“Oh, Jacobs. He’s a very devious sort of person, our Major Jacobs. He got the idea when he and Wolfram Romberg came to dig up your garden in Dachau. He noticed the similarity between us as soon as he met you, Bernie. Originally he was going to come back to Dachau and get things started to frame you there. But then, of course, you moved to Munich and returned to your former trade. And that’s when we hatched the scheme to have you go looking for Friedrich Warzok. Just to make you think you’d stepped on the toes of some old comrades. Enough to earn yourself a good beating, so we might effect some important alterations to the tailor-made suit we were making for you. Such as losing that all-important finger. Those old SS files are irritatingly precise in the way they describe all of one’s distinguishing characteristics. That was rather clever of him, don’t you think? It’s the first thing any Allied War Crimes investigator or Jewish avenger squad would look for. That missing finger of mine.”

“And the woman who hired me?”

“My wife. The first time she came to look for you was in Dachau, and of course you’d gone. Then she came to your offices to take a good look at you, to see if Jacobs was right about there being a resemblance. And she agreed, there was. Which is when we sat down with the major and helped him to cook up the whole plot. Which I have to say was the fun part. It was kind of like writing our own play, inventing our own parts. And making sure our stories all worked out. Then all we had to do was get you down here to Garmisch so that you and I could get to know each other better.”

“But you could hardly know that your mother was going to die,” I said. “Or could you?”

“She’d been ill for some time,” he said. “She could have died at any time. But as it happens, when the time was right, we did help to ease her passing. It’s not so difficult to kill people in a hospital. Especially when they’re in a private room. You know something? It was a real kindness to her.”

“You had her murdered,” I said, pushing yet more coins into the telephone. “Your own mother.”

“Not murdered,” insisted Gruen. “No. This was euthanasia. Preemptive triage. That’s the way most German doctors still look on that kind of mercy killing. It still goes on. More often than you might suppose. You can’t change the whole medical system, just like that. Euthanasia has been part of the normal hospital routine in Germany and Austria since 1939.”

“You killed your own mother to save your skin.”