'Or maybe they got the same as Linden,' I suggested.
'Who knows? But that's why you're here, Bernie. I can trust you. I know the kind of fellow you are. I respect what you did back in Minsk, really I did. You're not the kind to let an innocent man hang.' He smiled meaningfully. 'I can't believe I'm the only one who's had a use for a man of your qualifications.'
'I do all right,' I said quickly, not caring much for flattery, least of all from clients like Emil Becker. 'You know, you probably deserve to hang,' I added. 'Even if you didn't kill Linden, there must have been plenty of others.'
'But I just didn't see it coming. Not until it was too late. Not like you. You were clever, and got out while you still had a choice. I never had that chance.
It was obey orders, or face a court martial and a firing squad. I didn't have the courage to do anything other than what I did.'
I shook my head. I really didn't care any more. 'Perhaps you're right.'
'You know I am. We were at war, Bernie.' He finished his cigarette and stood up to face me in the corner where I was leaning. He lowered his voice, as if he meant Liebl not to hear.
'Look,' he said, 'I know this is a dangerous job. But only you can do it. It needs to be done quietly, and privately, the way you do it best. Do you need a lighter?'
I had left the gun I'd taken off the dead Russian in Berlin, having had no wish to risk arrest for crossing a border with a pistol. I doubted that Poroshin's cigarette pass could have sorted that out. So I shrugged and said, 'You tell me.
This is your city.'
'I'd say you'll need one.'
'All right,' I said, 'but for Christ's sake make it a clean one.'
When we were outside the prison again Liebl smiled sarcastically and said: 'Is a lighter what I think it is?'
'Yes. But it's just a precaution.'
'The best precaution you can take while you're in Vienna is to stay out of the Russian sector. Especially late at night.'
I followed Liebl's gaze across the road and beyond, to the other side of the canal, where a red flag fluttered in the early morning breeze.
'There are a number of kidnapping gangs working for the Ivans in Vienna,' he explained. 'They snatch anyone they think might be spying for the Americans, and in return they're given black-market concessions to operate out of the Russian sector, which effectively puts them beyond the reach of the law. They took one woman out of her own house rolled up in a carpet, just like Cleopatra.'
'Well, I'll be careful not to fall asleep on the floor,' I said. 'Now, how do I get to the Central Cemetery?'
'It's in the British sector. You need to take a 71 from Schwarzenbergplatz, only your map calls it Stalinplatz. You can't miss it: there's an enormous statue to the Soviet soldier as liberator that we Viennese call the Unknown Plunderer.'
I smiled. 'Like I always say, Herr Doktor, we can survive defeat, but heaven help us from another liberation.'
Chapter 13
'The city of the other Viennese' was how Traudl Braunsteiner had described it.
This was no exaggeration. The Central Cemetery was bigger than several towns of my acquaintance and quite a bit more affluent too. There was no more chance of the average Austrian doing without a headstone than there was of him staying out of his favourite coffee house. It seemed there was nobody who was too poor for a decent piece of marble, and for the first time I began to appreciate the attractions of the undertaking business. A piano keyboard, an inspired muse, the introductory bars of a famous waltz there was nothing too ornate for Vienna's craftsmen, no flatulent fable or overstated allegory that was beyond the dead hand of their art. The huge necropolis even mirrored the religious and political divisions of its living counterpart, with its Jewish, Protestant and Catholic sections, not to mention those of the Four Powers.
There was quite a turnover of services at the first-wonder-of-the-world-sized chapel where Linden's obsequies were heard, and I found that I had missed the captain's mourners there by only a few minutes.
The little cortege wasn't difficult to spot as it drove slowly across the snowbound park to the French sector where Linden, a Catholic, was to be buried.
But for one on foot, as I was, it was rather more difficult to catch up; by the time I did the expensive casket was already being lowered slowly into the dark-brown trench like a dinghy let down into a dirty harbour. The Linden family, arms interlinked in the manner of a squad of riot-police, faced its grief as indomitably as if there had been medals to be won.
The colour party raised their rifles and took aim at the floating snow. It gave me an uncomfortable feeling as they fired, and for just a moment I was back in Minsk when, on a walk to staff headquarters, I had been summoned by the sound of gunshots: climbing up an embankment I had seen six men and women kneeling at the edge of a mass grave already filled with innumerable bodies, some of whom were still alive, and behind them an SS firing squad commanded by a young police officer. His name was Emil Becker.
'Are you a friend of his?' said a man, an American, appearing behind me.
'No,' I said. 'I came over because you don't expect to hear gunfire in a place like this.' I couldn't tell if the American had been at the funeral already or if he had followed me from the chapel. He didn't look like the man who had been standing outside Liebl's office. I pointed at the grave. 'Tell me, who's the-'
'A fellow called Linden.'
It is difficult for someone who does not speak German as a first language, so I might have been mistaken, but there seemed to be no trace of emotion in the American's voice.
When I had seen enough, and having ascertained that there was nobody even vaguely resembling K/nig among the mourners not that I really expected to see him there I walked quietly away. To my surprise I found the American walking alongside me.
'Cremation is so much kinder to the thoughts of the living,' he said. 'It consumes all sorts of hideous imaginings. For me the putrefaction of a loved one is quite unthinkable. It remains in the thoughts with the persistence of a tapeworm. Death is quite bad enough without letting the maggots make a meal of it. I should know. I've buried both parents and a sister. But these people are Catholics. They don't want anything to jeopardize their chances of bodily resurrection. As if God is going to bother with ' he waved his arm at the whole cemetery '- all this. Are you a Catholic, Herr ?'
'Sometimes,' I said. 'When I'm hurrying to catch a train, or trying to sober up.'
'Linden used to pray to St Anthony,' said the American. 'I believe he's the patron saint of lost things.'
Was he trying to be cryptic, I wondered. 'Never use him myself,' I said.
He followed me on to the road that led back to the chapel. It was a long avenue of severely pruned trees on which the gobbets of snow sitting on the sconce-like ends of the branches resembled the stumps of melted candles from some outsized requiem.
Pointing at one of the parked cars, a Mercedes, he said: 'Like a lift to town?
I've got a car here.'
It was true that I wasn't much of a Catholic. Killing men, even Russians, wasn't the kind of sin that was easy to explain to one's maker. All the same I didn't have to consult St Michael, the patron saint of policemen, to smell an MP.
'You can drop me at the main gate, if you like,' I heard myself reply.
'Sure, hop in.'
He paid the funeral and the mourners no more attention. After all he had me, a new face, to interest him now. Perhaps I was someone who might shed some light on a dark corner of the whole affair. I wondered what he would have said if he could have known that my intentions were the same as his own; and that it was in the vague hope of just such an encounter that I had allowed myself to be persuaded to come to Linden's funeral in the first place.