“I’d forgotten what a violent temper you have, Gunther. There’s a fury in you I just didn’t remember.”

“You should see me when I can’t find my cigarettes. So talk, before I give you an ear piercing you won’t ever forget.”

“There’s a tape,” he said.

“What kind of a tape?”

“A tape. BASF. AEG. I don’t know. A sound recording.”

“Of what, exactly?”

“A man speaking. You might say that it’s a sort of confession.”

“Who is this man?”

“Ah, now this is where it gets interesting.”

I listened carefully as he started to describe what was on the tape. At first I was confused and then surprised, and then not really surprised at all. The whole thing sounded very clever. Too clever for an ordinary Fritz like me. Which is what I had half suspected all along. The only really strange part was that Hebel had decided to involve me in the whole rotten transaction. Then again, I seem to have a talent for finding trouble; it certainly seems to have no trouble in finding me. This couldn’t have looked more like trouble if someone had erected the word in fifty-foot-high letters on the summit of nearby Mont Boron. After a while he could see his explanation had made a real impression on me and he felt confident enough to stand up and go and help himself from the bottle of schnapps on the bedside table and light a cigarette without me waving the gun in his face again.

“You want one?” he asked, and poured a short glass for me anyway. “You look as though you need one.”

I took it from his hand and downed it quickly. It was good schnapps, cold as the Frisches Haff in January, and just the way I like it.

“Where is it now, this tape?”

“Safe. I’ll let you have a copy tomorrow so you can deliver it to the Villa Mauresque where Herr Maugham can listen to it at his leisure. I’ll even lend him my tape recorder so he can play it. Anyway, I expect he’ll know what to do next. After that the old man will have forty-eight hours to raise two hundred thousand dollars. Shouldn’t be too difficult given that he’s already raised fifty thousand of it. Let’s say that I’m letting you have the picture free as a sign of my good faith.”

“You’ve come a long way since blackmailing warm boys in the lavatories at Potsdamer Platz station,” I said. “I can see how you could squeeze Somerset Maugham. But this—this strikes me as foolhardy.”

“Some lemons are bigger than others, but they’ll squeeze just as easily. I learned that from the Nazis. Hitler’s grandmother was a practiced blackmailer, did you know that?”

“It doesn’t surprise me.”