Stahl rubbed the side of his head. He could feel the ridge of torn, stitched flesh beneath the dressing. It was his own fault. Whoever the man behind the door was, he should have kept firing bullets into him till he heard the body fall. He must have been tall – Stahl had been aiming for his heart, and his last memory was of seeing a blurred figure clutching his belly with one hand and a gun with the other. Then the night went green, and green became black. The black became light and light was day and nurses with incomprehensible London accents were chattering at him. And a young British bobby, so cleanly shaven his skin shone pink as a washed baby, called him sir and asked if he felt ‘OK’. An hour or so later a doctor had examined him – speaking to him all the time in fluent if accented German – and had pronounced him fit to travel. Then they’d bundled him into an ambulance, driven him, he thought, three or four miles across London and put him here – in his own room, in a hospital that must be the preserve of some sort of ruling class. It reminded him of those he had had access to in Berlin, where party members could be pampered back to good health.
A new doctor examined his wound, then said, ‘I never thought I’d see the day I’d be treating a German here.’
‘Austrian,’ said Stahl, the first word he had spoken.
‘Difference is there?’
‘What do you think the Anschluss was? A day trip?’
This had shut the man up – and Stahl had not privileged him with the truth, that he had been in the Führer’s entourage as they swept into Austria and that his people – Stahl’s as well as Hitler’s – had lined the streets and cheered and cheered at their own conquest. Days later, in Vienna, when the new regime had begun to make its mark, he found Storm Troopers standing over a group of Jews in the street. They were scrubbing the paving stones with brushes. Other Austrians stood around and watched. Stahl had looked for faces he knew among the crowd and found none. Then one of the Jews had looked up from the gutter and he and Stahl had recognised one another.
Now, Stahl looked up and recognised Captain Cormack.
‘I must be slipping. I didn’t hear you come in.’
‘You’re among friends, for the first time in years. Maybe you can afford to relax,’ Cormack said.
Stahl eased himself up on the pillows to be more level with Cormack, who had propped himself against the mattress at the foot of the bed.
‘Who was he?’ he asked.
‘One of ours, I’m afraid. You were right about that. Frank Reininger, a colonel in US Intelligence at our embassy here. I’m as surprised as you are. He was pretty close to being the last person I suspected. Known the man since I was a teenager.’
‘We’re both speaking of him in the past tense. Is he dead?’
‘Yes. I know it might have been useful to get him alive. But I can see why you didn’t take chances. That last shot to the head killed him outright. If it hadn’t, who knows – it could be both of us stretched out in the morgue.’
Stahl said nothing. He hadn’t fired to the head. He hadn’t had the chance. Cormack said, ‘The British are waiting. You know that, don’t you?’
‘Of course. Let me wash and eat something and then I’m theirs. After all, I’m their prisoner.’
‘They’re calling you their guest.’
‘And Hitler called the Anschluss a “reunification”. We’re in a war of words. Meaning was the first casualty.’
‘A couple of hours?’ said Cormack.
‘Yes. I’ll be ready.’