But he was wrong about one thing. There was something open, a сafé further up Cobenzlgasse: the Rudelshof. I decided that if I was going to get shot I'd prefer to collect it with something in my stomach.
The сafé was a cosy little place if you didn't mind taxidermy. I sat down under the beady eye of an anthraxic-looking weasel and waited for the badly stuffed proprietor to shamble up to my table.
'God's greeting to you, sir,' he said. 'It's a lovely morning.'
I reeled away from his distilled breath. 'I can tell you're already enjoying it,' I said, using my smart mouth yet again. He shrugged, uncomprehending, and took my order.
The five-schilling Viennese breakfast I gobbled tasted like the taxidermist had cooked it during his time off between jobs: the coffee had grounds in it, the roll was about as fresh as a piece of scrimshaw and the egg was so hard it might have come from a quarry. But I ate it. I had so much on my mind I'd probably have eaten the weasel if only they'd sat it on a slice of toast.
Outside the сafé I walked down the road awhile and then climbed over a wall into what I thought must be Arthur Nebe's vineyard.
There wasn't much to see. The vines themselves, planted in neat rows, were still only young shoots, hardly higher than my knee. Here and there on high trolleys were what looked like abandoned jet engines but were in fact the rapid burners they used at night to heat the atmosphere around the shoots and protect them from late frost. They were still warm to the touch. The field itself was perhaps a hundred metres square and offered little in the way of cover. I wondered exactly how Belinsky would manage to deploy his men. Apart from crawling the length of the field on your belly, you could only stay close to the wall while you worked your way down to the trees immediately behind the yellow house and its outbuildings.
When I got as far as the trees I looked for some sign of life, and seeing none I edged my way forwards until I heard voices. Next to the largest of the outbuildings, a long half-timbered affair that resembled a barn, two men, neither of whom I recognized, were standing talking. Each man wore a metal drum on his back, and this was connected by a rubber hose to a long thin tube of metal he held in his hand which I presumed to be some kind of crop-spraying contraption.
At last they finished their conversation and walked towards the opposite side of the vineyard, as if to start their attack on the bacteria, fungi and insects which plagued their lives. I waited until they were well across the field before leaving the cover of the trees and entering the building.
A musty fruit smell hit my nostrils. Large oak vats and storage tanks were ranged under the open rafters of the ceiling like enormous cheeses. I walked the length of the stone floor and emerged at the other end of this first building to be faced with the door to another, built at right angles to the house.
This second outhouse contained hundreds of oak barrels, which lay on their sides as if awaiting the giant St Bernard dogs to come and collect them. Stairs led down into the darkness. It seemed like a good place to imprison someone, so I switched on the light and went downstairs to take a look. But there were only thousands of bottles of wine, each rack marked by a small blackboard on which were chalked a few numbers that must have meant something to somebody. I came back upstairs, switched off the light and stood by the barrel-room window. It was beginning to look as if Veronika might be in the house after all.
From where I was standing I had a clear view across a short cobbled yard, to the west side of the house. In front of an open door a big black cat sat staring at me. Beside the door was the window of what looked like the kitchen. There was a large, shiny shape on the kitchen ledge which I thought was probably a pot or a kettle. After a while the cat walked slowly up to the outbuilding where I was hiding and mewed loudly at something beside the window where I was standing. For a second or two it fixed me with its green eyes, and then for no apparent reason ran off. I looked back towards the house and continued to watch the kitchen door and window. After a few more minutes I judged it safe to leave the barrel room, and started across the yard.
I had not gone three paces when I heard the ratchet sound of an automatic-slide and almost simultaneously felt the cold steel of a gun muzzle pressed hard against my neck.
'Clasp your hands behind your head,' said a voice, none too distinctly.
I did as I was told. The gun pressed under my ear felt heavy enough to be a .45.
Enough to dispose of a large part of my skull. I winced as he screwed the gun between my jaw and my jugular vein.
'Twitch and you're tomorrow morning's pig swill,' he said, smacking my pockets, and relieving me of my revolver.
'You'll find that Herr Nebe is expecting me,' I said.
'Don't know a Herr Nebe,' he said thickly, almost as if his mouth didn't work properly. Naturally I was reluctant to turn round and take a good look to make sure.
'Yes, that's right, he changed his name, didn't he?' I tried hard to remember Nebe's new surname. Meanwhile I heard the man behind me step back a couple of steps.
'Now walk to your right,' he told me. 'Towards the trees. And don't trip on your shoelaces or anything.'
He sounded big and not too bright. And it was a strangely accented German he spoke: like Prussian, but different; more like the Old Prussian I had heard my grandfather speak; almost like the German I had heard spoken in Poland.
'Look, you're making a mistake,' I said. 'Why don't you check with your boss? My name is Bernhard Gunther. There's a meeting at ten o'clock this morning. I'm supposed to be at it.'
'It's not even eight yet,' grunted my captor. 'If you're here for a meeting, how come you're so early? And how come you don't come to the front door like normal visitors? How come you walk across the fields? How come you snoop around in the outhouses?'
'I'm early because I own a couple of wineshops in Berlin,' I said. 'I thought it might be nice to take a look around the estate.'
'You were taking a look all right. You're a snooper.' He chuckled cretinously.
'I got orders to shoot snoopers.'
'Now wait a minute ' I turned into a clubbing blow from his gun, and as I fell I caught a glimpse of a big man with a shaven head and a lopsided sort of jaw.
He grabbed me by the scruff of my neck and hauled me back on to my feet, and I wondered why I had never thought to sew a razor blade under that part of my coat collar. He pushed me through the line of trees and down a slope to a small clearing where several large dustbins were standing. A trail of smoke and a sweet sickly smell arose through the roof of a small brick hut: it was where they incinerated the rubbish. Next to several bags of what looked like cement, a sheet of rusting corrugated iron lay on some bricks. The man ordered me to draw it aside.
Now I had it. He was a Latvian. A big, stupid Latvian. And I decided that if he was working for Arthur Nebe he was probably from a Latvian SS division, that had served in one of the Polish death camps. They had used a lot of Latvians at places like Auschwitz. Latvians were enthusiastic anti-Semites when Moses Mendelssohn was one of Germany's favourite sons.
I hauled the iron sheet away from what was revealed as some kind of old drain, or cesspit. Certainly it smelt every bit as bad. It was then that I saw the cat again. It emerged from between two paper sacks labelled calcium oxide close by the pit. It mewed contemptuously, as if to say, 'I warned you there was someone standing in that yard, but you wouldn't listen to me.' An acrid, chalky smell came up from the pit and made my skin crawl. 'You're right,' mewed the cat, like something from Edgar Allan Poe, 'calcium oxide is a cheap alkali for treating acid soil. Just the sort of thing you would expect to see in a vineyard. But it's also called quicklime, and that's an extremely efficient compound for speeding human decomposition.'