'I don't get it,' said Korsch. 'What about Streicher and his bunch? Are we still investigating them or not?'
'Yes,' I said. 'But until the Gestapo surveillance throws up something of interest to us, there's not a lot we can do in that direction.'
'So what do you want us to do while you're looking after the widow?' said Becker, who was on the edge of allowing himself a smile I might have found irritating. 'That is, apart from checking the Gestapo reports.'
I decided not to be too sensitive about the matter. That would have been suspicious in itself.
'Korsch,' I said, 'I want you to keep your eye on the Gestapo inquiry.
Incidentally, how's your man getting on with Vogelmann?'
He shook his head. 'There's not a lot to report, sir. This Vogelmann hardly ever leaves his office. Not much of a detective if you ask me.'
'It certainly doesn't look like it,' I said. 'Becker, I want you to find me a girl.' He grinned and looked down at the toe of his shoe. 'That shouldn't be too difficult for you.'
'Any particular kind of girl, sir?'
'Aged about fifteen or sixteen, blonde, blue-eyed, BdM and,' I said, feeding him the line, 'preferably a virgin.'
'That last part might be a bit difficult, sir.'
'She'll have to have plenty of nerve.'
'Are you thinking of staking her out, sir?'
'I believe it's always been the best way to hunt tiger.'
'Sometimes the goat gets killed though, sir,' said Korsch.
'As I said, this girl will have to have guts. I want her to know as much as possible. If she is going to risk her life then she ought to know why she's doing it.'
'Where exactly are we going to do this, sir?' said Becker.
'You tell me. Think about a few places where our man might notice her. A place where we can watch her without being seen ourselves.' Korsch was frowning.
'What's troubling you?'
He shook his head with slow distaste. 'I don't like it, sir. Using a young girl as bait. It's inhuman.'
'What do you suggest we use? A piece of cheese?'
'A main road,' Becker said, thinking out loud. 'Somewhere like Hohenzollerndamm, but with more cars, to increase our chances of him seeing her.'
'Honestly, sir, don't you think it's just a bit risky?'
'Of course it is. But what do we really know about this bastard? He drives a car, he wears a uniform, he has an Austrian or Bavarian accent. After that everything is a maybe. I don't have to remind you both that we are running out of time. That Heydrich has given me less than four weeks to solve this case.
Well, we need to get closer, and we need to do it quickly. The only way is to take the initiative, to select his next victim for him.'
'But we might wait for ever,' said Korsch.
'I didn't say that it would be easy. You hunt tiger and you can end up sleeping in a tree.'
'What about the girl?' Korsch continued. 'You don't propose to keep her at it night and day, do you?'
'She can do it in the afternoons,' said Becker. 'Afternoons and early evenings.
Not in the dark, so we can make sure he sees her, and we see him.'
'You're getting the idea.'
'But where does Vogelmann fit in?'
'I don't know. A feeling in my socks, that's all. Maybe it's nothing, but I just want to check it out.'
Becker smiled. 'A bull has to trust a few hunches now and then,' he said.
I recognized my own uninspired rhetoric. 'We'll make a detective out of you yet,' I told him.
She listened to her Gigli gramophone records with the avidity of someone who is about to go deaf, offering and requiring no more conversation than a railway ticket-collector. By now I had realized that Hildegard Steininger was about as self-contained as a fountain-pen, and I figured that she probably preferred the kind of man who could think of himself as little more than a blank sheet of writing paper. And yet, almost in spite of her, I continued to find her attractive. For my taste she was too much concerned with the shade of her gold-spun hair, the length of her fingernails and the state of her teeth, which she was forever brushing. Too vain by half, and too selfish twice over. Given a choice between pleasing herself and pleasing someone else she would have hoped that pleasing herself would have made everyone happy. That she should have thought that one would almost certainly result from the other was for her as simple a reaction as a knee jerking under a patella-hammer.
It was my sixth night staying at her apartment, and as usual she had cooked a dinner that was nearly inedible.
'You don't have to eat it, you know,' she had said. 'I was never much of a cook.'
'I was never much of a dinner guest,' I had replied, and eaten most of it, not for politeness' sake, but because I was hungry and had learnt in the trenches not to be too fussy about my food.
Now she closed the gramophone cabinet and yawned.
'I'm going to bed,' she said.
I tossed aside the book I was reading and said that I was going to turn in myself.
In Paul's bedroom I spent a few minutes studying the map of Spain that was pinned to the boy's wall, documenting the fortunes of the Condor Legions, before turning out the light. It seemed that every German schoolboy these days wanted to be a fighter-pilot. I was just settling down when there was a knock at the door.
'May I come in?' she said, hovering naked in the doorway. For a moment or two she just stood there, framed in the light from the hallway like some marvellous madonna, almost as if she were allowing me to assess her proportions. My chest and scrotum tightening, I watched her walk gracefully towards me.
Whereas her head and back were small, her legs were so long that she seemed to have been created by a draughtsman of genius. One hand covered her sex and this small shyness excited me very much. I allowed it for a short time while I looked upon the rounded simple volumes of her breasts. These were lightly, almost invisibly nippled, and the size of perfect nectarines.
I leant forwards, pushed that modest hand away, and then, taking hold of her smooth flanks, I pressed my mouth against the sleek filaments that mantled her sex. Standing up to kiss her I felt her hand reach down urgently for me, and winced as she peeled me back. It was too rough to be polite, to be tender, and so I responded by pushing her face first on to the bed, pulling her cool buttocks towards me and moulding her into a position that pleased me. She cried out at the moment when I plunged into her body, and her long thighs trembled wonderfully as we played out our noisy pantomime to its barnstorming denouement.
We slept until dawn came creeping through the thin material of the curtains.
Awake before her, I was struck by her colour, which was every bit as cool as her awakening expression which changed not a bit as she sought to find my penis with her mouth. And then, turning on to her back, she pulled herself up the bed and laid her head on the pillow, her thighs yawning open so that I could see where life begins, and again I licked and kissed her there before acquainting it with the full rank of my ardour, pressing myself into her body until I thought that only my head and shoulders would remain unconsumed.
Finally, when there was nothing left in either of us, she wrapped herself round me and wept until I thought that she would melt.
Chapter 19
Saturday, 29 October.
'I thought you'd like the idea.'
'I'm not sure that I don't. Just give me a second to swill it around my head.'
'You don't want her hanging around somewhere just for the hell of it. He'll smell that shit in minutes and won't go near her. It's got to look natural.'
I nodded without a great deal of conviction and tried to smile at the BdM girl Becker had found. She was an extraordinarily pretty adolescent and I wasn't sure what Becker had been more impressed with, her bravery or her breasts.
'Come on, sir, you know what it's like,' he said. 'These girls are always hanging around the Der Sturmer
