Offenbach’s disappearance raised a question: might he have forged the foreign office memorandum himself? It would have been an easy task for a halfway efficient officer of the Abwehr or, indeed, the foreign ministry itself. Perhaps everything started and finished with Anton Offenbach. This was all beginning to stink like an open sewer.

Jung had placed a phone call to the guest house down in the region of the Schorfheide and had made contact with Otto Kalt. It was hard to make himself understood, because Kalt spoke in riddles, as though afraid he was being eavesdropped. But there wasn’t time to worry about such niceties; they had to move – and move fast. And if the Gestapo wanted to listen in, well, that was fine, too, because with Bormann’s involvement this was clearly a great deal bigger than anything some junior Gestapo officers could disrupt. At last, the message got through, and Kalt said he would carry out Jung’s instructions to the letter.

Jung had his doubts. There was panic in Kalt’s voice. His only other leads were Frau Somerfeld’s house in Potsdam and the apartment of the American diplomat James Vanderberg.

*

Entering the Potsdam villa was a simple matter. There was no one at home and, with the blackouts secured, he spent two hours searching every room and every drawer, but he wasn’t at all sure what he was looking for.

He looked at his watch; the time was 11.30 p.m. Time to leave. He was in the front living room, which smelt of wood ash from an open fire. One last look around, and then he laughed. He had seen exactly what he was looking for, after all. How the hell had he missed it? For the first time, he felt a surge of optimism. Charlie Jung was going to land on his feet again.

*

A short time later he was standing in the teeming rain outside the apartment of James Vanderberg, to the north of the Tiergarten, and was deciding on his next move. He had never seen Vanderberg before, but he assumed that the man who turned up after midnight was the man he sought.

Who, though, he wondered, was the bedraggled woman who accosted the American, begging admittance to the house? Not Frau Somerfeld, that was certain, for he had seen her photographs in her grand Potsdam villa. Nor was this woman a prostitute; you’d have to be desperate as hell to pay fifty pfennigs for this appalling drab.

He turned to walk away. He didn’t have time for this; he’d let others investigate the woman. One phone call should take care of it.

Chapter 18

CHAPTER 18