leather sofa. She kept hold of her briefcase for a moment, hugging it to her ample chest like a breastplate.
'Oh? What makes you think so?'
'You're a private detective, aren't you?'
'Yes, but why me? Why not use Preysings in Frauenstrasse? Or Klenze on Augustinerstrasse? They're both bigger than me.'
She looked taken aback, as if I'd asked what color underwear she had on. I smiled encouragingly and told myself that so long as she was sitting on the edge of the sofa, I would just have to guess.
'What I'm trying to find out, Fraulein, is if someone recommended me. In this business, it's the sort of thing you like to know.'
'Not Fraulein. It's Frau Warzok. Britta Warzok. And yes, you were recommended to me.'
'Oh? By whom?'
'If you don't mind, I'd rather not say.'
'But you were the lady who turned up at Herr Krumper's last week. My lawyer. Asking about my hotel? Only you were calling yourself Schmidt then, I believe.'
'Yes. Not very original of me, I know. But I wasn't sure whether I wanted to hire you or not. I had been here a couple of times and you were out and I didn't care to leave a message in your mailbox. The concierge said that he thought you owned a hotel in Dachau. I thought I might find you there. I saw the 'For Sale' sign and then I went to Krumper's office.'
Some of that might have been true, but I let it go, for now. I was enjoying her discomfort and her elegant long legs too much to scare her off. But I didn't see any harm in teasing her a little.
'And yet when you came in here the other night,' I said, 'you said you'd made a mistake.'
'I changed my mind,' she said. 'That's all.'
'You changed it once, you could do it again. Leave me out on a limb. In this business that can be awkward. I need to know that you're committed to this, Frau Warzok. It won't be like buying a hat. Once an investigation is under way it's not something you can return. You won't be able to take it back to the shop and say you don't like it.'
'I'm not an idiot, Herr Gunther,' she said. 'And please don't speak to me as if I haven't given any thought to what I'm doing. It wasn't easy coming here. You've no idea how difficult this is. If you did you might be a little less patronizing.' She spoke coolly and without emotion. 'Is it the hat? I can take the hat off if it bothers you.' Finally she let go of her briefcase, placing it on the floor by her feet.
'I like the hat.' I smiled. 'Please, keep it on. And I'm sorry if my manner offends you. But to be frank, there are a lot of time-wasters in this business and my time is precious to me. I'm a one-man operation, and if I'm working for you I can't be working for someone else. Someone whose need might conceivably be greater than yours, perhaps. That's just how it is.'
'I doubt there is anyone who needs you more than I do, Herr Gunther,' she said, with just enough tremor in her voice to tug at the softer end of my aorta. I offered her a cigarette.
'I don't smoke,' she said, shaking her head. 'My . . . doctor says they're bad for you.'
'I know. But the way I figure it, they're one of the more elegant ways to kill yourself. What's more, they give you plenty of time to put your affairs in order.' I lit my cigarette and gulped down a mouthful of smoke. 'Now, what seems to be the trouble, Frau Warzok?'
'You sound like you mean that,' she said. 'About killing yourself.'
'I was on the Russian front, lady. After something like that, every day seems like a bonus.' I shrugged. 'So eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we might get invaded by the Ivans, and then we'll wish we were dead even if we're not, although of course we will be, because this is an atomic world we live in now and it takes just six minutes not six years to kill six million people.' I pinched the cigarette from between my lips and grinned at her. 'So what's a few smokes beside a mushroom cloud?'
'You've been through it, then?'
'Sure. We've all been through it.' I couldn't see them, but I knew they were there. The little piece of black fishnet on the side of her hat was covering the three scars on her cheek. 'You, too, by the look of things.'
She touched her face. 'Actually, I was quite lucky,' she said.
'That's the only way to look at it.'
'There was an air raid on the twenty-fifth of April 1944,' she said. 'They say that forty-five high-explosive and five thousand incendiary bombs fell on Munich. One of the bombs shattered a water pipe in my house. I got hit by three red-hot copper rings that were blown off my boiler. But it could just as easily have been my eyes. It's amazing what we can come through, isn't it?'
'If you say so.'
'Herr Gunther, I want to get married.'
'Isn't this a little sudden, dear? We've only just met.'
She smiled politely. 'There's just one problem. I don't know if the man I married is still alive.'
'If he disappeared during the war, Frau Warzok,' I said, 'you would be better off inquiring about him at the Army Information Office. The Wehrmacht Dienststelle is in Berlin, at 179 Eichborndamm. Telephone 41904.'
I knew the number because when Kirsten's father had died, I had tried to find out if her brother was alive or dead. The discovery that he had been killed, in 1944, had hardly helped her deteriorating mental condition.
Frau Warzok was shaking her head. 'No, it's not like that. He was alive at the end of the war. In the spring of 1946 we were in Ebensee, near Salzburg. I saw him for only a short while, you understand. We were no longer living together as man and wife. Not since the end of the war.' She tugged a handkerchief down the sleeve of her tailored suit jacket and held it crushed in the palm of her hand, expectantly, as if she was planning to cry.
'Have you spoken to the police?'
'The German police say it's an Austrian matter. The Salzburg police say I should leave it to the Americans.'
'The Amis won't look for him either,' I said.
'Actually, they might.' She swallowed a bolus of raw emotion and then took a deep breath. 'Yes, I think they might be interested enough to look for him.'
'Oh?'
'Not that I have told them anything about Friedrich. That's his name. Friedrich Warzok. He's Galician. Galicia was part of Austria until the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, after which it was allowed its autonomy. Then, after 1918, it became part of Poland. Friedrich was born in Krakow in 1903. He was a very Austrian sort of Pole, Herr Gunther. And then a very German one, after Hitler was elected.'
'So why would the Americans be interested in him?' I was asking the question, but I was beginning to have a shrewd idea.
'Friedrich was an ambitious man, but not a strong one. Not intellectually strong, anyway. Physically he was very strong. Before the war he was a stonemason. Rather a good one. He was a very virile man, Herr Gunther. I suppose that was what I fell for. When I was eighteen, I was quite vigorous myself.'
I didn't doubt it for a moment. It was all too easy to imagine her wearing a short, white slip and a laurel wreath in her hair and doing interesting things with a hoop in a nice propaganda film from Dr. Goebbels. Female vigor never looked so blond and healthy.
'I'll be honest with you, Herr Gunther.' She dabbed her eye with the corner of her handkerchief. 'Friedrich Warzok was not a good man. During the war, he did some terrible things.'
'After Hitler there's none of us can say he has a clear conscience,' I said.
'It's very good of you to say so. But there are things that one has to do to survive. And then there are other things that don't involve survival at all. This amnesty that's being discussed in the Parliament. It wouldn't include my husband, Herr Gunther.'
'I wouldn't be too sure about that,' I said. 'If someone as bad as Erich Koch is prepared to risk coming out of hiding to claim the protection of the new Basic Law, then anyone might do the same. No matter what he had done.'
Erich Koch had been the gauleiter of East Prussia and the Reich commissioner for the Ukraine, where some dreadful things had been done. I knew that because I'd seen quite a few of them myself. Koch was banking on receiving the protection of the Federal Republic's new Basic Law, which forbade both the death penalty and extradition for all new cases of war crimes. Koch was currently being held in a prison in the British Zone. Time
