte. What then?’

‘Suppose you think of a better idea.’

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

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

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

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

‘Can’t we ask them?’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Where are you from?’ I said eventually.

‘Williamsburg, New York.’

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

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

‘I guess not.’

‘Talking of names, if you do speak to the MPs again it might be better if you didn’t mention me, or the CIC, to them. On account of the fact that they recently screwed up an operation we had going. The MVD managed to steal some US Military Police uniforms from the battalion HQ at the Stiftskaserne. They put them on and persuaded the MPs at the 19th Bezirk station to help them arrest one of our best informers in Vienna. A couple of days later another informant told us that the man was being interrogated at MVD headquarters in Mozartgasse. Not long after that we learned he had been shot. But not before he talked and gave away several other names.

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

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

17

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

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

‘I was just cleaning my teeth.’

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

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

‘Well, blame it on the föhn,’ suggested Shields, referring to the unseasonably warm and dry wind that occasionally descended on Vienna from the mountains. ‘Everyone else in this city blames all kinds of strange behaviour on it. But all I notice is that it makes the smell of horseshit even worse than usual.’

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

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

‘Maybe he got off somewhere else.’

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

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

‘Not in the American Zone.’

‘Well, that doesn’t start until you get to Linz. There’s over a hundred kilometres of Russian Lower Austria between here and your zone. You said yourself that you’re sure he got on the train. So what else does that leave?’ Then I recalled what Belinsky had said about the poor security of the US Military Police. ‘Of course, it’s possible he simply gave your men the slip. That he was too clever for them.’

Shields sighed. ‘Sometime, Gunther, when you’re not too busy with your old Nazi comrades, I’ll drive you out to the DP camp at Auhof and you can see all the illegal Jewish emigrants who thought they were too smart for us.’ He laughed. ‘That is, if you’re not scared that you might be recognized by someone from a concentration camp. It might even be fun to leave you there. Those Zionists don’t have my sense of humour about the SS.’

‘I’d certainly miss that, yes.’

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

‘Look, I’ve got to go.’

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

‘Yes, well, if you do smell something it’ll probably just be the föhn.’

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

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

‘What are you selling, swing?’ I asked him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘That’s a new gun,’ Rudi said indignantly. ‘Squeeze your eye down the barrel. It’s still greased: hasn’t been fired yet. I swear them at the top don’t even know it’s missing.’

‘Where did you get it?’

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

I nodded reluctantly. ‘Did you bring any ammunition?’

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

‘What, did you buy them off the ration?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Apart from everyone?’

‘The main black-siders.’

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

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

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

‘When exactly was this tobacco factory on Thaliastrasse robbed?’

‘Months ago.’

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

‘Not a chance. Thaliastrasse is in the 16th Bezirk, part of the French sector. The French MPs couldn’t catch drip in this city.’

‘What about the local bulls — the Vienna police?’

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

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

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

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

18

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

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

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

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

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

‘Maybe so. All the same, you won’t find me working in one of those places on the Gürtel where the numbers just walk up the stairs. And you won’t find me selling it on the street outside the American Information Office, or the Atlantis Hotel. Chocolady I may be, but I’m no sparkler. I have to like the gentleman.’

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

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

‘Maybe the police are right. Ever think of that?’

‘Well, they never found anything wrong with me. Nor will they.’ She smiled a shrewd little smile. ‘Like I said, I’m careful. I have to like the gentleman. Which means I won’t do Ivans or niggers.’

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

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

‘You don’t have to be a swimmer to throw someone a life-preserver. I’ve met enough snappers in my time to know that most of them started out as selective as you. Then someone comes along and beats the shit out of them, and the next time, with the landlord chasing for his rent, they can’t afford to be quite as choosy. You talk about percentages. Well, there’s not much percentage in french for ten schillings when you’re forty. You’re a nice girl, Veronika. If there were a priest around he’d maybe think you were worth a short homily, but since there isn’t you’ll have to make do with me.’

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

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

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

‘You’re Czech?’

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

‘According to my papers I was born in Austria. But the fact is that I’m Czech: a Sudeten German-Jew. I spent most of the war hiding out in lavatories and attics. Then I was with the partisans for a while, and after that a DP camp for six months before I escaped across the Green Frontier.

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

She swallowed hard and took a long drag of her cigarette. ‘Do you want to know something? I think I would sleep with the whole of the British Army if it meant that the Russians couldn’t claim me. And that includes the ones with syphilis.’ She tried a smile. ‘But as it happens I have a medical friend who got me a few bottles of penicillin. I dose myself with it now and again just to be on the safe side.’

‘That sounds expensive.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘That’s not it at all,’ I laughed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘This is one particular girl.’

‘Maybe you hadn’t noticed. None of the girls at the Casanova are that particular.’ She threw me a narrow-eyed look, as if she suddenly distrusted me. ‘I thought you sounded like them at the top. All that shit about drip and all. Are you working with that American?’

‘No, I’m a private investigator.’

‘Like the Thin Man?’

She laughed when I nodded.

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

I nodded again.

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

‘Her name is Lotte. I don’t know her last name. You might have seen her with a man called König. He wears a moustache and has a small terrier.’

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

‘No? Do you know where she is?’

‘Not exactly. They went skiing together — Lotte and Helmut König, her schätzi. Somewhere in the Austrian Tyrol, I believe.’

‘When was this?’

‘I don’t know. Two, three weeks ago. König seems to have plenty of money.’

‘Do you know when they’re coming back?’

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

‘Are you sure she’s coming back?’

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

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

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

‘I ought to warn you. It could be dangerous.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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