in my trunk. Is he here now?'
'Yes, he's here. He's very probably in his hut. I'll take you over there.' We followed him to one of several long, single-storey wooden huts that had been built at the side of what had once been forest, and was now destined to be the autobahn. At the bottom of the hut steps the foreman turned and said, 'They're a bit rough-and-ready, these fellows. Maybe it would be better if the lady didn't come in. You have to take these men as you find them. Some of them might not be dressed.'
'I'll wait in the car, Bernie,' said Inge. I looked at her and shrugged apologetically, before following Welser up the steps. He raised the wooden latch and we went through the door.
Inside, the walls and floor were painted a washed-out shade of yellow. Against the walls were bunks for twelve workers, three of them without mattresses and three of them occupied by men wearing just their underwear. In the middle of the hut was a pot-bellied stove made of black cast-iron, its stove-pipe going straight through the ceiling, and next to it a big wooden table at which four men were seated, playing skat for a few pfennigs. Welser spoke to one of the card players.
'This fellow is from Berlin,' he explained. 'He'd like to ask you a few questions.'
A solid slab of man with a head the size of a tree stump studied the palm of his big hand carefully, looked up at the foreman, and then suspiciously at me.
Another man got up off his bunk and started to sweep the floor nonchalantly with a broom.
I've had better introductions in my time, and I wasn't surprised to see that it didn't exactly put Bock at his ease. I was about to utter my own codicil to Welser's inadequate reference when Bock sprang out of his chair, and my jaw, blocking his exit, was duly hooked aside. Not much of a punch, but enough to set off a small steam kettle between my ears and knock me sideways. A second or two later I heard a short, dull clang, like someone striking a tin tray with a soup ladle. When I had recovered my senses, I looked around and saw Welser standing over Bock's half-conscious body. In his hand he held a coal shovel, with which he had evidently struck the big man's head. There was the scrape of chairs and table legs as Bock's card-playing friends jumped to their feet.
'Relax, all of you,' yelled Welser. 'This fellow isn't a fucking bull, he's a private investigator. He's not come to arrest Hans. He just wants to ask him a few questions, that's all. He's looking for a missing person.' He pointed at one of the men in the skat game. 'Here you, give me a hand with him.' Then he looked at me. 'You all right?' he said. I nodded vaguely. Welser and the other man bent down and lifted Bock from where he lay in the doorway. I could see it wasn't easy; the man looked heavy. They sat him in a chair and waited for him to shake his head clear. Meanwhile the foreman told the rest of the men in the hut to go outside for ten minutes. The men in the bunks didn't put up any resistance and I could see that Welser was a man who was used to being obeyed, and quickly.
When Bock came round, Welser told him what he had told the rest of the hut. I could have wished that he had done it at the beginning.
'I'll be outside if you need me,' said Welser, and pushing the last man from the hut, he left the two of us alone.
'If you're not a polyp then you must be one of Red's boys.' Bock spoke sideways out of his mouth, and I saw that his tongue was several sizes too big for his mouth. Its tip remained buried in his cheek somewhere, so that all I saw was the large pink-coloured chew that was his tongue's thickest part.
'Look, I'm not a complete idiot,' he said more vehemently. 'I'm not so stupid that I'd get killed to protect Kurt. I really have no idea where he is.' I took out my cigarette case and offered him one. I lit us both in silence.
'Listen, first off, I'm not one of Red's boys. I really am a private investigator, like the man said. But I've got a sore jaw and unless you answer all my questions your name will be the one the boys up at the Alex draw out of the hat to make the trip to the blade for canning the meat at Pension Tillessen.' Bock stiffened in his chair. 'And if you move from that chair, so help me I'll break your damned neck.' I drew up a chair and put one foot on its seat so that I could lean on my knee while looking at him.
'You can't prove I was near the place,' he said.
I grinned at him. 'Oh, can't I?' I took a long pull at my smoke, and blew it in his face. I said: 'On your last little visit to Tillessen's joint you kindly left your pay-slip behind. I found it in the incinerator, next to the murder weapon. That's how I managed to track you down here. Of course it's not there now, but I could easily put it back. The police haven't yet found the body, but that's only because I haven't had time to tell them. That pay-slip puts you in an awkward situation. Next to the murder weapon, it's more than enough to send you to the block.'
'What do you want?'
I sat down opposite him. 'Answers,' I said. 'Look, friend, if I ask you to name the capital of Mongolia you'd better give me an answer or I'll have your fucking head for it. Do you understand?' He shrugged. 'But we'll start with Kurt Mutschmann, and what the two of you did when you came out of Tegel.'
Bock sighed heavily and then nodded. 'I got out first. I decided to try and go straight. This isn't much of a job, but it's a job. I didn't want to go back in the cement. I used to go back to Berlin for the odd weekend, see? Stay at Tillessen's bang. He's a pimp, or was. Sometimes he fixed me up with a bit of plum.' He tucked the cigarette into the corner of his mouth and rubbed the top of his head. 'Anyway, a couple of months after I got out, Kurt finished his cement and went to stay with Tillessen. I went to see him, and he told me that the ring were going to fix him up with his first bit of thieving.
'Well, the same night I saw him, Red Dieter and a couple of his boys turn up. He more or less runs the ring, you understand. They've got this older fellow with them, and start working him over in the dining room. I stayed out of the way in my room. After a while Red comes in and tells Kurt that he wants him to do a safe, and that he wants me to drive. Well, neither of us was too happy about it.
Me, because I'd had enough of all that sort of thing. And Kurt because he's a professional. He doesn't like violence, mess, you know. He likes to take his time, too. Not just go straight ahead and do a job without any real planning.'
'This safe: did Red Dieter find out about it from the man in the dining room, the man being beaten up?' Bock nodded. 'What happened then?'
'I decided that I wanted nothing to do with it. So I went out through the window, spent the night at the doss-house on Frobestrasse, and came back here.
That fellow, the one they had beaten up, he was still alive when I left. They were keeping him alive until they found out if he had told them the truth.' He took the cigarette stub out of his mouth and dropped it on the wooden floor, grinding it under his heel. I gave him another.
'Well, the next thing I hear is that the job went wrong. Tillessen did the driving, apparently. Afterwards, Red's boys killed him. They would have killed Kurt too, only he got away.' 'Did they double-cross Red?'
'Nobody's that stupid.'
'You're singing, aren't you?'
'When I was in the cement, in Tegel, I saw lots of men die on that guillotine,' he said quietly. 'I'd rather take my chances with Red. When I go I want to go in one piece.'
'Tell me more about the job.'
' Just crack a nut, ' said Red. 'Easy to a man like Kurt, he's a real professional. Could open Hitler's heart. The job was middle of the night. Puzzle the safe and take some papers. That's all.'
'No diamonds?'
'Diamonds? He never said nothing about no bells.'
'Are you sure of that?'
'Course I'm sure. He was just to claw the papers. Nothing else.'
'What were these papers, do you know?'
Bock shook his head. 'Just papers.'
'What about the killings?'
'Nobody mentioned killings. Kurt wouldn't have agreed to do the job if he thought he was going to have to can anyone. He wasn't that kind of fellow.'
'What about Tillessen? Was he the type to shoot people in their beds?'
'Not a chance. That wasn't his style at all. Tillessen was just a fucking garter-handler. Beating up snappers was all he was good for. Show him a lighter and he'd have been off like a rabbit.'
'Maybe they got greedy, and helped themselves to more than they were supposed to.'
'You tell me. You're the fucking detective.'
