“You ask me, that’s a perfect town gun,” he said. “Businesslike. Convenient. Discreet.” He made it sound more like a membership of the Herrenklub than a snapper’s rattle. Which was what it was. The rhinestone holster it came in told me that much. Some GI had very likely confiscated it from the slot he’d been feeding. Maybe she’d got him on the trap with it, intending to drop him for a few extra marks and he’d wrestled it off her. I just hoped it wasn’t a gun that the ballistics boys at the Praesidium were looking for. I tossed the holster back at Stuber and got out of his cab on Schellingstrasse. I figured a free ride to my next port of call was the least he could do after selling me some party-girl’s belly gun.

I went through the doors of Die Neue Zeitung and had the hatchet-faced redhead behind the desk call up Friedrich Korsch. I glanced over the front page while I waited for him to come down. There was a story about Johann Neuhausler, the Protestant auxiliary bishop of Munich who was involved with the various groups that were trying to free the Red Jackets in Landsberg. According to the bishop, the Americans “did not lag behind the Nazis in sadism,” and he spoke about an American prison guard—not named—whose description of conditions at Landsberg “beggared belief.” I had a shrewd idea of who this American soldier was, and it infuriated me to see, of all people, a bishop repeating the lies and half-truths of PFC John Ivanov. Evidently my efforts on behalf of Erich Kaufmann had been wasted.

Friedrich Korsch had been a young Kriminalassistent with KRIPO when I had been a Kommissar at the Alex, in Berlin, back in 1938-39. I hadn’t seen him in almost ten years until, one day the previous December, I had bumped into him coming out of Spöckmeier, a Bierkeller on Rosenstrasse. He hadn’t changed a bit, apart from the leather eye patch. With his long chin and Douglas Fairbanks-style mustache, he looked like a swashbuckling buccaneer, which might have been a good thing in a journalist working for an American newspaper.

We went to the Osteria Bavaria—once Hitler’s favorite restaurant —and argued about who was going to pick up the bill while at the same time we reminisced about old times and made a tally of who was dead and who was alive. But after I had told him of how I suspected Bishop Neuhausler’s source inside Landsberg Prison was a liar and a crook, Korsch refused to hear any more talk of me paying. “For a story like that, the paper will cover lunch,” he said.

“That’s too bad,” I said. “Because I was hoping to get some information out of you. I’m looking for a war criminal.”

“Isn’t everyone?”

“Name of Friedrich Warzok.”

“Never heard of him.”