“Schnapps.”
He was much bigger than I remembered, in almost every way: taller, louder, broader, fatter; his silver-haired head was huge and looked as if it belonged on a stone lion. Only his hands were small. He didn’t look younger than me, but he was, by at least a decade. He wore a good-quality thick tweed suit, ideal for a Munich winter, and while this didn’t fit him well—the waist of his trousers was positioned just below his breast, like a life belt—he was in more urgent need of a dentist than a good tailor; one of his front teeth was gold but the rest weren’t so good, perhaps a result of the large number of cigarettes he smoked. The office was pungent with the smell of Egyptian cigarettes. I smoke a lot myself, but Max Merten could have smoked for West Germany. His cigarettes arrived between his thick pink lips from a packet of Finas on his desk, one after the other, in an almost unbroken thin white line, one passing on a tiny flame to the next, like the baton in a never-ending relay race. He handed me a glass and then ushered us both to some comfortable armchairs beside the window, where he drew the heavy curtains and sat down opposite me.
“So what have you been doing with yourself?”
“Trying to stay out of trouble.”
“And not succeeding if I know you.”
“That’s why I’m here, Max. I need a lawyer. It’s just possible we both do.”
“Oh dear. That sounds ominous.”
“You hired a cop to do some freelance work for you. Christian Schramma.”
“That’s right.”
“You wanted him to check out the bona fides of a potential donor for this political party you’ve started. The CVP.”
“GVP. That’s right. General Heinkel. I wanted to find out where his campaign money was coming from.”
“Well, Schramma hired me. Not so much hired, perhaps. I didn’t have much choice in the matter.”
“To check out the money?”
“I thought so, but as things turned out he wanted me to help him steal it. I didn’t have much choice in the matter, either. I’m living here in Munich under a false name. For the obvious reasons.”
“The war.”
“Exactly.”
“So what precisely has happened? You’re not a thief.”
I told him everything that had taken place inside the general’s house. And then placed the money on his desk, all ten thousand marks of it.
“Then General Heinkel is dead.”
I nodded.
“But who’s the other man that’s been murdered?”
“I don’t know his name. But I think he worked for the East German foreign intelligence service. The MfS.”
“What’s the DDR have to do with this?”
“You were going to go to the general’s house tomorrow morning, to collect the money for the GVP, right?”
“Yes.”
“The MfS planned to have the local police turn up to arrest the general who, in order to clear himself, was then going to allege that the money was a bribe for you and your friend Professor Hallstein.”
“Why would the general do such a thing?”
“Because, according to Schramma, the Stasi have his son in a Leipzig prison cell. My guess is that the fellow from the MfS was in this with Schramma. But that Schramma double-crossed him.”
“I see. This is all very disturbing.”
“For me, too.”
“I had no idea that Christian Schramma was such a dangerous man.”
“Cops have guns. And they mix with all kinds of bad people. That makes them dangerous.”
“And Schramma is still there? Locked in the general’s wine cellar with the two bodies?”
“That’s right.” I sipped some of the schnapps and helped myself to a cigarette. “Given that it was you who hired him in the first place, I thought you might have an idea about what to do next. But for the fact that I’m living under a false name, and your friend’s a cop who’s put a lot of years into the job, I’d have called the police myself and left them to it. I was hoping you might do it instead of me.”
“You did the right thing coming to me, Bernie. I mean from what you’ve said, it looks like an open-and-shut case: two bodies and the killer and the murder weapon all in one locked room. But experience tells me that even cases that look open-and-shut have a habit of not closing properly, from an evidentiary point of view. And then there’s the Munich police, of course. If Schramma’s corrupt, then there’s every chance that there are others who are also corrupt. That they’ll pretend to believe his story and just let him go. No, this needs very careful thought about who to call, and when. It may be that I shall have to inform the Bavarian State Ministry of Justice.”
“That’s up to you, of course. But whoever you tell, please bear in mind that if it should come to my needing a lawyer, I can’t afford to pay you. I’m hoping my coming here and putting you in the picture about everything that’s happened would be enough for you to take me on as your client for free.”
“Oh, surely. And I do appreciate it. Very much. After all, you could easily have disappeared with the money and I’d have been none the wiser about any of this.”
“I’m glad you see it that way, Max.”
“By the way, what do you expect me to do with all this cash?”
“That’s up to you. No one but me knows you have it.”
“How much is here, anyway?”
“Ten thousand.”
“I suppose I’ll have to give it to the police.”
I took a long drag on the cigarette and narrowed my eyes against my smoke. If it made me look cagey and thoughtful that was always my intention.
“I get the feeling you have a few ideas of your own about what should happen to the money,” said Merten.
“If you give it to the police you’ll have to say where you got it. Or who gave it to you. The first looks awkward for you. The second looks just as bad for me. My advice would be to use it for the GVP
