I went back to the Alex for a while and sat at my desk and wondered if there might be a way of finding Gustav without involving Arianne Tauber. She and only she could have identified him and, for that reason alone, it seemed unlikely that he would ever go back to the Jockey and risk seeing her again. Especially if he was what it seemed he was – almost certainly a spy. More than likely he’d lost his nerve about meeting his Czech contact on Nolli. Possibly, he thought he was already being shadowed by the Gestapo, but if they had been tailing him, then surely they’d have picked her up when she met Gustav at the Romanisches Cafe. If he was under surveillance then the Gestapo would never have risked allowing him to pass information to her. It seemed more likely that Gustav had lost his nerve. In which case, who better than a joy-lady to deliver something to his Czech contact? Most of the prostitutes I’d ever known were resourceful, courageous, and, above all, greedy. For a hundred marks there wasn’t a silk in Berlin who wouldn’t have agreed to what Gustav had asked. Handing over an envelope in the dark was a lot easier and quicker and, on the face of it, safer than sucking someone’s pipe.
‘Working late?’
It was Lehnhoff.
‘Victor Keil, aka Franz Koci,’ I said.
‘The Kleist Park case. Yeah. What about it?’
‘The uniformed fairy that found him under the bushes. Sergeant Otto Macher. Do you know him well?’
‘Well enough.’
‘Do you think he’s honest?’
‘Meaning what?’
‘It’s a straightforward question, Gottfried. Is he honest?’
‘As far as it goes these days.’
‘In my book it goes all the way to the altar.’
‘There’s a war on. So maybe not as far as that.’
‘Look, Gottfried. We’re both in the shit-house age-group. And I certainly don’t want to cause any trouble for you and Sergeant Macher. But I need to know if our dead Czecho was carrying more than just the fifty marks we found on him.’
All of the lavatories at the Alex had three numbers on the door, of which two were always ‘00’; and the phrase ‘shit-house age-group’ was used to indicate anyone born before 1900 and therefore over the age of forty.
‘If you say you’re in the shit-house then I believe you,’ said Lehnhoff. ‘But from what I’ve heard around the factory you’re here not because you’re ready for your pension, but because you’ve got vitamin