Chapters (50)
- Praise
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- ONE
- TWO
- THREE
- FOUR
- FIVE
- SIX
- SEVEN
- EIGHT
- NINE
- TEN
- ELEVEN
- TWELVE
- THIRTEEN
- FOURTEEN
- FIFTEEN
- SIXTEEN
- SEVENTEEN
- EIGHTEEN
- NINETEEN
- TWENTY
- TWENTY-ONE
- TWENTY-TWO
- TWENTY-THREE
- TWENTY-FOUR
- TWENTY-FIVE
- TWENTY-SIX
- TWENTY-SEVEN
- TWENTY-EIGHT
- TWENTY-NINE
- THIRTY
- THIRTY-ONE
- THIRTY-TWO
- THIRTY-THREE
- THIRTY-FOUR
- THIRTY-FIVE
- THIRTY-SIX
- THIRTY-SEVEN
- THIRTY-EIGHT
- THIRTY-NINE
- FORTY
- FORTY-ONE
- FORTY-TWO
- EPILOGUE
- AUTHOR’S NOTE
- Teaser chapter
“Friedrich was an ambitious man, but not a strong one. Not intellectually strong, anyway. Physically he was very strong. Before the war he was a stonemason. Rather a good one. He was a very virile man, Herr Gunther. I suppose that was what I fell for. When I was eighteen, I was quite vigorous myself.”
I didn’t doubt it for a moment. It was all too easy to imagine her wearing a short, white slip and a laurel wreath in her hair and doing interesting things with a hoop in a nice propaganda film from Dr. Goebbels. Female vigor never looked so blond and healthy.
“I’ll be honest with you, Herr Gunther.” She dabbed her eye with the corner of her handkerchief. “Friedrich Warzok was not a good man. During the war, he did some terrible things.”
“After Hitler there’s none of us can say he has a clear conscience,” I said.
“It’s very good of you to say so. But there are things that one has to do to survive. And then there are other things that don’t involve survival at all. This amnesty that’s being discussed in the Parliament. It wouldn’t include my husband, Herr Gunther.”
“I wouldn’t be too sure about that,” I said. “If someone as bad as Erich Koch is prepared to risk coming out of hiding to claim the protection of the new Basic Law, then anyone might do the same. No matter what he had done.”
Erich Koch had been the gauleiter of East Prussia and the Reich commissioner for the Ukraine, where some dreadful things had been done. I knew that because I’d seen quite a few of them myself. Koch was banking on receiving the protection of the Federal Republic’s new Basic Law, which forbade both the death penalty and extradition for all new cases of war crimes. Koch was currently being held in a prison in the British Zone. Time would tell if he had made a shrewd decision or not.
I was beginning to see where this case, and my new business, were headed. Frau Warzok’s husband was my third Nazi in a row. And thanks to the likes of Erich Kaufmann and the Baron von Starnberg, from whom I had received a personal letter of thanks, it looked as if I was turning out to be the man to turn to if your problem involved a Red Jacket or a fugitive war criminal. I didn’t much like that. It wasn’t why I had gone back to being a private detective. And I might have brushed Frau Warzok off if she had been there telling me that her husband had nothing personal against the Jews, or that he was merely the victim of “historical value judgments.” But so far, she wasn’t telling me that. Quite the contrary, as she now proceeded to underline.