Smiling thinly, Six stood up. 'I don't think we need ever meet again, Herr Gunther.'
'Aren't you forgetting something?'
He began to look impatient. 'I don't think so,' he said testily.
'Oh, but I'm sure you are.' I put a cigarette in my mouth and struck a match.
Bending my head towards the flame I took a couple of quick puffs and then dropped the match into the ashtray. 'The necklace.' Six remained silent. 'But then, you already have it back, don't you?' I said. 'Or at least you know where it is, and who has got it.'
His nose wrinkled with distaste, as if it detected a bad smell. 'You're not going to be tiresome about this are you, Herr Gunther? I do hope not.'
'And what about those papers? The evidence of your involvement with organized crime that Von Greis gave to your son-in-law. Or do you imagine that Red Dieter and his associates are going to persuade the Teichmnllers to tell them where they are? Is that it?'
'I've never heard of a Red Dieter, or '
'Sure you have, Six. He's a crook, just like you. During the steel strikes he was the gangster you paid to intimidate your workers.'
Six laughed and lit his cigar. 'A gangster,' he said. 'Really, Herr Gunther, your imagination is running away with you. Now, if you don't mind, you've been very handsomely paid, so if you will please leave I would be most grateful. I'm a very busy man, and I have a lot of things to do.'
'I guess things are difficult without a secretary to help. What if I were to tell you that the man calling himself Teichmnller, the one that Red's thugs are probably beating the shit out of right now, is really your private secretary, Hjalmar HaupthSndler?'
'That is ridiculous,' he said. 'Hjalmar is visiting some friends in Frankfurt.'
I shrugged. 'It's a simple matter to get Red's boys to ask Teichmnller what his real name is. Perhaps he's already told them; but then, Teichmnller is the name on his new passport, so they could be forgiven for not believing him. He purchased it from the same man he was planning to sell the diamonds to. One for him and one for the girl.'
Six sneered at me. 'And does this girl have a real name too?' he said.
'Oh yes. Her name is Hannah Roedl, although your son-in-law preferred to call her Eva. They were lovers, at least they were until she murdered him.'
'That's a lie. Paul never had a mistress. He was devoted to my Grete.'
'Come off it, Six. What did you do to them that made him turn his back on her?
That made him hate you bad enough to want to put you behind bars?'
'I repeat, they were devoted to each other.'
'I admit it's possible that they might have become reconciled to each other not long before they were killed, with the discovery that your daughter was pregnant.' Six laughed. 'And so Paul's mistress decided to get her own back.'
'Now you really are being ridiculous,' he said. 'You call yourself a detective and you don't know that my daughter was physically incapable of having children.'
I felt my jaw. 'Are you sure about that?'
'Good God, man, do you think it's something that I might have forgotten? Of course I'm sure.'
I walked round Six's desk and looked at the photographs that were arranged there. I picked one of them up, and stared grimly at the woman in the picture. I recognized her immediately. It was the woman from the beach house at Wannsee; the woman I had socked; the woman who I had thought was Eva, and was now calling herself Frau Teichmnller; the woman who in all probability had killed her husband and his mistress: it was Six's only daughter, Grete. As a detective, you have to expect to make mistakes; but it is nothing short of humiliating to come face to face with evidence of your own stupidity; and it is all the more galling when you discover that the evidence has been staring you in the face all along.
'Herr Six, this is going to sound crazy, I know, but I now believe that at least until yesterday afternoon your daughter was alive, and preparing to fly to London with your private secretary.'
Six's face darkened, and for a moment I thought he was going to attack me. 'What the hell are you babbling about now, you bloody fool?' he roared. 'What do you mean alive? My daughter is dead and buried.'
'I suppose that she must have come home unexpectedly and found Paul in bed with his bit of brush, both of them drunk as cats. Grete shot them both and then, realizing what she had done, she telephoned the only person she felt she could turn to, HaupthSndler. He was in love with her. He would have done anything for her, and that included helping her to get away with murder.'
Six sat down heavily. He was pale and trembling. 'I don't believe it,' he said.
But it was clear that he was finding my explanation only too plausible.
'I expect it was his idea to burn the bodies and make it look like it was your daughter who had died in bed with her husband, and not his mistress. He took Grete's wedding-ring and put it on the other woman's finger. Then he had the bright idea of taking the diamonds out of the safe and making it look like a burglary. That's why he left the door open. The diamonds were to stake their new life somewhere. New lives and new identities. But what HaupthSndler didn't know was that somebody had already been in the safe that evening and removed certain papers that were compromising to you. This fellow was a real expert, a puzzler not long out of prison. A neat worker too. Not the sort to use explosives or do anything untidy like leave a safe door open. As drunk as they were, I'll bet that Paul and Eva never even heard him. One of Red's boys, of course. Red used to carry out all your dodgy little schemes, didn't he? While Goering's man Von Greis had these documents, things were merely inconvenient. The Prime Minister is a pragmatist. He could use the evidence of your previous criminality to ensure that you were useful to him, and make you toe the Party's economic line.
But when Paul and the Black Angels got hold of them, that was altogether more uncomfortable. You knew that Paul wanted to destroy you. Backed into a corner you had to do something. So, as usual, you got Red Dieter to take care of it.
'But later on, with Paul and the girl dead, and the diamonds gone from the safe, it looked to you as though Red's man had been greedy, and that he'd taken more than he was supposed to. Not unreasonably you concluded that it was he who had killed your daughter, and so you told Red to put things right. Red managed to kill one of the two burglars, the man who had driven the car; but he missed the other, the one who had opened the safe, who therefore still had the papers and, you assumed, the diamonds. That's where I came in. Because you couldn't be sure that it wasn't Red himself who had double-crossed you, and so you probably didn't tell him about the diamonds, just as you didn't tell the police.'
Six took the dead cigar from out of the corner of his mouth and laid it, unsmoked, on the ashtray. He was starting to look very old.
'I have to hand it to you,' I said. 'Your reasoning was perfect: find the man with the diamonds and you would find the man with the documents. And when you found out that Helfferich hadn't hazed you, you put him on my tail. I led him to the man with the diamonds and, you thought, the documents too. At this very moment your German Strength associates are probably trying to persuade Herr and Frau Teichmnller to tell them where Mutschmann is. He's the man who really has the documents. And naturally they won't know what the hell he's talking about.
Red won't like that. He's not a very patient man, and I'm sure I don't have to remind you of all people of what that means.'
The steel magnate stared into space, as if he had not heard one word I had said.
I grabbed the lapels of his jacket, hauled him to his feet, and slapped him hard.
'Did you hear what I said? These murderers, these torturers, have your daughter.' His mouth went as slack as an empty douche-bag. I slapped it again.
'We've got to stop them.'
'So where's he got them?' I let him go and pushed him away from me.
'On the river,' he said. 'The Grosse Zug, near Schm/ckwitz.'
I picked up the telephone. 'What's the number?'
Six swore. 'It's not on the phone,' he gasped. 'Oh Christ, what are we going to do?'
'We'll have to go there,' I said. 'We could drive there, but it would be quicker by boat.'
Six sprang round the desk. 'I've got a slipper at a mooring close by. We can drive there in five minutes.'
Stopping only to collect the boat keys and a can of petrol, we took the BMW and drove to the shores of the
