When she came back into the room she asked me peremptorily for another cigarette. Leaning forwards I waved one at her which she snatched from my fingers. She lit herself with the table lighter, and puffed like a trooper in the trenches. I watched her with interest as she paced up and down in front of me, the very image of parental anxiety. I selected a cigarette myself, and tugged a book of matches from my waistcoat pocket. Hildegard glanced fiercely at me as I bent my head towards the flame.
‘I thought detectives were supposed to be able to light matches with their thumbnails.’
‘Only the careless kind, who don’t pay five marks for a manicure,’ I said yawning.
I guessed that she was working up to something, but had no more idea of what it could be than I had of Hitler’s taste in soft-furnishings. I took another good look at her.
She was tall – taller than the average man, and in her early thirties, but with the knock-knees and turned-in toes of a girl half her age. There wasn’t much of a chest to speak of, and even less behind. The nose was maybe a bit too broad, the lips a shade too thick, and the cornflower-blue eyes rather too close together; and with the possible exception of her temper, there was certainly nothing delicate about her. But there was no doubting her long-limbed beauty which had something in common with the fastest of fillies out at the Hoppegarten. Probably she was just as difficult to hold on the rein; and if you ever managed to climb into the saddle, you could have done no more than hope that you got the trip as far as the winning-post.
‘Can’t you see that I’m scared?’ she said, stamping her foot on the polished wood floor. ‘I don’t want to be on my own now.’
‘Where is your son Paul?’
‘He’s gone back to his boarding-school. Anyway, he’s only ten, so I can’t see him coming to my assistance, can you?’ She dropped on to the sofa beside me.
‘Well I don’t mind sleeping in his room for a few nights,’ I said, ‘if you really are scared.’
‘Would you?’ she said happily.
‘Sure,’ I said, and privately congratulated myself. ‘It would be my pleasure.’
‘I don’t want it to be your pleasure,’ she said, with just a trace of a smile, ‘I want it to be your duty.’
For a moment I almost forgot why I was there. I might even have thought that she had forgotten. It was only when I saw the tear in the corner of her eye that I realized she really was afraid.
18
Wednesday, 26 October
‘I don’t get it,’ said Korsch. ‘What about Streicher and his bunch? Are we still investigating them or not?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But until the Gestapo surveillance throws up something of interest to us, there’s not a lot we can do in that direction.’
‘So what do you want us to do while you’re looking after the widow?’ said Becker, who was on the edge of allowing himself a smile I might have found irritating. ‘That is, apart from checking the Gestapo reports.’
I decided not to be too sensitive about the matter. That would have been suspicious in itself.
‘Korsch,’ I said, ‘I want you to keep your eye on the Gestapo inquiry. Incidentally, how’s your man getting on with Vogelmann?’
He shook his head. ‘There’s not a lot to report, sir. This Vogelmann hardly ever leaves his office. Not much of a detective if you ask me.’
‘It certainly doesn’t look like it,’ I said. ‘Becker, I want you to find me a girl.’ He grinned and looked down at the toe of his shoe. ‘That shouldn’t be too difficult for you.’
‘Any particular kind of girl, sir?’
‘Aged about fifteen or sixteen, blonde, blue-eyed, BdM and,’ I said, feeding him the line, ‘preferably a virgin.’
‘That last part might be a bit difficult, sir.’
‘She’ll have to have plenty of nerve.’
‘Are you thinking of staking her out, sir?’
‘I believe it’s always been the best way to hunt tiger.’
‘Sometimes the goat gets killed though, sir,’ said Korsch.
‘As I said, this girl will have to have guts. I want her to know as much as possible. If she is going to risk her life then she ought to know why she’s doing it.’
‘Where exactly are we going to do this, sir?’ said Becker.
‘You tell me. Think about a few places where our man might notice her. A place where we can watch her without being seen ourselves.’ Korsch was frowning. ‘What’s troubling you?’
He shook his head with slow distaste. ‘I don’t like it, sir. Using a young girl as bait. It’s inhuman.’
‘What do you suggest we use? A piece of cheese?’
‘A main road,’ Becker said, thinking out loud. ‘Somewhere like Hohenzollerndamm, but with more cars, to increase our chances of him seeing her.’
‘Honestly, sir, don’t you think it’s just a bit risky?’
‘Of course it is. But what do we really know about this bastard? He drives a car, he wears a uniform, he has an Austrian or Bavarian accent. After that everything is a maybe. I don’t have to remind you both that we are running out of time. That Heydrich has given me less than four weeks to solve this case. Well, we need to get closer, and we need to do it quickly. The only way is to take the initiative, to select his next victim for him.’
‘But we might wait for ever,’ said Korsch.
‘I didn’t say that it would be easy. You hunt tiger and you can end up sleeping in a tree.’
‘What about the girl?’ Korsch continued. ‘You don’t propose to keep her at it night and day, do you?’
‘She can do it in the afternoons,’ said Becker. ‘Afternoons and early evenings. Not in the dark, so we can make sure he sees her, and we see him.’
‘You’re getting the idea.’
‘But where does Vogelmann fit in?’
‘I don’t know. A feeling in my socks, that’s all. Maybe it’s nothing, but I just want to check it out.’
Becker smiled. ‘A bull has to trust a few hunches now and then,’ he said.
I recognized my own uninspired rhetoric. ‘We’ll make a detective out of you yet,’ I told him.
She listened to her Gigli gramophone records with the avidity of someone who is about to go deaf, offering and requiring no more conversation than a railway ticket-collector. By now I had realized that Hildegard Steininger was about as self-contained as a fountain-pen, and I figured that she probably preferred the kind of man who could think of himself as little more than a blank sheet of writing paper. And yet, almost in spite of her, I continued to find her attractive. For my taste she was too much concerned with the shade of her gold-spun hair, the length of her fingernails and the state of her teeth, which she was forever brushing. Too vain by half, and too selfish twice over. Given a choice between pleasing herself and pleasing someone else she would have hoped that pleasing herself would have made everyone happy. That she should have thought that one would almost certainly result from the other was for her as simple a reaction as a knee jerking under a patella-hammer.
It was my sixth night staying at her apartment, and as usual she had cooked a dinner that was nearly inedible.
‘You don’t have to eat it, you know,’ she had said. ‘I was never much of a cook.’
‘I was never much of a dinner guest,’ I had replied, and eaten most of it, not for politeness’ sake, but because I was hungry and had learnt in the trenches not to be too fussy about my food.
Now she closed the gramophone cabinet and yawned.