The One from the Other

handed over Gruen's passport carefully, and put my hands up again.

'I'm a friend of Frau Warzok's,' I said, and sniffed the air. It wasn't just the room that smelled. It was the whole situation. If the cops were there then something bad had happened. 'Look here, is she all right? Where is she?'

The second cop was still looking at the passport. I wasn't worried that he would think it wasn't me so much as that he would be abreast of whatever it was that Gruen was supposed to have done.

'It says here that you're from Vienna,' he said. 'You don't sound like you're from Vienna.' He was wearing the same outfit as his colleague, only without the baker's hat. A smile was stapled to the opposite cheek from the way his nose was angled. He probably thought it made him look wry or even skeptical, but it just came off oblique and distorted. All of his recessive genes seemed to have concentrated where his chin ought to have been. And the hairline on his high forehead matched the line of a long S-shaped scar. He handed the passport back to me as he spoke.

'Before the war, I lived in Berlin for ten years,' I said.

'A doctor, huh?'

They were starting to relax.

'Yes.'

'Her doctor?'

'No. Look here, who are you? And where's Frau Warzok?'

'Police,' said the one with the hat, flashing a warrant disk at me. 'Deutschmeister Platz.'

This seemed reasonable enough. The Kommissariat on Deutschmeister Platz was less than a hundred yards away from where we were standing.

'She's in there,' said the cop with the scar.

The two cops put away their guns and led me into a tiled bathroom. It had been built at a time when a bathroom was not a bathroom unless a football team could bathe in it. As it happened, there was only one woman in the bath. Except for the one nylon stocking she was wearing, she was naked. The nylon stocking was knotted around her neck. It wasn't the kind of knot that would have detained Alexander the Great for very long, but it was effective enough. The woman was dead. She had been strangled. Beyond the fact that I had never seen her before it was impossible to say more because the smell didn't encourage delay. Both the body and the water it was lying in were a slimy shade of poisonous green. And there were flies. Curious the way there are always flies on bodies, even when it's very cold.

'Good grief,' I said, reeling from the bathroom like a man who hadn't seen a cadaver since medical school, instead of less than half an hour earlier. And it was my hand I put up to my nose this time. For the moment the kickers were safely in my pocket. The effect the smell had on me was real enough. I went straight back to the open window and leaned into some fresh air. But it was just as well the stench left me gagging for a moment or two. Otherwise I might have said something stupid about how the body in the bathroom wasn't Britta Warzok. And that would have spoiled everything, in view of what the cop in the hat now said:

'Sorry to let you have it like that,' he said, following me to the window. It was now plain to see that it had been the two cops who had opened it. 'It was a bit of a shock for me, too. Frau Warzok used to give me piano lessons, when I was a kid.' He pointed to a piano behind the door. 'We'd only just found her ourselves when you came in. The neighbor downstairs reported the smell and the mail stacked up in her box.'

'How do you know her?' asked the other cop. He was eyeing the holdall I had arrived with, and was probably wondering what was in it.

I was inventing my story even as I told it to him, trying to fix a plausible chain of causation in my head. The body in the bath had the look of a body that had been in the water for not quite a week. That would be my approximate start point.

'I knew her husband,' I said. 'Friedrich. Before the war. Before he--' I shrugged. 'About a week ago I received a letter from her. At my home in Garmisch. It said that she was in trouble. It took me a while to get away from my medical practice. And I arrived in Vienna just a short while ago. I came straight here.'

'Do you still have the letter?' asked the cop with the scar.

'No, I'm afraid I left it in Garmisch.'

'What kind of trouble?' he asked. 'Did she say?'

'No, but Britta isn't--wasn't the kind of person to say that kind of thing lightly. The letter was really short. It just asked me to come to Vienna as soon as I could. Well then. I telephoned before I left Garmisch. But there was no reply. So I came anyway.'

I started to wander across the parquet wooden floor like some ordinary Fritz, distracted with grief. Which in part I was, of course. Vera Messmann's dead body was all too vivid in my memory. There were some nice rugs, a few elegant chairs and tables. Some good Nymphenburger porcelain. A vase of flowers that looked as if they had been dead for about as long as the woman in the bath. There were lots of framed photographs on a sideboard. I went to take a closer look at them. Many of them featured the woman in the bath. In one of them she was getting married to a face I recognized. It was Friedrich Warzok. I was quite sure it was him because he was wearing his SS uniform. I shook my head as if I was upset. But not in the way they imagined I was upset. I was upset because I had a very bad feeling about everything that had happened to me since a woman calling herself Britta Warzok had walked into my office.

'Who would have done such a thing?' I asked the two cops. 'Unless.'

'Yes.'

'It's no secret that Friedrich, her husband, is wanted for war crimes,' I said. 'And of course, one hears things. About Jewish revenge gangs. Perhaps they came looking for her husband and killed her instead.'

The cop with the hat was shaking his head. 'It's a nice idea,' he said. 'But it so happens we think we know who killed her.'

'Already? That's amazing.'

'Did you ever hear her mention a man called Bernhard Gunther?'

I tried to contain my surprise and look thoughtful for a moment. 'Gunther, Gunther,' I said, as if raking through the bottom drawer of my memory. If I was going to pump them for information I would have to give them something first.

'Yes, yes, I think I have heard that name before. But it wasn't in connection with Britta Warzok. A few months ago, a man turned up at my house in Garmisch. I think his name might have been Gunther. He said he was a private detective and that he was looking for a witness who might assist in the appeal of another old comrade I used to know. A fellow named von Starnberg. He's currently serving a sentence for war crimes in Landsberg Prison. What does your Bernhard Gunther look like?'

'We don't know,' admitted the cop with the scar. 'But from what you've told us, he's the man we're looking for all right. A private detective, based in Munich.'

'Can you tell us anything about him?' asked the other.

'Yes, but look here, do you mind if I sit down? I've had a bit of a shock.'

'Please.'

They followed me to a big leather sofa where I sat down. I took out the pipe and started to fill it, then hesitated. 'Do you mind if I smoke?'

'Go ahead,' said the hat. 'It will help get rid of the smell.'

'He wasn't very tall,' I said. 'Well dressed. A bit too fastidious, you might say. Brown hair. Brown eyes. Not from Munich, I'd say. Somewhere else, probably. Hamburg maybe. Berlin, possibly.'

'He's from Berlin,' said the scar. 'He used to be a policeman.'

'A policeman? Yes, well, he did strike me a bit that way. You know. Full of himself. A bit officious.' I hesitated. 'No offense, gentlemen. What I mean is, he was very correct. I must say he didn't strike me as the type to murder anyone at all. If you don't mind my saying so. I've met a few psychopathic personalities during my years as a doctor, but your Herr Gunther wasn't one of those.' I settled back on the sofa and puffed at my pipe. 'What makes you think it was he who killed her?'

'We found his business card on the mantelpiece,' said the hat. 'There was blood on it. We also found an initialed handkerchief with blood on it. His initials.'

I remembered using my own handkerchief to staunch the flow of blood from the stump of my little finger. 'Gentlemen, she was strangled,' I said, carefully. 'I don't see that a bit of blood proves anything.'