“Listen, Gunther, there’s ten thousand francs in my toilet bag at the Grand Hôtel. That’s for you. And don’t forget that there’s a bank account in Monaco. At the Crédit Foncier. That much is true. There’s another twenty thousand francs more in that account that was meant to finance this operation. You’re already a signatory. All you have to do is show your passport to the manager and the money is yours. We could go there right now. Get the cash. You needn’t ever see me again.”

“No.”

I worked the slide on the little gun and put one of the little twenty-five-caliber bullets in the chamber. It wasn’t much of a gun to kill a man, but at a range of less than two yards it didn’t have to be. Hennig knew that, too, and started backing away.

“You’re not the type to kill me, remember?” He was starting to sound scared now. “You said so yourself, Gunther. You’re a decent man. I knew that the first time I met you.”

“No, I said I wasn’t the type to leave a man to die chained to a radiator, like an abandoned dog. But this is different.” I pointed the gun at him.

“This is for those nine thousand people who died on the Wilhelm Gustloff in January nineteen forty-five. It’s been eleven years in coming, and for them this is an act of vengeance. But for Captain Achim von Frisch, Irmela Louise Schaper and her unborn child—my unborn child—it’s revenge, pure and simple.”

And then, as he was probably about to speak again and beg me for his life, I shot him in the chest five times and then once more between the eyes when he was oozing blood down on the floor.

I stepped outside the guesthouse for a moment and lit a cigarette to help slow my pounding heart. The cicadas were quiet now, holding their breath probably, shocked that human emotions could make other, more intelligent living creatures such as ourselves behave in such a barbarous fashion. What did they know about real tragedy anyway? Without emotion, pain is just pain; it’s human feeling that makes pain such absolute agony. I had no regrets about killing Harold Hennig, but I was wrong about revenge, of course. It was sweet, after all. And I wasn’t finished with it yet. Not by a long way.