'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 dumbwaiter. '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 Jnrgen 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
