see him in his seat, but I saw my card being handed over, and the waiter nodding in my direction.
'Look,' I said, 'there's something that I have to do. I won't be long, but I'll have to leave you for a short while. If there's anything you want just ask the waiter.' She looked at me anxiously as I accompanied her back to the table.
'But where are you going?'
'I have to see someone, someone here. I'll only be a few minutes.'
She smiled at me, and said: 'Please be careful.'
I bent forward and kissed her on the cheek. 'Like I was walking on a tightrope.'
There was a touch of the Fatty Arbuckle about the solitary occupant of the end booth. His fat neck rested on a couple of doughnut-sized rolls pressed tight against the collar of his evening shirt. The face was as red as a boiled ham, and I wondered if this was the explanation behind the nickname. Red Dieter Helfferich's mouth was set at a tough angle like it ought to have been chewing on a big cigar. When he spoke it was a medium-sized brown bear of a voice, growling from the inside of a short cave, and always on the edge of outrage.
When he grinned, the mouth was a cross between early-Mayan and High Gothic.
'A private investigator, huh? I never met one.'
'That just goes to show there aren't enough of us around. Mind if I join you?'
He glanced at the label on the bottle. 'This is good champagne. The least I can do is hear you out. Sit down ' He lifted his hand and looked at my card again for effect '- Herr Gunther.' He poured us both a glass, and raised his own in a toast. Cowled under brows the size and shape of horizontal Eiffel Towers were eyes that were too wide for my comfort, each revealing a broken pencil of an iris.
'To absent friends,' he said.
I nodded and drank my champagne. 'Like Kurt Mutschmann perhaps.'
'Absent, but not forgotten.' He uttered a brash, gloating laugh and sipped at his drink. 'It would seem that we'd both like to know where he is. Just to put our minds at rest, of course. To stop us worrying about him, eh?'
'Should we be worried?' I asked.
'These are dangerous times for a man in Kurt's line of work. Well, I'm sure I don't have to tell you that. You know all about that, don't you, fleabite, you being an ex-bull.' He nodded appreciatively. 'I've got to hand it to your client, fleabite, it showed real intelligence involving you rather than your former colleagues. All he wants is his bells back, no questions asked. You can get closer. You can negotiate. Perhaps he'll even pay a small reward, eh?'
'You're very well informed.'
'I am if that's all your client wants; and to that extent I'll even help you, if I can.' His face darkened. 'But Mutschmann he's mine. If your fellow has got any misplaced ideas of revenge, tell him to lay off. That's my beat. It's simply a matter of good business practice.'
'Is that all you want? Just to tidy up the store? You're forgetting the small matter of Von Greis's papers, aren't you? You remember the ones your boys were so anxious to talk to him about. Like where he'd hidden them or who he'd given them to. What were you planning to do with the papers when you got them? Try a little first-class blackmail? People like my client maybe? Or did you want to put a few politicians in your pocket for a rainy day?'
'You're quite well informed yourself, fleabite. Like I said, your client is a clever man. It's lucky for me he took you into his confidence instead of the police. Lucky for me, lucky for you; because if you were a bull sitting there telling me what you just told me, you'd be on your way to being dead.'
I leaned out of the booth to check that Inge was all right. I could see her shiny black head easily. She was freezing off a uniformed reveller who was wasting his best lines.
'Thanks for the champagne, fleabite. You took a fair-sized chance talking to me.
And you haven't had much of a payout on your bet. But at least you're walking away with your stake-money.' He grinned.
'Well this time, the thrill of playing was all I wanted.'
The gangster seemed to find that funny. 'There won't be another. You can depend on it.'
I moved to go, but found him holding my arm. I expected him to threaten me, but instead he said:
'Listen, I'd hate you to think that I'd cheated you. Don't ask me why, but I'm going to do you a favour. Maybe because I like your nerve. Don't turn round, but sitting at the bar is a big, heavy fellow, brown suit, sea-urchin haircut. Take a good look at him when you go back to your table. He's a professional killer.
He followed you and the girl in here. You must have stepped on someone's corns.
It looks as though you must be this week's rent money. I doubt he'll try anything in here, out of respect for me, you understand. But outside fact is, I don't much like cheap gunmen coming in here. Creates a bad impression.'
'Thanks for the tip. I appreciate it.' I lit a cigarette. 'Is there a back way out of here? I wouldn't want my girl to get hurt.'
He nodded. 'Through the kitchens and down the emergency stairs. At the bottom there's a door that leads onto an alley. It's quiet there. Just a few parked cars. One of them, the light-grey sports, belongs to me.' He pushed a set of keys towards me. 'There's a lighter in the glove-box if you need it. Just leave the keys in the exhaust pipe afterwards, and make sure you don't mark the paintwork.'
I pocketed the keys and stood up. 'It's been nice talking to you, Red. Funny things, fleabites; you don't notice one when you're first bitten, but after a while there's nothing more irritating.'
Red Dieter frowned. 'Get out of here, Gunther, before I change my mind about you.'
On the way back to Inge I glanced over at the bar. The man in the brown suit was easy enough to spot, and I recognized him as the man who had been looking at Inge earlier on. At our table Inge was finding it easy, if not particularly pleasant, to resist the negligible charm of a good-looking but rather short S S officer. I hurried Inge to her feet and started to draw her away. The officer held my arm. I looked at his hand and then in his face.
'Slow down, shorty,' I said, looming over his diminutive figure like a frigate coming alongside of a fishing boat. 'Or I'll decorate your lip and it won't be with a Knight's Cross and oak leaves.' I pulled a crumpled five-mark note from out of a pocket and dropped it onto the tabletop.
'I didn't think you were the jealous type,' she said, as I moved her towards the door.
'Get into the lift and go straight down,' I told her. 'When you get outside, go to the car and wait for me. There's a gun under the seat. Better keep it handy, just in case.' I glanced over at the bar where the man was paying for his drink.
'Look, I haven't got time to explain now, but it's got nothing to do with our dashing little friend back there.'
'And where will you be?' she said. I handed her my car keys.
'I'm going out the other way. There's a big man in a brown suit who's trying to kill me. If you see him coming towards the car, go home and phone Kriminalinspektor Bruno Stahlecker at the Alex. Got that?' She nodded.
For a moment I pretended to follow her, and then turned abruptly away, walking quickly through the kitchens and out of the fire door.
Three flights down I heard footsteps behind me in the almost pitch dark of the stairwell. As I scampered blindly down I wondered if I could take him; but then I wasn't armed and he was. What was more, he was a professional. I tripped and fell, scrambling up again even as I hit the landing, reaching out for the banister and wrenching myself down another flight, ignoring the pain in my elbows and forearms, with which I had broken my fall. At the top of the last flight I saw a light underneath a door and jumped. It was further than I thought but I landed well, on all fours. I hit the bar on the door and crashed out into the alley.
There were several cars, all of them parked in a neat row, but it wasn't difficult to spot Red Dieter's grey Bugatti Royale. I unlocked the door and opened the glove-box. Inside there were several small paper twists of white powder and a big revolver with a long barrel, the sort that puts a window in an eight-centimetre-thick mahogany door. I didn't have time to check whether it was loaded, but I didn't think that Red was the sort who kept a gun because he liked playing Cowboys and Indians.
I dropped to the ground and rolled under the running-board of the car parked next to the Bugatti, a big Mercedes convertible. At that moment my pursuer came through the fire door, hugging the well-shadowed wall for cover. I lay completely still, waiting for him to step into the moonlit centre of the alley.
Minutes passed, with no sound or movement in the shadows, and after a while I guessed that he had edged
