A twinkle came into Konig’s eye. ‘My dear fellow,’ he said standing up from the table, ‘that seems hardly German.’
I watched him as he walked into the back of the cafe to use the phone, the terrier trotting faithfully after him. I wondered who it was that he was calling: the one who was better able to judge the quality of my source might even be Muller. It seemed too much to hope for so soon.
When Konig returned a few minutes later, he seemed excited. ‘As I thought,’ he said, nodding enthusiastically, ‘there is someone who is keen to have immediate sight of this material, and to meet you. I have a car outside. Shall we go?’
Konig’s car was a black Mercedes, like Belinsky’s. And like Belinsky he drove too fast for safety on a road that had seen a heavy morning rain. I said that it would be better to arrive late than not to arrive at all, but he paid no attention. My feeling of discomfort was made worse by Konig’s dog, which sat on his master’s lap and barked excitedly at the road ahead for the whole of the journey, as if the brute had been giving directions on where we were going. I recognized the road as the one which led to Sievering Studios, but at that same moment the road forked and we turned north again on to Grinzinger Allee.
‘Do you know Grinzing?’ Konig shouted over the dog’s incessant barking. I said that I did not. ‘Then you really don’t know the Viennese,’ he opined. ‘Grinzing is famous for its wine production. In the summer everyone comes up here in the evening to go to one of the taverns selling the new vintage. They drink too much, listen to a Schrammel quartet and sing old songs.’
‘It sounds very cosy,’ I said, without much enthusiasm.
‘Yes, it is. I own a couple of vineyards up here myself. Just two small fields you understand. But it’s a start. A man must have some land, don’t you think? We’ll come back here in the summer and then you can taste the new wine yourself. The lifeblood of Vienna.’
Grinzing seemed hardly a suburb of Vienna at all, more a charming little village. But because of its proximity to the capital, its cosy country charm somehow appeared as false as one of the film sets they built over at Sievering. We drove up a hill on a narrow winding lane which led between old Heurige Inns and cottage gardens, with Konig declaring how pretty he thought it all was now that spring was here. But the sight of so much storybook provinciality merely served to stimulate my city-bred parts to contempt, and I restricted myself to a sullen grunt and a muttered sentence about tourists. To one more used to the perennial sight of rubble, Grinzing with its many trees and vineyards looked very green. However I made no mention of this impression for fear that it might set Konig off on one of his queer little monologues about that sickly colour.
He stopped the car in front of a high yellow-brick wall which enclosed a large, yellow-painted house and a garden that looked as if it had spent all day in the beauty parlour. The house itself was a tall, three-storey building with a high-dormered roof. Apart from its bright colour, there was a certain austerity of detail about the facade which lent the house an institutional appearance. It looked like a rather opulent son of town hall.
I followed Konig through the gates and up an immaculately bordered path to a heavy studded oak door of the kind that expected you to be holding a battle-axe when you knocked. We walked straight into the house and on to a creaking wooden floor that would have given a librarian a heart attack.
Konig led me into a small sitting-room, told me to wait there and then left, closing the door behind him. I took a good look round, but there wasn’t much to see beyond the fact of the owner’s bucolic taste in furniture. A rough-hewn table blocked the French window, and a couple of cartwheel farmhouse chairs were ranged in front of an empty fireplace that was as big as a mineshaft. I sat down on a slightly more comfortable-looking ottoman and re-tied my shoelaces. Then I polished my toes with the edge of the threadbare rug. I must have waited there for an indifferent half-hour before Konig came back to fetch me. He led me through a maze of rooms and corridors and up a flight of stairs to the back of the house, with the manner of a man whose jacket is lined with oak panelling. Hardly caring if I insulted him or not now that I was about to meet someone more important, I said, ‘If you changed that suit you’d make someone a wonderful butler.’
Konig did not turn around, but I heard him bare his dentures and utter a short, dry laugh. ‘I’m glad you think so. You know, although I like a sense of humour I would not advise you to exercise it with the general. Frankly, his character is most severe.’ He opened a door and we came into a bright, airy room with a fire in the grate and hectares of empty bookshelves. Against the broad window, behind a long library table, stood a grey-suited figure with a closely-cropped head I half recognized. The man turned and smiled, his hooked nose unmistakably belonging to a face from my past.
‘Hello, Gunther,’ said the man.
Konig looked quizzically at me as I blinked speechlessly at the grinning figure.
‘Do you believe in ghosts, Herr Konig?’ I said.
‘No. Do you?’
‘I do now. If I’m not mistaken, the gentleman by the window was hanged in 1945 for his part in the plot to kill the Fuhrer.’
‘You can leave us, Helmut,’ said the man at the window. Konig nodded curtly, turned on his heel and left.
Arthur Nebe pointed at a chair in front of the table on which Belinsky’s documents lay spread out beside a pair of spectacles and a fountain pen. ‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘Drink?’ He laughed. ‘You look as though you need one.’
‘It’s not every day I get to see a man raised from the dead,’ I said quietly. ‘Better make it a large one.’
Nebe opened a large carved-wood drinks cabinet, revealing a marble interior filled with several bottles. He took out a bottle of vodka and two small glasses, which he filled to the top.
‘To old comrades,’ he said, raising his glass. I smiled uncertainly. ‘Drink up. It won’t make me disappear again.’
I tossed the vodka back and breathed deeply as it hit my stomach. ‘Death agrees with you, Arthur. You look well.’
‘Thanks. I’ve never felt better.’
I lit a cigarette and left it on my lip for a while.
‘Minsk, wasn’t it?’ he said. ‘In 1941. The last time we saw each other?’
‘That’s right. You got me transferred to the War Crimes Bureau.’
‘I ought to have had you put on a charge for what you asked. Even had you shot.’
‘From what I hear, you were keen on shooting that summer.’ Nebe let that one pass. ‘So why didn’t you?’
‘You were a damned good policeman. That’s why.’
‘So were you.’ I sucked hard at my cigarette. ‘At least, you were before the war. What made you change, Arthur?’
Nebe savoured his drink for a moment and then finished it with one swallow. ‘This is good vodka,’ he remarked quietly, almost to himself. ‘Bernie, don’t expect me to give you an explanation. I had my orders to carry out, and so it was them or me. Kill or be killed. That’s how it always was with the SS. Ten, twenty, thirty thousand – after you’ve calculated that to save your own life you must kill others then the number makes little or no difference. That was my final solution, Bernie: the final solution to the pressing problem of my own continued survival. You were fortunate that you were never required to make that same calculation.’
‘Thanks to you.’
Nebe shrugged modestly, before pointing at the papers spread before him. ‘I’m rather glad that I didn’t have you shot, now that I’ve seen this lot. Naturally this material will have to be assessed by an expert, but on the face of it you appear to have won the lottery. All the same, I’d like to hear more about your source.’
I repeated my story, after which Nebe said:
‘Can he be trusted, do you think? Your Russian?’
‘He never let me down before,’ I said. ‘Of course, he was just fixing papers for me then.’
Nebe refilled our glasses and frowned.
‘Is there a problem?’ I asked.
‘It’s just that in the ten years I’ve known you Bernie, I can’t find anything that can persuade me that you’re now a common black-marketeer.’
‘That shouldn’t be any more difficult than the problem I have persuading myself that you’re a war-criminal, Arthur. Or for that matter, accepting that you’re not dead.’
Nebe smiled. ‘You have a point. But with so many opportunities presented by the vast number of displaced persons, I’m surprised you didn’t return to your old trade and become a private investigator again.’
‘Private investigation and the black market are not mutually exclusive,’ I said. ‘Good information is just like
