The Grave of Truth Read Online Free

were closed up except for the nightwatchman and the office where Max Steiner sat alone. He switched his desk light on when the room grew too dark for him to see, and he sat with his elbows on his desk and the little tape-recorder in front of him. The police had played the tape back, while they took a long statement from him. Someone had asked if he wanted to see a doctor himself, if he felt shocked. He had been very calm and refused everything but coffee. He wanted a clear head unclouded by alcohol or tranquillizers. He had seen the killers: two men, one above medium height, the other slighter in build and shorter; the dark glasses had made it difficult to guess their ages but both had dark, short hair and were Caucasians. Professionals, who had escaped through the crowds and been seen leaping into a waiting car. The car had been found abandoned in a Paris suburb. Predictably it had been stolen that morning.
    It was a political assassination and the newspapers and other media were blaming the Baader-Meinhof because Walther was a West German politician.
    Max had gone over the details with senior men from the Sûreté and then with a couple of investigators from SDECE. He had told them everything he could remember, every fleeting impression gained in those last few moments of panic and horror. Except for the dead man’s last word.
    He had washed and changed his bloodstained clothes for a suit sent round from his home. He had ignored the frantic messages from Ellie, who was assured by the police that he was quite unhurt. When he was told he could go home he asked to be driven to his office. His editor-in-chief was a Frenchman who had never forgiven him for being German but was too practical to let it influence his judgement. Steiner was one of his star correspondents; he cleared everyone out of Max’s office and took the story down himself. ‘I’m going to write it,’ Max said.
    â€˜Eye witness,’ Martin Jarre said briskly. ‘This is going to be your guideline. Tomorrow it mightn’t be so clear. Go home and get your doctor to give you something for a night’s sleep. You look clapped out.’
    But Max hadn’t gone home. He had switched off his telephone so Ellie couldn’t get through to him, and sat on, playing the tape back once or twice.
    It all looked very straightforward. Not the Baader-Meinhof but assassins from the right wing who didn’t want détente with East Germany. Or the KGB, who didn’t want it either.… The motives were there on that tape: reunification of Germany through a political understanding with the Communist regime in East Germany. A proposal that would make Walther many powerful enemies. But no more, on examination, than a political ideal to be promoted during an election, by a man who was aiming at power and popularity. Not sufficient threat to have him murdered in a Paris street, with all the attendant publicity and uproar. Walther had been killed for something else, and he had known it, and said so just before he died. ‘Janus.’
    It was twenty-five years since Max Steiner had heard that word, and the man who spoke it then was just about to die. In the Bunker in Berlin on 25 April 1945, when Adolf Hitler shot himself and the Third Reich came to an end.
    For twenty-six days and nights the city had been under bombardment from the air and the advancing Russians, their artillery ranged around the perimeter within fifteen kilometres of the Brandenburg Gate. Within the last seven days Berlin had become completely encircled, and already the first Russian patrols had penetrated the suburbs. All who could get out had taken to the roads and were fleeing to the West and the Allied armies. A massive pall of black smoke hung over Berlin, and through it the fires from bombed and burning buildings licked and spouted jagged flame. The air was thick with rubble dust and sweet with the stench of burst drains and corpses buried in the ruins. The