March Violets

12

It was nearly light by the time I got back to my apartment. The ‘painting-out’ squad was hard at work on the streets, obliterating the nocturnal daubings of the KPD—‘Red Front will Win’ and ‘Long Live Thaelman and Torgler’—before the city awoke to the new day.

I had been asleep for no more than a couple of hours when the sound of sirens and whistles wrenched me violently from my quiet slumbers. It was an air-raid practice.

I buried my head under the pillow and tried to ignore the area warden hammering on my door; but I knew that I would only have to account for my absence later on, and that failure to provide a verifiable explanation would result in a fine.

Thirty minutes later, when the whistles had blown and the sirens cranked to sound the all-clear, there seemed little point in going back to bed. So I bought an extra litre off the Bolle milkman and cooked myself an enormous omelette.

Inge arrived at my office at just after nine. Without much ceremony she sat down on the other side of my desk and watched me finish making some case notes.

‘Did you see your friend?’ I asked her after a moment.

‘We went to the theatre.’

‘Yes? What did you see?’ I found that I wanted to know everything, including details that had no bearing on the man’s possible knowledge of Paul Pfarr.

‘The Base Wallah. It was rather weak, but Otto seemed to enjoy it. He insisted on paying for the tickets, so I didn’t need the petty cash.’

‘Then what did you do?’

‘We went to Baarz’s beer restaurant. I hated it. A real Nazi place. Everyone stood and saluted the radio when it played the Horst Wessel Song and Deutschland Über Alles. I had to do it too, and I hate to salute. It makes me feel like I’m hailing a taxi. Otto drank rather a lot and became very talkative. I drank quite a lot myself actually—I feel a bit rough this morning.’ She lit a cigarette. ‘Anyway, Otto was vaguely acquainted with Pfarr. He says that Pfarr was about as popular as a ferret in a gumboot at the DAF, and it’s not difficult to see why. Pfarr was investigating corruption and fraud in the Labour Union. As a result of his investigations, two treasurers of the Transport Workers Union were dismissed and sent to KZs, one after the other; the chairman of the Koch Strasse shop-committee of Ullstein’s, the big printing works, was found guilty of stealing funds and executed; Rolf Togotzes, the cashier of the Metal Workers Union, was sent to Dachau; and a lot more. If ever a man had enemies, it was Paul Pfarr. Apparently there were lots of smiling faces around the department when it became known that Pfarr was dead.’

‘Any idea what he was investigating at the time of his death?’

‘No. Apparently he played things very close to his chest. He liked to work through informers, amassing evidence until he was ready to make formal charges.’

‘Did he have any colleagues there?’

‘Just a stenographer, a girl by the name of Marlene Sahm. Otto, my friend, if you can call him that, took quite a shine to her, and asked her out a couple of times. Nothing much came of it. That’s the story of his life, I’m afraid. But he remembered her address though.’ Inge opened her handbag and consulted a small notebook. ‘Nollendorfstrasse, Number 23. She’ll probably know what he had been getting up to.’

‘He sounds like a bit of a ladies’ man, your friend Otto.’

Inge laughed. ‘That’s what he said about Pfarr. He was pretty sure that Pfarr was cheating on his wife, and that he had a mistress. He saw him with a woman on several occasions at the same nightclub. He said that Pfarr seemed embarrassed at being discovered. Otto said she was quite a beauty, if a bit flashy. He thought her name was Vera, or Eva, or something like that.’

‘Did he tell the police that?’

‘No. He says that they never asked. On the whole he’d rather not get involved with the Gestapo unless he has to.’

‘You mean that he hasn’t even been questioned?’

‘Apparently not.’

I shook my head. ‘I wonder what they’re playing at.’ I thought for a minute, and then added, ‘Thanks for doing that, by the way. I hope it wasn’t too much of a nuisance.’

She shook her head. ‘How about you? You look tired.’

‘I was working late. And I didn’t sleep all that well. Then this morning there was a damned air-raid practice.’ I tried to massage some life into the top of my head. I didn’t tell her about Goering. There was no need for her to know more than she had to. It was safer for her that way.

That morning she was wearing a dress of dark-green cotton with a fluted collar and cavalier cuffs of stiffened white lace. For a brief moment I fed myself on the fantasy that had me lifting her dress up and familiarizing myself with the curve of her buttocks and the depth of her sex.

‘This girl, Pfarr’s mistress. Are we going to try and find her?’

I shook my head. ‘The bulls would be bound to hear about it. And then it could get awkward. They’re quite keen on finding her themselves, and I wouldn’t want to start picking that nostril with one finger already in there.’ I picked up the phone and asked to be connected to Six’s home telephone number. It was Farraj, the butler, who answered.

‘Is Herr Six, or Herr Haupthandler, at home? It’s Bernhard Gunther speaking.’

‘I’m sorry, sir, but they’re both away at a meeting this morning. Then I believe they’ll be attending the opening of the Olympic Games. May I give either of them a message, sir?’

‘Yes, you can,’ I said. ‘Tell them both that I’m getting close.’

‘Is that all, sir?’

‘Yes, they’ll know what I mean. And make sure that you tell both of them, Farraj, won’t you.’

‘Yes, sir.’

I put the phone down. ‘Right,’ I said.’ It’s time we got going.’

It was a ten-pfennig ride on the U-Bahn to the Zoo Station, repainted to look especially smart for the Olympic fortnight. Even the walls of the houses backing on to the station had been given a new coat of white. But high above the city, and where the Hindenburg airship droned noisily back and forwards towing an Olympic flag, the sky had gathered a surly gang of dark-grey clouds. As we left the station, Inge looked upwards and said: ‘It would serve them right if it rained. Better still, if it rained for the entire fortnight.’

‘That’s the one thing they can’t control,’ I said. We approached the top of Kurfürstenstrasse. ‘Now then, while Herr Haupthandler is away with his employer, I propose to have a squint at his rooms. Wait for me at Aschinger’s restaurant.’ Inge began to protest, but I continued speaking: ‘Burglary is a serious crime, and I don’t want you around if the going gets tough. Understand?’

She frowned, and then nodded. ‘Brute,’ she muttered, as I walked away.

Number 120 was a five-storey block of expensive-looking flats, of the sort that had a heavy black door that was polished so keenly they could have used it as a mirror in a negro jazz-band’s dressing room. I summoned the diminutive caretaker with the enormous stirrup-shaped brass door-knocker. He looked about as alert as a doped tree sloth. I flashed the Gestapo warrant disc in front of his rheumy little eyes. At the same time I snapped ‘Gestapo’ at him and, pushing him roughly aside, I stepped quickly into the hall. The caretaker oozed fear through every one of his pasty pores.

‘Which is Herr Haupthandler’s apartment?’

Realizing that he was not about to be arrested and sent to a KZ, the caretaker relaxed slightly. ‘The second floor, apartment five. But he’s not at home right now.’

I snapped my fingers at him. ‘Your pass-key, give it to me.’ With eager, unhesitating hands, he produced a small bunch of keys and removed one from the ring. I snatched it from his trembling fingers.

‘If Herr Haupthandler returns, ring once on the telephone, and then replace the receiver. Is that clear?’

‘Yes, sir,’ he said, with an audible gulp.

Haupthändler’s were an impressively large suite of rooms on two levels, with arched doorways and a shiny wooden floor covered with thick Oriental rugs. Everything was neat and well-polished, so much so that the apartment seemed hardly lived in at all. In the bedroom were two large twin beds, a dressing-table, and a pouffe. The colour scheme was peach, jade-green and mushroom, with the first colour predominating. I didn’t like it. On each of the two beds was an open suitcase, and on the floor were empty carrier-bags from several large department stores including C & A, Grunfeld’s, Gerson’s and Tietz. I searched through the suitcases. The first one I looked in was a woman’s, and I was struck by the fact that everything in it was, or at least looked, brand-new. Some of the garments still had the price tags attached, and even the soles of the shoes were unworn. By contrast the other suitcase, which I presumed must belong to Haupthandler himself, contained nothing that was new, except for a few toiletries. There was no diamond necklace. But lying on the dressing-table was a wallet-sized folder containing two Deutsche Lufthansa air-tickets, for the Monday evening flight to Croydon, London. The tickets were returns, and booked in the name of Herr and Frau Teichmüller.

Before leaving Haupthandler’s apartment I called the Adlon Hotel. When Hermine answered I thanked her for helping me with the Princess Mushmi story. I couldn’t tell if Goering’s people in the Forschungsamt had tapped the telephone yet; there were no audible clicks, nor any extra resonance in Hermine’s voice. But I knew that if they really had put a tap on Haupthandler’s telephone, then I ought to see a transcript of my conversation with Hermine later on that day. It was as good a way as any of testing the true extent of the Prime Minister’s cooperation.

I left Haupthandler’s rooms and returned to the ground floor. The caretaker emerged from his office and took possession of his pass-key again.

‘You will say nothing of my being here to anyone. Otherwise it will go badly for you. Is that understood?’ He nodded silently. I saluted smartly, something Gestapo men never do, preferring as they do, to remain as inconspicuous as possible, but I was laying it on for the sake of effect.

‘Heil Hitler,’ I said.

‘Heil Hitler,’ repeated the caretaker, and, returning the salute, he managed to drop the keys.

‘We’ve got until Monday night to pull this one back,’ I said, sitting down at Inge’s table. I explained about the air-tickets and the two suitcases. ‘The funny thing was that the woman’s case was full of new things.’

‘Your Herr Haupthändler sounds like he knows how to look after a girl.’

‘Everything was new. The garter-belt, the handbag, the shoes. There wasn’t one item in that case that looked as though it had been used before. Now what does that tell you?’

Inge shrugged. She was still slightly piqued at having been left behind. ‘Maybe he’s got a new job, going door-to-door, selling women’s clothes.’

I raised my eyebrows.

‘All right then,’ she said. ‘Maybe this woman that he’s taking to London doesn’t have any nice clothes.’

‘More like, doesn’t have any clothes at all,’ I said. ‘Rather a strange kind of woman, wouldn’t you say?’

‘Bernie, just you come home with me. I’ll show you a woman without any clothes.’

For a brief second I entertained myself with the idea. But I went on, ‘No, I’m convinced that Haupthändler’s mystery girlfriend is starting out on this trip with a completely new wardrobe, from top to toe. Like a woman with no past.’

‘Or,’ said Inge, ‘a woman who is starting afresh.’ The theory was taking shape in her mind even as she was speaking. With greater conviction, she added, ‘A woman who has had to sever contact with her previous existence. A woman who couldn’t go home and pick up her things, because there wasn’t time. No, that can’t be right. She has until Monday night after all. So perhaps she’s afraid to go home, in case there’s someone waiting for her there.’ I nodded approvingly, and was about to develop this line of reasoning, but found that she was there ahead of me. ‘Perhaps,’ she said, ‘this woman was Pfarr’s mistress, the one the police are looking for. Vera, or Eva, I forget which.’

‘Haupthändler in this with her? Yes,’ I said thoughtfully, ‘that could fit. Maybe Pfarr gives his mistress the brush-off when he finds out that his wife is pregnant. The prospect of fatherhood has been known to bring some men to their senses. But it also happens to spoil things for Haupthandler, who might himself have had ambitions as far as Frau Pfarr was concerned. Maybe Haupthandler and this woman Eva got together and decided to play the part of the wronged lover—in tandem, so to speak—and also make a little money into the bargain. It’s not unlikely that Pfarr might have told Eva about his wife’s jewellery.’ I stood up, finishing my drink.

‘Then maybe Haupthandler is hiding Eva somewhere.’

‘That makes three maybes. More than I’m used to having over lunch. Any more and I’ll get sick.’ I glanced at my watch. ‘Come on, we can think about it some more on the way.’

‘On the way where?’

‘Kreuzberg.’

She levelled a well-manicured finger at me. ‘And this time, I’m not being left somewhere safe while you get all the fun. Understood?’

I grinned at her, and shrugged. ‘Understood.’

The Kreuzberg, the Hill of the Cross, lies to the south of the city, in Viktoria Park, near Tempelhof Airport. It’s where Berlin’s artists gather to sell their pictures. Just a block away from the park, Chamissoplatz is a square surrounded by high, grey, fortress-like tenements. Pension Tillessen occupied the corner of Number 17, but with its closed shutters pasted over with Party posters and KPD graffiti, it didn’t look as though it had been taking guests since Bismarck grew his first moustache. I went to the front door and found it locked. Bending down, I peered through the letter-box, but there was no sign of anyone.

Next door, at the office of Heinrich Billinger, ‘German’ Accountant, the coalman was delivering some brown-coal briquets on what looked like a bakery tray. I asked him if he could recollect when the pension had closed. He wiped his smutty brow, and then spat as he tried to remember.

‘It never was what you might call a regular pension,’ he declared finally. He looked uncertainly at Inge, and choosing his words carefully, added: ‘More what you might call a house of ill-repute. Not a regular out-and-out bawdy house, you understand. Just the sort of place where you used to see a snapper take her sledge. I remember as I saw some men coming out of there only a couple of weeks ago. The boss never bought coal regular like. Just the odd tray here and there. But as to when it closed, I couldn’t tell you. If it is closed, mind. Don’t judge it by the way it looks. Seems to me as how it’s always been in that state.’

I led Inge round the back, to a small cobbled alleyway that was lined with garages and lock-ups. Stray cats sat mangily self-contained on top of brick walls; a mattress lay abandoned in a doorway, its iron guts spilling on to the ground; someone had tried to burn it, and I was reminded of the blackened bed-frames in the forensic photographs Illmann had shown me. We stopped beside what I took to be the garage belonging to the pension and looked through the filthy window, but it was impossible to see anything.

‘I’ll come back for you in a minute,’ I said, and clambered up the drainpipe at the side of the garage and onto the corrugated iron roof.

‘See that you do,’ she called.

I walked carefully across the badly rusted roof on all fours, not daring to stand up straight and concentrate all my weight on one point. At the back of the roof I looked down into a small courtyard which led on to the pension. Most of the windows in the rooms were shrouded with dirty net curtains, and there was no sign of life at any of them. I searched for a way down, but there was no drainpipe, and the wall to the adjoining property, the German accountant’s, was too low to be of any use. It was fortunate that the rear of the pension obscured the view to the garage of anyone who might have chanced to look up from poring over a dull set of accounts. There was no choice but to jump, although it was a height of over four metres. I made it, but it left the soles of my feet stinging for minutes afterwards, as if they had been beaten with a length of rubber hosing. The back door to the garage was not locked and, but for a pile of old car tyres, it was empty. I unbolted the double doors and admitted Inge. Then I bolted them again. For a moment we stood in silence, looking at each other in the half darkness, and I nearly let myself kiss her. But there are better places to kiss a pretty girl than a disused garage in Kreuzberg.

We crossed the yard, and when we came to the back door of the pension, I tried the handle. The door stayed shut.

‘Now what?’ said Inge. ‘A lock-pick? A skeleton key?’

‘Something like that,’ I said, and kicked the door in.

‘Very subtle,’ she said, watching the door swing open on its hinges. ‘I assume you’ve decided that there’s nobody here.’

I grinned at her. ‘When I looked through the letter-box I saw a pile of unopened mail on the mat.’ I went in. She hesitated long enough for me to look back at her. ‘It’s all right. There’s nobody here. Hasn’t been for some time, I’d bet.’

‘So what are we doing here?’

‘We’re having a look around, that’s all.’

‘You make it sound as if we were in Grunfeld’s department store,’ she said, following me down the gloomy stone corridor. The only sound was our own footsteps, mine strong and purposeful, and hers nervous and half on tiptoe.

At the end of the corridor I stopped and glanced into a large and extremely smelly kitchen. Piles of dirty dishes lay in untidy stacks. Cheese and meat lay flyblown on the kitchen table. A bloated insect buzzed past my ear. One step in, the stink was overpowering. Behind me I heard Inge cough so that it was almost a retch. I hurried to the window and pushed it open. For a moment we stood there, enjoying the clean air. Then, looking down at the floor, I saw some papers in front of the stove. One of the doors to the incinerator was open, and I bent forward to take a look. Inside, the stove was full of burnt paper, most of it nothing more than ash; but here and there were the edges or corners of something that had not quite been consumed by the flames.

‘See if you can salvage some of this,’ I said. ‘It looks like someone was in a hurry to cover his tracks.’

‘Anything in particular?’

‘Anything legible, I suppose.’ I walked over to the kitchen doorway.

‘Where will you be?’

‘I’m going to take a look upstairs.’ I pointed to the dumb-waiter. ‘If you need me, just shout up the shaft there.’ She nodded silently, and rolled up her sleeves.

Upstairs, and on the same level as the front door, there was even more mess. Behind the front desk were empty drawers, their contents lying on the threadbare carpet; and the doors of every cupboard had been wrenched off their hinges. I was reminded of the mess in Goering’s Derfflingerstrasse apartment. Most of the bedroom floorboards had been ripped up, and some of the chimneys showed signs of having been probed with a broom. Then I went into the dining room. Blood had spattered the white wallpaper like an enormous graze, and on the rug was a stain the size of a dinner-plate. I stood on something hard, and bent down to pick up what looked like a bullet. It was a lead weight, encrusted with blood. I tossed it in my hand and then put it in my jacket pocket.

More blood had stained the wooden sill of the dumb-waiter. I leaned into the shaft to shout down to Inge and found myself retching, so strong was the smell of putrefaction. I staggered away. There was something sticking in the shaft, and it wasn’t a late breakfast. Covering my nose and mouth with my handkerchief, I poked my head back into the shaft. Looking down I saw that the lift itself was stuck between floors. Glancing upwards I saw that as it crossed the pulley, one of the ropes supporting the lift had been jammed with a piece of wood. Sitting on the sill, with the top half of my body in the shaft, I reached up and pulled the piece of wood away. The rope ran past my face and beneath me the lift plummeted down to the kitchen with a loud bang. I heard Inge’s shocked scream; and then she screamed again, only this time it was louder and more sustained.

I sprinted out of the dining room, down the stairs to the basement and found her standing in the corridor, leaning weakly on the wall outside the kitchen. ‘Are you all right?’

She swallowed loudly. ‘It’s horrible.’

‘What is?’ I went through the doorway. I heard Inge say: ‘Don’t go in there, Bernie.’ But it was too late.

The body sat to one side in the lift, huddled foetally like a daredevil ready to attempt Niagara Falls in a beer barrel. As I stared at it the head seemed to turn, and it took a moment for me to realize that it was covered with maggots, a glistening mask of worms feeding on the blackened face. I swallowed hard several times. Covering my nose and mouth once again, I stepped forward for a closer look, close enough so that I could hear the light rustling sound, like a gentle breeze through moist leaves, of hundreds of small mouth parts. From my small knowledge of forensics, I knew that soon after death, flies not only lay their eggs on a cadaver’s moist parts such as the eyes and mouth, but also on open wounds. By the number of maggots feeding on the upper part of the cranium and on the right temple, it looked more than probable that the victim had been beaten to death. From the clothes I could tell that the body was that of a man, and judging by the obvious quality of his shoes, quite a wealthy one. I put my hand into the right-hand jacket pocket, and turned it inside out. Some loose change and scraps of paper fell to the floor, but there was nothing that might have identified him. I felt around the area of the breast pocket, but it seemed to be empty, and I didn’t feel like squeezing my hand between his knee and the maggoty head to make sure. As I stepped back to the window to draw a decent breath, a thought occurred to me.

‘What are you doing, Bernie?’ Her voice seemed stronger now.

‘Just stay where you are,’ I told her. ‘I won’t be very long. I just want to see if I can find out who our friend is.’ I heard her take a deep breath, and the scrape of a match as she lit a cigarette. I found a pair of kitchen scissors and went back to the dumb-waiter, where I cut the arm of the jacket lengthways up the man’s forearm. Against the skin’s greenish, purplish hue and marbled veining, the tattoo was still clearly visible, clinging to his forearm like a large, black insect which, rather than feast on the head with the smaller flies and worms, had chosen to dine alone, on a bigger piece of carrion. I’ve never understood why men get themselves tattooed. You would have thought there were better things to do than deface your own body. Still, it makes identifying someone relatively straightforward, and it occurred to me that it wouldn’t be very long before every German citizen was the subject of compulsory tattooing. But right now, the imperial German eagle identified Gerhard Von Greis just as certainly as if I had been handed his Party card and passport.

Inge looked round the doorway. ‘Do you have any idea who it is?’ I rolled up my sleeve and put my arm into the incinerator. ‘Yes, I do,’ I said, feeling around in the cold ash. My fingers touched something hard and long. I drew it out, and regarded it objectively. It was hardly burnt at all. Not the sort of wood that burns easily. At the thicker end it was split, revealing another lead weight, and an empty socket for the one I had found on the carpet in the dining room upstairs. ‘His name was Gerhard Von Greis, and he was a high-class squeeze-artist. Looks like he was paid off, permanently. Someone combed his hair with this.’

‘What is it?’

‘A length of broken billiard cue,’ I said, and thrust it back into the stove.

‘Shouldn’t we tell the police?’

‘We don’t have the time to help them feel their way around. Not right now, anyway. We’d just spend the rest of the weekend answering stupid questions.’ I was also thinking that a couple of days’ more fees from Goering wouldn’t go amiss, but I kept that one to myself.

‘What about him—the dead man?’

I looked back at Von Greis’s maggoty body, and then shrugged. ‘He’s in no hurry,’ I said. ‘Besides, you wouldn’t want to spoil the picnic, would you?’

We collected up the scraps of paper that Inge had managed to salvage from the inside of the stove, and caught a cab back to the office. I poured us both large cognacs. Inge drank it gratefully, holding the glass with both hands like a small child who is greedy for lemonade. I sat down on the side of her chair and put my arm around her trembling shoulders, drawing her to me, Von Greis’s death accelerating our growing need to be close.

‘I’m afraid I’m not used to dead bodies,’ she said with an embarrassed smile. ‘Least of all badly decomposed bodies that appear unexpectedly in service-lifts.’

‘Yes, it must have been quite a shock to you. I’m sorry you had to see that. I have to admit he’d let himself go a bit.’

She gave a slight shudder. ‘It’s hard to credit that it was ever human at all. It looked so . . . so vegetable; like a sack of rotten potatoes.’ I resisted the temptation to make another tasteless remark. Instead I went over to my desk, laid out the scraps of paper from Tillessen’s kitchen stove and glanced over them. Mostly they were bills, but there was one, almost untouched by the flames, that interested me a good deal.

‘What is it?’ said Inge.

I picked up the scrap of paper between finger and thumb. ‘A pay-slip.’ She stood up and looked at it more closely. ‘From a pay-packet made up by the Gesellschaft Reichsautobahnen for one of its motorway-construction workers.’

‘Whose?’

‘A fellow by the name of Hans Jurgen Bock. Until recently, he was in the cement with somebody by the name of Kurt Mutschmann, a nutcracker.’

‘And you think that this Mutschmann might have been the one who opened the Pfarrs’ safe, right?’

‘Both he and Bock are members of the same ring, as was the owner of the excuse for a hotel we just visited.’

‘But if Bock is in a ring with Mutschmann and Tillessen, what’s he doing working in motorway construction?’

‘That’s a good question.’ I shrugged and added, ‘Who knows, maybe he’s trying to go straight? Whatever he’s doing, we ought to speak to him.’

‘Perhaps he can tell us where to find Mutschmann.’

‘It’s possible.’

‘And Tillessen.’

I shook my head. ‘Tillessen’s dead,’ I explained. ‘Von Greis was killed, beaten with a broken billiard cue. A few days ago, in the police morgue, I saw what happened to the other half of that billiard cue. It was pushed up Tillessen’s nose, into his brain.’

Inge grimaced uncomfortably. ‘But how do you know it was Tillessen?’

‘I don’t for sure,’ I admitted. ‘But I know that Mutschmann is hiding, and that it was Tillessen who he went to stay with when he got out of prison. I don’t think Tillessen would have left a body lying around his own pension if he could possibly have avoided it. The last I heard, the police still hadn’t made a positive ID on the corpse, so I’m assuming that it must be Tillessen.’

‘But why couldn’t it be Mutschmann?’

‘I don’t see it that way. A couple of days ago my informer told me that there was a contract out on Mutschmann, by which time the body with the cue up its nose had already been fished out of the Landwehr. No, it could only be Tillessen.’

‘And Von Greis? Was he a member of this ring too?’

‘Not this ring, but another one, and far more powerful. He worked for Goering. All the same, I can’t explain why he should have been there.’ I swilled some brandy around my mouth like a mouthwash, and when I had swallowed it, I picked up the telephone and called the Reichsbahn. I spoke to a clerk in the payroll department.

‘My name is Rienacker,’ I said. ‘Kriminalinspecktor Rienacker of the Gestapo. We are anxious to trace the whereabouts of an autobahn-construction worker by the name of Hans Jurgen Bock, pay reference 30—4—232564. He may be able to help us in apprehending an enemy of the Reich.’

‘Yes,’ said the clerk meekly. ‘What is it that you wish to know?’

‘Obviously, the section of the autobahn on which he is working, and whether or not he’ll be there today.’

‘If you will please wait one minute, I shall go and check the records.’ Several minutes elapsed.

‘That’s quite a nice little act you have there,’ said Inge.

I covered the mouthpiece. ‘It’s a brave man who refuses to cooperate with a caller claiming to be in the Gestapo.’

The clerk came back to the telephone and told me that Bock was on a work detail beyond the edge of Greater Berlin, on the Berlin-to-Hanover stretch. ‘Specifically, the section between Brandenburg and Lehnin. I suggest that you contact the site-office a couple of kilometres this side of Brandenburg. It’s about seventy kilometres. You drive to Potsdam, then take Zeppelin Strasse. After about forty kilometres you pick up the A-Bahn at Lehnin.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘And is he likely to be working today?’

‘I’m afraid I don’t know,’ said the clerk. ‘Many of them do work Saturdays. But even if he’s not working, you’ll probably find him in the workers’ barracks. They live on site, you see.’

‘You’ve been most helpful,’ I said, and added with the pomposity that is typical of all Gestapo officers, ‘I shall report your efficiency to your superior.’