Chapter One
The hell with her then, Radok thought. She could have it all. Even the Schiele, Christ, Helga didn't even like Schiele's paintings. Decadent, she called them. His women were too skinny, too young, too immoral. But Schiele would fetch high prices after the war, and Helga knew it..., or her lawyer did. He'd said as much in the letter Radok had received from him this morning. So, Schiele, too. Give it all to her. Anything, just to have it over; to shut the door on that part of his life.
Inspektor Gunther Radok shivered, not at the thought of the lost Schiele, but because it was cold tonight. Too cold for a stakeout, but then you could hardly plan police actions around the weather reports. Even such ridiculous ones as this bust of a black marketeer.
His partner, Hinkle, was stomping up and down the sidewalk, clapping his arms around his massive chest, looking every inch a cop on stakeout, while Radok tried to look inconspicuous inside the old forest-green Mercedes the department supplied for undercover work. The leather upholstery was cold against his back and ass; his right toe-the one frostbitten ascending the Dachstein in '36-was numb already. He wiggled it: not even a tingle of sensation. And there was Hinkle on the street trying to make Radok feel guilty about being tucked away from the cold night air.
Over the month that Radok had been on this case, he had managed to convince himself that it was important. Managed to tell himself often enough that black marketeers could lose the war for the Reich; that they were, in fact, major war criminals.
But the tiny, ironic voice inside himself would not quite believe it. a scalper, a small-time crook, that's what this Cezak with the unlikely name of Czech was. But it brought the death penalty in the Reich. Cezak was bound for the guillotine at the Justice Palace, rather than a simple five count at the Liesl, the criminals' nickname for the Central Prison, and Radok was putting his head on the block. Radok, who'd traced every trip to the lavatory the bugger had made for the past month; who knew the Czech's movements better than he had Helga's hips. Maybe with a little more hip knowledge he wouldn't be losing the Schiele.
Let it go, Radok....