penicillin or cigarettes. It has its price. And the better, the more illicit the information, the higher that price. It’s always been like that. Incidentally, my Russian will want to be paid.’
‘They always do. Sometimes I think that the Ivans have more confidence in the dollar than the Americans themselves.’ Nebe clasped his hands and laid both forefingers along the length of his shrewd-looking nose. Then he pointed them at me as if he had been holding a pistol. ‘You’ve done very well, Bernie. Very well indeed. But I must confess I am still puzzled,’
‘About me as a black Peter?’
‘I can accept the idea of that rather more easily than I can accept the idea of you killing Traudl Braunsteiner. Murder was never in your line.’
‘I didn’t kill her,’ I said. ‘Konig told me to do it, and I thought I could, because she was a Communist. I learned to hate them while I was in a Soviet prison-camp. Even enough to kill one. But when I thought about it, I realized I couldn’t do it. Not in cold blood. Maybe I could have done it if it had been a man, but not a girl. I was going to tell him that this morning, but when he congratulated me on having done it, I decided to keep my mouth shut and take the credit. I figured there might be some money in it.’
‘So somebody else killed her. How very intriguing. You’ve no idea who, I suppose?’
I shook my head.
‘A mystery, then.’
‘Just like your resurrection, Arthur. How exactly did you manage it?’
‘I’m afraid that I can’t take any of the credit,’ he said. ‘It was something the intelligence people dreamed up. In the last few months of the war they simply doctored the service records of senior SS and party personnel, to the effect that we were dead. Most of us were executed for our part in Count Stauffenberg’s plot to kill the Fuhrer. Well, what were another hundred or so executions on a list that was already thousands of names long? And then some of us were listed as killed in a bombing raid, or in the battle for Berlin. Then all that remained was to make sure that these records fell into the hands of the Americans.
‘So the SS transported the records to a paper mill near Munich, and the owner – a good Nazi – was briefed to wait until the Amis were on his doorstep before he started to destroy anything.’Nebe laughed. ‘I remember reading in the newspaper how pleased with themselves the Amis were. What a coup they thought they had scored. Of course, most of what they captured was genuine enough. But for those of us who were most at risk from their ridiculous war-crimes investigations, it provided a real breathing space, and enough time to establish a new identity. There’s nothing quite like being dead for giving one a little room.’ He laughed again. ‘Anyway, that US Documents Centre of theirs in Berlin is still working for us.’
‘How do you mean?’ I asked, wondering if I was about to learn something that would throw light on why Linden had been killed. Or perhaps he had simply found out that the records had been doctored before they fell into Allied hands? Wouldn’t that have been enough to justify killing him?
‘No, I’ve said enough for the moment.’ Nebe drank some more vodka and licked his lips appreciatively. ‘These are interesting times we live in, Bernie. A man can be whoever he wants to be. Take me: my new name is Nolde, Arthur Nolde, and I make wine on this estate. Resurrected, you said. Well you’re not so very far away from it there. Only our Nazi dead are raised incorruptible. We’re changed, my friend. It’s the Russians who are wearing the black hats and trying to take over the town. Now that we’re working for the Americans, we’re the good boys. Dr Schneider – he’s the man who set the Org up with the help of their CIC – he has regular meetings with them at our headquarters in Pullach. He’s even been to the United States to meet their Secretary of State. Can you imagine it? A senior German officer working with the President’s number two? You don’t get more incorruptible than that, not these days.’
‘If you don’t mind,’ I said, ‘I find it hard to think of the Amis as saints. When I got back from Russia my wife was getting an extra ration from an American captain. Sometimes I think they’re no better than the Ivans.’
Nebe shrugged. ‘You’re not the only one in the Org who thinks that,’ he said. ‘But for my part, I never heard of the Ivans asking a lady’s permission or giving her a few bars of chocolate first. They’re animals.’ He smiled as a thought came into his head. ‘All the same, I will admit that some of those women ought to be grateful to the Russians. But for them, they might never have known what it was like.’
It was a poor joke, and in bad taste, but I laughed along with him anyway. I was still sufficiently nervous of Nebe to want to be good company for him.
‘So what did you do, about your wife and this American captain?’ he asked when his laughter has subsided.
Something made me check myself before I replied. Arthur Nebe was a clever man. Before the war, as chief of the criminal police, he had been Germany’s most outstanding policeman. It would have been too risky to give an answer which suggested that I had wanted to kill an American Army captain. Nebe saw common factors worthy of investigation where other men only saw the hand of a capricious god. I knew him too well to believe that he would have forgotten how once he had assigned Becker to a murder inquiry I was leading. Any hint of an association, no matter how accidental, between the death of one American officer affecting Becker and the death of another affecting me and I didn’t doubt that Nebe would have given orders to have had me killed. One American officer was bad enough. Two would have been too much of a coincidence. So I shrugged, lit a cigarette and said: ‘What can you do but make sure it’s her and not him who gets the slap in the mouth? American officers don’t take kindly to being socked, least of all by krauts. It’s one of the small privileges of conquest that you don’t have to take any shit from your defeated enemy. I can’t imagine you’ve forgotten that, Herr GruppenFuhrer. You of all people.’
I watched his grin with an extra curiosity. It was a cunning smile, in an old fox’s face, but his teeth looked real enough.
‘That was very wise of you,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t do to go around killing Americans.’ Confirming my nervousness of him, he added, after a long pause: ‘Do you remember Emil Becker?’
It would have been stupid to have tried to affect a show of protracted remembering. He knew me better than that.
‘Of course,’ I said.
‘It was his girlfriend that Konig told you to kill. One of his girlfriends anyway.’
‘But Konig said she was MVD,’ I frowned.
‘And so she was. So was Becker. He killed an American officer. But not before he’d tried to infiltrate the Org.’
I shook my head slowly. ‘A crook, maybe,’ I said, ‘but I can’t see Becker as one of Ivan’s spies.’ Nebe nodded insistently. ‘Here in Vienna?’ He nodded again. ‘Did he know about you being alive?’
‘Of course not. We used him to do a little courier work now and again. It was a mistake. Becker was a black-marketeer, like you, Bernie. Rather a successful one, as it happens. But he had delusions regarding his own worth to us. He thought he was at the centre of a very big pond. But he was nowhere near it. Quite frankly if a meteorite had landed in the middle of it, Becker wouldn’t even have noticed the fucking ripple.’
‘How did you find out about him?’
‘His wife told us,’ Nebe said. ‘When he came back from a Soviet POW camp, our people in Berlin sent someone round to his house to see if we could recruit him to the Org. Well, they missed him, and by the time they got to speak to Becker’s wife he had left home and was living here in Vienna. The wife told them about Becker’s association with a Russian colonel of MVD. But for one reason and another – actually it was sheer bloody inefficiency – it was quite a while before that information reached us here in Vienna section. And by that time he had been recruited by one of our collectors.’
‘So where is he now?’
‘Here in Vienna. In gaol. The Americans are putting him on trial for murder, and he will most certainly hang.’
‘That must be rather convenient for you,’ I said, sticking my neck out a little way. ‘Rather too convenient, if you ask me.’
‘Professional instinct, Bernie?’
‘Better just call it a hunch. That way, if I’m wrong it won’t make me look like an amateur.’
‘Still trusting your guts, eh?’
‘Most of all now that I’ve got something inside them again, Arthur. Vienna’s a fat city after Berlin.’
‘So you think we killed the American?’
‘That would depend on who he was, and if you had a good reason. Then all you would have to do is make
