The One from the Other

inclined to forget about it and get myself another client.'

'Then it's lucky she asked me and not you.'

'She must smell really nice.'

'Better than you and me.'

'It goes without saying, Bernie,' said Korsch. 'The federal government prefers us to keep downwind of the Amis. So as not to scare off the new investment that's coming here. That's why they want all these war crimes investigations to finish. So we can all get on and make some money. You know, I bet I could get you fixed up with something here at the paper, Bernie. They could use a good private investigator.'

'For those undercover stories that won't spoil anyone's breakfast? Is that it?'

'Communists,' said Korsch. 'That's what people want to read about. Spy stories. Stories about life in the Russian Zone and how terrible it is. Plots to destabilize the new federal government.'

'Thanks, Friedrich, but no,' I said. 'If that's really what they want to read about, I'd probably end up investigating myself.'

I put the phone down and lit a cigarette with the butt of the one I was finishing, to help me think things over in detail. It's what I do when I work a case that starts to interest not just me but other people as well. People like Friedrich Korsch, for example. Some people smoke to relax. Others to stimulate their imaginations, or to concentrate. With me it was a combination of all three at once. And the more I thought about it the more my imagination was telling me not only that I'd just been warned off a case, but also that this had been swiftly followed up by an attempt to buy me off, with a job offer. I took another drag on the cigarette and then stubbed it out in the ashtray. Nicotine was a drug, wasn't it? I was smoking way too much. It was a crazy idea. Korsch trying to warn me and then buy me off? That was the drug talking, surely?

I went out to get a coffee and a cognac. They were drugs, too. Maybe that way I'd see things differently. It was worth a try.

THIRTEEN

Wagmullerstrasse ran onto Prinzregentenstrasse, between the National Museum and the House of Art. On the English Garden side, the House of Art was now being used as an American Officers' Club. The National Museum had just reopened following extensive repairs and now, once again, it was possible to see the city treasures that no one really wanted to look at. Wagmullerstrasse was in a district of Munich called Lehel, which was full of quiet residential streets built for the well-to-do during Germany's industrial revolution. Lehel was still quiet but only because half of the houses were in ruins. The other half had been or were still being repaired and lived in by Munich's new well-to-do. Even out of uniform the new well-to-do were easily recognizable by their buzz-cut hairstyles; their busy, gum-chewing mouths; their loud braying laughs; their impossibly wide trousers; their handsome cigarette cases; their sensible English shoes; their Kodak folding Brownies; and, above all, their semi- aristocratic air--that sense of absolute precedence they all gave off like cheap cologne.

The Red Cross building was four stories of yellowish Danubian limestone set between a rather fancy-looking shop selling Nymphenburger porcelain and a private art gallery. Inside, everything was in motion. Typewriters were being punched, filing cabinets opened and closed loudly, forms being filled out, people coming down stairs, and people going up in an open-grille elevator. Four years after the end of the war the Red Cross was still dealing with the human fallout. Just to make things more interesting they had let the painters in, and I didn't have to look at the ceiling to know they were painting it white--there were spots of it all over the brown linoleum floor. Behind a desk that looked more like a counter in a beer hall, a woman with braids and a face as pink as a ham was brushing off an old man who might or might not have been a Jew. I never could tell the difference.

Most of her problem with him related to the fact that only half of what he was saying to her was in German. The rest, which was mostly spoken at the floor, just in case she understood the swear words, was in Russian. I buckled on my armor, mounted my white horse, and leveled my lance at the ham.

'Perhaps I can be of assistance,' I said to her before speaking to the man in Russian. It turned out that he was looking for his brother who had been in the concentration camp at Treblinka, then Dachau, before finally ending up in one of the Kaufering camps. He'd run out of money. He needed to get to the DP camp at Landsberg. He had been hoping that the Red Cross would help him. The way the ham was looking at him I wasn't sure they would, so I gave the old man five marks and told him how to get to the railway station on Bayerstrasse. He thanked me profusely and then left me to be eaten by the ham.

'What was all that about?' she demanded.

I told her.

'Since 1945, a total of sixteen million tracing requests have been submitted to the Red Cross,' she said, answering the accusation that lay behind my eyes. 'One point nine million returnees have been interviewed about missing persons. We're still missing sixty-nine thousand prisoners of war, one point one million members of the Wehrmacht, and almost two hundred thousand German civilians. That means there are proper procedures to be observed. If we gave five marks to every heel who walks in off the street with a sob story we'd be broke in no time. You'd be surprised how many walk in here looking for their long-lost brother when what they're really looking for is just the price of a drink.'

'Then it's very lucky he took five marks from me instead of from the Red Cross,' I said. 'I can afford to lose it.' I smiled warmly at her but she wasn't near being thawed.

'What can I do for you?' she asked coolly.

'I'm looking for Father Gotovina.'

'Do you have an appointment?'

'No,' I said. 'I thought I'd save him the trouble of meeting me at the Praesidium.'

'The Police Praesidium?' Like most Germans the ham was still apprehensive where the police were concerned. 'On Ettstrasse?'

'With the stone lion in front of the entrance,' I said. 'That's right. Have you been there?'

'No,' she said, keen to be rid of me now. 'Take the elevator to the second floor. You'll find Father Gotovina in the Passport and Visa Section. Room twenty-nine.'

At first glance the man operating the elevator looked not much older than me. It was only after the second glance, when you'd finished taking in the one leg and the scar on his face that the third glance told you he was probably not much more than twenty-five. I got in the car with him, and said 'two' and he went into action with the well-practiced air and grim determination of a man operating a 20mm Flak 38--the gun with the foot pedals and the collapsing seat. Stepping out onto the second floor I almost glanced up to see if he'd hit anything. It was just as well I didn't, because if I had I'd have tripped over the man painting a skirting board that ran the length of a corridor as big as a bowling alley.

The Passport and Visa Section was like a state within a state. More typewriters, more filing cabinets, more forms to be filled, and more meaty-looking women. Each of them looked like she ate a Red Cross parcel, including the wrapping paper and string, for breakfast. There was a guy standing around beside a 50mm camera with a trip and hood. Outside the window there was a good view of the Angel of Peace monument on the other side of the River Isar. Erected in 1899 to commemorate the Franco-Prussian War, it hadn't meant much then and it certainly didn't mean much now.

Being a detective I spotted Father Gotovina within a few seconds of going through the door. There were lots of things that gave it away. The black suit, the black shirt, the crucifix hanging around his neck, the little white halo of collar. His was not a face that made you think of Jesus so much as Pontius Pilate. The thick, dark eyebrows were the only hair on his head. The skull looked like the rotating dome roof on the Gottingen Observatory, and each lobeless ear resembled a demon's wing. His lips were as thick as his fingers, and his nose as broad and hooked as the beak on a giant octopus. He had a mole on his left cheek that was the size and color of a five-pfennig piece and walnut-brown eyes, like the walnut on the grip of a Walther PPK. One of them picked me out like a shoemaker's awl and he came over, almost as if he could smell the cop on my shoes. It could just as easily have been the cognac on my breath. But I didn't figure him for the teetotaler type any more than I could picture him singing in the Vienna Boys Choir. If the Medici had still been siring popes, Father Gotovina would have been what one looked like.

'Can I help you?' he asked in a voice like liquid furniture polish, with lips stretched tight across teeth that were as white as his collar in what, among the Holy Inquisition anyway, must have passed for a smile.

'Father Gotovina?' I asked.