“I’m a Roman Catholic, see?” he said. “And the father, he married me and my wife when he was at a different parish, during the war. Saint Ulrich’s, in the Seventh District. My wife, Giovanna, she’s half Italian, too, see? Half Austrian, half Italian. Her brother was in the SS, and Father Lajolo helped get him out of Austria after the war. He’s living in Scotland now. Can you believe it? Scotland. Plays golf all the time, he says. The Comradeship got him a new name, a home, a job. He’s a mining engineer in Edinburgh. No one will ever think of looking for him in Edinburgh. So, ever since then, I’ve helped the father out when he wanted to move an old comrade somewhere those Reds can’t get their bloody hands on him. You ask me, Vienna’s finished. It’ll go the same way as Berlin. You mark my words. One day, they’ll just roll their tanks in and nobody will do a thing to stop them. The Amis think it won’t ever happen. Either that or they just don’t care. None of this would have happened if they’d made a peace with Hitler. If they hadn’t forced that unconditional surrender on us. We’d still have a Europe that looked like Europe, not next week’s Soviet republic.”

It was a long journey. On the road from Vienna to Salzburg there was a speed limit of only forty miles an hour. But in the villages and small towns it was as low as ten miles an hour. By the time I had endured several hours of listening to Timmermann’s opinions of the Reds and the Amis, I was ready to ram a copy of The Stars and Stripes down his throat.

At Salzburg we got on the Munich autobahn and our speed increased. Soon we were across the German border. We drove north and then west, through Munich. There seemed little point in getting out of the truck in Munich. I didn’t doubt that Jacobs would make sure the police were waiting for me there. And until the Comradeship was able to provide me with a new identity and passport, my best course of action seemed to be to stay where I was being taken. We drove on through Landsberg before turning south to Kempten, which nestles in the foothills of the Alps, in the Allgäu region of southwest Bavaria. My journey finally ended at an old Benedictine monastery in the hills outside Kempten. This was temptingly close to Garmisch-Partenkirchen, which, Timmermann told me, was just sixty-five miles to the west of Kempten, and I knew it would not be long before I was tempted.