Group.'
'What?'
'I said I hope I didn't make you miss your tram last night. Did you have to kill him?'
He shrugged and started to unscrew the Luger's silencer. 'Two dead is better than one left alive to testify in court. Believe me, I know what I'm talking about.' He kicked the man's head with the toe of his shoe. 'Anyway, these Ivans won't be missed. They're deserters.'
'How do you know?'
Belinsky pointed out two bundles of clothes and equipment that lay near the doorway, and next to them the remains of a fire and a meal.
'It looks like they've been hiding here for a couple of days. I guess they got bored and fancied some ' he searched for the right word in German and then, shaking his head, completed the sentence in English '- cunt.' He bolstered the Luger and dropped the silencer into his coat pocket. 'If they're found before the rats eat them up, the local boys will just figure that the MVD did it. But my bet is on the rats. Vienna's got the biggest rats you ever saw. They come straight up out of the sewers. Come to think of it, from the smell of these two, I'd say they'd been down there themselves. The main sewer comes out in the Stadt Park, just by the Soviet Kommendatura and the Russian sector.' He started towards the window, 'Come on, kraut, let's find this girl of yours.'
Veronika was standing a short way back down WShringer Strasse and looked ready to make a run for it if it had been the two Russians who came out of the building. 'When I saw your friend go in,' she explained, 'I waited to see what would happen.' She had buttoned her coat to the neck, and, but for a slight bruise on her cheek and the tears in her eyes, I wouldn't have said she looked like a girl who had narrowly missed being raped. She glanced nervously back at the building with a question in her eyes.
'It's all right,' said Belinsky. 'They won't bother us no more.' When Veronika had finished thanking me for saving her, and Belinsky for saving me, he and I walked her home to the half-ruin in Rotenturmstrasse where she had her room.
There she thanked us some more and invited us both to come up, an offer which we declined, and only after I had promised to visit her in the morning could she be persuaded to close the door and go to bed.
'From the look of you I'd say that you could use a drink,' Belinsky said. 'Let me buy you one. The Renaissance Bar is just around the corner. It's quiet there, and we can talk.'
Close by St Stephen's Cathedral, which was now being restored, the Renaissance in Singerstrasse was an imitation Hungarian tavern with gypsy music. The kind of place you see depicted on a jigsaw-puzzle, it was no doubt popular with the tourists, but just a concertina-squeeze too premeditated for my simple, gloomy taste. There was one significant compensation, as Belinsky explained. They served Csereszne, a clear Hungarian spirit made from cherries. And for one who had recently been subjected to a kicking, it tasted even better than Belinsky had promised.
'That's a nice girl,' he said, 'but she ought to be a bit more careful in Vienna. So should you for that matter. If you're going to go around playing Errol-fucking-Flynn you should have more than just a bit of hair under your arm.'
'I guess you're right.' I sipped at my second glass. 'But it seems strange you telling me that, you being a bull and all. Carrying a gun's not strictly legal for anyone but Allied personnel.'
'Who said I was a bull?' He shook his head. 'I'm CIC. The Counter-intelligence Corps. The MPs don't know shit about what we get up to.'
'You're a spy?'
'No, we're more like Uncle Sam's hotel detectives. We don't run spies, we catch them. Spies and war- criminals.' He poured some more of the Csereszne.
'So why are you following me?'
'It's hard to say, really.'
'I'm sure I could find you a German dictionary.'
Belinsky withdrew a ready-filled pipe from his pocket and while he explained what he meant he suck-started the thing into yielding a steady smoke.
'I'm investigating the murder of Captain Linden,' he said.
'What a coincidence. So am I.'
'We want to try and find out what it was that brought him to Vienna in the first place. He liked to keep things pretty close to his chest. Worked on his own a lot.'
'Was he in the CIC too?'
'Yes, the 970th, stationed in Germany. I'm 430th. We're stationed in Austria.
Really he should have let us know he was coming on to our patch.'
'And he didn't send so much as a postcard, eh?'
'Not a word. Probably because there was no earthly reason why he should have come. If he was working on anything that affected this country he should have told us.' Belinsky let out a balloon of smoke and waved it away from his face.
'He was what you might call a desk-investigator. An intellectual. The sort of fellow you could let loose on a wall full of files with instructions to find Himmler's optical prescription. The only problem is that because he was such a bright guy, he kept no case notes.' Belinsky tapped his forehead with the stem of his pipe. 'He kept everything up here. Which makes it a nuisance to find out what he was investigating that got him a lead lunch.'
'Your MPs think that the Werewolf Underground might have had something to do with it.'
'So I heard.' He inspected the smouldering contents of his cherrywood pipe bowl, and added: 'Frankly, we're all scraping around in the dark a bit on this one.
Anyway, that's where you walk into my life. We thought maybe you'd turn up something that we couldn't manage ourselves, you being a native, comparatively speaking. And if you did, I'd be there for the cause of free democracy.'
'Criminal investigation by proxy, eh? It wouldn't be the first time that it's happened. I hate to disappoint you, only I'm kind of in the dark myself.'
'Maybe not. After all, you already got the stonemason killed. In my book that rates as a result. It means you got someone upset, Kraut.'
I smiled. 'You can call me Bernie.'
'The way I figure it, Becker wouldn't bring you into the game without dealing you a few cards. Pichler's name was probably one of them.'
'You might be right,' I conceded. 'But all the same it's not a hand I'd care to put my shirt on.'
'Want to let me take a peek?'
'Why should I?'
'I saved your life, kraut,' he growled.
'Too sentimental. Be a little more practical.'
'All right then, maybe I can help.'
'Better. Much better.'
'What do you need?'
'Pichler was more than likely murdered by a man named Abs, Max Abs. According to the MPs he used to be SS, but small-time. Anyway, he boarded a train to Munich this afternoon and they were going to have someone meet him: I expect that they'll tell me what happens. But I need to find out more about Abs. For instance, who this fellow was.' I took out Pichler's drawing of Martin Albers' gravestone and spread it on the table in front of Belinsky. 'If I can find out who Martin Albers was and why Max Abs was willing to pay for his headstone I might be on my way to establishing why Abs thought it necessary to kill Pichler before he spoke to me.'
'Who is this Abs guy? What's his connection?'
'He used to work for an advertising firm here in Vienna. The same place that K/nig managed. K/nig's the man that briefed Becker to run files across the Green Frontier. Files that went to Linden.'
Belinsky nodded.
'All right then,' I said. 'Here's my next card. K/nig had a girlfriend called Lotte who hung around the Casanova. It could be that she sparkled there a bit, nibbled a little chocolate, I don't know yet. Some of Becker's friends crashed around there and a few other places and didn't come home for tea. My idea is to put the girl on to
