I hardly knew what to say. It was now obvious that Eric Gruen had not been honest with me, and that there was something in his past that made his being in Vienna of interest to the Allies. Or had he been honest after all? Could it have been the execution of those prisoners of war, in France, that Engelbertina had mentioned? Why not? After all, the Allies already had dozens of SS men imprisoned in Landsberg for the Malmedy massacre. Why not another massacre involving Eric Gruen? Whatever the reason, one thing was clear: I needed to stall Medgyessy long enough to speak to Gruen himself. I had little choice but to go along with the butler’s blackmail, for now. With all the documentation I possessed being in the name of Eric Gruen, I could hardly go back to being Bernie Gunther.

“All right,” I said. “But I’ll need some time to get the money together. The will hasn’t yet been proved.”

His face grew harder. “Don’t play me for a fool, sir,” he said. “I’d never betray you. But the wife is a very different story. As you probably gathered at the funeral. Shall we say twenty-four hours? This time tomorrow.” He glanced at his pocket watch. “Two o’clock. That’ll give you plenty of time to get to Spaengler’s and make all the necessary arrangements.”

“Very well,” I said. “Until two o’clock tomorrow.” I opened the door for him and he limped out, like a man waltzing by himself. I had to hand it to him. He and his wife had handled it very nicely. Good cop, bad cop. And all of that guff about loyalty. It was an effective pitch. Especially the way he had dropped the name of Spaengler’s Bank and Garmisch.

I closed the door, picked up the phone, and asked the hotel operator to connect me with Henkell’s house in Sonnenbichl. After a few minutes the operator called me back and said there was no reply, so I put on my coat and hat and took a taxi to Dorotheengasse.

Most of the buildings in this narrow, cobbled street had been repaired. At one end was a yellow stucco church with a spire like a V-2 rocket, and at the other end, an ornate fountain with a lady who had picked the wrong day for going topless in Vienna. In its massive baroque portal, the green door of Spaengler’s Bank looked like Hitler’s train stuck in a railway tunnel. I approached the top-hatted doorman, informed him of the name of the person I had come to see, and was directed into what could have passed for the Hall of the Mountain King. And with footsteps echoing against the ceiling like the tintinnabulation of a broken bell, I walked up a staircase as wide as an autobahn.