Philip Kerr - Field Grey

'Is he here now?'

'He was. I expect he's already on the phone to Schaumberg's office trying to find out what the Hell's going on. What is going on?'

I thought it best not to tell her any more than she needed to know.

After about half an hour I went upstairs. There was no one to be seen but I could hear someone on the floor above shouting in French. I quickened my steps and arrived on a landing outside an open office door. Willms was on the telephone behind a desk. He was sitting next to an open safe as if he thought it might keep him warm. Perhaps it would have done, too, there was enough money in it.

Seeing me there, he put down the phone and nodded.

'I suppose it was you,' he said. 'The person who gave out that the gendarmerie was coming to raid this place.'

'That's right. I didn't want to embarrass any of those red stripes when I put you under arrest, Willms.'

'Me? Under arrest?' He chuckled. 'It's you who's going to be in trouble, Gunther. Not me. Half of the General Staff in Paris are sharing in this particular bottle, my friend. Some very important heads are going to feel sore about what you've done here tonight.'

'They'll get over it. In a few days those Wehrmacht counts and princes will forget a rat like you ever even existed, Willms.'

'The amount of coal they're raking back from this place? I don't think so. See, you're trying to flood a very nice little money pit, here. The only question is, why? Or maybe you've got something against your brother officers having a thump now and again.'

'I'm not arresting you for being a pimp, Willms. Though that's what you are. Personally I've got nothing at all against pimps. A man can't help what he is. No, I'm arresting you for attempted murder.'

'Oh? And whose murder is it that I'm supposed to have attempted?'

'Mine.'

'You can prove that, can you?'

'I'm a detective, remember? I've got a little thing called evidence. Not to mention a witness. And if I'm right, a motive, too. Not that I'll need any of these things when Himmler finds out what you've been up to here in Paris, Willms. He's rather less understanding than me when it comes to the conduct of men wearing the uniform of his beloved SS. Somehow I get the feeling that his opinion of your conduct is going to matter a lot more than General Schaumberg's.'

'You're serious, aren't you?'

'I always take it seriously when someone tries to gas me with the contents of a chemical fire extinguisher. And by the way, I checked back with the Alex. It seems that before you joined the police, you worked for the fire brigade.'

'I don't see that proves a thing.'

'It proves you know something about fire extinguishers. And it would account for how it was that the missing plug from the extinguisher that almost killed me was found in your hotel room.'

'Says who?'

'The witness.'

'You think that a court martial will accept the word of a Frenchman against the word of a German officer?'

'No. But they might accept it against the word of a greasy little pimp.'

'You might be right,' said Willms. 'We'll have to see, won't we?'

Uttering a weary sort of sigh he sat back in his chair and, in the same movement, pulled open the drawer of his desk. Even before I saw the gun I knew it was there, and after that it was simply a question of who could shoot first, him or me. On my SS soft-shell holster there was just a brass stud to keep the flap down, but even so I was no Gene Autry and the Luger was in his hand before the Walther P38 was in mine. It was the Walther's double-action trigger that probably saved my life. Like most policemen I was in the habit of carrying it with one in the chamber and the hammer down. All I had to do was squeeze the trigger. Willms ought to have known that. The toggle-lock action on his Luger was much more cumbersome, which was why cops didn't carry them, and by the time his pistol was ready to fire I was already shouting a warning. I might have finished the warning, too, if he hadn't started to straighten his arm and aim the gun at me, at which point I fired at the side of his head.

For a moment I thought I'd missed.

Willms sat down, only he didn't sit on the chair, but on the floor, like a boy scout dropping onto his backside beside a camp fire. Then I saw the blood boiling out of his skull like hot mud. He collapsed onto his side and lay still except for his legs, which straightened slowly, like someone trying to get comfortable enough to die; and all the time his head painted the beige carpet a very dark shade of red, as if an indifferent claret had been poured onto the floor by a truculent guest in an unsatisfactory restaurant.

With shaking hands I made my Walther safe and then holstered it, asking myself if I couldn't have aimed at something other than his head. At the same time I told myself that one of the easiest ways to end up dead is to leave your wounded adversary with an opportunity to shoot you.

I bent down and made sure the Luger was safe, too, and it was then I started to see how much of a jam I was in, what with all the generals and counts and princes who were in league with Willms. Thinking it might be better if Willms's death at least looked a bit less like a murder, I swapped the Luger for my own Walther. Then, seeing Willms's tunic and belt hanging on coat-stand, I took his own standard-issue

Walther and put it in my holster before replacing the cold Luger in the desk drawer. Things only looked like a mess. Suicide was actually a nice tidy solution for the French police, for Sipo, and for the red stripes over at the Majestic Hotel. I wondered if they'd even bother to look for a powder burn on Willms's head. Because cops all over the world love suicides; they're nearly always the easiest homicides to solve. You just lift the rug and brush them underneath.

I picked up the telephone and asked the operator for the Prefecture of Police, in the Rue de Lutece.

I sat up and blinked hard in the near-darkness of cell number seven, wondering how long I'd been asleep. The shade of Hitler was gone, at least for now, and I was glad about that. I didn't much like his questions, or the mocking assumption that, deep down, I was as big a criminal as him. It was true that I might have shot Nikolaus Willms somewhere less lethal than his head, and that even when I'd been trying to put him under arrest, secretly I had probably wanted to kill him. Perhaps if Paul Kestner had pulled a gun on me I'd have shot him, too. But as it was I never saw Kestner again, and the last I heard of him he'd been part of a police battalion in Smolensk, murdering Jews and communists.

I opened my window and put my face in the cool breeze of the Landsberg dawn. I couldn't see the cows but I could smell them in the fields across the river to the south-west and I could hear them, too. One, anyway; it sounded like a lost soul in a place far, far away. Like my own soul perhaps. I almost felt like blowing my own breath in a solitary hot blast by way of an answer.

The Paris of 1940 seemed equally far away. What a summer that had been, thanks to Renata. The Prefecture in the person of Chief Inspector Oltramare had accepted without demur my story of finding Willms dead after going to the maison with the intention of arresting him, although it was as plain as the Eiffel Tower that he believed not a word of it. Sipo proved only a little more troublesome, and I was summoned to the Hotel Majestic, in the Avenue des Portugais, to explain myself to General Best, the head of the RSHA in Paris.

A dark-eyed, severe-looking man from Darmstadt, Best was in his late thirties and bore a strong resemblance to the Nazi Party's deputy leader, Rudolf Hess. There was some bad blood between him and Heydrich, and because of that I half-expected Best to give me a rougher ride. Instead he confined himself to delivering a light reprimand for my declared intent to arrest Willms without consulting him. Which was fair enough and my apology seemed to put an end to the matter; as things turned out, he was much more interested in picking my brains for a book he was writing about the German police. On several occasions we met at his favourite restaurant, a brasserie on the Boulevard de Montparnasse called La Coupole, and I told him all about life at the Alex and some of the cases I investigated. Best's book was published the following year and sold very well.